Byzantium Endures: The First Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet

  Brodmann moaned in his bed. Grishenko glared at him absently. Then he appeared to dismiss him as he returned his attention to me. ‘He said to bring them. Now they are yours.’

  I did not understand.

  Grishenko had a tear in his left eye. He pulled one of his long daggers from its red velvet sheath. He leaned over me. ‘We are free. We have our own laws.’ He put the knife under my chin. ‘Up.’

  ‘Why?’ I began to cough and then stopped, fearing that I would impale myself on the sharp tip. The knife-point touched my jugular. I felt the vein pulsing against steel.

  ‘Up, yid.’

  I recalled Yermeloff’s warning. Grishenko was a savage dog who would only attack if you showed fear. I pulled at the triggers. The guns were not cocked. They would not fire. Grishenko put his face closer to mine. His breath burned me. ‘Up.’

  I had no choice. I dropped the pistols to the bed. I stood in my shirt. My legs and genitals froze. I was dizzy. He placed his free hand on my chest and pushed me against the wall.

  Brodmann began to whine slogans from where he sat in his nightshirt. He babbled about ‘rights’ and my ‘importance’. The Cossack said absently to him, ‘I’ll kill you. Be quiet.’

  I think my neck had begun to bleed.

  Grishenko gripped my shoulder. It felt as if it was going to break. The knife slid slowly down my stained shirt and the shirt parted. The blade touched my groin. ‘He said you would know what the guns meant to him. He was a holy one. I loved him. I protected him. I thought you would cheer him up. He was not a happy man.’ The point was drawn down one leg and then another. I hardly felt it, yet blood trickled. I did not beg. My honour was in me. I did not beg as the others begged. When he told me to face the wall, I obeyed. ‘He wanted you to live. To survive, he said. I did not understand. But Yermeloff was closer to God than I am. Do you accept his gift?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I think I thanked him.

  ‘Yermeloff was shot last night. Because he let you go. Not because your Bolsheviks ordered it. He told me to give you the guns. So I have brought them.’

  I could not see what he was doing. The knife was at my heart but he was removing something else from his belt. ‘He made me promise not to kill you.’

  ‘You … ‘

  ‘Shut up. I promised. But I said I must make sure you would remember him. I don’t think you’ll keep his guns.’

  I heard Grishenko’s awful whip whistling through the dull, grey air. We screamed together. I can feel the pain. It was the worst pain I have known. It was the most unexpected. It was inflicted with such skill, such controlled passion, that no bone was broken. But I still bear the marks of the little lead weights in my buttocks.

  ‘Now you’ll remember Yermeloff, yid.’

  He pushed me onto the bed so that my face struck the pommels of the guns. I was weeping. He was still in the room, staring at me, slowly putting his whip back in his belt, his knife back in its sheath. Then he turned and went out. He closed the door quietly behind him. The monster had gone. That monster, who had killed his friend to save his own skin.

  I still have the pistols. I have been offered a thousand pounds for them.

  FIFTEEN

  HISTORY IS NEVER THE SAME; but events repeat themselves. Gradually, through this repetition, you learn that people are very similar everywhere you go. They have always been inclined to leap to conclusions about me. I have rarely been guilty of anything. Is it my fault they transfer their own hopes and fears onto me? I am a scientist with a scientist’s mind. Few understand this. I have been humiliated. Grishenko humiliated me. Brodmann spoke of ‘outrages’ and ‘lack of discipline’ and used his Marxist rubbish to condemn Grishenko’s attack, but I could not bring myself to take the matter further. I am a forgiving soul. I had been fond of Yermeloff. To some extent I could understand Grishenko’s grief. Nonetheless, it was all but impossible for me to sit on anything hard for many weeks to come. Later, I would give the pistols into the safekeeping of Mrs Cornelius and would not see them again until 1940. Now, they had become a comfort.

  Brodmann had forced the doctor to attend me. I had won some sympathy, though still a ‘Viper’ and a ‘Jew’, a murderer of the Tsar. Alone, I could have agreed with everything he said about the Reds, but Brodmann had hovered. Perhaps he had been afraid the poor little doctor would assassinate me. We were due to link up with Hrihorieff. There was a train we must catch. As we left for the station, I felt only the song of the pain, as we say. It would not be for another day that I experienced the stiffness and throbbing agony, far harder to bear and more irritating.

