The Name of Hero was published by Tarcher/Houghton Mifflin in 1981. The rights have reverted to the author, Richard Seltzer. He grants permission to make and distribute verbatim electronic copies for non-commercial purposes provided that the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.
This historical novel is based on the life of Alexander Bulatovich, a Russian who was an explorer in Ethiopia, a cavalry officer during Russia's conquest of Manchuria in 1900, and later, as a monk at Mount Athos, led a group of "heretics" who challenged the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church, asserting the divinity of the Name of God.
ou can buy this book in hardcover:
The
Name of Hero by Richard Seltzer. an historical novel based
on the life of Alexander Bulatovich, a Russian who was an explorer in Ethiopia,
and a cavalry officer during Russia's conquest of Manchuria in 1900. Later,
as a monk at Mount Athos, he led a group of "heretics" who challenged the
hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church, asserting the divinity of the
Name of God.
You can also buy it on CD ROM with the author's other works:
Everything
But the Internet gathers the complete non-Internet
works of Richard Seltzer on CD, in plain text, with software that lets
you listen as well as read. It includes: The Name of Hero, Ethiopia Through
Russian Eyes, The Lizard of Oz, Without a Myth, Spit and Polish, Mercy,
Rights Crossing, short stories, articles, book reviews, and poems.
You'll find related materials at www.samizdat.com/readers.html#ethiopia
The grass beside his head was cool and moist.
As a boy, back when everyone called him "Sasha," he had loved to play in the grass, rolling down the steep hill behind the servants' house, or sliding down it on a big piece of waxed cardboard. This makeshift toboggan went fastest with two or three others and a running start. Usually it was just he and the servant boys, but sometimes Masha would jump out of nowhere and hop aboard at the last minute. They always yelled at her for that, but her momentum made those the best rides of all.
She was the daughter of one of the maids and was old enough to be doing maid's work herself. In fact, that's what she was supposed to be doing. But though as tall as a woman and with the shape of a woman, she was still a child inside and loved playing tomboy games. In contrast, his sisters had to be ladylike and practice the piano and listen to their French and German governess.
He had known her from earliest childhood, but mostly he had just ignored her. She was merely one of the gang of servant and peasant children he played with.
It was the summer after Aunt Elizaveta died, when he was thirteen and Masha was fifteen that he first paid attention to her. Somehow it felt different and good when he was the last one abroad the "toboggan" and she jumped on behind him, wrapping her arms and legs about him to hold tight.
The other boys started reacting to her differently, too. Instead of yelling at her, they welcomed her. They let her ride in the middle so they could hold her. In fact, they surreptitiously helped her finish her chores and kept a watch out while she sneaked away to join them. They got conspiratorial about it, not only because she was supposed to be working, but also because holding Masha or being held by her aroused pleasurable yet uncomfortable new sensations in them.
The game kept up for a few weeks. Then one day, when the other boys were busy, Sasha managed to get Masha to ride with him alone. She sat down first and he jumped on behind, reaching round and holding her chest, her newly formed breasts, boldly, as he had never done when the others were around. When they reached the bottom they fell in a giggling tangle.
They kissed. Dry lips pressed together expectantly, patiently, not really knowing what to expect. His eyes wandered to her leg, exposed to nearly her hip. (Would she wear underwear on a day as hot as this?) Curious, he reached for her. She slapped his hand, pushed him away and straightened her dress. She took one last look at him, but didn't meet his eyes. Still curious, still hoping, he wasn't looking at her eyes. She blushed deep red and ran away. That was the last time Masha played children's games with the boys. "it's not fitting, " was all the explanation she would give.
That was also the summer his mother, Jenny, began her endless lectures about learning one's proper place in society.
"Yes, all men are equal in the eyes of God," she admitted. "But pity though it is, men don't see with the eyes of God. Frail mortals that we are, we cringe at the sight of a dirty, ragged shirt, at the sound of a peasant's ungrammatical speech. And you are known by the company you keep.
"It's high time that you appreciated your status in society and started to take pains to preserve it. Not that you should be getting uppity notions and trying to climb where you don't belong, but just that you should know your place and keep to it.
"Some would say that I rose above my proper station when I married your father the general. An orphan I was, dependent on the charity of my aunt. But she was a wealthy woman and treated me like the daughter she never had; and my father, God rest his soul, was a colonel of engineers in the army and would have risen higher had it not been for his untimely death. And my grandfather -- his father -- was a wealthy merchant.
"You should know your place -- know that you re a member of a proud family -- of two proud families: your father's and my own."
