Heart of Iron (26 page)

Petro chose a coat that appeared quite bulky but fit beautifully over my uniform. He then found me a pair of very furry large boots that not only fit over my existing ones, but also went all the way up my legs, secured with belts and buckles, keeping my lower limbs warmer than any woolen trousers or stockings in the world could. Mittens and a hat seemed an unnecessary luxury, a bonus I was grateful for but could have done without. A few moments in Petro’s care transformed Siberia from a place of abject terror to something tolerable.

I paid Trubkozub Senior and thanked both Aardvarks profusely; I considered asking about the origin of their name but decided it would be an imposition. Instead, I said, “You wouldn’t happen to know when the post office is open, would you?”

Trubkozub the elder nodded. “It’s open when I open it,” he said solemnly. “We used to have a postmaster, but the winters here proved to be too much for him, so he left. Brave man, he put up with the mosquitoes and the drought, but the winter got to him. Feel like howling, he kept saying. Left after the second winter, took the first train west, and never heard from him again. I’m the postmaster now.” He put on his hat, made of the fur of a wolverine or some other menacing beast, and tossed aside the tangle of furs he had been sewing. “Petro,” he said. “Mind the store. If the Chinamen come again, you tell them that it’s five per pelt and not a penny less. I’ll take a few bolts of silk in barter, but very few.”

My heart fluttered and then settled, expecting unavoidable disappointment. “Chinamen fur traders?” I asked. “Do they come by often?”

“Not in winter,” Trubkozub the elder answered as he wrestled his thick arms into the sleeves of his voluminous coat. “These two showed up yesterday, on a train going back to China. What they were doing so far west, who knows. The strange thing is, they still have a lot of their silk and tea with them. Why didn’t they trade it all for pelts, I ask you? And why did they have to go west then back here, hmm?”

“Who knows other people’s business?” I answered with as indifferent a shrug as I could manage. “Only I think I met those two before, on the train — I should probably say hello to them.”

“That won’t be difficult,” said Trubkozub as he headed out the door, the keys on a heavy iron ring clinking like icicles. “They’ll either be here, haggling over nothing, or at the tavern, where the rest of you hussars are drinking now. The cook there is a Chinaman too, a good cook. Makes those Chinese pelmeni, calls them pot stickers — very much recommend them, young men. Try them when you join the rest of your army or regiment or whatever they call it nowadays.”

He chatted amiably and we followed. The three of us crossed the windswept street, dodging handfuls of snow lobbed at us by fir branches roused by particularly frisky gusts. I only smiled into my new collar that smelled faintly of milk and barn warmth, immune to such shenanigans.

The post office was a log building, single-storied, with shuttered windows, like everything else in this street. Trubkozub unlocked the door and let us inside with significant sighing. He took his place behind the counter and took off his hat. “What can I help you with?” he said in a much more official voice than the one we had been subjected to so far. It was almost as if he truly believed he became a different person, a postmaster instead of a furrier, the moment he stood behind the official counter.

“I need to mail these.” I handed over six envelopes and paid, as he laboriously calculated the exact price of delivery and tax for each of the letters. He did not seem surprised they were all addressed to the same person — all except one, that was heading back to St. Petersburg and addressed to Eugenia, a letter in which I said very little but did my best to convey the emotional drain this journey had been subjecting me to.

Trubkozub collected money and promised my letters would go out that night, with the first train heading west. It perplexed me still, this single line of travel and communication, this rut of steel and creosote-soaked wood along which we traveled, constrained by the rocking trains on their iron tracks. How could one not long for the three dimensional freedom of airships and submarines in a world such as this? I wished I had the plans Jack had spirited away. I also felt guilty at the thought that I should be missing Jack more than I actually did.

True, I was concerned about his wellbeing — as I would be concerned for any friend whose whereabouts were unknown and surrounded by danger; but I did not miss him in a way Olga and my other friends would expect, in a way that Jack himself might have liked. It occurred to me that by traveling with him I took a significant social risk; it would be a pity to ruin one’s reputation for a man one was not romantically interested in.

“Well,” Volzhenko intruded upon my reverie, “maybe now we can go and have a drink.”

