Chapter 1
Great and terrible was the year of Our Lord 1918, of the Revolution the second. Its summer abundant with warmth and sun, its winter with snow, highest in its heaven stood two stars: the shepherds’ star, eventide Venus; and Mars—quivering, red.
But in days of blood as in days of peace the years fly like an arrow and the thick frost of a hoary white December, season of Christmas trees, Santa Claus, joy and glittering snow, overtook the young Turbins unawares. For the reigning head of the family, their adored mother, was no longer with them.
A year after her daughter Elena Turbin had married Captain Sergei Talberg, and in the week in which her eldest son Alexei Turbin returned from years of grim and disastrous campaigning to the Ukraine, to the City of Kiev and home, the white coffin with the body of their mother was carried away down the slope of St Alexei’s Hill towards the Embankment, to the little church of the St Nicholas the Good.
Their mother’s funeral had been in May, the cherry and acacia blossom brushing against the narrow lancet windows of the church. His cope glittering and flashing in the golden sunlight, their parish priest Father Alexander had stumbled from grief and embarrassment while the deacon, his face and neck mauve, vested in beaten gold down to the tips of his squeaky boots, gloomily intoned the words of the funeral service for the mother who was leaving her children.
Alexei, Elena, Talberg, Anyuta the maid who had grown up in the Turbins’ house, and young Nikolka, stunned by the death, a lock of hair falling over his r... See more
Chapter 1
Great and terrible was the year of Our Lord 1918, of the Revolution the second. Its summer abundant with warmth and sun, its winter with snow, highest in its heaven stood two stars: the shepherds’ star, eventide Venus; and Mars—quivering, red.
But in days of blood as in days of peace the years fly like an arrow and the thick frost of a hoary white December, season of Christmas trees, Santa Claus, joy and glittering snow, overtook the young Turbins unawares. For the reigning head of the family, their adored mother, was no longer with them.
A year after her daughter Elena Turbin had married Captain Sergei Talberg, and in the week in which her eldest son Alexei Turbin returned from years of grim and disastrous campaigning to the Ukraine, to the City of Kiev and home, the white coffin with the body of their mother was carried away down the slope of St Alexei’s Hill towards the Embankment, to the little church of the St Nicholas the Good.
Their mother’s funeral had been in May, the cherry and acacia blossom brushing against the narrow lancet windows of the church. His cope glittering and flashing in the golden sunlight, their parish priest Father Alexander had stumbled from grief and embarrassment while the deacon, his face and neck mauve, vested in beaten gold down to the tips of his squeaky boots, gloomily intoned the words of the funeral service for the mother who was leaving her children.
Alexei, Elena, Talberg, Anyuta the maid who had grown up in the Turbins’ house, and young Nikolka, stunned by the death, a lock of hair falling over his right eyebrow, stood at the foot of the ancient brown ikon of St Nicholas. Set deep on either side of his long bird-like nose, Nikolka’s blue eyes had a wounded, defeated look. Occasionally he raised them towards the ikon screen, to the vaulted apse above the altar where that glum and enigmatic old man, God, towered above them and winked. Why had he inflicted such a wrong on them? Wasn’t it unjust? Why did their mother have to be taken away, just when they had all been reunited, just when life seemed to be growing more tolerable?
As he flew away through the crack that had opened up in the sky, God vouchsafed no answer, leaving Nikolka in doubt whether the things that happened in life were always necessary and always for the best.
The service over, they walked out on to the ringing flagstones of the porch and escorted their mother across the vast City to the cemetery, to where their father had long lain under a black marble cross. And there they buried their mother...
