The White Guard (8 page)

   All through the summer of 1918 the cab-drivers did a roaring trade and the shop windows were crammed with flowers, great slabs of rich filleted sturgeon hung like golden planks and the two-headed eagle glowed on the labels of sealed bottles of Abrau, that delicious Russian champagne. All that summer the pressure of newcomers mounted - men with gristly-white faces and grayish, clipped toothbrush moustaches, operatic tenors with gleaming polished boots and insolent eyes, ex-members of the State Duma in pince-nez, whores with resounding names. Billiard players took girls to shops to buy them lipstick, nail-polish, and ladies' panties in gauzy chiffon, cut out in the most curious places.

   They sent off letters through the only escape-hole across turbulent, insecure Poland (not one of them, incidentally, had the slightest idea what was going on there or even what sort of place this new country - Poland - was) to Germany, that great nation of honest Teutons - begging for visas, transferring money, sensing that before long they would have to flee Russian territory altogether to where they would be finally and utterly safe from the terrible civil war and the thunder of Bolshevik regiments. They dreamed of France, of Paris, in anguish at the thought that it was extremely difficult, if not nearly impossible to get there. And there were other thoughts, vague and more frightening, which would suddenly come to mind in sleepless nights on divans in other people's apartments.

   'And what if. . . what if that steel cordon were to snap . . . And the gray hordes poured in. The horror . . .'

   These thoughts would come at those times when from far, far away came the dull thump of gunfire: for some reason firing went on outside the City throughout the whole of that glittering, hot summer, when those gray, metallic Germans kept the peace all around, whilst in the City itself they could hear the perpetual muffled crack of rifle-fire on the outskirts. Who was shooting at whom, nobody knew. It happened at night. And by day people were reassured by the occasional sight of a regiment of German hussars trotting down the main street, the Kreshchatik, or down Vladimir Street. And what regiments they were! Fur busbies crowning proud faces, scaly brass chinstraps clasping stone-hard jaws, the tips of red 'Kaiser Wilhelm' moustaches pointing upward like twin arrows. Squadrons of horses advancing in tight ranks of four, powerful seventeen-hand chestnuts, all six hundred troopers encased in blue-gray tunics like the cast-iron uniforms on the statues of their ponderous Germanic heroes that adorned the city of Berlin.

   People who saw them were cheered and reassured, and jeered at the distant Bolsheviks, who were furiously grinding their teeth on the other side of the barbed wire along the border.

   They hated the Bolsheviks, but not with the kind of aggressive hatred which spurs on the hater to fight and kill, but with a cowardly hatred which whispers around dark corners. They hated by night, choking with anxiety, by day in restaurants reading newspapers full of descriptions of Bolsheviks shooting officers and bankers in the back of the neck with Mausers, and how the Moscow shopkeepers were selling horsemeat infected with glanders. All of them - merchants, bankers, industrialists, lawyers, actors, landlords, prostitutes, ex-members of the State Council, engineers, doctors and writers, felt one thing in common-hatred.

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   And there were officers, officers who had fled from the north and from the west - the former front line - and they all headed for the City. There were very many of them and their numbers increased all the time. They risked their lives to come because being officers, mostly penniless and bearing the ineradicable stamp of their profession, they of all refugees had the greatest difficulty in acquiring forged papers to enable them to get across the frontier. Yet they did manage to cross the line and appeared in the City with hunted looks, lousy and unshaven, without badges of rank, and adopted any expedient which enabled them to stay alive and eat. Among them were old inhabitants of the City who had returned home with the same idea in their minds as Alexei Turbin - to rest, recuperate and start again by building a new life, not a soldier's life but an ordinary human existence; there were also hundreds of others for whom staying in Petersburg or Moscow was out of the question. Some of them - the Cuirassiers, Chevalier Guards, Horse Guards and Guards Lancers - swam easily in the murky scum of the City's life in that troubled time. The Hetman's bodyguard wore fantastic uniforms and at the Hetman's tables there was room for up to two hundred people with slicked-down hair and mouthfuls of decayed yellow teeth with gold fillings. Anyone who was not found a place in the Hetman's bodyguard was found an even softer billet by women in expensive fur coats in opulent, panelled apartments in Lipki, the most exclusive part of town, or settled into restaurants or hotel rooms.

