Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea

12

I WENT to say goodbye to the Lavra.[63]

“God knows when I’ll be here again!”

Yes, God knows…

The Lavra, the very heart of devout old Russia, was empty. No pilgrims: no old men with little knapsacks; no old women with little bundles tied to their walking sticks. The monks going about their business looked troubled and anxious.

I went down into the caves. I remembered my first visit, many years ago, with my mother, my sisters, and our old nanny. A checkered and eventful life lay between me and the long-legged girl with blonde pigtails I had once been. But my feelings of awe and fear had not changed. Just as I had crossed myself and sighed long ago, so I crossed myself and sighed now—moved by the same beautiful and ineffable sorrow emanating from the age-old vaults that had heard so many ancient Russian prayers and seen so many, oh, so many Russian tears….

An old monk was selling little crosses, prayer ropes, and a miniature image of the Mother of God, glued by some miracle to the inside of a small, flat bottle with a narrow neck. Beside her were two plaited candles and a lectern with a tiny icon on it. And on her halo I read an inscription: “Rejoice, O unwedded Bride!” It was a wonderful miniature. To this day, having survived all my wanderings as a refugee, this small flat bottle—the old monk’s small miracle—stands on my Parisian mantelpiece.

I also went to say goodbye to the Cathedral of Saint Vladimir. In front of the icon of Saint Irina, I saw a little old woman, all in black, on her knees. Her shoes were old and worn, the toes turned inward, toward each other, in a way that seemed timid and endearing. She was weeping. And while the little old woman wept, the magnificent Byzantine Empress, entwined in pearls and framed in gold, gazed sternly down at her.

We left Kiev late at night. Cannons were booming somewhere close by.

The crush at the station was unimaginable. Troop trains were occupying nearly all the lines. We didn’t know whether they were just arriving or just departing. They probably didn’t even know themselves.

Everyone looked bewildered, resentful, and tired.

With some difficulty we made our way to our allocated train car. It was third class, which seemed to mean three tiers of sleeping boards. Our cases were thrown in after us.

The train stood at the station for a long time. Official and unofficial departure times had all long come and gone. We were on the second track and there were trains full of soldiers on either side of us. We could hear yells and shots. Through the gaps between cars we could see people rushing about in panic.

Sometimes people would come to our car with the latest news.

“We’re all going to be thrown out. The train’s being requisitioned for troops.”

“Anyway, you can only go about seven miles. Then there’s a junction controlled by the Bolsheviks.”

“A train that came under fire has just pulled in. With dead and wounded on board.”

Dead. Wounded. How accustomed we had grown to these words. No one felt any particular alarm or distress. No one said, “How awful!” or “What a tragedy!”

Our way of life had changed, and, in accord with this new way of life, we just thought, “Remove the dead and bandage the wounded.”

The words were a part of our everyday language. And we ourselves could well become “dead” or “wounded,” perhaps at this next junction, perhaps soon after it.[64]

Someone’s teapot had been stolen. And this occasioned as much (if not more) interest and discussion as the question of the Bolshevik-controlled junction—or the possibility of our train crew now being so frightened that we might not even leave the station at all.

All of a sudden a cardboard box fell on someone’s head. This was a good sign. A newly attached locomotive had sent a jolt through the carriages.

We were off.

We stopped many times. At dark stations or in the middle of nowhere, where there was more yelling and shooting and dancing pinpoints of light.

Soldiers with bayonets appeared in the doorways.

“Officers! To the end of the car!”

There were no officers in our car.

I remember seeing people running beside the track, past our windows. Breathless soldiers stormed into the car and stabbed under the benches with their bayonets.

And nobody knew what was going on, and nobody asked. Everyone sat quietly with their eyes closed, as if they were dozing, as if to show that they did not consider any of this to be in the least out of the ordinary.

We arrived in Odessa at night, to an unexpected welcome—we were locked inside the railway station and told we would not be allowed out until morning.

And that was that.

We arranged our things on the floor and sat down on top of them. It all felt very cosy. We were not being searched and we were not being shot at—what more could we want?

