Byzantium Endures

SIXTEEN

I DECIDED TO ESCAPE. In the night, while we were stopped and everyone slept, I took a map from the table, took a bottle of vodka and some food, and left the train. There was no snow worth mentioning. My plan was to strike out for the nearest good-sized town. Now I was au fait with the ways of partisans I could bluff someone in authority and get transport to Odessa. It might be possible to find a truck. I could repair it as easily as I had repaired Grishenko’s. I was in something of a trance. My memory of those days is hazy. But I know I was anxious to reach my mother and Esmé. I had no other particular plan in mind, save that I might sell Yermeloff’s pistols and purchase a passage on a ship bound for Yalta, which was then in Deniken’s hands. Nobody was sure the French would be able or willing to defend Odessa for long.

Those infernal gods have gathered their forces. They ride the wind which blows upon the West. Nika! Vanquish. The British are to blame. They will let any evil in. They let the east into their own country. Look at Portobello Road. Look at Birmingham. T’hiyyat hametim. Carthage is camped on the island the Phoenicians established as their trading base. Is anything changed? The British will sell their own birthright to Phoenicia for a few rayon scarves and a badly-carved wooden elephant. A culture cannot hold Light and Dark in eternal balance. Persia knew. What have the British made of their Empire? An empty name. And Carthage remains. The gods of Babylon and Tyre will crush London beneath stone feet. Moloch will open his flaming maw: into it will march the British, singing one of their songs. Good riddance! It is all they deserve. They shall be slaves of the Phoenicians again. They shall learn to grovel. They shall become a scattered race of money-grubbing, forehead-touching, dust-eating wretches and they shall weep and wail in their pride, and they shall forget their honour, and they shall tell of a past when they were great, and they shall be heard with contempt, for they shall be great no longer. Nicht kinder. Nicht einiklach.

I came to a dark village. It stank, as so many of them did, and it was silent. The houses were ramshackle. Some were crude thatched huts. It was like an extended, badly-run farmyard. I had been through such places with the Cossacks. I had seen them burn. Before dawn, I settled down against a wall and slept for a little while. I awoke to find a Jew standing over me: a Hasid rabbi. In Yiddish he asked me if I were hungry. I told him I was not. I got up. I had fallen into the hands of Zion. A shtetl. Everywhere signs in Yiddish and Hebrew. The sun shone bright and cold on this stronghold of avarice. I had been sleeping next to a synagogue. My bones ached. The marks of Grishenko’s whip stung, every one, as if fresh. I told him I could not speak Yiddish. He smiled. He spoke through his beard in halting Hebrew. I told him in Russian that I could not speak Hebrew. He did not understand my Russian. I used German. It was better than Ukrainian, which was like Yiddish to me. Even this was difficult. How did they trade? How did they manage to exist? The land was poor here. It was rocky. It was not like our Russian steppe. It was like Old Testament Palestine. The rabbi beckoned to me to follow him. I shook my head.

‘Emmanuel,’ said someone in the group. Black-clad men and women; perhaps it was Saturday. I was outraged. I remember the sensation of terror. My head began to ache. It aches now. I drew myself up. I told the rabbi I represented the Soviet Authority. He nodded and smiled. He was trying to trap me, I suppose. They probably thought I had money. I reached into my pocket and found my pistols. I did have some Petlyura money, with my papers, in my secret pocket. I was too cautious to touch it. They would know. They would set upon me. They would strip me. ‘You are a Jew?’ said a young man in Russian.

Judas call me. Or Peter. I would not confirm it: but I was too frightened to deny it. I made a gesture with my hand.

‘Why are you afraid?’ He was wearing a black suit, a prayer shawl and a peasant shirt. He had a cap on his black hair. His face was the picture of innocence. This made me wary. ‘Cossacks? You have been pursued?’

They had come out of the synagogue. They surrounded me. I kept my head. My hands were on the pommels of the pistols. They took me to a sort of tavern. They opened it. It made Esau’s in Odessa seem like a Petrograd cabaret. I told them I had relatives in Odessa; I was on my way there. They asked where my people lived. The young man had been to Odessa. I remember the sensation of humiliation as I let go of my pride. I told them Slobodka. I had to match cunning with cunning. After all, I had suffered from being called a Jew. Now at least I could turn it to my advantage. I regretted I had left the train. I took out my map. I asked someone to show me where we were.