His mothers' grandfather, Louis Albrand, had been a merchant from Ambrune, France, trading in Russia's newly acquired Black Sea ports. For many years the entire Black Sea coast had been controlled by Turks as part of the Ottoman Empire. Gradually the Russian state, which had originated as the small principality of Moscow, had expanded southward, coming into frequent conflict with the Turks, trying time and again to get access to warm-water ports on the Black Sea. Finally in 1774 the armies of Catherine the Great had succeeded in conquering a strip of coast near the mouths of the Dnieper and the Dniester, rivers that could carry goods from deep within the heartland of Russia to seaports like Kherson and from there to Western Europe. Recognizing the opportunities for trade that were opening up, merchants from Greece, Italy, France, and Germany soon gravitated to the area.
Many times in the 1780s and early 1790s, Louis Albrand voyaged between France and the new Russian Black Sea ports, first in his won ship, then with his own small merchant fleet. When the Revolution and the Reign of Terror made it dangerous for a wealthy merchant to return to France, he decided to stay permanently in Russia. Eventually, he settled in Odessa, a small port town built in 1794 by a pair of French engineers. A French nobleman and royalist, Armand, Duc de Richelieu, was appointed as the first governor of the district, and under the encouragement of Catherine the Great, the emigre population of the new town grew rapidly.
Business thrived as war rage din Europe off and on for two decades. Louis bought more ships and sheep and pastureland as well (the demand for wool for uniforms was heavy), and somehow he found time to marry a Russian and sire seven children.
His son Andrey, Jenny's father, went to expensive schools, and, as colonel of engineers, took part in building the Military-Georgia Road -- part of another Russian expansion movement, this time into the Caucasus, where fiercely independent mountain tribesmen resisted for decades, raiding forts and scouting parting parties, destroying bridges, blocking roads. While in Georgia with that interminable project (forever interrupted by sabotage and raids), Andrey had married a Georgian, Olga Tulayeva, Jenny's mother. It was in 1852, two years before the Crimean War, when Chechentsy tribesmen suddenly attacked their home, killing the mother and father and leaving ten-year-old Jenny with her little brother and sister, cowering in the darkness.
"You take all this for granted," Jenny would tell Sasha time and again. "This fine estate, with all the furniture and trimmings of luxury. Why, all you have to complain of are the lessons your tutor gives you and the sound of your sisters practicing scales on the piano.
"When I was your age, I lived in a log hut in the wilderness, some mountain pass in the Caucasus. We kept moving from one hut to another, each more cold and uncomfortable than the one before. No piano, no tutors, Just lugging water from the well and doing other chores. Do you have any idea what it's like in the dead of winter trying to break up the ice in a deep well?
"We weren't poor, mind you, but conditions were primitive out there in the Caucasus. The other married officers had left their wives behind in Russia. They stayed in barracks at one fort or another as the road moved along. but Mother was a Georgian girl Father had met there. He had learned the language. He loved those mountains and the Georgian people, and he preferred to live in the countryside, romantic fool that he was."
The orphans were divided up among relatives. Madame Kuris, Andrey's sister, had taken Jenny in and raised her at Lutsikovka, an estate in Kharkov Province in the Ukraine.
The master of the house, Platon Kuris, was a son of a Greek merchant in Odessa. He had joined the Russian army as an officer of the Guard during the wars with Napoleon and had marched all the way to Paris. Like many of the wealthy in Russia, imitating the nobility, his parents had seen to it that he had a French education, with genuine French emigre tutors. He had been raised to think of French as the only truly civilized language and Voltaire as the greatest of modern writers. Arriving with the conquering army in France itself, Kuris was dazzled by the wonders of Paris and Versailles and became a rabid Francophile. On returning to Russia, he had bought a piece of wilderness in the Ukraine and supervised the construction of a vast mansion with elaborately structured gardens in the style of Versailles. It was an impressive sight, but few ever saw it -- far from any neighbor, off in the woods alone, a private dream.
While visiting his parents in Odessa, he had met seventeen-year-old Elizaveta Albrand, Jenny's aunt. He dazzled her with his flawless French and his tales of Napoleon and Paris. Soon he married her and carried her off to his palace in the woods.
