Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea

2

THE DAY for our departure was constantly being postponed.

First, there would be delays with someone’s travel permit. Then it would turn out that our hope of hopes, our Nose-in-Boots, had yet to return to his frontier post.

My own preparations were more or less complete. My trunk was now full. Another trunk, in which I had packed a number of old Russian shawls (the latest of my crazes), had been stowed away in Lolo’s apartment.

But what if the authorities suddenly declared some “Week of Poverty”—or, for that matter, a “Week of Elegance”—and all these shawls were confiscated?

In the event of trouble, I asked Lolo to state that the trunk was of proletarian origin, that it belonged to Fedosya, his former cook. And to make all this more convincing and to ensure that the trunk was treated with proper respect, I put a portrait of Lenin inside it, with the inscription, “Darling Fedosya, whose memory I shall treasure with the deepest affection. Your loving Vova.”[14]

Not even these measures proved of any help.

Those last Moscow days passed by in a turbid whirl. People appeared out of the mist, spun around and faded from sight; then new people appeared. It was like standing on a riverbank in the spring twilight and watching great blocks of ice float past: On one block is something that could be either a cart packed with straw or a Ukrainian peasant hut; on another block are scorched logs and something that looks like a wolf. Everything spins around a few times and then the current sweeps it away forever. And never will you learn what it really was.

Various engineers, doctors, and journalists made brief appearances. Now and then some actress or other would show up.

A landowner I knew passed through on his way from Petersburg to his estate in Kazan. From Kazan he wrote that the peasants had looted his home and that he had been doing the rounds of their huts buying back his paintings and books. In one hut he had seen a miracle: a portrait of me painted by Schleifer,[15] hanging in the icon corner next to Saint Nicholas the Miracle Worker. The woman who had been allotted this portrait had taken it into her head that I was a holy martyr.

Lydia Yavorskaya was cast up on our shores.[16] She arrived unexpectedly, as elegant as ever, and talked about how we must all join forces and organize something. Just what, I never understood. She was accompanied by some kind of boy scout in shorts, whom she referred to rather solemnly as “M’sieur Sobolev.” The block of ice spun around, and they floated away into the mist.

Mironova made a no less sudden appearance. She performed a few pieces at a little theater on the outskirts of town and disappeared too.

Then a woman I liked very much, an actress from some provincial town, floated into our circle. Someone stole her diamonds, and she turned for help to a criminal investigations commissar. This commissar turned out to be someone kind and good-natured. He did what he could to help and then, learning that she would be spending the evening with a group of writers, asked her to take him along with her. He adored literature but had never set eyes on a living writer; nothing could make him happier than to glimpse us in the flesh. The actress asked our permission, then brought him along. Never in my life have I seen someone so tall. His voice was like a great bell high above us, but the words this bell sounded were surprisingly sentimental: well-known children’s verses, and declarations that until this moment his life had been only a matter of mind—or “moind,” as he put it—but that now his heart had awoken.

He spent day after day pursuing criminals and bandits. He’d set up what he called a museum of crime, and he showed us his collection of complex instruments for sawing through locks, snapping off door chains, and slicing silently through iron bolts. He showed us the small tool kits with which a professional burglar goes out to work. Each little case contained a small flashlight, along with a bite to eat and a small bottle of eau de cologne. I was surprised by the eau de cologne.

“Who’d have thought it? Such refinement. What makes them want to douse themselves with eau de cologne when they’re in such danger, when every moment is precious?”

His explanation was simple enough. The eau-de-cologne was a substitute for vodka, which was no longer obtainable.

After catching a few of his bandits, the commissar would join our little circle in the evening. He would show deep feelings; he would express astonishment that we really were the people we said we were. And at the end of the evening he would walk me home. There was something rather frightening about walking at night, down the bleak streets, beside this extraordinarily tall figure. All around us were alarming rustles, stealthy footsteps, screams, sometimes shots. Yet none of these was as frightening as the giant who was my guard.

Sometimes the telephone would ring late in the evening. It was our guardian angel whose heart had awoken. He was phoning to check that everything was all right with us.

After we’d recovered from the shock of the sudden ringing, we would recite:

Our guardian angel kept an eye on us until the very moment of our departure. He took us to the railway station and guarded our luggage, which was clearly an object of interest to the Cheka officers there.

