The Story of a Life

84

Puff Pastry

It was a gusty summer morning. The chestnut trees outside my windows thrashed about in a confused way, and cannons boomed off in the distance from the direction of Fastov. A battle was being fought there against Denikin’s forces advancing from the south.

Amalia’s dark flat smelled of fresh coffee. She was grinding the last of her precious beans. The coffee mill creaked unhappily, even screeching at times, as though it sensed its imminent doom. As always, the smell of coffee made the flat seem cosier, despite the ‘Gift of the Sea’ – a broken wall-mounted thermometer decorated with cockle shells that read three degrees below zero both winter and summer. Those everlasting minus three degrees sometimes made the flat feel colder than it was.

Someone knocked at the kitchen door. I heard Amalia go over to open it. There was a moment of silence, and then she cried out with excitement: ‘Yes, he’s here! He’s here, of course!’ Her voice broke. I dashed into the kitchen. Two beggar women covered in dust were standing there. Their heads were covered with kerchiefs that had been pulled down so low you could barely see their eyes.

‘Kostik!’ the shorter of the two cried. She sank onto a stool and her head dropped to the kitchen table. A homemade hazel staff fell from her hand and clattered to the floor. I recognised Mama’s voice, knelt before her, and tried to look into her face. She avoided my eyes, but squeezed my cheeks with her cold, thin hands and began to sob, almost without tears. Only her convulsive breathing told me she was crying. Galya stood there, too afraid to move – it seemed that she had lost the last bit of her sight. I noticed that her legs were wrapped in strips torn from an old twilled cotton bedspread and tied on with twine. Even now I still remember those strips with their distinctive green pattern. Galya was not wearing spectacles. She was straining her neck forward, trying to make out the bentwood coat rack in a dark corner of the kitchen, and kept asking Mama: ‘Well, is he here? Is Kostik here? Why aren’t you answering? Where is he?’

Mama and Galya had walked all the way from Kopan to Kiev. It had become impossible for them to stay there any longer. Small gangs raided the farm almost daily, although they had apparently not harmed either of the women since they were too poor to rob. Some had even taken pity on them and left Mama a handful of rusks or the crushed hulls of sunflower seeds. One bandit even gave Mama an exquisite though utterly moth-eaten Spanish shawl. He told her he had stolen it from a theatre in Zhitomir.

The last straw for Mama had been a bandit known as the ‘Angel of Vengeance’. Having already seen dozens of atamans, Mama was staggered to find that this Angel of Vengeance was a converted Jew with a full beard and spectacles who had once run a chemist’s shop in Radomyshl and regarded himself as a committed anarchist. He addressed her as ‘madame’ and proceeded to take every last thing she owned, right down to her sewing needles, although he was kind enough to leave her a detailed inventory of what he had stolen so that Mama could claim compensation, but only after ‘anarchy had swept over the entire world’.

It had taken Mama and Galya over two weeks to walk all the way to Kiev. They had adopted the disguise of beggars, which they in fact were. Galya had walked behind Mama, holding onto her shoulder. She didn’t wear her glasses, for that would have given them away: beggars were too poor for glasses. Moreover, in those violent, turbulent times, people in spectacles encountered widespread suspicion and even hatred. It was generally believed that anyone who wore glasses must be an enemy of the masses. Amazingly, some of this mistrust of men and women in glasses, which casts them as wily, devious and untrustworthy characters, remains today.

For several days Mama and Galya did nothing but rest and catch up on their sleep. A look of peace and happiness never left their faces. But then, as always, Mama decided it was time to act, and she began by helping Amalia with her sewing. They became fast friends, and now two sewing machines whirred away in the flat, while Galya busied herself making artificial flowers. She made them out of scraps of coloured material, working slowly and carefully. I was impressed by her array of steel tools and stamps. She used them to cut stiff calico into daisy chains, rose petals and leaves of various shapes. The buds and stamens were particularly difficult to make. Her flowers were pretty, but they smelled of paint and glue and very quickly gathered dust. Deep down I was convinced that Galya’s work was utterly pointless, especially during a time of revolution, famine and civil war. Who would want to buy these flowers when food was so scarce that people were risking their lives on long, dangerous trips to the countryside just for the sake of a pound of barley or a cup of sunflower oil? As it turned out, however, I was wrong.

