In Fastov, a plump, cheery young woman with pert eyes climbed aboard. Her name was Lyusena. Before getting on, she flung a dusty bundle made from an old, torn Gypsy shawl through the open door of our wagon. At that moment, the priests were sitting quietly on their rough wooden bunks by the door and chewing on pieces of dry, rock-hard rye flatbread. Khvat liked to joke that horses had a particular taste for this bread, mostly because it was made from straw.
‘Hey there, you oafs!’ Lyusena shouted at the priests. ‘Give a woman a hand. It’s obvious I can’t climb up by myself.’
The priests jumped up and bumped into each other in their rush to the door. Embarrassed by their poor manners, they joined together and with all their might lifted Lyusena into the wagon.
‘Ugh …’ she sighed, looking around the wagon. ‘Not exactly luxurious, I see.’
The priests just stood there awkwardly and said nothing.
‘All right, Your Graces, not to worry!’ said Lyusena, having finished her inspection of the wagon. She reached down to hitch up a much-darned silk stocking. ‘I’ll take the bunk in the dark corner over there, just so’s you don’t think I’ve got designs on your virginity. Which is as much use to you as a poultice to a corpse, I might add.’
One of the priests giggled inappropriately, and Viktor Khvat said with a presumptuous grin: ‘It’s clear to me, my dear, that with you here we’re all as good as sunk. Although it’s certain to be fun and exciting.’
‘Shut up, pipsqueak,’ she said in a feigned bass voice. ‘I’m from Odessa, got it? I’ve seen plenty of your types in my time. I don’t actually dance the cancan, although I used to sing at the Tivoli Café in Kharkov. I could sing you songs that would make even your weak blood boil, my dear little boy. But enough joking around! Would it kill you to give a young lady a piece of that bread there? I haven’t eaten a thing in two days.’
We treated her to some of the rye flatbread and from that moment life in our wagon became, as Khvat put it, ‘new and bright’. With her lively spirit and indefatigable cheerfulness, Lyusena let nothing bother her. She joked about every last thing, even the constant danger of our rickety old goods train being shot up and captured by bandits, and teased the priests, who had no idea what to make of her. She traded witticisms with Khvat, sang music-hall songs and shocked the priests with her salacious stories. They moaned disapprovingly, yet their eyes glowed with admiration for the woman they called ‘the great whore, Panna Lyusena’. It was obvious how much they liked her, and they kept trying to find justifications for Lyusena and her ways in Catholic dogma, the Old and New Testaments, and practically even in papal encyclicals.
In the end, they proclaimed her the Mary Magdalene of our times, a modern-day incarnation of the beautiful, red-headed prostitute who had sinned day and night and was later canonised for her pure love of Christ, she who had flung herself at the feet of the Crucified on Golgotha and by covering them with her hair had eased the pain in His tortured limbs. A great many women had travelled the same path from sin to sanctity, and as proof faint gold haloes had been lit over their heads in the paintings of the Great Masters of the Renaissance, and white lilies brushed their hems, spreading the scent of chastity.
The priests discussed this among themselves in low voices. I knew enough Polish to follow along and listening to them it struck me that Catholicism’s cult of the Madonna is nothing more than another manifestation, albeit refined, of humanity’s eternal and undeniable sensuality. I was to become even more convinced of this years later when I saw the fair Madonnas, beckoning me with their coquettish eyes and Gioconda smiles spread over their small, red, quivering lips, in the many-coloured half-light of the cathedrals in Naples and Rome.
Now, so many years later, none of this even seems possible: those conversations in that beaten-up goods wagon where the autumn wind whistled through the bullet holes and our motley company lived in such cheerful harmony – Lyusena, the impoverished singer and prostitute, the priests, the Knight of the Legion of Honour, the half-blind philosopher Nazarov, a volume of Heine always in his hand, and me, a young man still with no clear profession and prone to flights of fancy.
The train began stopping even more often, and the engine had begun to make imploring whistling noises. This meant that the fuel was running out, and if we, passengers, wanted to keep going and not sit there like dead ducks waiting for the closest gang to swoop down upon us, then we ought to hop from our wagons and get to chopping down the nearest fences or station toolsheds. Khvat would roll back the heavy door with a thud and shout: ‘Your Eminences! Fetch your axes!’
We had a crowbar and two axes with us. The priests grabbed the axes and leapt from the wagon. Hitching up their skirts, they bared their heavy army boots and puttees. We jumped out after them and raced for the nearest fence. These raids were not always successful. Sometimes the owners of these fences opened fire on us with their shotguns. Then the engine driver started the train without bothering to give a warning whistle, Khvat yelled, ‘Christian soldiers! To the horses!’ and we ran back to the wagon and threw ourselves in.
After we had passed Belaya Tserkov, the train was shot at regularly. We never saw who it was since the gunfire came from forests and dense groves along the tracks. As soon as we heard shooting, we lay flat on our bunks. Khvat called this ‘reducing the size of the target’. He insisted that a man lying down was sixteen times less likely to be hit than one standing up. We took little comfort in this, especially after a stray bullet pierced the wall of our wagon right above Lyusena’s head, grazing her hair and shattering the Spanish comb she had inherited from her grandmother, a market woman who sold bubliki in the town of Rybnitsa on the Dniester. After hitting the comb, the bullet howled and for a moment appeared to float in the air as if looking for the exit before hitting the far wall and falling on the back of one of the priests. He picked it up, tucked it away in his purse and swore to hang it on a silver chain before the icon of the Black Madonna of Chenstokhov as an ex-voto for sparing his life.
Lyusena tidied her hair, sat up in her bunk and burst into a rollicking song with her shrill voice:
Good day, my Lyubka, good day, my lovely,
Good day, my lovely, and goodbye!
You’ve gobbled up our last strawberry –
Now you’ve nothing but olives so don’t cry.
The priests took to the song and joined in. Lyusena stopped singing, thought for a moment, and then said: ‘If I’m killed, bury me in my Gypsy shawl. I know the priests will send me off in proper style, of that I’m certain.’
Lying face down on their bunks (the shooting was not as frequent but had not stopped), the priests squirmed strangely. It looked as though they were doing everything possible not to laugh.
‘I’ll get to heaven,’ Lyusena said confidently. ‘No problem at all. I’ll just sing St Peter a little chanson and he’ll weep from laughing. I can just see him blowing his nose and saying: “Mademoiselle Lyusena, if only I’d met you down on that sinful earth instead of here in this boring heaven. Oh, what a time we’d have had! We’d have made people’s heads spin. ‘Aren’t those two just something!’ they’d have said.”’
The most reserved of the priests said: ‘That’s blasphemy, Panna Lyusena! May Our Lady forgive you. As for us, we forgave you a long time ago.’
‘And I thank you for it,’ she replied, before adding softly: ‘Boys, my dear friends! You have no idea how happy I am here with you. No one’s made a pass at me or tried to put their greasy paws on me or even treat me like some kind of tart. And nobody knows I’ve been shot through the breast already. I shot myself in Lugansk. There’s a damned town by that name. That’s where my little boy died. My little boy …’