I still saw women-friends at The Cube, but I had moved back to The Yevropyaskaya, where many of my German acquaintances also stayed. I preferred the classical elegance of silver and gold, of big, clear mirrors, of plush and crystal, of properly-dressed waiters and clean, white linen. All this had returned as the Bolshevik butchers departed. The Germans appreciated it, as did the latest wave of Russian émigrés.
If Kiev were becoming packed again, at least it was packed with a better class of people: people with money, common-sense and concrete notions of how to counter Bolshevism. Factory-owners from Petrograd and Moscow had always argued for faster and better industrialisation. They had foreseen the Revolution and blamed the Tsar for his short-sightedness. They said the ‘socialist experiment’ would last about as long as Cromwell’s Commonwealth. It would be a bad time: a time of destruction and intolerance. Cromwell had killed the King, torn down churches, destroyed cathedrals, but there were still kings, churches and cathedrals in England to this day. It was a powerful argument and an encouraging one, but it was a delusion. Now I know all that can save the world, to paraphrase Lenin, is God plus electricity.
My mother found the changes alarming. While the Bolsheviks had occupied the city and red flags had flown and I had been in prison she had seemed cheerful and content. Every vicissitude had been met with a joke. Esmé and I had marvelled at her courage. She had bluffed the Reds away from a search of her home. She had wheedled them into providing her with extra rations. She had become personal laundress to a Chekist commissar. She knew the names of many minor Bolsheviks. She praised Comrade Lenin to the skies. She casually dropped the names of Zinovieff and Radek as if they were old friends. She had almost certainly delayed my execution and thus saved my life. But the strain had taken its toll. As the Bolsheviks retreated, she had had an attack of her old bronchial trouble and had gone to bed. By the time the Hetmanate was established, she was still coughing but insisting on going to work. She began to smell of sal-volatile and carbolic soap. The flat was returned to its previous impeccably clean state. She kept apologising for her ‘selfishness’. She said she had been a ‘bad mother’ to me, that it was her fault I had no father.
‘I should never have gone with him,’ she would say. ‘He was bad for me and I was bad for him. We were never suited. But it was ten years. And they were not all miserable.’
I found her reasoning difficult to follow. She had overtired herself in every way. She became worried by the new wave of pogroms in Podol. I assured her the fires would not spread. Then she said she was afraid the Hetman’s army would conscript me. I set her mind at rest. My friends would look after me.
‘You were never any trouble,’ she told me one evening at supper. ‘Everyone said so. They envied me. “He’s so good. How do you do it?” You were always good. From a baby. You’re too kind-hearted, Maxim. Don’t let some woman hurt you.’
‘I won’t mother. I’m only eighteen...’
She smiled. ‘The girls love you, eh? Esmé! Don’t the girls all love him?’
‘They must do,’ said Esmé. ‘He’s quite a dandy.’
‘Remember when you and Esmé used to sleep here? You over the stove, Esmé in her room?’ She became excited. ‘Didn’t we all have fun?’
I did not remember anything in particular. But I could not bring myself to say so. ‘It was great fun,’ I said. I had to leave then, to do some business.
It was still light as I turned the corner into Kirillovskaya and began to walk down the hill towards the city. The summer evening had a lazy yet unsettled quality to it. There were fewer factory chimneys smoking. Many of the smaller concerns had completely closed down. There was a darker mass of smoke over Podol. The sounds were muted in the streets, yet I heard the wail of a river-boat quite clearly, as if it were only a few feet from me. Gold and green domes of distant churches had a dull, deep shine; yellow brick was warm, it seemed to radiate heat; and the smell of grass, trees and flowers from the wooded gorges mingled with scents of soot and oil and that hint of leather always associated with a large occupying army. I could smell horses, too. Here it was as if the town and country met and blended in almost perfect harmony. I wanted to pause, perhaps hoping a tram would come by, but I knew better than to make myself prey for the gangs occupying some of the outlying parks. I glanced automatically up at an embankment. There was nothing but evening haze on hedges. As I walked down the hill into the city, I had a definite sense of God’s biding His moment. What puzzles me, to this day, is in what manner we failed. Certainly, the churches, both Orthodox and Catholic, were never fuller, from morning to night, than in that uncertain summer.
I returned to my hotel to enjoy a second dinner with a Prussian major, an Austrian colonel, a Ukrainian banker and two émigrés recently arrived from Vologda where, they said, anyone with a vocabulary of more than two hundred words was liable to be shot by the Cheka out of hand. I heard stories of Bolsheviks capturing ‘government’ officers, of stripping them naked and cutting their rank-insignia into their living flesh before killing them. The days of the French Revolution, the days of the Commune, were as nothing compared to the years and years of the Bolshevik Terror. And what did we have to counter it? Humanity? Religion? All we had was pazhlost, that grey, half-dead spiritual state one is in during the winter, when nothing is worthwhile and one can only hope to survive until spring.
In those days ordinary military operations did not exist; the entire pattern of war had gone crazy. It was gradually to become our Civil War. In the North-East were Czechs and Japanese, Russian Whites and small numbers of Americans and British. Finns, Letts, Lithuanians, Baltic Germans, Poles, French, Greeks, Italians, Rumanians and Serbs were all fighting somewhere. Few of these groups, even if they had been allies against the Germans, were able to agree either strategy or a common aim. Out of China, across the border, there were even raids from mixed groups of Chinese and renegade Cossack bandits bent entirely on looting and pillaging whatever they could get away with. It was like the Middle Ages, only worse. Tanks, machine-guns, aeroplanes and armoured trains were available to vicious, uneducated barbarians. In America it had been a crime to sell guns to Indians. This crime was as nothing compared to that of the British who put arms into the hands of Tatar tribesmen. It is like Africa today, where grenades and rocket-launchers replace the knobkerry and assegai. A small war, with few casualties, becomes a total war with thousands of civilians killed.
We face the Dark Age and we go into it whistling The Red Flag as if it were a music-hall song. Only a few stand back, shouting warnings. Soon they shall be sucked into the black maelstrom, too. There will be no escape this time, no little island monasteries where enlightenment can flourish. The whole world shall be conquered in the name of Zion and Mao. Yet we must resist. If it is a test, we must succeed or be eternally deserted by God. Sometimes I fear He has already left this planet to its fate; that there is another planet, in a distant star-system, which has proven itself a worthier place; where Eden still flourishes.