* * *
For many years before her death, in the house at No. 13 St Alexei’s Hill, little Elena, Alexei the eldest and baby Nikolka had grown up in the warmth of the tiled stove that burned in the dining-room. How often they had followed the story of Peter the Great in Holland, ‘The Shipwright of Saardam’, portrayed on its glowing hot Dutch tiles; how often the clock had played its gavotte; and always towards the end of December there had been a smell of pine-needles and candles burning on evergreen branches. In answer to the gavotte played by the bronze clock in their mother’s bedroom—now Elena’s—the black clock on the wall had struck its steeple chimes. Their father had bought both clocks long ago, in the days when women had worn funny leg-of-mutton sleeves. Those sleeves had gone, time had slipped by like a flash, their father the professor had died, and they had all grown, but the clock remained the same and went on chiming. They had all grown used to the idea that if by some miracle that clock ever fell off the wall, it would be as sad as if a beloved voice had died and nothing could ever be hung there in its place. But clocks are fortunately quite immortal, as immortal as the Shipwright of Saardam, and however bad the times might be, the tiled Dutch stove, like a rock of wisdom, was always there to radiate life and warmth.
The stove; the furniture covered in old red velvet; the beds with their shiny brass knobs; the worn carpets and tapestries, some plain red, some patterned, one with a picture of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, another showing Louis XIV reclining beside a silken lake in paradise; the Turkish carpets with their gorgeous oriental curlicues which had danced in front of little Nikolka’s eyes when he was once delirious from scarlet fever; the bronze lamp and its shade; the finest bookshelves in the world full of books that smelled mysteriously of old chocolate with their Natasha Rostovs and their Captain’s Daughters, gilded cups, silver, portraits, drapes: all seven of those crammed, dusty rooms in which the young Turbins had been raised; all this, at a time of great hardship, was bequeathed to the children by their mother who as she lay gasping, her strength failing, had clutched the hand of the weeping Elena and said:
‘Go on living... and be kind to one another...’
* * *
Hut how, how were they to go on living? Alexei Turbin, the eldest and a doctor, was twenty-eight, Elena twenty-four. Her husband Captain Talberg was thirty-one, and Nikolka seventeen and a half. Their life had been darkened at its very dawning. Cold winds had long been blowing without cease from the north and the longer they persisted the worse they grew. The eldest Turbin had returned to his native city after the first blast had shaken the hills above the Dnieper. Now, they thought, it will stop and we can start living the kind of life they wrote about in those chocolate-smelling books. But the opposite happened and life only grew more and more terrible. The snow-storm from the north howled and howled, and now they themselves could sense a dull, subterranean rumbling, the groaning of an anguished land in travail. As 1918 drew to an end the threat of danger drew rapidly nearer.
* * *
The time was coming when the walls would fall away, the terrified falcon fly away from the Tsar’s white sleeve, the light in the bronze lamp would go out and the Captain’s Daughter would be burned in the stove. And though the mother said to her children ‘Go on living’, their lot would be to suffer and die.
One day at twilight, soon after their mother’s funeral, Alexei Turbin called on Father Alexander and said:
‘It has been a terrible blow for us, Father Alexander. Grief like ours is even harder to bear when times are so bad... The worst is, you see, that I’d only just come home from the war and we were looking forward to straightening things out and leading a reasonable life, but now...’
He stopped and as he sat at the table in the half light he stared thoughtfully into the distance. Branches of the churchyard trees overshadowed the priest’s little house. It was as if just out there, beyond the walls of his cramped, book-lined study was the edge of a tangled, mysterious, springtime forest. From outside came the muffled evening hum of the City and the smell of lilac.
‘What can we do?’ muttered the priest awkwardly. (He always felt embarrassed when he had to talk to people.) ‘It is the will of God.’
‘Perhaps all this will come to an end one day? Will things be any better, then, I wonder?’ asked Turbin of no one in particular.
The priest shifted in his armchair.
‘Yes, say what you like, times are bad, very bad’, he mumbled. ‘But one mustn’t lose heart...’ Then drawing it out of the black sleeve of his cassock he suddenly laid his white hand on a pile of books, and opened the topmost one at the place marked by a bright embroidered ribbon.
‘We must never lose heart’, he said in his embarrassed yet somehow profoundly convincing voice. ‘Faintness of heart is a great sin... Although I must say that I see great trials to come. Yes, indeed, great trials’, he said with growing certainty. ‘I have been spending much of the time with my books lately, you know. All concerned with my subject of course, mostly books on theology...’
