Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea

13

SO OUR days in Odessa went by. And then they started to fly faster and faster—so fast that they overtook one another.

Clubs, cabarets, little theaters, all came and went.

Some middle-aged gentlemen called round without introduction to ask me to “lend my name” to some kind of “salon.” A profoundly artistic salon. Including card games and a hot dinner.

“And what will my role be?”

“You will be the hostess and you will receive a monthly fee.”

“But I know nothing about card games and nothing about hot dinners. I think you’re a bit muddled.”

They shuffled about a little, then increased their offer.

It was clear that we did not understand one another.

In the end they managed to find some popular chanteuse. And everything went like clockwork. That is, they would be closed down, pay a bribe, reopen, be closed down again, pay another bribe, etc.

“Do your police take bribes?” I asked Grishin-Almazov.

“How can you ask such a thing! The money goes exclusively to charitable works. I emphasize the word: goes,” he replied buoyantly.

At first we refugees found life in Odessa most entertaining.

“Hardly a city at all—more like one long laugh!”

One Odessa actress kept phoning me. She wanted my songs. She had a grand piano—so I really must go to her apartment.

“All right. I’ll come round tomorrow, about five o’clock.”

A sigh.

“Could you possibly, perhaps, come at six? It’s just that at five we always drink tea…”

“Are you quite sure an hour will be long enough for your tea?”

Sometimes we would all get together in the evenings and read aloud from the newspapers. The writers liked to pile it on thick, and their articles contained many small gems:

“The ballerina danced beautifully, which is more than can be said of the scenery.”

“During the climatic scene of Ostrovsky’s The Storm, with Roshchina-Insarova playing the title role…”

“The artiste performed Ernst’s Elegy quite wonderfully and his violin wept, though he was only wearing a rather ordinary jacket.”

“A steamer drove straight up the pier.”

“On Monday night Raya Lipshits, the merchant’s daughter, broke one of her legs underneath her bicycle.’

But life in Odessa soon began to pall. A joke is not so funny when you’re living inside it. It begins to seem more like a tragedy.

But there was one ray of light. Our much-loved editor Fyodor Blagov[72] arrived in Odessa and started gathering around him the former staff of the Russian Word. The Russian Word was to come out in Odessa. There were a number of us who were keen to write for it, and things quickly began to fall into place.

Around the beginning of spring, the poet Maximilian Voloshin[73] appeared in the city. He was in the grip of a poetic frenzy. Wherever I went, I would glimpse his picturesque silhouette: dense, square beard, tight curls crowned with a round beret, a light cloak, knickerbockers, and gaiters. He was doing the rounds of government institutions and people with the right connections, constantly reciting his poems. There was more to this than was at first apparent. The poems served as keys. To help those who were in trouble Voloshin needed to pass through certain doors—and his poems opened these doors. He’d walk into some office and, while people were still wondering whether or not to announce his presence to their superiors, he would begin to recite. His meditations on the False Dmitry[74] and other Russian tragedies were dense and powerful; lines evoking the fateful burden of history alternated with soaring flights of prophecy. An ecstatic crowd of young typists would gather around him, oohing and aah-ing, letting out little nasal squeals of horrified delight. Next you would hear the clatter of typewriter keys—Voloshin had begun to dictate some of his longer poems. Someone in a position of authority would poke his head around the door, his curiosity piqued, and then lead the poet into his office. Soon the dense, even hum of bardic declamation would start up again, audible even through the closed door.

On one occasion I too received a visit of this nature.

Voloshin recited two long poems and then said that we must do something at once on behalf of the poetess Kuzmina-Karavayeva, who had been arrested (in Feodosya I think), because of some denunciation and was in danger of being shot.[75]

“You’re friends with Grishin-Almazov, you must speak to him straightaway.”

I knew Kuzmina-Karavayeva well enough to understand at once that any such denunciation must be a lie.

