The fever had left him with the complication of slight deafness. The doctor sent by the Tsaritsin Party Committee told Anna that it would be possible to cure it only when he was thoroughly well again. He made slow progress. He had a wolfish appetite, but Anna strictly apportioned his diet. There was more than one quarrel between them on this account.
‘Give me some more milk,’ he would ask.
‘You can’t have any more.’
‘I ask you … give me some more. Do you want me to die of starvation?’
‘Ilia, you know that I mustn’t give you more than a certain amount.’
He lapsed into an injured silence, turned his face to the wall, sighed and refused to talk. Although suffering with an almost motherly tenderness for him, she would not yield. After a little while he turned back, his face clouded and so looking even more unhappy, and pleaded:
‘Can’t I have some pickled cabbage? Please, Anna dear … Listen to me … It’s all doctor’s fairy stories that it’s not good for you.’
Always meeting with a decided refusal, he sometimes wounded her with harsh remarks:
‘You have no right to make sport of me like this. You’re an unfeeling and heartless woman. I’m beginning to hate you.’
‘That would be the best payment I could have for what I have gone through in nursing you,’ she could not restrain herself.
‘I didn’t ask you to stay with me. It’s not fair to reproach me with that. You’re exploiting your position. All right! Don’t give me anything. Let me die! Great is pity!’
Her lips trembled, but she kept her self-command and patiently endured all. But once, after they had quarrelled over an extra helping of dinner, with tightened heart she noticed tears glittering in his eyes. ‘Why, you’re a perfect child!’ she exclaimed, and ran to the kitchen to bring back a full plate of patties.
‘Eat, eat, Ilia dear. Don’t get angry any more. Here’s an extra nice one.’ With trembling fingers she thrust a patty into his hands.
Suffering intensely, Bunchuk attempted to refuse. But he could not hold out; wiping away his tears, he sat up and ate the patty. A guilty smile slipped over his emaciated face, and asking forgiveness with his eyes, he said:
‘I’m worse than a child. You see, I almost cried …’
She looked at his terribly thin neck, at the sunken, fleshless chest visible through the open shirt-collar, at his bony arms. Troubled by a deep love and pity, for the first time she simply and tenderly kissed his dry, yellow brow.
Only after a fortnight was he able to move about the room without assistance. His spidery legs collapsed under him, and he had to learn to walk.
‘Look, Anna, I can walk,’ he exclaimed, and tried to move more quickly. But his legs could not support the weight of his body, and the floor broke from his feet. Compelled to lean against the first support to hand, he smiled broadly, and the skin on his translucent cheeks tightened into furrows. He laughed an agedly jarring, miserable little laugh, and weak with his efforts, fell back on the bed.
Their rooms were close to the quay. From the window they could see the snowy stretch of the Volga, beyond it forests sweeping in a dark half-circle, and the soft, undulating outlines of distant fields. Anna often stood by the window, thinking over the strange and violent change that had occurred in her life. Bunchuk’s illness had brought them very close together. But even before that, after their first meetings in Rostov, she had realized with an inward chill and tremor that she was bound to this man by inseverable bonds. Out of due season, in a time of menacing events, in the nineteenth spring of her life as brief as a dream, her feelings had taken charge of her and driven her towards Bunchuk. Plain and simple as he was, her heart had chosen him; in battle struggles she had become one with him; she had robbed death of him, had pulled him through.
At first, when after a long and arduous journey they had arrived at Tsaritsin, her life had been burdensome and bitter to the point of tears. Never before had she had to look so closely and nakedly at the reverse side of living with one beloved. Clenching her teeth, she had changed his linen, combed the insects out of his lousy head, and with shuddering and aversion had glanced stealthily at his naked, masculine body, at the envelope beneath which the dear life was hardly warm. Everything in her had risen up and revolted, but the external filth could not crush the deeply and faithfully preserved feeling. Under its powerful command she had learnt to overcome her pain and incomprehension. And at last all that was left was compassion and a deep well of love which beat and soaked through to the surface.
Once Bunchuk happened to ask her:
‘I suppose I’m repellent to you after all this … aren’t I?’
