6
“Why is the dog carrying on like that? We must go and see what’s the matter. He wouldn’t bark for nothing. Wait, Lidochka, blast you, shut up for a minute. We’ve got to clarify the situation. A posse may descend on us any minute. Don’t leave, Ustin. And you stay put, Sivobluy. They’ll get along without you.”
Not hearing the request to stop and wait a little, the representative from the center went on wearily in an oratorical patter:
“The bourgeois military power existing in Siberia by its politics of robbery, taxation, violence, executions, and torture should open the eyes of the deluded. It is hostile not only to the working class, but, by the essence of things, to all the laboring peasantry as well. The laboring peasantry of Siberia and the Urals should understand that only in union with the urban proletariat and the soldiers, in union with the Kirghiz and Buryat poor …”7
Finally he caught the fact that he was being interrupted and stopped, wiping his sweaty face, wearily lowered his puffy eyelids, and closed his eyes.
Those standing near him said in a half whisper:
“Rest a bit. Have a sip of water.”
The anxious partisan leader was told:
“What are you worried about? Everything’s all right. The signal lamp is in the window. The lookout, to put it picturesquely, devours space with his eyes. I think we can resume the lecturer’s talk. Speak, Comrade Lidochka.”
The interior of the big shed had been freed of firewood. In the cleared space an illegal meeting was going on. The firewood piled to the ceiling served to screen off the meeting, separating this emptied half from the front desk and the entrance. In case of danger, the assembled men were provided with a way down into the basement and an underground exit to the overgrown backyard of the Konstantinovsky Impass beyond the monastery wall.
The speaker, in a black cotton cap that covered his completely bald head, with a matte, pale olive complexion and a black beard up to his ears, suffered from nervous perspiration and sweated profusely all the time. He greedily relighted his unfinished butt in the stream of hot air over the kerosene lamp burning on the table, and bent low to the scraps of paper scattered in front of him. He ran his nearsighted little eyes over them nervously and quickly, as if he were sniffing them, and went on in a dull and weary voice:
“This union of the urban and village poor can be realized only through the soviets. Like it or not, the Siberian peasantry will now strive towards the same thing for which the Siberian workers have long since begun to fight. Their common goal is the overthrow of the autocracy of admirals and atamans, hateful to the people, and the establishment of the power of the peasants’ and soldiers’ soviets by means of a nationwide armed insurrection. For that, their struggle against the Cossack-officer hirelings of the bourgeoisie, who are armed to the teeth, will have to be conducted as a regular frontline war, persistent and prolonged.”
Again he stopped, wiped his forehead, and closed his eyes. Contrary to the rules, someone stood up, raised his hand, and wished to put in a comment.
The partisan leader, or, more precisely, the commander of the Kezhem formation of the Trans-Ural partisans, was sitting right in front of the speaker’s nose in a defiantly casual posture and kept rudely interrupting him, without showing him any respect. It was hard to believe that such a young soldier, almost a boy, was in command of whole armies and formations, and was obeyed and held in awe. He was sitting with his hands and feet covered by the skirts of his cavalry greatcoat. The flung-off top and sleeves of the greatcoat, thrown over the back of the chair, revealed his body in a tunic with dark spots where the lieutenant’s epaulettes had been ripped off.
At his sides stood two silent stalwarts of his guard, the same age as he, in white sheepskin vests that had had time to turn gray, with curly lambswool showing at the edges. Their handsome, stony faces showed nothing but blind devotion to their superior and a readiness for anything for his sake. They remained indifferent to the meeting, the questions touched upon at it, the course of the debate, did not speak, and did not smile.
Besides these people, there were another ten or fifteen men in the shed. Some stood, others sat on the floor with their legs stretched out or their knees sticking up, leaning against the wall and its roundly projecting caulked logs.
For the guests of honor, chairs had been provided. They were occupied by three or four workers, former participants in the first revolution, among them the sullen, changed Tiverzin and his friend, old Antipov, who always yessed him. Counted among the divinities at whose feet the revolution laid all its gifts and sacrifices, they sat like silent, stern idols in whom political arrogance had exterminated everything alive and human.
There were other figures worthy of attention in the shed. Not knowing a moment’s peace, getting up from the floor and sitting down again, pacing the shed and stopping in the middle of it, was the pillar of Russian anarchism, Vdovichenko the Black Banner, a fat giant with a big head, a big mouth, and a leonine mane, an officer, if not in the last Russo-Turkish War, then at least in the Russo-Japanese War, a dreamer eternally absorbed in his ravings.
By reason of his boundless good nature and gigantic height, which kept him from noticing events of unequal and smaller size, he treated all that was happening with insufficient attention and, misunderstanding everything, took opposite opinions for his own and agreed with everybody.
Next to his place on the floor sat his acquaintance, the forest hunter and trapper Svirid. Though Svirid did not live as a peasant, his earthy, soil-tilling essence showed through the opening of his dark broadcloth shirt, which he bunched up at the collar together with his cross and scraped and drove over his body, scratching his chest. He was a half-Buryat muzhik, amiable and illiterate, with hair that lay in flat strands, sparse mustaches, and a still more sparse beard of a few hairs. His face, puckering all the time in a sympathetic smile, looked aged because of its Mongolian features.
The lecturer, who was traveling around Siberia with military instructions from the Central Committee, wandered in his mind over the vast spaces he was still to cover. He regarded the majority of those present at the meeting with indifference. But, a revolutionary and lover of the people from early on, he looked with adoration at the young general who sat facing him. He not only forgave the boy all his rudeness, which the old man took for the voice of an ingrained, latent revolutionism, but regarded with admiration his casual sallies, as a woman in love may like the insolent unceremoniousness of her lord and master.
The partisan leader was Mikulitsyn’s son Liberius; the lecturer from the center was the former cooperative laborist Kostoed-Amursky, connected in the past with the Social Revolutionaries.8 Recently he had reconsidered his position, recognized the mistakenness of his platform, offered his repentance in several detailed declarations, and had not only been received into the Communist Party, but soon after joining it had been sent on such a responsible assignment.