The White Guard (14 page)

   'God, yes, I did . . .' whispered Turbin.

   The battery commander was standing in the entrance to the assembly hall, thousands of candle-power sparkling on the engraved silver of his scabbard. He beckoned to Myshlaevsky and said:

   'Lieutenant, I am very glad you were able to join our regiment. Well done.'

   'Glad to do my duty, sir.'

   'One more thing: I just want you to fix the heating in this hall so that the cadets on sentry-duty will be kept warm. I'll take care of everything else. I'll see you get your rations and some vodka -not much, but enough to keep the cold out.'

   Myshlaevsky gave the colonel a charming smile and cleared his throat in a way that conveyed tactful appreciation.

   Alexei Turbin heard no more of their conversation. Leaning over the balustrade, he stared down at the little white-haired figure until it disappeared below. A feeling of hollow depression came over Turbin. Suddenly, leaning on the cold metal railings, a memory returned to him with extreme clarity.

   ... A crowd of high-school boys of all ages was rushing along that same corridor in a state of high excitement. Maxim, the thickset school beadle, made a grab at two small dark figures at the head of the mob. 'Well, well, well', he muttered. 'The school inspector will be pleased to see Mr Turbin and Mr Myshlaevsky, today of all days, when the school governor is visiting. He
will
be pleased!' Needless to say Maxim's remark was one of crushing sarcasm. Only someone of perverted taste could have gained any pleasure from the contemplation of Mr Turbin and Mr Myshlaevsky, especially on the day of the school governor's visit.

   Mr Myshlaevsky, gripped in Maxim's left hand, had a split upper lip and his left sleeve was dangling by a thread. Mr Turbin, a prisoner of Maxim's right hand, had lost his belt and all his buttons - not only on his tunic but his fly-buttons as well, revealing a most indecent display of underwear.

   'Please let us go, kind Maxim', begged Turbin and Mysh-laevsky gazing beseechingly at Maxim with bloodstained faces.

   'Go on, Max, wallop him!' shouted the excited boys from behind. 'That'll teach him to beat up a junior!'

   Oh God, the sunshine, noise and bustling of that day. And Maxim had been very different from this white-haired, hunched and famished old man. In those days Maxim's hair had been as thick and strong as a black boot-brush, scarcely touched with a few threads of grey, Maxim's hands had been as strong as a pair of steel pincers and round his neck he had worn a medallion the size of a wagon-wheel . . . Yes, the wheel, the wheel of fate had gone on rolling from village 'A', making 'x' number of turns on the way . . and it had never reached village 'B' but had landed up in a stony void. God, it was cold. Now they had to defend . . . But defend what? A void? The sound of footsteps? . . . Can you save this doomed building, Tsar Alexander, with all the regiments of Borodino? Why don't you come alive and lead them down from the canvas? They'd smash Petlyura all right.

   Turbin's legs took him downstairs of their own volition. He wanted to shout 'Maxim!', but he hesitated and then finally stopped. He imagined Maxim down below in the janitors' quarters in the basement, probably sitting huddled over his stove. Either he would have forgotten the old days, or he would burst into tears. And things were bad enough without that. To hell with the idea -sentimental rubbish. They had all ruined their lives by being too sentimental. So forget it.

   
*

   Yet when Turbin had dismissed his medical orderlies he found himself wandering around one of the empty, twilit classrooms. The blackboards looked down blankly from the walls, the benches still stood in their ranks. He could not resist lifting the lid of one of the desks and sitting down at it. It felt difficult, awkward and uncomfortable. How near the blackboard seemed. He could have

   sworn that this was his old classroom, this or the next one, because there was that same familiar view of the City out of the window. Over there was the huge black, inert mass of the university buildings, there was the lamplit avenue running straight as an arrow, there were the same boxlike houses, the dark gaps in between them, walls, the vaulted sky. . . .

   Outside it looked exactly like a stage set for
The Night Before Christmas,
snow and little flickering, twinkling lights ... 'I wonder why there is gunfire out at Svyatoshino?' Harmless, far away, as though muffled in cotton wool, came the dull boo-oom, boom . . .

   'Enough of this.'

   Alexei Turbin lowered the desk-lid, walked out into the corridor and through the main lobby, past the sentries and out of doors. A machine-gun was posted at the main entrance. There were hardly any people out on the streets and it was snowing hard.

   
#

   The colonel spent a busy night, making countless journeys back and forth between the school and Madame Anjou's shop nearby. By midnight the machinery of his command was working thoroughly and efficiently. Crackling faintly, the school arc-lights shone with their pinkish light. The assembly hall had grown noticeably warmer, thanks to the fires blazing all evening and all night in the old-fashioned stoves in the library bays of the hall.

