Читать книгу Behind the Curtain - Philip Gibbs - Страница 8

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When they were in Kazan the Civil War was over and they were no longer refugees between two fires. Vladimir’s father had joined them and was billeted in the Kremlin or fortress of Kazan while his family lived in a one-story house on the outskirts of the city, not far from the great River Volga frozen in the hardest months of winter so that not even barges could push their way through the ice. Lucy took her small boy for walks in the city on frosty mornings when the dome of the cathedral gleamed like burnished gold and the onion-shaped domes of fifty churches clustered in the blue sky high above the houses like floating balloons. The snow was crisp and hard to the feet and had drifted against the garden fences and the city walls. Men and women in ragged fur caps tied round the ears, heavily muffled in rags, and with straw in wooden shoes or round their bare feet, dragged along the roadways sledges piled high with household things. They were refugees from the villages down the Volga where in good years the black earth gave the richest harvest in Russia. But there had been two years when the seed grass was burnt in the soil by the intense heat of the sun in two springs and summers of drought. Not for the first time had it happened within living memory, and the peasant farmers had always kept stocks of grain for such a possibility. But this time their reserves of grain had been seized to supply the Red Armies and when the drought came they had no reserves, or very little, to keep them alive. Men, women and children were facing death by starvation and thousands were dying slowly in the villages. The children’s stomachs were swollen as though filled with water though there was no flesh on their bones. Women carried babies with claw-like hands and faces like wizened monkeys. Food might have reached them from other parts of Russia by orders from Lenin. His brain was still working in the Kremlin of Moscow though he was a dying man himself, but the railroad system had broken down after the German war, revolution and civil war. There were few engines and few wagons. Rails needed repair over great lengths of line. Some stocks of potatoes came down the Volga by barge until the ice prevented all navigation and even that form of rescue did not reach out very far beyond the landing-stages because so many horses had died—their bleached bones were on the roadways—and men were too weak to drag the sledges.

“I can’t bear to see these people,” said Lucy. “My heart bleeds at the sight of the children. Those poor little ones!”

With the callousness of youth, as though this were part of ordinary and normal life—in childhood one takes everything for granted—Vladimir watched the trails of children across the snow, or the huddled heaps of them where they lay exhausted. Typhus caught hold of them. Every morning in Kazan carts passed with the bodies of those who had died.

“I expect those are dead ones,” said Vladimir, staring at one of these carts. “I expect typhus kills them more quickly than hunger.”

Lucy answered in a low voice.

“There’s no God in Russia.”

“Father doesn’t believe in God,” said Vladimir. “He says it’s a fairy-tale, this story of God. In any case we are not allowed to believe such things. Religion is the opium of the people. That’s what we are taught in school.”

“David!” cried Lucy. He was holding her hand as they walked in Kazan, and he felt her grip his hand so tightly that she hurt him. “It’s because the Russians have given up their belief in God that so many terrible things are happening. You needn’t tell anyone, David, but try to believe in God for my sake and your own and remember the little prayers I have taught you. If one doesn’t believe in God one becomes a devil. One does devilish things. Without faith in God men become cruel and wicked and without mercy.”

He answered with a vexed kind of laugh.

“Mother, you’re always saying things which make it difficult for me. Of course I love you more than anybody in the world, but I’m a Russian boy and I can’t stand out against what the others think, and what they’re taught. This God stuff of yours is very dangerous. It’s strictly forbidden. You know that.”

“I know,” she said to him. “But make it one of our secrets, David, like Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales. Do you remember how you fought with Igor Ivanovich when he tore up the book? That was brave of you.”

“Oh, that was a long time ago,” he answered. “I’ve grown up since then. I’m eight years old now. They were all nonsense, those tales. They belong to the bourjoi sentiment of the English people who are our enemies.”

Lucy stopped and stared at him. He saw a look of anguish in her eyes, or a look of terror.

“Oh, David!” she cried. “My little David! Have I lost you too?”

“Here I am,” he said, “holding your hand, Mother! What makes you think you’ve lost me?”

They were in the garden round the cathedral. The snow was frozen on the trees. Every branch and twig was like glittering ice. The ground was covered by an ermine mantle. High above the trees the dome of the cathedral dazzled in the brilliant sunshine which struck shafts of light from its metal. They were alone in this white world.

Suddenly Lucy began to weep and covered her face with her gloved hands, woollen gloves which she had knitted for herself. Her body was shaken by sobs. Vladimir was frightened.

“Mother!” he cried. “Little Mother! Why do you cry like that?”