All of us who were leaving felt a great deal of sorrow. There was a sorrow we all shared, and then we each had our own individual sorrow. Sorrow lay somewhere behind our eyes, deep behind our pupils. There it glimmered—like the skull and crossbones on the forage caps of the Prussian Death’s Head Hussars. But this was not something we spoke about.

I remember the delicate profile of a young harpist. About three months after we left, she was betrayed and executed. I remember my distress over my young friend Leonid Kannegisser. A few days before the assassination of Uritsky,[18] he’d heard that I was in Petersburg. He telephoned me and said that he very much wanted to see me—but only on neutral territory.

“Why not in my apartment?”

“I’ll explain when we meet.”

We agreed to meet for a meal at the home of some mutual friends.

When we met, Kannegisser said, “People are following me. I don’t want to lead them to your apartment.”

I put this down to adolescent posturing. It was a time when many young people were assuming mysterious airs and pronouncing enigmatic phrases. I thanked him and inquired no further.

He was very melancholy that evening, rather silent.

We recall all too often how, when we last saw some friend of ours, they had sad eyes and pale lips. And we always know, once it is too late, what we ought to have done back then, how we should have taken our friend by the hand and led them away from the shadow of darkness. But there is a mysterious law that does not allow us to disrupt the appointed order, the decreed rhythm. And this is in no way mere egotism or indifference—sometimes it would be easier to stop than to walk on by. The author of The Life of Leonid Kannegisser required us to walk on by, not to disrupt the decreed rhythm of his tragic novel. As if in a dream: You can see everything, you can feel everything, you almost know everything, but you’re unable to stop. You’re compelled to walk on.

Yes, we writers—in the words of a contemporary French colleague—are “imitators of God,” imitators of his creative work. We create worlds and people and we determine their fates, often cruel and unjust. Why we act one way and not some other way, we don’t know. We simply have no choice.

I remember a young actress approaching me during a rehearsal of one of my plays and saying timidly, “May I ask you something? You won’t get angry?”

“You may. I won’t get angry.”

“Why did that poor boy in your play have to be fired? Why do you have to be so cruel? Couldn’t you at least have found him some other job? And then in another play there’s a poor traveling salesman who ends up with egg on his face. Why? It’s horrible for the poor man. Surely there’s some way you can put these things right?”

“I don’t know… I can’t… It isn’t me who decides.”

But her lips were trembling, and she was pleading so pitifully and so touchingly that I promised to write a separate fairy tale in which I would bring together all those I had injured in my plays and stories and somehow compensate them for their suffering.

“Wonderful!” said the actress. “That will be paradise!”

And she kissed me.

“But there’s a problem,” I interrupted. “I’m afraid that this little paradise of ours won’t really comfort anyone at all. No one will believe us. They’ll know we’ve just made it up.”[19]

The day comes. Our train is leaving this morning.

Since the night before, Gooskin has been rushing from me to Averchenko, from Averchenko to his impresario, and from his impresario to the actresses. He keeps going into the wrong apartments and phoning the wrong numbers. At seven o’clock he bursts in on me, panting, covered in sweat, like an overheated horse. He looks at me, then spreads his hands despairingly in the air.

“Of course! Wonderful! Late for the station!”

“Surely not! What’s the time?”

“Seven o’clock, almost ten o’clock. The train leaves at ten. That’s it—it’s all over now.”

Someone gives Gooskin a lump of sugar. Gnawing on it like a parrot, he calms down a little.

A horn sounds in the street below, from the motorcar sent by our guardian angel.

It’s a wonderful autumn morning. Unforgettable. Up above—pale blue, and golden cupolas. Down on the earth—gray and heavy, and eyes glazed over in deep sorrow. Some Red Army soldiers herding along a group of prisoners. A tall old man in a beaver hat carrying a bundle wrapped in a woman’s red calico kerchief. An old lady in a soldier’s greatcoat looking at us through a turquoise lorgnette. A line by a dairy kiosk with a pair of boots displayed in the window.

“Goodbye, Moscow, dearest Moscow! It’s not for long. Just a month. I’ll be back in a month. In one month. And then… No, best not to think.”

“When you’re walking a tightrope,” an acrobat once told me, “you must never imagine that you might fall. On the contrary. You have to believe that everything will work out—and you must hum some little song to yourself.”

A jolly little tune from Silva is going round and round in my head. The words are stunningly inane:

What goose could have composed a jingle like this?

Gooskin is waiting outside the main entrance to the station, along with the commissar whose heart had awoken.

“Moscow, dearest Moscow, farewell! See you in a month!”

That was ten years ago.