Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea

3

OUR JOURNEY got off to a fairly smooth start.

We were in a second-class train car, each with a seat of our own. We were sitting the way passengers are generally meant to sit—no one was curled up underneath the seats or lying up above in the luggage rack.

My impresario, the pseudonymous Gooskin, became very agitated: Why was the train taking so long to leave? And then, when it finally did leave, he said it was ahead of schedule.

“And that’s a bad omen. Goodness knows what will happen now!”

The moment Gooskin climbed into the train car, his appearance changed bizarrely. Anyone would have thought he had been traveling for ten days—and in the most appalling conditions. His shoes were unlaced, his collar unbuttoned, and there was a round green spot beneath his Adam’s apple—evidently from a copper stud. Strangest of all, his cheeks were covered in stubble—as if he had been three or four days without shaving.

Along with our own group, there were three other ladies in the compartment. They were talking very quietly, sometimes even in a whisper, about matters all too close to our immediate concerns: who had managed to smuggle their money and diamonds abroad, and how.

“Have you heard? The Prokins managed to get away with their entire fortune. They used their old grandmother as a mule.”

“But how come the grandmother didn’t get searched?”

“How can you ask? She’s so unpleasant. Who would dare?”

“As for the Korkins, they were really smart. And all on the spur of the moment! Madame Korkina, who’d already been searched, was standing to one side. And then, all of a sudden—‘Ow! Ow!’—she twists her ankle. She can’t walk, she can’t even take a single step. Her husband, who hasn’t been searched yet, says to a Red Army soldier, ‘Please pass her my stick. She needs it.’ The soldier gives her the stick. And it’s the stick they’ve hollowed out and stuffed with diamonds. How do you like that?”

“The Bulkins have a teapot with a false bottom.”

“Fanichka took a huge diamond out of the country—you’ll never believe this—by stuffing it up her own nose.”

“All very well for her—she’s got a fifty-carat nose. But we aren’t all as lucky as her.”

Then they told the tragic tale of how a certain Madame Fook cleverly hid a diamond in an egg. She made a small hole in the shell of a raw egg, put the diamond inside, and then hard-boiled the egg: Who could find her diamond now? So she puts the egg into her food basket and sits there calm as can be, smiling away. Along come some Red Army soldiers. They search the luggage. And then one of them grabs that very egg, peels it and wolfs it down before Madame Fook’s very eyes. The poor woman traveled no further. She got off at that station and trailed around after that wretched Red Army soldier for three days on end, not once letting him out of her sight, as if he were a little child.

“And then?”

“What do you think? Nothing! She went back home empty-handed.”

Then they started talking about all sorts of cunning ploys—things they did to trap spies during the war.

“They grew so crafty, those spies! Just imagine: They started drawing plans of fortresses on their backs and then coloring them over. Well, military intelligence aren’t stupid either, they caught on to this pretty quick. They started washing the backs of any suspicious characters. Of course, there were unfortunate errors. Back home in Grodno they caught this gentleman—he was dark-haired and suspicious as they come, but after a good wash he turned out to be the most honest of blondes. Military intelligence was most apologetic…”

Peaceful discussion of these alarming topics made our journey both entertaining and informative, but we hadn’t even been going three hours when the train stopped and everyone was ordered to disembark.

We get off the train, drag our luggage out, stand on the platform for about two hours, and then get onto a different train. This train is third class only and packed full. Some malicious-looking peasant women with pale eyes are sitting opposite us. They clearly don’t like the look of us.

“Here they be on our train,” says a woman with a pockmarked face and a wart. “Here they be on our train, but where and why they’re going, they haven’t a clue.”

“Like dogs off a chain,” agrees the other one. She has a grimy headscarf and is using the corners of it, rather gracefully, to wipe her duck-like nose.

What irritates them most of all is a Pekinese dog—a tiny, silken ball lying on the lap of the older of our two actresses.

“A dog on a train! Look at her—a hat on her head and here she be on a train with a dog!”

“Should’ve left it at home. Nowhere for folks to sit and here she be with this hound of hers!”

“But she’s not in your way,” says the actress, her voice quivering as she defends her hound. “Anyway, it’s not as though you’d be sitting here on my lap!”

“No, we’d not be travelin’ around with dogs,” the women continue relentlessly.

“I can’t leave her at home on her own. She’s delicate. She needs more care than a little child.”

“Huh?”

“What d’ye mean by that then?” shouts the pockmarked one, leaping to her feet in fury. “Here, listen to this! This one here with the hat says our children’s worse than dogs! We’re not standing for this, are we?”

