The Story of a Life

80

Our Rag-Tag Hetman

I stayed in Kopan until late autumn, when I moved to Kiev to find work and lodgings in preparation for bringing Mama and Galya to live with me. It took a while. Eventually, I landed a job as a proofreader for the city’s one fairly respectable newspaper, Kievan Thought. The paper had known better days. Korolenko had written for it, as had Lunacharsky and other progressive figures. Even under the Germans and the Hetman, Kievan Thought tried to maintain an independent line, though not always successfully. The authorities fined it constantly and several times threatened to close it down.

I rented two small rooms from an overly sensitive Swiss spinster, Amalia Knoster, in a modest house near St Vladimir’s Cathedral. I was not able to bring Mama and Galya to Kiev, however, for at that moment the city was besieged by Petlyura’s forces.fn1 My windows looked out onto the Botanical Gardens. I awoke one morning to the sound of cannon fire which ceaselessly swept the entire perimeter of the city. I got up, lit the stove, looked out at the gardens where the gunfire was knocking the hoar-frost off the trees, and then went back to bed to read and think. The icy winter morning, the crackle of the burning logs in the stove, the booming of the guns – all this induced in me an unusual and precarious but nevertheless undeniable peace of mind. My head felt clear. I washed in the icy water from the tap. For some reason the smell of coffee coming from Frau Knoster’s room brought back memories of Christmas Eve.

I began to write a great deal at the time. Strange as it may seem, the siege helped. The city was held in a tight ring, and so were my thoughts. The realisation that Kiev was cut off from the world, that no one could get out, that the siege was likely to last a long time, and that there was nothing to do now but wait, made life somehow easier and more carefree. Even Frau Knoster became accustomed to the cannonade as a regular feature of daily life. When it occasionally stopped, she grew fidgety and nervous. Silence foretold something new and unexpected and, hence, dangerous. But soon the low thunder ringing the city started up again, and everyone relaxed. You could read again, or think, or work and return to the familiar cycle of normal life: of waking up, work, starvation (or, more accurately, half-starvation) and finally blissful sleep.

I was Amalia’s sole lodger. She let rooms only to single men, although without any devious intentions. It was simply that she couldn’t stand most women. She quietly fell in love with every one of her lodgers, although she expressed this through nothing more than extra care and concern or sudden, deep blushes. These would flood her long sallow face at the uttering of any word that might possibly be construed as a subtle reference to the dangerous realm of love and marriage. She loved to talk about all her former lodgers and was sincerely disappointed when they became engaged, as if by conspiracy, to some cruel and greedy woman and moved out. Amalia had been a governess to rich Kiev families, saved some money and rented her present flat. She earned a living by letting rooms and sewing.

Despite her former profession as a governess, there was nothing stiff or prim about Amalia. She was simply a kind, boring and lonely woman. Amalia hated the Germans occupying Kiev and considered them boors. She treated me with an air of timid sympathy, apparently because I tended to read and write at night. She considered me a writer and from time to time even got up the courage to talk to me about literature and her favourite writer, Spielhagen. She cleaned my room herself, and sometimes I would come back to find a sprig of dried flowers or a picture postcard of a brilliant dahlia left between the pages of one of my books. But there was never anything intrusive about these little acts of kindness, and nothing ever interfered with our friendship.

Her friends – elderly German and Swiss governesses in gaiters and capes with satin ribbons, reticules in their hands – came to visit on feast days. Amalia put out a pile of napkins embroidered with kittens, puppies, pansies and forget-me-nots, spread these treasures on the table and served her famous Basel coffee (her family originally came from there). The governesses ate and drank daintily and carried on a conversation that consisted entirely of exclamations of astonishment or horror. Only one man was admitted to this select company – our house superintendent, a clerk for the South-West Railway. He had a most luxurious name: Pan Sebastian Kturenda-Tsikavsky.

He was a cocky little man with a crew-cut, the dyed moustache of a pimp and insolent little button eyes. He dressed in a navy-blue jacket with brown stripes cut for a much smaller man and had sewn to his breast pocket a strip of purple silk that was meant to act as a symbolic replacement for a missing and presumably fashionable handkerchief. He was fond of bow-ties and the pink celluloid collars that were then referred to as ‘bachelor’s luck’. There was no way to wash them and so his collars were always dirty. The only way to get the dirt out was to rub them with an ordinary schoolboy’s rubber. Pan Kturenda gave off a complex aroma of hair dye, stale tobacco and hooch, which he distilled himself in his own dimly lit room. Kturenda was a bachelor and lived with his mother, a timid old woman who was afraid of her son and especially of his learning. Pan Kturenda loved to impress the lodgers with it as well, always in the most florid language.

‘I have the privilege of informing you’, he liked to say mysteriously, ‘that Weininger’s Sex and Character is the formulation of the sexual question in its most articulate of expressions.’ Pan Kturenda never broached the subject of sex in his conversations with Frau Amalia, but he made the governesses quiver with his accounts of the divine origins of ‘the Most Noble Pan Hetman Skoropadskyi’. I have seen many fools in my life, but nothing to compare with the likes of this idiot.

Life in Kiev at the time reminded one of a feast in a time of plague.fn2 Many coffee houses and restaurants had sprung up, although none of them had enough sweets and food for even a dozen or so patrons. Still, they made an impression of shabby wealth. The population had nearly doubled in size from the influx of a great many Muscovites and Petrograders. Artsybashev’s Jealousyfn3 and Viennese operettas played in the theatres. German uhlans with lances and red and black pennants patrolled the streets. The newspapers carried little news about events in Soviet Russia. It was a touchy subject. The editors decided it was best to ignore such matters. There was no harm in letting readers think that life there was just fine.

