Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea

21

LIFE ON board was settling into a routine.

Those first days of heroics, when Colonel S had stood on the deck, rolled up his sleeves, and kneaded dough for flatbreads, a gold bracelet jingling on his handsome white wrist, while a famous statistician sat beside him and calculated in a loud voice the total weight of the bread to be baked, in proportion to the number of working souls on board, and then half-souls and quarter-souls—those first days of heroic amateurism were long gone.

Now our rations were being supervised by the cook, Chinese Misha.

Misha was a consumptive, an old man with the face of a startled old maid. When he had no work to do and felt like a rest, he would squat down and puff on a special pipe that allowed the smoke to be drawn through a bowl of water. A kind of hookah.

Another Chinese, a rather foolish young man by the name of Akyn, said that until only recently Misha had been fit and healthy, but that he had once got so very angry and carried on swearing so long and so loudly that he had “torn his throat.”

And there was a third Chinese man—a general servant and laundry hand.

I began to take an interest in the Chinese language.

“Akyn, how do you say ‘old man’ in Chinese?”

“Tasolomanika,” Akyn replied.

“And ‘glass’?”

“Tasagalasika.”

Chinese sounded surprisingly similar to Russian.

“And how do you say ‘captain’?”

“Tasakapitana.”

Hm… The words seemed to be almost the same.

“And ‘ship’?”

“Tasashipa.”

Astonishing!

“And ‘hat’?”

“Tasahata.”

We were joined by a midshipman I knew.

“I’m learning Chinese. It sounds remarkably like Russian.”

The midshipman began to laugh.

“Yes, I overheard. He thinks you’re getting him to learn Russian. What he’s been saying to you is his idea of Russian. You’re a fool, Akyn!”

“Tusafulaka!” Akyn readily agreed.

The days passed monotonously by.

We ate rice with corned beef. We drank disgusting water from the desalinator.

We didn’t talk about the past, we didn’t think about the future. We knew that, in all probability, we would indeed reach Novorossiisk, but who and what we would meet there we did not know.

The Shilka was supposed to be going all the way to Vladivostok. I very much hoped it would. I could meet up there with my friend M, then return to Moscow by way of Siberia. There was no reason for me to remain in Novorossiisk. And what would I find to do there?

In the meantime I used to wander about the deck at night. I would stand for a while on the moonlit side, then cross over to where it was dark.

I had grown accustomed to the steamer’s various sounds. Lying on my narrow bench in our bathroom-cabin, I would listen to the clatter of the tiller chain and the stamping of the cadets’ feet as they swept the deck.

The passengers had shaken down, each finding his or her place like potatoes in a sack. An old dignitary who looked like a fat Tatar had attached himself to a young woman from Kiev, a plump little teacher.

“So, do you continue to maintain,” the dignitary would say, his voice as deep and booming as that of any general, “do you really continue to maintain that curd dumplings are tastier than cold botvinya soup?”[112]

And he would shake his head reproachfully.

“Ay, ay, ay! Can you really not see that curd cheese is something truly vile?”

“No, curd dumplings are delicious,” the teacher would reply, pouting her lips. “You just want to tease me. That’s the kind of man you are.”

What she meant by this was unclear. But the dignitary liked it anyway and looked at the teacher with pleasure. She was as round as a cherry; she had tight pigtails and wore a dirty raspberry-pink ribbon around her neck.

O the engineer had taken on the role of chief mechanic and was spending most of his time in the engine room.

V, who had gotten me out of Odessa, had sunk into melancholy. He ate double portions of rice to which he would add slices of stone-hard salami bought long ago in Sebastopol. After eating all this with gusto and with tears in his eyes, he would say, “I’m afraid we’ll end up starving to death.”

There was a young woman who had been a maid to a count. She would emerge from the hold in the evening, wrapped in a precious Manila shawl, and stand sadly by the ship’s rail. Resting her chin on her fist, she would quietly sing:

Once, we happened to anchor for a few hours alongside a coal freighter. The freighter was black all over, all smoke and soot. She was called the Violetta.

One of her sailors, himself as black as a lamp wick, kept staring at this count’s maid wrapped in a shawl. He would move away from the side of the ship, then reappear. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.

“Looks like our Traviata has made a conquest!” the passengers joked.

But the proud maid did not deign even to glance at the soot-covered sailor.

But when the Violetta weighed anchor, the sailor suddenly leant over the side of the freighter and shouted, “Anyuta! Is that you?”

The maid was dumbfounded. She looked up. She turned white.

“Lord have mercy! I don’t believe it… Your Excellency! It’s the count, our count… Heavens! Who’d have thought it?”

And turning to face us, she said, as if in a trance, “No one had any idea what had become of him. I did my best, I took care of his belongings for a long time, but in the end everything was looted anyway.” As she spoke, she kept twisting the ends of the precious shawl in her hands. “Everything went, everything was looted.”

How long had we been at sea? Eight days? Ten days? One person said eleven. Surely not!

In the afternoon, when my cabin-bathroom was unoccupied, I would lie on the narrow bench and think about how very little there was—only a thin layer of wood and metal—between me and the cold blue abyss. There were fish swimming about not far below; jellyfish were coiling and uncoiling their long arms and a crab was waving his claws. The crab had hooked itself to a deep underwater cliff and was staring after the bottom of our ship as it glided by: Maybe someone would come tumbling down for its breakfast. Wasn’t there sure to be at least one person who had reached the end of their tether? And still further down were rocks, seaweed, and some whiskered monster slowly moving its tentacles, waiting.

They say the ocean carries the bodies of the drowned to the shores of South America. Not far from these shores lies the deepest spot in the world—and there, some two miles down, can be found crowds of the dead: fishermen, friends and foes, soldiers and sailors, grandfathers and grandchildren—a whole standing army of the dead. The strong salt water preserves them well, and they sway there gently year upon year. An alien element neither accepts nor changes these children of earth.

I close my eyes and gaze into the transparent green water far beneath me… A merry shoal of tiny fish is swimming by. A school of tiny fish. Evidently they are being led by some wise fish, some fish sage and prophet. With what touching obedience the entire shoal responds to his slightest movement. If he moves to the right, they all move to the right too. If he turns back, so do they all. And there are a large number of these fish. Probably about sixty of them. Circling, darting this way and that way, wheeling about… Oh little fish, little fish, can you trust this leader of yours? Are you sure your foremost philosopher-fish is not simply a fool?

Soon we would be in Novorossiisk.

No one was particularly happy about this. It was, rather, a source of anxiety.

Those with family in Novorossiisk were no happier than anyone else. Would their family still be there? What might have happened to them was anyone’s guess.

The Shilka’s radio was now more or less functioning, but we had been unable to make contact with anyone. We were sailing into the unknown. It might be good; it might be evil.

The days dragged by, long and dreary.

How strange it was several years later to hear these ragged lines—now smartened up and set to music—being sung from the stage of the Salle Gaveau…[113]

As if I’d thrown the lines out to sea in a sealed bottle—and the waves had carried this bottle away to distant, happier shores. Someone had found the bottle and opened it. There had been a public announcement. People had come together and my SOS had been read aloud to everyone… To everyone, I repeat everyone, everyone without exception…