MIKHAIL BULGAKOV: THE WHITE GUARD

Elena, auburn-haired, had aged and grown uglier in a moment. Eyes reddened, her arms dangling at her sides she listened miserably to what Talberg had to say. As stiff as though he were on parade he towered over her and said implacably:

"There is no alternative, Elena.'

Reconciled to the inevitable, Elena said:

'Oh, I understand. You're right, of course. In five or six days, d'you think? Perhaps the situation may have changed for the better by then?'

Here Talberg found himself in difficulty. Even his patient, everlasting smile disappeared from his face. His face, too, had aged; every line in it showed that his mind was made up. Elena's hope that they could leave together in five or six days was pathetically false and ill-founded . . .

Talberg said: 'I must go at once. The train leaves at one o'clock tonight . . .'

Half an hour later everything in the room with the falcon had been turned upside down. A trunk stood on the floor, its padded inner lid wide open. Elena, looking drawn and serious, wrinkles at the corners of her mouth, was silently packing the trunk with shirts, underclothes and towels. Kneeling down, Talberg was fumbling with his keys at the bottom drawer of the chest-of-drawers. Soon the room had that desolate look that comes from the chaos of packing up to go away and, worse, from removing the shade from the lamp. Never, never take the shade off a lamp. A lampshade is something sacred. Scuttle away like a rat from danger and into the unknown. Read or doze beside your lampshade; let the storm howl outside and wait until they come for you.

Talberg was running away. He straightened up, trampling on the pieces of torn paper littered around the heavy, closed trunk. He was fully dressed in his long greatcoat, neat black fur cap with ear-muffs and gray-blue Hetmanite badge, his sword belted to his side.

On the long-distance departure track of the City's No. 1 Passenger Station the train was already standing, though still without a locomotive, like a caterpillar without a head. It was made up of nine cars, all shining with blindingly white electric light, due to leave at 1 a.m. carrying General von Bussow and his headquarters staff to Germany. They were taking Talberg with them; he had influence in the right quarters . . . The Hetman's ministry was a stupid, squalid little comic opera affair (Talberg liked to express himself in cutting, if unoriginal terms) - like the Hetman himself, for that matter. All the more squalid because . . .

'Look, my dear (whisper) the Germans are leaving the Hetman in the lurch and it's extremely likely that Petlyura will march in ... and you know what that means . . .'

Elena knew what that meant. Elena knew very well. In March 1917 Talberg had been the first - the first, you realise - to report to the military academy wearing a broad red armband. That was in the very first days of the revolution, when all the officers in the City turned to stone at the news from Petersburg and crept away down dark passages to avoid hearing about it. As a member of the Revolutionary Military Committee it had been none other than Talberg who had arrested the famous General Petrov. Towards the end of that momentous year many strange and wonderful things happened in the City and certain people began appearing -people who had no boots but who wore broad, baggy Ukrainian trousers called sharovary which showed beneath their army greatcoats. These people announced that they would not leave the City for the front on any account because the fighting was none of their affair and they intended to stay in the City. This irritated Talberg, who declared curtly that this was not what was required, that it was a squalid comic opera. And to a certain extent he turned out to be right: the results were operatic, though so much blood was shed that they were hardly comic. The men in baggy trousers were twice driven out of the City by some irregular regiments of troops who emerged from the forests and the plains from the direction of

Moscow. Talberg said that the men in sharovary were mere adventurers and that the real roots of legitimate power were in Moscow, even though these roots were Bolshevik roots.

But one day in March the Germans arrived in the City in their gray ranks, with red-brown tin bowls on their heads to protect them from shrapnel balls; and their hussars wore such fine busbies and rode on such magnificent horses that Talberg at once realised where the roots of power grew now. After a few heavy salvoes from the German artillery around the City the men from Moscow vanished somewhere beyond the blue line of the forests to cat carrion, and the men in sharovary slunk back in the wake of the Germans. This was a great surprise. Talberg smiled in embarrassment, but he was not afraid because as long as the Germans were there the sharovary behaved themselves, did not dare to kill anyone and even walked the streets with a certain wariness, like guests who were none too sure of themselves. Talberg said they had no roots, and for about two months he had no work to do. One day when he walked into Talberg's room, Nikolka Turbin could not help smiling: Talberg was seated and writing out grammatical exercises on a large sheet of paper, whilst in front of him lay a thin text-book printed on cheap gray paper:

Ignatii Perpillo

UKRANIAN GRAMMAR

At Easter in April 1918 the electric arc-lights hummed cheerfully in the circus auditorium and it was black with people right up to the domed roof. A tall, crisp, military figure, Talberg stood in the arena counting the votes at a show of hands. This was the end of the sharovary, there was to be a Ukrainian state but a 'hetmanite' Ukraine - they were electing the 'Hetman of All the Ukraine'.

'We're safely insulated from that bloody comic opera in Moscow', said Talberg, his strange Hetmanite uniform clashing with the dear familiar old wallpaper in the Turbins' apartment. The clock's tonk-tank was choked with scorn and the water drained away from the bowl. Nikolka and Alexei found that they had nothing in common with Talberg. Talking to him would in any case have been extremely difficult because Talberg lost his temper whenever the conversation turned to politics and especially on those occasions when Nikolka was tactless enough to begin with the remark: 'What was it that you were saying in March, Sergei . . .?' Then Talberg would instantly bare his strong, widely-spaced teeth, yellow sparks would flash in his eyes and he would start to lose his temper. Conversation thus went out of fashion.

Comic opera . . . Elena knew what those words meant on her husband's puffy, Baltic-German lips. But now the comic opera was becoming a real threat, and this time not to the sharovary, not to the Bolsheviks in Moscow, not just to other people, but to Sergei Talberg himself. Every man has his star and it was with good reason that court astrologers of the Middle Ages cast their horoscopes to predict the future. They were wise to do so. Sergei Talberg, for instance, had been born under a most unfortunate, most unsuitable star. Life would have been fine for Talberg if everything had proceeded along one definite straight line, but events in the City at that time did not move in a straight line; they followed fantastic zig-zags and Sergei Talberg tried in vain to guess what was coming next. He failed. Still far from the City, maybe a hundred miles away, a railroad car stood on the tracks, brilliantly lit. In that car, like a pea in a pod, a clean-shaven man sat talking, dictating to his clerks and his aides. Woe to Talberg if that man were to reach the City - and he might! Everybody had read a certain issue of the Gazette, everybody knew the name of Captain Talberg as a man who had voted for the Hetman. In that newspaper there was an article written by Sergei Talberg, and the article declared: