Byzantium Endures (51 page)

Mrs Cornelius avoided the sight. ‘Between you an’ me, Ivan,’ she confided, ‘I wasn’t expectin’ nuffink like this. It’s wot comes o’ bein’ English, I s’pose. It wouldn’t ‘appen over there. You wanna get ter London, mate.’

‘I had considered it.’

‘Yer might find me there a’ead o’ yer.’ She gave the sailor on the running board a cigarette she had already lit. She winked and laughed with him. it woz a soft spot fer sailormen got me inter me present predic, really, wannit?’

‘You’ve not been back to Odessa?’

‘Nar! I ‘alf-’oped, see, ter make ther Finlan’ train an’ go that way, like we wos talkin’ abart. But fings got orl wonky some’ow. An’ Leo can be a jealous pig. In spite o’ the fac’ ‘e’s not exactly single.’

‘Why not come with me to Odessa? The French are in control there.’

‘An’ a lot o’ bloody Bolshies, mark my words. I’ve ‘eard.’

‘Are you frightened they’ll do something to you?’

‘Nar! They got no reel respec’ fer women, any of ‘em. That’s me strengf, yeah? Know wot I mean?’

‘I think so.’

‘They don’t reckon women count. Unless they’re in ther Party, that is. I’m just a fancy-bit ter them. I’ll be orl right. If Leo ‘eard I’d got on that bloody train wiv you, ‘e’d jest bring it back, wouldn’t ‘e?’

‘I suppose he would.’ I rather regretted the principles which had, and always will, stopped me from leaguing myself with the Communists. They certainly knew how to gain and hold power better than any of their rivals. They saw and accepted no ambiguities. Many non-Bolsheviks eventually came round to Lenin. It was better to have Bolshevik order than no order at all.

As we entered the rather unattractive town of Fastov, I saw a red flag flying from the dome of the church. A synagogue was burning. There were Red Cossacks everywhere and a considerable amount of filth and confusion. Overhead, a biplane dropped, observed us, then flew away towards the west. As if waiting to board a train, guns and horses crowded the street leading to the station. The long Odessa train had been shunted off the main line into a siding. People crowded around it. There were Red Guards, Chekists, women with babies which they displayed like talismans, Jews who argued vehemently with officials, men in uniform from which all insignia had been ripped: the wadding showed through their greatcoats, so urgently had those symbols been removed. Youths gave the Bolshevik salute, old men wandered about in the deep snow, looking for things which had been dropped, beautiful girls fluttered their eyelashes and tried to flirt with the leather-jackets. Cossacks, with red stars on their caps, were lounging over their ponies making filthy remarks to all and sundry (there is nothing worse than a Cossack who has gone to the bad), while sailors marshalled whole lines of workers and peasants beside the train and into the first-class compartments which filled up rapidly and had begun to smell of urine. The richer people were being forced to enter the fourth-class compartments, or even the animal-wagons at the rear.

The car bumped along a track and came to a stop. An officer in ordinary military clothes, wearing a cloak and an old Tsarist blue and white uniform with the inevitable red stars, came up to us. He did not salute. All the usual disciplines had been abolished at that time. They would return with a vengeance. People were astonished in World War II when Stalin brought back the entire paraphernalia of military rank and etiquette. He was sensible. While war is a fact of life, soldiers must exist; while soldiers exist, there must be proper ways of controlling them.

Mrs Cornelius knew the officer. She greeted him. He grinned at her. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘It’s my friend,’ she said. ‘He needs to be on the Odessa train. Party business. He’s a courier for Commissar Trotsky.’

‘There’s a carriage at the front for proletarian representatives. They plan to argue with French soldiers. Do you think they’ll succeed, comrade?’ He seemed anxious for an answer from me.

‘There’s every chance,’ I told him. I privately prayed the canker of Bolshevism would never touch France. But it was like a gas used in the trenches. It touched everyone. Bolshevism would have died out completely by now if it had not been for that shot at Sarajevo.

They had rounded up a number of people in civilian clothes. I had seen some of them only recently. Then, they had been wearing Petlyurist uniforms. They were taken away behind an embankment. There was a burst or two of machine-gun fire and some laughter. The guards returned without their prisoners. I thanked God and Mrs Cornelius for my escape. By oversleeping, I had missed the train and probably that firing squad.

Mrs Cornelius, with a gesture which reminded me of my mother, at once began to joke with the sailors, asking them which girl they liked the look of most. ‘Anything would do me at the moment,’ one said. ‘I’ll take a horse if the Cossack leaves it alone for a minute.’

I could not quite summon proper self-control. I knew my lips were dry. I wondered if my alarm betrayed me.

Another sailor leaned across the front seat and patted me on the shoulder, ‘It’s not your fault, comrade.’