Ox-eyed Kievan beauties and the Hetman’s officers roller-skated arm in arm on the city’s rinks. Gambling dens and brothels opened left and right. At the Bessarabsky Market, cocaine was sold openly and passers-by were accosted by prepubescent prostitutes. No one had any idea what was happening at the local factories and in the workers’ suburbs. The Germans didn’t feel secure, especially after the murder of General Eichhorn. One got the impression Kiev was determined to enjoy itself during the blockade. As for Ukraine, it was as though it didn’t even exist. Nothing beyond the ring of Petlyura’s men seemed real.

Some evenings I walked over to an arts club on Nikolaevskaya Street. Poets, singers and dancers who had fled from the north performed on a restaurant stage. Loud drunks liked to interrupt the long-winded poetry readings. It was hot and stuffy inside, even in winter, and so the windows were often opened a crack. Together with the frosty air, snow would blow into the brightly lit room, land and immediately melt. With the windows ajar, the nightly sound of the guns became more apparent.

One evening Vertinsky sang.fn4 I had never heard him perform before. I still remembered him as a schoolboy who wrote exquisite verses. It was snowing unusually hard that evening, and the flakes twirled round and round in the air, drifting all the way to the piano where they caught the multi-coloured lights of the chandelier. Petlyura’s guns were getting closer now. Their thundering made the glasses on the tables ring. The troubling sound of the glassware seemed to be sending us a warning signal, but everyone carried on smoking, arguing, making toasts and laughing. A young woman in a black evening dress with narrow eyes that reminded me somehow of Egypt had the most infectious laugh of all that night. Snowflakes were landing on her exposed back, and with each one she shivered and quickly turned round as if she wanted to see it melt, but by then it was already too late.

Vertinsky came out onto the stage in a black tail-coat. He was tall, thin and terribly pale. The room fell silent. The waiters stopped serving and formed a line at the back. Vertinsky twisted his long slender fingers together, held them out in front of him in an air of great suffering, and started to sing. He sang of the Cadets recently killed outside Kiev in the village of Borshchagovka, of the youths sent to a certain death against a dangerous gang. ‘I don’t know, who wanted this or why? What merciless hand sent these boys off to die?’

He sang of the Cadets’ funeral. Vertinsky ended with the words:

Mourners huddled silently, shivering in their coats,

A woman, her frenzied face hidden behind a hand,

Bent down and kissed the cold blue lips of a corpse

And flung at the priest her wedding band.

He was singing of an actual incident that had happened at the Cadets’ funeral. The audience applauded. Vertinsky bowed. A drunken officer seated at a table in the back blurted out: ‘Sing “God Save the Tsar”!’

The room erupted. A wizened old man who looked like a schoolteacher in a pince-nez and a coat shiny with age rushed at the officer. His pointy little beard shaking with rage, the man began pounding the marble-topped table with his bony fists and showering the officer with spittle as he screamed: ‘Riff-raff! Vermin! You and all the other officers! How dare you insult the people of Free Russia! Why aren’t you at the front fighting the Bolsheviks? Just another paper tiger!’

Everyone jumped up. The old man threw himself at the officer, but some patrons pulled him away. Red in the face, the officer slowly stood up, kicked away his chair and grabbed a bottle by the neck. The waiters rushed over to him. The woman in the black dress screamed and covered her face with her hands. Vertinsky banged a loud chord on the piano and raised a hand. The noise stopped. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen!’ he said in a clear and contemptuous voice, ‘This is just too tiresome!’ With that, he turned and slowly walked off the stage.

The man in the pince-nez had been served a glass of water. As if nothing had happened, the officer sat back down and said to no one in particular: ‘I’ve beaten Yids all my life and I’ll go on beating Yids until the day I die. I’ll show you what officers’ scum is, Master Movshenzon from Gomel-Gomel.’

The room erupted once more. A patrol of the Hetman’s Cossack guards with blue and yellow armbands appeared in the restaurant. I left. As I walked, I cursed under my breath. Our country was overflowing with all kinds of riff-raff – be they in officers’ epaulettes, pink celluloid collars or heavy German helmets – but I couldn’t pretend to have done anything about it. I spent my days writing, that was it. I had been taken prisoner by my imaginary world and was helpless to escape it.

My writings to this point were merely picturesque exercises and useless sketches. They were full of wild imagination, but nothing more. I could spend hours crafting different descriptions of sunshine – the way it flashed on broken glass, or on a ship’s brass ladder, on windowpanes, a drinking glass, dew, the mother-of-pearl lining of a shell, a human eye. For me, they came together to form a series of unexpected images. The proper use of imagination demands sharpness, definition, which I rarely achieved. Most of my sketches were blurry. At that time, I wanted to forget real life and so I never did struggle to give my writings the precision of reality.

Eventually, I created my own literary school out of these descriptive sketches. But after reading them over, one after another, I quickly discovered how mawkish and boring they were. It came as a shock. Good prose requires vigour and austerity, and I had been churning out candy floss, Turkish delight and bonbons. They were sticky, these verbal sweets of mine. It was hard to wash them off. I scrubbed and scrubbed, but not always successfully. Traces of this misty, florid prose remained. Thankfully, this phase didn’t last long, and I tore up nearly everything I had written. Yet even now, I have to be on guard against my predilection for pretty words.

