The Story of a Life

82

The Bolshevik and the Haidamachka

Rain-soaked notices with menacing decrees from the newly established Military-Revolutionary Committee appeared on walls around the city. The decrees were short and momentous. Ruthlessly and without reservation, they divided the population of Kiev into worthwhile people and human rubbish. They began to clean out the rubbish, although it turned out there wasn’t much of it left. It had taken to hiding in hard-to-find places, where it settled down to wait for better days. My experiences from Moscow started all over again. But there was a difference – here in Kiev I noticed an added air of licence and recklessness.

The Bogunsky Regiment was quartered in private homes throughout Kiev. Four soldiers were billeted in our flat. They brought a bomb used by aeroplanes, carefully laid it on the floor in the front hall under a bentwood hat-stand, and said to Amalia: ‘Dearie, do be careful now and don’t so much as lay a finger on this here, or there’ll be such a big bang that your entire home and everything in it will be nothing more than a memory. Understood?’

‘Understood,’ she replied through pursed lips. She opened the door to the back stairs, and from then on no one used the front door again.

The soldiers of the Bogunsky Regiment carried so much weaponry with them it was hard to imagine how they ever got anywhere. They had everything: machine-guns, rifles, hand-grenades, Brownings, Mausers, sawn-off shotguns, hunting knives, daggers, swords. They also carried with them purple and red gramophone horns, sentimental reminders of peacetime.

As soon as the soldiers occupied a city, strains of long-forgotten, heart-rending romances wafted from every window. Once more, a morose baritone complained, his voice quivering, of nowhere to go and no one to love, while a lisping tenor lamented that never again would springtime come for him, no, not for him would the river Bug course mightily, nor would his heart ever again throb with joy. Once more, shouting ‘Hai-da-Troika!’, Vyaltseva galloped off, and a lovely seagull expired on some lake of flaming waters. Everything was all jumbled together – Varya Paninafn1 and hand-grenades, the smell of iodoform and the soft sing-song of Ukrainian speech, the red cockades on the Cossack hats and symphony concerts, soldiers’ dreams of still ponds amid peaceful meadows and the hysterical cries of illegal traders being rounded up in the bazaars.

A kind, feeble old engineer by the name of Belelyubsky lived together with his wife in the flat below us. He had once been famous throughout the world as the constructor of the bridge over the Volga at Syzran. The Belelyubskys had a maid, a jolly, red-cheeked girl named Motrya. The regimental sergeant-major fell in love with her and proposed. Motrya hesitated. The officer insisted. Motrya still wasn’t sure. She had some rather old-fashioned notions about marriage. She was afraid that he was trying to sweep her off her feet just so he could move in with her for a few days and then be gone for good.

One day Motrya came to me and with the direct honesty of a country girl said that she had nearly given in to the sergeant’s advances but had run away in time and was now willing to have him but only if he agreed to marry her ‘according to the Book’ and promised to love her for life. She dictated to me a letter for him that comprised four short words: ‘Yes, if for life.’ I wrote it down in big block letters. About an hour later, having received the letter, the sergeant began charging up and down the halls, swearing to high heaven and barging in and out of the flats in search of the regimental seal. ‘Which one of you bandits hid the damned seal?’ he screamed at his men. He had a gun in his hand. ‘I’ll shoot every last one of you Yids if it’s not returned to me this instant!’

The house shook from the tramping of boots. The sergeant began emptying out the men’s knapsacks. Finally, the seal was found. ‘I swear, for life’ he wrote on the letter, and then affixed the regimental seal for good measure and sent it back to Motrya. And so, Motrya gave in.

A large, noisy wedding was celebrated two days later. A few gun-carriages drove up to the house. Coloured ribbons had been braided into the excited horses’ manes. And even though it could not have been more than two hundred metres from our house to St Vladimir’s Cathedral, where the ceremony was set to take place, the entire wedding party climbed onto the carriages and roared off. They drove round and round the cathedral several times, to the sound of clanging bells, hoots and whistles, and rollicking song:

I sit on a barrel,

My head all a whirl,

I’m now a Bolshevik bride,

A Haidamachka with pride!

Ekh, lil’ darling, for whom are you yearning?

If Bogun should get you, you won’t be returning!

Bogun’s our commander,

You know what he’s after,

Tho’ covered with holes and scars,

He still makes the girls see stars!

At the words ‘Ekh, lil’ darling’ the drivers pulled up on the reins and the horses stopped, pranced and shook the bells in time to the tune. It was a brilliant performance, and a large crowd had formed before the cathedral to watch and cheer.

