Little Apple (16 page)

"He caught on at last," the girl said, still laughing.

Artemyev shook his head. "No, he didn't. He's as thick as a doorstep, that man." He turned to Vit¬torin. "Ah, there you are, comrade. Would you mind seeing if your own belongings are in order?"

Vit¬torin undid the drawstring of his knapsack. The red notebook was still lying on top, but tucked between the clothes beneath it, to his amazement, he saw a brown leather pouch that didn't belong to him.

"All right, hand it over," said Artemyev. "There aren't any roubles inside, but no matter, I'll take that too. All good things come from God."

The blood surged into Vit¬torin's cheeks.

"Are you suggesting I stole it?" he demanded angrily.

Artemyev fended off the imputation with both hands.

"No, no, why should I make a joke at your expense? I" wanted to thank you for doing me a little favour and retrieve my property, that's all. Remember what a fix I was in and you'll understand. Lydia! Lydochka! Comrade! Give that machine a rest, I can't hear myself speak."

The clatter of the typewriter ceased. Artemyev took the leather pouch from Vit¬torin and put it on the table.

"You see," he went on, "they arrested me just as I was on the point of leaving town. I had all kinds of things on me, but the militiamen didn't search me. Why should it have occurred to them that a tramp's pockets were stuffed with explosives and detonators? So there I sat in the cell. For someone in my disguise, the prison was a safe place to be. Everybody was too busy looking for Artemyev in town to bother about an old tramp in custody. But then, comrade, I learned the governor's name. Sixteen years ago, when I was preaching rebellion at the artillery barracks in Karkov, he was with the secret police. Later on he joined us and became a revolutionary - we fought side by side on the Moscow barricades. Since then we've gone our separate ways. Today he's a Bolshevik, whereas I'm an anonymous subversive again. He wouldn't have recognized me if he'd visited our cell, but he's an experienced type. 'Hey, you with the shifty eyes,' he might have said. 'Come here. Let's see what you've got in your pockets.' In a predicament like that, I had no choice: I divided up my things and palmed them off on other people."

Vit¬torin turned pale. "You mean that pouch contains an explosive of some kind?"

"Mercury fulminate," Artemyev replied, "but don't be alarmed. It got damp, so there was little risk of an explosion."

"What if they'd found it on me - what if they'd shot me?" Vit¬torin said bitterly. "Would you have been entitled to go on living?"

"I'm up against a whole regime, an entire political system," said Artemyev. "You don't appreciate what revolution entails. When Stromfeld tried to blow up the Moscow Government building in 1902, forty innocent people lost their lives."

"Stromfeld's operation was ill-conceived and ill-prepared," said one of the men at the table. "It was bound to fail."

"That's beside the point," Artemyev told him, turning back to Vit¬torin. "Now, comrade, if you'd be so kind, take another look among your things. A small white cardboard box - yes, here it is. Now look in your left-hand coat pocket: a batch of identity cards bearing the Military Commissariat's official seal. Aren't they there? Damnation, I'd forgotten: you don't have them. I got rid of them on that engineer who accused Lenin of hoarding kerosene. After him, Alyoshka! No, wait, there's no hurry, I can always find him at his factory. Well, comrade, that's that. May I offer you a cigarette? You're from Germany, aren't you? A prisoner of war? Where are you bound for?"

"Moscow," said Vit¬torin.

Artemyev started whistling, and for the first time Vit¬torin heard the tune that was being sung the length and breadth of Russia.

"Where are you rolling, little apple?" Artemyev quoted. "You will ne'er come back again . . ."He grinned. "To Moscow, eh? Why venture back into the forest when you've just escaped the wolves?"

"Because I've a bone to pick with one of the pack," Vit¬torin replied.

Artemyev studied his face intently, then gave an almost imperceptible nod.

"I thought as much. So I wasn't mistaken: 'there's fanaticism in those eyes' - that's what I said to myself when they brought you to the cell. However, I'm still not quite clear about you. What party do you belong to?"

An expectant hush descended on the room. Vit¬torin realized that they were all waiting for him to reply - that everything depended on the next few moments.

"I don't belong to any party," he said, determined not to stray from the truth because he knew that he could never deceive a man like Artemyev. "I'm operating on my own, for purely personal reasons." After a pause he added, "Is it possible to get to Moscow? That's all that interests me."

"Where there's a will there's a way," Artemyev replied with a chuckle. "Very well, let the apple roll. Comrade Dolgushin is leaving here tonight. He'll take you with him as far as the railway station at Pecherka-Slava. From there ..."