Cloth flowers sold well in the little shops around the Baikovoe Cemetery, along with cheap wreaths, grave railings (chiefly made from old bed springs), sugary marble monuments and curly iron crosses. Once a week an old woman who supplied the shops came to buy Galya’s flowers. She liked to encourage Galya not to waste too much time finishing them off because they would sell out no matter what for the simple reason she had no competitors. Her words made Galya indignant, and she carried on fussing over every last tea-rose for an entire day trying to make it perfect. She was conscientious to the point of self-torture.

The old woman, something of a born philosophiser, had a rather gloomy theory about trades and occupations, which she loved to expound in her monotonous voice: ‘In times like these, you’ve got to earn a living from things that have always been, are, and will continue to be on this earth, regardless of all these wars and revolutions. Take hair, for example. As long as the earth keeps turning, hair will keep growing. And, mind you, just as the earth spins day and night, hair grows day and night too. Given that fact, I propose that the most profitable occupation has to be that of a hairdresser.

‘After hair, there’s death. We’ll never stop dying. And no matter who’s in power, dead folks have to be buried. A corpse can’t dig its own grave, put a wreath on it, or write on its tombstone “Rest in Peace, My Beloved Husband Yasha” or “He Died a Hero’s Death Fighting the Enemy”. Death will always provide a way to make a few kopecks. That’s just the way it is. One man’s grief is another man’s bread. One man’s tears are another man’s pitcher of milk.’

We were all terrified of this sinister graveyard crone. All of us, that is, except for Galya, who alone had the courage to engage her in pointless arguments.

The rumble of the cannons to the south grew louder. Soviet units were by now fighting Denikin’s forces at the approaches to the city. The calico outfit to which I had returned after the fatigue regiment had begun to evacuate. The bales of calico were being moved to the goods station and sent north.

One morning I arrived at work and found a notice pinned to the door. I knew the typewriter well – it was missing its R – and so the notice read: ‘Oganisation Evacuated. Fo Futhe Infomation Dial …’ I waited in the dark stairwell strewn with scraps of sacking in the hope one of my colleagues would turn up, but no one did. Puzzled, I went back outside and came upon about twenty wounded Red Army soldiers. Dirty and exhausted, they were tramping wearily along the pavement. Fresh bandages, as white as snow, covered the men’s arms and faces. I followed them. It was obvious they had made their way into the city on foot straight from battle.

They walked along the noisy Vasilkovskaya Street, then the equally loud but smarter Kreshchatik, before descending to Podol towards the Dnieper. As they walked, the noise slowly died down, and they were left to their own silence. Passers-by stopped to stare. The sight of the wounded Red Army men making their way down Kreshchatik awoke panic that quickly spread to the side streets. I caught up with one of the soldiers and asked him where they had been fighting.

‘Near the Red Tavern,’ he said without bothering to look at me. ‘It’s pretty hot over there now, comrade.’

Denikin’s forces had attacked from the south-east, from the direction of Darnitsa, yet the Red Tavern was over to the south-west of Kiev.

‘Have Denikin’s men really encircled the city? Are there that many of them?’ people asked from the crowd.

‘What are you talkin’ about, Denikin’s men!’ the soldier said angrily. ‘They’re nowhere near there.’

‘Then who were you fighting?’

‘Well, the enemy, of course,’ he said, grinning, and then walked off to catch up with the others.

None of this made sense. And when, an hour later, shells began flying overhead with the now familiar screech and exploding in the Podol neighbourhood and on the wharfs, complete panic gripped the inhabitants of Kiev. Once more, everyone took shelter in their cellars. Once more, night patrols were organised in the courtyards, oil lamps went out with each explosion, water was hurriedly stored in every possible container, rumours spread, people lay awake at night unable to sleep.

Night watch was perhaps the calmest of occupations during this violent time. I actually loved my shift on duty in our nice little courtyard beside the solid wicket set into the equally solid iron gate. For some reason the closeness of the yard at night and its lone chestnut tree made me feel as safe as in an impregnable fortress. There was no thought of carrying a weapon – you could be shot on the spot just for holding a child’s popgun. The only thing we watchmen were expected to do was to raise the alarm at the first sign of danger so the house residents wouldn’t be caught unawares. For this, we were given a large copper bowl and a hammer.

