Читать книгу Behind the Curtain - Philip Gibbs - Страница 6

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Vladimir was born in 1915, a year after the beginning of the first world war. His father’s people must have been well-to-do before the war because they had a house in Moscow and a villa in the Crimea. They were not aristocrats like some of the “White” Russians who were shot in the time of the Revolution unless they escaped first to foreign countries. They belonged to the merchant class as Vladimir was told by his mother when he was old enough to understand things like that. But when their son was fighting against the Germans with an occasional time on leave, from 1915 onwards, they provided his mother with a nursery governess for Vladimir and Olga who had been born in 1917. That was Miss Smith. Perhaps they engaged her partly out of pity because she had been stranded in Russia like Vladimir’s mother when the war began.

“I used to hate her,” said Vladimir when they talked about her afterwards.

“No, no, David! She was a very good sort, but a little too prim. She was devoted to you and Olga.”

“She used to smack me when she said I was naughty.”

“I expect you jolly well deserved it.”

“She used to make me wash behind the ears in ice-cold water. She told me that little English gentlemen washed behind the ears and kept their nails clean and never had lice on their bodies.”

“Poor Miss Smith!” cried Lucy with a laugh. “She was a bit of a snob. She had been in service with English lords and ladies looking after their brats before she came out here with a Russian Princess and her children. That is to say she had married a Russian Prince but was a French actress and fled as soon as the war started, leaving poor Miss Smith in the lurch. Just like my German Baroness.”

“I can’t think why you liked Miss Smith,” said Vladimir. “I can’t remember her very well but I know I hated her. She had a red nose.”

“She had a heart of gold, David, and she was English and very brave. She was a great comfort to me when we were caught between the fires during the Civil War, and had to take to the roads, with villages burning behind us and Reds and Whites killing each other in the snow, or the sun.”

“I remember that,” said Vladimir. “I remember lying under the straw in a farm cart. I remember the creaking of the wheels which wanted grease. I remember Miss Smith nursing Olga who was a tiny girl, and I remember the long trail of refugees crawling along the roads with farm carts and wheelbarrows. I remember being hungry.”

“Yes,” said Lucy. “I wonder we didn’t all die. We very nearly did several times. Once when the Red Army stormed a village where we had taken shelter, not thinking the war was near us.”

“Tell me,” said Vladimir.

His mother warmed her hands against the stove and listened for a moment to footsteps passing on frozen snow outside this house on the outskirts of Kazan. She could hear children’s voices. It was another group of hungry and abandoned children coming into Kazan from villages down the Volga where there was no food for them. Some of them were like young wolves, fierce and wild. Others were like Hansel and Gretel, holding hands as they trudged through the snow until many of them dropped and died.

“Those poor little ones!” said Lucy in a low voice.

“Tell me about the escape we had,” said Vladimir, not worrying about the hordes of hungry children outside. As a son of a Lieutenant-Colonel of the Red Army he and Olga and his mother had enough to eat, or almost enough.

“The village where we took refuge that night had been in the hands of the White Russians for several months. It had been Denikin’s headquarters, and they had hanged a number of men who sympathized with the Red Army. Denikin had left behind about forty men and six officers. The officers were billeted in the inn where we took shelter. They were very nice to us and one of them played with you and Olga until Miss Smith put you to bed in the hay-loft. They invited me to join them at table although I told them that my husband was a soldier in the Red Army. There were two ladies with them—not very nice ladies, I think—and while we were waiting for dinner we drank some vodka out of mugs. Suddenly there was the sound of firing in the village and a shot came through one of the walls. It killed one of the ladies—well, I call them ladies. She fell without a cry with her head on the table and her arms flopping, and the glasses of vodka fell to the floor and splintered into little bits. The officers sprang up and ran for their revolvers. They weren’t in uniform of course. One of them wore a woman’s jacket over his suit and patent-leather shoes. That was the one who had played with you and Olga. His name was Tereschenko. There was heavy firing close to the house and a lot of hoarse shouting. A bullet came through one of the windows, splintering the glass, and I heard it whiz past my ear before it buried itself in the opposite wall.”

“Were you frightened, Mother?” asked Vladimir with excited eyes.

“No! It’s a funny thing. I wasn’t frightened. I just thought now we’re all going to be killed. Perhaps that would be a good thing. Tereschenko—he was very good-looking—smiled at me as our eyes met. ‘This is the end’, he said. ‘I’m glad to have met you, dear lady. I love those charming children of yours.’

“A bullet went through his head and he fell like a log. Just then the door opened and Miss Smith came in carrying baby Olga like a bundle under one arm and you over her other shoulder.”

“I don’t remember it,” said Vladimir. “Except like a dream that I’ve forgotten. What happened then?”

“Miss Smith spoke to me. She was quite calm and brave, but her nose seemed redder than usual. She looked at the body of the dead lady—I’ve told you about her—and that of Tereschenko, but didn’t seem shocked. ‘If there’s a cellar here,’ she said, ‘I suggest we go down to it. I don’t like these bullets. They might hurt the children.’ But it was too late to go into a cellar, if there was a cellar. The door of the room was smashed open by the end of a rifle and a crowd of Red soldiers rushed in. Their naked bayonets gleamed in the light. They were filthy in mud and snow. Their eyes were like those of hungry wolves. They bayoneted the other officers and one of them put his bayonet to my stomach and shouted a nasty name at me.”

“What name?” asked Vladimir, greedy for all details.

“Nothing nice, David! Not for your young ears.”

Vladimir grinned. “I know a lot of bad words from the other boys. But it doesn’t matter. What happened next? He couldn’t have killed you with his bayonet or you couldn’t be here telling me about it.”

