MIKHAIL BULGAKOV - THE WHITE GUARD

Vasilisa felt an agonising desire to fetch her a swinging blow across the face that would knock her over and make her hit her head on the edge of the sideboard. And then again and again until that damned, bony creature shut up and admitted she was beaten. He, Vasilisa, was worn out, he worked like a slave, and he felt he had a right to demand that she obey him at home. Vasilisa gritted his teeth and restrained himself. Attacking Wanda was a rather more dangerous undertaking than one might think.

'Just do as I say', said Vasilisa through clenched teeth. 'Don't you see - they may move the sideboard and what then? But they'd never think of looking under the table. Everybody in town does it.'

Wanda gave in to him and they set to work together, pinning banknotes to the underside of the table with thumb-tacks. Soon the whole underside of the table was covered with a multicolored pattern like a well-designed silk carpet.

Grunting, his face covered in sweat, Vasilisa stood up and glanced over the expanse of paper money.

'It's going to be so inconvenient', said Wanda. 'Every time I want some money I shall have to turn the dining-room table over.'

'So what, it won't kill you', replied Vasilisa hoarsely. 'Better to have to turn the table over than lose everything. Have you heard what's going on in the City? They're worse than the Bolsheviks.

They're searching houses indiscriminately, looking for officers who fought against them.'

At eleven o'clock Wanda carried the samovar from the kitchen into the dining-room and put out the lights everywhere else in the apartment. She produced a bag of stale bread and a lump of green cheese from the sideboard. The single lamp hanging over the table from one socket of a triple chandelier shed a dim reddish light from its semi-incandescent filament.

Vasilisa chewed a piece of bread roll and green cheese, which was so unpleasant that it made his eyes water as if he had a raging toothache. At every bite fine crumbs of the sickening stuff spattered his jacket and his tie. Uneasy, though not knowing quite why, Vasilisa glared at Wanda as she chewed.

'I'm amazed how easily they get away with it', said Wanda, glancing upwards towards the Turbins. 'I was certain that one of them had been killed. But no, they're all back, and now the apartment is full of officers again . . .'

At any other time Wanda's remarks would not have made the slightest impression on Vasilisa, but now, when he was tortured by fear and unease, he found them intolerably spiteful.

'I'm surprised at you', he replied, glancing away to avoid the irritation of looking at her, 'you know perfectly well that really they were doing the right thing. Somebody had to defend the City against those (Vasilisa lowered his voice) swine . . . Besides you're wrong if you think they got off lightly ... I think he's been . . .'

Wanda looked thoughtful and nodded.

'Yes, I thought so too when I went up there . . . You're right, he's been wounded . . .'

'Well, then, it's nothing to be pleased about - got away with it, indeed . . .'

Wanda licked her lips.

'I'm not pleased, I only say they seem to have "got away with it" because what I want to know is, when Petlyura's men come to you - which God forbid - and ask you, as chairman of the house committee, who are the people upstairs - what are you going to say? Were they in the Hetman's army, or what?'

Vasilisa scowled.

'I can say with absolute truth that he's a doctor. After all, there's no reason why I should know anything else about him. How could I?'

'That's the point. In your position you're supposed to know.'

At that moment the door-bell rang. Vasilisa turned pale, and Wanda turned her scrawny neck.

His nose twitching, Vasilisa stood up and said:

'D'you know what? Maybe I'd better run straight up to the Turbins and call them.'

Before Wanda had time to reply the bell rang again.

'Oh my God', said Vasilisa anxiously. 'Nothing for it - I shall have to go.'

Terrified, Wanda followed him. They opened their front door into the communal hallway, which smelled of the cold. Wanda's angular face, eyes wide with fear, peeped out. Above her head the electric bell gave another importunate ring.

For a moment the idea crossed Vasilisa's mind of knocking on the Turbins' glass door - someone would be bound to come down and things might not be so terrible. But he was afraid to do it. Suppose the intruders were to ask him: 'Why did you knock? Afraid of something? Guilty conscience?' Then came the hopeful thought, though a faint one, that it might not be a search-party but perhaps someone else . . .

'Who's there?' Vasilisa asked weakly at the door.

Immediately a hoarse voice barked through the keyhole at the level of Vasilisa's stomach and the bell over Wanda's head rang again.

'Open up', rasped the keyhole in Ukrainian. 'We're from headquarters. And don't try running away, or we'll shoot through the door.'

'Oh, God ., .' sighed Wanda.

With lifeless hands Vasilisa slid open the bolt and then lifted the heavy latch, after fumbling with the chain for what seemed like hours.

'Hurry up . . .' said the keyhole harshly.

Vasilisa looked outside to see a patch of gray sky, an acacia branch, snowflakes. Three men entered, although to Vasilisa they seemed to be many more.

'Kindly tell me why . . .'

'Search', said the first man in a wolfish voice, marching straight up to Vasilisa. The corridor revolved and Wanda's face in the lighted doorway seemed to have been powdered with chalk.

'In that case, if you don't mind', Vasilisa's voice sounded pale and colorless, 'please show me your warrant. I'm a peaceful citizen - I don't know why you want to search my house. There's nothing here', said Vasilisa, painfully aware that his Ukrainian had suddenly deserted him.

'Well, we've come to have a look', said the first man.

Edging backwards as the men pushed their way in, Vasilisa felt he was seeing them in a dream. Everything about the first man struck Vasilisa as wolf-like. Narrow face, small deep-set eyes, gray skin, long straggling whiskers, unshaven cheeks furrowed by deep grooves, he had a curious shifty look and even here, in a confined space, he managed to convey the impression of walking with the inhuman, loping gait of a creature at home in snow and grassland. He spoke a horrible mixture of Russian and Ukrainian, a language familiar to those inhabitants of the City who know the riverside district of Podol, where in summertime the quayside is alive with groaning, rattling winches and where ragged men unload watermelons from barges . . . On the wolf's head was a fur hat, a scrap of blue material with tinsel piping dangling loosely from one side.

The second man, a giant, almost touched the ceiling of Vasilisa's lobby. His complexion was as ruddy as a jolly, rosy-cheeked peasant woman's, and so young that there was no hair on his face. He wore a coarse sheepskin cap with moth-eaten earflaps, a gray overcoat, and his unnaturally small feet were clad in filthy, tattered rags.

The third man had a broken nose, one side of which was covered in a suppurating scab, and his upper lip was disfigured by a crudely stitched scar. On his head was an officer's old peaked cap

with a red band and a pale mark where the badge had once been. He wore an old-fashioned double-breasted army tunic with brass buttons covered in verdigris, a pair of black trousers, and bast foot-cloths round his instep over a pair of thick gray army-issue socks. His face in the lamplight was compounded of two colors - a waxy yellow and a dull violet, whilst his eyes stared with a look of malice and self-pity.

'We've come to have a look,' the wolf repeated, 'and here's our warrant.'

With this he dived into his trouser pocket, pulled out a crumpled piece of paper and thrust it at Vasilisa. While one of his eyes kept Vasilisa in a state of palsied fear, his other eye, the left, made a cursory inspection of the furniture in the lobby.