Byzantium Endures: Pyat Quartet

  ‘You’re not a Cossack?’

  ‘I was with a Cossack brigade.’ He shrugged, ‘I can ride a horse. It’s enough. We’re fighting cavalry actions all over the place. Doesn’t it seem strange? Has some atavist engineered the whole thing for his private amusement? We’ve gone back in time a hundred years at least. Look.’ From the belt beneath his coat he drew two large and very beautiful flintlock pistols. I had seen old prints of Cossacks wearing them. They were black with elaborate silver decoration. Typically Caucasian, the weapons had buttons where triggers would normally be. There were flints in the locks. They looked as if they worked. ‘I got these out of a museum while everyone else was busy looking for gold and meat. I’ve shot two men with them now. One was wounded. One fell over and cracked his head. But he was killed. You use ball-bearings of the appropriate caliber. And I take them seriously. They’re loaded now. Think how many poor Jews’ arses they’ve been fired up!’ He balanced one in his gloved hand. ‘And they’re worth a small fortune as antiques.’

  ‘They’re not very practical, are they?’

  ‘They kill.’ He spoke in a baffled voice. ‘And if I wanted to make a run for it - I don’t know, to Berlin or somewhere - I could live for a month by selling them for the silver alone. I’ve seen two lots of men fighting, in the past week, with sabres and whips, just as in the days of Taras Bulba. Is it happening all over the world? Is it the Dark Ages?’ He seemed anxious to hear my considered opinion.

  ‘It looks that way,’ I said. ‘But the Entente forces still have aeroplanes and tanks. Even the Bolsheviks have a Spad. I saw it outside Kiev. Flying well.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘You really think it’s the end of civilisation?’

  ‘If I didn’t I wouldn’t be here. I want to learn how to survive. I want to become a successful savage. Can you see my point?’

  ‘It’s defeatist.’

  ‘So was deserting from the Galician Front.’

  ‘You deserted?’

  ‘With everyone else. I’m not an individualist, comrade. I’m a Zaporizhian Cossack, like you. I’ve thrown away my Tolstoi and my Dostoieffski. Now I sing dirty songs and make jokes about yids and I get drunk on bad vodka. I piss in a line with thirty other drunks all farting and swearing and boasting of the human beings they’ve killed, the girls they’ve raped, the horses they’ve stolen. I accepted civilisation as a gift. I never thought twice about it. Now I’m morally obliged to accept barbarism. I don’t intend to think about it. That’s the end of that.’ He got up and found a cup in which some grubby vodka still swilled. I refused it, so he drained it. ‘How did Grishenko get you?’

  ‘He held up a train. I was on it. I agreed to fix his truck. He let the train go and I was stuck. He promised to let me back on the train.’

  ‘He would. He’s a bastard. Nobody likes him or trusts him. They say he’s a Jewish spy, a Bolshevik spy, a White spy. He’s careless, you see, about who he robs. But he’ll succeed. This is his world. I model myself on him. We’re friends. He gave you to me as a sort of present. He knows I can read.’

  ‘He likes you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. But everyone needs a friend and I’m Grishenko’s friend.’

  ‘And what do you think of him?’

  ‘He’s a beast. He has no morals. He has hatred instead of a brain. He has malice in place of a heart. I want to be like him. We’re both Sotniki at the moment, but he’ll rise. Hrihorieff’s already noticing him. The Ataman pretends to disapprove of him when the Bolshevik liaison people are about. But he doesn’t care. Grishenko’s a wolf. Hrihorieff’s building up a pack of them. Like Ivan’s oprishniki: a circle of iron, of snarling teeth. He’s bright enough to use current political catch-phrases, but he aims to become Tsar. When he does, I’ll be a wolf, too. The oprishniki were the only ones ever safe from Ivan the Terrible’s blood-lust.’

  He seemed mad. ‘You could emigrate,’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘The world’s the same all over. Russia was just the start. The War’s done it. Germany’s going. There are soviets in England. All the most civilised nations are breaking apart. It’s like an earthquake. It can’t be stopped. Maybe it’s natural. Maybe it’s something to do with the sun or the moon. What do you think?’

