Byzantium Endures: The First Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet

by Michael Moorcock

  It was obvious that the Hetman was a sentimental romantic with a theatrical gift for holding military displays in which his ‘Free Cossack Host’ (many of them recruited from the dregs of the city and not true Slavs, let alone Cossacks) paraded with grey-and blue-uniformed Austro-Hungarians, Germans and Galicians. This made a change from street-meetings, which were banned.

  I found myself naturally falling in with the Germans who were in the main practical, good-hearted fellows. The peasants were the chief cause of all our frustrations. The Germans had been promised grain. But the canny Ukrainian defeated our attempts to wrest it from him. He had learned to hide whole fields of corn, whole herds of cattle, as easily as he had hidden away his gold and his icons. German requisition teams, with official orders from Hetman Skoropadskya, searched barns and houses and found not so much as an egg. Used to threats, the peasants would confuse them, display their poverty, claim that Makhno’s guerillas or Hrihorieff’s bandits or some other force had already taken everything. It was an easy claim to make. Makhno in particular was displaying considerable ingenuity in his attacks. He flew the black banner of Anarchy and seemed to come and go faster than an express train. A favourite trick was to dress in Varta uniforms, claim he was chasing himself, enter a Varta garrison and then shoot down the occupants. To many he had already become a Robin Hood or Jesse James and dozens of legends were current about his daring exploits. It was forbidden to mention him in anything but a bad light in the newspapers. More folk heroes were not needed in Ukraine. There was a need for order, proper transport, proper communications.

  In Kiev, at least, there was now a semblance of Law. German businessmen began to come to the city to trade. I was able to discuss my new company and what it could do. It was important to increase production for export and home consumption. I mentioned new British and American machinery likely to outstrip anything we had. I discussed plans for new plants, new kinds of generators, new manufacturing machinery. This impressed the far-sighted Germans. They were by this time hard-pressed themselves. Many of them confided to me they thought Germany might not win the War. There would be a need to build their country up again very rapidly if it were not itself to fall into the hands of socialists. They suggested I consider locating a branch of my firm in Berlin. The sooner our countries were back to normal the sooner the Reds would be thwarted. Through my business friends I made the acquaintance of top-ranking officers and through these I came to meet the élite of Kiev society. I would now give my name automatically as Pyatnitski: I had been born in Tsaritsyn, my family had been killed by peasants in 1905, I had been brought up by relatives in Kiev, Odessa and Petersburg. This was, of course, fundamentally the truth. To have mentioned our rather ramshackle suburb to the crème de la crème would have raised too many eyebrows and closed too many doors. My mother’s family, of course, had been well-born, so I had an innate ability to mix with the very best people. Many of Kiev’s nobility were envious of my ‘Petersburg manner’. They attempted to imitate it. Quite often people made gestures I had made only a moment or two before, or repeated little remarks of mine. I considered adding the title ‘prince’ to my adopted name, but this would have been inappropriate, given the volatile political situation.

  I still saw women-friends at The Cube, but I had moved back to The Yevropyaskaya, where many of my German acquaintances also stayed. I preferred the classical elegance of silver and gold, of big, clear mirrors, of plush and crystal, of properly dressed waiters and clean, white linen. All this had returned as the Bolshevik butchers departed. The Germans appreciated it, as did the latest wave of Russian émigrés.

  If Kiev were becoming packed again, at least it was packed with a better class of people: people with money, common-sense and concrete notions of how to counter Bolshevism. Factory-owners from Petrograd and Moscow had always argued for faster and better industrialisation. They had foreseen the Revolution and blamed the Tsar for his short-sightedness. They said the ‘socialist experiment’ would last about as long as Cromwell’s Commonwealth. It would be a bad time: a time of destruction and intolerance. Cromwell had killed the King, torn down churches, destroyed cathedrals, but there were still kings, churches and cathedrals in England to this day. It was a powerful argument and an encouraging one, but it was a delusion. Now I know all that can save the world, to paraphrase Lenin, is God plus electricity.

