The Story of a Life

71

Blue Torches

In Moscow I found lodgings in a two-storey house near Nikitsky Gate. It faced three streets: Tverskoy Boulevard, Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street and Leontievsky Lane. The fourth side of the house abutted the thick firewall of a six-storey block of flats. Across the road, at the corner of Tverskoy Boulevard (where the Timiryazev Monument now stands), was a long, plain building that housed a chemist’s shop and had a cellar loaded with the shop’s supplies. The windows of my room on the first floor looked out onto the chemist’s. These details about the house and its location are necessary for making sense of the unusual events that were to come.

One autumn night, hazy with smoke and frost, I woke up with the strange sensation that all the air had suddenly been sucked out of my room. For a few seconds I thought I had gone deaf. I climbed out of bed. The floor was covered with shattered glass from the windows. The shards shone in the light of the misty moon drifting high in the sky over slumbering Moscow. The deathly quiet was broken by what sounded like a brief clap of thunder. Something flew past my windows with a loud screech followed immediately by a long, slow rumble as the corner of the house facing Nikitsky Gate collapsed. Children started crying in the landlord’s flat.

At the time there was no way of knowing that a gun placed at the base of the Pushkin Monument was firing directly at Nikitsky Gate. This we were to learn only later. After this second shot the silence returned. The moon was still staring down attentively from the misty night sky at the broken glass on my floor. A few minutes later a machine-gun by Nikitsky Gate opened fire. That’s how the October battle, or as we called it then the ‘October coup’, began in Moscow. It lasted for several days.

The machine-gun was answered by rifle fire. A bullet flew in through my window and straight into a portrait of Chekhov on the wall. The bullet hit Chekhov in the chest and tore a hole in his white piqué waistcoat. I later found the portrait buried under a heap of plaster. The crossfire crackled like burning brushwood. Bullets clattered on the metal rooftops. My landlord, an elderly widowed architect, called out to me to join him in some back rooms facing the courtyard. Two little girls and their old nanny were sitting on the floor. The woman had wrapped them up from head to toe in a thick shawl.

‘We’re safe here,’ said the landlord. ‘It’s not likely the bullets can pierce the interior walls.’

The older of the girls asked from under her shawl: ‘Papa, are the Germans attacking Moscow?’

‘No, that’s no Germans.’

‘But then who’s shooting?’

‘Be quiet!’ her father snapped.

I went back to my room. Pressing myself against the wall, I peered out at an angle through the window. Black clouds had covered up the moon. With their lights out, the neighbouring buildings were almost invisible in the darkness. The gunfire raged without stopping, and the bullets sang with their own individual notes – some whistled lightly, some whined, others made a strange screeching sound as though they were turning somersaults in the air. I tried to make out people in the streets but the flashes from the guns were not bright enough. Judging by the gunfire, the Red Guards had begun their attack at Strastnaya Square and had now advanced to the summer restaurant (an ornate wooden pavilion) located about halfway down the boulevard. The Cadets were holding down their positions in the square beside Nikitsky Gate.fn1

All of a sudden, a tall blue tongue of flame shot up with a quiet roar, swaying in the wind under my windows. It looked like a torch. In its pale light I could now make out figures running from tree to tree in the streets below. Soon a second blue torch flared up on the opposite side of the boulevard. Bullets had shattered the burners of the street lamps, and the burning gas was now rushing straight out of the pipes. By its fluttering light the gunfire immediately increased. I went back to my landlord.

‘Well?’ he asked.

‘We’ve got to get the children out of here,’ I said.

‘But where to? There’s shooting up and down Tverskoy Boulevard.’

‘Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street. We can get there through the shops.’

‘The Red Guards have set up machine-guns on Malaya Nikitskaya Street and they’re firing all along Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street. They’re also directing their guns at the Cadets’ headquarters in the Union Cinema.’

‘Then that leaves Leontievsky Lane.’

‘Let’s go and have a look.’

We went down the back stairs into the courtyard. Bullets whistled high overhead. Here and there bits of cornice exploded and rained down into the yard. A few people were standing around next to the small porter’s lodge in a far corner. The shooting in Leontievsky Lane turned out to be even more intense than on Tverskoy Boulevard. The firewall on the fourth side of our house loomed over the yard. It didn’t have a single window. The architect looked at it and cursed.

‘It’s a trap,’ he said. ‘We’re blocked in on all sides. There’s no way out. We’re doomed.’

It was getting light. The men by the lodge turned out to be employees of Bartel’s Bakery, located on the building’s ground floor. A bearded baker all white with flour – a veteran of Port Arthur – suggested moving all the tenants into the lodge as this was the safest location. The number of people was small since the entire ground floor was occupied by shops and stockrooms. And so began the first of many days we spent in the lodge.

