‘I’m Potoaki,’ he told me. It was a name with Polish resonances, but that was not strange in Ukraine. ‘You?’
‘Pyat.’ It was what Mrs Cornelius had christened me. It simply meant ‘five’ in Russian. I thought it gave me exactly the right air. I had decided how to play my game.
He said ‘most of us have only two’ and introduced me to the three men and the woman in our compartment. I remember only the name of the woman. She was Marusia Kirillovna and she was dark and delicate and grim. My mother must have looked like her. She had the same dark eyes, the same expression, half-open, half-shut. ‘Good afternoon, comrade,’ she said. She was pulling on tight leather gloves and there was a holstered automatic Mauser in her lap. She sat nearest the window. Her book was poetry by Mandelstam, and of recent issue, judging by the bad production. The others were good-natured idiots, but Marusia Kirillovna seemed a woman of reliable instinct. I determined to say nothing to her unless asked a direct question. Russia was throwing up better women than men at that time. All the worthwhile men had been killed. And they were more ruthless, some of those women. They judged themselves harshly. Their self-control became fanatical: dangerous to anyone who did not display the same quality. That was one of the reasons I remained uncommunicative. The only way to impress such women is to let their imagination work on your behalf. They are always inclined to see virtue in silence. They assume that a man with nothing to say is more intelligent. I have had long relationships, since my Russian years, which were only maintained because I had the sense to keep my mouth shut. I could have been Sophocles. It would not have mattered. Two or three sentences, and they would know I was ‘a sham’. They are the kind of women who shun mirrors as vanity, yet forever seek mirrors in their lovers. Sure enough, by the time the train was on its way, leaving corpses and cheering Cossacks in its wake, she had already begun to treat me with exaggerated respect. I pulled my hat down over my eyes, pretending to sleep.
Dante driven into exile inspired Liszt to create those painful Bolshoi voices, those Russian girls singing in Latin. What do the English know of exile? They cannot bear it. Everywhere they go they create another Surrey. New Zealand mutton and mint-sauce. And throbbing, terrible Australia, with its two-legged lizards, even that they have attempted to turn into some spiritual Torquay. The Romans left roads and villas. The English leave cold cups of tea and stale crumpets and ‘guest houses’ littering the world from China to Rio de Janeiro. They cannot abide emotion. They cannot face death, any more than can the Americans. So they smooth it away with polite voices and coffee-mornings. And because death is so unpleasant, because they cannot look Terror in the eye and smile back at him, they let their Law decline, their Empires fade—and they, too, have lost their honour. Phoenicia went sailing. What can save the world? Not the Jewish-Moslem God. We have had our taste of the power of the rabbi and the Khan. Our Cossacks dealt with them and will deal with them again if need be. Only the Son can save us. Christ is a Greek. The Greeks knew that. They laughed at the Jews when they spoke of strange new ideas. The Greeks took those ideas to Palestine. They were welcome again in Byzantium. Defend Greece. How did the English defend Cyprus? They let Turkish peasants foul it. Those sons of Islam knew nothing. They could not look after the houses they stole. They could not look after the olive groves or the vineyards. The Greeks lost everything. Islam is rising. Zion is rising. And from the East the Khans are galloping again, with skulls for banners, but now it is the skull of Mao who grins down at us from the lance-poles. Must Russia defend the West alone? Still? Must Ukraine drown in fresh blood? I worship Him: Kyrios, the Lord. The Christ of Saint Paul. The Greek Christ. I worship Him. Plato, Archimedes, Homer and Socrates were created by God to be the first prophets of Jesus, the Greek Messiah. That was why the Jews hated him. He spoke for Reason and Love. Their envious black eyes looked across the waters of the Middle Sea and saw Light glowing. Ah, Jerusalem. Oh, Carthage. They should put a wall across the world. What is race? Nothing. A description of the spirit. Christ is a Greek. Islam and Zion turn hot, black eyes towards the West. The light is too strong for them. It was alien to them. They crucified him. Those ancient devils, those primitive souls. What do they know of humility, with their Korans and their Talmuds? All they know is vengeance. Watch them fight. All they know is vengeance. What have we done to them? Fires burn through the Middle East, through Africa, through Asia. They are the smoking fires of ignorance. God tried to kill his own Son and failed. His Son returned from exile to Byzantium and there He shelters still. Where East and West blend in harmony, there is Christ. And that is the knowledge every Russian holds within him. It is what Tikhon tried to tell us; our martyred Tikhon. Herod. Nero. Stalin. They sought to kill the Shepherd. All they slaughtered was the sheep. The bandit-kings come and go. They die perplexed, wondering why they have won nothing, defeated nothing. And the generosity of the Shepherd is greater than ever. He is our protector, our comfort and our hope.
