The White Guard (28 page)

   'Just a little ... a little bit further!' she screamed. Fumbling wildly with her left hand she opened a third little wicket gate, pulled along the stumbling Alexei by his arm and began running again along a tiny narrow alleyway. 'What a labyrinth . . . thank God for it, though', Alexei thought hazily as he found himself in the white garden, but now at a much higher level and mercifully far away from Malo-Provalnaya Street. He felt the woman pulling him, felt that his left side and arm were very hot while the rest of his body was cold and his icy heart scarcely beating. 'She might have saved me, but this is the end now . . . legs getting weaker . . .' He dimly saw what looked like some lilac bushes under the snow, a door, a lantern hanging outside an old-fashioned porch covered in snow. There was the sound of a key. The woman was still there at his right side and was straining with the last of her strength to drag Alexei toward the lantern. Then after the sound of a second key, into the gloom of a place with an old, lived-in smell. Overhead a dim little light flared, the floor skidded sideways to the left under his feet . . . Some unfamiliar poison-green blobs with fiery edges flashed past his eyes, and in the darkness that followed he felt a great relief . . .

   
#

   A row of tarnished brass knobs in the dim, flickering light. Something cold was running down his open shirt-front, enabling him to breathe more easily, but his left sleeve was full of a damp, ominous,

   lifeless warmth. 'That's it. I'm wounded.' Alexei realised that he was lying on the floor, his head leaning painfully against something hard and uncomfortable. The brass knobs in front of him belonged to a trunk. The cold, so great that it took his breath away, was her throwing water over him.

   'For God's sake,' said a faint, husky voice over his head, 'drink this. Are you breathing? What am I to do now?'

   A glass clattered against his teeth and Alexei noisily gulped down some icy cold water. Now, very close, he could see her fair curls and her dark, dark eyes. Squatting on her haunches the woman put down the glass on the floor and gently putting her arm behind his neck she began to lift Alexei up.

   'How's my heart?' he wondered. 'Seem to be coming round . . . maybe I haven't lost too much blood . . . must fight.' His heart was beating, but fast, unevenly and in sudden jerks and Alexei said weakly:

   'Cut my clothes off if necessary, but whatever you do put on a tourniquet at once . . .'

   Her eyes widened as she strained to hear him, then as she understood she jumped up and ran to a closet, and pulled out heaps of material.

   Biting his lip, Alexei thought: 'At least there's no bloodstain on the floor, with luck I may not have been bleeding too hard.' With the woman's help he wriggled out of his coat and sat up, trying to ignore the dizziness. She began to take off his tunic.

   'Scissors', said Alexei.

   He was short of breath and it was hard to talk. The woman disappeared, sweeping the floor with the silk hem of her dress, and wrenched off her hat and fur coat in the lobby. Then she came back and squatted down again. With the scissors she sliced clumsily and painfully into the sleeve, already wet and sticky with blood, ripped it open and freed Alexei's arm. The shirt was quickly dealt with. The whole left sleeve and side was dark red and soaking. Blood started to drip on to the floor.

   'Don't worry, cut away . . .'

   The shirt fell away in tatters and Alexei, white-faced, naked and

   yellow to the waist, blood-stained, determined to live and not to faint a second time, clenched his teeth and prodded his left shoulder with his right hand.

   'Thank God . . . bone's not broken. Tear off a square or a long strip.'

   'I have a bandage', she said weakly, but happily. She disappeared, returned, tearing open the wrapping of a bandage and saying: 'There's no one else here . . . I'm alone . . .'

   Again she sat down beside him. Alexei saw the wound. It was a small hole in the upper arm, near the inner surface at the point where the arm lies closest to the body. A thin stream of blood was seeping out of it.

   'Wound on the other side?' he asked jerkily and laconically, instinctively conserving the breath of life.

   'Yes, there is', she said with horror.

   'Tie the tourniquet above it . . . yes, there . . . right.'

   There came a new, violent pain, green rings danced before his eyes. Alexei bit his lower lip.

   She pulled from one side, he helped from the other end with his teeth and his right hand, until the burningly painful knot encircled his arm above the wound. At once the bleeding stopped.

