STORY OF LIFE
Book III

In That Dawn
Spring 1917 - Spring 1920

by KONSTANTIN PAUSTOVSKY
• • •
Translated by Manya Harari and Andrew Thomson
Progress Publishers 1967


CONTENTS

1. Whirlpool
2. Blue Torches
3. The Journalists' Cafe
4. The Hall with the Fountain
5. The Zone of Silence
6. Rebellion
7. Material for a History of Moscow Houses
8. A Few Explanations
9. The Riga-Orel Goods Wagon
10. The Neutral Zone
11. Our Raggle-Taggle Hetman
12. The Violet Ray
13. A Bolshevik Wed me, a Gaidamak Girl
14. Purple Riding Breeches
15. Puff Pastry
16. Cries in the Night
17. Wedding Present
18. Firinka, Water Pipes and Minor Risks
19. The Last Shot
Notes



1
Whirlpool

In the course of a few months, Russia spoke out everything she had kept to herself for centuries.

Day and night, from February to the autumn of 1917, the country seethed from end to end like one continuous rowdy meeting.

Crowds shouted in city squares, in front of monuments, in railway stations smelling of chlorine, in factories, villages, markets, and in every yard and stairway of every house which showed the slightest sign of habitation.

Furious yells of 'Chuck him out!' or hoarse, enthusiastic hurrahs would suddenly drown out the fervid eloquence- pledges, accusations, appeals. The noise rumbled, like the thunder of carts on cobbles, from crossroads to crossroads.

The meetings in Moscow were particularly heated and spirited. There, someone was always being tossed up in the air, or dragged off the Pushkin Monument by the belt of his greatcoat, or kissed and scratched by unshaven chins. Calloused hands were wrung; an intellectual had his hat knocked off - only to be carried in triumph the moment after, while he held on to his bobbing pince-nez and called curses upon this or that destroyer of Russia's freedom. Frenzied outbursts of clapping sounded like the drumming of hail on pavements.

As it happened, the spring of 1917 was cold, and hail often covered the new grass in the boulevards with its crackling grain.

No one ever asked permission to speak. Everyone took it for granted. Front line soldiers were sure of a ready hearing; so was a French officer stranded in Russia-then a member of the French Socialist Party, later a communist-Jacques Sadoul. His light-blue overcoat seemed always on the move between the two busiest meeting places in Moscow, in front of Pushkin's Monument and Skobelev's.

A soldier who claimed to be back from the front, was first put through a deafening interrogation: 'Which front? Which division? Which regiment? Who was your regimental commander?'

If the soldier, taken aback, was slow to answer, people yelled, 'He's done his soldiering on the home front! Chuck him out!' and, dragging him off the platform, pushed him back into the crowd, where he stood, embarrassed, blowing his nose, wiping it on the skirt of his greatcoat, and shaking his head with a puzzled frown.

Shock tactics were needed to grip the crowd and force it to listen.

Once, a bearded soldier in an overcoat as stiff as tree-bark climbed the steps of the Pushkin Monument. Greeted by the usual heckling -'Which division? Which unit?'-he frowned angrily.

'What are you shouting about?' he yelled, 'I bet every third man of you has the Kaiser's photo in his pocket-if anyone bothered to look. More than half of you are spies! No doubt about it. Who the hell are you anyway to tell a Russian soldier to shut up?'

The crowd fell silent.

'Go and feed lice in the trenches,' the soldier roared. 'Then you can ask questions. Tsarist runts! Just because you've stuck red armbands on your sleeves, you think we can't see through you! Isn't it enough for you to sell us out to the bourgeoisie, like chickens across the counter, d'you have to pluck us to the last feather as well? Thanks to you, there's nothing but treachery at the front or any rotten-where else at the rear. Comrades, front line soldiers! It's you I'm talking to. Do me a favour, cordon off these citizens, search them and check their documents. And if anybody's got anything on him, we'll deal with him ourselves without waiting for orders from the Government Commissar. Hurrah!'

He swept off his sheepskin hat and waved it. There were a few scattered cheers. Then an ominous movement started in the crowd - soldiers, linking arms, began to encircle it.

No one knows how all this would have ended if someone hadn't thought of ringing up the Soviet of Deputies. The Soviet sent a lorry full of armed workers, who restored order.

Gradually the meetings in the various parts of Moscow assumed each its specific character. At the Skobelev Monument, the speakers were usually representatives of the various parties, from Cadets and Populist - Socialists to Bolsheviks. Here the speeches were violent, but to the point. No one was allowed to talk hot air in front of Skobelev. The moment anyone began, the crowd shouted in unison: 'Off with you to the Taganka! Out you go!'

In Taganka Square you could indeed say anything you liked - for instance that Kerensky was an apostate from the village of Shpola, or that the monks at the Donskoy Monastery had been caught red-handed hiding ten thousand gold rubles in the cores of pickled apples.

One day in spring (by then it was May, but I don't believe anyone had noticed that the ice on the Moscow River had broken, or that the wild cherries were in flower) I was standing in the crowd at the foot of the Skobelev Monument. A scuffle had broken out between Bolsheviks and SRs.

Suddenly I saw Rachinsky climbing up the steps of the monument. I had never come across him in Moscow before.

He took off his wide-brimmed velours hat, raised his stick with its silver mermaid knob, called for silence, and declaimed:

'Black clouds threaten to obscure the radiant sun of our freedom. Permit me, a poor and humble poet living in an attic, to raise my indignant voice. . . .'

'Chuck him out!' came a coarse but dear and determined voice from the crowd.

'Off to the Taganka!' the crowd cheerfully took up. 'You, up there, whoever is nearest, haul him off the monument.'

'. . . usurpation of authority!' Rachinsky shouted despairingly. 'The voice of the senseless rabble!'

It was no good, he was not allowed to go on. Raising tragic eyes to heaven, he shrugged his shoulders, climbed with dignity off the pedestal and disappeared into the crowd.

The meetings at the Pushkin Monument dealt with a variety of themes but, as they say now, always kept 'to a high level'. Most of the speakers were students.

I was working for a newspaper, and it was part of my job to attend the meetings. They reflected every change of mood in Moscow. They were also places where reporters could pick up a lot of news.

The paper appeared under the curious title Moscow Municipality Bulletin. The Moscow Municipality had long ceased to exist, and it certainly had no bulletin. Perhaps the paper derived its name from the fact that the building in Tverskoy Boulevard, which housed its office, had been the residence of the Municipal Governor.

It was a small paper, edited by the flippant poet-journalist 'Don Aminado'. No one knew his real name.

It published shattering news from all over the country, kept a chronicle of Moscow life, and occasionally printed a couple of decrees issued by Dr Kishkin, Commissar of the Provisional Government. As it never entered anyone's mind to carry out his orders, the Doctor's function was chiefly ornamental. He was a dry stick of a man, with a greying beard and the eyes of a martyr, who went about in an elegant frock-coat with silk lapels and wore a red rosette in his buttonhole.

Every day, the speeches at the meetings became more forthright, and from the welter of slogans and demands was beginning to emerge the pattern of the two camps into which the country was already divided: that of the Bolsheviks and workers, and that of the well-intentioned but distraught and spineless intellectuals who backed the government. Though not, of course, the whole of the intelligentsia, they represented a good part of it.

The State was falling apart like a lump of drying clay. The provinces, the country districts, refused obedience to Petrograd. They lived their own life, no one knew how, seething with unknown currents. The army was quickly melting away from the front.

Kerensky dashed about the country, trying to hold it together by his feverish eloquence. What he lacked in strength of ideas and conviction, he tried to make up for by pompous phrases, dramatic postures, grandiloquent but ill-timed gestures. Thus, standing on the parapets of trenches, he harangued the soldiers at the front, an incongruous figure but wholly unaware of it.

One day, ripping off the epaulettes of an elderly, sick soldier, who refused to fight, he pointed imperiously to the east: 'Coward! Back to the rear! We will not shoot you - we leave that to your conscience!' He shouted in a tragic voice, he had tears in his eyes, the soldiers turned away, muttering and cursing.

I saw him many times, with his puffy, sallow face, red eyelids, and sparse, greying crew-cut. He walked with headlong speed, making his A.D.C.s run to keep up with him. He turned swiftly, suddenly, startling his companions, his wounded arm in a black sling, the hand tucked into the breast of his crumpled coat, shiny brown leggings creaking on his long thin legs.

In a barking, staccato voice, he flung short sentences at the crowd and gasped. He believed in ringing words, he loved them. They seemed to him a tocsin ringing out over the turmoil, rousing men to sacrifice and valour.

After a speech, he collapsed, sobbing, in his armchair and his A.D.C.s revived him with essence of valerian-he reeked of it like a nervous woman.

This smell-it called to mind the fusty air of an old-fashioned flat-seemed to me a give-away. In those days I believed that the smell of medicine was incompatible with the high calling of a popular tribune.

I soon realised that he was merely a sick man with a strong streak of Dostoevskyism in his make-up, an actor who believed in his high messianic vocation, and who was rushing headlong to disaster.

A light-weight carried on the crest of the first revolutionary wave, he was clearly honest in his convictions and his devotion to Russia.

Ever since the Middle Ages, Russia had had her share of holy simpletons. There was something of the same holy simplicity in Kerensky.

At various times, I saw most of the current leaders of the February revolution. Muddled though I was by the situation, I was struck by their disparity.

What, for instance, had Kerensky in common with his Foreign Minister, the aristocratic professor of history, Milyukov?

His blue-grey hair looked sterilised and icy, as did the whole of him, including his every measured, correct word. In those turbulent times, he was like a visitor from some other, well-ordered, academic planet.

A crop of soap-box orators appeared overnight. They sprouted like mushrooms.

What mattered to each was to out-bellow his rivals. Cheap demagogy flourished.

Orators were even imported from abroad. Albert Thomas, French Minister of War-Supplies, arrived from Paris. He came to persuade the 'gallant Russian people' to stick to their allies and continue the war.

A stumpy man with a red beard and an elegant frock-coat, he proved a master of the art of shrillness and of pantomime. I once heard him speak from the balcony of what is now the Moscow Soviet (then the headquarters of the Commissar of the Provisional Government).

Thomas spoke in French. The listeners were mostly soldiers or workers from the suburbs-hardly a dozen of them could have known the language, yet he made himself perfectly clear to all.

Prancing up and down the balcony, he demonstrated what, he believed, awaited Russia if she withdrew from the war. Twisting his moustache into the shape of the Kaiser's, he glared savagely, leapt high into the air and seized an imaginary Russia by the throat. He gripped her in a stranglehold, spat, hurled her to the ground, kicked and trampled her with his polished boots, uttering war whoops and snarling like an enraged tiger.

For several minutes the crowd, fascinated, holding its breath, watched the Kaiser's terrifying war-dance over Russia's prostrate body.

Then it growled. Wiping his flushed face with a scented handkerchief, Thomas put on his glossy topper at its usual slight angle, and smiled: he thought that the rumbling was one of approval.

But it grew ever louder and more threatening. Finally individual words could be made out: 'Shame! Clowning! Chuck him out!' The crowd broke into shrill whistles.

Someone charitably took Thomas by the elbow and propelled him inside. His place on the balcony was taken by the Belgian Socialist Vanderwelde, a man with a painfully ascetic face and a clerical coat buttoned to the neck.

Chewing his dry, thin lips, he began quietly, in a flat voice. He seemed to want to put the crowd to sleep. It quickly dispersed except for a handful of people listening out of politeness.

Vanderwelde took the same line as Thomas. In his despondent way, he pleaded for loyalty to the 'holy military alliance'.

The sound of singing came from the direction of the Strastnoy Monastery. It grew louder, it thundered:

We are sons of the people, Children of toil.

Fraternal alliance and freedom Our rallying call.

Columns of workers were approaching from the direction of Presnya, marching down the Tverskoy Boulevard. Red banners fluttered past Vanderwelde. They were inscribed with slogans:

'Peace to the poor, war on the richi' 'All power to the Soviets!' 'Down with the war!'

Vanderwelde chewed his lips for a few more minutes, then folded up his notes and walked slowly away, leaning on his tightly rolled and sheathed umbrella.

None of the workers had looked up. They sang:

All that holds up thrones Is made bj workers^ hands. Our hands will cast our bullets And fix bayonets to our guns.

Looking back on those first months of the revolution, it is easy to see today how charged they were with a sense of unavoidable, impending change.

The old order had been destroyed. But hardly anyone in his heart of hearts believed that the revolution had achieved its aim. The February regime was, in fact, no more than a short interlude in Russia's history.

Perhaps the rulers were themselves aware of it, and therefore the less able to resist the future, hostile to them but inevitable- that future announced by Lenin from the armoured train at Finland Station: 'The dawn of the world socialist revolution has already begun.'

All that had been so easily achieved and so hurriedly put together since February was, after all, only the first glimmer of dawn!

It was only later that the majority understood this clearly. At the time it was only vaguely felt. We were too keyed up, too stunned by each day's fantastic happenings. We had no strength, no leisure to keep up with the lightning flight of history. The thunder of the collapsing structure of our past was a continuous roar in our ears.

The kindly, idyllic mood of the first days of the revolution was overcast. Worlds were being rent apart and dashed to dust.

The majority of the intellectuals-heirs of the great humanistic tradition of Pushkin and Herzan, Chekhov and Tolstoy-were utterly confused. Capable of creating high spiritual values, they had proved themselves, with few exceptions, powerless to lay the foundations of a state.

Their ideas had been defined, their aspirations and their civic courage trained in the struggle for freedom against autocracy, in which Russian culture had largely grown up.

Now that the old regime had collapsed, their task was no longer to sow the seeds of textbook 'reason, goodness and light' among the people, but at once, with their own hands, to create a new social order, to govern efficiently a vast and hopelessly neglected country.

The country's mood of vague euphoria could not go on. Its life depended on a clear purpose and a sense of priorities. The establishment of justice and freedom, it now appeared, required hard work, and even ruthlessness. The millennium would not come of itself, in response to the clashing of cymbals and the cheers of the citizens.

This was the first lesson of the revolution. For the first time, the Russian intellectuals were brought face to face with their own ideals.

It was a bitter cup to swallow. No one could avoid it. The strong drained it and stayed on the side of the people, the weak degenerated or were destroyed.

Thus began the long, stern era of creating a new civic order. But, as I have already said, few people thought the issues out to the end-they were only vaguely aware of them. Many drifted with the current, wishing only to survive, to see the course history would take, the haven which awaited Russia in the end.

As for me, I had welcomed the February revolution with a schoolboy's delight, though by then I was twenty-five. I believed naively that, overnight, everyone would change, be better, even the bitterest enemies make friends. To me, the new values were indisputable. For their sake, it would surely not be difficult for man to break with his unworthy past, with cupidity, national enmity, and the oppression of man by man.

I had always been convinced that there was an innate goodness in everyone-all it needed was to be called forth from the depth of his being.

But I soon discovered that half these splendid hopes were dust and ashes. Every day brought me new and cruel evidence that men are not so easily changed, that the revolution had not abolished hatred or distrust.

I drove the unpleasant thought away, but it insisted on coming back. I felt angrier and angrier. I began positively to hate the smooth liberal intellectuals who seemed to me to get more and more stupid through their dislike of the simple people over whom they had so recently been in ecstacies. Not that I was ready to accept the October revolution as a whole. I agreed with much, but some things shocked me-particularly what seemed to me its contempt for the culture of the past.

Prevented from wholehearted acceptance by my idealistic upbringing, I lived through the first two or three years as a deeply interested onlooker, but without taking an active part in the events.

Not till 1920 did I realise that the nation's choice was inevitably mine. At once, I felt relieved. There followed a period of faith and of great hope. My life became less casual, more considered, and on the whole devoted to the country's service in the field in which I felt that I could give of my best-writing.

Whether it is better to come to recognition through doubt or never to have doubted, no one can tell.

What seems to me required of a man of our time is honesty towards oneself, no less than devotion to justice, freedom and humanity.

The cold spring of 1917 was followed by a sweltering summer. A hot wind blew armfuls of torn and crumpled newspapers along the pavements. Every day new papers appeared in Moscow, sometimes with the most unusual trends, such as those of the theosophists or the anarchists movement whose slogan was:

'Anarchy breeds order'. Noisy and mostly illiterate, few survived for more than a week.

The wind ruffled dozens of posters-accusing, denouncing, or calling for restraint. The air was thick with the smell of printers' ink and of rye bread. The village smell of bread was brought by the army. In spite of Kerensky's shrill orders, the city filled with soldiers pouring in from the front.

Moscow had become a rest camp. Whole regiments parked round the stations, where the squares smoked like the ruins of a conquered city-but only with cigarette smoke-and grey flurries of sunflower seeds swirled in the wind.

A red flag, tied to the martially raised sword of Skobelev's statue, had faded in the sun but flapped triumphantly in the wind.

The city lay under a pall of dust. Yellow lights burned drowsily night and day. No one could remember to put them out.

For the sake of economy, summer-time was introduced: the sun set at four o'clock.

The whole town was on its feet. Houses stood empty. All night long, people talked themselves hoarse at meetings, argued, wandering sleeplessly about the streets, sitting in the squares or squatting on the pavements. Strangers, thrown together at a meeting, immediately became staunch friends or fierce enemies. The revolution was four months old, but the excitement was as tense as ever, people were as anxious, as troubled at heart.

Early that autumn, I decided to go to stay with Mama. Moscow had exhausted me. In all this time I had read nothing but the mass of hastily run-off pamphlets, which reflected the bitter party-political strife. I longed to re-read War and 'Peace-it seemed an impossible dream! The novel itself seemed to me to have been written a couple of centuries ago.

Mama and my sister Galya were living in the Polesye near the little town of Chernobyl. There, my Aunt Vera, who lived in Kiev, owned a small estate, Kopan, which Mama had undertaken to run. Anything to do with the land delighted her. She had even once hoped to make me study scientific farming.

I passed through Kiev. Like Moscow, it was one solid, seething, endless public meeting. The only difference was that 'hurrah' and 'chuck him out' were shouted in Ukrainian, and 'the Ukraine will never die' by Shevchenko replaced the Marseillaise.

I sailed along the Dnieper and the Pripet to Chernobyl, in a scruffy little paddle steamer, the Volodya. It was a conscientious little boat. Every now and then the Captain, a Ukrainian with a grey moustache and a red ribbon on his chest, climbed onto the bridge, and, grinning, shouted through to the engine room:

'Step on it, Volodya! Do your bit for the revolution!'

And the Volodya did its best. Puffing steam with all its might and hurriedly slapping the water with its paddles, it put on a spurt. But this never lasted long. Soon, the paddles were splashing sleepily as before while the contented passengers snoozed on deck, the bitter smell of marsh marigolds drifted from the bank and the shrill rattle of crickets merged into a soothing whirr.

I, too, lay on deck, making up for lost sleep. Moscow seemed a tangled dream.

It was thirty miles by horse and cart, through forest and wasteland, from Chernobyl to Kopan. The horses plodded on at a walk. The wheels creaked, the ancient harness smelled of tar. The driver, a little old man in a threadbare brown Ukrainian cloak, kept asking me:

'Begging you pardon to be sure, isn't there any news in Moscow about when the general permit will come through?'

'What permit?'

'For us peasants to take the land and be the masters, and to stick all the big and little masters in the backside with our pitch-forks and send them to the devil's mother.'

Kopan turned out to be no more than a neglected farm. In a clearing in the forest stood an old farmhouse with a rotting thatched roof, a few derelict outhouses and no fence. The woods hemmed it in on all sides. After the commotion in Moscow, the soughing of the pines struck me as particularly peaceful and majestic.

Mama managed not to cry when she saw me, although her lips trembled and her voice choked. She threw her arms round me, pressed her head into my shoulder, and for a long time stood silent, holding back her tears. She had never dung to me like this before, as though I were the older, her protector and her only comfort in all her misfortunes.

Galya squeezed my arm, tears dripping from under her thick spectacles. She made no attempt to wipe them away.

I tried clumsily to comfort Mama. I often thought other when I was away, but it only now occurred to me that life had robbed her of everything except her sour, deeply hidden love for Galya and myself, the only two people left to her. These were the last crumbs of love which kept her alive. For its sake she put up without a murmur with being snubbed by her rich relations and with living and drudging, utterly deserted, in these lonely woods.

When dusk fell. Mama mentioned apologetically that it was quite impossible to get kerosene-there wasn't any even in Chernobyl-so she and Galya spent their evenings by the light of a pine torch. It was the first I had ever seen, and I rather liked its bright, crimson light.

Her dry, roughened fingers picking at the fringe of her shawl, Mama said diffidently:

'I wish you could stay with us for good, Kostik. It's so dangerous to be apart nowadays. We'd manage all right. We'd live on potatoes and lard, but at least we'd be together. What do you think, Kostik?'

Not daring to look at me, she kept her eyes lowered.

I said nothing.

The torch had burned down, and she fixed a new one in the iron clamp. Her hands were shaking.

'We were talking about it with Galya,' she said without turning. 'If you haven't given up your idea of writing, it can't make much difference where you work. It's very quiet here. And nobody would disturb you!'

I had to say something.

'I'll think it over,' I replied.

She came up to me and stroked my head.

'That's good, Kostik.' She smiled sadly. 'That's wonderful. Do that, Kostik, think it over.'

However long you live in Russia, it never ceases to astonish you by its contrasts.

I felt this more than ever in Kopan.

The day after I arrived, I was telling Galya and Mama about Moscow and the revolution, when I looked out of the window and saw an old, hunchbacked litde monk, in a dusty habit and pointed hat, trudging from the woods towards the house.

He came in, crossed himself in front of the empty ikon corner, turned to us, bowed from the waist, and asked Mama if she would take some dried mushrooms in exchange for salt for the brethren. He might have stepped down from a picture of Russia before Peter the Great.

As it happened. Mama did have some salt. She poured out a quarter of a bag for the monk but refused the mushrooms. Living in the woods, she already had more than she knew what to do with.

Mama offered the monk tea. He sat down at the table without taking off his hat and sipped his tea through a lump of sugar; a few tears trickled down his cheeks as yellow as candle wax. He wiped them carefully and said:

'So the Lord has granted me to drink tea with sugar once again before I die. Truly, the Lord is merciful. He has taken pity on my poor cold bones.'

Mama went to fetch something from the other room. I followed her and asked where the monk had turned up from. She told me there had always been a small community about six miles away in the woods, on the bank of the River Uzh. Now, since the revolution, most of the able-bodied monks had scattered, only a few ailing old men remained.

'You ought to go and see it,' she suggested. 'Have a talk with them. It would interest you.'

A few days later, I walked over to the monastery. The woods were dark and cluttered up with fallen trees. There was no clearing; right in the thick of the forest, I stumbled upon a tall, blackened, wooden fence. I had seen such fences in Roerich's and Nesterov's paintings of old monastic settlements.

I followed it to the gate. The gate was barred. I knocked several times before it was opened by the same monk who had come to us for salt.

Walking into the small courtyard overgrown with grass, and seeing the crooked little church built of rough pine logs, was like walking into the Middle Ages.

Old men's voices chanted in the church. Now and then a muffled tinkle came from the belfry.

'We don't rightly know whether to ring the bell or not,' said the monk. 'It's risky. We wouldn't want to give offence to the authorities. So we just give it a twitch very sofdy-it wouldn't frighten a crow off the roof. Please to come inside.'

We went into the church. Only three or four candles were burning. The old men, in black habits with white cloth patches in the shape of crosses and skulls, never stirred. Their narrow faces gleamed like darkened gold in the shadows. There was a bitter smell of burned juniper berries-they burned them instead of incense.

Everything was jumbled in my mind-the ancient community, the mournful singing, the wind in the forest outside, the skulls on the monks' robes, Moscow, the cross on Lyolya's grave, the soldiers crawling with lice in the trenches, the synagogue in Kobrin, the lighthouse in Taganrog, revolution, meetings, Marseillaise, Kerensky, 'Peace to the poor, war on the rich'. My whole life seemed a patchwork, a vivid dream, my only settled habit-the expectation of change.

How could I take it all in, make sense of it, clear my mind so that I could in the end do something worth doing? And how explain to myself that I could, at one and the same time, be on the side of the revolution, of progress, love Heine, and yet feel myself a contemporary of this ancient Russia, its voice quavering on about man's eternal predestination to happiness, 'as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be'? And why did these words remind me of the poem, 'My grief is a necklace of matchless pearls, locked in a casket of wrought steel'? The poem seemed an echo of the chant.

I went home, still in a muddle.

Afterwards, whenever I went to fish the River Uzh, I called on the monks. They offered me cold water and old mead.

Newspapers never reached us. To get them, I had to ride our limping horse to Chernobyl.

I did this once, and brought back the news of Kornilov's rebellion, the German offensive, and the fall of Riga.

Mama wouldn't let me go a second time. A mysterious gang had appeared in the woods-perhaps escaped Austrian prisoners or convicts released from jail. No one had seen them, but everyone was alarmed.

Time passed. Nothing more was heard of the gang. People quietened down. At the end of autumn, I went back to Moscow. Mama made me promise to return in spring. By the time I left, the leaves had shrivelled and turned yellow, and the woods were wreathed in mist.

A week later, bandits raided the monastery, searched it for silver, shot all the monks, and set fire to the church. But age had petrified its timber, so the church was charred, but not burned down.

2
Blue Torches

In Moscow I found lodgings in a three-storeyed house near Nikitsky Gate. It looked out on Tverskoy Boulevard, Great Nikitskaya Street and Leontyevsky Lane. Its fourth side abutted onto the safety wall of a six-storeyed block of flats.

Across the road, at the corner of Tverskoy Boulevard (where the Timiryazev Monument stands now) a long, dull building housed a chemist's shop which kept part of its stock in the basement. My room was on the first floor and its windows faced the chemist's.

I give all these details because they help to explain the unusual events described below.

One autumn night, grey with mist and frost, I woke up feeling as if all the air had been sucked out of the room. For a moment I thought I had gone deaf.

I leapt out of bed. The floor was littered with glass from the shattered windows. The splinters shone by the light of the misty moon drifting high above the sleeping city.

There was deep silence, then a sound like a thunder-clap. Something screeched past the windows, and immediately the corner of the house opposite collapsed with a slow rumble. Children started crying in my landlord's flat.

Nikitsky Gate was being shelled from the Pushkin Monument - but we only learned this later.

Again there was silence. As attentively as before, the moon looked down from the misty sky at the litter of glass on the floor.

A few minutes later came a long burst of machine-gun fire from Nikitsky Gate.

The October fighting-the 'October upheaval' as we called it then-had begun. It went on for several days.

Rifles answered the machine-gun. A bullet went through Chekhov's portrait, smack into the wall. I found the portrait later, buried under a heap of plaster. The bullet had hit Chekhov in the chest, tearing a hole in his white pique waistcoat.

The crossfire crackled like burning brushwood. Bullets rattled on the metal roofs.

My landlord, a widowed, middle-aged architect, called me to his flat. It was at the back of the house, facing the yard.

Two little girls were sitting on the floor with their old Nanny. The old woman had wrapped them up, head and all, in a thick woollen shawl.

'We're safe here,' said the landlord. 'The bullets won't go through the house.'

'Are the Germans shooting at us. Papa?' asked the older of the two girls.

'Don't be silly. They're nowhere near.' 'Who, then?' 'Be quiet!' snapped her father.

I went back to my room and looked through the window from the shelter of the wall. Black clouds had blotted out the moon. The buildings, their windows dark, barely showed against the dark sky. Gunfire flashed without a break and bullets sang in various keys, screeching, whistling, or oddly clacking, as though turning somersaults in the air.

I tried to make out people in the street, but the flashes were not bright enough. Judging from the gunfire, the Red Guards had advanced from Strastnaya Square to where the ornate timbered pavilion of a summer restaurant stood halfway up the Boulevard. The Junkers held their ground in the square beside Nikitsky Gate.

Suddenly a tall blue tongue of flame shot up under my windows, hissing and swaying in the wind. It looked like a torch. By its ghostly light, I could at last see people running and taking cover behind trees.

Soon a second torch flared up across the road. Bullets had shattered the burners of the gaslights and the burning gas poured straight from the pipes.

By its wavering light the gunfire immediately increased.

I went back to my landlord's.

'Well?' he asked.

'We must get the children away.'

'Where to? The Boulevard is under fire.

'To Great Nikitskaya. Through the shops.

'The Red Guards are shelling it from Lesser Nikitskaya. The Junkers' H.Q. is at the Union Cinema.

'That leaves only Leontyevsky Lane.'

'Let's go and see.'

We went down the back stairs, into the square courtyard. Here the bullets sang high overhead and only now and then dislodged a piece of the cornice. A few men stood outside the porter's lodge at the back of the yard.

The gunfire in Leontyevsky Lane was even fiercer than in Tverskoy Boulevard. On the fourth side of the yard loomed the wall of the neighbouring house. It had not a single window.

The architect looked at it and cursed.

'It's a trap,' he said. 'We are cut off on all four sides. There's no way out. We're in no-man's-land.'

Dawn was breaking. The men outside the porter's lodge were bakers from Bartel's bakery on the ground floor.

White with flour from head to foot, a bearded baker-a veteran of Port Arthur-suggested moving all the tenants to the porter's lodge as the safest place. The tenants were very few. The whole of the ground floor was occupied by shops and storage premises.

Thus began the first of many days we spent in the lodge.

One of the bakers, a young lad, made up his mind to join the Red Guards. Bent double, he ran out of the gate and was immediately mown down by machine-gun fire from Nikitsky Gate.

Sitting in the lodge, we talked over the events of the past few days and were amazed by our own stupidity. The fighting had taken us all by surprise. Yet we knew about the rising in Petrograd, the storming of the Winter Palace, the gunshot from the Aurora;

we knew that martial law had been proclaimed in Moscow, that well-armed units of soldiers and Red Guards were massing on the Khodynka, that the Alexeyev and Alexandrov Military Academies had been alerted for duty.

The Port Arthur veteran took command of the building.

There was still a thin trickle of water from the tap in the porter's lodge. The baker made us collect and fill every bucket and jug we could find: the water could give out at any moment.

Next we collected all the food we could lay our hands on: it wasn't very much.

We had no news but felt sure that fighting must be going on all over Moscow. One thing was clear-we were in a state of siege, as though living in a fortress ringed by fire. Unfortunately our fortress was unsafe. Already by the end of the first day, stray bullets were falling in the yard.

All that night we sat on the front-door steps of the lodge, trying to guess from the intensity of the gunfire which side was getting the upper hand.

Suddenly, in the middle of the night, the shooting stopped. We strained our ears. The silence seemed more dangerous than an artillery barrage. But it was soon over. Distant, long-drawn shouts came from the pitch-darkness: 'Message for the Commander! The Junkers are manning the roofs!'

The shouts, hurriedly repeated, sounded more and more urgent: 'Message for Commander! Junkers manning roofs!' Then the gunfire broke out as suddenly as it had stopped, and again bullets drummed on rain pipes and shop signs.

On the second evening, a fire broke out in the chemist's shop opposite. As the various chemicals caught fire, it burned yellow, green, or blue. Muffled explosions boomed in the basement and very soon the whole building caved in. The fire gradually died down, but pungent, rainbow-coloured clouds of smoke rose from the ruins for days on end.

Our metal roof buckled and the window frames smoked, but luckily did not catch.

We coughed and our eyes watered from the smoke; we tied wet handkerchiefs over our faces, but it made little difference.

On the third night, there was another lull in the fighting and we heard a strained, uncertain voice shouting in the Boulevard:

'Vikzhel' (The Railway Workers Union as it was known then) 'calls on both sides to cease fire and send delegates! To negotiate a truce! Don't shoot! The go-between-a representative of Vikzhel-will wait ten minutes. Don't shoot!'

Now the silence was so deep that we could hear the bullet-torn shop signs groaning in the wind.

By the dying glow of the chemist's shop, I could just see my watch. The others looked at me in silence. The seconds seemed to race. Five minutes . . . Seven . . . Would the Junkers really hold out? . . . Ten.

A single shot rang out, then another, and at once the crossfire rose like a squall.

A field-gun boomed from Arbat Square, and something crashed, echoing, beyond the blank wall of the next-door house. A shaft of flame slowly rose and spiralled into the sky.

As we learned later, the Junkers had shelled the building and set it on fire to prevent its capture by the Red Guards. In military language, the building commanded the neighbourhood.

This second fire was much more dangerous for us than the one across the road. Burning timber and clanging, twisted sheets of roof-iron were already flying into our yard. We doused them with the little water we had stored.

The old baker assured us that the danger would be over once the top floor had collapsed-provided of course that the safety wall held. We agreed although we knew that our situation was fairly desperate.

That same night, a man in spectacles with a red beard, an army belt on his civilian jacket, and an automatic in his hand, managed, by some miracle, to climb through a broken window in Tverskoy Boulevard and appeared in our yard which was so brightly lit that every speck on the flagstones showed. He looked like Dobrolyubov.

'Silence!' he shouted. 'All residents over here! A cease-fire has been agreed-it will begin in one minute from now-to enable the women and children to evacuate this building. Women and children only. They won't let the men leave. But the house will go up in flames at any moment. You couldn't be much worse off so, if I were in your shoes, I'd chance it-only of course after all the women and children have gone. You'll cross the Boulevard to Bronnaya Street. In single file. Line up at the gate.'

The man vanished as suddenly as he had come.

We lined up at the gate. The gunfire died down and the old Nanny with the two little girls scuttled across. The other women followed.

While the women were crossing the Boulevard, a slanging match broke out between the Junkers and the Red Guards.

'Hi, you snivellers!' shouted the Red Guards. 'Stop fooling! Drop your rifles!'

'We've sworn allegiance!' the Junkers shouted back.

'To whom? To Kerensky? He's buzzed off! He's joined the Germans, the son-of-a-bitch!'

'We're pledged to Russia, not to Kerensky.'

'Aren't we Russia? Use your brains!'

As soon as all the women had gone, the baker dashed through the gate. I was to go next. But instantly, a burst of machine-gun fire from the Junkers' side ripped off a corner of the gatepost. The baker leapt back. The crossfire started up again, and splintered wood, brick and glass showered the pavement. We returned to the porter's lodge.

The baker cursed. 'If only we'd got throughl You and I would have joined the Red Guards. With me there, they'd have taken you on for sure, even though you're a student. You can say what you like, there's only one Russia, ours-theirs stinks of the coffin.' I thought of the Red Guards shouting 'Aren't we Russia?' and suddenly, with extraordinary clarity and freshness, understood the meaning of the hackneyed words 'the mass of the people'. I belonged to that 'mass'. I felt at home among those craftsmen, peasants, workers, soldiers, and the Gorkys, the Leskovs, all the writers, poets, artists who had come from among them.

'Oh, well,' I said. 'I can't live apart from Russia. I know that.'

'Well, there you are,' the baker grinned. 'You stick to us. Don't get left behind.'

On the fifth day we ran out of food. We stuck it out until the evening, famished. Behind the wall of the porter's lodge the neighbouring house was burning itself out.

There was a small food shop in our building. We decided to raid it-there was nothing else to do. The back door led into our yard. The baker snapped off the lock with an axe and we took it in turn to dash in at night and grab as much salami, tinned food and cheese as we could carry.

The glow was so bright that we had to hide behind the counters or the Junkers at the cinema would see us through the broken window.

All went well the first night, but by the second, a Red Guard sniper had settled in the turret of the corner building in Bronnaya Street. From there, he could see into our yard by the light of the fire; he sat, puffing at a cigarette and taking pot shots at whoever showed up.

It was my turn to go. I dashed across. The sniper can't have seen me or else he was too slow.

I still remember that shop. Sausages in silver paper hung from a stretched wire. Round red cheeses lay on the counter, generously splattered with horseraddish from bullet-shattered jars. A sharp smell came up from puddles of vinegar mixed with brandy and liqueurs on the floor. Swimming in the pools were hard pickled mushrooms covered with a reddish film, their big earthenware container smashed.

I pulled down some sausages, stacked them like logs and put a thick Dutch cheese as round as a wheel and several tins on top.

Running back across the yard, I heard something ping against the bundle in my arms, but I took no notice.

As I came into the lodge, the only woman among us-the porter's ailing wife-let out a terrified screech.

I dropped the bundle and saw my hands were dripping with blood.

Next moment, despite the inappropriate circumstances, we were all in fits of laughter and everyone was helping me to scrape tomato puree off my hands and clothes.

As I was running back, the sniper had found his target, and the bullet pierced a tin drencing me with blood-red puree.

We had not a crust of bread between us. Cheese, salami, pickles, all had to be eaten without bread and washed down with water from the tap.

My landlord remembered a bag of rusks he had left in his kitchen: I went to fetch it.

I climbed cautiously up the back stairs, piled high with rubble and broken bricks. In the kitchen, water poured from a bullet hole in the pipe and the floor was deep in sodden plaster.

I was groping in the sideboard, looking for the rusks, when shouts and the sound of running feet came from the Boulevard. I went to my room to see what had happened. Red Guards with tilted rifles were running abreast along the Boulevard; the Junkers were falling back without firing.

I had never yet seen fighting at such close quarters-right under my window. I was struck by the men's faces-livid and hollow-eyed. Deafened by their own shouts, they seemed to me blind and dazed as well.

Boots clattered up the main stairs. The door from the landing flew open and crashed into the wall. Plaster showered from the ceiling. An excited voice yelled from the hall: 'Mityukha! Bring the machine-gun!'

I turned. An elderly man in a fur hat with ear flaps, a machine-gun ammunition belt slung across his shoulder and a rifle in his hands, stood in the doorway. He gave me a fixed, wild look, pointed his rifle at me and shouted: 'Don't move! Hands up!'

I held up my hands.

'What've you got there. Dad?' a young voice asked from the corridor.

'We've caught one! He was shooting. From the window. Shooting us in the back, son-of-a-bitch.'

Only now did it occur to me that I was wearing my shabby student uniform and that, according to the baker, there was a squad of students at Nikitsky Gate, fighting on the side of the Provisional Government.

A young worker, his cloth cap pulled down over his ears, walked into the room. He strolled across to me, casually took hold of my right hand and carefully examined the palm.

'He wasn't shooting. Dad,' he said cheerfully. 'No marks from the bolt. His hand's clean.'

'Blockhead!' shouted the man with the ear flaps. 'What if he was shooting with a pistol, not a rifle? And then chucked it away? Take him to the yard.'

'Everything's possible,' the young man slapped me on the shoulder. 'Come on, then, forward march. And don't try anything on.'

All this time I hadn't said a word. I suppose because appearances were so hopelessly against me that there seemed no point in trying to explain. I had been caught standing by the broken window of a first-floor room in a house just captured by the Red Guards. I was wearing a student uniform streaked with plaster and suspiciously stained brown by the tomato juice. Whatever I had said, no one would have believed me.

So I said nothing, though I realised that my silence was another damning piece of evidence against me.

'Obstinate devil!' said the man with ear flaps. 'You can see he's a real fanatic.'

I was taken out into the yard, the young man prodding me in the back with his rifle.

The yard was full of Red Guards. They had broken into a store room and were dragging out crates to build a barricade across the Boulevard.

'What's all this? Who's that?' They surrounded us shouting.

The man with ear flaps said I had been shooting them in the back from a window.

'Off with him to the Lord God's headquarters,' a young man with a tipsy face shouted merrily.

•Where's the Commander?'

'He's not here.'

'Where's he got to?'

'Prisoners are not to be harmed-that's the order.'

'Prisoners? He was shooting us in the back.'

'There's only one answer to that-shoot him on the spot.'

'Wait for the Commander, Comrades.'

'There's a legalist for you! Put him up against the walll'

They dragged me over to the wall. The porter's wife, dishevelled, rushed out of the lodge. She clutched their arms.

'Children! Comrades! I know him! That's our lodger. He never shot at you. I'm an old woman, shoot me instead.'

'Now, now, Mother,' the man with ear flaps said reasonably. 'Don't you start feeling sorry for people regardless. We're not murderers. You leave us alone.'

I still don't understand why, as I stood against the wall and heard the click of the rifle bolts, I felt nothing. Whether I was too numbed or my mind suddenly blacked out, I don't know. I stared at the gate-post, chipped by the machine-gun fire, and thought of nothing at all. But for some reason I remember that gate-post in the minutest detail.

I remember that there were seven bullet holes. They were white outside (where the bullets had gone through plaster) and red in the middle (where the brick was exposed). I remember the broken, white-painted, metal bracket of the porter's bell, and the piece of flex attached to it, and the ugly face with a huge nose and bristly hair, drawn with a piece of charcoal on the wall and the scrawl underneath: 'Cheat the fool.'

It seemed to me that time had stopped and the whole world was sunk in silence. In actual fact, it must only have been a few seconds before I heard a strange, yet somehow familiar voice:

'What the hell are you doing? Forgotten your orders? Put down those rifles.'

I tore myself with difficulty from the gate-post-my neck was so stiff that it hurt horribly-and saw the man with the Mauser, who looked like Dobrolyubov-the one who had come to us in the night to get the women and children out of the house. He was pale and didn't look at me.

'Stop it,' he said sharply. 'I know this man. He was not in the student squad. The Junkers are attacking, while you're fooling about with this nonsense.'

