The Story of a Life

86

The Wedding Present

The train took eighteen days to get from Kiev to Odessa. I didn’t bother to count the number of hours, but I remember well how each one of them on this exhausting trip seemed to us passengers like two. This clearly had something to do with the fact that every hour contained the danger of death. Three passengers were indeed killed and a few more wounded by stray bullets, a number that we all, especially the young priests from the Catholic seminary in Zhitomir, deemed nothing short of a miracle. It could have been much worse. The priests were trying to reach Poland by a crazily roundabout route – first to Istanbul, then Thessaloniki, Belgrade and Budapest. Of course, none of us on the train believed a single one of them would make it to Poland alive.

One warm autumn dawn in Kiev, when the Whites still held the line between Orël and Kursk and we felt quite safe, we were suddenly awakened by the rattle of machine-gun fire. As always, it was impossible to know what was happening without a bit of ‘reconnaissance’. Mama was always the one to reconnoitre. As we rushed to get dressed, still half asleep, she ran out into the street and soon returned, cheerful and excited. Mama’s bravery always amazed me. It was largely due to the fact she was a convinced fatalist and believed that everyone’s life was ruled by inexorable fate. There was no escaping fate. Everything had been set down at birth.

She returned with incredible news. Soviet forces had fought their way into Kiev from the west and advanced as far as the Galitsky Market. The distance between Kiev and the closest Soviet front was considerable. It was inconceivable that Soviet troops could have crossed this territory that was controlled by the Whites. Thus, their appearance in Kiev seemed a miracle, although an undeniably physical one, as the hail of bullets slamming into the brick of our much-abused house proved. It turned out that some Soviet units, which had retreated from the south at the beginning of Denikin’s advance, had stopped in the vast and nearly impenetrable marshes around Irpen not far from Kiev. They hid there throughout the summer and autumn, and no one, neither Denikin’s men nor anyone in Kiev, had any idea. The only people who did know were the peasants living in the villages surrounding the marshes, but they didn’t tell a soul.

And now these units had suddenly burst into Kiev, occupied half the city, seized a good deal of food and ammunition, and then fought their way back out and taken off to the north to rejoin the rest of the Soviet army. The fighting had been fierce, erupting here and there in district after district and dying down only towards nightfall. The next day we learned that General Bredov, the commander of Denikin’s forces, had decided to call up every male in the city under the age of forty. It was at that moment I decided to escape to Odessa. By then, Mama’s nerves were better, and she had found herself a place to live. Galya was making good money from her artificial flowers, and the two of them had become friends of Amalia, who I knew would not desert them. I gave Mama nearly all the money I had, and we agreed that I would return to Kiev once things had quietened down. And so, I left for Odessa with an easy mind.

The first night passed safely, although the glow of burning villages flickered in the wind along the horizon. The train felt its way forward, its lights out. It stopped often and for long periods, as though listening to strange noises in the night, uncertain whether it was safe to go on. Sometimes it even reversed, backing up a bit into the shadows to hide from the light of an especially bright fire. And every time I thought I saw horsemen dressed in black crossing the rails far up ahead, unaware of our presence.

Riding together in our goods wagon were the five priests, an employee of the Russian Word named Nazarov, and a fidgety Odessan with the Ribbon of the Legion of Honour in his buttonhole. His name was Viktor Khvat. He had served in the French army during the First World War and had even fought at the famous First Battle of the Marne. Khvat joked the whole way, mostly about his Jewish ancestry. He joked mainly to calm his fear. We all knew that if we encountered one of the many gangs of bandits then swarming across most of Ukraine Khvat would be the first one shot.

In those days many new expressions for being shot appeared – ‘put up against the wall’, ‘change’, ‘liquidate’, ‘send to Dukhonin’s HQ’, ‘settle expenses’. Practically every region of the country had its own colloquialisms. Khvat’s wit was a precious commodity – a good joke could save a man from death back then. Nazarov had his own good qualities as well, which had got him out of trouble more than once. He was by nature simple-hearted, a trait that had won him the sympathy of even the cruellest of bandits, and extremely short-sighted, a physical defect that others always took as a sign that Nazarov must be both defenceless and harmless.