“Huh? Us? We be dogs and she ain’t?”

Then this discussion—and there’s no knowing where it might have led—is interrupted by a wild shriek. The shriek comes from the space at the end of the train car. Everyone jumps up and rushes to investigate. The pockmarked woman goes as well, and, when she returns, she tells us in the most amiable of tones that a thief had been caught and that they’d been about to “drop ’im under the car”—only the thief had beaten them to it. He’d jumped off the moving train.

“Charming characters!” says Averchenko. “Try to ignore them. Think about something cheerful.”

I do as he says. Tonight, the lights will be switched on at the theater, people will gather and sit in their seats and will listen to:

Oh why do I have to remember this? This idiotic refrain—spinning round and round in my poor head!

The women carry on chatting happily about how jolly it would have been to throw the thief under the wheels and about how he must be lying on the ground now with a smashed head.

“Lynch every one of ’em! Yes, him and every one of his sort. Poke out their eyes, rip out their tongues, cut off their ears, and then tie a stone round their necks and—into the water with ’em!”

“Back in our village we’d drag ’em under the ice on a rope, from ice-’ole to ice-’ole…”

“Oftentimes they was burned on a fire.”

Thank God they were diverted by the thief. Otherwise who knows what they’d have done to us?

“How awful!” I say to Averchenko.

“Sh!”

“I don’t mean them,” I continue. “I have torments of my own, I can’t get Silva out of my head.”

I shall think instead about how we might have been roasted, maybe that will do the trick. First I think about the pockmarked woman sitting opposite me. She’d be hard at it! She’s thorough. She’d be blowing on the kindling. And Gooskin? He’d be shouting, “Please excuse me, but we have a legally binding contract! You are preventing her from fulfilling her part of our agreement, and you are bankrupting me as an impresario! First she must pay me a forfeit!”

The “stupid cupid” gradually withdraws. It fades and dies away.

The train pulls into a station. Women with bundles start bustling about. The thump of soldiers’ boots. Bags, sacks, and baskets obscure the light of day. And then, on the other side of the glass, I see Gooskin. His face is twisted in terror. For the past few hours he’s been in a different car. What on earth has happened to him?

He looks ghastly. White all over, gasping for air.

“Get out quick! We must take a different route. This route’s out of the question. I’ll explain later.”

Well then, so be it. We get off the train. I’m rather slow, the last one out. When I finally jump down onto the platform, a ragged beggar boy comes up to me and says very clearly, “Stupid Cupid can’t be canned. Fifty kopeks, please!”

“Wha-at?”

“Fifty kopeks! Stupid Cupid.”

It’s all over. I’ve gone mad. I’m hearing things. My weak nerves must have been incapable of withstanding the combination of Silva and the people’s wrath.

I look around for our group; I need moral support. Averchenko is studying his gloves with extraordinary attentiveness and doesn’t respond to my mute appeal. I slip the boy fifty kopeks. I still don’t understand, but I have my suspicions.

“Admit it!” I say to Averchenko.

He gives an embarrassed laugh.

“While you were still in the train car,” he says, “I asked the boy if he wanted to earn a little money. I said a passenger in a little red hat was about to get off the train. ‘You go up to her,’ I told him, ‘and say, “Stupid Cupid can’t be canned!” She gives fifty kopeks to everyone who says that to her.’ Well, he seems like a bright boy!”

Gooskin, who’s been busying himself with our luggage, walks over. He is drenched in sweat.

“Wonderful!” he says in a ghastly whisper. “That bandit has gone and got himself shot!”

“What bandit?”

“That commissar of yours! What don’t you understand? Well? He’s been executed for robbery and bribe-taking. We can’t cross the border here. We’ll be fleeced—and then slaughtered to boot. We must cross somewhere else.”

All right then, a different border crossing it is. About two hours later we get onto another train and set off in another direction.

We arrived at the border station in the evening. It was cold. We wanted to go to bed. But we were anxious: What did this place have in store for us? When would they let us through and how would we continue our journey?

Gooskin and Averchenko’s impresario went off into the station building to assess the situation and conduct negotiations, giving us strict instructions to stay where we were. The omens did not bode well.

The platform was empty. Occasionally a dark figure would appear—maybe a guard, maybe a peasant woman in a soldier’s great-coat. This figure would cast a suspicious look in our direction, then disappear again. We waited for a long time. Finally, Gooskin emerged—escorted by no fewer than four men.

