And on the bayonet of the lone sentry,
Bright flashes sparked by the midnight moon.fn2
As I was singing this old tune there came the sound of a horse’s hooves. Someone had ridden up to the warehouse and hopped down from the saddle. I could hear him cursing. I recognised Antoshchenko’s voice. Sometimes he rode out at night to inspect the guards. Antoshchenko walked over to the warehouse. Morgenstern stood watch at the doors. ‘Who goes there?’ he called out in his soft little voice.
‘What the hell’s wrong with you, damned fool!’ yelled Antoshchenko. ‘Can’t you see who it is?’
Morgenstern now realised perfectly well who it was. Nevertheless, he followed regulations and shouted, ‘Who goes there?’ three times in quick succession. Without giving Antoshchenko a chance to answer, Morgenstern fired at him from point-blank range. Antoshchenko was killed instantly. Morgenstern was arrested and then released the next day. Our regiment was immediately disbanded, and we were sent home.
It was late in the evening as I made my way along Institutskaya Street past the State Bank, built by an eccentric architect in the style of the Doge’s Palace in Venice. It was humid, a storm was approaching, lightning reflected off the polished black pillars of the bank. A fresh breeze blew through the chestnut trees and then died. Through an open window in the dark I could hear someone playing the piano and a baritone voice singing: ‘He’s far away, he won’t know, he’ll never care about your grief.’ The smell of grass came from the front gardens.
All of a sudden, I recalled that night of my graduation ball marking the end of my gymnasium years when I had accompanied Olga Bogushevich along this same street under these same chestnut trees. Her dress had seemed too formal even for that festive night, but still she was all beauty and joy. I recalled that night, her hands, cold with nervous excitement as we said goodbye outside her house, her eyes sparkling in the lamplight. All of it seemed to me now like an impossible dream from centuries ago. I couldn’t believe that in the same world as this summer lightning and chestnut trees, in this simple, decent world of fresh grass and soft voices, of a young girl’s tender trembling, of books, poetry and secret hopes, there could also exist a monster like Antoshchenko, this raving, bloodthirsty madman, this ‘fiend from hell’, as Morgenstern called him. I couldn’t help thinking how thin was the veneer of civilisation that separated us from a bottomless sea of dark savagery. I wanted to believe that human reason would penetrate these waters, and I knew this was going to be the great challenge of our future and of our still unsettled lives.
More than twenty years later, I was asked to give a talk at the main library in the city of Alma-Ata. The stiff, dry leaves of the poplars crackled in the late autumn wind. Irrigation canals carried icy water which smelled of the sea down from the mountains. A deep blue sky sparkled over the Alatau, beyond whose peaks one could imagine far-off India.
After my talk, a small, completely white-haired man with sad eyes approached me. ‘You don’t recognise me, do you?’ he asked.
‘No, I’m afraid not.’
‘I’m Morgenstern. We served in the fatigue regiment together in Kiev.’
‘What are you doing now?’ I asked.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said and smiled. ‘But I’m happy for you. You’ve got to speak up for all of us in your writing, to give voice to everyone you’ve ever met. That includes me too, Morgenstern, your old comrade in arms.’
84
Puff Pastry
It was a gusty summer morning. The chestnut trees outside my windows thrashed about in a confused way, and cannons boomed off in the distance from the direction of Fastov. A battle was being fought there against Denikin’s forces advancing from the south.
Amalia’s dark flat smelled of fresh coffee. She was grinding the last of her precious beans. The coffee mill creaked unhappily, even screeching at times, as though it sensed its imminent doom. As always, the smell of coffee made the flat seem cosier, despite the ‘Gift of the Sea’ – a broken wall-mounted thermometer decorated with cockle shells that read three degrees below zero both winter and summer. Those everlasting minus three degrees sometimes made the flat feel colder than it was.
Someone knocked at the kitchen door. I heard Amalia go over to open it. There was a moment of silence, and then she cried out with excitement: ‘Yes, he’s here! He’s here, of course!’ Her voice broke. I dashed into the kitchen. Two beggar women covered in dust were standing there. Their heads were covered with kerchiefs that had been pulled down so low you could barely see their eyes.
‘Kostik!’ the shorter of the two cried. She sank onto a stool and her head dropped to the kitchen table. A homemade hazel staff fell from her hand and clattered to the floor. I recognised Mama’s voice, knelt before her, and tried to look into her face. She avoided my eyes, but squeezed my cheeks with her cold, thin hands and began to sob, almost without tears. Only her convulsive breathing told me she was crying. Galya stood there, too afraid to move – it seemed that she had lost the last bit of her sight. I noticed that her legs were wrapped in strips torn from an old twilled cotton bedspread and tied on with twine. Even now I still remember those strips with their distinctive green pattern. Galya was not wearing spectacles. She was straining her neck forward, trying to make out the bentwood coat rack in a dark corner of the kitchen, and kept asking Mama: ‘Well, is he here? Is Kostik here? Why aren’t you answering? Where is he?’
Mama and Galya had walked all the way from Kopan to Kiev. It had become impossible for them to stay there any longer. Small gangs raided the farm almost daily, although they had apparently not harmed either of the women since they were too poor to rob. Some had even taken pity on them and left Mama a handful of rusks or the crushed hulls of sunflower seeds. One bandit even gave Mama an exquisite though utterly moth-eaten Spanish shawl. He told her he had stolen it from a theatre in Zhitomir.
The last straw for Mama had been a bandit known as the ‘Angel of Vengeance’. Having already seen dozens of atamans, Mama was staggered to find that this Angel of Vengeance was a converted Jew with a full beard and spectacles who had once run a chemist’s shop in Radomyshl and regarded himself as a committed anarchist. He addressed her as ‘madame’ and proceeded to take every last thing she owned, right down to her sewing needles, although he was kind enough to leave her a detailed inventory of what he had stolen so that Mama could claim compensation, but only after ‘anarchy had swept over the entire world’.
It had taken Mama and Galya over two weeks to walk all the way to Kiev. They had adopted the disguise of beggars, which they in fact were. Galya had walked behind Mama, holding onto her shoulder. She didn’t wear her glasses, for that would have given them away: beggars were too poor for glasses. Moreover, in those violent, turbulent times, people in spectacles encountered widespread suspicion and even hatred. It was generally believed that anyone who wore glasses must be an enemy of the masses. Amazingly, some of this mistrust of men and women in glasses, which casts them as wily, devious and untrustworthy characters, remains today.
For several days Mama and Galya did nothing but rest and catch up on their sleep. A look of peace and happiness never left their faces. But then, as always, Mama decided it was time to act, and she began by helping Amalia with her sewing. They became fast friends, and now two sewing machines whirred away in the flat, while Galya busied herself making artificial flowers. She made them out of scraps of coloured material, working slowly and carefully. I was impressed by her array of steel tools and stamps. She used them to cut stiff calico into daisy chains, rose petals and leaves of various shapes. The buds and stamens were particularly difficult to make. Her flowers were pretty, but they smelled of paint and glue and very quickly gathered dust. Deep down I was convinced that Galya’s work was utterly pointless, especially during a time of revolution, famine and civil war. Who would want to buy these flowers when food was so scarce that people were risking their lives on long, dangerous trips to the countryside just for the sake of a pound of barley or a cup of sunflower oil? As it turned out, however, I was wrong.