Byzantium Endures (49 page)

Someone grinned. ‘That’s true.’

‘And you’re leaving?’ I could not believe such perfidy.

‘We’re withdrawing from this position. We still have a great deal of support. I think we can rely on Hrihorieff. There’s a strong chance the Entente will lend us troops. Deniken and Krassnoff will have to throw in with us. It’s to their advantage.’

‘How shall I leave if the Bolsheviks find me?’ It seemed a fair question.

‘You’ll be able to slip away,’ said a captain. ‘You’re wearing civilian clothes.’

I wondered if I could get back to my hotel and pick up my bags or whether they would have been stolen already. I saluted in military fashion. ‘Then I shall do my duty.’ That duty, naturally, was to my dependants and to myself. There was no chance at all of the Ultraviolet Projector standing off the entire Bolshevik army. Petlyura had miscalculated everything. I asked him where I should meet the rest of the army.

He hesitated. ‘You’ll hear.’

He expected me to be captured. He did not want to risk my revealing his position. Some of his generals looked openly sympathetic to me. Others were smiling. I seemed to have become a bone of contention amongst them.

‘What if Antonov captures the ray?’ I asked.

‘You’ll destroy it first.’

I thought he was placing a great deal of trust in my loyalty to a cause I had never supported. ‘If they capture me before I can destroy it?’

Petlyura turned. With a gesture of supremely arrogant impatience he struck with his whip at my apparatus. I was horrified. The tripod wobbled but held. ‘They’ll never guess what it is. They have no money. They can’t pay you. Take it to the French. They’ll give you what you ask.’ He was suspicious of something. He was mad.

I became confused and distracted as I attempted to right the machine before the precious vacuum tube was thrown out of alignment. But Petlyura had already done his worst. The machine would take hours to re-set. I told him nothing of that. ‘You asked me to build this.’

‘And it doesn’t work!’

‘You have not given it a fair trial.’

‘Very well. Use it now. Sweep Trukhanov.’

‘I will do my best. You have probably made it impossible...’

‘Destroy Trukhanov.’

I shrugged and pointed the projector in the general direction of the island. I began to move it as a man might move a machine gun, spraying from side to side. Nothing, naturally, happened.

Petlyura was laughing. ‘I’m in a hurry, comrade.’

I noticed from my instruments that not enough power was going through the transformer. ‘The power has been diverted. I must use the Voltaics.’ I pointed up the narrow stair to where they were arranged. ‘Someone must pull that large switch all the way down when I give the word.’

Petlyura was staring at me as if he believed himself crazy. ‘Will it work?’

‘Pull the switch!’

Some fool went clattering up to it, all spurs and frogging; a military genius who could sit a horse without instantly falling off and was thus a general in Petlyura’s idiot-army. He pulled the switch, of course, before I gave the word. The Voltaics began to arc. The soldier came stumbling back. There was noise and light everywhere. Petlyura screamed and was gone, his men behind him, while I battled with what was left of my equipment. It was impossible to do anything. I opened one of the straw-filled ammunition boxes which had brought my vacuum-tubes. The case still contained a tube. All I needed were the lenses. I began to dismantle them as quickly as possible. Someone returned. There was a pistol shot, the tube on the tripod burst and as I covered my eyes I felt pieces of glass strike my hands and forehead. Another shot was aimed at me. Petlyura evidently wished to be sure the Bolsheviks gained no advantage. It seemed at that moment to be a bizarre act of vengeance. I thought it was Petlyura himself firing. I suppose I was mistaken. I saw flashes of pistol-fire and a dark silhouette. I moved behind one of the columns, onto the outer balcony. All six shots were discharged before the figure ran away. Something was on fire. It was my straw. I tried to pull at least one of the tubes to safety but there was every danger it would overheat and burst and then I should be killed. Electricity still sputtered. The connections had been badly made. My worst danger was from the fire in the straw. I did not save a single lens, a single tube. I moved cautiously down the steps, trying to hear any sound of the assassin. But he was gone. I heard some cars going away. Monks with tapers came and looked at me. They were accusing me. I tried to ask their forgiveness with my eyes but they turned their backs to me. I was too cautious to speak. I still found it hard to believe such hatred and violence had been directed at me. I slipped from the church. A Jew in a skull-cap ran past. He was panting. He held something to him. A bundle. It was a baby, I thought. But it was probably a family heirloom he hoped to save from the new invaders. He was quite young, in his twenties, and sandy-haired. But for his obvious Jewishness, he might have been handsome. When he had gone there was only the heaped, dirty snow. Everything was dead. I moved nervously back towards Kreshchatik but I was hardly bothered at all. The inhabitants had taken to their cellars. All the Haidamaki had gone. I reached
The Yevropyaskaya
and walked through undefended doors. I went up to my room. There was no one about. My room had been searched. Nothing of any note had been taken. I slipped my diploma, passport and other papers, together with some gold, into a special secret pocket of my trousers. I packed my notes and realised that most of my designs for the machine, together with written descriptions of processes, had gone. I put little packets of cocaine into prepared places in my jacket and waistcoat. I wondered if Petlyura himself had decided to sell my plans to one or other of the opposing forces. There was nothing I could do. I no longer had any concrete proof I had built and tested my ‘death-ray’. I had been thoroughly and cynically betrayed. After some thought, I decided to take what I could and head for the station. It would be dangerous at night. I would wait until-dawn before venturing out. I went to sleep in all my clothes because the heating had been turned off in the hotel. I heard shots. There was yellow blood in my eyes. I writhed in mud. My mother burned. Bronze bubbled through the gorges of Kiev. Suns rose and set over a battlefield which was the whole world. Years went by as I searched for something.