  I saw Grishenko once more while I was boarding the train. He grinned at me. I blushed like a girl. Nobody else noticed my reaction. Brodmann was too furious, pointing out Grishenko as my assailant. In all his looted finery, Grishenko rode away on his pony, lashing at its neck and shoulders with that whip. The round pommels of my pistols rested against each of my hips. They fitted easily into the pockets of my louse-ridden great-coat. I also had my papers, my diploma.

  We received special attention. We had even better accommodation than on the Kiev train. The seats, thank God, were soft. Brodmann sat opposite me, by the window. He kept grumbling and muttering and staring out at the muddy snow, looking for Grishenko. I laughed and told him it was nothing.

  ‘It is typical!’ Brodmann would have me know. ‘Justice is merely their word for vendetta. And this is the material we must work with!’

  Strangely, I felt elevated that morning. I felt superior. I chuckled. ‘Worse has happened to me, Brodmann. You should be in my trade.’

  ‘I hate violence.’ His soft, wizened face clouded.

  ‘Then you’re in the wrong vocation.’ Our thin friend entered, pulled off his long coat, folded it neatly, and placed it in the overhead rack.

  ‘I was a pacifist. The Bolsheviks promised peace. I worked for them at the Front. I published newspapers, pamphlets.’ Brodmann sat back as the train began to move. ‘Does anyone know where we’re really going?’

  ‘Hrihorieff said he wants us at his field HQ. He has some idea of taking Kherson or Nikolaieff. Maybe he’s there already.’

  ‘They’re far too well defended. Greeks and French in one, Germans in the other.’

  ‘The Germans aren’t happy about fighting for the Allies and the Whites. They might come over to us.’

  ‘But not to Hrihorieff. He’s shown what he thinks of Germans. They wouldn’t trust him.’

  The train moved into wide, horizonless steppe-land. Filth gave way to the purity of late snow. It would begin to melt quite soon. The conflict might be settled by spring. Hrihorieff’s and the Bolsheviks’ advances were rapid. Soon there would probably be a decisive battle. My only fear was that it would occur in Odessa before I could get Mother and Esmé to safety. Hrihorieff’s progress seemed relentless and inevitable. If Makhno joined us, Whites and Allies might well be wiped out. I was praying for dissension amongst the different leftist groups. There is nothing like socialism to divide men up into smaller units. Those flags were the colour of the roses I gave to Mrs Cornelius: the deepest, blood-red lustre. The colour of my own blood. Pricked on thorns, my blood mingled with the petals: she was my sister, my mother, my friend. Roses. I would not look back. I have no nostalgia. I have been cheated. This is the world. God’s purpose will be revealed in Heaven. I had no Faith. All God’s gifts were taken from me. I am selling the same fur coats (though cleaner) I was in those days forced to wear. The young men strut up and down like comic-opera Chekists. There is one who wears the badge of Anarchy. What can he know of Anarchy? He speaks a little Russian. I say to him: ‘What is this?’ The badge. He says A is for Anarchy. I say why not wear a badge from A to Z to make the Z for Zionism, it is the same thing. He finds me amusing. He is a fool. All these murders and kidnappings. The Anarchists were fools and still are fools. They rejected power and yet accepted responsibility for their terrorism. What did they gain? What did the world gain? Anarchy? No government? It gained more, wo
rse government. Chaos. The universe expands. The universe grows cold. Soon there will be snow everywhere.

  The snow will harden and squeeze the Earth. All will be ice. The ice will contract to vanishing point. Then there will be nothing. It is a law of physics. It is entropy. It is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is the Heat Death of the Universe. It is the end. This echo-theory they have discovered: what is that but Hope? And what is Hope but Faith? They have their ‘echo-theory’: nothing in the universe vanishes, nothing dies. They have done no more than rediscover God! That is the state of science today. It wastes its resources and the public’s money finding out what the world has known from the beginning of Time and will know until the end of Time: God loves the world. This is not science as I was taught it. Mine was a world of machines and engines, not theoretical gobbledegook. Everyone wants to be an Einstein. Einstein had the grace to credit his source. He was a godly fool. What Russians call an ‘enchanted one’. For all that he was a Jew and a Zionist. But perhaps I do him too much credit. How those two Jews confused the world between them! They introduced more superstition into the twentieth century than all our scientists had banished from the nineteenth. Sex? Freud confused sex with affection; the need for love. Physics? They have become poetry. Everyone says so. They build huge laboratories to test poetic theories. Where is the old pragmatism?

