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.

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'.

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.

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.

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.

•

8
A Few Explanations

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.

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.

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

•

16
Cries in the Night

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.

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.

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.

• 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.'