Читать книгу Behind the Curtain - Philip Gibbs - Страница 9
VII
ОглавлениеSince his early childhood until this time in Kazan Vladimir had hardly known his father who was just a name to him. He had been fighting with the Red Armies against Denikin and afterwards against Wrangel in the Crimea, and had only made brief appearances at odd times and in odd places. Now as an officer in the Kremlin of Kazan he came home every day at least for a few hours, and seemed to take a delight in playing with his children and especially with Olga who was now nearly six years old and out of babyhood—a pretty slip of a thing like an English daffodil—devoted to a rag doll and a doll’s perambulator with three wheels. She was a companion for Vladimir when he came home from school.
Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Petrovich Rogov of the Red Army was not at all ferocious-looking, though he had seen and perhaps done ferocious things. He had, thought his son, eyes like a deer’s, brown and liquid and gentle. He was clean-shaven except when he forgot or had no time to shave, when his cheek was very bristly to kiss and as rough as a boot-brush. He had a good-natured laugh and could play bears very well with Olga. He was good with his hands and made toys out of wood, of which his masterpiece was a doll’s house with windows which opened and shut and a front door painted green.
Sometimes he brought other officers to the house and they sat drinking coffee or vodka and talked a lot and laughed a lot. They were all very polite to Lucy and kissed her hand when they came and went, but she did not seem to like them much and sat very still and quiet until they had gone.
Vladimir sometimes listened to their talk but could not understand much of it. They talked about episodes in the war against Denikin and one of them—a big square-built man with a fat face and flat cheeks—roared with laughter so that the coffee-cups shook on the table and the samovar rattled. Sometimes he was checked by Vladimir’s father who frowned and said: “That’s not a nice story, Anton Nicolaevich. It isn’t good in the presence of little ones.”
“Your pardon, tavarish,” said the fat man good-naturedly. “I’m a rough fellow. I’m not educated like you are. I’m just a Russian peasant smelling of the soil.”
“You’re a good soldier and a good friend,” answered Vladimir’s father, smiling at him. “We could do with more like you in the Red Army.”
There was one name which they often spoke. Trotsky. He was the master brain behind the Red Armies. It was his genius which had led to victory. He was a born organizer, and a man of quick decision. He wanted things done in a hurry. When he gave an order it had to be obeyed. It was no use saying seichas, which means immediately, to Trotsky and then letting the grass grow under one’s feet. He had shot more than one officer for disobedience and delay.
“He’s made of quicksilver,” said Vladimir’s father, Michael Petrovich.
“He has fire in his belly,” said Anton Nicolaevich.
“That’s true,” said another man, younger than the rest, hardly more than a boy with the first soft hair of youth on his chin. “One sees the fire in his eyes. It burns with passion. He was the sword of the Civil War. Lenin was the brain and Trotsky was the weapon. Isn’t that so, Colonel?”
“I agree,” said Michael Petrovich. “I’ve the greatest admiration for him. It’s astonishing that a Jew should be such a brilliant man of action. It isn’t the characteristic of their race.”
Anton, the fat flat-faced man, laughed gruffly.
“I remember the time when I hated all Jews. It’s a prejudice of the peasant mind. But we owe much to the Jewish race. There are many Jews at the top. Litvinov, Radek and others. Brainy fellows! They know how to read and write. They understand the mysteries of book knowledge. Doubtless they’ve all read Karl Marx.”
Vladimir’s father smiled in his gentle way. He knew that Anton Nicolaevich did not know how to read and write and regarded book learning with reverence and awe. And yet he was a shrewd-minded man with some wisdom of his own, the wisdom of the peasant close to the earth. He had also the brutality of the peasant insensitive to blood and dead bodies. With his own hand he had hanged some of the Whites and had laughed loudly at their twistings and contortions at the end of the rope. He preferred the bayonet to the rifle. There had been bloody scenes in some of the villages where the Whites had been trapped, and this fellow Anton, a good comrade, with the strength of an ox, had led the way. Yet here he sat, a fat good-natured man, playful with the children and a bit timid in the presence of Lucy whose manner was cold to him.
