‘Time to call a halt, lads. This is treason.’
Barbolin looked up at me uncomprehendingly.
‘The agents of the Entente are at it again,’ I threw in at random.
These words seemed to have some meaning for him, because he immediately tugged his rifle from his shoulder. I restrained him.
‘Not that way, comrade. Wait.’
Meanwhile the gentleman with the saw had reappeared on the stage, seated himself on the stool and begun ceremoniously removing his shoe. Opening up my travelling bag, I took out a pencil and a blank Cheka arrest order; the plaintive sounds of the saw swept me upwards and onwards, and a suitable text was ready within a few minutes.
‘What’s that you’re writing?’ asked Zherbunov. ‘You want to arrest someone?’
‘No,’ I replied, ‘if we take anyone here, we have to take them all. We will handle this a different way. Zherbunov, remember the orders? We’re not just supposed to suppress the enemy, we have to propound our line, right?’
‘Right,’ said Zherbunov.
‘Well, then,’ I said, ‘you and Barbolin go backstage. I will propound our line from the stage. Once I have finished, I’ll give the signal, and you come out. Then we’ll play them the music of the revolution.’
Zherbunov tapped a finger against his cup.
‘No, Zherbunov,’ I said sternly, ‘you won’t be fit for work.’
An expression somewhat akin to hurt flitted across Zherbunov’s face.
‘What d’you mean?’ he whispered. ‘Don’t you trust me, then? Why I, I’d…I’d give my life for the revolution!’
‘I know that, comrade,’ I said, ‘but cocaine comes later. Into action!’
The sailors stood up and walked towards the stage with firm, lumbering strides, as if they were not crossing a parquet floor but the heaving deck of a battleship caught in a storm; at that moment I felt something almost like sympathy for them. They climbed up the side steps and disappeared into the wings. I tossed back the contents of my cup, rose and went over to the table where Tolstoy and Briusov were sitting. People were watching me. Gentlemen and comrades, I thought, as I strode slowly across the strangely expanded hall, today I too was granted the honour of stepping over my own old woman, but you will not choke me with her imaginary fingers. Oh, damnation take these eternal Dostoevskian obsessions that pursue us Russians! And damnation take us Russians who can see nothing else around us!
‘Good evening, Valery Yakovlevich. Relaxing?’
Briusov started and looked at me for several seconds, obviously unable to place me. Then a doubtful smile appeared on his emaciated face.
‘Petya?’ he queried. ‘Is it you? I am truly glad to see you. Join us for a minute.’
I sat at the table and greeted Tolstoy with reserve. We had met frequently enough at the Apollo editorial office, but hardly knew one another at all. Tolstoy was extremely drunk.
‘How are you?’ asked Briusov. ‘Have you written anything lately?’
‘No time for that now, Valery Yakovlevich,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Briusov thoughtfully, his eyes skipping rapidly over my leather jacket and Mauser, ‘that’s true. Very true. I’m the same…But I didn’t know you were one of us, Petya. I always thought highly of your verse, especially your first collection, The Poems of Captain Lebyadkin. And of course, Songs of the Kingdom of I. But I simply couldn’t have imagined…You always had all those horses and emperors, and China…’
‘Conspiracy, Valery Yakovlevich,’ I said, ‘conspiracy…’
‘I understand,’ said Briusov, ‘now I understand. But then, I assure you, I always did sense something of the sort. But you’ve changed, Petya. Become so dashing…your eyes are positively gleaming…By the way, have you found time to read Blok’s “Twelve”?’
‘I have seen it,’ I said.
‘And what do you think?’
‘I do not entirely understand the symbolism of the ending,’ I said. ‘What is Christ doing walking in front of the patrol? Does Blok perhaps wish to crucify the revolution?’
‘Yes, yes,’ Briusov replied quickly, ‘Alyosha and I were just talking about that.’
Hearing his name mentioned, Tolstoy opened his eyes and lifted his cup, but it was empty. He fumbled about on the table until he found the whistle and then raised it to his lips, but before he could blow it, his head slumped back on to his chest.
