The White Guard Part 4

Again her teeth flashed. For a moment Vasilisa forgot about the price of milk, forgot about everything and a deliciously wicked s.h.i.+ver ran through his stomach - the same cold s.h.i.+ver that Vasilisa felt whenever this gorgeous sunlit vision appeared before him in the morning. (Vasilisa always got up earlier than his wife.) He forgot everything and for some reason he imagined a clearing in the forest, the scent of pinewoods. Ah, well . . .

'See here, Yavdokha', said Vasilisa, licking his lips and looking quickly round in case his wife was coming. 'You've blossomed since this revolution. Look out, or the Germans will teach you a lesson or two.' 'Dare I kiss her or daren't I?' Vasilisa wondered agonisingly, unable to make up his mind.

A broad alabaster ribbon of milk spurted foaming into the jug.

'If they try and teach us a lesson we'll soon teach them it doesn't pay', the omen suddenly replied, flas.h.i.+ng, glittering, rattling her pail; swung her yoke and herself, even brighter than the sunlight, started to climb up the steps from the bas.e.m.e.nt into the sunlit yard. 'Ah, what legs', groaned Vasilisa to himself.

At that moment came his wife's voice and Vasilisa, turning round, b.u.mped into her.

'Who were you talking to?' she asked, giving a quick, suspicious glance upward.

'Yavdokha', Vasilisa answered casually. 'Can you believe it -milk's up to fifty kopecks today.'

'What?' exclaimed Wanda. 'That's outrageous! What cheek! Those farmers are impossible . . . Yavdokha! Yavdokha!' she shouted, leaning out of the window. 'Yavdokha!'

But the vision had gone and did not come back.

Vasilisa glanced at his wife's angular figure, her yellow hair, bony elbows and desiccated legs and suddenly felt so nauseated by everything to do with his life that he almost spat on the hem of Wanda's skirt. Sighing, he restrained himself, and wandered back into the semi-darkness of the apartment, unable to say exactly what was depressing him. Was it because he had suddenly realised how ugly Wanda looked, with her two yellow collar bones protruding like the shafts of a cart? Or was it something vaguely disturbing that the delicious vision had said?

'What was it she said? "We'll teach 'em it doesn't pay"?' Vasilisa muttered to himself. 'h.e.l.l - these market women! How d'you like that? Once they stop being afraid of the Germans . . . it's the beginning of the end. ". . . teach 'em it doesn't pay" indeed! But what teeth - bliss . . .'

Suddenly he seemed to see Yavdokha standing in front of him stark naked, like a witch on a hilltop.

'What cheek . . . "we'll teach 'em" . . . But those b.r.e.a.s.t.s of hers . . . my G.o.d . . .'

The thought was so disturbing that Vasilisa felt sick and dizzy and had to go and wash his face in cold water.

Imperceptibly as ever, the fall was creeping on. After a ripe, golden August came a bright, dust-laden September and in September there came not another omen but a happening that at first sight was completely insignificant.

It was one bright September evening that a piece of paper, signed by the appropriate official of the Hetman's government, arrived at the City's prison. It was an order to release the prisoner being held in cell No. 666. That was all.

That was all all?!Without any doubt that piece of paper was the cause of the untold strife and disaster, all the fighting, bloodshed, lire and persecution, the despair and the horror that were to come . . .

The name of the prisoner was quite ordinary and unremarkable: Semyon Vasilievich Petlyura. Both he and the City's newspapers of the period from December 1918 to February 1919 used the rather frenchified form of his first name - Simon. Simon's past was wrapped in deepest obscurity. Some said he had been a clerk.

'No, he was an accountant.'

'No, a student.'

On the corner of the Kreshchatik and Nikolaevsky Street there used to be a large and magnificent tobacco store. Its oblong shop-sign was beautifully adorned with a picture of a coffee-colored Turk in a fez, smoking a hookah and shod in soft yellow slippers with turned-up toes. There were people who swore on their oath that not long ago they had seen Simon in that same store, standing elegantly dressed behind the counter and selling the cigarettes and tobacco made in Solomon Cohen's factory. But then there were others who said: 'Nothing of the sort. He was secretary of the Union of Munic.i.p.alities.'

