The White Guard (12 page)

   'What did you say?' hissed Turbin, and immediately relaxed his grip.

   'Sorry sir', replied the voice, shaking with fright. 'I didn't say anything. I didn't open my mouth. What's the matter?' The voice trembled.

   The man's duck-like nose paled, and Turbin realised at once that he had made a mistake and had grabbed the wrong man. A face of utter loyalty peered out from behind the duck-bill nose. It was struck dumb and its little round eyes flicked from side to side with fright.

   Turbin let go the sleeve and in cold fury he began looking around amongst the hats, backs of heads and collars that seethed about him. He kept his left hand ready to grab anything within reach, whilst keeping his right hand on the butt of the revolver in his pocket. The dismal chanting of the priests floated past, beside him sobbed a peasant woman in a headscarf. There was no one to seize now, the voice seemed to have been swallowed up by the earth. The last coffin marked 'Ensign Morskoy' moved past, followed by some people on a sledge.

   '
Voice of Liberty!'
came a piercing contralto shriek right beside

   Alexei Turbin's ear. Senseless with rage he pulled the crumpled newspaper out of his pocket and twice rammed it into the boy's face, grinding his teeth and saying as he did so:

   'There's your damned
Voice of Liberty!
You can damn well have it back! Little swine!'

   With this his attack of fury subsided. The boy dropped his newspapers, slipped and fell down in a snowdrift. For a moment he pretended to burst into tears, and his eyes filled with a look of the most savage hatred that was no pretence.

   'What's the matter with you? Who d'you think you are, mister? What've I done?' he snivelled, trying to cry and stumbling to his feet in the snow. A face stared at Turbin in astonishment, but was too afraid to say anything. Feeling stupid, confused and ashamed Turbin hunched his head into his shoulders and, turning sharply, ran past a lamp-post, past the circular white walls of the gigantic museum building, past some holes in the ground full of snow-covered bricks and towards the huge asphalt square in front of the Alexander I High School.

   
'Voice of Liberty!
Paper! Paper!' came the cry from the street.

   The huge four-storey building of Alexei Turbin's old school, with its hundred and eighty windows, was built around three sides of an asphalted square. He had spent eight years there. For eight years, in springtime during breaks between classes he had run around that playground, and in the winter semester when the air in the classrooms was stuffy and dust-laden and the playground was covered by the inevitable cold, solid layer of snow, he had gazed at it out of the window. For eight years that brick-and-mortar foster-mother had raised and educated Alexei Turbin and his two younger friends, Karas and Myshlaevsky.

   And precisely eight years ago Turbin had said goodbye to the school playground for the last time. A spasm of something like fear snatched at his heart. He had a sudden feeling that a black cloud had blotted out the sky, that a kind of hurricane had blown up and carried away all of life as he knew it, just as a monster wave will sweep away a jetty. Ah, these eight years of school! There had been much in them that as a boy he had felt to be dreary, pointless

   and unpleasant - but there had also been a lot of sheer fun. One monotonous classroom day had plodded after another -
ut
plus the subjunctive, Caius Julius Caesar, a zero for astronomy and an undying hatred of astronomy ever since; but then spring would come, eager spring and somehow the noise in the school grew louder and more excited, the high school girls would be out in their green pinafores on the avenue, May and chestnut blossom and above all the constant beacon ahead: the university, in other words - freedom. Do you realise what the university means? Boat trips on the Dnieper, freedom, money, fame, power.

   And now he had been through it all. The teachers with their permanently enigmatic expressions; those terrible swimming baths in the math problems (which he still dreamed about) always draining themselves at so many gallons per minute but which never emptied; complicated arguments about the differences in character between Lensky and Onegin, about the disgraceful behaviour of Socrates; the date of the foundation of the Jesuit order; the dates of Pompey's campaigns and every other campaign for the past two thousand years.

   But that was only a beginning. After eight years in high school, after the last swimming bath had emptied itself, came the corpses in the anatomy school, white hospital wards, the glassy silence of operating theatres; then three years in the saddle, wounded soldiers, squalor and degradation - the war, yet another ever-Mowing, never-emptying pool. And now he had landed up here again, back in the same school grounds. He ran across the square feeling sick and depressed, clutching the revolver in his pocket, running God knew where or why: presumably to defend that life, that future on whose behalf he had racked his brains over emptying swimming-pools and over those damned men, one of whom was always walking from point 'A' and the other walking towards him from point 'B'.