‘I have heard,’ I said, ‘that he has changed the ending, and now he has a revolutionary sailor walking ahead of the patrol.’
Briusov pondered this for a moment, and then his eyes lit up.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s more correct. That’s more accurate. And Christ walks behind them! He is invisible and he walks behind them, dragging his crooked cross through the swirling blizzard!’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and in the opposite direction.’
‘You think so?’
‘I am certain of it,’ I said, thinking that Zherbunov and Barbolin must have fallen asleep behind the curtain at this stage. ‘Valery Yakovlevich, I have something I would like to ask you. Would you announce that the poet Fourply will now present a reading of revolutionary verse?’
‘Fourply?’ Briusov asked.
‘My party pseudonym,’ I explained.
‘Yes, yes,’ Briusov nodded, ‘and so very profound! I shall be delighted to listen to you myself.’
‘I would not advise that. You had better leave straight away. The shooting will start in a minute or two.’
Briusov turned pale and nodded. Neither of us said another word; when the saw fell silent and the dandified musician had put his shoe back on, Briusov rose from the table and went up on the stage.
‘Today,’ he said, ‘we have already spoken of the very latest forms in art. This theme will now be continued by the poet Fourply,’ – he could not restrain himself, and he rolled his eyes up to the ceiling, making it clear that he was about to indulge in his typically idiotic wordplay – ‘hmm…I have no wish to spoil the surprise, but let this poem serve as a kind of…hmm…foreplay. Your attention please for the poet Fourply, who will read his revolutionary verse!’
He walked quickly back down into the hall, smiled guiltily at me, shrugged, grabbed the weakly protesting Tolstoy under the arm and dragged him towards the exit; at that moment he looked like a retired teacher tugging along a disobedient and stupid wolfhound on a leash.
I went up on to the stage. The abandoned velvet stool stood conveniently ready at its edge. I set my boot on it and gazed out into the hall, which had fallen silent. All the faces I saw seemed to merge into a single face, at once fawning and impudent, frozen in a grimace of smug servility – beyond the slightest doubt, this was the face of the old moneylender, the old woman, disincarnate, but still as alive as ever. Sitting close to the stage was Ioann Pavlukhin, a long-haired freak with a monocle; beside him a fat, pimply woman with immense red bows in her mousy hair was chewing on a pie – I thought that she must be the Theatre Commissar Madam Malinovskaya. How I hated them all for that long second!
I took the Mauser from its holster, raised it above my head, cleared my throat, and in my former manner, gazing straight ahead without expression and using no intonation whatsoever, but simply pausing briefly between quatrains, I read the poem that I had written on the Cheka arrest form:
Comrades in the struggle! Our grief can know no bound.
Comrade Fourply has been treacherously struck down.
The Cheka reels now, pale and sick
At the loss of a senior Bolshevik.
It happened that on leaving a dangerous suspect
He paused along the way to light a cigarette,
When a counter-revolutionary White
Caught him clearly in his pistol sight.
Comrades! The muzzle thundered fierce and loud,
The bullet smote brave comrade Fourply in the brow.
He tried to reach a hand inside his jacket
But his eyes closed and he fell down flat ker-sma
ckit.
Comrades in the struggle! Close ranks and sing in unison,
And show the great White swine the terror of the revolution!
With these words I fired at the chandelier, but missed; immediately there was another shot from my right, the chandelier shattered and I saw Zherbunov there at my side, resetting the breech on his gun. Going down on one knee, he fired a few more shots into the hall, where people were already screaming and falling to the floor or attempting to hide behind the columns, and then Barbolin emerged from the wings. Swaying as he walked, he went up to the edge of the stage, then screeched as he tossed a bomb into the hall. There was a searing flash of white fire and a terrible bang, a table was overturned, and in the silence that followed someone gasped in astonishment. There was an awkward pause; in an attempt to fill it at least partly, I fired several times more into the ceiling, and then I suddenly caught sight again of the strange man in the military tunic. He sat unperturbed at his table, sipping from his cup, and I think he was smiling. I suddenly felt stupid.