‘It was a hard test.’
‘What of? Your self-control?’
‘No. My feelings.’
He turned away, and for long could not restrain his lips from trembling. They did not refer again to the subject. Words would have been superfluous and colourless.
When he returned to health their friendly relations were not troubled by a single misunderstanding. He seemed to be trying to compensate her for all she had suffered for him, and was exceptionally attentive, anticipating her every wish, but doing it unobtrusively, with an unwonted gentleness. With eyes rough, yet humble and full with boundless devotion he watched her.
At the end of January they went to Voronezh. As she stared from the rear platform of the carriage at the retreating town of Tsaritsin, she laid her hand on his shoulder and said, as though completing the conversation they had left unfinished:
‘We came together in extraordinary circumstances … Perhaps it would have been better not to … I say that with my head, and not with my heart, of course. And do you know why I say it? Look …’ She pointed to the snowy steppe, lying like an enormous, glittering silver rouble. ‘Out there life is fermenting. It calls for the application of all one’s strength, and I think at such times feeling dissipates our concentration on the struggle. We should have met earlier, or else later.’
‘That’s not true!’ he smiled and pressed her to himself. ‘You and I will be one, and that will not only not weaken our concentration, but on the contrary it will strengthen it. It’s easy to break one twig, but more difficult to break two intertwined.’
‘Not a very good example, Ilia.’
‘Perhaps not … but all this talk leads nowhere.’
‘That’s true, and besides, I’m not so very sorry that we …’ she was embarrassed, and hesitated ‘… have half come together. The personal cannot stifle our desire to struggle …!’
‘And conquer, damn it!’ he finished for her, squeezing her little, militantly closed fist in his hand.
The fact that they had not yet come together physically gave their relationship a childlike, agitatingly tender quality. They were not oppressed by the desire to cross the last barrier to their complete union. This circumstance gave Anna cause for agitated joy, and as she thought of it she asked:
‘Our relations are not at all like what they usually are in such cases, are they? Our landlady in Tsaritsin and everybody else thought we were man and wife, didn’t they? How good it is, if only because we have got beyond the petty restrictions of the everyday! In the struggle you and I came to love each other, and succeeded in preserving our feeling without soiling it with anything bestial, earthly …’
‘Romanticism!’ he laughed.
‘What?’ she inquired.
He silently stroked her head.
She stared with misty eyes at the snowy expanse, at the distant, indistinct outlines of villages, at the lilac contours of copses, at the gashes of ravines. She spoke hurriedly, and her voice was low and crooning in timbre like a violoncello:
‘And besides, how poisonous and petty seems any care for the achievement of one’s own individual little happiness at the present time! What does it signify in comparison with the uncompassable human happiness which suffering humanity will achieve through the revolution? Isn’t that so? We must be wholly absorbed into this struggle for liberatio
n, we must … must fuse with the collective group and forget ourselves as isolated parts.’ Gently, like a child in sleep, she smiled at the corners of her tender yet strong mouth, and a wavering shadow lay on her upper lip because of her smile. ‘You know, Ilia, I perceive the future life like a distant, distant, magically beautiful music. Just as one sometimes hears it in sleep … Do you hear music in your sleep? It is not a separate, slender melody, but a mighty, growing, perfectly harmonized hymn. Who doesn’t love beauty? I love it in all, even its smallest manifestations … And won’t life be beautiful under socialism! No more war, no more poverty, or oppression, or national barriers … nothing! How human beings have sullied, have poisoned the world! How much human misery has been poured out!’ She turned passionately towards Bunchuk and sought for his hand. ‘Tell me, wouldn’t it be sweet to die for that? Tell me! Yes? What is there to believe in, if not in that? What is one to live for? It seems to me that if I die in the struggle …’ She pressed his hand to her chest so that he felt the muffled beating of her heart, and gazing up at him with a deep, darkened glance, she whispered: ‘… and if death is not instantaneous, then the last thing I shall feel will be that triumphant, disturbingly beautiful music of the future.’
