The White Guard (5 page)

   After making sure that the street was quiet at last, with not even the occasional creak of sleigh-runners to be heard, and listening attentively to the whistling sound coming from his wife in the

   bedroom, Vasilisa went out into the lobby. There he carefully checked the locks, bolt, chain and door-handle and returned to his study, where he produced four shiny safety-pins from a drawer of his massive desk. He tiptoed away somewhere into the darkness and returned with a rug and a towel. Again he stopped and listened, even putting his finger to his lips. He pulled off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves and took down from a shelf a pot of glue, a length of wallpaper neatly rolled into a tube, and a pair of scissors. Then he sidled up to the window and, shielded by his hand, looked out into the street. With the aid of the safety-pins he hung the towel over the top half of the left-hand window and the rug over the right-hand window, arranging them with care lest there should be any cracks. Taking a chair he climbed up on it and fumbled for something above the topmost shelf of books, ran the point of a little knife vertically down the wallpaper, then sideways at a right angle; next he inserted the blade under the cut to reveal a small, neat hiding-place the size of two bricks, made by himself during the previous night. He removed the cover - a thin rectangle of zinc - climbed down, glanced fearfully at the windows and patted the towel. From the depths of a lower drawer, which opened with a tinkling double turn of the key, there came to light a package carefully wrapped in newspaper, sealed and tied crisscross with string. This Vasilisa immured in his secret cache and replaced the cover. For a long while he stood on the red cloth of the chair-cover and cut out pieces of wallpaper until they exactly fitted the pattern. Smeared with glue, they covered the gap perfectly: half a spray of flowers matching its other half, square matching square. When the engineer climbed down from his chair, he was positive that there was not a sign of his secret hiding-place in the wall. Vasilisa rubbed his hands with exultation, crumpled up the scraps of wallpaper and burned them in the little stove, then pounded up the ashes and hid the glue.

   Out in the black and deserted street a gray, ragged, wolf-like creature slid noiselessly down from the branches of an acacia, where he had been sitting for half an hour, suffering badly from the cold but avidly watching Lisovich at work through a tell-tale gap above the upper edge of the towel. It had been the oddness of a green towel being draped over the window which had attracted the snooper's attention. Dodging behind snowdrifts, the figure disappeared up the street, whence it loped through a maze of side-streets until the storm, the dark and the snow swallowed it up and obliterated all its traces.

   Night. Vasilisa in his armchair. In the green shadows he looks exactly like the Taras Bulba. Long, bushy, drooping moustaches: he's no Vasilisa - he's a man, dammit! After another gentle tinkle of keys in his desk drawer, there lay on the red cloth several wads of oblong bills like green stage-money, with a legend in Ukrainian:

   
State Bank Certificate

   
50 Roubles

   
Circulates at Parity with Credit Notes

   Pictured on one side of the bill was a Ukrainian peasant with drooping moustaches and armed with a spade, and a peasant woman with a sickle. On the reverse in an oval frame were the reddish-brown faces of the same two peasants magnified in size, the man complete with typical long moustaches. Above it all was the warning inscription:

   
The Penalty for Forgery is Imprisonment

   and beneath it the firm signature:

   
Director of the State Bank: Lebid- Yurchik.

   Mounted on his horse, a bronze Alexander II, his face framed in a ragged lather of metal sideburns, glanced angrily at Lebid-Yurchik's work of art and smirked at the Egyptian queen disguised as a lampstand. From the wall one of Vasilisa's ancestors, a civil servant painted in oils with the Order of St Stanislav around his neck, stared down in horror at the banknotes. The spines of Goncharov and Dostoyevsky glowed gently in the green light, whilst nearby the green and black volumes of Brockhaus and Ephron's encyclopedia stood drawn up in mighty ranks like Horse Guards on parade. A world of comfort and security.

   The five-per-cent state bonds were safely hidden in the secret cache under the wallpaper, along with fifteen Tsarist 1000-rouble bills, nine 500-rouble bills, twenty-five silver spoons, a gold watch and chain, three cigar-cases (presents 'To our Esteemed Colleague', although Vasilisa did not smoke), fifty gold 10-rouble pieces, a pair of salt-cellars, a six-person canteen of silver cutlery and a silver lea-strainer. The second cache was a large one, outside in the woodshed-two paces straight forward from the doorway, one pace to the left, then one pace on from the chalk-mark on one of the planks of the wall. Everything was packed in tin boxes that had once held Einem's Biscuits, wrapped in oilcloth with tarred seams, then buried five feet deep.

