Every nation has its own character, its own distinguishing traits. But the chauvinists who drool over them, who lose all sense of proportion in their fanatical worship, turn themselves, and these traits, into something pathetic and at times even disgusting. That is why jingoists are a nation’s greatest enemies. It was this syrupy idea of Ukraine that Petlyura tried to recreate. Needless to say, he failed.
Riding behind Petlyura came the Directorate – the writer Vynnychenko,fn2 a shambolic neurasthenic, and after him some ministers, all of them long-mothballed and utterly unknown personages. So began the brief and foolish reign of the Directorate. Prone to irony, the people of Kiev made the new ‘independent’ government the butt of a great many jokes. They were especially delighted by the sight in the first days of the Directorate of foppishly attired Haidamaks going up and down Kreshchatik with step-ladders and removing all the Russian signs. Petlyura had brought with him something called ‘Galician’, a rather clumsy dialect full of loan words borrowed from Ukraine’s neighbours. Before this new intruder, the native language of Ukraine – sparkling, witty, sing-song and as shiny as the pearly teeth of the vibrant young village girls – retreated to the remote huts of Shevchenko and the quiet fields of the countryside where it hid throughout these troubled years, refusing to die and preserving all its poetry.
Everything under Petlyura had a contrived air – the Haidamaks, the language, the politics, the large number of grey-whiskered chauvinists who crawled out of the woodwork, the money – everything, all the way down to the Directorate’s progress reports to the people. But more of this later.
Meeting a Haidamak in the street, people rubbed their eyes and asked themselves: ‘Is that really a Haidamak or just some actor in costume?’ Hearing the tortured sounds of the new language, one couldn’t help wondering: is that Ukrainian or some recently invented version of it? And upon receiving change in a shop, you scratched your head with disbelief at the smudgy little scraps of paper faintly marked with yellow and blue ink: was this real or just some toy money from a children’s game? There was so much counterfeit money being passed around that everyone decided to turn a blind eye and take whatever they were given. Whether fake or genuine, all banknotes were treated equally and exchanged at the same rate. You couldn’t find a printing press in the entire city where typesetters and printers weren’t laughing and happily turning out counterfeit Petlyura banknotes – karbovantsy and shagi. The shag was the smallest unit, worth about half a kopeck. Many enterprising people made their own counterfeit notes at home using Indian ink and cheap watercolours. They didn’t even bother to hide what they were doing when strangers dropped in.
Few people were as busy making counterfeit money, as well as homemade hooch, as Pan Kturenda. Ever since that bombastic little man had pushed me into the Hetman’s army, he had shown me an affection rather like a hangman’s for his victim. He was amazingly attentive and always inviting me over. Interested in this last remnant of the nobility’s lower rungs, somehow still afloat in what Pan Kturenda himself called ‘our astonishing new era’, I did once go to visit him in his little room crowded with carboys of murky homebrew. It had the sour smell of paint and the particular medicine – the name escapes me – that was then used to treat gonorrhoea.
He was busy making hundred-rouble notes when I arrived. They were decorated with the image of two sturdy, bare-legged women with sultry eyes dressed in embroidered blouses. For some reason they were poised like graceful ballerinas on swirls of intricate festoons, which Kturenda was going over with a brush at that very moment. Pan Kturenda’s mother, a gaunt old woman with a twitching face, was sitting behind a screen and softly reading aloud from a Polish prayer-book.
‘The festoon is the alpha and omega of the Petlyura banknote,’ Pan Kturenda instructed me. ‘You could just as easily replace these two young Ukrainian ladies with any fat old women you like, it doesn’t matter at all. What does matter are these festoons – they must look official. If they do, you can easily change your hundred karbovantsy without anyone batting an eyelid at these deliciously piquant ladies.’
‘How many can you make?’
‘In a day, I can paint’, Pan Kturenda said importantly, pushing out his lips with the cropped little moustache, ‘as many as three notes. And sometimes as many as five. Depends on how inspired I am.’
‘Bassya!’ said the old woman from behind the screen. ‘Bassya, my son. I’m frightened.’
‘Oh, Mama, don’t you worry, nothing’s going to happen. No one would dare to lay a finger on Pan Kturenda.’
‘It’s not prison I’m frightened of,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘It’s you, Bassya.’
‘Water on the brain,’ said Pan Kturenda, gesturing towards the old lady. ‘Excuse me, Mama, but could you be quiet?’
‘No!’ she said. ‘No, I can’t. God will punish me if I don’t tell everyone that my son is a Judas.’ By now she was sobbing.
‘Shut up!’ Pan Kturenda shouted in a frenzied voice. He jumped up from his chair and shook the screen so violently that it danced about, creaked and released a cloud of yellow dust. ‘Shut up, you silly old fool, or I’ll gag you with an oil-rag.’
The old woman sobbed and blew her nose.
‘What does she mean?’ I asked him.
‘That’s my own personal business,’ he replied defiantly. His distorted face was covered with criss-crossing veins. It looked as though they might burst at any moment. ‘I advise you not to stick your nose into my affairs, unless you want to end up in some common grave with the Bolsheviks.’
‘Bastard,’ I said quietly. ‘You’re such a cheap little bastard you’re not even worth these measly hundred karbovantsy.’
‘Under the ice!’ Pan Kturenda yelled hysterically, stamping his feet. ‘That’s what Pan Petlyura does to people like you – tosses them into the Dnieper and under the ice!’
I told Amalia about the incident. She said she suspected Pan Kturenda had worked as an informer for all the successive governments that had ravaged Ukraine – the Central Rada, the Germans, the Hetman and now Petlyura. She was convinced he would try to get back at me. It was only a matter of time until he denounced me to the new authorities. And so, careful and practical as she was, Amalia set up her own watch on Pan Kturenda that very day. By evening, however, her precautions were no longer necessary, for he had died right before our eyes. His death proved as pointless as the whole of his mean, boorish life.
At dusk we heard pistol shots outside. Whenever this happened, I went out onto the balcony to see what was going on. This time I saw two civilians running towards our house across the empty square in front of St Vladimir’s Cathedral. They were being chased and shot at by a few Petlyura officers and soldiers. ‘Stop!’ they shouted, although it was clear from their efforts that their pursuit was only half-hearted.
Just then I noticed Pan Kturenda run from his room in the other wing of the house to the heavy front gate and remove a key big enough to be from some medieval city. Key in hand, he hid behind the gate. As the two men in civilian garb were running past, Pan Kturenda flung open the gate, pointed the key at them like a pistol (it actually did look like an antiquated firearm from a distance) and shouted: ‘Stop right there, you Bolshevik scum, or I’ll shoot!’ Pan Kturenda wanted to help Petlyura’s men by slowing the civilians down, if only for a moment, and this moment would, of course, have sealed their fate.