Turkish Gambit

Chapter One

IN WHICH A PROGRESSIVE WOMAN FINDS HERSELF IN A QUITE DESPERATE SITUATION

La Revue Parisienne

14 (2) July 1877

Our correspondent, now already in his second week with the Russian Army of the Danube, informs us that in his order of the day for yesterday, 1st July (13th July in the European style), the Emperor Alexander thanks his victorious troops, who have succeeded in forcing a crossing of the Danube and breaching the borders of the Ottoman state. His Imperial Majesty's order affirms that the enemy has been utterly crushed and in no more than two weeks' time at the very most the Orthodox cross will be raised over Saint Sophia in Constantinople. The advancing army is encountering almost no resistance, unless one takes into account the mosquito bites inflicted on the Russian lines of communication by flying detachments of the so-called Bashi-Bazouks ('mad-heads'), a species of half-bandit and half-partisan, famed for their savage disposition and bloodthirsty ferocity.

According to Saint Augustine, woman is a frail and fickle creature, and the great obscurantist and misogynist was right a thousand times over - at least with regard to a certain individual by the name of Varvara Suvorova.

It had all started out as such a jolly adventure, but now it had come to this. She only had her own stupid self to blame - Mama had told Varya time and time again that sooner or later she would land herself in a jam, and now she had. In the course of one of their many tempestuous altercations her father, a man of great wisdom endowed with the patience of a saint, had divided his daughter's life into three periods: the imp in a skirt; the perishing nuisance; the loony nihilist. To this very day Varya still prided herself on this characterisation, declaring that she had no intention of resting on her laurels as yet; but this time her self-confidence had played her a really mean trick.

Why, oh why had she agreed to make a halt at the tavern - this korchma, or whatever it was they called the abominable dive? Her driver, that dastardly thief Mitko, had started his whining with those funny Bulgarian endings: 'Let's water the hossesta, let's water the hossesta.' So they had stopped to water the horses. O God, what was she going to do now?

Varya was sitting in the corner of a dingy and utterly filthy shed at a table of rough-hewn planks, feeling frightened to death. Only once before had she ever experienced such grim, hopeless terror, when at the age of six she broke her grandmother's favourite teacup and hid under the divan to await the inevitable retribution.

If she could only pray - but progressive women didn't pray. And meanwhile the situation looked absolutely desperate.

Well then . . . The St Petersburg-Bucharest leg of her route had been traversed rapidly enough, even comfortably: the express train (two passenger coaches and ten flatcars with artillery pieces) had rushed Varya to the capital of the principality of Roumania in three days. The brown eyes of the lady with the bobbed hair, who smoked papyrosas and refused on principle to allow her hand to be kissed, had very nearly set the army officers and staff functionaries bound for the theatre of military operations at each others' throats. At every halt Varya was presented with bouquets of flowers and punnets of strawberries. She threw the bouquets out of the window, because they were vulgar, and soon she was obliged to forswear the strawberries as well, because they brought her out in a red rash. It had turned out to be a rather jolly and pleasant journey, although from an intellectual and ideological perspective, of course, all of her suitors were absolute maggots. There was, to be sure, one cornet who was reading Lamartine and had even heard of Schopenhauer, and he had been more subtle in paying court than the others; but Varya had explained to him - as one comrade to another - that she was travelling to join her fiance, after which the cornet's behaviour had been quite irreproachable. He had not been at all bad-looking, either, rather like Lermontov. Oh, bother the cornet, anyway.

The second stage of her journey had also gone off without as much as a single hitch. There was a stagecoach which ran from Bucharest to Turnu-Megurele. She had been obliged to swallow a little dust as she bounced and jolted along, but it had brought her within arm's reach of her goal; for rumour had it that the general headquarters of the Army of the Danube were located on the far side of the river, in Tsarevitsy.

