Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea

9

NOT WANTING to impose on Olyonushka’s young friends for too long, I set about finding somewhere else to stay. This was a long, tedious, and confusing business. It meant many hours in lines waiting to get myself registered, returning day after day to check up on things, unraveling one tangle after another.

Eventually, I obtained a room. It was in a huge hotel with a leaking roof and broken windows. The ground floor was occupied by the Bat. The first floor was empty and undergoing refurbishment. My own room was on the second floor, which was also empty.

It was a corner room; there were two windows on one side to catch the north wind, and two on the other side for the west wind. They were all double-paned, and the glass had been knocked out so skillfully that at first you didn’t even notice: on the inner window it was the bottom left and top right panes that were missing, while on the outer window it was the bottom right and top left panes. At first glance, everything looked fine and you had no idea why letters were flying about the room and the dressing gown on the hanger kept flapping its sleeves.

The room was furnished with a bed, a table, a washstand, and two rattan armchairs. The armchairs were exhausted, worn out by life, and during the night they liked to stretch out their arms, legs, and backs, creaking and groaning.

I moved in on a cold, dry autumn day. I looked around and said to myself, for no apparent reason, “I wonder which of the doctors round here specializes in Spanish influenza. Because I’m going to have Spanish influenza with pulmonary complications.”

With Gooskin, everything was resolved—or rather dissolved—quite happily. After receiving an advance from Kiev Thought, I paid him his cancellation fee and he left for Odessa entirely content.

“You’re not going to be working with Averchenko’s impresario, are you?” he asked jealously.

“You have my word that I won’t be working either with him or with any other impresario. I hate making any kind of public appearance. I’ve only ever given readings at charity events, and always with great reluctance. You can rest assured. All the more so because I really don’t like Averchenko’s impresario.”

“Well, you surprise me to death! A man like that! Just ask people in his home town of Konotop! In Konotop literally everyone adores him. Peskin the dentist once hit him with a ham bone. Because of his wife. Of course, there may be something a bit poultry about his behaviour, and he may even seem rather unattractive… Such swarthy features… And maybe it wasn’t because of his wife that Peskin hit him—maybe it was to do with some business disagreement. Or maybe he didn’t hit him at all, the man may just be lying—well, I’m sure his dog will believe him!”

And so Gooskin and I parted amicably. After we had finished all our goodbyes, he poked his head through the door again and asked anxiously, “Do you eat curd fritters?”

“What? When?” I asked in surprise.

“Some time,” Gooskin replied.

And so we parted.

Olyonushka was the next to leave. She had been offered work at a theater in Rostov.

Just before leaving, she said she wanted to have a heart to heart with me, to ask my advice about a matter of great complexity.

I took her to a patisserie where, dripping tears into her hot chocolate and whipped cream, she told me her story: Vladimir was terribly in love with her and he lived in Rostov. But Dmitry, who lived here in Kiev, was also terribly in love with her. Vladimir was eighteen and Dmitry was nineteen. Both were officers. She loved Vladimir, but she had to marry Dmitry.

“Why?”

Olyonushka sobbed and almost choked on her cake: “I must! I simply m-m-m-ust!”

“Wait, Olyonushka. And please don’t howl like that. If you want to know what I think, you must tell me everything.”

“It’s not easy,” said Olyonushka, still weeping. “It’s all quite awful! Awful!”

“Stop it, Olyonushka! Stop it! You’ll make yourself ill.”

“I can’t, the tears just keep coming….”

“Well, at the very least, stop eating cakes. You’re on your eighth now, you’ll make yourself ill.”

Olyonushka gave a despairing shrug. “What do I care? I’d be only too happy to die—it would solve everything. But yes, you’re right. I am starting to feel a little sick….”

Olyonushka’s story was indeed emotionally complex. She loved Vladimir, but he was someone bright and cheerful and always lucky in life. Whereas Dmitry was very poor and somehow always unlucky. Everything was going wrong for him and she didn’t even love him. All this meant that she simply had to marry him. It just wasn’t right for someone to have to suffer so much: “It’ll be the death of the poor man!”

At this point her howls became so alarming that the elderly owner of the café came out from behind the counter, shook her head sympathetically and gently stroked Olyonushka’s hair.

“She’s a kind woman!” sobbed Olyonushka. “You must give her a good tip!”

Three days later we saw Olyonushka off on her way to Rostov.

The trains were all crammed with people, and it was only with difficulty that we managed to get her a seat. We sent a telegram to the ticket office in Kharkov, to reserve a sleeping berth for her in the night train from there to Rostov, and we gave her a letter to show when she reached Kharkov.

A week later we received a letter from Olyonushka, telling the awful story of how a certain determined officer had insisted on his right to die.

