Cloth flowers sold well in the little shops around the Baikovoe Cemetery, along with cheap wreaths, grave railings (chiefly made from old bed springs), sugary marble monuments and curly iron crosses. Once a week an old woman who supplied the shops came to buy Galya’s flowers. She liked to encourage Galya not to waste too much time finishing them off because they would sell out no matter what for the simple reason she had no competitors. Her words made Galya indignant, and she carried on fussing over every last tea-rose for an entire day trying to make it perfect. She was conscientious to the point of self-torture.
The old woman, something of a born philosophiser, had a rather gloomy theory about trades and occupations, which she loved to expound in her monotonous voice: ‘In times like these, you’ve got to earn a living from things that have always been, are, and will continue to be on this earth, regardless of all these wars and revolutions. Take hair, for example. As long as the earth keeps turning, hair will keep growing. And, mind you, just as the earth spins day and night, hair grows day and night too. Given that fact, I propose that the most profitable occupation has to be that of a hairdresser.
‘After hair, there’s death. We’ll never stop dying. And no matter who’s in power, dead folks have to be buried. A corpse can’t dig its own grave, put a wreath on it, or write on its tombstone “Rest in Peace, My Beloved Husband Yasha” or “He Died a Hero’s Death Fighting the Enemy”. Death will always provide a way to make a few kopecks. That’s just the way it is. One man’s grief is another man’s bread. One man’s tears are another man’s pitcher of milk.’
We were all terrified of this sinister graveyard crone. All of us, that is, except for Galya, who alone had the courage to engage her in pointless arguments.
The rumble of the cannons to the south grew louder. Soviet units were by now fighting Denikin’s forces at the approaches to the city. The calico outfit to which I had returned after the fatigue regiment had begun to evacuate. The bales of calico were being moved to the goods station and sent north.
One morning I arrived at work and found a notice pinned to the door. I knew the typewriter well – it was missing its R – and so the notice read: ‘Oganisation Evacuated. Fo Futhe Infomation Dial …’ I waited in the dark stairwell strewn with scraps of sacking in the hope one of my colleagues would turn up, but no one did. Puzzled, I went back outside and came upon about twenty wounded Red Army soldiers. Dirty and exhausted, they were tramping wearily along the pavement. Fresh bandages, as white as snow, covered the men’s arms and faces. I followed them. It was obvious they had made their way into the city on foot straight from battle.
They walked along the noisy Vasilkovskaya Street, then the equally loud but smarter Kreshchatik, before descending to Podol towards the Dnieper. As they walked, the noise slowly died down, and they were left to their own silence. Passers-by stopped to stare. The sight of the wounded Red Army men making their way down Kreshchatik awoke panic that quickly spread to the side streets. I caught up with one of the soldiers and asked him where they had been fighting.
‘Near the Red Tavern,’ he said without bothering to look at me. ‘It’s pretty hot over there now, comrade.’
Denikin’s forces had attacked from the south-east, from the direction of Darnitsa, yet the Red Tavern was over to the south-west of Kiev.
‘Have Denikin’s men really encircled the city? Are there that many of them?’ people asked from the crowd.
‘What are you talkin’ about, Denikin’s men!’ the soldier said angrily. ‘They’re nowhere near there.’
‘Then who were you fighting?’
‘Well, the enemy, of course,’ he said, grinning, and then walked off to catch up with the others.
None of this made sense. And when, an hour later, shells began flying overhead with the now familiar screech and exploding in the Podol neighbourhood and on the wharfs, complete panic gripped the inhabitants of Kiev. Once more, everyone took shelter in their cellars. Once more, night patrols were organised in the courtyards, oil lamps went out with each explosion, water was hurriedly stored in every possible container, rumours spread, people lay awake at night unable to sleep.
Night watch was perhaps the calmest of occupations during this violent time. I actually loved my shift on duty in our nice little courtyard beside the solid wicket set into the equally solid iron gate. For some reason the closeness of the yard at night and its lone chestnut tree made me feel as safe as in an impregnable fortress. There was no thought of carrying a weapon – you could be shot on the spot just for holding a child’s popgun. The only thing we watchmen were expected to do was to raise the alarm at the first sign of danger so the house residents wouldn’t be caught unawares. For this, we were given a large copper bowl and a hammer.
I am sure the reason I loved night duty was the strange and completely illusory feeling of safety it gave me, a feeling that owed much to the danger all around. Danger was lying in wait right there, just on the other side of that iron wicket no more than two millimetres thick. Just open the wicket and cross the threshold, and you were face to face with the terrifying unknown that stalked the dark, dead streets of the city at night. Cross the threshold and you could hear someone sneaking through the garden and sense with every single nerve in your body the vibrating air as the lead bullet flew straight at your heart.
Inside the courtyard that fear disappeared. All you had to do not to give yourself away was to sit still and listen. Animal instinct told you that your only chance for survival was to remain invisible, cloaked by darkness and silence. I sometimes shared my watch with Avel Isidorovich Stakover, a former history teacher at the Levandovskaya Gymnasium for Girls. Despite the fact that Stakover had taught at a girls’ school, he was a terrible misogynist. A small man with a scraggy beard and bloodshot eyes, slovenly and always enraged, he never grew tired of calling down curses, like some Prophet Jeremiah, on the head of every last woman without exception.
There was only one subject he could discuss in a calm, relaxed manner – the Middle Ages. He insisted that this was the loveliest age in the history of humanity. Stakover had his reasons for this, accepting, of course, one excluded the era’s embrace of chivalry, courtly love and the whole cult of the Virgin Mary. Everything else, however, suited him just fine. He liked to tick off the merits of the Middle Ages on his fingers. First, the earth wasn’t so crowded. Second, dense forests, brooks, streams and rivers came right up to your doorstep. You lived on the life-giving air of the woods and the pure fruits of the earth, not on paraffin and tins. Third, great poetry had already flourished, and the life of the mind did not take a back seat to today. And fourth, people were simpler, less homogenised, and so more attractive than at the height of civilisation.
Stakover did not miss an opportunity to try to convince me of the beauty of the Middle Ages. It was almost as though he thought he could easily transport me back to that distant time and that I had some sort of real choice about which epoch I might care to live in. He talked like a recruiting agent, like a zealous disciple, like an official representative of those Middle Ages from which he had just returned. Stakover even used the civil war in Ukraine and our shared night watch to sing the praises of the Middle Ages. On the night the Red Army units abandoned Kiev, shelled by an unknown enemy on the other side of the city as they went, he said to me: ‘I don’t know about you, my young friend, but I would like to live in a medieval castle. Only there did one enjoy blessed peace and safety in those dangerous times. Leaving the forest, where with every step one risked being snatched and hanged from the nearest oak, one entered the ancient shelter of the crenellated walls. Up went the drawbridge, the fortress gate was locked, and every man, woman and child felt not only the joy of escape but the full richness of life itself. It filled the air, it sparkled with the sunlit silence of the enormous flagstone courts, it rang in the music of the horn summoning them to the banqueting hall, and it was preserved in the heavy folios of the library, where the wind stirred the thick pages. And it is only in such a state, my young friend, that anything of immortal value can be created.’