The man with the ear flaps grabbed the front of my tunic and shook me till my teeth rattled:

'Damn your mother's eyes! I nearly had you on my conscience, you bloody fool. Why didn't you speak up? And you a student!'

The young worker grinned and winked:

'Get out while the going's good.'

A Junker hand grenade burst in the street. Sheltering behind the barricade, the Red Guards ran out into the Boulevard. The house emptied. Once again, machine-guns chattered.

I never discovered who the young commander was, who had rescued the women and children, and now me. I would certainly have known him among thousands, but I never met him again.

On the sixth night of our 'siege' we were sitting as usual, unshaven, our voices hoarse from the cold, on the steps of the lodge, wondering when at last the fighting would stop. It seemed to be marking time.

There was not much bitterness as yet. This came later, during the Civil War. The Red Guards were fighting a 'war of attrition', confident of victory, knowing that the Junkers would soon crack up.

The new Soviet regime had established itself in Petrograd.

Like layer after layer of soil, the country was dropping away from the Provisional Government. The Moscow Junkers knew that theil cause was lost. The bullets whistling past the building at Nikitsky Gate had been their last.

We sat talking. It was late at night. The air smelled of the smoke of burning houses. Their glow was fading. Only in the direction of Kiev Station was the sky still a dull crimson.

Then, from the north, from the side of Khodynka, came the whining of a shell. It crossed Moscow and the explosion thudded somewhere near the Kremlin. The crossfire ceased suddenly. Evidently both Red Guards and Junkers were waiting for the next shot, to know what the target was.

At last it came-the same aloof, high-pitched whine followed by the flash of the explosion. Once again, it was near the Kremlin.

'They can't be shelling the Kremlin!' the old baker said softly.

The architect jumped up. 'I don't believe it!' he shouted. 'It can't be! No one would dare!'

'Of course not,' the baker agreed in a low voice. 'It's just a warning. Wait. Let's listen.'

We sat, rigid, waiting for more shots. An hour went by, but there were none. Two hours passed. There was deep silence.

Grey light-the first chilly light of dawn-seeped from the east. Moscow was unusually still, so still that we could hear the gas jets hissing in the Boulevard.

'Seems to be over,' the old baker said quietly. 'Let's go and see!'

We stepped cautiously out into the Boulevard.

The lime trees with their broken branches stood in the grey hoar frost and smoke. All along the Boulevard, as far as the Pushkin Monument, the gas jets blazed like funeral torches. The street was a tangle of torn cables. They twanged plaintively, swaying and catching against the cobbles. A dead horse, its yellow teeth bared, lay across the tramlines.

A thin trickle of frozen blood led from our gate. The houses, riddled with machine-gun bullets, kept dropping sharp splinters of glass and we heard it tinkling all around us.

Filling the street from pavement to pavement, columns of Red Guards, exhausted, silent, their red armbands twisted into string, were marching to Nikitsky Gate. Nearly all were smoking and the flashes of their cigarettes in the darkness were like silent crossfire.

A white flag on a pole was tied to a lamp post near the Union Qnema.

Near the flag, a row of Junkers, in crumpled forage caps and greatcoats grey with plaster, stood drawn up against the wall. Many looked half asleep as they leaned on their rifles.

An unarmed man in a leather jacket walked up to them. Several Red Guards halted behind him.

The man in the leather jacket raised his hand and said something in a low voice to the Junkers.

A tall officer stepped out from the row. He removed his sword and his revolver, threw them down at the feet of the man in the leather jacket, saluted, turned about, and with slow, unsteady steps walked in the direction of Arbat Square.

Following him, all the Junkers in turn went up to the man in the leather jacket, piled their rifles and cartridges at his feet, then, as slowly and wearily as their officer, walked away along Nikitsky Boulevard towards Arbat. Some ripped off their shoulder straps as they went.

The Red Guards watched silently, frowning, their faces strained. There was not an exclamation, not a word.

It was all over. From Tverskaya, through the chilly darkness, came the sound of singing and of several brass bands playing the 'International'.

3
The Journalists' Cafe

The year 1918 began -with a thaw. The snow was grey and the sky so opaque that factory smoke, reaching the clouds, spread in heavy coils beneath them.

The Moscow streets still smelled of printers' ink, and old posters and newspapers hung in sodden strips from the walls.

The decrees of the Soviet Government were pasted over these tatters.

Day by day, with a ruthless logic, these harsh, pitiless decrees demolished our familiar background and shovelled it aside, making way for the new foundations of our life.

It was still difficult to imagine what this life would be like. The change of concepts was so startling that at times the very ground of our existence seemed to give way, quaking and deceptive as a quicksand. Everyone felt a warning chill. The weak staggered like drunkards.

My room near Nikitsky Gate had been destroyed by the shelling. I moved to a dull brick house in Granatny Lane, next door to the one where I was born. The landlady was a morose widow. She let rooms only to men and women students.

My neighbour was a freckled girl called Lipochka, the daughter of a village schoolmaster. Friends and relations often came to see her from the country near Ryazan, bringing a smell of apples, frost and homespun.

I asked them what it was like in the country. They sighed, hesitated, and said in low voices that no one really knew. It was rather like the spring floods, they said-you couldn't tell what The Journalists' Cafe would come after. They might leave the field covered with good, fertile topsoil, or they might wash the seed out of the ground. That was village life at present-a mixture of apprehension and joy. The great thing was that now the peasants had the land. They would sooner have their hands cut off than give it up.

The apples had a strong smell, the homespun looked warm and solid, and for some reason I found this very soothing.

I was working as a reporter on a paper called Government by the People. I had joined it in September, on my return from Kopan. It was one of the recent crop of short-lived publications. Later on, they were all to be brusquely shut down.

The paper was published by the Populist Socialists. Not even all its contributors had more than a vague idea of its highly indefinite programme. All we knew was that the people at the top were liberal intellectuals, full of good ideas but without the qualities to make them work.

The paper was run by a handsome and masterful middle-aged woman, Ekaterina Kuskova. She spoke in a deep gypsy voice, chain smoked, and disapproved of the reporters, especially after a scribble in indelible pencil was found on her door:

Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Little cuckoo bird,

Do stop cuckooing in vain.

Dead and buried is the past,

Madame Kuskova-that's plain.

As reporters, our writing was not expected to be tendentious- the political slant was provided by the feature articles and leaders. I was utterly and sleeplessly absorbed in my life as a journalist, in the major and minor happenings, sensations, arguments, revolutionary meetings in the squares, marches and streets battles.

The sharp air of that revolutionary winter went to our heads. We were full of woolly romanticism. I neither could nor wished to resist it. Our burning faith in universal happiness shone like an unfading light over the chaos of our lives. That happiness was sure to come. Our very longing to see it, to be its organisers, seemed to us an earnest of its coming.

In everything we read, we looked for universal values. In all we heard we listened to the dialogue between the centuries. The French Revolution, the Decembrist Rising, the Paris Commune and the Revolution of 1905 cast their distant glow on current events, making them still more vivid and exciting.

Despite its inner contradictions, even the poetry of Verhaeren which fascinated me at the time, burned with an old revolutionary fire:

To where the guillotine blade is poised over the square,

To where the savage tocsin quests,

We fly in our insensate dreams.

Our state of fever and confusion was only to be expected of our age and our impatience. Such maturity as I had slowly gained, chiefly through the war, I lost completely. I seemed to be ten years younger, and more stupid with every day. I felt no ground under my feet. It embarrassed and occasionally maddened me to realise that I had no consistent attitude.

What was happening around me seemed to me now wonderful, now wrong, now great, now faking greatness by unnecessary cruelty, now bright with promise, now as lowering as a stormy sky.

Only one thing was clear-life had settled its accounts with the past and was groping towards new standards. These, of course, must be justice and freedom, the opportunity for each man to rise to undreamed heights, to fulfil himself in every way. I believed that the revolution must open up an equal chance for everything that could enrich man's inner life.

To me, the chief point of the revolution was that, of all the manifestations of life and culture, it would encourage those which helped the human spirit to grow. I was told that this was not the aim but the result. But I firmly believed that the result must be the aim-anything else was absurd.

Of all the Populist Socialists who worked on the paper, we youngsters made friends only with the Mikhail Osorgin.

A writer returned from abroad, he was trying desperately hard to make sense of what was going on and was obviously all at sea. It even showed in the expression of his pale-grey eyes, wide open and too bright.

He was charming to everyone and believed everything he was told. His weary voice and his whole appearance suggested a controlled sadness. He was homesick for Italy where he had spent many years. In Russia he seemed always to be only half awake.

We sometimes urged him to go back abroad, telling him that there was nothing for him to do here, whereas out there he could at least write his artless novellas.

'But don't you understand?' he replied in a guilty voice. 'I am a Russian and I love Russia so that it breaks my heart. It's just that I don't recognise her now. Sometimes I wonder if I really am in Russia-I can't believe it. I listen to people talking-even the intonation has changed. So I long for Italy, but if I were there I'd be longing for Russia. There really is no hope for me.'

His bewilderment reached its height when old Gilyarovsky, the ubiquitous 'king of reporters' made one of his periodic irruptions, filling the office with the noise of his raucous rumble and smoker's cough.

'Milksops!' he roared at us young reporters. 'Populist Socialists! What do you know of the Russian people, you moth-eaten liberals? About as much as that fool, Madame Kurdyukova:

'Je ne vais pas, je ne sais pas, je ne mange pas Ie repas,' ' he declaimed with an atrocious accent. 'A newspaper ought to breathe fire. It ought to be too hot to hold in your hand. It ought to make the reader gasp. And what does your rag do? It mumbles. All you are fit for is to write novellas about anaemic young women. Now I do know my Russians. You wait-they'll show you where you get off.'

Osorgin smiled guiltily. Kuskova crossly banged the door of her office. Gilyarovsky winked and went on in a penetrating whisper:

'Of course, a lady can do what she likes-she can sit at her spider-legged desk and play politics and shed tears over her own articles about the Russian peasant. But just one word from a real peasant and you'd all have fits. Goodbye. I'll come back some other time. I don't feel like passing the time of day with you at present.'

He went, but a tense silence reigned over the office for some time, in fear of his return.

All the younger journalists loved this desperate old character with his rumbustiousness, brilliance and inexhaustible imagination, and he, in his own mocking way, loved us in return.

From Government by the People he would wander off to some other newspaper office in the neighbourhood. There, according to the circumstances, he would launch another offensive, or collect news, or sit reminiscing about Chekhov, Kuprin, Shaly-apin and General Skobelev.

Running into me, he would stare at me with round, indignant eyes and say:

'Time you switched from six to ten-point type, young man, and from that to bold. Journalism is six-point, poetry-ten-point, prose-bold. Strap yourself to your chair and work.'

With his grey moustache, cossack jacket and sheepskin hat, he was Russian common sense, good nature, cunning and imagination personified. Journalist, poet, prose writer, he was also a connoisseur of painting and a well-known Moscow host. He was always full of stories, jokes, improvisations; he was always putting on an act. Without it, he would probably have pined away.

This tempestuous old man was at bottom a child. He loved, for instance, sending letters to non-existent addresses in exotic countries he liked the sound of-Australia or the Republic of Costa Rica. Inevitably undelivered, they returned to Moscow, covered with foreign writing and coloured labels.

He looked and even sniffed them all over, as though hoping that they smelled of tropical fruit. But the only smell was that of leather and of sealing wax.

Who knows, perhaps the letters were a pathetic substitute for

his own dream of travelling round the world-clowning all the way, slapping backs, offering snuff to cab-drivers in Paris and Negro kings on the banks of the Zambesi - and returning to Moscow with such traveller's tales as would really make the old lady sit up.

The revolution struck him as a tremendous news story and a manifestation of the Russian spirit of revolt. He sought its origins in Stenka Razin, Pugachev the old peasant risings and tales of arson.

He knew Moscow like the back of his hand, especially that hidden part of it which kept well out of the way of the Soviet authorities-the Moscow of gypsy nightclubs at Pokrovsk-Streshnev, sectarian chapels at Rogozhsky Gate, gambling dens in Brest Street, and the howling mobs of aesthetes who met at Persov's, near St Saviour's Church. Here the leader was a poet with a lisp, a fringe, a smoking jacket and a monocle, who looked so frail that you dared not shake his hand-you felt the pale, transparent fingers might be left in yours as a relic.

Life hadn't settled down yet. The most unlikely people rubbed shoulders. They were more noticeable than before. The revolution had brought them to the surface and shaken them up-as when you shake a barrel of standing water, and all the grains of sand, leaves, twigs, beetles and grubs swim up and rush round and round on the eddy, meeting and colliding, until once again they sink and settle down on the bottom.

In those early days of the revolution, a lot of interesting people used to gather every evening at the Journalists' Cafe in Stolesh-nikov Lane. Pooling their resources, the journalists had rented an empty second-floor flat, furnished it with cafe tables and chairs, and a cheerful all-night meeting was held regularly in its smoke-filled rooms.

There you could run into Andrey Bely and the Menshevik Martov, Bryusov and Balmont, the blind leader of the Moscow Anarchists, Cherny and the writer Shmelev, the actress Roxa-nova,-the first of the Chekhov many 'Sea-gulls', Maximilian Voloshin, Potapenko, Agnivtsev, and many other journalists, •writers and artists of all ages, characters and views.

Agnivtsev, in wide, checked trousers covered with cigarette burns, an enormous yellow tie swathed like a bandage round his long, thin neck and ending in a bow, used obligingly to sing his artless songs.

Coffee, bitter as quinine, steamed in enamel mugs. Even saccharine couldn't sweeten it. Now here, now there, a furious argument broke out, occasionally interrupted by the sound of a loud smack.

The one whose cheeks were most often smacked was a handsome journalist with a dyed beard and a poisonous tongue. Hissing like a snake, he poured his venom over everyone and everything.

Slapping his face was dangerous because he never took his pipe out of his mouth and, every time he was hit, it shot over our heads, spinning like a Catherine-wheel and showering us with burning tobacco. The room smelled of scorched wool. The smouldering table-cloths, coats and trousers were hurriedly doused. The journalist calmly picked up his pipe, filled it, lit it and went off, promising to report the outrage to the Comrades' Court, and followed by shouts of 'Go to the Revolutionary Tribunal if you like. Get out! Go to hell! We've had enough! Provocateur!'

One day, the poet Maximilian Voloshin, red-bearded and shortsighted, dropped in and asked us to his lecture on poetry at the Hermitage Garden Theatre.

Only a few went. The others were too busy arguing to move.

I went to the Hermitage. It was the end of March. The garden was dark and silent. The trees were shedding melted snow.

I caught the smell of rotting leaves, like the faint bouquet of a wine, as though the acrid vegetable smell of last year's thawed-out flowers were seeping through the damp, comfortless, long-unturned and untended soil.

Nature was forgotten in those days. Words rang out across the country-calling to arms, threatening, accusing, denouncing or rejoicing. Millions were drawn by them, as though by a magnetic field. They were called upon simultaneously to destroy and to construct.

It was a time of sudden decisions and of turmoil-not a time to think of nature. Yet the wind rustled as before in the deserted woods, and the frozen rivers turned from white to blue, filling with water. On grey mornings, the lime trees in the boulevards sulked as usual, shaggy with frost. And the sunsets faded as meekly, and the stars shivered apprehensively at night, as though realising that people-even poets and astronomers-had quite other things to think about.

Everyone was at the mercy of his private mental storm. No one looked at rivers or trees or, if he ever did, it was with fixed, unseeing eyes.

Men were swayed by other joys and passions. Even love, simple and unconditional as air and sunshine, at times gave way before the torrent of events. It was experienced as an emotional disease.

Dangerous or misplaced affections were denied in the name of duty. They were relegated to some distant future. The titanic upheaval and reconstruction claimed all our strength. Not an ounce of it could be wasted. Wasted? The sacrifice of love was of course immense and heroic-especially when those who made it knew what they were giving up.

Love, poetry, political events-whatever I stopped to think about, I realised how muddled I was. I longed for a clear sense of values. It was difficult to live without-for me as for everyone. But it was evidently too soon. Things were too unsettled, and we had to wait for the outlines of the new order to emerge from the chaos.

Voloshin's lecture only added to the confusion.

The theatre was almost empty. The cold numbed my hands. A few dusty electric bulbs flickered on and off. Brown fog hung in the air.

Voloshin seemed to be talking to himself, oblivious of the audience. He spoke of the war, of our iron age in the history of the world, and asked, his eyes searching the back of the empty hall, his voice hollow and tragic, what use were poets and artists in such pitiless times.

The best of the Irish poets had been hanged in England. Three hundred poets had been killed in the very first days of the war in France. A French general, who regarded himself as a lover and connoisseur of poetry, had said:

'Let these dedicated youths lead the attack. They will inspire the men to follow.'

Verhaeren, making nonsense of his whole life, had been forced to learn to hate. Jules Lemaltre, shocked by the absurdities of war, had fallen sick and forgotten how to read. He no longer knew what the letters stood for and had to be taught from the beginning like a child.

The terrible list of war crimes against art grew and grew. Voloshin's voice was more and more hollow.

But what was the solution? On this he had nothing to say.

There were many striking people among the regular patrons of the cafe. Each was cut to his own pattern; together, they made up the jeering, ruthless tribe of journalists.

Only Alexander Yakovlev, a young writer from the Volga town of Volsk, kept his distance from the rest.

Yakovlev was an expert on peasant life and wrote excellent articles about it. Shy and reserved, he was treated with respect. Apart from his writing, he earned it by his rare gift for travelling to the remotest parts of Russia and, in spite of the chaotic conditions, returning unharmed. His journeys were feats of daring and endurance. He risked his life almost every time.

A horde of demobilised soldiers poured along the railways, leaving ruin and destruction in its wake. Carriages were stripped of everything that could be broken or torn off. Even the rusty sheet-iron was wrenched off the roofs. There was a lively trade at the Sukharevka Market, in wash-basins, looking-glasses, and strips of bald red plush upholstery from the trains.

Thieves and hooligans, dressed up as soldiers, egged on the demobilised men. At the stations, windows were smashed, fences and sometimes even railway-workers' huts pulled down for timber to stoke the engines. As for the graveyards near the tracks- the crosses went to feed the boilers while the rusty tin lilies and roses festooned the carriage walls, whistling mournfully in the draught.

The station staff scattered long before a train full of demobbed men shook the rails and burst into the stations to the noise of bandit hoots, accordions, gramophones and chattering machine-guns. The slightest hold-up brought savage retribution to those in charge. The engine drivers blenched at the sound of the chorus 'Get cracking, Gavrila!' roared by hundreds of voices.

If a civilian by some miracle managed to get on board, he was normally flung off the moving train. Yakovlev had been thrown out three times but was still alive.

The oddest thing was that, after brushing death, he came back refreshed, excited, full of the amazing things he had seen and heard, and swearing that no price was too high to pay for such copy.

He discovered the strangest, ancient, moth-eaten little towns- Khvalynsk, Sarapul, Serdobsk-so remote and so cut off from Moscow that it was hard to believe in their existence except as a myth.

Russia seemed once more to be split up into small fiefs, separated by the lack of roads, the break-down of the post and telegraph, by forests, swamps and demolished bridges, by distance grown immeasurably longer.

In these God-forsaken corners of the country, autonomous republics were proclaimed and banknotes printed by the local printers (though more often postage stamps were used for money).

It was all mixed up with remnants of the past-balsam in the window-boxes, bell-chimes, wedding feasts with drunken salvoes from sawn-off shotguns, and weed-choked fields of straggly corn, and talk about the end of the world when nothing would be left of Russia but 'black night and three pillars of smoke'.

All this, Yakovlev described unhurriedly, with taste, enjoyment and the skill of a saddler stitching a saddle girth with tough, coloured twine.

Since then, I have run across him a few times. He always struck me by the sweetness of his nature and his devotion to peasant Russia. Characteristically, his dying wish was to be buried, not in Moscow, but on the Volga, in his native town of Volsk.

Very occasionally, a short, nondescript man, in a hat with a drooping brim, would drop in at the cafe. He had, I believe, at one time worked on a paper in Tula or Orel.

Prishvin was once involved in a fantastic incident with this man.

He was moving from Yelets to Moscow at a time when spot-check patrols of sailors from the Baltic fleet were throwing their weight about at the railway junctions.

Prishvin had packed all his things, including books and manuscripts, into several sacks which he kept with him in his compartment. At a small junction near Orel, the sailors took them away, in spite of all his protests and appeals.

Prishvin dashed into the station building in search of the officer commanding the patrol. This turned out to be a sailor with high cheekbones, one pewter ear-ring and an automatic rifle. Holding a wooden spoon and shovelling salted fish, like porridge, into his mouth, he refused to listen to Prishvin.

'That's enough, you long-haired intellectual. One squeak out of you and I arrest you for sabotage. Who knows what a revolutionary tribunal might dig up! Clear out while you're still in one piece.'

The little man in the wide-brimmed hat had followed Prishvin. He stopped at the door of the commander's office and said in a low but distinct voice:

'Give the citizen his luggage back at once.'

'And who might you be?' asked the sailor. 'Who d'you think you are to order me about?'

I am Megalif,' said the stranger in the same low dear voice, fixing the sailor with his small, grey, piercing eyes.

The sailor choked on his salted fish and stood up.

'I beg your pardon,' he said ingratiatingly. 'My lads must have slipped up. Got too excited, I expect. Lobov!' he yelled in a voice of thunder. 'Give the citizen his things! That's an order from the plenipotentiary of Megalif himself! Understand? Take them back to his compartment. And look sharp about it. Swabs! You might look who you're grabbing from.'

When they were outside and Prishvin was thanking him, his nondescript rescuer merely advised him to mark his sacks clearly, in indelible pencil, with the word 'folklore'.

'A Russian is always impressed by a word he doesn't understand,' he explained, 'especially if it's foreign. You do that and no one will bother you. You'll see.'

'I'm sorry to be so ignorant,' said Prishvin, 'but what is this powerful organisation you represent-Megalif? Why does the mere mention of it have this galvanising effect on the security patrol?'

The wispy man smiled guiltily.

'It's not an organisation-it's my surname,' he said. 'Sometimes it works.'

Prishvin roared with laughter.

He followed Megalif's advice and marked his sacks with the mysterious word 'folklore'. No one laid a finger on them after that.

This was the time when many new, strange words, made up of abbreviations, were coined. A few years later, their number assumed the proportions of a catastrophe and threatened to reduce the language to an absurd international jargon.

Every evening, the well-known Moscow bibliophile and journalist, Shchelkunov, walked into the cafe, wiping the steam off his bulging spectacles and stumbling blindly into the tables. He invariably carried heavy batches of dusty books tied together with telephone flex.

Taking off his shabby, old-fashioned overcoat with its velvet collar, he carefully hung it on a peg-and the room filled with the sound of furious miaowing.

Shchelkunov had a habit of picking up stray kittens in the street and carrying them about in his overcoat pockets until late at night when he took them home to be fed by his wife.

He looked like a country doctor. His damp beard was unkempt and his jacket, its pockets stuffed with books and manuscripts, hung on him like a sack.

It was before the days of fountain pens, so he also had on him a bottle of ink and several goose quills. He could never write in pencil-and I think I was the only one who sympathised and never made fun of this oddity. A pencilled text always looked to me unfinished and messy. It seemed to me that if an idea had been properly thought out, it deserved to be properly put down. If I could have my way, I would always have used good thick paper and Indian ink.

Shchelkunov would sit down at a table, carefully sharpen a quill with a razor blade and, puffing and grunting, write up his notes in a hand which looked like mediaeval script.

He wrote about rare books, rediscoveries of famous paintings, exhibitions, bibliographical news and other recondite matters.

He was out hunting for books and news from early morning on, and he turned up in the most unexpected places.

His address book was filled with the addresses of pious widows, retired booksellers and binders, book-hawkers and receivers of stolen goods. These were his suppliers. Most of them lived on the outskirts of the city, in Izmailovo, Cherkizovo, Kotly or beyond Presnya. He went where possible by tram, but very often had to walk.

Shchelkunov had a sixth sense for anything to do with books. He would sniff out a rare edition and track it down with the patience of a retriever. He was not the only bibliophile in Moscow. Knowing his uncanny gift, dealers and collectors kept an eye on him and often tried to intercept his prey. He was always having to confuse his tracks and put his rivals off the scent. As a result he had developed a conspiratorial manner.

He spoke in a muffled whisper, his narrow Tartar eyes glinting suspiciously.

'I believe,' he muttered, having forced me to edge round the table and sit close up to him, 'I believe I'm at last on the track of the library of Ivan the Terrible. I think I know where they've hidden it. In a few days I'll know. God forbid that Lunacharsky should hear of it! Don't breathe a word.'

If anyone brought him a rare book for valuation, he leafed through it, almost seemed to sniff at it, gave a twisted smile and said:

'It's a well-known edition. You can pick it up any day on the stalls by the China Town Wall. You've been had. It's a pity. Still, I'll give you a first edition of Chekhov's Collected Stories in exchange. All right? What d'you mean it's not all right? In a year you'll be sorry. Oh well! I'll make it an Italian edition of Marco Polo. You'll have it tomorrow.'

Without waiting for the misguided owner's consent, he stuffed the rare edition into his fat briefcase, snapped the lock and, glancing suspiciously round him, waited for the chance to slip away. Not once, so far as I remember, did anyone manage to get his property back once it had been engulfed in Shchelkunov's briefcase.

It was useless to make a scene. At the first sign, Shchelkunov silently wriggled into his coat, put down his head and charged out of the cafe like a bull. No power on earth could stop him. Breathing loudly through his nose, he was obstinately silent and deaf to the most blistering insults.

One day, he asked me to go with him to a doss-house near Vindava Station. There, according to his information, lived a self-taught poet from Tula, run to seed but still the owner of some rare books and manuscripts. Shchelkunov hoped to wheedle them out of him.

We took a tram but prudently got out a stop before our destination. Shchelkunov had reason to believe that his eternal enemies, the dealers, were on to him and would try to reach the poet before him.

Suddenly, he grabbed my arm and pulled me behind a hoarding.

'There,' he muttered breathlessly. 'See him? Opposite the doss-house. That old man with the tattered panama and the billy-goat beard. I've brought you along because I need your help.'

'How can I help you?'

'I'll slip into the chemist's shop, there's a good view of the doss-house through the window. Meanwhile you get rid of him. I'll wait at the chemist's. If he sees me going into the house, it's all up. I've been after this wretched poet for two months.'

'But how am I going to get rid of him?'

'Pretend you're a detective. That'll scare him off. I know all about him. I've myself bought books from him which he knew were stolen from the History Museum.'

Before I could come to, Shchelkunov had dived into the chemist's shop. There was nothing for it but to play the detective.

Cap pulled down over my eyes, hands deep in my pockets, I slouched towards the doss-house. A few feet short of the old man, I stopped, leaned back against the railings and looked at the house with studied concentiation. It was an old, four-storeyed building with a crack from top to bottom in the facade. A notice, in alternate letters of blue and red, was pinned to the door:

'Callers! Silence on all floors!'

The old man darted a glance at me. My expression was impassive, perhaps even a little impudent. After a moment, I looked down into my cupped hand, as though surreptitiously comparing his face with a photograph.

He turned sharply and began to shuffle away. But he made an unforgivable mistake: pulling out his cigarette case, he lit a cigarette.

I followed him. By the frightening tension of his spindly back, I could see that the old man was making a supreme effort not to break into a run. Catching up with him, I asked politely:

'Could I have a light, please. Citizen?'

What happened next was incredible and terrifying. The old man screamed, leapt high into the air, and, knees bent, scutded away like a crab to vanish without a trace through an open gateway.

Shchelkunov rubbed his podgy hands.

He had beaten the dealers and managed to buy a letter of Leo Tolstoy's from the poet. But I was disgusted with the whole stupid business and swore never to have anything to do with him again.

I assumed that, like the majority of book collectors, Shchelkunov never had time to read and was only interested in books as collector's items. But I was proved wrong.

One day at the cafe, Shchelkunov gave a lecture on the history of books-it was a poem, a poem of praise.

Books, he said, are the sole repository of human thought, its only vehicle of transmission from century to century, from generation to generation. They preserve it through all time in its primordial freshness, in all its variety and gradation of tone, just as though it were newly born.

Made by human hands, they are yet a category of the eternal. Mortals have created an immortal value. But in the bustle of our daily lives, we are always forgetting this.

Listening to Homer, we watch a miracle. Homer's petrified, fhousand-year-old shepherd's staff blossoms with living poetry.

An idea may reach us across an unthinkable distance and yet our first encounter with it may be as immediate, as stimulating, it may give us the same shock of novelty as it gave our ancestors twenty centuries ago.

The centuries have gone by, only human thought persists, as sharply brilliant as Vega, shining as though its pale blue radiance had absorbed the light of all the spaces of the universe. And just as the 'black pits' of space cannot put out this purest of stars, so none of the destruction and ruin, none of the dark spaces of time have power to extinguish an idea embodied and kept safe in all the hundreds, thousands, millions of books and manuscripts.

Shchelkunov was convinced that there were manuscripts still to be unearthed, especially in the ancient lands of the Bible. A city built by the Ptolemies had been discovered in the mountains of Sinai. It was hidden in the hot canyons of the desert. And if dries could be discovered, why not manuscripts and scrolls as well?

After hearing from Shchelkunov about the hidden cities of Arabia, I conceived a passion for the East. I wanted to study its poetry and Shchelkunov gladly found me books by Saadi, Omar Khayam and Hafiz.

It may seem strange that at a time of revolution, of the breakdown of all familiar ways and notions, anyone should have been interested in anything so remote from his daily revolutionary life as the East or as poetry. But the human mind is more capacious than might be thought.

The rough freshness of the early revolutionary climate was so stimulating that it affected all our thinking. It seemed to me obvious that a man of our time, a child of the revolution, must be endowed not only with the lofty moral qualities which had so far been the attribute of an elite, but also with the spiritual riches of the past and of all the countries of the world. I looked for this enrichment in everything, including Eastern poetry.

I was encouraged in my infatuation with the East by Rozovsky, a lazy, elderly journalist with a wavy chestnut beard. He went about all through the winter in a long and once magnificent but now bedraggled episcopal fur-coat and, in general, despite his Jewish origin, looked very like an Orthodox priest.

He spent all his leisure in his room, on a broken-down ottoman covered with a Turkish rug, reading about the East.

He knew a lot about Islam, especially the various Moslem sects. One of them-the Persian Bahais founded by El Baba - he regarded as 'revolutionary': he prophesied that it would bring about the downfall of Islam and the spiritual regeneration of the Middle East.

Before the revolution, Rozovsky had been to Persia and Turkey to pursue his studies at first hand. He was an independent, solitary man who 'could always get away and who travelled light.

He had spent close on a year in Asia Minor, staying in the ancient Turkish town of Brussa. He had much to tell us about Turkey, and his way of telling it was all his own.

He never started with the point-he began with something marginal, often a trifling detail. But little by little, the details would build up into a fascinating story. Had it been taken down word by word, it could easily have been published as it stood.

But Rozovksy's monstrous laziness kept him from ever writing anything. As soon as lie sat down at his desk, he felt bored to death and, throwing aside his pen, would go off to his newspaper or to the journalists' ca.fe, to look for someone to talk to.

I remember Rozovsky telling us about the old timbered Turkish house he stayed at in Brussa. He began with an elaborate description of the smeLl of timbered Turkish houses in general.

They smelled, he said, of the warm dust of rotting wood and of honey, especially on hot still afternoons when, if you touched the verandah railing, it blistered your hand.

The smell of dust was mixed with a faint smell of dry roses. The reason why the houses smelled of honey was that the surrounding olive groves were overgrown with wild roses and swarming with bees. The bees hived in the attics and this was why the houses smelled so sweetly of honey.

Rozovsky was first s;truck by the cloying smell of honey and roses in Constantinople, when he was shown the casket, studded with rough gems, in wlhich the green banner of the Prophet was kept. The banner was enveloped in layers of old, threadbare silk, and dry rose petals had been scattered over it.

Rozovsky made me -understand some of the obscure oriental imagery in Bunin's poems about the East. Ever since reading them, I had thought of Islam as a religion of dreams, indolence and patience, like the mood induced in Bunin by reading the Koran:

In the sultry hour when all creation,

self-mirrored, becomes a dream, my soul

is carried by the mirage

to the eternal glitter of the gardens

of the Djinns, beyond the edge of the sad world.

There, beyond the mists, flows the stream of streams, promising rest to all the earth with all its tribes and lands. Be ever-patient, pray, believe.

But when I mentioned my idea of the sloth and passivity of Islam to Rozovsky he said it was rubbish. No religion was more aggressive or fanatical. Were the green banner of the Prophet raised in a new Holy War, Islam would swoop upon the world like a black, devastating storm from the desert. I clearly pictured to myself that desert storm-the low, scudding, whirling darkness, the yells of the mounted warriors and the thousand lightning flashes of their naked swords.

I cannot, of course, describe all the patrons of the cafe, though they all deserve to be described. But neither can I leave out that chip of old Moscow, journalist and worst liar in the profession, Savelyev. A giggling, gossiping old man, he was our chief supplier of political mares' nests. The only reason he got away with his hide was that he had a cleft palate and spoke in an indistinguishable mumble. It needed the greatest effort of concentration to guess what he was talking about.

Savelyev kept the pockets of his shapeless jacket stuffed with sticky sweets which he pressed on anyone among us who smoked. Smothered as they were in fluff from his grubby pockets, he positively thrust them down our throats. The moment he appeared, every cigarette in the office was put out.

Savelyev was nicknamed 'de Mortuis'; his only job on the paper was obituaries. Every obituary started with either 'Death has tragically deprived us', or 'Society has suffered a cruel blow' So inevitably boring were they that, to liven things up, a young sub-editor once inserted the words 'At long last' before the usual 'Death has depiived us'.

Next morning there was a storm in the office. The sub-editor was sacked. We all felt terrible about it, though the obituary had only been that of some disagreeable old professor. All day Savelyev sat at his desk, blowing his nose.

'I've seen hundreds of them off into the next world,' he muttered, 'and never once did I sin against their memory-I am not their judge. If they were scoundrels, I refused to write a word about them.'

When he finished crying, he went to see the editor-in-chief and told him, hiccupping, that it was impossible for him to work for a paper which allowed such shameful things to happen. Nothing could persuade him to change his mind. He left, and all at once we realised how much we would miss Savelyev's giggling, mumbling, even the sticky fruit drops covered with grit and fluff.

Soon afterwards, he died. His obituary was indistinguishable from all the other boring and unfeeling newspaper obituaries:

'Death has depleted our ranks. A humble journalist . . .'

Savelyev had no family. All he left in his stuffy little room was an old parrot. The parrot hung head down from its perch, giggled like its master, and screeched nastily: 'Have a lollipopi'

It was adopted by the janitor of the block of flats-thus were all Savelyev's accounts with life squared.

Always the last to burst into the journalists' cafe was a polite, but noisy man with pitiless eyes, Oleg Leonidov, known as the King of Scoops. He deliberately arrived after everyone else, just at the moment when the papers, damp with printers' ink, were rolling off the presses.

By then, he could safely tell his rivals about all the scoops he had made that day. They listened, helpless and green with envy.

It was impossible to keep track of Leonidov. He was too elusive. No one knew when or by what means he managed to penetrate into the innermost recesses of the newly founded Soviet institutions and kindly, gently, with a winning smile, worm their most sensational stories out of them.

Nor was he a man who could be deceived or stalled. He was a past master at this himself. Only once, while the war was still on, did a Kiev journalist rashly plant a story on him. Leonidov nearly lost his job, but so cruel was his revenge that no one ever tried to play a trick or even a joke on him again.

Leonidov merely sent the Kiev journalist a telegram: 'Feed turkeys in Kharkov, Archangel and Minsk exclusively on oatmeal.'

It was wartime. The telegram was stopped by the military censor and pronounced to be in code. The journalist was arrested. There was talk of espionage.

No one knows how long he would have spent in prison if it had not occurred to the examining magistrate to put together the initial letters in the text; they made up the words: 'Insolent fool'. In the end, the journalist got off with nothing worse than a fright, while Leonidov swaggered in Moscow, his reputation established as a dangerous wit.

The journalists' cafe dosed down for lack of funds at the end of summer, 1918. It was sadly missed, not only by the journalists, whatever paper they belonged to, but by many writers and artists for whom the first-floor flat, with its low ceilings and absurd pink wallpaper, had become a comfortable, informal club where they could say what they liked.

I was particularly fond of it at twilight. Outside, beyond the bell tower of the fire station and the stone pedestal from which Skobelev's statue had been removed, the warm glow of sunset faded in the golden dusk. The noises of the city-or rather its conversation (there was very little traffic in those days)-gradually died away; only the Varshavyanka could be heard in the distance.

More and more often at this hour, I remembered with nostalgia that out there, beyond Brest Station, beyond Khodynka, where the sun had slowly set, the birch woods were already covered with dew, and the river, escaped from the city, rustled, winding past the trees. The river had a chilly smell of mud and rotting timber piles. The deserted houses were dark, and the peonies, planted in their gardens long ago, blossomed in solitude. The dew dripped from the roofs to the glass tops of the boarded-up verandahs, and its even tinkling was the only sound in the gathering dusk.

Left for the time being in peace, the parks, woods and fields around the stirred-up city listened drowsily to its excited rumbling.

4
The Hall with the Fountain

The Government moved from Petrograd to Moscow.

Soon afterwards, I was sent to cover Lenin's address to the demobilised soldiers at the Lefortovo Barracks.

It was a rainy evening. The air in the enormous barrack-hall was grey with cigarette smoke. The rain beat on the dusty windows. The soldiers, in dirty foot rags and sodden boots, their rifles beside them, sat on the muddy floor.

The majority were men from the front, stranded in Moscow since the conclusion of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. They were thoroughly disgruntled. They believed nothing and nobody. One day, they clamoured to go home to their villages, the next they flatly refused to leave Moscow for fear of being tricked and sent to the front instead. Deserters and shady characters of every sort made trouble among them. As everyone knows, if a simple Russian is sufficiently teased and muddled, he will suddenly get into a rage and rebel. More often than not, the ordnance men and cooks are the chief sufferers in such army revolts.

There was a persistent rumour in Moscow that the soldiers at Lefortovo Barracks were on the point of mutiny.

I pushed my way with difficulty into the hall. The soldiers glared at my civilian clothes.

I asked if they would let me through, closer to the platform, but no one would budge an inch. It was dangerous to insist. Here and there, as though playfully, men were clicking their rifle bolts.

'To hell with them.' A soldier yawned loudly, tilted his sheepskin hat and scratched the back of his head. 'More mumbo-jumbo. Gives you the pip.'

'What d'you expect? You've got grub and tobacco. That's enough for the likes of us.'

'Moscow's all right,' a weedy, bearded soldier grinned. 'Take the girls out. Get a dose of clap and you have a souvenir for life. Better than a medal!'

'Get a move on!' people shouted at the back, pounding the floor with their rifle butts. 'Start talking! Now you've got us here, don't waste our time.'

'He'll start in a minute.'

'Who?'

'Lenin.'

'Go on! Lenin! I suppose he can't wait to look at your ugly mug!'

'Got nobody to talk to, poor chap!'

'We know what he'll say.'

'I've had a bellyful of their slogans.'

'Listen chaps, we're not letting them send us anywhere.'

'Don't worry. We'll do the sending.'

Suddenly there were shouts. The soldiers rose to their feet. The clouds of cigarette smoke swayed. Before I could see anything in the dim light and the smoky air, I heard someone say in an unusually calm, high voice, rolling his r's:

'Let me through. Comrades.'

The men at the back shoved to get a better view. Rifles were pointed at them. The commotion threatened to turn into a shooting match.

'Comrades!' said Lenin.

The noise stopped as though sliced off with a knife. The only sound was the wheezing breath of the pent-up crowd.

Lenin began his speech. I couldn't hear him properly. I was hemmed in, a rifle-butt digging into my ribs. The man behind me gripped my shoulder and squeezed it painfully from time to time.

Blue trickles of smoke rose straight to the ceiling. The cigarettes, stuck to the soldiers' lips, were burning themselves out, forgotten.

The rain drummed on the walls. But gradually, through the noise, I was beginning to make out the quiet, simple words. Lenin wasn't urging anyone to do anything. He was merely giving these embittered, inarticulate men the answers to their unspoken questions-answers which perhaps they had been given more than once before, but never in the right words. He explained what obscurely troubled them,

Unhurriedly, he explained the meaning of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. He spoke about the treachery of the Left SRs, about the need for the workers' and peasants' alliance, and about bread. The way to get it was not by holding rowdy meetings and generally raising hell in Moscow, or by waiting for someone to do something, without knowing what, but by getting down to ploughing their fields, and by trusting the Government and the Party.

I could only hear the odd word, but I knew the rest from the altered breathing of the crowd, the hats pushed to the back of the heads, the gaping mouths, and the sudden, unexpected sighs, more like a woman's than a man's.

Now the hand on my shoulder lay heavy but relaxed. Its weight seemed friendly. It was the hand the soldier would rest on the cropped heads of his children, back in his village, as he sighed with relief: 'Well, at last we've got the land. Now all we have to do is plough and harrow and sow, and raise these brats to do the same after us.'

