The road to Perm's outer defences ran through a birch forest that had the particular quality of beauty that places have when they don't know what's about to happen in them, the light coming through the white trunks in long pale columns that hit the ground in patches and moved slowly as the morning progressed. I noticed this and immediately felt vaguely insulted by it, the way I had learned to feel vaguely insulted by beautiful things that had the poor timing to be beautiful while I was trying to do something that required a different kind of attention entirely.
We moved in the early morning, the column spread across the road and into the tree lines on either side, the advance scouts somewhere ahead of us in the birch sending back signals we'd learned to read over the weeks of the campaign — hand signs, whistle patterns, the specific silence that meant clear versus the specific silence that meant something else. The men around me moved with the particular quiet of soldiers who had been doing this long enough to have shed the noises that amateur soldiers make without knowing they're making them. No clinking equipment — everything secured and wrapped. No talking. Just boots on packed earth and the occasional birdsong above us that had apparently not received the memo about what the morning was for.
Dmitri was two positions to my left, pipe unlit for once, which I had come to understand as his personal indicator that something serious was about to happen. He caught my eye briefly and gave the small nod that meant he was ready, which in the context of our specific friendship meant nothing more ceremonial than that — just the acknowledgment between two men who had been watching each other's backs long enough that the watching had become its own kind of communication.
I had known, going to sleep the previous night, that something was wrong with my body. Not the ordinary wrong of exhausted muscles and inadequate food and three weeks of marching through Ural countryside, which was a constant condition I'd learned to operate inside the way a man learns to operate inside chronic pain — not ignoring it exactly, but refusing to let it run the proceedings. This was different. A specific heat behind my eyes that was not the heat of the summer morning, and a heaviness in my limbs that was heavier than tiredness, and the particular tenderness across my torso where I'd been scratching at the lice bites that every man in the column carried, because the lice were as much a part of the campaign as the rifles and the bad bread and the disappearing roads.
I had not told anyone. There was nothing to tell that would change anything, and everything to lose by being pulled from the column before Perm, which was the thing I had been marching toward for three weeks and which was, as of this morning, close enough that the scouts had reported hearing the city's church bells the previous evening when the wind was right.
I was going to be there when it fell. After that, whatever my body needed to say about itself could say it.
---
The outer defences were lighter than the intelligence had suggested, which was a pleasant surprise in a campaign that had mostly generated the other kind. The Czech units that had been holding the approaches had pulled back to the inner perimeter overnight, apparently having made the calculation that the outer positions were not worth the cost of holding against the force coming at them, which was tactically sound and personally irritating given how much I'd been building up a specific anger about Czechoslovaks for the last several days.
We took the outer line in two hours of fighting that was sharp and unpleasant and cost us eleven men, which in the context of the campaign felt like a reasonable price and in any other context would feel like an outrage. I will not describe those two hours in detail beyond saying that the birch forest, by the time we came through it, was no longer the kind of beautiful it had been when we entered it, and that what beauty remained was of a different and considerably less peaceful variety.
The inner city was harder. The Czechs had consolidated well, falling back to prepared positions in the stone buildings around the central district, using the streets as channelled approaches that let them concentrate fire on whoever came through them. It was urban fighting of the kind I had done in Moscow, which meant it was the kind that grinds rather than breaks — building by building, floor by floor, the cost accumulating in a way that the individual engagements don't capture because each one looks containable until you add them all together at the end of the day.
I fought through the morning and into the afternoon and the fever that I'd woken up with climbed steadily through all of it, which I noticed in the specific detached way that I had learned to notice things that couldn't be addressed immediately — filed under later, the way you file everything during a sustained engagement that isn't directly relevant to the next thirty seconds.
The Czechs began pulling back around midday. Not a rout — organised, disciplined, falling back in sections that covered each other's withdrawal, heading for the rail yards where their trains were waiting. This was what the intelligence had predicted and what Grushko had planned around, and watching it happen with the particular relief of a plan going roughly as intended was one of the better feelings the campaign had produced.