He flung himself at her and put his face against her body.

Presently instead of crying she began to laugh.

“I’m absurd,” she told him. “I suppose I didn’t have enough for breakfast. Sorry, David, my dear! You have a very foolish mother, haven’t you? Always saying ridiculous things. So silly of me!”

“Speak in Russian,” he told her. “There are people coming. It’s safer to speak Russian.”

Some Tartars came by dragging a sledge. Kazan was once the capital of the Golden Horde of Mongols who invaded this part of Russia. Many of them still remained, Chinese-looking men with slant eyes and sparse hairs on their chins.

“Let’s make a snow man,” suggested Lucy, anxious to make her son forget her breakdown.

“Is it safe?” he asked. “Isn’t it a bit bourjoi?”

“Let’s risk it, David. Let’s have a bit of fun.”

She made with his help a very good snow man with bits of stick for his eyes and mouth and a crooked stick for a pipe. Vladimir laughed loudly at this caricature of humanity.

“A bit like old Igor Ivanovich!” he suggested.

But a police officer who came striding through the gardens was not amused. He stared at the snow man and spoke angrily to Lucy. All Vladimir heard was the word bourjoi before the officer gave the snow man a kick and made it fall in a heap.

“Never mind!” said Lucy when he had passed. “We had our little bit of fun. We’ve had a good laugh in time of famine and typhus and all horrors.”

It may have been that night, or some other, that Vladimir was awakened from his sleep by footsteps coming down the front path of the little garden round the house and voices at the door. His mother opened the door and gave a little cry of surprise when seven or eight people—men and women—came in stamping their feet and talking rapidly. He heard disconnected words and sentences.

“We’re dying of hunger.... No food but two sticks of chocolate.... I feel faint, my dear.... They call us the pampered pets of Soviet Russia! ... This is a life of horror.... Lucy darling, I heard you were in Kazan. I have brought my friends here.”

“Come in, dear Anna Kusanova,” answered Lucy. “How white you look! How thin!”

“This is Zabotin—the famous, the only, Zabotin. Do you remember? You met him with me in Moscow before the war. We were at the Academy together.”

A handsome young man with straw-coloured hair and blue eyes took Lucy’s hand and kissed it.

“Before hell was let loose in Russia,” he said. “We were like happy children.”

“Hush!” cried the young woman called Anna Kusanova. “Nothing was good before the Revolution. Aren’t we asked to believe that?”

“We’re all friends here,” said the young man called Zabotin—the famous, the only, Zabotin. “We may talk freely. We may even tell the truth.”

These people were in the ballet playing in Kazan. Vladimir had been taken there one day by his mother and had lost himself in an enchanted world. People were dying of hunger in Kazan, the refugees from famine were streaming into the streets around the theatre, but the ballet went on. It was in accordance with the cultural philosophy of the Soviet Government. Opera and ballet must be maintained though famine and typhus might take their toll and the white bones of dead horses lie along the roads, and barge-loads of potatoes rot at the landing-stages. Vladimir had seen the ballet with his mother and not even the stench of unwashed lavatories which came in whiffs to the stalls where he sat could spoil his pleasure, though Lucy had to go out and be sick from time to time.

He had seen the great Zabotin now talking to his mother and had been thrilled to his young marrow-bones by his marvellous leaps and spirals and leopard-like grace. It was wonderful that he should be in this little house talking there like an ordinary human being. Vladimir had also seen Anna Kusanova. His mother had pointed her out. “That’s Anna Kusanova. I used to know her in Moscow before the war, when she was a young girl of sixteen. Isn’t she lovely, David?”

Yes, he had thought her lovely. She was like one of those fairies in Hans Andersen. She was like a beautiful bird. She seemed to fly. Her twinkling feet hardly touched the ground. Perhaps she was more like a flower when she stood now and then with her little head above a white neck, drooping like a tired flower in the sun. Now she was down there talking to his mother and the others. He could look down upon her from the top of the stove. But she didn’t look so beautiful as when she was dancing. She wore a ragged fur coat tucked up at the neck and an old fur cap tied round the ears, until presently she took off these outer clothes because of the warmth of the room and was there again in her dancing-frock with bare neck and shoulders looking like white marble.

They were all talking together, these people of the ballet. Vladimir listened to them drowsily and could only make out bits here and there. Zabotin talked all the time. He talked with body and hands as well as with his lips. He flung himself against the wall. He raised his arms or clasped his hands high over his head, and then with one clenched fist beat his breast. What was he saying? Something about the Famine. Something about the wandering children.