But the young girl's dream soon turned to nightmare, for the great admirer of the French philosophers, the great lover of Republican France and republican principles, ruled his young wife like an autocrat. She cringed when he entered the room. She dared not speak in his presence for fear that he would correct her French or mock her accent. And she dared not walk in his presence for fear that he would lecture her again on the proper way a "true lady" should walk. Fifteen years her elder, he assumed that her mind was a blank slate. He was determined to shape "Madame Kuris" to his ideal notion of a graceful and educated woman, just as he had shaped this corner of the wilderness into a French palace. He gave her books to read and quizzed her relentlessly on her assignments. At first she tried hard to live up to his expectations, but she became so intimidated in his presence, especially when he knitted his huge bushy brows and glared at her, that even when she knew the answer he wanted to hear, she often couldn't bring herself to say it, or stuttered it or expressed it poorly. He never yelled at her. He just sighed softly and leaned back in his chair, taking a deep breath. She would rather have been beaten than to have to endure that sigh and look of disappointment.
Once Madame Kuris had tried to run away. Leaving at night, she ran and walked twenty miles along the desolate wilderness road before he caught up with her in a coach and took her back to Lutsikovka. He then sat down opposite her in the vast drawing room, sighing deeply, his bushy brows knit in deep concern.
After that incident, he had stopped the lessons. And she came to miss them as part of the relatively idyllic early stage of their marriage. Instead of trying to form her mind, now he set out with equal fervor to make himself a philosophe. He ordered books, hundreds and thousands of French books, from Moscow, Petersburg, and even directly from Paris. And for long hours every day, he immersed himself in these impressive volumes. His library became a sacred shrine. Neither servants nor wife dared enter there except by specific invitation. and while he read, the house must be perfectly silent.
Then in the evening at supper, he would read aloud passages that had struck his fancy, or some of his own writings in the philosophic vein. Madame Kuris had to learn to smile just the right way and say just the right words at appropriate intervals or she would incur again the awful silence, the heavy breathing of his disappointment.
He aged quickly, and as he grew old, even that ritual came to an end. He took up residence in the library, eating his meals there, reading all night, and sleeping all day. Madame Kuris saw to such mundane matters as running the house and estate. So long as the house remained quiet and the food arrived regularly, he was quite pleased.
This blissful state was interrupted briefly when the house began to collapse about them. It had been built of unbaked brick. In his rush to make his dream a reality, Kuris had used the materials at hand. It would have taken too long to have baked bricks shipped in from Kharkov or to build his own little factory to bake them. One stormy spring, the magnificent palace, with its thirty rooms reverted to mud, as if a magic spell had been withdrawn.
They managed to save most of the books. Platon retired with them to an apartment in Kharkov, while Madame Kuris set about the work of rebuilding.
As Platon had gradually withdrawn into his books, Madame Kuris had assumed an increasing share of the responsibility for managing the estate. In that silent house, her will had grown strong. She had come in certain ways to resemble the man she so hated and loved. His dream of a palace in the wilderness was now her dream, tempered somewhat by a strong sense of practicality. Through all the years she had developed into a good manager, commanding respect and obedience from her serfs and from the merchants she dealt with. Under her able management, Lutsikovka, her husband's private dream, his expensive toy, had become a productive and valuable estate. Platon would have been proud of her, had he noticed.
So Madame Kuris oversaw the rebuilding of the house, on a less grand scale and following an architect's drawings. The new house lacked some of the extravagant charm of the original, which Platon had designed himself, such as a room without doors and an elegant staircase that led nowhere. But it was nonetheless impressive, and to the delight of Platon, the new library was twice the size of the old one.
Old Platon died a year or two after Jenny came to live at Lutsikovka. But even after his death, his spirit continued to reign there. The library was sacred ground. One entered there only with the utmost respect. If one borrowed a book, it must be put back exactly as the master had left it. Since he had rarely been seen those last few years, it was sometimes hard to believe that he wasn't still there, poring over his books all through the night. And a portrait of him that hung in the hall had eyes that seemed to follow you as you walked by.
Madame Kuris, also known as Aunt Elizaveta, was now the autocrat. She ruled the household with a benevolent, somewhat enlightened despotism. She hired a French governess for her orphaned niece and, in general, treated Jenny as she would have treated her own daughter, had she had a daughter. She listened to Jenny recite her lessons every day, listened to her say her prayers morning and night. If the child made a mistake or seemed insufficiently devout and sincere, Aunt Elizaveta sighed deeply, leaned back in her chair, and stared into the distance. Whenever her aunt did that, little Jenny pursed her lips and cringed, silently resolving never again to be so ungrateful as to displease Auntie. But try as she would to please her aunt, there were always those moments when her aunt sighed deeply, in disappointment.