And then, all of a sudden, my writing and my doubts were interrupted in a most unexpected manner. Petlyura was drawing the noose tighter and tighter around Kiev. In response, Hetman Skoropadskyi issued a decree calling up all men without exception between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. The house superintendents were responsible for making sure every male obeyed, otherwise they would be considered to have been ‘hiding’ the men and would be shot immediately. The decree was posted throughout the city. I read it matter-of-factly. I considered myself a citizen of the Russian Federative Republic and so not subject to any of the Hetman’s decrees, which, to be honest, I had no desire to follow.

Late one winter evening I was returning home along Bibikovsky Boulevard from the printers. A cold wind was blowing. The poplars made a plaintive murmur. A woman muffled in a warm shawl was standing by the gate to my house. She hurried up to me and took my hand. I drew back.

‘Quiet!’ she said. I recognised Amalia’s voice, breathless with emotion. ‘Follow me.’

We walked off in the direction of St Vladimir’s Cathedral. Hulking buttresses shored up its massive walls. We stopped behind one of the walls to get out of the wind, and even though we were all alone, Amalia spoke in a hurried whisper.

‘Thank God you’ve been out all day. He’s been sitting in the front hall since ten o’clock this morning. He hasn’t moved once. It’s terrible!’

‘Who?’

‘Pan Kturenda. He’s lying in wait for you.’

‘Why?’

‘Oh Lord!’ she cried, raising her hands, hidden in a small muff, to her chest. ‘You’ve got to run! I beg you! Don’t go back to your room. I’ll give you the address of a friend – one of the kindest old women left on earth. I’ve written her a letter. Go to her. It’s far from here, in Glubochitsa, but you’ll be safer there. She lives all alone in a small house and can hide you. I’ll bring you food every day until the danger passes.’

‘What’s happened?’ I asked. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Haven’t you read the Hetman’s decree?’

‘Yes, I’ve read it.’

‘Kturenda has come to turn you in. To hand you over to the army.’

Only now did I understand.

‘He’s crying,’ Amalia said coldly. ‘He’s soaked in tears and keeps saying that if you run off he’ll be shot like a common bandit tomorrow morning at ten.’ She pulled a letter from her muff and placed it in the pocket of my coat. ‘Go!’

‘Thank you, Amalia Karlovna! I’m in no danger. I’m a citizen of the Russian Federation. I don’t give a damn about the Hetman’s decrees.’

‘Oh Lord, that’s wonderful,’ she said, ignoring my crude language. She pressed the muff to her chest and laughed. ‘I didn’t know that. So that means they’ll leave him alone as well.’

‘Nothing’s going to happen. I’ll go to the recruiting office with him tomorrow and we’ll settle the matter right then and there.’

‘Well, all right then,’ she said, now completely reassured. ‘Let’s go home. I’ll go in first, and you follow me a few minutes later so he doesn’t suspect anything. Oh, I’m so tired!’

For the first time since we had met, I took her by the arm. I could feel her shaking as we walked. She waited a minute or two on the steps before entering her room. Pan Kturenda was sitting in the front hall. He hurled himself at me, grabbed my arms with his bony claws and muttered in a quivering voice: ‘For the love of Christ, don’t kill me! I’ve been waiting here for you the whole day. Have pity, if not for me, then at least for my poor mama!’

I told him that tomorrow the two of us would visit the recruiting office and since I was a Russian citizen they would of course let me go. Pan Kturenda gave a sob, dropped to his knees and tried to kiss my hand. I snatched it away. Amalia stood in the doorway watching Kturenda with a piercing stare. I had never seen this look in her eyes before. All of a sudden it hit me that if I had followed Amalia’s advice, then this wretched little man might indeed have been shot. I couldn’t help but marvel at the cool ruthlessness of this extraordinarily sensitive woman.

Pan Kturenda went off, calling down blessings on my head and insisting that, of course, I would be exempt because Pan Hetman had no interest in recruiting Reds from Moscow into his army.

After I had washed under the tap in the kitchen, Amalia stopped me in the hall on the way to my room. ‘Not a word!’ she whispered mysteriously, taking me by the hand and tiptoeing across the small sitting room and into the dark front hall. She stopped, pointed at a door, and gently pushed down on my shoulders as a way of telling me to peep through the keyhole. I looked. There sat Pan Kturenda, yawning silently, his mouth covered by a hand, on an egg-crate at the top of the stairs. Clearly, he had not believed me and was making sure I didn’t sneak off in the middle of the night.

‘He’s an animal!’ whispered Amalia when we were back in the sitting room. ‘And to think I used to have him in my house. I hate him so now that the mere sight of him gives me a headache. I’ve left some breakfast for you in the kitchen cupboard.’

At exactly eight o’clock the following morning, Pan Kturenda rang the bell at my door. I opened it. His red eyes were full of tears. The wings of his bow-tie had drooped. He looked pathetic. We walked over to the recruitment office in the Galitsky Market. Pan Kturenda, complaining that he felt dizzy, held me tightly by the arm. It was obvious he was afraid I might try to escape down some dark side street. At the office, we had to stand in a queue. House superintendents, fat ledgers under their arms, were fussing around the recruits. They looked embarrassed and ingratiating and kept offering, or, more accurately, forcing, cigarettes on their charges, nodding foolishly at everything the young men said, and making sure not to leave their side for moment.

