Russian Treasures

11. THE CHINESE MERCENARIES

Klim had no choice but to renounce his Argentine citizenship and apply for a Soviet passport.

By now, anyone wanting to leave Russia had to pay bribes running into thousands of rubles. Becoming a Soviet citizen, on the other hand, cost next to nothing and usually went smoothly except for the tiring delays and queues.

The door to the Bureau for the Registration of Foreign Citizens opened once every thirty minutes or so. Former prisoners of war sat on the floor in front of the door with their legs stretched out. Next to them stood dozens of Chinese men dressed in ragged oriental robes belted with hemp cords.

“Where are you from?” Klim asked the men in Shanghainese.

The Chinese gawped at him in disbelief. They had never seen a white person who spoke their language before.

A shock-headed, thick-lipped young man bowed to Klim. “My name is Ho,” he said. “My mother is from the province of Jiangsu, and I know some Shanghainese. My friends don’t speak it though. They are from the northern provinces.”

Somehow, the two of them managed to make themselves understood. Ho told Klim that two years earlier, he and his fellow countrymen had come as laborers to work on the construction of the Murmansk Railroad. To compensate for the shortage of labor during wartime, Russian merchants who had settled in China had recruited teams of Chinese workers from the villages and sent them to construction sites across Russia, mostly the railroads. After the Bolshevik coup, the government had stopped paying the Chinese, and they had made the long journey to Petrograd in the hope that the state would pay for their passage back to China.

The door of the Bureau for the Registration opened again, and a scrawny man stuck his head around it. He was narrow-shouldered and dark and looked like a young gypsy. Shifting from one foot to another, he scrutinized the silent queue for a moment and then spoke, “Oppressed workers of China, follow me please!”

Nobody moved, so the young man went up to one of the Chinese and tried to take his hand. The man recoiled in fear.

“He wants you to go with him,” Klim explained in Shanghainese.

“Do you understand their language?” exclaimed the scrawny young man, staring at Klim. “Listen, I could do with someone like you.”

“But I have my own business here in the Bureau for the Registration,” Klim protested.

The young man paid no attention. “Don’t worry. I can get you to the front of the queue once you’ve helped me. Do you need bread? I can arrange for you to get a loaf. And some tallow and tea.” He thrust out a skinny hand. “I’m Lyosha Pukhov. I’ve been charged with creating a detachment of proletarians from the yellow races.”

Pukhov ushered the awed cluster of Chinese men into a huge hall with crystal chandeliers.

“Ask them to take a seat,” he told Klim. “We’ll have a political meeting first, and then we’ll move onto practical arrangements.”

Pukhov took a piece of paper out of his pocket. “Dear Chinese comrades!” he began to read. “Those of you who support the liberation of the oppressed and the protection of the power of the workers and peasants come and join us in the ranks of the Red Armyd. Come and join its Chinese battalion.”

Klim had no idea how to say words like “comrade,” “oppressed,” and in particular “battalion” in Shanghainese, so he just provided a basic translation: Pukhov would give the Chinese food and money if they followed his orders. Ho listened to Klim and then interpreted Pukhov’s speech into the northern dialect.

“Our revolution is working miracles,” Pukhov called out. “We all are brothers. The same red blood runs under yours and our skin. The same stout hearts beat in all our chests, at one with those of the world’s proletariat. Please step up one at a time and fill in a form for us with your details.”

“I’d be surprised if they can write,” said Klim.

Pukhov scratched his head. “Well—they can dictate their details to you, and you can just write everything down in Russian. By the way, I have sunflower oil too. I’ll give you some of that as well.”

It was late evening by the time Klim had finished filling out the forms.

After the Chinese had left, Pukhov spent some time reading the biographies of his soldiers-to-be.

“What a life!” he exclaimed angrily. “What cynical exploitation! They were being paid a measly ruble and a half a day, half of what a Russian worker got. They had no recourse to the law and no chance of having any complaints heard. The slightest dissension and they would be sacked on the spot.”

Klim nodded, glancing uneasily through the window at the darkening sky. The twenty-four-hour period had expired, he still hadn’t been to the Bureau for the Registration of Foreign Citizens and could now be arrested on the spot.

“According to the statistics, we have about four million foreign nationals in Russia,” Pukhov continued nonchalantly. “Half of them are prisoners of war, and the rest are immigrants and seasonal workers from all around the world. They’re working-class people, and they’ve already organized themselves into their own little communities. I tell you, these people make the best proletarian fighters. Have you heard about the Finnish Detachment of the Red Guards? And the Latvian Riflemen are a great help to the Cheka too.”

