The woman turned, grabbed him by the front of his shirt and spat in his face. The crowd roared with laughter.
We had stayed at Bobrinets for several days. The track up ahead, destroyed by Makhno, was being repaired. To the south, savage hordes of outlaws were laying waste to the countryside – roaring about on gun-carriages, shooting up everything before them with their machine-guns, looting, burning, raping, only to vanish at the first sight of serious resistance. The little towns of Ukraine, pink with hollyhocks and, until recently, quiet and traditional, now unleashed a wave of ataman-monsters. The bloody days of the ‘Uman’ had returned, swords flashed, slicing off of the heads of thistles one minute, men the next. Black flags emblazoned with white skull-and-crossbones fluttered in the wind over the once peaceful steppes north of the Black Sea. The Middle Ages paled before the brutality, violence and sudden unreason of the twentieth century.
Where had it all been hiding, slowly ripening, gathering strength and biding its time? No one could say. History was racing backwards. Everything had been thrown up into the air, and for the first time in many years, we all became aware of our helplessness before each other’s inhumanity. Nazarov talked about this most of all. The priests kept quiet. Lyusena slept for days on end. As for Khvat, he didn’t care for such conversations – they didn’t provide good material for his witticisms.
The little town of Smela was four kilometres from Bobrinets. I had visited here once as a boy with my Aunt Nadya and met the bearded artist who was in love with her. The day after we stopped at Bobrinets, I walked to Smela. Visits back to the places of one’s past tend to be melancholy experiences. The mood is deepened by those unexpected encounters with long-forgotten, and since altered, things, be it a crumbling old porch, a dying poplar or a rusty letterbox, where I had once posted a letter to my first love, a blue-eyed schoolgirl in Kiev.
Smela was quiet and empty. People tried to avoid going out for fear of running into Denikin’s drunken soldiers. Just as in my childhood, the river Tyasmin was covered with a thick carpet of bright red duckweed that made it look like a fresh spring meadow. The smell of marigolds drifted from behind the fences.
All these places – including Smela and Cherkassy – were connected to the life of my family. As I strolled in Smela’s quiet streets, my seemingly short life now suddenly stretched out before me into a long vista of crowded years. People apparently like to recall their past because from a distance everything becomes clearer. My own passion for exploring my memory arose too early, when I was still quite young, and turned into a kind of game. I didn’t look back on my life as a series of connected events but liked to group things into various categories. So, for example, I would try to remember every hotel I had ever stayed at (actually, they were mostly just cheap lodging houses), or all the rivers I had seen, all the steamers I had sailed on, or every girl I might have fallen in love with.
This predilection proved to be not as silly as I had first supposed. Take hotels. I would try to retrieve from my memory every last detail – the colour of the faded runners in the corridors, the wallpaper designs, the various smells, the prints on the walls, the faces of the maids, the way they talked, the worn bentwood furniture – everything right down to the inkwells made of stone from the Urals the colour of damp sugar which were always filled with a few dead flies but never any ink. As I remembered, I tried to see everything afresh, as though for the first time, and it was only later when I began to write that I realised how useful this was to my work.
I returned to the station at Bobrinets at dusk. I walked along one of the steep sides of the railway embankment. A full moon was rising. Gunshots rang out from the direction of Bobrinets. Suddenly, I could feel my heart beating faster. I was gripped by the notion of how fortunate I was to live in such an interesting moment in history, one full of contradictions and confusion, but also of great hopes. I told myself that I had indeed been born under a lucky star.
Our train pulled into the station at Pomoshnaya early in the morning. We were immediately shunted to a siding at the far end, where piles of old slag were covered with the dry black stems of goosefoot. A short time later we jumped down from our wagon and to our surprise found that our engine had been uncoupled and was gone. There was not a soul to be seen up and down the many tracks or along the platforms. It was as though the station had died.
I went to explore. The air in the station building was cold and grey. All the doors were open, but I didn’t see a single person in the waiting room, the buffet or the booking hall. The station appeared abandoned. After pacing the echoing stone floors, I went out into the main square, walked around to the back of the station, and came upon a rickety old door. I opened it. A man in a red cap, most likely the station guard, sat hunched over a desk in a narrow room with a high ceiling. He had pulled his hands up inside the sleeves of his frayed greatcoat and didn’t make a move, but just glanced at me with a pair of small, inflamed eyes. Greasy strands of hair stuck out from under his red cap.
‘What’s happened?’ I asked him. ‘The station’s deserted.’
He pulled his hands out of his sleeves and beckoned me mysteriously to the table. I went over. He grabbed my hand with his cold damp fingers and muttered softly: ‘Everyone’s fled into the steppe. I’m here all by myself. It wasn’t even my shift, it was Bondarchuk’s, but he’s got a wife and children, the poor devil. And I’ve got nobody, so that’s the way it is. He didn’t ask me to, I volunteered to take his place.’
The man squeezed my hand tighter and tighter. I was getting nervous. He’s mad, I thought, and pulled my hand away. He gave me a puzzled look and grinned. ‘Afraid, are you?’ he asked. ‘Me too.’
‘Of what?’
‘A bullet,’ said the guard. He stood up and began buttoning his coat. ‘Nobody knows where it is now, but there’s a bullet out there meant for my head. So, I just sit, and wait.’
He looked at the clock. ‘Half an hour yet.’
‘Until what?’
‘Makhno’s coming,’ he said suddenly in a clear, loud voice. ‘Understand? He’ll be here in half an hour.’
‘Where did you hear that?’
‘From right here.’ The guard pointed at the telegraph key on the table. ‘From Edison. Before Edison, we led peaceful lives. Didn’t know nothing but didn’t care. Now we can see what’s coming, and all that’s done is cause us a lot of useless worry. Makhno’s been beaten near Golta. He’s heading back home, to Gulyaipole. He sent a telegram – he’ll be passing through Pomoshnaya with three trainloads of his men. Not planning on stopping. Making for Zlatopol. Here’s his order: “All points and signals to be left clear. Wait.” If we don’t, he’ll shoot every last one of us on the spot. Here, look, it’s right here in the telegram: “Blanket Execution by Firing Squad.”’ The guard pointed to the tangle of telegraph tape on the table and sighed. ‘Let’s just hope he passes quickly, the son of a bitch. Are you from the passenger train?’
I said yes and smiled – a hell of a passenger train that was! A collection of dirty, broken-down goods wagons that slumped from one side to the other as it plodded along on bent, rusty wheels.
‘So, go back to the train and tell everyone to lock the doors and don’t let Makhno see so much as the tips of their noses. If he does, you’ll all be lined up in a ditch in front of a machine-gun before you know it.’
I returned to the train with this staggering piece of news. We immediately locked every door on the train and extinguished all the iron stoves so the smoke from the tin chimneys wouldn’t give us away. Many of the passengers took comfort in the fact that between the main line and us stood a long empty goods train to provide cover. But Khvat and I weren’t pleased with this arrangement – we both wanted to have a look at Makhno’s men. Ducking behind coaches and sheds, we made our way over to the station. The guard was happy to see us. In a situation like this, no one wants to be alone.