Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea

29

AND so the day came for me to travel to Yekaterinodar, to take part in the two evenings of my work being put on at the local theater.

Tired and downcast, I left Novorossiisk at nightfall. The train was overflowing, hordes of soldiers and officers filling every car. Evidently they were on their way north, to the front. But they did not look as if they had been on leave for any length of time; they looked too drawn, too worn out, too haggard. Perhaps they were simply being flung from one front to another. I don’t know.

I found myself squashed into a third class car with a broken window and no lighting.

Everywhere I looked—on the benches, on the floor—were figures in brown greatcoats. The car was stifling and full of smoke.

Many of the soldiers fell asleep before the train had even set off.

Standing diagonally across from me, leaning against the side of the car, was a tall, emaciated officer.

“Andreyev!” someone called out. “Come and sit down, we can squash up a bit.”

“I can’t,” the officer replied. “I’m better off standing.”

And so he remained all through the night. His head was thrown back and I could see the whites of his half-closed eyes. On his brow, beneath the skewed peak of his cap, a round crimson spot was slowly going black. As if nailed to the mast like the captain of the Flying Dutchman, he stood there almost without moving, just rocking a little when the train gave a jolt, his long, thin legs spread wide apart. No one talked much, apart from one officer who was sitting beside the smashed window. This man was telling some endless story, never pausing, and I soon realized he was simply talking to himself and that no one was listening to him.

Then a man sitting near me asked somebody else a question: “Have you heard about Colonel K?”

This colonel was a man I had already heard about. Apparently the Bolsheviks had tortured this colonel’s wife and two children to death right in front of him. Ever since, whenever he took any Bolshevik prisoners, he had had them put to death then and there, and always in exactly the same way. He would sit on the porch drinking tea and have the prisoners strung up in front of him, first one, then another, then another.

While he carried on drinking tea.

This was the man my neighbour was asking about.

“Yes, I have,” came the reply. “He’s insane.”

“No, he isn’t. For him, what he’s doing is entirely normal. You see, after all he’s been through, it would be very, very strange if he were to act in a more ordinary way. That really would be insane. There’s a limit to what the soul can take, to what human reason can endure. And that’s as it should be. The way Colonel K behaves is, for him, entirely normal. Understand?”

The other man said nothing. But someone sitting a little further away, on the other side of the aisle, said loudly, “They gouged a boy’s eyes out, a ten-year-old boy. They cut them right out. If you’ve never seen a face like that with gouged-out eyes, you can’t imagine how terrible it looks. He lived on like that for another two days, screaming the whole time.”

“That’s enough… Don’t…”

“And the agent—did you hear about him? They tied his hands and stuffed his mouth and nose with earth. He suffocated.”

“No, Colonel K is not insane. In his world, in the world he lives in, he’s perfectly normal.”

It was dark in the car.

The wan light coming in through the broken glass—moonlight, I think, although we could not see the moon itself—picked out the dark silhouettes of the men close to the window. Everyone else—those sitting further from the window or on the floor—formed a single, dense, murky shadow. This shadow muttered, swayed, cried out. Were these men asleep? Or awake but out of their wits?

One voice pronounced clearly, too loudly, and with excessive effort, “I can’t go on anymore. Since 1914 they’ve been torturing me, torturing me, and now… now I’m dead. I’m dead…”

It was the voice of a man who was not alive, a man no longer conscious of himself. It was like the voices of those who are no more—at a spiritualist séance or on an old gramophone recording….

Our old, beaten-up train car was rattling every one of its bolts, its rusty wheels squealing and screeching as it rolled these semi-corpses along toward torment and death.

Day began to break.

In the half light the rocking heads and pale faces seemed more terrible still.

These men were asleep. Talking in their sleep. And if one of them awoke, he would at once quiet down, straighten his stiff shoulders, and smooth down his greatcoat. Calmly and simply, as if nothing were the matter. He didn’t know what his soul had been weeping about as he slept.

But most terrible of all was the man still standing upright before them, greatcoat wide open, his thin, dead head thrown right back, a bullet hole in his forehead.

He was facing us, like a commanding officer preparing to lead his men forward. A man with a bullet hole in his forehead, the captain of the Flying Dutchman—the ship of death.[132]

The train reached Yekaterinodar early in the morning. The city was still asleep.

The bright sunny day, the dusty streets, and the creaking horse-drawn cab quickly brought me back to my usual, more spacious state of mind. The previous night had vanished, dying away like a distant moan.

“It’s all right,” I said to myself encouragingly. “Soon the Shilka will be allowed to go east. And then in Vladivostok I’ll be with M, a loyal and devoted friend. I’ll get my breath back. And by then things will be a bit clearer…”

I began to think about these two evenings of mine; we needed to start rehearsing straightaway.

When I reached the house of the impresario who had invited me, the shutters were still closed. It seemed everyone was still asleep.

I rang the bell—and Olyonushka let me in. She was one of the company.