   Under Myshlaevsky's command several cadets had lit the white stoves with bound volumes of literary magazines of the 1860's, and then to a ceaseless clatter of axes had fed the flames by chopping up the old school benches. Having swallowed their ration of two glasses of vodka (the colonel had kept his promise and provided them with enough to keep the cold out - a gallon and a half), Studzinsky and Myshlaevsky took turns as officer of the guard. They slept for two hours, wrapped in their greatcoats, lying on the floor beside the stove with the cadets, the crimson flames and shadows playing on their faces. Then they got up, moving from

   sentry-post to sentry-post all through the night inspecting the guard. Relieved every hour, four cadets, muffled in sheepskin jerkins, stood guard over the broad-muzzled six-inch mortars.

   The stove at Madame Anjou's glowed infernally, the draught roaring and crackling up the flue. A cadet stood on guard at the door keeping constant watch on the motor-cycle and sidecar parked outside, while four others slept like logs inside the shop, wrapped in their greatcoats. Towards midnight the colonel was finally able to settle down at Madame Anjou's. He was yawning, but was still too busy on the telephone to go to sleep. Then at two o'clock in the morning a motor-cycle drove hooting up to the shop. A military man in a gray coat dismounted.

   'Let him pass. It's for me.'

   The man handed the colonel a bulky package wrapped in cloth, tied criss-cross with wire. The colonel personally deposited it in the little safe at the back of the shop and locked it. The gray man drove off again on his motor-cycle. The colonel mounted to the balcony, where he spread out his greatcoat and put a bundle of rags under his head. Having ordered the duty cadet to waken him at precisely 6.30 a.m., he lay down and went to sleep.

   The coal-black gloom of the darkest night had descended on the terraces of the most beautiful spot on earth, St Vladimir's Hill, whose brick-paved paths and avenues were hidden beneath a thick layer of virgin snow.

   Not a soul in the City ever set foot on that great terraced mound in wintertime. Still less was anyone likely to climb the hill at night, especially at times like these, which were grim enough to deter the bravest man. There was no good reason for going there and only one place that was lit: for a hundred years the black, cast-iron St Vladimir has been standing on his fearful heavy plinth and holding, upright, a twenty-foot-high cross. Every

   evening, as soon as twilight begins to enfold the snowdrifts, the slopes and the terraces, the cross is lighted and it burns all night. From far away it can be seen; from thirty miles away in the black distance stretching away towards Moscow. But here on the hilltop it lights up only very little: the pale electric light falls, brushing the greenish-black flanks of the plinth, picking out of the darkness the balustrade and a stretch of the railings that surround the central terrace. And that is all. Beyond this - utter darkness. Out there stand strange trees capped with snow, looking like chandeliers wrapped in muslin, and neck-deep snowdrifts all around. Terrifying.

   Obviously no one, however courageous, is going to come here. Chiefly because there is nothing to come for. The City, though, is another matter. A night of alarm, of military decision. Street-lamps shining like strings of beads. The Germans asleep, but with half an eye open. A blue cone of light suddenly flashes into life in one of the City's darkest streets.

   'Halt!'

   Crunch . . . crunch . . . Helmeted soldiers, with black ear-muffs, walking down the middle of the street. . . Crunch . . . Rifles not slung, but at the ready. The Germans are not in a joking mood for the moment. Whatever else may be in doubt, the Germans are to be taken seriously. They look like dung-beetles.

   'Papiere!''

   'Halt!'

   A cone from the flashlight . . .

   A big shiny black car with four headlamps. No ordinary car, because it is followed at a brisk canter by an escort of eight cavalrymen. The Germans are not impressed, and shout at the car:

   'Halt!'

   "Where to? Who? Why?'

   'General Belorukov, commanding general.'

   That is another matter. Proceed, general. Deep inside, behind the glass of the car's windows, a pale moustached face. Faint glimmer reflected from general's shoulder-straps. The German

   helmets saluted. Secretly they didn't care whether it was General Belorukov, or Petlyura, or a Zulu chief-it was a lousy country anyway. But when in Zululand, do as the Zulus do. So the helmets saluted. Courtesy is international, as the saying goes.

