Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea

4

OVERCAST and wet, the day dragged on forever.

We huddled together in our “ladies’ room,” where Averchenko had joined us. As if by unspoken agreement, nobody said anything about our present concerns. We reminisced about our last days in Moscow and about the people with whom we had spent those last days. Not a word about either our present or our future.

How, we wondered, was our lofty protector doing? Was our exalted guardian still living with an awoken heart or was his life once again only a matter of moind?

I remembered how, on the eve of our departure, I had gone to say goodbye to a former baroness and found her stooping to a rather lowly task—cleaning the floor. Lanky and sallow, with the face of a thoroughbred horse, she was squatting down and examining the floorboards with distaste through a turquoise lorgnette. Between two fingers of her other hand she gingerly held a scrap of wet lace, using it to flick water about.

“I’ll mop it up later, when my Valenciennes has dried out.”

We also reminisced about the bread of our last Moscow days. One kind, made out of sawdust, had crumbled like sand; the other kind, made out of clay, had been bitter, greenish and always damp…

Averchenko glanced at his watch.

“Well, it’s already five—not long till our evening.”

“I think someone just tapped on the window,” said Olyonushka, on her guard.

It was Gooskin.

“Madame Teffi, Monsieur Averchenko!” he shouted loudly. “You must absolutely come out and stretch your legs a bit. To be in good voice, I swear you must have a clear head before the start of the evening.”

“But it’s raining!”

“Only a little drizzle. You absolutely must come out, I’m telling you.”

“Maybe there’s something he needs to say to us,” I whispered to Averchenko. “You go first and see whether or not he’s on his own. If Robespierre’s there too, I’m not going. I just can’t.”

What I dreaded more than anything was having to shake this man’s hand. I could answer his questions and even meet his eye, but I knew that I couldn’t bring myself to touch him. My aversion to this creature was so intense, so beyond my control that I couldn’t answer for myself. I couldn’t be sure that I wouldn’t scream or make a scene or do something irreparable, something that would cost me dear, something our whole group would have to pay for. I knew that physical contact with this reptile was more than I could bear.

Averchenko appeared at the window and beckoned me out.

“Don’t go to the right,” our hostess whispered to me in the hall, while pretending to look for my galoshes.

“Let’s keep to the middle of the street,” whispered Gooskin. “We’re just out for a walk, for a breath of fresh air.”

And so we set off, with a measured, easy walk, glancing more and more frequently at the sky. Yes, we were just stretching our legs, getting a breath of fresh air.

“Don’t look at me,” muttered Gooskin. “Look at the rain.”

He looked to either side. He looked behind him. A little calmer now, he said, “I’ve managed to find out a thing or two. The person who runs the show here is a woman, commissar H—” After pronouncing her name, which sounded like the bark of a dog, he continued, “She’s just a young girl, a student, a telephone operator. Her word is the law. And she’s deranged, a mad dog, as the phrase goes. A beast,” he spat out in a tone of horror. “She does as she pleases. She conducts the searches, she sentences, and she shoots. There she sits on her porch, sentencing and shooting. What goes on at night by the embankment—that’s someone else’s doing, that’s not her. She herself just sits on her porch—and she’s without shame. I can’t even speak about such things in front of a lady, no, I can’t, I would rather speak only to Monsieur Averchenko. He’s a writer, so he’ll be able to put it in some poetic manner. Well, suffice it to say that the simplest Red Army soldier will sometimes go and find a quiet place to answer the call of nature. But she—she just answers the call there and then, with no embarrassment at all. It’s horrible!”[25]

He looked from side to side.

“Let’s walk the other way for a while.”

“Is anything being said about us?” I asked.

“They’re still promising to let us through, but commissar H hasn’t had her say yet. A week ago there was a general, on his way to the south. All his papers were in order. She searched him and found real money—a kerenka[26]—sewn into his trouser stripes. So she says, ‘Don’t waste good bullets on him, just beat him with your rifle butts!’ So they beat him. ‘Still alive?’ she asks. ‘Hm,’ they say, ‘seems like it.’ ‘Douse him with kerosene and put a light to it.’ So they doused him with kerosene and set him on fire. Don’t look at me, look at the rain—we’re just having a breath of fresh air. This morning they searched some industrialist’s wife. She’d brought all kinds of stuff with her. Money. Furs. Diamonds. She was traveling with her steward. Her husband’s in the Ukraine. She was on her way to join him. They took away everything she had. Literally. Left her only the clothes she stood up in. Some old woman gave her her own shawl. It’s still not clear if they’ll let her leave or… Heavens! We shouldn’t have come this far! Turn around, quick!”