One of the four came rushing up to us. I shall never forget him: a thin, dark little man with a crooked nose, wearing a student’s cap and a huge, magnificent beaver coat that trailed behind him like a royal mantle in some throne-room portrait. The coat was brand new, evidently only just ripped off somebody’s back.

The little man ran up to us. With what seemed like a habitual movement he hitched up his trousers with his left hand, then raised his right hand high in the air with inspired rapture, and exclaimed, “Are you Teffi? Are you Averchenko? Bravo, bravo, and bravo! Here I am at your service, the commissar of arts for this shtetl,[20] here at your service! Our cultural needs here are immense. You, our dear guests, will stay with us and help me to organize a series of cultural evenings—you will give readings and the local proletariat will act out your plays, under your supervision.”

The actress with the little dog gave a quiet gasp and sank down onto the platform. I looked around me. Dusk. A tiny station building with a small garden. Beyond it—miserable little houses, a boarded-up food stall, mud, a bare willow and a crow. And this Robespierre.[21]

“We would, of course, love to,” Averchenko said calmly, “but unfortunately we have booked a theater in Kiev for our performances, and we really do have to hurry.”

“Out of the question!” cried Robespierre. Abruptly lowering his voice, he added, “You will never be allowed across the border unless I put in a special request on your behalf. And what might induce me to make such a request? The fact that you have responded to the needs of our proletariat. Then I will even be able to arrange for your luggage to be let through!”[22]

At this point Gooskin suddenly darted forward and said, “Mister commissar! Of course they agree. Even though I’m losing enormous capital from this delay, I shall personally undertake to persuade them, although I could see at once that they are already overjoyed at the prospect of serving our dear proletariat. But you must understand, Mister commissar—only one evening. But what an evening it will be! Yes, an evening that’ll have you licking every one of your fingers in delight! Believe me! So tomorrow the public performance—and the following morning we go on our way. Well, that’s all settled then—everyone’s happy. But where are we to put our guests for the night?”

“You stay here. We’ll sort everything out right away,” cried Robespierre and rushed off, his beaver coat brushing away his footprints. He was followed by the other three figures, evidently his entourage.

“Now we’re in real trouble,” said Gooskin. “Slap into the hornet’s nest. Executions every day. Only three days ago a general was burnt alive. And they make off with every last piece of luggage. We must get out of here fast.”

“Maybe we’ll have to go back to Moscow.”

“Shush!” hissed Gooskin, before saying with frightening emphasis, “You think they’re going to let you go back to Moscow so you can tell everyone there how you’ve been robbed? A likely story!”

Averchenko’s impresario came back, his head pulled down into his neck, constantly looking around him and keeping as close as he could to the wall.

“Where’ve you been?”

“Carrying out a little reconnaissance. It’s going to be difficult. There’s no space anywhere. The shtetl is crammed with people.”

I looked around in surprise. These words did not tally with the emptiness of the streets, the silence, and the deep-blue twilight, against which the solitary streetlamp made no impression.

“But where are all the people? And what are they doing here?”

“What do you think? They’re stuck here. They’re having to stay here for two or three weeks. They’re not allowed to go on and they’re not allowed to go back. The things I’ve heard! But not now… Shush!”

Like a bird with outstretched wings, our Robespierre—followed by his entourage—was flying down the platform in his beaver coat.

“Accommodation has been found for you. Two rooms. Evictions are being effected as we speak. The rooms were jam-packed. Children too. Everyone howling and wailing! But I have a warrant. I am requisitioning for the needs of the proletariat.”

Once again he hitched up his trousers with his left hand and stretched out his right hand, forward and up, as if pointing the way to distant stars.

“You know what?” I said. “This really isn’t what we want. Can you please not evict them? We just can’t take their rooms from them like this.”

“I agree,” said Averchenko. “You said they’ve got children there. It’s not right.”

Gooskin immediately gave a cheerful shrug.

“See what these artists of ours are like! There’s nothing to be done about it. But don’t worry—we’ll find somewhere to put ourselves. Yes, it’s just the way they are.”

While cheerfully inviting Robespierre and the rest of our station audience to marvel at our eccentricity, he did, of course, share our feelings.

Robespierre didn’t know what to do. And then, unexpectedly, someone else stepped forward. Until then he had been keeping modestly out of sight behind the other members of the entourage.

“I c-can of-offer my roo-oo…”

“What?”

“Roo-rooms.”

Who was this man? But then, what did it matter?

We were led somewhere behind the station building to a small house that looked as if it had been built for some government employee. The stutterer turned out to be the son-in-law of someone who had once worked on the railway.

Robespierre was triumphant.