I looked round at him. He was a young recruit with a broad, pale, almost bloodless face bristling with fair stubble. He smiled shyly and said:

'The Chairman himself, eh?'

•What about him?'

'He's the Chairman of the People's Commissars! And he's promised we'll have peace and land! Didn't you hear?'

'Yes, I heard.'

'Well, there you are! My hands are itching for the land. And I've been too long away from my family.'

'Quiet!' hissed our neighbour, a wispy soldier in a forage cap too big for him.

'Quiet, yourself,' the recruit snapped back, hurriedly undoing his faded tunic.

'Wait, wait, I'll show you . . .' he muttered, fumbling inside his collar and finally pulling out the cord of a sweat stained little canvas bag and, from it, a creased snapshot.

He blew on it and handed it to me. I could see nothing by the light of the dim bulb protected by a wire mesh high up under the ceiling.

The recruit lit a match between his cupped hands. It had burned down to his fingers before he blew it out.

I only looked at the snapshot out of politeness. I was sure it was the usual photograph of a peasant family, such as I had often seen next to the ikons on the wall of a peasant house.

A gnarled old woman, the mother, always sat in front. Whatever she was really like-kind and patient or shrill and bossy- she was always photographed with the same tight lips and stony face. For that one instant, when the shutter clicked, she became the embodiment of the tribal spirit-the stem, relentless matriarch-while around her stood or sat her wooden, goggle-eyed children and grandchildren.

You had to look long and hard at the picture before you recognised your old friends: the taciturn, consumptive son-in-law-the village cobbler; his wife-a shrewish, big-bosomed woman in a frilly blouse, with strap boots and bare calves; the shock-headed boy with the vacant stare of a hooligan, and that other, dark and grinning, whom you knew as a blacksmith famous throughout the district; and the timid grandchildren with their tragic eyes-children who had never known kindness or affection. Only perhaps their uncle, the cobbler, secredy pitied them and gave them his old lasts as toys.

But there was none of these family waxworks in the picture I was looking at. It showed an open carriage with a fine black pair; the recruit sat on the box, young and handsome in a sleeveless velvet vest, hands straining at the wide reins, while sitting sideways inside the carriage was a remarkably attractive peasant girl. 'Will you strike another match?' I asked him.

He hurriedly struck one and I noticed that he was looking at the photo as attentively as I was and almost with the same surprise.

... Sitting in the carriage was a girl in a long, flounced, printed dress, and a white kerchief, like a nun's coif, low over her forehead.

Her lips faintly parted, she was smiling. There was so much tenderness in her smile that it went straight to my heart. Her large, probably grey eyes, were thoughtful and gentle.

'I was coachman to the landowner Velyaminov for a couple of years,' the recruit was whispering hurriedly. 'We had our photo taken in his carriage on the quiet. Before our wedding.' He fell silent.

'Well, say something, can't you?' he suddenly burst out in a rough, challenging voice. 'Have you seen many of them like that?'

'No,'I said. 'Never.'

'There you are,' he calmed down. 'She died just before the war. In childbirth. Our daughter is just like her. Come and see us-you'll be welcome. We're near Orel. . .'

The crowd suddenly surged forward and we were separated. Sheepskin hats and caps flew into the air. Frenzied cheering exploded near the platform, echoing through the hall and out into the street. I saw Lenin walking quickly towards the door, surrounded by soldiers. One hand over his ear, not to be deafened by the hurrahs, he was laughing and saying something to the little soldier whose cap kept slipping down over his eyes.

I looked for my recruit but couldn't find him in the milling crowd, and made my way out. Hurrahs were still ringing out in the side-street. Lenin was evidently being cheered as he drove away.

I walked home through the long dark streets. The rain had stopped. A rain-drenched moon showed among the clouds. I thought of Lenin-the huge mass movement he led, and the astonishingly simple man I had just seen walking through the crowd. I thought of the recruit, and of the young peasant girl- half in love with her across the years, as though she were a part of my love for Russia-and the same sudden happiness and excitement gripped me at the thought of all three. Perhaps it was partly the excitement of the times we lived in, the future we hoped for, and the country in which all this was happening.

Just below the roof, the facade of the Hotel Metropole was decorated with a reproduction in mosaic of Vrubel's 'Princesse Lointaine'. The mosaic was badly chipped by bullets.

Inside the hotel were held the sessions of TZIK (Central Executive Committee)-the Parliament of that time.

It met in what had been the restaurant. A grey, waterless, cement fountain rose from the floor. A little to the left of it and in the centre of the hall as seen from the Dais, sat the Bolsheviks and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. The few but noisy Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries and Internationalists sat on the right.

I often came to the sessions. I liked to arrive early and sit reading in a recess not far from the platform, I enjoyed the dimness and the echoing emptiness of the hall, the few solitary bulbs shining in their crystal bowls in the corners; I even liked the characteristically hotel-room smell of carpets, of which no amount of airing could ever rid the Metropole.

But what I enjoyed most was waiting in the empty, silent hall for the moment when, echoing to merciless debates and brilliant oratory, it would become the arena of stormy historical events.

Among the other journalists who came regularly, were Rozovsky and Shchelkunov. Rozovsky seemed always able to predict exactly the amount of heat which the debate would generate. 'Hold tight. There are going to be fireworks,' he would warn us one day. At other times he would yawn and say: 'There's tea in the canteen, let's go. They're all set for splitting legislative hairs.'

Shchelkunov for some reason was afraid of Sverdlov, Chairman of the Central Committee of TZIK. Sverdlov's calm yet piercing gaze petrified him, and every time Sverdlov turned in our direction, Shchelkunov looked away or ducked behind his neighbour's back.

A short, pale man in a shabby leather jerkin, every word and gesture of Sverdlov's-above all his deep, powerful voice, so out of keeping with his sickly appearance, conveyed an impression of inexorable will. His voice subdued even his most resolute and fearless opponents, such as the Mensheviks, Martov and Dan.

Martov sat nearest to the journalists, so we had every opportunity of studying him. Tall, thin and fierce, a ragged scarf wound round and round his sinewy neck, he was always jumping up, interrupting the speaker, shouting indignantly in his hoarse, staccato voice. The instigator of every storm, he could not be suppressed except by being deprived of the right to speak or suspended for several sessions.

Very rarely, he happened to be in a peaceful mood. Then he would join us, sit down, borrow a book and bury himself in it, apparently oblivious of time, space and whatever was going on around him.

One day, he borrowed a History of Islam from Rozovsky and sat immersed in it, sinking deeper and deeper in his armchair, his long, spindly legs stretched out in front of him.

The subject of the debate was the proposed decree enabling workers' squads to be sent out to the villages to requisition food. A storm of protest had been expected. But neither Martov nor Dan looked like making trouble and, little by little, everyone relaxed. Newspapers rustled, pencils scratched. Sverdlov took his hand away from the bell and smiled as he listened to the speeches. This, perhaps more than anything else, reassured the deputies:

Sverdlov seldom smiled.

Nearly all the scheduled speakers had had their turn when Martov came to life and, in a half-hearted voice, asked for the floor. The audience pricked up its ears. A premonitory mutter ran through the hall.

Martov slouched towards the platform, climbed the steps, swept the hall with vacant eyes and began to speak slowly, reluctantly. The decree concerning the despatch of workers' squads needed, he said, closer legal and stylistic definition. Such and such a clause could be put more simply and briefly-'for the purpose of was unnecessary when 'in order to' would do- while another clause repeated what had already been said in the one before . . .

He spent minutes digging among his notes, couldn't find the one he wanted and shrugged his shoulders in annoyance. The audience convinced itself that there would be no outburst. Newspapers began to rustle again. Rokovsky, who had forecast an explosion, whispered: 'Gone flat like a botde of old smelling-salts. Let's go to the canteen.'

Suddenly everyone sat up. It took me a moment to realise what had happened. Martov's voice was thundering from the platform. It seethed with rage. His dull notes, torn to fragments and flung away, fluttered in the air like snowflakes and settled on the front row chairs.

Choking and shaking his fist, Martov roared:

'Traitors! The reason you've thought this up is to get all the discontented workers out of Moscow and Petrograd! To rid the cities of the finest flower of the proletariat! To stifle the healthy opposition of the working-class!'

There was a moment's silence, then everyone was on his feet shouting: 'Get down!' 'Traitor!' 'Bravo, Martov!' 'How dare he!' 'The truth hurts!'

Sverdlov clanged the bell, calling Martov to order, but Martov shouted more furiously than before. He had lulled his listeners by his assumed indifference-now he was making the most of their surprise.

Sverdlov ordered him to stop, but Martov went on. Sverdlov suspended him for the next three sessions. Martov shrugged his shoulders and continued to pile accusation upon accusation, each more bitter than the last.

Finally, Sverdlov summoned the guard. Only then did Martov leave the platform and, passing through the gale of whistling, stamping, shouting, clapping, slowly and deliberately walked out of the hall.

Some such commotion shook the walls of the Metropole at almost every session. Often it was provoked by Mensheviks and SRs on the flimsiest pretexts, such as a speaker's clumsy word or his manner of speech. Sometimes, instead of shouting indignantly, they burst into sardonic laughter or, at a speaker's first words, stood up in a body and left, talking at the top of their voices among themselves.

They behaved in this way from a mixture of impotence and childish bravado. They turned debates into schoolboy squabbles.

The whole life of the country had been shaken to its thousand-year-old roots. The times were threatening, full of vague forebodings, expectations, ruthless passions and conflicts. It was all the harder to see the point of this fruitless strife.

Their party doctrines seemed to matter more to these men than the fate of the country or the happiness of ordinary people. There was something synthetic and abstract about their theories, devised in smoke-filled board-rooms, far away from Russia and her day-to-day life. Their belief that the future could be tailored to fit their back-room emigre systems was itself a sign of their ignorance of Russia and of life.

There was one meeting of TZIK at which the deepest silence reigned. It was during the week of the murder of Count Mirbach, the German Ambassador.

Ostensibly for the protection of its Embassy, the German government had sent an ultimatum demanding the admission of German military units to Moscow and German control of the whole Denezhny district surrounding the Embassy. It would be hard to imagine a more brazenly cynical demand.

As soon as the ultimatum was received, TZIK was summoned for a special meeting.

How well I remember that sultry summer day declining towards sunset! Moscow was full of the pale gleams of the sun reflected in its windows and of the yellowish shadows of late afternoon.

I came into the hall with the fountain and was struck by how silent it was in spite of being packed. There was not even that faint murmur which comes of many people whispering.

The wall clock ticked away the time. But for me, as I think for everyone else, time had stopped and only this soft, as though dying, sound was left.

Sverdlov came in, rang the bell and in a toneless voice called upon the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, to make an urgent and important communication.

The audience gasped. We knew that Lenin was ill and his doctors had forbidden him to speak in public.

Lenin walked quickly up to the platform. He was pale and thin, a gauze bandage white against his neck. He gripped the sides of the table and slowly swept the room with his eyes. We could hear his fitful breathing.

Slowly, in a low voice, now and then pressing his hand to his throat, he said that the Council of People's Commissars had categorically rejected the ultimatum presented by Germany and decided to mobilise all the armed forces of the Russian Federation.

In utter silence, arms were raised and lowered, voting the assembly's approval.

Still shaken by what we had heard, we came out into Theatre Square. Dusk had fallen over the city. Bristling with bayonets, a Red Army unit came swinging past the Metropole.

5
The Zone of Silence

Occasionally I had a day off. I would go out early in the morning and walk across the town to Noyevsky Park, or wander about the outskirts, usually beyond Presnya and Devichy Field.

Those were hungry times. We were rationed to two ounces of black bread a day. I took my two ounces, a couple of apples supplied by my neighbour Lipochka, and a book, and stayed out until dark.

In those days, the outskirts of Moscow were almost indistinguishable from the so-called 'un-established' Russian towns. The vast, turbulent capital was ringed by these quiet, forgotten suburbs, too remote for its noise to reach them. Only now and then a gust of wind, raising the perennial dust, would bring a distant echo of the 'International' or of equally distant gunfire. There were frequent short gun-battles in the city streets, but hardly anyone took any notice of them. They started for no apparent reason and as unexpectedly broke off.

The outskirts were deserted. This, for me, was perhaps their chief attraction. I must have needed respite from the daily strain, silence to relax, to take a look at things from outside, and to try to sort them out.

Another feeling which came over me, the moment I set foot in those oudying districts was the certainty of a varied, perhaps even too exciting a future in front of me. Why it was here that I felt this so strongly, I still don't know.

I would even think of the day, perhaps some five years hence, when I would surely revisit one of these neglected back-alleys overgrown with anaemic grass, a string of faded washing across it, and seeing it still as neglected, unchanged, realise the extent of the change in myself.

The metal domes of the peeling church would have the same dull sheen, and the washing, bone dry in the wind, would rusde exactly as now, while I, perhaps would have made journeys, written books, and-who knows-loved as no one had ever loved before.

It was as though I were calling upon the alley to bear witness to my life. I wanted this homely corner of Moscow to measure the passage of time in myself.

But I was wrong, of course. When, after five years, I returned to Moscow and to some such corner of it, what I saw was a new white building, young lime trees planted around it and a notice over the door: 'District School of Music'.

The suburbs had their own enchantment. It lay in their timbered houses leaning to one side and propped up by blackened struts; their long-deserted little factories, the boilers, red with rust, lying among the weeds; their woodsheds smelling of birch-bark. There was a charm about the benches, shiny with age, standing at gateways where the ground was trodden hard as asphalt with husks of sunflower seeds, about the pavements soft with silver-weed, and the ever-open barriers of the level-crossings of disused branch lines. Black locomotives with full-throated funnels-surely made in the lifetime of Stephenson-stood on the tracks, their fires forever extinguished. Swallows nested in the drivers' cabs.

There was a charm about the dark elms, so feeble with age that only half their leaves had come out by the end of summer, the slag heaps overgrown with dandelions, the bird cotes, and the fences made of broken iron bedsteads and church railings. Bittersweet convolvulus climbed over them. Geraniums blazed in the windows, growing out of old tins and looking as exotic as hibiscus.

In one yard I came upon a rare sight-a kennel and, in place of the missing dog, a carmine, black-tailed cock, chained by the foot, no doubt to correct its insolent and aggressive character.

Equally pleasing were the light, silver-grey rolls of fluff from the poplars, skimming along the streets; the mangy, mewing kittens playing in the backyards: the old women looking as though carved out of brown, ridged wood; the wildfire of nasturtiums with fat round leaves and red, hooded flowers; even the sparrows drinking from perpetual puddles around the water hydrants, and the fly-specked oleograph, 'The Ritual Kiss', the bored canary in its cage, the potted ficus, the cracked china red-setter and the moth-eaten stuffed thrush, seen through the open window of a darkish room, or the smoking samovar in the middle of a yard, the smoke rising straight towards the white sky, although it was a crooked samovar. As everyone knows, when a samovar behaves in this way, there is going to be a heat wave.

Huge cement pipes lay abandoned on a vacant lot, and a child's hand had scribbled on them in charcoal 'Heaven', 'Hell', 'Treasure Island', 'Winter Palace'. 'Winter Palace' had recently been under fire: it was covered with fresh red scars from flying bricks.

Occasionally the wind filled the street with the smell of stagnant water and tomato plants. The houses backed on to green vegetable plots. Popping up between the beds were bits of shiny, coloured paper fixed on sticks and twirling in the wind. They acted as scarecrows.

In the distance, above the dust and the greyish haze, the onion domes of Moscow shone dark gold, and the Cathedral of St Saviour raised its giant helmet. Above the churches rose the clouds, like lushly whipped-up white of egg faintly touched with pink by the sun.

This, of course, was Asia-this crowd of saints moulded in brown clay or cast in gun-metal, the hundredweight crosses held in place by chains, and the round towers of the Kremlin wreathed in endlessly ascending flights of pigeons.

Particularly pleasing were the silted suburban lakes. Drowned tins gleamed through their olive-green water. The tops of rotting timber piles showed, hung with delicate strands of scum. It smelled like a chemist's shop. Along the shore, willows, burned out by lightning, bowed over the lake. The willows gave shade.

I would sit on the warm ground in their shadow, reading and glancing at the bubbles of marsh gas as they streamed from the bottom without ever overtaking each other. Small beetles scurried on long legs about the surface. The local children called them 'water-coursers'. You had only to throw in a match and the water-coursers raced towards it from all sides, got into a huddle round it, and, having convinced themselves that it was only an inedible match, darted off again in all directions.

Into every such pond, bubbling water gushed from a rusty pipe. At the place where the water poured into the lake, there was always a flock of water birds.

Small boys launched flat wood-chips as steamers. Girls in their early teens, their skirts hitched up, rinsed the family washing, squealing at invisible water-creatures darting around their feet. The girls swore that they were leeches.

At one of the lakes I often met a gloomy man in tattered overalls, who lived off his kitchen garden. He fished, using five or six rods stuck into the bank. Occasionally he caught a halfpenny-sized carp. He sat for hours on the bank, nibbling black bread, just as I did.

I got into conversation with him, and he took me to see his vegetable plot. Its damp green jungle smelled refreshingly of mint and dill, and I thought it more beautiful than the most luxurious rose garden.

'So you see,' he said to me, 'this also is a way of life. You can fight for freedom, you can reshape human beings, as they say, or you can grow tomatoes. Everything has its cost, its merit and its reward.'

'What is that supposed to prove?' I asked him.

'The need for tolerance and understanding. To my way of thinking, that's the key to real freedom. Every man should choose the work he likes and do it. And no one should stop him. Then we'd have nothing to be afraid of and no enemy could do us down.'

Sometimes I used to walk across the back gardens and the vacant lots, where sharp splinters of sun from the broken glass flew into my eyes until I came to the low bank of the Moskva. Across the river, leafy slopes ran down from Noyevsky Park to the edge of the water. The faint film of oil on the water made rainbow patterns weaving in and out as on a gypsy's shawl.

A boy with a boat would row me across to Noyevsky Park. There the tall lime trees with their green shadows gave majesty to the landscape.

The lime trees were in blossom. Their strong scent seemed to me to come from some distant southern country in spring. I pictured it to myself and felt more than ever fascinated by the world. There was nothing to do with such stray thoughts except put them down. Occasionally I made a few notes, nearly always losing them without regret.

I was ashamed of my writing. It was out of keeping with our time.

Noyevsky Park had long been famous for its flowers, but it had gradually declined, growing poorer and poorer, so that by the time of the revolution, only one greenhouse was left. An old gardener still worked there, assisted by a few old women. They soon got used to me and even talked to me about their troubles. The gardener complained that nowadays flowers were wanted only for funerals and state occasions. One of the women-thin and with pale, clear eyes-looked embarrassed by his grumbling and kept assuring me that they would soon be growing flowers for the city squares and for sale to the citizens.

'You can say what you like,' she insisted, although I never argued with her, 'you can't do without flowers. Take lovers, for instance-there always have been, always are and always will be people in love. And how are they to show their love better than with flowers? So, you see, our profession can't die out.'

Occasionally the gardener would cut a few carnations and stocks for me. I was ashamed to carry them through hungry, careworn Moscow, so I always made them up into a parcel, so carefully that no one could guess what was inside.

One day, the parcel came undone in the tram. I never noticed it until an elderly woman with a white headscarf said to me:

'Wherever did you get such beauties at this time?'

'Careful how you hold them,' the conductress warned me. 'Somebody might push against you and crumple the lot-you know what people are!'

'Who's pushing?' a sailor with cartridges in his belt protested, and at once picked on a knife-grinder with a grinding machine who was pushing through the crowd of passengers: 'Where d'you think you're going? Look out for the flowers! Clumsy oaf!'

'There's a sensitive plant for you!' the knife-grinder jeered, but only for the sake of form. 'And he in the navy!'

'Leave the navy out of it or I'll give you something to cry for.'

'Lord! Flowers! Even that they have to quarrel about!' a young woman with a baby sighed. 'My husband-he's ever such a serious type-well, imagine, he brought me almond blossom to the maternity ward when I was having this one, it's my first.'

There was someone behind me breathing very fast, then I heard a whisper so faint that I couldn't at first make out where it came from. I turned round. A small, pale child of about ten, in a faded pink frock, was gazing at me imploringly out of eyes as grey and round as pewter saucers.

'Please, Uncle,' she said in a hoarse, conspiratorial voice. 'Just one little one! Please, Uncle! Give!'

I gave her a carnation. The child pushed her way desperately through the crowd which muttered with envy and indignation, jumped off the rear platform of the moving tram and vanished.

'Crazy fool!' the conductress said. 'Must be out of her mind! As though other people wouldn't ask, if their conscience let them!'

I took a second carnation from the bunch and handed it to her. Blushing painfully, the elderly conductress stood looking down at it with radiant eyes.

Immediately several hands stretched out to me in silence. I gave away the whole bunch and suddenly, sitting in that shabby tram, saw more joy around me, more shining eyes and delighted smiles than I think I have ever seen before or since. It was as if dazzling sunshine had burst into that dirty tram and rejuvenated all these weary, anxious people. They wished me happiness, health, the most beautiful bride in the world, and goodness knows what other blessings.

An old man as bony as a skeleton, with a close-cropped head and a worn black jacket, bent low over his canvas briefcase, opened it carefully, put the flower inside and, I thought, dropped a tear into it as well.

This was more than I could bear to see and I jumped out of the tram before it had stopped. As I walked, I thought about the sad or happy memories the flower must have brought to life for that bony old man, and wondered how long he had kept locked up inside him the pain of his old age and his young heart, which had finally broken him down and made him cry in front of strangers.

Everyone, I supposed, treasured in his heart some memory-as delicate as the scent of the lime trees in Noyevsky Park-of a glimmer of happiness long buried under the squalor of everyday life.

Wandering in the outskirts of Moscow or in Noyevsky Park, I escaped into that zone of silence which ringed the city and lay so improbably close to it. Inside the tumult was deafening. There was no time even for one event to follow another-they piled up, several of them every day.

Yet normal life continued side by side with them, running its course almost within yards of the greatest historical happenings. This also, no doubt, had its own logic.

6
Rebellion

The empty stage of the Bolshoi was set for the Granatnaya Palata scene in Boris Godunov.

Heels clicking, a woman in black, a scarlet carnation pinned to her blouse, ran across the stage towards the footlights.

At a distance she looked young but, in the glare of the footlights, her sallow face was seen to be covered with fine wrinkles and her eyes had an unhealthy, tearful glitter.

The woman held a small steel pistol. She raised her arm, pointed it at the ceiling and, with another clatter of heels, cried piercingly:

'Hurrah for the rebellion!'

The audience responded: 'Hurrah for the rebellion!'

The woman was the well-known SR, Maroussya Spiridonova.

This was how we journalists learned of the outbreak of the SR rebellion in Moscow.

The Congress of Soviets was in session. I doubt if anyone had better seats than the reporters: we sat in the stalls and could see and hear perfectly.

The only speaker I remember clearly is Lenin. What I recall is not so much his words as his gestures and his manner.

He sat close to the table, bending over it and writing quickly, as though paying no attention to the speeches. All you could see of him was his bulging forehead and sometimes the amused flash of his sideways glance at an orator. Occasionally he sat up and made some light or caustic comment on the speech. The audience laughed and clapped. Lenin leant back in his chair and laughed •with an infectious gaiety.

When it came to his turn, he spoke lightly, easily-as though talking to a friend, not to an enormous audience-without the slightest sign of rhetoric or pompousness. Rolling his r's, he spoke in his simple, everyday tone. Only now and then, after a moment's pause, would a sentence ring out, in a voice of cast-iron certainty.

While speaking, he walked up and down in front of the footlights, hands deep in his trouser-pockets or casually thrust into the armholes of his black waistcoat.

There was nothing stiff or monumental about him, no sense of his own majesty, no bombast, no desire to utter sacramental truths.

He was simple and natural in word and gesture. You could tell from his eyes that, besides affairs of state, he would be glad at any spare moment to discuss some interesting everyday problem or hobby-say the mushroom season, or fishing, or the need for scientific weather forecasts.

At the Congress, he spoke about the country's need for peace and for a breathing space, about food supplies and bread. In the mouths of other speakers, the word 'bread' became an abstract, an economic, a statistical concept, but something elusive in Lenin's intonation gave it body-you saw the black rye loaf, you knew it for the daily bread for which the whole country was aching. This did not diminish the statesmanlike, political importance of the speech.

The proceedings of the Congress were followed from a side box by Count Mirbach, the German Ambassador, a tall, balding man with a haughty expression and an eyeglass.

At the time, the Germans were occupying the Ukraine where peasant risings were continually breaking out, flaring up and dying down in region after region.

On the very first day of the session, Kamkov, a Left SR, took the floor and burst into an indignant tirade against the Germans. Rebellion

He demanded a break with Germany, immediate resumption of hostilities and support for the insurgents. The hall bu2zed with excitement.

Striding up to Mirbach's box, Kamkov shouted at him:

'Long live the Ukrainian rebels! Away with the German occupiers! Away with Mirbach!'

All the Left SRs leapt to their feet. They shouted, they shook their fists. So did Kamkov and, as his jacket fell open, he was seen to carry a revolver attached to his belt.

Throughout all this, Mirbach sat unmoved, reading his newspaper. He hadn't even dropped his eyeglass.

The noise of shouting, hooting, stamping rose to an unbelievable din. Any moment, it seemed, the great chandelier would crash down and the plaster moulding come off the walls.

Even Sverdlov, with his mighty voice, was powerless to control the meeting. He kept ringing his bell, but only the reporters could hear it. Beyond the first rows of the stalls, the sound was lost in a wave of shouting.

Finally, Sverdlov closed the session. Mirbach rose and slowly walked out, leaving his newspaper lying on the box rail.

The corridors were jammed, it was impossible to get through. The guards had thrown all the doors wide open, yet the theatre emptied very slowly.

Emotions ran so high that violence could break out at any moment. Yet the rest of the day passed in unexpected calm.

Next day, 6th July, I came to the Bolshoi well in advance of the meeting, but all the other journalists were already in the stalls. Expecting further excitements, they had arrived earlier still. It was thought that the Government would make a brief statement on the demonstration staged by the Left SRs the day before.

The theatre was crowded. The session had been announced for two o'clock. But two o'clock passed and there was still no one at the Presidium table. Half an hour went by. The hall buzzed with puzzled murmurs.

Finally, Smidovich, Secretary of the Council of People's Commissars, appeared on the stage, said the opening of the session was briefly postponed and invited all the Bolsheviks present to follow him to a house next to the Bolshoi, where a party meeting was in progress. The Bolsheviks went away.

The hall emptied. Only the Left SRs remained in their seats. Everyone realised that only the most unusual circumstances could account for the postponement of the session. The reporters dashed off to ring up their papers and try to discover what had happened. But all the telephones were guarded by armed Red soldiers. No one was allowed to make a call. All the exits were closed. They, too, had armed guards posted in front of them. Their orders were to allow no one to leave.

Soon a rumour spread, no one knew from where, that three hours earlier. Count Mirbach had been murdered at his Embassy.

The journalists were frantic. The Left SRs silently moved from their places to seats near the doors.

Strange sounds began to reach the theatre from outside-a muffled crash followed by dull blows, as though pile drivers, somewhere near the building, were driving wooden piles into the ground.

An old usher beckoned with his finger and said:

'If you want to know what's going on, why don't you go up that ladder to the flies? Only make sure nobody sees you. Up there on the left, there's a tiny window. Have a look. I really would if I were you. The things that happen, God help us!'

I climbed the steep iron ladder as far as the dusty little window -it was more like a deep slit in the wall. Looking out, I could see the edge of Theatre Square and the side-wall of the Metropole.

Bent double. Red soldiers were running towards it from the direction of the Town Hall; every few steps, they flung themselves on the ground and a spurt of fire flashed from their rifles. Then, from the left, from the side of Lyubyanka Square, came the stutter of a machine-gun and the crash of a cannon shot.

Evidently, while we were sitting in the theatre, locked in together with the SRs, a rebellion had broken out. Rebellion

I went quietly back to my seat. Just then, Spiridonova ran across the stage towards the footlights and the scene I have described at the beginning of this chapter took place. Everything was now clear-the rising had been organised by the Left SRs.

In response to Spiridonova's cry, all the Left SRs in the hall drew revolvers from their pockets or from under their jackets. But instantly, the calm, hard voice of the Kremlin Commander rang out from the gallery:

'Gentlemen Left SRs, at your first attempt to leave the theatre or to use your weapons, fire will be opened on the hall from the upper tiers. I advise you to sit still and wait for your fate to be settled.'

None of the journalists felt like losing his life through the carelessness of the security guards who had obviously forgotten to let us out in time. We sent a deputation with Oleg Leonidov to the Commander. He replied, politely but firmly, that he was sorry, he had no instructions about journalists. In the end, however, the Commander was moved by our arguments and told us to go quietly, without attracting attention, to the vestibule where the guards quickly flung the doors open and pushed us out into the Square.

After the dimly lit theatre, I was at first dazzled by the sunset. A moment later, a bullet smacked into the pillar next to me, hissed and seemed to turn back. As at a word of command, bullets began to ping systematically all along the wall, fortunately above our heads.

Oleg Leonidov shouted, 'To Kopyevsky Lane!' and, bent double, dashed round the corner of the street, the rest of us followed.

The side street was quiet. Bullets still passed quite close, but to one side of us. We only heard them zip past and saw windows cracking and white jets of plaster spurting from the wall of the house opposite.

Shchelkunov, as he was running for shelter, had dropped a tattered book from his briefcase. He tried several times to go back for it but we held on to him. In the end he broke away, crept up to the book on all fours and returned flushed and covered in dust but rejoicing.

'You and your books! You're a dangerous maniac!' Oleg Leonidov shouted at him. 'You're out of your mind!'

'How can you say that!' Shchelkunov protested indignantly. 'This is a first edition of the Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau. It's you who must be out of your mind, not I!'

The gunfire quickly moved away beyond Lyubyanka Square. The Left SRs were falling back.

At the newspaper office, I learned that Count Mirbach had indeed been murdered that morning by Biyumkin, a Left SR.. This had been the signal for the rising. The rebels had seized the Pokrovsky Barracks and the Telegraph Office in the Myasnitskaya, and had almost got as far as Lyubyanka Square. The Left SRs inside the Bolshoi were arrested soon after our escape.

By nightfall the rebels were driven from the city and, falling back on the Kazan Railway goods station and the Ryazan highway, began to disperse.

The rebellion ended as suddenly as it had begun.

7
Material for a History of Moscow Houses

The history of a house can be even more fascinating than that of a man. Houses last longer and see several generations come and go.

The trouble is that no one, except a handful of regional experts, ever bothers to trace the history of an old house back to its beginnings. And the experts are treated condescendingly as harmless lunatics. Yet it is they who, grain by grain, collect the raw material of our history and teach us to know our traditions and love our country the better.

I am convinced that, if only one could reconstruct the history of some old house in detail-follow the lives of those who lived there, know their characters and all that happened to them-the result would be a roman de maurs perhaps more revealing than the novels of Balzac.

Besides, the life of a house is bound up with that of many things as old as itself, which have come from far away and seen much in their time. Unfortunately, their story will never be told:

they can't speak and people, having short memories and no curiosity, treat their faithful though inanimate assistants with insulting casualness.

Like other objects made by human hands, Pinocchio was carved out of a log by the toy-maker Carlo. Pinocchio came to life and started a train of events such as only magic could sort out.

If things really came to life, how they would tangle up our social relationships, and how much richer history would be!

No one knew exactly how many large private houses there were in Moscow at the time of the October Revolution: people said at least two hundred. The majority had belonged to rich merchants. Few of those belonging to the nobility had survived the fire of Moscow of 1812.

After October, most of these houses were seized by the Anarchists. There they lived their merry, uninhibited lives amid the fine antique furniture, chandeliers and rugs, which they used in their own unorthodox way. Pictures became targets for revolver practice. Instead of tarpaulin, valuable rugs covered the stacked cases of cartridges left in the yard. Windows were boarded up for safety with collectors' items from the library. Ballrooms with patterned parquet floors were used as night shelters by the Anarchists and their indeterminate fringe of friends.

Moscow was full of rumours about the dissolute lives the Anarchists led in the mansions they had seized. Prim old ladies spoke with horror of abominable orgies. In fact, there were no orgies, only drinking bouts of the most pedestrian sort, at which hooch was drunk instead of champagne to wash down salted fish as hard as rock.

The mansions housed a collection of riff-raff and neurotic boys and girls-an early version of a Makhno gang in the heart of Moscow.

The Anarchists even had their own theatre. It was called 'Lzid'. Its posters described it as a theatre of 'mysticism, eroticism and spiritual anarchy' devoted to the cause of an 'idea raised to fanatical pitch.'

What the idea was, the posters failed to say. Every time I passed one, it occurred to me that Rachinsky must somehow be connected with Izid.

I was writing my first novel and often stayed at the office late into the night, sometimes even until morning. I slept on the editorial divan with its troughs and broken springs. Occasionally, in the middle of the night, a spring would hit me in the side with a vengeful ping.

I liked working at the office, rather than in my sleepy, musty lodgings where a tap dripped in the bathroom and the landlady was always shuffling past my door in bedroom slippers. She worried about the light in my room and got up several times at night to check the electric meter.

At the office, I invaded Kuskova's large room, with its fitted carpet and comfortable desk. Sometimes, I would drop off at the desk and wake up in ten or fifteen minutes, rested and refreshed.

The editorial cat slept opposite me on the desk, its front paws tucked in. Once in a while, its eyes would open a slit and give me a friendly look, as though to say: 'Working? That's right, you get on with it. I'll just have another little snooze.'

But one night, the cat twitched its ears this way and that, looked at me, its eyes green as gooseberries, and gave a hoarse miaow.

I listened. Rifle-fire was crackling over the sleeping city and coming closer to the office. Judging from the noise, it was something more than a casual street-fight.

Just then, the telephone-bell blared. The Moscow news editor was on the line.

'They're disarming the Anarchists,' he roared into the receiver. 'They're taking the houses by assault. Good thing you're there. I'm coming. Meanwhile, be a good chap-go to Morozov's house in Vozdvizhenka and see what's going on. But be careful.'

I went out. The streets were dark and deserted. Ragged firing came from the direction of Malaya Dmitrovka where the Anarchists were entrenched in the former Merchants' Club and had even set up two field-guns at the gate.

I made my way through alleys to Morozov's house in Vozdvi-zhenka. Every Moscovite knows this curious building which looks like a casde and has sea-shells encrusted in its grey walls. The old millionairess Morozova had lived there until recently.

Now, without a chink of light in the windows, it looked black and sinister. I climbed the granite steps to the front doors, as massive as the bronze doors of a mediaeval cathedral, and listened. Not a sound came from within. Almost sure that the Anarchists had left, I knocked cautiously all the same.

Lightly, suddenly, the door flew open. Someone seized my arm, pulled me inside and the door slammed. I was in total darkness. My arms were firmly gripped by several people.

'What's the matter?' I asked coolly. The very words sounded idiotic, even to me. Nothing was the matter-only foolish nonsense. But the nonsense, I realised, might cause me a lot of trouble.

'He's obviously an agent,' a young woman's voice said close to my ear. 'We must report to Comrade Fire.'

'Look here,' I said, determined to laugh it off. 'This is not the age of Monte Cristo. Put the light on, I'll explain, and you will kindly let me out.'

The answer-to the effect that I could think again but no one would touch a hair of my head so long as I behaved-came in an astonishing mixture of old-lag and schoolgirl slang.

I lost my temper.

'Queen of Anarchy!' I addressed the invisible girl. 'Stop playing the fool. You've been reading too many cheap novels. It's bad for you at your age.'

'Search him and lock him up in the left corner drawing-room,' the voice said icily. 'I'll report to Comrade Fire.'

'Do what you like,' I snapped. 'Report to Fire or Smoke or Stink, for all I care.'

'Careful, little one! Don't say anything you'll be sorry for!' the voice crooned.

In the darkness, two men bundled me along a corridor. One of them wore a leather jerkin; it was cold to the touch.

They dragged me up and down several nights of steps, pushed me into a room, locked it from outside, took away the key, told me they would shoot through the door if I tried to make a noise, and went off, one of them saying fairly peacefully in conclusion:

'That's no way for a scout to work, you Bolshevik pest. If you'd been with us, I'd have trained you better.'

I had a box of matches on me. But I didn't dare strike even one to have a look round. Those Anarchists might get anything into their heads! If I lit a match, they might think I was trying to signal and, for all I knew, really start shooting through the door!

I touched the door. It was elaborately carved. I felt along the wall, scraped a fingernail on the silk panelling and started back. In the end, I stumbled over a stuffed armchair and sat down to wait.

At first, my adventure amused me. The Anarchists had really taken me for a spy! To me, this seemed completely idiotic, but there was nothing I could do about it. And who was the girl, I wondered. Her voice had something familiar about it. I dug in my memory and recalled a meeting near the Gogol monument, at which a girl had spoken in that same voice. She had a long black fringe, greedy, glittering, drug-addict's eyes, and huge, dangling turquoise ear-rings. Prevented by hecklers from finishing her speech, she took out a cigarette, lit it, and walked away through the crowd, swinging her hips and smiling disdainfully. Yes, of course, it was the same girl!

I enjoyed sitting in the soft, comfortable armchair, waiting for what would happen next. I was sure they would let me go as soon as I showed them my press-card from Government by the People.

Over an hour went by. There was rifle-fire in the distance, and once I heard the muffled rumble of an explosion.

I was dying to smoke. In the end I could bear it no longer - I got out my cigarettes, crouched on the floor behind the armchair, and struck a match. It flared up like magnesium and for an instant illuminated the semi-circular room. The light flashed back from mirrors and cut glass. I hastily lit my cigarette and blew out the match, only then realising why it had burned so brighdy- it was a defective match with a double head.

At this point, I had my second surprise-suddenly rifle-fire burst through the windows. Plaster showered from the ceiling. I remained on the floor.

The firing increased. 1 realised that the flame of my match, seen through the window, had served as a signal to Red Army men who had quietly surrounded the house.

Most of the shots were aimed at the room in which I sat on the floor. Bullets hit the chandelier. Its crystals dropped with a plaintive tinkle.

I had unwittingly played the very role the Anarchists had cast me for. Clearly, my position was not too good. If they had noticed the light, they would burst in and shoot me.

But either they hadn't noticed it or they had other things to think about. They were shooting back. I heard running footsteps and something rumbling along the corridor-presumably a machine-gun. In between volleys of swear words, someone shouted: Tour men to the first floor! Keep them from the windows.'

Something caved in with a crash and a tinkle. People stampeded past my room, a window frame cracked, the girl's voice shouted: 'This way. Comrades! Through the hole in the wall!'- then, after a brief commotion, silence. Nothing but the occasional crackle of a probing bullet against the windows, as though to test whether anyone were ambushed inside.

Now the silence was complete, but not for long. Again there were heavy footsteps, weapons clanking, and voices: 'Search the entire house! Light!' 'Must have had a posh time, the bastards!' 'Watch that corner-they might toss a grenade.'

The footsteps stopped outside my door. Someone gave a wrench at the handle, but the door held.

'Locked themselves in, the skunks,' a becolded voice said thoughtfully.

The door shook. I kept quiet. What could I do? Start a long, confused explanation through the locked door of how I came to be captured and locked up by the Anarchists? Who would believe me?

'Open up, you shaggy devil!' By now several voices were shouting in the passage. Someone fired a shot and the door cracked. It was pounded with rifle-butts. It swayed on its hinges.

'Made to last!' the same hoarse voice said admiringly.

One leaf of the double door burst open and an electric torch flashed in my eyes.

'Just one left!' a young Red Guard cried happily. 'Well, get up. Anarchist! You've had your fun. Off to headquarters!'

I was very ready to be taken to headquarters. They were in a small private house in Povarskaya. There, at a desk in the front hall, sat an extraordinarily thin man in a field jacket, with a pointed little straw-coloured beard and amused eyes.

He quietly looked me over and suddenly smiled. I smiled back.

'Well, what's your story?' he asked, lighting a pipe. 'Only make it snappy. I haven't much time to waste with you.'

I frankly told him everything and showed him my documents. The thin man scarcely glanced at them.

'You ought to be locked up for a week or two for too much curiosity. Unfortunately, I can't think of a decree that covers it. Get going. My advice to you is, tell your paper, your Government by the People, to go to hell. Aren't you satisfied with the Soviet regime?'

I said that, on the contrary, all my hopes of a happy future for the country were bound up with the regime.

'Well, then,' he blinked through a cloud of smoke. 'We will naturally do our best to justify your confidence, young man. I assure you, it's most flattering. Most. Now get out.'

I went out. There was still shooting here and there in the town. I felt myself blushing hotly. The thin man had laughed at me. But at bottom I knew he was right, and that none of the clever, caustic remarks which came to me too late would have proved him wrong.

By midday, all the Anarchists had been thrown out of their mansions. Some fled, others hid in the city and lost their warlike ardour.

The Moscovites who had slept through the events of the night gazed with astonishment at the bullet-riddled houses, the janitors sweeping up the broken glass, and the breach in the wall of the Merchants' Club, made by the only shell fired throughout the engagement.

There were so many sudden events in those days that it was quite possible to sleep through them.