'No, not the Union of Munic.i.p.alities, the Zemstvo Union,' countered yet a third opinion; 'a typical Zemstvo official.'

A fourth group (refugees) would close their eyes as an aid to memory and mutter: 'Now just a minute ... let me think . . .' Then they would describe how, apparently, ten years ago - no, sorry, eleven years ago - they had seen him one evening in Moscow walking along Malaya Bronnaya Street carrying under his arm a guitar wrapped in a black cloth. And they would add that he had been going to a party given by some friends from his home town, hence the guitar. He had been going, it seems, to a delightful party where there were lots of gay, pretty girl students from his native Ukraine, bottles of delicious Ukrainian plum-brandy, songs, a Ukrainian band... Then these people would grow confused as they described his appearance and would muddle their dates and places . . . 'He was clean-shaven, you say?'

'No, I think . . . yes, that's right ... he had a little beard.' 'Was he at Moscow University?' 'Well no, but he was a student somewhere . . .' 'Nothing of the sort. Ivan Ivanovich knew him. He was a schoolteacher in Tarashcha.'

h.e.l.l, maybe it wasn't him walking down Malaya Bronnaya, it had been so dark and misty and frosty on the street that day . . . Who knows? ... A guitar ... a Turk in the sunlight ... a hookah . . . chords on a guitar, it was all so vague and obscure. G.o.d, the confusion, the uncertainty of those days . . . the marching feet of the boys of the Guards' Cadet School marching past, lurking figures shadowy as bloodstains, vague apparitions on the run, girls with wild, flying hair, gunfire, and frost and the light of St Vladimir's cross at midnight.

Marching and singing Cadets of the Guards Trumpets and drums Cymbals ringing . . .

Cymbals ringing, bullets whistling like deadly steel nightingales, soldiers beating people to death with ramrods, black-cloaked Ukrainian cavalry-men are coming on their fiery horses.

The apocalyptic dream charges with a clatter up to Alexei Turbin's bedside, as he sleeps, pale, a sweaty lock of black hair plastered damply to his forehead, the pink-shaded lamp still burning. The whole house was asleep, - Karas' snores coming from the library, Shervinsky's sibilant breathing from Nikolka's room . . . Darkness, muzzy heads ... A copy of Dostoevsky lay open and unread on the floor by Alexei's bed, the desperate characters of The Possessed The Possessed prophesying doom while Elena slept peacefully. prophesying doom while Elena slept peacefully.

'Now listen: there's no such person. This fellow Simon Petlyura never existed. There was no Turk, there was no guitar under a wrought-iron lamp-post on the Malaya Bronnaya, he was never in the Zemstvo Union . . . it's all nonsense.' Simply a myth that grew up in the Ukraine among the confusion and fog of that terrible year 1918.

. . . But there was something else too - rabid hatred. There were four hundred thousand Germans and all around them four times forty times four hundred thousand peasants whose hearts blazed with unquenchable malice. For this they had good cause. The blows on the face from the swagger-canes of young German subalterns, the hail of random shrapnel fire aimed at recalcitrant villages, backs scarred by the ramrods wielded by Hetmanite cossacks, the IOU's on sc.r.a.ps of paper signed by majors and lieutenants of the German army and which read: 'Pay this Russian sow twenty-five marks for her pig.' And the derisive laughter at the people who brought these chits to the German headquarters in the City. And the requisitioned horses, the confiscated grain, the fat-faced landlords who came back to reclaim their estates under the Hetman's government; the spasm of hatred at the very sound of the words 'Russian officers'.

That is how it was.

Then there were the rumors of land reform which the Lord Hetman was supposed to carry out . . . and alas, it was only in November 1918, when the roar of gunfire was first heard around the City, that the more intelligent people, including Vasilisa, finally realised that the peasants hated that same Lord Hetman as though he were a mad dog; and that in the peasants' minds the Hetman's so-called 'reform' was a swindle on behalf of the landlords and that what was needed once and for all was the true reform for which the peasants themselves had longed for centuries: All land to the peasants.