“There you are, I have provided you with accommodation. Get yourselves settled in, and I’ll drop by in the evening.”

The stutterer mumbled something and bowed.

We settled in.

The actresses and I were to share one room. The stutterer took Averchenko into his own room and the two pseudonyms were tucked away into some kind of storeroom.

The house was very quiet. There was a pale and exhausted-looking elderly woman who wandered about as if with her eyes shut. We could hear someone else moving about in the kitchen, but we never saw them. Very likely it was the stutterer’s wife.

We were given some tea.

“We could get some h-h-am,” the stutterer whispered, “while it’s still light.”

“No, it’s already dark,” the old woman murmured in response—and closed her eyes.

“Ma-mama. What if I go without a lantern? Just with matches.”

“All right, if you’re not frightened.”

The stutterer shivered and stayed put. What did all this mean? Why did they only eat ham during the day? I didn’t like to ask. It seemed best not to ask anything at all. Our hosts took fright at the simplest of questions and never gave a direct answer. And when one of the actresses asked the old woman if her husband was here, she looked horrified, raised a trembling hand, quietly shook a finger at her and stared out through the window into the blackness beyond.

We sat there, silent and tense. It was Gooskin who saved the day. After loud huffing and puffing he began, in a loud voice, saying some remarkable things:

“I can see that you’ve had rain here. It’s wet outside. When there’s rain, it always gets wet outside. When it rains in Odessa, it’s Odessa that gets wet. It’s never the case that it rains in Odessa but it gets wet in Nikolaev. Hah! Yes, where it rains, that’s where it gets wet. And when there’s no rain, then God only knows how dry it can get. And who likes rain, I ask you. Nobody does, and that’s God’s truth. Well, why would I lie? Hah!”

Gooskin showed true genius. He spoke simply and with animation. And so, when the door burst open and Robespierre flew in, now with an entourage of six, what he saw was a group of friends sitting cosily round a table, drinking tea and listening to an engaging storyteller.

“Magnificent!” Robespierre exclaimed. He hitched up his trousers with his left hand and, without taking off his fur coat, joined us at the table. His entourage squeezed in too.

“Magnificent! We start at eight. Capacity of the barrack—one hundred and fifty. Décor—pine cones. Posters to be posted in the morning. And now we can have a little talk about art. Who’s most important—the director or the chorus?”

This floored nearly all of us but not our young actress. Like a war-horse at the sound of the bugle, she took off and began talking unstoppably, managing the most remarkable leaps and turns. We heard flashes of Meyerhold and his triangles of forces, of Yevreinov’s Theater for Itself, of Commedia dell’Arte, of actor-creators, of the slogan “Away with the Footlights!”, of theater as collective ritual and goodness knows what else.[23]

Robespierre was in seventh heaven.

“This meets our needs exactly! You will stay here with us and give us some lectures on art. Yes, that’s settled.”

The poor girl turned pale and looked at us in confusion.

“I have a contract… I can in one month… I’ll come back here… I promise you!”

But now it was Robespierre’s turn. He had his own repertoire—an entire play in “beyonsense language.”[24] The most complete possible development of a gesture. The audience to compose plays in its own right, then act them out on the spot. Actors to play the part of the audience, which requires greater talent than any ordinary, routine acting.

Everything was going smoothly. The only disruption to our peaceful scene of cultured comfort came from the little dog, which evidently sensed something sinister about Robespierre. Tiny as a wool mitten, it growled at him with the fury of a tiger, bared its pearly little teeth and then, all of a sudden, threw back its head and began to howl like some common guard dog on a chain. And Robespierre, who was being transported into mysterious realms on the wings of art, for some reason took fright and broke off in mid-sentence.

The actress took her little dog away.

For a minute, everyone fell silent. And then from somewhere not far away, over by the railway embankment, came an almost inhuman cry, like the cry of a goat, full of animal horror and despair. It was followed by three dry, even shots, distinct and businesslike.

“Did you hear?” I asked. “Whatever was that?”

But nobody answered me. It seemed no one had heard.

The pale hostess sat motionless, her eyes closed. The host continued to say nothing. His jaw was trembling convulsively, as if he even thought with a stutter. Then Robespierre started talking excitedly, in a much louder voice than before, about the evening we had been planning. Clearly he had heard something.

The entourage did not join in; they just went on smoking silently. One of them, a snub-nosed lad in a ragged brown soldier’s tunic, pulled out a massive gold cigarette case with an embossed monogram. Out toward it stretched someone’s calloused paw, with broken nails. On this paw was a beautiful cabochon ruby, shining darkly from its deep setting in a massive antique ring. Our guests appeared to be unusual people.