8
A Few Explanations

In the middle of the summer 1918, Government by the People and all the other papers which called themselves 'independent' were closed down.

Soon after, I received a letter from my sister Galya. It was brought to my lodgings, while I was out, by some railway guard from Bryansk who left no trace by which I could find him.

The letter was tattered, creased and stained with engine oil. It had taken a month to reach Moscow from Kopan. Galya wrote:

You promised Mama to come in spring, but there is still no sign of you and we are losing hope. Mama has suddenly aged a lot. You wouldn't recognise her. She keeps silent for days on end and at night, when she thinks I am asleep, she sobs so that even I can hear her-though since last year, Kostik, I have become almost completely deaf.

Is it really impossible for you to give her this last joy? We talk of nothing but you-how your health is and what has become of you. It's terrifying to think that any day something might happen to you. Your life is very full, but Mama has no one but you-try to understand this, Kostik. Yesterday morning. Mama said that if you don't come by the middle of August, we will set out on foot from here to Moscow. She is sure we'll get there somehow. We'll leave everything-what good is it to us anyhow-we'll only take knapsacks. We have hardly any money, but Mama says there are plenty of good people in the world, so there's nothing to be afraid of. We must start while it's still warm, well before the winter. We might even manage to do bits of the journey by train-though they say the trains aren't running.

Kostik, darling, do try to let us know how you are and whether we should wait for you here. We live all alone in these woods as in a lair, and I can't think why we haven't yet been murdered.

This letter was like a razor slash across my heart. I had to go. But how? How to get to the Ukraine?

By then, the Ukraine, the Don basin and the Crimea were under German military occupation. Kiev was held by a puppet 'Hetman'-a sleek, spindly-legged fool of an army officer, Pavlo Skoropadski. Ukrainian papers praised him for condemning low-cut dresses for women, but could find nothing else to say. Even the Germans made rude jokes about their fake Hetman.

To get an exit visa from the Commissariat of Home Affairs would take at least a month. It was the end of July-and I knew Mama: come what may, in mid-August, she and Galya would start on foot for Moscow, risking their lives. I had not a day to lose.

To go to the Ukraine, I found I also needed an entry visa from the Ukrainian Consul.

I went to the Consulate. It looked out onto the yard of a large building in Tverskaya Street. A faded, blue and yellow flag hung limply from a pole tied to the railing of the balcony.

On the balcony, washing was hung out to dry, and the Consul's baby slept in its pram. An old Nanny sat beside it, joggling the pram with her foot and singing drowsily:

The doves have come

They've brought a plum,

For Pefrik,for Petrik,

For our little Petrik.

It was impossible to get anywhere near the Consulate door. Hundreds of people sat in the dust, awaiting their turn. Some had been there for over a month, listening to the little song, making up to the old Nanny and being slowly driven insane by their ignorance of their fate.

I had to do without a visa. I heard that some Petrograd journalists, reporters for cheap gossip rags, were going to the Ukraine. Their documents were in order. A Moscow journalist arranged for me to meet them. Though not exactly delighted, they agreed to take me with them and to help me at the frontier- 'always within the bounds of reason', stipulated the leader of the expedition, an irritable gentleman who wore a gold pince-nez and grey spats. What 'the bounds of reason' were, he didn't say, but I realised that, if I were caught, I would be on my own.

We were leaving in three days. Nothing happened until then, except that I was told my war-time friend, Romanin, was in Moscow. I went at once to his address in Yakimanka. The surly woman who opened the door but wouldn't let me in, said he only stayed there a couple of days a month.

I left him a note-and have never heard of him since. With all the changes in my life, I lost friends almost as soon as I made them. It distressed me as much as ever. Of all the hundreds of people I met, no one stayed. They left and the chances were that I would never see them again. I comforted myself with Ler-montov's 'ardour of the spirit wasted on the desert air'.

Before leaving, I made a round of all my favourite places in Moscow. I looked at the view of the Kremlin from Noyevsky Park. A thunderstorm was gathering over it. The church-domes smouldered with a dark fire, the red flags bellied in the wind, lightning flashed from a yellow bank of clouds.

Suddenly, as though bursting from the crowded city, thunder rolled overhead and the rain poured noisily over the trees.

I took shelter in the empty greenhouse. A single plant of blossoming pelargonium covered with an unhealthy flush, had been left behind on the shelves. With all its leaves and flowers it was stretching out towards the air and the rain.

I took it outside and it seemed to come alive under my eyes.

I remembered it for a long time as one of my last impressions of Moscow. I was going away into the unknown, without any idea that it would be five long years before I came back, or that my life would be so much like fiction that I would find it hard to describe.

In the chapters I have written so far, I have told only what I myself saw and heard. Many important events are left out because of this, but I intend to stick to my own eye-witness account-I am not writing an over-all history of the revolution, and I couldn't even if I wanted to.

I began this book a long time ago. Now I am old, but I am still writing about myself as a very young man. I don't know if I'll have time to finish. If I were ten years younger, I might write another and perhaps more interesting story of my life-not of my life as it was but as it could and should have been, had its circumstances depended upon myself alone and not upon a number of exterior, often hostile causes.

It would be the story of what never came about, but of all that ruled my mind and heart, of a life that gathered all the light, the colour, the excitement of the world into itself.

I can see many chapters of that book as clearly as though I had lived them several times.

9
The Riga-Orel Goods Wagon

Perhaps the fact that my father worked on the railways had something to do with the passion I have had for them ever since my childhood.

Of course, in those days it took a childish form. Whenever we spent the summer holidays anywhere near a railway, I would slink off for days on end to the station where, together with the station guard in his red cap, I met every train and saw it off.

To this day, everything to do with railways is bound up for me with the poetry of travel-even to the smell of coal and smoke from the engine.

Spell-bound, I used to watch the green, oily engine-its shiny steel pistons moving slower and slower-pull in beside the water-tower and spout great hissing jets of steam into the sky, as though panting after its exertion.

I imagined it with its steel breast battling against wind and night and forest as it raced across the flowering wilderness of the earth, its whistle echoing far into the woods, perhaps to some lonely cottage: there, a small boy exactly like myself was imagining the fiery express tearing through the deserts of the night, and a fox, watching it from a distance, one paw in the air, barked with anguish-or perhaps with joy.

When the passenger train had left, the station sank back into torpor.

Drowsiness and station boredom came into their own. Warmish water dripped from the green-painted tub on the platform. Impudent hens pecked between the rails. The tobacco flowers in the bed were closed until evening. The tracks, polished by hundreds of wheels, shone with intolerable brightness. Tethered to the back of a goods wagon which stood on the sidings, a horse hitched to a cart slept, but now and then twitched the skin of its back to get rid of the persistent flies.

Then a trembling, shrieking whistle was heard in the distance. This was the non-stop goods train. Outside the station, the tracks curved in a horseshoe arc and vanished in a pinewood. Always unexpectedly, the train burst out of the woods, snaking and bending outwards round the curve.

I felt I had never seen anything more beautiful in my life. The train dashed, full tilt, into the station and swept dizzily through with a clanking of metal, a thrumming of wheels and a hurricane of dust. It seemed that a little more, and all the people on the platform would rise into the air and be swept away in its wake like so many dry leaves-naturally the first to go would be the station guard in his red cap.

The goods wagons flashed past, dazzling me, but I could sometimes make out the initials of the lines they served, painted in white on their sides: RO (Riga-Orel), MKV (Moscow-Kiev-Voronezh), SPBW (St Petersburg-Warsaw), RU (Ryazan-Urals), MVR (Moscow-Vindava-Rybinsk), SV (Syzran-Vyazma), MKS (Moscow-Kharkov-Sebastopol). Occasionally, I saw some I didn't know-a USS or PRIM which, I discovered later from my father, was the Ussuri Line in the Far East or the short Primorsk branch, running along the Finnish Gulf from St Petersburg to Oranienbaum.

I envied those carriages because they never knew where they would be sent next. It might be to Vladivostok and from there to Vyatka, from Vyatka to Grodno, from Grodno to Feodosia, and from Feodosia to the little station of Navlya, at the very heart of the many-voiced forest of Bryansk.

I wished I could live tucked away in a corner of one of these •wagons. What enchanting days I would spend on the sidings where goods trains were always getting stuck. I would roll in the warm grass at the foot of the embankment, drink tea with the guards at the end of the carriage, buy wild strawberries from the leggy peasant-girls on the platform, and bathe in the little river nearby where the water-lilies were in cool full blossom. I would sit, swinging my legs, in the open door of the wagon, and the wind, warmed by the earth, would blow in my face, while I watched the long, scurrying shadows of the train stretch across the fields, and the sun sink like a golden shield into the hazy distance of the Russian plain, leaving its wine-gold trace on the burnt-out sky.

I thought of my early love of goods wagons as I walked up and down the sidings of Kiev station, looking for the Riga-Orel goods wagon no. 707,802.

I found the Petrograd journalists already inside. They had settled in and, using an upturned crate for a table, were having tea and telling elegantly bawdy jokes.

They took not the slightest notice of me, barely said 'how d'you do', and did their utmost to show that they had no wish to know me. Why, then, had they agreed to take me with them?

I kept trying to think of a reason. Could it possibly be merely so that, in case of trouble with the authorities, they should have a chance of saving their own necks by offering up mine? Their documents were in order, but you never knew-the authorities might pick on something. In such circumstances, a stranger without a travel pass, without an exit visa, could be a godsend to them.

'Why pick on us, who are loyal Soviet citizens, Comrade? What about this shady character without travel documents who has thrust himself into our carriage? It's our duty to report him to you. Why don't you check up?'

I dismissed my suspicions. I was ashamed of them. Five years earlier, such uncharitable thoughts, even about people of whom I knew nothing, would not have entered my mind. But I could not get rid of my uneasy feeling about these journalists with their free and easy ways. The one who disgusted me most was a little man with round, oily eyes. He was known as Andrei Borelli, but this was only the pseudonym he used for his various sensational contributions to the press. Among themselves, the journalists called him Dodya.

Dodya was forever hitching up his short khaki-coloured trousers, bursting into squeaky fits of giggles and spraying spit. He was constantly making silly jokes and puns, and could speak of nothing without a sickly leer. Russia he called 'Sovdepia', Moscow - 'the Red Navel', the Bolsheviks-'Comrade Rebinders'.

Even the leader of the gang - the testy journalist in grey spats -sometimes got fed up and ticked him off.

'You have a genius for verbal fornication, Dodya. Stop clowning. You really are a blight.'

'Whatever's white you call a blight, because it's red you like instead,' Dodya instantly shot back.

Grey-spats would threaten to throw him off the train, and for a few moments Dodya would subside.

The night passed without incident. The train was barely dragging itself along. I had no conversation with my companions and kept trying to think of an excuse to change carriages. But this was impossible. Nearly all the others were full of Red Army men and sailors from the Baltic fleet, and cavalry horses were travelling in some.

Next day, I noticed a very odd thing. Tied to Dodya's suitcase was a blue enamel teapot, chipped and dented all over. What struck me as odd was that when, at the stations, the journalists went off to fetch boiling water for their tea, they took with them a large tin mug but they never took the teapot, even though the mug obviously did not hold enough water to go round.

The business of the teapot had an unexpected sequel a day later. The train-stopping every other minute-was crawling into Bryansk station. A soldier from the wagon next to ours put his head in at the door:

'We're in trouble, mates,' he said. 'Fools that we are, we've lost our teapot somewhere along the way. A government-issue teapot! It's enough to make you cry. You wouldn't have a spare one to lend us?'

'No, we haven't,' snapped Dodya. 'We're having to use a mug as it is.'

'But you've got a teapot there, on your suitcase,' the soldier said innocently. 'Can't we borrow it for a day? We'll bring it back safely.'

'No, you can't have that one,' grey-spats broke in with an angry flash of his pince-nez.

The soldier looked hurt.

'Why ever not? Is it made of gold or something?'

'It leaks, that's why. It leaks-see? It's no use. It's full of holes.'

The soldier grinned.

'Looks crazy to me!' he said with the same innocent air as before. 'Why should you want to lug such trash with you? It's not as if you were poor. Look at you, putting real sugar in your tea, not even saccharine. Oh well, sorry I troubled you.'

The soldier went off. The journalists looked at one another, and one of them hissed at Dodya:

'Cretin! Did you have to leave it sticking out like a sore thumb?'

After some more low-voiced altercation, they piled a bundle on top of the suitcase and an overcoat on top of that.

Suddenly, a discontented voice was heard outside:

'Which wagon? This one, is it?'

'That's right. Comrade Commissar. The Riga-Orel one.'

Dodya dived down for the teapot, pulled it out, put it on his knee, and flushing with the effort so that tears came into bis eyes, wrenched off the tin spout and pushed it in his pocket.

An elderly, disgruntled Commissar climbed in. The soldier we knew followed him.

'What's all this about a teapot?' asked the Commissar. 'Where's the teapot? Show it to me.'

Dodya produced the mutilated teapot from under the bundle.

'Hallo! Spout's gone!' The soldier gave a whistle. 'Here a moment ago and now it's gone! Flown away, just like a dicky-bird!'

The Commissar looked thoughtfully at the teapot, then told the soldier:

'Go and fetch two security guards.'

He turned to the journalists:

'Your documents, please.'

They reached for them eagerly, but their hands were trembling. The Commissar waited patiently. He examined each document, taking his time, and put them away in his pocket.

'Our documents are all in order-why are you keeping them, Comrade Commissar?' asked grey-spats.

'I can see they are.' The Commissar looked at me expectantly.

'There's something you should know. Comrade Commissar,' grey-spats burst into speech. 'This citizen turned up in our coach in Moscow. He insisted on staying in spite of our protests. To the best of our knowledge, he has neither a travel pass nor an exit visa. He's the one you should check up on. We, as loyal Soviet citizens, meant to tell you all along, but we haven't had a chance so far.'

'And what makes you think. Gentlemen Loyal Citizens, that he hasn't got a travel pass or a visa? Do you know him?'

'Certainly not.'

'Always get to know a man before you slander him,' said the Commissar in a classroom voice. 'As for Johnnies with diamonds in their teapot spouts-we've fished five of them out this week. What you need for a job like that is imagination. That's what it needs - imagination.'

He crooked his fingers and knocked on the teapot.

'Well, Citizens, come along. We must have a talk. Leave your things here for the moment.-Sidorov! Yershikov!' he called to the two armed guards who stood outside. 'Take them to my office-all except this one,' he pointed at me. 'I'll see him later. And see that they don't throw anything out of their pockets on the way. Right?'

'Right!' the guards cheerfully replied. 'It won't be the first time, Comrade Commissar!'

The journalists were led away. The Commissar followed them.

I remained alone in the wagon. Soon the guards came back and silently collected the journalists' luggage.

I sat and waited. An hour went by. From a nearby coach which served as a propaganda-office, a sleepy, barefooted man, bare to the waist and with a huge, tousled mane of hair and beard, climbed down. He dragged out after him a sheet of plywood, brushes and tins of paint, propped the plywood against the coach, spat on his hands and, with a single stroke of black, drew a fat man in a top-hat. Money poured from the fat man's belly which was slit open by a bayonet.

The artist paused, scratched his ear, and wrote in red down one side of the poster:

The bourgeois belly, fat with gold, Did not expect a stroke so bold.

The sailors in the next coach guffawed. Taking no notice of them, the hairy man sat down on the steps of the coach and rolled himself a thick cigarette.

At this point, a guard came to take me to the Commissar. This was the end. I picked up my suitcase and went with him.

The Commissar's office was in a coach which stood on a siding overgrown with dandelions. A machine-gun, bright as a new pin, stood in the door.

The Commissar sat at a rough deal table and was smoking. He looked at me long and thoughtfully.

'Unpack the lot,' he said finally. 'Where are you going and why? And incidentally, let's see your papers.'

I realised I had to come clean. I told him about my troubles with the visa.

'As far as documents are concerned, I have one very important one', I said, putting down my sister Galya's letter on the desk in front of him. 'But that's all. I've got no others.'

The Commissar frowned and began slowly to read the letter. While he was reading, he occasionally glanced up at me. Then he folded the letter, put it in its envelope and handed it back to me.

'It's certainly an authentic document,' he said. 'Got anything to identify you?'

I gave him my identity card.

'Sit down,' he said. He got out a blank form with an official stamp and carefully filled it in, looking now and then at my identity card.

'Here you are,' he finally said, holding it out. 'Here's your exit visa.'

'Thanks,' I gulped. The Commissar got up and clapped me on the shoulder.

'There, there,' he said embarrassed. 'It's no good getting upset. Give my compliments to your mother. From Commissar Anokhin, Pavel Zakharovich, tell her. A remarkable old lady, she must be. Fancy planning to walk to Moscow.'

We shook hands. I still couldn't get out a word. He straightened the leather strap of his revolver holster and said:

'That little runt with the diamonds in his teapot-we'll have to liquidate him. We've let the others go. I've given orders to move you to another wagon. You shouldn't be travelling with them. Well, have a good journey. And don't forget to give my greetings to your mother.'

I walked out in a daze. I could only just stop myself from crying with relief. The soldier who was taking me to my wagon must have noticed it.

'For a Commissar like that,' he said, 'anyone would give his life twice over. He's a worker from Obukhov's factory. Comes from Petrograd. Mind you don't forget his name-Anokhin, Pavel Zakharovich. You might run into him again, you never know.'

The only other passengers in the coach were an elderly singer and a skinny chatterbox of a boy, Vadik, clumsy, simple-hearted and responsive. Both were travelling from Petrograd-the singer to stay with his only daughter, a doctor in Vinniza, and Vadik- home to his mother in Odessa. During the winter holidays of 1917, Vadik had gone from Odessa to Petrograd, to stay with his grandfather, and got stuck for a year and a half. He thought of it as an exciting adventure.

We travelled without further incident to Zernovo, then to the frontier post between Russia and the Ukraine. The night before, the train stopped at a halfway halt on the edge of a wood. Stretching northwards from it were the forests of Bryansk and here, nearby, were all the places I had known and loved so well as a child.

I couldn't sleep. The singer and I got out and went for a walk. The dirt track ran along the edge of the wood and lost itself in the night-haze of the fields. Low over the rustling corn, summer lightning flashed, quivered with a pink flame, and went out.

We sat by the roadside, on the trunk of an old elm blown down by some long-past storm. Such wind-felled trees, lying among the fields and meadows, always made me think of tough old men in homespun tunics and with wind-swept beards. The singer said after a silence:

'Everyone believes in Russia in his own way and for his own reasons.'

'What are yours?'

'A singer's, naturally.' He thought for a while, then began to sing sofdy:

I walk alone,The stony highway shining through the mist. The night is still, the wilderness attends on God, The stars converse.

I had long believed that there was nothing greater in Russian than this poem by Lermontov. And how clear it was that, when he said that he had neither hopes of the future nor regret for the past, he said it just because he did regret the past and expected life to grant him poignant, even though illusory, moments of happiness.

The wind stirred the fields. The corn waved with a soft, scattering whisper. Lightning flashed brighter and the thunder gave a half-awake growl.

We walked back to the train. In the darkness, I picked a handful of grass and only in the morning noticed that it was scented clover, my favourite of all Russian flowers.

10
The Neutral Zone

In the morning, we reached Zernovo. The frontier patrol went through the train, inspecting exit permits.

Our coach and several others were uncoupled and hitched to an old shunting engine which took us on towards the 'Neutral Zone.' The doors of the coaches were kept closed and guarded by armed soldiers.

At last the train stopped. We got out. A railway hut stood in the middle of a dry field. Clouds of dust rose in the wind. Several carts were waiting beside the barrier, their drivers flicking their whips and shouting: 'Who's for the other side? Who's for the Ukraine? This way, if you please.'

'Is it far?' I asked an old driver with a straggly beard.

'What d'you mean - far? A couple of miles and you'll see the Germans. Come on.'

We piled our luggage on the cart and walked alongside. The other carts strung out behind us. At the rear, I saw my companions from the Riga-Orel coach. They were walking behind their cart, talking cheerfully and looking excited. Dodya wasn't with them. On the road, among the swirling dust, the fields, the nut-trees rustling in the gulleys, grey-spats was an incongruous sight.

After about half a mile he stopped, turned to face the north and Russia, and swore obscenely. Our driver gave him a look of alarm and shook his head sadly.

I think I mentioned somewhere that my mother had a firm belief in the law of retribution. Any mean, cruel or treacherous action, she used to say, was bound to be avenged-sooner or later retribution would come. I used to laugh at her a little for her superstition, but that day I came very close to sharing it.

The road dipped into a wooded hollow. The driver looked round nervously and hurried his horse on.

We were halfway through and climbing up the other side when a man in a tall military sheepskin hat and purple riding breeches came out of the wood. He held a Mauser in his hand, and two canvas cartridge belts were crossed over his breast.

Several young men in greatcoats, quilted jackets and embroidered Ukrainian shirts followed him out of the scrub. All were armed with sawn-off shotguns and swords, and some had hand-grenades hanging from their belts as well.

The man in the sheepskin hat raised his arm and fired a shot into the air. The carts stopped.

'Who let you through?' shouted the man in a pained voice.

'The frontier patrol,' answered grey-spats, taken aback. The man had stepped onto the road exactly opposite the journalists' cart.

'They let you slip through their pockets!' roared the man. 'Did they inspect your luggage?'

'Yes.'

'Their pockets is what they inspected! Did they look at your documents?'

'Yes.'

'Their pockets is what they looked at! Come on, boys! At it! All together!'

The boys began at once to sling the luggage off the carts. The journalist screamed. The man in the sheepskin hat hit him in the teeth with his revolver butt.

'Want some more? Shut your trap, you bourgeois spawn, or I'll put a bullet through your bowler hat.'

Clutching a blood-stained handkerchief to his mouth, the journalist was grovelling on the dusty road, fumbling for his broken pince-nez.

Meanwhile, the boys were slitting the suitcases open with their swords. They did it very neatly, with two strokes-criss-cross. It was quicker than opening or hacking off the locks, and the boys were noticeably in a hurry. They kept glancing in the direction of the Soviet frontier.

Our driver nudged his horse, moved a few paces on and stopped. The boys were dragging shirts and sheets out of the bags, holding them up against the light and throwing what they didn't want into the dust.

'Frisking,' our driver explained. 'You walk on ahead, only keep quiet. Past that bush there is a turning. You'll be out of sight. I'll try and catch up. With any luck they mightn't notice us.'

We did as we were told. The driver followed, a few paces at a time. Past the bush, he whipped up his horse and when it was over the rise, it set off at a gallop. We ran after the cart for about ten minutes. Finally it pulled up.

We lit cigarettes and the driver told us that a gang of highwaymen, led by 'Ataman' Kozyuba, was known to infest the neutral zone and to rob travellers. They looked for money and jewels and were always in a hurry because, although the Soviet frontier guards were not supposed to cross into the neutral zone, they occasionally made a sortie against the bandits and shot them mercilessly out of hand.

We continued on our way, silent and depressed. Even our own escape gave us little joy. The road wound through a wide cutting dotted with tree-stumps. The setting sun touched the crowns of the remaining pines with red.

I was walking, lost in my thoughts, when a harsh, metallic voice made me start and look up:

'Halt!

Two German soldiers in dark greatcoats and steel helmets stood in the middle of the road, one of them holding our driver's mangy horse by the bridle.

They asked us for our entry permits. The stockier of the two must have guessed by my expression that I didn't have one. He came up to me and, pointing in the direction of Russia, barked out:

'Zuruck!

'Give him five rubles in Tsarist money,' the driver told me. ' 'That'll get rid of the bastard.'

I held out a ten-ruble note. 'No, no!' the soldier shouted, shaking his head and looking annoyed.

'What d'you give him ten for?' the driver said angrily. 'I told you five. That's all they'll take. Because Tsarist five-ruble notes is what they print in Germany.'

I gave the soldier a five-ruble note. He raised a finger to his helmet and waved us on:

'Fahrt!'

We went on. I looked over my shoulder. The two Germans, boots wide apart and firmly planted on the sandy road, were smiling and lighting cigarettes.

I had a lump in my throat-I felt there was no more Russia and never would be again, everything was lost and there was nothing to live for. The singer seemed to guess my thoughts.

'My God! What has Russia come to nowadays! It's like some horrible dream!'

Vadik stopped and also looked back. His mouth drooped, his lips trembled and he burst into loud, childish sobs.

'Never mind, son,' muttered the driver. 'It mayn't be soon, but we'll pay them back. See if we don't.'

He jogged the reins and the cart creaked on over the deep red sand marked by the Germans' steel-shod boots.

In the north, where we had left Russia, pink twilight was gathering in the forest cuttings. Purple clover grew in clumps along the road. For some reason, I began to feel better. We have yet to see who wins, I told myself. We'll see.

11
Our Raggle-Taggle Hetman

I stayed in Kopan until late autumn, then moved to Kiev where I wanted Mama and my sister to join me as soon as I had settled down and found a job.

Finding a job took me some time. In the end, I got one as proof-reader for the only fairly self-respecting paper The Thought of Kiev. The paper had known better days. Korolenko, Lunacharsky and many other progressive people had written for it. Even under the Germans and the Hetman, it still tried-not always successfully-to follow an independent line. It was continually being fined and the authorities had several times threatened to shut it down.

I rented two small rooms from an oversensitive German spinster, Amalia Knoster, in a little house near the Cathedral of St Vladimir. But I did not succeed in bringing Mama and Galya to Kiev, for the city had suddenly been encircled by Petlyura's forces. They had started a regular siege.

My windows looked out onto the Botanical Gardens. Every morning, I was awakened by the artillery fire which ceaselessly swept the perimeter of the city. I got up, lit the stove, looked out at the gardens where the gunfire shook the hoar-frost off the trees, and went back to bed to read and think. The shaggy winter morning, the logs crackling in the stove, the booming of the guns - all this oddly induced in me an unusual and precarious peace of mind.

My head felt clear-I had washed in the icy water from the tap - and the smell of coffee from Fraulein Amalia's room made me think of Christmas Eve.

At that time, I began to write a great deal. Strange as it may seem, the siege helped me. The town was held in a tight ring, and so were my thoughts.

The knowledge that Kiev was cut off from the outside world and that there was no way out, that the siege would evidently last for a long time and that there was nothing I could do about it except wait, made life easy and carefree.

Even Fraulein Knoster became accustomed to the cannonade as part of the established order of the day. When, occasionally, it stopped, she grew fidgety and nervous. The silence boded something unexpected and therefore dangerous.

But soon the low thunder ringed the city again, and everyone relaxed. One could again read, work, think, resume the normal round of waking, working, starving (or, to be more accurate, half starving) and refreshing sleep.

I was Amalia's only lodger. She would let rooms only to bachelors - not that she had any sinister intentions. It was merely that she could not abide women. Quietly she fell in love with each lodger in turn, but expressed her feelings only by minor attentions and by sudden, deep blushes. They flooded her long sallow face at any word which could possibly be interpreted as a reference to the dangerous realm of love or marriage. She spoke of her former lodgers with enthusiasm and was sincerely grieved that they had all, as though by conspiracy, married greedy, bad-tempered women and moved out.

Amalia had worked as governess in rich Kiev families, saved up a little money and rented her present flat. She earned a living by letting rooms and by sewing.

But despite her former profession, there was nothing of the schoolmarm about her. She was merely a kind, dull, lonely woman.

What astonished me about her was that, although herself a German, she was hostile to the Germans who occupied Kiev and considered them boors.

Her attitude to me was one of timid sympathy, apparently aroused by the fact that I read and wrote at night. She regarded me as a writer and now and then diffidently spoke to me of literature in general and of her favourite author, Spielhagen, in particular. She did my room herself, and I would afterwards find a sprig of dried flowers or a picture postcard of a handsome dahlia in full bloom left between the pages of one of my books. But she was never importunate in her attentions and nothing ever interfered with our friendship.

Her friends called on her only on feast days. They were old German or Swiss nursemaids and governesses like herself-old ladies with reticules, gaiters and capes tied with satin ribbons.

Amalia would pick out a pile of napkins embroidered with kittens, puppies, pansies and forget-me-nots, spread these treasures on the dining-room table, and serve her famous Basle coffee (her family came from Basle).

The governesses ate and drank delicately and conducted a conversation made up entirely of exclamations of astonishment or horror.

The only male admitted to this exclusive circle was the house-superintendent who also worked as clerk on the South West Railway and was pompously called Pan Sebastian Kturenda-Tzikavski.

He was a cocky little man with close-cropped hair, a pimp's moustache and bold boot-button eyes. Sewn into the breast pocket of his short navy-blue jacket with its maroon stripes was a piece of purple silk, a symbol of the elegant handkerchief it replaced. He also wore butterfly ties and stiff collars made of pinkish celluloid. Never quite clean, the collars were known as 'bachelor's luck'. It was impossible to wash them-the owner usually cleaned them with a rubber.

Pan Kturenda gave off a mixed smell of hair-dye, burned tobacco shreds and hooch. This cloudy liquid he distilled from millet in his own dark little room.

He was unmarried and lived with his mother, a timid old lady who was afraid of her son and impressed by his learning. He tried to impress the lodgers with it as well, talking of the books he read in florid and strange language:

'I must inform you,' he would say mysteriously, 'that Weininger's book. Sex and Character, is the fixation of the problem of sex in its loftiest aspects.'

He never touched on the problem of sex in his conversations with the governesses, but he set them quivering with accounts of the origin of the 'most noble Pan Hetman Skoropadski'.

I have seen many fools in my life, but never one to touch Kturenda.

Life in Kiev at that time had something of the glitter of a banquet in a plague-stricken city. Many restaurants and coffeehouses had cropped up and, though none had food for more than thirty clients, the general effect was one of spurious wealth. The population had been doubled by the inflow from Moscow and Leningrad. Artsibashev's Jealousy and Viennese musical comedies were put on at the theatres. German Uhlans with lances and red and black pennons rode through the streets.

The papers printed hardly any news of the events in Soviet Russia. A disturbing subject, they were better left alone-let the readers imagine that everything was sunny and serene.

Ox-eyed Kiev beauties rollerskated on the rink, arm in arm with the Hetman's officers. Gambling dens and bawdy houses had sprung up overnight. Cocaine was openly sold in the Bessarabka Market, where ten-year-old prostitutes accosted passers-by.

As to what went on in factories and workers' suburbs-no one knew. The Germans felt insecure, especially since the rnuider of General Eichhorn.

Kiev was determined to enjoy itself throughout the blockade. The rest of the Ukraine might not have existed. It lay outside the ring of Pedyura's troops.

Sometimes I spent the evening at a Writers' and Artists' Club in Nikolaevsky Street. Poets, singers and dancers who had fled from the north performed in the restaurant. Drunken howls interrupted the sing-song recitation of poetry. The room was always stiflingly hot, so, although it was winter, the windows were sometimes opened a crack. Together with the frosty air, snow would blow into the brightly lit room, at once melting on the floor, and the gunfire could be heard more clearly.

One evening, Vertinsky gave a recital. I had never before seen him on the stage. I remembered him only as a schoolboy who wrote precious verse.

That evening, the snow was particularly heavy. It floated round and round, drifting across the room and settling on the polished piano lid, over the rainbow lights reflected from the chandelier. The gunfire was noticeably nearer. It made the glasses ring on the tables. Their plaintive tinkle seemed to carry a warning of danger. But the clients took no notice and sat on, smoking, drinking, clinking glasses, arguing and laughing. A young woman in evening dress, with narrow, gypsy eyes, laughed loudest of all. The snow melted on her bare back and she kept shivering and looking over her shoulder as though trying to watch it melt.

Vertinsky wrung his slender hands and began to sing. He sang of the Cadets recently killed in the village of Borshchagova near Kiev-boys who had been sent to certain death against a dangerous gang;

I do not know who wanted this, or why. Who sent them to their death so ruthlessly? He sang about their funeral, concluding with the words:

Weary, silent, shivering, the crowd looked on. A woman kissed a dead man's lips and flung her wedding ring at the priest. This had in fact happened at the funeral.

The audience clapped. Vertinsky bowed. A drunken officer, sitting at a table across the room, bawled:

'Sing 'God save the Tsar'.'

There was an uproar. A thin old gentleman in pince-nez, who looked like a schoolmaster, his coat shiny with age, his pointed little beard shaking with fury, rushed at the officer and, pounding the marble-topped table with his fists and spraying spit, screamed:

*You drunken army riff-raff, don't you dare insult the people of Free Russia! Why aren't you at the front, fighting the Bolsheviks, you lounge lizard?'

Everyone jumped up. The old man was raring for a fight, but they pulled him back. Purple in the face, the officer slowly rose, kicked away his chair and grabbed a bottle by the neck.

The waiters rushed up to him. The girl in evening dress shrieked and covered her face with her hands.

Striking a loud chord on the piano, Vertinsky held up his hand. Silence fell.

'Gentlemen, this is a great bore!' he said in a clipped, contemptuous voice and, turning, slowly left the stage.

The man in pince-nez had been brought a glass of water. The officer sat down calmly and announced to no one in particular:

'All my life I've beaten up the Jews, and I'll go on beating them up to my dying day. I'll show you what army riff-raff is. Master Moisheson from Gomel-Gomel.'

The row started all over again. A patrol of the Hetman's Cossack Guards with blue and yellow arm-bands appeared in the hall.

I left. All the way home I cursed myself. How much riff-raff- in epaulettes, in jackboots or in celluloid collars-were we going to put up with? My own excuse for doing nothing seemed weak. I spent my time writing and was obsessed by my imaginary world.

What I wrote were exercises in the art of the picturesque- light sketches in which imagination ran riot.

I could spend hours describing sunshine flashing from a variety of objects-a broken bottle, the brass rail of a ship's ladder, a window, a glass, the mother-of-pearl lining of a shell, a human eye. Put together, they formed an unexpected pattern.

The proper use of imagination requires boldness, definiteness, but this I rarely achieved. My sketches were blurred. I didn't trouble to give them the sharpness, the harshness of reality.

In the end, I was writing them to a canon I had worked out. But I soon discovered, as I re-read them, that they cloyed and bored me. This was a great shock to me. Instead of the austere and powerful prose I had in mind, I was churning out toffee, Turkish delight, lollipops! Their stickiness was incredibly hard to wash off.

I scrubbed desperately, but not always with success. Luckily, I was soon out of this cloudy, flowery phase, and I tore up nearly everything I had written. Yet even now, I sometimes catch myself out in a liking for choice words.

My writing and my doubts about it were soon unexpectedly interrupted.

Petlyura was drawing the net tighter and tighter round the city. Hetman Skoropadski issued a decree calling up all men between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five. The responsibility for their turning up was placed on the house superintendents. The decree said in so many words that any superintendent found 'hiding' a man liable to call-up would be shot without mercy.

The decree was posted up in the streets. I read it unmoved. I regarded myself as a citizen of the Russian Federal Republic, with no obligation-and certainly no wish-to take orders from the Hetman.

Late one winter evening, I was on my way home from the printers. A cold wind was blowing. The poplars in Bibikov Boulevard hummed plaintively.

Standing inside the gate was a woman muffled up in a thick shawl. She hurried out to me and seized my hand. I drew back.

'Quiet!' I recognised Amalia's voice, breathless with emotion. 'Come away.'

We walked to the Cathedral of St Vladimir. Clumsy buttresses shored up its massive walls. We stopped behind one, sheltered from the wind, and Amalia whispered, though there was not a soul around:

'Thank God you were out all day. He's been sitting in the hall since ten this morning. He hasn't moved. It's awful!'

'Who?'

'Pan Kturenda. He's lying in wait for you.'

'Why?'

'Oh God!' She raised her hands, hidden in a dainty muff, and pressed them to her breast. 'Fly! I beg you! Don't go in! I'll give you the address of a friend of mine-she's a dear old soul, soon there won't be any like her. I've written her a letter. Go to her. It's far away, in Glubochitsa, but you'll be all right there. She lives alone in her own little house. She'll hide you. And I'll come and see you every day and bring you food until the danger is over.'

'But what's happened?' I asked. 'I don't understand.'

'Haven't you read the Hetman's decree?'

'Yes, I have.'

'Kturenda has come for you-to hand you over to the army. He's crying,' Amalia said coldly. 'He sits dripping tears and saying, if you run away, they'll shoot him like a common bandit at ten tomorrow morning.'

Taking a letter from her muff, she slipped it into the pocket of my overcoat.

'Now go.'

'Thank you very much indeed, Amalia Karlovna! But I'm in no danger. I am a citizen of the Russian Federation. I don't give a damn for the Hetman's orders.'

'Oh God, how wonderful!' Amalia exclaimed-either without noticing, or else forgiving me my 'damn'. She pressed the muff to her heart and laughed. 'I had no idea. That means they won't touch him either.'

'Everything will be all right, you'll see. Tomorrow, I'll go with him to the recruiting office and they'll release me at once.'

'That's all right then,' she said, completely reassured. 'Let's go in. I'll go first-you stay behind for a minute or two, so that he shouldn't guess I saw you. Oh, I'm tired!'

For the first time in our acquaintance, I took her arm. I could still feel her trembling.

I waited a couple of minutes on the stairs, then went in. Pan Kturenda was sitting in the hall. He hurled himself off his chair, fastened his thin claws into my arm, and muttered breathlessly:

Tor Christ's sake! They'll kill me! I've been waiting for you all day. Have pity-if not on me, at least on my poor Mama!'

I told him I would go with him to the recruiting point next day, but that of course, as I was a Russian citizen, I would be released at once.

Pan Kturenda gave a sob, dived down and tried to kiss my hand. I snatched it away. Amalia stood in the doorway, watching him through narrowed eyes. Never before had I seen such a mean expression on her face. It struck me that, if I had followed her advice and run away, this wretched little man might indeed have been shot. I marvelled at the ruthlessness of this oversensitive woman.

Pan Kturenda went off, calling down blessings on my head, and expressing the liveliest conviction that I would indeed be released since it could not be in the Pan Hetman's interest to recruit Reds from Moscow for his army.

I had a wash under the kitchen tap and was going back to my room when Amalia stopped me in the passage.

'Not a word,' she said mysteriously. Leading me by the hand, she tiptoed through the small sitting-room into the dark hall, and, pointing at the door, made me bend down and peep through the keyhole.

On an empty egg-crate on the landing. Pan Kturenda sat silently yawning, his hand over his mouth. He had, of course, disbelieved me, and decided to keep watch all night.

'Beast!' Amalia said softly when we were back in the sitting-room. 'And to think I used to have him to my house! I've taken such a hate to him, it's given me a headache. I'll go to bed. I've left your breakfast in the kitchen cupboard.'

Next morning. Pan Kturenda rang the bell at eight o'clock sharp. His eyes were red and watering. His bow-tie drooped and looked woe-begone.

We went to the recruiting office in Galitsky Bazaar. Pan Kturenda said he was feeling giddy and hung on to my arm, clearly afraid that I would vanish down the nearest alley-way.

At the recruiting office, we had to stand in a queue. House superintendents, fat ledgers under their arms, were fussing round the recruits. They looked guilty and ingratiating, plied their charges with cigarettes, positively forcing them to accept, smiling and nodding at everything they said, but never leaving their side for a moment.

The office stank of cooking. Sitting at the desk at the far end was an officer in blue and yellow epaulettes, his foot under the desk tapping impatiently on the floor.

Ahead of me was an unshaven, sickly looking young man in spectacles. He waited silently, with down-cast eyes. When his turn came and the officer asked him his profession, he replied:

'I am an accountant.'

'A count?'- the officer had misheard. He leaned back in his chair and beamed. 'That's a rare bird! We've had plenty of gentlemen, even a baron or two, but you're the first count!' 'Not count-accountant.'

'Shut up!' The officer said coldly. 'We're all counts. Any more nonsense from you and you'll sweat it out in the pioneer corps.'

The young man shrugged his shoulders. 'Next!'

It was my turn. I showed the officer my documents and said firmly that, as a citizen of the Russian Soviet Federation, I was not affected by the Hetman's decree.

'Well, well, that's a surprise!' The officer raised his eyebrows. 'And you actually bothered to turn up! If I'd known, I'd have laid on the regimental band.'

'Your jokes have nothing to do with it.' 'And what has?' He rose ominously to his feet. 'This?' He made an obscene gesture and shook his fist. 'Think I care a fig for your Soviet-Jewish citizenship? I spit on it. I don't give a damn.'

'Don't you dare talk to me like that,' I said, trying to keep my temper.

'Everybody's always telling me what I dare not do.' The officer sighed sadly and sat down. 'That's enough. Out of consideration for your so-called citizenship, I'm putting you down for the Cossack Infantry-the Pan Herman's own lifeguards. You should be grateful to me. Your documents I'll keep. Next!'

During this conversation. Pan Kturenda had slipped away. We, recruits, were now marched off under guard to the barracks in Demyevka.

The whole farce was so ludicrous and incredible that I felt the shock only when I found myself inside the cold barrack room. Sitting down on the dusty window-sill, I lit a cigarette and thought things over. I was ready to face any hardship or danger, but not as a member of the Hetman's circus. I decided to look round for an opportunity to escape.

But the farce turned out to be not in the least funny. That same evening, two recruits-boys from the workers' suburb nearby- were shot dead by the sentry for walking out of the gate and not stopping when challenged.