We were in the region of Hulyai-Polye, a large village whose name was associated with Makhno as Alexandriya was associated with Hrihorieff. These places were fundamentally Cossack fortresses. We were a good hundred miles at least from Odessa. Possibly two hundred.

What wretches they were, these Jews. So poor. With that terrible, accusing humility they all affect. I had begun to shiver, in spite of myself. My self-control was slipping. I needed cocaine. Hardly any was left. It should not be wasted. Was Makhno at Hulyai-Polye? They did not think so.

‘He is away,’ said the youth, ‘fighting for us.’

‘For you?’ I almost laughed aloud. Even an Anarchist would not league himself with such creatures. They had no pride; they did not fight; they fell on their knees and they prayed and they cringed. I have seen them. They do it to frighten their enemies. They rob Christians, yet rely on Christian mercy. Christ said to forgive them. And Christ must be obeyed. It is not for the killing of Jesus I hate them. I am not simple-minded. I am not guilty. Jahveh, they say, destroy our enemies. But they will not do it for themselves. What is Israel but a landing stage for Europe? A landing stage rotting from lack of use. The Allies have forgotten. They court the Turk and African. Those Jews sit so proudly in their American planes, their British tanks. It is a sin. They beat me with their rods, but I do not whine. To whine is to die. Yermeloff taught me that. They offered me food. I would not accept. I pulled out my vodka and drank. I offered it. They refused. ‘Where is Makhno?’ I asked.

‘Fighting,’ said the youth. ‘How do you not speak Yiddishi?’

‘My father,’ I said, ‘was a revolutionary.’ The rabbi guessed my meaning and shook his head. He was ignorant. There was a damp, chilling smell of poverty attached to their priest and their tavern. To insult me so! I have never been in a poorer place. It was barren and old. It was falling apart. Did they not have enough dignity to mend their houses? At least I would have put up a fence. But their fences sagged. Their gardens were overgrown. The shuttered shops, with their Yiddish signs, were unpainted. Russian villages could look the same, but there was a reason for it: the peasant had been robbed. And who had robbed him? I shall say no more. The synagogue: that was clean. The synagogue had its share of gold and fine tapestries, no doubt.

‘These are bad times,’ said the youth. ’Here as every where. Which flag do you fly?’

‘Flag?’

‘Red or Black?’

‘I fly no flag,’ I said, ‘I am my own man. I am my own man.’ I felt weak, as if a chill had come to my stomach. It is still there. It has always been there. Like a piece of cold metal which can never be warmed, not even with blood. Like a spy. I do not know. The pennants fluttered above the smoke, the sheepskins, the shapkas, the stallions. Down they would come. All shades of flags; all fine Cossacks; all with good horses and modern machine-guns. Hrihorieff ignored commands, so in revenge Lenin and Trotsky unleashed Chinese, Hungarians, Rumanians, Chekists, Jewish commissars, upon Ukraine. The commissars attacked their own people. The Jews suffered worst. The Reds took fifty near the Polish border and sliced out their tongues: old men, little girls, youths. Ten million people killed. And only blood could quench the fires; blood mingled with ash; it became a hard scum on the surface of our soil. The smoke of burning flesh clogged the nostrils of the living; it stifled new-born children as they took their first breath. Wearily we sank into War, as hopeless victims of a shipwreck sink into water, glad of the oblivion. There was nothing left but smoke and flame, the din of machine-guns. The noise was too loud. Whole cities yelled in terror and in pain. Whole cities wailed in the night, drowning the sound of guns, of transports, of armoured trains, of hooves. The Apocalypse? Vietnam? Lidice and Lezaky? Nothing compares to what we suffered in Ukraine. Then Stalin came. Then Hitler came. Now German tourists visit the smiling land of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. They always leave their marks. The mountains no longer protect us. We know that we are a humane race. What have we attacked? Czechoslovakia? That was not the Russian people. Finland? It was always ours.

As if from a helicopter you see little figures climbing carefully up and down the crags; clinging to the rock. And you know they climb and descend, climb and descend because they think there is nobody to love them. They have only their rock. It is impersonal. Once on top, they are alone and for a while they are strong. They carry this strength back to their homes. It is not the strength of people who feel themselves to be loved. It is defiant strength. But it is all they expect. Are they looking for God? I sat on that crag in Lapland and looked down on peaks, clouds, the tundra beyond; and the mountains, turning blue all across to Norway. I became like steel, tempered and cold. I took my strength through Finland to the barbed wire of the border and looked at Russia. The guards came with their dogs and waved me off. I called out to them in Russian. They told me to go away. They were anxious. They were kind. They wanted no trouble. Russians are told to fear the foreigner. I said I was not a foreigner. They did not believe me.