Three hundred acres per man.

No more landlords.

A proper t.i.tle-deed to those three hundred acres, on official paper with the stamp of authority, granting them perpetual owners.h.i.+p that would pa.s.s by inheritance from grandfather to father to son and so on. No sharks from the City to come and demand grain. The grain's ours. No one else can have it, and what we don't eat ourselves we'll bury in the ground. The City to supply us with kerosene oil.

No Hetman - or anyone else - could or would carry out reforms like those. There were some wistful rumors that the only people who could kick out both the Hetman and the Germans were the Bolsheviks, but the Bolsheviks themselves were not much better: nothing but a bunch of Yids and commissars. The wretched Ukrainian peasants were in despair; there was no salvation from any quarter.

But there were tens of thousands of men who had come back from the war, having been taught how to shoot by those same Russian officers they loathed so much. There were hundreds of thousands of rifles buried under-ground, hidden in hayricks and barns and not handed in, despite the summary justice dealt out by the German field courts-martial, despite flailing ramrods and shrapnel-fire; buried in that same soil were millions of cartridges, a three-inch gun hidden in every fifth village, machine-guns in every other village, sh.e.l.ls stored in every little town, secret warehouses full of army greatcoats and fur caps.

And in those same little towns there were countless teachers, medical orderlies, smallholders, Ukrainian seminarists, whom fate had commissioned as ensigns in the Russian army, healthy sons of the soil with Ukrainian surnames who had become staff-captains -all of them talking Ukrainian, all longing for the Ukraine of their dreams free of Russian landlords and free of Muscovite officers; and thousands of Ukrainian ex-prisoners of war returned from Austrian Galicia.

All these plus tens of thousands of peasants could only mean trouble . . .

And then - this prisoner . . . the man with the guitar, the man from Cohen's tobacco store, Simon, the one time Zemstvo official? All nonsense, of course. There was no such man. Rubbish, mere legend, a pure mirage. But when the wise Vasilisa, clasping his head in horror, had exclaimed on that fateful November day 'Quem deus vult perdere, prius dementat!' and cursed the Hetman for releasing Petlyura from the filthy City prison, it was already too late.

'Nonsense, impossible,' they said. 'It can't be Petlyura - it's another man. No, it's someone else.'

But the time for omens was past and omens gave way to events. The second crucial event was nothing so trivial as the release of some mythical figure from prison. It was an event so great that all mankind will remember it for centuries to come. Far away in western Europe the Gallic rooster in his baggy red pantaloons had at last seized the steel-gray Germans in a deathly grip. It was a terrible sight: these fighting-c.o.c.ks in Phrygian caps, crowing with triumph, swarmed upon the armor-plated Teutons and clawed away their armor and lumps of flesh beneath it. The Germans fought desperately, thrust their broad-bladed bayonets into the leathered b.r.e.a.s.t.s of their adversaries and clenched their teeth; but they could not hold out, and the Germans - the Germans! -begged for mercy.

The next event was closely connected with this and was directly caused by it. Stunned and amazed, the whole world learned that the man whose curled moustache-ends pointing upwards like two six-inch nails and were as famous as his name, and who was undoubtedly made of solid metal without a trace of wood, had been deposed. Cast down, he ceased to be Emperor. Everyone in the City felt a s.h.i.+ver of horror: they watched with their own eyes as the color drained from every German officer, as the expensive material of their blue-gray uniforms was metamorphosed into drab sackcloth. All this happened in the City within the s.p.a.ce of a few hours: every German face paled, the glint vanished from the officers' monocles and nothing but blank poverty stared out from behind those broad gla.s.s discs.

It was then that the reality of the situation began to penetrate the brains of the more intelligent of the men who, with their solid rawhide suitcases and their rich women-folk, had leaped over the barbed wire surrounding the Bolshevik camp and taken refuge in the City. They realised that fate had linked them with the losing side and their hearts were filled with terror.

