She quietly said:
‘Yes, go to the front or get on to other work. Do, Ilia, or you’ll … go out of your mind.’
He turned his back to her and drummed on the window.
‘No … I’m strong. Don’t think that there are any men made of iron. We’re all cast of one material. In real life there isn’t a man who is without fear in battle, and not a man who can kill people without carrying … without getting morally scratched. I don’t feel any regret for the officers. They’re class-conscious like you and me. But yesterday I had to shoot three cossacks among the rest … three toilers. I began to bind one …’ his voice became hollow and indistinct, as though he were going farther and farther away. ‘I happened to touch his hand, and it was as hard as sole-leather, covered with callouses. A black palm, all cuts and lumps … Well, I must be going.’ Seized by a harsh spasm, he sharply broke off and rubbed his throat.
He put on his boots, drank a glass of milk and went out. In the passage Anna overtook him. She stood long holding his heavy, hairy hand in her own, then she pressed it to her flaming cheek and ran out into the yard.
Time swept on in lengthening days. The weather turned warmer. Spring came knocking at the lands of the Don. At the beginning of April Red Guard detachments driven back by the Ukrainians and the Germans began to arrive in Rostov. Murders, pillaging, unauthorized requisitions occurred in the town. The Revolutionary Committee was compelled to disarm certain completely demoralized units. The task was not accomplished without conflicts and exchanges of fire. Around Novocherkass the cossacks were stirring. In March, like buds on the poplars clashes broke out in the villages between the cossacks and the Russian settlers, risings rumbled here and there, and counter-revolutionary conspiracies were discovered. But Rostov went on living a passionate, full-blooded life. Crowds of soldiers, sailors and workers promenaded up and down the main street of an evening. They held meetings, they husked sunflower seeds, spat into the little streams running over the pavements, and flirted with the women. As before, they worked, ate, drank, slept, died, gave birth, made love, hated, breathed the salty sea-breeze, and lived in the grip of great and petty passions. Days sown with menace were approaching Rostov. The air was laden with the scent of the thawing black earth and the blood of imminent battles.
One sunny, pleasant day Bunchuk returned home earlier than usual, and was surprised to find Anna already there.
‘But you are always so late; why are you early today?’ he asked her.
‘I’m not feeling very well.’
She followed him into his room. He removed his outdoor clothes, and said with a smile of tremulous joy:
‘Anna, after today I shall not be working in the Tribunal.’
‘What are you saying? Where are you going?’
‘To the Revolutionary Committee. I had a talk with Krivoshlikov today. He promised to send me somewhere into the district.’
They had supper together, and afterwards he lay down to sleep. In his agitation he could not get to sleep for a long time, but lay smoking, tossing on the hard mattress. He was greatly satisfied to leave the Tribunal, for he felt that a little more and he would not last, but would break down under the strain. He was finishing his fourth cigarette when he heard the light scrape of the door. Raising his head, he saw Anna. Barefoot, and only in her shift, she slipped across the threshold and quietly approached his bed. Through a chink in the shutter the misty green light of the moon fell on her bare shoulders. She bent over him and laid a warm hand on his lips:
‘Move over … Not a word …’
They lay down together. Her burning legs were trembling at the knees. She raised herself on her elbow, and passionately whispered into his ear:
‘I’ve come to you … only quieter … quieter … mother’s asleep.’
She impatiently brushed back a strand of hair, as heavy as a bunch of grapes, from her forehead. Her eyes smoked with a bluish fire, and she whispered roughly, tormentedly:
‘If not today, then tomorrow I may be deprived of you … I want to love you with all my strength.’ She shuddered violently with her own resolution. ‘Well, quickly!’
Bunchuk kissed her cool, tightly swelling, drooping breasts, and stroked her compliant body. But with horror, with a great shame that whipped his consciousness, he realized that he was impotent. His head shook and his cheeks flamed with his torture. After a moment Anna released herself and angrily thrust him off. Pulling down her shift, with loathing and aversion in her voice she asked in a contemptuous whisper:
‘You … are you impotent? Or are you … ill? Oh, how abominable! … Leave me alone!’