Zherbunov fired off another shot into the hall.
‘Cease fire!’ I roared.
Zherbunov muttered something that sounded like ‘too young to be giving me orders’, but he slung his rifle back be hind his shoulder.
‘Withdraw,’ I said, then turned and walked into the wings.
At our appearance the people who had been hiding in the wings scattered in all directions. Zherbunov and I walked along a dark corridor, turning several corners before we reached the rear door and found ourselves in the street, where once again people fled from us. We walked over to the automobile. After the stuffy, smoke-polluted atmosphere of the hall, the clean frosty air affected me like ether fumes, my head began to spin and I felt a desperate need to sleep. The driver was still sitting there motionless on the open front seat, but now he was covered with a thick layer of snow. I opened the door of the cabin and turned round.
‘Where’s Barbolin?’ I asked.
‘He’ll be along,’ chuckled Zherbunov, ‘just something he had to see to.’
I climbed into the automobile, leaned back against the seat and instantly fell asleep.
I was woken by the sound of a woman’s squeals, and I saw Barbolin emerging from a side street, carrying in his arms the girl in lace panties. She was offering token resistance and the wig with the plait had slipped to one side of her face.
‘Move over, comrade,’ Zherbunov said to me, clambering into the cabin. ‘Reinforcements.’
I moved closer to the side wall. Zherbunov leaned towards me and spoke in an unexpectedly warm voice: ‘I didn’t really understand you at first, Petka. Didn’t see right into your heart. But you’re a good ‘un. That was a fine speech you gave.’
I mumbled something and fell asleep again.
Through my slumber I could hear a woman giggling and brakes squealing, Zherbunov’s voice swearing darkly and Barbolin hissing like a snake; they must have quarrelled over the unfortunate girl. Then the automobile stopped. Raising my head I saw the blurred and improbable-looking face of Zherbunov.
‘Sleep, Petka,’ the face rumbled, ‘we’ll get out here, there are things still to be done. Ivan’ll get you home.’
I glanced out of the window. We were on Tverskoi Boulevard, beside the city governor’s building. Snow was falling slowly in large flakes. Barbolin and the trembling semi-naked woman were already out on the street. Zherbunov shook my hand and got out. The car moved off.
I was suddenly keenly aware of how alone and vulnerable I was in this frozen world populated by people keen either to dispatch me to the Cheka or to perturb my inner soul with the dark sorcery of their obscure words. Tomorrow morning, I thought, I will have to put a bullet through my brain. The last thing I saw before I finally collapsed into the dark pit of oblivion was the snow-covered railing along the street, which came up very close to the window as the automobile finally turned.
2
To be more precise, the railings were not simply close to the window, but were part of it; in fact, it appeared that they were bars across a small window through which a narrow beam of sunshine was falling directly on to my face. I tried to turn away from it, but that proved impossible. When I attempted to press one hand against the floor in order to turn from my stomach on to my back, I found that my hands had been secured behind me: I was dressed in a garment resembling a shroud, the long sleeves of which were tied behind my back.
I felt no particular doubt as to what had happened to me. The sailors must have noticed something suspicious in my behaviour, and while I was asleep in the car they had taken me to the Cheka. By wriggling and squirming, I managed to get up on to my knees and then sit down by the wall. My cell had a rather strange appearance; up under the ceiling there was a small barred window – the point of entry for the ray of sunlight that had woken me – while the walls, the door, the floor and ceiling itself were all concealed beneath a thick layer of padding, which meant that romantic suicide in the spirit of Dumas (‘one more step, milord, and I dash my brains out against the wall’) was quite out of the question. The Chekists had obviously built cells like this for their specially honoured guests, and I must confess that for a second I was flattered at the thought.
A few minutes went by as I gazed at the wall, recalling the frightening details of the previous day, and then the door swung open.