I am sure the reason I loved night duty was the strange and completely illusory feeling of safety it gave me, a feeling that owed much to the danger all around. Danger was lying in wait right there, just on the other side of that iron wicket no more than two millimetres thick. Just open the wicket and cross the threshold, and you were face to face with the terrifying unknown that stalked the dark, dead streets of the city at night. Cross the threshold and you could hear someone sneaking through the garden and sense with every single nerve in your body the vibrating air as the lead bullet flew straight at your heart.

Inside the courtyard that fear disappeared. All you had to do not to give yourself away was to sit still and listen. Animal instinct told you that your only chance for survival was to remain invisible, cloaked by darkness and silence. I sometimes shared my watch with Avel Isidorovich Stakover, a former history teacher at the Levandovskaya Gymnasium for Girls. Despite the fact that Stakover had taught at a girls’ school, he was a terrible misogynist. A small man with a scraggy beard and bloodshot eyes, slovenly and always enraged, he never grew tired of calling down curses, like some Prophet Jeremiah, on the head of every last woman without exception.

There was only one subject he could discuss in a calm, relaxed manner – the Middle Ages. He insisted that this was the loveliest age in the history of humanity. Stakover had his reasons for this, accepting, of course, one excluded the era’s embrace of chivalry, courtly love and the whole cult of the Virgin Mary. Everything else, however, suited him just fine. He liked to tick off the merits of the Middle Ages on his fingers. First, the earth wasn’t so crowded. Second, dense forests, brooks, streams and rivers came right up to your doorstep. You lived on the life-giving air of the woods and the pure fruits of the earth, not on paraffin and tins. Third, great poetry had already flourished, and the life of the mind did not take a back seat to today. And fourth, people were simpler, less homogenised, and so more attractive than at the height of civilisation.

Stakover did not miss an opportunity to try to convince me of the beauty of the Middle Ages. It was almost as though he thought he could easily transport me back to that distant time and that I had some sort of real choice about which epoch I might care to live in. He talked like a recruiting agent, like a zealous disciple, like an official representative of those Middle Ages from which he had just returned. Stakover even used the civil war in Ukraine and our shared night watch to sing the praises of the Middle Ages. On the night the Red Army units abandoned Kiev, shelled by an unknown enemy on the other side of the city as they went, he said to me: ‘I don’t know about you, my young friend, but I would like to live in a medieval castle. Only there did one enjoy blessed peace and safety in those dangerous times. Leaving the forest, where with every step one risked being snatched and hanged from the nearest oak, one entered the ancient shelter of the crenellated walls. Up went the drawbridge, the fortress gate was locked, and every man, woman and child felt not only the joy of escape but the full richness of life itself. It filled the air, it sparkled with the sunlit silence of the enormous flagstone courts, it rang in the music of the horn summoning them to the banqueting hall, and it was preserved in the heavy folios of the library, where the wind stirred the thick pages. And it is only in such a state, my young friend, that anything of immortal value can be created.’

In the daytime, Stakover showed me plans and drawings of old castles, with their massive towers, dungeons, embrasures, turrets, passageways, gloomy labyrinths, walls two metres thick, fireplaces, inner gardens and wells. All the castles stood on the tops of mountains or clung to impregnable rocky faces. The winds of Burgundy and the Île-de-France, of Lotharingia and Savoy, Bohemia and the Apennines buffeted them from all sides. The sun, like a burning crown, cast its rays over the towers, banners and moss-grown slates.

Mama especially loved to listen to Stakover. When I was on duty, she got up at night, threw on a heavy shawl and came into the yard. We would sit in a nook sheltered from the wind and talk in a whisper, often stopping to listen to some unfamiliar sound. Like all mothers, Mama still thought of Galya and me as little children and encouraged me in her good-natured way to see more of Stakover. ‘He’s a fount of knowledge,’ Mama liked to say. ‘A walking encyclopedia. It would be good for you to spend more time with him, Kostik. Don’t look down on people like that.’

She was wrong. I never did look down on people like that. Just the opposite. I could listen to them for hours. I was impressed by their vast knowledge and grateful for their generosity in sharing it with me. What astonished me was that they, in their turn, were grateful to me for listening to them so attentively. They had evidently not been spoiled by too much attention, and I could explain this only by the fact that, as Pushkin said, we Russians ‘are lazy and incurious’. Neither gymnasium nor university taught me so much, or so thoroughly, as the books I’ve read and the people I’ve met. Being extremely shy, I have always envied people who feel comfortable in any surroundings and can easily strike up conversations with strangers. This is something that has always been difficult for me to do.

