17. EXCELLENCIES AND GENTERALS

WHILE still in Odessa I had learned the address of the Russian centre in Serbia, which had sent volunteers to the Russian corps being formed by the Germans. We knew that since the Revolution a large number of White Russian emigrants had settled in Serbia.

Being sure that it would not be difficult to get to Germany, we were in no hurry. We got off the train at the Belgrade station, hired a handcart for our luggage, and set out for the Russian House, an address which our porter knew.

After a long hike we reached Queen Natalia Street in which this house was situated. Its high porch was full of people, who were observing our small procession with interest. I could imagine that it was not without a certain amount of colour. The porter was pulling the cart over the cobblestones; Igor and I were pushing it from behind and catching the suitcases which kept falling off when the cart bumped on the uneven street. Behind us walked the old lady holding Nina, who was inspecting this new strange city with interest. Zina brought up the rear, pulling along on a string a puppy which we had recently adopted. We stopped at the driveway to the house. Since nobody made a move to come down to us, Zina and I ascended to the porch. The people divided silently to let us through. I turned to the doorman.

‘Is this the Russian House?’ I asked. It was a superfluous question. A sign clearly announced the fact in large letters.

‘That’s right. What can I do for you?’

‘I would like to see one of the directors.’

‘Which one?’

‘Unfortunately I don’t know anyone here. Anyone; it doesn’t matter.’

The doorman turned to a little old man with a trembling chin who did not in the least resemble a director of anything.

‘Your Excellency, please talk to this gentleman,’ he said.

The old form of address sounded strange to my ears. His Excellency came over and gave me a questioning glance. Struck with doubt as to his position in the house, I asked him, ‘Are you in charge of the Russian House?’

‘No, not I. The general is receiving no one today. May I help you?’

‘Perhaps you can. We have just arrived from Russia and have got to find a place to stay. Perhaps you could advise us where we can find accommodation. ‘

‘Oh, that’s quite complicated. Wait out here; I’ll see what I can find out inside.’

He disappeared. I looked down and saw that the cart was still there, loaded with baggage. The puppy was yapping beside it, and Igor was rolling a cigarette. I joined him. Zina, her mother, and daughter had disappeared. Igor’s attempt to start a conversation with the people staring down at us from the porch didn’t take. After a few minutes Zina reappeared.

‘I think things are going to be all right,’ she said. ‘The fact that Mama is both the daughter and the widow of tsarist generals is going to help us. She’s found some sort of acquaintances already. We’ll probably get fixed up here. The Russian House covers a whole block; it’s the building of the old Russian Imperial Embassy in Belgrade. They can’t fail to find a place for us.’ With that she disappeared again.

An hour passed and I went up to the porch again, elbowing my way through the growing crowd. The old man with whom I had talked before tried to conceal himself from me but I caught him.

‘Listen, Your Excellency, why are you making us wait? Have you received any answer from the management about us?’

‘No. We won’t be able to settle anything today. Today is Sunday and we don’t receive visitors. The general said that he will consider the question tomorrow and then decide what we can do for you.’

‘Can’t I see the general himself?’ I asked.

The little old man looked frightened.

‘Please! Please! That’s impossible. Nothing can be done until tomorrow.’

Things were taking an unpleasant turn. I went out to look for Zina and her mother and found them in conversation with some local ladies of obviously aristocratic origin. French words and sometimes whole sentences kept appearing in their speech. I called Zina aside.

‘Well, are you getting any results here? It’s growing dark and we’re still out on the street. I hate to think what we’ll have to pay the porter, too.’

‘No, nothing yet, but they are all very nice. As soon as they found out that I was a general’s daughter and that Mama is not only the widow but the daughter of a general, they became very cordial.’

‘Has any one of the nice ladies invited us to spend the night?’ I probed.

‘Really! How could they, after such a short acquaintance?’

‘Well, in that case, here’s what we’ll do. Finish up your conversations. Igor and I will go and look out for a hotel right away. If you want to go on with your chats that’s your business, but I don’t intend to spend the night in the street.’

I left Zina without listening to her explanations. Having explained to the porter that we had to find a hotel, we set out with him. Our women did not catch up with us until a quarter of an hour later. They nagged at us a long time for being so impatient.