“And in the meantime,” said Voloshin, “I’ll go and speak to the Metropolitan.[76] Karavayeva’s a graduate of the theological academy. The Metropolitan will do all he can for her.”

I called Grishin-Almazov.

“Are you sure?” he responded. “Word of honor?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll give the order tomorrow. All right?”

“No, not tomorrow,” I said. “Today. And it’s got to be a telegram. I’m very concerned—we might be too late already!”

“Very well. I will send a telegram. I emphasize the words: I will.”

Kuzmina-Karavayeva was released.

In Novorossiisk, in Yekaterinodar, in Rostov-on-Don—at all the remaining staging posts of our journey—I would again encounter the light cloak, the gaiters, and the round beret crowning the tight curls. On each occasion I heard sonorous verse being declaimed to the accompaniment of little squeals from women with flushed, excited faces. Wherever he went, Voloshin was using the hum—or boom—of his verse to rescue someone whose life was endangered.

My old friend M appeared in Odessa. Bearing a dispatch from Admiral Kolchak in Vladivostok,[77] he had made his way across the whole of Siberia, through areas controlled by the Bolsheviks; the dispatch—written not on paper but on thin cloth—had been sewn into his greatcoat lining. His hosts, a family we both knew, told him I was in Odessa and telephoned me straightaway to tell me to come round. Our meeting was joyful, but strange. M’s hosts were all huddled together in one corner of the room so as not to be in our way. Overcome with emotion, an old family nanny was peering through a crack in the door. Everyone went quiet, waiting with baited breath, imagining the scene they were about to witness: a meeting between two friends each of whom had thought that the other had died. Many tears would be shed…What times we were living through…

I went in.

“Michel! My dear! I’m so glad to see you…”

“Not as glad as I am! Things haven’t been easy. Look at all my gray hairs!”

“Nonsense. I can’t see a single one. But as for me! Just take a look at my left temple. Please don’t make out you can’t see them!”

“Not one. Literally, not even one.”

“No. Come over here—the light’s better. Now what do you call this? What’s this if it isn’t a gray hair?”

“I can’t see even a hint of gray. But as for me! Look—in the light!”

“No. You’re being mean and obstinate!”

“No, it’s me who’s gone gray. You’re just wanting an argument.”

“Some things never change. A true gentleman. Outshining us nobodies in every way!”

The hosts tiptoed reverently out of the room.

After these first moments of shared joy, M told me many interesting things.

M had, in the past, been anything but a military man—though he had served his country during the war. After the revolution, he had returned to his estate. When his hometown was besieged by the Bolsheviks, he had been chosen, as he put it, “to be the town dictator.”

“You won’t believe me, of course, but I have risked my life by carrying in my greatcoat lining decrees bearing my own signature.”

He showed me these decrees. He was telling the truth.

“The Bolsheviks brought up their artillery and began shelling us. We had to run,” he continued. “So there I was, riding through a field of rye. And then I saw two cornflowers right next to each other. There were none anywhere else, just these two. Like two blue eyes. And, would you believe it, I forgot where I was. I didn’t even hear the guns any longer. I stopped my horse, got down, and picked the cornflowers. All around me people were running, shouting, falling to the ground. But somehow I wasn’t even in the least scared. Why was that? Was it bravery?”

He stopped to think.

“And then?”

“Next it was the Volga. It’s absurd! I was in command of a fleet. We didn’t fight at all badly. Remember what a fortune-teller said to me around five years ago? How not long before my death I’d be an officer in the navy? And everyone made jokes about a big stout man like me wearing a hat with little ribbons. Well, the fortune-teller was right. Now I’m on my way to Paris and then—via America and Vladivostok—back to Admiral Kolchak. I’ll return his admiral’s cutlass to him, the one he threw into the water. The sailors fished it out and said I must take it back to him, with their compliments.”[78]

He said he’d seen Olyonushka in Rostov. She was acting in a theater there and living very happily with her husband, who looked like a schoolboy in military uniform. Olyonushka had become a strict vegetarian—she would cook some sort of twigs for herself and steal pieces of meat from her husband’s plate.

