Byzantium Endures (64 page)

‘A little.’

‘Carbs?’

‘I should think so.’

‘Spiffing. Now, then, you have some shut-eye. Some brekker in the morning and you’ll be fit enough to look at Bessie.’ Almost all tanks, I was to learn, were called Bessie by Australians. I have asked more than once why this should be. Nobody knows. He spoke with kind assurance, as one chanting a spell whose efficacy has been thoroughly proven.

I slept in a sack beside a tank. The Russians were piling what little booty they had been able to find on the ground, under the eye of the captain, Kulomsin. He was thought lenient by his men. They called themselves, of course, Volunteers. Few of them were actually that. The Australians were contemptuous of them; ashamed of their association. The French-speaking liaison officer was a Serb. I guessed he was some sort of failed adventurer who had taken up with the Whites in order to save his skin. I breakfasted on bread and more soup, which they thinned with water. They kept their own stores and refused to share them with the Volunteers. They gave me a cigarette. It was milder than I had been used to. It was real Virginia tobacco. I cleaned their carburetor for them and reconnected it. They tested the engine. It ran well enough, but it had been badly overtaxed; driven too hard and too soon. I would have no more trouble servicing it, however, than if it had been a tractor. We were leaving the village. The Whites burned it. For harbouring Reds, they said. I did not see it. I was excited by my first experience of the choking interior of a tank. Those machines were even more cramped than the modern kind, which are Rolls Royce limousines in comparison. We moved slowly ahead. The Australians hardly spoke at all amongst themselves. I asked where we were going. They were joining up with other units, they said, for ‘some real fighting’. By this, I gathered, they meant an attack on a city.

The tank was hot and stuffy. I did not care. In it I felt secure for the first time in over two years. Every so often we stopped. Maps were inspected. I translated between Captain Wallace, the Australian commander, in his tank, and the Russian officer, who had a staff-car. My heart was singing. We were on our way to Odessa! The Serb glowered at me. His function had gone. When I last saw him, through one of the observation slits at the side of the tank, he wore an expression of morbid despair. I was called upon to tune the other machine’s engine as best I could. I was worth, said the Australians, my weight in gold.

All the gold would soon be gone from Russia. You see it in the Kensington antique shops still, just near the Soviet Embassy.

It was August, I learned. It grew hotter and hotter. Whenever possible, the hatches would be left open. We would take turns in the turret, trying to cool ourselves. My face and hands became quite brown. I was happy and very content by the time we entered a range of low wooded hills; it might have been Dorset, said Captain Wallace. We halted. Wallace conferred with Kulomsin. Kulomsin indicated a small, dusty road, wide enough to take a carefully-steered tank. He would go ahead in the car.

The leaves of the trees were shimmering. The smell of earth, recently damp and now drying in the sun, had the effect of further relaxing me. I have since discovered that the scent of flowers, rather than the by-product of the poppy, can calm me quite rapidly: hyacinth, roses, lilac and sometimes lilies do this.

I had just taken my turn in the turret, when we emerged from the wood and began to roll across an overgrown lawn leading down to an old ornamental lake with ruined balustrades. There was an artificial island in the middle. On it were willows and the gutted remains of a Japanese gazebo. Far across the murky waters I saw a large, neo-classical mansion. It was pitted by recent artillery bombardment. Its southerly side was half caved-in from what I took to have been a recent fire. Doubtless peasants, Bolsheviks, Nationalists, Socialist Revolutionaries, Anarchists, bandits of all descriptions, had had their way with house and estate. But it retained a good deal of its antique dignity. The Volunteer Army colours were flying from the roof now. The owner, doubtless dead or fled, would have been reassured to see the flag, if not the rather battle-weary White troops who moved around the grounds, setting up a camp.

The tank followed the curve of the water until we reached a kind of paddock where several more tanks were already at rest. To my absolute joy I saw, near a jetty on the far shore of the lake, two seaplanes. They had been hastily painted with Volunteer insignia and obviously had belonged to the Germans. There was a large machine and a very small single-seater. The first was a double-biplane with huge sets of wings fore and aft: an Oertz Flugschooner. The other was a Hansa-Brandenburg W20, meant to be flown from U-Boats but never actually used for that purpose. It could be collapsed and stored very quickly and was just as easily re-assembled. It was an ideal plane for this sort of campaigning where water, of course, was not always available. Hansa-Brandenburgs were wonderful aircraft. The Oertz on the other hand had a bad reputation. It was difficult to bring in on even the calmest waters. I could not take my eyes away from either plane until the tank cut its engine. We began to disembark, the Australians exchanging loud, friendly greetings and complaining about their Russian allies. Eventually Captain Wallace came up to me. He would introduce me to our Russian CO. We walked around the lake to the mansion. There was a smell of decay I found pleasant. The Volunteer units had made the house their GHQ.