We had almost reached the railway embankment.

“Don’t look! Don’t look that way!” Gooskin said in a loud whisper. “Quick! Turn around quick! We haven’t seen a thing. Just keep going, keep walking quietly along… After all, we’re just out for a walk, stretching our legs. We’ve got a concert tonight, we just need to stretch our legs.” A smile on his pale lips, he was doing his best to sound convincing.

I’d turned around at once and almost not seen anything. I hadn’t even quite understood what I wasn’t meant to be seeing. A figure in a soldier’s greatcoat was bending down, picking up stones and throwing them at a pack of dogs that seemed to be gnawing at something. This was at the foot of the embankment, but some way away. One dog ran off on its own, dragging something along the ground. All this took only a moment… but it seemed to be dragging… probably I imagined it… dragging an arm… yes, some shreds of clothing and a hand, I could see the fingers. Only that’s not possible. A dog can’t gnaw off an arm…

I remember a cold clammy sweat on my temples and upper lip, and a wave of nausea that made me want to snarl like an animal.

“Come along now, come along!” said Averchenko, taking me by the arm.

“The hostess did warn me,” I wanted to say, but I couldn’t unclench my teeth. I couldn’t speak.

“We’ll get you some steaming hot tea!” Gooskin shouted. “That’ll sort out the migraine in no time at all. There’s nothing like something nice and cold to sort out a migraine. Ri-ight?”

When we reached the house, he whispered, “Not a word to our actresses, not a word. After all, we can all scream blue murder—but there still won’t be time to put the world to rights. We’ve got to leave in the morning. Ri-ight?”

Gooskin’s “Ri-ight?” was not a question and did not require an answer. It was his style, a rhetorical flourish. Though sometimes it seemed that there were two Gooskins—one would speak and the other, in a surprised tone, would then ask for confirmation.

The house was a picture of peace, with lamp and samovar. The older actress was giving her little dog some milk; Olyonushka was rehearsing a monologue for the performance to come.

What was I to read? What kind of audience would we have? Robespierre had said that they would be “enlightened spirits who had cast off the chains of the ages.” Did this mean they had all done forced labor? They would, moreover, be “true judges and connoisseurs of art.” What sort of art? Averchenko thought that Robespierre was thinking of the music of criminal slang.

But what was I to read?

“You must read poems of tender feeling,” said Olyonushka. “Poetry ennobles.”

“I think I’ll read that little police-station sketch of mine,” said Averchenko. “Not so very ennobling, but it’ll strike more of a chord with the audience.”

Olyonushka disagreed. On tour in the western provinces, she had read my poem about a beggar woman: “Around the country walked Fedosya, around the land the cripple wandered,” and so on (a piece much loved by actors and recited by them ad nauseam).

“And what do you think happened?” Olyonushka went on. “In the interval, this old Tatar comes backstage to see me. He’s quite a simple man, and with tears in his eyes he says, ‘Dear Miss Actress please read about that cripple woman again.’[27] The poem’s about Christ,”—Olyonushka now sounded more impassioned than ever—“so it’s the last thing a non-Christian should have wanted to listen to, yet he was truly moved.”

“Olyonushka, dear,” I said, “I don’t think your simple old man will be there tonight. Read something about an airplane—or roast mutton.”

Suddenly, from the entrance room, came the sound of Robespierre’s ecstatic voice.

I left the room.

Evening. Eight o’clock.

Time to set out to our much-vaunted show.

What to wear? A serious question. We think long and hard, then decide on skirts and blouses.

“If we wear anything at all smart, we’ll get robbed,” says the actress with the little dog. “Better not to let them even suspect that we own any decent dresses.”

“You’re right.”

We have to go on foot, over fences, across the railway line, and past some sheds. It’s raining. Where the mud’s thin, it slurps. Where it’s thicker, it squelches. In the darkness it seems almost to boil and bubble.

