The Story of a Life

81

The Violet Ray

Next morning, I awoke in my room to the sound of cheering outside and assumed that Pan Petlyura, Ataman of the Ukrainian Army and the Haidamaka Battalion,fn1 was making his triumphal entry into Kiev on a white steed. Notices from the city commandant had gone up around Kiev the day before stating with epic, humourless solemnity that Petlyura would be entering the city as the head of the government – the Directorate – on a white steed, a gift from the railway men of Zhmerinka. Why they had given Petlyura a horse rather than a railway coach or even a shunting engine, no one could say.

Petlyura did not disappoint the hopes of Kiev’s housemaids, merchants, governesses and shopkeepers. He truly did ride into the vanquished city on a white though fairly placid steed. The horse had a pale blue saddlecloth with a yellow border. Petlyura was modestly attired in a wadded khaki coat. His only ornament was a curved Zaporozhian sword, apparently taken from some museum, which slapped against his thigh as he rode along. Loyal Ukrainians gazed reverently at the Cossack sword, the puffy pale face of Petlyura and his guard of Haidamaks prancing behind him on their scruffy horses. The Haidamaks, their heads shaven except for a long single forelock of blue-black hair hanging from under their sheepskin hats, reminded me of my childhood visits to the old Ukrainian theatre. There Haidamaks just like these, their eyes inked blue, had wildly danced the gopak – ‘Hip, hop, shout! Now here, now there, turn about!’

Every nation has its own character, its own distinguishing traits. But the chauvinists who drool over them, who lose all sense of proportion in their fanatical worship, turn themselves, and these traits, into something pathetic and at times even disgusting. That is why jingoists are a nation’s greatest enemies. It was this syrupy idea of Ukraine that Petlyura tried to recreate. Needless to say, he failed.

Riding behind Petlyura came the Directorate – the writer Vynnychenko,fn2 a shambolic neurasthenic, and after him some ministers, all of them long-mothballed and utterly unknown personages. So began the brief and foolish reign of the Directorate. Prone to irony, the people of Kiev made the new ‘independent’ government the butt of a great many jokes. They were especially delighted by the sight in the first days of the Directorate of foppishly attired Haidamaks going up and down Kreshchatik with step-ladders and removing all the Russian signs. Petlyura had brought with him something called ‘Galician’, a rather clumsy dialect full of loan words borrowed from Ukraine’s neighbours. Before this new intruder, the native language of Ukraine – sparkling, witty, sing-song and as shiny as the pearly teeth of the vibrant young village girls – retreated to the remote huts of Shevchenko and the quiet fields of the countryside where it hid throughout these troubled years, refusing to die and preserving all its poetry.

Everything under Petlyura had a contrived air – the Haidamaks, the language, the politics, the large number of grey-whiskered chauvinists who crawled out of the woodwork, the money – everything, all the way down to the Directorate’s progress reports to the people. But more of this later.

Meeting a Haidamak in the street, people rubbed their eyes and asked themselves: ‘Is that really a Haidamak or just some actor in costume?’ Hearing the tortured sounds of the new language, one couldn’t help wondering: is that Ukrainian or some recently invented version of it? And upon receiving change in a shop, you scratched your head with disbelief at the smudgy little scraps of paper faintly marked with yellow and blue ink: was this real or just some toy money from a children’s game? There was so much counterfeit money being passed around that everyone decided to turn a blind eye and take whatever they were given. Whether fake or genuine, all banknotes were treated equally and exchanged at the same rate. You couldn’t find a printing press in the entire city where typesetters and printers weren’t laughing and happily turning out counterfeit Petlyura banknotes – karbovantsy and shagi. The shag was the smallest unit, worth about half a kopeck. Many enterprising people made their own counterfeit notes at home using Indian ink and cheap watercolours. They didn’t even bother to hide what they were doing when strangers dropped in.

Few people were as busy making counterfeit money, as well as homemade hooch, as Pan Kturenda. Ever since that bombastic little man had pushed me into the Hetman’s army, he had shown me an affection rather like a hangman’s for his victim. He was amazingly attentive and always inviting me over. Interested in this last remnant of the nobility’s lower rungs, somehow still afloat in what Pan Kturenda himself called ‘our astonishing new era’, I did once go to visit him in his little room crowded with carboys of murky homebrew. It had the sour smell of paint and the particular medicine – the name escapes me – that was then used to treat gonorrhoea.