I feel sick. There is a chill. Metal in my stomach. Russians are generous. They want to love everyone. Now they are told to fear love. Is it because Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin could not love? They used our love. What did Budyenny and Timoshchenko and Voroshilov fight for? For chewing-gum? American tourists give chewing-gum to Russian officers in exchange for their cap badges. It is true. It is allowed. Ask. They fought through Ukraine. They pillaged. They persecuted peasants. They took grain. They took horses. They took boots. They said they were the saviours of Ukraine, that we should be free. The peasant wanted land. He did not hate Jews. He hated businessmen in cities: Katsupi and Jew alike, the German merchants, the Greeks. Because they had been robbed. Then the Bolsheviks came and robbed them more efficiently. When all else was stolen, they stole lives. That was their Red Cavalry. Trading cap-badges for chewing-gum in Leningrad and grinning at Japanese cameras. Where is Russian honour? The two-headed eagle becomes the two-faced commissar. And Islam grows in the womb of the Empire. The Slavs are outnumbered. Is it any wonder they protect their boundaries? What happened in Czechoslovakia is understandable.

The British and the Americans, the French and the Swedes; they never had to fight as we fought. We threw off Islam. We forced the Tatar to go home. The Jewish Poles were defeated, but they clung on; ancient and patient and waiting. It was Trotsky. Everyone agrees. If I were a Jew I should feel the weight of the guilt. But I am myself. I fly no flags. They do not realise how powerful those people were. They think we killed because we were strong. But we killed because we were weak. We had nothing of the wealth.

That spring, in the area about Hulyai-Polye, there was a cone of silence; perhaps it was the eye of the hurricane. The Anarchist territory was the only territory where peace reigned. The world is full of ironies. I stayed in the village, but I was cautious. When the troops came through, with bread for the Jews, they put me in a tachanki, the little machine-gun carts Makhno made famous (they gave him superior speed and fire-power). They were true Russians: kindly and friendly. I do not know why they supported Makhno. They were Chernosametsiya (Black Flags) but were far more like idealised Bolshevik fighters of Soviet fiction. We stopped at another village. It was Greek. Bread and flour. We were offered tsatsiki. They took nothing. We stopped at a farming commune named after the Jewess Luxemburg. I was drunk. I was baffled. They asked me my rank. I told them I was a colonel. This made them laugh.

I was Comrade Pyat. I was Commissar Pyat. I was Colonel Pyat. They would hold up their five fingers when they called my name. They had healthy faces. I suppose they were the true servants of the Devil, for they seemed so normal. The noise was gone and the mud was gone. We sometimes crossed a railway track, that was all. I said I must go to Odessa. They said everyone was leaving Odessa. Hrihorieff had taken it. The French had deserted it. Hrihorieff and the Bolsheviks were in open dispute. The Bolshies were losing control. Hrihorieff was a pig, but a clever one. The Black Flags bided their time now. There was sunshine on my face. It was spring. The fields were as they should be. The villages were as they should be. Tranquillity was here, as it should be in the countryside. It was the first time I knew fondness for open spaces. I understood the attraction of the steppe, the fields, the villages, the little woods and rivers. The sky became blue. The Makhnovischini talked urgently to me by the fires in the evenings. They asked me to understand their own faith. They were like early Christians. I believed in God, not governments. Some of them agreed. They were too clever, Makhno’s men; they almost had me convinced. Just before the detachment took the warm white road for Hulyai-Polye I pretended to become a Black Flag brother. We passed through armed camps. We reached the town. I wanted to see the Batko, the Old Man, the Little Father. I was taken to him. He was in a long room, possibly a school, with some comrades wearing the usual motley: sailor hats, Tsarist jackets, bandoliers. He wore a green military coat with black frogging, a sheepskin hat on the back of his head. He was small and he was drunk. He had an open Slavic face, a broad forehead. He spoke in a soft, friendly voice, like a Mafioso’s. He spoke pure Russian, full of power. He offered me vodka. I accepted. I had been drinking all day, every day. He asked me if I were SD or SR, if I supported this group or that. I told him I supported the Nabat. A man in a black overcoat, with a black, wide-brimmed hat and a small, black moustache, came over to me. ‘But you’re a Bolshevik.’