This was the point at which she had to put into effect the final and most crucial part of The Plan which she had worked out back in St Petersburg (that was what

Varya called it to herself: The Plan, with capital letters). Yesterday evening, under cover of darkness, she had crossed the Danube in a boat a little above Zimnitsa, where two weeks previously the heroic Fourteenth Division under General Dragomirov had completed a forced crossing of that formidable watery barrier. This was the beginning of Turkish territory, the zone of military operations, and it would certainly be only too easy to slip up here. There were Cossack patrols roaming the roads, and if she once let her guard down she was as good as done for - she would be packed off back to Bucharest in the winking of an eye. But Varya was a resourceful girl, so she had anticipated this and taken appropriate measures.

The discovery of a coaching inn in the Bulgarian village on the south bank of the Danube had been a really great stroke of luck, and after that things had gone from good to better; the landlord understood Russian and had promised to give her a reliable vodach - a guide - for only five roubles. Varya had bought wide trousers much like Turkish chalvars, a shirt, boots, a sleeveless jacket and an idiotic cloth cap, and a change of clothes had instantly transformed her from a European lady into a skinny Bulgarian youth who would not arouse the slightest suspicion in any patrol. She had deliberately commissioned a roundabout route, avoiding the columns of march, in order to enter Tsarevitsy not from the north but from the south; and there, in the general army headquarters, was Pyotr Yablokov, Varya's . . . Well, actually, it is not quite clear just who he is. Her fiance? Her comrade? Her husband? Let us call him her former husband and future fiance. And also -naturally - her comrade.

They had set out while it was still dark on a creaky, ramshackle camtza, a Roumanian-style cart. Her vodach Mitko, tight-lipped, with grey moustaches, chewed tobacco all the while, constantly ejecting long streams of brown spittle on to the road (Varya winced every time he did it). At first he had crooned some exotic Balkan melody, then he had fallen silent and sunk into a reverie. It was clear enough now what thoughts he had been pondering.

He could have killed me, Varya thought with a shudder. Or even worse. And without the slightest problem - who would bother investigating in these partsl They would just blame those what's-their-names - Bashi-Bazouks.

But though things may have stopped short of murder, they had turned out quite badly enough. That traitor Mitko had led his female travelling companion to a tavern which resembled more than anything a bandit's den, seated her at a table and ordered some cheese and a jug of wine to be brought, while he himself turned back towards the door, gesturing as much as to say: I'll be back in a moment. Varya had dashed after him, not wishing to be abandoned in this dim, dirty and distinctly malodorous sink of iniquity, but Mitko had said he needed to step outside - not to put too fine a point on it - in order to satisfy a call of nature. When Varya did not understand, he had explained his meaning with a gesture and she had returned to her seat covered in confusion.

The duration of the call of nature had exceeded all conceivable limits. Varya ate a little of the salty, unappetising cheese, took a sip of the sour wine and then, unable any longer to endure the curiosity that the fearsome denizens of the public house had begun to evince in her person, she went out into the yard.

Outside the door she froze in horror.

There was not a trace of the carutza or of the trunk with all her things which it contained. Her travelling medicine chest was in the trunk, and in the medicine chest, between the lint and the bandages, lay her passport and absolutely all her money.

Varya was just about to run out on to the road when the landlord, with a bright crimson nose and warts on his cheek, came darting out of the koxchma in his red shirt. He shouted angrily and gestured: pay up first, and then you can leave. Varya went back inside, because the landlord had frightened her and she had nothing with which she could pay him. She sat down quietly in the corner and tried to think of what had happened as an adventure. But she failed miserably.

There was not a single woman in the tavern. The dirty, loud-mouthed yokels behaved quite unlike Russian peasants, who are quiet and inoffensive and talk amongst themselves in low voices until they get drunk, while these louts were bawling raucously as they downed red wine by the tankard, constantly erupting into loud and rapacious (or so it seemed to Varya) laughter. At a long table on the far side of the room they were playing dice, breaking into uproarious dispute following every throw. On one occasion, when they fell to quarrelling more loudly than usual, a small man who was extremely drunk was struck over the head with a clay tankard. He lay there sprawled under the table and nobody paid the slightest attention to him.

