第 20 页

A dull pain choked her and in the agony of helpless despair and fear her body was racked by soundless sobs. A shadow moved in the corner by the wall. "Why are you crying?"

In a passionate whisper Khristina poured out her woes to her silent cell mate. He did not speak,but laid his hand lightly on hers.

"They'll torture me to death, curse them," she whispered in terror, gulping down her tears.

"Nothing can save me." What could Pavel say to this girl? There was nothing to say. Life was crushing them both in an iron ring.

Perhaps he ought to put up a fight when they came for her tomorrow? They'd only beat him to death, or a sabre blow on the head would end it all. Wishing to comfort the distraught girl somehow, he stroked her hand tenderly. The sobbing ceased. At intervals the sentry at the entrance could be heard challenging a passer-by with the usual "Who goes there?" and then everything was quiet again. Grandpa was fast asleep. The interminable minutes crawled slowly by. Then, to his utter surprise, Pavel felt the girl's arms go around him and pull him toward her.

"Listen," hot lips were whispering, "there is no escape for me: if it isn't the officer, it'll be those others. Take me, love, so that dog won't be the first to have me."

"What are you saying, Khristina!"

But the strong arms did not release him. Full, burning lips pressed down on his—they were hard to escape. The girl's words were simple, tender—and he knew why she uttered them.

For a moment everything receded—the bolted door, the red-headed Cossack, the Commandant,the brutal beatings, the seven stifling, sleepless nights—all were forgotten, and only the burning lips and the face moist with tears existed.

Suddenly he remembered Tonya.

How could he forget her? Those dear, wonderful eyes.

He mustered his strength and broke away from Khristina's embrace. He staggered to his feet like a drunken man and seized hold of the grill. Khristina's hands found him.

"Why, what is the matter?"

All her heart was in that question. He bent down to her and pressing her hands said:

"I can't, Khristina. You are so . . . good." He hardly knew what he was saying.

He stood up again in the intolerable silence and went over to the bunk. Sitting down on the edge,he woke up the old man.

"Give me a smoke, please, Granddad."

The girl, huddled in her shawl, wept in the corner.

The next day the Commandant came with some Cossacks and took Khristina away. Her eyes sought Pavel's in farewell, and there was reproach in them. And when the door slammed behind her his soul was more desolate and dreary than ever.

All day long the old man could not get a word out of Pavel. The sentries and the Commandant's guard were changed. Toward evening a new prisoner was brought in. Pavel recognised him: it was Dolinnik, a joiner from the sugar refinery, a short thickset man wearing a faded yellow shirt under a threadbare jacket. He surveyed the storeroom with a keen eye.

Pavel had seen him in February 1917, when the reverberation of the revolution reached their town.

He had heard only one Bolshevik speak during the noisy demonstrations held then and that Bolshevik was Dolinnik. He had climbed onto a roadside fence and addressed the troops. Pavel remembered his closing words:

"Follow the Bolsheviks, soldiers, they will not betray you!"

He had not seen the joiner since.

Granddad was glad to have a new cell mate, for he obviously found it hard to sit silent all day long. Dolinnik settled down next to him on the edge of the bunk, smoked a cigarette with him and questioned him about everything.

Then the newcomer moved over to Korchagin. "Well, young man?" he asked Pavel. "And how did you get in here?"

Pavel replied in monosyllables and Dolinnik saw that it was caution that kept the young man from speaking. When he learned of the charge laid against Pavel his intelligent eyes widened with amazement and he sat down beside the lad.

"So you say you got Zhukhrai away? That's interesting. I didn't know they'd nabbed you."

Pavel, taken by surprise, raised himself on his elbow. "I don't know any Zhukhrai. They can pin anything on you here."

Dolinnik, smiling, moved closer to him. "That's all right, my boy. You don't need to be cautious with me. I know more than you do."

Quietly, so that the old man should not overhear he continued:

"I saw Zhukhrai off myself, he's probably reached his destination by now. He told me all about what happened." After a moment's pause, Dolinnik added: "I see you're made of the right stuff,boy. Though, the fact that they caught you and know everything is bad, Very bad, I should say."