“The sight of them makes my heart drip blood.... They take them into empty houses where there is no fuel. They strip them of their verminous clothes and there they are huddled together for warmth like a crowd of little monkeys.... The nurses are starving of course. They die of typhus like so many of these little ones. There are no blankets. There is no medicine. It is all horrible. Horrible! This Russia is like Dante’s Inferno. We are all in hell. That is the result of the Revolution. That is what Lenin has brought to Russia.”

“Hush, dear Zabotin!” said Anna Kusanova. “Your voice is penetrating. If it were heard outside....”

“Let them shoot me!” cried Zabotin in his clear bell-like voice. “Let them torture me. I would rather be dead. The only happy ones in this Russia are the dead.”

Vladimir went to sleep for a while. The warmth of the room and the chorus of those voices made him sleepy again. Then some time later he was awake again. There was a new smell in the room. It was a nice smell of food. Fried fat and onions and black coffee. The people of the ballet were still down there. They were all talking together as when he had fallen asleep. They were eating at the table. He saw his mother come out of the kitchen. She was holding a frying-pan which was all sizzling. Zabotin leapt to his feet and rushed to her, taking the frying-pan.

“It is unbelievable!” he cried. “You work miracles, dear lady. That omelette is divine! But we are eating all your own food. We are ravening wolves. We are without conscience because of empty stomachs. You will have to starve, dear lady, because we devour your reserves. Tomorrow all of us will starve again but tonight we gorge ourselves. Perhaps after all there is a God. He has answered our prayers. Perhaps He has worked this miracle.”

There was the sound of laughter from the voices of these young men and women. One of the men with a shock of black hair and greenish-coloured eyes raised his voice above the others.

“I used to believe in God. I still think He may exist elsewhere. But not in Russia. Only the Devil takes command in Russia.”

“That’s true,” said one of the young women. “God has abandoned Russia because of its crimes. Nevertheless I feel happy for an hour because my stomach has some food in it. It’s astonishing that one’s soul—if there is a soul—is so dependent upon one’s stomach. It’s a little humiliating perhaps, that thought!”

“We are dual creatures,” said one of the young men. He was smoking a cigarette and sipping a cup of coffee. The boy Vladimir on top of the stove could smell the fumes of the hot coffee. They made a pleasant sensation in his nostrils.

“We are animals,” said the young man. “We have animal instincts. But I believe in the immortality of the soul. I believe that we have a spirit as well as a body. Otherwise I could not dance. Otherwise I should kill myself.”

“Zabotin,” said Lucy, “you’re not eating. Have you no more appetite?”

“I’m still hungry,” said Zabotin in that bell-like voice which rose above the general conversation. “I’m a ravening wolf, but now the sight of this food makes me sick. I want to go out and vomit. How can we sit here eating when there’s famine in all the villages along the Volga, when tonight, now, at this hour, millions are dying of hunger in their little houses? I think of those naked little creatures in Kazan half a mile away from where we sit. Like little monkeys, like little monkeys! I think of the peasant farmers and their wives lying above their stoves with their swollen-bellied children waiting for death drowsily. Their cupboards are empty. The Red Armies seized their grain before the drought came. No food comes down the Volga. No hope of rescue comes to them. O God! O God! How can I eat, how can any of us eat, with that creeping death so close to us? I feel sick. I feel very ill.”

He rose from the table as though going out to vomit but flung himself against the wall again with his hands clasped above his head.

“O Christ!” he cried in a loud voice. “O Christ, come back to Russia! O Christ, have mercy on us!”

It was Lucy who went to him holding out her hands, her long lovely hands which were so good at making shadow pictures.

“Dear Zabotin,” she cried, “the name of Christ is not liked in Russia. Speak it in your heart but do not cry out so loud. Dear Zabotin I wish I could comfort you a little. Perhaps one day Christ will come back to Russia.”

Lucy looked very English among these Russians. She spoke Russian with an English accent.

Zabotin turned from the wall and took her hands and his head dropped upon her breast and he wept like a hurt boy.

On top of the stove Vladimir was thinking strange things in his young mind. He thought that these people down there were saying terrible things. “If I were to tell my masters about them, if I were to tell my professor, who is very angry if he hears a word about God, they would all be shot. It would be a pity if Zabotin were shot. He is very good in ballet. And Anna Kusanova is very pretty. She wouldn’t look so pretty if she were shot. All the same they shouldn’t talk like that. It’s against Lenin. My father says Lenin is the greatest man on earth and that we must all be loyal to him. If I were to tell Father——”

The boy fell asleep again. Once again he was awakened by excited voices. Zabotin was talking again. Zabotin was always talking.

