The huts to which the cossacks returned as masters or expected guests were filled with rejoicing. The rejoicing was emphasized more sharply and ruthlessly by the deep misery of those who had lost their relatives and dear ones for ever. There were many cossacks missing, scattered over the fields of Galicia, the Bukovina, Eastern Prussia, the Carpathians, Roumania – their bodies lying and rotting under the gunfire dirge. And now the hillocks of the brotherly graves were overgrown with vegetation, rain pressed down on them, and the drifting snow enwrapped them. No matter how often the straight-haired cossack women ran to the corner and gazed under their palms, they would never live to see their dear ones come riding home. No matter how much the tears streamed from their swollen and faded eyes, they could not wash away the pain. No matter how much they cried on the anniversaries and remembrance days, the eastern wind would not carry their cries to Galicia and Eastern Prussia, to the grass-grown hillocks of the brotherly graves.
The grass grows over the graves, time overgrows the pain. The wind blew away the traces of those who had departed; time blows away the bloody pain and the memory of those who did not live to see their dear ones again – and will not live, for brief is human life, and not for long is any of us granted to tread the grass.
The wife of Prokhor Shamil beat her head against the hard ground and chewed the earthen floor of her hut with her teeth, as she saw her brother-in-law, Martin Shamil, caressing his pregnant wife or giving his children presents and dandling them. She writhed and crawled on hands and knees over the floor, whilst around her her little children clung like a drove of sheep, howling as they watched their mother, their eyes dilated with fear.
Tear the collar of your last shirt at your throat, dear heart! Tear the hair of your head, thin with your joyless, heavy life; bite your lips till the blood comes; wring your work-scarred hands and beat yourself against the floor on the threshold of your empty hut! The master is missing from your hut, your husband is missing, your children are fatherless; and remember that no-one will caress you or your orphans, no-one will press your head to his breast at night, when you drop worn out with weariness; and no-one will say to you as once he said: ‘Don’t worry, Aniska, we’ll manage somehow!’ You will not get another husband, for labour, anxieties, children have withered you and lined you. No father will come for your half-naked, snivelling children. You yourself will have to do all the ploughing, the dragging, panting with the over-great strain. You will have to pitchfork the sheaves from the reaper, to throw them on to the wagon, to raise the heavy bundles of wheat on the pitchfork, feeling the while that something is rending beneath your belly. And afterwards you will writhe with pain, covering yourself with your rags and issuing with blood.
As Alexei Bieshniak’s mother turned over his old underwear she wept bitter tears as she sniffed at them; but only in the folds of his last shirt, brought back by Misha Koshevoi, could she smell the traces of his sweat. Dropping her head on to it, the old woman rocked and lamented grievously, soiling the stained and dirty cotton shirt with her tears.
The families of Manitskov, Ozierov, Kalinin, Likhovidov, Yermakov, and many other cossacks were orphaned.
Only for Stepan Astakhov did no-one weep; for there was no-one. His boarded-up hut, tumbledown and gloomy even in summertime, was left empty. Aksinia lived in Yagodnoe, and little was heard of her; she never set foot in the village, and had no inclination towards it.
The cossacks of the upper districts of the Don returned home in local waves. By December almost all had returned to the villages of Vieshenska district. Day and night the bands of riders passed through Tatarsk in groups of from ten to forty, making their way to the left bank of the Don.
‘Where are you from, soldiers?’ the old men would go out and ask.
‘From Chorna Rechka; from Zomovna; from Dubrovka; from Gorokhovska,’ would come the replies.
‘Finished fighting, then?’ an old man would ask with a sneer.
Some of the riders, more honest and peaceable, would reply:
‘We’ve had enough, daddy! We’re finished!’
But the more desperate and evil would curse and advise the old men:
‘Go home, old men, and mind your own business! What are you asking for? There are too many of you busybodies about.’
By the end of the winter the beginnings of civil war had broken out close to Novocherkass, but in the villages in the upper districts of the Don reigned a graveyard silence. Only an internal, hidden dissension raged in the huts, and sometimes broke through to the surface. The old men could not get on with the cossacks returned from the front.
Of the war which was raging close to the capital of the Don province they knew only by hearsay. Only hazily understanding the various political tendencies that had arisen, they waited on event, listening attentively.
Until January life flowed quietly in the village of Tatarsk. The cossacks who had returned from the front rested at the sides of their wives and ate their fill, little recking that still more bitter woes and burdens than those they had had to bear during the war were on guard at the threshold of their huts.
Chapter Nine
In January 1917 Gregor Melekhov was promoted to officer’s rank in recognition of his distinguished services in the field, and was appointed to the second reserve regiment as a troop commander. In the following September he went home on leave, after an illness with inflammation of the lungs. He spent six weeks at home, then was passed as fit by the district medical commission and returned to his regiment. After the November revolution he was promoted to the rank of company commander. About this time his opinions underwent a considerable change, as the result of the events occurring around him and the influence of one of the officers in the regiment, captain Yefim Izvarin.
