Behind the Lines Bugulma and Other Stories (Ukázka, strana 99)

‘Want speak with you,’ the Chuvash went on. ‘Bad people, make curses.’

‘Send them up here!’

A moment later the door flew open and the visitors stormed into my office-cum-sleeping quarters.

The first was fair-haired and full-bearded, the second was a woman hidden inside a fur coat and the third was a man with a black moustache and a penetrating stare.

They had a rota for introducing themselves. ‘I am Sorokin. I am Kalibanova. I am Agapov.’

The last of these added in a harsh and implacable tone: ‘We are the Committee of the Revolutionary Tribunal of the Eastern Front.’

I offered them cigarettes and in return Agapov offered an observation: ‘I can see that you’re not badly off here, Comrade Gašek. People who serve the revolution honourably could never afford tobacco of such quality.’

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When the samovar was brought in we entertained ourselves with other matters. Sorokin spoke about literature and informed us that when he’d been a left social revolutionary*, he’d published a collection of poems in Petersburg under the title Resistance, only to have them seized by the Publications Commissariat. He did not regret that nowadays, because what he’d written then had been pure tosh. He had studied modern philology and was now the President of the Revolutionary Tribunal of the Eastern Front. He was a nice man, as soft in nature as his long, fair beard, which I took to gently tweaking while we were drinking tea.

Comrade Kalibanova was a medical student and had also been a left social revolutionary. A lively and pleas*) The ‘Left Social Revolutionaries’ were a splinter group who left the Socialist-Revolutionary Party when the latter decided to support the Provisional Russian Government formed in February 1917. Instead they backed the Bolsheviks in their communist insurrection and many became zealous supporters of, and officials in, the new Soviet government.

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ant little person, she had conned the whole of Marx by rote. The third member of the revolutionary tribunal was the one with the most radical opinions of all. He had worked as a clerk for a Moscow lawyer who once provided sanctuary for the White General Kalenin when he was in hiding. This lawyer was, in Agapov’s words, the worst villain in the world, because he paid him no more than fifteen roubles per month. This was only a third of what he gave to the waiter in the Hermitage as a tip when the man brought him a slice of salmon, asking in return merely that the man would let him spit in his face.

His whole appearance highlighted the fact that all the events preceding the fall of Tsarism had turned him into something cruel and implacable, a hard and terrible human being. He had settled accounts long beforehand with those who paid him those miserable fifteen roubles.

He was a man doing battle with phantoms of the past, bathing his surroundings wherever he went in the dull glow of suspicion and making out the forms of traitors unknown.

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