We went to five or six hotels. Some were ‘Nur fur Deutsche’; others were full. Finally near the station we found a large hotel where for a big bribe we managed to get a room for the five of us and the dog.

While the others were hauling the baggage up to the fourth floor I had time to go to the station and draw a Marschverpfiegung for my ‘troops’. It was quite dark when we began to eat. That evening, for lack of other food, the puppy ate excellent soldiers’ sausage, of which we were all extremely fond ourselves.

The next days passed in making contacts at the Russian House. Igor objected to going there at all, but Zina and her mother, as persons of aristocratic antecedents, broke the ice of the local society and finally managed to reach the general himself.

Actually, upon closer acquaintance, the general turned out not to be as haughty as we had originally thought. When he realized that we were not penniless refugees looking for charity he became quite pleasant and after we had offered him some German rations a few times (in spite of his generalcy, he had to procure his food on the black market) he even came to feel a certain bias in our favour.

We inspected the Russian House. It was a very large institution which occupied a city block opposite the royal palace. It consisted of several buildings and a complete plant: supply rooms, kitchens, and dining halls.

The Russian House had become the refuge of a great many White emigrants. Thousands of them had resided in Serbia before the war. Since then some of them had gone to Germany and some had entered the Russian Corps which had been created to fight against Tito’s Yugoslav partisans. The rest had gathered in Belgrade; the countryside was becoming too disturbed for those who lived there.

In general the Russians in Serbia found themselves in a difficult situation. For twenty-five years they had benefited from the hospitality of the Serbian people and government, enjoying almost the same rights as the native population. Then the war started. Serbia was occupied by the Germans. The White monarchist émigrés, counting on Germany’s ultimate victory, offered their services to the Germans, including actual military help. After long bargaining the Germans decided to form a Russian corps, announcing that it would be sent to the Soviet front to fight against the Bolsheviks. Several thousand volunteers assembled. Former colonels enlisted as privates. A Russian general of German extraction was put in command.

However, the Germans changed their plans unexpectedly. The corps, which was subordinate to the German commander in Serbia, was sent to fight against the partisans, who by that time were succeeding in poisoning the life of the occupying forces. It is true that the corps was used only in the fight against Tito; it absolutely refused to take part in any action against Mikhailovich. But even Tito at that time was popular enough in Yugoslavia, where everyone unanimously hated the Germans. As a result the Russian volunteers, dressed as they were in German Army overcoats – and later all Russians in Yugoslavia – began to be hated as enemies by the Yugoslavs.

The Russian House, under the command of General Kramer, was the refuge of the nonmilitary part of the emigration, but Kramer was also under the orders of the German commander, who helped the Russian colony by supplying it with a certain amount of food (naturally taken from the local population) and money. The money belonged to the Russian House. It consisted of proceeds from the sale of valuables brought from Russia after the Civil War – the contents of the former Petersburg ‘Lombard’.* The Yugoslav Government had previously handled these valuables. Now the Germans had laid their hands on them and gave Kramer only enough for his current needs.

The dining room ‘for the poor’ in the Russian House was terrible. Former Russian aristocrats, for the most part over the age of sixty-five, ate their modest, bad-smelling dinner, and spent hours discussing the most humdrum things in the most refined language.

The Russian House had its own high school, a good military and historical museum, and, most important, a wonderful library of 200,000 books – the biggest Russian library outside the borders of Russia.

No matter how far removed from us in spirit were these countrymen of ours who had left Russia twenty-five years before, one could not fail to respect them for the persistence with which they had preserved their national identity during their exile. In Belgrade and the provinces the Russians had done a great deal after the first World War to develop Serbia, but they had hardly mixed with the local population. Their children studied in Russian schools and in one of the two Russian cadet corps. Most of the marriages among the younger generation took place within their own Russian circle.

The possibility of living among countrymen was very attractive to Zina and her mother. Again they began to say that it was not worth going on to Germany, that it was more comfortable in Belgrade and much more fun. But in this case Igor was firmly allied with me. Being a modest and somewhat shy person, he could not stand all these ex-’excellencies’, and in addition he was eager to settle somewhere for good and begin to work. To find work in Serbia was out of the question. Even the Serbs had difficulty in finding it.