  My mother found the changes alarming. While the Bolsheviks had occupied the city and red flags had flown and I had been in prison she had seemed cheerful and content. Every vicissitude had been met with a joke. Esmé and I had marvelled at her courage. She had bluffed the Reds away from a search of her home. She had wheedled them into providing her with extra rations. She had become personal laundress to a Chekist commissar. She knew the names of many minor Bolsheviks. She praised Comrade Lenin to the skies. She casually dropped the names of Zinovieff and Radek as if they were old friends. She had almost certainly delayed my execution and thus saved my life. But the strain had taken its toll. As the Bolsheviks retreated, she had had an attack of her old bronchial trouble and had gone to bed. By the time the Hetmanate was established, she was still coughing but insisting on going to work. She began to smell of sal-volatile and carbolic soap. The flat was returned to its previous impeccably clean state. She kept apologising for her ‘selfishness’. She said she had been a ‘bad mother’ to me, that it was her fault I had no father.

  ‘I should never have gone with him,’ she would say. ‘He was bad for me and I was bad for him. We were never suited. But it was ten years. And they were not all miserable.’

  I found her reasoning difficult to follow. She had over-tired herself in every way. She became worried by the new wave of pogroms in Podol. I assured her the fires would not spread. Then she said she was afraid the Hetman’s army would conscript me. I set her mind at rest. My friends would look after me.

  ‘You were never any trouble,’ she told me one evening at supper. ‘Everyone said so. They envied me. “He’s so good. How do you do it?” You were always good. From a baby. You’re too kind-hearted, Maxim. Don’t let some woman hurt you.’

  ‘I won’t mother. I’m only eighteen … ‘

  She smiled. ‘The girls love you, eh? Esmé! Don’t the girls all love him?’

  ‘They must do,’ said Esmé. ‘He’s quite a dandy.’

  ‘Remember when you and Esmé used to sleep here? You over the stove, Esmé in her room?’ She became excited. ‘Didn’t we all have fun?’

  I did not remember anything in particular. But I could not bring myself to say so. ‘It was great fun,’ I said. I had to leave then, to do some business.

  It was still light as I turned the corner into Kirillovskaya and began to walk down the hill towards the city. The summer evening had a lazy yet unsettled quality to it. There were fewer factory chimneys smoking. Many of the smaller concerns had completely closed down. There was a darker mass of smoke over Podol. The sounds were muted in the streets, yet I heard the wail of a river-boat quite clearly, as if it were only a few feet from me. Gold and green domes of distant churches had a dull, deep shine; yellow brick was warm, it seemed to radiate heat; and the smell of grass, trees and flowers from the wooded gorges mingled with scents of soot and oil and that hint of leather always associated with a large occupying army. I could smell horses, too. Here it was as if the town and country met and blended in almost perfect harmony. I wanted to pause, perhaps hoping a tram would come by, but I knew better than to make myself prey for the gangs occupying some of the outlying parks. I glanced automatically up at an embankment. There was nothing but evening haze on hedges. As I walked down the hill into the city, I had a definite sense of God’s biding His moment. What puzzles me, to this day, is in what manner we failed. Certainly, the churches, both Orthodox and Catholic, were never fuller, from morning to night, than in that uncertain summer.

  I returned to my hotel to enjoy a second dinner with a Prussian major, an Austrian colonel, a Ukrainian banker and two émigrés recently arrived fro
m Vologda where, they said, anyone with a vocabulary of more than two hundred words was liable to be shot by the Cheka out of hand. I heard stories of Bolsheviks capturing ‘government’ officers, of stripping them naked and cutting their rank-insignia into their living flesh before killing them. The days of the French Revolution, the days of the Commune, were as nothing compared to the years and years of the Bolshevik Terror. And what did we have to counter it? Humanity? Religion? All we had was pazhlost, that grey, half-dead spiritual state one is in during the winter, when nothing is worthwhile and one can only hope to survive until spring.