A black-bearded man in the background leapt out of his chair.

"Excuse me, Comrade Artemyev, but what are you thinking of? We know nothing about this German, and -"

Artemyev cut him short with a gesture.

"Our friend distrusts intellectuals," he told Vit¬torin. "He's almost a Bolshevik in that respect. Comrade Dolgushin," he continued, addressing the bearded man, "when Lieutenant Gromov approached us in 1911, it was you that told him, 'We know nothing about you. Show us what you're made of.' So he went off to Rostov the next day and gunned down the chief of police in broad daylight. I remember what you said at the time. You said -"

"At the time, acts of terrorism based on personal initiative were useful to us," Dolgushin broke in angrily. "Today they only harm the Party. They lend our operations a disorganized appearance and alienate the Europeans."

"Alienate the Europeans?" Artemyev laughed uproariously. "So you still hope for assistance from
them?
From whom, exactly? Surely not from the newspapermen who ride around Russia in Trotsky's private train and gorge themselves on caviare? Enough!"

He turned to Vit¬torin.

"There's a carter named Yankel Hornstein in Sukharov Street. Dolgushin will meet you outside his place at nine tonight. Now it's my turn to say, 'Show us what you're made of.' How much time do you need? When shall I hear from you?"

Vit¬torin drew himself up. He confronted Artemyev like Lieutenant Gromov, the police chiefs assassin, who had long since vanished into a Siberian salt mine. Now that he was sure of getting to Moscow, the remainder of his mission seemed child's play.

"I'll be in touch a week from now," he said, and picked up his knapsack.

LA FURIOSA

Moscow, arsenal and armed camp of world revolution, was undergoing a Messidor 1793 of its own.

A bloody fog brooded over the soil of Russia. Fierce fighting was in progress everywhere, and the white armies, those "hirelings of foreign stockholders and their lackeys", were gaining ground on every front. Orenburg and Ufa had fallen to Kol-chak's Cossack regiments, Kazan was under threat from the Czechoslovaks advancing on the Volga. Soviet government forces were faring no better in the south. General Denikin, who enjoyed French support, had proclaimed his intention of hanging Budenny, "the renegade sergeant", and Trotsky, whom he called "the Jew Leiba". Repulsed at Nikopol and beaten at Kremenchug, Red troops had given up the Donets Basin, evacuated Poltava, and abandoned Kharkov to the enemy. The "black bands" led by the peasant anarchist Makhno, hitherto allied with the Soviets, deserted to the counter-revolution. At Tula the 4th Red Infantry Regiment murdered its commanding officer and joined forces with the rebel peasants of Vyenev. In the north, General Yudenich's army was preparing to attack Leningrad with the support of the British Navy.

Faced with this predicament, the men in the Kremlin resorted to heroic measures. Under a decree proclaiming the Soviet Republic to be in extreme danger, all able-bodied workers were drafted into the Red Army. Factory yards became parade grounds. The woodworkers, textile workers and paper-mill workers raised a regiment apiece, and wildly cheering crowds applauded these units as they left for the front after a mere six days' training. Anaemic and undernourished Russian clerks who had never before handled a gun were mobilized and hurled into battle. A call for help went out to the Baltic destroyer fleet, which succeeded in doing what everyone had thought impossible: it steamed up the Neva, negotiated the Mariinsk canals, entered the Volga, and subjected the Czechoslovak lines to a murderous and wholly unforeseen bombardment.

Trotsky and his staff of former Tsarist officers sped between the battlefronts by express train. There were eleven fronts in all, and Vatsetis, Trotsky's Lettish military adviser, was rumoured to have forecast that they would soon be augmented by a twelfth, to wit, starvation. Although food and fuel were in short supply, the munitions factories continued to function. "If our coal runs out," Kamenev told a gathering of foundrymen, "we'll stoke our furnaces with the pianos of the bourgeoisie." Muscovites undertook two-day journeys by rail to obtain a sack of potatoes. The itinerant traders who used to peddle garlic, dried fish and cranberries in the streets of Moscow had disappeared overnight. All that could now be bought were buttons, shoe polish and notebooks.