As night fell and the train became colder I was forced to share the chicken and salami from my very obvious hamper. They were all grateful. Even the woman ate with unfeminine greed. The train was moving very slowly. Since we had not yet passed Vinnitza, it would be a long time before we reached Odessa. Once or twice we heard firing, or saw flashes of rifles and artillery in the distance, but nobody was able to speculate with any authority as to the identity of the antagonists. Marusia Kirillovna suggested it was probably just Haidamaki fighting amongst themselves. I think she could have been right. There were thousands of petty warlords seeking to hold smaller and smaller territories as the major participants moved closer together for the decisive battles of our Civil War. Sometimes shots were fired from the train. We had a Red Army escort which would disembark when it reached a territory occupied by bandits who (like Vietnamese today) found it politic to declare themselves Bolsheviks. Thus they received arms and money to achieve their own petty ends.
Potoaki became bored. He kept leaving the carriage, presumably to use the lavatory (although there was one in the adjoining cubicle) and returning, stamping his feet and clapping his gloved hands together. The woman looked at him with considerable intolerance. ‘Trying to make the train go faster, comrade?’
‘I’m supposed to be at the docks by tomorrow morning,’ he explained. ‘There’s a French ship arriving— ‘
‘What will you do?’ Another occupant took Marusia Kirillovna’s lead. ‘Speak to each French sailor as he comes ashore? Explain he’s hampering the course of world revolution?’
‘They’re unloading supplies.’ Potoaki sat down beside me again and brought out his bottle of vodka. ‘It will be up to me to find out the kind of guns we’ll be confronting.’ With a self-important movement of his hand he finished his vodka.
‘I hope you don’t broadcast that particular piece of information so efficiently,’ she said. She stood up, arranged her dark shirt, then carefully reseated herself. ‘Has anyone the time?’
I took out my watch. It had stopped. I replaced it in my pocket. ‘I am sorry.’
‘We must be nearing Hrihorieff’s territory.’ Potoaki bent across the dark-faced man who sat reading a newspaper by the window. He wiped away condensation. There was nothing but ice inside and out. He rubbed at his waistcoat. ‘That salami of yours must have been cat and rat.’ He belched. ‘It can’t have been dog. Dog never disagrees with me.’ He laughed. We were all becoming irritated. He could sense it. He apologised, farted, and left the smell behind him as he stepped again into the corridor. We kept the door open, in spite of the cold, until the air was clearer. Nobody mentioned the source of the smell. The train stopped completely. I thought I heard shouts from the locomotive. Booted feet ran past our carriage. There was a clatter. The feet ran back. Our train began to build up steam and again we were moving. Potoaki came in and told us there had been trees on the line. Soldiers had cleared the track. ‘They’ re used to it. I’ve never seen such efficiency.’ He hesitated. ‘I’d hoped for a smoother ride. You’d think they’d let refug
ees through.’
The dark man with the newspaper was puzzled. ‘We’re not refugees.’
‘They don’t know that, do they? What bastards these people are. Worse than the Poles.’
‘You’re from Galicia?’ asked the woman.
‘I spent years in Moscow. And two years in Siberia.’
‘Where in Siberia?’ asked the man opposite him.
‘Near Kondinsk. Then I was a few months in the army.’
‘I know Kondinsk,’ said the man who had asked the question. He looked at me. ‘Are you a “Siberian”, too?’
‘Happily,’ I said, ‘not.’
‘It’s an experience,’ said Potoaki. ‘It gives you a better idea of what you’re fighting for. You live like the peasants. All our people should do it voluntarily. It keeps your feet on the ground.’
