The Exile: A novel about Taras Shevchenko by Tulub Zinaida

Author:Tulub, Zinaida [Tulub, Zinaida]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Publisher: Glagoslav Publications
Published: 2015-10-11T04:00:00+00:00

21

The Schooner Constantine

Fort Raïm stood on the crest of a hill dominating a green valley. Luxurious meadows down below passed gradually into stands of reed through which the sunlit ripples of the full-fed Syr Darya glittered now and then. In the middle of a square inside the fort stood a tall monument of stone at the grave of Raïm Batyr who died a hundred years ear­lier and after whom the fort was named.

At the end of a three-day rest, the Orenburg carpenters and Baltic sailors started assembling the schooner with a will on a level bank of the Syr Darya where no shrubs or reeds grew.

Shevchenko sat on the sand under a shed where sail cloth and rings of rope were stacked, and delighted in drawing the light fleecy cloudlets on the horizon.

But his thoughts were far away from the place where he was now.

He recalled his last week at Orsk, shortly before the ar­rival of Butakov’s caravan. As he usually did every holiday, he had walked beyond the ramparts — remnants of fortifications from the times of Czarine Catherine — where the building of the town of Orenburg was started on the site of Orsk, sat down on the steep bank of the Ural and drifted into gloomy reverie. He had not noticed then how an old man had come up to him. The man served his long sentence in exile and was now living out his days near his prison. He could not work any­more and the wardens, whom he helped by distributing the food to the prisoners or tending the stoves when blizzards raged outdoors, fed him with the offal from the prison kitchen, and even the supervisor of the prison turned a blind eye to his existence, since the almost hundred-year-old man had nowhere else to go.

It was not the first time Shevchenko talked with him, listening to his sad life story and telling him about his own. They had a lot of things in common.

The old man had once been a serf, an orphan and beg­gar among beggars. The lord he belonged to had two boys growing up. The orphan was taken into the lord’s household as a playmate for the boys. Like wolflings they often hit him painfully and beat him while playing. The lordlings grew up, tutors were invited to teach them, and the orphan whiled away his time during the lessons. He, too, memorized the letters, forming them into words and reading and writing no worse than the lordlings by and by. After two years of private tutoring, the lordlings were taken to school in town, while the boy was made to work in the fields. He walked behind the plowmen, harrowing and tilling fields, but did not forget what he had learned. When he grew up and became a young man, he fell in love and became en­gaged to his sweetheart. The day of the wedding had been set, preparations for it were already underway, when sud­denly the lordlings came home, took away his bride to be, disgraced her and she bore a child out of wedlock.

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