I was grateful and smiled at him. He grinned back. ‘God knows what you Bolshies think you’re up to.’

I became confused.

‘No offence,’ he added. ‘I don’t quarrel with Bolsheviks. So long as they go on representing Soviet needs.’ He spoke with a certain amount of menace, as if he challenged Lenin himself. I could make no sense of it. I told the sailor I agreed with him and that fundamentally we had no differences. He was already turning away to take an interest in an argument between a Chekist and a woman with three small sons who refused to hand over their bundles for inspection.

I whispered in English to Mrs Cornelius. ‘Why do they shoot them so mercilessly? It will only bring more death.”

Because she was frowning I thought I had offended her. Then the frown became a wink. She said seriously: ‘They’re bloody shit-scared, Ivan. Leo an’ the ovvers, more than these bleedin’ fugs ‘oo don’t care ‘oo they kill. It’s like tryin’ ter stay on top of a bloody eruptin’ volcano, innit? They carn’t get ther stopper back in. Shoutin’ at it don’t exactly ‘elp! So they’re tryin’ dynamite, right?’ She screamed with laughter all of a sudden. ‘Pore buggers!’

‘A volcano expends its energy with less loss of life,’ I said.

‘Not in bloody Bali.’ Mrs Cornelius was smug. ‘They orl run up ther bloody ‘ill an lie darn in front o’ the bloody lava. If it gets enough o’ ‘em, they reckon, it’ll stop.’ She drew a handkerchief from a muff on the seat beside her and blew her nose. ‘I read that,’ she said with some pride, ‘in ther
Penny Pictorial.
Yer don’t see ther
Penny Pictorial
rahnd ‘ere, I s’pose?’

‘I have never seen it.’

‘Me neither. I could do wiv a nice read. It was a lot less borin’ fer me before all this broke aht, yer know. ‘Ow long’s it bin? Two years? Well, just over a year since the Old Man - ‘e don’t like me. neither - nearly bungled ‘is larst chance. ‘E won’t give an ounce o’ credit to Antonov, will ‘e?’

I scarcely understood her. She was so immersed in the internal gossip and politics of the Bolsheviks she assumed everyone took her meaning.

‘Never met such a bunch o’ self-important buggers. They orl ought ter be given little kingdoms of their own. No wonder I carn’t keep me eyes off ther bloody sailors!’ She sighed. ‘Well, it woz fun while it lasted. While they ‘ad nuffink ter do but talk. I’ll be glad ter be art of it, an’ no mistake. Yer goin’ ter Blighty?’

‘I hope so.’

‘I’ll give yer me address in Whitechapel. Somebody’ll know if I’m back an’ wot I’m up ter. But, I tell yer, Ivan, I’ll be up West first charncet I get.’

With these cryptic words she stretched across me, all soft fur and French perfume, and opened the door of the car. As I began to climb out, she fumbled with gloved hands in a reticule, removed a pamphlet printed on coarse paper, and with a pencil slowly wrote down a single line. She gave me the pamphlet. ‘Don’t mind if I wave bye-bye from ‘ere, do yer? I’m not goin’ in that bloody snow if I can ‘elp it.’

Two sailors shouldered their rifles and took my bags from the box at the back of the car. Between them I walked in dirty slush to the carriage nearest the locomotive. A variety of desperadoes, male and female, regarded me from misted windows. The sailors dumped my bags on the metal steps. Stumbling through the door I found I was in a sleeper. The compartments, however, were fairly full and there would be no way in which I would be able to stretch out. The majority of the people were dressed as peasants and industrial workers. There were one or two ‘intellectuals’ in dark overcoats similar to my own. My natural inclination was to join these. I had stored my luggage (including a small hamper from Mrs Cornelius) before I realised I had made a serious mistake. I would not be able to answer their questions or understand their references. They had made space for me. They were calling me comrade. I shook several hands and then went back to the carriage door to wave to Mrs Cornelius. Fox-fur arms saluted me. The car was already turning. One of the sailors now sat next to her, grinning at his friends and at me. I heard a faint ‘Keep yer pecker up, Ivan!’ and she was gone. I was left with the cursing Cossacks, the pallid Chekists, the weary sailors. I returned to the relative security of the compartment and was offered a flask of vodka. I accepted it and sipped. It was raw moonshine; the kind they brewed in Shulyavka, the foulest slum in Kiev. I expected to go blind instantly and it affected my vocal chords as the arak had done in Odessa. The man who had offered it, a round-faced Ukrainian with a bushy red beard and thick spectacles, laughed and said, ‘You’re used to better, eh?’

I managed to say I was not a great drinker. This gave him further amusement. ‘Then you can’t be a Katsup. What are you? A Moslem?’

I considered claiming I was from Georgia or Armenia, but the problem there was that someone else in the carriage might know those areas. I shook my head and said I was from Kiev. I had spent some time in Petrograd and elsewhere.

