Читать книгу Behind the Curtain - Philip Gibbs - Страница 13

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Vladimir remembered his first sight of Moscow. He sat in a droschke with his father and mother and little Olga, and at the first sight of the walled city with its fan-shaped battlements, like one of those fairy castles of which his mother used to tell him, his father took Lucy’s hand and cried out “Moscow!” with a smile in his eyes as though they were going into an earthly paradise. “It’s like an ogre’s city,” said Lucy.

They drove through an archway and the droschke driver took off his old fur cap and crossed himself.

Vladimir’s father called out to him jokingly.

“Why do you do that, old man? It’s forbidden now. You know that.”

The droschke driver turned in his seat and looked back in a frightened way.

“Pardon me, Comrade Colonel. An old habit! Even the Czar doffed his cap when he passed the shrine of the Iberian Virgin. I forgot for the moment that we’ve done with all that.”

“Better remember it in future,” said Michael Petrovich mildly. “It might get you into trouble one day.”

Lucy spoke to the driver and Vladimir saw that her lips were tight as though she were not taking much pleasure in this coming to Moscow.

“Remember there’s no God in Russia,” she said. “Or rather there is a new God whose name is Lenin.”

“Hush, my dear!” said Michael, very nervously. “I implore you....”

They drove into Red Square and saw before them the high walls of the Kremlin, a city within a city—rose-red walls with fan-shaped battlements broken here and there by stairways leading to small turrets guarded by sentries whose long bayonets gleamed in the cloudless blue sky against which they were etched—a cloudless blue sky though snow outlined the battlements and had crowned the pear-shaped domes of churches and cathedrals and the roofs of palaces and government buildings.

Inside one of the gates the droschke was stopped by a sentry at one of the guardhouses and an officer came out and saluted. He was in his winter dress with hooded cap rising to a spike on top like the uniform of Vladimir’s father.

“You have your pass, Comrade Colonel?” he asked politely. “Or rather your passes for the others.”

“They are here,” said Vladimir’s father.

“It will be necessary to report at the next guardhouse,” said the officer. “The rules are strict of course.”

Three times they had to show their passes and the last time they were kept until the officer had telephoned to the police headquarters.

“We are prisoners,” said Lucy in a low voice when they had passed this last post. “We are going into prison. We shall never get out.”

Michael touched her hand and laughed.

“Nothing like that. But the Kremlin is well guarded. Lenin is here. There was an attempt against his life.”

He spoke the last words in a kind of whisper.

“Jolly good job,” said Lucy in English, and then she gave a little laugh, seeing the pained look in her husband’s eyes.

“Don’t look so worried, Michael. Don’t look as if I had been blasphemous.”

“You alarm me,” he said. “You will have me shot one day. For God’s sake control your tongue, my dear. Remember that we shall be in the Kremlin. There are police everywhere. In any case for the children’s sake....”

“Mum’s the word,” answered Lucy, and Vladimir, who heard these words in English, smiled at her. He had often heard them before. They had amused him as a younger boy. There was something comical in the sound of them. “Mum’s the word.”

Lucy hated living in the Kremlin. They had two rooms in one of the government offices, and were luckier than some families who had only one. It was an overcrowded rabbit warren. Sanitary conditions were deplorable. The rationing was abominable, mostly herrings and black bread with a rare bit of meat. The only comfort was the constant supply of tea which Lucy made in a samovar in the room where she slept with Michael, which by day they used as a sitting-room. Down the long corridors there were many families behind the doors. When the doors opened, young women came out to empty their tea-pots into the garbage cans; there were glimpses of other women nursing babies, or of men in Russian shirts outside their trousers playing accordions or the balalaika. It was like a gypsy camp and very squalid. On the lower floor were the government offices where clerks worked and from which came an incessant click of typewriters mostly worked by short-haired women who were fanatical Communists and looked like it.

In the evenings, when the boy and girl were in bed, they had visits from some of Michael’s friends living in some other part of the Kremlin, or men who made courtesy calls on a Lieutenant-Colonel with staff appointment in the War Office. One of them was a man named Kapek, one of the old brigade of Russian revolutionaries. He had a flat round face rimmed by a reddish beard, and brown humorous eyes which blinked through horn-rimmed glasses. He was an extraordinary type, at first repulsive but on acquaintance attractive because of his cynical humour and brilliant conversation. He was in charge of Propaganda and there seemed to be nothing that he did not know about the internal affairs of other countries—their political crises and personalities and their trends of public opinion.

