Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea

10

LOLO JOINED us in Kiev.

As a native of the city, he became Levonid (Leonid); his wife—the actress Vera Ilnarskaya—became zhinka Vira (wifey Vira).

They were emaciated and exhausted. They had managed to get out of Moscow only with great difficulty—and with considerable help from our guardian angel, the giant commissar.

“When he came round after your departure,” wifey Vira told me, “he was like a forlorn dog howling beside a burned-down house.”

Soon we heard rumors that our commissar had been executed.

I saw Doroshevich a number of times.

He was living in an enormous apartment. He was ill and haggard. He had aged and was clearly finding it almost unbearable to be separated from his wife—a pretty, empty-headed little actress who had stayed behind in Petersburg.

Doroshevich would stride up and down his huge office and say with assumed nonchalance, “Yes, yes, Lyolya should be here in about ten days.”

It was always ten days—ten days that lasted until his death. I don’t think he ever found out that his Lyolya had long ago married another man—a splendid figure of a leather-clad Bolshevik commissar.

Doroshevich would have probably gone to Petersburg to fetch her had he not been so utterly terrified of the Bolsheviks.

He died in hospital, alone, in Bolshevik Petersburg.

But throughout our time in Kiev he kept pacing up and down his office, tall, thin and weak from illness, as if, with the very last of his strength, he was determined to stride forward—toward his own, bitter death.

While I was working for the Russian Word, I rarely saw Doroshevich. I lived in Petersburg and the editorial office was in Moscow. There were just two occasions in my life when, so to speak, he looked my way.

The first was at the very start of my newspaper career. The editors were eager to assign me to “topical feuilletons.” There was a fashion then for these little squibs—castigating the city fathers for the unsanitary state of coachmen’s yards, lamenting the “desperate plight of the modern washerwoman.” You were allowed to touch on politics, but only in the lightest and most inoffensive of tones, lest the editor get it in the neck from the censor.

And Doroshevich had intervened on my behalf.

“Let her be. Let her write what she likes—and how she likes.”

Then he had said something very kind: “You don’t use an Arab thoroughbred to haul water.”

The second occasion was during a very complicated and difficult time in my life.

At such times, you always find yourself alone. Your closest friends tell themselves that it will be best if they keep their distance: “After all, she has enough on her plate as it is.”

This display of tact leaves you with the feeling that nobody cares about you in the least: “Why are they all avoiding me? They must all think it’s me who’s to blame!”

Afterward it emerges that everyone was on your side all the time. They were with you all the time in spirit. Everyone was deeply concerned, but no one dared to approach you.

But Doroshevich was different. He came up from Moscow. All of a sudden.

“My wife said in a letter that you seem in a very bad way. I felt I really must see you. I’m leaving tonight, so let’s talk now. It’s not good for you to get so upset.”

He talked for a long time—with real kindness and from the heart; he even offered to champion me in a duel if I thought that would help.

More publicity, I answered, was the very last thing we needed.

He made me promise that if ever I needed help, advice, or friendship, I would send him a telegram, and he would get on a train to Petersburg without delay.

I knew very well that I would never summon him, and I wasn’t even entirely confident that he would come if I did, but his kind words were a comfort and a support. They created an opening, a chink of light in a black wall.

This startlingly chivalrous gesture—so at odds with his reputation as someone self-satisfied, hardheaded, and enamored only of himself—had truly moved me, which made it all the more painful to watch him now, pacing up and down his huge room and blustering away: “Lyolya should be here in about ten days. Anyway it will only be a few weeks, if not days, before the Bolshevik regime collapses. Maybe it’s not even worth her leaving Petersburg. It’s not the safest of times to travel. I keep hearing rumors about some kind of armed bands…”

This was a reference to Petlyura.

My premonition about Spanish influenza proved remarkably accurate.

