I had a clear view from the balcony of what happened next. The second of the two men raised a pistol and without bothering to look, much less aim, fired in the direction of Kturenda as he ran. Pan Kturenda, screaming and spitting blood, stumbled back into the yard, tripped on the cobblestones, fell, let out a desperate wheeze, and died. He was still clutching the key in his hand. Blood dripped onto his pink celluloid cuffs, and in his open eyes was a look of angry terror. More than an hour passed before a rickety ‘First Aid’ cart arrived to take Pan Kturenda to the morgue.
His mother slept through her son’s death and learned of it only that night. A few days later the old woman was sent to the ancient Sulimovskaya Almshouse. I often came across its residents on my walks. They always went about in pairs, like schoolgirls, dressed in identical dresses of dark Toile du Nord fabric. Seeing them in the streets made me think of a solemn procession of ground-beetles.
I have described this insignificant incident with Pan Kturenda for the sole reason that it was so in keeping with the tenor of life under the Directorate. Everything was petty, mean and ridiculous, like a badly produced but at times tragic farce.
One day, enormous posters went up all over Kiev informing the populace that the Directorate would be giving a report of its progress in the Ars Cinema. The whole city tried to squeeze into the cinema to hear the report. Everyone was expecting an unusual show, and they were not disappointed.
The long, narrow hall was wrapped in a mysterious gloom. None of the lights had been lit. The crowd made a cheerful hum in the darkness. All of a sudden, a gong boomed behind the stage curtain, coloured footlights came alive, and then there appeared, against a garish backdrop depicting ‘The Miraculous Dnieper in Still Weather’, an elderly but handsome man in black with a luxurious beard – Premier Vynnychenko. Unhappy and clearly uncomfortable, constantly fidgeting with his bright tie, he delivered a short, dry speech on the international affairs of Ukraine. The audience applauded. Next, an unbelievably skinny young woman with a heavily powdered face came out onto the stage. She was wearing a black dress and clutching her hands out in front of her in a gesture meant to convey utter despair. As the accompanist struck a variety of pensive chords, she recited in a frightened voice the verses of the poetess Galina: ‘They’re cutting down the young woods, the tender, green woods …’fn3 They applauded her as well.
In between the ministers’ speeches there were short musical interludes, and little girls and boys danced the gopak after the minister of communications spoke. The audience was thoroughly enjoying itself, but a guarded silence settled over it when out onto the stage plodded the old ‘Minister of Sovereign Balances’, as the minister of finance was called. He had a dishevelled, truculent look. He was snorting with anger. His round, closely cropped head glistened with sweat. His silver Cossack moustache drooped over his chin. He wore baggy grey pinstriped trousers, an equally baggy silk coat with large pockets and an embroidered shirt tied at the neck with a cord dangling red pompoms at the ends.
He had no intention of delivering a report. He approached the footlights and stuck an ear out to listen to the faint murmur in the hall. For effect, he even cupped a hand over this furry ear. People laughed. The minister grinned with a satisfied air, nodded as though at some passing thoughts, and asked: ‘Muscovites?’
Sure enough, almost everyone in the audience was Russian. Yes, they answered unsuspectingly, most of us here are Muscovites.
‘I see-e-e-e,’ the minister said ominously and then blew his nose into a large checked handkerchief. ‘It’s all very understandable, although not at all pleasant.’
The murmuring in the hall ceased. The audience sensed trouble.
‘Just what the hell were you thinking?’ he suddenly thundered in Ukrainian. His face had turned as red as a beetroot. ‘What the hell were you thinking coming here from your rotten Moscow? Like flies to honey. May lightning strike you dead! Just think of what you’ve seen here! You’re here because you’ve so ruined Moscow that not only do you have nothing to eat, you don’t even have anything to eat it with!’
The audience erupted with anger. People were hooting and whistling. Someone jumped up on stage, carefully took the ‘Minister of Sovereign Balances’ by the arm and tried to lead him away, but the old man gave him a shove and nearly knocked him over. The minister had got into his stride. He wasn’t going to stop now.
‘Well, why don’t you say something?’ he asked. ‘Hmm? Playing the fool, are you now? All right then, I’ll say it for you. Here in Ukraine you can help yourselves to all the bread and sugar and lard and buckwheat and cakes you want. Back home in Moscow you’d be sucking lamp oil off your thumbs. And that’s the truth!’
By now two men had grabbed onto the tails of the minister’s silk coat and were trying to carefully pull him off the stage, but he was furiously fighting them off and shouting: ‘Beggars! Parasites! Back to Moscow with you! Go home and die under your Yid government! Back to Moscow, all of you!’
Vynnychenko appeared in the wings. He was waving his hand angrily, and finally the old minister, red from indignation, was dragged off the stage. To ease the unfortunate impression left by the minister, out onto the stage hopped a group of young men with sheepskin hats poised jauntily on their heads. Some struck up their banduras, others threw themselves into the national dance, squatting and leaping as they sang:
Oy, who’s the corpse lying there at the funeral?
Not the Prince, not the Pan, not the Colonel,
It can only be the old crone’s love eternal!
And with that, the Directorate’s report to the people came to a close. Laughing and shouting ‘Back to Moscow with you! Go home and die under your Yid government!’ the audience poured out of the Ars Cinema and into the street.
Petlyura and the entire Ukrainian Directorate had a provincial air about them. Once glittering Kiev had been turned into a glorified Shpola or Mirgorod, with their stuffy, hide-bound officialdom, their interminable meetings, their Dovgochkhuns.fn4 It looked as though the city had been made over as a stage-set for ‘ye olde Ukraine’, right down to the pastry shop’s ‘Taras Bulba of Poltava’ sign. Bulba, with his long white moustache and his snow-white shirt emblazoned with scarlet embroidery, cut such an operatic, and intimidating, figure that many potential customers were too frightened to come in and ask for biscuits and honey. One couldn’t be certain whether this was meant to be taken seriously or was just some sort of performance starring the lead characters of Haidamaki.fn5
It was impossible to make sense of what was happening. These were feverish, violent times when one coup quickly followed another. Within days of the appearance of a new government, clear signs of its imminent and ignominious collapse appeared. Each hurried to pronounce as many decrees and resolutions as possible in the hope that at least some of them would catch on and leave their mark on history. The governments of both Petlyura and the Hetman made an impression of utter confusion and a lack of confidence in the future.
To the north, Petlyura faced the unforgiving threat of the Soviet forces, and so he had placed all his hopes in the French, then occupying Odessa. His government began circulating rumours that the French were on their way to save Kiev. People were saying that they had already reached Vinnitsa and Fastov and that any day now the brave French Zouaves in their red trousers and handsome fezzes would reach Boyarka on the outskirts of the capital. Petlyura’s bosom friend, the French consul Hénault, had given his word of honour on the matter. Bewildered by all the conflicting rumours, the newspapers decided to print every single bit of this nonsense even though it was obvious to nearly everyone that the French were sitting tight in Odessa and sticking to their zone of occupation, although the various ‘zones of influence’ (French, Greek, Ukrainian) were separated by nothing more than some rickety old bentwood chairs.