   Others, such as staff-captains of shattered and disbanded regiments of the line, or hussars who had been in the thick of the fighting like Colonel Nai-Turs, hundreds of ensigns and second lieutenants, former students like Karas, their careers ruined by the war and the revolution, and first lieutenants, who had also enlisted from university but who could never go back and study, like Viktor Myshlaevsky. In their stained gray coats, with still unhealed wounds, with a torn dark strip on each shoulder where their badges of rank had been, they arrived in the City and they slept on chairs, in their own homes or in other people's, using their greatcoats as blankets. They drank vodka, roamed about, tried to find something to do and boiled with anger. It was these men who hated the Bolsheviks with the kind of direct and burning hatred which could drive them to fight.

   And there were officer cadets. When the revolution broke out there were four officer-cadet schools in the City - an engineers' school, an artillery school and two infantry schools. They were closed and broken up to a rattle of gunfire from mutinous soldiery and boys just out of high school and first-year students were thrown out on to the street crippled and wounded. They were not children and not adults, neither soldiers nor civilians, but boys like the seventeen-year-old Nikolka Turbin . . .

   'Of course I'm delighted to think that the Ukraine is under the benevolent sway of the Hetman. But I have never yet been able to discover, and in all probability never will until my dying day, just exactly who is this invisible despot with a title that sounds more appropriate to the seventeenth century than the twentieth.'

   'Yes - exactly who is he, Alexei?'

   'An ex-officer of the Chevalier Guards, a general, rich landowner, his name is Pavel Petrovich Skoropadsky . . .'

   By some curious irony of fate and history his election, held in April 1918, took place in a circus-a fact which will doubtless provide future historians with abundant material for humor. The people, however, in particular the settled inhabitants of the City who had already experienced the first shocks of civil war, not only failed to see the humor of the situation but were unable to discern any sense in it at all. The election had taken place with bewildering speed. Before most people knew it had happened it was all over -and God bless the Hetman. What did it matter anyway, just so long as there was meat and bread in the market and no shooting in the streets, and so long - above all - as the Bolsheviks were kept out and the common people were kept from looting. Well, more or less all of this was put into effect under the Hetman - indeed to a considerable degree. At least the Moscow and Petersburg refugees and the majority of people in the City itself, even though they laughed at the Hetman's curious state and like Captain

   Talberg called it a ludicrous operetta, sincerely blessed the Hetman, and said to themselves 'God grant that it lasts for ever'.

   But whether it could last for ever, no one could say - not even the Hetman himself.

   For the fact was that although life in the City went on with apparent normality - it had a police force, a civil service, even an army and newspapers with various names - not a single person in it knew what was going on around and about the City, in the real Ukraine, a country of tens of millions of people, bigger than France. They not only knew nothing about the distant parts of the country, but they were even, ridiculous though it seems, in utter ignorance of what was happening in the villages scattered about twenty or thirty miles away from the City itself. They neither knew nor cared about the real Ukraine and they hated it with all their heart and soul. And whenever there came vague rumors of events from that mysterious place called 'the country', rumors that the Germans were robbing the peasants, punishing them mercilessly and mowing them down by machine-gun fire, not only was not a single indignant voice raised in defense of the Ukrainian peasants but, under silken lampshades in drawing-rooms, they would bare their teeth in a wolfish grin and mutter:

   'Serve them right! And a bit more of that sort of treatment wouldn't do 'em any harm either. I'd give it 'em even harder. That'll teach them to have a revolution - didn't want their own masters, so now they can have a taste of another!'

   'You're so mistaken . . .'

   'What on earth d'you mean, Alexei? They're nothing more than a bunch of animals. The Germans'll show 'em . . .'

   The Germans were everywhere. At least, they were all over the Ukraine; but away to the north and east beyond the furthest line of the blue-brown forest were the Bolsheviks. Only these two forces counted.