He raised the book so that the last rays of the sun fell on the open page and read aloud:
‘And the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of waters; and they became blood.’
Chapter 2
White with hoar-frost, December sped towards its end. The glitter of Christmas could already be felt in the snowbound streets. The year 1918 would soon be over.
Number 13 was a curious building. On the street the Turbins’ apartment was on the second floor, but so steep was the hill behind the house that their back door opened directly on to the sloping yard, where the house was brushed and overhung by the branches of the trees growing in the little garden that clung to the hillside. The back-gardens filled up with snow, and the hill turned white until it became one gigantic sugar-loaf. The house acquired a covering like a White general’s winter fur cap; on the lower floor (on the street side it was the first floor, whilst at the back, under the Turbins’ verandah, it was the basement) the disagreeable Vasily Lisovich-an engineer, a coward and a bourgeois—lit his flickering little yellow lamps, whilst upstairs the Turbins’ windows shone brightly and cheerfully.
One evening Alexei and Nikolka went out into the yard for some firewood.
‘Hm, damn little firewood left. Look, they’ve been pinching it again.’
A cone of bluish light burst out from Nikolka’s pocket flashlight, and they could see clearly where the planking of the woodshed had been wrenched away and clumsily pushed back into place from the outside.
‘I’d shoot the swine if I caught them, by God I would. Why don’t we keep watch out here tonight? I know it’s that shoemaker’s family from Number 11. And they’ve got much more firewood than we have, damn them!’
‘Oh, to hell with them... Come on, let’s go.’
The rusty lock creaked, a pile of logs tumbled down towards the two brothers and they lugged them away. By nine that evening the tiles of Saardam were too hot to touch.
The gleaming surface of that remarkable stove bore a number of historic inscriptions and drawings, painted on at various times during the past year by Nikolka and full of the deepest significance:
If people tell you the Allies are coming to help us out of this mess, don’t believe them. The Allies are swine.
He’s a pro-Bolshevik!
A drawing of a head of Momus, written underneath it:
Trooper Leonid Yurievich.
News is bad and rumours humming—
People say the Reds are coming!
A painting of a face with long drooping moustaches, a fur hat with a blue tassel. Underneath:
Down with Petlyura!
Written by Elena and the Turbins’ beloved childhood friends—Myshlaevsky, Karas and Shervinsky—in paint, ink and cherry-juice were the following gems:
Elena loves us all,
the thin, the fat and the tall.
Lena dear, have booked tickets for Aida Box No. 8, right.
On the twelfth day of May 1918 I fell in love.
You are fat and ugly.
After a remark like that I shall shoot myself.
(followed by an extremely realistic drawing of an automatic)
Long live Russia!
Long live the Monarchy!
June. Barcarolle.
All Russia will recall the day
of glorious Borodino.
Then printed in capitals, in Nikolka’s hand:
I hereby forbid the scribbling of nonsense on this stove. Any comrade found guilty of doing so will be shot and deprived of civil rights,
signed: Abraham Goldblatt,
Ladies, Gentlemen’s and Women’s Tailor.
Commissar, Podol District Committee.
30th January 1918.
The patterned tiles were luxuriously hot, the black clock going tonk-tank, tonk-tank, as it had done for thirty years. The elder Turbin, clean-shaven and fair-haired, grown older and more sombre since October 25th 1917, wearing an army officer’s tunic with huge bellows pockets, blue breeches and soft new slippers, in his favourite attitude—in an upright armchair. At his feet on a stool Nikolka with his forelock, his legs stretched out almost as far as the sideboard—the dining-room was not big—and shod in his buckled boots. Gently and softly Nikolka strummed at his beloved guitar, vaguely... everything was still so confused. The City was full of unease, of vague foreboding...
On his shoulders Nikolka wore sergeant’s shoulder-straps to which were sewn the white stripes of an officer cadet, and on his left sleeve a sharp-pointed tricolor chevron. (Infantry, No. 1
Detachment, 3rd Squad. Formed four days ago in view of impending events.)