Jenny couldn't help but dream of escape from this tyranny of kindness. some dashing young man (like those she had read about in French novels she found buried behind the impressive philosophic works in the library) would carry her away to a new and dazzling life.
For a while it seemed that her dream would become a reality. She met such a man -- Anatole, son of a nearby landowner -- and he did fall in love with her. They were going to get married. He would take her to Paris for their honeymoon. They would live in Petersburg.
It rained heavily that spring. Several weeks before the wedding was scheduled to take place, the two of them got drenched while riding. He left her at Lutsikovka and laughed merrily as he went riding off in the rain toward his father's estate. He caught a severe cold. It turned to Pneumonia. He died.
For seven more long years, Jenny remained, unmarried, in her aunt's house, under her aunt's firm but quiet control. As the estate grew richer and the aunt grew older, distant relatives began to visit the matriarch with ever-increasing frequency, solicitously asking about her health, bringing her little gifts, doing her little favors. They snubbed the little orphan niece, the charity case who should be eternally grateful for everything she had received and who certainly shouldn't expect anything more. They implied that Jenny was trying to please the old woman just to get a part of the inheritance. Every time she did her aunt a service, the everyday household tasks she had learned were her duty to perform, the other relatives would glare at her and whisper among themselves.
As Aunt Elizaveta's wealth increased, local officials and neighbors started visiting frequently, not expecting immediate reward but responding to the natural magnetism of wealth. April 24, her nameday, became a major social occasion in the province. Everyone who was anyone -- all the major landowners, the wealthier merchants, government officials, and military offices -- came to pay homage to her and also to see one another. It was at such an event that Jenny first met Xavier Vikentyevich Bulatovich.
This Bulatovich was a Pole by descent. His ancestors were gentry from Grodno Province on the Polish border, territory that had changed hands frequently in the wars between Poland and Russia and the various partitions of Poland. He had graduated from the Academy of Engineering in Petersburg and had served his Tsar well, earning the medals of Stanislav, Valdimir, and Anna -- for service in the Caucasus, quelling the uprisings there, and, later, in the Crimean War. He was a widower, a distinguished gentleman, and Jenny was flattered that he took an interest in her. Also, he was a general. His wife would have the title generalsha -- quite a contrast to the prospect of becoming an old maid as the ward and nurse of an aging despot.
He was fifty and she twenty-five, the same age as his daughter by his first wife.
But it was religion, not age, that posed a problem. While Old Platon was alive, Aunt Elizaveta had tried hard not to believe in God, in deference to her husband's philosophy. But she never quite succeeded, and after his death, with a sigh of relief, she gave up trying not to believe and allowed herself that one indulgence: fervent belief and devotion to all the outward forms of Orthodoxy.
Even though her own father, the merchant from France, had been Roman Catholic, she was frantically concerned that if Jenny should have children, she raise them as Orthodox. To calm her aunt, Jenny promised to do so, though she never mentioned it to the general, who up until his death was somewhat indifferent to questions of religion.
As Jenny often told her children afterward, "I could never see any essential difference between Russian Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. I suppose that's due to some deficiency in my education, my religious training, my understanding. Maybe that's the effect of that free-thinking uncle of mine. The difference is all a matter of outward forms and bureaucracy, as far as I can tell. They have a Pope in Rome, and we have a Holy Synod in Petersburg and a Patriarch in Istanbul. A few words in the creed and politics. It's the same God, I presume. But what a 'true believer' won't do for a few words or a ritual gesture. It makes me sick to think of all the hundreds and thousands of Old Believers executed by the state because they crossed themselves with two fingers instead of three and because they said 'Alleluia' two times instead of three at the Eucharist -- so ridiculous. Just two hundred years ago. And it was the Church that had changed its mind, not the Old Believers. The Church had switched from two to three for some political reason and expected all the peasants suddenly to start doing the same. Let them go ahead, I'd say. It's a comfort for them cross themselves the way they always have, the way their ancestors did. So why force this petty innovation on them? What difference does it make? It's certainly not worth killing people over. Thank goodness they don't kill people anymore for that. But they still make life very uncomfortable for Old Believers and all the other sectarians or raskolniki who don't follow the official line precisely. If you are a Russian, you are supposed to belong to the Russian Orthodox Church. If you believe anything else, you are subject to all kinds of legal penalties. At the slightest provocation: 'Off to Siberia with them.' 'Fine them.' 'Take away their legal rights as citizens.' With the new laws, if your father were alive -- a Pole and a Roman Catholic -- he wouldn't be allowed to hold any official position; and he and others like him served the Tsar so well. Religion has nothing to do with reason, I'm afraid.