Hovering near me just before dawn, I saw a shadowy figure, a yellow vanity case in a delicate hand.

“Armand Duclos?”

“Yes.”

He too had been on our train. He sat down beside me and started talking. In his vanity case he was carrying some exceptionally important documents. He had already been offered a million dollars, but nothing would induce him to part with them.

“I think you should part with them.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I really don’t know. But it’s exhausting me terribly—never being able to let go of this vanity case.”

I dozed off. When I awoke, Armand was no longer there. By my feet lay his treasure, abandoned.

In the morning the station doors were unlocked and we were free to go out into the city. When the porters were piling our luggage into cabs, Armand’s vanity case, which had no lock, fell open—and out tumbled a bottle of Rue de la Paix[65] and a nail file. And nothing more.

Time passed without any of us so much as glimpsing Armand. In the end we placed an advertisement in the paper: “Can the clairvoyant Armand Duclos please divine the location of his vanity case!”

Followed by a name and address.

So began our days in Odessa.

The same faces appeared once again. And once again people came out with all the same nonsense.

People we thought had returned to Moscow proved to be here in Odessa. Those who should have been in Odessa had long since returned to Moscow.

And nobody knew anything for certain about anyone.

The man in charge of Odessa was the young, gray-eyed General Grishin-Almazov—and no one knew anything for certain about him either.[66] Even he himself seemed a little unsure how he had come to be the city’s military governor. He was, I suppose, a minor Napoleon—and his personality, like Napoleon’s, mattered less than the historical forces at play around him.

Grishin-Almazov was energetic, cheerful, and strong. He flaunted his buoyant energy; he wanted everyone to know about it. He loved literature and theater and there were rumors that he had once been an actor.

One day he even called on me and very kindly offered me accommodation at the Hotel London. And so I got a wonderful room—number sixteen. Vladimir Burtsev had stayed there before me and so there were piles of The Common Cause in every corner.[67]

Grishin-Almazov liked pomp and ceremony. When he visited me in the hotel, he always left a whole entourage in the corridor and two guards at the main entrance.

He was kind and considerate, easy to be with. He often spoke as if he had stepped straight from the pages of Yushkevich’s Leon Drey.[68]

“It’s very cold today,” he would say. “I emphasize the word: very.”

“Are you comfortable in this room? I emphasize the word: you.”

“Do you have books for reading? I emphasize the word: for.”

He encouraged the hotel commandant—a bearded colonel who used to walk around all day long with two wonderful white spitzes—to take special care of me.

Grishin-Almazov was, in short, extremely courteous.

These were difficult months for him.

“The omens bode ill”—it was not for nothing that this was a catch-phrase of the time.

As the Bolsheviks drew nearer, people were little by little being robbed of all they owned; criminal gangs had taken over the abandoned quarries that formed entire catacombs under the city. Grishin-Almazov once tried to negotiate with one of the ringleaders—the notorious “Mishka the Japanese.”[69] This evidently achieved little—from then on Grishin was unable to drive around town at anything less than full speed, since he had been promised “a bullet at a bend in the road.”

Nevertheless, people did creep out of their unheated flats in the evenings. They went to clubs and theaters to entertain one another with terrifying rumors. When it was time to go back home, they would gather in groups and get themselves an escort—usually about half a dozen students, armed with whatever they could lay their hands on. Rings would be tucked away inside cheeks, watches hidden in shoes. This was of little help.

“So the scoundrel cocks his ear, then homes in on the ticking. I tell him, ‘That’s the sound of my heart, I’m frightened.’ But why would they believe an honest man?”

The brigands would stop cab drivers, unharness their horses, and lead them down into their catacombs.

But we were not easily deterred. All night long, the theaters, clubs and restaurants remained crowded with people. Fabulous sums were lost at cards.

In the morning, stupefied by wine, gambling, and cigar smoke, bankers and sugar manufacturers would emerge from these clubs and blink their puffy eyelids at the sun. Shadowy figures from Moldavanka[70] would be hanging about in doorways, sifting the piles of nutshells and sausage skins for scraps and leftovers. Their eyes hungry and sullen, they would stand and watch as the revelers walked away.[71]