As Piotra approached, Likhovidov guessed by his walk that he was an officer risen from the ranks. So he did not invite him into his house, and he spoke to him with a hint of benevolent familiarity:
‘No, my lad, there’s nothing for you to do in the Migulinsk district. They’ve managed without you; we received a telegram yesterday evening. Ride back and await further orders. Stir up the cossacks well! A large village like Tatarsk, and only forty fighters? Wring their withers, the scum! It’s their skins that are at stake. Good-bye, and good journey.’
He went into his house, carrying his heavy body with unexpected ease, his boots creaking. Piotra returned to his cossacks on the square. They overwhelmed him with questions. Not attempting to hide his satisfaction, he smiled and answered:
‘Home! They’ve done without us!’
The cossacks grinned and went in a crowd towards their horses. Christonia even sighed as though a great load had fallen from his back, and clapped Tomilin on the shoulder:
‘So we’re going home, cannoneer!’
After considering the situation they decided not to spend the night in Kargin, but to return at once. In scattered and disorderly groups they rode out of the village. They had ridden unwillingly to Kargin, rarely breaking into a trot, but on the way back they rode their horses hard, galloping their fastest. The earth, cracked with lack of rain, thundered beneath their horses’ hoofs. Beyond the Don and the distant range of hills lightning was playing.
They arrived in Tatarsk at midnight. As they galloped down the hill Anikushka fired from his Austrian rifle, and a salvo of shots rang out to announce their return. The dogs in the village gave tongue in reply, and scenting its home, one of the horses snorted and neighed. Through the village they scattered in various directions.
As he said good-bye to Piotra, Martin Shamil croaked with relief:
‘Well, the fighting’s over! That’s good!’
Piotra smiled in the darkness and rode off to his hut. Pantaleimon came out and took his horse, unsaddled it and led it into the stable. He and Piotra entered the hut together.
‘Is it all over?’ he asked.
‘Aha!’
‘Well, praise be! May we hear no more of it!’
Daria arose, hot from sleep. She went to get her husband some supper. Gregor came out half-dressed from the kitchen, scratching his hairy chest, and winked humorously at Piotra.
‘So you’ve beaten them?’ he remarked.
‘I can beat any soup that’s left!’
‘You can beat the soup all right, especially if I give you a hand!’
Until Easter there was not a sound or smell of war. But on the Easter Saturday a messenger galloped into the village from Vieshenska, left his foaming horse at Korshunov’s gate, and ran into the porch.
‘What news?’ Miron Gregorievitch greeted him.
‘I want the ataman. Are you he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Arm the cossacks at once. Podtielkov is leading the Red Guards into Nagolinsk district. Here’s the order.’ He turned the sweaty lining of his cap inside out to get the packet.
At the sound of talking old Grishaka came out, harnessing his spectacles to his nose. They read the order from the regional ataman. Leaning against the balustrade, the messenger rubbed the dust from his face with his sleeve.
On Easter Sunday, after breaking their fast, the mobilized cossacks rode out of the village. General Alferov’s order was strict: he threatened that all who refused to go would be deprived of the title of cossack. So the detachment was composed not of forty men, as at first, but a hundred and more, including a number of older men who were possessed with the desire to have a smack at the Bolsheviks. The young men went willy-nilly; the older in the heat of the hunt.
Gregor Melekhov rode in the last rank. A rain was sprinkling from the clouded heaven. The clouds rolled above the brilliantly green steppe. An eagle was floating high above the hills. With deliberate flaps of its wings it flew before the wind to the east, a dark brown speck distancing and diminishing.
The steppe was a shining green with the rain. Here and there were snapdragons and clumps of last year’s wormwood. On the slope single grey bushes stood on guard.
As they dropped down into Kargin they were met by a youngster driving bullocks out to graze. He went slapping along with bare feet, waving his whip. Seeing the riders, he halted and attentively examined their mud-splashed horses.
‘Where are you from?’ Tomilin asked.
‘Kargin,’ the lad boldly replied, smiling under the coat thrown over his head.