  ‘It’s not possible,’ I said with self-mocking earnestness, ‘to reach an analysis with such subjective data. But you’re not the first Russian to develop a philosophy based on despair. And you might not be the first to have been wrong.’

  ‘I can, as I say, only go by the evidence. Do you read modern poetry?’

  ‘It isn’t to my taste.’

  ‘Our poets predicted an age of blood and fire. The Apocalypse. Didn’t they identify themselves with the end of the world?’

  I was not sure. There had been so many -isms and -ists in Petrograd I remain confused to this day. They are all forgotten, those Acmeists and Constructivists. They went mad or killed themselves or were killed by Stalin. As I said recently, I am personally nothing but a ‘Lisztist’. Naturally none of those ignoramuses in the pub followed a word. I begin to believe now that Yermeloff was right. The process has merely been slower, less dramatic and less interesting than he thought.

  ‘Will they let me send a cable to my mother in Odessa?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re a bit nervous of the telegraph, we savages.’ He bent to the lamp again, to relight his cigarette. ‘The message has to be of “military importance”.’

  ‘The Ataman’s still loyal to the Bolsheviks?’

  ‘Technically, yes.’

  ‘Then I’ll introduce myself as a comrade. I’ll say the matter’s political.’

  ‘He’s cunning.’

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘About my age,’ said Yermeloff.

  ‘Forty?’

  ‘Thirty-five. Have I only aged five years? I must be adapting better than I supposed.’ He took no offence at my blunder, ‘I could get through it, yet, eh? I might even witness the re-invention of the wheel.’

  ‘Is Hrihorieff like Grishenko?’

  ‘He’s much cleverer.’

  ‘Why does Grishenko think everyone’s a Jew?’

  ‘That’s simple. He enjoys the sufferings of others. And nobody enjoys suffering more than a Jew. So Grishenko makes a whole damned circus of it. It’s a sort of conspiracy between both parties, I think.’

  ‘He believed me a Jew. He didn’t kill me.’

  ‘He’s not sure. He calls everyone a yid who looks a bit wrong to him. If they start to whine and grovel, he knows he’s right. It’s not complicated logic, is it? There’s no secret to it. He’s a savage dog. He can smell fear. If one wants to keep his good opinion, by the way, it’s as well to display as much savagery as he does.’

  ‘I can’t accept your cynicism.’ My head ached.

  ‘We all have ways of surviving. We have to find strong masters in a world like this one.’

  ‘Why not aim to be your own master?’

  ‘It’s the second rank which survives. I studied history. As a cadet. I was in the army most of my life.’

  I had guessed. He had the stance and way of relaxing of a regular soldier; a way of economising on his own energy and that of others. God knows what passions really slept in him. But he would not allow them to wake up. It was his training. He was doing his job as best he could. Having no cause, no Tsar, no God, he desperately rationalised the situation by looking about for the most likely Tsar. That, at least, was my belief.

  It now strikes me how narrowly we missed achieving the founding of a new dynasty in Russia. I imagine we should have had a Tsar Grigori of one family or another. Rasputin, perhaps, or Hrihorieff. Or a new Peter, in Krassnoff. I suppose none of them allowed themselves to admit the fullness of their ambition. But they would have let their supporters proclaim them Tsar. Rasputin: Theocrat of All Russia. What might he have achieved? An Enlightenment? Or an age of terror to match Lenin’s? Was he Lorenzo the Magnificent or Savonarola? Did we need both in one? Evide
ntly we did. The theological student from Georgia, Stalin, became Priest-King in the end. He widened and extended the Russian Empire. Kerenski baulked at using the whip. He screamed like an hysterical mother at her children, begging us to be good. Stalin proclaimed that Russia should be orderly, and it was orderly. We have had ages of greyness and we have had ages of silver in Russia. In the distant past we have had fleeting ages of gold. We long for those golden ages. But when they come, they are like the gold of an Arctic autumn, seen for a single day. Then Winter falls.