One government decree ordained the surrender of all privately-owned bicycles, binoculars and torches; another mobilized the bourgeoisie and set them to cleaning streets and military installations. The Communist Party threw open its ranks to all who wished to join. In Moscow alone, twenty thousand people registered within three days. The streets were filled with long lines of workers queueing up at counters for hours, not for food, but to hand in donations toward the equipping of the Red Army. The work force at a match factory formally resolved to "overthrow the class enemy by boosting output". At Kazan Station, a man was regularly seen distributing fur coats, shoes, pocket watches, meerschaum cigarette holders and petrol lighters to troops bound for the front. When arrested, he admitted having robbed passers-by, night after night, "in order to regale our valiant Red Army men with riches wrested from the bourgeoisie".

Lorries laden with soldiers, machine-guns and ammunition boxes roared through the city in an unending stream. Two batteries of heavy guns on their way to Yaroslav Station bore the inscription: "They'll hear us in Paris!" One of the battery commanders mounted the roof of his truck and addressed the crowd that had escorted him to the station. "The real front is here," he declared, "here with you in Moscow. We out there are only covering your rear."

His point was taken. The counter-revolution had yet to be finally crushed in Moscow. It was said that the headquarters of the Moscow garrison had been mined by White conspirators, that the general staff of all the White Guard organizations was secretly based in a building on Smolensky Boulevard, and that a coup d'etat had been planned to coincide with a forthcoming religious festival. These rumours were continually refuelled by the mass arrests and executions that took place every day.

Being unable to lay hands on every conspirator, the masses vented their revolutionary spleen on the stone emblems of the
ancien regime.
Tsarist monuments were torn from their plinths. When the statue of Alexander II in Sokolniki Gardens was smashed to pieces, the park attendants and two
petites bourgeoises
raised their voices in protest, not on behalf of the emancipator of the serfs, but because a pair of thrushes had nested in his metal crown.

Statues and busts of the great revolutionaries of the past sprouted everywhere, though many of them vanished as quickly as they had appeared. A bust of Bakunin by a Futurist sculptor disdainful of "the bourgeoisie's reactionary methods of representation" - he had fashioned it out of bottle sleeves, matchboxes, electric light bulbs, box lids, telegraph wire and raffia shoes - was hurled into the gutter by a brief resurgence of counter-revolutionary sentiment. Not far from the Iberian Madonna in Red Square, on the other hand, it was possible to see a revolutionary monument which, though crude, was nonetheless effective: an outsize axe embedded in a massive block of white stone bearing the inscription, in big red letters: "The White Guard". One morning, old Prince Kochubey was found on the steps of this monument with a bullet in his head. His three sons had all lost their lives in the civil war, one as a Red Army soldier, the other two as officers in Denikin's forces. The old man had kept the wolf from the door during his last few days on earth by working as billposter.

Such was Moscow in March 1919: a city gone mad, a city through whose streets a sick, tired and hungry Vit¬torin, his clothes in rags, trudged in search of Selyukov.

He looked for Selyukov in the streets traversing the centre of the city, in government eating-houss, in the dance halls where sailors and Chekists disported themselves, in the hutted encampments on the outskirts. He lingered outside the War Commissariat building and scrutinized the faces of the people streaming past him. His money had run out even before he reached Moscow, so he lived as an "illegal", spending the night under bridges or in empty barns and shacks outside town. When hunger became too much for him he suspended his investigations for long enough to earn a few roubles by devising propaganda posters for a Soviet printing works to which he was directed by the labour exchange. For two whole days he drew potbellied bourgeois smuggling their moneybags across the frontier and White generals fleeing from Red bayonets. On the third day he skipped work to look for Selyukov at the Party's club for revolutionary officers. He was reprimanded on his return and given to understand that concentration camps had been established for the disposal of slackers, shirkers and saboteurs.

In search of a job that would leave him more spare time, he worked as a day labourer loading timber for half a pound of bread and a bowl of soup. In the afternoons he mingled with the crowds that thronged Kuznetsky Bridge, Sukharov Square or Strastny Boulevard, ever on the look out for Selyukov.

Vit¬torin's series of conjectures, which he held to be logically irrefutable conclusions, had persuaded him that Selyukov must be in Moscow. Although he persisted in that belief, even after three long weeks of fruitless research, he changed his investigative technique. Having learned that all officers in the old army were obliged to register in accordance with a Soviet decree promulgated some months before, he abandoned his post on Kuznetsky Bridge and spent hours in various government information bureaux. There he waited his turn with the serene self-assurance of a man on the brink of success. The official would listen with an air of suspicion, impatience, or stolid indifference, demand to see his identity card and trade union membership booklet, ask him a number of questions, and eventually tell him to return the next day or direct him to another department.