Jacob's Ladder

7 From the Willow Chest

The Diary of Jacob Ossetsky

(1911)

JANUARY 1

I woke up this morning fairly early, suddenly recalling with vivid clarity a memory from early childhood. Thirteen years ago. I’m not yet seven. Mama helps me with my lessons. Every day I write two pages to practice my penmanship. I sit in the dining room of our tiny little house (our “own home”) in Rtishchevo. It’s evening already. I have copied out a whole story, and there are still two pages left. I write on them: “Jacob Ossetsky, January 1, 1898.” Mama says that there are two hours to go, it’s still December. I answer, “But I’m already going to bed.”

And in the morning a manservant came over, and another man, a peasant who was a stranger to me. And they wished us a Happy New Year, and showered us with rye and barley. The newspaper Life and Art was extra fat, with pictures in it. Then Genrikh, my older brother, came—what joy! I felt such love for him! He is still the most interesting and well-read person in the family. His mother died in childbirth, and he was taken in by his aunt; she also had an infant, so she nursed both of them at once. And he stayed in that family to live. When Father remarried, to Mama, they wanted to take him back, but his aunt wouldn’t agree to it. I missed him terribly when I was little. I still do when I don’t see him for a long time. It’s been a whole year and a half since he went to Germany to study in Göttingen. His adopted family is wealthy, but Father doesn’t have the means to send me to Germany. I’m sure that in time I will earn enough myself to pay for my studies and go to Germany, like Genrikh. To Göttingen or Marburg.

It means so much to have an elder half-brother, even though I rarely see him. The little ones are another matter altogether. They are wonderful, but I love Eva most of all, and feel the most for her. And I mean the most to her. It will be this way our whole life—an eternal bond. She’s no longer a child, but a young lady. She has developed a womanly figure, real breasts, and she has started feeling embarrassed about it. She’s a charming creature. It’s strange to me to think that some man will love her, that the carnal world will claim its due, and there will be children. For some reason, it’s unpleasant for me to think about. In three weeks I’ll be twenty, and I still can’t figure it out—am I already grown up, or still an adolescent? When I study music or mathematics, or read a serious book, I always think I’m completely grown up; but as soon as I’m around my younger siblings, I seem to shed five or six years. Yesterday we were horsing around and playing, and I was galloping around like a madman, until Rayechka fell and bumped her nose. Is it possible that I’ll have kids, a lot of them? First, though, a wife. It’s hard for me to envision her. I think I’ll recognize her, though. But it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon.

JANUARY 10

Yesterday Yura told me that Rachmaninoff was coming to Kiev. Two concerts! January 21 and 27. The main thing now is to get hold of tickets. They haven’t gone on sale yet, but I’ll run over to see Radetsky today and ask him to ask his aunt, who has been secretary of the Kiev Musical Society for many years, to get a ticket for me. I’ll go down on my knees and beg—only I don’t know whom to kneel before, Radetsky or his aunt!

JANUARY 22

Yesterday I didn’t have the strength to write. I don’t know about today, either. But I always feel that if I don’t write down everything that happens to me, from the first to the last, it will all disappear. I have never experienced such a storm of emotion, and the main thing is that I feel I never really lived before yesterday—up until now, it was all practice, just études of some sort. Scales, nothing but scales!

First—Rachmaninoff. In the first half of the concert he conducted the orchestra. The Second Symphony. I had never heard it before. Modern genius. But I will have to listen to it a lot; there is much in it that is new for me. He didn’t wear a tuxedo, as is customary, but a frock coat. His hair is cropped short, and he looks more like an aviator or a scientist, a chemist, than an artist. And he looks so powerful that from the first moment you lay eyes on him you know he’s a colossus, a giant! For the entire first half of the concert, I had no idea where I was—in paradise? I could have been anywhere, except on earth. Still, it was not a divine realm, but a human one—an exalted human realm. The melodic principle is very strong in it. It takes another direction altogether from Scriabin’s, and it is more in keeping with my nature. I even had the feeling that all the organs inside me, each individually—heart, lungs, liver—were rejoicing at these sounds. My ticket, moreover, was for a seat in the orchestra, not for a cheap upper-balcony seat. Father gave me ten rubles for my birthday. Eva probably told him that I was longing to be able to attend this concert. I would have been happy even to stand on the stairs, but I was in the orchestra. And this had important consequences. At the end of the first half of the concert, the audience gave a standing ovation, for ten minutes. I have never seen such a successful performance in my life. During the intermission, I went out to the lobby. Everyone was enthralled; the atmosphere was electric, and rapturous exclamations filled the air. Then I saw her. Standing by a column was a slender girl, pale, her delicate neck rising from a large white collar, like a white stem growing from it. I saw her from the side, and recognized her immediately. It was her! The very same girl! With the blue tie under the white collar. I hardly saw her face—I simply rushed up to her and said: “What luck! I knew I was sure to meet you again! And at a concert like this, a concert like this!” She looked at me calmly and said, surprised, “I beg your pardon, there must be some mistake. We aren’t acquainted.” “No, no, of course we’re not! But I saw you at a performance of Khovanshchina. You were with two students. Very unpleasant ones!” That just burst out of me, and I was horrified that it had slipped off my tongue so easily. And she looked at me with enormous surprise, then laughed such a wonderful, girlish laugh, like Eva.