‘Or under it,’ said the dark man. Only I and Marusia Kirillovna did not laugh at this.
‘You get your milk in slices up there.’ Potoaki became nostalgic. ‘You had milk?’
‘The peasants did. They were often very kind. You have to saw it. Have you watched them sawing their milk?’
The man opposite nodded but now he was looking sceptically at Potoaki, as if he did not believe the man had been a political prisoner at all. There was a great deal of elitism involved. Whatever your intelligence, the length of your Siberian sentence gave extra weight to any argument you might make. They were like savages. And all obviously were originally well-educated.
The train was going faster. Soon it was moving as rapidly as any prewar Express. This cheered us. ‘We could be in Odessa by morning,’ said Potoaki. He relaxed.
His fellow Siberian said quietly, ‘I never feel lonely now. Not after so much solitude. Every spring I am utterly re-born. A new person. But with the same political convictions, of course. That, however, is the mind. The mind remains. But the spirit is re-born every spring.’
He was becoming as much a bore as Potoaki. The man by the window uttered a choking, tubercular cough. The coughing grew worse. He began to snort and wheeze.
‘It’s asthma, I think,’ said the woman. She made to open the window. We all protested.
‘Get him into the corridor.’ Potoaki helped the man to his feet. Blood was on his lips. He tried to suppress the coughing and at the same time gasped for air. ‘What we need is a doctor.’
From boredom and to show I was a good comrade, I got up and moved along the carriage, asking if a doctor were present. Naturally, there was not. Any person with a real profession would have refused to be in the ‘political’ carriage. They would have had proper work to do. The coughing subsided as I returned. Ice was falling away from one of the forward windows, melted by gusting steam. I saw a few bare trees and small, snow-covered hills. We passed what I took to be gypsy fires. I felt much better now that we had picked up speed.
I remained in the corridor for the next hour or two, smoking and thinking. I had been lucky. None of the Bolsheviks had questioned me. All assumed I must be on important business because I had arrived in an official car. Dawn came, miserable and cunning. The train’s pace did not slacken. We were at least half-way to Odessa. The woman emerged from the compartment. She was stiff. She stretched her legs and arms like a dancer. Her pistol was on her hip. I realised, with a hint of amusement, that both skirt and black blouse were of heavy silk. She had not had a deprived childhood. She was used to the best. She nodded to me and asked for a cigarette which I willingly gave her. I had several hundred with me. They were likely to prove invaluable. We smoked. She rubbed at her neck. She seemed paler. I wondered if she were Jewish. There was something about her mouth. She yawned, looking out onto the grey snow. The sky was heavy and melancholy. There was yellow grey mist hanging between it and the land. I have never really seen anything like it since. It seemed to depress her. I had a stupid impulse to put my arm around her shoulders (though she was almost as tall as me). I motioned. She looked into my face. She seemed startled. She said rapidly: ‘You’re tired. You should rest.’
‘Aha,’ I said. This was significant, even to me.
‘You must have a great deal on your mind. Too much thinking is exhausting, eh?’
‘Oh, indeed, Marusia Kirillovna.’ She hesitated. ‘I’m disturbing you?’
‘Not at all.’ I put my hand out to her without touching her. ‘I’m bored.’
This relieved her. ‘I can’t stand being still. It’s what makes a revolutionary, I suppose. Impatience.’
As one whose main virtue is patience, I could say nothing. Perhaps her generalisation was correct and that was why I was not a revolutionary. I have no patience with fools; but you will not find me complaining after five minutes if a bus does not come along.
She continued. ‘One desires to create Utopia overnight. It’s hard to understand, isn’t it, why people resist? They haven’t the imagination, I suppose. Or the vision. We have to supply that. It’s our function. We all have a rôle.’
I nodded. The train slowed, then gained speed. It drummed down a gradient, turning in a long curve, and everything was grey, including the locomotive, part of which I could now see. Our skins were grey. The windows were grey. The smoke from our grey cigarettes blended together to form a single grey cloud near the ceiling.
‘But what is duty, I wonder?’ asked Marusia Kirillovna.
There came a noise from outside the train. I looked up at the embankment. I saw men in heavy coats squatting behind machine-guns. Others were mounted. They fired at us with carbines.