One of the bakers, a young fellow, decided to go over to the Red Guards. Crouched down low, he ran out of the gate onto the pavement and was immediately mown down by machine-gun fire from Nikitsky Gate.

Sitting in the lodge, we talked about what had happened over the past few days and found ourselves amazed by our own stupidity. The fighting had taken us all by surprise. Nevertheless, we all knew about the uprising in Petrograd, the storming of the Winter Palace, the shot fired by the Aurora. We all knew that martial law had been declared in Moscow, that over on Khodynka Field well-armed units of Red Guards and soldiers had been massing, and that the Alexeevskoe and Alexandrovskoe military academies had been alerted for active duty.

The Port Arthur veteran took command of our building. A thin trickle of water still flowed from the tap in the lodge, and so he ordered us to collect every last jug and pail from every flat and fill them up. The water could be cut off at any moment. Next we collected all the bread and other remaining food. It wasn’t very much. We didn’t know what was going on outside, but were certain fighting was occurring all over Moscow. One thing was clear – we were in a state of siege. We found ourselves as though in a fortress ringed by fire. Our fortress, however, wasn’t safe. Already by the end of the first day, bullets were flying into the courtyard. We sat out on the lodge’s steps the entire first night, trying to determine by the sound of the gunfire which side was gaining the upper hand.

Suddenly, in the middle of the night, the shooting stopped. We all froze. The silence seemed more threatening than the barrage of gunfire. It didn’t last long. We heard distant voices in the pitch-darkness calling out: ‘Message for the commander! The Cadets are manning the roofs!’ The message was repeated, again and again, with growing urgency. As abruptly as it had stopped, the gunfire resumed, and again lead hail crackled against the drainpipes and shop signs. Towards evening on the second day the chemist’s shop caught fire, sending up coloured flames – one minute yellow, then green, then blue – most likely from the various chemicals. Muffled explosions boomed in the cellars. Before long the whole building collapsed. The flames died down, but an acrid, rainbow-coloured cloud of smoke rose from the ruins for several days. The metal roof on our building began to buckle and the window frames smoked, but fortunately nothing caught fire. We choked on the smoke, our eyes burned with tears. The wet kerchiefs we tied to our faces provided little relief. On the third night there was another lull in the shooting, and we heard someone shouting on the boulevard in a strained and uncertain voice: ‘Vikzhel (that was the abbreviated name at the time for the All-Russian Union of Railway Workers) calls on all sides to cease fire and send delegates! To negotiate a truce! Don’t shoot! A representative of Vikzhel shall act as the mediator. He’ll wait ten minutes. Don’t shoot!’

An unbelievable silence followed. It was so quiet we could hear the bullet-ridden shop signs groaning in the wind. I looked at my watch in the dull glow of the smouldering chemist’s shop. Everyone followed along in silence as the second hand moved around my watch face, faster, it seemed, than normal. Five minutes! Seven minutes! Are the Cadets really not going to surrender? Ten minutes!

A single shot rang out, followed by another, and then all sides began firing at once like a swirling tornado. Cannon fire could now be heard coming from the direction of Arbatskaya Square. Something crashed in the neighbouring house behind the firewall. A column of fire slowly rose over the roofline. We later learned the Cadets had shelled the house and set it on fire to keep it from falling into the hands of the Red Guards. The building, in military jargon, commanded the whole neighbourhood. This second fire was more dangerous than the one at the chemist’s. Burning timber and pieces of red-hot metal from the melting roof came crashing down on us in the yard. We hurried to put them out with what little water we still had left. The old baker assured us that we would be safe once the building’s top floor burned away, assuming, of course, the firewall didn’t collapse. We agreed with him even though we knew the situation was grim.

That same night, as if by some miracle, a man climbed through a broken ground-floor window along Tverskoy Boulevard and made his way into our yard, now so brightly lit by the fire that every fleck of dirt could be seen on the stone paving. Wearing a grey jacket and a soldier’s belt, a Mauser on his side, he had a light brown beard and spectacles and looked a bit like Dobrolyubov.fn2

‘Quiet!’ he yelled. ‘All the tenants over here! We’ve made a deal with the Cadets to hold our fire so that we can evacuate all the women and children. But only the women and children! They won’t let the men leave. I’ll admit, you’re in an awful bind. The house is going to go up in flames any minute now, so I’d take my chances and try to run for it, if I were you. But that’s only after we take the women and children out. Leave by way of Tverskoy Boulevard and then cross over to Bronnaya Street. Single file, one at a time. Line up by the gate.’