One of the Hetman’s officers in yellow and blue epaulettes sat behind a desk at the far end of a room that smelled of coffee. His foot bounced up and down nervously under the desk. Ahead of me was a sickly, unshaven youth in spectacles. He waited quietly, his eyes directed at the floor. When his turn came and the officer asked his profession, he said: ‘Accountant.’

‘A count?’ the officer asked, leaning back in his chair and beaming with pleasure at the young man. ‘That’s a rare bird! I’ve had lots of nobles and even a few barons, but so far no counts.’

‘Not a count, an accountant.’

‘Shut up!’ The officer said matter-of-factly. ‘We’re all counts. And we know all about you counts and accountants. Any more nonsense out of you and you’ll end up in the housekeeping unit.’

The young man just shrugged his shoulders.

‘Next!’

I was next. I showed the officer my documents and said firmly that as a citizen of the Russian Soviet Federation I could not be called up into the Hetman’s army.

‘What a surprise!’ said the officer, making a face and raising his eyebrows. ‘Your words simply delight me. Had I known you planned to grace us with your presence, I would have called for the regimental band.’

‘Your jokes really aren’t called for.’

‘Oh, really? And what is called for? Maybe this?’ he asked angrily and stood up. He made an obscene gesture with his hand and shoved it in my face. ‘Do you think I give a fig for your Soviet-Jewish citizenship? I couldn’t give a damn about it or you.’

‘You can’t talk to me like this!’ I said, trying to stay calm.

‘Everybody’s always telling me what I can and can’t do.’ The officer sighed sadly and sat back down. ‘That’s enough now! Out of my respect for your so-called citizenship, I’m putting you down for the Cossack Infantry Regiment – Pan Hetman’s very own life guards. You should thank God for that. Your documents will remain with me. Next!’

During this conversation, Pan Kturenda disappeared. We recruits were marched off under guard to the barracks in Demievka. The whole farce, highlighted by the presence of so many bayonets, was so ludicrous and unbelievable that the seriousness of it didn’t hit me until we reached the cold barracks. I sat down on a dusty windowsill, lit a cigarette and thought things over. I was prepared to face any danger or hardship, but not as a soldier in the Hetman’s army. I decided to look around for an opportunity to escape. The farce quickly turned bloody. That first night sentries shot and killed two young men from the workers’ suburb of Predmostnaya for walking out of the gate and not stopping fast enough when ordered.

The shelling was growing louder. This calmed those of us who had not yet lost the ability to feel anything. It signalled some sort of change, and soon, although whether good or bad no one could say. Not that it mattered. The Ukrainian saying ‘It may be worse, but at least it’s different’ was on everybody’s lips in Kiev.

Most of the recruits were so-called motor boys. That’s what the hooligans and thieves from Solomenka and Shuliavka – the worst slums on the outskirts of Kiev – were called. They were wild, desperate youths. They were happy to join the Hetman’s army. It was clear that its final days were approaching, and the motor boys knew better than anyone that in the coming chaos they would be able to hold onto their weapons and then rob and loot at will and generally raise hell. And so in the meantime the motor boys tried not to arouse the suspicions of the authorities and, as best they could, behave as model soldiers of the Hetman’s army. It boasted a grandiloquent title: ‘The Cossack Infantry Regiment of His Most Noble and Radiant Highness Pan Pavlo Skoropadskyi’. I was assigned to a regiment under the command of a former Russian airman. We addressed him as ‘Pan Sotnik’, an old Cossack military term roughly comparable to a captain. He didn’t know a word of Ukrainian, other than a few simple commands, and even these he wasn’t too sure of. He always had to stop and think for a few moments before saying ‘right’ or ‘left’, trying to remember which was which. He was openly contemptuous of the Hetman’s army. Sometimes, looking at us, he would shake his head with disgust and say: ‘Just look at you, the Shah of Lilliput’s army! Nothing but a band of riff-raff and ninnies!’

He spent a few days pretending to teach us how to march, fire our rifles and handle grenades. Then they dressed us in tobacco-coloured greatcoats, caps with the Ukrainian seal, old boots and puttees and got us to parade up and down Kreshchatik Street. They informed us that tomorrow we were being sent to the front against Petlyura’s men. Together with a few other units, we marched down Kreshchatik past the city Duma, where as a child I had come under fire. Even now, many years later, the gilded figure of the arch-strategist St Michael still balanced on one foot atop the spire.

In front of the Duma, the Hetman, in a white Circassian coat and a crumpled little Cossack hat, sat astride an English bay, a riding crop in his hand. Arranged behind the Hetman, as still as statues on their dark, gunmetal steeds, were several German generals. They wore helmets with gilded spikes and almost every single one of them had a glinting monocle screwed in place. Thin crowds of curious bystanders had gathered on the pavement. The units marched past, saluting the Hetman with lacklustre cheers of ‘Hurrah!’ He merely raised his crop to his hat and gave his horse a quick tug on the reins.

Our unit had prepared a little surprise for the Hetman. As soon as we drew even with him, we broke into a jaunty tune:

Our pride, our joy! Such a fine man!

That’s our rag-tag Pan Hetman!

To the future, there’s just one key,

No one else but – Pavlo Skoropadskyi!

The motor boys sang with exceptional bravura, adding whistles and a rollicking ‘Ekh!’ at the beginning of each stanza. The boys were angry that we were being sent off to the front so soon and had got a bit out of hand.

Skoropadskyi didn’t bat an eyelid. As calm as ever, he raised his crop to his hat, grinned as though he had heard a clever joke and turned to share the fun with the German generals behind him. An ironic flash of their monocles was the only sign that the generals had got the gist of the song. The crowd on the pavement erupted with laughter.