   
#

   A night of martial deeds. Rays of light slanting out of Madame Anjou's windows, with their ladies' hats, corsets, underwear and crossed cannon. A cadet marched back and forth like a pendulum, freezing cold, tracing the tsarist cypher in the snow with the tip of his bayonet. Over in the Alexander I High School the arc-lights shone as though at a ball. Fortified by a sufficient quantity of vodka Myshlaevsky tramped around the corridors, glancing up at Tsar Alexander, keeping an eye on the switch-box. There at the school things might have been worse: the sentry-posts armed with eight machine-guns and manned by cadets - not mere students . . . and they would fight. Myshlaevsky's eyes were red as a rabbit's. He was unlikely to get much sleep that night, but there was plenty of vodka and just enough tension in the air for excitement.

   Provided it got no worse life in the City was tolerable in this state. If you had nothing on your conscience you could keep out of trouble. True, you might be stopped four times, but if you had your papers on you there was nothing to hold you up. It might look odd that you were out so late at night, but still - pass, friend . . .

   Crazy as it might seem, there
were
people out on St Vladimir's

   Hill despite the icy wind whistling between the snowdrifts with a sound like the voice of the devil himself. If anyone were to climb up the Hill it could only be some complete outcast, a man who under no matter what government felt as much at home among his fellow men as a wolf in a pack of dogs - in a word, one of Victor Hugo's 'miserables'. The sort of man who had good reason not to show himself in the City, or if so then at his own risk. If he were in luck he might evade the patrols; if not, then it would be just too bad. If a man like that found his way up on to the Hill one could only feel sorry for him out of sheer human pity. The wind was so

   icy, one wouldn't send a dog out - after five minutes up there he would be back home and whining to be let in. But . . .

   'Onlyfive o'clock. Christ, we'll freeze to death . . .'

   The trouble was that there was no way into the Upper City past the Belvedere and the water-tower because Prince Belorukov's headquarters was installed in the monastery building on Mikhail-ovsky Street, and cars with cavalry outriders or mounted machine-guns were passing by all the time . . .

   'Damned officers, we'll never get through that way!'

   And patrols everywhere.

   It was no good trying to creep down the hillside terraces to the Lower City either, firstly because Alexandrovsky Street, which wound its way around the foot of the hill, was lit by rows of street-lamps, and secondly because it was heavily patrolled by the Germans, damn them. Maybe someone might be able to slip down that way toward dawn, but by then they would be frozen to death. As the icy wind whistled along the snowbound avenues there seemed to be another sound too - the mutter of voices somewhere near the snowbound railings.

   'We can't stay here, Kirpaty, we'll freeze to death, I tell you.'

   'Stick it out, Nemolyaka. The patrols will be out till morning, then they turn in and sleep. Once we can slip through to the Embankment we can hide at Sychukla's and warm ourselves up.'

   There was a movement in the darkness along the railings as if three shadows blacker than the rest were huddling against the parapet and leaning over to look down at Alexandrovsky Street stretched out immediately below. It was silent and empty, but at any moment two bluish cones of light might appear and some German cars drive past or the dark blobs of steel-helmeted troops, casting their sharp, foreshortened shadows under the street-lamps . . . and so near, they might be within reach . . .

   One shadow broke away from the group on the Hill and his wolfish voice grated:

   'Come on, Nemolyaka, let's risk it. Maybe we can slip through . . .'

   
*

   Something equally bad was afoot in the Hetman's palace, where the activity seemed oddly out of place at that hour of night. An elderly footman in sideburns scuttled like a mouse across the shiny parquet floor of a chamber lined with ugly gilt chairs. From somewhere in the distance came the jerky ringing of an electric bell, the clink of spurs. In the state bedroom the mirrors in their gloomy crowned frames reflected a strange, unnatural scene. A thin, graying man with narrow, clipped moustaches on his foxy, clean-shaven, parchment-like face was pacing in front of the mirrors; he was dressed in a fancy Circassian coat with ornamental silver cartridge-cases. Around him hovered three German officers and two Russian. One of the latter wore a Circassian coat like the central figure, the other was in service tunic and breeches whose cut betrayed their tsarist Chevalier Guards origin despite the officer's wedge-shaped Hetmanite shoulder-straps. They were helping the foxy man to change his clothes. Off came the Circassian coat, the wide baggy trousers, the patent-leather boots. In their place the man was encased in the uniform of a German major and he became no different from hundreds of other majors. Then the door opened, the dusty palace drapes were pulled aside and admitted another man in the uniform of a German army medical officer carrying a large quantity of packages. These he opened and with the contents skilfully bandaged the head of the newly-created German major until all that remained visible were one foxy eye and a thin mouth open just wide enough to show some of its gold and platinum bridgework.