“So I hear,” Klim said, smiling bitterly.

“Now, we have to organize the Chinese,” Pukhov said. “There are about five thousand of them in Petrograd. They live in ramshackle, overcrowded huts in unimaginable filth. Almost none of them have a permanent job. The police have received a number of reports about them being involved in robbery and rape. There are only nine Chinese women per five hundred men living in one barrack. These men are young, and they have—well, you know—perfectly natural instincts. But if a man has no money to take a girl to the pictures, let alone start a family, something is eventually going to give.”

“Yes, obviously rape is the inevitable consequence,” Klim said through gritted teeth. “You’ll have to excuse me, but I have to go.”

“Oh, I almost forgot,” Pukhov said. “I owe you your wages.”

He took Klim into a small office piled high with boxes labeled “Red Cross.”

“These are the rations for our Chinese recruits,” Pukhov said. “So, tell me, why were you in the queue at the Bureau for Registration? Do you need documents?”

Klim described his situation.

“What nonsense!” Pukhov cried. “The Cheka has no right to cancel your visa. It’s not their business but ours—the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. I’ll take you to Comrade Zalkind. He’ll fix things.”

“What if he doesn’t agree to help me?” Klim asked.

“He will. If need be, I’ll send a messenger to Gorokhovaya Street. You have to stay in Petrograd. Otherwise, how will I be able to speak to my Chinese recruits tomorrow?”

His words set Klim’s heart pounding.

“Could you help get my fiancée permission to come to Petrograd?” he asked. “The authorities in Nizhny Novgorod have forbidden her to leave the city.”

“Well—you know,” Pukhov grimaced, “the local executive committees do pretty well what they please. At the moment, we don’t have any control over them.”

“I could go to Nizhny Novgorod myself and bring her back.”

Pukhov shook his head. “I need you here. We’ll be training the Chinese for a couple of months, and then we’ll send them to Moscow as reinforcements for the Cheka. After that, I can organize your trip to Novgorod or wherever it is. But you have to make a good showing.”

Pukhov was offering Klim a position as an interpreter for a Cheka hit squad.

“I accept,” Klim nodded slowly. “But may I ask you a favor? I need to send a telegram to Nizhny Novgorod, and I want it to be handed directly to the addressee. And I need a response.”

“That’s easy. We’ll send the telegram immediately. We have a telegraph operator on duty around the clock.”

Pukhov advised Klim not to give up his Argentine passport. “They’ve just begun a general mobilization of the population. As soon as you become a Russian citizen, they’ll have you in the army like a shot. It will be much harder for me to get you out of there. No, I have a better idea—we’ll just extend your visa.”

Khitruk had done nothing but anxiously mope around his apartment since losing his paper. His editorial staff had gradually gone their separate ways to the countryside, Ukraine, or Finland. The days of fearless journalistic scoops had been consigned to history.

Khitruk correctly surmised that Klim had made a deal with the Bolsheviks to let him stay in Russia without changing his citizenship. He didn’t ask Klim to play chess anymore and looked at him suspiciously. The two men could no longer find anything to talk about, but this was not the most important thing on Klim’s mind at the moment. He had finally had word from Nina. It turned out that she had never received any of his letters, but she assured him she was alive and well.

Klim telegraphed that he would come to Nizhny Novgorod in early September. Pukhov had promised to provide him with the necessary documents, from train tickets to a travel pass from the Cheka. Klim had no idea what to do next, but that mattered little either.

Every morning, he went out to meet Pukhov at the commissar’s luxurious lodgings in the Astoria Hotel. A shiny-black, chauffeur-driven car would arrive at the entrance, and they would speed along the grassy, deserted streets to the barracks of the Grenadier Regiment where the Chinese recruits were billeted.

Klim kept himself aloof from Pukhov and his assistants, former Imperial Army officers who had offered their services to the Bolsheviks in exchange for rations. These men quickly began to look down on Klim after it became clear that only about twenty out of the three hundred Chinese recruits understood Klim’s Shanghainese. Klim talked, and then Ho had to interpret to the rest of the men. To make matters worse, neither Klim nor Ho knew any military terms, so almost everything had to be explained using gestures.

“There are no other interpreters!” Pukhov shouted in a rage. “We’ve been everywhere from the university to the Academy of Sciences. Even when we do find someone who knows Chinese, they refuse to cooperate.”