Olyonushka suddenly stops dead, squealing that her galoshes have been “swallowed up.”

Gooskin is swinging a shaded lantern over the road, as if censing the rain and the night.

How bleak it is—this dark road to the “Club of Enlightenment and Culture.”

“What would they want with anything better?” says an unfamiliar voice. “Nobody ever goes there anyway.”

Someone is slurping and squelching right beside me. A stranger. We must watch our words.

But even if we manage to get there, how can we appear on stage with clumps of mud all over our legs?

Averchenko’s impresario suggests we take off our shoes and stockings and walk barefoot. When we get to the club, we can ask for a bucket of water, wash our feet and put our shoes and stockings back on. Or the other way round—we can carry on through the mud in our shoes, ask for water when we get there, wash our feet and then appear barefoot on stage. Or best of all—wash our stockings at the club and put them on wet. Who’s going to notice?

“So you know how to wash stockings, do you?” asks a grim voice.

Gooskin plows through the mud in his clodhoppers and goes on censing the rain with his lantern. I catch a glimpse of bare feet—Olyonushka’s. But I can’t bring myself to take off my shoes. Robespierre has walked down this road today. Most likely he will have spat somewhere.

“Is this yours?”

Someone hands me something round and black. What is this filth?

“It’s your galosh… with your shoe inside it.”

“Gooskin!” I cry. “I can’t go any further. I’ll die.”

Gooskin walks briskly up to me.

“You can’t? All right, I’ll carry you, on my shoulders.”

I hear this as a metaphor. He is telling me, I think, that I am ruining everything and that it is he who has to shoulder the burden.

“Gooskin, I really can’t. Look at me. I’m standing on one leg like a heron. My shoe’s all covered in mud. How can I put it on now? Robespierre has passed this way. He may have spat on the ground right here… Gooskin, save me!”

“That’s why I’m telling you to get up on my shoulders. I shall carry you.”

I still find this hard to take in.

“You’re so huge, Gooskin. I’ll never be able to climb up that high.”

“Well, you can start by climbing onto that little fence. Or even… I can see a short little fellow over there, he’s probably quite young. Why not use him?”

Was I to ride on Gooskin? Like Gogol’s Vakula—the blacksmith who once rode on the devil?[28]

I had taken part in many performances. I had ridden to them in carriages, in motorcars, and in cabs, but never on my own impresario.

“Thank you, Gooskin. But you really are too huge. I’ll start to feel dizzy up there.”

Gooskin is nonplussed.

“Well then… do you want to wear my boots?”

At this, even without the advantage of height, I start to feel dizzy.

As happens in moments of supreme tension, my whole life flashes like forked lightning before my inner gaze: childhood… first love… war… third love… public acclaim… second revolution and—and to crown it all—Gooskin’s unforgettable clodhoppers. In the back of beyond, in the mud, in the dead of night—what an inglorious end! Because there is no way, you must understand, that I can come out of all this alive…

“Thank you, Gooskin. You are a man of high moral standing. But I’ll get there on my own two feet.”

Which, of course, I do.

We stand around for a while in the cubbyhole that serves as a dressing room for the “Messrs and Mesdames Artistes.” While someone wipes our shoes clean with newspaper, we peek at our audience through a crack in the wooden wall.

The barrack probably holds about a hundred people. On the right, supported by timbers, is some kind of gallery or hayloft.

In the front rows of the stalls are what one might call the top brass and aristocracy. All of them in skins (I am talking, of course, not about their own human skin but about the skin of calves and sheep—about the leather jackets and tall boots with gaiters so loved by our revolutionaries). Many are draped in bullet belts or are carrying guns. Some carry two revolvers as if, rather than being about to watch a performance, they are preparing for some military operation—a quick sortie, a dangerous reconnaissance, a skirmish with numerically superior forces.

“There, in the front row,” whispers Gooskin. “Yes, look, her in the middle!”

I see a dumpy, short-legged girl with a sleepy-looking face, a face as flat as if she were squashing it against a pane of glass. An oilskin jacket with cracked folds. An oilskin hat.

“A beast!” Gooskin hisses in my ear, in the same tone of horror as before.