He squeezed her fingers so tightly that they cracked a little, fixed his gaze on her dilated, mournfully darkened, hostile eyes and stammeringly asked, his head twitching paralytically:
‘Why? What are you condemning me for? Yes, I’m burnt up to the very depths of me …! Even for this I am impotent at the moment. I am not ill … Understand … Understand! I am only completely emptied …’
He bellowed stupidly, jumped up from the bed and lit a cigarette. He huddled by the window as though shattered. Anna arose, silently embraced him, and as calmly as a mother kissed him on the brow.
But after a week, when that happened which they both desired, Anna, hiding her burning face beneath his arm, confessed:
‘I thought … you had been with some other … I didn’t realize that the work had exhausted you so much.’
And for long afterwards Bunchuk felt not only the caress and fire of a woman beloved, but the warm, full-flowing care of a mother.
He was not sent into the country. Podtielkov insisted that he should be retained in Rostov. The Don Revolutionary Committee was boiling with activity, preparing for a provincial congress of Soviets and for a struggle against the counter-revolution raising its head in the Don area.
Chapter Seven
The frogs were croaking beyond the riverside willows. The sun streamed over the hillside across the rapids. The cool of evening was soaking into the village of Sietrakov. Enormous slanting shadows cast by the huts fell athwart the dusty road. The village cattle were straggling slowly back from the steppe. The cossack women drove them on with wattles, exchanging gossip as they went. The barefoot and already sunburnt children were playing at leapfrog in the side alleys. The old men were sitting in rows on the ledges of the hut walls.
The village had finished the Spring sowing. Only here and there were they still sowing sunflowers and millet.
A group of cossacks was sitting on a fallen oak close to one of the huts on the outskirts of the village. The master of the hut, a freckled artillery-man, was telling of some incident in the Russian-German war. His audience, an old neighbour and his son-in-law, were listening in silence. The artillery-man’s wife, a handsome woman as corpulent as a noblewoman, came down the steps. Her rose-coloured bodice, gathered into her skirt, was torn at the elbows and revealed her swarthy, shapely arms. She was carrying a pitcher, and went to the cattle-yard with that free and sweeping, elegant stride peculiar to cossack women. Her hair was escaping from its white kerchief, and the shoes on her bare feet slapped along, lightly pressing down the young green overgrowing the yard.
The sound of milk streaming against the sides of the pitcher came to the ears of the cossacks. The mistress finished milking the cows and returned to the hut, a little bowed and carrying the full pitcher of milk in her left hand.
‘Simion, you’d better go and look for the calf,’ she called from the steps.
‘And where’s Mitka?’ her husband asked.
‘The devil knows; he’s run off somewhere.’
The cossack rose unhurriedly and went to the corner of the street. The old man and his son-in-law turned to go home. But the cossack called to them from the corner:
‘Look, Dorofei Gavrilitch! Come here!’
The two men went across to the cossack, who silently pointed out into the steppe. A ruddy cloud of dust raised by ranks of infantry, cavalry and wagons was advanc
ing along the road.
‘Soldiers, surely?’ the old man screwed up his eyes in astonishment and set his palm to his white eyebrows.
‘What are they?’ the cossack wondered.
His wife came out of the yard gate, her jacket flung across her shoulders. She gazed into the steppe and groaned anxiously:
‘Who are they? Jesus Christ, how many there are!’
‘They’re not out for any good, that’s certain …’
The old man turned and went to his yard, crying to his son-in-law:
‘Come into the yard; there’s no point in standing and staring.’
Children and women came running to the corner, followed by crowds of cossacks. The column of soldiers was winding along the road across the steppe about a mile from the village. The wind brought the sound of their voices, the snorting of horses, the rumble of wheels.
‘They’re not cossacks; they’re not our folk,’ the artillery-man’s wife said to him. He shrugged his shoulders.