'The Germans are beaten', said the swine.

'We are beaten', said the intelligent swine.

And the people of the City realised this too. Only someone who has been defeated knows the real meaning of that word. It is like a party in a house where the electric light has failed; it is like a room in which green mould, alive and malignant, is crawling over the wallpaper; it is like the wasted bodies of rachitic children, it is like rancid cooking oil, like the sound of women's voices shouting obscene abuse in the dark. It is, in short, like death.

Of course the Germans will leave the Ukraine. As a result some people will have to run away, others to stay and face the City's next wave of new, unpredictable and uninvited guests. And some, no doubt, will have to die. The ones who run away will not die; who, then will die? . . .

As the fall turned to winter death soon came to the Ukraine with the first dry, driven snow. The rattle of machine-gun fire began to be heard in the woods. Death itself remained unseen, but its unmistakable herald was a wave of crude, elemental peasant fury which ran amok through the cold and the snow, a fury in torn bast shoes, straws in its matted hair; a fury which howled. It held in its hands a huge club, without which no great change in Russia, it seems, can ever take place. Here and there 'the red rooster crowed' as farms and hayricks burned, in other places the purple sunset would reveal a Jewish innkeeper strung up by his s.e.xual organs. There were strange sights, too, in Poland's fair capital of Warsaw: high on his plinth Henryk Sienkiewicz smiled with grim satisfaction. Then it was as if all the devils in h.e.l.l were let loose. Priests shook the green cupolas of their little churches with bell-ringing, whilst next door in the schoolhouses, their windows shattered by rifle bullets, the people sang revolutionary songs.

It was a time and a place of suffocating uncertainty. So - to h.e.l.l with it! It was all a myth. Petlyura was a myth. He didn't exist. It was a myth as remarkable as an older myth of the non-existent Napoleon Bonaparte, but a great deal less colorful. But something had to be done. That outburst of elemental peasant wrath had somehow to be channelled into a certain direction, because no magic wand could conjure it away.

It was very simple. There would be trouble; but the men to deal with it would be found. And there appeared a certain Colonel Toropetz. It turned out that he had sprung from no less than the Austrian army . . .

'You can't mean it?'

'I a.s.sure you he has.'

Then there emerged a writer called Vinnichenko, famous for two things - his novels and the fact that as far back as the beginning of 1918 fate had thrown him up to the surface of the troubled sea that was the Ukraine, and that without a second's delay the satirical journals of St Petersburg had branded him a traitor.

'And serves him right . . .'

'Well, I'm not so sure. And then there's that mysterious man who was released from prison.'

Even in September no one in the City could imagine what these three men might be up to, whose only apparent talent was the ability to turn up at the right moment in such an insignificant place as Belaya Tserkov. By October people were speculating furiously about them, when those brilliantly-lit trains full of German officers pulled out of the City into the gaping void that was the new-born state of Poland, and headed for Germany. Telegrams flew. Away went the diamonds, the s.h.i.+fty eyes, the slicked-down hair and the money. They fled southwards, southwards to the seaport city of Odessa. By November, alas, everyone knew with fair certainty what was afoot. The word 'Petlyura' echoed from every wall, from the gray paper of telegraph forms. In the mornings it dripped from the pages of newspapers into the coffee, immediately turning that nectar of the tropics into disgusting brown swill. It flew from tongue to tongue, and was tapped out by telegraphists' fingers on morse keys. Extraordinary things began happening in the City thanks to that name, which the Germans misp.r.o.nounced as 'Peturra'.

Individual German soldiers, who had acquired the bad habit of lurching drunkenly around in the suburbs, began disappearing in the night. They would vanish one night and the next day they would be found murdered. So German patrols in their tin hats were sent around the City at night, marching with lanterns to put an end to the outrages. But no amount of lanterns could dissolve the murky thoughts brewing in people's heads.