Yet despite these events, all was well inside the Turbins’ home:
it was warm and comfortable and the cream-colored blinds were drawn—so warm that the two brothers felt pleasantly languorous.
The elder dropped his book and stretched.
‘Come on, play “The Survey Squad”.’ Thrum-ta-ta-tum, thrum-ta-ta-tum...
‘Who look the smartest?
Who move the fastest?
The Cadets of the Engineers!’
Alexei began to hum the tune. His eyes were grim, but there was a sparkle in them and his blood quickened. But not too loud, gentlemen, not too loud...
‘No need to run, girls,
Life can be fun, girls—’
The guitar strummed away in time to the marching feet of an engineer company—left, right, left, right! In his mind’s eye Nikolka saw a school building, peeling classical columns, guns. Cadets crawling from window to window, firing. Machine-guns at the windows. A handful of soldiers was besieging the school, literally a handful. But it was no use. General Bogoroditzky had turned yellow and surrendered, surrendered with all his cadets. The shame of it...
‘No need to run, girls,
Life can be fun, girls—
The Survey Squad is here!’
Nikolka’s eyes clouded again. Heat-haze over the red-brown Ukrainian fields. Companies of cadets, white with powdery dust, marching along the dusty tracks. All over now. The shame... Hell.
Elena pushed aside the drapes over the door, and her auburn head appeared in the dark gap. She glanced affectionately at her brothers but anxiously at the clock. With good reason; where on earth was Talberg? Their sister was worried. To hide it, she started to sing the tune with her brothers, but suddenly stopped and raised her finger.
‘Wait. Did you hear that?’
On all seven strings the company came to a halt. All three listened. There was no mistaking the sound: gunfire. Low, muffled and distant. There it was again: boo-oo-om... Nikolka put down his guitar and jumped up, followed, groaning, by Alexei.
In the lobby and drawing-room it was quite dark. Nikolka stumbled over a chair. Outside it was exactly like a stage-setting for The Night Before Christmas—snow and twinkling, shimmering lights. Nikolka peered through the window. Heat-haze and school house vanished as he strained his ears. Where was that sound? He shrugged his tabbed shoulders.
‘God knows. I get the impression it’s coming from the Svyato-shino direction. Funny, though. It can’t be as near as that.’
Alexei was standing in the dark, but Elena was nearer to the window and her eyes were shadowed with fear. Why had Talberg still not come home? What did it mean? The elder brother sensed her anxiety and because of it he said nothing, although he very much wanted to speak his thoughts. There was not the slightest doubt that it was coming from Svyatoshino. The firing was no more than eight miles outside the City. What was going on?
Nikolka gripped the window-catch and pressed his other hand against the pane as if to break it open, and flattened his nose against the glass.
Td like to go out there and find out what’s going on...’
‘Maybe; but it’s no place for you right now...’ said Elena anxiously. Her husband should have been home at the latest—the very latest—at three o’clock that afternoon, and now it was ten.
They went silently back into the dining-room. The guitar lay glumly silent. Nikolka went out to the kitchen and carried in the samovar, which hissed angrily and spat. The table was laid with cups that were pastel-colored inside and decorated outside with gilded caryatids. In their mother’s day this had been the family’s best tea-service for special occasions, but her children now used it for everyday. Despite the gunfire, the alarms and anxiety, the tablecloth was white and starched. This was thanks to Elena, who instinctively saw to such things, and to Anyuta who had grown up in the Turbin household. The hem of the tablecloth gleamed, and although it was December, in the tall, pillar-shaped matt glass vase stood a bunch of blue hortensias and two languorous roses to affirm the beauty and permanency of life—despite the fact that out there, on the roads leading into the City, lay the cunning enemy, poised to crush the beautiful snowbound City and grind the shattered remnants of peace and quiet into fragments beneath the heel of his boot. The flowers were a present from Elena’s faithful admirer, Lieutenant Leonid Shervinsky of the Guards, a friend of the salesgirl at La Marquise, the famous confectioners, and a friend of the salesgirl at the florist’s shop, Les Fleurs de Nice. In the shadow of the hortensias was a blue-patterned plate with a few slices of sausage, butter under a glass bell, lumps of sugar in the sugar-bowl and a long loaf of white bread. Everything one could want for a delicious supper if only the situation...