“Why not just put some meat on your plate to begin with, Olyonushka?” M had asked.

Olyonushka’s little husband had gone red in the face with agitation: “Oh no, no! Don’t say such things. You’ll make her angry. She has her convictions.”

M was preparing for a long journey. He was in a hurry. It was important to establish more reliable communications with Kolchak and, in particular, to pass on to him various decisions taken by the authorities in Odessa. M was the first messenger to have got through from Kolchak.

He was in good spirits. He believed ardently in Kolchak and the White cause. “I will gladly, and with no thought for myself, carry out this mission that has been entrusted to me. I feel at peace with myself. Only one thing troubles me—my black opal ring. The opal has cracked—cracked in the shape of a cross. What do you think that means?”

I did not say, but there was no doubting this omen. Exactly a month later, M died.

He had very much wanted to get me out of Odessa. “The omens bode ill!”—as people kept saying.

M was leaving on a torpedo boat and he promised to secure me the necessary permissions. But the weather was vile, there were ferocious storms out at sea, and I refused to go with him.

Countless friendly voices were telling M that I would be all right, that he had nothing to worry about:

“No, if Odessa has to be evacuated, we certainly won’t forget Nadezhda Alexandrovna. Surely you understand that!”

“She’ll be first to board the steamer, I give you my word!”

“As if any of us could leave Odessa without first making sure she can leave too! How absurd can you get!”

(Things did indeed get absurd, but not in the way these people meant.)

I was awoken early in the morning. It was very cold. There were blue shadows on M’s pale cheeks.

When someone wakes you early on a blind winter’s morning, it’s always for a farewell, or a funeral, or on account of some misfortune, or some terrible news. And in the dim, sunless light your body trembles; every drop of blood in your body trembles.

There were blue shadows on M’s cheeks.

“Well, farewell. I’m going now. Make the sign of the cross over me.”

“God be with you.”

“This time it probably won’t be for long. Not long at all.”

But in that gloomy dawn, that ghostly image of my future, I had no hope at all of any sweet and simple joys. I repeated quietly, “God be with you. But as for whether we’ll see each other again—who knows? We know nothing at all—every time we part, it’s forever.”

And that was the last we saw of each other.

A year later, the Russian consul in Paris gave me the ring with the black opal.

All M’s other belongings had gone. After M’s death, some opportunist staying in the same hotel had gone into his room and taken everything. He had taken luggage, clothes, linen, rings, a cigarette case, a watch, even little bottles of scent, but he hadn’t dared touch the black opal. He must have sensed something about it.

That opal had an interesting history.

At one time—around the beginning of the war—I had had something of a passion for gemstones. I had studied them and collected legends about them.[79] And an old man by the name of Konoplyov used to come round, bringing precious stones from the Urals, and sometimes even from India. He was someone I felt at ease with—a sweet old man with only one eye. He would spread a piece of black velvet on the table, under the lamp, and with long thin tweezers he called “scoopers” he would reach into the box and take out little shining lights—blue, green and red. He would lay them out on the velvet, examine them, and tell stories about them. Sometimes a stone would misbehave, refusing to yield to the scoopers. It would struggle like a live fledgling, giving off sparks of fear.

“There’s a stubborn one for you,” the old man would grumble. “Balas ruby, orange—a hot orange, see? And here’s a sapphire. Look at how it flowers. Blue, green, like the eye on a peacock’s tail. What matters in a sapphire is not whether it’s light or dark, but at what point it turns lilac, at what point it flowers. You need to understand this.”

You could spend long hours sitting with the tweezers and turning over the cold little lights. I would remember legends: “If you show an emerald to a snake, tears will flow from its eyes. The emerald is the color of the Garden of Eden. Bitterly does the snake remember its sin.”