  In those days ordinary military operations did not exist; the entire pattern of war had gone crazy. It was gradually to become our Civil War. In the North-East were Czechs and Japanese, Russian Whites and small numbers of Americans and British. Finns, Letts, Lithuanians, Baltic Germans, Poles, French, Greeks, Italians, Rumanians and Serbs were all fighting somewhere. Few of these groups, even if they had been allies against the Germans, were able to agree either strategy or a common aim. Out of China, across the border, there were even raids from mixed groups of Chinese and renegade Cossack bandits bent entirely on looting and pillaging whatever they could get away with. It was like the Middle Ages, only worse. Tanks, machine-guns, aeroplanes and armoured trains were available to vicious, uneducated barbarians. In America it had been a crime to sell guns to Indians. This crime was as nothing compared to that of the British who put arms into the hands of Tatar tribesmen. It is like Africa today, where grenades and rocket-launchers replace the knobkerry and assegai. A small war, with few casualties, becomes a total war with thousands of civilians killed.

  We face the Dark Age and we go into it whistling The Red Flag if it were a music-hall song. Only a few stand back, shouting warnings. Soon they shall be sucked into the black maelstrom, too. There will be no escape this time, no little island monasteries where enlightenment can flourish. The whole world shall be conquered in the name of Zion and Mao. Yet we must resist. If it is a test, we must succeed or be eternally deserted by God. Sometimes I fear He has already left this planet to its fate; that there is another planet, in a distant star-system, which has proven itself a worthier place; where Eden still flourishes.

  My mother took, in the coming weeks, to sending me notes in which she apologised for disturbing me, told me not to visit her and insisted I look after myself and be careful. The notes were brought by various means, often left at the hotel by Esmé on her way to work. Sometimes she would enclose a message of her own, insisting I stay away ‘for your own sake and your mother’s’. My poor mother was suffering from hysterical exhaustion. She would soon recover. I continued to feel extremely uncomfortable.

  My days and evenings were spent advising people on the installation, siting or repair of machinery. For these services I was paid in a variety of ways. Sometimes they were direct cash transactions. Sometimes shares or bonds. I was able to invest money in France, Switzerland, England and, of course, Germany. Without even possessing an office, living entirely out of the hotel, I was becoming a man of means. I knew this could not last forever. I had still not received decisive backing for my main projects. The political climate remained too unsettled for anyone to consider serious investment in Ukraine. There was, as well, a certain amount of ‘pogromchik’ activity in Kiev and outlying regions. This made the German financial people nervous. Many of them had Jewish connection of their own: Jewish masters to whom they were liable. I considered travelling to Berlin, but my mother’s health stopped me from coming to a proper decision.

  As the evenings grew darker and colder, we began to hear rumours of heavy German defeats, of revolutionary activity similar to the kind which had sparked the Petrograd risings. It was obvious that my German acquaintances were wondering if they themselves would have a country to which they could safely return. In the meantime Ataman Petlyura was gaining strength. His Cossack cavalry and his Sich riflemen were joined by many irregulars and it seemed he represented a more popular and stronger force than Skoropadskya’s. The Germans were thinking they had backed the wrong man.