The artillery fire was growing louder. This cheered those of us who were still capable of feeling anything. It boded change- for better or worse, but in any case soon. The Ukrainian proverb 'It may be worse, but at least it's different' must have been the most popular saying in Kiev at that time.

Most of the recruits were so-called 'motor-boys'-thieves and hooligans from Solomenka and Shulyavka, the worst slums on the outskirts of Kiev.

They were desperate characters who had nothing to lose.

They joined the Hetman's army willingly. It was clearly living out its last few days, and the 'motor-boys' knew better than anyone else that, in the confusion of its break-up, they would have a chance to keep their weapons, loot right and left and generally raise hell. Meanwhile, they tried not to arouse the suspicions of the authorities and behaved as model soldiers of the Hetman's force.

The full name of the regiment was: 'Cossack Infantry Regiment of His Most Noble and Radiant Highness Pan Hetman Pavlo Skoropadski.'

My Company Commander was a former Russian airman. The only Ukrainian he knew were a few words of command, and even of these he was not too sure. He always had to think hard before saying 'right' or 'left', trying to remember which was which. He was openly contemptuous of the Hetman's army. Sometimes, looking at us, he would shake his head sadly:

'Call yourselves an army! With that Lilliput Shah at your head. A rabble of runts and guttersnipes.'

We spent a few days being casually taught to march and to use rifles and hand-grenades. Then, dressed in tobacco-coloured greatcoats, caps with the Ukrainian emblem and ancient boots and puttees, we were paraded along the Kreshchatik and told we were going to the front next day.

Together with a few other regiments, we marched down the Kreshchatik, past the town hall where I had once come under fire as a child. As then, the gilded figure of Saint Michael, the arch-strategist, balanced on one foot at the top of the spire.

In front of the town hall, the Hetman in a short, white Cossack coat and crumpled little Cossack hat, sat astride an English bay, a riding-crop in his hand.

Grouped behind the Hetman, as still as statues on their dark-bronze chargers, were several German generals wearing helmets with gilded spikes. Nearly every one wore a glinting monocle. Thin crowds of curious bystanders had gathered on the pavement.

The regiments marched past, saluting the Hetman with ragged hurrahs. He merely raised his crop to his hat and made his horse fidget.

We had decided to give the Hetman a surprise. As we drew level, the whole regiment broke into a rousing song:

Our pride, our joy! Our raggle-taggle Hetman Waggle-toggle Hetman Pavlo Skoropadski!

The 'motor-boys' sang with particular dash, adding whistles and a rollicking 'Ekh!' at the beginning of each stanza:

Ekh! Our joy and pride,

Our ragged Skoropadski!

We are the rabble of Hetman Skoropadski.

The boys were angry at being sent to the front so soon, and had got out of hand.

Skoropadski didn't bat an eyelid. As calm as ever, he raised his crop to his sheepskin hat, grinned as though he had heard a charming joke, and glanced back at the German generals. Only an ironic flash of monocles suggested that they had understood the words. The crowd on the pavement cackled with delight.

The reveille was sounded in the dark. The unwished-for dawn was only a pale streak in the east. The sullen morning, the stink of paraffin in the barrack room, the weak tea smelling of salted herring, the Company Commander's eyes hollow with despair, the cold, wet boots we could scarcely pull on-everything filled us with such hopeless and futile misery, such enormous, devastating unease that I made up my mind to desert from the Most Noble Highness's Regiment that very day.

At the roll-call, it turned out that we were already twelve men short.

The airman shrugged his shoulders and said:

'To hell with you all! Fall in!'

We more or less managed to form a line.

'Forward march!' ordered the airman. Shivering, we came out of the damp and dubious warmth of the barracks into the sharp air of the early winter morning.

'Where's the front?' a sleepy voice asked from the rear. 'Are we going to foot-slog all the way?'

'Ever heard of Madam Tzinkovich's brothel, in Priorka? That's where the front is. It's the Supreme Commander's H.Q.'

'Can't you shut up?' the Company Commander pleaded. 'Honest to God, it's disgusting to listen to you. Anyway, you're not supposed to talk on the march.' 'We know what we are supposed to do and what we aren't.'

The Commander only sighed and moved a few paces away from the column. The 'motor-boys' made him nervous.

'They've sold the Ukraine for a bottle of Schnapps,' said a deep, angry voice. 'Now we've got to churn up this snow and horse-shit. It's a bloody shame.'

'To hell with the lot of them, I'd say.'

'Who's 'them'?'

'The whole pack. Petlyura, and your bastard ofaHetman, and all the rest. Why can't they leave people alone?'

'Come on. Pan Commander, say something? Don't be shy. Where's the front?'

'Beyond Priorka,' the airman said unwillingly. 'Near the Voditza Wood.'

'Hell! That's a ten-mile tramp.'

'Don't worry,' said the airman. 'They're providing us with transport.'

The soldiers tittered.

'What kind of transport?'

'You'll see.'

'Sending the Tsar's coach for us, are they? We're such bloody heroes, it's the least they can do!'

I still can't account for the dull apathy that kept us walking on and on, although we all-including the Commander-knew that there was not the slightest point in our getting to the front, and that we could, at any moment, quietly and safely disperse and go home.

On we walked nevertheless, down to Padol into Kontraktov Square. There, people were beginning to stir as on any peaceful morning-schoolboys in grey overcoats going to school, bells pealing for the early service at the Bratsky Monastery, women in boots driving mangy cows to market, barbers opening their flyblown shops and janitors sweeping the grey snow and slush off the pavements.

Two muddy, open-decked trams were waiting in the square.

'All aboard!' The airman suddenly came to life.

The Company stopped dead in surprise.

'You've heard me-get into the trams!' the airman said crossly. 'Didn't I tell you we'd get transport? These are military trams.'

The Cossacks gabbled cheerfully.

'There's a civilised war for you!'

'Father Gervaise must have worked a miracle! Going to the front by tram!'

'Get in! Don't hold everybody up!'

We hurried in, and the rattling, jingling trams trundled off along the cobbled streets of Podol and through dreary Priorka toward Voditza Wood.

Just beyond Priorka we stopped. We got out and followed the airman, straggling through alleys lined with crooked hovels and over snow-bound fields dotted with steaming heaps of manure. Ahead of us, a vast and ancient park loomed black against the sky. It was the famous 'Throw Away Sorrow' which I had known so well in my childhood.

Trenches had been dug on a snow-covered slope at the edge of the park, complete with communication trenches, dugouts and foxholes. The Cossacks were unexpectedly pleased with them- they gave excellent cover.

The airman took a dugout for himself, while two of the fox-holes were at once grabbed by the 'motor-boys' who, within minutes, had set up trestle-boards and were playing cards.

I stood at the observation post. Before me lay a wide field and, beyond it, the pinewood of Voditza, green and thawing out in the warm wind. From there, Petlyura's men idly took pot-shots at us. The bullets whistled softly and harmlessly over our heads and only now and then smacked into the parapets.

The airman had forbidden us to show ourselves above the parapet or to return the fire.

A leaden sky hung over the Dnieper on our right, and a dirt track brown with manure, led into a wood.

The sound of an artillery barrage came from the direction of Svyatoshina on our left. I stared hard into the pinewood, hoping to catch sight of Petlyura's men but couldn't see a single one. If at least something had stirred in the bushes! But there was not even that.

It was a boring job. I lit a cigarette. I had managed recently to get hold of three packets of Odessa 'Salves' and was very proud of them. They were strong, fat and rank. I stood smoking and, for want of anything better to do, thought desultorily about the past few years of my life.

It was time, I thought, to pull myself together and become a writer. I was twenty-six, yet all I had written so far were bits and pieces, sketches, exercises. I must become more purposeful, stop drifting.

There was a flicker of movement on my right. Beyond the dirt track lay an old graveyard. A cross stood leaning sideways on a tall mound. Suddenly the landscape, the sullen day and the cross, the jackdaws screeching in the leafless park behind me, and the track covered with manure and rotting straw-everything seemed familiar. It was on such a day three years ago, that we had buried Lyolya on a mound outside a village. The three years seemed three decades. There, as here, the enemy held the village, the slush covered the fields, and perhaps no trace was left of the grave. Not for a moment could I think of Lyolya as a handful of bones buried in the earth. I did not believe it. It seemed to me that she would lie for ever unchanged, as I had seen her last, pale and incredibly beautiful, young and at peace, her eyes closed and the sad shadow of her eyelashes on her cheeks.

Not a day passed without my feeling the pain of her death, though I could speak of this to no one.

My nerves on edge, I lit another cigarette. Then, as though to discharge my sudden anxiety, I pressed the trigger of my rifle. The barrel rested on the parapet. The shot rang out and was immediately answered by a ragged volley from the graveyard where Petlyura's men had evidently gathered; my shot had startled them.

The airman leapt out of his dugout. We opened fire on the ' cemetery. We could see splinters flying off the crosses, then soldiers breaking cover and running for the woods. The 'motor-boys' sped them on with shots, whistles and curses. Petlyura's men had evidently gathered in the graveyard, planning an attack. My shot had frightened them off.

I was relieved from my post by a shaggy-haired student in thick spectacles, probably the son of a priest.

I went down into a foxhole. A small smoking oil-lamp gave a little light. I took a piece of bread and a chunk of stale salami out of my knapsack, and started to eat. The orderly on duty came up to me-a little man with sharp eyes, a face criss-crossed with white scars, and a woman's lips, pursed in a cupid's bow tattooed on the palm of his hand. When the hand lay flat, the lips were open as though for a kiss, when he cupped it, they closed. This gave him enormous prestige among the 'motor-boys'.

He poured a mug of tea for me, added three lumps of sugar and said:

'Tea by Vysotsky, sugar by Brodsky, Russia by Trotsky. Am I right?'

Without waiting for an answer, he left me, joined the gamblers at the trestle-board and immediately, clowning and cursing, cut into the game. The guns boomed louder and louder from the direction of Svyatoshino. The lamp smoked more after every shot.

Warm and tired, I leaned back against the wall and fell asleep.

The sound of muffled swearing and a confused tussle woke me up in the middle of the night. The gamblers were fighting. They had pinned the orderly face down over the table and with quiet concentration were beating him on the neck.

The orderly said nothing and made no attempt to resist- evidently he had asked for it.

Three men were summoned to relieve those on duty. The 'boys' let the orderly go, and he and I and a tall man in a cavalry greatcoat, went up.

In the dugout, I was placed next to the orderly.

A thaw had set in. The snow rusded, as though mice were scurrying round us.

The orderly kept up a stream of curses until the tall man hissed at him:

'Shut your trap, or I'll carve you up.' The orderly spat, squatted on his heels beside me and said after a silence:

'Nobody's going to carve me up, chum. I did it for myself. Made a proper picture of my mug. Did you notice the scars on my face?'

'Yes,' I said curdy. I didn't feel like talking to the silly man.

'They aren't, properly speaking, scars at all,' he said with sudden gravity. 'They're the tale of a great love written on my bloody hide. That's hov/ you have to read them.'

He gave a forced laugh, as though he had choked on something.

'I worked on a Volga steamer at one time-it belonged to the Caucasus Mercury Line. I was a waiter in the restaurant. Well, one day, a girl in her last year at highschool came on board at Kostroma. She was travelling to Simbirsk. I'd had plenty of women by then-shipboard girlfriends. I wasn't one to make heavy weather about it. There are men who weep, who beat their heads against the wall if a woman falls out of love with them. But I never went in for suffering. If a woman had had enough of me -well, I'd had my fun and that was that. Out of the way and make room for the next! It was always the greedy ones who seemed to come my way. Every woman I knew-greedy for love or greedy for money. Mostly waitresses or kitchen-maids, young ones ... Well.... This schoolgirl took the boat and came to supper in the restaurant. All by herself. Pale, beautiful, and you could see it was all new to her and she was feeling a bit shy. Her hair was pure gold, heavy, coiled in a knot in the nape of her neck. I brushed it with my hand as I was waiting on her, and I shivered all over-it seemed somehow so cold and springy. I begged her pardon ofcourse.but she just frowned, glanced at me, said: 'All right', and straightened her hair. She was a proud girl, you could see that.

'Well, I thought, I've had it this time! What really got me was that look of innocence she had. Like an apple tree in blossom, sweet-smelling all over. And at once a terrible sadness came over me. I could have beaten my head against the wall and howled, to think she'd get off at Simbirsk and I'd be stuck on board with my bloody broken heart. But there were still two days before Simbirsk, so I counted the hours and hung on. I gave her the very best of everything. I even promised to tip the cook if he'd pretty-up the dishes for her. But she, of course, being so young and inexperienced, never even noticed. She was just a child. I tried to get into conversation with her, though that was strictly forbidden. Quick, silent service, and no talking to the gentry, those were the orders. Keep your dirty mug to yourself and don't dare even think of such a thing! You're a servant, so behave. 'Yes, Sir,' 'Right away, Sir,' 'Can I take your order. Sir?' 'Thank you very much. Sir,' (that's if they tipped you).

'It didn't look as if I'd get a chance to talk to her again-the head-waiter, Nikodim, was always hanging round. Then I had a bit of luck-Nikodim was called to the kitchen-so I nipped in. 'Where might you be going. Miss?' She looked up-her eyes were grey and dark, and the lashes as velvety as night. 'To Simbirsk. Why?' That 'why' confused me altogether. 'Nothing special,' I said. 'Just that you seem to be travelling alone, so I wanted to warn you. There are all sorts of people on a ship-shameless people, you might say, up to no good-especially where a defenceless young woman is concerned.' She looked at me and said, 'I know', and smiled. And there and then I knew that for every one of her smiles I'd be ready to give all my blood, drop by drop, without even a groan.

'I never got a chance to talk to her again. Of course, I'd collect the flowers from a couple of other tables and put them on hers- at least by this token, I thought, I'd let her know she was dearer to me than all the world. But she didn't seem to notice that either.

'Just before Simbirsk, Nikodim kicked up a row. In front of her, too. 'Don't grab my flowers,' he said. 'Look at this Don Juan!' She guessed, of course, but she only blushed and kept her eyes down.

'You've got to believe me. It's the first time I've told anyone. It's not a thing you can tell the gang. They'd make it dirty as soon as look at it and I swear to you on my old mother's head, I've never had anything better than this in my life. I may be as crooked as you like, an honest-to-God thief, you might say, but I'd never sink so low as to tell the gang. Can you believe me?'

'I believe you,' I said. 'What happened in the end?'

'Nothing.' He repeated in an oddly threatening voice: 'Nothing. It isn't finished yet, that's what I believe. And you've got no right to put doubts into my head. Don't you muddle me. Well . . . Next morning, we stopped in Simbirsk, and I was all in a daze. Only one thing I knew-I couldn't be parted from her. If only from afar, if only on the sly, I had to follow her all my life, to the very day of my lousy death. I didn't ask for much-only to breathe the same air-because any other air would choke me. Can you understand that? You've read books about love-it must tell you there. Well, by morning I had a plan, I'd worked out what to do. While it was still dark, I stole the takings from the cash-box in the restaurant and, as soon as we tied up at Simbirsk, I nipped ashore-just as I was, in my old tails, as if I was only going to market for radishes. And I didn't go back.

'I had money to get on with, but my clothes looked suspicious, of course. So I bought a jacket. I managed to trace her, naturally. And by a stroke of luck, just across the road from where she lived at her grandmother's-in an old house with a garden and raspberry bushes-there was a pub. A wretched sort of little pub, without even a canary singing in a cage. There I settled in and sat tight. I made up a story about a friend I'd arranged to meet in Simbirsk, to buy geese. He was late, he hadn't turned up. I was getting bored waiting for him. What I hadn't figured out was that you don't buy geese in summer, only in autumn.'

'And did you see her?' I asked.

I did. Twice. She walked through my soul and took everything away with her. I couldn't think straight. All I knew-I was happy. She didn't suspect anything, of course-most likely, she'd even forgotten me.

'I'm an unattractive-looking man, I know that-weasel teeth and beady eyes. And they will swivel round and round. I could tear them out to hell, sometimes. There it is-you can't buy or borrow beauty, however much you try.'

A Petlyura machine-gun fired its drearily monotonous, short blast from the edge of the woods.

'This is all nonsense,' said the orderly. Tedyura and the Hetman and all the fuss. What the hell they do it for, I don't know. Not that I care a damn.'

'Well, go on,' I said after a while. 'Now you've started telling me, don't stop.'

'I'm not going to. I'd been ten days in Simbirsk when the innkeeper-a sickly sort of chap but a decent bloke-took me aside:

'The police have been nosing around, asking about you. Mind you don't get caught. Are you a thief?' 'No,' I said, 'I'm not, and I'd never have been if it hadn't been for the love of a woman.' -'Well, the judge won't take love into account. It's not in the book. You'd better clear out. Look out for yourself.' I thought it over and I made up my mind-I wasn't going to sit in prison. I had to be free, or I'd lose her. I had to mislead them, cover up my tracks.

'That same day I went to Sizran-to sit it out there-but within three days they picked me up, as easy as a snotty brat running from the police. They took me by boat to Samara. Two guards went with me. We were passing Simbirsk. I looked out of the porthole-you could see the house and the garden from the river. I said to the guard: 'I haven't eaten for two days, take me to the third-class canteen.' Well, naturally, they were sorry for me, they took me down. I asked the barmaid quietly for a vodka. She poured me one. I swallowed it down and crushed the glass in my hand-this one here-and started rubbing my face with the splinters, cutting it up. As if I was washing myself with those bloody bits of glass. Because of my unbearable anguish. The whole counter was streaming with blood. I've had those scars ever since, to add to my beauty.'

'And what then?' I asked.

He looked at me and spat. 'As if you didn't know. Shit for supper, that's what. Hand over a packet of those 'Salves' or I'll have you by the throat-I've got a good grip-you won't even have time to twitch. I've told you a lot of lies, you mug. Don't you start snivelling.'

I gave him a packet of 'Salves'.

'That's all,' he said, moving slowly away along the trench. 'But if you ever drop a single word to the gang-now or in thirty years-I'll do you in. I bet you're making up a poem- 'Oh, love! What an intoxicating dream!' '

I watched his back, wondering what had suddenly made him so spiteful.

Out of the early morning mist, a shell came howling from the direction of Kiev. It seemed to me that it was making straight for us, and I was right.

The shell hit the parapet-the explosion sounded as though the air around us had blown up like a steel balloon. Shrapnel whistled like a flight of swifts. The orderly turned with a look of surprise, fell slap against the wall of the dugout, spat a last curse with a mouthful of blood, and slithered down into a puddle of mud mixed with snow. A crimson stain spread over the snow.

Another shell burst near a foxhole. Our Company Commander jumped out of his dugout. A third shell hit the parapet again.

'Our own guns!' the Commander yelled in a broken voice, shaking his fist at Kiev. 'Our own guns shelling us! Bloody fools! Who d'you think you're shelling? Your own side!'

He turned to us: 'Back to Priorka! Quick! No panicking. To hell with your Hetman!'

In short sprints, throwing ourselves on the ground every time a shell came whining overhead, we ran down to Priorka. The first to run were of course the 'motor-boys'.

It appeared that the Hetman's gunners had decided that Petlyura had overrun our trenches and opened a barrage.

As he climbed out of the dugout, the Commander stepped over the orderly and said to me, without looking round:

'Take his documents just in case. He might have relatives. You can't leave him like a dog.'

The orderly lay face down. I turned him over. He was still warm and, although so thin, seemed very heavy. A piece of shrapnel had cut his throat. The blue mouth tattooed on his palm was smeared with blood.

I undid his light-blue Austrian greatcoat and took out of the pocket of his tunic a dog-eared, obviously forged identity card, and an empty envelope addressed to 'Elizaveta Tenisheva, 13 Garden Street, Simbirsk.'

The bedraggled remnants of the Hetman's army assembled in the littered market-place in Priorka.

The inhabitants of Priorka poured into the streets, discussing the departure of the Cossacks and openly rejoicing at their

Plight-German soldiers calmly rode about on well-fed bays, still

patrolling the town. Hetman or Petlyura, it was all one to them - their job was to keep the peace.

By order of the airman, we piled up our guns and ammunition in the square. The Germans immediately rode up and stood guard over the weapons. They didn't give us a glance.

'And now home,' the airman said, taking off his blue and yellow shoulder-straps and throwing them on the pavement. 'As best you can. Each man for himself. The town is in a mess:

Petlyura chasing up one street, the Hetman's men running down another. So when you cross the road, look right, then left. Good luck.'

He smiled stiffly at his own lame joke, waved to us like a civilian and walked quickly away.

Some of the Cossacks took off their greatcoats there and then, in the square, sold them for pennies or gave them away to civilians and walked away in nothing but tunics stripped of their

badges.

I was cold so I kept my greatcoat on, only ripping off the epaulettes. Wadding stuck out of the holes where I had torn the cloth, making it easy for anyone to guess what I was.

I walked to town, past the Church of St Cyril where I had once been as a child with my father and Vrubel. At that time, this whole neighbourhood, with its knotted elm trees and deep gullies overgrown with hawthorn, had seemed to me mysterious and frightening. Now I was slowly trudging up the steep, dusty highway to Lukyanovka, and I had no sense of the strangeness of the place or even of the moment. I was too tired.

Of course we were living in a legendary, fantastic time- sometimes it seemed more like a nightmare or a grotesque travesty of reality-but all I could see was the same grey sky over the tumbledown suburban hovels as twenty years before. How long will it go on, I wondered dully, this ridiculous third-rate show of Hetmans, Atamans, Petlyuras, noisy slogans, muddled notions, and hatred out of all proportion to what provoked it? When would the curtain at last ring down on the makeshift stage on which unfortunately real, hot blood-not plum-juice-was being shed?

When I crossed the streets, I looked neither left nor right. I was sick to death of the circus-show of politics and war, and anger robbed me of all sense of danger. I walked through Pedyura's columns in my greatcoat with its ripped-off shoulder-straps, and was only twice hit hard in the back with a rifle-butt.

The streets were thinly lined with 'loyal' crowds, who cheered Petlyura and looked at me with loathing.

I reached home nevertheless, rang the bell, heard Amalia's cry of joy, clutched the door-handle and collapsed on a chair in the hall, light and cheerful thoughts whirling in my head, although my greatcoat was pressing on my chest, heavier with every moment, as though it were a living creature trying to strangle me. Then I realised that it was not the greatcoat that was strangling me, but the long, gnarled fingers of the orderly squeezing my throat, fighting me for a packet of Odessa 'Salves'. And I was also being strangled by the blue cupid's bow of a woman's lips tattooed on his hand. I groaned and passed out.

As a young man, I sometimes had short fainting fits when I was very tired.

12
The Violet Ray

Next morning, I was woken up by the sound of cheering outside, and guessed that Pan Petlyura, Ataman of the Ukrainian army and the Gaidamak30 host, was making his triumphant entry into Kiev.

A notice to that effect by the Town Commander had been posted up on the previous day. It stated pompously and in an oddly humourless language that Petlyura, at the head of his 'Directorate', would ride into the city, mounted on a white steed -a present from the railwaymen of Shmera.

Why the railwaymen should have presented him with a horse rather than a railway coach, or say an engine, was a mystery. But the hopes of the Kiev housewives were not deceived and Petlyura rode into the vanquished city, mounted on a fairly placid white steed.

The horse had a pale-blue saddlecloth embroidered in yellow. Petlyura wore a wadded khaki coat, his only ornament; a curved Ukrainian sabre, obviously taken from a museum, slapped against his thigh as he jogged along. 'Loyal' Ukrainians gazed reverently at the Cossack sword, the puffy, pale-faced Ataman, and his guard of Gaidamaks prancing on their shaggy horses.

The Gaidamaks, their heads shaven except for a single strand of blue-black hair hanging from under their sheepskin hats, reminded me of my childhood and the old Ukrainian Theatre. At nearly every show, just such Gaidamaks, their eyes touched up with blue, had danced the Gopak: 'Hi, hop, shout! This way, that way, turn about!'

Every nation has a right to its eccentricities, but the chauvinists who drool over them destroy the magic. Our neighbour, when I lived in Kiev as a boy, was a well-known painter, Pimonenko, renowned as the 'glorifier' of traditional Ukraine. Always in his studio, the old gentleman painted exclusively from memory. With incredible speed, he turned out daubs of pretty, old-world cottages, cherry orchards, sunflowers, hollyhocks and village girls beribboned from head to toe. Hardly had he finished one picture when he started on another-his output was prodigious. He laboured in the sweat of his brow to create the picture-postcard image of a honey-sweet Ukraine-even as children, it turned our stomachs.

It was this Ukraine that Petlyura tried to re-create. Needless to say, he failed.

Riding after the Ataman came the Directorate-the sad and seedy writer Vinnichenko followed by a number of Ministers whom nobody knew, and who look as if they had just been taken out and dusted. This was the opening scene of the brief and irresponsible era of the Directorate in Kiev.

Ironical like all southerners, the Kievites made the new regime the target of innumerable jokes. They were delighted with the sight of smartly dressed-up Gaidamaks stumping up and down the Kreshchatik with step-ladders, taking down Russian shop-signs and replacing them with Ukrainian ones. Petlyura introduced a language known as Galician-a clumsy dialect full of words borrowed from its neighbours. Before this intruder, the native language of the Ukraine-witty, singing, sharp and sparkling like the teeth of Pimonenko's village girls-took refuge in remote cottages and vineyards where it hid throughout the troubled times, keeping all its poetry and vigour.

Everything under Petlyura's rule had a contrived air-the Gaidamaks, the dialect, Petlyura's policies, the crowds of hoary, whiskered chauvinists who crept out of their dusty holes- everything down to the public speeches of his ministers. But more of this later.

Meeting a Gaidamak in the street, people rubbed their eyes and stared-was it a soldier in uniform or an actor in disguise? The same impression of make-believe was produced by the tortured sounds of the new language. And when customers counted their change in a shop, they looked suspiciously at the greasy scraps of greyish paper faintly stained with yellow and blue, so like the toy money used in nursery games.

There were so many more spurious banknotes than genuine ones, that the population tacitly agreed to accept both at the same rate.

At every printing press in town, typesetters and printers were cheerfully turning out forged Petlyura notes-Karbovantsi and Shagi. The Shag was the smallest unit, worth about half a kopek.

Some enterprising citizens produced them at home, using water-colours and Indian ink. They didn't even bother to put them away when a stranger dropped in.

One of the busiest centres for the manufacture of money as well as of hooch was Pan Kturenda's room.

Ever since the pompous little man had pushed me into the Hetman's army, he showed me an affection rather like that of the hangman for his victim. He was always inviting me.

Interested in this remnant of the Polish gentry washed up in what he called 'our shattering age', one day I went to see him in his small room, crowded with carboys of muddy homebrew and smelling sourly of paint.

Kturenda was busy making hundred-ruble notes. They were decorated with the engraving of two stout, bare-legged, sultry-eyed young women poised like ballerinas on clouds of intricate arabesques. Kturenda was shading them in with Indian ink.

Pan Kturenda's mother, a gaunt old lady with a twitching face, sat behind a screen, reading in a low voice from a Polish prayer-book.

'The arabesque is the alpha and omega of the Petlyura bank-note,' Kturenda told me in a professional tone. 'You could quite easily replace these two Ukrainian misses by any two stout parties you chose. It wouldn't matter a scrap. What matters is to get this curlicue exactly right. If you do, you'll get change for your banknote without anyone batting an eyelid.

'How many do you make?'

'I can paint,' Kturenda said importandy, sticking out his lip with its cropped little moustache, 'I can paint up to three a day. Sometimes even five. It depends on my inspiration.'

'Bassya!' The old lady called from behind the screen. 'Bassya, my son, I am so frightened, my dear.'

'Now don't worry. Mama. Nothing will happen. No one is going to lay a finger on Pan Kturenda.'

'It's not prison I'm afraid of,' the old woman said unexpectedly. 'It's you, Bassya.'

'Water on the brain!' Pan Kturenda winked at me. 'Couldn't you please just manage to keep quiet. Mama?'

'No, I won't. I can't. God will punish me if I don't tell everyone that my son'-the old lady sobbed-'that my son is a Judas.. .'

'Shut up!' Kturenda jumped up and violendy shook the screen. It danced about and creaked, letting out a cloud of yellow dust. 'Shut up you silly old fool, or I'll gag you with an oil-rag.'

The old lady sobbed and blew her nose.

'What does she mean?' I asked.

'That is strictly my own business,' Kturenda replied defiantly. The crisscrossed veins on his contorted face looked as if they were about to burst. 'I advise you not to stick your nose into my affairs-unless you want to end up in the same common grave as the Bolsheviks.'

'You scoundrel,' I said quiedy. 'You are such a cheap scoundrel that you are not worth as much as your own forged notes.'

'Under the ice with you!' Kturenda shrieked and stamped hysterically. 'That's what Pan Kturenda does with people like you-into the Dnieper and under the ice . . .'

I described the incident to Amalia. She said that she had long suspected Kturenda of acting as informer for each of the successive governments which had ravaged the Ukraine-the Central Rada, the Germans, the Hetman and now Pedyura. She was convinced that he would pay me out by denouncing me. Careful and practical as ever, she set up her own watch on Kturenda that same day.

But her precautions proved unnecessary. That very evening, Pan Kturenda met his end before our eyes. And his death was as unbearably pointless as had been the whole of his mean and boorish life.

Towards dusk, we heard pistol shots outside. As usual on such occasions, I went out onto the balcony to see what was going on.

Across the empty square in front of the church, two civilians were running in our direction and, chasing after them but plainly frightened of catching up, were several Petlyura officers and men. The officers were firing as they ran and shouting to the fugitives to stop.

Suddenly I caught sight of Kturenda. Darting out of his room in the wing of the house, he hurried to the massive gate between the courtyard and the street and took from the lock a key as huge as that of a mediaeval city.

Key in hand. Pan Kturenda lay in wait inside the gate. As the civilians were running past, he flung it open, thrust out his hand holding the key like a pistol (from a distance it did look like an antiquated firearm) and shouted:

'Halt, you Bolshevik scum! Halt or I fire!'

He meant to help the officers by holding up the fugitives, if only for a moment. That moment would of course have settled their fate.

From my balcony, I saw clearly what happened next. The second of the two men fired at him as he ran, without even looking. Screaming and spitting blood, Kturenda rolled over and over on the cobbled drive, twitched, and with a last rattling breath died, still clutching the key in his hand. Blood dripped down his pink celluloid cuffs and his open eyes glazed in an expression of angry terror.

It took an hour for the rickety old ambulance to come and take him to the morgue.

Kturenda's mother slept through his death and heard of it only late that night.

A few days later, she was bundled off to the ancient almshouse in Sulima. I often came across the inmates on my walks. They went about in crocodile, like schoolgirls, all dressed alike in dark cotton frocks. They made me think of a solemn procession of ground-beetles.

I have described this incident in detail only because it was so in keeping with the whole tenor of life under the Directorate. Everything seemed equally mean and pointless, like a badly-produced but occasionally tragic farce.

One day, the whole of Kiev was plastered with enormous posters. They announced a meeting at the 'Ars' Cinema where the Directorate would give an account of itself to the citizens.

The whole town tried to squeeze into the cinema. The citizens expected an unusual show. They got it.

The long, narrow hall was wrapped in mysterious gloom. No lights had been switched on. The crowd buzzed cheerfully in the dark.

At last, a gong boomed off-stage, coloured footlights blazed and, against a garish backdrop of 'the Dnieper on a sunny day', there appeared an elderly but well-built man in black with a becoming beard-Premier Vinnichenko.

Patently unhappy and embarrassed, he fidgeted with his spotted tie, made a short, dry speech on the international position of the Ukraine, and was given a round of applause.

Next came an unbelievably gaunt young woman also in black, with a thickly powdered face, who clutched her hands in a despairing gesture and, to the accompaniment of pensive piano-chords, shyly recited a poem by the Ukrainian poetess Galina:

They felled the wood,
TheJoung, green wood .. .

She too was briefly applauded.

Every speech was followed by musical interludes. After the Minister of Communications, some boys and girls danced the Gopak.

The audience was thoroughly enjoying itself but quietened down discreetly when the Minister of Finance walked onto the stage.

The Minister was dishevelled and looked truculent. He was snorting with anger. His round, closely cropped head shone with sweat. His grey Cossack moustache drooped over his chin.

He wore baggy grey pin-striped trousers, an equally baggy tussore coat with bulging pockets, and an embroidered shirt fastened at the neck with a cord ending in red pompoms.

He had no intention of making a speech. Walking up to the footlights, he stood listening to the low hum of conversation in the hall. He even cupped his hand over his ear. People laughed.

The Minister grinned with a satisfied air, nodded as though at some passing thought, and asked:

'Moskovites?'

The audience were indeed mostly Russians. Yes, they replied unsuspectingly, they were nearly all from Moscow.

'I see-e-e' the Minister said ominously, blowing his nose into a large checked handkerchief. 'Very understandable. But no more pleasant for that.'

The sound of conversation ceased. The audience scented trouble.

'And why the hell,' the Minister suddenly shouted, turning as red as a beetroot, 'why the hell did you come here from your bloody Moscow? Swarming like flies round a honeypot! What have you come for, blast you? I know what-your Moscow is in such a state that there is nothing to eat and nothing to . . . '

The audience roared with indignation and hooted. A little man leapt out onto the stage and tried to take the Minister by the elbow and lead him away, but the old fire-eater gave him a push which nearly knocked him down. The Minister had got into his stride. Nothing could stop him.

'Well, why don't you say something?' he asked slyly.

'Acting stupid, eh? Well, I'll say it for you. Here you can stuff yourselves with bread and sugar and fat and buckwheat and cakes. And in Moscow you'd be sucking lamp oil off your thumbs! That's what you've come for!'

Two men were now pulling him away by the skirts of his tussore coat, but he struggled furiously, shouting:

'Beggars! Parasites! Back to your Moscow! Back to your Jewish bosses! Get out!'

Vinnichenko appeared in the wings and waved his hand angrily. Purple with indignation, the old man was finally dragged off the stage.

To counter the unfortunate impression left by this performance, young men in sheepskin hats set at a jaunty angle, bounced onto the stage. Some struck up their balalaikas, others swung into the national dance, singing:

Whose's the dead man lying there?

Not the prince, or squire, or colonel,

But the old crone's love eternal.

This was the closing scene of the meeting. Laughing and shouting, 'Back to Moscow! Back to your Jewish bosses!' the audience poured into the street.

Everything about the regime had a provincial air. Once a glittering city, Kiev turned into a backwater, a large-scale Shpola or Mirgorod, stuffy with antiquated ritual and hide-bound officialdom.

Everything looked like a stage-set for Ukrainian opera-down to the grocery shop with its old worlde sign 'Taras Bulba of Poltava'. The grocer, with his long moustache and snow-white shirt blazing with scarlet embroidery, was so impressive that it took courage to ask him for biscuits and honey.

The whole town seemed to be taking part in a performance of The Gaidamaks.

It was hard to sort tilings out. Upheaval followed upheaval. Each government in turn, as soon as it seized power, showed signs of imminent and ignominious collapse. Each hurried to pass as many resolutions and decrees as possible, hoping that a few at least would leave their mark on history. Petlyura's government, like the Hetman's before him, produced an impression of utter confusion and lack of confidence in its own future.

Against the Soviet armies bearing down on Kiev from the north, Petlyura put his trust mainly in the French who were occupying Odessa.

His agents circulated rumours that the French were coming to the rescue-they were in Vinnitsa, in Fastov, tomorrow their brave Zouaves in fezes and red trousers would be seen in the Boyarka suburb of Kiev. This Petlyura had on oath from his bosom-friend, the French Consul Hennault.

Bewildered by conflicting rumours, the papers printed this nonsense, although everyone knew that the French were sitting tight in Odessa, keeping strictly to their occupation zone, although the 'zones of influence' (French, Greek and Ukrainian) were separated from each other by no more than rows of rickety wicker chairs.

Rumour became an elemental force, a cosmic phenomenon, an irresistible epidemic. It was a form of mass hypnosis.

Rumours lost their normal purpose: to spread fictitious news. They changed their character, their substance. They became a powerful drug, a means of reassurance, the only way of holding on to hope.

Even outwardly, the citizens of Kiev began to look like drug addicts. At each new rumour, their eyes became clearer and brighter, their torpor vanished. They ceased to mumble, they were excited, even witty.

Some rumours were fleeting, others kept people in a state of artificial animation for as long as two or three days.

Even the most hardened sceptics could be made to believe anything. They swallowed the story that the Ukraine was to become a department of France and that President Pointcare himself was on his way to Kiev to announce this act of State. According to another, the cinema star Vera Kholodnaya had recruited her own army like Joan of Arc and, riding a white charger at the head of her victorious troops, had entered the town of Priluki and proclaimed herself Empress of the Ukraine.

I began to keep a list of such rumours but soon gave up. It was enough to make one sick and drive one quietly insane. I felt like liquidating the whole lot-from Presidents Pointcare and Wilson down to Makhno and the notorious Ataman Zeiyony who had set up his H.Q. in the village of Tripolye near Kiev. I now wish I hadn't destroyed my notes. They were a fantastic catalogue of lies, and of the wild imaginings of helpless, bewildered souls.

To keep my sanity, I re-read some of my favourite books- Tristan and Isolde, Manon 'Lescaut, Turgenev's Torrents of Spring, Boris Zaitsev's The Blue Star. In the muddy darkness of those Kiev evenings, their message seemed indeed as clear and incorruptible as the stars. I lived alone. Mama and Galya were still completely cut off from Kiev. I could get no news of them.

I had decided that in spring I would make my way to Kopan on foot, in spite of people warning me that I would have to cross the unsettled 'Dymersk' Republic and had little chance of coming through alive. But new events made it useless even to think of such a plan.

I lived with my books. I tried to write a little but the result looked like the ravings of a lunatic.

At night, I listened to the silence in the house and in our district, where nothing seemed awake except the clouds, the stars, and an occasional patrol.

The sound of the patrolmen's footsteps carried from a long way off. Each time, I put out my oil-lamp for fear of attracting the patrol to our house. At rare intervals, I heard Amalia crying in the night and thought of how much harder to bear her loneliness was than mine.

Always for a few days after such a crying fit, she spoke to me in an arrogant, almost hostile tone. Then, with a shy, apologetic smile, she would once more look after me with the same devotion as she had lavished on each of her lodgers in turn.

Revolution broke out in Germany. The German forces stationed in Kiev quietly elected their Soviet of army deputies and prepared to go home. Taking advantage of their weakness, Petlyura decided to disarm them. But they heard about his plan.

On the day the Germans were to be disarmed, I woke up to a roll of drums loud enough to shake the house. I went out onto the balcony. Amalia was already there. Down Fundukleyev Street, German regiments were tramping in silence. Windows jingled to the beat of hobnailed boots. The drums rolled warn-ingly.

The cavalry followed, faces equally stern, horse-shoes clicking on the wooden blocks which paved the road. Then came dozens of field-guns, jolting and rumbling.

Silently, with no music except the rolling of the drums, the Germans marched round the city and back to their barracks. Petlyura at once cancelled his secret order. Soon after this silent demonstration, the sound of distant gunfire began to reach us from the left bank of the Dnieper. The Germans were hurriedly clearing out of Kiev. The gunfire grew ever louder, and we learned that Soviet forces were advancing quickly from Nezhin.

When the fighting broke out on the very outskirts of Kiev and it became clear to everyone that Petlyura's goose was cooked, a new decree by the Town Commander was posted up.

It announced that on the following night Petlyura's High Command would use a secret weapon against the Bolsheviks. This was a deadly violet ray which the French military authorities had put at Petlyura's disposal through the intermediary of that well-known 'friend of Free-Ukraine', the Consul Hennault.

To avoid unnecessary casualties, all civilians were instructed to take shelter in their basements from nightfall to morning.

Kievites were used to sheltering in their basements-they had sat it out there through each political upheaval in turn. The next safest place was the kitchen, where cosy conversation could be carried on over endless cups of tea. The kitchen was usually fairly safe because it was at the back of the house, and there was something soothing about the smell of cooking that clung to it.

You could coax a little water from the tap. It took an hour to fill a kettle, but you could then brew yourself a good strong pot of cranberry tea.

All who drank that tea during those nights remember it as our only comfort-a sort of elixir of life, a panacea for all our troubles and misfortunes.

It seemed to me that the country was rushing headlong into dense banks of all-embracing fog. It was hard to believe that, to the whistling of the wind through bullet-riddled roofs, the dark night thick with soot and despair would at last give way to a bleak dawn, if only to reveal again the empty streets or the blindly running men livid from hunger and cold-men with guns of every calibre and make, men with fingers numbed by the steel triggers and every trace of human warmth blown out of them through their threadbare greatcoats and scratchy cotton shirts.

On the night of the 'violet ray', the city was dead still. Even the artillery fire had died down-there was only the sound of wheels rumbling in the distance. From the quality of this sound, the more knowledgeable citizens judged that army convoys were hurriedly withdrawing from the city.

And so it turned out. By morning, the city was free of the Petlyurists-not one of them was left. The story of the violet ray had been put about only to enable them to get away un-hindered.

As often before, Kiev was left without a government. But neither the Atamans nor the suburban gangs had time to take over. At twelve noon-horses steaming, wheels rumbling, crowds shouting and singing, accordions squeaking-the Bogun and Tarashchensky Red Army Regiments crossed the river by the Chain Bridge, and once again the life of the city was shaken to its very foundations.