The landlord nodded in Varya's direction and passed some savoury remark, at which the men sitting at nearby tables turned in her direction and roared in malevolent laughter. Varya squirmed and tugged her cap down over her eyes. Nobody else sitting in the tavern was wearing a cap, but she couldn't take it off or her hair would come tumbling down. Not that it was really long - Varya wore her hair short, as befitted a modern woman - but even so it would betray her membership of the weaker sex. That disgusting designation invented by men: 'the weaker sex'. But, alas, it was only too true.

Now their eyes were boring into Varya from every side, and their glances were viscous and disgusting. The only ones who seemed to have no time for her were the dice-players and some dejected type sitting two tables away with his back to her, his nose buried in a tankard of wine. All she could see of him was a head of short-trimmed black hair greying at the temples.

Varya began to feel really terrified. Stop snivelling, she said to herself. You're a strong, grown-up woman, not some prim young lady. You have to tell them you're Russian and you're travelling to join your fiance in the army. We are the liberators of Bulgaria-, everyone here is glad to see us. And then, speaking Bulgarian is so easy: you just have to add 'ta' to everything. Russian armyta. Fianceta. Fianceta of Russian soldierta. Or something of the sort.

She turned towards the window - maybe Mitko would suddenly turn up? Maybe he had taken the horses to the watering place and now he was on his way back? But alas, there was no sign of Mitko or any carutza out on the dusty street. Varya did, however, notice something that had failed to catch her attention earlier: protruding above the houses was a low minaret covered in chipped and peeling paint. Oh! Could the village possibly be Moslem? But the Bulgarians were Christians, Orthodox, everybody knew that. What's more, they were drinking wine, and that was forbidden to Moslems by the Koran. But if the village was Christian, then what on earth did the minaret mean? And if it was Moslem, then whose side were they on, ours or the Turks? Hardly ours. It looked as though the 'armyta' might not be much help after all. O, Lord, what was she to do?

At the age of fourteen, in a Holy Scripture class, little Varya Suvorova had been struck by an idea so un-impugnable in its very obviousness that it was hard to believe nobody had ever thought of it before. If God created Adam first and Eve afterwards, far from demonstrating that men were more important, this demonstrated that women were more perfect. Man was the experimental prototype of the human being, the rough draft, while woman was the final approved version, as finally revised and amended. Why, it was as clear as day! But for some reason the real, interesting side of life belonged exclusively to the men and all the women did was have children and do embroidery, then have more children and do more embroidery. Why was there such injustice in the world? Because men were stronger. And that meant she had to be strong.

So little Varya had decided she was going to live her life differently. The United States already had the first woman doctor in Mary Jacobi and the first woman priest in Antoinette Blackwell, while life in Russia was still riddled with dodoism and patriarchal discipline. But never mind, just give her time!

On graduating from girls' high school Varya had emulated the United States in waging a victorious war of independence (her papa, the solicitor Suvorov, proved to be a spineless weakling) and started training to be a midwife - thereby making the transition from 'perishing nuisance' to 'loony nihilist'.

The training did not work out well. Varya mastered the theoretical part with no difficulty, although she found many aspects of the process of creating a human being quite astonishing, even incredible; but when her turn came to assist at a genuine birth, it had proved most embarrassing. Unable to bear the heart-rending howls of the woman giving birth and the terrible sight of the flattened head of the infant as it emerged from the tormented and bloody flesh, Varya had disgraced herself by slumping to the floor in a dead faint, after which the only course left open to her had been to study to be a telegrapher. It had been flattering at first to become one of the first female telegraphers in Russia - they had even written about Varya in the St Petersburg Gazette (an article entitled 'Long Overdue' in the issue of the 28th of November 1875), but the job had proved to be boring beyond all endurance and without any prospects of advancement whatsoever.