Standing in the doorway were Zherbunov and Barbolin – but, my God, how changed they were! They were dressed in white doctors’ coats, and Barbolin had a genuine stethoscope protruding from his pocket. This was simply too much for me, and my chest heaved abruptly with nervous laughter that erupted from my cocaine-scorched throat in an explosion of hoarse coughing. Barbolin, who was standing in front, turned to Zherbunov and said something. I suddenly stopped laughing, struck by the thought that they were going to beat me.
I should say that I was not in the least bit afraid of death. In my situation to die was every bit as natural and reasonable as to leave a theatre that has caught fire in the middle of a lacklustre performance. But I most definitely did not want my final departure to be accompanied by kicks and punches from people I hardly knew – in the depths of my soul I was clearly not sufficiently a Christian for that.
‘Gentlemen,’ I said, ‘I am sure you must understand that soon they will kill you too. Out of respect for death, therefore – if not for mine, then at least for your own – I ask you to get it over with quickly, without any unnecessary humiliation. I shall not be able to tell you anything, in any case. I am no more than an ordinary private citizen and…’
‘That’s a bit feeble,’ Zherbunov interrupted me with a chuckle. ‘But that stuff you were giving us yesterday, that was something else. And that poetry you read! D’you remember any of that?’
There was something strangely incongruous about the way he spoke, something rather odd, and I decided that he must have been tippling his Baltic tea already that morning.
‘My memory is excellent,’ I replied, looking him straight in the face.
The emptiness in his eyes was impenetrable.
‘I don’t know why you bother talking to that asshole,’ Barbolin hissed in his thin voice. ‘Let Timurich handle it, that’s what he’s paid for.’
‘Let’s go,’ said Zherbunov, putting an end to the conversation. He came over to me and took hold of my arm.
‘Can you not at least untie my hands?’ I asked. ‘There are two of you, after all.’
‘Oh, yeah? And what if you try strangling one of us?’
I cringed as though I had been struck. They knew everything. I had an almost physical sensation of the crushing weight of Zherbunov’s words tumbling down on top of me.
Barbolin gripped me by my other arm. They easily stood me on my feet and dragged me out into the dimly lit, deserted corridor, which did actually have a vague hospital smell about it, not unlike the smell of blood. I made no attempt to resist, and a few minutes later they pushed me into a large room, sat me down on a stool at its centre
and withdrew.
Directly in front of me stood a large desk piled high with bureaucratic-looking files. Sitting behind the desk was a gentleman of intellectual appearance wearing a white doctor’s coat just like those of Zherbunov and Barbolin. He was listening attentively to a black ebonite telephone receiver squeezed between his ear and his shoulder, while his hands mechanically sorted through some papers on the desk; from time to time he nodded, saying nothing, and he paid not the slightest attention to me. Another man wearing a white doctor’s coat and green trousers with red stripes down their sides was sitting by the wall, on a chair placed between two tall windows over which dusty blinds had been lowered.
Something indefinite in the arrangement of the room reminded me of General HQ, which I had visited frequently in 1916, when I was trying my hopeful but inexperienced hand at patriotic journalism. But instead of a portrait of the Emperor (or at the very least of that infamous Karl who had left a trail of indelible marks across half the kingdoms of Europe), hanging on the wall above the head of the gentleman in the white coat was something so terrible that I bit my lip, drawing blood.
It was a poster, printed in the colours of the Russian flag and mounted on a large piece of cardboard, depicting a blue man with a typically Russian face. His chest had been cleaved open and the top of his skull sawn off to expose his red brain. Despite the fact that his viscera had been extracted from his abdomen and labelled with Latin numerals, the expression in his eyes seemed one of indifference, and his face appeared frozen in a calm half-smile; on the other hand, perhaps that was simply the effect created by a wide gash in his cheek, through which I could see part of his jaw and teeth as flawless as in an advertisement for German tooth powder.
‘Get on with it, then,’ the man in the white coat barked, dropping the receiver back into its cradle.
‘I beg your pardon,’ I said, lowering my eyes to look at him.
‘Granted, granted,’ he said, ‘bearing in mind that I already have some experience in dealing with you. Allow me to remind you that my name is Timur Timurovich.’
Buddha's Little Finger Page 4