The man disappeared as quickly as he had come.

We all gathered at the gate. The shooting stopped. The first to hurry across the boulevard were the old nanny and the two little girls. The rest of the women followed. While they were running the Red Guards and Cadets began shouting at each other.

‘Hey, you snivelling little brats, stop fooling around and drop your weapons!’ shouted the Red Guards.

‘We swore an oath!’ the Cadets yelled back.

‘To whom? Kerensky? That son of a bitch has already turned tail and bolted to the Germans.’

‘Not to Kerensky – to Russia!’

‘We are Russia!’ the guards shouted. ‘Use your brains!’

As soon as the women had made it across, the old baker rushed out of the gate. I was to go next, but just then a burst of machine-gun fire from the Cadets’ side ripped off a corner of the gate. The baker turned and threw himself back inside. The crossfire started up again and chunks of broken brick, glass and wood showered the pavement. We returned to the porter’s lodge. The baker cursed and then said to me: ‘If only we’d got out. You and I would have gone over to the Red Guards. You’re just a student, but they’d have taken you since you’re with me. Look at it any way you like, there’s just one Russia. And that’s our Russia. Theirs already has one foot in the grave.’

I thought of the Red Guards yelling ‘We are Russia!’ and suddenly, with an incredible rush of clarity, I understood the meaning of the hackneyed words ‘the mass of the people’. I belonged to that ‘mass of the people’. I felt at home among those craftsmen, peasants, workers, soldiers, among that great, enormous world of simple folk which had produced Gleb Uspensky, Leskov, Nikitin, Gorky and thousands of others like them.fn3

‘Well,’ I said to the baker, ‘there’s no life for me apart from my people. That I know.’

‘Exactly,’ said the baker, grinning. ‘Stick with us, my friend. You don’t want to get left behind.’

The food ran out on the fifth day. Famished, we stuck it out until the evening. Behind the wall of the lodge the neighbouring house was burning itself out. There was a small food shop in our building. We had no other choice than to break in. The back door opened onto the courtyard. The baker snapped off the lock with an axe, and we took turns that night running in and grabbing as much sausage, tinned food and cheese as we could carry. The glow from the fire was so bright we had to hide behind the counters to stay out of sight of the Cadets at the Union Cinema. We didn’t want to give them any excuses to shoot.

The first night went well, but the second night a Red Guard sniper set himself up in the turret of the corner building on Bronnaya Street. From there he had a clear view into the courtyard, still lit up by the fire next door, and so he sat, puffing a cigarette, and taking pot shots at anyone who ventured out into the yard.

It was my turn. I managed to dash into the shop – either the sniper didn’t see me or he didn’t manage to get a shot off. I can still remember the place. Smoked sausages wrapped in silver paper hung from a stretched wire. Round, red cheeses on the countertop were smothered in horseradish from bullet-ridden jars. Sharp-smelling puddles of vinegar, cognac and various liqueurs oozed over the floor. Firm, white marinated mushrooms covered with a reddish film floated in the puddles. The large earthenware jar that had held the mushrooms lay in shattered pieces.

I quickly tore off several sausages and stacked them like logs in one arm, and put a large wheel of Swiss cheese on top, along with a few tins. As I was running back across the yard something pinged under my arms, but I didn’t pay any attention. Once inside the lodge, the only woman still with us, the porter’s wife, pale and sickly, let out a terrible scream. I dropped everything and saw that both my arms were bleeding. A minute later, despite our desperate circumstances, everyone was laughing as they helped to wash the thick tomato purée off me. The sniper had missed me, and fortunately only the tin of tomatoes, the contents of which I was now covered in, had been hit.

The bread was gone, so we ate the sharp cheese together with sausage and tinned peppers and washed it all down with cold tap water. The landlord remembered he had a bag of rusks back in his kitchen, and I offered to go and fetch it. I carefully picked my way up the back stairs, which were now littered with broken bricks. In the kitchen water poured from a bullet hole in the pipe, and the floor was deep in sticky, sodden plaster. I began rummaging around in the cupboard for the bag when I heard shouts and the pounding of feet coming from the boulevard. I went back to my room to see what was happening. Red Guards with their rifles at the ready were running in pairs along the street. The Cadets were retreating without firing a shot. I had never seen fighting at such close quarters before, right under my windows. I was struck by the men’s faces – green and hollow-eyed. Deafened by their own shouting, the men seemed to be in the grips of a blind rage. I heard the pounding of boots running up the main stairs and pulled myself away from the window. The door from the stair landing flew open and smashed against the wall. Bits of plaster fell from the ceiling. An excited voice yelled out from the landing: ‘Mityukha, bring the machine-gun!’