The young actress walked pensively around the table and stood herself against the wall. I felt her calling me with her eyes, but I didn’t get up. She was looking at Robespierre’s back, her lips twitching nervously.

“Olyonushka,” I said, “it’s time we went to bed. In the morning we’ll be rehearsing.”

We nodded a general goodnight and went to our room. Our quiet hostess followed us with a candle.

“Put the light out,” she whispered. “You’ll have to undress in the dark. And don’t, for the love of God, pull down the blind.”

We quickly got ready for bed. Our hostess blew out the candle.

“And remember about the blind. For the love of God.”

She left the room.

I felt warm breathing, close beside me. It was Olyonushka.

“There’s a hole in the back of that wonderful coat of his,” she whispered. “And there’s something dark all around the hole… something terrible.”

“Go to sleep, Olyonushka. We’re all of us tired and on edge.”

The little dog was fretting all night, growling and whimpering. And at dawn Olyonushka said in her sleep, in a loud, spine-chilling voice, “I know why the dog’s howling. There’s a bullet hole in that man’s coat, and there’s dried blood all around it.”

My heart was pounding so fast I felt sick. I’d known this all along, I realized, even though I’d barely glanced at the coat.

We woke up late. A cold gray day. Rain. Outside the window—sheds and barns. Further on—the embankment. All completely deserted. Not a soul to be seen.

Our hostess brought us tea, bread, and ham, then said in a whisper, “My son-in-law slipped out at dawn. We’ve hidden the ham in the shed. If you go outside at night with a lantern, they report you. And it’s no better during the day. One glimpse of you—and along they come. It’s searches day in and day out.”

She was more talkative now. But her face was still saying as little as ever. It was like stone, as if she feared it might say more than she wanted it to.

Gooskin was knocking on the door.

“Are you nearly ready? Our… young friends have been round twice.”

Our hostess left. I half-opened the door and motioned Gooskin in.

“Gooskin, tell me, is everything all right? Will we be allowed to leave this town?” I asked in a whisper.

“Smile, for heaven’s sake, smile!” Gooskin whispered, stretching his mouth into a hideous grimace, like Victor Hugo’s L’homme qui rit. “Smile when you speak. Someone may, God forbid, be watching you. They’ve promised to let us leave and to provide us with an escort. There’s a twenty-five-mile border zone. It starts here. And it’s in this zone that people get robbed.”

“Who by?”

“Who do you think? By them, of course. But if we can get ourselves an official escort, from the headquarters of this hornet’s nest, no one will dare to rob us. But there’s one thing I will say—we must leave tomorrow. Otherwise, I swear to God, I shall be astonished if ever the day comes when I see my dear Mama.”

This was all rather complicated, and certainly not comforting.

“You must stay at home today. Don’t go out anywhere. Say you’re tired and rehearsing. Everyone is rehearsing and everyone is tired.”

“You don’t happen to know where the owner of this house is, do you?”

“I don’t know anything for sure. He may have been executed, or he may have made off somewhere, or he may be sitting right here beneath our feet. Because why else would they be this scared? The doors and windows are open all day and all night. Why don’t they dare close them? Why must they keep proving that they’ve got nothing to hide? But none of this has anything to do with us. Why are we talking about it? Is someone going to pay us for all our talking? Or grant us some kind of honorary citizenship? Things have been going on here that—well, heaven forbid that they should happen to us! What made that young fellow start stuttering? He’s been stuttering for weeks on end. If we’re not going to end up the same, we’d better get out of here—with our trunks and a proper escort.”

We heard a chair move in the dining room.

“Quick, rehearsal time!” shouted Gooskin, backing out of the room. “Come on, sleepy feet, get up now! Heavens, it’s eleven o’clock and they’re still snoring cats and dogs!”

Olyonushka and I stayed in all day, saying we were tired. Averchenko, his impresario, and the actress with the little dog took on the task of making conversation with the shtetl’s apostles of political and cultural enlightenment. They even went out for a walk with them.

“Most interesting!” Averchenko said on his return. “You see that smashed-up shed? Apparently, a couple of months ago the Bolsheviks were having a hard time of it here, and some chief commissar of theirs needed to get out fast. He jumped up onto a locomotive and ordered a railwayman to take him away. But the railwayman just rammed the locomotive into the wall of the depot—under full steam. The Bolshevik was boiled alive.”

“And the railwayman?”

“Never found.”

“So… could this be our missing host?”