It was decided to leave soon after Easter. We attended the solemn midnight mass at the Russian House church. All the former officers wore their old uniforms. The orders of the Russian Empire sparkled on their chests. The ladies were dressed in their most magnificent finery.

In the morning we went for a walk, leaving the puppy at the hotel. We decided to get some lunch at the Russian restaurant, but it turned out to be closed. Just as we reached the door the city’s air-raid sirens began to sound. This was the first air raid in Serbia since the very beginning of the German occupation. The streets emptied. Antiaircraft fire began. We heard the hum of approaching aircraft. We decided not to stand in the doorway of the closed restaurant and so crossed the street to a shop on the other side, which was open. Suddenly bombs began to rain from the sky with their own peculiar whistle. We withdrew into the depths of the store. There was a tremendous roar followed by the tinkling of broken glass. The street had suddenly become black as night. The building shook, fruit flying off the shelves everywhere. Igor was thrown to one side.

The bomb explosions began to sound farther away. Fifteen minutes later it became lighter. I looked out in the street and saw that there was only a pile of ruins where the Russian restaurant had stood.

The all clear sounded, and we raced back to the hotel. It was in one piece, but two houses near by were on fire. Not a window-pane in the hotel was unbroken. The door to our room lay in the corridor. We found our puppy, scared half to death, huddled between two wine barrels in the cellar.

Obviously we weren’t too lucky. The American bombings, here as in Bucharest, were beginning a week after our arrival. The United States Air Force seemed to be following us around Europe.

The city had suffered fairly severe damage, more than from the first (and only) German air raid at the beginning of Germany’s war with Yugoslavia. A row of large houses in the centre of town had been demolished and one of the bridges across the river had been damaged, but cars could still cross to the other side.

We decided to continue our journey, and as soon as possible. General Kramer agreed to issue us documents which stated that we belonged to the White emigration. We had heard that former Soviet citizens had a harder time in Germany than most others.

A couple of days later we received official visas from the German envoy to Nedich’s government and departed for Budapest and Vienna.

We took with us dim memories , of Serbia as a half-starved country, of an alien Russian colony, and of burning buildings in Belgrade after the air raid. Standing in the corridor of our railroad car and looking out at ‘allied’ Hungary, I remembered a conversation I had had with an intelligent Serb in a Belgrade restaurant.

I was sitting at a table reading a Russian book, waiting for the waiter to bring me my meal. The man sitting next to me addressed me in almost perfect Russian.

‘Excuse me; you’ve just recently arrived in Serbia, haven’t you?’ he said.

‘Yes, I just got here from Russia a few days ago.’

‘May I ask if you plan to enlist in the Russian Corps?’

‘Definitely no. I don’t want to fight, particularly in the German Army, and especially under the present circumstances.’

‘Yes, you’re quite right!’ The respectable-looking Serb seemed to come to life. ‘I can’t understand the local White Russians. They’ve lived here for years, taken advantage of our hospitality, and now they are helping to destroy our patriots!’

‘So you thoroughly dislike the Germans?’ I asked.

The Serb flushed.

‘Everybody hates them. Who asked them to come here? What are they doing here? We lived quietly and well before and didn’t threaten anybody. But then these——occupiers came. However, it won’t be long now before they go back home and Yugoslavia will be free again. The Russians will come from the east, the King will return, Mikhailovich will form a government, and everything will be fine again.’ ‘But aren’t you afraid that the Russians will establish the same system here as they have in the U.S.S.R. – nationalize everything, and introduce the collective farm system?’

‘Oh, no! You don’t know our people! We are a liberty-loving folk. We’re great individualists, with a strong sense of private property. The Soviet system would not do for us at all. If you take away land from our peasant, he will immediately rise against the regime. He’ll kill and burn until he gets his way. Tito has sold out to Moscow, but we have Mikhailovich, and all of our sympathies are with him.’

I did not try to argue with him. I did not try to prove to him that the Russian people love freedom too, that the Russian peasant also wants his own land, and that in spite of all that, the Soviet regime does what it wants with Russia. I let him keep his hopes . . .

* A bank specializing in loans with valuables as collateral.