  The train stopped after about two hours. We were on the empty steppe. An apparently orderly military camp was set up on a nearby ridge. Soldiers began to trudge across to us. They carried large cans of soup. These were distributed the length of the train. We had made a scheduled food-stop. Bandit or not, Hrihorieff knew enough to keep his lines of communication clear. His logistics were excellent. He controlled a wide radius of track. The track and the telegraphs gave him the power of rapid transport and the ability to modify orders quickly. The Whites further South had far less rolling stock or track available to them. They were fundamentally more suspicious of technical innovation. Here the Reds, to their credit, had the advantage. They had fewer aeroplanes, but they were prepared to use them. The Whites put their faith in cavalry charges. They were brave romantics. It was calculating Jews who looked into the Future. But they did not see everything. I do not deny it was a crime. But it was a crime of revenge. It was not cold-blooded. I have literature which claims only two or three million died in the camps. I believe it was six million. Stalin killed more. Death dominated the twentieth century just as it had the sixth, the fourteenth and the seventeenth. Memento mori. The Western democracies should recall the Golden Age of Florence. Savonarola destroyed it in a month. Freedom and responsibility are the same thing. The young have forgotten. Self-discipline, not swords, saved Sparta. Brotherly love saved Sparta. But it did not save those poor, noble Greeks at Kherson when the servants of Satan descended upon them. They say I know nothing of religion. But I have come to religion. My heart and my brain brought me to the noble faith of Russia which resisted Africa and Asia, took root here, in London; in New York, in Paris, everywhere. Is that a dead faith? The true faith of Constantine, who made Rome Christian, who founded Byzantium? There is no purer faith. It is the faith of the Greeks who invented the Christian religion. The Jews borrowed it and handed it back to them as if it were new. Jews have always traded so. Paul understood this. The Greeks give us everything, yet we betray them over and over again. Look at Cyprus. The British are in love with Islam. They give them land for their mosques. They applaud them in their books; they invite them to buy Park Lane. They name their heroes after Arabia. They flirt with Islam as a young girl flirts with the demon-lover who plans to make her a harlot. They are simple minded. They lack the ancient experience of Russia. Beware Carthage! I had pamphlets printed at my own expense. There is no point in explaining to the British. At best I was laughed at. I used to keep them in my shop. The National Front is no good. I am not afraid of Indians. Or the Chinese who run the fish-and-chip shop across the road. Can nobody see but me? Spies fill these streets. It is like a nightmare. I am the sole person who realises what is going on. Nazis and National Front have only acne and envy in common. Communists and foreigners steal our souls, our blood, our minds. But these are not Martians. This is not The War of the Worlds. We cannot expect a natural solution. The body fights cancer. It usually wins. The new cells destroy the rogues. Only when intelligence interferes is there danger. Many die because they are diagnosed. Cancer comes and goes, the body instinctively fights it. So we should fight. Nothing so spectacular as the Gorynich dragon. Chur menia! Chur menia! But who will listen? Not the Chinese or the Africans or the Indians. Not the Italians. Even the Greeks will not listen. There is a Serbian Church, admittedly, behind the Public Library. And a Greek Church in Bayswater. I continue to be optimistic. I have become more subtle in my methods. It is all monasteries and convents, all Catholics and Irish and negro chapels here. Some of the young people appear to understand. Perhaps we will muddle through. When we have sent back all the foreigners, and transported Golders Green to the Promised Land. But I think it is too late. Oh, Byzantium! Come to us with your horses and your swords to save us.