He looked gloomily at his warriors kitted out in a motley array of oriental robes, striped sailor’s vests, and tattered trousers. “The ill-fated soldiers of the revolution,” he sighed.

Gradually, the Chinese learned how to understand “fall in” and “forward, march” and “hurrah” in Russian. But they failed to recognize their commanders because all white people looked alike to them. The guards often even prevented Lyosha Pukhov from entering the barracks. “Halt!” they yelled in broken Russian, and only after they realized that it was Commissar Le Sha, as they called him, did they let him through. The sound of Pukhov’s first name made them snigger. Klim guessed that sha meant something like “stupid” in their language.

The instructors worked their recruits into the ground from dawn to dusk, making them run, aim, and fire.

Klim got back home at around nine in the evening, tired and hoarse from shouting pointless commands. Durga usually waited for him on the stairs, and he would greet her gloomily.

“Don’t you want to write another book?” she asked. “I have a marvelous idea. What about Pest Control for the Home and Workplace?”

Klim shook his head. “These days, the censors wouldn’t allow it. They’d suspect some political subtext or other.”

As he made his way upstairs, Durga’s voice floated up from the darkness below, “What about Official Claims and Complaints for All Occasions?”

As soon as Klim got into the apartment, he gave his groceries to the cook and retreated to the guest room. He had pinned a calendar out of a newspaper onto the wall, and every day, he crossed out another day—not the current day but the day ahead. That way he could fool himself into thinking that he had a little less time to wait.

Finally, the day came for Klim to say goodbye to Khitruk.

“War has broken out,” he said. “The Czechs have rebelled on the Volga, and my Chinese are being sent to defend Kazan. We’ll go on the troop ship Nakhimovets through the Mariinsk Canal System.”

“Well, good luck to you,” said Khitruk, giving him a mocking look.

Klim made a curious sight in his new guise as a Russo-Argentine Chinese interpreter for the Bolsheviks. His haute couture gray overcoat sewn by the best tailor in Florida Street in downtown Buenos Aires hung incongruously over his brand-new Red Army uniform.

“I’m going to find Nina,” said Klim. “Nizhny Novgorod is on the way to Kazan.”

Khitruk averted his eyes. “Well, may God help you.” He patted at his pockets in search of a cigarette lighter, muttering away and pretending not to notice Klim’s outstretched hand.

“Thank you for everything,” said Klim, picking up his kit bag from the floor.

Durga met him on the stairs.

“I really don’t know what I should wish you,” she said angrily. “Go now before I say something stupid and jinx you. I don’t want you to catch a bullet in your first battle.”

The rivers were shallow in summer and full of hidden shoals and sandbanks, and the troopships made slow, tortuous progress. There were twenty-eight ascending locks and four descending ones on the Sheksna River alone. The rickety wooden holds were so small that the sailors had to load all the coal and ammunition onto barges. Even the water for the boilers had to be stored on them. The troopships were towed to the town of Rybinsk by tugboats at an agonizingly slow speed of two and a half knots.

Klim grew weary and impatient. He paced the burning hot deck, shading his eyes to look at the ancient monasteries on the riverbanks with their towers and arrow-slit windows. The air was filled with the smell of cut grass and river mud.

Pukhov kept pestering the Chinese soldiers as they lay listlessly in the heat.

“How do you say ‘hello’ in your language?”

The Chinese would say something to him and cackle gleefully. Pukhov repeated what they said and burst into shrill laughter too, not realizing that he had just called himself a donkey and that they were having a laugh at his expense.

After dinner, Klim took refuge behind a lifeboat in the stern. He wanted to spend some time alone away from the Chinese, who were constantly asking him to interpret something. But Pukhov always managed to find him and sat down beside him with his thin hands pressed between his knees.

“The Whites have a fleet of their own now,” he said. “I never thought I’d ever be taking part in a river battle. I remember reading about warships, cannons, and cutlasses as a child, but now, I’m going to experience it all for myself.”

Klim remained tight-lipped. The civil war was none of his business. He had decided long ago that as soon as they got to Nizhny Novgorod, he would go ashore and escape.

The mowers on the riverbank began to cook their lunch. The waves lapped quietly against the side of the ship. Klim tried to work out how long it would take the Nakhimovets to get to Nizhny Novgorod, given all the stops, locks, loading, and unloading.

“Klim?” came Pukhov’s voice.

“Hmm?”

“Do you ever get scared at the thought that they might kill us? Personally, I simply can’t imagine how the world could possibly exist without me in it.”