I fell ill in the night. A 104-degree fever swept down on me like a hurricane. In my semi-delirium I remembered only one thing: that at eleven o’clock, Meskhieva, one of the actresses from the Bat, was coming to pick up some little songs of mine she was going to sing in a concert. And all through the night she kept knocking at the door, and I kept getting up to let her in and then realizing that this was delirium, that nobody was knocking, and that I was still in my bed. And then there she was, knocking at my door yet again. I forced my eyes open. It was light. A loud, clear voice was calling, “Still asleep? Then I’ll come round again tomorrow.”

Then quick footsteps, receding down the passage. Tomorrow! But what if I couldn’t get up? Would it be twenty-four hours before anyone even knew I was ill? The hotel had no staff and nobody was due to visit me.

Horrified, I leapt out of bed and drummed on the door.

“I’m sick,” I called out. “Come back!”

She heard. Half an hour later some frightened friends of mine hurried round, bringing what someone with influenza needs more than anything—a bouquet of chrysanthemums—and telling me, “Well, you’re over the worst now!”

News of my illness got into the papers.

And since no one really had anything to do, since few people wanted to start anything new until “the death throes of Bolshevism” were well and truly over, my predicament evoked the most intense sympathy.

From morning until night my room was crowded with people. They must have all found it very entertaining. They brought flowers. They brought sweets, which they then ate themselves. They talked and smoked. Young couples arranged trysts on one of the windowsills. Everyone swapped theatrical and political gossip. There were people I didn’t know at all, but they smiled and helped themselves to food and drink the same as everyone else. Sometimes I felt superfluous amongst this merry crowd. Fortunately, though, they soon ceased to pay me any attention.

“Perhaps there’s a way to send them all packing?” I said timidly to Vera Ilnarskaya, who was nursing me.

“Oh no, dear, you mustn’t do that—they’d be offended. It would be awkward. Just put up with it all for a while. You can have some rest when you get better.”

I remember one evening in particular. My guests had all gone out to have dinner. Only Vera was still left, along with someone unknown to me, who was saying, in what seemed an endless drone:

“I have an estate outside Warsaw, just a small one of course….”

“I have an income from this estate, just a small one of course….”

Was I, or was I not, dreaming all this?

“I have meadows on this estate, just small ones of course….”

“I have an aunt in Warsaw….”

“Just a small one, of course,” I interrupted, surprising even myself. “But how about, if only for the sake of variety, going and calling a doctor? Yes, I can see you’re someone most kind and obliging, go and fetch me a doctor, just a small one of course…”

Were those last words his or mine? I wasn’t sure. I hope they were his.

The doctor came. He marveled for a while at the state of my room.

“What’s been going on in here? Have you been holding a ball?”

“No, it’s just… visits from well-wishers.”

“Out! Out with the lot of them! And the flowers too—get rid of them! You have pneumonia.”

I was triumphant.

“Why so cheerful all of a sudden?” he asked, scared.

“Yes, it’s what I said! Just what I said was going to happen!”

He must have thought I was delirious, and he most certainly was not going to share in my joy.

After I’d recovered, when I went outside for the first time, Kiev was all ice. Black ice and wind. The few pedestrians I saw were barely able to make their way along the streets. They were falling like ninepins, knocking their companions off their feet too.

I remember an editorial office I used to visit from time to time. It was halfway up an icy hill. Trying to get to it from below was hopeless—I’d manage ten steps, then slide back down again. Approaching it from above was no better; I would gain too much momentum and slide straight past. Never in my life had I encountered such ice.

The mood in the city had changed; it was no longer celebratory. Something had been extinguished. Everyone was on the alert, ears pricked, eyes darting about. Many people had quietly disappeared, to destinations unknown. There was more and more talk of Odessa.

“Things are looking up in Odessa, I’ve heard. Whereas round here… Peasants, armed bands… They’re closing in on us… Petlyura or something…”

Kiev Thought did not fear Petlyura. Petlyura was a former employee. He would, of course, remember this.

He did indeed. His very first decree was to close down Kiev Thought. Long before he entered the city, he sent his minions ahead with instructions.

Kiev Thought was perplexed, even a little embarrassed.

But close it did.