‘Of course they’re not cossacks. Maybe they’re Germans? No, they’re Russians. Look, you can see their red flag …’
A tall cossack came up. He was evidently suffering from malaria, for he was a sandy yellow and was wrapped up in a sheepskin and felt-boots. He raised his shaggy fur cap and said:
‘You see that flag? They’re Bolsheviks.’
‘It’s them right enough.’
Several riders broke away from the head of the column and galloped towards the village. The cossacks exchanged glances and silently began to melt away; the girls and children scattered in all directions. Within a minute or two the street was deserted. The group of riders galloped into the village, and rode up to the oak where a few minutes earlier the three cossacks had been sitting. The artillery-man was standing by his gate. The leader of the riders, in Kuban uniform and with a great crimson silk scarf across his khaki shirt, rode up to him.
‘Good health, cossack! Open the gate!’
The cossack turned pale and removed his cap.
‘And who may you be?’ he asked.
‘Open the gate!’ the soldier shouted.
The horse, glancing askance with evil eyes and champing at the bit, struck its forefeet against the wattle fence. The cossack opened the wicket gate, and the riders rode into the yard in single file. Their leader jumped nimbly from his saddle and strode towards the hut steps. While the others were still dismounting he had reached the steps, had seated himself, lit a cigarette and offered the cossack his case. The man refused.
‘Don’t you smoke?’
‘Thank you.’
‘You’re not Old Believers here?’
‘No, we’re Greek Church. And who may you be?’
‘We’re Red Guards of the Second Socialist Army.’
The other riders hurried towards the steps, leading their horses. They tied them up to the balustrade. One of them, a spindle-shanked man with hair falling like a horse’s mane over his brow, went to the sheep-pen. He threw open the gate as though he were the master, bent down, fumbled at the partition of the pen, and pulled out a large sheep by its horns.
‘Piotra, come and give me a hand,’ he cried in a high falsetto voice.
A soldier in an Austrian tunic ran to help him. The cossack master stroked his beard and looked about him as though he were in someone else’s yard. He said nothing, and only went up the steps into the hut when the sheep, its throat slit by a sabre, doubled up its thin legs.
The Kuban soldier and two others, one a Chinese, the other a Russian, followed him into the kitchen. ‘Don’t take offence, cossack,’ the leader cried as he crossed the threshold. ‘We’ll pay for all we have.’
He clapped his hand against the pocket of his trousers and laughed aloud. But the laugh suddenly died away as his eyes fell on the cossack’s wife. She was standing by the stove, her lips compressed, staring at him with terrified eyes. His eyes shifting restlessly around the kitchen, he turned to the Chinese and said:
‘You go with the old man,’ he pointed to the cossack. ‘Go with him, he’ll give you hay for the horses. Let us have some hay,’ he turned to the cossack. ‘We’ll pay handsomely for it. The Red Guard never pillages. Off you go, cossack, off you go!’ A steely note sounded in his voice.
Accompanied by the Chinese and the other soldier, the cossack went out of the hut. He was going down the steps when he heard his wife calling in a weeping voice. He ran back into the porch. The soldier had seized the woman’s arm above the elbow and was dragging her into the twilit front room. She was resisting, pushing at his chest with her hands. He was on the point of putting his arms around her waist and carrying her off bodily, but at that moment the door flew open. The cossack strode across the kitchen and placed himself in front of his wife. His voice was hard and low:
‘You came as a guest into my hut … What are you doing shame to my wife for? Clear out! I’m not afraid of your guns. Take whatever you want, steal everything, but don’t lay hands on my wife. You’ll do that across my body. And you, Nura …’ his nostrils quivering, he turned to his wife. ‘You go along to daddy Dorofei. There’s no point in your staying here.’
Adjusting the straps across his shirt, the soldier smiled wrily:
‘You get upset easily, cossack. You won’t even let a man have his little joke. I’m the joker of the whole regiment, don’t you know? I did it on purpose. “I’ll see what the woman’s like,” I thought; but she started bawling. Have you let us have some hay? You haven’t any? Well, has your neighbour?’