He was busy making hundred-rouble notes when I arrived. They were decorated with the image of two sturdy, bare-legged women with sultry eyes dressed in embroidered blouses. For some reason they were poised like graceful ballerinas on swirls of intricate festoons, which Kturenda was going over with a brush at that very moment. Pan Kturenda’s mother, a gaunt old woman with a twitching face, was sitting behind a screen and softly reading aloud from a Polish prayer-book.

‘The festoon is the alpha and omega of the Petlyura banknote,’ Pan Kturenda instructed me. ‘You could just as easily replace these two young Ukrainian ladies with any fat old women you like, it doesn’t matter at all. What does matter are these festoons – they must look official. If they do, you can easily change your hundred karbovantsy without anyone batting an eyelid at these deliciously piquant ladies.’

‘How many can you make?’

‘In a day, I can paint’, Pan Kturenda said importantly, pushing out his lips with the cropped little moustache, ‘as many as three notes. And sometimes as many as five. Depends on how inspired I am.’

‘Bassya!’ said the old woman from behind the screen. ‘Bassya, my son. I’m frightened.’

‘Oh, Mama, don’t you worry, nothing’s going to happen. No one would dare to lay a finger on Pan Kturenda.’

‘It’s not prison I’m frightened of,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘It’s you, Bassya.’

‘Water on the brain,’ said Pan Kturenda, gesturing towards the old lady. ‘Excuse me, Mama, but could you be quiet?’

‘No!’ she said. ‘No, I can’t. God will punish me if I don’t tell everyone that my son is a Judas.’ By now she was sobbing.

‘Shut up!’ Pan Kturenda shouted in a frenzied voice. He jumped up from his chair and shook the screen so violently that it danced about, creaked and released a cloud of yellow dust. ‘Shut up, you silly old fool, or I’ll gag you with an oil-rag.’

The old woman sobbed and blew her nose.

‘What does she mean?’ I asked him.

‘That’s my own personal business,’ he replied defiantly. His distorted face was covered with criss-crossing veins. It looked as though they might burst at any moment. ‘I advise you not to stick your nose into my affairs, unless you want to end up in some common grave with the Bolsheviks.’

‘Bastard,’ I said quietly. ‘You’re such a cheap little bastard you’re not even worth these measly hundred karbovantsy.’

‘Under the ice!’ Pan Kturenda yelled hysterically, stamping his feet. ‘That’s what Pan Petlyura does to people like you – tosses them into the Dnieper and under the ice!’

I told Amalia about the incident. She said she suspected Pan Kturenda had worked as an informer for all the successive governments that had ravaged Ukraine – the Central Rada, the Germans, the Hetman and now Petlyura. She was convinced he would try to get back at me. It was only a matter of time until he denounced me to the new authorities. And so, careful and practical as she was, Amalia set up her own watch on Pan Kturenda that very day. By evening, however, her precautions were no longer necessary, for he had died right before our eyes. His death proved as pointless as the whole of his mean, boorish life.

At dusk we heard pistol shots outside. Whenever this happened, I went out onto the balcony to see what was going on. This time I saw two civilians running towards our house across the empty square in front of St Vladimir’s Cathedral. They were being chased and shot at by a few Petlyura officers and soldiers. ‘Stop!’ they shouted, although it was clear from their efforts that their pursuit was only half-hearted.

Just then I noticed Pan Kturenda run from his room in the other wing of the house to the heavy front gate and remove a key big enough to be from some medieval city. Key in hand, he hid behind the gate. As the two men in civilian garb were running past, Pan Kturenda flung open the gate, pointed the key at them like a pistol (it actually did look like an antiquated firearm from a distance) and shouted: ‘Stop right there, you Bolshevik scum, or I’ll shoot!’ Pan Kturenda wanted to help Petlyura’s men by slowing the civilians down, if only for a moment, and this moment would, of course, have sealed their fate.

I had a clear view from the balcony of what happened next. The second of the two men raised a pistol and without bothering to look, much less aim, fired in the direction of Kturenda as he ran. Pan Kturenda, screaming and spitting blood, stumbled back into the yard, tripped on the cobblestones, fell, let out a desperate wheeze, and died. He was still clutching the key in his hand. Blood dripped onto his pink celluloid cuffs, and in his open eyes was a look of angry terror. More than an hour passed before a rickety ‘First Aid’ cart arrived to take Pan Kturenda to the morgue.