Wilhelm. Three Germans murdered yesterday. Oh G.o.d, the Germans are leaving - have you heard? The workers have arrested Trotsky in Moscow!! Some sons of b.i.t.c.hes held up a train near Borodyanka and stripped it clean. Petlyura has sent an emba.s.sy to Paris. Wilhelm again. Black Senegalese in Odessa. A mysterious, unknown name - Consul Enno. Odessa. General Denikin. Wilhelm again. The Germans are leaving, the French are coming.

'The Bolsheviks are coming, brother!'

'Don't say such things!'

The Germans have a special device with a revolving pointer -they put it on the ground and the pointer swings round to show where there are arms buried in the ground. That's a joke. Petlyura has sent a mission to the Bolsheviks. That's an even better joke. Petlyura. Petlyura. Petlyura. Peturra. . . .

There was not a single person who really knew what this man Peturra wanted to do in the Ukraine though everyone knew for sure that he was mysterious and faceless (even though the newspapers had frequently printed any number of pictures of Catholic prelates, every one different, captioned 'Simon Petlyura') and that he wanted to seize the Ukraine. To do that he would advance and capture the City.

Six.

Madame Anjou's shop, Le chic parisien, was in the very center of the City, on Theater Street, behind the Opera House, on the first floor of a large multi-storied building. Three steps led up from the street through a gla.s.s door into the shop, while on either side of the gla.s.s door were two large plate-gla.s.s windows draped with dusty tulle drapes. No one knew what had become of Madame Anjou or why the premises of her shop had been put to such uncommercial use. In the left-hand window was a colored drawing of a lady's hat with 'Chic parisien' in golden letters; but behind the gla.s.s of the right-hand window was a huge poster in yellow cardboard showing the crossed-cannon badge of the artillery. Above it were the words: 'You may not be a hero - but you must volunteer.' Beneath the crossed cannon it read: 'Volunteers for the Mortar Regiment may enlist here.'

Parked at the entrance to the shop was a filthy and dilapidated motor-cycle and sidecar. The door with its spring-closure was constantly opening and slamming and every time it opened a charming little bell rang - trrring-trrring - recalling the dear, dead days of Madame Anjou.

After their drunken evening together Alexei Turbin, Mysh-laevsky and Karas got up next morning almost simultaneously. All, to their amazement, had thoroughly clear heads, although the hour was a little late - around noon in fact. Nikolka and Shervinsky, it seemed, had already gone out. Very early that morning Nikolka had wrapped up a mysterious little red bundle and creaking on tiptoe out of the house had set off for his infantry detachment, whilst Shervinsky had returned to duty at General Headquarters.

Stripped to the waist in Anyuta's room behind the kitchen, where the geyser and the bath stood behind a drape, Myshlaevsky poured a stream of ice-cold water over his neck, back and head, and shouted, howling with the delicious shock; 'Ugh! Hah! Splendid!' and showered everything with water for a yard around him. Then he rubbed himself dry with a Turkish towel, dressed, anointed his head with brilliantine, combed his hair and said to Alexei: 'Er, Alyosha ... be a friend and lend me your spurs, would you? I won't be going home and I don't like to turn up without spurs.'

'You'll find them in the study, in the right-hand desk drawer.'

Myshlaevsky went into the study, fumbled around, and marched out clinking. Dark-eyed Anyuta, who had returned that morning from staying with her aunt, was flicking a feather duster over the chairs in the sitting room. Clearing his throat Myshlaevsky glanced at the door, made a wide detour and said softly: 'Hullo, Anyuta . . .'

'I'll tell Elena Vasilievna', Anyuta at once whispered automatically. She closed her eyes like a condemned victim awaiting the executioner's axe.

'Silly girl...'

Alexei Turbin appeared unexpectedly in the doorway. His expression turned sour.

'Examining our feather duster, Viktor? So I see. Nice one, isn't it? Hadn't you better be on your way? Anyuta, remember in case he tells you he'll marry you, don't believe it - he never will.'