The priests were pale, quiet and excessively polite young men. At the first whiff of danger, they surreptitiously crossed themselves and cast worried glances our way. By the third day, thick stubble had sprouted over their smooth faces, and they had lost their elegant appearance. Just like the rest of us, they had gone days without bathing. Their cassocks were torn from frequent forays for firewood. At every stop, they jumped from the train and with intense zeal tore apart wooden fences and crossing keepers’ huts for fuel to feed the engine. Viktor Khvat acted as the foreman of their little brigade, which was considered one of the finest at its job.

In Fastov, a plump, cheery young woman with pert eyes climbed aboard. Her name was Lyusena. Before getting on, she flung a dusty bundle made from an old, torn Gypsy shawl through the open door of our wagon. At that moment, the priests were sitting quietly on their rough wooden bunks by the door and chewing on pieces of dry, rock-hard rye flatbread. Khvat liked to joke that horses had a particular taste for this bread, mostly because it was made from straw.

‘Hey there, you oafs!’ Lyusena shouted at the priests. ‘Give a woman a hand. It’s obvious I can’t climb up by myself.’

The priests jumped up and bumped into each other in their rush to the door. Embarrassed by their poor manners, they joined together and with all their might lifted Lyusena into the wagon.

‘Ugh …’ she sighed, looking around the wagon. ‘Not exactly luxurious, I see.’

The priests just stood there awkwardly and said nothing.

‘All right, Your Graces, not to worry!’ said Lyusena, having finished her inspection of the wagon. She reached down to hitch up a much-darned silk stocking. ‘I’ll take the bunk in the dark corner over there, just so’s you don’t think I’ve got designs on your virginity. Which is as much use to you as a poultice to a corpse, I might add.’

One of the priests giggled inappropriately, and Viktor Khvat said with a presumptuous grin: ‘It’s clear to me, my dear, that with you here we’re all as good as sunk. Although it’s certain to be fun and exciting.’

‘Shut up, pipsqueak,’ she said in a feigned bass voice. ‘I’m from Odessa, got it? I’ve seen plenty of your types in my time. I don’t actually dance the cancan, although I used to sing at the Tivoli Café in Kharkov. I could sing you songs that would make even your weak blood boil, my dear little boy. But enough joking around! Would it kill you to give a young lady a piece of that bread there? I haven’t eaten a thing in two days.’

We treated her to some of the rye flatbread and from that moment life in our wagon became, as Khvat put it, ‘new and bright’. With her lively spirit and indefatigable cheerfulness, Lyusena let nothing bother her. She joked about every last thing, even the constant danger of our rickety old goods train being shot up and captured by bandits, and teased the priests, who had no idea what to make of her. She traded witticisms with Khvat, sang music-hall songs and shocked the priests with her salacious stories. They moaned disapprovingly, yet their eyes glowed with admiration for the woman they called ‘the great whore, Panna Lyusena’. It was obvious how much they liked her, and they kept trying to find justifications for Lyusena and her ways in Catholic dogma, the Old and New Testaments, and practically even in papal encyclicals.

In the end, they proclaimed her the Mary Magdalene of our times, a modern-day incarnation of the beautiful, red-headed prostitute who had sinned day and night and was later canonised for her pure love of Christ, she who had flung herself at the feet of the Crucified on Golgotha and by covering them with her hair had eased the pain in His tortured limbs. A great many women had travelled the same path from sin to sanctity, and as proof faint gold haloes had been lit over their heads in the paintings of the Great Masters of the Renaissance, and white lilies brushed their hems, spreading the scent of chastity.

The priests discussed this among themselves in low voices. I knew enough Polish to follow along and listening to them it struck me that Catholicism’s cult of the Madonna is nothing more than another manifestation, albeit refined, of humanity’s eternal and undeniable sensuality. I was to become even more convinced of this years later when I saw the fair Madonnas, beckoning me with their coquettish eyes and Gioconda smiles spread over their small, red, quivering lips, in the many-coloured half-light of the cathedrals in Naples and Rome.

Now, so many years later, none of this even seems possible: those conversations in that beaten-up goods wagon where the autumn wind whistled through the bullet holes and our motley company lived in such cheerful harmony – Lyusena, the impoverished singer and prostitute, the priests, the Knight of the Legion of Honour, the half-blind philosopher Nazarov, a volume of Heine always in his hand, and me, a young man still with no clear profession and prone to flights of fancy.