"Not that there's no difference among sects. Some are flagrantly fanatical. Take the Skoptsy, for instance -- castrating themselves for Christ. Lord only knows how many thousands of those poor demented creatures there are in Russia today. But within limits, beliefs should be a private, personal matter.
"I wonder why I keep coming back to 'reason' -- echoes of old Platon Kuris, and it's hard to imagine a more unreasonable man."
The general was charmed by Jenny's wit and vivacity. She made him feel young again. With her faultless French and her gentle upbringing, she could make a fine general's wife. Of course, at his age, he was set in his ways, but she was young and malleable. She would learn to adjust. And she would bear him a son.
In 1866, five years after the emancipation of the serfs, the orphan married the general and went off to live with him. But there was no time for a honeymoon. Maneuvers were coming up soon, and they'd have to postpone it for a while. Maybe next year. And he was always gone, at least during the day. It seemed she hardly knew him when she first discovered she was pregnant. Then for eight straight years, she was always pregnant or just getting over the last pregnancy. Two sons died within a year of their birth. Then came Sasha in 1870, Lilia in 1872, and in 1874 the youngest, Mariya -- "Meta" they called her. She was born in Austria shortly before the general's death in Switzerland, at the end of a traumatic race across Europe from one health spa to another.
It had been another rainy spring, and the general had caught cold on maneuvers, a cold that wouldn't go away, that painfully racked his lungs with every cough. The doctors advised that he try a warmer climate. So, leaving the children behind, he and his pregnant wife had set out on a sad parody of the honeymoon they had postponed too long.
Returning to Russia as a widow, Jenny had taken up residence once again with her aunt at Lutsikovka, bringing along Sasha, Lilia, and newborn Meta.
by now Aunt Elizaveta was bedridden but still regal. Her incense-filled room became sacrosanct. As her eyes failed, she loved to hold and kiss and touch the icons, to inhale the incense. The feel, the smell, the taste of religion -- in her own way she reveled in it all.
Every morning the young children made a pilgrimage to that room to say their prayers and to kiss the hand of their generous aunt and benefactress. Inside that room, Jenny was once again the meek, obedient little orphan girl. But outside that room, Jenny ruled as her aunt had ruled before her. Somehow the disappointments she had endured had tempered her will, had made her strong, and unconsciously, she had learned something of her aunt's techniques. Small as she was, little more than five feet tall, she learned to use her apparent helplessness as a weapon now that she was a widow with an estate to manage and three young children to raise. When her rambunctious little son disturbed the books in the library or ran noisily about the house, she wouldn't yell and she wouldn't beat him. she would just look at him, her lips pursed, her eyes blank and weary, and she would heave a little sigh of disappointment.
Somehow she coped with all that needed to be done. Then finally in 1883 the old aunt died, and Jenny found herself with three half-grown children she hardly knew, with a son who at thirteen was still a little savage, with no playmates but the servants' children and the children from the peasant village of Markovka. There was no social life to speak of, but what else was she to expect/ The nearest town was forty miles away, and that millionaire sugar-beet grower, Khritoninka, had bought up all the other estates in the district. For herself, she hadn't really noticed and didn't really care. but her children would need opportunities to socialize with people of their own class.
The governess seemed to have the girls well under control for the moment, but Sasha was another matter. Jenny lectured him, "You must learn to keep your distance from the peasants and their children. You must learn to treat them with cordial condescension.
"Remember the huntsman and the coachman are your servants, not your equals. And their children are servants' children.
"It was one thing for you to run around with them and make playmates of them when you were an ignorant child. But now you have reached an age when that is no longer appropriate. It is time you began to show some discretion, to act the part of a gentleman."
"But Hrisko is my friend."
"The huntsman? A friend? Phooey and nonsense."
"And Masha..."
"The daughter of a scrubwoman? What's become of you? What have I let you become? You simply grew too fast. Where did the time go? Lord only knows. I should have realized before. Keeping you isolated out here in the wilds with no one but these urchins to consort with. It's high time you got a proper education, time I took you to civilized society where you can be with your equals and profit from examples of behavior appropriate to your station."
"What do you mean, Mother?"
"I'm going to take you to Petersburg and make a proper gentleman of you. Lord grant that it's not too late already, that you can be cured of your ragamuffin ways. I had hoped to set aside some more money. Petersburg is so expensive, and especially schools, proper schools for the girls, too. It will all be so expensive, and I had hoped to put it off for just another year. The crops have been poor and the tenants have been cheating me, I know they have. That new overseer isn't to be trusted either. Trust in God, yes, but man is another matter.
