With Guchkov’s letter the spring was released and Vorotyntsev was catapulted forward and upward, with all that had been accumulating within him finding no release. Almost within the hour, still on his way through the HQ hutment, he had made up his mind to go, look, learn. Maybe that was where he could be most useful. Petrograd was the obvious place to go. A unique moment was approaching—so Guchkov had hinted in his letter.
His shoulders and his back ached for action. He must give whatever strength he had left.
In those few hours at Corps HQ, he heard yet another rumor, from two officers of his acquaintance (separately): that there was a conspiracy to carry out a coup d’état in Petrograd—and that everybody knew about it!
What could it mean? What could the conspirators have in mind? And what chance had they when news of it had reached even his Corps HQ without the use of telephone or telegraph?
What sort of conspiracy was it if everybody knew about it? Or was it so overwhelmingly strong, so sure of success, that concealment was unnecessary?
That very evening he applied for leave. Three days later he handed over the regiment to his replacement. And sped off along his scorching vector.
* * *
I’D MAKE PEACE WITH THE TURK,
BUT THE TSAR SAYS NO.
* * *
[13]
Fired by its high design, the heart leaps instantly ahead, but the body is slow: first, the captured Austrian narrow-gauge line from Kimpolung, then the first little trains, with frequent changes, and no passengers except soldiers behaving as they had learned to do in the Transylvanian mountains, where they saw no civilians at all, let alone a real live woman. In the officers’ carriages you heard the usual officers’ conversation, and although they were all new faces, from many different regiments, with different tales to tell, they all dwelled on the same humdrum experiences—the lieutenant with the black rubber glove concealing a mutilated hand, the burly Caucasian cavalry officer with a sword in an enameled sheath, and the overexcited staff captain full of complaints against his superior—"that GHQ Jesuit.”
Later, he slept as far as Vinnitsa. From Vinnitsa onward there were many civilians on the train, and every fellow passenger brought a fresh accretion of information, preparing him for the vastness of the rear, a more populous world after all than his own. He couldn’t shut his ears to any of it, he felt that he must drink it all in—or what would be the point of his journey? More information than he could comfortably accommodate forced itself into his head and buzzed restlessly around.
Then there were the papers, bought at stations along the line, and read now as a duty, not just out of curiosity, and full for the most part of arguments about which ministry should be put in charge of the food supply. He couldn’t make head or tail of it. At Kiev he was surprised to see such crowds at the station—crowds of lively people with apparently not a care in the world. And although he was speeding as though catapulted, propelled still by his obsession, Vorotyntsev could not help feeling a certain very pleasurable slackening of the tension. He was vaguely aware of passing officers, saluting without really seeing them. He also tried not to notice sad and anxious faces, and had no eyes for women in mourning, but only for those who were wearing their best and gaily chattering. Suddenly, he longed for anything that reminded him of life before the war. There was nothing unnatural about it—but it was something he would never have expected to feel. A forgotten sensation, a pleasurable but somehow dishonorable one. It was as if he was getting younger from one half hour to the next. He did not slacken in his flight, but the nature of the flight was changing.
His destination was Petersburg, with no stops on the way, and he had intended to hurry there before his ardor cooled, and without letting his wife know, but suddenly, in this new frame of mind, he wavered: perhaps he should look in on her first? To make his decision easier, the Moscow train would leave six hours before the through train to Petersburg. He didn’t feel like a tedious wait, and he told himself that Guchkov might well be in Moscow, as he often was.
Once persuaded, he was happy. He bought a ticket for Moscow and immediately sent a telegram to Alina, pleased for her and for himself.
In the station restaurant he found himself at the same table with a sailor from Sevastopol, and heard a staggering item of news that had not been reported in the newspapers. A week ago, just before dawn on 20 October, fire had broken out in the forward ammunition locker of the Empress Maria, causing a big explosion and a general conflagration. Admiral Kolchak had hastened to the rescue and personally supervised the flooding of the remaining lockers on the listing ship. It had worked, and there were no more explosions. The battleship had capsized and sunk, but neither the harbor approach nor the city was affected. Still, the pride of the Black Sea Fleet was no more, and two hundred men were dead and several hundred injured.
How could such a thing happen? Nobody knew. The culprits had not been found. It emerged, however, that workmen were, as often happened, brought in on the night before the explosion to carry out repairs, without a roll call, or inspection of their bundles, or supervision on board. Anybody could have wandered on and dropped anything he pleased through a ventilator into the hold.
What a way to fight a war!
The finest ship in the fleet!
Why have I let myself be distracted and diverted? I shouldn’t be going via Moscow!
Vorotyntsev was half asleep and half awake. He had lost touch with civilian life, and there was something to startle him at every turn. Thoughts of the unknown people he was about to look up swarmed in his mind. Every new arrival had something fresh to say, and he felt compelled to listen.