   
#

   The woman moved him thus: he got to his knees and put his right arm round her shoulder while she helped him to stand up on his weak, trembling legs, and led him into the next room, supporting him with her whole body. Around him in the twilight he saw deep, dark shadows in a very low, old-fashioned room. When she had sat him down on something soft and dusty, she turned aside and turned up the light in a cerise-shaded lamp. He made out a velvet fringe, part of a double-breasted frock-coat and a yellowish-gold epaulette in a frame on the wall. Stretching out her arms to Alexei and breathing heavily from excitement and exertion, she said:

   'I have some brandy . . . Perhaps you should have some? . . . Brandy?'

   He replied:

   'Yes, right away . . .'

   And collapsed on to his right elbow.

   The brandy seemed to help, at least Alexei began to feel he might not die and might survive the pain which was gnawing and cutting into his shoulder. Kneeling, the woman bandaged his wounded arm, then sidled down to his feet and pulled off his felt boots. This done she brought him a pillow and a long Japanese robe that smelled faintly of a sweet, long-faded perfume and was embroidered with exotic sprays of flowers.

   'Lie down', she said.

   Obediently he lay down, she spread the robe over him and then a blanket, and stood beside the narrow ottoman looking in to his face.

   He said:

   'You . . . you're a remarkable woman.' After a silence: 'I'll lie down for a bit until I get my strength back, then I'll get up and go home . . . Just put up with me for a little longer.'

   Fear and despair came over him. 'What's happened to Elena? Oh God, and Nikolka. Why did Nikolka have to die? He's dead, for sure . . .'

   She pointed silently at a little window, covered by a ruched blind with pompoms. Far away he clearly heard the crack of rifle-fire.

   'They'll kill you at once if you try and go now', she said.

   'I wouldn't like to drag you into it. .. They may come suddenly, they'll see a revolver, blood . . . there in my greatcoat pocket . . .' He licked his dry lips. He was feeling slightly light-headed from the loss of blood and the brandy. The woman's face looked frightened, then thoughtful.

   'No,' she said resolutely, 'no, if they had been going to find you they would already be here by now. This place is such a labyrinth that no one could find our tracks. We crossed through three gardens. But all the same I must clear up at once . . .'

   He heard the splash of water, rustle of material, the sound of things being rearranged in closets. She returned holding his

   Browning automatic by the butt with two fingers as though it werered hot and asked:

   'Is it loaded?'

   Pulling out his sound arm from under the blanket, Alexei tested the safety catch and said:

   'It won't harm you, but only hold it by the butt.'

   She came back again and said in embarrassment:

   'Just in case they do come ... I shall have to take off your breeches . . . Then you can lie there and I'll say you're my husband and you're sick . . .'

   Frowning and grimacing Alexei began to unbutton his breeches. She walked firmly up to the ottoman and knelt down, then put her hands under the blanket and having pulled off his breeches by the footstraps, folded them up and took them away. In the short time that she was away he noticed that the apartment was divided into two rooms by an arch. The ceilings were so low that if a grown man had stood on tiptoe he could have touched the ceiling with his hand. In the far room beyond the arch it was dark, but the varnished side of an old piano gleamed, there was something else shining and what looked like a flowering cactus. Nearby the wall was dominated by the portrait of the man in gold epaulettes.

   God, the place was so full of antiques, it was like a museum! The epaulettes in the portrait fascinated him. A tallow candle in a candlestick gave a gentle light. There had once been peace and now peace was dead. Those years could not be brought back. Behind him were two small, low windows and another at his side. What was this funny little house? She lived alone. Who was she? She had saved him ... no peace . . . shooting out on the streets . . .

   
#

   She came in, laden with a pile of firewood and dropped it noisily in the corner by the stove.

   'What are you doing? Why bother?' he asked irritably.

   'I had to light the stove anyway', she answered with a hint of a smile in her eyes. 'I can manage . . .'

   'Come here', Alexei asked her quietly. 'Look, I haven't thanked

   you for everything you've . . . done . . . And I don't know how
to . .
.' He stretched out his hand and took her fingers. As she obediently drew nearer he kissed her thin wrist twice. Her face softened as though a shadow of anxiety had been lifted from it and in that moment her eyes looked extraordinarily beautiful.

   'If it hadn't been for you,' Alexei went on, 'I would certainly have been killed.'