Gregor made Izvarin’s acquaintance the day he returned from leave, and afterwards met him frequently both on and off duty. Yefim Izvarin was the son of a well-to-do cossack. He had been educated in the Novocherkass Junkers’ training college, went straight from college to the Tenth Don Cossack regiment at the front, served in this regiment for about a year, received the cross of St George and fourteen pieces of hand-grenade in various convenient and inconvenient parts of his body, and was then transferred to the second reserve regiment.
A man of many abilities, highly talented, educated considerably above the level of the average cossack officer, Izvarin was a fervent cossack nationalist. The March revolution afforded him opportunities for development, he associated with cossack separationist circles, and carried on an intelligent agitation for the complete autonomy of the Don region and the establishment of the form of government which had existed before the enslavement of the cossacks by Great Russia. He was well acquainted with history, was ardent yet clear-sighted and sober in intellect, and with compelling eloquence painted a picture of the future free life of the Don cossacks when they would have their own government, when there would not be a Russian left in the province, and the cossackry, setting guards along their own frontiers, would talk as equals, without any cap-raising, with the Ukraine and Great Russia, and carry on commerce and exchange with them. Izvarin turned the heads of the simple-minded cossacks and the poorly educated officers, and Gregor also fell under his spell. At first heated arguments went on between them, but the half-educated Gregor was no match for his opponent, and Izvarin easily triumphed in the verbal duels. The discussion usually took place in some corner of the barracks, and the listeners were always on Izvarin’s side. He impressed the cossacks with his views, touching their innermost, deeply cherished feelings.
‘But how shall we be able to live without Russia, when we’ve got nothing except wheat?’ Gregor would ask.
Izvarin would patiently explain:
‘I am not thinking of an independent and completely isolated existence for just the Don region. We shall live together with the Kuban, the Terek, and the mountaineers of the Caucasus on the basis of federation, that is association. The Caucasus is rich in minerals; you can find everything there.’
‘And coal too?’
‘The Don basin is right to our hands.’
‘But it belongs to Russia.’
‘Whom it belongs to and on whose territory it is is a matter of dispute. But even if the Don basin goes to Russia we shall lose very little. Our federative alliance will not be based on industry. We are an agrarian country, and as that is so we shall supply our small industry with coal bought from Russia. And not only coal! There are many other things we shall have to buy from Russia: timber, metal articles, and so on; and in return we shall supply them with good quality wheat and oil.’
‘And what advantage shall we get by being separate?’
‘That’s simple! In the first place we shall be free from their political protection. We shall restore the order destroyed by the Russian Tsars, and turn out all the foreigners. Within ten years, by importing machinery we shall raise our agriculture to such a level that we shall be ten times as rich. The land is ours. It was washed with our fathers’ blood and fertilized with their bones; but for four hundred years we have been in subjection to Russia, defending her interests and not thinking of ourselves. We have a way out to the sea. We shall have a strong fighting army, and neither the Ukraine nor even Russia will dare to violate our independence. Life will be like a fairy-tale then!’
Izvarin, with his average height, handsome figure and broad shoulders, was a typical cossack. He had curly hair the colour of unripened oats, a swarthy face, a white, receding forehead, and was sunburnt only on his cheeks and along his bleached eyebrows. He spoke in a high, flexible tenor voice, and, when talking, had a habit of suddenly raising his left eyebrow and wrinkling his hook-nose, so that he seemed to be sniffing at something. His energetic walk, self-confident carriage, and the open gaze of his black eyes marked him out from the other officers of the regiment. The cossacks had a frank respect for him, more perhaps than for the regimental commander himself.
He and Gregor had long talks together, and Gregor, feeling that the ground was quaking beneath his feet, passed through an experience similar to that in the hospital at Moscow when he met Garanzha. He compared the words of Izvarin and Garanzha, and tried to decide where the truth was to be found. But he could not. Nevertheless, almost involuntarily and sub-consciously he adopted the new faith.
Shortly after the November revolution he had a long conversation with Izvarin. Torn by contradictory impulses, he cautiously asked the captain what he thought of the Bolsheviks.
‘Tell me, Yefim Ivanitch,’ he said. ‘Do you think the Bolsheviks are right or not?’
Raising his eyebrow and humorously crinkling his nose, Izvarin replied:
‘Are the Bolsheviks right? Ha-ha! My boy, you’re like a newborn babe. The Bolsheviks have their own programme, their own plans and hopes. They are right from their point of view, and we are right from ours. Do you know the real name of the Bolsheviks’ party? No? It is the “Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party.” Understand? “Workers!” They’re flirting now with the peasantry and the cossacks, but the working class is their basis. They are bringing emancipation to the workers, but perhaps even worse enslavement to the peasants. In real life it never works out that everybody gets an equal share. If the Bolsheviks get the upper hand it will be good for the workers and bad for the rest. If the monarchy returns it will be good for the landowners and suchlike and bad for the rest. We don’t want either the one or the other. We need our own, and first of all we need to get rid of all our protectors, whether Kornilov, or Kerensky, or Lenin. God save us from our friends and we’ll manage our enemies ourselves.’
‘But you know the majority of the cossacks are drawn towards the Bolsheviks?’