He went out whistling, vigorously waving his whip. Soon afterwards the entire detachment entered the village. There were about eight hundred bayonets and swords in all. The Red Guards, a good third of them Chinese, Letts, and other foreign nationalities, prepared to spend the night outside the village. Evidently their commander did not trust his nondescript and undisciplined soldiers in the village at night.
Shaken in battles against the Ukrainian troops and the German army of occupation, this detachment of the Second Socialist Army had fought its way back to the Don, and was trying to make its way through to Voronezh in the north. Demoralized under the influence of the criminal elements that flourished in the detachment, the Red Guards were roistering along the road. That night, despite the threats and orders of their command, they poured in crowds into the village, began to kill sheep, ravished two cossack women on the outskirts, opened causeless fire on the square, and wounded one of their own number. During the night they got drunk on the spirits they were carrying with them.
But meantime three mounted cossacks had been despatched from the village to give the alarm in the neighbouring villages. In the darkness of the night the cossacks saddled their horses, armed themselves, and hastily assembled detachments of front-line cossacks and elder men. Under the command of officers and sergeant-majors living in the villages, they hurried towards Sietrakov, concealing themselves in ravines and behind rises all round the Red Guard camp. During the night groups of men arrived from all the surrounding villages.
The Milky Way was burning out in the sky, the black, velvety fur of night was moulting and fading. At dawn the avalanches of cossack horsemen flung themselves with a roar from all sides on the Red Guards. A machine-gun rattled, and died away; broke into fire again, then was silent.
Within an hour the deed was accomplished; the detachment was completely shattered; more than two hundred were shot and hewn down, some five hundred were taken prisoner. Two batteries of four field-guns apiece, twenty-six machine-guns, thousands of rifles and a large store of military equipment fell into the hands of the cossacks.
Next day the red flags of couriers galloping along the roads and tracks burst into blossom throughout the district. The villages seethed with excitement. The Soviets were thrown out head over heels, and atamen were hurriedly appointed. By the beginning of May the upper districts of the Don Province had completely broken away from the Don Revolutionary Committee. The populous Vieshenska was elected the centre of the new district, which was
called the ‘Upper Don’. And the Upper Don region, drawing twelve cossack and one Ukrainian district into its orbit, began to live its own life, cut off from the main centre of the Don Province. A cossack from the Yelansk district, a general named Zakhar Akimovitch Alferov, was hurriedly elected regional ataman. It was said of him that he had made his way upward from indigent cossack officer to the rank of general only thanks to his wife, an energetic and intelligent woman. It was said that she had dragged her ungifted consort by the ears and had given him no peace until, after failing three times, at the fourth examination he passed into the military college.
But if Alferov was talked about at all in these days, it was very little. The cossacks’ minds were occupied with other things.
Chapter Eight
The flood water was beginning to abate from the fields. By the garden fences the brown earth was laid bare and edged with borders of dry reeds, branches, and dead leaves left behind by the flood. The pussy-willows of the flooded Donside woods were beginning to turn green, and the catkins hung in tassels. The poplars were ready to burst into bud. In the village farmyards the sprigs of the alders hung low down to the pools at their feet, and their yellow buds, fluffy like the down of ducklings, dabbled in the wind-ruffled water. At dawn and sunset flights of wild geese and ducks swam up to the fence in search of food, the copper-tongued grebes called in the backwaters. At noonday the wind-driven surface of the Don was flecked and fondled by white-feathered teal.
There were many birds in transit that year. The cossack fishermen rowing out to their nets at dawn, when the wine-red sunrise was staining the water with blood, frequently saw swans resting in the wooded stretches of water. But the news brought back to the village by Christonia and old Matvei Kashulin was the greatest miracle of all. They had driven into the government forest to select a couple of young oaks for their farm needs, and as they were making their way through a thicket they disturbed a wild goat with a young kid. The lean, yellow-brown goat jumped out of a dell overgrown with thistles and thorns, and stood gazing for some seconds at them, her thin legs dancing nervously, the kid pressing against her. Hearing Christonia’s gasp of astonishment, she sped off so fast through the oak saplings that the cossacks hardly caught sight of her blue-grey hoofs and the camel-hue of her short tail.