His mother slept through her son’s death and learned of it only that night. A few days later the old woman was sent to the ancient Sulimovskaya Almshouse. I often came across its residents on my walks. They always went about in pairs, like schoolgirls, dressed in identical dresses of dark Toile du Nord fabric. Seeing them in the streets made me think of a solemn procession of ground-beetles.

I have described this insignificant incident with Pan Kturenda for the sole reason that it was so in keeping with the tenor of life under the Directorate. Everything was petty, mean and ridiculous, like a badly produced but at times tragic farce.

One day, enormous posters went up all over Kiev informing the populace that the Directorate would be giving a report of its progress in the Ars Cinema. The whole city tried to squeeze into the cinema to hear the report. Everyone was expecting an unusual show, and they were not disappointed.

The long, narrow hall was wrapped in a mysterious gloom. None of the lights had been lit. The crowd made a cheerful hum in the darkness. All of a sudden, a gong boomed behind the stage curtain, coloured footlights came alive, and then there appeared, against a garish backdrop depicting ‘The Miraculous Dnieper in Still Weather’, an elderly but handsome man in black with a luxurious beard – Premier Vynnychenko. Unhappy and clearly uncomfortable, constantly fidgeting with his bright tie, he delivered a short, dry speech on the international affairs of Ukraine. The audience applauded. Next, an unbelievably skinny young woman with a heavily powdered face came out onto the stage. She was wearing a black dress and clutching her hands out in front of her in a gesture meant to convey utter despair. As the accompanist struck a variety of pensive chords, she recited in a frightened voice the verses of the poetess Galina: ‘They’re cutting down the young woods, the tender, green woods …’fn3 They applauded her as well.

In between the ministers’ speeches there were short musical interludes, and little girls and boys danced the gopak after the minister of communications spoke. The audience was thoroughly enjoying itself, but a guarded silence settled over it when out onto the stage plodded the old ‘Minister of Sovereign Balances’, as the minister of finance was called. He had a dishevelled, truculent look. He was snorting with anger. His round, closely cropped head glistened with sweat. His silver Cossack moustache drooped over his chin. He wore baggy grey pinstriped trousers, an equally baggy silk coat with large pockets and an embroidered shirt tied at the neck with a cord dangling red pompoms at the ends.

He had no intention of delivering a report. He approached the footlights and stuck an ear out to listen to the faint murmur in the hall. For effect, he even cupped a hand over this furry ear. People laughed. The minister grinned with a satisfied air, nodded as though at some passing thoughts, and asked: ‘Muscovites?’

Sure enough, almost everyone in the audience was Russian. Yes, they answered unsuspectingly, most of us here are Muscovites.

‘I see-e-e-e,’ the minister said ominously and then blew his nose into a large checked handkerchief. ‘It’s all very understandable, although not at all pleasant.’

The murmuring in the hall ceased. The audience sensed trouble.

‘Just what the hell were you thinking?’ he suddenly thundered in Ukrainian. His face had turned as red as a beetroot. ‘What the hell were you thinking coming here from your rotten Moscow? Like flies to honey. May lightning strike you dead! Just think of what you’ve seen here! You’re here because you’ve so ruined Moscow that not only do you have nothing to eat, you don’t even have anything to eat it with!’

The audience erupted with anger. People were hooting and whistling. Someone jumped up on stage, carefully took the ‘Minister of Sovereign Balances’ by the arm and tried to lead him away, but the old man gave him a shove and nearly knocked him over. The minister had got into his stride. He wasn’t going to stop now.

‘Well, why don’t you say something?’ he asked. ‘Hmm? Playing the fool, are you now? All right then, I’ll say it for you. Here in Ukraine you can help yourselves to all the bread and sugar and lard and buckwheat and cakes you want. Back home in Moscow you’d be sucking lamp oil off your thumbs. And that’s the truth!’

By now two men had grabbed onto the tails of the minister’s silk coat and were trying to carefully pull him off the stage, but he was furiously fighting them off and shouting: ‘Beggars! Parasites! Back to Moscow with you! Go home and die under your Yid government! Back to Moscow, all of you!’

Vynnychenko appeared in the wings. He was waving his hand angrily, and finally the old minister, red from indignation, was dragged off the stage. To ease the unfortunate impression left by the minister, out onto the stage hopped a group of young men with sheepskin hats poised jauntily on their heads. Some struck up their banduras, others threw themselves into the national dance, squatting and leaping as they sang:

Oy, who’s the corpse lying there at the funeral?