There was a total change of scenery, but what the future held in store for the famished citizens, no one could guess. Only time would tell.

13
A Bolshevik Wed me, a Gaidamak Girl

Rain-sodden posters carried the grim decrees of the Army-Revolutionary Committee.

They were brief and momentous. Ruthlessly, they divided the Kiev population into two-worthwhile citizens and human rubbish. There were no qualifications.

The authorities started sweeping up the rubbish but found little left to sweep. Most of it had blown away into holes and corners where it settled down to wait for better times.

The experience of Moscow was repeated in Kiev, but with a certain difference. There was an added tinge of licence and recklessness.

The Bogun Regiment-named after Colonel Bogun of legendary courage, who had been Bogdan Khmelnitsky's comrade-in-arms-was stationed in the town.

Four soldiers were billeted in our flat. They brought a bomb, stood it cautiously under the bent-wood hatstand in the hall, and said to Amalia:

'Careful, ducks. Don't bump into it. Or it'll go bang and your house and furniture will be nothing but a dream. Understand?'

'I understand,' Amalia said grimly. She at once unlocked the long disused back door, and from then on no one went in or out through the hall.

It was hard to imagine how the regiment ever got on the move with all its equipment. The regiment had everything-machine guns, rifles, hand-grenades, sawn-off shotguns, bayonets, Mausers, sheath-knives, swords, daggers-as well as red and purple gramophone horns, carried as a sentimental reminder of peace-time.

As soon as a town was occupied, the strains of long-forgotten, heart-rending love-songs poured from every window. Once again, the sobbing baritone complained of nowhere to go and no one to love, once again the tenor lisped that not for him, oh not for him would come the spring-not for him would the birch-tree flower or the heart be filled with throbbing joy.

Vyaltseva shouted, 'Hai-da Troika!' once again and was borne away to die, a lonely seagull, by the waters of the sunset lake.

Everything was there-film stars and grenades, the smell of iodine and the slow sing-song of Ukrainian speech, red cockades on Coassck hats, symphony concerts, soldiers' dreams of quiet lakes and cheerful meadows, and the shrill hysteria of man-hunts in the bazaars.

In a flat crowded with pugs on the floor below us, lived a harmless, decrepit old couple-engineer Belelyubsky and his wife. Belelyubsky had once been famous as the constructor of the Syzran bridge over the Volga. But memories are short, and his only occupation nowadays was taking his horrible, snorting pugs with eyes as round and popping as Bismarck's, out for a morning walk.

The Belelyubskys had a maid, a jolly, pink-cheeked country girl called Motrya.

The regimental sergeant-major fell in love with her and proposed. Motrya hesitated. Her ideas were old-fashioned. She was afraid of the sergeant, a flighty Don Juan, leaving her after a week.

One day, she came to my room. With peasant frankness, she explained that she had very nearly given in to the sergeant's advances but had run away in time, and was now resolved to accept him only if he married her 'according to the Book' and promised to love her for life.

She dictated me a letter for him. It consisted of four words, 'Yes, if for life,' which I wrote in large block capitals.

An hour later, the sergeant, swearing blue murder and pointing his gun at his men-was storming in and out of the flats, looking for the regimental seal;

'Where's the seal, you bandits? Find me that seal or I'll shoot you all like rats.'

The stairs shook with the tramping of boots. The sergeant was turning out the soldiers' knapsacks.

At last it was found. The sergeant wrote, 'Yes, for life, I swear,' on the back ofMotrya's note, sealed it with the regimental seal and sent it back.

The wedding was celebrated two days later. Several gun carriages drove up to the gate. The champing horses had coloured ribbons in their manes. The church was only a couple of hundred yards from the house, but the guests mounted the carriages and dashed round and round the church to the sound of jingling bells and rollicking song.

I sit on a barrel I'm all in a whirl.

A Bolshevik wed me,

A Gaidamak girl.

Hi, pretty maid, for whom are YOU yearning?

If you go to Bogun,You won't be returning.

Our Colonel Bogun

Is a desperate lad,

He's handsome enough

To send a girl mad.

At the words, 'Hi, pretty maid,' the drivers pulled up and the horses backed, pranced and jingled their bells in time to the tune. It was a brilliant performance and a huge crowd gathered in front of the church, roaring and cheering.

On the third day after the wedding (trouble always seems to come on the third day) the regiment was alerted in the middle of the night.

The men assembled unwillingly, silent and morose. All they would say was:

'We're off to Zhitomir. To restore order. The priests are up in arms.'

Motrya was sobbing. Her worst fears were coming true-her sergeant was deserting her.

At this the sergeant went berserk.

'Drive all the lodgers out into the yard,' he yelled at his men, and to show that he meant business, fired from the bottom of the stairwell at the roof. 'All into the yard, the parasites! This minute!'

The frightened lodgers were chased out into the yard. It was late on a winter night. Sleet came down from the muddy sky. Women wept and clutched their sleepy children to their breasts.

'Don't take on so,' the men comforted them. 'It's only our sergeant, he's dotty about his Motrya, blast her.'

The sergeant lined up his platoon to face the crowd of terrified civilians and stepped forward. He led his wailing Motrya by the hand. In the middle of the ice-bound yard he stopped, drew his sword from its scabbard, traced a cross with it on the ice and shouted:

'Soldiers and free citizens of free Russia! Be my witnesses! By this cross and by my native soil I swear that I will not desert my love but will come back to her for sure. We'll live in our own cottage in the village of Moshno, near the famous town of Kanovo, and to this I sign my name and pledge my troth.'

He hugged Motrya who was still crying, though more quietly, pushed her gently away and ordered:

'Mount the carriages! March!'

The men flung themselves on the gun-carriages. Singing and whistling, they hurtled out of the yard and the metal wheels thundered away along Bibikov Boulevard towards the Zhitomir Highway.

It was all over. Motrya dried her tears, said, 'To hell with him, the damned Mohammedan,' and went back to the Belelyubskys' flat where the pugs were yapping in a frenzy. Life resumed its normal course.

But it had lost much of its glamour. Soon the Kievites were talking of the regiment with nostalgia. Young, cheerful daredevils, the soldiers had arrived with their smell of battle, their tattered red flags, their dashing songs and their revolutionary ardour. They had come and gone, but long afterwards a romantic breath of revolution was still blowing through Kiev, bringing smiles to the faces of the townsfolk who had been through so much.

The officer in command of the Bogun Regiment was Shchors. His name was soon to become a legend.

I first heard of him from his men. They told enthusiastic tales about him as a stern but unbelievably brave and gifted commander.

What struck me from the first was their almost childlike affection for him. For them he embodied all the qualities of army leadership-firmness, resourcefulness, fairness, devotion to the common man and an inexhaustible and, if I may so put it, sober romanticism.

The men were young, so was Shchors. They were united by their faith in the triumph of the revolutionary cause, their enthusiasm and the battles they had fought together.

No external events could slow down the sap rising in the trees. So the spring came at the usual time, the Dnieper overflowed its banks, the weeds in the fields grew taller than a man's head, and the chestnut-trees put out their leaves and, for some reason, unusually splendid flowers.

It seemed to me sometimes that the chestnut-trees were the only thing on earth which had been left untouched. Their branches swayed over the pavements, casting a deep shadow. And as gently and discreetly as ever, the tall candles of pink flowers faintly mottled with yellow came into blossom. But there were no more dreamy schoolgirls strolling in the shadow of the trees. Among the litter of dry blossoms on the flagstones, you In that came across green cartridge shells and stiff, grubby rolls of bandage.

Spring was blazing over Kiev, steeping it in blue. At last the lime-trees blossomed in the parks. Their scent stole into the musty houses, battened down throughout the winter, and forced the owners to throw their windows and verandah doors wide open.

Then the warmth and light, soft draughts of summer burst into the rooms, and its drowsy peace dissolved our fears and worries.

It is true that there was no bread and we had to eat last year's frozen potatoes.

I got a job in a very odd concern. Its name was made up of initials and quite unpronounceable. I remember only the beginning, 'Obgubsnabchuprod . . .' After that it became so complicated that even the director, a fat Armenian with a short black beard and a Mauser slung like a camera round his neck, frowned and snorted every time he signed a piece of headed paper.

What the concern dealt in it would be hard to say. Mostly calico. All the rooms and passages were cluttered up with bales. Never was the calico sold or disposed of in any form. The bales were always being shifted, taken to warehouses, brought back and again piled up in the corridor. The puzzle of this to-ing and fro-ing of the same bales nearly drove the staff out of their minds.

I had a lot of free time. I looked for some of my school-friends, but found that hardly any were in Kiev. I discovered only Schmuckler, but saw him rarely. He had become quiet and sad, perhaps because he had had to give up painting for the sake of his family. His father was dead and he had shouldered the whole burden of protecting them-against famine, requisitioning, billeting, eviction and Petlyura's pogroms and raids.

Once again, as in my schooldays, I went to evening concerts in the garden of the former Merchants' Club. The roses and arum lilies in the garden had been replaced by mint and sage.

Fairly often, the music was interrupted by sounds not in the score-the crack of a rifle or a distant explosion. But nobody took the slightest notice.

In those days in Kiev, I became addicted to the great French writer and illusionist, Stendhal. Not that I gave much thought to the tricks he played on his public.

They seemed to me perfectly legitimate, as they still do- justified as they are by an abundance of ideas and images so varied that it was unthinkable to print them all over the same signature. No one would have believed it possible for any one writer to describe so accurately, to go so deeply into subjects as diverse as painting and the steel trade, cosy French provincial life and the turmoil of Waterloo, the art of seducing women, the rejection of the bourgeois age, military supplies and the music of Qmarosa and Haydn.

And when I learned that his extensive diaries, so full of exciting events and comments, were largely fictitious, but that even historians had been taken in by them, I could only bow before his genius and his daring.

Ever since, he has been my secret friend and I wouldn't like to say how often I have wandered through the streets of Rome and of the Vatican, visited mediaeval towns in France, watched plays at the Scala or listened to the conversation of the wisest men of his time, always in the company of this clumsy, puzzling, solitary man.

Soon I had a piece of luck. Two Moscow writers, Mikhail Koltsov and Yefim Zozyulya, arrived in Kiev. They started an art journal and I got the job of literary editor. I had very little work. The periodical was as thin as a school exercise-book with half its pages torn out.

Self-confident, ironical and witty, Koltsov was hardly ever in the office. I spent my days with Yefim Zozyulya who was much too gentle, kind-hearted and short-sighted to fit the image of the man of steel from Moscow.

I showed him part of my first and still unfinished novel. Romantics. He genuinely liked it, but told me that I went in for too much self-analysis and was a bit too wordy.

Zozyulya himself was engaged on a cycle of short-stories of half a dozen lines each -'shorter than a sparrow's beak', as he put it. They were fables in prose and always had a clearly pointed moral.

Zozyulya regarded literature as a form of teaching, a sermon. I believed it to be far above this merely utilitarian function, so we never stopped arguing.

By then I was convinced that genuine literature was the truest expression of the mind and heart of a free man, that only there could the human spirit reveal itself in all its power, richness and complexity, redeeming as it were, the many failings of our commonplace lives. It seemed to me a gift from the future. It reflected man's perpetual longing for perfect harmony and undying love, cherished in spite of love's daily birth and death. As the droning of a seashell makes us wish for the quiet expanse of the sea at dawn, or the smoke of rising clouds, or the freshness of a forest, or a child's voice, or deep, all-embracing silence, so literature draws us to the golden age of our desires.

While Zozyulya and I were arguing about literature. Atamans Zeiyony and Struk were prowling round Kiev and raiding its outskirts. Once Struk actually seized the whole district of Podol, and it took a lot of effort to throw him out.

Denikin was advancing from the south. Beyond Kremenchug, Nestor Makhno was ravaging the countryside.

But such things were seldom discussed in Kiev. People wouldn't take them seriously. So many wild rumours were flying about that even facts were disbelieved.

14
Purple Riding Breeches

My high-minded arguments on artistic themes with Zozyulya were ended by my call-up. I was very short-sighted and had so far always been deferred on a 'white ticket'. But now the army suddenly conscripted men who had been deferred before.

Together with several unhealthy looking youngsters, I was given a hasty medical examination and packed off to a pioneer corps.

I think it must have been the craziest regiment ever to have existed.

An adjutant of Makhno's had been captured in a skirmish. His name was either Antoshchenko or Antonyuk, I can't remember which. We'll call him Antoshchenko. He was sentenced to be shot. But while he sat in Lukyanovka Jail in the condemned cell a way out of his predicament occurred to him.

He sent for the prosecutor and dictated to him a letter for the head of the Cheka. In it, he pointed out that the Soviet government didn't know what to do with the bandits it captured. They couldn't all be shot-there were too many-and it would be wasteful to keep such parasites in prison, especially in such hungry times. In fact, the prisoners were often merely disarmed and allowed to go free-and most of them went straight back to their Atamans, so that the looting and bloodshed went on as before throughout the Ukraine.

Antoshchenko offered a solution for this problem. If, instead of shooting him, the authorities let him go, he would, out of gratitude, recruit a regiment from among the captured thugs and see to it that its discipline was exemplary.

He stressed that, in view of his own prestige with the gangsters, no one was better fitted for this difficult task.

The government took the risk of releasing him and, within a short time, Antoshchenko had formed his regiment. It was divided into companies according to the bands the thugs had belonged to-Makhno's, Struk's, Zeiyony's, Grigory's, 'Red Coats', 'Red Angels', and one other made up of the members of smaller and less famous gangs.

It was to this regiment that we, former 'white ticket men', were posted.

An escort picked us up at the recruiting station and took us to Pechersk where the regiment was stationed. On the way, the guards refused to answer our questions but from time to time muttered ominously, 'He's a proper bastard, you'll see,' 'Mind you keep out of his way or he'll do you in.'

In Pechersk, we lined up in front of a cottage, in a garden where the lilac bushes grew taller than the roof. There was no sign of immediate danger, though the pale, tense faces of our guards boded nothing good.

A short, thick-set man with black side-whiskers and bundy legs waddled out of the cottage. He wore a red tunic, purple riding breeches with silver piping, red boots with huge, clanking spurs, red gloves on his stubby hands, and a Cossack hat with a scarlet top, pulled low over his forehead.

Anything more like a Makhno caricature of a 'Red Commander' could not be imagined.

Not one of the conscripts looked amused. Instead, many shuddered as they noticed the man's eyes, colourless and bright with rage. We guessed that this was Antoshchenko.

A large revolver with a wooden butt hung from his belt and, at his side, a short, curved sword in a sheath decorated with silver.

Pulling a snow-white handkerchief from his pocket, he shook it out delicately, and wiped his lips.

'What kind of scum have you pulled in this time?* he asked in a husky voice.

The guards were silent.

Antoshchenko walked up and down the ranks, inspecting us from head to toe. He was followed by two lanky officers. We assumed them to be battalion commanders.

Suddenly, he unsheathed his sword and began in a high, plaintive voice:

'I'll teach you to serve the revolutionary cause, you bastards! F-- your mothers! Do you know who I am? With this very sword I carved up General Kaledin, so don't think I'll handle you with kid gloves. I spit out a dozen mugs of blood a day, I've been riddled with bullets in the service of my country, and for this reason Moscow sends me thirty-thousand gold rubles a month, just for my pocket expenses. Did you know that, or didn't you? And do you know that I make short shrift of such fellows as you? A bullet in the neck and into the ditch with you!'

His voice rose to a shriek. Bubbles of foam formed at the corners of his mouth. Clearly the man was insane or an epileptic.

Stepping up to a tall youngster in glasses who looked like a student, he prodded him on the chin with his sword-hilt.

'What's that for?' He stared drunkenly at the boy. 'What've you put goggles on for? See these hands?' He spread out his short fat hands in their blood-red gloves, a size too large and wrinkled on the fingers. 'With these hands I strangled my own wife for being unfaithful. Think I'll spare you because of your goggles? I'll skin you alive and roast you, and nobody will dare to breathe a word.'

We were speechless, bewildered, wondering where we were and what was happening. The guards glared angrily at Antoshchenko. Only the two battalion commanders stood by unmoved, glancing at us with bored expressions. They were evidently used to outbursts of this kind.

Antoshchenko skipped back and asked playfully:

'Well, now, which of you can read and write? Those who can, step forward.'

I was about to do so when one of the guards, who was standing next to me, whispered:

'Stay where you are.'

I stood still. We could all read and write, of course, but many of us were alerted by something dangerous in Antoshchenko's voice, and only about a dozen men stepped out of rank. Anto-shchenko didn't seem surprised.

As innocently as before, he asked, 'Which of you can play musical instruments?' Once again the guard whispered:

'Don't move.'

Joking and laughing, Antoshchenko called for shoemakers, singers, tailors. Reassured by his manner, a lot of people came out. Only a handful of us useless ignoramuses were left - evidently those whom the guards had managed to warn.

Antoshchenko turned to one of the officers and said in a tired voice:

'Look at these skunks. Commander-all wanting to be clerks at headquarters, or mend soldiers' trousers, instead of fighting for the peasants of the world and dying as heroes on the battlefield! Look at the egg-head bastards all after cushy jobs to which they have no right!'

'I see them, Comrade Commander,' the officer said wearily.

'Send them all off today to the Tripolye front against Zeiyony. And if a single one comes back alive, you'll pay for it with your head.'

'Yes, Comrade Commander,' said the officer, in the same dejected voice.

Glancing at us illiterates, Antoshchenko slipped his sword back into its scabbard.

'I don't want to look at that scum. Assign them to the fatigue squad. March them off to hell.'

Separated from the rest, we were marched off to the regimental barracks in Nikolsky Fort.

A semicircular building, its moat overgrown with elder, it stood on a bluff overlooking the Dnieper, not far from Marinsky Park. In that shady, unfrequented park, I had, as a boy, often spent hours on end, especially in spring. There, I had once seen a midshipman and the meeting had fired me with a passion to go to sea. There, to the humming of bees over the jasmine, I had read and recited poetry, almost to the point of stupor. As a result, the grey brick fort with its embrasures, its archways, its ancient draw-bridge hanging from rusty chains, the bronze lion-heads on its cast-iron gates, had always seemed to me the most romantic place on earth.

It had long stood empty and neglected. Tall grass grew on the parade ground. Swallows nested under the eaves. The smell of warm, limp summer leaves drifted through the broken windows.

The fort had never been besieged. For many years, it had been a peaceful architectural folly.

So deep was this impression of it in my mind, that I was actually pleased at the idea of serving within its walls. But, from the very first, my naive illusions were scattered like dust. One look at the gloom and dirt inside was enough. Scrawled all over with obscenities, the mildewed walls shook to the tramp of boots and the noise of shouts, curses, blasphemies and songs. So strong was the barrack stench, that it sank into my clothes at once, never to leave them.

Again we lined up, this time in a dusty passage with a rough plank floor. The pale, effeminate-looking sergeant in charge of the kitchen squad-obviously a former officer-came up to us. He gave us a pitying look, tapped his boots with his riding crop and said:

'Well? Seen the mad dog? Murder's too good for him.'

Whether he was sincere or a provocateur, it was impossible to make out. To be on the safe side, we kept quiet.

'You're a lot of women,' he said after a pause. 'Go and peel potatoes in the cellar.'

For the rest of the day we sat peeling rotten potatoes in a cold underground vault. The walls were dripping with damp. Rats scurried in the dark corners.

The only light came from a slit under the ceiling. Our hands were numbed by the cold, slippery potatoes.

We talked softly among ourselves. I learned that my neighbour, a meek little man in spectacles, with reddened eyelids and a sad expression, was called Yosif Morgenstern, and that before the war he had worked in a razor-factory in Lodz.

We returned to barracks for the night. I lay down on my bare plank-bed and fell asleep at once.

In the middle of the night, I was woken by the hollow beat of horse's hooves. A single bulb glowed dimly at the end of a long flex. The sound of snores of every sort rose from all around. The pendulum clock on the wall showed three.

By the dim yellow light, I saw Antoshchenko. Down the vaulted corridor he came, riding a sleek bay, and the stone flags rang under its shoes. The flex of a field telephone, stretched across the passage, held him up. He halted, unsheathed his sword, and cut it.

Turning and advancing into the barrack room, he stopped and shouted:

'Fatigue squad! Fall in!'

Startled, sleepy men jumped from their beds and hastily lined up. Nearly all barefoot, they stood on the stone floor, half awake and shivering.

'In a moment,' Antoshchenko said calmly, 'I will summon the machine-gunner, and I'll order him to shoot you all down, like so many snipe. Do you think I don't know that you are plotting to murder me, that you call your commanding officer a mad dog?'

His voice rose hysterically.

'Fetch the machine-gunner,' he turned and shouted-it was only then we noticed that behind him, in the doorway, stood two orderlies.

'Comrade Commander,' one of them said anxiously. 'Honest to God, we'd better go back.'

'I'll kill you,' Antoshchenko screamed and swayed in his saddle. 'I'll cut you into strips, you bespectacled little Jews! I'll slice you up with a circular saw, like mutton!'

He choked. Foam pouring from his mouth, he slowly slipped from the saddle. We stood motionless. Afterwards it turned out that each of us at that moment had had the same thought-if the gunner really came, we'd make a dash for the rifle-rack, seize our rifles and open fire.

The orderlies caught Antoshchenko as he fell and dragged him down the corridor, out into the yard and the fresh air. His well-trained horse clicked after him, impassive as clock-work.

None of us conscripts in the fatigue corps, men who had joined the regiment by chance, could understand how it was possible that here in Kiev, within a stone's throw of the Kreshchatik, of the theatres, the university, the libraries and concert halls, not to speak of the crowds of ordinary, decent townsfolk there could exist this gang of bandits with a sick, half-mad commander at its head.

Its existence seemed a fantasy, a nightmare. At any moment, Antoshchenko could shoot any one of us down. Each man's life hung on what he might take it into his head to do next.

Every day,-we waited for some new, humiliating scene, and he never disappointed us.

We lived penned up in the fort. We were never allowed out into the town. In any case, no one was there to whom we could report. And had there been someone, it would still have been useless-we would never have been believed.

We decided to write to the Government and the War Commissar, Podvoysky, but events moved faster than we did.

A few days went by in relative calm. Part of the regiment had been sent to Tripolye, against Zeiyony, other companies were on guard duty in Kiev, protecting warehouses and the goods station, and taking part in raids against speculators in the Bessarabska district and around the notorious Semadeni Cafe in the Kreshchatik.

But late one night we were roused by an alarm signal and formed up in a large square on the parade ground. No one knew what was happening. There were rumours of an unknown gang advancing from Svyatoshin, and that we were being sent to cut them off.

The excitement infected even our pioneer company, armed with Japanese rifles but without a single bullet.

We stood and waited on the parade ground. A rainy dawn was breaking through the clouds across the Dnieper. The wide green fingers of the chestnut trees drooped limply. There was a smell of dust, and we could hear the bell in the Monastery of Pechersk striking the useless hour of four.

'Company! 'tion!' came the officers' long-drawn shouts in a variety of keys. The men drew themselves up and stood to attention.

A shiny black landau swept swiftly into the centre of the square. The two dappled greys pulled up and pawed the ground.

Antoshchenko was standing up in the landau and sitting in it were three girls in large hats. The girls were digging one another in the ribs, giggling and squealing with joy.

'Regiment!' Antoshchenko bawled drunkenly, waving his sword. 'Come here ... by platoons . . . round the carriage . . . slow march . . . sing my song . . . forward march!'

He lowered his sword. Only the First Company, made up of Makhno's men, moved hesitantly, out of step, towards the carriage. The song leaders struck up 'Don't you weep, Maroosya, you'll be mine,' but stopped after a few bars, and the Company shuffled to a halt.

'March!' Antoshchenko screamed. The regiment stood silent and motionless. The girls stopped giggling. In the dead quiet, we could hear Antoshchenko panting with rage.

'Is that how it is, you bastards!' He pulled his Mauser from its holster, but at the same moment a ringing voice came from a back row:

'Showing off to his popsies, the swine! At him, boys! Beat the living daylights out of him!'

A shot rang out. The coachman pulled the horses round so sharply that they even reared, and the carriage dashed out of the square and down the street, alongside the Park.

A few rifle shots followed it. Then the regiment broke rank and became a furiously yelling, cursing mob. The First Company were driven back to the wall. They beat back their attackers with rifle-butts. Drowning everything, piercing, two-fingered, bandit whistles shrilled over the square, the fort, it seemed even the city.

'Back to barracks! Quiet! Keep calm!' shouted the officers, but no one was listening. The regiment had mutinied.

Makhno's men were being beaten up for the obvious reason that they were Antoshchenko's favourite Company; they occupied the ground floor of the fort and opened fire from the windows. Cooks and orderlies were being beaten up as well, for good measure.

It was hard to make out what was happening. Savage howls echoed through the parade ground, the stairways, the guardrooms. Luckily the pioneer corps had so far escaped notice. We made for our barrack room, reached it safely and barricaded ourselves in.

The rebellion ended two hours later, when the fort was surrounded by the International Regiment composed of Austrian and Hungarian prisoners who were stationed nearby. Astonishingly, there were no dead and very few wounded.

At eleven in the morning, we were again summoned to the parade ground. The men growled and grumbled as they sullenly fell in.

It was announced that members of the Government were coming to talk to us and to enquire into what had happened. A sigh of relief went up from the ranks.

A wooden platform was erected in the middle of the square. Soon the delegates, headed by Rakovsky, drove up by car.

The regiment presented arms. The band struck up the 'International' and, looking at the motionless ranks, no one would have believed that onlv a few hours earlier this same regiment had been in a state of raging mutiny. The only sign of the wounds and bruises of the night were a few freshly bandaged heads.

Antoshchenko had slipped unobtrusively on to the platform.

He didn't greet the regiment. Standing among the great, he was trying to engage them in conversation, but everyone snubbed him.

The first speaker was Rakovsky. He was kind, considerate, reassuring. He told the men that a special commission appointed by the Government would devote three days to hearing complaints against the regimental commander and that, if it found them justified, strong measures would be taken.

Antoshchenko was standing behind Rakovsky. His face flushed crimson and a nervous twitch pulled at the livid scar across his cheek. His hands clenched and unclenched on his sword-hilt. At last he could stand it no longer, he pushed Rakovsky out of the way and shouted:

'1 can't understand, you. Comrade Rakovsky, wasting sympathy on this cattle.' He turned to the men. 'The Government can do what it likes, but I don't have to put up with shit. I'll talk to you in my own way. First, what d'you mean, you bastards, by complaining of me, your Commander, your father, to the Government? Who put the idea into your thick skulls? You should kiss my hands instead of complaining. Who made human beings out of you, you cut-throats? I, Antoshchenko! Who shoed you and clothed you? Antoshchenko! Who feeds you on buttered gruel and gives you your tobacco ration in full? I, Commander Comrade Antoshchenko! And you complain! You start a mutiny! You scabs! You, over there with the carroty hair-three steps forward march! No, not you-the one in the Austrian greatcoat. Who issued you your greatcoat? Answer me.

The red-head took three steps forward and stood at attention but made no reply.

'Everything you've got, you got from me, you snub-nosed clod! Where did you get those blue puttees made of the purest English wool? You don't know, damn your eyes. I, Commander Antoshchenko, broke the law to give them to you-they're officer's puttees, but I took pity on you, vermin. What are you goggling for? Say something. Feeling shy? Next. You've got a been selling Government bread to the monks in Pechersk? Think I don't know? And who's been flogging greatcoats in Zhitny Market? And who stripped those tarts on Vladimir Hill and sent them off stark naked through the streets of Russia's mother city? I know everything about you. I've got you right here'-he clenched and unclenched his fist-'I could have every man jack of you shot out of hand.'

His adjutant was trying to stop him, but Antoshchenko wouldn't even glance at him.

'Brewing hooch all over barracks, setting up a still and using gas-masks for coils! Wasting cartridges for your amusement and to commit crimes, when they're needed at the front for the war against the free Ukrainian Atamans! Enough said. To hell with it. I forgive you in the name of the Government. I don't bear you any ill-will in my heart. What else can anyone expect of you, illiterate oafs? So now, listen.'

He pulled his curved sword out of its sheath. It gave a watery flash in the raw morning air.

'Singing, slow march, by companies, past the platform . . . Forward march!'

The band struck up a rollicking tune and the regiment clumsily goose-stepped past the platform. The First Company broke into song:

AfatJoung capon

Went for a swim.

They caught him and jailed him,

All for his whim.

Without waiting for the end of the march-past, the delegates hurriedly left the platform and drove away.

We were puzzled as to what would happen next. We were sure that Antoshchenko would be removed and cashiered. But the days passed and nothing happened. Evidently, the Government had other fish to fry. Denikin had seized Odessa. The military situation was grave.

Antoshchenko strutted about like a cock and bullied us more than ever.

The end came through the action of a man in our company- that meek little soldier, Yosif Morgenstem, the one I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter.

Mild and long-suffering by nature, Morgenstem hated Antoshthenko with a cold and savage hatred, especially since the Commander had promised to rid the regiment of its 'Jerusalem gentry' by 'finishing off' the Jews.

One night, against the regulations, our company was ordered to guard a warehouse beyond the Baykovo graveyard, and actually issued with two cartridges to each rifle.

It was a warm night. The smell of flowering shrubs drifted from somewhere. A dying crescent moon rose over the darkened city after midnight.

To keep myself awake, I hummed tune after tune. When I came to the old-fashioned song

The city noise is stilled,
The Neva Fort is silent,
The moon at midnight flashes
On the sentry's bayonet,

I heard the sound of horse's hooves. The rider pulled up at the warehouse and dismounted, cursing. I recognised Antoshchen-ko's voice. He sometimes inspected the sentry posts at night.

Antoshchenko walked up to the gate. In front of it stood Morgenstem.

'Who goes there?' he challenged in his piping voice.

'What's the matter with you?' growled Antoshchenko. 'Lost your pig's eyes? Can't you see who it is?'

Then Morgenstem, who had of course recognised the Commander at once, complied with the regulations by quickly shouting 'Who goes there' three times without a pause, and, giving Antoshchenko no time to reply, fired at point-blank range and shot him dead.

Morgenstem was arrested but released the next day, and the regiment was immediately disbanded. Our fatigue company was demobbed.

I walked home in the late dusk along Institute Street, past the State Bank built by an eccentric architect in imitation of the Palace of the Doges in Venice.

It was a sultry evening. A storm was approaching. Summer lightning played on the black, polished pillars of the Bank. A fresh breeze ruffled the chestnut leaves and died down.

In a completely dark room with an open window, a piano tinkled and a baritone voice sang: 'He's far away! He'll never know! You sigh in vain.' A fresh smell of grass came from the front garden.

I thought suddenly of the night of our school leaving ball, when I saw Olga Bogushevich home after the dance. We •walked along Institute Street under these same chestnut trees. Her dress seemed to me too festive even for that festive night, and she was all beauty and joy.

I remembered everything about that night - Olga shivering as we said goodbye at her door, her hands cold and her eyes shining in the lamplight. And it all seemed to me an incredible, century-old dream.

It was hard to believe that the same city could contain that simple candid world of summer lightning, chestnut trees, fresh grass and quiet human voices, love and books and poetry and hope, and side by side with it, Morgenstern's 'fiend of hell', Antoshchenko, a raving, bloodthirsty, crazy-eyed fanatic. How thin was the civilised crust, how bottomless the savagery beneath iti Human reason would plumb it in the long run. But this was the problem of our still unsettled lives.

Over twenty years later, I was asked to give a talk at the municipal library in the town of Alma Ata.

The late autumn crackled with stiff, dry leaves of poplars. Irrigation ditches ran with icy water from the mountains and smelled of the sea. A hard blue sky sparkled over the peaks of Alma-Tau, and beyond the peaks could be imagined India

After my talk, a little man with snow-white hair and sad eyes came up to me and asked:

'Remember me?'

'I'm afraid I don't.'

'I'm Yosif Morgenstem. We were together in the pioneer company in Kiev.'

'What are you doing now?' I asked.

'It doesn't matter,' he said, smiling. 'But I'm glad for you, that you're a writer. You must speak up for all of us-all you ever met in your life.

15
Puff Pastry

It was a windy summer morning. The wind rose in sudden gusts, the branches of the chestnut trees shook noisily outside the window, and field-guns boomed in the distance from the direction of Fastovo. There, a battle was being fought against Denikin who was advancing from the south.

Amalia's dark little flat smelled of freshly ground coffee. She was grinding the last of her precious coffee beans and the mill creaked, occasionally even screeched as though it knew its doom.

As always, the smell of coffee made the flat seem cosier, despite the 'seaside souvenir'-a broken wall-thermometer in a cockle-shell frame, which, summer and winter, showed three degrees of frost. Those everlasting three degrees sometimes made the flat seem colder than it was.

Someone knocked on the kitchen door. I heard Amalia open, then, after a short silence, cry out:

'Yes! He is! Indeed he is! Come in!'

Her voice broke. I rushed to the kitchen. Two dusty beggar women stood in the middle of the room. Their heads were so swathed in shawls that you couldn't see their eyes.

The shorter of the two cried 'Kostik!', sank down on a stool and leaned her head on the table. Her hazel staff clattered to the floor.

I recognised Mama's voice, knelt before her and tried to look into her face. Without looking at me, she pressed my cheeks between her thin, cold hands and burst into dry sobs.

Galya stood, afraid to move-1 don't suppose she could see anything. I noticed that her feet were wrapped in strips torn from a cotton bedspread and tied on with twine. I still remember the green pattern on those strips of bedspread. She had no glasses on. Her face strained, she was craning her neck, peering at the dark coat-stand in the corner, asking Mama: 'Well? Is he here? Why don't you tell me? Where's Kostik?'

They had come from Kopan to Kiev on foot. It had become impossible for them to stay on. The farm was continually raided by small gangs, and the only reason why Mama and Galya had remained unhurt was that they were too poor to rob.

Some of the robbers even took pity on Mama and gave her, now a flask of vegetable oil, now a handful of rusks. One had actually presented her with a Spanish shawl, very beautiful but all in holes. He said he had picked it up at the Zhitomir theatre.

What finally decided Mama to leave was a visit from the 'Avenging Angel'. After seeing dozens of Atamans, she was staggered to find that this one was a bearded, bespectacled highbrow who, before the war, had kept a chemist's shop in Radomysl and regarded himself as an anarchist philosopher.

Addressing Mama as 'Madam', he took away everything, to the last thread, but left her a detailed inventory of all he had removed so that she could claim compensation 'once anarchy has been established throughout the world.'

It had taken them over a fortnight to reach Kiev. They had dressed deliberately as beggar women, which indeed they were. Galya, without her glasses and holding on to Mama, looked like any one of the blind beggars often seen on the roads. No one would have believed them to be poor had she worn her spectacles. 'Goggles' were suspect in those tough times. Those who wore them were regarded as cunning enemies and loathed accordingly. The extraordinary thing is that something of this distrust has survived until now.

For several days Mama and Galya did nothing but rest and make up for lost sleep, their faces unalterably peaceful and happy. Then Mama, as usual, decided it was time to act and began to help Amalia with her sewing. The two women immediately made friends, and now two sewing machines whirred away in the flat, while Galya settled down to making artificial flowers.

She made them out of scraps of coloured material, working slowly and conscientiously. I was impressed by her array of steel tools, punches and stamps. She used them to cut daisy chains, rose-petals and leaves of various sorts, out of stiffened calico. Buds and stamens gave her an immense amount of trouble. The flowers were pretty, but smelled of dye and glue, and quickly gathered dust.

In my heart of hearts I was convinced that her occupation was utterly pointless, especially in a time of revolution, famine and civil war. Who would want her flowers when food was so short that people travelled miles and risked their necks for the sake of a pound of barley or a glassful of cooking oil? But as it turned out, I was wrong.

The little shops around Baykovo graveyard, where cheap wreaths, grave railings (usually made out of broken bedsteads), sugary marble monuments and curly iron crosses were sold, did a roaring trade in Galya's linen flowers.

Once a week, an old woman who supplied the shops came to collect them, and each time urged Galya not to take such trouble over them-the flowers would sell anyway, as there was no competition.

But this only made Galya indignant and she continued to fuss for days on end over a single tea-rose. She was scrupulous to the point of self-torture.

Always ready to philosophise and holding a fairly pessimistic view of the human condition, the old woman expounded in her monotonous voice:

'In times like these you've got to earn your living out of things that always were and are and will be, independently of revolutions and wars. Take hair, for instance-human hair will go on growing for as long as the earth turns. It grows night and day, mind you. So you can see, there's nothing more profitable than to be a hairdresser. Next to that there's death. People never stop dying.

And whatever the regime, they have to be buried. A dead man can't dig his own grave, he can't put a wreath on it, and write 'Rest in peace, dear spouse', or 'He fell gallantly fighting the enemy' on his own gravestone. So somebody can always make a living out of it. That's how it is. One man's grief is another man's bread. What's tears for some is a pitcher of milk for me.'

We were all terrified of this sinister graveyard crone. Galya alone had the courage uselessly to argue with her.

The noise of gunfire from the south was much louder. Red units were by now fighting Denikin over the approaches of the city.

The office with the unpronounceable name and the bales of calico, to which I had returned on my release from the army, was being evacuated. The bales were being moved to the goods station for dispatch to the north.

One morning, I came to work and found a typed notice pinned to the door. The typewriter was an old friend-it had lost its 'r'- so the notice read: 'Oganisation evacuated. Addess queies to so-and-so.'

I stood in the dark stairs littered with scraps of sacking, waiting for some other member of the staff to turn up. But no one came.

Puzzled, I went out and saw some twenty wounded soldiers, their faces drawn, their clothes covered with dust, tramping wearily along the pavement. Some had fresh white bandages on their arms or heads.

I followed them. They had obviously come straight from the front and reached the city on foot. They walked along Vasilkov Street and the Kreshchatik, then downhill towards the Podol and the Dnieper. And as they advanced, first in the busy shopping street, then in the smart Kreshchatik, the usual noise gradually died down. Passers-by stopped and looked long at the soldiers' backs. Panic followed them along the avenue and spread into the side-streets.

Catching up with one of them, I asked him where they had been fighting.

'Near the Red Tavern,' he said without looking up. It's pretty hot down there. Comrade.'

Denikin was approaching from the south. The Red Tavern ky west of Kiev.

'Has Denikin encircled the town? Has he got a lot of men there?' people asked from the crowd.

'What d'you mean, Denikin?' the soldier said crossly. 'He's nowhere near there.'

'Then whom were you fighting?'

'Who d'you think? The enemy!' The soldier grinned and caught up with the others.

It was hard to understand. And when, an hour later, shells flew overhead with their familiar screech and burst in the Podol and on the wharves, the Kievites were thrown into utter confusion. There began again the migration to the basements. We went back to our familiar routine-turns on duty in the yard, flickering oil-lamps going out at each explosion, water stored in every pot and pan, rumours and sleepless nights.

Acting as night-watchman was perhaps our most peaceful occupation in those turbulent times. I even looked forward to my turn on duty in our tiny courtyard beside the locked wicket in the bolted iron gate.

Something about that confined court with its single spreading chestnut tree at night made me feel as safe as in a fortress.

We could not be armed-a civilian in possession of even a child's popgun could be shot out of hand. All we were expected to do was to give the alarm at the slightest sign of danger, so that the people in the house should not be taken unawares. A large copper basin and a hammer hung on the wall for such an emergency.

The reason I enjoyed night-duty must have been the strange, illusory feeling it gave me, of safety coexisting with danger. The danger was there, lying in wait just outside the metal wicket scarcely a quarter of an inch thick.

Open the wicket, cross the threshold-and you were face to face with the unknown, the terrifying things which stalked the lifeless street in the pitch-black night. You heard the stealthy footsteps by the garden wall, you felt, with every nerve stretched, the passage of the lead bullet tearing the air and aimed at your heart.

Inside the courtyard, the fear vanished. You had only to listen and keep very still, not to give yourself away. Your animal instinct warned you that dead silence and darkness were your protection, your one chance was to remain unobserved.

I sometimes shared my watch with an old schoolmaster, Avel Stakover, who taught history at the former Levandovsky High School for Girls.

In spite of teaching in a girls' school, he was a confirmed misogynist. Short, with a long dishevelled beard and inflamed eyelids, slovenly and always in a rage, he was as tireless as Jeremiah in anathematising all women without exception.

The only subject he talked about without flying into a temper was the Middle Ages. He claimed they were the finest period in the history of mankind. Excluding, of course, the cult of the Blessed Damosel and the Madonna, everything about them suited him perfectly.

He would tick off their merits on his fingers. Firstly, the world was more spacious. Secondly, uncharted forests and rivers came right up to your front-door-you lived on the life-giving air of the woods and the fresh fruits of the earth instead of on paraffin fumes and tins. Thirdly, great poetry already flourished and the human intellect was as sharp as today. Fourthly, man was simpler, more clear-sighted and generally more attractive than at the height of civilisation.

He tried to convert me to the charm of the Middle Ages as though he could physically transplant me to that distant time and as though I could choose the period in which to live. He made speeches like a recruiting agent, he preached as a zealous disciple, an official delegate of those Middle Ages from which he seemed to have just returned.