  I asked Yermeloff, as he went to sleep, why Grishenko had not waited for the second train of which I had spoken.

  ‘If it was a Bolshevik train, he would have had to wipe everyone out: all witnesses; passengers, soldiers, drivers. The lot. It wasn’t economic. He got the best he could. Loot from the Jews and a mechanic to fix our transport. You were quite a coup. I’m honoured to own you.’

  ‘What fuel was in that truck?’

  ‘Moonshine,’ said Yermeloff, ‘in all likelihood.’ He turned his back and began to breathe deeply.

  I did not sleep. I went out into the yard again. I wished I could ride. I considered stealing the truck. But it would be hard to start and it might be low on fuel. I did not dare risk Grishenko’s anger. I would wait until we got to Alexandriya and look for Bolshevik ‘comrades’. Politicians were easier to deal with than wolves, and Yermeloff was merely a comfort to me, not an ally. He served his own private Tsar: the Emperor of Destruction, the God of Despair. It was almost traditional: to ally oneself with the Devil in the belief that God had given up the world.

  * * * *

  FOURTEEN

  MUSIC IS MEANT to soothe us. Even the Cossacks understood that. They had their drinking songs; their mournful ballads of death and love; and their lullabies. A Cossack, his rifle on his back, his sword at his side, singing a lullaby to a child, is one of the most beautiful sights and sounds in this world. I saw this when we camped on the way to Alexandriya. I had been dumped into the booty truck and, ahead of the entire squadron, driven through the grim February snow. With Kiev captured, Antonov was now heading south, Yermeloff said. We were all supposed to be fighting for socialism.

  In this age of the Ego, I was to learn, ‘socialism’ can be anything one wants it to be. These bandits were all Catholics. Catholicism is the last rung in the ladder to Communism. Socialism or freemasonry, call it what you will, it is all tainted with the same false pride. Only the Greek Orthodox religion is free of the taint. In our religion, Christ rules. There is no such thing as an independent conscience. It is the only religion which can save us from Carthage. The Arabs do not question their Koranic law. That is their strength. God will protect the innocent. Let the Dark Age come, the Age of Iron, so we may be shown the Light once more; a new dawn granted to us by God, who is always merciful. We must not betray His trust. I speak from experience. I thought God’s gifts to me were enough. But they were taken away because I accepted them, without Faith. That is why the world now has its Polio alia Kiev, its Boeuf Stroganoff, its Strawberry Romanoff: because the generals, the politicians, the lawyers, betrayed God’s Faith. They had to become waiters, porters and chefs all over the world. It is why I am selling second-hand clothes in the Portobello Road, to Germans who push me off the pavement to get at some mock-silver Indian bracelet to take home to Munich; to French girls who laugh at me and talk amongst themselves, not knowing I understand every filthy word; to Americans with their terror-struck condescension.

  I had not expected to find such a large camp at Alexandriya. The town itself was of average size. But this was Hrihorieff s home base; his wife and family were here. He had a far larger army than anyone had suggested to me in Kiev. There he had been described as little more than a petty leftist warlord. He had the loyalty of thousands of Cossacks. They swarmed around him. They accepted him, in all loyalty, as their Ataman. He was as powerful as Krassnoff of the Don, who wrote that important book revealing much about Jews, Catholics, Freemasons and their betrayal of Russia. It was published in German in the twenties in four volumes: From The Two-Headed Eagle To The Red Flag. It is more truthful than anything written since. That was why the commissars hanged him when they got to Germany. He should have changed his name. I see him taken out into black trees and executed for telling the truth.

  Hrihorieff had none of the dignity or literacy of Krassnoff. His bombastic proclamations were pasted up on every available space in Alexandriya and its environs. His camp lay outside the town, beyond the railway yards. Here armoured carriages, goods-wagons, passenger-cars, mobile guns and all the rest of his loot was heaped. They had army tents, shanties, every sort of temporary housing; a massive water-cart was constantly filled with vodka, from which any soldier could drink. Not only Cossacks, but regular infantrymen, artillerymen and Haidamaki had joined Hrihorieff. They were all drunk. ‘Changeable,’ Yermeloff warned me. He helped me out of the truck and then lifted the little girls down. He called to a woman washing her laundry outside a stationary railway-carriage. He told her to look after the girls and feed them.