   The third cache was in the loft, a hollow in the plaster under a beam six feet north-east of the chimney-stack. In this were a pair of sugar-tongs, one hundred and eighty-three gold 10-rouble pieces and state bonds to a nominal value of twenty-five thousand roubles.

   Lebid-Yurchik was for current expenses.

   Vasilisa glanced around, as he always did when counting money, licked his finger and started to flick through the wad of stage money. Suddenly he went pale.

   'Forgeries', he growled angrily, shaking his head. 'Disgraceful!'

   Vasilisa's blue eyes glowered morosely. In the third bundle of ten bills there was one forgery, in the fourth - two, in the sixth -two, in the ninth three bills in succession were unmistakeably of the kind for which Lebid-Yurchik threatened to imprison him. A hundred and thirteen bills in all and, if you please, eight of them with obvious signs of being forged. The peasant had a sort of gloomy look instead of being cheerful, they lacked the proper quotation marks and colon, and the paper was better than Lebid's. Vasilisa held one up to the light and an obvious forgery of Lebid's signature shone through from the other side.

   'One of these will do for the cab fare tomorrow', said Vasilisa aloud to himself. 'And I've got to go down to the market, anyway. They don't look too hard at them there.'

   He carefully put the forged notes aside, to be given to the cab-

   driver and used in the market, then locked the wad in the drawer with a tinkle of keys. He shuddered. Footsteps were heard along the ceiling overhead, laughter and muffled voices broke the deathly silence. Vasilisa said to Alexander II:

   'You see - no peace . . .'

   There was silence again upstairs. Vasilisa yawned, stroked his wispy moustache, took down the rug and the towel from the windows and switched on the light in the sitting-room, where a large phonograph horn shone dully. Ten minutes later the apartment was in complete darkness. Vasilisa was asleep beside his wife in their damp bedroom that smelled of mice, mildew and a peevish sleeping couple. In his dream Lebid-Yurchik came riding up on a horse and a gang of thieves with skeleton keys discovered his secret hiding-place. The jack of hearts climbed up on a chair, spat at Vasilisa's moustache and fired at him point-blank. In a cold sweat Vasilisa leaped up with a shriek and the first thing that he heard was the mouse family hard at work in the dining-room on a packet of rusks; then laughter and the gentle sound of a guitar came through the ceiling and the carpets . . . Suddenly from the floor above a voice of unusual strength and passion struck up, and the guitar swung into a march.

   'There's only one thing to be done - turn them out of the apartment', said Vasilisa as he muffled himself up in the sheets. 'This is outrageous. There's no peace day or night.'

   'The guards' cadets Are marching along -Swinging along, Singing a song.'

   'Still, in case anything happened . . . Times are bad enough. If you kick them out you never know who you'll get instead - they are at least officers and if anything happened, they would defend us . . . Shoo!' Vasilisa shouted at the furiously active mouse.

   The sound of a guitar . . .

   Four lights burning in the dining-room chandelier. Pennants of blue smoke. The french windows on to the verandah completely shut out by cream-colored blinds. Fresh bunches of hot-house flowers against the whiteness of the tablecloth, three bottles of vodka and several narrow bottles of German white wine. Long-stemmed glasses, apples in glittering cut-crystal vases, slices of lemon, crumbs everywhere, tea ...

   On the armchair a crumpled sheet of the humorous magazine
Peep-show.
Heads muzzy, the mood swinging at one moment towards the heights of unreasoning joy, at the next towards the trough of despondency. Singing, pointless jokes which seemed irresistibly funny, guitar chords, Myshlaevsky laughing drunkenly. Elena had not had time to collect herself since Talberg's departure . . . white wine does not remove the pain altogether, only blunts it. Elena sat in an armchair at the head of the table. Opposite her at the other end was Myshlaevsky, shaggy and pale in a bathrobe, his face blotchy with vodka and insane fatigue. His eyes were red-ringed from cold, the horror he had been through, vodka and fury. Down one of the long sides of the table sat Alexei and Nikolka, on the other Leonid Shervinsky, one-time First Lieutenant in His Majesty's Own Regiment of Lancers and now an aide on the staff of Prince Belorukov, and alongside him Second Lieutenant Fyodor Stepanov, an artilleryman, still known by his high school nickname of 'Karas'-the carp. Short, stocky and really looking very like a carp, Karas had bumped into Shervinsky at the Turbins' front door about twenty minutes after Talberg had left. Both had brought some bottles with them. In Shervinsky's package were four bottles of white wine, while Karas had two bottles of vodka. Beside that Shervinsky was loaded with an enormous bouquet, swathed in three layers of paper - roses for Elena, of course. Karas gave him his news on the doorstep: he was back in artillery uniform. He had lost patience with studying at the university, which was pointless now anyway; everybody had to go and fight, and if Petlyura ever got into the City time spent at the university would be worse than useless. It was everyone's duty to volunteer and the mortar regiment needed trained gunnery officers. The commanding officer was Colonel Malyshev, the regiment was a fine one - all his friends from the university were in it. Karas was in despair because Myshlaevsky had gone off to join that crazy infantry detachment. All that death-or-glory stuff was idiotic, and now where the hell was he? Maybe even killed at his post somewhere outside the City . . .

