The White Guard - Mikhail Bulgakov [31]
It was then that the reality of the situation began to penetrate the brains of the more intelligent of the men who, with their solid rawhide suitcases and their rich women-folk, had leaped over the barbed wire surrounding the Bolshevik camp and taken refuge in the City. They realised that fate had linked them with the losing side and their hearts were filled with terror.
'The Germans are beaten', said the swine.
'We are beaten', said the intelligent swine.
And the people of the City realised this too. Only someone who has been defeated knows the real meaning of that word. It is like a party in a house where the electric light has failed; it is like a room in which green mould, alive and malignant, is crawling over the wallpaper; it is like the wasted bodies of rachitic children, it is like rancid cooking oil, like the sound of women's voices shouting obscene abuse in the dark. It is, in short, like death.
Of course the Germans will leave the Ukraine. As a result some people will have to run away, others to stay and face the City's next wave of new, unpredictable and uninvited guests. And some, no doubt, will have to die. The ones who run away will not die; who, then will die? . . .
As the fall turned to winter death soon came to the Ukraine with the first dry, driven snow. The rattle of machine-gun fire began to be heard in the woods. Death itself remained unseen, but its unmistakable herald was a wave of crude, elemental peasant fury which ran amok through the cold and the snow, a fury in torn bast shoes, straws in its matted hair; a fury which howled. It held in its hands a huge club, without which no great change in Russia, it seems, can ever take place. Here and there 'the red rooster crowed' as farms and hayricks burned, in other places the purple sunset would reveal a Jewish innkeeper strung up by his sexual organs. There were strange sights, too, in Poland's fair capital of Warsaw: high on his plinth Henryk Sienkiewicz smiled with grim satisfaction. Then it was as if all the devils in hell were let loose. Priests shook the green cupolas of their little churches with bell-ringing, whilst next door in the schoolhouses, their windows shattered by rifle bullets, the people sang revolutionary songs.
It was a time and a place of suffocating uncertainty. So - to hell
with it! It was all a myth. Petlyura was a myth. He didn't exist. It was a myth as remarkable as an older myth of the non-existent Napoleon Bonaparte, but a great deal less colorful. But something had to be done. That outburst of elemental peasant wrath had somehow to be channelled into a certain direction, because no magic wand could conjure it away.
It was very simple. There would be trouble; but the men to deal with it would be found. And there appeared a certain Colonel Toropetz. It turned out that he had sprung from no less than the Austrian army . . .
'You can't mean it?'
'I assure you he has.'
Then there emerged a writer called Vinnichenko, famous for two things - his novels and the fact that as far back as the beginning of 1918 fate had thrown him up to the surface of the troubled sea that was the Ukraine, and that without a second's delay the satirical journals of St Petersburg had branded him a traitor.
'And serves him right . . .'
'Well, I'm not so sure. And then there's that mysterious man who was released from prison.'
Even in September no one in the