   'Of course,' she replied, 'of course you would . . . After all you did kill one of them.'

   'I killed one of them?' he asked, feeling a new weakness as his head began to spin.

   'M'hm.' She nodded approvingly and looked at Alexei with a mixture of fear and curiosity. 'Oh, it was terrible . . . they almost shot me too.' She shuddered.

   'How did I kill him?'

   'Well, they leaped round the corner, you began shooting and the man in front fell down . . . Perhaps you just wounded him. Anyway you were brave ... I thought I was going to faint. You were running, turned round and shot at them, then ran on again . . . What are you - a captain?'

   'What made you think I was an officer? Why did you shout "officer" at me?'

   Her eyes shone.

   'I decided you must be an officer when I saw your badge in your fur cap. Why did you have to take such a risk by wearing your badge?'

   'Badge? Oh my God, of course ... I see now ...' He remembered the shop bell ringing . . . the dusty mirror ... 'I ripped off everything else - but had to go and forget my badge! I'm not an officer,' he said, 'I'm just an army doctor. My name is Alexei Vasilievich Turbin . . . Please tell me - what is your name?'

   'I am Julia Alexandrovna Reiss.'

   'Why are you alone?'

   Her answer was somehow strained and she looked away as she said:

   'My husband's not here at the moment. He went away. And his mother too. I'm alone . . .' After a pause she added: 'It's cold in here. Brrr . . . I'll light the stove.'

   #

   As the logs burned up in the stove his head ached with growing violence. His wound had stopped hurting him, all the pain was concentrated in his head. It began in his left temple, then spread to the crown of his head and the back of his neck. Some little vein under his left eyebrow tautened and radiated waves of desperate pain in all directions. Julia Reiss knelt down at the stove and raked the fire with a poker. Alternately opening and closing his eyes in pain, Alexei watched her as she turned her head aside from the heat, screening it with her pale wrist. Her hair seemed to be an indefinite color which at one moment looked ash-blond shot with flame, at the next almost gold; but her eyebrows were as coal-black as her eyes. He could not decide whether that irregular profile with its aquiline nose was beautiful or not. The look in her eyes was a riddle. There was fear, anxiety and perhaps - sensuality . . . Yes, sensuality.

   As she sat there lapped in a wave of heat she was miraculously attractive. She had saved his life.

   #

   For hours that night, when the heat of the stove had long since died down and burned instead in his head and arm, someone was twisting a red-hot nail into the top of his head and destroying his brain. 'I've got a fever', Alexei repeated drily and soundlessly, and tried to instil into his mind that he must get up in the morning and somehow make his way home. As the nail bored into his brain it finally drove out his thoughts of Elena, of Nikolka, of home and of Petlyura. Nothing mattered. Peturra... Peturra... He could only long for one thing - for the pain to stop.

   Deep in the night Julia Reiss came in wearing soft fur-trimmed slippers, and sat beside him and again, his arm weakly hooked around her neck, he passed through the two small rooms. Before this she had gathered her strength and said to him:

   'Get up, if only you can. Don't pay any attention to me. I'll help you. Then lie right down . . . Well, if you can't . . .'

   He replied:

   'No, I'll go . . . only help me . . .'

   She led him to the little door of that mysterious house and then helped him back. As he lay down, his teeth chattering from the cold, he felt some lessening and respite from his headache and said:

   'I swear I won't forget what you've done. Go to bed . . .'

   'Be quiet, I'll soothe your head', she replied.

   Then the dull, angry pain flowed out of his head, flowed away from his temples into her soft hands, through them and through her body into the floor, covered with a dusty, fluffy carpet, and there it expired. Instead of the pain a delicious even heat spread all over his body. His arm had gone numb and felt as heavy as cast-iron, so he did not move it but merely closed his eyes and gave himself up to the fever. How long he lay there he could not have said: perhaps five minutes, perhaps hours. But he felt that he could have lain like that, bathed in heat, for ever. Whenever he opened his eyes, gently so as not to alarm the woman sitting beside him, he saw the same picture: the little lamp burning weakly but steadily under its red shade giving out a peaceful light, and the woman's unsleeping profile beside him. Her lips pouting like an unhappy child, she sat staring out of the window. Basking in the heat of fever, Alexei stirred and edged towards her . . .