There had been only one berth left in the sleeper from Kharkov, and this was duly assigned to Olyonushka. But an officer standing just behind her in the line demanded that he himself should be given this berth. The man in the ticket office argued with him, showing him our telegram and explaining that the berth was reserved. But the officer remained intransigent. He was an officer, he said, and he had been fighting for the fatherland. He was exhausted and needed to sleep. In the end, Olyonushka gave up her berth to him and crossly took a seat in a second-class carriage.

In the middle of the night she was woken by a terrible jolt and almost thrown from her seat. Cardboard boxes and suitcases flew down from the overhead luggage racks. The frightened passengers all rushed to the end of the carriage. The train was not moving. Olyonushka jumped down and ran toward the front of the train, where there was a crowd of shouting people.

Under full steam, their locomotive had collided with a freight train. The two front cars had been smashed to splinters. Having so eloquently asserted his right to die, the unfortunate officer was being retrieved from the wreckage piece by piece.

“So you don’t always help someone by giving in to them,” Olyonushka concluded.

The thought that the officer had died “because of her” was evidently causing her great distress.

A month after this we received a telegram: “Vladimir and Olyona ask you to pray for God’s blessing.”

We understood that they had married.

I began work at Kiev Thought.[53]

These were wild and hectic times. The air was full of confused rumors about Petlyura.[54]

“Who is this man anyway?”

“An accountant,” said some.

“An escaped convict,” said others.

Whether he was an accountant or a convict, he had also worked for Kiev Thought, if only in a modest capacity. Apparently he had been a proofreader.

The place where we newly arrived “scribes” met most often was the house of the journalist Mikhail Milrud.[55] He was a wonderful man. And we were given a warm welcome by his kind and beautiful wife and their three-year-old son Alyoshka. Alyoshka had been born into the world of journalism, and the games he played were always linked to political events. He would be a Bolshevik, a White, a member of some unidentified “band” or, later on—Petlyura himself. On one occasion, under cover of the scraping of chair legs and the tinkle of teacups and spoons, “Petlyura” crept up to me on all fours, let out a wild shriek, and sank his sharp teeth into my leg.

Milrud’s wife had never before been involved in any kind of charitable work. Nevertheless, when crowds of hungry soldiers—former prisoners of war released from camps in Germany—began to arrive in Kiev and representatives of various organizations took to pontificating about our duty to society and how dangerous it would be to create a class of angry and embittered young men, who would be only too ready to listen to Bolshevik propaganda, she at once began cooking cabbage soup and buckwheat. Without the least drama, without making any political demands of anyone, she would go quietly along to the barracks with a few servants and feed up to twenty soldiers a day.

More and more people kept arriving in Kiev.

I met some old acquaintances from Petersburg—a very senior official, almost a government minister, and his family. The Bolsheviks had tortured and killed his brother, and he had only just managed to escape them himself. Shaking with hatred and sounding like an Old Testament prophet, he would repeat, “I will not know peace until with my own hands, there on the grave of my brother, I have slaughtered enough Bolsheviks for the blood to seep down into his coffin.”

He is now working quietly in an office in Petersburg. It appears he has, after all, managed to find peace, with or without seeping blood.

Vasilevsky appeared, with plans for a new newspaper. People got together, conferred, and drew up agendas.

Then Vasilevsky disappeared.[56]

In the weeks before Petlyura’s arrival people were disappearing all the time. Anxiety was in the air. Even the slightest tremors registered on the sensitive membranes of the most alert souls—and these souls quickly took their bodies somewhere calmer and safer.

I had an unexpected visit from a tall young man in a strange dark-blue uniform—one of the Hetman’s retinue. With great eloquence he tried to persuade me to become involved with a new newspaper that the Hetman was setting up. He said that the Hetman was a colossus and that I must support him with my feuilletons.

I thought that if this colossus had nothing more reliable by way of support, he must be in a somewhat shaky position. Moreover, the prospective staff of this newspaper were a motley crew. There were names I did not want to appear beside. Either the colossus had a poor grasp of the world of journalism or he just wasn’t so very particular.

I promised to consider the proposal.

The young man went on his way, leaving behind a check for an unbelievably large advance—mine should I choose to accept.

After he left, I wrapped myself, like Sonya Marmeladova, in a drap de dames shawl and lay all day on the couch, mulling this over.[57] The check lay on the mantelpiece. I tried not to look in its direction.

Early the next morning I put the check in an envelope and sent it back to the representative of the colossus.

Some people accused me of being “excessively quixotic” and even of harming my fellow scribes since my refusal cast a shadow over the newspaper and thus made it awkward for other, more sensible, writers to join it.

But these sensible people were not, in any case, able to enjoy their life of comfort and ease for long.

Petlyura was approaching.