The train began stopping even more often, and the engine had begun to make imploring whistling noises. This meant that the fuel was running out, and if we, passengers, wanted to keep going and not sit there like dead ducks waiting for the closest gang to swoop down upon us, then we ought to hop from our wagons and get to chopping down the nearest fences or station toolsheds. Khvat would roll back the heavy door with a thud and shout: ‘Your Eminences! Fetch your axes!’

We had a crowbar and two axes with us. The priests grabbed the axes and leapt from the wagon. Hitching up their skirts, they bared their heavy army boots and puttees. We jumped out after them and raced for the nearest fence. These raids were not always successful. Sometimes the owners of these fences opened fire on us with their shotguns. Then the engine driver started the train without bothering to give a warning whistle, Khvat yelled, ‘Christian soldiers! To the horses!’ and we ran back to the wagon and threw ourselves in.

After we had passed Belaya Tserkov, the train was shot at regularly. We never saw who it was since the gunfire came from forests and dense groves along the tracks. As soon as we heard shooting, we lay flat on our bunks. Khvat called this ‘reducing the size of the target’. He insisted that a man lying down was sixteen times less likely to be hit than one standing up. We took little comfort in this, especially after a stray bullet pierced the wall of our wagon right above Lyusena’s head, grazing her hair and shattering the Spanish comb she had inherited from her grandmother, a market woman who sold bubliki in the town of Rybnitsa on the Dniester. After hitting the comb, the bullet howled and for a moment appeared to float in the air as if looking for the exit before hitting the far wall and falling on the back of one of the priests. He picked it up, tucked it away in his purse and swore to hang it on a silver chain before the icon of the Black Madonna of Chenstokhov as an ex-voto for sparing his life.

Lyusena tidied her hair, sat up in her bunk and burst into a rollicking song with her shrill voice:

Good day, my Lyubka, good day, my lovely,

Good day, my lovely, and goodbye!

You’ve gobbled up our last strawberry –

Now you’ve nothing but olives so don’t cry.

The priests took to the song and joined in. Lyusena stopped singing, thought for a moment, and then said: ‘If I’m killed, bury me in my Gypsy shawl. I know the priests will send me off in proper style, of that I’m certain.’

Lying face down on their bunks (the shooting was not as frequent but had not stopped), the priests squirmed strangely. It looked as though they were doing everything possible not to laugh.

‘I’ll get to heaven,’ Lyusena said confidently. ‘No problem at all. I’ll just sing St Peter a little chanson and he’ll weep from laughing. I can just see him blowing his nose and saying: “Mademoiselle Lyusena, if only I’d met you down on that sinful earth instead of here in this boring heaven. Oh, what a time we’d have had! We’d have made people’s heads spin. ‘Aren’t those two just something!’ they’d have said.”’

The most reserved of the priests said: ‘That’s blasphemy, Panna Lyusena! May Our Lady forgive you. As for us, we forgave you a long time ago.’

‘And I thank you for it,’ she replied, before adding softly: ‘Boys, my dear friends! You have no idea how happy I am here with you. No one’s made a pass at me or tried to put their greasy paws on me or even treat me like some kind of tart. And nobody knows I’ve been shot through the breast already. I shot myself in Lugansk. There’s a damned town by that name. That’s where my little boy died. My little boy …’

She lay face down on her bunk and slowly calmed down. No one said a word.

‘And why the hell am I going to Odessa? What am I going to do there?’ Lyusena said suddenly, not raising her head.

I got up and carefully opened the door. A small blue river was winding its way across the dry steppe. The white autumn sun shone brightly. Its soft, fading warmth touched my face. High up in the mists overhead, a flock of cranes was being drawn to the south and the sea, as were we in our grunting, shuddering train.

A freckled, red-haired woman got on the train in Korsun. She was on her way to her daughter’s wedding in Znamenka and was carrying a heavy chest filled with her dowry. The woman was shrill and bad-tempered. A flounce of dirty yellow lace dangled from under her skirt and brushed against her greased hob-nailed boots. She ordered the hungry, pale-faced railway guards about as though she were their ataman, shouting at them to load the chest onto the train. But no one would make room for her. The woman’s chest, her sweaty, red face and her screeching voice had turned the whole train against her.

