'But what sort of a man is your husband?' #
'He's a swine, and nothing more!' said Alexei Turbin to himself, alone in his room across the lobby from Elena.
He had divined what she was thinking and it infuriated him. 'He's a swine - and I'm a weakling.
Kicking him out might have been going too far, but I should at least have turned my back on him.
To hell with him.
And it's not because he left Elena at a time like this that he's a swine, that has really very little to do with it - no, it's because of something quite different.
But what, exactly?
It's only too clear, of course.
He's a wax dummy without the slightest conception of decency!
Whatever he says, he talks like a senseless fathead - and he's a graduate of the military academy, who are supposed to be the elite of Russia . . .'
Silence in the apartment.
The streak of light from Elena's room was extinguished.
She fell asleep and her thoughts faded away, but for a long time Alexei Turbin sat unhappily at the little writing desk in his little room.
The vodka and the hock had violently disagreed with him.
He sat looking with red-rimmed eyes at a page of the first book he happened to pick up and tried to read, his mind always flicking senselessly back to the same line:
'Honor is to a Russian but a useless burden . . .'
It was almost morning when he undressed and fell asleep. He dreamed of a nasty little man in baggy check pants who said with a sneer:
'Better not sit on a hedgehog if you're naked!
Holy Russia is a wooden country, poor and . . . dangerous, and to a Russian honor is nothing but a useless burden.'
'Get out!' shouted Turbin in his dream. 'You filthy little rat-I'll get you!' In his dream Alexei sleepily fumbled in his desk drawer for an automatic, found it, tried to shoot the horrible little man, chased after him and the dream dissolved.
For a couple of hours he fell into a deep, black, dreamless sleep and when a pale delicate light began to dawn outside the windows of his room that opened on to the verandah, Alexei began to dream about the City.
Four
Beautiful in the frost and mist-covered hills above the Dnieper, the life of the City hummed and steamed like a many-layered honeycomb.
All day long smoke spiralled in ribbons up to the sky from innumerable chimney-pots.
A haze floated over the streets, the packed snow creaked underfoot, houses towered to five, six and even seven storeys.
By day their windows were black, while at night they shone in rows against the deep, dark blue sky.
As far as the eye could see, like strings of precious stones, hung the rows of electric globes suspended high from the elegant curlicues of tall lamp-posts.
By day the streetcars rolled by with a steady, comfortable rumble, with their yellow straw-stuffed seats of handsome foreign design.
Shouting as they went cabmen drove from hill to hill and fur collars of sable and silver fox gave beauty and mystery to women's faces.
The gardens lay silent and peaceful, weighed down with white virgin snow.
And there were more gardens in the City than any other city in the world.
They sprawled everywhere, with their avenues of chestnuts, their terraces of maples and limes.
The beautiful hills rising above the Dnieper were made even lovelier by gardens that rose terrace-wise, spreading, at times flaming into colour like a million sunspots, at others basking in the perpetual gentle twilight of the Imperial Gardens, the terrifying drop over the escarpment quite unprotected by the ancient, rotting black beams of the parapet.
The sheer hillsides, lashed by snowstorms, fell away to the distant terraces below which in turn spread further and wider, merging into the tree-lined embankments that curved along the bank of the great river. Away and away wound the dark river like a ribbon of forged steel, into the haze, further than the eye could see even from the City's highest eminence, on to the Dnieper Rapids, to the Zaporozhian Sech, to the Chersonese, to the far distant sea.
In winter, more than in any other city in the world, quiet fell over the streets and alleyways of the two halves of the City - the Upper City on the hilltops and the Lower City spread along the curve of the frozen Dnieper - and the City's mechanical roar retreated inside the stone buildings, grew muffled and sank to a low hum.
All the City's energy, stored up during a summer of sunshine and thunderstorms, was expended in light.
From four o'clock in the afternoon light would start to burn in the windows of the houses, in the round electric globes, in the gas street-lamps, in the illuminated house-numbers and in the vast windows of electric power-stations, turning people's thoughts towards the terrifying prospect of man's electric-powered future, those great windows through which could be glimpsed the machines whose desperate, ceaselessly revolving wheels shook the earth to its very core.
All night long the City shone, glittered and danced with light until morning, when the lights went out and the City cloaked itself once more in smoke and mist.
But the brightest light of all was the white cross held by the gigantic statue of St Vladimir atop Vladimir Hill. It could be seen from far, far away and often in summer, in thick black mist, amid the osier-beds and tortuous meanders of the age-old river, the boatmen would see it and by its light would steer their way to the City and its wharves.
In winter the cross would glow through the dense black clouds, a frozen unmoving landmark towering above the gently sloping expanse of the eastern bank, whence two vast bridges were flung across the river.
One, the ponderous Chain Bridge that led to the right-bank suburbs, the other high, slim and urgent as an arrow that carried the trains from where, far away, crouched another city, threatening and mysterious: Moscow. #
In that winter of 1918 the City lived a strange unnatural life which is unlikely ever to be repeated in the twentieth century.
Behind the stone walls every apartment was overfilled.
Their normal inhabitants constantly squeezed themselves into less and less space, willy-nilly making way for new refugees crowding into the City, all of whom arrived across the arrow-like bridge from the direction of that enigmatic other city.
Among the refugees came gray-haired bankers and their wives, skilful businessmen who had left behind their faithful deputies in Moscow with instructions to them not to lose contact with the new world which was coming into existence in the Muscovite kingdom; landlords who had secretly left their property in the hands of trusted managers; industrialists, merchants, lawyers, politicians.
There came journalists from Moscow and Petersburg, corrupt, grasping and cowardly.
Prostitutes.
Respectable ladies from aristocratic families and their delicate daughters, pale depraved women from Petersburg with carmine-painted lips; secretaries of civil service departmental chiefs; inert young homosexuals.
Princes and junk-dealers, poets and pawnbrokers, gendarmes and actresses from the Imperial theatres.
Squeezing its way through the crack, this mass of people converged on the City.