I watched them go from a second-floor window of a building we'd just cleared, looking down at the street below where Czech units were moving at speed toward the rail yard, and I thought about the men I'd been angry at for three weeks, and found that watching them retreat was less satisfying than I'd expected it to be, which was probably the fever saying something, or possibly just the truth of the thing — that the Czechs going away didn't fix anything, didn't get me to Ukraine, didn't make the revolution into what I needed it to be, just moved one obstacle out of the way of a road that had more obstacles on it further along.
The trains pulled out of Perm's rail yard that afternoon while we were still consolidating the city's centre. I heard the whistles from somewhere across the rooftops and understood what they meant.
Further east. Always further east, further from home, further from whatever after was supposed to look like when it finally arrived.
---
Perm fell by evening.
The last White and Czech holdouts in the city's southern district surrendered around five o'clock, coming out of buildings with their hands raised into the late afternoon light, and the Red units around them received the surrender with the tired, pragmatic efficiency of men who had been doing this since morning and had enough left to process a surrender but not quite enough for anything more elaborate.
What happened in the city after the fighting ended I will record in the same terms I have used throughout this account for the things that happened in Moscow and in the villages on the road — briefly and without the specific detail that would make them easier to dismiss as aberrations rather than patterns.
The men who'd fought against us were not all treated as prisoners. Some were, and some were not, and the distinction between those two categories was made by individual commissars and unit commanders with a speed and finality that suggested the criteria were understood even if they were never fully articulated. I watched some of what was decided and looked away from some of what was decided and kept moving through the city doing what the orders required, which was the same thing I had been doing since October in Moscow, which was the same thing I would apparently keep doing until something stopped me.
A factory owner was taken from his house near the central square, his family watching from the doorway, and what happened to him in the street outside happened quickly and with the flat efficiency of something that had been decided before anyone arrived at that specific house on that specific evening. His wife made a sound that I heard from a block away and have not stopped hearing since. His children were too young to make sense of what they were seeing and old enough to never stop seeing it. I kept walking because stopping would have changed nothing except my position in the column, and I had learned by now that my position in the column was the only thing I had meaningful control over, and that exercising control over everything else required an authority I did not have and a power I had not been given.
Grushko, that evening, in the requisitioned office building that had become our temporary headquarters, gave a short speech about the victory that had the shape of the speeches he always gave — the revolution, the workers, the inevitable correctness of the historical process — and I listened to it with the same complicated feeling I had been listening to those speeches with since Moscow, which was the feeling of a man who believes the sentence and cannot believe the paragraph and cannot stop needing the book.
---
The fever was worse that night.
I lay in a requisitioned room in a requisitioned building on a requisitioned mattress and the heat behind my eyes had moved into the rest of me, the specific radiating heat of something systemic rather than localised, and I understood, somewhere in the honest part of my mind that the fever hadn't yet reached, what this probably was. The lice. The weeks of marching through Ural countryside in the same clothes, sleeping on ground that had been hosting other armies before us, eating whatever the day produced and drinking whatever water the march passed near. Typhus moved through columns the way rumour moved through columns — faster than any individual soldier, finding the gaps in whatever immunity the body had managed to construct out of the inadequate materials available to it.
I had seen two men in the column go down with it in the previous week. One had been pulled from the march and left at a village with the understanding that someone would collect him eventually, which in the context of a civil war through the Ural countryside meant whatever it meant. The other had kept marching until he couldn't, and then had been left at the side of the road with his rifle beside him and a blanket that was the only thing anyone had to give him, and I had walked past him on the road and he had watched me go with eyes that were still present enough to watch.
I had not told anyone then either. I had kept marching.
I kept marching now. There were orders to move out the following morning — the Whites and Czechs pulling further east meant the column needed to follow before the advantage dissolved — and I was not going to spend what might be my last coherent morning in Perm lying on a mattress in a requisitioned room while the revolution continued without me.
I got up when the order came and I put on my coat and I picked up my rifle and I went out into the grey morning and found my place in the column and started moving east.
---
The first day after Perm I managed.