“Amethyst is a chaste and humble stone. Its touch is cleansing. The ancients used to drink from amethyst cups, lest wine intoxicate them. Of the High Priest’s twelve stones, none was more important than the amethyst. And the Pope blesses Books of Prayer with an amethyst.”

“Ruby is the stone of those who are in love. It intoxicates without touch.”

“Alexandrite—our astonishing stone from the Urals—was first found during the reign of Alexander II. Prophetically, it was named after him. Its shifting colors foretold the tsar’s fate—blossoming days and a bloody sunset.”[80]

“And the diamond, a clear jasper, symbolizes the life of Christ.”

I loved stones. And what wonderful freaks there were among them: a light blue amethyst, a yellow sapphire, another sapphire that was pale blue except for a bright yellow spot of sunlight. Konoplyov called this a “flaw”—but if you ask me, that sapphire had a hot little heart.

Sometimes he would bring a piece of gray rock containing a whole litter of little emeralds. Like children lined up by height—getting smaller and smaller, wan, blind as puppies. They had been hurt; they had been dug up too early. To come to maturity, they would have needed to stay deep in the hot ore for many more millennia.

During this time when I was so in love with stones, the artist Alexander Yakovlev had come round with a few opals.[81] They were strange, dark opals. Some other artist had brought them from Ceylon and asked Yakovlev to sell them for him.

“Opals bring bad luck,” I had said. “I’m not sure I want them. But let me have a word with Konoplyov.”

Konoplyov said, “If you have doubts, you really mustn’t buy them. But let me show you some stones myself, some quite wonderful stones. And I can let you have them for almost nothing. Here, look. A whole necklace.”

He unfolded a chamois cloth and, one after another, took out twelve enormous and unbelievably beautiful opals. Pale moonlit mist. And in the moonlight, crimson and green lights flashing: “Stop… Go… Stop… Go…” The shifting colors both enticed and confused….

“You can have them for nothing,” Konoplyov repeated with a smile.

I was held by the play of the moonlight. You could stare at it and see only a quiet mist. A flash of light—and then, beside it, a second flash that swelled up into a flame. It would engulf the first; then both would vanish.

“For nothing. But there’s something I must tell you. I sold these stones, just as you see them, to Mrs. Martens, the wife of the professor. She liked them very much and bought them. But then, only the next morning, her servant came round with the stones; Mrs. Martens wanted me to take them back. Her husband, Professor Martens, had passed away in the night, quite unexpectedly. So, it’s up to you. If this story doesn’t put you off, please take them, but I won’t try to persuade you.”[82]

I didn’t take Konoplyov’s opals, but I decided to have one of the black ones from Ceylon. That evening I looked at it for a long time. It was beautiful. It had two lights—green and deep blue. And the flame leaping out from the opal was so powerful that it seemed to have a life of its own. It shivered and shimmered not inside the stone but in the air just above it.

I bought one opal. M bought another just like it.

And that’s when it all began.

I can’t say that the opal brought me any specific misfortune. It’s the pale, milky opals that bring death, sickness, sorrow, and separation. This one simply snatched up my life and embraced it with its black flame—until my soul began to dance like a witch on a bonfire. Howls, screeches, sparks, a fiery whirlwind. My whole way of life consumed, burned to ashes. I felt strange, savage, elated.

I kept the stone for about two years and then gave it back to Yakovlev, asking him, if he could, to return it to whoever had brought it to him from Ceylon. I thought that, like Mephistopheles, it needed to retrace its steps, to go back the same way it had come—and the sooner the better. If it tried to go any other way, it would get lost and end up in my hands again. Which was the last thing I wanted.

As for Yakovlev, I know he kept one stone for himself. I don’t know if he kept it for long, but I know that he too was snatched away by a blue-green wave, which spun him round and hurled him into faraway slant-eyed Asia.

