memories.
• • •
Word of my arrival spread to every Orenburg officer within hours. Visitors began to call the very next day: Wallenstern the commandant, Reinsdorp the governor; Major Naumov, who served under Andrei; Major Varnsted, who’d come from Bugulma in November; Brigadier Korf, who’d retreated his corps to Orenburg from Ural fortresses that had fallen into enemy hands. Anna served the men tea in dainty porcelain cups, while their wives slipped her jars of rhubarb jam and sachets of dried echinacea for Andrei. My brother dragged himself out of the bedroom and, propped on an ottoman and ignoring entreaties to spare himself, took part in an impromptu war council where I was made to testify about Kazan, the road, and Freiman’s plans. Andrei drilled me until he hit the gaps in my recall. How many troops in Bugulma? What kind? Which regiments? Have they received our letters?
I did not know.
Reinsdorp, it seemed, took me for a harbinger of victory, and Wallenstern for a fraud. Reinsdorp said that we all ought to march out of two gates and strike Pugachev on three sides at once. Andrei’s voice roseabove the others, “The cavalry! You can’t nail him without it. Have our cavalry cross the Sakmara, go up the right bank, and strike Pugachev from the north!” This suggestion was met with bewilderment. Wallenstern warned, “Andrei Mikhailovich, have mercy. One must think in cannon and infantrymen at this time.” Andrei protested, mentioning hundreds of dragoons and Cossacks. These must have been phantoms of his fever, because he was roundly ignored. Reinsdorp bent toward me and confided, sotto voce, “We haven’t got horses. He knows. He just forgets.” Then he signaled the end of the meeting. “We’d better let our colonel rest. Take care of yourself, Andrei Mikhailovich, listen to the doctor. Do not forget that rhubarb.” Andrei, red in the face, glanced sheepishly after the departing men as if they had exposed a foolishness in him. I felt bitter pity for my brother. Before he left, Reinsdorp gave me a pat on the back. “I do expect your visit, Guards Captain. We need to talk more about our strategy.”
I had no strategy to talk about, and Andrei was beyond help of rhubarb and echinacea.
• • •
Anna and I helped Andrei back to bed, and after that I did not quite make it out of his bedroom, an act as selfish as it was helpful: I was not feeling right, I was hiding from Reinsdorp and company. He needed a nurse. A perfect match.
Nay, more than that. Together, we embarked on a journey, each of us at once a Virgil and a Dante to the other.
Through fever and sickness, around the clock, from present to past. He cursed, he taunted me, he spoke in riddles: “The word is out. Killing a noble is just as inconsequential as killing a chicken. Pugachev? He’s a drunken puppet!” He spoke of atrocities: “Cowled over face with skin of own scalp and chased into fields hands tied behind can’t unblindfold himself !” and I felt sick imagining how I would be smothered by a mat of my own hair turned inside out and pulled over my nose and mouth, the hood of skin tightening, shrinking in the sun as I stumbled on . . . To whom had it been done? And by whom?
But I had to keep up with my brother, who rushed forth, revisiting every battle, releasing every memory he had kept locked up in the cellar of his mind. He descended—and I followed—from the Turkish conflict to the Seven Years’ War; he hallucinated parched flats of the Sea of Azov; salty wind; two toothless old men, a master and his slave; one fished foranother and then they ate out of one bowl; taking of Taganrog, dust devils, not a shot fired; then forests of Moldova, minarets of the Izmail fortress and the dome’s up-horned crescent above the wafts of gunsmoke, a Wallachian youth who jumped off the wall onto Russian bayonets; then wading the Danube’s estuaries in a fog where tresses of willows touched one’s face like women’s hands
• • •
Word of my arrival spread to every Orenburg officer within hours. Visitors began to call the very next day: Wallenstern the commandant, Reinsdorp the governor; Major Naumov, who served under Andrei; Major Varnsted, who’d come from Bugulma in November; Brigadier Korf, who’d retreated his corps to Orenburg from Ural fortresses that had fallen into enemy hands. Anna served the men tea in dainty porcelain cups, while their wives slipped her jars of rhubarb jam and sachets of dried echinacea for Andrei. My brother dragged himself out of the bedroom and, propped on an ottoman and ignoring entreaties to spare himself, took part in an impromptu war council where I was made to testify about Kazan, the road, and Freiman’s plans. Andrei drilled me until he hit the gaps in my recall. How many troops in Bugulma? What kind? Which regiments? Have they received our letters?
I did not know.
Reinsdorp, it seemed, took me for a harbinger of victory, and Wallenstern for a fraud. Reinsdorp said that we all ought to march out of two gates and strike Pugachev on three sides at once. Andrei’s voice roseabove the others, “The cavalry! You can’t nail him without it. Have our cavalry cross the Sakmara, go up the right bank, and strike Pugachev from the north!” This suggestion was met with bewilderment. Wallenstern warned, “Andrei Mikhailovich, have mercy. One must think in cannon and infantrymen at this time.” Andrei protested, mentioning hundreds of dragoons and Cossacks. These must have been phantoms of his fever, because he was roundly ignored. Reinsdorp bent toward me and confided, sotto voce, “We haven’t got horses. He knows. He just forgets.” Then he signaled the end of the meeting. “We’d better let our colonel rest. Take care of yourself, Andrei Mikhailovich, listen to the doctor. Do not forget that rhubarb.” Andrei, red in the face, glanced sheepishly after the departing men as if they had exposed a foolishness in him. I felt bitter pity for my brother. Before he left, Reinsdorp gave me a pat on the back. “I do expect your visit, Guards Captain. We need to talk more about our strategy.”
I had no strategy to talk about, and Andrei was beyond help of rhubarb and echinacea.
• • •
Anna and I helped Andrei back to bed, and after that I did not quite make it out of his bedroom, an act as selfish as it was helpful: I was not feeling right, I was hiding from Reinsdorp and company. He needed a nurse. A perfect match.
Nay, more than that. Together, we embarked on a journey, each of us at once a Virgil and a Dante to the other.
Through fever and sickness, around the clock, from present to past. He cursed, he taunted me, he spoke in riddles: “The word is out. Killing a noble is just as inconsequential as killing a chicken. Pugachev? He’s a drunken puppet!” He spoke of atrocities: “Cowled over face with skin of own scalp and chased into fields hands tied behind can’t unblindfold himself !” and I felt sick imagining how I would be smothered by a mat of my own hair turned inside out and pulled over my nose and mouth, the hood of skin tightening, shrinking in the sun as I stumbled on . . . To whom had it been done? And by whom?
But I had to keep up with my brother, who rushed forth, revisiting every battle, releasing every memory he had kept locked up in the cellar of his mind. He descended—and I followed—from the Turkish conflict to the Seven Years’ War; he hallucinated parched flats of the Sea of Azov; salty wind; two toothless old men, a master and his slave; one fished foranother and then they ate out of one bowl; taking of Taganrog, dust devils, not a shot fired; then forests of Moldova, minarets of the Izmail fortress and the dome’s up-horned crescent above the wafts of gunsmoke, a Wallachian youth who jumped off the wall onto Russian bayonets; then wading the Danube’s estuaries in a fog where tresses of willows touched one’s face like women’s hands
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