‘Gregor, my friend, understand this, for it is fundamental. At the moment the roads of the peasants and the cossacks coincide with that of the Bolsheviks. That’s true, but do you know why? It is because the Bolsheviks stand for peace, for an immediate peace, and at the moment this is where the cossacks feel the war!’ He gave himself a sounding slap on his swarthy neck, and straightening his lifted eyebrow, shouted:
‘And that is why the cossacks are reeking with Bolshevism and are going step by step with the Bolsheviks. But … as soon as the war is over and the Bolsheviks stretch out their hands to touch the cossacks’ possessions the roads of the cossacks and the Bolsheviks will part! That is basic, and historically inevitable. Between the present order of cossack existence and socialism, which is the final consummation of the Bolshevik revolution, there is an uncrossable Rubicon, an abyss! Well, what do you say to that?’
‘I say that I don’t understand it!’ Gregor mumbled. ‘It’s hard for me to make head or tail of it. I’m all over the place, like drifting snow in the steppe.’
‘You won’t get out of it like that. Life itself will force you to make something of it, and will drive you to one side or the other,’ Izvarin clinched his argument.
This conversation took place at the beginning of November. Later in the same month Gregor happened to meet another cossack who played a large part in the history of the revolution in the Don. A freezing rain had been falling since midday. Towards evening the weather cleared, and Gregor decided to call on Drozdov, a subaltern of the 28th regiment who came from his own district. He found Drozdov had company: a healthy, sturdy cossack with the epaulettes of a sergeant-major in the guards’ battery was sitting on the camp-bed with his back to the window. He sat with bowed back, his legs in their black cloth trousers set widely apart, his large, hairy hands resting on his broad knees. His tunic fitted him tightly and was rucked up under the arms. At the scrape of the door he turned his short neck, stared coldly at Gregor, and dropped his puffy eyelids over the chilly light of his eyes.
‘Let me introduce you to each other! Gregor, this is Podtielkov from Ust-Khopersk, almost a neighbour of ours,’ said Drozdov.
The two men silently shook hands, and Gregor sat down. He offered his new acquaintance a cigarette. Podtielkov fumbled a long time with his great red fingers at the closely packed case, flushing with confusion and cursing in his vexation. Finally he managed to pick out a cigarette, and raised his smiling eyes to Gregor’s face. His easy manner pleased Gregor, who asked:
‘What village are you from?’
‘I was born in Krutovsky, but I’ve recently been living in Ust-Klinovsky. You’ve heard of Krutovsky, I expect.’
Podtielkov’s face was slightly pockmarked. His whiskers were twisted tightly; his hair was plastered down over his little ears and raised elegantly over his left eyebrow. He would have made a pleasant impression but for his large, upturned nose and his eyes. At first glance there was nothing extraordinary about his eyes, but as he looked more closely Gregor almost felt their leaden heaviness. Small like grapeshot, they gleamed through narrow slits as though out of embrasures, and fastened their gaze on one spot with a heavy, cadaverous obstinacy.
Gregor stared at the man curiously, noting one characteristic feature. Podtielkov almost never blinked. As he talked he fixed his cheerless gaze on his audience, or shifted his glance from object to object, but all the time his curly, sun-bleached eyelashes were drooped and motionless. Only occasionally did he drop his puffy eyelids and suddenly raise them again.
‘Here’s an interesting point, brothers,’ Gregor opened the conversation. ‘The war will end and we shall begin to live again. The Ukraine will have a separate government, and the Military Council will rule in the Don.’
‘You mean ataman Kaledin,’ Podtielkov quietly corrected him.
‘It’s all the same. Where’s the difference?’
‘Oh, there’s no difference,’ Podtielkov agreed.
‘We’ve said good-bye to Mother Russia,’ Gregor continued his paraphrase of Izvarin’s argument, curious to see how Drozdov and this stranger from the guards’ battery reacted to these ideas. ‘We shall have our own government and our own style of life. Out with the Ukrainians from the cossack lands; we’ll establish frontier guards and keep the Hokhols out! We shall live as our forefa
thers lived in the old days. I think the revolution is all to our good. What is your opinion, Drozdov?’
Drozdov smiled ingratiatingly. ‘Of course it will be better for us,’ he replied. ‘The “peasants” robbed us of our strength, and we couldn’t live under them. And all the atamans were Germans: Von Taube, Von Grabbe, and the devil knows what else. They gave our land to all these staff-officers. Now we shall get time to breathe at any rate.’
‘But will Russia agree to all this?’ Podtielkov quietly asked of no-one in particular.
‘She’ll have to,’ Gregor assured him.
‘In any case it will be just the same. The same old soup, only thicker.’
‘How do you make that out?’
‘Of course it will.’ Podtielkov shifted his tiny eyes more swiftly and threw a heavy glance at Gregor. ‘The atamans will go on just the same as before, oppressing the people who have to work. You will go before some “Excellency”, and he’ll give you one on the snout. A fine life indeed! A millstone round the neck, and nothing else.’
And Quiet Flows the Don Page 47