‘And then what?’ I asked.
He looked at me and spat. ‘As if you don’t know. And then … shit for supper. Give me a packet of Salve, or I’ll have you by the throat before you can even blink. I’ve got a good grip. Things would be over real quick. Ah, you dumb fool, I’ve told you a pack of lies. And look at you, snivelling like a pup.’
I gave him a packet of Salve.
‘Well, that’s that!’ he said, and got up and slowly walked away down the trench. ‘But if you ever mention a word of this to the gang – now or in thirty years – I’ll kill you dead. I bet you’re writing a little poem in your head just now – “O love, what an enchanting dream!”’
I watched him go, confused by this sudden outburst of anger.
Out of the early morning mist, a shell came screaming from the direction of Kiev. It seemed to be heading straight towards us, and I was not mistaken. The shell hit the parapet and exploded. It sounded as though the air around us had popped like a large iron balloon. Shrapnel whistled through the air like a flight of swifts. The orderly turned with a look of surprise, fell face first into the trench wall, spat one final curse together with a mouthful of blood, and then slumped down into a puddle of muddy snow. A crimson stain slowly spread over the snow.
A second shell exploded near the foxhole. Pan Sotnik jumped out of the bunker. Then the parapet was hit by another shell.
‘Our own guns!’ Pan Sotnik cried in a quivering voice, shaking his fist at Kiev. ‘Shot at by our own troops! Idiots! Scoundrels! You’re shooting your own men!’
He turned to us. ‘Pull back to Priorka. On the double! No panicking! To hell with your damned Hetman.’
We took off running. With the sound of each new shell, we hit the ground. Eventually, we made our way back down to Priorka. The first ones there were, of course, the motor boys. It turned out that the Hetman’s artillery had somehow decided that Petlyura’s men had overrun our trenches and so opened fire on them. As we were retreating, Pan Sotnik stepped over the orderly and without turning round said to me: ‘Take his documents just in case. Maybe we can find his relatives. We can’t really just leave him like a dog.’
The orderly was lying face down. I rolled him over on his back. He was still warm, and even though he was thin, he still seemed very heavy. He had been hit by shrapnel in the neck. The blue mouth tattooed on his hand was smeared with blood. I undid the buttons of the light blue Austrian greatcoat he was wearing and took out of the pocket of his tunic a crumpled and obviously forged identity card as well as an envelope addressed to a ‘Yelizaveta Tenisheva, 13 Sadovaya Street, Simbirsk’.
The bedraggled, dwindling troops of the Hetman’s army had begun assembling on the hay-strewn square in the centre of Priorka. The local inhabitants were coming back out onto the streets, discussing the departure of the Cossacks and rejoicing at their plight with unconcealed relish. But in spite of everything, detachments of German cavalry on their well-fed bays went on calmly patrolling the streets. Hetman or Petlyura – it was all the same to the Germans; the main thing was to maintain order. Upon Pan Sotnik’s command, we dumped all our rifles and ammunition in a pile on the square. The Germans immediately rode up and stood guard over it. They didn’t even bother to look our way.
‘And now, everybody go home!’ said Pan Sotnik, removing his yellow and blue epaulettes and then tossing them on the ground. ‘As best you can. It’s every man for himself. The city’s a mess. Petlyura’s men running up one street, the Hetman’s fleeing down another. So, make sure you look both ways – left and right – before crossing the street. I wish you good luck.’
He smiled awkwardly at his own lame joke, gave us a friendly wave and then hurried away. Some of the Cossacks removed their greatcoats and either sold them then and there to some of the locals for a few kopecks or just gave them away for free and walked away in nothing but tunics stripped of their badges. I was cold and so I kept my greatcoat on, although I did tear off the epaulettes. Wadding stuck out of the holes on my shoulders, and so anyone could immediately guess what I was.
I walked to St Cyril’s Church, where I had been long ago with my father and Vrubel. At that time, this whole neighbourhood, with its knotty elm trees and its deep ravines overgrown with hawthorn bushes, had seemed so mysterious and threatening to me. Now I was slowly trudging up the steep, dirty road to Lukyanovka, and I had no sense of the strangeness of the place, or even of the times. No doubt I was simply too exhausted to notice anything. I was aware, of course, that we were living in an epochal, practically fantastical period in history, but at times it felt like a nightmare or a grotesque distortion of reality. At that particular moment, all I could see was the same dreary sky that had been hanging over these tumbledown suburban streets and hovels thirty years ago. Vague ideas drifted through my mind, and I wondered, how much longer could this ridiculous third-rate show of Hetmans and Atamans and Petlyuras last? How much more of these noisy slogans, of these muddled and hateful notions, exaggerated beyond any sense of proportion, could we take? When would the curtain finally come down on this makeshift stage on which real blood, unfortunately, and not cranberry juice was being shed?
Back in the city I did not look left or right before crossing the street. I was sick to death of this cheap sideshow of war and politics, and anger robbed me of all sense of danger. I walked through a column of Petlyura’s men in my greatcoat with the torn epaulettes and was slammed in the back by rifle butts, although only twice. Groups of ‘true’ Ukrainians standing in sparse lines along the pavements cried ‘Hurrah!’ to the men and looked at me with rabid loathing.
Nonetheless, I managed to make it home, rang the bell, heard Amalia’s joyful voice call out, opened the door, and collapsed in a chair in the hall, light and happy thoughts whirling in my head, even though my greatcoat was pressing on my chest, harder with each minute as though it were some living creature trying to strangle me. Then I realised that it was not the coat, but the long, gnarled fingers of the orderly crushing my neck for a packet of Salve. I saw before my eyes the blue tattooed lips on his hand just before I groaned and passed out. I had had fainting spells like this as a boy. They were always a sign of exhaustion.
81
The Violet Ray
Next morning, I awoke in my room to the sound of cheering outside and assumed that Pan Petlyura, Ataman of the Ukrainian Army and the Haidamaka Battalion,fn1 was making his triumphal entry into Kiev on a white steed. Notices from the city commandant had gone up around Kiev the day before stating with epic, humourless solemnity that Petlyura would be entering the city as the head of the government – the Directorate – on a white steed, a gift from the railway men of Zhmerinka. Why they had given Petlyura a horse rather than a railway coach or even a shunting engine, no one could say.
Petlyura did not disappoint the hopes of Kiev’s housemaids, merchants, governesses and shopkeepers. He truly did ride into the vanquished city on a white though fairly placid steed. The horse had a pale blue saddlecloth with a yellow border. Petlyura was modestly attired in a wadded khaki coat. His only ornament was a curved Zaporozhian sword, apparently taken from some museum, which slapped against his thigh as he rode along. Loyal Ukrainians gazed reverently at the Cossack sword, the puffy pale face of Petlyura and his guard of Haidamaks prancing behind him on their scruffy horses. The Haidamaks, their heads shaven except for a long single forelock of blue-black hair hanging from under their sheepskin hats, reminded me of my childhood visits to the old Ukrainian theatre. There Haidamaks just like these, their eyes inked blue, had wildly danced the gopak – ‘Hip, hop, shout! Now here, now there, turn about!’