  The Hetman should at least have made some pretence of deferring to peasant demands, but he was too honourable to do anything save obey his own conscience and God’s will. And so he fell. Winter drew down upon Kiev and my hopes were dashed. Almost overnight, my German colleagues left, my Hetmanate contacts deserted me, and the politicians drove me again from The Yevropyaskaya hotel Germany’s Hindenburg Line had been breached. The German Chancellor proposed to accept an armistice plan drawn up by the Americans. The British refused to consider the idea. They wanted blood. By November a Communist Soviet was established in Bavaria and revolution broke out in Berlin itself. The Kaiser abdicated. Prince Max of Baden, the Chancellor, relinquished his position to a socialist. Germany became a Republic and was no longer an ally against Bolshevism. Maps were taken out and lines were re-drawn. We had lost our Crimean territories to Tatars. In spite of the treaty signed with the Don and Kuban Cossacks we had not gained a real ally against the socialists. Just before Christmas, 1918, Petlyura was back in full command promising, in Ukrainian, a secure national future. Not only Russians found his posturing dangerous; a good many Ukrainians decided it would be wiser to give up the struggle. Half the industrialists vanished. During the festive season I again entertained my family at a good hotel; again I spoke of my plans for my engineering business. But it seemed I had achieved little beyond making some money, most of which I should probably never be able to claim. Even my work was likely to be curtailed by the socialists. I had no Special Diploma. I had no career worth speaking of. There was hardly any working industry in Ukraine. I was unable to read most of the newspapers because they were suddenly in an alien language. I had trouble filling in simple forms. I was insulted if I did not ask for my tram fare in Ukrainian. I had again become some sort of second-class citizen. I thought of going to Odessa where at least now it would be possible to book passage on a ship. But I would bide my time for a little while, until the Greens settled in. I moved back to my mother’s flat. She was cheerful and well again. This was a relief. But her moods remain a mystery to me to this day.

  Esmé had continued nursing through at least three different régimes. She was beginning to look drawn. It was Esmé, I thought, who suffered from exhaustion now. My mother devoted herself, with maniacal quixotism, to learning Ukrainian from the badly printed books available. New schools and universities had been established. All, of course, taught in Ukrainian. There was no longer a chance for me to work as a teacher. I had not received a single reply to my requests for a position, though it was generally accepted amongst my friends and the business community that I had done brilliantly at Petrograd. I admit the impression was useful. I was often, these days, addressed as ‘Doctor’ and more than once I was called ‘Professor’. I found this comforting. It did no harm. When I received my Special Diploma I could go on to receive a proper doctorate almost anywhere. I want no one to think I made these claims for myself. But life is often hard. If people wish to have illusions about one, then it is sometimes foolish to spend unnecessary energy denying them. Doubtless because she was overworking, Esmé could sometimes be condescending and irritatingly sharp when I wanted to discuss my plans for the future. On the other hand my mother would sometimes call me ‘Doctor’ just for the sound of it. She would stand on our landing and say, for instance: ‘Well, well, Doctor, here’s our old friend Captain Brown to see us.’

  Captain Brown was beginning to decay almost by the day. His face was blotchy and his hands had an obvious drunkard’s shake. His craving for alcohol was pathetic. Sometimes I was tempted not to pander to him. But Esmé would say ‘What else has he to live for?’ and I could not argue. His stories became more confused, though substantially familiar. He was baffled by what he called ‘this fake language with its fake government, its fake bank-notes and its fake history.’ We hushed him when he uttered such sentiments in Russian. It did not matter when he spoke English, as he did most frequently n
ow. Esmé had learned a little English from me, but not enough for her to understand him clearly. Once, she told me, he had been found in Bessarabskaya market where he had gone up to one of Petlyura’s Sich riflemen and asked him which circus he belonged to. He had spoken first in English, then in French, then in German, then in Russian and then, it seemed, in Polish. The soldier had either misunderstood him or had not bothered to take exception to the insult. A couple of friends had brought the captain home.

  I visited Bessarabskaya myself. Cocaine was plentiful and cheap there, though not of particularly good quality. I was building up a supply for a rainy day, as they say in England. The market was booming, with old family heirlooms to be purchased for a mere chag or two. Chags and karvovantsis were the new monetary units. The notes were so easily forged nobody bothered to check them unless it was in the post office. Inflation was running at a ridiculous rate. At least for a while the prostitutes became younger and prettier. Two of them actually turned out to be the virgins they claimed to be. I was again in a mood to take my pleasures as they came, in case they should not come too frequently later.