This must have been the first time I saw a classic example of a kulak woman – greedy, spiteful, petty, mean and intent on flaunting her wealth, which wasn’t much except when viewed amid the general ruin and poverty. Ukraine was full of ruthless, arrogant kulaks in those days. Women ready to strangle their own fathers if there was a bit of profit to be had, while their ‘darling sons’ joined Makhno or Zelëny or some other ataman’s bandit gang and, without batting an eyelid, buried people alive, smashed children’s skulls with the butts of their rifles, and cut strips of skin from the backs of Jews and Red Army men to make trophies.

The woman was fussing around her chest, untying and retying the warm shawl around her shoulders, and yelling in a strained voice: ‘You’ve filled the train with hungry tramps, and now there’s no room left for us decent folk. Just look at them, holes in their trousers and not a kopeck to their names. And the women – tarts and worse! They ought to be squished like dirty bugs and not taken for a drive from Kiev to Odessa.’

A stoop-shouldered station official stood by her, not saying a word.

‘Don’t just stand there like an old goat! Why do you think I gave you that bread and lard? So every last beggar here could laugh at me? You promised to find me a seat – so do it! Or else I’ll take that bread and lard back this instant.’

The official shrugged his shoulders and walked off down the platform. He stopped at every door and asked the passengers in a soft voice so the woman wouldn’t hear: ‘For pity’s sake, make some room for her, the bitch. Her husband’s the head of the village here, a real bandit. He’ll have me beaten to death. There’s not a crumb in the house, again, and she did give me a loaf.’

But the passengers refused. Eventually, the official got the engine driver to take her in return for the bread and lard. They decided to place the chest on the buffer plate between the headlights. The chest was hauled up with difficulty and then tied in place with a heavy rope to the engine. The woman climbed on top of the chest and sat down like a broody hen, her dirty skirt spread out over it, her warm shawl wrapped around her. The train set off.

So we puffed along, past whistling and jeering village boys, with the chest on the engine and the furious woman perched on top. At each stop she opened her basket and wolfed down great quantities of food. It’s doubtful she was always hungry. She did it intentionally, out of spite, to have her revenge on the hungry passengers and gloat over them. She cut herself enormous slices of soft, pinkish lard, tore roast chickens apart with her clawlike fingers, and stuffed her mouth with hunks of fluffy white bread. Her cheeks glistened with fat. When she had finished, she let loose a loud, satisfied burp. She rarely climbed down off her chest, and even when she had to relieve herself she never took more than two or three steps away from the train. It was not only shameless, it was a sign of her utter contempt for everyone else.

The driver grunted and turned away, but he never said anything. He still hadn’t got a crumb of her bread or a single taste of her lard. She insisted she wouldn’t give him anything until he delivered her to Znamenka. All of us hated her with a passion stronger than the fear of death. A few of the passengers went so far as to pray for some gang to come along and shoot up the whole train. They were convinced the woman on her chest would be killed first since she made such a perfect target.

Somewhere past Bobrinets our dreams of vengeance were partly fulfilled. One evening our train came under fire from Makhno’s men. Several bullets hit the marriage chest. The woman was unscathed, but some of the dowry was now full of holes. After that, the woman sat on the chest as though made of stone, her lips pressed together so tightly they turned blue, her eyes burning with such rage that none of the passengers dared to go near the engine unless absolutely necessary.

We kept waiting for revenge. I remembered Mama’s famous belief in the great ‘law of retribution’. When I mentioned it, the priests became all excited and were happy to confirm that such a law existed and was still in effect, even during our civil war. Lyusena, on the other hand, was equally certain there was no such law, but simply pathetic little men who lacked the courage to throw the woman and her chest off the nearest bridge into a nice deep river. And then, finally, it happened.

The ‘Day of Retribution’ was suitably dark and overcast. Ragged, black clouds tore with unbelievable speed over the barren fields. Sheets of rain beat like hail against the peeling walls of Znamenka station. It seemed as though the Goddess of Retribution herself had unleashed these angry clouds, this pelting rain, this wet wind.

It started with the woman giving the engine driver a single pound of lard and a single loaf of bread instead of the promised four pounds and two loaves. The driver didn’t say a thing. He even thanked her and helped the fireman haul the chest down from the engine. The chest weighed a good five hundred pounds, at least. It wasn’t easy removing it from the train and setting it down on the track.

