The White Guard - Mikhail Bulgakov [17]
'Treacherous bastards.'
'Well, if all that's true it won't be long before we catch Petlyura and hang him! String him up!'
'I'd like to shoot him with my own hands.'
'And strangle him too. Your health, gentlemen.'
Another drink. By now minds were getting fogged. Having drunk three glasses Nikolka ran to his room for a handkerchief, and as he passed through the lobby (people act naturally when there's no one watching them) he collapsed against the hat-stand. There hung Shervinsky's curved sabre with its shiny gold hilt. Present from a Persian prince. Damascus blade. Except that no prince had given it to him and the blade was not from Damascus, butit was still a very fine and expensive one. A grim Mauser in a strap-hung holster, beside it the blued-steel muzzle of Karas' Steyr automatic. As Nikolka stumbled against the cold wood of the holster and fingered the murderous barrel of the Mauser he almost burst into tears with excitement. He suddenly felt an urge to go out and fight, now, this minute, out on the snow-covered fields outside the City. He felt embarrassed and ashamed that here at home there was vodka to drink and warmth, while out there his fellow cadets were freezing in the dark, the snow and the blizzard.
They must be crazy at headquarters - the detachments were not ready, the students not trained, no sign of the Senegalese yet and they were probably as black as a pair of boots . . . Christ, that meant they'd freeze to death - after all, they were used to a hot climate, weren't they?
'As for your Hetman,' Alexei Turbin was shouting, 'I'd string him up the first of all! He's done nothing but insult us for the past six months. Who was it who forbade us to form a loyalist Russian army in the Ukraine? The Hetman. And now that things have gone from bad to worse, they've started to form a Russian army after all. The enemy's practically in sight and now - now! - we have to rake up troops, form detachments, headquarters, - and in conditions of total disorder! Christ, what lunacy!'
'You're spreading panic', Karas said coolly.
Turbin lost his temper.
'Me? Spreading panic? You are simply shutting your eyes to the facts. I'm no panic-monger. I just want to get something off my chest. Panic? Don't worry. I've already decided to go and enrol in that Mortar Regiment of yours tomorrow, and if your Malyshev won't have me as a doctor I shall enlist in the ranks. I'm fed up with the whole damn business! It's not panic . . .' A piece of cucumber stuck in his throat, he began to cough furiously and to choke, and Nikolka started thumping him on the back.
'Well done!' Karas chimed in, beating the table. 'In the ranks hell - we'll fix you to be the regimental doctor.'
'Tomorrow we'll all go along together,' mumbled the drunken Myshlaevsky, 'all of us together. The whole of our class from the Alexander I High School. Hurrah!'
'He's a swine,' Turbin went on with hatred in his voice, 'why, he can't even speak Ukrainian properly himself! Hell - the day before yesterday I asked that bastard Kuritsky a question. Since last November, it seems, he's forgotten how to speak Russian. Changed his name, too, to make it sound Ukrainian . . . Well, so I asked him-what's the Ukrainian for "cat"? "Kit" he said. All right, I said, so what's the Ukrainian for "kit"? That finished him.
He just frowned and said nothing. Now he doesn't say good-morning any longer.' Nikolka roared with laughter . . .
'Mobilisation - huh', Turbin continued bitterly. 'A pity you couldn't have seen what was going on in the police stations yesterday. All the black marketeers knew about the mobilisation three days before the decree was published. How d'you like that? And every one of them had a hernia or a patch on his lung, and any one of them who couldn't fake lung trouble simply vanished