   Then suddenly, out of the blue, a third force appeared on the vast chessboard. A poor chess-player, having fenced himself off from his opponent with a line of pawns (an appropriate image, as Germans in their steel helmets look very like pawns) will surround his toy king with his stronger pieces - his officers. But suddenly the opponent's queen finds a sly way in from the side, advances to the back line and starts to knock out pawns and knights from the rear and checks the terrified king. In the queen's wake comes a fast-moving bishop, the knights zig-zag into action and in no time the wretched player is doomed, his wooden king checkmated.

   All of this happened very quickly, but not suddenly, and not before the appearance of certain omens.

   One day in May, when the City awoke looking like a pearl set in turquoise and the sun rose up to shed its light on the Hetman's kingdom; when the citizens were already going about their little affairs like ants; and sleepy shop-assistants had begun opening the shutters, a terrible and ominous sound boomed out over the City. No one had ever heard a noise of quite that pitch before - it was unlike either gunfire or thunder - but so powerful that many windows flew open of their own accord and every pane rattled. Then the sound was repeated, boomed its way around the Upper City, rolled down in waves towards Podol, the Lower City, crossed the beautiful deep-blue Dnieper and vanished in the direction of distant Moscow. It was followed instantly by shocked and bloodstained people running howling and screaming down from Pechyorsk, the Upper City. And the sound was heard a third time, this time so violently that windows began shattering in the houses of Pechyorsk and the ground shook underfoot. Many people saw women running in nothing but their underclothes and shrieking in terrible voices. The source of the sound was soon discovered. It had come from Bare Mountain outside the City right above the Dnieper, where vast quantities of ammunition and gunpowder were stored. There had been an explosion on Bare Mountain.

   For five days afterwards they lived in terror, expecting poison gas to pour down from Bare Mountain. But the explosions ceased, no gas came, the bloodstained people disappeared and the City regained its peaceful aspect in all of its districts, with the exception of a small part of Pechyorsk where several houses had collapsed. Needless to say the German command set up an intensive investigation, and needless to say the City learned nothing of the cause of the explosions. Various rumors circulated.

   'It was done by French spies.'

   'No, the explosion was produced by Bolshevik spies.'

   In the end people simply forgot about the explosions.

   The second omen occurred in summer, when the City was swathed in rich, dusty green foliage, thunder cracked and rumbled and the German lieutenants consumed oceans of soda-water. The second omen was truly appalling.

   One day on Nikolaevsky Street, in broad daylight, just beside the cab-stand, no less a person than the commander-in-chief of the German forces in the Ukraine, that proud and inviolable military pro-consul of Kaiser Wilhelm, Field Marshal Eichhorn was shot dead! His assassin was, of course, a workman and, of course, a socialist. Twenty-four hours after the death of the Field Marshal the Germans had hanged not only the assassin but even the cab driver who had driven him to the scene of the incident. This did nothing, it is true, towards resurrecting the late distinguished Field Marshal, but it did cause a number of intelligent people to have some startling thoughts about the event.

   That evening, for instance, gasping by an open window and unbuttoning his tussore shirt, Vasilisa had sat over a cup of lemon tea and said to Alexei Turbin in a mysterious whisper:

   'When I think about all these things that have been happening I can't help coming to the conclusion that our lives are extremely insecure. It seems to me that the ground (Vasilisa waved his stubby little fingers in the air) is shifting under the Germans' feet.

   Just think . . . Eichhorn . . . and where it happened. See what I mean.' (Vasilisa's eyes looked frightened.)

   Alexei listened, gave a grim twitch of his cheek and went.

   Yet another omen appeared the very next morning and burst upon Vasilisa himself. Early, very early, when the sun was sending one of its cheerful beams down into the dreary basement doorway that led from the backyard into Vasilisa's apartment, he looked out and saw the omen standing in the sunlight. She was incomparable in the glow of her thirty years, the glittering necklace on her queenly neck, her shapely bare legs, her generous, resilient bosom. Her teeth flashed, and her eyelashes cast a faint, lilac-colored shadow on her cheeks.