I was Comrade Pyat. I was Commissar Pyat. I was Colonel Pyat. They would hold up their five fingers when they called my name. They had healthy faces. I suppose they were the true servants of the Devil, for they seemed so normal. The noise was gone and the mud was gone. We sometimes crossed a railway track, that was all. I said I must go to Odessa. They said everyone was leaving Odessa. Hrihorieff had taken it. The French had deserted it. Hrihorieff and the Bolsheviks were in open dispute. The Bolshies were losing control. Hrihorieff was a pig, but a clever one. The Black Flags bided their time now. There was sunshine on my face. It was spring. The fields were as they should be. The villages were as they should be. Tranquillity was here, as it should be in the countryside. It was the first time I knew fondness for open spaces. I understood the attraction of the steppe, the fields, the villages, the little woods and rivers. The sky became blue. The Makhnovischini talked urgently to me by the fires in the evenings. They asked me to understand their own faith. They were like early Christians. I believed in God, not governments. Some of them agreed. They were too clever, Makhno’s men; they almost had me convinced. Just before the detachment took the warm white road for Hulyai-Polye I pretended to become a Black Flag brother. We passed through armed camps. We reached the town. I wanted to see the Batko, the Old Man, the Little Father. I was taken to him. He was in a long room, possibly a school, with some comrades wearing the usual motley: sailor hats, Tsarist jackets, bandoliers. He wore a green military coat with black frogging, a sheepskin hat on the back of his head. He was small and he was drunk. He had an open Slavic face, a broad forehead. He spoke in a soft, friendly voice, like a Mafioso’s. He spoke pure Russian, full of power. He offered me vodka. I accepted. I had been drinking all day, every day. He asked me if I were SD or SR, if I supported this group or that. I told him I supported the Nabat. A man in a black overcoat, with a black, wide-brimmed hat and a small, black moustache, came over to me. ‘But you’re a Bolshevik.’
‘Nonsense. An Anarchist.’
‘You’re Pyat?’
‘Yes.’
‘We’ve heard of you. A saboteur from Odessa. SR.’
‘Who told you?’
‘Brodmann.’
‘He came here?’
Makhno’s laughter, too, was soft. ‘He’s still here, somewhere. Isn’t he?’
‘We handed him back,’ said the man with the moustache.
A woman entered. She was small, stocky, like Makhno. Perhaps she was his sister. At any rate, he greeted her as one would greet a relative. She told him his brother wanted him to come to eat. He was compliant. He slapped me on the shoulder and called me comrade. He limped from the room. That was the Anarchist, Nestor Makhno, in his hey-day. He was the best of all who fought in our war, which will tell you something. Even then he drank, but he was cheerful. He had raped. He told me in Paris, after Semyon Karetnik and Fedor Shchusa and his other lieutenants had been betrayed by the Cheka or killed in battle. Makhno was glad of any listener, then.
I was taken to a small barn and put in with a couple of bewildered, unkempt individuals too gloomy at first to do more than introduce themselves. They lounged about in the straw, throwing sticks at the walls. They were also drunk. Everyone was drunk here. They were Abramavitch and Kasaroff. There was an Abramavitch convicted of sabotage in the twenties. He might have been the same one. They were Bolsheviks. Arrested for trying to organise a ‘RevKom’ in a neighbouring village. Revolutionary Committees were banned by Makhno. These were like others of their type, full of whining self-pity and self-congratulation, experts on The People, embittered with Moscow for ‘letting us down’, angry with Makhno who was, they said, politically ignorant. Abramavitch had dark, Jewish features. He was quite young and had a scar on his lip which emphasised his sardonic, despairing manner. Kasaroff was older, with heavy, Great Russian features which had once been handsome. There is a type which will look like Nijinski one year and like Brezhneff the next. He was that: fat with stolen bread and drink. I kept my own company on the other side of the barn. I merely asked the date. It was I May. They found this amusing. I had been a prisoner of Bolsheviks, Jews and Anarchists for two months. From then on, I became more sober. It had been a strange holiday.