‘Two healthy bulls and they can hardly lift a single chest. Drag it over here,’ said the woman.

‘Try it yourself,’ said the driver. ‘Damned thing’s heavy. I need to go and get my crowbar.’ He climbed into the cab, but instead of grabbing his crowbar, he released two scalding blasts of steam from either side of the engine. The woman screamed and jumped out of the way. The driver then put the train in motion and drove straight into the chest. It exploded with a sharp crash into a dozen pieces, and out flew in every direction the expensive dowry – a quilted bedspread, shirts, dresses, towels, knives, spoons, rolls of fabric and even a nickel-plated samovar. With a triumphant whistle, steam billowing, the engine drove over everything on its way to the water pump. The samovar was left as flat as a pancake. But the driver hadn’t finished yet. He put the engine in reverse, coming to a stop directly over the remains of the dowry, at which point he let loose a shower of hot water mixed with engine oil.

The woman ripped off her shawl and began tearing at her hair before falling face first into a large puddle with a heart-rending wail. Her hands, which now held large clumps of hair, were shaking, and it looked almost as if she were trying to swim to the other side. Then she jumped up and threw herself at the driver. ‘I’ll tear your eyes out!’ she screamed, rolling up her sleeves.

A few men grabbed her. A small man elbowed his way through the crowd. He consisted of new galoshes and an enormous checked cloth cap, from under which stuck a long, sharp nose. The woman’s future son-in-law. He had arrived late to greet her at the station. He looked at the destroyed remains of the dowry, picked up the flattened samovar, tossed it at the woman’s feet, and said in a high, grating voice: ‘Dearest Mama, thank you ever so much for delivering the last of our things in such good condition.’

The woman turned, grabbed him by the front of his shirt and spat in his face. The crowd roared with laughter.

We had stayed at Bobrinets for several days. The track up ahead, destroyed by Makhno, was being repaired. To the south, savage hordes of outlaws were laying waste to the countryside – roaring about on gun-carriages, shooting up everything before them with their machine-guns, looting, burning, raping, only to vanish at the first sight of serious resistance. The little towns of Ukraine, pink with hollyhocks and, until recently, quiet and traditional, now unleashed a wave of ataman-monsters. The bloody days of the ‘Uman’ had returned, swords flashed, slicing off of the heads of thistles one minute, men the next. Black flags emblazoned with white skull-and-crossbones fluttered in the wind over the once peaceful steppes north of the Black Sea. The Middle Ages paled before the brutality, violence and sudden unreason of the twentieth century.

Where had it all been hiding, slowly ripening, gathering strength and biding its time? No one could say. History was racing backwards. Everything had been thrown up into the air, and for the first time in many years, we all became aware of our helplessness before each other’s inhumanity. Nazarov talked about this most of all. The priests kept quiet. Lyusena slept for days on end. As for Khvat, he didn’t care for such conversations – they didn’t provide good material for his witticisms.

The little town of Smela was four kilometres from Bobrinets. I had visited here once as a boy with my Aunt Nadya and met the bearded artist who was in love with her. The day after we stopped at Bobrinets, I walked to Smela. Visits back to the places of one’s past tend to be melancholy experiences. The mood is deepened by those unexpected encounters with long-forgotten, and since altered, things, be it a crumbling old porch, a dying poplar or a rusty letterbox, where I had once posted a letter to my first love, a blue-eyed schoolgirl in Kiev.

Smela was quiet and empty. People tried to avoid going out for fear of running into Denikin’s drunken soldiers. Just as in my childhood, the river Tyasmin was covered with a thick carpet of bright red duckweed that made it look like a fresh spring meadow. The smell of marigolds drifted from behind the fences.

All these places – including Smela and Cherkassy – were connected to the life of my family. As I strolled in Smela’s quiet streets, my seemingly short life now suddenly stretched out before me into a long vista of crowded years. People apparently like to recall their past because from a distance everything becomes clearer. My own passion for exploring my memory arose too early, when I was still quite young, and turned into a kind of game. I didn’t look back on my life as a series of connected events but liked to group things into various categories. So, for example, I would try to remember every hotel I had ever stayed at (actually, they were mostly just cheap lodging houses), or all the rivers I had seen, all the steamers I had sailed on, or every girl I might have fallen in love with.