‘Have your cossacks gone?’
‘They’ve gone. They’ve gone to smash the Red Guards. Have you got any tobacco for a cigarette, daddy?’
‘Tobacco for you?’ Gregor reined in his horse.
The lad went up to him. His tucked-up trouser legs were wet, and the stripes were a shining red. He stared boldly into Gregor’s face and said:
‘You’ll be seeing dead bodies in a moment, as soon as you go downhill. Yesterday our cossacks drove the Red prisoners out and killed them. I was minding cattle over there by that bush, and saw them cut them down. Oh, it was terrible! When the swords began to swing they roared and ran … Afterwards I went and looked; they were mostly Chinese. One of them was cut down through the shoulder, and I could see the heart beating in his chest, and the blue kidneys … It was terrible!’ he repeated, astonished that the cossacks were not frightened by his story. So at least he judged as he stared at the cold and unmoved faces of Gregor, Christonia and Tomilin.
He lit his cigarette, stroked the wet neck of Gregor’s horse, said ‘Thank you’ and ran off to his bullocks.
By the roadside, in a shallow hole washed with rain-water, only lightly sprinkled with earth, lay the bodies of the Red Guards. One leaden-blue face was visible; the blood had baked on its lips. And a bare foot with blue woollen trousers below it stuck out of the ground.
‘They might bury them better! The swines!’ Christonia muttered. He abruptly brought his whip down across his horse, overtook Gregor and galloped downhill.
‘Well, so blood has flowed on the Don earth too!’ Tomilin smiled, but his cheeks were twitching. ‘Gregor, can you smell how the blood stinks? Can you smell it?’
Chapter Nine
In the morning the weather took a strange turn. It had been noticeably hot by nine o’clock, but towards mid-day a wind sprang up from the south, the clouds sped across the heavens, and on the outskirts of Rostov there was an intoxicating scent from the juicy young poplar leaves and the sunburnt bricks and earth.
On the previous day Bunchuk and Anna with a selected detachment had disarmed an insurgent anarchist band at the station. On the previous day frowns had furrowed Bunchuk’s ageing brow. But now the wind from the south had driven away his cares, and he was domesticatedly tackling a primus stove on the doorstep, and coldly staring at Anna’s face, which was warm with a taunting smile.
Before breakfast he had muttered something about being a good hand at cutlets with sauce.
‘Are you serious?’ Anna doubted.
‘Quite.’
‘Where did you learn?’
‘Well, you know, a Polish woman taught me during the war.’
‘Go and try your hand. I still have my doubts.’
Hence the primus stove. Hence Bunchuk’s furrowed brow and Anna’s smile, with so much sly roguishness in it that he could not stand it. He vigorously shook the potatoes in the frying-pan, and frowned:
‘Of course, if you’re going to stand over me and jeer, nothing will come of it. And do you call this a primus? It’s a blast-furnace, if you want to know.’
Anna spoke slowly and almost dreamily:
‘Why weren’t you a cook? What dishes you would have prepared! With what authority you would have ruled in the kitchen! Really, why did you neglect the culinary department?’
‘Listen, you’re going too far!’
Anna played with a lock of her hair, twisting it in her fingers. Glancin
g up under her eyelids at him, she burst into a peal of laughter:
‘I’ll tell the boys this very day that you’re only a humbug as a machine-gunner, and that you used to be a cook in the household of some great personage.’
He was sincerely mortified when instead of the sauce he turned out something smelly and evil-tasting. But Anna devotedly ate it, and even found words of praise for it.
‘Not at all bad! Very nice sauce. A little bitter, that’s all.’
‘Is it really all right?’ he cheered up. ‘But if we had some horseradish to add to it now, then …’ he smacked his lips, not observing Anna’s bravely compressed mouth.
Towards the end of breakfast she seemed to darken in features, yawned limply, and sat thinking, not answering him. Afterwards she stood in the sun at the garden palisade, abstractedly chewing a straw between her teeth.
Bunchuk pressed her head against his shoulder, breathing in the pleasant scent of her hair, and asked:
‘Why are you so quiet? What’s the matter?’