  Now I was Yermeloff’s mascot. He tied a red band around my sleeve and told me I was a liaison man with ‘our friends the SRs’. Most of the Cossacks supported the Left Socialist Revolutionary group known as Barotbists. These had a great deal of power in Kharkov at that time (Barotba means Struggle, the name of their newspaper). Hrihorieff issued many of his proclamations on behalf of these near-Bolsheviks. He might not have believed in their cause, but he was wise to accept it. The Cossack will serve his Ataman only if the Ataman serves him. Some of them would even spit when the word Bolshevik was mentioned. I noticed a few ‘leather-jackets’ in the town. Apparently Antonov had already sent his officers to parley with Hrihorieff. I asked Yermeloff if I could visit the telegraph-post. He shook his head. ‘You are in my charge. It’s my duty to keep an eye on you. Grishenko said so.’

  ‘You’re of the same rank. Why listen?’

  We passed a broken Nieuport and an Albatros. Someone had tried, stupidly, to combine the parts. Neither plane would ever fly. Yermeloff ignored my question. Like a master with his dog, he let me stand by the aeroplanes as if waiting while I sniffed at something interesting. He said: ‘You mustn’t approach the commissars. Grishenko wants to keep you for us. We need mechanics, you see.’

  ‘Hrihorieff will have him shot. I’m a resource being diverted for Grishenko’s own use.’ I was outraged. I had really become a slave; a pawn.

  ‘Hrihorieff might pretend to have Grishenko shot. But Grishenko would not die.’ Yermeloff was amused. ‘I, however, would be shot if I let you go. You see the game Grishenko’s playing? You are now my responsibility.’

  ‘It’s a children’s game!’

  ‘All war’s that. Have you any titles, by the way?’

  ‘I have a Doctorate from the University of Kiev. Petlyura made me a major against my will.’

  ‘Major will be good. You’re now Major Pyatnitski of our Engineering Corps. Work well with us. You’ll get quick promotion.’ He helped me pick my way through a group of drunken, coughing partisans who lounged outside a hut. By the smell, the place was used as a latrine. ‘You outrank me already, you see!’

  I was still tired. I was out of my depth. I had to stay with Yermeloff. He was my sole link with sanity in this unholy chaos. I resented him, nonetheless. He mocked me. The camp stretched for miles along the railway tracks. Occasionally long trains steamed in. They dispensed soldiers, guns, booty. Cossacks stumbled between moving locomotives, scarcely aware of them. I saw several men come close to being crushed under the wheels.

  These were our noble Red fighters. Most of them could not even read Hrihorieff’s proclamations. Those who could read were too insensible with vodka to focus on the words. Yet many were, indeed, true Cossacks, fighting for the freedoms eroded by the decrees of a dozen bungling Tsars. In the thirties they would become a source of terror to Stalin. He would disband all Cossack units. By the forties those units would be revived and their ol
d glories recalled to give them the morale to fight Germans. Many went over immediately to the German side and continued to fight for their own needs. Stalin was enraged. He gave the order to shoot all returning Cossacks as traitors. It did not matter if they had been POWs or partisans or fighting with the Axis. The liberal British, the good-natured Americans, packed them into trains and ships and delivered them up to hideous and dishonourable death. Few escaped. Some are in Canada, where the weather and land (if not the eager MacDonalds and Campbells) are more to their taste. They escaped but they lost their Russian souls; that inner life so necessary to a Russian and such an irritating cargo to an American. Some, in Russia, sell their souls nightly, prancing and singing for tourists. Even Hrihorieff’s partisans were not drinking to lose consciousness, but to find their souls; to find God and seek His confirmation that what they did was just. It was not. And God did not tell them it was. So they continued to drink. At the time I was nervous of them. Looking back, I feel pity.