Lucy smiled in a queer way.

“That’s true! Here I am still alive in Russia and talking to my son David. No, he didn’t shove his bayonet into me. He stared at me as though he had gone mad, and then suddenly called out my name—Lucy! It was your Papa, David. What novelists call ‘the long arm of coincidence’, and not to be believed except in Russia, where anything could happen in the Civil War.

“Why haven’t you told me that before?” asked Vladimir. “It’s your best story, Mother. It’s like a fairy-tale. Are you sure it’s true?”

Lucy smiled again with that queer look in her eyes.

“It’s true, David. Sometimes I dream of it at night—the death of Tereschenko who was so good-looking, the look of that pretty lady who was not very nice, when her head flopped on to the table, and the gleam of light on the sharp long bayonets, and ...” She spoke some words to herself very softly but not too softly for Vladimir’s sharp ears.

“The stench of blood—sickening.”

“I call it a good story,” said Vladimir. “I would like to hear it all over again.”

“I’m sorry I told it to you,” said Lucy. “Why do I tell you all these horrors, David? Aren’t there horrors enough all round us now?”

She went to the window and put her hands on each side of her head so that she could look out into the darkness. There was a moon at three quarters shining on the frozen snow. Across the snow came a line of little black figures. They were the hungry children stumbling their way forward to the city of Kazan from villages down the Volga where there was no food for them, and where their parents lay dead or dying in the little wooden houses.

It was during the Civil War—Vladimir’s memory confused times and places in those early days—that Miss Smith died.

He remembered as in a dream a period of wandering in farm carts and covered wagons with crowds of people who were mostly peasants, women and young girls, old people and children, trying to escape from the Reds or the Whites, all mixed up and not sure which way to go lest they should be trapped in villages which sometimes burned behind them.

He remembered this time as being in summer, very hot and scorching. He remembered being thirsty and crying for water, and he remembered the gritty taste of white dust in his mouth and the dust and flies and sweat making his eyes smart as he clutched his mother’s hand or frock while they trudged down long endless roads behind the farm carts. Some of the women moaned and wept in a silly way. They were peasant women who had left their farms. Some of their husbands had been killed by Whites or Reds—it didn’t seem to make much difference whether they were Whites or Reds. Some of their men were swinging by their necks from trees or signboards in villages and small towns. He remembered very well those dead bodies with clouds of flies about them. He had stared at them curiously and without surprise. It happened like that, he knew, in time of civil war. His memory of those days was not one of horror or fear but of an open-air gypsy-like existence with troops of other children, dirty, ragged and verminous like himself, but happy on the whole if his dream of all this were true. They fought with each other, tore one another’s hair, scratched each other’s faces and then played on the roadsides in the dust or burnt grass. They slept in cow-sheds and barns. That, no doubt, was how they became verminous—even Miss Smith, who shuddered at the thought of lice, and tried to keep Vladimir and Olga free of them. Her shoes wore out and she walked barefoot. Her black frock was often white with dust, and her hands and face were dirty. But she kept a little comb in her pocket and was always combing the children’s hair and then her own.

One night she became delirious, as Vladimir’s mother told him.

“I knew she had typhus because of the bright colour in her cheeks. We had no shelter that night and huddled between the farm carts. The stars were very bright above us, and far away three villages were burning, and we could see the leaping flames. It was when Denikin’s army advanced again. But that doesn’t matter now. It didn’t matter then to poor Miss Smith. She lay on a mattress from one of the carts. The farmer was a kind man and sorry for this English Miss. She kept talking and I listened with fear in my heart because I knew she had typhus, and I was afraid she might pass it on to you and baby Olga. She kept talking of English boys to whom she had been governess. There was one called Francis, and she kept on telling him not to be naughty. ‘It’s so wrong of you to behave like that,’ she said. ‘You’ll get into trouble when you go to Eton. They have nice manners there. Young gentlemen at Eton never bite their nails or pick their noses.’ ”

“What else did she say?” asked Vladimir, much interested in the death of Miss Smith.

“She spoke about a young man named Lord Frederick Something—a funny name which I can’t remember. She said, ‘You mustn’t come into the nursery so often. Her ladyship won’t like it. No, I’m not going to give you a kiss. No, don’t take my hand. Supposing her ladyship came in? It’s silly to say you love me. I’m only a nursery governess, and you’re a boy of eighteen. You’re making me very unhappy. You make me afraid. I shall have to leave.’ ”

“She must have been in love with him,” said Vladimir. “Like David Copperfield fell in love with Dora.”

“Bless the child!” cried Lucy, laughing at this precocious knowledge. It was her fault. She had talked so much to him, and told him so many stories.

“What else did Miss Smith say before she died?”

“I couldn’t hear all she said. I didn’t want to. But once she called out ‘My dear England! My dear, dear England!’ and it was such a heart-rending cry that I wept because I too was English and loved England, and hate this Russia with all its horrors of war and revolution. She died soon afterwards, poor dear. Some of the peasants made a hole in the ground for her and buried her. That was the last of Miss Smith, and I was heart-broken because she and I had become good friends, and she was English, and I was alone now in Russia with two small children, between the Whites and the Reds.”

“Russia is a very fine country,” said Vladimir. “I don’t see why you should hate Russia.”

“I said I hated Russia, David, because of war and revolution. Of course I don’t hate Russia now. Don’t misunderstand me, for goodness’ sake.”

He could see that she was frightened again. He always knew when she was frightened.

“I’ll tell everybody that you love Russia,” he said laughingly, “and I shall be telling a big lie for your sake, Mother.”

She had given her life into the hands of this young boy.