I turned. An old man in a fur hat with ear flaps and a bandolier across his shoulder stood in the doorway. He was holding a rifle. He stared at me for an instant with wild eyes and then pointed his gun at me and shouted: ‘Don’t move! Hands up!’

I raised my hands.

‘What’ve you got there, Grandpa?’ came a young voice from the hallway.

‘I’ve got one of ’em,’ the old man said. ‘He was shooting. From the window up here, shooting us in the back, the bastard!’

Only now did I realise that I was wearing my shabby student uniform. Just then it hit me that, according to the baker, a student militia on the side of the Provisional Government had been fighting at Nikitsky Gate. A young worker walked into the room. He had on a cap pulled down tightly over his ears. He strode over to me, casually took hold of my right hand, and examined my palm. ‘Look here, Grandpa, he wasn’t shooting,’ he said. ‘No marks on his hand from the bolt. It’s perfectly clean.’

‘You damned fool!’ yelled the old man in the hat. ‘What if he’d been shooting with a pistol and not a rifle? There wouldn’t be any marks. He could’ve tossed the pistol somewhere. Take him to the yard!’

‘Anything’s possible,’ the young worker replied and slapped me on the shoulder. ‘All right, let’s go, and don’t try anything stupid.’

I don’t know why, but I didn’t say a word the entire time. Maybe because the situation seemed so hopeless there was no point in trying to explain. I had been caught standing next to a broken window on the first floor in a house just captured by the Red Guards. I was wearing a student uniform smeared with plaster and covered with dark stains that looked more like blood than tomato purée. No matter what I might have said, no one would have believed me. And so, I said nothing, recognising, of course, that my silence was one more damning piece of evidence against me.

‘Crazy devil!’ said the old man. ‘It’s obvious he’s a real fanatic.’

The young Red Guardsman marched me out into the yard. I felt the hard barrel of his rifle in my back as I walked. The yard was now full of Red Guards. They were pulling crates out of a demolished warehouse and using them to build a barricade across Tverskoy Boulevard.

‘What’s going on? Who’s this?’ they asked, gathering around me.

The old man in the hat said I had been shooting at them from a window.

‘Off with him, straight to the Good Lord’s general staff!’ a youth with drunken eyes said merrily.

‘Fetch the commander?’

‘He’s not here.’

‘Where is he?’

‘We had an order not to harm any prisoners!’

‘Sure, prisoners, but he was shooting us in the back.’

‘Then there’s only one thing to do – shoot him right here on the spot.’

‘Comrades, we can’t do anything without the commander.’

‘What, some sort of lawyer, are you? Up against the wall with him!’

They dragged me over to the wall. The porter’s wife came rushing out and threw herself at the Red Guards, grasping at their arms. ‘My sons, comrades,’ she pleaded, ‘he lives here with us. He didn’t shoot at you. I’m a sick woman, better to kill me and let him be.’

‘Now, now, Mother, don’t go feeling sorry for people without knowing all the facts,’ said the old man in the hat. ‘We’re not a gang of murderers. Go on now, leave us alone.’

I still don’t understand why, as I stood against the wall and heard the click of the rifle bolts, I didn’t feel a thing. Maybe I went numb inside or even lost consciousness for a moment. I don’t know. I just stood there staring at the corner of the gatepost, damaged by a burst of machine-gun fire, thinking about nothing at all. Yet for some reason I remember the tiniest details about that post. I remember there were seven deep pits where it had been grazed by bullets. The pits were white (the upper layer of plaster) on top and red farther down (exposed brick). I remember the broken, white-painted bracket of the porter’s bell, a piece of electrical wiring dangling from the bracket, and a drawing in charcoal on the wall of a face with an enormous nose and a few straggly hairs. ‘We sure made a fool out of him!’ was scrawled beneath it. It seemed as though time had stopped, and I was trapped in some universal silence. In fact, only a few seconds must have passed before I heard a man shout: ‘What the hell are you doing? Have you forgotten your orders? Put down those rifles!’

The man’s voice was at once unfamiliar and yet quite familiar. With difficulty I looked up from the gatepost – my neck hurt terribly – and saw the man with the Mauser who had reminded me of Dobrolyubov, the very man who had come the other night to evacuate the women and children. He was pale now and didn’t look at me.

‘Stop it!’ he said sharply. ‘I know this man. He’s not part of the student militia. The Cadets are attacking, and you’re fooling around with this nonsense.’