Lucy was difficult. It was, thought young Vladimir, because she was English. This Russia of evolution and famine was a horror to her. Nothing that her husband could say would convert her to the glorious ideals of the Revolution and the great experiment of Communism. When he had first joined the Red Army she had quarrelled with him and had jeered at his conviction that it was the right side to be on. She had called him an idiot and a fool in her blunt English way and then she had held on to him and wept, and he had wept with her because of the tragic parting which was necessary, this parting with a young wife whom he adored and this young mother of his babes. Perhaps he would never have volunteered for the Red Army if he had known in advance the length of time he would be separated from his wife and family, and the frightful things he would have to endure—the filth, the vermin, the bloody business of civil war; the hangings of Russians by Russians; the dying agonies of young boys, some of them as young as fifteen and sixteen; hunger and thirst on long marches; days of exhaustion in scorching sun when his tongue became swollen and his eyes blinded by dust and flies; nights in winter when he was frozen stiff in his sleep; years of beast-like hardship; and always in his heart an agony of home-sickness and a hatred of war, threatening to break down his loyalties to Lenin and Trotsky and the ideals of Communism. A thousand times he was tempted to desert and go searching for Lucy and the children, as on both sides so many men deserted. His soul craved for the beauty of his wife, for her laughter, for her little jokes in English, for her tenderness, for the caress of her playful hands. It had been a boy-and-girl love just before the war. This English girl had seemed to him lovely beyond his knowledge of women, not because of physical beauty, though he thought her beautiful, but because of her gaiety—her frankness of speech, the laughter in her eyes, the courage of her spirit.
Some of these things became known to young Vladimir later in life when he found a kind of diary, with many gaps in the dates and entries, in an old satchel which his father had carried with spare socks and boots during his campaign with the Red Army. It was scribbled roughly in blue pencil and many words were illegible as the pages had become damp, perhaps in heavy rains, and had stuck together, blurring the writing. Many of the entries were just brief notes of military operations.
“Entered Ivankovo, village burned as reprisal for murders of Red Army soldiers ... reached Markavo. Three men hanged in market square.... Marched twenty versts. Cloud of dust. Many men fell out and deserted. We are all very verminous and I fear typhus which is raging in the villages hereabouts. Saw piles of dead bodies, mostly women and young girls, flung on floor of church which is used as a morgue.... Six men, just boys really, hanged for stealing Red Army stores. This civil war is horrible, but Denikin’s troops are demoralized and we may soon have the greater part of Russia.”
Some of the entries were very poignant and young Vladimir read them with emotion. They revealed his father’s agony of home-sickness and his passionate love for his wife.
“As we marched I thought of Lucy. I seemed to see her in the white dust raised by the wagons ahead of us. She appeared to me as I first saw her when she came to see my mother. She came through the french window from the garden with the sun behind her, in a white bodice and blue frock. She looked like an English rose I thought, and I fell in love with her on the spot. Now today she seemed to walk ahead of me, turning now and then to look at me with a smile, in the white dust. It was an illusion, a mirage, but so real in appearance that once I called out to her, ‘Lucy! Lucy!’ and the man at my side—it was Anton Nicolaevich—thought I had gone mad, and turned his head to stare at me with a queer look. Perhaps I was a little mad. I think I have a touch of fever owing to the long march under a hot sun. I hope it isn’t typhus. That thought often frightens me. I don’t want to die of typhus before I see Lucy and the children again. We are of course covered with lice. I haven’t had a bath for three months. Nor have my comrades. It is astonishing that not more of us have died of typhus. I suppose it establishes certain immunity.”
Now and again he wrote down his faith in the ultimate victory of Communism and the Soviet State.
“Out of this misery and abomination a new Russia will arise. Out of this filth and agony and blood will come a new era for the Russian people with a new spirit of brotherhood, with social and political equality free from the old superstitions and the ravening injustice of capitalism and private profit-greedy enterprise. All loyal servants of the State will be rewarded by the precious gifts of life, among which I count first the gift of education, raising the general level of intelligence now so low in an illiterate nation.
“By this hope in Lenin’s promises, in Lenin’s vision and of all the revolutionary leaders who have gone before him, I am sustained in this long and fratricidal conflict. Yet sometimes I weaken. Sometimes I am a deserter in spirit, staggering on without faith. It is when I see the cruelties of my comrades and of the other side. It is when I myself have to give orders for the execution of old men and boys. It is when I march with my Company through burning villages which once were little Russian homes and farmsteads with happy children and sturdy young mothers and simple hard-working men, some of whom lie dead under the burning embers while others have fled in advance of the Red Army, as they fled from the advance of Denikin’s men last year. Today a few hours ago before I write these words in a rat-infested barn I stumbled over the body of a dead child lying with a battered head in the gutter of the market-place. It was a little girl. She was clasping a rag doll.