Everything was grist to his mill-even the civil war in the Ukraine and our spells of duty as watchmen. The night the Red Army was retreating, shelled by an unknown enemy across the town, Stakover said to me:

'I don't know about you, but the place I'd like to live in is a mediaeval castle. Only there did man enjoy the blessedness of peace and safety in those dangerous times. Coming from the forest where at every step he risked being hanged from the nearest oak, he entered the age-old shelter of the crenellated walls. The drawbridge was pulled up, the fortress gate barred and locked, and not only did he feel the joy of his escape but of all the fullness and richness of life. It filled the air and the sunlit silence of the enormous stone-flagged courts, it rang in the music of the horn summoning him to the banqueting hall, it was bound into the thick folios in the library, their pages stirred by the wind. He had no fear for his life. And only on this condition, my friend, can man create anything of immortal value.'

By day, Stakover showed us plans and photos of old castles, with their great towers, dungeons, embrasures, turrets, passageways, their gloomy labyrinths of rooms, the walls a couple of yards thick, their fire-places, their walled gardens and wells. The castles stood on the tops of mountains and impregnable rocks. The winds of Burgundy and the He de France, of Lotharingia and Savoy, of Bohemia and the Apennines, blew on them from every side. The sun, like a fiery crown, shone on the towers, banners and moss-grown slates.

Mama loved listening to him. When I was on duty, she got up at night, put on a warm shawl and came into the yard. We sat, sheltered from the wind, and talked in whispers, often breaking off to listen to some unfamiliar sound.

Like all mothers. Mama thought of her children as infants. Simple-heartedly, she urged me to see more of Stakover:

'He's a fund of knowledge, Kostik. He's a walking encyclopaedia. Such people can be very useful to you. Don't look down on them.'

Indeed, I never did. I listened to them for hours, grateful for their knowledge and their generosity in sharing it.

What astonished me was that they were grateful to me for listening. They had evidently not been spoiled by success, and I could explain this only by the fact that we Russians, as Pushkin said, are 'lazy and incurious'. Neither school nor university taught me so much, so deeply, so absorbingly, as I have learned on my own from books and from people. I only envied those •who find it easy to make friends and plunge at once into an interesting conversation. Being an exceedingly shy man, I have always been slow to do this.

Shells whistled overhead all through the night. They exploded in the Podol with a noise as of someone dropping bundles of metal sheets.

By dawn, the Red Army had withdrawn along the Dnieper, and the city was quiet.

Early in the morning, Mama, who was gifted with unusual curiosity and complete disregard for danger, went out, as she called it, 'to reconnoitre*. Soon she came back and told us that the city was empty, Denikin hadn't yet arrived, but here and there, farsighted citizens were already flying red, white and blue Tsarist flags.

We were drinking carrot tea in the kitchen when the familiar sound of cheering broke out in Fundukleyev Street. We went to the balcony. The soldiers marching down the road, with blue and yellow banners, were not Denikin's but Petlyura's. They were calm, self-confident and looked smug in their Austrian uniforms.

And all the 'proper' old Ukrainians, of whom we had so recently seen so much were out again, in their embroidered shirts, cheering and flinging their moth-eaten lambskin hats in the air.

The city was puzzled. Why Petlyura instead of Denikin?

The soldiers marched up to the Kreshchatik, occupied it, spread their bivouac, and hung their flag from the balcony of the town hall. This was a way of staking one's claim-every new occupier hung his flag from the balcony of the town hall to show he would not give up without a fight.

Rumours flew round that Denikin had ceded Kiev to Petlyura and removed his forces from the southern approaches of the city towards Orel.

Dazed and sickened by all the sudden changes and 'upheavals', the population hardly cared who controlled the town, so long as not too many people were shot, robbed or driven from their homes. So the arrival of the Petlyurists was greeted with complete indifference.

But at one o'clock, advance units of Denikin's cavalry, followed by one regiment of Don Cossacks, moved in from the direction of Pechersk.

They reached the Kreshchatik, found it occupied, were greatly astonished-as astonished as the citizens-and set about trying to sort things out.

It appeared that a Petlyura division had long been hiding in the villages west of Kiev, waiting for its chance. No one had known this. Taking advantage of the withdrawal of the Soviet troops, it had decided to jump in ahead of Denikin and captured the city after two days' fighting.

Naturally, the Denikinists were displeased. They entered into some sort of involved secret negotiations with the Petlyurists. In the end, a red, white and blue flag appeared on the town hall balcony, next to Petlyura's, as a sign of dual sovereignty.

The Kievites were more bewildered than ever. Who in fact was in control?

But all doubts on this score were setded by evening, when the Denikinists brought up reinforcements. Two more regiments of Don Cossacks poured like lava down the steep Pechersk Hills, taking the Petlyurists completely by surprise.

Lances levelled, swords flashing, the Cossacks galloped full-tilt, yelling, whooping, firing into the air. The suddenness and savagery of the attack were enough to break the strongest nerves.

The Petlyurists fled without a shot, abandoning their field-guns and rifles. And the same 'proper' old Ukrainians who had wildly cheered them only that morning, shouted and shook their fists from their doors and balconies, calling out, 'Shamel' and 'Disgrace!' But the Pedyurists paid no attention. Glancing back in terror and hastily stuffing their pockets, they ran faster than ever.

Not until Svyatoshino, outside the city, did they stop and draw breath. Their one remaining battery fired a dozen shells in the general direction of Kiev. But there were no casualties-unless you count a wrecked ice-cream cart on Vladimir Hill, and one ear knocked by a shell-splinter off the plaster statue of either St Methodius or St Cyril.

Next morning, an order signed by General Bredov was posted up, announcing that from that day and forever Kiev was again a part of Russia, indivisibly one.

16
Cries in the Night

It must have been that late hour of night when everything is clogged and deadened by darkness and silence. Even the water in the rusty pipes stopped dripping from the kitchen tap after midnight.

It was the kind of night that breeds troubled dreams and leaves a vague sense of disquiet.

For a long time, someone had been trying hard to rouse me, but I could not wake up. Or rather, I didn't want to, and kept groping for some vanishing gleam of light in my befuddled mind.

At last the sound of crying broke through to me. I sat up, opened my eyes and saw Mama.

She was sitting at the foot of my bed, her grey hair falling over her face in dishevelled strands. Clutching the bed rail, she sobbed quietly, her shoulders shaking.

'What's the matter?' I asked. 'What's happened?'

'Hush,' she whispered back. 'You'll wake Galya.'

'But what's wrong? Tell me.'

'I don't know,' she looked at me vacantly and shivered. For a moment I thought she had gone out of her mind. 'I don't know, but it's something dreadful. Get up and listen. Go out onto the balcony.'

I groped my way across the room. The balcony door was open. Then I heard it-from far away in the direction of Vasilkov Street and rolling across the darkened city towards us, came a many-voiced scream of terror, the death-cry of a great multitude.

No individual voices were distinguishable.

'What is it?' I spoke into the darkness.

'It's a pogrom,' Amalia answered unexpectedly from behind me.

Her teeth were chattering. Strained to breaking point, she was on the verge of hysteria.

I listened again to the noise outside. Apart from the screaming, there were none of the usual signs of a pogrom-no shots, no crashing of broken windows, no fire glow.

After the terrible spate of Gaidamak pogroms, things had quietened down. They were quiet too, at first, under Denikin. The Jews were left in peace. Only occasionally and, even then, only away from the .crowded streets, would a posse of Cadets with the bright eyes of drug-addicts ride by, singing their favourite song:

Black Hussars!

Save Russia!

Kill the Jews!

They re the Commissars.

But since the Red Army had freed Orel and begun to drive Denikin south, the mood of the Whites had changed. There were attacks on Jews in towns and villages closer and closer to Kiev, until, at last, that night a pogrom started in the city itself.

The thugs had surrounded a block of flats in Vasilkov Street but had not yet broken in. Then, from the dead stillness of the dark house, came a woman's terrifying, despairing shriek. She had no other weapon with which to protect her children-only this endless, unbroken wail of terror and helplessness.

The woman's lonely cry was taken up by others, echoing it throughout the house, from attic to cellar. This howling broke the raiders' nerve and they took to their heels. But there was nowhere for them to run to-the wailing outstripped them, coming from house after house in Vasilkov Street and from side street after side street.

The screams spread like wildfire from district to district. The most terrifying thing about it was that it came from dark, deserted-looking houses and completely empty, lifeless streets where only a few gas-lights nickered as though lighting its way.

I was to learn this only later. At the moment, knowing nothing of what was going on, I hurried to dress and go out to where the heart-rending cries came from. Mama also dressed- she decided to come with me.

Why was I going? I didn't quite know. I couldn't stay at home. I had to know-I knew I would have no peace until I found out. Not to know was worse than the worst danger stalking those streets by night.

But while we were still dressing, the shrieking spread to Fundukleyev Street adjoining us, and to the three-storeyed building next door. Not a window in it was lit up.

Going to the balcony again, I saw men running along the street, swerving away from the shrieking houses. They must have been some of the raiders.

I had a fit of nervous shivering. Amalia was sitting on the floor, swaying, moaning softly, her hands over her face. Mama took her to her room and gave her essence of valerian.

I stood listening. Podol, Novoye Stroyeniye, Bessarabka-the whole huge city was shrieking. The noise must have been heard far beyond its precincts. An agonised cry for mercy, it beat against the dark, low sky and echoed back to earth.

The pogrom never got under way. Taken aback, the authorities changed their minds. Armed patrols were sent to keep order in the town. The streets were lit. By morning, a reassuring proclamation by the Officer in Command of the Occupation Army had been posted up. And next day. The Kiev Messenger came out with an article - 'Torture by Terror'- by Schulgin, a well-known conservative, attacking Denikin's High Command for abetting pogroms.

I had heard people-even crowds-screaming in terror, but never a whole city. It was unbearably shocking because it cancelled out the usual, presumably naive, assumption of an indestructible common bond of humanity present in us all. It was a final desperate appeal to the last remnants of human conscience.

At that time in Kiev, those last remnants were still 'operative' as people say now-there was no pogrom. But there might have been-it was sheer accident that things went the way they did. Innocent people have often enough been massacred throughout history.

There have indeed been horrors in plenty during man's progress towards justice, freedom and happiness, when only deep faith in the final victory of reason over black stupidity could keep hopelessness at bay.

Yet, such is the power of the human conscience that it can never safely be written off.

A friend of mine, a writer, recently told me an extraordinary story.

He had grown up in Latvia and speaks fluent Latvian. Soon after the war, he was travelling by train from Riga to Vzmorye, a gloomy old Latvian sitting opposite him. I don't know what led up to it, but after a while the old man told him the following story.

'Listen,' he said. 'I live in a suburb of Riga. Just before the war, a new tenant moved in next door. He was a bad man. I'd even say a thoroughly wicked man. He lived by black marketeering. You know what such people are-no heart, no principles. They say sometimes that hoarding and speculating are only words for making money. But how?-A little out of human greed, but mostly out of human sorrow, out of the tears of children. This man together with his wife were black market operators. Well . . . the Germans took Riga and drove all the Jews into a ghetto-they killed some and left the rest to starve. The whole ghetto was cordoned off-not even a cat could get through. Anyone who came up to within fifty paces of the sentry was shot. The Jews were dying like flies, especially the children, and that gave my neighbour a bright idea-bribe the sentry, drive in with a cartload of potatoes and sell them to the Jews for gold and precious stones. Locked in their ghetto, the Jews were said still to have a lot of valuables. That's what he decided to do. I met him in the street one day, and you wouldn't believe he told me. 'I'll sell only to mothers with children,' he said. 'Why?' I asked him.-'Because they'll give anything to keep their children alive, so I'll make more out of them.' I managed to keep my mouth shut, but I can tell you it cost me something.'

The old man took his pipe out of his mouth and showed his teeth. Several were missing.

'See that? I bit on my pipe so hard, I broke the stem and two of my teeth. Talk about blood rushing to your head! Mine rushed to my fists. They felt heavy as lead. I could have killed him with one blow-I'd have done it too if he had stayed within reach. He must have guessed-he jumped back, snarling like a hyena. But that's by the way . . . That night, he loaded his cart and drove off to Riga, to the ghetto. The sentry stopped him, but you know how two scoundrels understand each other at a glance. The sentry took his bribe, though he told him:

'You're a damned fool. They've got nothing left, only their empty bellies. You'll soon be back with your rotten potatoes.'

'Well, he drove into a big yard. A lot of women and children came and stood round the cart. They said nothing, they watched him as he untied a sack. One woman stood with a dead little boy in her arms, holding out a broken gold watch. 'Are you crazy?' he yelled at her. 'What d'you want potatoes for, now he's dead? Get out of the way.' He told me himself afterwards, he didn't know what had come over him. Suddenly, he started untying the sacks and spilling the potatoes on the ground. 'Hurry up!' he shouted at the women. 'Give me your children. I'll take them out. Only they mustn't move or make a sound. Hurry up!' So the women quickly shoved their children into the sacks- they were too frightened to move-and he tied them up tight. Imagine-they didn't even have rime to kiss them, and they knew they'd never see them again.

'He filled the whole cart-all the sacks had children in them, except just a few with potatoes he packed round the sides-and he drove away. The women were trying to kiss the muddy cartwheels, but he went straight on and didn't look back. He kept yelling at his horses, for fear a child should start crying and give them all away. But none did.

'The sentry he knew spotted him and shouted: 'What did I tell you? Didn't I say you were a bloody fool? Now get the hell out of here with your stinking potatoes before the captain shows up.'

'So he drove past the sentry, cursing the Jews and their children at the top of his voice. He didn't go straight home but took a round-about way to a place in the forest beyond Tukumsi, where he found our partisans; and he handed the children over to them and they kept them in a safe place. He told his wife the Germans had seized his potatoes and kept him for two days under arrest. After the war, he divorced his wife and left Riga.'

The old man paused.

'I'm thinking now,' he added, smiling for the first time, 'it's lucky I didn't lose my temper and kill him.

17
Wedding Present

The train took eighteen days to get from Kiev to Odessa. I didn't count the number of hours, but I know that each seemed more like two, I suppose because of the constant danger of death.

Only three passengers were in fact killed, and a few more wounded by stray bullets, but we all-especially the young priests from the Catholic Seminary in Zhitomir-felt these low casualties to be a merciful dispensation.

The priests were trying to reach Poland by an extraordinarily roundabout route-Istanbul, Salonika, Belgrade and Budapest. Needless to say, we could not believe that even one of them would get there alive.

One warm autumn morning, when the Whites still held a line between Orel and Kursk and were apparently safe in Kiev, we awoke early to the loud chatter of machine-guns.

As usual, it was impossible to find out anything without a 'reconnaissance'. It was Mama who went. While the rest of us •were still hurriedly dressing, she slipped out and soon came back, cheerful and excited.

I was always amazed by Mama's courage. It was partly that she was a determined fatalist-she believed everyone's life to be ruled by inexorable fate. No one could escape his destiny. Everything was fixed in advance.

She brought back an astounding piece of news. Soviet forces had broken into Kiev and already seized Galitsky Market.

Yet, the nearest Soviet forces were a long way off. It was inconceivable that they could have crossed all this stretch of enemy-held territory without being spotted by the Whites. Their appearance in Kiev seemed a miracle. But, if so, it was a very tangible miracle-bullets were again raining fast and thick on our wretched house.

It turned out later that some of the Soviet regiments, driven from the south at the very beginning of Denikin's advance had gone to ground in the vast and almost impenetrable marshes of Irpen near Kiev and remained hidden there throughout the summer. Neither the Denikinists nor even the friendly civilians in Kiev knew anything about it-the peasants in the nearby villages had never, by a single word, betrayed their presence.

Now they had irrupted into Kiev, taken half the city, seized a quantity of food and ammunition, and were fighting their way out to rejoin their units in the north.

The fighting was savage. It flared up in district after district and only died down at nightfall.

Next day, it became known that General Bredin, in command of Denikin's forces, had decided to call up all men under forty. I decided to escape mobilisation by fleeing to Odessa.

By then, Mama was over the worst of her worries. She had a room in Kiev, and before I went, I left her nearly all my money. Galya was earning. And both had been befriended by Amalia - I knew that she would not desert them.

We agreed I would come back when things had settled down, and I went off with an easy mind.

The first night passed safely, although the glow of burning houses swayed in the wind on the skyline. The blacked-out train crept stealthily. Often it stopped, as though to listen to the confused noises of the night, hesitating whether to go on. Sometimes it even backed when the glow was very bright, as if to hide in the shadows. Each time, I thought I could see black figures of horsemen ahead, crossing the line, unaware of our presence.

With me in our goods wagon were five priests, a journalist who wrote for Russian Monitor, Nazarov, and a scrawny, fidgety Odessan with the Ribbon of the Legion of Honour in his buttonhole. His name was Victor Khvat. He had fought with the French Army in the war, and even taken part in the famous battle of the Marne.

Khvat joked all the way, mostly about his Jewish origin. He probably did this to conceal his nervousness. We knew that if we were captured by bandits-and the Ukraine was swarming with them-Khvat would be the first to be shot.

There were many new colloquialisms for being shot-being 'put against the wall', 'changed', 'liquidated', 'expended', 'sent to Dukhonin'. Nearly every district had its own expressions.

Khvat's humour was a valuable asset-a good joke could save a man's life.

Nazarov, too, had useful qualities, which often got him out of trouble-he was simple-hearted and short-sighted. His guileless-ness predisposed even the cruellest bandits in his favour, and near-blindness was a sure sign of a man being defenceless and harmless.

The priests were pale, quiet and excessively polite young men. In moments of danger they surreptitiously crossed themselves, throwing us a worried glance.

But already by the third day, they had grown a stubble and lost their smart appearance. Like the rest of us they were unwashed. Their cassocks were torn-whenever we stopped for refuelling, the priests showed the greatest zeal in breaking up the station fences to feed the engine. They were considered experts at the job. Victor Khvat acted as their foreman.

In Fastov, we were joined by a plump, cheerful young woman with cheeky eyes. Her name was Lucienna.

Before getting in, she flung a dusty bundle wrapped in a torn gypsy shawl through the open door of the wagon. The priests were sitting sedately on their wooden bunks, chewing bone-dry rye-crackers. Khvat claimed the cakes were made chiefly of straw, and horses were very fond of them.

'Hi, you layabouts!' Lucienna shouted. 'Can't you give a girl a hand? You can see I can't get in by myself.'

The priests jumped up. Ashamed of their discourtesy, they rushed to the door and, by their joint efforts, pulled Lucienna aboard.

'Out! That's better.' She looked round the wagon. 'Though I don't think much of your smart set-up!'

The priests were too embarrassed to speak.

'All right. Reverend Fathers.' She finished her inspection and hitched up a much-darned silk stocking. 'I'll take that dark corner over there. So you won't think I've got designs on your virginity. Not that it's any more use to you than a poultice to a corpse!'

One priest giggled out of turn while Khvat said, grinning:

'Don't worry, my dear, with you here we're all sunk-cheerfully and with a flourish!'

'Shut up, pipsqueak,' Lucienna growled in an affected voice. 'Think I haven't seen jokers like you before? I'm from Odessa! I don't actually dance the can-can, though I did have a job as a singer at the Kharkov cafe-chantant. The Tivoli. I could sing you songs that would set your anaemic blood on fire, my boy. But joking apart, it wouldn't hurt you to treat a lady to a rye-cake when she hasn't had a bite for two days.'

We treated her to rye-cakes, and from that moment began 'a new and brighter life' for us, as Khvat put it.

Lucienna, with her high spirits and her vitality, took everything in her stride. Even the constant danger of being shot up and captured by bandits in our ramshackle train only made her joke and tease the priests, who were completely bewildered by her. Her jokes were as good as Khvat's, she sang music-hall songs and stunned the priests by her anecdotes.

The priests sighed, but their eyes often lit up with genuine admiration for 'Lucienna the sinner'. They obviously liked her, and kept trying to find excuses for her in Catholic dogma, in the Old and New Testaments, almost even in the Papal Encyclicals.

They finally decided that she was a modern Mary Magdalen- the beautiful sinner canonised for her pure love of Christ, and because she had flung herself at the feet of the Crucified, covering them with her hair, and thereby easing the pain in His tortured limbs.

After all, many women had since travelled the same path from sin to sanctity-and gold haloes had been lit over their heads by masters of the Renaissance, and white lilies bowed over their hems, spreading the odour of chastity.

The priests talked softly among themselves. I knew enough Polish to follow, and it struck me, how much of the eternal sensuousness of human nature-etherealised but still there - found expression in Catholicism. Years later I was to feel this more strongly still, when I saw the pretty Madonnas smiling their Gioconda smiles in the many-coloured dusk of Italian churches.

Now, at a distance of decades, it all seems to me incredible: our conversations in the broken-down goods wagon where the wind whistled through the bullet holes and where our ill-assorted company lived in such cheerful harmony-the priests, the Mary Magdalen, the knight decorated with the Legion of Honour, the half-blind philosopher never parted from his pocket edition of Heine, and I, a young man, in those days also without a recognised profession and given to flights of fantasy.

The train would often stop and the engine whistle plaintively. This meant we were running out of fuel, and if we wanted to get on before the nearest gang of bandits fell upon us, we must hurry to the nearest fence or station tool-shed and start chopping it down.

Khvat rolled back the heavy wagon-door and shouted:

'Eminences! Your axes!'

The priests grabbed the two axes and the crowbar we kept in the coach and hitched up their skirts, showing long legs in big army boots and puttees.

We jumped out after them and made for the nearest fence. Sometimes we were unlucky. The owner would open fire with a sawn-off shotgun. Then, the engine driver started the train without a warning whistle, Khvat yelled, 'To Horse!' and we ran after our coach and leapt in.

After Belaya Tserkov, the train came more and more often under fire from the nearby woods. We never saw the snipers.

We lay flat on our bunks, to 'reduce the target area,' as Khvat urged us. He claimed that a man lying down was sixteen times less vulnerable than one standing up.

But this was not much comfort to us, especially after a bullet came through the wall, brushing Lucienna's fluffy hair and smashing the Spanish comb she had inherited from her grandmother- a market woman who sold doughnuts in Rybnitsa on the Dniester.

After hitting the comb, the bullet seemed for a few seconds to buzz round the coach like a demented bee, but finally bumped into another wall and dropped on the back of one of the priests.

He picked it up and put it away in his purse, promising to hang it on a silver chain as an ex-voto before the ikon of Our Lady of Chestokhov.

Lucienna patted her hair, sat up on her bunk and burst shrilly into a rollicking song, the priests joining in the chorus:

Good-day, Lyuha, good-da)', love, Good-day, darling, and good-hye. You've eaten all the strawberries-

Now have olives and don't cry.

Then she thought for a moment and said:

'If I'm killed, bury me in my gypsy shawl. I know the priests will send me off in proper style, I don't worry about that.'

The priests, still on their faces-the shots were fewer but hadn't stopped-heaved and shook. It looked as if they were trying hard not to laugh.

'I'll get to Heaven all right,' Lucienna said firmly. 'No difficulty at all. I'll just sing a song to St Peter, and he'll laugh to split his sides, and blow his nose and say to me: 'Panna Lucienna, I only wish we'd met on the sinful earth instead of in this boring Heaven. We'd have had such a time that people would have stared in wonder and said, 'That's quite something!' '

'You shouldn't say such blasphemous things, Panna Lucienna,' said the most austere of the five priests. 'Our Lady forgive you! As for us, we've forgiven you long ago.'

'Thank you for that,' said Lucienna. She suddenly added softly: 'You're all darlings. I'm so happy with you. Nobody's made a pass at me, nobody treats me like a tart. And nobody knows I've been shot through the breast already. I shot myself in Lugansk. There's a damned rotten town by that name. That's where I lost my little boy . . .'

She lay face down on the bunk. Nobody spoke.

'And what the hell am I going to Odessa for, what am I going to do there?' Lucienna said suddenly, without raising her head.

I got up and opened the door quietly. A little dark-blue river was looping its way across the dry plain. A white autumn sun shone brightly. Its waning warmth touched my face. And high up in the mists overhead, a flight of cranes was winging its way south, to where our grunting, jogging train was taking us.

A woman with pock-marks and red hair got on to the train in Korsun. She was going to her daughter's wedding in Znamenka, and was taking her a heavy marriage-chest filled with her dowry.

She was shrill and bad-tempered. A grubby flounce of yellow lace showed under her skirt, dangling against her greased, hobnailed boots.

She ordered the undernourished, grey-faced railway guards about like a bandit chief, shouting at them to load her chest on to one of the wagons. But none of the passengers would make room for her. They had taken a violent dislike to her chest, her red, shiny face, and her screeching voice.

It must, I think, have been the first time I ever saw a real 'kulak'-greedy, spiteful, mean, brazenly rich and well-fed in the midst of the general poverty and misfortune. There were still many such ruthless, arrogant kulaks in the Ukraine in those days, the women ready to throttle their own fathers for gain, while their 'darling sons' joined Makhno or Zeiyony and, without turning a hair, buried people alive, smashed children's skulls with rifle-butts, and cut strips of skin for belts from the backs of Jews and Red Army men.

Stumping excitedly round her chest, tying and untying her warm shawl, the woman was scolding furiously:

'The whole train is packed with riff-raff from town-tramps and tarts without a penny to their name, all they have is holes in their pants-and decent people can't get in! Squash them like flies, I say, don't take them gallivanting from Kiev to Odessa!'

A guard with drooping shoulders stood listening despondently.

'Don't stand there like a stuck pig. What did I give you that bread and lard for? So that every good-for-nothing should laugh at me? You promised to get me in, and you'll do just that or I'll have that bread and lard back from you.'

The guard shrugged his shoulders and slouched off along the platform. He looked into coach after coach, entreating the passengers in a low voice so that the woman shouldn't hear:

Tor pity's sake, take her in, the old sow. Her husband is the mayor, a real bandit, he'll kill me. And she did give me a loaf, and there's not a crumb in the house.'

But the passengers refused. Finally, by getting the woman to promise bread and lard to the engine driver, he induced him to agree to carry the chest on the buffer-plate between the headlights.

With great difficulty, the chest was hauled up and firmly roped onto the engine. The woman climbed onto the chest, sat on it like a broody hen, her skirts spread out, wrapped her shawl around her, and the train started.

So we puffed along, past jeering village boys, with the chest in front of the engine and the fury perched on top.

Every time the train stopped, she opened her basket and had a long and hearty meal. She couldn't always have been hungry- she seemed to eat deliberately, out of spite, to gloat over the hungry passengers and get even with them.

Triumphantly, she cut thick slices of tender lard, tore roast chickens apart with fingers like claws, and stuffed her mouth with chunks of soft white bread. When she had finished, her cheeks shining with grease, she belched loudly and puffed.

She seldom climbed down from her chest and, even to relieve herself, moved only a couple of yards away from the train. It was not only shamelessness but utter contempt for everyone else.

The driver grunted and turned away but said nothing. He had yet to see a single crumb of the bread she had promised to give him, but only in Znamenka.

The passengers hated her with a black hatred stronger than their fear of death. Some actually hoped for a gang to shoot up the train 'properly'-the woman on her chest made a perfect target and, we all thought, was bound to be killed before anyone else.

Somewhere past Bobrinskaya station, our thirst for vengeance was partly satisfied. The train came under fire from Makhno's men. Several bullets hit the marriage chest. The woman was unhurt, but some of the dowry must have been spoilt.

After that, the woman sat as though turned to stone, her lips tight and blue, her eyes blazing with such rage that no one dared go near the engine unless he had to.

We still awaited the bolt from heaven. I remembered Mama's famous 'law of retribution'. When I mentioned it, the priests brightened up and assured me that it did indeed exist, and lost none of its force even in times of civil war, while Lucienna flatly denied that there was any such thing and said it was a pity the men had not the guts to throw the old bag off the nearest bridge into a nice deep river.

But retribution came at last. The day was suitably overcast. Dark, ragged clouds chased with incredible speed over the bare fields. Squalls of rain lashed as hard as hail against the peeling walls of Znamenka station.

The Goddess of Retribution herself might have unleashed those clouds and that rain and wind.

The woman started by giving the engine driver a single loaf and a single pound of fat instead of the promised five pounds and two loaves. The driver actually thanked her and lifted the chest with the fireman's help.

The chest weighed a quarter of a ton at least. Sweating, they hauled it off the engine and set it down on the track.

'Two hefty fellows and you can't lift a chest,' said the woman. 'Bring it over here.'

'You try,' said the engine driver. 'It needs a crowbar. I'll get one now.'

He climbed into the cab, but instead of coming back with a crowbar, he released two scalding, whistling jets of steam, one on either side of the engine. The woman yelped and jumped out of the way.

The driver started the engine, and crashed into the chest which flew apart, spilling all its treasure-a featherbed, blouses, dresses, house linen, forks, knives and spoons-even a fat samovar.

With a loud whistle and a belch of steam, the engine ploughed through the lot, squashing the samovar flat as a pancake. Not content with this, it stopped by the water pump, reversed, stopped again over the remnants of the dowry and let out a hot stream of water mixed with engine oil.

Flinging off her shawl, the woman grabbed two handfuls of her hair, pulled it out and fell face down on the ground with a rending shriek. Her hands still clutching the tufts of hair, her arms jerked spasmodically in the puddle beside the track as though she were swimming.

Then she jumped up and flew at the driver.

'I'll scratch your eyes out,' she shouted, rolling up her sleeves. We hauled her back.

A small figure elbowed its way through the crowd. All one could see was an enormous checked cloth-cap, a sharp nose sticking out from under it, and a pair of new galoshes. The bridegroom, coming to meet his prospective mother-in-law, had arrived late. He looked at the ruined dowry, picked up the flattened samovar, dropped it at the woman's feet and said in a grating voice:

'Thank you very much, dearest Mama, for delivering the little we had left in such good condition.'

The woman turned, grabbed him by the shirt-front and spat in his face. The crowd roared with laughter.

We had stayed at Bobrinskaya for several days, while the track ahead, demolished by Makhno, was being repaired.

All the country south of Bobrinskaya was at the mercy of savage freebooters. Thundering about on gun-carriages, roaring and letting off machine-guns, they looted, raped, pillaged, turning tail at the first sight of a determined opponent.

From small towns pink with hollyhocks and until recently patriarchal, ferocious Atamans burst into the open. The blood-letting days of the 'Uman' were back. Swords whistled and flashed, slicing off the heads of men and thistles. Black flags with white skulls and cross-bones fluttered over the quiet fields of Nikolayevsk and Kherson. And the Middle Ages paled before the lust, violence, and sudden, black unreason of the twentieth century.

Where had it all stayed hidden, ripening, gathering strength and biding its time? History was racing backwards and, after many peaceful years, man again realised his helplessness before his neighbour's inhumanity.

Nazarov was the one who raised this subject most often. The priests kept quiet; Lucienna slept for days on end; Khvat disliked such conversations as too serious.

The day after we stopped at Bobrinskaya, I walked to Smela. Pilgrimages to once familiar places are a melancholy business. My depression deepened with every altered landmark, here an older porch or a taller poplar, there the letter-box, now rusty, where I had once posted my first love letter to a blue-eyed Kiev schoolgirl.

Smela was quiet and looked empty. People stayed at home as much as possible, for fear of running into drunken Denikin soldiers. The Tyasmin River was as thickly carpeted with bright-green watercress as I remembered, and looked like a spring meadow. The smell of marigolds drifted through the fences.

All these places-Smela and the small town of Cherkassy next to it-were bound up with memories of my home. As I walked the empty streets, my short life suddenly stretched out before me into a long vista of crowded years.

I suppose the reason why people are fond of recalling their past is that the meaning of what happened becomes clearer seen from a distance. My own passion for remembering developed too early-when I was still a boy-and turned into a game.

What I liked to recall was not the consecutive order of events. Instead, I grouped them, as it were, under certain headings. Thus I would think of all the hotels (they were really cheap lodging houses) where I had ever stayed, or all the rivers I had ever seen, or the ships I had ever sailed in, or the girls I thought I might have fallen in love with.

This addiction turned out to be less silly than it had seemed at first. Remembering hotels, for instance, I would try to think of every single detail I could dredge up-the colour of the faded runners in the corridors, the pattern of the wallpapers, the hotel room smells and the prints on the walls, the faces of the maids, the way they talked, the shabby wicker furniture, everything down to the inkstands made of stone from the Urals and always filled with bone-dry skeletons of flies instead of ink.

All this I tried to see afresh, as though for the first time, and only afterwards, when I began to write, did it all strike me as useful to my work. Unconsciously I had trained my memory to be concrete, fully visual, my mind to relive past experience-not to speak of accumulating a vast amount of detail from which I had only to choose.

I walked back to Bobrinskaya at dusk. I followed the railway. It dipped into a deep hollow. The moon had already risen. Shots came from the direction of Bobrinskaya. And suddenly I felt happy and excited to be living in a time of so many happenings, so many hopes.

We pulled into Pomoshnaya at dawn. The train was immediately shunted to a siding at the far end, where slagheaps overgrown with goosefoot bristled with black, withered stems.

Later in the morning we came out and were surprised to see that the engine had been uncoupled and had disappeared. There was not a soul to be seen anywhere along the platforms or the tracks with their many points. The station might have been dead.

I went to explore. The air was grey and cold. All the doors were open but there was no one in the waiting rooms, the restaurant, the booking hall. The station was deserted.

After pacing the echoing stone floors, I went through to the square at the back, walked round the building and came to a tottering, half-open side door. Sitting at a table in a high, narrow room was a guard in his red cap. He sat hunched up over the table, hands tucked into the sleeves of his greatcoat. He didn't turn as I came in-only his small red-rimmed eyes swivelled in my direction. Greasy tufts of hair stuck out from under his red cap.

'What's happening?' I asked. 'Where's everyone?'

He took his hands out of his sleeves and beckoned mysteriously. I went up to the table. Clutching my hand with cold, damp fingers, he muttered sofdy:

'They're all out in the fields. I'm alone. It's not my turn to be on duty, it's Bondarchuk's. But he's got a wife and children, poor devil, I haven't. So I stayed. He didn't ask me to, I volunteered.'

He was squeezing my hand tighter and tighter. I was beginning to be frightened. He's mad, I thought. I pulled my hand away. He gave me a puzzled look and grinned.

'Frightened, are you? So am I.'

'What of?'

'A bullet.' He stood up and began to fasten his coat. 'A bullet through my head. Nobody knows where it's now, that bullet. So I sit here and wait.'

He looked at the clock.

'Another half-hour.'

'What happens then?'

'Makhno's coming,' the guard said suddenly in a loud voice. 'Realise what that means? He'll be here in half an hour.'

'Where did you hear that?'

'Here.' He pointed at the telegraph key on the table 'Straight from Edison. Things were a lot more peaceful before that Edison came along. People didn't know and didn't care. Now we know everything before it happens and it's nothing but a lot of worry. Makhno's been beaten near Golta. He's making for his base, for Alexandria. He's sent a telegram-he'll be passing through Pomoshnaya non-stop with three trainloads of men. All the points and signals are to be left clear, and all the station staff is to wait for him. If anybody runs away, he'll shoot everyone he finds. That's what it says here-'everyone'-see for yourself.'

He showed me the tangle of telegraph tape on the table and sighed.

'If only he'd go through quickly! Are you from the passenger train?'

I said yes and smiled-a hell of a passenger train it was, our collection of dirty, broken-down wagons leaning this way and that.

'Then go back and tell them to lock themselves in and not to show their noses outside. If Makhno spots you, you'll be out in a ditch in front of a machine-gun in no time.'

I went back with my staggering news. We immediately put out all the iron stoves, so that the smoke from the tin pipes shouldn't give us away and locked all the doors. Luckily there was a long empty goods train screening us from the main line.

But Khvat and I were not content to sit and look at it-we wanted to see Makhno and his army. Sheltering behind coaches and sheds, we made our way to the station building. The guard was glad to see us-he needed company.

'Go into the restaurant,' he told us. 'You'll have a good view of everything through the windows.'

'What about you?'

'I'll go out onto the platform and wave the train through. With my green flag.'

Khvat looked at him doubtfully.

'Hadn't you better stay inside?'

'Don't be silly! I'm on duty. If I'm not on the platform, the engine driver will stop the train, and then it's goodbye for ever,

write to me in heaven!'

Khvat and I went to the restaurant. We found a wooden board with a prehistoric timetable of arrivals and departures, and moved it to the window, so that we could look out from behind it. Like this, no one would notice us. In case of danger we could slip out to the kitchen where there was a stairway leading to a dark cellar.

A grey torn cat with rusty patches came up the stairs, gave us a passing glance, walked on every table and the empty counter, jumped onto the window-sill, turned his back on us, sat down and, like ourselves, stared at the empty tracks. The tip of his tail twitched irritably.

He was in our way but we left him alone. After all, he was a railway cat and had a perfectly good right to sit and look, whereas we passengers ought to know our place.

The cat pricked up his ears and we heard the insistent whistle of a train rushing furiously towards the station. I pressed my face to the window and saw the guard. He hurried out onto the platform, pulled his greatcoat straight and held up his furled green flag.

Blowing clouds of steam at the sky, the engine raced through, pulling a string of flat-wagons alternating with goods-wagons. What we saw on the flat-wagons came straight out of a night- I saw young men roaring with laughter, hung all over with weapons-curved sabres, broadswords, naval silver-hilted daggers, rifles, revolvers, cartridge belts.

Streaming in the wind, enormous red and black ribbons flew from peaked caps, bowlers and sheepskin hats of every shape and size. The largest, I noticed, decorated a crumpled top hat. The owner, in a sleeveless fur coat, cut to knee-length to give freedom of movement, was firing into the air-perhaps to salute the station of Pomoshnaya holding its breath in terror.

A boater carried off by the wind wheeled round and round on the platform and finally came to rest at the feet of the guard. It looked frivolous in spite of its ominous black bow. The envy of all provincial DonJuans, it must until recently have covered the parting on some barber's well-groomed hair-perhaps the owner had paid for his elegance with his life.

Next, a bony, hook-nosed sailor, with a neck as long as a giraffe's, swept past. His vest ripped open to the navel, he displayed his richly tattooed chest as a warning to all. I hadn't time to make out more than a confused tangle of legs, hearts, daggers and snakes, the grey-blue outlines were filled in with strawberry-pink dye. The style would have been rococo, if tattooing had a style.

Then came a fat Georgian in green velvet riding breeches, a feather boa round his neck. He stood balancing himself on a gun-carriage, between two machine-guns, their barrels pointing directly at us.

The cat watched this circus, quivering with delight, putting out its claws and drawing them in.

Following a drunken boy in a surplice, with a roast goose in his hands, an imposingly white-haired gentleman swayed solemnly by, a school cap with a broken badge on his head. He held a Cossack lance with a torn black skirt tied to it. Painted on the black skirt was a white sunrise.

Snatches of sound spilled from each flat-wagon as it hurtled by -a sob from an accordion, a shrill whistle, fragments of song. The words 'Arise young men', telescoping into absurd sequences, came thundering from one wagon. 'To the call of Patachon', chorused another, while a third roared away 'Rabinovich's wife, she's lost her life-so!' Next came the melancholy ending of the first song, 'Who lies under the green sward?' and the sorrowful reply from the last wagon, 'We heroes of Makhno, saddle rugs for shrouds.'

Immediately the first train went through, the second burst into the station. A forest of shafts of overturned gun-carriages swayed and jolted as it rushed by. Inside the goods wagons shaggy horses stood in profile, shaking their heads. Instead of blankets, they were covered with Jewish prayer-shawls.

The men sat on the flat-wagons, legs hanging over the side. Brown riding boots swung by, sandals, felt shoes, boots laced up to the knee, silver spurs, cavalry boots with officers' cockades, pink slippers with pompoms, horny red feet, puttees cut out of red plush or of green baize from a billiard table.

All at once the train slowed down. The guard looked round helplessly, then suddenly drew himself up and stood at attention. We shied from the window and prepared to run for our lives.

But the train moved on. Slowly, smoothly, it glided through the station, and another flat-wagon came into view. This one carried a magnificent, glossy landau with a prince's gilded coat of arms on the door. From one of its shafts, raised like a flag pole, fluttered a black banner bearing the motto 'Anarchy Breeds Order'. A machine-gun stood at each corner of the wagon, a soldier in an English greatcoat squatting beside it.

A small, weedy man in a black hat and an unbuttoned Cossack jacket, his face grey, lay sprawling on the red morocco-leather cushions of the landau.

His feet were propped up against the coach box, and his whole attitude suggested a calm, lazy, well-fed indifference. He was playing with a revolver, tossing it up in the air and catching it as it fell.

Looking at the face, I felt sickened. A damp fringe hung over the low forehead. The eyes, at once fierce and vacant-they were the eyes of a wild-cat and a paranoiac-shone with malevolence. Even at that moment, in spite of his easy, relaxed pose, he seemed to simmer with the savage violence which must always have possessed him.

This was Nestor Makhno.

The guard, rigid, one arm stretched straight out, held the green flag in his right hand and saluted with the left. At the same time he smiled. I can think of nothing more terrifying than that smile. It was not a smile at all. It was a pitiful call for mercy, a cry of terror, begging for his life, an abject despairing appeal.