The old man in the hat grabbed me by the collar and started shaking me. ‘God damn you!’ he snarled. ‘I nearly had you on my conscience, you fool. Why didn’t you say anything? And you a student!’

The young worker rapped me playfully on the shoulder and winked. ‘Beat it, and good luck!’

A Cadet hand-grenade exploded in the street. The Red Guards ran out from behind the barricade and into the boulevard. The house emptied. Once again, the machine-guns rattled with terrifying intensity. I never did learn the name of the young commander with the Mauser who had saved the women and children and me as well. I never saw him again, although I know I could have picked him out of a crowd.

On the fifth night of the ‘Nikitsky siege’, all of us – unshaven, our voices hoarse from the cold – sat out on the porter’s steps as we did every night, trying to guess when the fighting would finally stop. It didn’t seem to be in any hurry. The fighting had yet to acquire the intense bitterness that would come later during the civil war. The Red Guards were fighting a ‘war of attrition’, confident of victory, knowing that the Cadets would soon lose their nerve and give up. The new Soviet government had seized power in Petrograd. Bit by bit the country was abandoning the Provisional Government. The Cadets in Moscow knew this. Their cause was lost. The bullets whistling through the air around the house at Nikitsky Gate were their last.

We sat talking about the fate of the Cadets and the Provisional Government. The late-night air smelled of smoke from the burning houses. Only in the direction of Kievsky station was the sky still a dull crimson. From Khodynka to the north came the whining sound of an artillery shell. It flew over Moscow and exploded somewhere near the Kremlin. Just then, as if on command, the shooting stopped. Apparently, the Red Guards and Cadets were listening and waiting for the second explosion to learn the artillery’s target. And finally it came – a second whining noise flew through the air followed by the flash of an explosion by the Kremlin.

‘Are they really firing on the Kremlin?’ whispered the old baker.

The architect sat up. ‘I don’t believe it!’ he shouted. ‘That’s impossible! No one would ever dare raise their hand against the Kremlin.’

‘You’re right, no one would dare,’ the baker agreed quietly. ‘It must just be a warning. Let’s listen.’

We sat, frozen in place, waiting for more shots. An hour passed. Nothing. Then two hours. All was quiet. A thin light began to seep along the eastern edge of the sky, the chilly light of dawn. It was unusually quiet in Moscow, so quiet we could hear the burning hiss of the gas torches along the boulevard.

‘Seems like it’s all over,’ said the baker. ‘We should go and have a look.’

We carefully stepped out onto Tverskoy Boulevard. Lime trees, their branches broken, loomed in the grey hoar-frost and smoke. Along the boulevard all the way to the Pushkin Monument, the broken street lamps blazed like funeral torches. Torn cables covered the ground. They buzzed angrily, twisting this way and that and catching against the cobbles. A dead horse, its yellow teeth bared, lay across the tramlines. A long trickle of frozen blood stretched over the paving stones by our gate. Riddled with bullet holes from the machine-gun fire, the houses kept dropping sharp splinters of glass that fell all around us.

Filling the boulevard from one side to the other, columns of exhausted, silent Red Guards were walking towards Nikitsky Gate. Their red armbands had been twisted into string. Almost every one of them was smoking, and the light at the ends of their cigarettes flashed, creating the effect of a silent gun battle. A white flag had been hung from a lamp-post in front of the Union Cinema. Nearby against one of the façades stood a row of Cadets in crumpled forage caps and greatcoats smeared with bits of grey plaster. Many of them were half asleep, leaning on their rifles.

An unarmed man in a leather jacket went up to the Cadets. Several Red Guards stood waiting behind him. The man in the leather jacket raised an arm and said something to the Cadets in a low voice. A tall officer stepped forward. He removed his sword and his revolver, threw them down at the feet of the man in the leather jacket, saluted, turned and then walked away slowly on unsteady feet in the direction of Arbatskaya Square.

Next, all the Cadets, one by one, approached the man in the leather jacket and laid down their rifles and ammunition. And then, with the same slow, tired footsteps as their officer, they walked off down Nikitsky Boulevard towards the Arbat. As they walked some of the Cadets tore off their epaulettes. The Red Guards watched the Cadets go. Their faces were creased with tension, their eyes were stern, but no one said a word. It was all over. From the direction of Tverskaya Street, through the chilly darkness, came the crash of cymbals, the blare of brass horns and the sound of voices singing:

Our deliverance we’ll receive from no one –

Not God, Tsar, or Hero of another land.

We alone shall win our freedom,

By ourselves and with our own hand.