‘Nonsense. An Anarchist.’

‘You’re Pyat?’

‘Yes.’

‘We’ve heard of you. A saboteur from Odessa. SR.’

‘Who told you?’

‘Brodmann.’

‘He came here?’

Makhno’s laughter, too, was soft. ‘He’s still here, somewhere. Isn’t he?’

‘We handed him back,’ said the man with the moustache.

A woman entered. She was small, stocky, like Makhno. Perhaps she was his sister. At any rate, he greeted her as one would greet a relative. She told him his brother wanted him to come to eat. He was compliant. He slapped me on the shoulder and called me comrade. He limped from the room. That was the Anarchist, Nestor Makhno, in his hey-day. He was the best of all who fought in our war, which will tell you something. Even then he drank, but he was cheerful. He had raped. He told me in Paris, after Semyon Karetnik and Fedor Shchusa and his other lieutenants had been betrayed by the Cheka or killed in battle. Makhno was glad of any listener, then.

I was taken to a small barn and put in with a couple of bewildered, unkempt individuals too gloomy at first to do more than introduce themselves. They lounged about in the straw, throwing sticks at the walls. They were also drunk. Everyone was drunk here. They were Abramavitch and Kasaroff. There was an Abramavitch convicted of sabotage in the twenties. He might have been the same one. They were Bolsheviks. Arrested for trying to organise a ‘RevKom’ in a neighbouring village. Revolutionary Committees were banned by Makhno. These were like others of their type, full of whining self-pity and self-congratulation, experts on The People, embittered with Moscow for ‘letting us down’, angry with Makhno who was, they said, politically ignorant. Abramavitch had dark, Jewish features. He was quite young and had a scar on his lip which emphasised his sardonic, despairing manner. Kasaroff was older, with heavy, Great Russian features which had once been handsome. There is a type which will look like Nijinski one year and like Brezhneff the next. He was that: fat with stolen bread and drink. I kept my own company on the other side of the barn. I merely asked the date. It was I May. They found this amusing. I had been a prisoner of Bolsheviks, Jews and Anarchists for two months. From then on, I became more sober. It had been a strange holiday.

I was only with the Bolshevik prisoners for two days. They knew nothing about Odessa. I was taken from the barn by grinning Makhnovischini and told to go to a house they pointed to down the street. I had no escort. I still had pistols, papers, a few bank-notes in my pocket. I must have been utterly filthy. I had not changed clothes or shaved or properly washed for at least six weeks. I was nineteen years old. They laughed at me and saluted. To all who passed me I was ‘Colonel Pyat’. It was my salvation, my youth. The house was wooden, with typical Ukrainian gables, painted in a variety of light colours, with a veranda and a heavy double door. I opened the door. A soldier told me to go through the passage to the back. I walked along the passage. I assumed Makhno had sent for me. There was the sound of water. It was warm and quiet in the house. I heard a girl laugh. I knocked on the door. I was told to enter.

Esmé was naked. She was in the tin bath looking up at me and grinning. She held out soap-covered pink arms, exposing her breasts. Her golden hair was darkened by water. Her body smelled of clean skin and soap. She was shameless. I turned away. A girl in a grey dress was scrubbing Esmé’s neck. ‘He’s embarrassed.’ It had been a trick.

I sat down on a chair, near a screen. My back was to her. ‘How did you get here? Are the Anarchists in Odessa?’

‘The Whites have Odessa,’ she told me.

The grey girl began to whistle a folk-tune.

‘I never got there.’ Esmé stood up in the water. I heard her. I saw her shadow. The sun came through a window in the door. ‘We stopped at a station for food. I was taken by the soldiers. I was raped. I’ve been raped so often I’ve got calluses on my cunt.’ The grey girl spluttered and giggled. They had planned this, surely, to make me upset. But why should Esmé feel aggressive towards me?

‘Mother?’

‘Got off the train. Still in Kiev. With Captain Brown.’ Esmé’s voice was softer. I felt her come close. I stood up and went to the door. She wore a sheepskin. She smiled at me. ‘Max?’

