And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there

shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed

away.

*

The dim mist parted and revealed Lieutenant Shervinsky to Elena. His slightly protuberant eyes smiled cheerfully.

'I am a demon,' he said, clicking his heels, 'and Talberg is never coming back. I shall sing to you . . .'

He took from his pocket a huge tinsel star and pinned it on to the left side of his chest. The mists of sleep swirled around him, and his face looked bright and doll-like among the clouds of vapor. In a piercing voice, quite unlike his waking voice, he sang: 'We shall live, we shall live!'

'Then will come death, and we shall die', Nikolka chimed in as he joined them.

He was holding a guitar, but his neck was covered in blood and on his forehead was the wreath worn by the dead. Elena at once thought he had died, burst into bitter sobs and woke up in the night screaming:

'Nikolka! Nikolka!'

For a long time, sobbing, she listened to the muttering of the night.

And the night flew on.

*

Later Petka Shcheglov, the little boy next door, dreamed a dream too.

Petka was very young, so he was not interested in the Bolsheviks, in Petlyura, or in any sort of demon. His dream was as simple and joyful as the sun.

Petka dreamed he was walking through a large green meadow, and in it lay a glittering, diamond ball, bigger than Petka himself. When grown-ups dream and have to run, their feet stick to the ground, they moan and groan as they try to pull their feet free of the quagmire. But children's feet are free as air. Petka ran to the

diamond ball, and nearly choking with happy laughter, he clasped it in his arms. The ball sprinkled Petka with glittering droplets. And that was all there was of Petka's dream. He laughed aloud with pleasure in his sleep. And the cricket behind the stove chirped gaily back at him. Petka began dreaming more sweet, happy dreams, while the cricket sang its song somewhere in a crack, in the white corner behind the bucket, enlivening the night for the Shcheglov family.

The night flowed on. During its second half the whole arc of the sky, the curtain that God had drawn across the world, was covered with stars. It was as if a midnight mass was being celebrated in the measureless height beyond that blue altar-screen. The candles were lit on the altar and they threw patterns of crosses, squares and clusters on to the screen. Above the bank of the Dnieper the midnight cross of St Vladimir thrust itself above the sinful, bloodstained, snowbound earth toward the grim, black sky. From far away it looked as if the cross-piece had vanished, had merged with the upright, turning the cross into a sharp and menacing sword.

But the sword is not fearful. Everything passes away - suffering, pain, blood, hunger and pestilence. The sword will pass away too, but the stars will still remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the earth. There is no man who does not know that. Why, then, will we not turn our eyes toward the stars? Why?

Moscow, 1923-1924.

by VICTOR NEKRASOV

Originally published in the journal

NOVY MIR, Moscow 1967, No. VIII,

pp. 132-142

And at that moment, out go the lights. Nikolka and his guitar stop playing. 'What the hell's the matter?' says Alexei. 'They keep going out. Lena my dear, let's have some candles.' Elena enters with a candle, and from somewhere very far away comes the boom of gunfire. '. . . I get the impression it's coming from the Svyato-shino direction', says Nikolka. 'Funny, though. It can't be as near as that.'

Nikolka Turbin is seventeen and a half. And I am seventeen and a half. Admittedly he wears a corporal's stripes on his shoulder straps and tricolor chevrons on his sleeves and I am simply an apprentice in a trades-union school for Soviet railwaymen, but we are both seventeen and a half. And he is talking about Svyatoshino, our Kievan suburb of Svyatoshino, and the lights had gone out in our apartment too and we too heard the sound of distant gunfire . ..

The firing boomed on day after day, with occasional random bursts of rifle-fire. And at night they used to hit a length of railroad track as some kind of alarm. People came and went. Then when everything calmed down we were taken to the Nicholas I Park in front of the university buildings, where it was always full of soldiers. Nowadays there are none, the park is a haunt of old-age pensioners playing dominoes, but in those days the people sitting on the benches were soldiers. They were of various kinds -Germans, Petlyura's men, and then in 1920 Poles, wearing British khaki greatcoats. We would run from bench to bench asking the Germans: 'Wieviel ist die Uhr?' The soldiers would laugh, and show us their watches, give us sweets and sit us on their knees. We liked them very much. But as for 'white guardists', or, as they were called in those days, 'volunteers', there was no sign of them. There were the two huge sentries who used to stand by the steps leading up to the Tereshchenkos' big house where General Dragomirov had his headquarters and we would throw pebbles at them, but they just stood dumbly there like statues . . .

I always think of them, those unmoving sentries, whenever I pass that house on the corner of Kuznechnaya and Karavaevskaya streets, the house which was metamorphosed into the prosaic Institute of Radiology after the general and his staff had left it. . .

. . . The electric lights come on again. The candles are put out. (The electricity came on again in our house too, but in our case we would put out oil lamps, not candles. God knows where the Turbins got their candles from - they were worth their weight in gold.) Talberg has still not returned. Elena is worried. A ring at the door. Enter Myshlaevsky, frozen to death. 'Careful how you hang it up, Nikolka. Don't knock it. There's a bottle of vodka in there...'

How many times have I seen The Days of the Turbins} Three or four, maybe even five times. I have grown up, but Nikolka has stayed seventeen. Sitting with my knees hunched up on the steps of the dress circle at the Moscow Art Theater, I felt as I always did that I was the same age as him. And Alexei Turbin has always seemed 'grown-up', much older than me, although when I last saw The Turbins, before the war, I was already at least as old as Alexei.

Sakhnovsky, a director at the Moscow Art Theater, wrote somewhere that for the younger generation at the M.A.T. The Turbins became 'the second Seagull'. I'm sure it was. But that was for the actors, for the M.A.T. - for me, though at first as an apprentice then as a gradually maturing student, The Turbins was not just a play but something much more. Even when I became an actor and began to be interested in it from the purely professional angle, even then The Turbins was still not merely a piece of theater, even though a play of great talent and fascination, oddly unique in our stage literature, but it was a tangible piece of life, receding as the years passed, yet always very near to me.

Why? After all, I had never known a single 'white guardist' in my life (I met some for the first time in Prague in 1945), my family had no liking for them at all (in our apartment we had Germans and French billeted on us and - my favourites - two Red Army men who smelled of home-grown shag and foot-cloths, but never a 'White'); my parents were in any case left-wing in sympathy, having made friends abroad with Plekhanov, and with Bolsheviks like Lunacharsky and Nogin . . . there were never any Myshlaevskys or Shervinskys in our house. But there was something else about our family, something obviously 'Turbinesque'. It is even rather hard to define exactly what it was. I was the only man in our family (my mother, my grandmother and my aunt and myself - aged seven), and there were no guitars, no rivers of wine - not even a trickle - in our house, and it would seem that we had nothing in common with the Turbins, unless you count our neighbour Alibek, an Ossete, who occasionally called on us wearing his Caucasian silver cartridge-pockets (Shervinsky?) and who, when I was a little more grown up, kept asking me whether one of my schoolmates wouldn't like to buy his dagger - he was rather fond of his drink. And yet we had something in common with the Turbins. A kind of spirit? The past? Things, perhaps?