The teapot was covered by a bright woolen tea-cosy in the shape of a rooster, while the gleaming side of the samovar reflected the three distorted faces of the Turbins, making Nikolka’s cheeks look as round and puffed as the face of Momus scribbled on the stove.
Elena looked miserable and her red curls hung lankly down.
Talberg and his trainload of the Hetman’s money had gone astray somewhere, and the evening was ruined. Who knows what might have happened to him? The two brothers listlessly ate some slices of bread and sausage. A cold cup of tea and The Gentleman from San Francisco lay on the table in front of Elena. Misty and unseeing, her eyes stared at the words:
‘... darkness, sea, storm.’
Elena was not reading.
Finally Nikolka could restrain himself no longer:
‘Why is the gunfire so close, I’d like to know? I mean, they can’t have...’
He broke off, his reflection in the samovar distorting as he moved. Pause. The hands of the clock crawled past the figure ten and moved on—tonk-tank—to a quarter past ten.
‘They’re firing because the Germans are swine’, his elder brother barked unexpectedly.
Elena looked up at the clock and asked:
‘Surely, surely they won’t just leave us to our fate?’ Her voice was miserable.
As if at by unspoken command the two brothers turned their heads and began telling lies.
‘There’s no news’, said Nikolka and bit off a mouthful.
‘What I said was purely, h’m... conjectural. Rumors.’
‘No, it’s not rumors’, Elena countered firmly. ‘That wasn’t a rumor—it was true; I saw Shcheglova today and she said that two German regiments had withdrawn from Borodyanka.’ ‘Rubbish.’
‘Now just think,’ Alexei began. ‘Is it conceivable that the Germans should let that scoundrel Petlyura come anywhere near the city? Is it? Personally I can’t imagine how they could ever come to terms with him for one moment. Petlyura and the Germans—it’s utterly absurd. They themselves regard him as nothing but a bandit. It’s ridiculous.’
‘I don’t believe you. I know what these Germans are like by now. I’ve seen several of them wearing red arm-bands. The other day I saw a drunken German sergeant with a peasant woman—and she was drunk too.’
‘What of it? There may be isolated cases of demoralisation even in the German army.’
‘So you don’t think Petlyura will break through?’
‘H’m... No, I don’t think it’s possible.’
‘Absolument pas. Pour me another cup of tea, please. Don’t worry. Maintain, as the saying goes, complete calm.’
‘But where’s Sergei, for God’s sake? I’m certain that train has been attacked and...’
‘Pure imagination. Look—that line is completely out of any possible danger.’
‘But something might happen, mightn’t it?’
‘Oh, God! You know what railroad journeys are like nowadays. I expect they were held up for about three hours at every single station.’
‘That’s what a revolution does to the trains. Two hours’ delay for every hour on the move.’
With a deep sigh Elena looked at the clock, was silent for a while, then spoke again:
‘God, if only the Germans hadn’t acted so despicably everything would be all right. Two of their regiments would have been enough to squash that Petlyura of yours like a fly. No, I can see perfectly well that the Germans are playing some filthy double game. And where are our gallant Allies all this time? Ugh, the swine. Promises, promises...’
The samovar, silent until then, suddenly whistled and a few glowing coals, forced down by a heap of gray ash, fell on to the tray. Involuntarily the two brothers glanced towards the stove. There was the answer. Didn’t it say: ‘The Allies are swine’?
The minute hand stopped on the quarter-hour, the clock cleared its throat sedately and struck once. Instantly the clock’s chime was answered by the gentle, tinkling ring of the front-door bell.
‘Thank God; it’s Sergei’, said Alexei joyfully.
‘Yes, it must be’, Nikolka agreed and ran to open the door.
Flushed, Elena stood up.
But it was not Talberg. Three doors slammed, then Nikolka’s astonished voice could be heard coming from the staircase. Another voice answered. The voices coming upstairs were gradually drowned by the noise of hobnailed boots and a rifle-butt. As the cold air flooded in through the front door Alexei and Elena were faced by a tall, broad-shouldered figure in a heel-length greatcoat and cloth shoulder-straps marked in grease pencil with a first lieutenant’s three stars. The hood of the coat was covered with hoar-frost and a heavy rifle fixed with a rusty bayonet filled the whole lobby.
‘Hello there’, piped the figure in a hoarse tenor, pulling at the hood with fingers stiff with cold.
‘Viktor!’
Nikolka helped the figure to untie the drawstring and the hood fell away to reveal the band of an officer’s service cap with a faded badge; on the huge shoulders was the head of Lieutenant Viktor Myshlaevsky. His head was extremely handsome, with the curiously disturbing good looks of centuries of truly ancient inbred lineage. His attractive features were two bright eyes, each of a different colour, an aquiline nose, proud lips, an unblemished forehead and ‘no distinguishing marks’. But one corner of his mouth drooped sadly and his chin was cleft slantwise as though a sculptor, having begun by modelling an aristocratic face, had conceived the wild idea of slicing off a layer of the clay and leaving an otherwise manly face with a small and crooked feminine chin.
‘Where have you come from?’
‘Where’ve you been?’
‘Careful,’ replied Myshlaevsky weakly, ‘don’t knock it. There’s a bottle of vodka in there.’
Nikolka carefully hung up the heavy greatcoat, from whose pocket there protruded the neck of a bottle wrapped in a piece of torn newspaper. Next he hung up a Mauser automatic in a wooden holster, so heavy that it made the hat stand of stag’s antlers rock slightly. Only then did Myshlaevsky turn round to Elena. He kissed her hand and said:
‘I’ve come from the Red Tavern district. Can I spend the night here, please, Lena? I’ll never make it home tonight.’
‘My God, of course you can.’
Suddenly Myshlaevsky groaned, tried to blow on his fingers, but his lips would not obey him. His face grew moist as the frost on his eyebrows and smooth, clipped moustache began to melt. The elder Turbin unbuttoned Myshlaevsky’s service tunic, pulled out his dirty shirt and ran his finger down the seam.
‘Well, of course... Thought so. You’re crawling with lice.’
‘Then you must have a bath.’ Frightened, Elena had momentarily forgotten about Talberg. ‘Nikolka, there’s some firewood in the kitchen. Go and light the boiler. Oh, why did I have to give Anyuta the evening off? Alexei, take his tunic off, quickly.’
By the tiled stove in the dining-room Myshlaevsky let out a groan and collapsed into a chair. Elena bustled around, keys clinking. Kneeling down, Alexei and Nikolka pulled off Myshlaevsky’s smart, narrow boots strapped around the calf.
‘Easy now... oh, take it easy...’
They unwound his dirty, stained puttees. Under them was a pair of mauve silk socks. Nikolka at once put the tunic out on to the cold verandah, where the temperature would kill the lice. In his filthy cotton shirt, criss-crossed by a pair of black suspenders and blue breeches strapped under his instep Myshlaevsky now looked thin, dark, sick and miserable. He slapped his frozen palms together and rubbed them against the side of the stove.
‘News... rumors... People... Reds...’
‘... May... fell in love...’
‘What bastards they are!’ shouted Alexei Turbin. ‘Couldn’t they at least have given you some felt boots and a sheepskin jerkin?’
‘Felt boo-oots’, Myshlaevsky mimicked him, weeping. ‘Felt boo...’
Unbearable pain gripped his hands and feet in the warmth. Hearing Elena’s footsteps go into the kitchen, Myshlaevsky screamed, in tears, screamed furiously:
‘It was a shambles!’
Croaking and writhing in pain he collapsed and pointing at his socks, groaned:
‘Take them off, take them off...’
There was a sickening smell of methylated spirits as frozen extremities thawed out; from a single small wineglass of vodka Lieutenant Myshlaevsky became intoxicated in a moment, his eyes clouding.