“At this sight I suddenly revoked all faith in the noble purpose of the Red Armies or in the hope of a new and nobler Russia. How is it possible, I thought, for good to come out of all this evil? I am lying to myself when I think so. Lenin has let loose all the devils of hell in the hearts of a debased and brutal race, uncivilized and incapable of being civilized, oriental in their savagery, in their callousness of death beast-like and ferocious, in their way of fighting and their disregard of human decency. Why did I become a soldier of the Red Army, and eager volunteer in Trotsky’s legions? These thoughts shook me and tore at me as they have shaken and torn me before. But they are, of course, blasphemy due to weakness and black despair. I believe in the ideals of a Communistic world. I believe in Lenin. I believe that the Red Army is fighting a crusade for the down-trodden peoples of the earth. I’m a faithful disciple of Karl Marx. Forward to victory! Under the Red Star!”
Young Vladimir in his young manhood read these words written by his father with a sense of pity and admiration. Here was the soul of his father revealed by words scrawled with a blue pencil on damp paper still smelling damp. How he had suffered! How often he had been tempted to betray this faith! How strong had been his loyalty! It was a pity that he had such a fanatical allegiance to Trotsky who had turned traitor.
During those days in Kazan—long before he found these letters—he questioned his father sometimes on difficult subjects as a young boy does to the embarrassment of his parents. It was when Lucy had gone out. She was helping to nurse the refugee children in one of the big homes for them, and when his father came down from the Kremlin which was guarded by his regiment.
“Father, do you believe there is a God? Mother believes in God, though I wouldn’t tell anybody but you.”
He saw his father hesitate.
“The idea of God,” he said after a pause, “has been mixed up with superstitions. Some people’s Gods are very much like devils. In our Russian Church there was gross superstition and the priests upheld the Czars with all their oppression. They were never on the side of liberty, except a few who were sent off to Siberia in chains.”
“Yes, Father, but do you believe in a God? Like Mother?”
He saw a faint colour creep into his father’s face.
“I have departed from the old religion,” he said. “I don’t believe in the orthodox creed as preached by the black-bearded priests, many of whom were immoral and corrupt. But somewhere behind this strange universe of ours there may be a Master mind. Sometimes in the Steppes when I have been awake in the midst of sleeping men on the snow under the stars I have had a sensation of being in touch with some mystery of the spirit above and around us.”
“God?” asked Vladimir.
His father stared at him curiously for a moment and fear crept into his eyes. He answered with a pretence of impatience.
“This is dangerous talk,” he said. “Not suitable for small boys with wagging tongues. The name of God isn’t popular in Russia, not in accordance with State teaching. You will get into trouble, my son, if you talk about God to your school fellows or teachers.”
Vladimir knew that beneath his father’s touch of anger there was fear. He knew that look. He knew how people glanced over their shoulders to see if anyone were listening.
“Don’t be afraid, Father!” he said with a laugh. “Little Mother and I have our secrets. Now I can have secrets with you. I don’t tell them to others.”
He saw that his father looked relieved. The fear left his eyes and he smiled.
“You are wise for your age, my little one,” he said. “It’s best not to talk about these things except among ourselves, and even that is dangerous.”
Vladimir nodded.
“In case the cat hears!” he said with a grin.
His father laughed good-naturedly.
“That’s very good!” he exclaimed. “ ‘In case the cat hears!’ I quite agree. She might whisper it to the mice and the mice might whisper it to——”
He hesitated, not quite knowing how to carry this on.
“To an officer of the Cheka,” suggested Vladimir.
A shadow came into his father’s eyes. He stared at Vladimir with surprise and looked disconcerted.
“That’s a word we don’t mention,” he said. “Not even among ourselves. How do you know these things? Who tells you?”
“They can’t hide things,” explained Vladimir. “All the boys talk in whispers. Several fathers of the boys have been arrested and dragged off by the Cheka. They never come back. I expect they’ve been shot. Maybe they had the wrong ideas about things. Maybe they weren’t loyal to Lenin. Perhaps they deserved to be shot. Don’t you think so, Father?”
“Very likely,” answered his father hurriedly. “But let’s have a game of dominoes, I expect little Olga is awake by now.”