THE WHITE GUARD

'Ow!' screamed the thin voice, turning as pale as death and

realising that his fur hat had been knocked off. In that second he

felt the violent sting of a second blow on the face and someone

shouting:

'That's him, the dirty little thief, the son of a bitch! Beat him ____

'Hey!' whined the thin voice. 'What are you hitting me for? I'm not the one! You should stop him - that Bolshevik! - Ow!' he howled.

'Oh my God, Marusya, let's get out of here, what's going on?' There was a furious, whirling scuffle in the crowd by the fountain, fists flew, someone screamed, people scattered. And the orator had vanished. He had vanished as mysteriously and magically as though the ground had swallowed him up. A man was dragged from the centre of the melee but it turned out to be the wrong one: the traitorous Bolshevik orator had been wearing a black fur hat, and this man's hat was gray. Within three minutes the scuffle had died down of its own accord as though it had never begun, because a new speaker had been lifted up on to the fountain and people were drifting back from all directions to hear him until, layer by layer around the central core, the crowd had built up again to almost two thousand people.

*

By the fence in the white, snow-covered side-street, now deserted as the gaping crowd streamed after the departing troops, Shchur could no longer hold in his laughter and collapsed helplessly and noisily on to the sidewalk where he stood,

'Oh, I can't help it!' he roared, clutching his sides. Laughter cascaded out of him, his white teeth glittering. 'I'll die laughing! God, when I think how they turned on him - the wrong man! -and beat him up!'

'Don't sit around here for too long, Shchur, we can't take too many risks', said his companion, the unknown man in the beaver collar who looked the very image of the late, distinguished Lieutenant Shpolyansky, chairman of The Magnetic Triolet.

'Coming, coming', groaned Shchur as he rose to his feet.

'Give me a cigarette, Mikhail Semymovich', said Shchur's other companion, a tall man in a black overcoat. He pushed his gray fur hat on to the back of his head and a lock of fair hair fell down over his forehead. He was breathing hard and looked hot, despite the frosty weather.

'What? Had enough?' the other man asked kindly as he thrust back the skirt of his overcoat, pulled out a small gold cigarette-case and offered a short, stubby German cigarette. Cupping his hands around the flame, the fair-haired man lit one, and only when he had exhaled the smoke did he say:

'Whew!'

Then all three set off rapidly, swung round the corner and vanished.

Two figures in student uniforms turned into the side-street from the square. One short, stocky and neat in gleaming rubber overshoes. The other tall, broad-shouldered, with legs as long as a pair of dividers and a stride of nearly seven feet. Both of them wore their collars turned right up to their peaked caps, and the tall man's clean-shaven mouth and chin were swathed in a woollen muffler - a wise precaution in the frosty weather. As if at a word of command both figures turned their heads together and looked at the corpse of Captain Pleshko and the other man lying face downward across him, his knees crumpled awkwardly to one side. Without a sound they passed on.

Then, when the two students had turned from Rylsky Street into Zhitomirskaya Street, the tall one turned to the shorter one and said in a husky tenor:

'Did you see that? Did you see that, I say?'

The shorter man did not reply but shrugged and groaned as though one of his teeth had suddenly started aching.

'I'll never forget it as long as I live,' went on the tall man, striding along, 'I shall remember that.'

The shorter man followed him in silence.

'Well, at least they've taught us a lesson. Now if I ever meet that swine . . . the Hetman . . . again . . .' - A hissing sound came from behind the muffler - 'I'll . . .' The tall man let out a long, complicated and obscene expletive. As they turned into Bolshaya Zhitomirskaya Street their way was barred by a kind of procession making its way towards the main police station in the Old City precinct. To pass into the square the procession only had to go straight ahead, but Vladimirskaya Street, where it crossed

Bolshaya Zhitomirskaya, was still blocked by cavalry marching away after the parade, so the procession, like everyone else, was obliged to stop.

It was headed by a horde of little boys, running, leapfrogging and letting out piercing whistles. Next along the trampled snow of the roadway came a man with despairing terror-stricken eyes, no hat, and a torn, unbuttoned fur coat. His face was streaked with blood and tears were streaming from his eyes. From his wide, gaping mouth came a thin, hoarse voice, shouting in an absurd mixture of Russian and Ukrainian:

'You have no right to do this to me! I'm a famous Ukrainian poet! My name's Gorbolaz. I've published an anthology of Ukrainian poetry. I shall complain to the chairman of the Rada and to the minister. This is an outrage!'

'Beat him up - the pickpocket!' came shouts from the sidewalk.

Turning desperately to all sides, the bloodstained man shouted: 'But I was trying to arrest a Bolshevik agitator . . .'

'What? What's that?'

'Who's he?'

'Tried to shoot Petlyura.'

'What?'

'Took a shot at Petlyura, the son of a bitch.'

'But he's a Ukrainian.'

'He's no Ukrainian, the swine', rumbled a bass voice. 'He's a pickpocket.'

'Phee-eew!' whistled the little boys contemptuously.

'What are you doing? What right have you to do this to me?'

'We've caught a Bolshevik agitator. He ought to be shot on the spot.'

Behind the bloodstained man came an excited crowd, amongst them an army fur hat with a gold-braided tassel and the tips of two bayonets. A man with a tightly-belted coat was striding alongside the bloodstained man and occasionally, whenever the victim screamed particularly loudly, mechanically punched him on the neck. Then the wretched prisoner, at the end of his tether, stopped shouting and instead began to sob violently but soundlessly.

The two students stepped back to let the procession go by. When it had passed, the tall one seized the short one by the armand whispered with malicious pleasure:

'Serve him right. A sight for sore eyes. Well, I can tell you one thing, Karas - you have to hand it to those Bolsheviks. They really know their stuff. What a brilliant piece of work! Did you notice how cleverly they fixed things so that their speaker got clean away? They're tough and by God, they're clever. That's why I admire them - for their brazen impudence, God damn them.'

The shorter man said in a low voice:

'If I don't get a drink in a moment I shall pass out.'

'That's a thought. Brilliant idea', the tall man agreed cheerfully. 'How much do you have on you?'

'Two hundred.'

'I have a hundred and fifty. Let's go to Tamara's bar and get a couple of bottles . . .'

'It's shut.'

'They'll open up for us.'

The two men turned on to Vladimirskaya Street and walked on until they came to a two-storey house with a sign that read:

'Grocery'

Alongside it was another: 'Tamara's Castle - Wine Cellars.' Sidling down the steps to the basement the two men began to tap cautiously on the glass of the double door.

Seventeen

Throughout the last few days, since events had rained down on his family like stones, Nikolka had been preoccupied with a solemn obligation, an act bound up with the last words of his commanding officer, who had died stretched out on the snow. Nikolka succeeded in discharging that obligation, but to do so he had had to spend the whole of the day before the parade running around the city and calling on no less than nine addresses. Several