"It's the worst of times, really, but you force me to it. And Masha -- I've seen you with her. What have I been thinking? And you at the threshold of manhood, the threshold of sin, with peasant servant girls all about, smiling sweetly, and playing games with the young master.
"Enough of that. I'll have no son of mine mix his blood with peasant stock.
"And you with your notions that everyone's equal in the eyes of God -- equal indeed! You might even get notions of marrying such a girl. enough of that. Petersburg it is. Petersburg will cure you."
Was that why they left for Petersburg then, not later, not the next year? and Lilia caught typhoid a few months later? and died?
Was he why?
More than her looks -- her long black tresses, her dark eyes with their glimmer of playfulness -- he remembered Lilia's patient stumbling practice at the piano. She wanted to do so well, and she did so poorly.
Her sister Meta, two years younger than she, was a genius at the piano and made it seem easy. But Lilia show no jealousy. She just plodded ahead persistently with her practice, thoroughly convinced that hard work and merit would have their reward in the end.
Chopin, in particular, she would practice over and over again. She had trouble with timing, racing ahead, then slowing for a difficult phrase, then racing ahead again. And there were those times, agonizing for the listener, when she stopped in the middle of a phrase she had played hundreds of times, and hunted, it seemed an eternity, for the next note, or she'd give up an start again.
Her death was a mistake like that -- stopping in mid-expectation. But this time there was no chance to start over again.
When they were little, they fought often and they were inseparable. As they grew older they found equally petty things to argue over and keep them close.
In the year before she died, she had become his confidante. He needed someone to tell of his adventures and his misdemeanors, someone to complain to about this mother's quiet self-sacrificing tyranny. Those heavy sighs of disappointment of hers were really beginning to hurt. He needed to unburden himself of guilt, needed to be reassured that he was not alone, that he was not altogether in the wrong, that his mother was often unfair.
After Lilia died (was there anything he could have done to stop it? to keep her safe and happy at Lutsikovka, to keep her from that accidental meeting with death?), no one could take her place, no one could relieve his growing burden of guilt.
And ever after he could never stand the sound of Chopin.
The death of his Aunt Elizaveta had been no surprise. She had been dying -- of cancer, they said -- for as long as he could remember. The sock was to see her laid out on the dining-room table instead of in her bed.
He had never seen her in the dining room before. hat was what made her look so dead -- it was so unlike her to be there like that. That couldn't be her at all lying there.
For the late few months Aunt Elizaveta had hardly moved. Only the pungent smell of incense, right under her nose, could revive her long enough for his mother to force her to eat something. It was as if she kept sinking deeper and deeper within herself, until nothing could pull her out and they called her "dead."
With Lilia it was different. No sinking. No gradual decline and emaciation. Just suddenly she wasn't there anymore.
For the longest while after the doctor said it was over, Sasha kept expecting her to prove him wrong, finally to breathe the next breath, finally to find that next note.
Only when he saw her laid out on a dinging-room table, like Aunt Elizaveta, did he believe that that was all. There was nothing more.
Months later, his sister Meta forgot for a moment. Hearing steps in the hallway, she called out cheerfully, "Lilia! Is that you, Lilia?"
But it wasn't Lilia. it was Sasha. And seeing him she broke out crying.
He ran up to her and shook her, and shouted harshly, "When will you face the facts? You can't bring her back. No matter what you want to believe and how hard you want to believe it, you still have to face the facts."
His own words frightened him, and he awoke to the sound of oxen and carts and harsh shouting. The detachment was getting ready to move to the border.
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You can buy this book in hardcover:
The
Name of Hero by Richard Seltzer. an historical novel based
on the life of Alexander Bulatovich, a Russian who was an explorer in Ethiopia,
and a cavalry officer during Russia's conquest of Manchuria in 1900. Later,
as a monk at Mount Athos, he led a group of "heretics" who challenged the
hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church, asserting the divinity of the
Name of God.
You can also buy it on CD ROM with the author's other works:
Everything
But the Internet gathers the complete non-Internet
works of Richard Seltzer on CD, in plain text, with software that lets
you listen as well as read. It includes: The Name of Hero, Ethiopia Through
Russian Eyes, The Lizard of Oz, Without a Myth, Spit and Polish, Mercy,
Rights Crossing, short stories, articles, book reviews, and poems.
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