Makhno raised his revolver and without aiming, without so much as looking at the guard, fired. Why-I don't know. Can anyone tell what goes on in the mind of a demented fanatic?

The guard threw up his arms in a grotesque gesture, stumbled backwards, fell on his side and lay twitching, clawing his neck and vomiting blood.

Makhno waved his hand. A burst of machine-gun fire raked the platform, hitting the guard. He twitched a few more times and lay still.

We rushed out through the booking hall onto the platform. The last flat-wagon was gliding past. A snub-nosed girl with cropped curly hair, dressed in a broadtail jacket and riding breeches, smiled all over her face as she pointed a Mauser at us. A soldier in a French steel helmet, his face covered with black stubble, pushed up her arm, and the bullet smacked harmlessly into the wall.

We ran up to the guard. He was dead, the ingratiating smile frozen on his face.

We picked him up and, trying not to step into the pool of blood, carried him to the restaurant. There we laid him on a long table, under a dead palm tree in its green tub. The earth in the tub bristled with cigarette ends.

Our train left next morning, making for Golta.

The priests were subdued, reading in whispers from their prayer books.

Lucienna lay all day staring through the open door at the washed-out sky, Khvat frowned crossly-Nazarov alone made efforts at conversation, but no one encouraged him, so he finally gave it up.

We arrived at Golta a few hours after a pogrom. Many people were said to have been killed and left lying in the street. We never found out who killed them. None of us felt like leaving our coach.

In the middle of the night Lucienna burst into tears, weeping louder and louder until she was sobbing in hysterics.

By early morning she had calmed down, but when later we woke up at a halfway halt, she was not in the carriage. We searched the train, but no one had seen her. She had simply disappeared, leaving her bundle in its gypsy shawl on her bunk, as though she had no more use for it.

18
Firinka, Water Pipes and Minor Risks

Firinka, a small Black Sea fish about the size of a safety-pin, was always fresh because it was the only fish in the shops and all Odessa ate-or, as southerners say-fed on it. Sometimes even the supplies of firinka ran out.

We ate it raw, only just salted, or minced and fried as fishcakes. The fishcakes-'seasoned with tears' as the Odessans put it- could be eaten only out of desperation.

As my neighbour Nazarov and I had hardly any money left, we lived on firinka and soggy maize bread. The bread looked like cake but tasted of pure aniseed. We had to rinse our mouths after every meal to get rid of the smell.

On rare occasions, I bought roast chestnuts, sold in the street by old women in heavy fringed shawls. They sat on low stools on the pavement, roasting the chestnuts on braziers and sighing. The chestnuts crackled, burst and spread a sweetish smell of burnt shells.

The streets were dark. The lamps were lit very late, and sometimes not at all, so that on some autumn evenings the only light came from the braziers. The foot-light effect had a certain pantomime charm.

Odessa wrapped herself in mist, like the old women in their shawls. Sea-fog lasted all through the autumn. I have been fond of misty days ever since-especially in autumn when the watery light is lemon-yellow like turning leaves.

It was almost impossible to find lodgings, but we were lucky. Overlooking the sea in Chernomorskaya, a quiet little street in the suburb of Langeron, stood Dr Landesman's private nursing home for nervous diseases. The incidence of nervous disorders had risen sharply in those anxious, uncertain times, but no one could afford the money for treatment, especially in an expensive private clinic. So the nursing home had shut down.

Nazarov met a neurologist he had known in Moscow, and it was she who arranged for us to live in the empty house. Landes-man-grey, impressive and meticulously well-mannered-gave us the use of two small wards in return for our acting as caretakers. We had to see to it that the small garden was not cut down and the house itself broken up for firewood.

My room had a huge window, a high ceiling, and a tiny metal stove. There was virtually no firewood. Occasionally, I bought acacia logs. They were sold by the pound; I could never afford more than three or four.

It was bitterly cold, particularly when the wind was blowing from the north. The glazed white walls made it seem even colder.

Once again, I was a proof-reader for a newspaper-I forget its name. The editor was Academician Ovsyanniko-Kulikovsky I worked one day out of three, and was paid a very little in 'bells'-Denikin paper rubles engraved with a picture of the Great Bell of the Kremlin.

I liked the echoing house over the sea, the loneliness, almost even the cold, rough as sand and smelling of salt.

I read a lot, wrote a little and, for want of something better to do, studied the fog. Every morning I went out into the garden on its cliff ledge, overhanging the sea.

Breakers swooshed lazily on the shingle, invisible in the fog. The foghorn blew and a bell tolled on Vorontsov lighthouse. Small grey drops shone on the long-withered grass and the branches of the acacia trees.

Ever since, fog has been linked for me with solitude, quiet and concentration. It reduced the visible world to a small, enclosed circle in which there was litde to observe-a few trees, a gorse bush, a column of rough stone, the iron wicket-gate and an anchor chain lying in the corner of the garden, goodness knows why.

The fog made me look at them longer and more carefully than one usually does, and I discovered many unnoticed details. Welded fast to the porous yellow stone were many small seashells, the gorse had still a few blossoms left, sitting on straight, stiff twigs like drenched, bedraggled butterflies waiting patiently for the sun-but it seldom showed and then only as a watery white blur in the fog, without warmth or shadow. Under the solitary ancient plane tree, with lemon patches on its trunk, leaves lay scattered, looking as though cut out of dull green velvet. Rows of ants hustled along the wicket, stocking up underground winter larders while, beneath the anchor chain, there lived a small shy toad.

The fog had its own sounds. They began just before it thinned out. There was a faint rustling. Moisture collected on the trees, ran down the black branches and dropped rustling to the ground. Breaking into this confused, soft sound would come a clear, echoing tinkle-the first drop of condensed fog fell from the roof, hitting the upturned bottom of a zinc tub below.

I loved the smell of the fog-a faint smell of coal and steam. It was the smell of railway stations, ports, decks, of travelling, of long sea and land routes, of distant pink islands floating past in the violet-blue light of the Aegean, the wind faintly scented with lemons; it was the smell of the raw gusts and warning lights on floating buoys in the English Channel, of trains rolling through our sleepy woodlands, of everything that for ever captivates the heart.

In Odessa, the idea took hold of me of spending my whole life travelling, so that whether it was long or short I should experience it as perpetually new, and of putting all my strength into writing many books about it, and of giving them-giving the whole world with all its remote places and hidden joys-to the woman, as yet unmet, who would fill my life with happiness and pain, and ceaseless joy in the beauty of the world, the world as it should be and as it so seldom is.

I was sure that this would be my future.

For a writer, to give to the beloved was to give to mankind-I was sure of this ill-defined law of generosity, of total self-gift: to give away and expect nothing, ask for nothing in return, except perhaps the merest trifle, no bigger than a grain of sand brushed from the warm, cherished hand.

All I have just written is a lyrical digression-critics warn writers against them. But I don't see why one shouldn't write a whole book just like that-quite freely and without the slightest strain, following only the uninterrupted flow of imagination and ideas. For all I know, this may be the only way of achieving complete self-expression.

All the same, I must go back to that autumn in Odessa, to firinka and maize bread.

The poor food was never a great hardship and it worried me still less after I made a deal with the cook of the French ship, the Dumonf-Durville, anchored in the port. He bartered two tins of condensed Dutch coffee for a packet of Stomboli tobacco. The tobacco had belonged to my father and came to me from Mama who for some reason had kept it all this time.

The Dutnont-Diirville was berthed by the pier of the quarantine harbour, next to an English destroyer. The sailors from the destroyer played football on the pier all day.

The black and yellow steamships of the Lloyd-Triestino Line called regularly from Trieste and Venice. Posses of Greek sailors went about the streets, their blue uniforms with buttoned white gaiters and broad cutlasses looking old-fashioned and theatrical.

There was an incredible assortment of people in Odessa that year.

The petty local stock-exchange gamblers and black-marketeers were swamped by a flood of ruthless tycoons fleeing from 'Sovdepia' as they spitefully called it. The small-fry shook their heads and sighed but could do nothing-gone were the good old days of patriarchal life at the Fanconi Cafe where a single bill of lading for a single wagon-load of lemon extract in Archangel would change hands for weeks on end, rising and falling in price so that everyone could make a turn on the 'difference'.

Archangel was farther away than Mars, and lemon extract had long been a myth. But the brokers were not to be discouraged. Their daily business sounded like the noisy games of lunatics. They bargained until they were hoarse, shook hands, took umbrage, and sometimes the consignment of lemon extract or some equally mythical cargo of sponges (f.o.b. Patras, Greece) very nearly led to a riot.

Occasionally, they even made a small deal-over a box of saccharine, or a batch of shop-soiled braces, or a dubious packet of ammonia powder. Ammonia was in demand. It was a substitute for yeast.

But the northern tycoons staggered the peaceful, philosophical small-fry by the sheer brazenness of their transactions. Diamonds flashed-all from the Tsar's own crown, of course; brand-new sterling and franc notes crackled; scented furs, straight from the shoulders of famous Petrograd beauties, passed into the trembling hands of blue-jowled Greek traders. The most popular line was in landed estate in all parts of 'our long-suffering Russia'.

Every evening, many well-known figures could be seen with the flower girls in Deribasov Street-admittedly most of them shabby and kept in a constant fever by the epidemic of rumours. In this respect, Odessa was well ahead of any other southern town.

The rumours were crazy; they were also frightening. Like the blustering north wind, they blew from the Kherson Steppes. The Soviet Army was thrusting south, destroying rear-guards, harassing the Whites, cutting their communication lines. Deni-kin's thin front-line kept snapping like rotten thread.

Deserters filled Odessa after every break-through. The bars were noisy all night-women shrieked, glass and china broke and shots rang out-the defeated were settling their accounts among themselves, sorting out who was who, and which of them were betrayers and destroyers of Russia. The white skulls on the sleeves of the officers of the 'battalions of death' were yellow with grease and mud, and no longer frightened anyone.

The city lived from hand to mouth. According to official estimates, it ought long before to have run out of food and fuel but, by some miracle, the supplies lasted. There was electricity only in the centre, and even there it was dim and flickering. The White authorities had completely lost control, even over the Whites.

Three thousand bandits from the slums of Moldavanka with Misha the Jap at their head, looted half-heartedly. They were sated with fabulous loot from their previous raids. All they wanted was to relax from this strenuous occupation. They cracked jokes more than they pillaged, they crowded the night-clubs, singing the heart-rending lay of Vera Kholodnaya's death:

Poor Runich weeps Over Vera's grave.

Runich, the film star, had been Vera Kholodnaya's partner. In the song, Vera begs him from her grave:

Wreathe my breast in cornflowers blue, Weep and showjour love so true.

One evening, I was going home from the printer's with Yasha Lifshits, a Petrograd journalist. Homeless, he had joined us as the third lodger at Dr Landesman's.

A dishevelled, restless little man, he was known as 'Yasha on Roller-skates' because of his extraordinary walk. He took swift, short steps, his foot pressing on the pavement with a rippling motion from heel to toe, rather like a blotter blotting a page. As a result he looked as though he was travelling very fast on roller-skates. Even his shoes looked like blotters, the soles bent in a convex arc.

To avoid running into too many patrols on our way to Cherno-morskaya, we kept to quiet side streets and lanes. In one of them, two young men in identical jockey caps came out of a doorway ahead of us. They stopped on the pavement and lit cigarettes. We were walking towards them but they stood still. It looked as though they were waiting for us.

'Thugs,' I whispered to Yasha.

'Nonsense. Thugs don't work in such empty streets. Let's check.'

'How?'

'By going up and talking to them, of course.'

Yasha had a pet theory-always meet danger face to face and head on. It had got him out of many a bad spot, he assured us.

'What can we talk to them about?' I asked.

'It doesn't matter. Anything will do.'

He went up to them and asked:

'Could you tell me, please, how to get to Chernomorskaya?'

The young men told him politely. It was a complicated way and took long to explain, especially as Yasha kept interrupting and asking them to repeat the directions.

Finally he thanked them and we went on.

'There, you see,' he said smugly. 'It works every time.'

I was about to agree with him when the young men called out to us. We stopped. They came up and one of them said:

'You realise that outside Alexander Park, which you have to pass on your way to Chernomorskaya, all pedestrians are stripped of their overcoats?'

'Oh well, I don't suppose they all are,' Yasha said gaily.

'Nearly all,' the young man corrected himself, smiling. 'But they're bound to take yours. It's inevitable. So perhaps you wouldn't mind taking it off quietly now? After all, it can't make much difference to you where you hand it over-at Alexander Park or here in Kanatny Lane. Don't you agree?'

'I suppose not . . .' Yasha faltered.

'There you are. I knew you would. Now, shall we get on with it?'

He nicked a knife out of his sleeve. Never yet had I seen quite such a long, beautiful and obviously razor-sharp knife. It had appeared in his hand at the level of Yasha's stomach.

'Do take anything you want out of the pocket, except money. That's right. Thank you. Goodnight. No, don't bother'-he turned to me. 'One is enough for us. Greed is the begetter of all vice. Go home and don't worry-only don't look back. It never pays to look back, you know.'

We went home, not even particularly depressed. All the way back Yasha kept waiting for my overcoat to be stolen as well. But it wasn't. Then he turned sulky, as though it were my fault that his coat had been taken and not mine-almost as though I had been in cahoots with the thieves.

Altogether, Yasha was very unlucky. Nazarov assured us that he was a Jonah. Two incidents-one with a water jug, the other with a thermometer-had convinced him of it, and I couldn't very well argue with him because they had happened before my own eyes.

Odessa was very short of water. The water had to be pumped from the Dniester, forty miles away. The pump was on its last legs. It had been shot up repeatedly by various gangs of bandits. The fate of the city hung by a thread-any moment, it might be left without water.

There was still water in the pipes but only in the low-lying districts, nearest sea-level. To these favoured districts queues of people filed all day, from all over the town, with buckets, jugs and kettles.

Only the few lucky owners of carts could fill a barrel at a time, and we envied them with bitter ferocity-even though they had to harness themselves to their carts and puff and pant with them uphill or chase after them in terror down steep slopes, half the water spilling on the ground.

We fetched our water in turn from Uspensky Street about a mile away. I knew every basement in the street where water was laid on, and could have found the tap blindfold.

Standing in the queue, we heard all the latest news and gossip, and the 'regulars' greeted one another as old friends.

The poetess Vera Imber lived in a shadowy little street not far from us. She always came with a large opaque glass vase, white with purple irises in relief.

A slight, frail woman, one day she stumbled and broke the vase. Next morning, she turned up with its twin. Out of sheer compassion I carried her vase home for her. She was so afraid of my breaking the second vase that I felt exhausted and my legs began to shake.

Carrying water, I had of course to look where I was going and, as a result, learned everything there was to know about all the roads and pavements between Uspenskaya and Chernomorskaya.

It was an interesting and, in some ways, rewarding study. I was always coming across small objects which could be read as signs. Some were good or bad, others indifferent.

The worst, and the most common, were spent Mauser cartridges and drops or even pools of blood. The cartridges had a sour smell of gunpowder. Almost as bad were empty purses and torn-up documents. But these were rare.

The lucky finds were few but varied. They were usually completely unexpected objects: faded flowers from a bouquet, fragments of cut glass, dry lobster claws, empty packets of Egyptian cigarettes, lost hair ribbons, rusty fish-hooks. They all spoke of a world at peace. So, of course, did the grass growing here and there between the paving stones, the common little flowers, mostly withered, and the rain-washed pebbles in the cement gutters.

The majority were indifferent-buttons, copper coins, pins and cigarette-butts-things which no one bothered to look at.

Having brought the water home, we poured it into a large glass carboy which stood on the landing.

One day, Yasha went out onto the landing, and let out a yell. I jumped out of my room, and could not believe my eyes-as I was looking at it, the huge carboy tilted slowly, stood leaning for a few seconds like the tower of Pisa, then toppled over and crashed into splinters. The precious water ran gurgling down the stairs.

We would have been in time to save the carboy-but we had stood stock still, staring at it, as though bewitched.

The incident with the thermometer was even more startling.

I caught Spanish flu. Thermometers in Odessa were as rare as pineapples. There were only a handful of them. People treasured them as a shipwrecked sailor treasures his last match.

Nazarov managed to borrow one for a couple of days from our editor, the highly reputed, the venerable, the illustrious Academician Ovsyanniko-Kulikovsky.

As a well-known humanist and established guardian of our liberal traditions, he could hardly have refused. Biting his lips and grunting (a grunt was his strongest expression of dissatisfaction) he agreed but gave Nazarov strict instructions to keep the thermometer in cotton wool in a drawer and to cherish it like the apple of his eye.

Nazarov took my temperature but forgot his orders. He left the thermometer on the bedside table and went out. I fell asleep.

Yasha woke me by opening the door very carefully but with a loud squeak.

I opened my eyes, glanced at the bedside table, and felt the hair rise on my head-the thermometer was very slowly rolling towards the edge of the table.

I wanted to shout but my voice died in my throat. I could see Yasha's terror-stricken eyes. He too was watching the thermometer, motionless.

The thermometer rolled off and broke. I suppose from sheer terror, my temperature fell. I recovered at once.

For a long time we racked our brains-how to get another thermometer. Nazarov took two days' sick leave to keep out of the editor's way. In the end, we had to resort to crime. We found a key to fit the door of Dr Landesman's consulting room and discovered a thermometer in his desk. To use the evasive language of thieves, we picked it up (thieves never 'steal') and returned it to the Academician.

Convinced after these two incidents that Yasha was dangerous, Nazarov urged me never to go out with him again. But I only laughed at him-for which I was soon to be cruelly punished.

To explain what happened, I must say a few words about Sturzo Lane. It led to Chernomorskaya and was impossible to avoid.

Named after a famous Jesuit, a contemporary of Pushkin, the lane always gave me a sense of hidden danger, perhaps because of the tall garden walls on either side. The large gardens on one side backed onto the cliff-edge and the sea. The solid walls offered no protection, no cover. Walking about the town in those days, we all automatically looked carefully down the street for cover to run to if firing broke out or we met a drunken patrol.

There was no hiding place in Sturzo Lane, other than its one two-storeyed house with its deeply recessed doorway. No one lived in the house and weeds grew out of its broken windows.

Heedless of Nazarov's warning, I was again walking back from the office with Yasha, late on an autumn evening.

The only way to be safe in the streets at night was to stick to certain rules: no smoking, talking or coughing; walk softly;

keep closely to the walls or in the shadow of trees; stop, look and listen every twenty yards or so; at the crossroads, look up and down the intersecting street and cross swiftly.

Having safely reached the corner of Sturzo Lane, we stood for a long time listening and peering into the inky darkness. In one way darkness was an advantage, it concealed us. But it favoured the enemy in case of ambush.

The silence was such that we could faintly hear the sea.

We crept stealthily down the lane. My own view-as I had told Yasha-was that we should follow the pavement on the side of the recess, stop before we reached it, listen, then dart quickly and silently across. I had worked it out mathematically. Even if there were people in the doorway, we might get by unnoticed. Whereas if we walked on the other side of the road, they would spot us much earlier. According to my reckoning, we would be in sight of the enemy five times longer. Our danger would therefore be five times as great.

But Yasha started off again on his favourite theory that the best way to meet danger was to fly into its jaws. Even though he was whispering, I was so anxious to stop him that I didn't argue and we walked on the side opposite the doorway.

Yasha was counting the seconds to himself. We knew it took us seven minutes to walk from the top of the lane to the nursing home. Once inside the high railing and the iron gate, we always felt safe-particularly if we didn't light the lamps.

As we passed the doorway, Yasha stumbled. Afterwards, whenever we talked about it, he insisted that the harder you try to do your best, the surer you are to be brought to grief by some footling accident. Personally, I thought the whole trouble had been due to his absurd way of walking, but I didn't like to hurt his feelings by saying so.

Yasha stumbled and was so starded that, instead of cursing himself silendy, he said in a loud, clear voice:

'I'm sorry.'

'Halt!' a thick voice called from the doorway, and we were dazzled by the beam of an electric torch. 'Take your hands out of your pockets. And look sharp about it, you bastards!'

Several armed men came up to us. It was a Cossack patrol.

'Your papers.'

I handed him my identity card.

The Cossack shone his torch first on the card, then on me.

'Greek,' he decided. 'Red mullet with lemon sauce. Take your bumph.'

He returned my identity card and shone the torch on Yasha.

'As for you,' he said, 'you needn't show yours. I can tell a Jerusalem general when I see one. All right. Scoot.

We walked on a few steps.

'Halt!' the same Cossack shouted suddenly in a shrill voice. 'Don't move.'

We stopped.

'What are you hanging about for? Didn't I tell you to get

goin

We walked on again, very slowly, for fear of breaking into a run. I knew, though I hadn't heard the click, that the Cossacks had slipped the bolts of their rifles-I felt it in my back, in my whole body. I realised they were playing cat and mouse with us- they were bound to kill us, any moment might be our last.

'Halt! F--your mothers,' the Cossack yelled again.

We stopped by the wall. I couldn't see it in the dark, but I knew the rough stone surface must offer footholds.

'Over the wall, quick,' I whispered to Yasha. 'In one go. It's our last chance. We've nothing to lose.'

I was thin and slight-it was easy for me to climb over. But Yasha, with his roller-skate shoes, very nearly fell off. I grabbed his arm and yanked him up. We swung our legs over the top and jumped. Shots rang out on the other side of the wall, and chips of stone flew off the wall.

We tore through the dark garden. The white trunks of trees treated with lime helped to guide us.

The Cossacks were already climbing the wall after us. A bullet flew past my ear. We reached the wall at the end of the garden. There was a gap in it.

By now the Cossacks were running through the garden but they wasted time aiming and firing and we scrambled through the gap ahead of them. Three steps beyond it, the ground dropped steeply away towards the sea.

We slithered down the cliff and fled along the beach. The Cossacks were still firing from the top of the cliff but had already lost us in the darkness and their shots went wide.

We ran on for a long time following the steep shore hollowed out by caves. The surf broke on the shingle, drowsy as ever. It was hard to believe that men could senselessly kill their fellow men on a warm autumn night, watched by the peacefully whispering sea. I was still naive enough to imagine that beauty disarms evil and that a murder could not be committed on the Acropolis or in front of the Sistine Madonna.

I was longing for a smoke. The firing had died down. We climbed into the nearest cave and lit cigarettes. Never have I enjoyed a cigarette so much before or since.

We sat in the cave for about three hours, then we climbed out and made our way cautiously along the beach towards Landes-man's nursing home. All was quiet.

Clinging to rocks and bushes, we climbed the sheer cliff to the high garden wall. There was a culvert in it. We scrambled through, blocked it with stones, though this was quite unnecessary, and went in.

Nazarov was awake. He was stunned by our tale. The bathroom had no window, so we lit an oil-lamp and could see ourselves for the first time. Our clothes were torn, our hands caked with blood. On the whole, we had got off cheaply.

We drank an enormous lot of tea and got drunk. Not on tea, of course-what intoxicated us was the indescribable, incomparable, weightless feeling of being safe. If perfect happiness exists, we experienced it that night.

I wanted to prolong this feeling. Putting on my coat and picking up a blanket, I went out into the loggia - a deep bay with a projecting balcony on the first floor. The loggia was dark. There was no wind, and no one could see me from outside.

I lay down on a wicker chaise-longue, wrapped myself in the blanket and stayed until dawn, listening to the night.

The sea murmured endlessly. The sound of the long breakers rose and fell. So did the wind in the bare branches. It became silent-as I was, listening to the flow of night. But it was still there: I could tell from the smell of the wet shingle and the trembling of the one leaf left on the plane tree.

I had noticed that stubborn grey leaf the day before but now, at night, it seemed a tiny living creature keeping me company.

At rare intervals a rifle shot rang out in town. After each shot the dogs barked for a long time. Once a dim light glimmered far out at sea and then vanished.

Everything was asleep. I slept fitfully, a few moments at a time. It was the kind of half sleep when one can see large white flowers floating on the black waves, or hear the sound of a violin, light as a child's hand, as clearly as is possible only to one awake.

In that half sleep I felt completely different from my normal self-very calm, trusting, accepting the world.

19
The Last Shot

The mood in Odessa was more and more uneasy. The Soviet advance continued. By now the fighting was at Voznesenk.

Ships crowded with refugees left for Constantinople. Dirty, dingy, black paint peeling off their sides, most of them edged their way out of the port overloaded, listing and belching thick smoke which hung over Chernomorskaya and the whole of Langeron.

But the papers still came out. The White Command knew that the end was drawing nearer, literally hour by hour, but did all they could to conceal this from civilians, particularly the refugees from the north. The papers claimed that the Bolshevik attack had been repulsed and that strong French reinforcements, equipped with artillery and poison gas, were on their way from Salonika.

All these rumours were spread in order to prevent panic and a mass flight of northern refugees farther south, to Constantinople. There were few ships in the harbour, and the White Army needed them for its own flight.

Papers came out, and officers, who had lost hope long ago, still killed time at the 'Yellow Canary' Cafe. The papers reminded the population of the hackneyed adage: 'Moscow burned, but Russia held out' (against Napoleon).

The paper I worked for was as busy as the rest embroidering on this theme in endless leaders, feature articles and poems, despite the fact that its presiding genius. Academician Ovysanniko-Kulikovsky, had fled to Turkey on a scruffy little Greek ship, the Venus.

One day, Bunin called at the office. He was worried and had come for news from the front. He stood in the doorway, tugging at the glove on his right hand. It was a cold, rainy day, and the kid glove had stuck to his fingers.

At last he peeled it off and, looking round the smoke-filled room, said:

'Well, you don't exactly live in luxury!'

For some reason we felt put out, and Nazarov answered:

'What did you expect, Ivan Alexeyevich? We've all got one foot in the grave.'

Bunin pilled up a chair to Nazarov's desk and sat down.

'That's a thought. You're right, it's all over.' He paused. 'Cold, rainy, dark-but in a way peaceful. Or rather, empty. Like death.'

'Feeling low, Ivan Alexeyevich?' Nazarov said gently.

'Not really. It's just that the world has become such an uncomfortable place. Even the sea smells of rusty iron.'

He rose and went to the editor's room.

I had always admired Bunin for his gloomy, merciless precision, his devotion to Russia and exceptional understanding of ths Russians, his quick observation, his intelligent love of beauty in all its forms, and his own particular, clear knowledge that happiness is everywhere, but only for those who know it. I already considered him a master. I knew many of his poems and even some of his prose by heart. The piece I liked best for its depth and its faultless language, was a short story, only a couple of pages long, called 'Elijah, the Prophet.'

As a result, in Bunin's presence I became speechless, too impressed to open my mouth. I hung my head and listened to his toneless voice, not daring to look up for fear of catching his eye.

Many years later, I read his Life of Arsenyev. Some chapters in it moved me more than any other prose or poetry I know, particularly the passage where he speaks of his mother's death and, in general, of the inevitable loss of those we love and the emptiness of surviving them. He knew how to use simple words:

A widow wept in the night - She was mourning her child.

So did an old man, her neighbour, wiping his eyes with his sleeve. The stars shone, the kid wept in the byre, And the mother wept for her child. Weeping at night is catching. The stars run down the sky, like tears- The Lord weeps, wiping his eyes with his sleeve. Bunin soon left, but he had put me off my work-off the wretched illiterate proofs I was correcting-so I went home.

A black wind blew from a leaden sea. Swathes of rain hung over the water. There were no more leaves floating on clear puddles, they had all drowned. Now they lay submerged, layer upon yellow rotting layer plastering the pavement. Only the wet ivy leaves in the back gardens caught the light as a last reminder of life.

I went down to Arcadia by the sea. The watery desert rippled and washed silently over the wet sand.

The gloomy restlessness of the autumn sea flooded me with chilly sadness. I made no attempt to keep it out.

For the umpteenth time I looked back on my life. Going over it year by year, I could see that my disjointed past, torn by so many conflicts, could be given point, direction, meaning, only by the future.

Perhaps the future would sift from it whatever had been touched by genuine human warmth and poetry, knitting the pieces together and helping me to see my life as a coherent whole. Perhaps even-who knows-the account of it might answer a need in others as well as in me, helping them to struggle through the wind and rain to the distant strip of dazzling clear sky somewhere ahead.

A patch of it was already spreading over the sea in the south, promising to release the pale autumn seaside sun from the cold and the clouds.

Overnight, the clear strip widened still more and I awoke to an improbably blue sea outside my windows.

A thin sharp wind blew from the north-east. The withered grass sheathed in shining, ringing hoar-frost, swung in the wind. Slow, heavy surf licked the rocks, leaving them white with a crust of ice. Salt spray as stiff as whipped-up white of egg, blew off the crests of the waves, and froth billowed and quivered on the beach-it was easy to believe the Greeks that it had given birth to Aphrodite.

My leisurely thoughts were interrupted by the thunder of artillery. It clanged down on the city like a mailed fist. At the first round, the nursing home rattled like an old cupboard with glass doors, and tiles fell, crashing and scattering, off the roof. It was followed by a second, a third, a fourth . . .

The French cruiser anchored in the roadstead was firing into the steppe. The shells passed over the town and burst in the distance, so far away that we couldn't even hear them.

From my window, I saw 'Yasha on roller-skates' wheel full tilt into the yard. He banged the front door open and shouted up the stairs, filling the empty house with echoes:

'They've broken through! The Bolsheviks are nearing Kyalniki It's all over!'

Kyalnik was a few miles west of Odessa.

He dashed into my room, Nazarov following him. Still shouting, he told us that the Whites were running away without so much as firing a shot, there was panic in the port, the French cruiser was shelling the steppe at random-we must each pack a bag and hurry to the docks where embarkation had begun.

'Okay,'I said. 'Off you go. It's up to you and your conscience. Mine doesn't hold with running away from my country, whatever the mess.'

'I couldn't agree more,' said Nazarov. 'I know my life wouldn't be worth living away from Russia - but if yours is so precious, Yasha-and I don't know who would give a damn for it-run along and to hell with you.'

'Don't be an idiot,' muttered Yasha, blushing painfully. 'It's just that everybody's running-I got carried away. Of course I am not going anywhere.'

It was a time for quick decisions. The slightest moment of hesitation could make or break one's whole life.

Yasha stayed. Relieved not to have to think about it any more, he rejoiced noisily, and even brewed tea for us-we gulped it down and set off for Alexander Park.

There, from an old pavilion at the top of the cliff, we could see the harbour and all that was going on in it.

For a very long time afterwards, I was haunted and burdened by the feeling that at some time, in some picture by a pitiless artist, I had already witnessed this epic flight-gaping mouths, torn open by cries for help, eyes bulging from their sockets, faces livid and deeply-etched by fear of death, of people who could see nothing but the one, blinding, terrible sight: rickety ships' gang-planks with handrails snapping under the weight of human bodies, soldiers' rifle-butts crashing down overhead, mothers stretching up their arms to lift their children above the demented human herd, the children desperately crying, and the trampled body of a dying woman still squirming and screaming on the quay.

People were senselessly destroying each other, preventing even those who reached the gangway from saving themselves. The moment anyone gained a hold on the plank or the rail, hands grabbed and clutched at him, clusters of bodies hung on him. He inched his way forward, pulling them along, but lost his hold, fell together with his terrible human load into the sea and drowned, powerless to shake it off.

All the streets and alleys leading down to the port were crammed. The houses and fences looked as if they would give way and collapse at any moment. It would have been a mercy-but the rough stone walls stood firm. Only glass splintered and timber cracked with a continuous noise as people were squeezed through windows and doors.

Crushed suitcases, bundles and baskets slithered downhill under foot, like monstrous living creatures. Clothes spilled out and wound themselves round shoes and ankles. Women's petticoats and lace, children's frocks and ribbons trailed after the fugitives, and the sight of these homely things made their flight seem even more tragic.

Cold clouds of dust hung sickeningly over all the alleys.

Groups of men in uniform scattered and were lost in the crowd of civilians, only the cloaks of the Caucasians swung out here and there like black bells, hindering their owners' flight. Ripped off and caught by the wind, they floated like black carpets as though moving themselves towards the port.

Ships slowly listed under the weight of people clinging to the deck rails and scrambling aboard. Sailors and soldiers tried to keep them out but were pushed back and borne down.

The mob howled louder and louder, drowning even the roar of the sea against the mole. Shots rang out over the gangways. They were an attempt to stop the crowd, but they only roused it to fury.

At the back of the hysterical mob, the city was quiet and empty. No Soviet units seemed to have entered it yet. What would have happened had a single horseman appeared or a single shot been fired in the rear of the crowd is not to be thought of.

In fact, as we learnt next day, a Soviet force had carried out a reconnaissance, but the men were so shaken by the apocalyptic scenes of the flight that they remained on the bluff, neither going down to the docks nor opening fire.

We saw mooring lines being hacked through, and ships sailing away without stowing the gang-planks. The gang-planks slid into the sea, with people still clinging to them.

It was impossible to listen to the cries, curses, and wails of those who were left behind, parted from their families.

The ships steamed slowly out towards the roadstead, pouring thick smoke and racing their propellers. Suddenly the docks emptied. People hurled themselves back into the alleys, disappeared into the chinks of the port.

Riding slowly down the slope littered with broken luggage, torn clothes and here and there a body trampled to death, came a Soviet mounted patrol.

The men rode with heads bowed, as though lost in thought. They pulled up beside the bodies, dismounted and bent over them, trying to see if any were still alive - but none were.

The horsemen rode to the end of the breakwater, halted and for a long time watched the ships.

They were moving out into the roadstead, past the old Vorontsov lighthouse which had seen so many strange sights in its time. The harbour was dead still. Only the sound of the 'International' drifted faintly from the town.

A jet of steam, spurting up at the grey sky, and a hoarse, quavering whistle came from the bridge of one of the ships. Immediately taking up the sound, all the other ships chorused in their various keys. It was the whistle of departure.

It sounded like a chant for the departed, for those who had left their country, left the Russian fields and woods, winters and springs, renounced their share in our common sufferings and joys, in the present and the past, in Pushkin and Tolstoy, and in the great filial love every man feels for each blade of grass and drop of water from a well on his native land.

At the end of the breakwater, the riders sat on their horses motionless.

The minesweeper, sailing with the convoy, fired two unnecessary rounds. Two shells whined and burst uselessly over the town.

Soviet guns did not return the fire. Silent crowds watched from the breakwaters, the quays, the bluffs over the sea, as the outlines of the departing ships grew dim in the smoke and dusk.

The ships were disappearing in the mist. The winter wind blew from the north-east, as though turning over a new page. On it was to be written: The heroic story of Russia-long-suffering, unique, and beloved to our dying breath.


•••

Notes

Cadets: party of Constitutional Democrats founded in 1905, headed by P. N. Milyukov who later emigrated. The Cadets favoured constitutional monarchy.

SR: party of Socialist Revolutionaries founded in 1901, of which Kerensky was a member. p>• Rachinsky: decadent writer, journalist.

Presnya: Moscow suburb where violent fighting took place during the revolution of 1905.

Taras Shevchenko (1814-61): Ukrainian patriot and perhaps the best Ukrainian poet.

Nikolai Roerich (1874-1947): painter known in his early period for his scenes of Russian life before Peter the Great; emigrated in 1920. Mikhail Nesterov (1862-1942); painter known for paintings on religious themes, landscapes, portraits.

Lyolya: a young nurse with whom Paustovsky was in love and who died in a cholera epidemic.

During the war, Paustovsky spent a night in a synagogue in the village of Kobrin where he witnessed tragic scenes of the flight of refugees.

Paustovsky was nearly drowned in a storm within sight of the lighthouse of Taganrog on the Black Sea.

Safety wall: fireproof wall between two adjoining houses.

Junkers: Cadets.

The gunshot from the Baltic Fleet battleship Aurora was the signal for the storming of the Winter Palace and the outbreak of the October Revolution.

Nikolai Dobrolyubov (1836-61): literary critic; radical claimed as forerunner by both Marxists and Populists.

Populist Socialists : (Narodniki) descendents of 19th-century Populists, anti-Marxist revolutionaries who based their programme on the peasants.

Mikhail Osorgin: pen name of M. A. Ilyin (1879-1942), novelist and short story writer; his Moscow, a Quiet Street was a U.S. Book of the Month Club choice in 1952.

Stepan (Stenka) Razin (d. 1761): Don Cossack leader of peasant revolt 1760-61. Emelyan Pugachev (1742-75): Don Cossack leader of peasant rebellion 1773-75; claimed to be Tsar Peter III who had been deposed and killed in 1762 by order of his wife Catherine the Great.

Andrey Bely: pen-name of Boris Bugaev (1880-1934), perhaps the most original and influential poet, novelist and theoretician of the Symbolist School. Valeriy Bryusov (1873-1923): poet, translator of Poe, Goethe, Virgil, etc.; introduced free verse and had an important influence on Russian prosody. Konstantin Balmont (1867-1943): Symbolist poet, translator of Byron, Shelley, Whitman, etc.; emigrated in 1921. Sasha Cherny (1880-1932): poet, satirist; emigrated in 1920. Ivan Shmelev (1872-1950): novelist and short-story writer; emigrated in 1917. Maximilian Voloshin (1878-1932): poet, translator, painter. Ignatiy Potapenko (1856-1929); short-story writer.

Mikhail Prishvin (1873-1954): prominent Soviet novelist and short-story writer.

Anatoliy Lunacharsky (1875-1933): Minister of Education 1917-29.

Left SR: the Left Wing of the Socialist Revolutionaries split off, formed a separate party in December, 1917, and supported the Bolsheviks, but opposed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. It was suppressed after staging a rising in Moscow in July, 1918.

Mikhail Vrubel (1856-1910); Romantic painter, designer of stage sets and decorative panels in ceramics.

Vladimir Korolenko (1853-1921): Populist writer of Ukrainian-Polish origin.

Mikhail Artsibashev (1878-1927): popular novelist and playwright who rejected all moral codes.

Field Marshal Hermann von Eichhorn: C. in C. of all German troops on the Eastern front; assassinated in Kiev on 30th July, 1918.

Alexander Vertinsky (1888-1957): popular poet who set his poems to music and gave recitals; emigrated in 1919, returned to Russia in 1943.

'Throw Away Sorrow'; park surrounding a merchant's house on the outskirts of Kiev.

Vysotsky, Brodsky: merchants who controlled most of the tea and sugar trade before 1917.

Gaidamaks: originally Ukrainian peasants who rebelled against their Polish landlords in the 18th century; the name was taken over by Petlyura's troops fighting the Bolsheviks 1918-19.

Gopak: Ukrainian national dance.

Vladimir Vinnichenko (1880-1951); Decadent writer, influenced by Nietzschean ideas.

Bogdan Khmelnitsky (1595-1657); leader of Ukrainian rebellion against Poland 1648-54.

Uman bloodletting: massacre of Poles and Jews by Ukrainian Cossacks in 1768.

Paustovsky left Moscow for the Ukraine at a time when Russia was at peace with Germany. His stay in Kiev covered part of a three-year period during which the Ukraine saw seventeen political upheavals.

Governed by the Tsar until February, 1917, and by the Provisional Government until October, it became independent under its own Rada (headed by the Left SR nationalist leader Petlyura, the writer Vinnichenko and others). Almost immediately, however, the Rada was overthrown by a communist invasion and replaced by a Soviet Government. In December, negotiations began between Russia and Germany for the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, by which Russia was to withdraw from the World War. Lenin was in favour of accepting the German terms, but many of his followers and the Left SRs were against it. Trotsky broke off the negotiations, and the Germans occupied the Ukraine and concluded a separate treaty with it in February, 1918. The Brest-Litovsk Treaty was finally signed on 3rd March, leaving them in occupation. They had reintroduced the Rada, but, as its hold on the country was precarious, replaced it by their own puppet Skoropadski. When, however, with the end of World War I, the Germans withdrew from the Ukraine, the Government of Skoropadski was replaced by one of the Ukraine Nationalists, Petlyura, and the Bolsheviks denounced the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. They occupied Kiev in December but were driven out nine months later by Denikin's anti-Bolshevik Russian Army, which held it (except for a two-day break) until December, 1919. The Bolsheviks took over until May, 1920, when they were replaced by the Poles (who were fighting Russia for the territories they had lost to her in the lyth century). They were expelled by the Red Army under the command of Budenny in summer, 1920.

Throughout the time Paustovsky spent in Kiev, the Ukraine was torn by the struggles between various local leaders, such as Petlyura, the anarchist Makhno, etc., as well as threatened from the north by the Red Army (anxious to prevent an anti-Bolshevik regime) and from the south by Denikin fighting the Bolsheviks.

Dmitriy Ovsyanniko-Kulikovsky (1853-1920): critic, journalist; occasionally contributed to Marxist press before 1917.

Vera Imber (b. 1890): poet; belonged to Constructivist school in the twenties; well-known in the Soviet Union for her poems on World War II.

Ivan Bunin (1870-1955): novelist and short-story writer; emigrated in 1920; his Life of Assenyev was published abroad in 1925.

Arcadia: garden by the sea in Odessa.

Chernobyl: a little town in the Ukraine. In English it means 'Wormwood'. Now after the nuclear tragedy there we look in the Bible (Revelation, Chapter VIII) and read:

'And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of water;
And the name of the star is called Wormwood; and the third part of waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.'

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