She stared at him with drooping eyelashes, then stood unbuttoning and buttoning the collar of her blouse.
‘Are you going into the town?’ she asked. Without waiting for a reply she said through closed lips: ‘I shall be dropping out of the ranks soon, Ilia …’
‘Why?’
She shrugged her shoulders and watched the dance of the sunspots scattered under a poplar. Resting her breast against the low fence, she said with unexpected irritation:
‘I waited … I didn’t believe it at first. Now I know. In seven, in seven and a half months I shall be a mother.’
The wind from the sea played with the leaves of the poplar and blew Anna’s hair over her face. She made no attempt to brush it back. Bunchuk was silent. He stroked her hand, but as though she felt some sense of injury against him, she did not reply to the caress, but with faltering step turned back to the house.
He followed her into his room and shut the door, then asked, unable to struggle with his impatience:
‘And what now?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ she replied indifferently.
The silence was torturous. He sought for words, but felt only a stupid jumble of thoughts.
‘Let it come. By that time we shall have finished with the counter-revolution. Why, is it so very bad to have children?’ Suddenly he instinctively sensed the line to take and smiling a little embarrassedly, hastened to add: ‘Of course you must bear the child. Anna, give birth to a boy: a strong, healthy, fat little boy! I shall be a locksmith, and you know life will be fine! In three years or so you will begin to grow fat, and I shall get such a big belly. We’ll buy a little house of our own. And of course we shall have a geranium in the window and a canary in a cage. On Sundays we shall have visitors and shall visit other respected citizens. You will make cakes, you will weep if the dough doesn’t come up to expectations. We shall save up …’
At first Anna smiled unwillingly and sadly but towards the end she snorted:
‘Pfooh, what an idealist!’
‘Don’t you like it?’
‘It sounds all right!’
They went into the town together. Rostov was swarming with crowds of soldiers, workers and poorly dressed people. The wind was fluttering the torn proclamations and orders on the fences. The unswept streets smelt of horse-dung and hot stones. The changes in the aspect of the town struck Anna in the eyes:
‘See, Ilia, how simple the town looks! You won’t see a bowler hat anywhere, or a troika. Everything is the colour of stone.’
‘A town is like a chameleon. If the Whites were to come, how it would change its colour!’ he smiled.
They walked silently along, and as silently separated. Towards evening, when Podtielkov interrupted a session of the Don Executive Committee in order to collect a detachment and lead it against an approaching band of Novocherkass cossacks, they met again and marched in the same column.
‘Turn back!’ Bunchuk pleaded with her, touching her hand.
But she obstinately pressed her lips together.
They marched on beyond the last houses of the suburb, and opened fire on the slowly advancing cossacks. Podtielkov strode up and down the chain of Red Guards, encouraging them:
‘Don’t stint the ammunition, brothers! There’s enough and to spare!’
Bunchuk licked the bitter sweat from his lips, hurriedly dug a shallow hole with his trenching tool, and helped to set up the machine-gun. The gunner loaded a cartridge belt into the gun.
Bunchuk’s gunner was Maksim Griaznov, the cossack from Tatarsk village. He had lost his horse in a struggle against Kutepov’s Volunteer Detachment, and since then had taken to heavy drinking and card-playing. When his horse was killed under him he had unfastened the saddle and carried it three miles or so, then, seeing that at this rate he would not escape alive from the Volunteers, he had torn off the valuable metal pommel, had taken the snaffles also, and had voluntarily abandoned the fight. He had turned up in Rostov, quickly gambled away the silver-hilted sword he had borrowed from a captain cut down in battle, lost also the horse’s equipment he had carried away with him, and even his trousers and kid boots. He was almost naked when he joined Bunchuk’s command. He might have pulled himself together then, but in this very first battle a bullet struck him in the face, his blue eye fell on to his breast, and from the back of his head, shattered like matchwood, the blood spurted. It was evident that the Tatarsk cossack Griaznov, former horse-stealer and recent drunkard, had departed this life.