“And get something to eat,” I agreed. “I haven’t eaten in three days.”

“Come on then!” Volzhenko bounded for the door like a very large and a very enthusiastic puppy, and I followed in a more sedate manner.

At the door, I waved goodbye to Trubkozub. “Thank you.”

He smiled, and lit a kerosene lamp — I hadn’t realized it was getting dark despite it still being afternoon. “You be well now,” Trubkozub the elder said. “And if you ever need any furs or pelts, you know where to come.”

I promised I would, and ran after Volzhenko, my new fur boots squeaking on the smooth snow, colored lavender by the long slow shadows.

The tavern was noisy, smelly, warm, and welcoming. The rotmistr presided, as one would expect, over several tables pushed together. It was a Roman bacchanal in spirit if not in exact letter, and there was shouting and singing and spilled wine and awkward dancing cut tragically short by gravity, the cruel mistress of drunks and children.

Right away, I realized that as much as the rotmistr was always kind and welcoming, I would be better off trying to find some food by myself rather than joining the party already in progress. A young man, his dirty apron betraying his occupation as a scullery helper, loitered by the kitchen door but did not dare to venture into the tavern hussars had taken over so completely. I smiled at him. “Say, fellow,” I asked. “Is the kitchen still open?”

He scratched his freckled button nose thoughtfully. “The cook is there, only he has some friends with him since no one here seems to care and winters are generally slow. But go right in, see if he will make you something.”

I pushed the door and entered a cloud of steam smelling of sesame oil, and plowed through the dense artificial fog toward the sound of voices speaking Chinese.

I found the cook and Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi sitting around a thick wooden slab all the way in the back of the kitchen, next to a vast sink filled with boiling, steaming water, and a busy day’s worth of dishes. A woodstove blazed with red flames, and crackled with the resinous sap of the pine and fir branches.

“Hussar Menshov!” Kuan Yu cried out in English. “We wondered if you would be along with your fellow hussars. Have you found Mr. Bartram?”

I shook my head. “I worry the English have him, but I found no trace of him.”

Liu Zhi gave me a penetrating look. “You got here fast enough; you didn’t look for long.”

“I fell ill,” I said, and felt my cheeks blaze with shame.

Kuan Yu whispered to his friend and smiled at me. “Do not worry,” he said, reassuring. “Do not pay attention to Zhi — he’s a busybody. Here, meet our friend Woo Pei, the cook here.”

I shook hands with a very tall and very thin Chinese gentleman, who wore his hair braided in a long queue. His lips pressed tightly together, lest a word or a smile escaped from them.

“I hear you make great pot stickers,” I said.

He nodded. “My fame precedes me. Or rather, it escapes my kitchen and wanders about looking for new customers. Sit with us then, as I was about to make food for my friends. You are welcome to join us, but you mustn’t get angry if we speak our own language.”

I shrugged. “Why would I be? Surely if it is something that concerns me you would tell me. Correct?”

Woo Pei said something in Cantonese, and the three of them laughed. I busied myself taking off my new furs and watching Woo Pei boil water in a copper kettle, and pour it over flour. He mixed the dough and kneaded it with his long, thin fingers, then cut it into small pieces and flattened them. With minute, precise motions that seemed more suited to a watchmaker than a cook, he chopped onions and mixed them with ground meat and sesame oil, dusted the mixture with potato flour, and stuffed all the tiny dough circles with meat.

Before I knew it, he was heating a large iron skillet. As it hissed and sputtered oil, he dropped perhaps three dozen of the tiny meat dumplings into the skillet. He then poured water over them, covered the skillet, and sat down with the rest of us.

“Five minutes,” he told me in Russian, and then went back to talking with Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi. By then, the aroma of onion and meat had grown strong enough to distract me from any other thoughts but how hungry I was. Jack was an afterthought now, as I concentrated on not looking too impatient.

The pot stickers were delicious — fried golden on one side and steamed perfectly otherwise, served with brown salty and spicy dipping sauce, they seemed to me a most delicious meal I had ever tasted. I always got such an impression when eating after a long hike or a protracted riding lesson, something about the combination of physical exertion and fresh air made even the simplest food taste divine, a joy meant to be savored only infrequently, distinct in my memory from all the other mundane, everyday meals.