They woke us up when it was still dark. The unwished-for dawn was nothing more than a pale streak in the east. The sullen morning, the stench of paraffin in the barracks, the weak tea that smelled oddly of salted herring, the quiet despair that filled Pan Sotnik’s faded eyes, the cold, wet boots we could scarcely pull on – all this amounted to such complete and senseless misery, to such enormous, devastating unease, that I decided I had to escape from the Cossack Infantry Regiment of His Most Noble and Radiant Highness Pan Hetman that very day.

At roll call we discovered that twelve men had already deserted. Pan Sotnik shrugged his shoulders and said: ‘To hell with all of you! Fall in!’

We more or less managed to form a line.

‘Forward, march!’ commanded Pan Sotnik. Shivering, we exited the damp and dubious warmth of the barracks into the biting air of the early winter morning.

‘Where exactly is the front?’ a sleepy voice asked with a note of confusion from the rear. ‘Do we really plan to march the whole way?’

‘Ever heard of Madame Tsimkovich’s brothel, over in Priorka? Well, that’s where the front is. It’s the supreme commander’s HQ.’

‘Would you please shut up,’ Pan Sotnik begged. ‘Honest to God, it’s disgusting to listen to you. And besides, you’re not supposed to talk while marching.’

‘We know what we’re supposed to do and what not.’

Pan Sotnik just sighed and moved a few paces away from the men. The truth was, the motor boys frightened him.

‘They sold out Ukraine for a bottle of schnapps,’ said a deep, angry voice. ‘And now we’re the ones forced to wade through this pile of snow and horseshit. It’s a bloody disgrace!’

‘To hell with the lot of ’em, I say!’

‘Who’s “them”?’

‘Them, every last one – Petlyura, and that bastard Hetman and all the rest. All of ’em! Just leave the people in peace.’

‘Hey, Pan Sotnik, what’s the matter with you? Don’t be shy, say something! Tell us, just where is the front?’

‘Just beyond Priorka,’ he replied hesitantly. ‘Near the Voditsa Woods.’

‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, now you tell us! That’s a good ten versts from here.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Pan Sotnik, ‘we’re going to get a ride.’

The soldiers tittered. ‘On what?’

‘You’ll see.’

‘The tsar’s landau. It’s the least they could do for heroes like us.’

I still don’t know what dull apathy kept us marching on, even though all of us, Pan Sotnik included, understood that there was no good reason for going to the front and that we could just as easily and without any fear of consequences turn round and head home. But we kept on nevertheless, down to Podol and into Kontraktovaya Square. There, a normal, everyday morning had begun – little boys in their grey overcoats were on the way to school, the bells of the Bratsky Bogoyavlensky Monastery summoned the worshippers, peasant women in boots drove mangy cows to market, barbers opened their filthy shops, and house porters swept the dirty, slushy snow off the pavement. Two old open-decked trams stood on the square.

‘All aboard!’ shouted Pan Sotnik, having suddenly come to life.

In complete shock, the regiment stopped dead in its tracks.

‘You heard me – all aboard!’ he was angry now. ‘I told you transport had been arranged. These are military trams.’

The Cossacks began talking happily among themselves.

‘Now, this is what I call a civilised war!’

‘One of Father Gervasy’s miracles! Heading off to the front on a tram.’

‘Get in, boys, you’re holding us up!’

We quickly climbed in, and the jingling trams trundled off down the cobbled streets of Podol and through dreary Priorka to the Voditsa Woods. Just beyond Priorka the trams came to a stop. We got out and followed Pan Sotnik, straggling through alleys lined with crooked hovels and snow-bound open spaces dotted here and there with mounds of stinking manure. Up ahead loomed a dark, ancient park. This was the famous park called ‘Cheer Up’, which I had known so well since my childhood.

On a snow-covered slope near the edge of the park, a network of trenches had been dug, complete with communications, bunkers and foxholes. The Cossacks were unexpectedly pleased with the foxholes, which provided excellent cover. Pan Sotnik took a bunker for himself, and the motor boys quickly occupied two foxholes. Within minutes they had set up trestle boards and were playing cards.

I stood watch at the observation post. Before me lay a large field and beyond that the pine forest of the Voditsa Woods, now green and thawing out in the warm wind. Petlyura’s men took lazy pot-shots at us from there. The bullets whizzed quietly and harmlessly over our heads, now and then smacking into the parapets. Pan Sotnik had forbidden us from showing our heads or returning fire. To the right, a leaden sky hung over the Dnieper, and a dirt track, reddish-brown from manure, led into a wood. To the left, from the direction of Svyatoshino, came the sound of artillery fire. However hard I stared into the woods, I never once saw one of Petlyura’s men. If only a bush had stirred, but I didn’t even see so much as that. It was boring, standing there. I lit a cigarette. I had recently managed to get hold of three packets of Odessan Salve cigarettes and was quite proud of myself. They were fat, strong and aromatic.

I smoked and, with nothing better to do, thought back over the past few years of my life. They had been full of adventure. I thought it was high time I got serious and dedicated myself to becoming a writer. I was twenty-six, but still hadn’t written anything worthwhile – nothing but some vague drafts, sketches and studies. I had to set a goal, make a plan, stop drifting.