The glass shattered. I fell to the floor, bearing Marusia Kirillovna with me. The train began to shriek and shudder. Cold air filled the squealing corridor. The train jolted as if mortally wounded, skidding down the gradient for a few more yards. It twitched and became lifeless, save for the sound of steam escaping, like the last breaths of a corpse.
Marusia Kirillovna’s blood stained my shirt and jacket. It warmed my hands. Her face was all blood. The only thing I could recognise was one sad and disapproving eye. Even as I crawled back towards the compartment I thought she had died exactly as her romantic nature might have demanded. Few of us are given the opportunity.
The Bolsheviks in my compartment were searching in their luggage for the pistols they all seemed to carry. I was astonished to see so much metal in those limp hands. I pulled my own bags down from the rack and, pushing them ahead of me, scrambled through the connecting door into the next carriage. I had no wish to be identified with the Reds.
I found myself in a press of peasants who screamed uncontrollably or sat with their hands covering their heads. The glass here had also been shattered. Several people were wounded while others were quite dead, sitting bolt upright between fellow passengers who could not or did not wish to move. It was a peculiar moment. The peasants thought I was an official. They began asking me what had happened. I said I intended to find out. They must let me through. They pushed one another back, some even removing their caps, to allow me to pass. There were more machine-guns firing. It was from our side. Another volley. There were shouts from the embankment and from our own soldiers. The firing stopped. They seemed to be parleying.
I reached the end of the second carriage and decided to wait where I was. The lavatory was occupied. I balanced my bags on top of some sacks and moved a little distance away, as if I were merely waiting to use the lavatory. Through the broken glass I saw stocky figures stumbling down the embankment. They made dark scars in the snow. They were laughing and using words like ‘comrade’ and ‘soviet’. I began to feel a little less anxious. These were Bolsheviks who had fired on us by accident. They were a long way from Bolshevik lines and wore no red stars. Indeed, they had no identifiable uniforms at all. I guessed they were irregulars.
THIRTEEN
THEY WERE USING a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian which was easy enough to understand. At least half of what they shouted was slogans. The attackers had begun to argue with the defenders. They needed supplies. The Red Army soldiers pointed out that th
e train only carried passengers. I heard one of the newcomers laugh. ‘They’ll have supplies. What are they? Katsupi on their way to France?’
‘There are important comrades on board. They have work in Odessa.’
‘We have work, too. Give us the Jews and a Katsup or two. We need food. Do you know how long we’ve been out here?’
‘Who are you with?’
‘Hrihorieff.’
‘He’s turned against us.’ ‘He’s turned back again.’ ‘How do we know?’
There was silence. Then murmuring. Then some oaths. A few moments later sailors came alongside the train thumping with their rifle-butts on the doors. ‘Everybody out for an inspection, citizens.’
They stopped when they got to the ‘Party carriage’. I began to make my way to it, but now the peasants were even more confused, trying to get their bundles together. I was pushed back. I managed to grab one suitcase. The other was left behind. I decided to return to my compartment by way of the ground. I had no galoshes. I plunged through melting snow. It was freezing. My shoes and trousers were soaked by the time I reached the carriage. I was climbing up when a soldier shouted. ‘Stay where you are!’
I looked at him, smiling. ‘I’m merely going to my carriage, comrade. I’ve been trying to help the people back there who were shot.’
The soldier, a heavy-faced Russian, paused. He thought for a moment. I continued to climb. He said, ‘Why do you have a suitcase with you?’
‘I picked it up instinctively. My comrades will vouch for me.’
I opened the carriage door. The guard drew back the bolt on his rifle. ‘Stay there for a moment. I’ll have to check this.’
‘You’re being foolish.’
‘I must be careful.’
I was glad I had the suitcase with my spare papers in it. At least they would show me as nothing more than an innocent engineer, my ‘cover’, if they liked, for Odessa. There were more people out in the snow now than there had been at Fastov. I heard a peasant ask an insurgent where we were. Near Dmitrovka, he said. It was a town some fifty versts from Alexandriya. It meant we had not been on the direct express route at all, although we were certainly heading for Odessa.
Byzantium Endures: The First Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet Page 39