This predilection proved to be not as silly as I had first supposed. Take hotels. I would try to retrieve from my memory every last detail – the colour of the faded runners in the corridors, the wallpaper designs, the various smells, the prints on the walls, the faces of the maids, the way they talked, the worn bentwood furniture – everything right down to the inkwells made of stone from the Urals the colour of damp sugar which were always filled with a few dead flies but never any ink. As I remembered, I tried to see everything afresh, as though for the first time, and it was only later when I began to write that I realised how useful this was to my work.

I returned to the station at Bobrinets at dusk. I walked along one of the steep sides of the railway embankment. A full moon was rising. Gunshots rang out from the direction of Bobrinets. Suddenly, I could feel my heart beating faster. I was gripped by the notion of how fortunate I was to live in such an interesting moment in history, one full of contradictions and confusion, but also of great hopes. I told myself that I had indeed been born under a lucky star.

Our train pulled into the station at Pomoshnaya early in the morning. We were immediately shunted to a siding at the far end, where piles of old slag were covered with the dry black stems of goosefoot. A short time later we jumped down from our wagon and to our surprise found that our engine had been uncoupled and was gone. There was not a soul to be seen up and down the many tracks or along the platforms. It was as though the station had died.

I went to explore. The air in the station building was cold and grey. All the doors were open, but I didn’t see a single person in the waiting room, the buffet or the booking hall. The station appeared abandoned. After pacing the echoing stone floors, I went out into the main square, walked around to the back of the station, and came upon a rickety old door. I opened it. A man in a red cap, most likely the station guard, sat hunched over a desk in a narrow room with a high ceiling. He had pulled his hands up inside the sleeves of his frayed greatcoat and didn’t make a move, but just glanced at me with a pair of small, inflamed eyes. Greasy strands of hair stuck out from under his red cap.

‘What’s happened?’ I asked him. ‘The station’s deserted.’

He pulled his hands out of his sleeves and beckoned me mysteriously to the table. I went over. He grabbed my hand with his cold damp fingers and muttered softly: ‘Everyone’s fled into the steppe. I’m here all by myself. It wasn’t even my shift, it was Bondarchuk’s, but he’s got a wife and children, the poor devil. And I’ve got nobody, so that’s the way it is. He didn’t ask me to, I volunteered to take his place.’

The man squeezed my hand tighter and tighter. I was getting nervous. He’s mad, I thought, and pulled my hand away. He gave me a puzzled look and grinned. ‘Afraid, are you?’ he asked. ‘Me too.’

‘Of what?’

‘A bullet,’ said the guard. He stood up and began buttoning his coat. ‘Nobody knows where it is now, but there’s a bullet out there meant for my head. So, I just sit, and wait.’

He looked at the clock. ‘Half an hour yet.’

‘Until what?’

‘Makhno’s coming,’ he said suddenly in a clear, loud voice. ‘Understand? He’ll be here in half an hour.’

‘Where did you hear that?’

‘From right here.’ The guard pointed at the telegraph key on the table. ‘From Edison. Before Edison, we led peaceful lives. Didn’t know nothing but didn’t care. Now we can see what’s coming, and all that’s done is cause us a lot of useless worry. Makhno’s been beaten near Golta. He’s heading back home, to Gulyaipole. He sent a telegram – he’ll be passing through Pomoshnaya with three trainloads of his men. Not planning on stopping. Making for Zlatopol. Here’s his order: “All points and signals to be left clear. Wait.” If we don’t, he’ll shoot every last one of us on the spot. Here, look, it’s right here in the telegram: “Blanket Execution by Firing Squad.”’ The guard pointed to the tangle of telegraph tape on the table and sighed. ‘Let’s just hope he passes quickly, the son of a bitch. Are you from the passenger train?’

I said yes and smiled – a hell of a passenger train that was! A collection of dirty, broken-down goods wagons that slumped from one side to the other as it plodded along on bent, rusty wheels.

‘So, go back to the train and tell everyone to lock the doors and don’t let Makhno see so much as the tips of their noses. If he does, you’ll all be lined up in a ditch in front of a machine-gun before you know it.’

