Rumours during the days of Petlyura became an elemental force, practically a cosmic phenomenon, an epidemic of the plague. It felt like a form of mass hypnosis. Rumours had lost their normal purpose – to spread made-up facts – and acquired a new essence. They had become a means of self-reassurance, an incredibly powerful narcotic medicine. Rumours were the only thing that gave people hope for tomorrow.
Even outwardly, the people of Kiev began to look like morphine addicts. With each new rumour, their dull eyes caught fire, their usual torpor disappeared and their mumbled speech became lively again, witty even. There were fleeting rumours and there were rumours that hung around long enough to keep people in a state of delusional agitation for two or three days. Even the most hardened sceptics eventually surrendered to the rumours, like the one about how Ukraine was going to be declared a department of France and President Poincaré himself was on his way to Kiev to be present at the glorious official announcement, or the one about how the film actress Vera Kholodnaya had recruited her own army and, like Joan of Arc on her white steed, entered the town of Priluki outside Kiev at the head of her victorious troops, and proclaimed herself empress of Ukraine.
At one point I began keeping a list of all these rumours but then gave up. It was enough to give you a terrible headache or even drive you quietly insane. I wanted to destroy every last one of them, beginning with Presidents Poincaré and Wilson and ending with Makhno and the notorious Ataman Zelëny, who had set himself up at Tripolie outside Kiev. I now wish I had saved that list. In fact, it was an outrageous Apocrypha of lies and the unbridled fantasies of helpless, bewildered souls. To keep my sanity, I reread some of my favourite books which I never grew tired of – Turgenev’s Torrents of Spring, Boris Zaitsev’s The Blue Star, Tristan and Isolde, Manon Lescaut. In the murky darkness of those Kiev nights, these books truly did shine for me like inextinguishable stars.
I was living alone. Mama and Galya were still completely cut off from Kiev. I had no news of them. I had decided that come spring I would make my way to Kopan on foot, even though I had been warned that I would never make it past the ‘Dymerskaya Republic’, an utterly mysterious and lawless territory that lay along my path. I was alone with my books. I tried to do some writing, but everything came out shapeless and read like the ravings of a madman. I had nothing to share my loneliness with except the nights when silence descended over our house and the neighbourhood and everyone slept except for the clouds, the stars and the occasional patrol. The sound of the patrolman’s footsteps carried from afar. Every time I heard them, I put out the oil lamp to keep the patrols from stopping at our house. Once in a while I heard Amalia crying at night, and this reminded me that her loneliness was much worse than mine. For a few days after these tears she spoke to me in a haughty, almost hostile tone, but then she would suddenly make a shy, apologetic smile and return to her usual self, showing me the same great care that she had extended to all her lodgers.
Revolution broke out in Germany. The German troops stationed in Kiev quietly and dutifully elected their Soviet of Soldiers’ Deputies and prepared to return home. Petlyura decided to take advantage of their weakness and disarm them. The Germans discovered his plan.
I awoke on the morning of Petlyura’s planned operation with the feeling that the walls of our house were gently shaking in rhythm. There was the loud banging of drums. I went out onto the balcony. Amalia was already there. German forces were goose-stepping in silence down Fundukleevskaya Street. The pounding of their hobnailed boots made the windows shake. The drums thundered out a warning. After the infantry came the cavalry, the riders’ faces equally grim, the horseshoes clicking together in time, and finally the artillery, jolting and rumbling down the paved road. Without saying a word, accompanied by nothing but the roll of the drums, the Germans marched once around the whole city and then returned to their barracks. Petlyura immediately rescinded his secret order.
Soon after the Germans’ silent demonstration, distant artillery fire could be heard from the left bank of the Dnieper. The Germans were hurriedly clearing out of Kiev. The shelling grew ever louder, and everyone in the city realised that Soviet troops were quickly advancing from Nezhin. When the battle for Kiev began, in the outskirts near Brovary and Darnitsa, and we all understood that Petlyura was finished, his city commandant issued one last decree. It stated that the following night the High Command of Petlyura’s army was going to unleash a terrifying secret weapon against the Bolsheviks – namely, a deadly Violet Ray which French military leaders had given to Petlyura thanks to the mediation of that famous ‘Friend of Free Ukraine’, Consul Hénault. To avoid unnecessary casualties from the Violet Ray, the entire populace of the city was ordered to take shelter in their cellars for the night and not to come out until daylight.
The people of Kiev were used to climbing down into their cellars, where they would wait out one coup after another. After the cellar, the next safest spot was the kitchen. It was a sort of citadel for interminable conversations and tea drinking. Kitchens were usually located at the back of the house, and so were relatively safe from bullets. There was something comforting about the smell of old food that clung to the kitchens. Sometimes water dripped from the tap, and if you left your cup in the sink, in an hour or so you could fill an entire kettle, put it on to boil and brew some strong tea out of dried cranberry leaves. Everyone who drank that tea during those nights would agree that it was our sole comfort, a sort of elixir of life, a panacea for all our troubles and misfortunes.
It seemed to me that the country was racing straight into a bank of impenetrable fog. As I lay there listening to the whistling of the wind through the bullet-riddled roofs, I found it impossible to believe that these impossibly dark nights, thick with soot and despair, would ever give way to a bleak dawn, if only to reveal once again the same deserted streets and the same blindly running men, armed with every possible make and calibre of rifle, their faces green from ice and hunger, their feet frozen, their fingers stiff from the cold of steel triggers. Every last bit of human warmth had been blown out of these men through their threadbare greatcoats and their coarse calico shirts.
The city was deathly quiet on the night of the Violet Ray. Even the artillery fire had stopped, and all that could be heard was the sound of wheels rumbling in the distance. The more experienced of the residents recognised the sound – it was that of army convoys hurriedly withdrawing from the city. And that is just what happened. The next morning, not one of Petlyura’s men was left in the city. The story of the Violet Ray had been concocted simply so they could leave Kiev that night without any trouble.
As had happened many times before, Kiev was left without a government. But neither the atamans nor the local gangs had time to take over. At noon – horses steaming, wheels clattering, crowds shouting and singing, accordions wheezing – the Bogunsky and Tarashchansky Red Army regiments crossed into the city over the Tsepnoy Bridge and once more life was shaken to its very foundations.