Bunchuk listened with bowed head. He was inflamed by her youthful, passionate outburst; and through the rhythmic clatter of the wheels, through the scrape of the carriage and the ring of the rails he thought he heard a great, intangible melody. A shiver ran down his back. He went to the outer door and threw it open with a kick of his boot. The wind burst whistling into the platform, bringing with it steam, a prickly, snowy dust, and the incessant, powerful roar of the engine.
Bunchuk and Anna arrived at Voronezh on the evening of January 29th. They spent two days there, then, learning that the Don Revolutionary Committee had been driven out of Kamenska by the Chornetsov troops, they followed it to Millerovo.
Millerovo was alive and active with people. Bunchuk remained there only a few hours, and left by the next train to Gluboka. The next day he resumed command of the machine-gun detachment, and the following morning took part in the battle which ended in the defeat of the Chornetsov forces.
After Chornetsov had been smashed Bunchuk had unexpectedly to part from Anna. One morning she came running from staff headquarters, excited and a little sad.
‘Do you know, Abramson’s here. He badly wants to see you. And I’ve some more news … I’m going away today.’
‘Where to?’ he asked in amazement.
‘Abramson, I and several other comrades are going to Lugansk on agitation work.’
‘So you’re deserting our detachment?’ he asked coldly.
She laughed and pressed her flushed face against his chest.
‘Confess! You aren’t sad because I’m deserting the detachment, but because I’m deserting you! But it’s only for a time. I’m sure that I shall be of more service in that work than with you. Agitation is more in my line than machine-guns’ – she gave him a roguish look – ‘even under so experienced a commander as Bunchuk.’
She went behind a screen to change her clothes. When she returned she was wearing a soldier’s khaki tunic girdled with a leather belt, and her old black skirt, patched in places but spotlessly clean. She had recently washed her hair, and it fluffed and broke away from the knot. She put on her overcoat, and asked, in a voice which had lost all its previous vivacity and was dull and pleading:
‘Will you be taking part in the attack today?’
‘Why, of course! I’m not going to sit with folded hands.’
‘I only ask you … Listen, do be careful. You’ll do that for my sake, won’t you? I’m leaving you an extra pair of woollen socks. Don’t catch cold, and try to keep your feet dry. I’ll write to you from Lugansk.’
The light suddenly faded from her eyes. As she said goodbye she confessed:
‘You see, it’s very painful for me to leave you. When Abramson proposed that I should go to Lugansk I was delighted, but now I feel that it will be desolate there without you. Another proof that feeling is only in the way at present. Well, in any case, goodbye.’
She was cold and constrained in her farewell, but he understood that she was afraid of breaking down in her resolution.
He went to the door to see her off. She walked away hurriedly, swinging her shoulders and not looking round. He wanted to call her back, but he had noticed a moist glitter in her eyes as she said goodbye for the last time, and mastering his desire, he shouted with feigned cheerfulness:
‘I hope to see you in Rostov. Keep well, Anna!’
She glanced round across her shoulder, and hastened her steps.
After she had gone Bunchuk suddenly realized all his terrible loneliness. He turned back into the house, but ran out again at once as though it were on fire. Everything there spoke of her. Everything retained her scent: the forgotten handkerchief, the soldier’s wallet, the copper mug, everything her hands had touched.
Until nightfall he wandered about the station, experiencing an unusual anxiety and a feeling that something had been cut away from him. He could not get accustomed to his new situation. He abstractedly stared into the faces of Red Guards and cossacks, recognizing some, and being recognized by many others. He was stopped by a cossack who had been in the army with him during the Russian-German war. The man dragged him to his home and invited him to join in a game of cards with a number of other Red Guards and sailors. Enveloped in tobacco-smoke, they slapped the cards down, rustled their Kerensky rouble notes, and cursed and shouted incessantly. Bunchuk longed for air, and under the pretext that he had to take part in an attack within the hour, he left without saying good-bye to anyone.
Chapter Five
The last hopes of the counter-revolutionary forces were collapsing like rotten wood. The Bolshevik noose was lashing and tightening round the throat of the Don province. The revolutionary forces were drawing near to Rostov, and Kornilov, realizing that it was dangerous to remain in the town, decided on February 22nd to retreat.