I returned to the train with this staggering piece of news. We immediately locked every door on the train and extinguished all the iron stoves so the smoke from the tin chimneys wouldn’t give us away. Many of the passengers took comfort in the fact that between the main line and us stood a long empty goods train to provide cover. But Khvat and I weren’t pleased with this arrangement – we both wanted to have a look at Makhno’s men. Ducking behind coaches and sheds, we made our way over to the station. The guard was happy to see us. In a situation like this, no one wants to be alone.

‘Go over to the buffet. There’s a good view of everything from the windows,’ he said.

‘And what about you?’

‘I’ll go out onto the platform and wave the train through with my green flag.’

Khvat looked at the guard doubtfully. ‘Maybe it’d be best if you didn’t go out,’ he said.

‘What are you talking about? I’m the station guard. If I don’t, the engine driver will stop the train, and then it’s farewell, my sweet little Dusya, you’ll have to write to me in heaven.’

Khvat and I walked over to the buffet. We found a wooden board with a prehistoric timetable of departures and arrivals and moved it over to the window. We could hide behind it and watch without being seen. In case of danger, it was easy to reach the kitchen from the buffet and then from there slip down into a dark cellar.

A dingy tomcat with rusty spots came up the cellar stairs, gave us a passing glance, walked across the empty tables and counter, jumped onto the windowsill, sat down with his back to us, and, like ourselves, began to stare at the empty tracks. He was apparently displeased with all the strange goings-on in the station, for the tip of his tail never stopped twitching irritably. He bothered us, but we decided to let him be. We understood that he was a railway cat and had every right to sit here, whereas we, mere passengers, should know our place. Now and then, he shot us exasperated looks. Then he pricked up his ears, and we heard the emphatic whistle of an engine racing furiously towards the station. I pressed my face to the window and saw the guard. He rushed out onto the platform, straightened his coat and raised his furled green flag.

Blowing clouds of steam into the air, the train tore through the station, pulling a string of alternating goods and flat wagons. What went by on the open flat wagons struck me as raving madness.

I saw hideous, laughing young men all covered with weapons – curved sabres, broadswords, silver-hilted daggers, Colts, rifles and cartridge belts. Large black and red ribbons flew in the wind from tall astrakhan hats, caps, bowlers and every headdress imaginable. The largest ribbon, I noticed, had been stuck to a crumpled top hat. The owner, in a fur coat with the bottom cut off for greater freedom of movement, was firing into the air, apparently a salute to the station of Pomoshnaya, which was holding its breath in terror.

One of Makhno’s men lost his boater in the wind. It rolled a long way down the platform before coming to a gentle stop near the guard’s feet. The boater looked frivolous, despite its sinister black band. The dream of every provincial Don Juan, the hat must have until recently covered the parting atop some well-groomed barber’s head. It’s not hard to imagine that this dandyism had cost him his life. Next, a scrawny, hook-nosed sailor with a neck as long as a giraffe’s swept past. His striped vest had been ripped down to his navel, obviously to show off the extravagant, menacing tattoo on his chest. It flashed by so fast that all I could make out was a tangle of women’s legs, hearts, daggers and snakes. The faint outline had been filled in with pinkish ink almost the colour of strawberry juice. If I were to give it a style, I’d say it was Rococo.

The sailor was followed by a fat Georgian in green velvet riding breeches, a feather boa around his neck. He stood balanced on a gun-carriage alongside two machine-guns, their barrels pointing straight at us. The cat watched this travelling circus and quivered with delight, one minute putting out his claws, the next drawing them back in. After a drunk blond youth in a priest’s stole who was clutching a roasted goose, an old man with a majestic head of white hair flowing out from beneath a school cap with its badge broken off whooshed solemnly by. He held in his hand a Cossack lance to which a torn black skirt had been tied. Painted on it was a white sunrise.

Every flat wagon flung snatches of sound onto the platform as it passed – the crying wail of an accordion, shrill whistles, a few words of a song. One song interrupted the next. ‘Arise now, boys!’ roared one wagon, ‘To Patashon’s Call’ chorused another, while a third shouted: ‘Rest in peace, rest in peace! That’s the end of Rabinovich’s wife, she’s gone and lost her life!’ After this the sad ending of the first song rose up: ‘And who’s that lying there under the green grave so proud?’ to which the next wagon provided the mournful reply: ‘One of Makhno’s heroes, a saddle blanket for his shroud.’