I thought I saw something move off to my right, just beyond the dirt track. There was an old cemetery over there. On a grave mound a cross stood leaning to one side. All of a sudden, it seemed strangely familiar somehow–the sullen day and the cross, the thaw in the air and the jackdaws screeching behind me in the dark park, the track covered with manure and rotting straw. The sensation was so powerful I let out a moan. It was exactly three years ago, on a day just like this on a mound just like the one I saw before me, that we had buried Lëlya. Three years that seemed like three decades. Still the same Germans, the same ice and slush, although by now perhaps no trace of her grave was left. Not for a moment could I imagine her bones lying in the ground. I did not believe it possible. It seemed to me that she would lie forever just as she had been when we laid her body in that wooden coffin – pale and indescribably beautiful, peaceful and young, her eyes closed and her lashes casting sad shadows on her cheeks.

There was no one I could ever tell this to, not even Mama. I was condemned to carry this burning pain in my heart. I felt this pain every day and still do, even though I speak of it rarely. Maybe it’s pointless to bring it up. Can a writer ever be certain that stony critics or churlish readers won’t treat such painful confessions with derisive condescension? Can a writer ever be certain that a confession of one’s grief will not be used by others to inflict even more pain?

Still thinking about Lëlya, I lit another cigarette and then, desperate to discharge my sudden anxiety somehow, I pulled the trigger of my rifle. A shot rang out and was answered immediately by a ragged volley from the cemetery, where Petlyura’s men had apparently been hiding. My shot must have startled them. Pan Sotnik leapt from his bunker. We opened fire on the cemetery. Our bullets were knocking splinters off the crosses and then we saw some soldiers break cover and run for the woods. The motor boys fired at them as they took flight, whistling and hounding them with curses. In the end, we had repulsed their planned attack.

I was relieved from my post by a bushy-haired student in thick glasses, probably the son of a priest. I went down into a foxhole. A small smoky paraffin lamp gave a bit of light. I pulled some bread and a piece of stale smoked sausage out of my knapsack and started to eat. The duty orderly came over, a little man with bright eyes, white scars all over his face and a tattoo on his hand in the shape of a woman’s pursed pair of lips. When he opened his palm, the lips puckered as though ready for a kiss. The tattoo made him enormously popular with the motor boys. He poured me a mug of hot tea, handed me three sugar cubes and patted me on the back, saying: ‘Tea by Vysotsky, sugar by Brodsky and Russia – by Trotsky.fn5 Right, aren’t I?’

Not waiting for an answer, he left and walked over to the gamblers at the trestle board. Cursing and clowning, he sat down and joined in the game. The guns in the direction of Svyatoshino boomed louder and louder. After every explosion, the lamp poured out ever more smoke. Warm and tired, I fell asleep leaning against the wall of the foxhole. I awoke in the middle of the night to the muffled sounds of swearing and commotion. The gamblers were fighting. They were holding the orderly face down on the trestle board and calmly, methodically punching him in the head. He wasn’t resisting. No doubt he knew he had earned a beating. Three men were needed for a new duty shift in the trench. The motor boys let the orderly go, and three of us – the orderly, a tall man in a cavalry greatcoat and myself – made our way over to the trench.

It was warmer now, and the melting snow sounded like mice scurrying around us. The orderly kept up a stream of cursing until the man in the cavalry coat hissed at him angrily: ‘Shut your trap or I’ll carve you up into little pieces. Got it?’

The orderly spat, moved a bit closer to me, sat back on his haunches, drew a deep breath and said: ‘You won’t carve me up, chum, I’ve already done it myself. Made a proper picture of my mug. I’ve got scars on top of my scars. Haven’t you noticed?’

‘Yes, I noticed,’ I said. I had no interest in talking to this ridiculous man.

‘They aren’t really scars at all,’ he said with unexpected sadness. ‘They’re a strange tale of love written on my hide. That’s how you have to read them.’

He laughed in a curious way, almost as if he were choking. ‘I worked some time ago on a Volga steamer that belonged to the Caucasus-Mercury Company. I was a waiter in the restaurant. Well, on one of our trips, a girl who was about to finish gymnasium boarded the boat at Kostroma on her way downriver to Simbirsk. I’d had lots of women by then – shipboard girlfriends mostly. I had an easy way with them. Some men weep, beat their heads against the wall if a woman falls out of love with them. Not me. I took what I wanted and got more than my share. And if some woman had had enough, so what – good riddance, I’d say! The greedy ones always seemed to fall for me. All the women I knew were greedy – either for love or for money. Most of them were waitresses or kitchen maids, young ones … Well … so this schoolgirl comes aboard and makes her way to the restaurant for some dinner. All on her little lonesome. Pale, beautiful, and by the look of her this was all new to her and made her feel a bit shy. Her plaits were of pure gold, thick and luxurious, pulled back around the nape of her neck. I brushed them with a hand while waiting on her. Sent a shiver right through me – those plaits seemed somehow so cold and springy. I begged her pardon, of course, but she just frowned, glanced at me, said not to worry and then tidied her hair. A proud girl, you could see it.

‘Well, I thought, I’ve had it this time! What really knocked me over was some sort of purity about her, like an apple tree in blossom, you know, sweet-smelling all over. I was hooked. Feelings took hold of my body, I even started moaning. The thought of her getting off at Simbirsk and me stuck on the boat with my damned broken heart was enough to make me want to bash my head against the wall and howl with misery. But I held myself together. I had to be patient – Simbirsk was still two full days away. I made sure to serve her only the best of everything. I even promised the cook a bottle of vodka if he’d add a little extra garnish to her plates. She was young, inexperienced, and didn’t notice a thing. She was a young lady, just a girl, to be honest. I tried talking to her, even though this was strictly forbidden. Quick, silent service, and no talking to the fine paying customers – those were our orders. Don’t go sticking your dirty mug in where it doesn’t belong, heaven forbid! You’re a servant, so act like one: “Yes, sir!” “Right away, sir!” “May I take your order, sir?” “Thank you very much, sir.” That was for if they tipped you.