He took off his jacket and spreading it on the floor sat down on it with his back against the wall,and began to roll another cigarette.

Dolinnik's last remark made everything clear to Pavel. There was no doubt about it, Dolinnik was all right. Besides, he had seen Zhukhrai off, and that meant. . . .

That evening he learned that Dolinnik had been arrested for agitation among Petlyura's Cossacks.

Moreover, he had been caught distributing an appeal issued by the gubernia revolutionary committee calling on the troops to surrender and go over to the Reds.

Dolinnik was careful not to tell Pavel much.

"Who knows," he thought to himself, "they may use the ramrod on the boy. He's still too young."

Late at night when they were settling themselves for sleep, he voiced his apprehensions in the brief remark:

"Well, Korchagin, we seem to be in a pretty bad fix. Let's see what will come of it."

The next day a new prisoner was brought in—the flop-eared, scraggy-necked barber Shlyoma Zeltser.

"Fuchs, Bluvstein and Trachtenberg are going to welcome him with bread and salt," he told Dolinnik gesturing excitedly as he spoke. "I said that if they want to do that, they can, but will the rest of the Jewish population back them up? No, they won't, you can take it from me. Of course they have their own fish to fry. Fuchs has a store and Trachtenberg's got the flour mill. But what've I got? And the rest of the hungry lot? Nothing—paupers, that's what we are. Well, I've got a long tongue, and today when I was shaving an officer—one of the new ones who came recently —I said: 'Do you think Ataman Petlyura knows about these pogroms or not? Will he see the

delegation?' Oi, how many times I've got into trouble through this tongue of mine. So what do you think this officer did when I had shaved him and powdered his face and done all in fine style too? He gets up and instead of paying me arrests me for agitating against the authorities." Zeltser struck his chest with his fist. "Now what sort of agitation was that? What did I say? I only asked the fellow. . . . And to lock me up for that. . . ."

In his excitement Zeltser twisted a button on Dolinnik's shirt and tugged at his arms.

Dolinnik smiled in spite of himself as he listened to the indignant Shlyoma.

"Yes, Shlyoma," he said gravely when the barber had finished, "that was a stupid thing for a clever fellow like you to do. You chose the wrong time to let your tongue run away with you. I wouldn't have advised you to get in here."

Zeltser nodded understandingly and made a gesture of despair with his hand. Just then the door opened and the samogon woman was pushed in. She staggered in, heaping foul curses on the Cossack who brought her.

"You and your Commandant ought to be roasted on a slow fire! I hope he shrivels up and croaks from that booze of mine!"

The guard slammed the door shut and they heard him locking it on the outside.

As the woman settled down on the edge of the bunk the old man greeted her jocularly:

"So you're back with us again, you old chatterbox? Sit down and make yourself at home."

The samogon woman darted a hostile glance at him and picking up her bundle sat down on the floor next to Dolinnik.

It turned out that she had been released just long enough for her captors to get some bottles of samogon out of her.

Suddenly shouts and the sound of running feet could be heard from the guardroom next door.

Somebody was barking out orders. The prisoners stopped talking to listen.

Strange things were happening on the square in front of the ungainly church with the ancient belfry. On three sides the square was lined with rectangles of troops— units of the division of regular infantry mustered in full battle kit.

In front, facing the entrance to the church, stood three regiments of infantry in squares placed in checkerboard fashion, their ranks buttressed against the school fence.

This grey, rather dirty mass of Petlyura soldiers standing there with rifles at rest, wearing absurd Russian helmets like pumpkins cut in half, and heavily laden down with bandoliers, was the best division the "Directorate" had.

Well-uniformed and shod from the stores of the former tsarist army and consisting mainly of kulaks who were consciously fighting the Soviets, the division had been transferred here to defend this strategically important railway junction. Five different railway lines converged at Shepetovka,and for Petlyura the loss of the junction would have meant the end of everything. As it was, the "Directorate" had very little territory left in its hands, and the small town of Vinnitsa was now Petlyura's capital.

The "Chief Ataman" himself had decided to inspect the troops and now everything was in readiness for his arrival.

