MIKHAIL BULGAKOV - THE WHITE GUARD

'Somebody's cut the strap of my handbag!'

'But Petlyura's supposed to be a socialist, isn't he? So why areall the priests praying for him?'

'Look out!'

'Give the fathers twenty-five roubles, and they'll say a mass for the devil himself

'We ought to go straight off to the bazaar now and smash in some of the Yids' shop windows. I once did . . .'

'Don't speak Russian.'

'This woman's suffocating! Clear a space!'

'Kha-a-a-a

Shoulder to shoulder, unable to turn, from the side chapels, from the choir-lofts, down step after step the crowd slowly moved out of the cathedral in one heaving mass. On the wall frescoes the brown painted figures of fat-legged buffoons, of unknown antiquity, danced and played the bagpipes. Half suffocated, half intoxicated by carbon dioxide, smoke and incense the crowd

flowed noisily out of the doors, the general hum occasionally pierced by the strangled cries of women in pain. Pickpockets, hat brims pulled low, worked hard and with steady concentration, their skilled hands slipping expertly between sticky clumps of compressed human flesh. The crowd rustled and buzzed above the scraping of a thousand feet.

'Oh Lord God . . .'

'Jesus Christ . . . Holy Mary, queen of heaven . . .'

'I wish I hadn't come. What is supposed to be happening?'

'I don't care if you are being crushed . . .'

'My watch! My silver watch! It's gone! I only bought it yesterday . . .'

'This may be the last service in this cathedral . . .'

'What language were they holding the service in, I didn't understand?'

'In God's language, dear.'

'It's been strictly forbidden to use Russian in church any more.'

'What's that? Aren't we allowed to use our own Orthodox language any more?'

'They pulled her ear-rings off and tore half her ears away at the same time . . .'

'Hey, cossacks, stop that man! He's a spy! A Bolshevik spy!'

'This isn't Russia any longer, mister. This is the Ukraine now.'

'Oh my God, look at those soldiers - wearing pigtails . . .'

'Oh, I'm going ... to faint . . .'

'This woman's feeling bad.'

'We're all feeling bad, dear. Everybody's feeling terrible. Look out, you'll poke my eye out - stop pushing! What's the matter with you? Gone crazy?'

'Down with Russia! Up the Ukraine!'

'There ought to be a police cordon here, Ivan Ivanovich. Do you remember the celebrations in 1912? Ah, those were the days . . .'

'So you want Bloody Nicholas back again, do you? Ah, we know your sort ... we know what you're thinking.'

'Keep away from me, for Christ's sake. I'm not in your way, so keep your hands to yourself . . .'

'God, let's hope we get out of here soon . . . get a breath of fresh air.'

'I won't make it. I shall die of suffocation in a moment.'

Like soda-water from a bottle the crowd burst swirling out of the main doors. Hats fell off, people groaned with relief, crossed themselves. Through the side door, where two panes of glass were broken in the crush, came the religious procession, silver and gold, the priests breathless and confused, followed by the choir. Flashes of gold among the black vestments, mitres bobbed, sacred banners were held low to pass under the doorway, then straightened and floated on upright.

There was a heavy frost, a day when smoke rose slowly and heavily above the City. The cathedral courtyard rang to the ceaseless stamp of thousands of feet. Frosty clouds of breath swayed in the freezing air and rose up towards the belfry. The great bell of St Sophia boomed out from the tallest bell-tower, trying to drown the awful, shrieking confusion. The smaller bells tinkled away at random, dissonant and tuneless, as though Satan had climbed into the belfry and the devil in a cassock was amusing himself by raising bedlam. Through the black slats of the multi-storied belfry, which had once warned of the coming of the slant-eyed Tartars, the smaller bells could be seen swinging and yelping like mad dogs on a chain. The frost crunched and steamed. Shocked by noise and cold, the black mob poured across the cathedral courtyard.

In spite of the cruel frost, mendicant friars with bared heads, some bald as ripe pumpkins, some fringed with sparse orange-colored hair, were already sitting cross-legged in a row along the stone-flagged pathway leading to the main entrance of the old belfry of St Sophia and were chanting in a nasal whine.

Blind ballad-singers droned their eerie song about the Last Judgment, their tattered peaked caps lying upwards to catch the sparse harvest of greasy rouble bills and battered coppers.

Oh, that day, that dreadful day, When the end of the world will come. The judgment day . . .

The terrible heart-rending sounds floated up from the crunching, frosty ground, wrenched whining from these yellow-toothed old instruments with their palsied, crooked limbs.

'Oh my brethren, oh my sisters, have mercy on my poverty, for the love of Christ, and give alms.'

'Run on to the square and keep a place, Fedosei Petrovich, or we'll be late.'

'There's going to be an open-air service.'

'Procession . . .'

'They're going to pray for victory for the revolutionary people's army of the Ukraine.'

'What victory? They've already won.'

'And they'll win again!'

'There's going to be a campaign.'

'Where to?'

'To Moscow.'

'Which Moscow?'

'The usual.'

'They'll never make it.'

'What did you say? Say that again! Hey, lads, listen to what this Russian's saying!'

'I didn't say anything!'

'Arrest him! Stop, thief!'

'Run through that gateway, Marusya, otherwise we'll never get through this crowd. They say Petlyura's in the square. Let's go and see him.'

'You fool, Petlyura's in the cathedral.'

'Fool yourself. They say he's riding on a white horse.'

'Hurrah for Petlyura! Hurrah for the Ukrainian People's Republic!'

Bong . . . bong . . . bong . . . tinkle - clang-clang . . . Bong-clang-bong . . . raged the bells.

'Have pity on an orphan, Christian people, good people ... A blind man ... A poor man . . .'

Dressed in black, his hindquarters encased in leather like a broken beetle, a legless man wriggled between the legs of the crowd, clutching at the trampled snow with his sleeves to pull himself along. Crippled beggars displayed the sores on their bruised shins, shook their heads as though from tic douloureux or paralysis, rolled the whites of their eyes pretending to be blind. Tearing at the heart-strings of the crowd, reminding them of poverty, deceit, despair, hopelessness and sheer animal misery, creaking and groaning, they howled the refrain of the damned.

Shivering dishevelled old women with crutches thrust out their desiccated, parchment-like hands as they moaned:

'God give you good health, handsome gentleman!'

'Have pity on a poor old woman . . .'

'Give to the poor, my dear, and God will be good to you . . .'

Capes, coats, bonnets with ear-flaps, peasants in sheepskin caps, red-cheeked girls, retired civil servants with a pale mark on their cap where the badge had been removed, elderly women with protruding bellies, nimble-footed children, cossacks in greatcoats and shaggy fur hats with tops of different colors - blue, red, green, magenta with gold and silver piping, with tassels from the fringes of coffin-palls: they poured out on to the cathedral courtyard like a black sea, yet the cathedral doors still gave forth wave upon wave.

Heartened by the fresh air, the procession gathered its forces, rearranged itself, straightened up and glided off in an orderly and proper sequence of heads wearing check scarves, mitres, stovepipe hats, bareheaded deacons with their long flowing hair, skullcapp-ed monks, painted crosses on gilded poles, banners of Christ the Saviour and the Virgin and Child and a host of ikons in curved and wrought covers, gold, magenta, covered in Slavonic script.