‘I was having trouble finding a chance to talk to her. The other waiter, Nikodim, was always hovering around. Then I had a bit of luck – Nikodim went off to the kitchen. I asked her immediately: “Miss, where might you be going?” She raised her eyes – they were dark and grey, her lashes as velvety as the night – and said: “Simbirsk. Why?” That “Why” brought me to my knees. “No particular reason,” I said. “It’s just that since you are travelling alone, I feel I ought to warn you that there all sorts of people on board. One might say dirty people, shameless people, especially when it comes to defenceless young ladies such as yourself.” She looked at me and said: “I know.” And then she smiled. At that moment I knew that I would give all the blood in my body – drop by precious drop without so much as even a groan – for every one of her smiles.

‘I never got another chance to speak to her. I did, however, take the flowers from a couple of the other tables and put them on hers – a small token, I thought, to show her she was dearer to me than all the world. Not that she noticed.

‘Just before Simbirsk, Nikodim kicked up a row, and right in front of her too. “What are you doing taking my flowers from the table? Tulips, no less!” She guessed immediately what was going on and blushed but kept her eyes down.

‘Believe me when I say I’ve never before told this story to a soul. You’re the first. It’s not a thing you can tell the boys. They’ll turn it into something dirty, but I swear to you on the life of my old mother, it was the finest thing I’ve ever known. I may be a crook, an honest-to-God thief if you like, but I’d never stoop so low as to tell this to the gang. Do you believe me?’

‘I do. Tell me, what happened in the end?’

‘It’s not over yet,’ he said, and then repeated himself in an unexpectedly threatening voice: ‘It’s not over yet! That’s what I believe. And you’ve got no right to put doubts in my head. Stop trying to confuse me. So … we were supposed to arrive at Simbirsk the next morning, and you wouldn’t guess what I was thinking. I now knew for certain that I couldn’t bear to be parted from her. Whether from afar, or on the sly, I had to follow her until my dying day. I didn’t need much. Just to breathe the air around her would be enough, for any other air was poison for me. Can you believe this? You’ve read books about love – this kind of thing has to be in there. Well, that night I worked out a nice plan in my head. While it was still dark, I stole the takings from the restaurant’s cash box and as soon as we tied up at Simbirsk, I hopped ashore still dressed in my waiter’s outfit as if I were on my way to buy some radishes. Except I never came back.

‘My clothes looked suspicious, but since I had some money, I was able to buy myself a jacket. You can bet I tracked her down. To my good fortune, just across from the house where she was living with her grandmother – an old kind of place with a garden and gooseberry bushes – there was an inn. It was small and rundown, didn’t even have a canary singing in a cage. I took a seat and made myself comfortable. I made up a story about how I was waiting for a friend to buy some geese from him in Simbirsk. The man was obviously late. What I didn’t know myself at the time, you never buy geese in summer, only in autumn.’

‘Well, did you see her?’ I asked.

‘I did. Twice. She waltzed right through my soul and took everything with her. I had no idea what was happening, but I did know this: I was happy. She didn’t suspect a thing, of course, and had no doubt already forgotten all about me. I know, I’m not much to look at – got the teeth of a ferret and the eyes of a rat. What’s more, one eye goes one way, the other another. Damned things. Might as well tear them out. Nope, you can’t buy or steal beauty, try all you will.’

A Petlyura machine-gun fired a lazy burst from the edge of the woods and then went quiet.

‘This is all nonsense,’ he said. ‘The Hetman, Petlyura. And all this fuss and running about. I have no idea what the point of it is, and I don’t care to find out.’

He was silent for a while. I said: ‘Well, go on. Since you’ve started, don’t stop.’

‘I’m not going to. I’d been in Simbirsk no more than ten days when the innkeeper – a kind but sickly sort – took me aside and said in a whisper: “The police have been nosing around here, asking about you. Careful, young fellow, they don’t catch you. You a thief?” “No, I’m no thief and I never would have been if it hadn’t been for the love of a woman.” “Well, the court won’t take love into account. It’s not in the book. You’d better not come around here anymore. Look out for yourself.” And I decided – nope, no jail for me. I had to be free as a bird if I wasn’t going to lose my woman. I had to give them the slip, cover my tracks.

‘So, I left for Syzran that very day to lie low, but they caught up with me like a sitting duck just three days later. They took me by boat to Samara under the watch of two armed guards. We were approaching Simbirsk. I looked out of the porthole and could see that very house and garden where she lived. I asked the guards: “I haven’t eaten in two days, would you mind bringing me up to the third-class buffet?” Well, they felt bad for me so they took me there. I softly asked the barmaid if I might have a glass of vodka. She poured me one. I drained it in one gulp, then smashed the glass, and began tearing at my face with the jagged pieces still in my hand. It was like I was washing my face with the bloody shards. Because of my unbearable anguish. The whole counter was covered in blood. Ever since I’ve worn these scars on my mug. Made me that much prettier.’

‘And then what?’ I asked.

He looked at me and spat. ‘As if you don’t know. And then … shit for supper. Give me a packet of Salve, or I’ll have you by the throat before you can even blink. I’ve got a good grip. Things would be over real quick. Ah, you dumb fool, I’ve told you a pack of lies. And look at you, snivelling like a pup.’