   But Myshlaevsky was here - upstairs! At her mirror, with its frame of silver foliage, in the half-light of the bedroom the lovely Elena hastily powdered her face and emerged to accept her roses. Hurrah! They were all here. Karas' golden crossed cannon on his crumpled shoulder-straps and carefully pressed blue breeches. A shameless spark of joy flashed in Shervinsky's little eyes at the news of Talberg's departure. The little hussar immediately felt himself in excellent voice and the pink-lit sitting-room was filled with a positive hurricane of gorgeous sound as Shervinsky sang an epithalamion to the god Hymen - how he sang! Shervinsky's voice was surely unique. Of course he was still an officer at present, there was this stupid war, the Bolsheviks, and Petlyura, and one had one's duty to do, but afterwards when everything was back to normal he would leave the army, in spite of all his influential connections in Petersburg -and they all knew what sort of connections
those
were (knowing laughter) - and ... he would go on the stage. He would sing at La Scala and at the Bolshoi in Moscow - as soon as they started hanging Bolsheviks from the lamp-posts in the square outside the theatre. Once at Zhmerinka, Countess Lendrikov had fallen in love with him because when he had sung the Epithalamion, instead of C he had hit E and held it for five bars. As he said 'five', Shervinsky lowered his head slightly and looked around in an embarrassed way, as though someone else had told the story instead of him.

   'Mm'yes. Five bars. Well, let's have supper.'

   And now the room was hung with wispy pennants of smoke . . .

   'Where are these Senegalese troops? Come on, Shervinsky, you're at headquarters: tell us why they aren't here. Lena, my dear, drink some more wine, do. Everything will be all right. He was right to go. He'll make his way to the Don and come back here with Denikin's army.'

   'They're coming,' said Shervinsky in his twinkling voice, 'reinforcements are coming. I have some important news for you: today on the Kreshchatik I myself saw the Serbian billeting-officers and the day after tomorrow, in a couple of days' time at the latest, two Serbian regiments will arrive in the City.'

   'Listen, are you sure?'

   Shervinsky went red in the face.

   'Well, really. If I say I saw them myself, I consider that question somewhat out of place.'

   'That's all very well, but what good are two regiments?'

   'Kindly allow me to finish what I was saying. The prince himself was telling me today that troop-ships are already unloading in the port of Odessa: Greek troops and two divisions of Senegalese have arrived. We only have to hold out on our own for a week - and then we can spit on the Germans.'

   'Treacherous bastards.'

   'Well, if all that's true it won't be long before we catch Petlyura and hang him! String him up!'

   'I'd like to shoot him with my own hands.'

   'And strangle him too. Your health, gentlemen.'

   Another drink. By now minds were getting fogged. Having drunk three glasses Nikolka ran to his room for a handkerchief, and as he passed through the lobby (people act naturally when there's no one watching them) he collapsed against the hat-stand. There hung Shervinsky's curved sabre with its shiny gold hilt. Present from a Persian prince. Damascus blade. Except that no prince had given it to him and the blade was not from Damascus, butit was still a very fine and expensive one. A grim Mauser in a strap-hung holster, beside it the blued-steel muzzle of Karas' Steyr automatic. As Nikolka stumbled against the cold wood of the holster and fingered the murderous barrel of the Mauser he almost burst into tears with excitement. He suddenly felt an urge to go out and fight, now, this minute, out on the snow-covered fields outside the City. He felt embarrassed and ashamed that here at home there was vodka to drink and warmth, while out there his fellow cadets were freezing in the dark, the snow and the blizzard.