Not well. The fever had settled into me fully overnight, the kind of settled that told me it was done with the introductory phase and had moved into the part where it simply ran whatever it was going to run. My legs worked but they worked at a remove from the rest of me, as if the signals being sent from my body to my limbs were travelling through something thicker than they were used to travelling through. The light had a quality I couldn't account for rationally — too bright at the edges, slightly wrong in the centre, the birch trees we were moving through again having taken on a quality that seemed more like memory than present experience.
Dmitri noticed by midmorning. He moved his position without comment to walk directly beside me, close enough that if I listed he'd be there before I hit the ground, which I understood was what he was doing and which I did not object to because there was no version of objecting to it that didn't cost energy I needed for the walking.
"How long," he said.
"Few days," I said.
He made a sound that was not quite a word. He lit his pipe and smoked it and stayed beside me and said nothing else about it, which was the right response and which I appreciated in the specific, tired way that you appreciate the right response from someone when you have very little appreciation left to spend.
The second day I managed less well. The fever had moved into my chest overnight, the breathing becoming a thing that required more conscious management than breathing is supposed to require, each breath something I had to think about completing rather than something that simply happened. My legs still worked but the remove had increased, the signal-to-limb transmission now travelling through something close to water, and the light's wrongness had intensified into something that made the world look like it was being seen through glass that had been slightly warped.
I did not tell Grushko. Grushko would have left me at a village, and I had seen what being left at a village meant, and Ukraine was still ahead of me somewhere on the other side of after the Whites, and I was not going to find it from a village in the Ural countryside.
I kept walking.
---
The third morning I woke up and understood, with the clarity that high fever sometimes provides as a parting gift to the consciousness it's about to take, that I was not going to make it to wherever the column was going next.
Not as a decision. Not as a defeat, exactly. Just as information, arriving with the flat, inarguable quality of information that the body has decided to stop withholding from the mind. The fever had reached a point that the body recognised and the mind, once told, recognised too — the point at which the resources being spent on the walking are more than the resources available for the walking, and the arithmetic completes itself whether you want it to or not.
I got up anyway. I put on my coat and I picked up my rifle and I went out into the grey morning and found Dmitri, who looked at me the way he'd been looking at me for two days, with the specific attention of a man watching something he cannot stop and has decided to witness properly.
"You can't march today," he said.
"I'm marching today," I said.
He looked at me for a moment. Then he took up his position beside me, close enough to catch me, and we moved out with the column into the birch forest that still had the particular wrong beauty of forests that don't know what's happening in them.
I want to describe what walking felt like by that third morning, because I think it matters. It felt like walking through something more resistant than air, the world having thickened around me overnight into something I had to press through rather than move through. The fever was in my eyes and my chest and my legs and somewhere behind everything the specific, radiating heat of a body that had been running on reserves that were no longer there. My rifle felt like it weighed twice what it weighed. The road felt like it was moving slightly under my feet in a way that roads are not supposed to move.
The birch trees were very white. I noticed that specifically — whiter than they should have been, the white of them filling more of my vision than the space they actually occupied, and the light between them doing something that light between birch trees in early morning does in reality but that the fever was amplifying into something closer to the way light appears in the specific kind of dream you have when your body is running a serious temperature.
Dmitri's shoulder was beside mine. I focused on that specifically. The solidity of it, the reality of it, a shoulder attached to a man I trusted in the only sense of trust that the campaign had left functional in me — not ideological trust, not political trust, just the trust of a man who had been beside me for long enough that his continued presence had become a kind of evidence that continuity was still possible.
"Dmitri," I said.
"Here," he said, without looking at me, watching the road.
"Tell me something about Yekaterinburg," I said. I don't know why I asked that specifically. I think I needed to hear him talk about something real, something that had existed before the revolution and would exist after, something that had no relationship to the road we were on or where it was going.
He told me about the steel mill where he'd worked for eleven years, about the specific sound the furnaces made when they were running correctly and the different sound they made when something was wrong, about a foreman he'd hated and then come to respect and then watched join the revolution a month before him, about the particular smell of the city in winter when the cold came off the Urals and the steel mills were running at full output and the air had an iron quality that was simultaneously terrible and, for some reason he'd never fully resolved, something close to home.