Towards evening of that day a long column of soldiers wound its way out of Rostov, marching heavily over the half-melted snow. The majority were wearing officers’ uniforms, and captains and colonels were in command of the platoons. In the ranks were Junkers and officers of all degrees from ensigns to colonels. Behind the numerous wagons of the baggage train came crowds of refugees: elderly, well-dressed men in overcoats and goloshes, and women wearing high-heeled shoes. In one of the companies of soldiers was captain Listnitsky.
The evening shadows gathered. A frost set in. A salty, humid breeze was blowing from the mouth of the Don. Yellow puddles appeared here and there on the heavily trodden road. The going was difficult, and the damp penetrated inside the boots. As he walked Listnitsky listened to the conversation of the men in front of him. An officer in a fur jacket and an ordinary cossack fur cap was saying:
‘Did you see him, lieutenant? Rodzianko, the president of the State Duma, and an old man, forced to go on foot …’
‘Russia is going to her Golgotha …’
Someone remarked ironically:
‘A Golgotha, truly … with the one difference that instead of a stony road we have snow, and a devilish cold.’
‘Have you anything to smoke?’ a lieutenant asked Listnitsky. The man took the cigarette Eugene offered, thanked him, and blew his nose on his hand soldier-fashion, afterwards wiping his fingers on his coat.
‘You’re acquiring democratic habits, lieutenant,’ a lieutenant-colonel smiled sarcastically.
‘One has to, willy-nilly. What do you do? Have you managed to salvage a dozen handkerchiefs?’
The lieutenant-colonel made no reply. Tiny green icicles were clinging to his reddish-grey moustache. Occasionally he snorted, frowning with the cold which pierced through his overcoat.
‘The flower of Russia!’ Listnitsky thought, glancing with keen commiseration over the ranks of the column winding along the road. As he listened unattentively to the conversation he recalled h
is departure from Yagodnoe, his father, and Aksinia. He was choked by a sudden feeling of yearning. He put his feet forward limply, stared at the rifle-barrels and bayonets swinging in front of him, at the fur caps and cowls swaying to the rhythm of the march, and thought:
‘Every one of these five thousand ostracized are like me, carrying with them a charge of hatred and boundless anger. The swines have thrown us out of Russia, and think to crush us here. We shall see! Kornilov will yet lead us into Moscow!’
Until the 24th of March the Volunteer Army was concentrated in the district of Olginsk, a few miles to the south-east of Rostov. Kornilov delayed any further movement, as he was expecting the arrival of general Popov, the newly appointed ataman of the Don cossack army, who had retreated from Novocherkass into the steppes to the east of the Don with a detachment of sixteen hundred men, five field-guns and forty machine-guns. Popov, accompanied by his chief of staff Sidorin and a cossack escort, rode into Olginsk on the 26th. He reined in his horse on the square in front of the house occupied by Kornilov, dismounted, and slowly walked towards the porch, followed by Sidorin.
Entering the hall, the two newcomers greeted the generals assembled for the conference and went to the table. Alexeev asked a few unimportant questions concerning their journey and the evacuation of Novocherkass. Kutepov entered, accompanied by several line officers whom Kornilov had invited to the conference.
Staring fixedly at Popov, who had seated himself calmly at the table, Kornilov asked:
‘General, tell us the size of your detachment.’
‘Fifteen hundred swords, a battery, and forty machine-guns with their complement.’
‘You know the circumstances which have compelled the Volunteer Army to evacuate Rostov. We held a conference yesterday, and took the decision to march to the Kuban, in the direction of Yekaterinodar, where volunteer detachments are already in action. We shall take this route.’ He passed the blunt end of his pencil over the map, and went on hurriedly: ‘We shall draw in the Kuban cossacks as we march, shattering the few unorganized and feeble Red Guard bands which may attempt to impede our movement. We propose that you join the Volunteer Army with your detachment and march with us to Yekaterinodar. It is not to our interests to split up our forces.’