‘I know.’ He was amused. ‘That’s why they put me with you. I’m the intellectual of the division.’ He began to laugh, ‘I did a year at technical college before I was conscripted.’
‘You were at the Front?’
‘Galicia.’
‘You’ll fight the Bolsheviks when they attack?’
‘You’re crazy,’ he said. He patted my tube. ‘This will fight the Bolsheviks, comrade professor. I’ll be running like fuck for the nearest train.’
I laughed with him. We were of an identical mind.
I left him on guard when I had lined up the available mirrors and tested the projector once more on a paper target. I had slept only a few hours during the whole week but I still did not feel like going to bed. I directed the driver to Bessarabskaya. He told me it was four in the morning. From all around I heard cackling laughter, breaking windows, the creak of hand-carts bearing away loot. We returned to the hotel where I found a message from Esmé. A train departed for Odessa in the morning. She would do all she could to be on it, but she needed extra papers, travel-permits. I telephoned a good friend of mine in the appropriate ministry. I was impossibly lucky. He, too, was not sleeping. Within an hour, I had documents for myself, my mother, Captain Brown and Esmé. I put my permit with my passport, summoned a soldier from downstairs, and sent him to Esmé. For once I was relieved that neither Esmé nor my mother were resisting me. I fell asleep suddenly and was awakened at noon by a nightmare in which I, several years younger, was writhing in the mud, the only figure on a vast, deserted battlefield. There were bullets in my stomach.
I did not immediately open my eyes because I thought for a second I was in Odessa again, listening to the sound of the Arcadian surf. My eyes were filled with yellow light, like blood. I realised that the sun was out. It was the first sunshine I had seen for a long time. I rolled over and looked about me. My apartment was insane. I had not noticed before that it was so untidy. Yellow blood from the sun. It ran in a series of canals, cut across the steppe. It ran swiftly and could not be navigated or crossed. The booming continued. It was, of course, artillery fire. It might have been our own. It had become impossible to distinguish friends from enemies. They battled over Kiev. They came and went. They all said they were saving us. Some cities are fated to become symbols. In those days we lived symbolically in a symbolic city. The mad universe of the Symbolists had for a while become reality. Had all those people I despised in Petrograd been prescient? Or had they created this world because it was the only environment in which they felt at ease. It was a madman’s world. Someone was standing in the room. A young corporal in a Cossack coat. He held his sheepskin hat in his gloved hands. I think he said the situation was urgent. Yellow blood still filled my eyes. I got up. I was wearing my clothes.
Hannibal’s Numidian cavalry drove deeper and deeper into Spain, that pious land; drove deeper towards the shrine of the Holy Virgin. And the steppe was broken by black trees. Burning bronze ran through the Kiev gorges. And I was on fire: and my mother’s black clothes were on fire. ‘A train?’
Cossack: ‘They thought you’d been killed. The enemy is close. You are needed, Pan.’
He spoke with a strong Polish accent. My Polish was weak. Mother had taught me once. And I had listened to her nightmares.
‘Has the train left? The morning train for Odessa?’
‘The emergency train. Yes.’
‘Was it well-protected?’
‘Armoured, I think.’
I went with this Polish Cossack. There were little girls singing a huge chorus in my mind. Pure, Russian voices. There is no sound like it. And still I blinked away the sun’s blood. It was Liszt. I had heard it at the Opera House in Odessa with Uncle Semya. Dante. I could not. My mind was weak. Something had attacked it as I slept. There is no purer sound than that of little Russian girls singing.
