The name of the prisoner was quite ordinary and unremarkable: Semyon Vasilievich Petlyura.
Both he and the City's newspapers of the period from December 1918 to February 1919 used the rather frenchified form of his first name - Simon.
Simon's past was wrapped in deepest obscurity.
Some said he had been a clerk.
'No, he was an accountant.'
'No, a student.'
On the corner of the Kreshchatik and Nikolaevsky Street there used to be a large and magnificent tobacco store.
Its oblong shop-sign was beautifully adorned with a picture of a coffee-colored Turk in a fez, smoking a hookah and shod in soft yellow slippers with turned-up toes.
There were people who swore on their oath that not long ago they had seen Simon in that same store, standing elegantly dressed behind the counter and selling the cigarettes and tobacco made in Solomon Cohen's factory.
But then there were others who said:
'Nothing of the sort.
He was secretary of the Union of Municipalities.'
'No, not the Union of Municipalities, the Zemstvo Union,' countered yet a third opinion; 'a typical Zemstvo official.'
A fourth group (refugees) would close their eyes as an aid to memory and mutter:
'Now just a minute ... let me think . . .'
Then they would describe how, apparently, ten years ago - no, sorry, eleven years ago - they had seen him one evening in Moscow walking along Malaya Bronnaya Street carrying under his arm a guitar wrapped in a black cloth.
And they would add that he had been going to a party given by some friends from his home town, hence the guitar.
He had been going, it seems, to a delightful party where there were lots of gay, pretty girl students from his native Ukraine, bottles of delicious Ukrainian plum-brandy, songs, a Ukrainian band...
Then these people would grow confused as they described his appearance and would muddle their dates and places . . .
'He was clean-shaven, you say?'
'No, I think . . . yes, that's right ... he had a little beard.'
'Was he at Moscow University?'
'Well no, but he was a student somewhere . . .'
'Nothing of the sort.
Ivan Ivanovich knew him.
He was a schoolteacher in Tarashcha.'
Hell, maybe it wasn't him walking down Malaya Bronnaya, it had been so dark and misty and frosty on the street that day . . .
Who knows? ... A guitar ... a Turk in the sunlight ... a hookah . . . chords on a guitar, it was all so vague and obscure.
God, the confusion, the uncertainty of those days . . . the marching feet of the boys of the Guards' Cadet School marching past, lurking figures shadowy as bloodstains, vague apparitions on the run, girls with wild, flying hair, gunfire, and frost and the light of St Vladimir's cross at midnight.
Marching and singing Cadets of the Guards Trumpets and drums Cymbals ringing . . .
Cymbals ringing, bullets whistling like deadly steel nightingales, soldiers beating people to death with ramrods, black-cloaked Ukrainian cavalry-men are coming on their fiery horses.
The apocalyptic dream charges with a clatter up to Alexei Turbin's bedside, as he sleeps, pale, a sweaty lock of black hair plastered damply to his forehead, the pink-shaded lamp still burning.
The whole house was asleep, - Karas' snores coming from the library, Shervinsky's sibilant breathing from Nikolka's room . . .
Darkness, muzzy heads ...
A copy of Dostoevsky lay open and unread on the floor by Alexei's bed, the desperate characters of The Possessed prophesying doom while Elena slept peacefully.
'Now listen: there's no such person.
This fellow Simon Petlyura never existed.
There was no Turk, there was no guitar under a wrought-iron lamp-post on the Malaya Bronnaya, he was never in the Zemstvo Union . . . it's all nonsense.'
Simply a myth that grew up in the Ukraine among the confusion and fog of that terrible year 1918.
. . . But there was something else too - rabid hatred.
There were four hundred thousand Germans and all around them four times forty times four hundred thousand peasants whose hearts blazed with unquenchable malice. For this they had good cause.
The blows on the face from the swagger-canes of young German subalterns, the hail of random shrapnel fire aimed at recalcitrant villages, backs scarred by the ramrods wielded by Hetmanite cossacks, the IOU's on scraps of paper signed by majors and lieutenants of the German army and which read:
'Pay this Russian sow twenty-five marks for her pig.'
And the derisive laughter at the people who brought these chits to the German headquarters in the City.
And the requisitioned horses, the confiscated grain, the fat-faced landlords who came back to reclaim their estates under the Hetman's government; the spasm of hatred at the very sound of the words 'Russian officers'.
That is how it was.
Then there were the rumors of land reform which the Lord Hetman was supposed to carry out . . . and alas, it was only in November 1918, when the roar of gunfire was first heard around the City, that the more intelligent people, including Vasilisa, finally realised that the peasants hated that same Lord Hetman as though he were a mad dog; and that in the peasants' minds the Hetman's so-called 'reform' was a swindle on behalf of the landlords and that what was needed once and for all was the true reform for which the peasants themselves had longed for centuries:
All land to the peasants.
Three hundred acres per man.
No more landlords.