I gave him a packet of Salve.

‘Well, that’s that!’ he said, and got up and slowly walked away down the trench. ‘But if you ever mention a word of this to the gang – now or in thirty years – I’ll kill you dead. I bet you’re writing a little poem in your head just now – “O love, what an enchanting dream!”’

I watched him go, confused by this sudden outburst of anger.

Out of the early morning mist, a shell came screaming from the direction of Kiev. It seemed to be heading straight towards us, and I was not mistaken. The shell hit the parapet and exploded. It sounded as though the air around us had popped like a large iron balloon. Shrapnel whistled through the air like a flight of swifts. The orderly turned with a look of surprise, fell face first into the trench wall, spat one final curse together with a mouthful of blood, and then slumped down into a puddle of muddy snow. A crimson stain slowly spread over the snow.

A second shell exploded near the foxhole. Pan Sotnik jumped out of the bunker. Then the parapet was hit by another shell.

‘Our own guns!’ Pan Sotnik cried in a quivering voice, shaking his fist at Kiev. ‘Shot at by our own troops! Idiots! Scoundrels! You’re shooting your own men!’

He turned to us. ‘Pull back to Priorka. On the double! No panicking! To hell with your damned Hetman.’

We took off running. With the sound of each new shell, we hit the ground. Eventually, we made our way back down to Priorka. The first ones there were, of course, the motor boys. It turned out that the Hetman’s artillery had somehow decided that Petlyura’s men had overrun our trenches and so opened fire on them. As we were retreating, Pan Sotnik stepped over the orderly and without turning round said to me: ‘Take his documents just in case. Maybe we can find his relatives. We can’t really just leave him like a dog.’

The orderly was lying face down. I rolled him over on his back. He was still warm, and even though he was thin, he still seemed very heavy. He had been hit by shrapnel in the neck. The blue mouth tattooed on his hand was smeared with blood. I undid the buttons of the light blue Austrian greatcoat he was wearing and took out of the pocket of his tunic a crumpled and obviously forged identity card as well as an envelope addressed to a ‘Yelizaveta Tenisheva, 13 Sadovaya Street, Simbirsk’.

The bedraggled, dwindling troops of the Hetman’s army had begun assembling on the hay-strewn square in the centre of Priorka. The local inhabitants were coming back out onto the streets, discussing the departure of the Cossacks and rejoicing at their plight with unconcealed relish. But in spite of everything, detachments of German cavalry on their well-fed bays went on calmly patrolling the streets. Hetman or Petlyura – it was all the same to the Germans; the main thing was to maintain order. Upon Pan Sotnik’s command, we dumped all our rifles and ammunition in a pile on the square. The Germans immediately rode up and stood guard over it. They didn’t even bother to look our way.

‘And now, everybody go home!’ said Pan Sotnik, removing his yellow and blue epaulettes and then tossing them on the ground. ‘As best you can. It’s every man for himself. The city’s a mess. Petlyura’s men running up one street, the Hetman’s fleeing down another. So, make sure you look both ways – left and right – before crossing the street. I wish you good luck.’

He smiled awkwardly at his own lame joke, gave us a friendly wave and then hurried away. Some of the Cossacks removed their greatcoats and either sold them then and there to some of the locals for a few kopecks or just gave them away for free and walked away in nothing but tunics stripped of their badges. I was cold and so I kept my greatcoat on, although I did tear off the epaulettes. Wadding stuck out of the holes on my shoulders, and so anyone could immediately guess what I was.

I walked to St Cyril’s Church, where I had been long ago with my father and Vrubel. At that time, this whole neighbourhood, with its knotty elm trees and its deep ravines overgrown with hawthorn bushes, had seemed so mysterious and threatening to me. Now I was slowly trudging up the steep, dirty road to Lukyanovka, and I had no sense of the strangeness of the place, or even of the times. No doubt I was simply too exhausted to notice anything. I was aware, of course, that we were living in an epochal, practically fantastical period in history, but at times it felt like a nightmare or a grotesque distortion of reality. At that particular moment, all I could see was the same dreary sky that had been hanging over these tumbledown suburban streets and hovels thirty years ago. Vague ideas drifted through my mind, and I wondered, how much longer could this ridiculous third-rate show of Hetmans and Atamans and Petlyuras last? How much more of these noisy slogans, of these muddled and hateful notions, exaggerated beyond any sense of proportion, could we take? When would the curtain finally come down on this makeshift stage on which real blood, unfortunately, and not cranberry juice was being shed?

Back in the city I did not look left or right before crossing the street. I was sick to death of this cheap sideshow of war and politics, and anger robbed me of all sense of danger. I walked through a column of Petlyura’s men in my greatcoat with the torn epaulettes and was slammed in the back by rifle butts, although only twice. Groups of ‘true’ Ukrainians standing in sparse lines along the pavements cried ‘Hurrah!’ to the men and looked at me with rabid loathing.

Nonetheless, I managed to make it home, rang the bell, heard Amalia’s joyful voice call out, opened the door, and collapsed in a chair in the hall, light and happy thoughts whirling in my head, even though my greatcoat was pressing on my chest, harder with each minute as though it were some living creature trying to strangle me. Then I realised that it was not the coat, but the long, gnarled fingers of the orderly crushing my neck for a packet of Salve. I saw before my eyes the blue tattooed lips on his hand just before I groaned and passed out. I had had fainting spells like this as a boy. They were always a sign of exhaustion.