I listened to it and it helped. It helped in the specific way that ordinary things help when the extraordinary is what's currently killing you — not fixing anything, not changing the arithmetic, just providing a texture of realness to press against.
The road curved through the birch forest and the column moved along it and the white of the trees was very present at the edges of my vision and Dmitri's shoulder was beside mine and I was thinking about Ukraine, about the village outside Kharkiv, about whether the mill my father had worked was still standing and who was working it now under the German puppet government that called itself freedom, and whether after was going to be long enough to reach it before whatever was happening in my chest finished what it had started.
My legs stopped.
Not dramatically. Not a fall. Simply a cessation of forward motion, the way a clock stops when it has run down — not breaking, just finishing. I was standing and then I was not standing, and the ground came up to meet me with a patience that surprised me, as if it had been waiting this whole march for exactly this moment and had no urgency about it now that it had arrived.
Dmitri caught me before I was fully down, one arm across my chest, lowering me to the road's edge with the careful strength of a steelworker from Yekaterinburg who had been ready for this for two days and had been beside me to catch it when it came.
The birch trees were very white above me. The sky between them was the particular grey of a Ural morning that hasn't decided yet whether it's going to become something else. Men from the column were stopping around me, the faces of comrades appearing in the periphery of what I could see, and Dmitri's face was directly above mine, the pipe still in the corner of his mouth, his eyes doing the thing eyes do when a man is trying to find the right expression for a moment that doesn't have one.
I thought about Ukraine. About after.
About my mother, who had died while I was in a Moscow dormitory reading pamphlets by lamplight.
About my sister, whose letters had stopped in the winter of 1916 and whose silence I had been carrying ever since as a question I had no way to answer.
About the metalworker from Tula who had stamped my enlistment papers and said after the Whites with the specific implication of and then, and whether and then had ever been a real thing or only a direction that kept existing as long as you kept walking toward it and revealed itself as a horizon the moment you stopped.
"Dmitri," I said. My voice had a quality I didn't recognise as my own.
"Here," he said. Still here. Still beside me.
The birch trees were very white.
The column was still moving around us, boots on packed earth, the sound of men continuing toward wherever they were going next, the revolution not pausing for the specific moment of one man from a village outside Kharkiv who had been angry for three years and had spent all of it and had come this far and no further.
I wanted to say something about Ukraine. About after. About the fact that I had believed it, I had genuinely believed it, and that believing it had been the only thing that had kept me walking long enough to get here, and that here was not where I'd intended to end up but was, apparently, where the arithmetic had decided I would end up regardless of my intentions.
I didn't say any of it. The words required
more than what was left.
Dmitri's hand closed around mine. The same grip I'd watched him use on his pipe for three weeks, the steelworker's grip, the grip of a man who held onto things properly when he decided they were worth holding
onto.
The birch trees were very white above me and the sky between them was grey and the column moved on the road beside us with the patient indifference of a thing that had somewhere to be and was going to get there regardless, and somewhere ahead of it the Whites were retreating further east, further from Ukraine, further from after, and the revolution was following them with the same flat determination it had shown since October, and I was lying on the road's edge in the Ural birch forest with Dmitri's hand in mine and the fever doing what fevers do when they have finished their approach and
begun their conclusion.
The last thing I heard was the column moving.
The last thing I saw was the white of the birch trees and Dmitri's face and the grey sky between the branches, which was ordinary and unheroic and entirely real, which was, I decided in the last moment I had available for deciding anything, exactly
what I had always wanted.
Then the ambush hit the column's rear, and the birch forest filled with the sound that birch forests fill with when men start shooting in them, and Dmitri dropped my hand and picked up his rifle, and the revolution continued without me, the way it had always been going to continue without me, because that was what revolutions did — they continued, regardless of who they left on the road's edge, regardless of what those men had believed or how far they had walked toward it or what they had given up along the way to keep walking.
I did not hear the ambush end. I did not hear whether the column held or broke or lost men or took ground or retreated or advanced. I did not hear any of it.
I was already somewhere else, or nowhere, which in the end turned out to be the same thing.