During his first visit he seemed to take a fancy to Lucy because she was English.

“I know London,” he told her, “as well as I do Moscow. I used to study in the British Museum and fall asleep after lunch because the Reading Room was completely airless. I was breathing the atmosphere of the past hundred years as expelled from the lungs of innumerable old scholars who dug deeply into the history of the past and knew nothing of their own time or had any vision of the future.”

“Did you ever go to Clapham?” asked Lucy with a sudden pang of homesickness.

Kapek laughed behind his horn-rimmed glasses. He spoke English almost without an accent.

“Good heavens, yes! Many a time I took the tram there. I used to read the illustrated papers in the public library, and I remember going to sleep on the Common with the sun on my face when I couldn’t afford a lunch. Qui dort dine. I walked back all the way to Soho that evening and had blistered feet next morning. I loved old London. I still have an affection for it.”

“I would give my right arm to be there again,” said Lucy.

Kapek, that strange personality, thrust his fat fingers through his fringe of red beard and smiled benignly at Lucy while Vladimir, that boy with quick eyes and ears, pretended to be reading a book in the corner of the room.

He thought Kapek looked like an ogre in one of his mother’s fairy-tales, a kind sort of ogre who would eat small boys and girls with a smile.

“Don’t you like our beautiful Soviet Russia?” he asked.

“I hate it,” said Lucy. It was a good thing, thought Vladimir, that his father was not at home that afternoon. He was working hard at the War Office. He would have been much alarmed.

Kapek laughed good-naturedly.

“I daresay you find it rather trying. So do I from time to time, especially perhaps at the present time, when things have not been going too well in the economic sphere. Black bread and herrings! Oh dear! Oh dear! Then there’s that famine on the Volga. Very distressing when one thinks of it. But later on things will improve. Lenin says so. He’s a realist. He doesn’t believe in fairy-tales. His New Economic Policy ought to help things forward though it’s a reversal pro tem of the strict faith of Communism. He’s allowing the markets to open up and a few shops. He’s re-establishing the wage system. The peasants have thwarted all our dreams. They hoard their supplies. They’re as cunning as monkeys and as obstinate as mules.”

“This country,” said Lucy, “is still under the Terror. Nobody dares speak because of the Cheka.”

Kapek made a comical grimace.

“I suppose all that is necessary for some time after a revolution. We have to safeguard ourselves against conspiracy and sabotage.”

Lucy told him about the questioning of her son and asked if that were a sign of the beautiful brotherhood and liberty of the proletariat. Children frightened into accusing their own mothers.

Kapek shrugged his heavy shoulders and laughed uneasily.

“I have nothing to do with the police. They’re a separate branch and have their own methods. I’m interested in other phases of this experiment. I am, as a matter of fact, most interested in the Russian Empire. We and Great Britain are the greatest oriental powers in the world. We ought to come to some arrangement but your Lord Curzon is a stiff-necked diplomat of the old school and won’t play ball with us. Tchicherin has been having a long correspondence with him which will shortly be published. It’s enough to make a cat laugh. Tchicherin, who is also an old-time diplomat, scores every point.”

“All that’s beyond me,” said Lucy. “I only know that life in Russia is disgusting. Nobody laughs. Everybody is afraid. And now here I am a prisoner in the Kremlin.”

Kapek grinned at her and played with his red fringe of beard again.

“My dear young lady,” he said. “You are delightfully English! I daresay you think Clapham was a paradise compared to Russia, and that a little villa in England is more admirable than the Kremlin with all its churches and palaces.”

“Yes, I do,” answered Lucy, but she also laughed at the absurdity of the contrast. She could not help liking this flat-faced, heavily shouldered, plump-fingered man who had a kindly expression behind his glasses, and did not take offence at her denunciation of Soviet Russia. He was at least human. He was humorous. He spoke perfect English. He was in a way broad-minded.