Not the Prince, not the Pan, not the Colonel,

It can only be the old crone’s love eternal!

And with that, the Directorate’s report to the people came to a close. Laughing and shouting ‘Back to Moscow with you! Go home and die under your Yid government!’ the audience poured out of the Ars Cinema and into the street.

Petlyura and the entire Ukrainian Directorate had a provincial air about them. Once glittering Kiev had been turned into a glorified Shpola or Mirgorod, with their stuffy, hide-bound officialdom, their interminable meetings, their Dovgochkhuns.fn4 It looked as though the city had been made over as a stage-set for ‘ye olde Ukraine’, right down to the pastry shop’s ‘Taras Bulba of Poltava’ sign. Bulba, with his long white moustache and his snow-white shirt emblazoned with scarlet embroidery, cut such an operatic, and intimidating, figure that many potential customers were too frightened to come in and ask for biscuits and honey. One couldn’t be certain whether this was meant to be taken seriously or was just some sort of performance starring the lead characters of Haidamaki.fn5

It was impossible to make sense of what was happening. These were feverish, violent times when one coup quickly followed another. Within days of the appearance of a new government, clear signs of its imminent and ignominious collapse appeared. Each hurried to pronounce as many decrees and resolutions as possible in the hope that at least some of them would catch on and leave their mark on history. The governments of both Petlyura and the Hetman made an impression of utter confusion and a lack of confidence in the future.

To the north, Petlyura faced the unforgiving threat of the Soviet forces, and so he had placed all his hopes in the French, then occupying Odessa. His government began circulating rumours that the French were on their way to save Kiev. People were saying that they had already reached Vinnitsa and Fastov and that any day now the brave French Zouaves in their red trousers and handsome fezzes would reach Boyarka on the outskirts of the capital. Petlyura’s bosom friend, the French consul Hénault, had given his word of honour on the matter. Bewildered by all the conflicting rumours, the newspapers decided to print every single bit of this nonsense even though it was obvious to nearly everyone that the French were sitting tight in Odessa and sticking to their zone of occupation, although the various ‘zones of influence’ (French, Greek, Ukrainian) were separated by nothing more than some rickety old bentwood chairs.

Rumours during the days of Petlyura became an elemental force, practically a cosmic phenomenon, an epidemic of the plague. It felt like a form of mass hypnosis. Rumours had lost their normal purpose – to spread made-up facts – and acquired a new essence. They had become a means of self-reassurance, an incredibly powerful narcotic medicine. Rumours were the only thing that gave people hope for tomorrow.

Even outwardly, the people of Kiev began to look like morphine addicts. With each new rumour, their dull eyes caught fire, their usual torpor disappeared and their mumbled speech became lively again, witty even. There were fleeting rumours and there were rumours that hung around long enough to keep people in a state of delusional agitation for two or three days. Even the most hardened sceptics eventually surrendered to the rumours, like the one about how Ukraine was going to be declared a department of France and President Poincaré himself was on his way to Kiev to be present at the glorious official announcement, or the one about how the film actress Vera Kholodnaya had recruited her own army and, like Joan of Arc on her white steed, entered the town of Priluki outside Kiev at the head of her victorious troops, and proclaimed herself empress of Ukraine.

At one point I began keeping a list of all these rumours but then gave up. It was enough to give you a terrible headache or even drive you quietly insane. I wanted to destroy every last one of them, beginning with Presidents Poincaré and Wilson and ending with Makhno and the notorious Ataman Zelëny, who had set himself up at Tripolie outside Kiev. I now wish I had saved that list. In fact, it was an outrageous Apocrypha of lies and the unbridled fantasies of helpless, bewildered souls. To keep my sanity, I reread some of my favourite books which I never grew tired of – Turgenev’s Torrents of Spring, Boris Zaitsev’s The Blue Star, Tristan and Isolde, Manon Lescaut. In the murky darkness of those Kiev nights, these books truly did shine for me like inextinguishable stars.