“The Revolution has resulted in nothing but human misery. After all that blood, after all that death, after all those hangings and murders among brother Russians, what has come out of it except the downfall of our civilization, such as it was? The aristocrats have been liquidated or have fled. The middle classes have been wiped out. But what about the proletariat and the peasants? Have they gained anything? What are their gains? Hordes of them are driven into Siberia to the mines or the forests. In the factories they toil for long hours. They are given coupons for the government stores. Coupons for food, coupons for clothes. A wonderful system! But there is nothing in the government stores. They are given paper money—millions of roubles—but there is nothing to buy in the markets and the paper is worthless. Now they are going to force the peasants into the communal farm system. They’re going to take away the farmer’s cows and his strip of earth. Is that going to bring them happiness? Lenin promises a golden future for Russia by way of Communism. Lunacharsky—that hum-bugging orator—talks about the education of the proletariat and the cultural glory of Russian genius. It was better under the Czars. There was more happiness in Imperial Russia. This Revolution is a fraud. There’s more iron tyranny under Lenin than under the Emperor Nicholas. He was not a tyrant. He had a kind heart. He desired the well-being of his people. Lenin is an autocrat without pity or mercy or human compassion.”

“You talk dangerously, Zabotin,” said Anna Kusanova.

Vladimir had sat up in his bed on top of the stove. He felt angry and bad-tempered. These people would not let him sleep. They were talking bad things about Russia and about Lenin who was the greatest man in the world. His father had told him so. All his school-fellows believed that. His schoolmasters spoke the name of Lenin as his mother spoke of God, who did not exist they said.

Vladimir flung back the bed-clothes and sprang to the floor. The voice of a small boy rang through the room.

“You’re talking wicked things. I’ve been listening. If I told my professors you would all be shot. My father is a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Red Army. If I told my father——”

The people in the room seemed to be turned to ice by the apparition of this small boy among them and by his shrill words. They stayed there just as they had been sitting and standing, quite motionless, as though dead. One of the young women of the ballet had been using a lipstick. Her hand remained three inches from her mouth. Zabotin had been taking a cigarette from its packet and his hand too was poised motionless on the way to his lips. Anna Kusanova who sat at the table with her chin in cupped hands stared at the boy Vladimir with terror in her eyes.

It was Lucy who cried out to break this spell of silence.

“David, darling, what are you doing? Why aren’t you asleep? You’ve been dreaming.”

“I kept waking up,” he told her. “I heard what you were all saying.”

“No! no!” cried Lucy, laughing at him. “It was all a dream, David. You were dreaming that you heard us talking. You didn’t hear a word. It’s like that in dreams.”

She spoke gaily but the boy knew she was afraid. He knew that look of fear in her eyes. He saw that her face had gone white as though made of snow.

“It wasn’t a dream,” he said. “They were saying bad things about Lenin and about Russia.”

Anna Kusanova spoke in a faint voice.

“We’re all lost!”

Zabotin went towards Vladimir and lifted him high above his head.

“You’re a fine little fellow!” he said. “How would you like to be a ballet dancer? I would teach you.”

He too spoke gaily but he was white to the lips.

“I would like that,” said Vladimir, excited at the thought of being a ballet dancer.

“Come and give me a kiss, dear boy,” cried Anna Kusanova. “If you’ll give me a kiss I’ll take you behind the scenes of the ballet. Would you like that?”

Her lips were ice cold when he kissed them.

She knew, they all knew that their lives were in the hands of this small boy with tousled hair. They made a fuss of him. He was given a chair at the table and fed with the remains of an omelette. They all laughed and joked around him. Anna Kusanova put her fingers through his tousled hair until he thrust her away with a shake of his head. He didn’t like being petted like this. He wasn’t a baby. He was eight years old or thereabouts.

Then they all went out into the snow again after embracing Lucy.

Anna Kusanova whispered a question. “Will he blab? If so we’re doomed.”

Lucy shook her head.

“I can trust him. He and I are comrades.”

Zabotin bent over her hand as he kissed it.

“It has been a happy night,” he said. “What does it matter if tomorrow we die? It’s best to be dead.”

“Never say die!” answered Lucy. “That’s an English proverb. You must go on dancing, Zabotin. For the sake of the world. For the sake of art.”

They went out into the snow at dawn in Kazan. Along the road came a party of abandoned children. Some of them lay in the snow like dead birds.