I knew more than a little regret for the idyllic past, when the house and estate had represented the acme of civilisation in South Russia. However, I was glad enough to enjoy what it still represented. I imagined how it must have looked in the days of Turgenev who wrote so beautifully about such places you might have imagined yourself in France. The hall was wide and cool. A spiral staircase led off it. As usual all pictures and anything of the slightest value had been carried off. There were a few camp-chairs and collapsible desks for the staff, maps on the wall; an atmosphere of lassitude created, I suspect, by the heat. The majority of the soldiers were Russians in the smart uniforms of Tsarist times. There were also French, Greek and British officers among them. We were, I learned, less than twenty versts from Odessa and were quite near the coast. I could almost smell the beloved scent of flowers and saltwater. As I entered a large room, I thought I recognised one of the Russians. He was of average height, with a monocle and a small moustache, wearing a dark leather jacket open to reveal a light blue army shirt. The uniform, with its red, yellow and black flashes, was that of the Russian Engineers. He was a Second-Lieutenant. He was someone I had met in Petersburg when he had been home on leave. I saluted Major Perezharoff, the Russian ranking officer, who sat moodily on his desk smoking. Captain Wallace introduced me to him as ‘Major Pyatnitski, Intelligence’. Major Perezharoff regarded me with a scowl. He had a dark, unhappy Crimean face. He spoke in the purest French, asking me how things were in Nikolaieff. I explained I had been serving with the tanks. He nodded. ‘You speak English. That’s something.’ He sighed. ‘And you were spying on the Reds?’ He glanced with distaste at my clothes. ‘We have no spare uniforms.’

‘I was captured. And rescued by Captain Wallace.’

‘Where were you last?’

‘Hulyai-Polye. Before that Alexandriya. Before that Kiev.’

‘Do you know what Antonov’s up to?’

‘The different factions are at loggerheads, unable to agree amongst themselves. Their movements, I regret, are now a mystery to me.’

‘Well, their morale’s no better than ours. I’m glad.’ He turned away from me. I saluted the Second-Lieutenant and brought my heels together, unable to match the precision of the true Russian soldier. ‘I believe we are acquainted. Are you not Alexei Leonovitch Petroff, cousin to my old friend Prince Nikolai Feodorovitch Petroff? We met at the Mikhishevskis some years ago. In Peter. You knew me then as Dimitri Mitrofanovitch Kryscheff.’

‘Ah, yes.’ He blinked and removed the monocle from his eye. He had become more expert with it now. ‘We talked about Rasputin.’ He uttered a rather unpleasant laugh.

‘Kolya and I were very close. I was studying science.’

He looked at me with a familiar insolence. I had not really experienced anything like it since Petersburg. I remembered how irritating he had been. But we were now, after all, equals. Indeed, I outranked him. ‘Do you know how Kolya is? Where he is? I know he went into politics.’

‘Kolya?’ The laugh was challenging, as if he laughed at a conqueror. He was puzzling. He said: ‘Who knows? Cheka?’

‘He’s in prison?’

Petroff laughed again. ‘Unlikely. They don’t keep too many prisoners for long, do they? Particularly Kerenskyite princes.’

I knew a terrible sadness. He spoke almost accusingly. I wondered if he associated me with Kolya’s political comrades.

‘You have English, I hear?’

‘Yes.’ I was mourning Kolya. He had been the best friend I had known. ‘I’m in Intelligence. I was acting as interpreter with the Australians.’

‘I could do with an interpreter. It always takes half-an-hour to translate a report. We’ll lose Odessa at this rate. Why don’t you come up with me, as my observer?’ The engineer’s uniform had deceived me. I remembered his conversation, then, in that Petersburg drawing-room. He was, of course, a pilot-officer. His was one of the planes on the lake. It could be my first trip in a machine not of my own making. I was curious to experience the differences.

‘In the Oertz?’ I said.

‘It’s the only two-seater. Done any observing before?’

‘Not really.’

‘It’s fun.’ He laughed again, still sardonically, still as if I had somehow cheated him at a sport. ‘What do you say, Kryscheff?’

‘If your seniors agree ...’

‘I have none. I’m a flyer. Like the tank people, I’m my own man. They need us too much to make us go through all that palaver. I’m going soon. There’s something I have to do in Odessa. You know the Church of the Vanquisher?’

‘It’s a strange name for a church.’ I tried to join in whatever his joke was. But Kolya’s memory was too strong.

‘Isn’t it? There’s a map in the plane. You can make notes of positions.’ There was a despairing quality about him. All his ideals had gone. He wanted to be revenged on something but could find nothing to blame. I should have been more nervous of him, but I wanted to forget about Kolya and I desperately wanted to take the aeroplane trip.

Petroff saluted Major Perezharoff. ‘Sir, this officer will be of considerable use to me as an observer. He can also relay reports directly to the English liaison people. I should like to take him up with me.’

Perezharoff shrugged. ‘He’ll be out of our way.’

Having said farewell to Captain Wallace I left the mansion. I wandered with a suddenly silent Petroff down to the lake. A small wooden jetty had been repaired and led out to where the seaplanes were moored. ‘Do you know the Oertz?’ he asked.

‘I know the Germans rejected them for war work.’

‘Not at the end. That’s how we got it. They’re devils to handle, but they’ve their own beauty. The little Hansa is a gem. You’d hardly know you were taking off or touching down. Like a dragonfly. But she’s a one-seater.’

‘You use both?’

‘I’m the only airman left. You’ve had some plane experience, didn’t Kolya say?’

‘Mine were experimental.’

‘Yes.’ He was thoughtful. ‘Kiev, of course.’

‘I owe Kolya much.’

‘You were a special friend? He was a true Bohemian. But he knew his duty.’

‘Politics?’ I shrugged. I was missing a clue to the nature of this exchange. We reached the end of the jetty.

‘Hot as hell, eh?’ Petroff removed his cap. it’s cooler up there.’ He seemed to yearn for the sky. The sun caught his monocle. It blazed like a dragon’s eye. ‘You survived, however. You’re a bit of a fraud, aren’t you? So you went into Intelligence.’

I ignored the insult, ‘It was my only possible contribution.’

‘Spying.’

‘Sabotage, too. As an engineer, I had to make the best use of my talents. In the struggle.’

‘You were always against the Reds?’

I wondered why he was interrogating me so intensely. ‘Profoundly opposed.’