Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea

19

THE LADIES too were required to do their share of labor.

The fresh fish seized from the cargo boat (the stolen fish for which we had been held to account by the French steamer) had to be gutted and cleaned. And so the ladies were called up on deck.

Boards were laid across trestles to form makeshift tables. Knives and salt were distributed and work got underway.

I managed not to appear on deck until all the places at the tables had been taken. I would have liked to dispense a little advice to the housewives (those who don’t know how to work are always generous with their advice), but the sight and smell of the fish entrails forced me to be sensible and go back down again.

On the way I bumped into Mr. Excuse-Me-I’m-Berkin.

“How are you?” he asked cheerfully. Then he lowered his voice and, with an altogether different look on his face, hissed, “Treason! Have you heard?”

He glanced around, then added still more quietly, “The captain’s a traitor. He’s taking us to Sebastopol to hand us over to the Bolsheviks.”

“But that’s nonsense! Who told you that?”

“It was a radio message. A passenger happened to overhear. But hush! Don’t say a word! Not a word—but do warn your friends.”

He looked around once more, pressed a finger to his lips, and made off.

I went back up and found the midshipman in charge of the radio.

“Tell me—is the ship’s radio working?”

“No, not yet. I’m hoping we’ll get it working by tomorrow.”

“And are you certain there are no Bolsheviks in Sebastopol?”

“I’m afraid no one can be certain, since we’re unable to receive news. And we haven’t yet met any ships coming the other way. But we’ll do everything possible to find out in good time. Would you like to have a look at the radio?”

Oh Berkin, Berkin! Dear Excuse-Me-I’m-Berkin! Where, oh where did you get all these mad ideas from?

Meanwhile, dinner was being served downstairs: fish soup and rice with corned beef.

Passengers were forming two long lines, with bowls, plates, and spoons.

I had neither bowl nor spoon, and no idea where to get hold of such items. One kind soul generously gave me the lid from a tin teapot.

“You can use it for the rice.”

Good. Now I just needed a spoon. I went into the kitchen. There I found two Chinese men—the cook and his assistant. Neither understood a word I said.

“Do you have a spoon? A spoon? Understand? Spoon?”

“Dututanpun?” the cook replied.

“Yes, yes, a spoon. Give me a spoon!”

“Dututanpun,” his assistant repeated placidly—and the two men returned to their work, entirely ignoring me.

“I’ll bring it back. Understand? I’ll pay for it.”

I held out some money.

Suddenly, like a storm cloud out of nowhere, a young woman was bearing down on me. She looked like a pike.

“Bribery!” she shrieked. “Employing money to bribe the ship’s staff! Attempting to buy privileges beyond the reach of the poor!”

“What’s the matter?” I asked in amazement. “All I need is a spoon. If they don’t want a tip, they can just give me the spoon—I’m happy either way.”

At the word “tip,” the girl became apoplectic.

“Here on this ship we have no nobility, no tips, and no money. Everyone has to work and everyone receives the same rations. I saw you trying to employ money in order to obtain privileges. I’m ready to bear witness to all I have seen and heard. I shall go to the captain and tell him everything.”

She spun round and flew out of the kitchen.

Not only was I a depraved criminal but I was also, for all my depravity, still in need of a spoon.

Gloomily, I started back up again. I met one of our senior officers.

“Goodness me!” he said jovially. “Have you finished your dinner already?”

I gave a despairing shrug and said, “I have neither bowl nor spoon. I am, moreover, being reported to the captain.”

“What on earth for?” said the astonished officer. “Go to your cabin and I’ll have your dinner sent to you straightaway.”

And ten minutes later I was regally installed on our bathroom bench. I was sitting cross-legged, with a plate of rice and corned beef on my knees. Sticking up out of the rice were a fork and a spoon. How high fate had raised me!

Late in the evening, after I’d lain down on my refugee’s sealskin coat, someone flung open the cabin door. Silhouetted against the murky light of the corridor was the pike-maiden.

“Are you asleep?”

“Not yet.”

“You’ve got a guitar in your luggage, haven’t you?”

“Yes. Why?”

Sleepy as I was, I felt frightened. What if she went and reported me to the captain for carrying musical instruments “while the people are starving.”

“No,” I said to myself. “They can throw all my clothing overboard if they like—but I’m not going to let them have my guitar.”

“Please be so kind as to hand over your guitar,” the pike-maiden pronounced icily. “It’s required in the hospital bay, where we have a sickly element.”

This was the first time I’d heard of the sick being healed with guitars.

“No,” I replied no less icily. “I’m not giving you my guitar. Anyway, it’s down in the hold—they’re not going to go through every last item of luggage just because of you and your whims.”

“So that’s your attitude toward your civic duty, is it?” the maiden replied, gasping hysterically. “Well, you haven’t heard the last of this!”

How I wished she would go away! Never would I let her get her fishy fins on my beloved guitar, on my singing joy!

The “sickly element” would, no doubt, overtighten the pegs and then begin to strum away:

How horrible!

I so love her, my “seven-stringed friend.”[108]

Ever since I was a little girl I have known the power of strings.

I remember first hearing Zabel’s “Solo for Harp” during a ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre.[109] It affected me so deeply that, when we got back home, I went alone into the living room and wrapped my arms around a stiff sofa cushion. On it was a dog, embroidered in beads. I wept, pressing my face against its beaded paws until it hurt; I knew no way to speak of the ineffable bliss, the exquisite anguish that, for the first time in my life on earth, those strings had awoken in me.

The sound of strings was one of the first musical joys known to mankind. Still earlier, of course, came the pipe, the shepherds’ pipe. But in the first prayers, in the first places of worship there was always the solemn, exalted song of the strings.

Egyptian women and Assyrian priestesses, with small harps that they held in their hands…

The Book of Psalms. David’s instructions to the choirmaster: “With stringed instruments, upon an eight-string lyre. A psalm of David.”[110]

Then lyres and lutes and—at last—the guitar. The strings of the guitar sounded all through the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, making them sing, making them weep. Through their songs the minstrels, minnesingers, and wandering poet-musicians spread love charms and the sorcery of the grimoires. And so, through strings, all the poetry of medieval life found its way into people’s hearts.

In the depths of the Middle Ages, when silent recluses concealed their true thoughts like secret lamps in the dark cells of the monasteries, when their agonized search for some great principle of reason in life was meeting no reward but the fires of the Inquisition—in those dark days the joys of this earth were known only in song, in songs spread by singer-poets with guitars in their hands.

In Russia, only the gypsies understood the guitar’s true beauty. The Russians themselves treated her as if she were a mere balalaika. They strummed drearily away or picked out the harmonies as they sang: “I shall go to the banks of the strea-ea-eam…”

Gypsies never strum. They know how to make guitar strings speak, how to make them burst out in fiery cries of emotion, how to silence a stormy chord in an instant with a gentle but commanding hand.

Everyone has their own way of touching a string—and the string, in turn, responds differently to each person. The string too has its moods and does not always give the same response even to a touch it knows well. “It’s the humidity,” people say, or “It’s the dryness.”

Maybe. But then are not our own moods affected by our milieu—by the humidity or dryness around us?

My old, yellowed guitar with its slender and resonant sound-board—just think how many sounds it has accumulated over the years, how many vibrations from fingers that have touched it in song! A guitar like this will sing of its own accord—you need only reach out to it. Within it there is always a string attuned to some string deep within you, to some string that will respond with a strangely physical sensation of melancholy and passion deep in your chest, in what was understood by the ancients to be the home of the soul.

No, I could not yield my guitar to the pike-maiden for the entertainment of some “sickly element.”