I was living alone. Mama and Galya were still completely cut off from Kiev. I had no news of them. I had decided that come spring I would make my way to Kopan on foot, even though I had been warned that I would never make it past the ‘Dymerskaya Republic’, an utterly mysterious and lawless territory that lay along my path. I was alone with my books. I tried to do some writing, but everything came out shapeless and read like the ravings of a madman. I had nothing to share my loneliness with except the nights when silence descended over our house and the neighbourhood and everyone slept except for the clouds, the stars and the occasional patrol. The sound of the patrolman’s footsteps carried from afar. Every time I heard them, I put out the oil lamp to keep the patrols from stopping at our house. Once in a while I heard Amalia crying at night, and this reminded me that her loneliness was much worse than mine. For a few days after these tears she spoke to me in a haughty, almost hostile tone, but then she would suddenly make a shy, apologetic smile and return to her usual self, showing me the same great care that she had extended to all her lodgers.

Revolution broke out in Germany. The German troops stationed in Kiev quietly and dutifully elected their Soviet of Soldiers’ Deputies and prepared to return home. Petlyura decided to take advantage of their weakness and disarm them. The Germans discovered his plan.

I awoke on the morning of Petlyura’s planned operation with the feeling that the walls of our house were gently shaking in rhythm. There was the loud banging of drums. I went out onto the balcony. Amalia was already there. German forces were goose-stepping in silence down Fundukleevskaya Street. The pounding of their hobnailed boots made the windows shake. The drums thundered out a warning. After the infantry came the cavalry, the riders’ faces equally grim, the horseshoes clicking together in time, and finally the artillery, jolting and rumbling down the paved road. Without saying a word, accompanied by nothing but the roll of the drums, the Germans marched once around the whole city and then returned to their barracks. Petlyura immediately rescinded his secret order.

Soon after the Germans’ silent demonstration, distant artillery fire could be heard from the left bank of the Dnieper. The Germans were hurriedly clearing out of Kiev. The shelling grew ever louder, and everyone in the city realised that Soviet troops were quickly advancing from Nezhin. When the battle for Kiev began, in the outskirts near Brovary and Darnitsa, and we all understood that Petlyura was finished, his city commandant issued one last decree. It stated that the following night the High Command of Petlyura’s army was going to unleash a terrifying secret weapon against the Bolsheviks – namely, a deadly Violet Ray which French military leaders had given to Petlyura thanks to the mediation of that famous ‘Friend of Free Ukraine’, Consul Hénault. To avoid unnecessary casualties from the Violet Ray, the entire populace of the city was ordered to take shelter in their cellars for the night and not to come out until daylight.

The people of Kiev were used to climbing down into their cellars, where they would wait out one coup after another. After the cellar, the next safest spot was the kitchen. It was a sort of citadel for interminable conversations and tea drinking. Kitchens were usually located at the back of the house, and so were relatively safe from bullets. There was something comforting about the smell of old food that clung to the kitchens. Sometimes water dripped from the tap, and if you left your cup in the sink, in an hour or so you could fill an entire kettle, put it on to boil and brew some strong tea out of dried cranberry leaves. Everyone who drank that tea during those nights would agree that it was our sole comfort, a sort of elixir of life, a panacea for all our troubles and misfortunes.

It seemed to me that the country was racing straight into a bank of impenetrable fog. As I lay there listening to the whistling of the wind through the bullet-riddled roofs, I found it impossible to believe that these impossibly dark nights, thick with soot and despair, would ever give way to a bleak dawn, if only to reveal once again the same deserted streets and the same blindly running men, armed with every possible make and calibre of rifle, their faces green from ice and hunger, their feet frozen, their fingers stiff from the cold of steel triggers. Every last bit of human warmth had been blown out of these men through their threadbare greatcoats and their coarse calico shirts.

The city was deathly quiet on the night of the Violet Ray. Even the artillery fire had stopped, and all that could be heard was the sound of wheels rumbling in the distance. The more experienced of the residents recognised the sound – it was that of army convoys hurriedly withdrawing from the city. And that is just what happened. The next morning, not one of Petlyura’s men was left in the city. The story of the Violet Ray had been concocted simply so they could leave Kiev that night without any trouble.

As had happened many times before, Kiev was left without a government. But neither the atamans nor the local gangs had time to take over. At noon – horses steaming, wheels clattering, crowds shouting and singing, accordions wheezing – the Bogunsky and Tarashchansky Red Army regiments crossed into the city over the Tsepnoy Bridge and once more life was shaken to its very foundations.

There was, to quote the theatrical expression, a complete change of scenery, although no one could guess what the future held in store for the famished citizens. Only time would tell.