Shells whistled over the city all night long. The explosions coming from Podol sounded as though someone were dropping large bundles of sheet metal. By dawn the Soviet forces had retreated to the north along the Dnieper, and everything was quiet again. Early that morning, Mama, who had been blessed with extraordinary inquisitiveness and a complete disregard for her safety, went out into the city, as she put it, ‘to reconnoitre’. She came back soon to say that the city was deserted and even though there was still no sign of Denikin’s troops, some of the city’s more cautious residents had already hung out white, blue and red tsarist flags.

Drinking our carrot tea later in the kitchen, we heard the familiar cries of ‘Glory!’ coming from Fundukleevskaya Street. We went out to the balcony. The soldiers marching down the street holding blue and yellow banners were not Denikin’s but Petlyura’s. They marched slowly and confidently, full of pride in their Austrian uniforms. And the same old ‘proper’ Ukrainians we had grown so tired of seeing a short while ago were now back out in the streets in their embroidered shirts screaming ‘Glory!’ and tossing their moth-eaten lambskin hats in the air. The city was puzzled. Why Petlyura and not Denikin?

The soldiers marched to Kreshchatik, occupied it, spread their bivouac and hung their flag from the balcony of the City Duma. Hanging one’s flag from that balcony was a declaration of sorts. Every new occupier did it as a way of saying they would not surrender without a fight. Rumours quickly began to spread that Denikin had ceded Kiev to Petlyura and redirected his White Army, which had been advancing on the city from the south, towards Orël. Driven nearly mad by the ceaseless coups and overthrows, the population hardly cared who controlled the city, as long as the new rulers stopped shooting, looting and throwing people out of their homes. For this reason, the arrival of Petlyura was met with complete indifference.

And then, at one o’clock, advance cavalry units of Denikin’s army, followed by a regiment of Don Cossacks, entered the city from the direction of Pechersk, not far from the monastery. Denikin’s forces advanced to Kreshchatik, only to find it already occupied by Petlyura’s men, a state of affairs they found as shocking as had the residents a short while ago and that they tried to get to the bottom of. It turned out that one of Petlyura’s divisions had been hiding in the villages to the west of Kiev and biding its time. No one had known anything about this. Taking advantage of the Soviet retreat, the division had decided to beat Denikin to the prize – the soldiers launched an attack on Kiev and after a two-day battle they occupied the city.

Quite naturally, Denikin’s men were not pleased. Mysterious and complicated talks began between the two sides, after which a white, blue and red flag appeared on the Duma balcony alongside that of Petlyura’s as a sign of dual sovereignty. The residents were now completely bewildered. It was impossible to know who exactly was in charge.

All doubts on the matter were settled that evening when reinforcements from Denikin’s army moved in. Two more Cossack regiments suddenly poured like lava down the steep Pechersk hills onto Petlyura’s unsuspecting troops. Galloping at full-tilt, lances levelled, swords flashing, the Cossacks roared forth, whooping and shooting their guns in the air. The steeliest of nerves could not have withstood this savage and sudden attack. Petlyura’s men dropped their weapons, abandoned their cannons and fled without a shot. And the same old ‘proper’ Ukrainians who had been shouting ‘Glory!’ so movingly only that morning were now out on the streets and the balconies, shaking their fists and screaming ‘Ganba!’ – ‘Shame! Disgrace!’ But the soldiers paid them no attention. They were running as fast as they could, looking back now and then in terror and hurriedly shoving things into their pockets. It wasn’t until they reached Svyatoshino outside the city that they stopped to catch their breath. Their last remaining battery lobbed a dozen or so shells in the general direction of Kiev, but that was it. There were no casualties, unless you count a wrecked ice-cream stand on Vladimirskaya Hill and the loss of an ear from the plaster statue of one of those two great Enlighteners of Russia, either St Cyril or St Methodius, I can’t recall which.

The following morning, an order signed by General Bredov had been posted around the city, announcing that from that day on, Kiev would forever remain a part of a united and indivisible Russia.