On the third day (when for some reason trouble always seems to happen) the regiment was roused in the middle of the night. They gathered themselves reluctantly, in silence, saying only when questioned: ‘They’re sending us to Zhitomir. To restore order. The priests there are rebelling.’

Motrya was sobbing. Her worst fears had come to pass – the sergeant was leaving and never coming back. At this the sergeant flew into a rage. ‘Herd all the lodgers out into the yard!’ he yelled at his men, punctuating his words upon reaching the bottom of the stairs by firing his pistol into the ceiling. ‘Everybody into the courtyard! This instant, you bloody parasites!’

The men forced the frightened lodgers out of their rooms and into the yard. It was late on a winter night. Ice crystals hung in the still, cold air. Women cried and clutched their sleepy, quivering children to their breasts.

‘Stop your carrying on,’ the soldiers said. ‘Nothing’s going to happen to you. It’s just our sergeant, that devilish Motrya drives him mad.’

The sergeant lined up his men to face the frightened group of lodgers and then stepped forward. He was holding a wailing Motrya by the hand. They came to a stop in the middle of the icy yard. He drew his sword, scratched a large cross in the ice, and shouted: ‘Warriors and citizens of a free Russia! You are my witnesses that by this cross and by my native land, I swear never to desert my queen and to return to her. And I swear that we shall make a home together in the village of Moshny near the celebrated town of Kanev, and to this I sign my name and pledge my troth.’

He hugged Motrya, who was still crying, and then gently pushed her away and barked at his men: ‘Mount the carriages! March!’

The men flung themselves up onto the carriages and hurtled out of the yard whistling and singing. We could hear the metal wheels thunder off down Bibikovsky Boulevard in the direction of the Zhitomirsky Highway. It was all over. Motrya dried her tears. ‘To hell with him, the damned heathen!’ she said before turning and going back inside to the Belelyubskys’ flat. Life resumed its normal course. Yet it seemed to have lost some of its lustre, and soon the people of Kiev began to speak about the Bogunsky Regiment with unmistakable nostalgia. The soldiers had been cheerful, big-hearted and incredibly brave young men. They had brought with them the smell of battle, bullet-ridden red banners, dashing songs and a selfless devotion to the revolution. They had come and gone, but for a long time afterwards a current of revolutionary romanticism pulsed through Kiev, bringing a smile to the faces of its citizens who had been through so much.

The man in charge of the Bogunsky Regiment at the time was named Shchors. He soon became a legend. I first heard of him from his men, who told me ecstatic stories of their commander’s uncompromising bravery and talent. What amazed me the most was the men’s devoted, almost childlike, love for Shchors. For them, he embodied the best possible qualities of military leadership – steadfastness, resourcefulness, fairness, admiration for the common man and inexhaustible and, if one can put it so, sober romanticism. The men of the Bogunsky Regiment were young, and so was Shchors. Their youth combined with their faith in the victory of the revolution had transformed this military unit into a sort of brotherhood, strengthened by a shared enthusiasm and by the blood they had spilled together.

No external events could slow the sap rising in the trees. And so, at the appropriate moment, spring returned, the Dnieper overflowed its banks, the weeds in the fields grew taller than a man’s head and the battle-scarred chestnut trees put out their plump leaves and, for some reason, bloomed with unusual splendour. It seemed to me at times that these trees were the only thing left untouched in the world. Just as before, their leaves rustled over the pavements and cast deep shadows. Just as before, their shapely candles of pink and yellow-flecked flowers blossomed gently and discreetly on the branches. But no more dreamy-eyed schoolgirls strolled in these shadows, and among the dried blossoms that had fallen to the pavement lay shell casings that had turned green over the winter and stiff, grubby rolls of bandage.

Spring glistened over Kiev, steeping the city in vibrant blue. At long last, the lime trees blossomed in the parks, and their scent filtered into the houses sealed up tight over the winter and forced the city dwellers to throw open their windows and balcony doors. Soon after, summer stole into the rooms, bringing warmth and light breezes, and all our fears and troubles dissolved in its drowsy peace. It’s true, however, that we had no bread, and survived on nothing more than last year’s frozen potatoes.