  The train started up again. The soup had been a half-way decent shtshyi, with good meat. Brodmann had gone to sleep. The others read or scribbled in notebooks. That was how they fought our Civil War. Yet every man in that carriage probably had more blood on his hands than a dozen Cossacks. Sometimes cavalry trotted alongside the train. The riders gave Red salutes and waved. If we moved slowly they would exchange shouts with the troops. We were carrying guns and soldiers. Every coach was armoured. Sometimes, as in our own, they had been fitted with a hotchpotch of sheet-metal riveted at random. The windows were largely unprotected. In the event of an attack we were supposed to throw ourselves to the floor and hope for the best. But there were no attacks. Hrihorieff and the Bolsheviks between them had brought a kind of peace to the area. It would not be long before they fell out amongst themselves. In common with the Whites, they all had a hatred of the Nationalists. But the Devil was amongst us. Never had Russia been so divided. Only now are the wounds healing, but Islam and Zion still threaten the Slavic race.

  I was to see Hrihorieff the next day. Following his usual habit he had taken over a good-sized town. Mounted on a white Arab, like Skoropadskya’s, he was reviewing his troops: motley, swaggering Cossacks in a thousand varieties of clothing, armed with good carbines. Their ponies, as always, were lovingly groomed. The Zaporizhian Ataman was fairly short, his head was shaven, he had grey, Mongolian features, but he was no play-actor. He handled his horse well. His uniform was ‘pure’ Cossack, without any stupid antique adornments. He drew his strength from his troops as Constantine did when he returned from England to claim the Roman Empire. He was a true soldier. He had served bravely in the War. He laughed, he gesticulated, but his horse was always firmly controlled, never allowed to skip or rear. Thus he displayed the intelligence and the will lying beneath the braggadocio. This was why the Cossacks allowed him to be their master: to lead them on their daring attacks on great Ukrainian cities. I understood why Yermeloff had planned to become indispensable to the Ataman, why Grishenko was so useful. If Lenin or Trotsky had possessed half Hrihorieff’s manliness we should never have suffered the disasters and consequences of War Communism. There is none, in all that frightful crew, I would have served more willingly than Hrihorieff, yet I continued to be nervous of his followers. Pretending to disapprove of the pogromchik bandits, he nonetheless used them for his own ends, as Queen Elizabeth had used her pirates. Ultimately they might, in spite of Yermeloff’s guess, be eliminated, as Lafitte was cast out after serving his turn in the American Revolution. Trotsky would cheerfully have killed most of his allies by 1921. He invited them for peace-talks or political meetings and had them shot. Trotsky learned bandit ruthlessness but not bandit courage. I am a child in such matters.

  The train stayed another day in a siding, then took us away from Hrihorieff’s garrison to a nearby Bolshevik camp. This contained more uniforms but it was only s
lightly less orderly than the partisan camps. Many Red Cavalry Cossacks were drunk, though Chekists tried to control them. These commissars had far more authority than any ordinary officer. They were greatly feared, as Lenin wanted them to be. I was doubly glad I was an ‘activist’, with comrades who still talked of ways and means of getting me to Odessa. We were thirty or forty versts closer, I think. I was not good at judging distance or the passage of time. Nikolaieff, if that were our destination, was relatively near to Odessa, east along the coast. Kherson was even further east, on the Dnieper, as Nikolaieff was on the Bug. The two towns were strategically important. They were served by main railway lines and rivers leading directly to the sea. Large ships docked at both. With these cities taken, an army approaching from Alexandriya would be able to attack Odessa with its large well-equipped Allied and White garrison. This was the substance of most debates over the coming days. Allied ‘interventionist’ forces defended Kherson and a reluctant German garrison occupied Nikolaieff. Though supported by French or English warships, the cities were vulnerable. However there was considerable dispute between Hrihorieff and the Bolsheviks about strategy. I suspect Antonov wanted any victories for himself. Brodmann claimed to be winning partisans over to the Bolshevik cause daily. They were now, he said, describing themselves as ‘Bolsheviks’ instead of ‘Barotbists’. I was unimpressed. They seized on slogans and Parties for comfort because they could no longer fight for God. At least the Whites knew what was of value to them. With better leaders, they would have given us back God and our Tsar. The Roman Empire never fell. It lives on in spirit. God will return to Russia. There is a religious revival. Byzantium remains in the soil, in the hearts of the people.

  The train moved a few versts a day. Grubby snow melted and revealed a ruined land; as bandages are peeled away from an unhealed body.