played and caught on the cutting edges
. . . and after the high barbed wire was a wooden fence that was three yards high. Two wooden fences, two wire fences, and all lit as day, all covered by the watch-towers standing in each corner of the compound, and over the highest of the wooden fences he could see only the roof of the prison.
A terrible silence without beauty. The silence of those without hope.
A man in front of him had stopped. He stared at the low wooden fence and the pure sward of snow yellowed by the lights, and at the low wire fence and at the high wire fence and at the high wooden fence. Holly saw his face as he passed behind him on the perimeter path, a face that was scraped with despair. Holly walked on and the man behind him was an abandoned nothing.
It can't be real, Holly. It can only be canvas. Put a knife to it and the canvas will rip. There must be another picture behind the paint.
Crap, Holly, it's real. And the bullets in the gun in the watch-tower above, they're real . . . and the cold, and the sentence of the court which has fourteen years to run, and the worst luck that the Consul had ever heard of. . . they're real.
He had completed another revolution of the prescribed path, and the man still stood and stared at the fences, and his shoulders were not hunched as if the cold no longer concerned him.
Where did it begin?
Where was the start of the story that brought Mikhail Holovich, who was to become Michael Holly, to this place of wire and snow, of dogs and guns?
The town called Bazar in the heart of the'Ukraine was found on the fringes of thick forestland to the north of the Kiev to Zhitomir railway. In its way the town possessed a certain prosperity that was based on the quality of the nearby timber, the richness of the black soil, and the failure of central government's collectivization policy to reach with any great thoroughness into the self-sufficiency of the few thousands who lived there.
The Ukraine is not Russia. The Ukraine had struggled to preserve its identity of language, heritage, and literature.
Moscow was a distant capital, a foreign overlord handing out its satraps and commissars. In spite of, and because of, the Stalinist purges of the Thirties, the uniqueness of the Ukraine had not been dislodged. And where better to remember that individuality than in the town of Bazar. On the lips of every child of that town was the story of the day-long battle fought there on November 21st 1921 between the men loyal to George Tiutiunnyk and the fledgling Red Army. A gunfight that stretched from dawn until night as the group who believed themselves to be Ukrainian patriots held out, without hope of rescue or reinforcement, against the encircling advance of Moscow's soldiers. It was an epic fight. Old rifles against mortars and machine-guns and howitzers. It was followed, after the ammunition pouches of the defenders had been emptied, by total slaugh-ter as the last line on the summit of an open hill was breached.
The sacrifice of Tiutiunnyk and his men, because sacrifice was how it was seen in Bazar, lingered for twenty years as a whispered obsession in the minds of the townspeople. From the time they could read and write and understand, Stepan Holovich and Ilya, who was to become his wife, had known of the battle.
And then in November 1941 the unimaginable happened.
The Militia were gone from Bazar. The Party offices were closed and its workers speeding East in open lorries. Straggling, beaten columns of troops marched without equipment into the town and out along the main road to Kiev.
And a day after them the Panzer convoys took the same road, and some of the girls and women of Bazar with great daring threw flowers onto the mud-spattered armour of the Panther heavy tanks, and some of the men cheered and the headmaster of the secondary school said that evening in the cafe on Lenin Street that this was a moment of deliverance.
The people of Bazar could not differentiate between the
. . . and after the high barbed wire was a wooden fence that was three yards high. Two wooden fences, two wire fences, and all lit as day, all covered by the watch-towers standing in each corner of the compound, and over the highest of the wooden fences he could see only the roof of the prison.
A terrible silence without beauty. The silence of those without hope.
A man in front of him had stopped. He stared at the low wooden fence and the pure sward of snow yellowed by the lights, and at the low wire fence and at the high wire fence and at the high wooden fence. Holly saw his face as he passed behind him on the perimeter path, a face that was scraped with despair. Holly walked on and the man behind him was an abandoned nothing.
It can't be real, Holly. It can only be canvas. Put a knife to it and the canvas will rip. There must be another picture behind the paint.
Crap, Holly, it's real. And the bullets in the gun in the watch-tower above, they're real . . . and the cold, and the sentence of the court which has fourteen years to run, and the worst luck that the Consul had ever heard of. . . they're real.
He had completed another revolution of the prescribed path, and the man still stood and stared at the fences, and his shoulders were not hunched as if the cold no longer concerned him.
Where did it begin?
Where was the start of the story that brought Mikhail Holovich, who was to become Michael Holly, to this place of wire and snow, of dogs and guns?
The town called Bazar in the heart of the'Ukraine was found on the fringes of thick forestland to the north of the Kiev to Zhitomir railway. In its way the town possessed a certain prosperity that was based on the quality of the nearby timber, the richness of the black soil, and the failure of central government's collectivization policy to reach with any great thoroughness into the self-sufficiency of the few thousands who lived there.
The Ukraine is not Russia. The Ukraine had struggled to preserve its identity of language, heritage, and literature.
Moscow was a distant capital, a foreign overlord handing out its satraps and commissars. In spite of, and because of, the Stalinist purges of the Thirties, the uniqueness of the Ukraine had not been dislodged. And where better to remember that individuality than in the town of Bazar. On the lips of every child of that town was the story of the day-long battle fought there on November 21st 1921 between the men loyal to George Tiutiunnyk and the fledgling Red Army. A gunfight that stretched from dawn until night as the group who believed themselves to be Ukrainian patriots held out, without hope of rescue or reinforcement, against the encircling advance of Moscow's soldiers. It was an epic fight. Old rifles against mortars and machine-guns and howitzers. It was followed, after the ammunition pouches of the defenders had been emptied, by total slaugh-ter as the last line on the summit of an open hill was breached.
The sacrifice of Tiutiunnyk and his men, because sacrifice was how it was seen in Bazar, lingered for twenty years as a whispered obsession in the minds of the townspeople. From the time they could read and write and understand, Stepan Holovich and Ilya, who was to become his wife, had known of the battle.
And then in November 1941 the unimaginable happened.
The Militia were gone from Bazar. The Party offices were closed and its workers speeding East in open lorries. Straggling, beaten columns of troops marched without equipment into the town and out along the main road to Kiev.
And a day after them the Panzer convoys took the same road, and some of the girls and women of Bazar with great daring threw flowers onto the mud-spattered armour of the Panther heavy tanks, and some of the men cheered and the headmaster of the secondary school said that evening in the cafe on Lenin Street that this was a moment of deliverance.
The people of Bazar could not differentiate between the
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