And the stone M bought did something similar to his own quiet and peaceful life. His life had been so tranquil: a soft armchair, an ivory paper knife between the rough pages of a book by his favourite poet, languid hands with nails polished like precious stones, a grand piano, a portrait of Oscar Wilde in a tortoiseshell frame, Kuzmin’s poems copied out in a minuscule script…[83]

And then—the languid hands dropped the uncut book. War, revolution, an absurd marriage, being chosen as the “dictator of his home town,” putting his signature to monstrous decrees, guerrilla warfare on the Volga, Admiral Kolchak, a long and terrible journey across Siberia. Odessa. Paris. Death. A deep cross-shaped fissure cutting through the black stone. The end.

New refugees kept appearing in Odessa: from Moscow, Petersburg, and Kiev.

It was easiest to obtain a travel pass if you were an actor or singer. The amount of artistic talent in Russia proved truly remarkable—opera and theater companies began to head south in droves.

“We got out with no trouble at all,” you would hear some Petersburg hairdresser say, smiling serenely. “I was the leading man, my wife was the ingénue, aunty Fima was the coquette, Mama was in charge of the box office and we had eleven prompters. We all got through. Of course, the proletariat was a little puzzled by the number of prompters, but we explained that no element of the dramatic art is more important. Without a prompter a play can’t run at all. And prompters get worn out sitting so still in their booths—and so this crucial element of the art has to be repeatedly replaced by fresh elements.”

There was an opera company made up entirely of noble fathers.

And a ballet company that was all elderly nannies and headmistresses.

Every new arrival adamantly asserted that the Bolshevik regime was falling apart and that, to be honest, it was hardly even worth unpacking one’s bags. But unpack them they did…

There was a general air of excitement, though you couldn’t quite call it high spirits.

“The Entente! The Triple Entente!”

We looked out to sea, hoping to glimpse British or French “pennants.”[84]

Money started slowly disappearing. Shopkeepers would give change in their own special notes, which they would later sometimes fail to recognize.

Everything was getting more expensive by the day. Once, a salesman pointed with tragic solemnity at a piece of cheese he was wrapping for me and said, “Keep an eye on it—it’s growing more expensive by the minute!”

“Well, wrap it up quickly,” I said. “Maybe the paper will slow it down.”

And then, all of a sudden, we lost Grishin-Almazov. He left Odessa incognito, without a word to anyone. There were urgent matters he needed to discuss with Kolchak. It was not long before we heard the tragic news. He was intercepted by the Bolsheviks while crossing the Caspian Sea. Seeing an approaching ship with a red flag, the gray-eyed governor of Odessa threw several cases of documents into the water, leaned over the side, and put a bullet through his forehead. He died the death of a hero.

A hero, Grishin-Almazov. I emphasize the word: hero!

His death evoked little response in Odessa. I noticed only that the hotel commandant’s greetings became more perfunctory and his fluffy dog stopped wagging its tail at me. One day the commandant knocked on my door. Sounding preoccupied, he informed me apologetically that he had found me a room in the International, since the whole of the London was being requisitioned for use as a military headquarters.

I was very sorry to leave my dear room number sixteen where at six o’clock every evening the radiator would warm up a little, where the mirror above the mantelpiece had sometimes reflected the faces of people I loved—the dry, aristocratic face of Ivan Bunin, the pale cameo silhouette of his wife, the piratical Alexey Tolstoy and his lyrical wife Natasha Krandievskaya, and Sergey Gorny, and Lolo, and Nilus and Pankratov.[85]

So there I was, another stage of my journey now over. There were now many behind me—though still many ahead…

And around us we began to glimpse a kind of man we hadn’t seen before—coat collar turned up, constantly looking over his shoulder, quick to slip behind the nearest gate.

“They’re sneaking in already. Yes, I assure you, we are being infiltrated. We saw a face we’d seen before—a commissar from Moscow. He pretended not to know us and made himself scarce.”

“It doesn’t matter… The Entente… they’ll ship in reinforcements…. It’ll be all right.”

And then, all of a sudden, a familiar phrase. It had caught up with us. It might be out of breath, but there it was: “The o-mens boode ill!”

Yet again!