   The dark windows were grim and silent, a silence revealed at a glance as utterly lifeless. Strange, that here in the center of the City, amidst all the disintegration, uproar and bustle this great four-storey ship, which had once launched tens of thousands of

   young lives on to the open sea, should now be so dead. No one seemed to be in charge of it any longer; there was not a sound, not a movement to be found any longer in its windows or behind the yellow-washed walls dating from the reign of Nicholas I. A virginal layer of snow lay on its roofs, covered the tops of the chestnut trees like white caps, lay evenly like a sheet over the playground, and only a few random tracks showed that someone had recently tramped across it.

   And most depressing of all, not only did nobody know, but nobody cared what had become of the school. Who was there now to come and study aboard that great ship? And if no one came to school-why not? Where was the janitor? What were those horrible, blunt-muzzled mortars doing there, drawn up under the row of chestnut trees by the railings around the main entrance? Why had the school been turned into an armory? Whose was it now? Who had done this? Why had they done it?

   
#

   'Unlimber!' roared a voice. The mortars swung round and moved slowly forward. Two hundred men sprang into action, ran about, squatted down or heaved on the enormous cast-iron wheels. There was a confused blur of yellow sheepskin jerkins, gray coats and fur caps, khaki army caps and blue students' caps.

   By the time Turbin had crossed the vast square four mortars had been drawn up in a row with their muzzles facing him. The brief period of instruction was over and the motley complement of a newly-formed mortar troop was standing to attention in two ranks.

   'Troop all present and correct, sir!' sang out Myshlaevsky's voice.

   Studzinsky marched up to the ranks, took a pace backwards and shouted:

   'Left face! Quick-march!'

   With a crunch of snow underfoot, wobbling and unsoldierly, the troop set off.

   Among the rows of typical students' faces Turbin noticed several that were similar. Karas appeared at the head of the third troop. Still not knowing quite what he was supposed to do Turbin fell into step beside them. Karas stepped aside and marching backwards in front of them, began to shout the cadence:

   'Left! Left! Hup, two, three, four!'

   The troops wheeled toward the gaping black mouth of the school's basement entrance and the doorway began to swallow litem rank by rank.

   Inside, the school buildings were even gloomier and more funereal than outside. The silent walls and sinister half-light awoke instantly to the echoing crash of marching feet. Noises started up beneath the vaults as though a herd of demons had been awakened. The rustling and squeaking of frightened rats scuttling about in dark corners. The ranks marched on down the endless black underground corridors shored up by brick buttresses, until they reached a vast hall feebly lit by whatever light managed to filter through the narrow, cob webbed, barred windows.

   The silence was next shattered by an infernal outbreak of hammering as steel-banded wooden ammunition boxes were opened and their contents taken out- endless machine-gun belts and round, cake-like Lewis gun magazines. Out came spindle-legged machine-guns with the look of deadly insects. Nuts and bolts clattered, pincers wrenched, a saw whistled in a corner. Cadets sorted through piles of store-damaged fur caps, greatcoats in folds as rigid as iron, leather straps frozen stiff, cartridge pouches and cloth-covered waterbottles.

   'Come on, look lively!' Studzinsky's voice rang out.

   Six officers in faded gold shoulder-straps circled around like clumps of duckweed in a mill-race. Myshlaevsky's tenor, now fully restored, bawled out something above the noise.

   'Doctor!' shouted Studzinsky from the darkness, 'please take command of the medical orderlies and give them some instruction.'

   Two students materialised in front of Alexei Turbin. One of them, short and excitable, wore a red cross brassard on the sleeve of his student's uniform greatcoat. The other was in a gray army

   coat; his fur cap kept falling over his eyes, so he was constantly pushing it back with his fingers.

   'There are the boxes of medical supplies,' said Tubirn, 'take out the orderlies' satchels, put them over your shoulder and pass me the surgeon's bag with the instruments . . . Now go and issue every man with two individual field-dressing packets and give them brief instructions in how to open them in case of need.'

