Читаем Byzantium Endures полностью

As if from a helicopter you see little figures climbing carefully up and down the crags; clinging to the rock. And you know they climb and descend, climb and descend because they think there is nobody to love them. They have only their rock. It is impersonal. Once on top, they are alone and for a while they are strong. They carry this strength back to their homes. It is not the strength of people who feel themselves to be loved. It is defiant strength. But it is all they expect. Are they looking for God? I sat on that crag in Lapland and looked down on peaks, clouds, the tundra beyond; and the mountains, turning blue all across to Norway. I became like steel, tempered and cold. I took my strength through Finland to the barbed wire of the border and looked at Russia. The guards came with their dogs and waved me off. I called out to them in Russian. They told me to go away. They were anxious. They were kind. They wanted no trouble. Russians are told to fear the foreigner. I said I was not a foreigner. They did not believe me.

I feel sick. There is a chill. Metal in my stomach. Russians are generous. They want to love everyone. Now they are told to fear love. Is it because Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin could not love? They used our love. What did Budyenny and Timoshchenko and Voroshilov fight for? For chewing-gum? American tourists give chewing-gum to Russian officers in exchange for their cap badges. It is true. It is allowed. Ask. They fought through Ukraine. They pillaged. They persecuted peasants. They took grain. They took horses. They took boots. They said they were the saviours of Ukraine, that we should be free. The peasant wanted land. He did not hate Jews. He hated businessmen in cities: Katsupi and Jew alike, the German merchants, the Greeks. Because they had been robbed. Then the Bolsheviks came and robbed them more efficiently. When all else was stolen, they stole lives. That was their Red Cavalry. Trading cap-badges for chewing-gum in Leningrad and grinning at Japanese cameras. Where is Russian honour? The two-headed eagle becomes the two-faced commissar. And Islam grows in the womb of the Empire. The Slavs are outnumbered. Is it any wonder they protect their boundaries? What happened in Czechoslovakia is understandable.

The British and the Americans, the French and the Swedes; they never had to fight as we fought. We threw off Islam. We forced the Tatar to go home. The Jewish Poles were defeated, but they clung on; ancient and patient and waiting. It was Trotsky. Everyone agrees. If I were a Jew I should feel the weight of the guilt. But I am myself. I fly no flags. They do not realise how powerful those people were. They think we killed because we were strong. But we killed because we were weak. We had nothing of the wealth.

That spring, in the area about Hulyai-Polye, there was a cone of silence; perhaps it was the eye of the hurricane. The Anarchist territory was the only territory where peace reigned. The world is full of ironies. I stayed in the village, but I was cautious. When the troops came through, with bread for the Jews, they put me in a tachanki, the little machine-gun carts Makhno made famous (they gave him superior speed and fire-power). They were true Russians: kindly and friendly. I do not know why they supported Makhno. They were Chernosametsiya (Black Flags) but were far more like idealised Bolshevik fighters of Soviet fiction. We stopped at another village. It was Greek. Bread and flour. We were offered tsatsiki. They took nothing. We stopped at a farming commune named after the Jewess Luxemburg. I was drunk. I was baffled. They asked me my rank. I told them I was a colonel. This made them laugh.