I do not know why I began to weep. It was probably a mixture of exhaustion and vodka. I had wasted so much of myself trying to get to Odessa. I hated her as I wept. She stroked my face and I still hated her. I had suffered for her and Mother. Neither had been there at all. I had lied, endured terror, endured pain. I could have stayed safely in Kiev with Mrs Cornelius to look after me; with my mother. It was not Esmé’s fault, of course, but I blamed her then. ‘She never meant to go to Odessa,’ said Esmé. ‘She heard it was the last train. She said you wouldn’t come. She said she’d be all right.’

‘And you were raped?’

‘I’m not raped now. I have a respectable job with the education team. We take a train with food and books and clothes to the villages. The station’s about five miles away. I just came in. I heard about you. I asked to see you.’

‘You’ve changed,’ I said.

She was amused. ‘Look at me, Max. Do you want the bathwater? It’s still hot.’

Esmé had been my virgin sister; without vice or passion. My oldest admirer. My friend. My rose. And she spoke foul words and had no shame. She told me to bathe. I was still drunk and dazed. I let the women take off my clothes. I did not mind if they saw my stigmata. I have suffered much from Cossacks with their whips and little knives! And I let them wash me. Esmé was soft. She murmured to me as she soaped my head. They put something in the water. It stung. It killed the lice.

They washed me with their hands, one in grey, the other naked but for a worn sheepskin. ‘I thought it was you,’ she said. She had been fucked so often she had calluses on her cunt. I shivered. I was still weeping. I became very cold. I shivered. I was swaddled. Esmé took me to a dormitory where there were two rows of empty beds. I had a fever, she said. A mild form of typhus. I don’t know. Where have you been? Everywhere, I told her. With the Bolsheviks? With that Brodmann and his gang who came? I was away. No, I said, I was only with them because I was searching for you. I thought you were in Odessa. Are you an Anarchist, Esmé? She said she did not have to be. She was a nurse. She worked on the education train. There were two doctors, both Jews, who also helped. Seamstresses. It was a community, she said, in which some sort of order flourished. Though it was protected by Makhno’s bayonets. Soon these would go. Why? Because the Whites were advancing. The Don Cossacks were on their way and Makhno had let too many units help the Reds. But it would be a while yet, she thought. Who raped you? I asked her. Many, she said. Who? It was true, she said, a Cossack whipped you. The beast. Did Brodmann rape you? I asked. That swine! She said no. Makhno? He saved my life, she said. It was not much of a rape. It was a token. His wife knows what he does. She tries to stop him. He feels bad afterwards. He’s drunk. His men expect it of him. Not here, but out there. The ones here know him and his two brothers. He should not have raped you, Esmé. It was a token. You should have been there when the first one happened. I trembled. I felt sick, but all there was in my stomach was vodka. It returned as bile. Esmé! Esmé! I can nurse you for today, she said. It was good I came here. Who else? Raped me? She laughed. Lots. It’s silly. It’s over. I’m doing my job again. I have a boy. He wants to marry me. It was quiet in the dormitory. There was no one there. I was confused. She stroked my whole body. My new, clean, body. She held my cock. She stroked it. I began to relax. I love you, Esmé. I love you, Max. She stroked my cock. She stroked my nipples. She stroked my face. She put ointment on Grishenko’s marks. She told me I would be better. She loved me. Esmé. Raped by Jews and Bolsheviks, yet still you were full of pity. We could have been married as Mother wanted. Lived in that village. Where are you? You said I had a fever. I did not know you left while I slept.

A week later she returned. Now the dormitory was filled with dozens of wounded men. She was tired. She was slatternly. She was a slut. She helped the others more than she helped me. I was her own brother. She nursed the very men who raped her. I was sweating. Without vodka, which had controlled it, the fever increased. Those Jews had poisoned me. They put a piece of iron in my stomach. I had been ill for months. I was dying. She soothed the others, just as if they were me. Mrs Cornelius would not have done that. She would have left me alone. They had poisoned me. I had been right to mistrust them. I had been a fool. The men made too much noise. They stank of gangrene, of blood and cordite. They were hideous.

I was taken with them, in carts to a train. I saw Esmé in the crowd. I think she was looking for me, but could not see me because of the other bodies. Then she was gone.

Sie fährt morgen in die Egypte. Sie hat ihre Tat selbst zu verantworten.

Such practices are common in Egypt. My cities are silver. They rise into a brazen winter sky. Through them I shall celebrate the glory of God. Wagner has crossed the desert. Anubis is my friend. Ya salaam! Ana fi’ardak! Allah akhbar! Allah akhbar!