   Myshlaevsky's head rose above the swarming gray mob. He climbed upon a box, waved a rifle, slammed the bolt open, noisily charged the magazine, then aimed out of a window, rattled the bolt and showered the surrounding cadets with ejected cartridges as he repeated the action several times. After this demonstration the cellar began to sound like a factory as the cadets rattling and slamming, filled their rifle-magazines with cartridges.

   'Anyone who can't do it - take care. Cadets!' Myshlaevsky sang out, 'show the students how it's done.'

   As straps fitted with cartridge pouches and water-bottles were pulled on over heads and shoulders, a miracle took place. The motley rabble became transformed into a compact, homogeneous mass crowned by a waving, disorderly, spiky steel-bristled brush made of bayonets.

   'All officers report to me, please', came Studzinsky's voice.

   In a dark passageway to the subdued clink of spurs, Studzinsky asked quietly:

   'Well, gentlemen, what are your impressions?'

   A rattle of spurs. Myshlaevsky, saluting with a practised and nonchalant touch of his cap, took a pace towards the staff-captain and said:

   'It's not going to be easy. There are fifteen men in my troop who have never seen a rifle in their lives.'

   Gazing upwards as though inspired towards a window where the last trickle of gray light was filtering through, Studzinsky went on:

   'Morale?'

   Myshlaevsky spoke again.

   'Er, h'umm ... I think the students were somewhat put off by

   the sight of that funeral. It had a bad effect on them. They watched it through the railings.'

   Studzinsky turned his eager, dark eyes on to him.

   'Do your best to raise their morale.'

   Spurs clinked again as the officers dispersed.

   'Cadet Pavlovsky!' Back in the armory, Myshlaevsky roared out like Radames in
Aida.

   'Pavlovsky . . . sky . . . sky!' answered the stony walls of the armory and a chorus of cadets' voices.

   'Here, sir!'

   'Were you at the Alexeyevsky Artillery School?'

   'Yes, sir.'

   'Right, let's smarten things up and have a song. So loud that it'll make Petlyura drop dead, God rot him . . .'

   One voice, high and clear, struck up beneath the stone vaults:

   'I was born a little gunner-boy . . .' Some tenors chimed in from among the forest of bayonets:

   'Washed in a shell-case spent . . .'

   The horde of students seemed to shudder, quickly picked up the tune by ear, and suddenly, in a mighty bass roar that echoed like gunfire, they rocked the whole armory:

   'Christened with a charge of shrapnel, Swaddled in an army tent! Christened with . . .'

   The sound rang in their ears, boomed among the ammunition boxes, rattled the grim windows and pounded in their heads until several long-forgotten dusty old glasses on the sloping window ledges began to rattle and shake . . .

   'In my cradle made of trace-ropes The gun-crew would rock me to sleep.'

   Out of the crowd of greatcoats, bayonets and machine-guns, Studzinsky selected two pink-faced ensigns and gave them a rapid, whispered order:

   'Assembly hall. . . take down the drapes in front of the portrait . . . look sharp . . .' The ensigns hurried off.

   
#

   The empty stone box of the school building roared and shook in march time, while the rats lurked deep in their holes, cowering with terror.

   'Hup, two, three, four!' came Karas' piercing voice.

   'Louder!' shouted Myshlaevsky in his high, clear tenor.

   'What d'you think this is - a funeral!?'

   
#

   Instead of a ragged gray mob, an orderly file bristling with bayonets now marched off steadily along the corridor, the floor groaning and bending under the crunch of feet. Along the endless passages and up to the second floor marched the detachment straight into the gigantic assembly hall bathed in light from its glass dome, where the front ranks had already halted and were beginning to fidget restlessly.

   Mounted on his pure-bred Arab charger, saddle-cloth emblazoned with the imperial monogram, the Arab executing a perfect caracole, with beaming smile and white-plumed tricorn hat cocked at a rakish angle, the balding, radiant Tsar Alexander I galloped ahead of the ranks of cadets and students. Flashing them smile after smile redolent of insidious charm, Alexander waved his baton at the cadets to show them the serried ranks of Borodino. Clumps of cannon-balls were strewn about the fields and the entire background of the fourteen foot canvas was covered with black slabs of massed bayonets.