‘Oh Lord, don’t say they’ll have to be amputated...’ he said bitterly, rocking back and forth in his chair.
‘Nonsense, of course not. You’ll be all right... Yes. The big toe’s frostbitten. There... The pain will go.’
Nikolka squatted down and began to pull on some clean black socks while Myshlaevsky’s stiff, wooden hands inched into the sleeves of a towelling bathrobe. Crimson patches began to appear on his cheeks and Lieutenant Myshlaevsky, grimacing in clean underwear and bathrobe, loosened up and came back to life. A stream of foul abuse rattled around the room like hail on a window-sill. Squinting with rage, he poured a stream of obscenities on the headquarters staff in their first-class railroad cars, on a certain Colonel Shchetkin, the cold, Petlyura, the Germans and the snowstorm and ended by heaping the most vulgar abuse on the Hetman of All the Ukraine himself.
Alexei and Nikolka watched the lieutenant’s teeth chatter as he thawed out, making occasional sympathetic noises.
‘The Hetman? Mother-fucker!’ Myshlaevsky snarled. ‘Where were the Horse Guards, eh? Back in the palace! And we were sent out in what we stood up in... Days on end in the snow and frost...
Christ! I thought we were all done for... Nothing but a row of officers strung out at intervals of two hundred yards—is that what you call a defensive line? It was only by the grace of God that we weren’t slaughtered like chickens!’
‘Just a minute’, Turbin interrupted, his head reeling under the flow of abuse. ‘Who was with you at the Tavern?’
‘Huh!’ Myshlaevsky gestured angrily. ‘You’ve no idea what it was like! How many of us d’you think there were at the Tavern? For-ty men. Then that scoundrel Colonel Shchetkin drove up and said (here Myshlaevsky twisted his expression in an attempt to imitate the features of the detested Colonel Shchetkin and he began talking in a thin, grating lisp): “Gentlemen, you are the City’s last hope. It is your duty to live up to the trust placed in you by the Mother of Russian Cities and if the enemy appears—attack, God is with us! I shall send a detachment to relieve you after six hours. But I beg you to conserve your ammunition...” (Myshlaevsky spoke in his ordinary voice again)—and then he and his aide vanished in their car. Dark—it was like being up the devil’s arsehole! And the frost—needles all over your face.’
‘But why were you there, for God’s sake? Surely Petlyura can’t be at Red Tavern?’
‘Christ knows. By morning we were nearly out of our minds. By midnight we were still there, waiting for the relief. Not a sign of them. No relief. For obvious reasons we couldn’t light fires, the nearest village was a mile and a half away, the Tavern half a mile. At night you start seeing things-the fields seem to be moving. You think it’s the enemy crawling up on you... Well, I thought, what shall we do if they really do come? Would I throw down my rifle, I wondered—would I shoot or not? It was a temptation. We stood there, howling like wolves. When you shouted someone along the line would answer. Finally I burrowed in the snow with my rifle-butt and dug myself a hole, sat down and tried not to fall asleep: once you fall asleep in that temperature you’re done for. Towards morning I couldn’t hold out any longer—I was beginning to doze off. D’you know what saved me? Machine-gun fire. I heard it start up at dawn, about a mile or two away. And, believe it or not, I found I just didn’t want to stand up. Then a field-gun started booming away. I got up, feeling as if each leg weighed a ton and I thought: “This is it, Petlyura’s turned up.” We closed in and shortened the line so that we were near enough to shout to each other, and we decided that if anything happened we would form up into a tight group, shoot our way out and withdraw back into town. If they overran us—too bad, they overran us. At least we’d be together. Then, imagine—the firing stopped. Later in the morning we took it in turns to go to the Tavern three at a time to warm up. When d’you think the relief finally turned up? At two o’clock this afternoon. Two hundred officer cadets from the ist Detachment. And believe it or not they were all properly dressed in fur hats and felt boots and they had a machine-gun squad. Colonel Nai-Turs was in command of them.’
‘Ah! He’s one of ours!’ cried Nikolka.
‘Wait a minute, isn’t he in the Belgrade Hussars?’ asked Alexei.