He came several times to take tea and was friendly with Vladimir and Olga, putting Olga on his knee, stroking her fair hair, and calling her Alice in Wonderland. It was undoubtedly due to him that she was allowed to leave the Kremlin with her children and live in a private apartment—two rooms anyhow—on the other side of the river. Michael joined them later, astonished that Kapek had worked this arrangement and glad for Lucy’s sake. She felt more free. She could walk about Moscow with Olga and go to the ballet and the opera from time to time when Kapek sent her tickets. But she still resented the inquisition and espionage which attended them in the apartment house. The house Kommissar—a tall bearded man with cross-eyes which made him squint—kept a check on her comings and goings as he did on all the other inhabitants of the house. The front door was on a chain and bolt and he was always there rattling his keys when she came in or went out. Special permission was necessary to stay out late. He was always sulky and sullen and once when she put a bit of lace round her shoulders on an evening when she had seats for the ballet he grabbed at it as though about to tear it off her neck and said, “bourjoi” in a harsh voice.

“How dare you?” she cried.

His squint eyes hovered about her.

“You’re an English woman,” he said. “We don’t like foreigners in Russia and we don’t like bourjoi customs. In any case I am the house Kommissar responsible for order and good manners.”

“I’ll report you to friends of mine,” she told him.

“What friends?” he asked. “I’d like to know.”

“People in higher authority than you, Mr. House Kommissar.”

He spat on the stone floor of the hall.

“I only take orders from the police,” he said. “You’d better be careful, Englishwoman. The police might take a fancy to your pretty neck. They have funny ways with people’s necks.”

“In any case I’ll tell my husband,” she warned him. “He’ll teach you better manners.”

“And I’ll report you to the police,” he answered sullenly. “They already have a dossier about you. All your visits and all your friends. There’s nothing they don’t know.”

The man’s remark about her visits being known to the police worried her a little, not so much for her own sake as for her friends’ safety. She had met two of them in the market which was now open under Lenin’s New Economic Policy, or “Nep” as it was called. A number of women of the old régime had ventured to stand among the stalls offering little trinkets, or bits of clothing or babies’ shoes. Here and there one of them had a fur tippet over her arm or an embroidered shawl. Old men who had once been gentlemen in green, and stained old overcoats with scraps of fur or astrakhan round the collars, stood in the slushy snow exhibiting pipes or signet rings or carpet slippers on small trays. Lucy had gone to the market with her boy and girl, and suddenly gave a cry at the sight of one woman.

“Anna Sergeyevna!”

She had known her as a rather pretty girl just before the war. They had been to parties together and Anna had been engaged to a young officer of the Imperial Hussars. She was no longer pretty, and hardly recognizable because of her sharp cheekbones and tightly drawn skin and deep sunken eyes.

She stared at Lucy, and then spoke her name in a whisper.

“Lucy! Oh my dear!”

“What has happened to you?” asked Lucy. “You look so ill, my poor Anna.”

“I’m dying,” said Anna in a faint voice. “I wish I were dead.”

Heavy tears welled into her eyes and moistened her sharp cheekbones.

“Where are you living?” asked Lucy. “May I come and see you?”

“I have one room which I share with my mother and father.”

She gave the address in Moscow.

Vladimir grabbed his mother’s arm and whispered to her.

“Isn’t this a bit dangerous?” he asked. “There’s a policeman edging nearer.”

“Yes,” said Anna Sergeyevna who had overheard. “It’s dangerous. Go away, my dear.”

“I will come and see you,” said Lucy.

The other she met was Lydia Novikova. She was at the far end of the market-place, selling sunflower seeds which Russians split between their teeth eating the little kernels for the same reason as Americans chew gum, a mere habit of mastication.

She wore a coat and skirt very stained and dirty, and she had dirty hands for lack of soap, but even now in her misery—and she looked miserable—had a touch of grace and elegance not to be mistaken among these peasant women who passed by fingering the trinkets on the trays, holding up the fur tippets and dropping them again, now and then buying some trivial thing.

“Lydia!” exclaimed Lucy. “Have you come down to this?”

She spoke in English and at the sound of it Lydia Novikova turned white and began to tremble.

“Why do you speak to me in English?” she asked. “Who are you?”

Then she recognized Lucy and put her thin hands to her face and began to weep.

“Hush!” said Lucy. “Don’t cry, for God’s sake, Lydia. We are being watched.”

Out of the corner of her eye she saw one of the military police staring in their direction from one of the stalls near by.

“Where can I find you?” she asked.

Lydia Novikova whispered some address and Lucy passed on with her boy and girl.

“Little Mother,” said Vladimir, “if I were you I wouldn’t prowl about this market. There are too many police and you are always so rash.”