“What didn’t you like about those young men? One of them was my brother, and the other his close friend! You have a funny way of beginning an acquaintance!”

Still smiling, she stepped to the side a bit, and I understood she was not there by herself, but in the company of a formidable woman, no longer young, wearing a queer-looking net over her gray hair—by all appearances, a schoolmistress.

I was terribly afraid that everything would fall through, that she would leave and I would never see her again. I clutched at her sleeve like a madman and held her back. She was not in the least alarmed, just brushed away my hand and said she had to go back up to the top balcony, and she hoped I would get even more pleasure out of the second part of the concert.

It’s over, it’s all over—now she will go away, forever, and that will be the end of it! “I beg you, I beg you, don’t go upstairs to the balcony. My father gave me a ticket in the orchestra seats, for my birthday, you see … I beg you, change seats with me; it’s the fifth row, in the middle, seat number eleven.”

She looked at me with great sympathy and began nodding her head: “Please, don’t worry yourself, I’ll gladly take your seat—especially since not only can I not see anything from mine, but the sound is also bad there. I am very grateful to you for your kindness.”

She waved to her companion and said, in French, “Madame Leroux, I’ve just run into an acquaintance who offered to exchange his seat for mine. It’s in the orchestra.”

The girl clutched the ticket a bit uncertainly, as though offering it to the Frenchwoman, but the woman became very animated, pushed her hand away, raised her eyebrows, and said, laughingly, something along the lines of “Run along, Marie … And keep your eye out for another acquaintance of yours in the orchestra.”

And we exchanged our tickets, and I led her to my place and seated her, and she nodded to me gratefully, but without constraint. She was no doubt a girl of exceptionally good upbringing—that kind of simplicity of behavior is only common among well-bred people.

By the time I rushed up to the balcony, Rachmaninoff was already seating himself behind the piano. He played the first chord—and I was lost! I have already managed to get hold of the musical score from Filimonov, a clarinet player. I looked it over, and will study it for a long time to come, but I am left with the feeling that the first part is simply unattainable. It is the principle of conversation in a higher and middle register, and the lower F in the contra-octave, the very beginning, and the mighty theme, and the introduction of the strings and clarinets … The concert was enormous in its content and meaning; there was not a single empty phrase, nothing merely decorative, only the essence itself! The audience was in a state of nervous rapture, but Rachmaninoff himself was calm and unflappable, a giant among men, a giant! Everyone applauded rhythmically, then got out of phase, then picked up the rhythm again!

Oh my God! I forgot, I completely forgot about the marvelous girl. When the audience had grown tired of the ovations and started to disperse, I remembered about the girl and realized that I had lost her. She had already left, never to be found again. I practically flew down the stairs, and, truly, the crowd was already departing. I rushed to the coat check for my things, and although the magic of the music had still not left me and I was still happy, I was sad at the same time, because I understood that I had lost what I would never again find. I grabbed my coat and, pulling it on as I walked, made a beeline for the exit, so that I might, if I was lucky, run into her on the steps or at the trolley stop … Then I stepped on the hem of a coat belonging to some lady who was sitting on the velvet bench, putting on her boots. I apologized—and it turned out to be her! Her face looked both solemn and troubled by the music, and also radiant. She had, of course, forgotten all about me, and didn’t even recognize me at first.

I walked her home—she lives on Mariinsko-Blagoveshchenskaya Street, a five-minute walk from our house. Her name is Maria. Maria. Maria.