73
The Hall with a Fountain
The government moved from Petrograd to Moscow. Soon afterwards, my editor at the People’s Power sent me to the Lefortovo Barracks, where Lenin was to speak to a group of demobilised soldiers.
It was a raw evening. The air in the enormous barrack hall was thick with smoke from harsh makhorka tobacco. An icy rain lashed at the grimy windows. There was a sour smell of wet greatcoats and carbolic acid. The soldiers, in dirty puttees and sodden boots, their rifles beside them, sat on the muddy floor. Most of them were men back from the front, stranded in Moscow since the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Thoroughly disgruntled, they didn’t believe anyone or anything. They made noisy demands, one day clamouring to be sent back to their home villages, the next flatly refusing to leave Moscow amid loud protests that they were being tricked and the trains were not going to take them home but back to the front. Deserters and suspicious characters were riling them up. As everyone knows, if you bait and confuse the simple Russian long enough he will suddenly fly into a rage and rebel. In the end, the people who suffer the most in these army revolts are the ordnance men and cooks. A persistent rumour was going around Moscow then that the soldiers at the Lefortovo Barracks were at the point of revolt.
I pushed my way with difficulty into the hall and stood at the back. The soldiers gave me, a stranger in civilian clothes, a sullen, threatening stare. I asked them to let me through so I could move closer to the cheap plywood platform up front, but no one would budge an inch. It would have been dangerous to insist. Here and there, soldiers clicked their rifle bolts, as if they were playing around. One of the men yawned loudly. ‘To hell with this already!’ he said, scratching the back of his head under his sheepskin hat. ‘More of the same mumbo-jumbo. I’m fed up with their excuses and stalling.’
‘What d’you want? We’ve got tobacco and they’re dishing out some grub. Oughta be enough for us.’
‘Moscow’s all right,’ a scrawny, bearded soldier laughed. ‘Take the girls out, get a dose of clap, and you’ve got yourself a souvenir of the old capital for life. Better than a St George’s medal!’
‘Get a move on!’ soldiers shouted from the back, pounding the floor with their rifle butts. ‘Let’s hear it! Now you’ve got us all here, stop wastin’ our time!’
‘He’s just about to start.’
‘Who?’
‘Looks like Lenin.’
‘Lenin? Yeah, right. He’s just dying to get a look at your ugly mug.’
‘He’s got no one else to talk to but you and your toothless gob.’
‘Ah, for Christ’s sake, he …’
‘We know what he’ll say.’
‘More of the same old rubbish.’
‘I’ve already had a bellyful of their slogans. Enough!’
‘Listen, brothers, we’re not lettin’ anyone send us anywhere!’
‘That’s right. We’ll decide who gets sent and where!’
Suddenly, a noise went through the hall, and the men began to move and rose to their feet, sending rippling waves through the cloud of tobacco smoke. Blinded by the smoke and the dim light, I became aware of someone saying in an unusually calm, high voice: ‘Let me through, comrades, let me through.’ The man rolled his r’s as he spoke. The men in the back crowded forward to get a better view. They were met with pointed rifles. The soldiers began shouting and cursing at each other. It seemed gunfire might erupt at any moment.
‘Comrades!’ said Lenin.
The noise was cut, as if by a knife. The only sound was the wheezing breath of the agitated crowd. Lenin began to speak. I had trouble hearing him. I was being crushed by the throng of soldiers. I could feel a rifle butt digging into my ribs. Some man behind me had laid a meaty hand on my shoulder and squeezed it from time to time. His grip was so strong it hurt. The cigarettes stuck to the soldiers’ lips burned down. The men had forgotten all about them and had stopped puffing. Blue wisps of smoke swirled upwards towards the ceiling.
Through the sound of the rain I began to make out the quiet, simple words. Lenin wasn’t urging the men on. He was merely giving these inarticulate and embittered men answers to the questions they were themselves only dimly aware of, answers that they had heard before, but not in the right words. He spoke in an unhurried voice about Brest-Litovsk, about the treachery of the Left SRs,fn1 about the union of the workers and the peasants and about bread. He said rowdy meetings and raising hell in Moscow was not the answer, nor was waiting for someone to solve their problems. Rather, they should go back home to work the land and trust the government and the party to do the right thing. I could hear little of what Lenin was saying, but I had a good idea from the shift in the men’s breathing, from the way they pushed their hats back on their heads, their gaping mouths and the sudden, unexpected sighs of agreement.
The heavy hand on my shoulder had relaxed. Its weight now suggested the touch of a friend. Once he was back in his village this soldier would pat the cropped heads of his children with this hand, as he sighed with relief thinking that the land was at last theirs. He would be telling himself that all he needed to do now was plough and sow and raise these little rascals to do the same after him. I wanted to see what he looked like. I turned. He was a pale, young recruit with a broad, smooth face covered in fair stubble.
‘The chairman!’
‘What chairman?’ I asked, not understanding.
‘It’s him, the chairman of the people’s commissars. Promising us land and peace. Didn’t you hear?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘Well, there you have it! My hands are itching for that land. And I’ve been gone too long from the family.’
‘Pipe down!’ hissed our neighbour, a scrawny little soldier whose forage cap kept sliding down over his eyes.
‘Hold your tongue!’ the recruit growled back and began to hurriedly unbutton his faded tunic. ‘Wait, hold on, I want to show you …’ he muttered. He fumbled around under his collar for a bit and then pulled out a sweat-stained canvas bag hanging on a string around his neck. It held a photograph, folded in half, that he blew the dust off and then handed to me. The only light was an electric bulb protected by a wire mesh high up on the ceiling. I couldn’t make out a thing on the photograph. The recruit lit a match and cupped it in his hands. He held it there until it burned down to his fingers and went out.
I looked at the photograph only because I did not want to insult him. I was certain that it was the typical family photograph that I had seen so many times before in peasant huts next to the icons. The mother was always seated in front – a dry, wrinkly old woman with knotty fingers. No matter what she was like in real life – kind and patient or shrill and bossy – she was always photographed with the same stony face and tight lips. In that instant when the camera shutter clicked, she was memorialised as the strict matriarch of the family, the embodiment of the severe progenitor of the clan, while gathered around her, some standing, some seated, were her wooden, bulging-eyed children and grandchildren.
You had to look hard and long at these photographs until you recognised in the stiff figures your well-known friends: the matriarch’s quiet, consumptive son-in-law, a village cobbler; his wife, a big-bosomed, shrewish woman in a frilly blouse and strap boots that showed her bare calves; a youth with a forelock and the same terrifying vacant eyes you encounter in street thugs; and then that other one, grinning and black-haired, whom you recognised as the finest blacksmith in the county. And the grandchildren – frightened little creatures who stared out at you like young martyrs. These were children who had known neither kindness nor affection. Perhaps their uncle, the cobbler, had secretly shown pity and given them his old boot lasts as toys. If so, then he had been the only one.