Bunchuk glanced at his body writhing in the throes of death, and carefully wiped the blood off the barrel of the machine-gun. Almost immediately afterward it became necessary to retreat. Bunchuk dragged back the machine-gun, leaving Maksim to grow cold as he lay on the hot earth, exposing to the sun his swarthy body with the shirt pulled over his head.
A platoon of Red Guards made a stand at the first cross-roads of the suburb. A soldier in a half-rotten fur cap helped Bunchuk to set up the machine-gun, and the others built a rough barricade across the street. Anna lay down at Bunchuk’s side.
Suddenly there was a patter of feet along the next street to the right, and nine or ten Red Guards poured round the corner. One managed to shout:
‘They’re coming!’
In a moment the crossing became deserted and still. Then there was a storm of dust, and a mounted cossack with a white band across his cap, a carbine pressed to his side, appeared around the corner. He pulled up his horse with such force that the animal sat down on its hind legs. Bunchuk fired a shot from his revolver. Bending low over his horse’s neck, the cossack galloped back. The soldiers behind the barricade hesitated irresolutely; two of them ran along under the wall and lay down by a gate. It was evident that in another minute the men would waver and retreat. The tense silence and their apprehensive glances did not induce steadiness …
Of all that followed Bunchuk remembered one moment indelibly and palpably. Anna, her kerchief thrust on the back of her head, dishevelled and agitated beyond recognition, jumped up with rifle at the trail, looked round, pointed to the house behind which the cossack had disappeared, and in an unrecognizable, broken voice shouted: ‘Follow me!’ With uncertain, stumbling feet she ran towards the corner.
Bunchuk raised himself off the ground. An unintelligible cry broke from his mouth. He seized a rifle from the nearest soldier and ran after Anna, panting, feeling an uncontrollable trembling in his legs, his face darkening with a fearful and impotent attempt to shout, to call to her and turn her back. Behind him he heard the gasping breath of several men following him. In all his being he felt that something terrible, irreparable would follow this beautiful yet surely useless gesture.
By the time he reached the corner he was at Anna’s side. He ran full tilt towards the cossacks galloping up and firing haphazardly as they came. The whistle of bullets. A thin, miserable shriek from Anna. Then he saw her crumpling to the road with outstretched hand and vacant eyes. He did not see the cossacks turn back, he did
not see the Red soldiers chasing them, afire with belated enthusiasm for Anna’s impulsive action. She, she alone was in his eyes, as she struggled at his feet. He turned her over to lift her and carry her away. But he saw a stream of blood coming from her left side and the rags of her blue blouse fluttering around the wound; he realized that she had been struck by a dum-dum bullet; he realized that she was dying: he saw death lurking in her fading eyes.
With what passion he kissed those eyes and the almost masculine hands, tried to arouse her, roughly pulled her about in the endeavour to bring her back to life …! Someone thrust him aside, and they carried her into a yard and laid her in the cool under a shed.
A soldier pressed wads of cottonwool into the wound and hurled away the blood-soaked scraps. Mastering himself, Bunchuk unbuttoned the collar of her jacket, tore off a piece of his own shirt, and pressed it in a pad against the wound. But the blood came soaking through; he saw her face turning blue and her blackened lips quivering with agony. Her mouth gulped at the air, and her lungs heaved; the air came out again by her mouth and through the wound. He cut away her torn shirt and unashamedly laid bare her body clothed with the sweat of death. They managed to plug the wound a little, and a few minutes later she returned to consciousness. Her sunken eyes stared at Bunchuk out of their dark sockets for a moment, then the trembling eyelashes closed over them.
‘Water! It’s hot!’ she groaned, tossing herself about. She burst into tears. ‘I want to live! Ilia! Beloved …! Aah!’
Bunchuk put his swollen lips to her flaming cheek. He poured water over her chest. It brimmed the hollows beneath her collarbones, but dried away in a moment. She was aflame with a mortal fire. She struggled and tore herself out of his hands.
‘It’s hot … Fire …!’
And Quiet Flows the Don Page 60