I got a job at a strange organisation. It was almost impossible to pronounce the abbreviation for its name. I only recall the beginning: ‘Obgubsnabchuprod …’ The rest was so complicated that even the organisation’s director, a fat Armenian with a black imperial and a Mauser slung around his neck (just as one would carry a camera), snorted and frowned every time he signed a piece of letterhead. It’s hard to say what the organisation dealt in exactly. It was mostly calico. The corridors and rooms were all piled high with bales of calico. They were never sold or given to anyone under any circumstances. Rather, the bales were being constantly delivered, then taken away to the warehouse, then dragged back and stacked up again in the corridors. This perpetual back and forth and back and forth drove the employees out of their minds.

I had a good deal of free time. I tried to track down my old schoolmates, but no one was left in Kiev other than Emma Shmukler. I rarely saw him. He had become quiet and sad, perhaps because his family had forced him to give up his dream of becoming a painter. Emma’s father had become ill, and so all the responsibilities fell on Emma. He alone had to protect his relations against famine, requisitioning, eviction, Petlyura’s pogroms and raids, and what was called at the time uplotnenie, ‘consolidation’, when whole families moved into a single room and the rest of their flat was handed over to strangers.

Once again, as in my schooldays, I went to evening concerts in the garden of the former Merchants’ Club. The roses and canna lilies were all gone, replaced by mint and wormwood. Quite often extraneous sounds found their way into the music – distant explosions, the crackle of gunfire – but no one took the slightest notice.

During those days in Kiev I became consumed by the works of that great French writer and literary mystifier, Stendhal. I never gave much thought to the nature of his mystifications, for I considered them perfectly legitimate, as I still do, since they testified to an inexhaustible store of ideas and images so varied that it was unthinkable to combine them under one name. No one would ever believe that one person was capable of penetrating so deeply into so many and such different areas of life – painting, the steel trade, daily life in the French provinces, the fog of war at Waterloo, the art of seduction, the rejection of the bourgeois age, the work of the quartermaster, the music of Cimarosa and Haydn.

When I learned that his extensive diaries, so full of exciting events and rich with ideas, were largely fictitious, but so convincingly written that even the most knowledgeable experts of the era were fooled by them, I could only bow before the genius and literary courage of this mysterious and solitary figure. Ever since he has been my secret friend. It is difficult to say how many times I have strolled through Rome and the Vatican, how many trips I have taken to the provincial towns of France, how many operas I have seen at La Scala, and how many brilliant conversations among the great minds of the nineteenth century I have overheard in the company of this clumsy, puzzling man.

Soon my luck changed. The writers Mikhail Koltsov and Yefim Zozulyafn2 arrived in Kiev from Moscow. They began to publish an art magazine, and I was taken on as its literary editor. The work was light. The magazine was quite meagre, something along the lines of a school exercise book with half the pages torn out. Self-confident, ironical and witty, Koltsov rarely came by the office. I spent my days in the single room with Zozulya, who was so short-sighted, kind and accommodating that he could never be mistaken for the popular ‘man of steel’ from Moscow.

I showed Zozulya the beginning of my first and still unfinished novel, The Romantics. He genuinely liked it but did say that I had overdone the self-analysis bits and that, besides, it was too wordy. Zozulya was then writing a series of stories no longer than half a dozen lines each. He liked to say that every story was ‘shorter than a sparrow’s beak’. They resembled fables and had a clear moral. He considered literature to be a form of teaching, a sermon. For me, literature possessed something much greater than this narrow utilitarian function, and so we quarrelled constantly.

By then I was already convinced that genuine literature was the purest form of expression for a free spirit’s heart and mind, that only in literature could an artist reveal all the complex richness and power of the human soul, and in that way redeem us, in a sense, of the many sins of our commonplace lives. I thought of literature as a gift, given to us by a distant and precious future, that reflected humanity’s dream over the centuries for perfect harmony and undying love on this earth, a dream that is born and dies every day but refuses to expire for good. As the quiet hum of a seashell awakens our desire to behold the still expanse of a misty sea, or the silver smoke of clouds flying across the sky, or the oceans of cleansing air rising from a damp forest, or a child’s ringing voice, or the profound silence of the world, so literature draws us closer to the golden age of our thoughts, our feelings and our actions.

Meanwhile, as Zozulya and I sat arguing about literature, Atamans Zelëny and Struk were prowling around Kiev and making raids here and there on the outskirts. Once Struk managed to occupy the entire district of Podol, and it took a great deal of effort to dislodge him. Denikin’s army was advancing from the south.fn3 On the steppes beyond Kremenchug, Makhno and his men raped and pillaged. But few people in Kiev talked about such matters or bothered to take them seriously. There had been so many false rumours that no one even believed in real facts anymore.