Always he had this sense of responsibility for his mother’s safety. Always he wanted to shield her, though as the son of a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Red Army he had a sense of allegiance to Russia and its leaders, especially to Lenin who had made the Revolution and had promised to make a new and beautiful Russia.

Small boy as he was, he argued these things out in his own mind. It was, of course, sad that his mother’s friends should be so miserable. She took him with her to see Anna Sergeyevna who was living in a basement room without a door but with a bit of ragged carpet nailed up to keep out the draughts. There was an old man with a white pointed beard who was Anna’s father and an old lady with white hair and glasses looking as though a puff of wind might blow her away. She was so tiny, thin and frail. There was a lot of weeping which Vladimir found rather trying.

“Because of our family name we are persecuted,” said Anna.

“We don’t even get the ordinary rations. We starve to death. How can we help having one of the old names?”

“I thank God for my name,” said the old man. “I am proud of it.”

“Father dear,” said the old lady. “Don’t shout out for all the world to hear.”

Lydia Novikova was in a worse place. It was an attic room with a leaky roof and no furniture except a few wooden boxes on which she had made a bed.

“Because of my husband’s name,” she said. “I am treated as a wild animal. I was in prison for five years. When they let me out I wept because I was still alive. This life is a torture. It’s a living death.”

She spoke in English to Lucy and together they wept, until Vladimir tugged at his mother’s frock and said, “Let’s go.”

“After all,” he said to his mother when they were walking home, “those ladies belong to the old régime. They have bad names in Russian history. They were aristocrats.”

“They were beautiful women,” cried Lucy. “They were living lovely lives. Is that a reason why they should be starved to death?”

“Perhaps they oughtn’t to be alive,” said Vladimir. “They were certainly enemies of the Revolution. I expect they hate Lenin.”

“You heartless little Bolshevik!” cried Lucy. “If I weren’t your mother I’d scrag you!”

She was very angry with him, and each of her cheeks had reddened, as he saw.

“I belong to Father’s side of things,” said Vladimir softly. “I can’t help it, Mother. Of course I love you just the same.”

He felt her hand tighten its grip of his own and she laughed in a vexed kind of way.

“Don’t let’s talk nonsense,” she answered. “Don’t let’s get into a political argument, David. If you do that I shall go scranny.”

“Scranny” was a new word to him. He made a mental note of it.

The boy Vladimir did not see much of his father at this time in Moscow. He worked early and late at the Commissariat of War. But occasionally he was at home in the evenings, and now and then received visitors when only tea was served after the family’s frugal supper.

Most of them were Michael’s fellow officers in the Red Army or on the staff of the Commissariat of War, and they laughed a lot and talked a lot, hours after Vladimir and Olga had gone to bed. The boy could hear their voices in the crowded little room next to where he slept, with gusts of laughter followed by quieter lulls when they were talking seriously, but mostly he fell asleep and did not hear them. But one night he kept awake with the consent of his mother and father. An important visitor was coming, and his father was quietly excited as he could see, and he felt excited himself because the man who was coming was a very great man.

It was his father who told him so.

“Tonight a very great man is coming to see us, Vladimir,” said his father. “It is my chief and comrade. My real hero. Lev Davidovich Trotsky. He organized the Red Armies. To his genius, his ardent spirit, his indefatigable brain, we owe our victories.”

“Well, I know all about that, Father,” said Vladimir. “But of course I shall be glad to have a look at him.”

Lucy did not seem so glad. She made a funny little grimace and wanted to know what all Trotsky’s glorious victories had done for Russia, beyond making it into a pest-house and a morgue.

Vladimir saw his father’s face colour up slightly and he answered with a vexed laugh:

“You are incurable, my darling. I can’t do anything to convert you. Perhaps one day you will realize the stupendous thing that has happened in Russia. The beginning of a new era. The triumph of the proletariat over their old tyrannies and serfdom—an example to the whole world. The old dream come true of the Brotherhood of Man.”

“You won’t convert me,” said Lucy. “It’s all stuff and nonsense. New tyrannies for old tyrannies. What’s the use of that? Serfs under a different name. All of them hungry and without any liberty. I think you’re mad, Michael. You’re daft.”

Vladimir remembered that argument because he took part in it and was on his father’s side.