The first troop train passed, followed immediately by the second. Gun-carriages turned upside down to face the sky created a forest of metal shafts that bounced and swayed with the movement of the wagons. Inside the goods wagons, scruffy horses stood in profile, shaking their heads. Instead of blankets, they were covered with tallits, Jewish prayer shawls. The horsemen sat on the flat wagons, legs dangling over the side. Yellow riding boots swung by, wellingtons, traditional felt valenki, sandals, worn-out shoes held in place with twine, silver spurs, expensive hussars’ boots with officers’ cockades on the sides, waders, orange slippers with pompoms, horny red feet, puttees cut from red plush or a billiard table’s green baize.

Unexpectedly, the train slowed down. The guard looked around helplessly, but then drew himself up and froze. We moved back from the window, ready to run for our lives. But the train didn’t stop. It moved on slowly, smoothly through the station. Another flat wagon came into view carrying nothing but a luxurious, highly polished landau with some prince’s gilded coat of arms on the side. From one of the shafts, raised up like a flagpole, hung a black flag with the words ‘Anarchy is the Mother of Order!’ A machine-gun had been mounted in each of the wagon’s four corners, next to which sat one of Makhno’s men in a khaki-coloured English greatcoat.

A frail little man with a pallid green face in a black hat and an unbuttoned Cossack kaftan lay sprawled out on the landau’s back seat of rich red morocco. His feet were propped up against the coach box, and his whole bearing suggested a lazy, calm, well-fed indifference. He had stretched out one of his arms and was playing with his Mauser, tossing it up into the air and catching it as it fell.

The sight of his face made me sick. A damp fringe hung over his low, frowning forehead. His eyes – at once vicious and vacant, the eyes of a skunk and a paranoiac – burned with malevolence. Even now, despite his relaxed and stately pose, he seemed to simmer with a fierce violence which permeated his being.

This was Nestor Makhno.

The guard, standing unnaturally stiff and erect, held out the green flag with his right arm, while saluting Makhno with his left. At the same time, he smiled. This smile was the most horrifying thing imaginable. It was not a smile at all. It was an abject supplication, a pitiful call for mercy, a desperate, terrified appeal to spare a poor life. Makhno lazily raised his Mauser and, without bothering to aim or even look at the guard, fired. Why, I don’t know. Can anyone guess what goes on in the mind of a satanic monster?

The guard threw up his hands in a strange manner, stumbled, fell on his side and began to convulse on the platform, grabbing at his neck, which was spilling blood. Makhno waved his hand. Instantly, machine-gun fire raked the platform, hitting the guard. He twitched a few more times and then lay still.

We rushed out onto the platform. The last flat wagon was rolling past. A snub-nosed girl with cropped, curly hair, dressed in an astrakhan jacket and riding breeches, smiled from ear to ear and levelled her Mauser at us. The man next to her, his face covered in black stubble, a French steel helmet on his head, gave her a push. The bullet missed us and buried itself harmlessly in the wall. We ran up to the guard. He was dead. The imploring smile had frozen to his face. We lifted him, trying not to step in the large puddle of blood, and carried him to the buffet, where we laid him down on a long table next to a dried-out palm in a green pot. The soil in the pot bristled with yellowed cigarette butts.

It wasn’t until the next morning that our train was able to leave for Golta. The priests were quiet and spent the entire day reading in whispers from their prayer books. Lyusena lay on her bunk, silent and staring at the watery sky through the open door. Khvat sat alone, frowning to himself. Nazarov was the only one who tried to make conversation, but he soon realised no one cared to talk and gave up.

We arrived in Golta a few hours after a pogrom. We heard that many Jews had been killed and were lying dead in the streets. We never found out who was responsible. None of us wished to go into town and see for ourselves.

In the middle of the night, Lyusena began to cry, softly at first, then louder and louder until she was sobbing hysterically. Towards dawn she calmed down. Later that morning, when we awoke at some halfway halt, Lyusena was gone. We searched the whole train but didn’t find her. No one had seen her. She had vanished and left behind her bundle in the Gypsy shawl – it seemed she had no more use for it.