Between Kiev and Bryansk one incorrigibly talkative passenger lengthily aired views which he seemed to think self-evident: the government was intolerable, Russia was ruled by the gigantic figure of a debauched bumpkin, and the country’s one hope of salvation was the Unions of Zemstvos and Towns. The man turned out to be a grain and fodder buyer for the army, and talked about fixed prices, repositories, station warehouses, mills, milling standards, and deliveries to the towns and to the troops.
Soldiers and civilians had different concerns, different scales of importance. A soldier at the front was in constant contact with timeless things, and what seemed of prime importance to civilians was laughable to him.
The hours passed, the train went deeper and deeper into the rear, and Vorotyntsev, weary and distracted as he was, listened carefully, schooling himself.
His companion’s knowledge was not limited to wheat. Some of the things he talked about Vorotyntsev might have surmised, except that you can’t see far from a trench.
The “liquidation of German domination” act. What was the point of it? What would Russia gain by it? German landowners and settlers were being driven off the land, 600,000 desyatins* would remain unsown, model farms would go to rack and ruin, farms that used to manufacture their own threshers and seed drills.
The refugee problem. Why had they invented it anyway? To scare off the Germans? By displacing millions of people, to come pouring in like lost souls, blocking the railroads and the cities in the hinterland? Anyway, it had been obvious long ago that the war wouldn’t be over in a month, so these people should have been resettled—the state had reserves of vacant land in various places, besides that taken from the Germans. The new farmers should have been given financial aid to settle in and start tilling the land. Should have been, but weren’t. So these millions of people were without work, while labor was recruited from outside, and Chinese brought in to aggravate the congestion. It was no good—Vorotyntsev’s head couldn’t take it all in. How could he hope to make sense of it all in the few short days of his furlough? He could only marvel at the vastness of the administration’s problems, the impossibility of solving them at a stroke, and the unlikelihood of any one person being able to grasp them.
From what he knew of Guchkov, he wouldn’t be able to either.
I must find people who already know the answers.
>
As soon as the train reached stations under civilian control his eye was affronted by the occasional glimpse of a uniformed “zemstvo hussar.” These officials of the Unions of Zemstvos and Towns had no connection with the army, and never turned up anywhere near the front, but they wore a smart uniform, almost like that of an officer, with embroidered epaulets, but narrow ones like those of an army doctor or a civil servant.
They of course held forth louder than anybody on the train. What they were surest of was the state of the Russian government, and the final disaster for which Russia was heading. There was no arguing with them—they were too well-informed—and Vorotyntsev was more and more alarmed. Had he woken up too late? Maybe all was lost, and his journey was pointless? Perhaps the situation in the rear was worse than that at the front?
Yet he heard the same fellow travelers deplore negotiations for a separate peace. (His heart beat faster. They didn’t know what a raw nerve they had touched! Was someone really talking peace?)
One of these people, wearing the same sort of uniform, got on at Bryansk—a man of rather more than thirty with a blond mustache, a quiet, pleasant person. When he heard that the colonel had just come from Romania he fired questions at him. He had been there several times himself before the war on business for his firm. He was, it appeared, an engineer, Swiss by birth, and Gerber by name. He had been brought to Russia as a small child—his father was also an engineer—had grown up as a Russian and had traveled around the country a lot. When another zemstvo hussar said snootily, “You have Zemgor* and the War Industry Committee to thank for your shells, they supply most of them,” Gerber calmly contradicted him.
“No, you’re wrong. Most of them come from government factories.”
“How do you know that?” the other man said heatedly. “I manage Zemgor’s central garage in Moscow, and I know what its trucks carry.”
They went out into the corridor for a smoke, and Gerber told him the extra bit he didn’t want to mention in the other man’s presence: not long ago a consignment of shells from a government factory had been brought to the station, and by the time they were loaded the next morning the crates had Zemgor stamps on them. A neat trick—and the troops at the front would be taken in.
They went on talking, and Gerber declared that the whole intelligentsia was in the grip of an epidemic, a contagious disease: it made them abuse the government and lose their sense of responsibility to state and people. They would stop at nothing to undermine the government.
“And how did you escape infection?”
“Probably because I’m not Russian,” Gerber said with a smile, “so I can take a detached and impartial view. However bad a government is, changing it in the middle of a war would lead to anarchy.”
These additional impressions from Gerber were more than Vorotyntsev could take in. He dozed off after Sukhinichi, but slept badly. His worries and uncertainties, and not least his mixed feelings, at once pleasurable and anxious, about Moscow gave him no respite.
Coarsened by life at the front, he had not realized how powerfully it would affect him: to stroll around Moscow, his own city, and look across the river from rising ground at the jumble of buildings marked here and there with the blue and gold of cupolas.
To dispense with his batman, Vorotyntsev was traveling almost without luggage. In the glass-roofed Bryansk station he went straight to a telephone booth, called the operator, asked for the apartment of Guchkov’s brother Nikolai Ivanovich, and was told that Aleksandr Ivanovich was at present in Petrograd and not expected in the next few days.
It was more obvious all the time that he should have gone straight from Kiev to Petrograd. Coming to Moscow was a mistake, he needn’t have been so impatient. If only he hadn’t sent that telegram to Alina, damn it, he could have gone straight from station to station, without risking distraction and loss of impetus: Georgi had burned his fingers so often in the past—impetuously making premature promises.
