The Golden Sabre. Jon Cleary
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everyone. This was always a village that hated outsiders. Now that the Prince won’t be back …’
‘Can you help us escape?’
‘I want to go to the lavatory,’ said Olga. ‘I can’t hold it any longer.’
‘I can’t help you escape,’ said Delyanov, ‘but I can escort the young lady to the lavatory.’
He opened the door, stood back to let Eden and Olga go out. He looked back at Cabell and the beard twitched again. ‘You and the boy and the scrawny one will have to attend to your own bladders. Everyone pisses on the railway tracks.’
He went out, closing the door behind him. They heard him snap something at the two young guards, then the door opened and the two youths looked in and jerked their heads at Cabell.
He, Frederick and Nikolai went out on to the small station platform and stood there in a row relieving themselves. Cabell looked south down the railway line, wondering how far it went. Was there another town further on, one where outsiders were hated as much as in this one? He began to appreciate for the first time that they were heading into a part of the Russian Empire that had never really been fully conquered, where the people did not, and possibly never would, see themselves as Russians.
‘I wish they would stop calling me the scrawny one. They all sound like my father.’ Nikolai shook himself, pulled up his trousers and turned back towards the waiting room. Melancholy and insulted, he eyed the two guards who stood watching them. ‘Shot by Bolsheviks. He’ll never forgive me for that.’
‘I doubt if he’ll get to hear of it.’ Cabell tried to sound comforting, a little difficult in the circumstances. ‘How are you, Freddie? You’ve kept your mouth shut pretty well.’
‘I’m going to let them know who I am.’ Frederick waved a strong stream in the air, a golden rapier stroke. ‘So’s they’ll know whom they’re murdering.’
‘Whom? That’s good grammar, Freddie, but poor politics. We’ve got to start thinking of getting out of here.’
Crossing the square with Eden and Olga, Delyanov fluffed up his beard and said, ‘You’re a remarkably pretty girl.’
‘Thank you,’ said Eden, and refrained from saying he had already told her that. She had met lecherous old men before, but never one as ancient as this. She changed the subject away from herself: ‘You sound as if you might have been educated, Mr Delyanov.’
He nodded proudly. ‘I educated myself, taught myself to read when I was forty years old. I met Pushkin – you know, the poet?’
‘I know him.’ She had discovered him when she had come to Russia, almost swooned over Tatiana’s love letter to Onegin.
‘I didn’t agree with everything he wrote. Too much about freedom – that was what I thought then. Now – well, maybe he was right. I met Tolstoy too. On my hundredth birthday I made the journey all the way to Yasnaya Polyana to pay my respects. He talked to me, called me Uncle – he thought he was getting old till he talked to me. He talked to me about what he believed in. I began to see that things had been wrong—’ He shook his head and the beard quivered. ‘You are a hundred years old and one day you discover you’ve been blind all your life.’
‘It’s not too late.’ But Eden felt ridiculous telling him so.
‘No.’ He fluffed up his beard again. ‘I can save you from being shot. Marry me.’
Eden stopped by the well in the middle of the square, leaned against its stone wall while she splashed water on her face from the dribbling pump. There were still people in the square: the half-dozen old men still sitting under the walnut trees, several conferences of crones, children slipping like drops of mercury from one group to another. The heat pressed down on her like a soft invisible weight; it came up from the cobblestones and the dust its sharp white lights that made her eyes ache. Everyone in the square, even the old man immediately in front of her, seemed to hang suspended in shimmering sunlight. She was going to faint; or fall into the mirage with them. Yesterday a Mongolian general had tried to rape her; today a centenarian was proposing marriage. Perhaps she was already in the mirage.
‘Don’t you already have a wife?’
‘I’ve had four. They’re all gone. You’re a pretty girl, you’d be good to look at in my old age. Keep me company. All my children are dead, too. All twelve of them. Took after their mothers, all died young. None of them lasted past seventy.’
Eden wanted to laugh. She could feel hysteria taking hold of her like a fever. She looked wildly around for some grasp on reality, heard Olga say, ‘I want to go to the lavatory.’
‘Here it is.’ Delyanov led them up a lane past log houses, opened the gate in a rough wooden fence and pointed to an out-house in the middle of a vegetable garden. Olga, walking carefully but quickly, went along the garden path to the lavatory and disappeared into it. Eden leaned against the fence, recovered slowly.
‘If you marry me,’ said Delyanov, ‘Keria won’t shoot you.’
‘But you don’t know me – we have only just this moment met—’
‘I like your looks. At my age one cannot afford to waste even a day.’
‘At my age one doesn’t marry at a moment’s notice. You will have to give me time.’ But she knew that back home her mother already thought she was on the shelf for good: twenty-six and no husband in sight. But she couldn’t see herself taking a centenarian bridegroom home to Croydon.
‘There is not much time. You may be dead by tomorrow afternoon. This man Keria is very impulsive.’
She had heard the phrase a shotgun wedding, something that Americans evidently went in for. But this was terrifyingly ludicrous: a firing-squad wedding. ‘I shall have to talk to Mr Cabell.’
‘Is he your lover?’
She hesitated, then nodded: any port in a storm. ‘He won’t like it.’
‘He will if you save his life and the children’s. What does he do besides tell lies about being a comrade?’
‘He’s an engineer, an oil engineer. A geologist.’
‘They’re practical men,’ said Delyanov, as if the engineers he had known put romance to some mathematical test. ‘Ah, here comes the little girl. That better, my dear? A little bladder relief does wonders.’
Olga gave him her princess look. ‘One does not talk about such things in polite company.’
Delyanov smiled in the depths of his beard. ‘You’ll be a great lady some day, my dear. May you live long enough,’ he said, and winked at Eden.
He escorted them back to the railway station, exhorted Eden to consider his proposal as a serious one and left them in the care of the two young guards. Eden closed the waiting-room door on the youths, leaving them sitting on a bench in the sun. They didn’t protest but sat there dumbly, now and again looking at each other as if expecting some flash of intelligence that would tell them exactly what their duties were. They had heard all the theory from Comrade Keria, but this was the first lesson in the practice of revolution and they were at a loss. The revolution, Keria had told them, was a Russian affair, a war against the Tsar and all the reactionaries who had supported him. And here they were guarding two foreigners, a couple of kids and a scrawny one who sometimes walked like a girl.
Eden sat down on a bench in the waiting room and said, ‘The old man wants me to marry him.’
‘He is far too old for you,’ said Frederick. ‘He would be impotent.’
‘Watch it!’
‘What sort of education did you give these kids?’ said Cabell; but it was only a mark-time remark while he took in what she had said. ‘The old son-of-a-bitch must be senile. It’s – it’s indecent!’
‘What is the matter?’ Nikolai said