MIKHAIL BULGAKOV - THE WHITE GUARD

'I don't care - even if he is dead', she cried, hoarse with misery. 'What does it matter now? I'll drink to him.'

'He can never, never be forgiven for his abdication at Dno Station. Never. But we have learned by bitter experience now, and we know that only the monarchy can save Russia. Therefore if the Tsar is dead - long live the Tsar!' shouted Alexei and raised his glass.

'Hurrah! Hur-rah! Hur-ra-ah!' The threefold cry roared across the dining-room.

Downstairs Vasilisa leaped up in a cold sweat. Suddenly weakened, he gave a piercing shriek and woke up his wife Wanda.

'My God, oh my God . . ' Wanda mumbled, clutching his nightshirt.

'What the hell's going on? At three o'clock in the morning!' the weeping Vasilisa shrieked at the black ceiling. 'This time I really am going to lodge a complaint!'

Wanda groaned. Suddenly they both went rigid. Quite clearly, seeping down through the ceiling, came a thick, greasy wave of sound, dominated by a powerful baritone resonant as a bell:

'. . . God Save His Majesty, Tsar of all Russia . . .'

Vasilisa's heart stopped and even his feet broke out into a cold sweat. Feeling as if his tongue had turned to felt, he burbled:

'No ... it can't be . . . they're insane .. . They'll get us into such trouble that we'll never come out of it alive. The old anthem is illegal now! Christ, what are they doing? They can be heard out on the street, for God's sake!'

Wanda had already slumped back like a stone and had fallen asleep again, but Vasilisa could not bring himself to lie down until the last chord had faded away upstairs amid a confused babble of shouts.

'Russia acknowledges only one Orthodox faith and one Tsar!' shouted Myshlaevsky, swaying.

'Right!'

'Week ago ... at the theater . . . went to see Paul the First', Myshlaevsky mumbled thickly, 'and when the actor said those words I couldn't keep quiet and I shouted out "Right!" - and d'you know what? Everyone clapped. All except some swine in the upper circle who yelled "Idiot!" '

'Damned Yids', growled Karas, now almost equally drunk.

A thickening haze enveloped them all . . . Tonk-tank . . . tonk-tank . . . they had passed the point when there was any longer any sense in drinking more vodka, even wine; the only remaining stage was stupor or nausea. In the narrow little lavatory, where the lamp jerked and danced from the ceiling as though bewitched, everything went blurred and spun round and round. Pale and miserable, Myshlaevsky retched violently. Alexei Turbin, drunk himself, looking terrible with a twitching nerve on his cheek, his hair plastered damply over his forehead, supported Myshlaevsky.

'Ah-aakh

Finally Myshlaevsky leaned back from the bowl with a groan, tried painfully to focus his eyes and clung to Alexei's arms like a limp sack.

'Ni-kolka!' Someone's voice boomed out through the fog and black spots, and it took Alexei several seconds to realise that the voice was his own. 'Nikolka!' he repeated. A white lavatory wall swung open and turned green. 'God, how sickening, how disgusting. I swear I'll never mix vodka and wine again. Nikol . . .'

'Ah-ah', Myshlaevsky groaned hoarsely and sat down on the floor.

A black crack widened and through it appeared Nikolka's head and chevron.

'Nikol. . . help me to get him up. There, pick him up like this, under his arm.'

'Poor fellow', muttered Nikolka shaking his head sympathetically and straining himself to pick up his friend. The half-lifeless body slithered around, twitching legs slid in every direction and the lolling head hung like a puppet's on a string. Tonk-tank went the clock, as it fell off the wall and jumped back into place again. Bunches of flowers danced a jig in the vase. Elena's face was flushed with red patches and a lock of hair dangled over her right eyebrow.

'That's right. Now put him to bed.'

'At least wrap him in a bathrobe. He's indecent like that with me around. You damned fools - you can't hold your drink. Viktor! Viktor! What's the matter with you? Vik . . .'

'Shut up, Elena. You're no help. Listen, Nikolka, in my study . . . there's a medicine bottle ... it says "Liquor ammonii", you can tell because the corner of the label's torn off . . . anyway, you can't mistake the smell of sal ammoniac.'

'Yes, right away . . .'

'You, a doctor - you ought to be ashamed of yourself, Alexei. ..'

'All right, I know . . .'

'What? Has his pulse stopped?'

'No, he's just passed out.'

'Basin!'

'Ah-aah

'Christ!'

Violent reek of ammonia. Karas and Elena held Myshlaevsky's mouth open. Nikolka supported him while Alexei twice poured white cloudy liquid into his mouth.

'Aah . . . ugh . . . urkhh . . .'

'The snow . . .'

'God almighty. Can't be helped, though. Only way to do it . . .'

On his forehead lay a wet cloth dripping water, below it the swivelling, bloodshot whites of his eyes under half-closed lids, bluish shadows around the sharpened nose. For an anxious quarter of an hour, bumping each other with their elbows, they strove with the vanquished officer until he opened his eyes and croaked:

'Aah ... let me go . . .'

'Right. That's better. He can stay and sleep here.'

Lights went on in all the rooms and beds were quickly made up.

'Leonid, you'd better sleep in here, next to Nikolka's room.'

'Very well.'

Copper-red in the face but cheerful, Shervinsky clicked his spurs and, bowing, showed the parting in his hair. Elena's white hands fluttered over the pillows as she arranged them on the divan.

'Please don't bother ... I can make up the bed myself.'

'Nonsense. Stop tugging at that pillow - I don't need your help.'

'Please let me kiss your hand ...'

'What for?'

'Gratitude for all your trouble.'

'I can manage without hand-kissing for the moment . . . Nikolka, you're sleeping in your own bed. Well, how is he?'

'He's all right, sleeping it off.' Two camp beds were made up in the room leading to Nikolka's, behind two back-to-back bookcases. In Professor Turbin's family the room was known as the library.

#

As the lights went out in the library, in Nikolka's room and in the dining-room, a dark red streak of light crawled out of Elena's bedroom and into the dining-room through a narrow crack in the door. The light pained her, so she had draped her bedside lamp with a dark red theater-cloak. Once Elena used to drive to an evening at the theater in that cloak, once when her arms, her furs and her lips had smelled of perfume, her face had been delicately powdered - and when under the hood of her cloak Elena had looked like Liza in The Queen of Spades. But in the past year the cloak had turned threadbare with uncanny rapidity, the folds grown creased and stained and the ribbons shabby. Still looking like Liza in The Queen of Spades, auburn-haired Elena now sat on the turned-down edge of her bed in a neglige, her hands folded in her lap. Her bare feet were buried deep in the fur of a well-worn old bearskin rug. Her brief intoxication had gone completely, and now deep sadness enveloped her like a black cloak. From the next room, muffled by the bookshelf that had been placed across the closed door, came the faint whistle of Nikolka's breathing and Shervinsky's bold, confident snore. Dead silence from Mysh-Iaevsky and Karas in the library. Alone, with the light shining on her nightgown and on the two black, blank windows, Elena talked to herself without constraint, sometimes half-aloud, sometimes whispering with lips that scarcely moved.

'He's gone . . .'

Muttering, she screwed up her dry eyes reflectively. She could not understand her own thoughts. He had gone, and at a time like this. But then he was an extremely level-headed man and he had done the right thing by leaving ... It was surely for the best.