But when he thought of his wife he was conscience-stricken.
He had been the same all his life: family matters always took second place to his real concerns, there was never room for them.
He had sent the telegram because he liked making Alina happy. He could imagine how happy she would be, and all the little preparations which were so important to her; it would be more enjoyable for her that way than if he descended unexpectedly.
But although it would have been faster to go straight home, Vorotyntsev, who liked putting first things first, made for Nikolaevski station.
The No. 4 tram (from the Dorogomilov Gate to Sokolniki) went straight there, but when Vorotyntsev got into the street he saw something new to him: people clinging in clusters to the handrails on the steps of the tram’s rear platform, losing hold, running to catch up, landing on other people’s feet, clutching at other people’s arms.
There were, however, plenty of unoccupied cabs outside the station, but what used to be a fifty-kopeck ride cost three rubles—take it or leave it. Now they were crossing the new Borodino Bridge, and to their right a big black cloud was drifting from the Sparrow Hills over an already overcast sky. The cabby pointed his whip at it. “Let’s hope it doesn’t mean snow. We’ve had one fall already. Froze over as well.”
Yes, Moscow was having a cold October, while in Romania there was only slush. Vorotyntsev had had the foresight to wear his big fur hat but had not put on a fur-lined tunic under his greatcoat. It always made him too hot, and there was nothing he dreaded more than feeling as though he was in a steam bath.
So here I am—riding through Moscow as though in a fairy tale!
His mind was still occupied with Guchkov, but his eyes were fixed on his surroundings, staring with childlike enjoyment at the city of his birth.
It was as if he had never before appreciated its inimitable contours—boulevard after boulevard, building after building—but of course no observer from outside would ever see in the city what an old inhabitant knew to be there. The great houses, yes—but does he see the spacious grounds behind them? And then, in a lane hard by, the sort of tavern you would find in a run-down country town, a cheap bathhouse, life going on as it had two centuries ago, people drinking tea from samovars in weedy yards. And you didn’t just know all these things—every corner, every tree, every paving stone as it passed before your stirred emotions and memories. How much that did not meet the eye was lodged in them! Yet people went by, trod it all underfoot noticing nothing.
He was carried away, as if this was what he had come for, to look his fill of Moscow. To come from another world, from absolute nothingness to your native place—what greater thrill can there be! And the memories that came to him were not of recent things, not of the months just before the war, but of days long gone, of childhood.
He could so easily have never returned to look at it all. One little lump of lead, half an ounce of iron, would have been enough.
But all those people. The city was not its old self. The jostling crowds, an unbroken stream, the tram drivers desperately ringing their bells and knocking on their windows to get pedestrians to move out of the way. And the trams themselves were packed. Well, there was a war on, and Moscow was overpopulated. Many of the passersby you could tell at a glance were not Muscovites. They were better dressed than most of the locals. Were they from Poland? The Baltic States? Languages other than Russian reached him from the pavement. And when he had telephoned from the station the young lady had answered “zajȩte,” and only when he had asked her to repeat it did he realize that she meant “zanyato.” So there must be Polish girls working at the exchange. He remembered being told on the train about the refugees. There were many anxious faces. But there were many others on which the war had left no imprint at all.
What was this, though? People of different ages, mostly women, bunched together here and there, blocking the pavement, in a strange formation, each pair of eyes fixed on the back of someone’s head. Like blind people waiting their turn for something, or soldiers standing wit
h mess tins ready when the field kitchen arrives—but there it was always quick. Here in the city it was weird to see one person studying the back of another’s head.
The cabby explained: “Standing in line.”
Did Alina have to do this too?
Something else he’d never seen: women tram drivers, women conductors, women changing the points. Women in place of yardmen. He caught a glimpse of a girl wearing a messenger boy’s red cap.
All of which went to show how right he was: Russia at war could not carry on like this.
The cabby complained that his horse was losing weight: you couldn’t buy enough oats.
Another thing: streamers with red crosses hung on many buildings, as if one-quarter of Moscow was engaged in treating the wounded. Could there be so many military hospitals? The cabby explained that anybody could hang out a streamer if he took in just five wounded men in a single apartment. And were people taking them? Certainly they were.
Looked at one way, this showed magnanimity; looked at another, it showed poor organization. How could they scatter the wounded around in such a fashion? And there were so many men in bandages on the streets. Most of them apparently lightly wounded or making a good recovery. There were also a lot of disabled men on crutches.
What did victory matter to them now? Even victory plus Constantinople? Back there, he was aware only of men leaving. But here was where they were all gathering. And here they weighed much more heavily on his conscience. How could it go on like this?
Heavy trucks went by from time to time, overtaking carts and cabs. And some armored cars. There were also passenger cars, open-topped or covered.
The sheer size of Russia! Who could possibly take this great mass in hand, reform it, give its life a new direction, save it? Was there somewhere a handful of men, soldiers or civilians, capable of it?
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