In the morning I looked out of my window and saw Red Army cavalry riding up Kreshchatik.

* * * *

TWELVE

IT WAS LIKE A FLOOD of brown and red mud in that wide, cold street. Remorseless and orderly, it flowed to the drone of engines and the trotting of horses; it flowed into the buildings, as disciplined as Germans and as fearsome as Haidamaki. I was looking at a real army, at last, and I was terrified. This was what Trotsky and Stalin and Antonov had built from our old Tsarist army: they had fuelled it with Bolshevik fanaticism and fired it with promises of land and Utopia. A dream worth killing for. And it was a Russian army. It was singing. The men on horseback, or in cars, or those who were marching, they were laughing in that easy, desperate way Russians have when they fight. Not a single Nationalist or Republican flag could be seen in the whole of Kreshchatik. Not a single shop was opening into the thin sunshine of that February dawn. There was only ice and Bolshevism in the streets. Without much hope, I began to finish packing. I dressed in my old ‘classless’ suit of black and white. I was able to light a cigarette before the doorhandle rattled and a tired voice asked who occupied the suite. I went to the door and opened it immediately. ‘Good morning, comrade,’ I said. ‘I’m glad to see you at last. I am Pyatnitski.’

It was a Chekist commissar in the leather jacket they all wore (many still wear such jackets, as easy to spot as Special Branch anoraks). He had yellow hair and a wide, prudish mouth. There were three Red Army guards behind him. They wore sailor uniforms, with red stars and bandoliers. They carried long rifles with fixed bayonets. The Chekist held the hotel register in his hands. He turned the pages. ‘You have stayed here frequently, citizen. Is this your home?’

‘I lost my own home,’ I told him. ‘It was looted by the Hetman’s people and by Petlyura.’

‘You don’t seem to have lost much.’ He came into the room.

‘I was poor. I worked with the Soviets. Pyatnitski?’ I hardly knew what lies to tell. I was desperate to talk my way clear of this terrible man.

‘You’ve stayed here and left, stayed here and left. Why’s that?’

‘I was in prison,’ I told him.

‘What had you done?’

‘Nothing. Bolshevik sympathies are enough to get you jailed in Kiev.’

‘You weren’t here during our previous occupation?’

‘I was in Kharkov, visiting comrades.’

‘And who do you support? The Kiev group?’

I knew no more about the different factions of the Party than I did about the sorts of flowers one might discover on a country walk. ‘I was non-aligned,’ I said. ‘My sympathies are with Moscow. I had made attempts to get back there.’

‘Have you any papers?’

I knew better than to give up my real papers, but I still had a spare set in my luggage. I opened my suitcase and took them out. ‘You’ll see I’m a scientist.’

‘Doctor Pyatnitski, is it? You’re very young.’

‘I did well at Petrograd, comrade.’

‘Your degree is from Kiev.’

‘I was transferred. That’s why I found myself here in the first place. You’ll discover that Comrade Lunarcharsky is an acquaintance of mine. He’ll vouch for me.’

‘You’re well-connected.’ He was sardonic. ‘One meets a lot of well-connected overnight Bolsheviks.’

‘I knew many comrades in Petrograd. Before the Revolution. I had a reputation. There are people there who know me.’

The Chekist sighed and scratched himself under his chin with my papers. He replaced a wide-brimmed hat on his head and looked at me through green, almost sympathetic eyes. They were the eyes of a man who was about to kill me. He turned away. A ritual had begun. ‘You’ll let these comrades search the rooms?’

‘If you think it necessary.’ There was a growing scent of death. I had smelled it once or twice before. I would learn to identify it easily in the months and years which followed.

‘You’ve been living very well.’

‘I’ve been lucky.’

‘How have you earned your money?’

‘As a mechanic.’

He sniffed. I wished I had stayed at Mother’s or had risen early enough to catch that Odessa train. ‘My working clothes aren’t here, of course.’

He removed his hat again. One of the sailors found an envelope in a drawer and brought it to him. ‘We still need skilled mechanics, comrade.’ He emptied all the Petlyurist military insignia into his hand.

I began to laugh.

He rounded on me. He was one of those unimaginative men who finds laughter baffling. I stopped, ‘I was offered a commission. Of course I refused it. That’s a souvenir.’

‘A major?’

I would normally have become impatient at this school-masterly malice, the stock-in-trade of so many Chekists and, indeed, policemen everywhere. They have no wit, but they have power. The worst abuse of that power, in my view, is in its employment to make bad jokes.

‘Is it major? I’m impressed.’ I was frightened.

‘Why did they offer you a commission?’

‘They wanted my help with their industrial problems.’

‘Running factories? Or motor-cars? Or what?’

‘Advice. I’ve helped keep most of Kiev going.’

He rubbed at his light-coloured eyebrows. He drew his puritanical lips together as if he had remembered a particularly unpleasant sin, either of his own or someone else’s. ‘You wouldn’t have had anything to do with the fire in that church? It was like a damned beacon. It helped us move in last night. I heard Petlyura or the French had installed a secret weapon up there. It had gone wrong. Was that you?’