‘Shut up. I promised. But I said I must make sure you would remember him. I don’t think you’ll keep his guns.’
I heard Grishenko’s awful whip whistling through the dull, grey air. We screamed together. I can feel the pain. It was the worst pain I have known. It was the most unexpected. It was inflicted with such skill, such controlled passion, that no bone was broken. But I still bear the marks of the little lead weights in my buttocks.
‘Now you’ll remember Yermeloff, yid.’
He pushed me onto the bed so that my face struck the pommels of the guns. I was weeping. He was still in the room, staring at me, slowly putting his whip back in his belt, his knife back in its sheath. Then he turned and went out. He closed the door quietly behind him. The monster had gone. That monster, who had killed his friend to save his own skin.
I still have the pistols. I have been offered a thousand pounds for them.
HISTORY IS NEVER THE SAME; but events repeat themselves. Gradually, through this repetition, you learn that people are very similar everywhere you go. They have always been inclined to leap to conclusions about me. I have rarely been guilty of anything. Is it my fault they transfer their own hopes and fears onto me? I am a scientist with a scientist’s mind. Few understand this. I have been humiliated. Grishenko humiliated me. Brodmann spoke of ‘outrages’ and ‘lack of discipline’ and used his Marxist rubbish to condemn Grishenko’s attack, but I could not bring myself to take the matter further. I am a forgiving soul. I had been fond of Yermeloff. To some extent I could understand Grishenko’s grief. Nonetheless, it was all but impossible for me to sit on anything hard for many weeks to come. Later, I would give the pistols into the safekeeping of Mrs Cornelius and would not see them again until 1940. Now, they had become a comfort.
Brodmann had forced the doctor to attend me. I had won some sympathy, though still a ‘Viper’ and a ‘Jew’, a murderer of the Tsar. Alone, I could have agreed with everything he said about the Reds, but Brodmann had hovered. Perhaps he had been afraid the poor little doctor would assassinate me. We were due to link up with Hrihorieff. There was a train we must catch. As we left for the station, I felt only the song of the pain, as we say. It would not be for another day that I experienced the stiffness and throbbing agony, far harder to bear and more irritating.
I saw Grishenko once more while I was boarding the train. He grinned at me. I blushed like a girl. Nobody else noticed my reaction. Brodmann was too furious, pointing out Grishenko as my assailant. In all his looted finery, Grishenko rode away on his pony, lashing at its neck and shoulders with that whip. The round pommels of my pistols rested against each of my hips. They fitted easily into the pockets of my louse-ridden greatcoat. I also had my papers, my diploma.
We received special attention. We had even better accommodation than on the Kiev train. The seats, thank God, were soft. Brodmann sat opposite me, by the window. He kept grumbling and muttering and staring out at the muddy snow, looking for Grishenko. I laughed and told him it was nothing.
‘It is typical!’ Brodmann would have me know. ‘Justice is merely their word for vendetta. And this is the material we must work with!’
Strangely, I felt elevated that morning. I felt superior. I chuckled. ‘Worse has happened to me, Brodmann. You should be in my trade.’
‘I hate violence.’ His soft, wizened face clouded.
‘Then you’re in the wrong vocation.’ Our thin friend entered, pulled off his long coat, folded it neatly, and placed it in the overhead rack.
‘I was a pacifist. The Bolsheviks promised peace. I worked for them at the Front. I published newspapers, pamphlets.’ Brodmann sat back as the train began to move. ‘Does anyone know where we’re really going?’
‘Hrihorieff said he wants us at his field HQ. He has some idea of taking Kherson or Nikolaieff. Maybe he’s there already.’
‘They’re far too well defended. Greeks and French in one, Germans in the other.’
‘The Germans aren’t happy about fighting for the Allies and the Whites. They might come over to us.’
‘But not to Hrihorieff. He’s shown what he thinks of Germans. They wouldn’t trust him.’
