The man in the pince-nez had been served a glass of water. As if nothing had happened, the officer sat back down and said to no one in particular: ‘I’ve beaten Yids all my life and I’ll go on beating Yids until the day I die. I’ll show you what officers’ scum is, Master Movshenzon from Gomel-Gomel.’
The room erupted once more. A patrol of the Hetman’s Cossack guards with blue and yellow armbands appeared in the restaurant. I left. As I walked, I cursed under my breath. Our country was overflowing with all kinds of riff-raff – be they in officers’ epaulettes, pink celluloid collars or heavy German helmets – but I couldn’t pretend to have done anything about it. I spent my days writing, that was it. I had been taken prisoner by my imaginary world and was helpless to escape it.
My writings to this point were merely picturesque exercises and useless sketches. They were full of wild imagination, but nothing more. I could spend hours crafting different descriptions of sunshine – the way it flashed on broken glass, or on a ship’s brass ladder, on windowpanes, a drinking glass, dew, the mother-of-pearl lining of a shell, a human eye. For me, they came together to form a series of unexpected images. The proper use of imagination demands sharpness, definition, which I rarely achieved. Most of my sketches were blurry. At that time, I wanted to forget real life and so I never did struggle to give my writings the precision of reality.
Eventually, I created my own literary school out of these descriptive sketches. But after reading them over, one after another, I quickly discovered how mawkish and boring they were. It came as a shock. Good prose requires vigour and austerity, and I had been churning out candy floss, Turkish delight and bonbons. They were sticky, these verbal sweets of mine. It was hard to wash them off. I scrubbed and scrubbed, but not always successfully. Traces of this misty, florid prose remained. Thankfully, this phase didn’t last long, and I tore up nearly everything I had written. Yet even now, I have to be on guard against my predilection for pretty words.
And then, all of a sudden, my writing and my doubts were interrupted in a most unexpected manner. Petlyura was drawing the noose tighter and tighter around Kiev. In response, Hetman Skoropadskyi issued a decree calling up all men without exception between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. The house superintendents were responsible for making sure every male obeyed, otherwise they would be considered to have been ‘hiding’ the men and would be shot immediately. The decree was posted throughout the city. I read it matter-of-factly. I considered myself a citizen of the Russian Federative Republic and so not subject to any of the Hetman’s decrees, which, to be honest, I had no desire to follow.
Late one winter evening I was returning home along Bibikovsky Boulevard from the printers. A cold wind was blowing. The poplars made a plaintive murmur. A woman muffled in a warm shawl was standing by the gate to my house. She hurried up to me and took my hand. I drew back.
‘Quiet!’ she said. I recognised Amalia’s voice, breathless with emotion. ‘Follow me.’
We walked off in the direction of St Vladimir’s Cathedral. Hulking buttresses shored up its massive walls. We stopped behind one of the walls to get out of the wind, and even though we were all alone, Amalia spoke in a hurried whisper.
‘Thank God you’ve been out all day. He’s been sitting in the front hall since ten o’clock this morning. He hasn’t moved once. It’s terrible!’
‘Who?’
‘Pan Kturenda. He’s lying in wait for you.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh Lord!’ she cried, raising her hands, hidden in a small muff, to her chest. ‘You’ve got to run! I beg you! Don’t go back to your room. I’ll give you the address of a friend – one of the kindest old women left on earth. I’ve written her a letter. Go to her. It’s far from here, in Glubochitsa, but you’ll be safer there. She lives all alone in a small house and can hide you. I’ll bring you food every day until the danger passes.’
‘What’s happened?’ I asked. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Haven’t you read the Hetman’s decree?’
‘Yes, I’ve read it.’
‘Kturenda has come to turn you in. To hand you over to the army.’
Only now did I understand.
‘He’s crying,’ Amalia said coldly. ‘He’s soaked in tears and keeps saying that if you run off he’ll be shot like a common bandit tomorrow morning at ten.’ She pulled a letter from her muff and placed it in the pocket of my coat. ‘Go!’
‘Thank you, Amalia Karlovna! I’m in no danger. I’m a citizen of the Russian Federation. I don’t give a damn about the Hetman’s decrees.’
‘Oh Lord, that’s wonderful,’ she said, ignoring my crude language. She pressed the muff to her chest and laughed. ‘I didn’t know that. So that means they’ll leave him alone as well.’
‘Nothing’s going to happen. I’ll go to the recruiting office with him tomorrow and we’ll settle the matter right then and there.’
‘Well, all right then,’ she said, now completely reassured. ‘Let’s go home. I’ll go in first, and you follow me a few minutes later so he doesn’t suspect anything. Oh, I’m so tired!’
For the first time since we had met, I took her by the arm. I could feel her shaking as we walked. She waited a minute or two on the steps before entering her room. Pan Kturenda was sitting in the front hall. He hurled himself at me, grabbed my arms with his bony claws and muttered in a quivering voice: ‘For the love of Christ, don’t kill me! I’ve been waiting here for you the whole day. Have pity, if not for me, then at least for my poor mama!’
I told him that tomorrow the two of us would visit the recruiting office and since I was a Russian citizen they would of course let me go. Pan Kturenda gave a sob, dropped to his knees and tried to kiss my hand. I snatched it away. Amalia stood in the doorway watching Kturenda with a piercing stare. I had never seen this look in her eyes before. All of a sudden it hit me that if I had followed Amalia’s advice, then this wretched little man might indeed have been shot. I couldn’t help but marvel at the cool ruthlessness of this extraordinarily sensitive woman.
Pan Kturenda went off, calling down blessings on my head and insisting that, of course, I would be exempt because Pan Hetman had no interest in recruiting Reds from Moscow into his army.
After I had washed under the tap in the kitchen, Amalia stopped me in the hall on the way to my room. ‘Not a word!’ she whispered mysteriously, taking me by the hand and tiptoeing across the small sitting room and into the dark front hall. She stopped, pointed at a door, and gently pushed down on my shoulders as a way of telling me to peep through the keyhole. I looked. There sat Pan Kturenda, yawning silently, his mouth covered by a hand, on an egg-crate at the top of the stairs. Clearly, he had not believed me and was making sure I didn’t sneak off in the middle of the night.
‘He’s an animal!’ whispered Amalia when we were back in the sitting room. ‘And to think I used to have him in my house. I hate him so now that the mere sight of him gives me a headache. I’ve left some breakfast for you in the kitchen cupboard.’
At exactly eight o’clock the following morning, Pan Kturenda rang the bell at my door. I opened it. His red eyes were full of tears. The wings of his bow-tie had drooped. He looked pathetic. We walked over to the recruitment office in the Galitsky Market. Pan Kturenda, complaining that he felt dizzy, held me tightly by the arm. It was obvious he was afraid I might try to escape down some dark side street. At the office, we had to stand in a queue. House superintendents, fat ledgers under their arms, were fussing around the recruits. They looked embarrassed and ingratiating and kept offering, or, more accurately, forcing, cigarettes on their charges, nodding foolishly at everything the young men said, and making sure not to leave their side for moment.