'h.e.l.l, I was only saying hullo . . .' Myshlaevsky reddened at the undeserved slight, stuck out his chest and strode clinking out of the drawing-room. At the sight of the elegant, auburn-haired Elena in the dining-room he looked uncomfortable.

'Good morning, Lena my sweet. Err . . . h'mmm' (Instead of a metallic tenor Myshlaevsky's voice came out of his throat as a low, hoa.r.s.e baritone), 'Lena, my dear,' he burst out with feeling, 'don't be cross with me. I'm so fond of you and I want you to be fond of me. Please forget my disgusting behaviour yesterday. You don't think I'm really such a beast, do you?'

So saying he clasped Elena in an embrace and kissed her on both cheeks. In the drawing-room the feather duster fell to the ground with a gentle thud. The oddest things always happened to Anyuta whenever Lieutenant Myshlaevsky appeared in the Turbins' apartment. All sorts of household utensils would start slipping from her grasp: if she happened to be in the kitchen knives would cascade to the floor or plates would tumble down from the dresser. Anyuta would look distracted and run out into the lobby for no reason, where she would fiddle around with the overshoes, wiping them with a rag until Myshlaevsky, all cleft chin and broad shoulders, swaggered out again in his blue breeches and short, very low-slung spurs. Then Anyuta would close her eyes and sidle out of her cramped hiding-place in the boot-closet. Now in the drawing-room, having dropped her feather duster, she was standing and gazing abstractedly into the distance past the chintz curtains and out at the gray, cloudy sky.

'Oh, Viktor, Viktor,' said Elena, shaking her carefully-brushed diadem of hair, 'you look healthy enough - what made you so feeble yesterday? Sit down and have a cup of tea, it may make you feel better.'

'And you look gorgeous today, Lena, by G.o.d you do. That cloak suits you wonderfully, I swear it does', said Myshlaevsky ingratiatingly, his glance darting nervously back and forth to the polished sideboard. 'Look at her cloak, Karas. Isn't it a perfect shade of green?'

'Elena Vasilievna is very beautiful', Karas replied earnestly and with absolute sincerity.

'It's the electric light that makes it look this color', Elena explained. 'Come on, Viktor, out with it - you want something, don't you?'

'Well, the fact is, Lena dearest, I could so easily get an attack of migraine after last night's business and I can't go out and fight if I've got migraine . . .'

'All right, it's in the sideboard.'

'Thanks. Just one small gla.s.s . . . better than all the aspirin in the world.'

With a martyred grimace Myshlaevsky tossed back two gla.s.ses of vodka one after the other, in between bites of the soggy remains of last night's dill pickles. After that he announced that he felt like a new-born babe and said he would like a gla.s.s of lemon tea.

'Don't let yourself worry, Lena,' Alexei Turbin was saying hoa.r.s.ely, 'I won't be long. I shall just go and sign on as a volunteer and then I shall come straight back home. Don't worry,*there won't be any fighting. We shall just sit tight here in the City and beat off "president" Petlyura, the swine.'

'May you not be ordered away somewhere?'

Karas gestured rea.s.suringly.

'Don't worry, Elena Vasilievna. Firstly I might as well tell you that the regiment can't possibly be ready in less than a fortnight; we still have no horses and no ammunition. Even when we are ready there's not the slightest doubt that we shall stay in the City. The army we're forming will undoubtedly be used to garrison the City. Later on, of course, in case of an advance on Moscow . . .'

'That's pure guess-work, though, and I'll believe it when I see it . . .'

'Before that happens we shall have to link up with Denikin . . .'

'You don't have to try so hard to comfort me', said Elena. 'I'm not afraid. On the contrary, I approve of what you're doing.'

Elena sounded genuinely bold and confident; from her expression she was already absorbed with the mundane problems of daily life: sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

'Anyuta,' she shouted, 'Anyuta dear, Lieutenant Myshlaevsky's dirty clothes are out there on the verandah. Give them a good hard brush and then wash them right away.'

The person who had the most calming effect on Elena was the short, stocky Karas, who sat there very calmly in his khaki tunic, smoking and frowning.

They said goodbye in the lobby.