“Little Mother, you’re very naughty,” he cried. “You ought not to call Father mad and daft. What he says is the truth. It is what I’m taught every day in school. Russia has had a glorious Revolution which one day will lead us to great happiness. Russia will be the most beautiful country on earth. Everyone will have equal opportunities. You don’t understand, Little Mother, because you’re English.”

He saw his mother tighten her lips. She gave him a strange look and then laughed in a shrill way.

“I’m outvoted,” she said. “Two men against one woman. Of course they must be right. My own son turns against me.”

Michael put his arm round her.

“Vladimir is a child of the Revolution,” he said, “like all our young people. But he will never cease to love his English mother.”

“No, Mother,” said Vladimir. “I shall always love you, even if I take Father’s side, when it comes to talk about Russia.”

“Well, that’s nice,” said Lucy. “As long as I’m loved.”

But she looked upset and went about arranging the tea-things for their visitor, humming one of her nursery rhymes. It was Baa, Baa, Black Sheep, Have You Any Wool? He had already noticed that she hummed this particular tune when she was a bit annoyed.

Trotsky came with a friend and Vladimir peeped at him through the door of the sitting-room which was also his parents’ bedroom. He wore a big overcoat with an astrakhan collar and a fur cap which he took off when he entered the room. He had a little pointed beard and moustache, and his eyes, as the boy saw, seemed to shine with an inner light like two torches. He talked excitedly, smiling and laughing. On his arrival he put his arm round Michael’s shoulder and called him “tavarish” and he was very friendly and informal.

“So this is your little English wife,” he said in Russian, and then kissed Lucy’s hand and spoke to her in English.

“Your husband and I are good friends. No soldier fought better in the war against Denikin and that rabble. Now he is doing excellent work in the Commissariat of War for me.”

“You will take some tea?” asked Lucy.

“A little later. Give me leave to go on talking for a bit. I am one of the world’s talkers. Talk to me in English, which I used to know pretty well. Once I could speak Cockney. I knew London from Limehouse to the Old Kent Road. I had good days there. I used to like riding on the top of a bus down the Strand. Many a time I’ve had a meal at a coffee stall, a cup of coffee and a baked potato. What could be better?”

“I would give a lot to be there now,” answered Lucy, smiling at him in no hostile way, though she had made light of his glorious victories before he came.

“Yes,” said Trotsky good-humouredly. “With all its faults England is a good place, and dear dirty old London takes hold of one. One day perhaps England will go Communist. Then we can be friends with her.”

“Never!” cried Lucy. “England loathes Communism.”

Trotsky laughed.

“Never is a long time, dear lady. Even England must change and dig herself out of her old ruts. Even the English people, so deeply conservative as well I know, will watch what is happening here in Russia and will abolish the old titled aristocracy, the rich drones, and declare war upon the fatheaded bourgeoisie and press on to the dictatorship of the proletariat. It’s the writing on the wall. Communism is the new pattern of life. Here in Russia at the moment it’s all experimental and we have made many mistakes and many failures, but in the end you will see.”

“I shan’t live to see the end,” said Lucy. “And I don’t want to see it.”

Vladimir’s father coughed and looked uneasily at his wife but Trotsky had not taken offence. He laughed good-naturedly.

“You’re very young,” he said. “I hope you will live to see a happy Russia without any of the severities which are now inevitable after Revolution. I may not live to see the full fruits on the tree. I burn myself up too much. I talk too much and drink too much tea. I work too hard as though I were driven by some devil inside me. It’s hardly likely that I shall see our dream come true.”

Michael laughed nervously.

“My dear Lev Davidovich, you are a young man as age is counted nowadays.”

“Somebody will probably have a shot at me,” said Trotsky, laughing again. “There are still people in Russia who would like to plug me with a bullet. That fellow Stalin hates me like poison. He would like to get rid of me. Well, after all, I’ve done my job. I built up the Red Armies from nothing. I beat that fellow Dankin and all his crew. I drove Wrangel into the sea. Do you mind if I smoke a pipe, dear lady? I learnt the habit in England.”

“My father used to smoke a pipe,” said Lucy. “I like the smell of it. But now is the time for tea.”

That was all that Vladimir heard, listening at the door and peeping in at the great man. He felt proud that his father was such a friend of Lev Davidovich Trotsky. It was certainly an honour to have a visit from him, thought Vladimir called David.