I dropped on my knees beside Marchinkovas. He lay in an attitude of complete relaxation, one arm thrown up above his head. I took the outstretched arm and shook it. He lay unmoving, eyes closed. I felt for the pulse, I laid my ear to his chest, lifted the eyelids. I went through all the tests again, fearful of believing their shocking message. The body was still warm.
I straightened up. I was surprised at how small and calm my voice was. ‘Marchinkovas is dead,’ I said. The statement sounded odd and flat to me, so I said it again. ‘Marchinkovas is dead.’
Somebody burst out, ‘But he can’t be. There was nothing wrong with him. I talked to him only a few hours ago. He was well. He made no complaint…’
‘He is dead,’ I said.
Mister Smith got down beside the body. He was there only a minute or two. Then he crossed the hands of Marchinkovas on his chest, stood up and said, ‘Yes, gentlemen, Slav is right.’ Paluchowicz took off his old fur cap and crossed himself.
Zacharius Marchinkovas, aged 28 or 29, who might have been a successful architect in his native Lithuania if the Russians had not come and taken him away, had given up the struggle. We were stunned, we could not understand it, we did not know how death had come to him. Perhaps he was more exhausted than we knew and his willing heart could take the strain no more. I don’t know. None of us knew. Marchinkovas the silent one with the occasional shaft of cynical wit, Marchinkovas who lived much with his own thoughts, the man with a load of bitterness whom Kristina had befriended and made to laugh — Marchinkovas had gone.
In the rocky ground we could find no place to dig a grave for him. His resting place was a deep cleft between rocks and we filled up the space above him with pebbles and small stones. Kolemenos carried out his last duty of making a small cross which he wedged into the rubble. We said our farewells, each in his own fashion. Silently, I commended his soul to God. The five of us went heavy-footed on our way. With us went Marchinkovas’s
The country changed again, challenging our spirit and endurance with the uncompromising steepness of craggy hills. We learned to use our wire loops as climbing aids on difficult patches. We tried always to find a village to spend the night under cover but all too often the end of the day overtook us in the open with no human settlement in sight.
Once from the heights we saw, many miles off, the flashing reflection of the sun from the shining roofs of a distant, high-sited city, and it pleased us to believe that at least we had seen the holy city of Lhasa. What we saw may have been one of the greater monasteries of Tibet, but the direction was right for Lhasa and the idea of having seen it after using its name like a talisman all the way from the borders of Siberia appealed to us.
Towards the end of December we came across the biggest village of our Tibetan journey, almost a small township of some forty houses arranged with an unusual regularity on each side of the road. It had, too, the unusual refinement of a larger building which in Europe would certainly have been the village hall. We were taken along to this building by a villager who was well padded and clothed against the cold and we remarked on the way on the absence of children. The reason emerged when our escort fetched out from the building a slim, lean-faced, sharp-eyed Asiatic who may have been between thirty and forty. He looked us over, bowed, smiled and went back inside. A minute later a couple of dozen children exploded out and scampered down the street, throwing us glances as they went. The place was a school and the thin man apparently their teacher.
I am sure he was not a Tibetan. Chinese? I could not be sure. Three or four Tibetan villagers stood beside us as he came out a second time and there was an exchange of conversation between them and him the gist of which was that we were foreigners who did not understand their language. That much seemed obvious. He spoke to us in a couple of languages, which may have been Tibetan and Chinese, enunciating slowly and carefully. I said a few words in Russian and Zaro spoke in German. We were getting nowhere.
We stood there awkwardly for a minute, the Tibetans looking anxiously on. The teacher spoke again, very slowly. His language this time was
Then the man, in his slow and gentle voice, said to Zaro, ‘Go with the man who brought you to me. He will take you to his house and look after you. Later I will join you and you shall talk again to me.’ He turned and spoke briefly to the Tibetan. We were led off, taken into a house and regaled with tea while a meal was in preparation.
The teacher walked in quietly. He entered without knocking — nobody seems to knock on doors in Tibet — and bowed all round. He sat with us and when the meal came ate with us. He produced a clasp knife attached to a plaited leather thong about his waist and, noting my interest, handed it to me. It was single-bladed, bone handled and the inscription on the steel showed it had been made in Germany. He did not tell me where he had obtained it.
Zaro tried to get from him where he had been educated and particularly where he had learned his little French but he cleverly allowed his attention to be distracted by his host, leaving the question hanging in the air. Zaro’s inquiries on this point were, in fact, never answered. The man interested me tremendously and I felt sure he had not lived the whole of his life in Tibet. The thought has since occurred to me that he might have spent some part of his time in French Indo-China.
With our habitual caution we did not tell him the origin of our journey but Zaro satisfied his curiosity on the manner of our entry into Tibet. He was genuinely impressed to learn that we had crossed the Gobi. He said he had not heard of anyone making the crossing without animals and without food supplies.
‘And where are you going now?’ he asked.
‘We are trying to reach India,’ said Zaro. It was pointless now to talk of a pilgrimage to Lhasa. We were off course.
The Tibetan householder interrupted politely to ask for a translation. The teacher answered and both men showed concern.
‘You should change your route,’ he advised us. ‘The weather will be bad in the mountains and you will suffer greatly. The best thing you can do is to go to Lhasa and join up with a caravan. You may have to wait a long time but you will find it worthwhile.’
Zaro said we would think over his counsel, but we all knew we were going on and that we should never enter Lhasa.
We asked the teacher to thank the Tibetan for the meal and for his kindness to us. The message was passed over. The Tibetan talked and the teacher said to us, ‘The man is pleased. He wishes your feet will preserve you and that you will not meet with any misfortune on your way. He says you will stay with him tonight and he will give you food for your journey tomorrow.’
We sat there talking until long after darkness. Through Zaro I asked a question on a subject that had been bothering me ever since I entered the house — that was the peculiar, acrid, faintly farmhouse smell in the place.
The teacher smiled and pointed to the stone floor, which appeared to have been given a hard, thick coat of brick-red paint. The smell, he explained, came from the floor. The smooth painted effect was achieved by house- proud Tibetans in this part with the use of a fine red dust mixed with animal urine.
Zaro had him work out the date for us. It was 23 December 1941.
We slept soundly on sheepskins spread on the coloured stone floor and the next morning were given food as we had been promised and sent on our way with good wishes for the success of our journey.
On Christmas Eve we sat up around a bright fire. The night was freezing and no one wanted to settle down to a chilled half-sleep. We talked about Christmases we had known, of the awful Christmas a year ago when we were slogging north to the timber camp. Paluchowicz, that tough, devout old Roman Catholic, surprised us all by suddenly starting to sing in his rusty, off-tune voice a Polish carol. He got through two verses; then, finding we were not going to join in, became silent.
After a little while he said, ‘Every Christmas since I was old enough to remember I have sung carols on Christmas Eve. So tonight I have sung a carol. It will be good for us, I know.’
The days were cold now, the nights colder. Snow-charged clouds hung menacingly over the distant, gaunt foothills of the Himalayas. In a poor hamlet of four stone-built shacks we stayed one night and the next morning