Back in a far corner of the square where they were least likely to be seen stood a regiment of new recruits— barefoot youths in shabby civilian clothes of all descriptions. These were farm lads picked up from their beds by midnight raiding parties or seized on the streets, and none of them had the least intention of doing any fighting.

"Let them look for fools somewhere else," they said.

The most the Petlyura officers could do was to bring the recruits to town under escort, divide them into companies and battalions and issue them arms. The very next day, however, a third of the recruits thus herded together would disappear and with each passing day their numbers dwindled.

It would have been more than foolhardy to issue them boots, particularly since the boot stocks were far from plentiful. And so everyone was ordered to report for conscription shod. The result was an astonishing collection of dilapidated footwear tied on with bits of string and wire.

They were marched out for parade barefoot.

Behind the infantry stood Golub's cavalry regiment.

Mounted men held back the dense crowds of curious townsfolk who had come to see the parade.

After all, the "Chief Ataman" himself was to be present! Events like this were rare enough in town and no one wanted to miss the free entertainment it promised.

On the church steps were gathered the colonels and captains, the priest's two daughters, a handful of Ukrainian schoolteachers, a group of "free Cossacks", and the slightly hunchbacked mayor—in a word, the elite representing the "public", and among them the Inspector-General of Infantry wearing a Caucasian cherkesska. It was he who was in command of the parade.

Inside the church Vasili, the priest, was garbing himself in his Easter service vestments.

Petlyura was to be received in grand style. For one thing, the newly-mobilised recruits were to take the oath of allegiance, and for this purpose a yellow-and-blue flag had been brought out.

The Division Commander set out for the station in a rickety old Ford car to meet Petlyura.

When he had gone, the Inspector of Infantry called over Colonel Chernyak, a tall, well-built officer with a foppishly twirled moustache.

"Take someone along with you and see that the Commandant's office and the rear services are in proper shape. If you find any prisoners there look them over and get rid of the riffraff."

Chernyak clicked his heels, took along the first Cossack captain his eye lighted on and galloped off.

The Inspector turned politely to the priest's elder daughter.

"What about the banquet, everything in order?"

"Oh, yes. The Commandant's doing his best," she replied, gazing avidly at the handsome Inspector.

Suddenly a stir passed through the crowd: a rider was coming down the road at a mad gallop,bending low over the neck of his horse. He waved his hand and shouted:

"They're coming!"

"Fall in!" barked the Inspector.

The officers ran to their places.

As the Ford chugged up to the church the band struck up The Ukraine Lives On.

Following the Division Commander, the "Chief Ataman" heaved himself laboriously out of the car. Petlyura was a man of medium height, with a square head firmly planted on a red bull neck;he wore a blue tunic of fine wool cloth girded tight with a yellow belt to which a small Browning in a chamois holster was attached. On his head was a peaked khaki uniform cap with a cockade bearing the enamel trident.

There was nothing especially warlike about the figure of Simon Petlyura. As a matter of fact, he did not look like a military man at all.

He heard out the Inspector's report with an expression of displeasure on his face. Then the mayor addressed him in greeting.

Petlyura listened absently, staring at the assembled regiments over the mayor's head.

"Let us begin," he nodded to the Inspector.

Mounting the small platform next to the flag, Petlyura delivered a ten-minute speech to the troops.

The speech was unconvincing. Evidently tired from the journey, the Ataman spoke without enthusiasm. He finished to the accompaniment of the regulation shouts of "Slava! Slava!" from the soldiers and climbed down from the platform dabbing his perspiring forehead with a handkerchief. Then, together with the Inspector and the Division Commander, he inspected the units.

As he passed the ranks of the newly-mobilised recruits his eyes narrowed in a disdainful scowl and he bit his lips in annoyance.

Toward the end of the inspection, when the platoons of new recruits marched in uneven ranks to the flag, where the priest Vasili was standing, Bible in hand, and kissed first the Bible and then the hem of the flag, an unforeseen incident occurred.

A delegation which had contrived by some unknown means to reach the square approached Petlyura. At the head of the group came the wealthy timber merchant Bluvstein with an offering of bread and salt, followed by Fuchs the draper, and three other well-to-do businessmen.