‘I’m Potoaki,’ he told me. It was a name with Polish resonances, but that was not strange in Ukraine. ‘You?’

‘Pyat.’ It was what Mrs Cornelius had christened me. It simply meant ‘five’ in Russian. I thought it gave me exactly the right air. I had decided how to play my game.

He said ‘most of us have only two’ and introduced me to the three men and the woman in our compartment. I remember only the name of the woman. She was Marusia Kirillovna and she was dark and delicate and grim. My mother must have looked like her. She had the same dark eyes, the same expression, half-open, half-shut. ‘Good afternoon, comrade,’ she said. She was pulling on tight leather gloves and there was a holstered automatic Mauser in her lap. She sat nearest the window. Her book was poetry by Mandelstam, and of recent issue, judging by the bad production. The others were good-natured idiots, but Marusia Kirillovna seemed a woman of reliable instinct. I determined to say nothing to her unless asked a direct question. Russia was throwing up better women than men at that time. All the worthwhile men had been killed. And they were more ruthless, some of those women. They judged themselves harshly. Their self-control became fanatical: dangerous to anyone who did not display the same quality. That was one of the reasons I remained uncommunicative. The only way to impress such women is to let their imagination work on your behalf. They are always inclined to see virtue in silence. They assume that a man with nothing to say is more intelligent. I have had long relationships, since my Russian years, which were only maintained because I had the sense to keep my mouth shut. I could have been Sophocles. It would not have mattered. Two or three sentences, and they would know I was ‘a sham’. They are the kind of women who shun mirrors as vanity, yet forever seek mirrors in their lovers. Sure enough, by the time the train was on its way, leaving corpses and cheering Cossacks in its wake, she had already begun to treat me with exaggerated respect. I pulled my hat down over my eyes, pretending to sleep.

Dante driven into exile inspired Liszt to create those painful Bolshoi voices, those Russian girls singing in Latin. What do the English know of exile? They cannot bear it. Everywhere they go they create another Surrey. New Zealand mutton and mint-sauce. And throbbing, terrible Australia, with its two-legged lizards, even that they have attempted to turn into some spiritual Torquay. The Romans left roads and villas. The English leave cold cups of tea and stale crumpets and ‘guest houses’ littering the world from China to Rio de Janeiro. They cannot abide emotion. They cannot face death, any more than can the Americans. So they smooth it away with polite voices and coffee-mornings. And because death is so unpleasant, because they cannot look Terror in the eye and smile back at him, they let their Law decline, their Empires fade - and they, too, have lost their honour. Phoenicia went sailing. What can save the world? Not the Jewish-Moslem God. We have had our taste of the power of the rabbi and the Khan. Our Cossacks dealt with them and will deal with them again if need be. Only the Son can save us. Christ is a Greek. The Greeks knew that. They laughed at the Jews when they spoke of strange new ideas. The Greeks took those ideas to Palestine. They were welcome again in Byzantium. Defend Greece. How did the English defend Cyprus? They let Turkish peasants foul it. Those sons of Islam knew nothing. They could not look after the houses they stole. They could not look after the olive groves or the vineyards. The Greeks lost everything. Islam is rising. Zion is rising. And from the East the Khans are galloping again, with skulls for banners, but now it is the skull of Mao who grins down at us from the lance-poles. Must Russia defend the West alone? Still? Must Ukraine drown in fresh blood? I worship Him: Kyrios, the Lord. The Christ of Saint Paul. The Greek Christ. I worship Him. Plato, Archimedes, Homer and Socrates were created by God to be the first prophets of Jesus, the Greek Messiah. That was why the Jews hated him. He spoke for Reason and Love. Their envious black eyes looked across the waters of the Middle Sea and saw Light glowing. Ah, Jerusalem. Oh, Carthage. They should put a wall across the world. What is race? Nothing. A description of the spirit. Christ is a Greek. Islam and Zion turn hot, black eyes towards the West. The light is too strong for them. It was alien to them. They crucified him. Those ancient devils, those primitive souls. What do they know of humility, with their Korans and their Talmuds? All they know is vengeance. Watch them fight. All they know is vengeance. What have we done to them? Fires burn through the Middle East, through Africa, through Asia. They are the smoking fires of ignorance. God tried to kill his own Son and failed. His Son returned from exile to Byzantium and there He shelters still. Where East and West blend in harmony, there is Christ. And that is the knowledge every Russian holds within him. It is what Tikhon tried to tell us; our martyred Tikhon. Herod. Nero. Stalin. They sought to kill the Shepherd. All they slaughtered was the sheep. The bandit-kings come and go. They die perplexed, wondering why they have won nothing, defeated nothing. And the generosity of the Shepherd is greater than ever. He is our protector, our comfort and our hope.