So - to hell with it!
It was all a myth.
Petlyura was a myth.
He didn't exist.
It was a myth as remarkable as an older myth of the non-existent Napoleon Bonaparte, but a great deal less colorful.
But something had to be done.
That outburst of elemental peasant wrath had somehow to be channelled into a certain direction, because no magic wand could conjure it away.
It was very simple.
There would be trouble; but the men to deal with it would be found.
And there appeared a certain Colonel Toropetz.
It turned out that he had sprung from no less than the Austrian army . . .
'You can't mean it?'
'I assure you he has.'
Then there emerged a writer called Vinnichenko, famous for two things - his novels and the fact that as far back as the beginning of 1918 fate had thrown him up to the surface of the troubled sea that was the Ukraine, and that without a second's delay the satirical journals of St Petersburg had branded him a traitor.
'And serves him right . . .'
'Well, I'm not so sure.
And then there's that mysterious man who was released from prison.'
Even in September no one in the City could imagine what these three men might be up to, whose only apparent talent was the ability to turn up at the right moment in such an insignificant place as Belaya Tserkov.
By October people were speculating furiously about them, when those brilliantly-lit trains full of German officers pulled out of the City into the gaping void that was the new-born state of Poland, and headed for Germany.
Telegrams flew.
Away went the diamonds, the shifty eyes, the slicked-down hair and the money.
They fled southwards, southwards to the seaport city of Odessa.
By November, alas, everyone knew with fair certainty what was afoot.
The word
'Petlyura' echoed from every wall, from the gray paper of telegraph forms.
In the mornings it dripped from the pages of newspapers into the coffee, immediately turning that nectar of the tropics into disgusting brown swill.
It flew from tongue to tongue, and was tapped out by telegraphists' fingers on morse keys.
Extraordinary things began happening in the City thanks to that name, which the Germans mispronounced as
'Peturra'.
Individual German soldiers, who had acquired the bad habit of lurching drunkenly around in the suburbs, began disappearing in the night.
They would vanish one night and the next day they would be found murdered.
So German patrols in their tin hats were sent around the City at night, marching with lanterns to put an end to the outrages.
But no amount of lanterns could dissolve the murky thoughts brewing in people's heads.
Wilhelm.
Three Germans murdered yesterday.
Oh God, the Germans are leaving - have you heard?
The workers have arrested Trotsky in Moscow!!
Some sons of bitches held up a train near Borodyanka and stripped it clean.
Petlyura has sent an embassy to Paris.
Wilhelm again.
Black Senegalese in Odessa.
A mysterious, unknown name - Consul Enno.
Odessa.
General Denikin. Wilhelm again.
The Germans are leaving, the French are coming.
'The Bolsheviks are coming, brother!'
'Don't say such things!'
The Germans have a special device with a revolving pointer -they put it on the ground and the pointer swings round to show where there are arms buried in the ground.
That's a joke.
Petlyura has sent a mission to the Bolsheviks.