After the four of us had finished eating, I sat back in my chair, enjoying the pleasant sensation of fullness and warmth, accompanied by the first twinges of fatigue. I listened to the three Chinese men, and imagined myself back in the comfortable confines of the Crane Club, its vast windows gilded by the setting sun, its mysterious tiny machines and airship models humming and whirring, the tiny jointed wings folding and unfolding like paper fans…

Two words pulled me abruptly back into the tavern kitchen in a brand-new Siberian town. The words
Taiping Tianguo
stood out clearly in the otherwise incomprehensible speech.

I sat bolt upright and leaned over the table, as if sheer effort of my will would be enough to decipher the indecipherable syllables, and I wished I had learned Cantonese back in St. Petersburg when there was still someone to teach me. As Eugenia had warned me when I was just a child, no one grew up with no regrets; the best one could do was to make sure one’s regrets were not stupid.

Woo Pei noticed me straining to understand, laughed softly, and spoke to Kuan Yu, his gaze still lingering on mine. I felt rather like a dog, trying so hard to understand what the men around me were talking about, and vaguely hoping for something good, trying to discern their mood from their intonation — but their language was so alien, everything sounded the same.

Kuan Yu finally turned to me, and if I had a tail, I would’ve wagged it in relief and jubilation. “Apologies,” he said. “Woo Pei is away from home, so we tell him what we know about the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace. We also tell him about your Englishman, because everyone who travels through this town, they come here to eat and talk. At least, when there are no hussars around — they make it too noisy.”

“Well?” I sucked in my breath and leaned back, my hands fisted in the pockets of my britches, trying to feign impatience I did not feel. “Will he tell me if he’s seen my friend or not?”

Kuan Yu smiled, his anthracite eyes narrowing like those of a sated cat. “He hasn’t,” he answered. “But we have something we found in your compartment, after you left in Yekaterinburg. A letter.”

“Give it to me!” I cried, forgetting all proper decorum and reaching out with both hands, like a child. “Why haven’t you told me?” Relief and fear alternately lapped at my heart, making it soar with hope that this was my lost letter, my confession that did not belong in anyone’s hands but mine, and then plummet with grief when I thought that it was nothing, a useless scrap discarded by the previous passengers, a train schedule, a nothing.

Kuan Yu smiled still. “If I give that letter to you, will you do something for me?”

I heaved a sigh. Everyone wanted the same thing — information. Who spied on whom, why the British were forming alliance with the Turks, why there had to be a war… if only I could answer such questions to anyone’s satisfaction. It was intimidating, really, to realize how little I knew, and how little business I had meddling with forces and powers too great for anyone, least of all me. “What do you want?”

“Nothing much. Just your word that you do not mean to harm us, to harm the Taiping.”

I smiled, relieved. “I… we mean no harm, I swear to you. We want an alliance between China and Russia, because both are in danger of aggression from the West.”

Kuan Yu nodded, solemn. “That is true. There’s fear that the British will start another war, if the Qing do not get the Taiping under control fast enough.”

“So you do not think the Qing would be interested in allying themselves with Russia.”

“No.” Kuan Yu’s smile was frozen, a sliver of white ice in his dark beard. “Qing… you know they are foreigners, you know how Han hate them. But there’s also this: they have chosen their demon. They know it is a demon, a demon that torments and kills and mutilates them every day, and yet it is familiar and they tell themselves that it will protect them from other demons.”

“You think all westerners are demons?”

Woo Pei shook his head, impatient. “It is not that. Your god is taking over our gods, and maybe it is all right, maybe they can all live together or they will battle and the weak ones will perish. What it is, however, is this: we do not yet believe we must ally with any demon. Maybe we are naïve and foolish, but we do think like this: maybe we don’t have to honor demons, maybe there are angels, or maybe we, ourselves, are enough. Qing, they believe in nothing but the demons and are eager to strike a bargain without ever thinking that maybe they don’t have to.”