A beast? I can’t see it. I don’t understand. Her legs are too short to reach the ground. She’s wide. Her flat face looks washed out, as if a sponge has been drawn across it. There’s nothing to catch your attention. No eyes, no eyebrows, no mouth. All her features are smudged, somehow blurred together. Nothing you could call diabolical here. Just a boring lump. The sort of woman you see in line at dispensaries for the poor, or at domestic service employment bureaus. Her eyes look so sleepy. Why do I seem to recognize them? I feel I’ve seen them before. A long time ago… in our village… the peasant woman who washed the dishes. Yes, that’s it, I remember now. When chickens had to be slaughtered, she always put herself forward. The old cook never had to ask her—she just went out into the yard and got on with it. Every time. Those very same eyes, yes, I remember them clearly.

“No!” Gooskin whispers. “Don’t stare at her like that. Not for so long. How can you?”

I shake my head impatiently, and he steps away. And I go on looking.

She slowly turns her face toward me and, unable to see me through the narrow crack, looks straight into my eyes, vaguely and sleepily. In the same way that an owl, dazzled by daylight but still sensing a human gaze, will somehow always look—blindly—straight at the source of this gaze.

And so we freeze in this strange union.

I say to her, “I know. Your life, beast, was nothing but boredom. Boredom and monstrous ugliness. You would never have got far on such stumpy little legs. The difficult path of human happiness requires longer legs than yours. You would have plodded dismally on until you were about thirty and then you would probably have hanged yourself with some old braces or poisoned yourself with boot polish—and that would have been the end of your story. But what a splendid banquet fate turned out to have prepared for you! You drank warm, sharp human wine. You’ve drunk deep and long, until you’re intoxicated. Good, isn’t it? You’ve quenched your thirst, your sick, black sensual thirst. Not in the shadows, with a sense of shame, but brazenly, wholeheartedly, glorying in your mad lust. Your comrades in leather jackets and revolvers are just murdering thieves, a criminal mob. You disdainfully toss them a few scraps—furs, rings, money. It is perhaps for this very selflessness, for your ‘devotion to an ideal’ that they respect and obey you. But I know better. I know that there is no worldly treasure for the sake of which you would renounce your black work. Your lowly, black work means more to you than anything in the world, and you reserve this work for yourself.

I don’t know how I can look at you and not cry out like a wild animal, wordlessly, not out of fear, but out of horror on your behalf—horror that the divine potter, in an hour of fury and revulsion, an hour beyond the reach of reason, should have shaped so terrible a fate for a piece of human clay.”

The barrack was packed. Red Army soldiers and some sinister riffraff. A few women, most of them in soldiers’ greatcoats. Two stocky commissars in leather jackets kept exchanging glances and taking turns to exit the barrack with an unwavering revolutionary stride and then return to their places, adjusting their bullet belts as if, having swiftly consolidated the conquests of the revolution, they could now afford to reacquaint themselves with its artistic achievements.

Our Robespierre had for some reason gone rather quiet and was hanging about somewhere off to one side. He was without his entourage and was doing none of his usual excited gesticulating.

It was time for us to begin.

I returned to the Messrs Artistes’ dressing room to find that our program for the evening was now settled. For the evening to go with a swing—Gooskin had suddenly realized—we absolutely had to have a master of ceremonies. It was a pity we hadn’t thought of this earlier, but our stutterer, thank God, had unexpectedly come to our rescue.

“Well I never!” I whispered to Averchenko. “Poor man. God knows what he’ll end up saying.”

“We couldn’t really say no to him,” said Averchenko with a laugh. “And maybe it’ll be the best part of the evening.”

The first number was to be a short sketch performed by Averchenko’s impresario and the actress with the little dog.

We pushed the stutterer out to announce, “Sketch by Averchenko, performed by… s… s… s…” He then gave up the struggle and retired backstage.

Understanding this as a request for silence, the audience showed no surprise.

The actress with the little dog began cheeping like a frightened bird. In these surroundings it seemed strange indeed to hear her lines about flowerbeds, waltzes, distant cousins, a lovesick professor, and Verdi’s Aida.

I was keeping an eye on the audience. The two commissars continued exchanging glances and striding in and out of the barrack. Everyone else just sat there, as if waiting for the moment, after the final resolution had been carried, when they could go back home. But I do remember a look of interest on one broad face. Now and again it bared its teeth in a kind of smile. Then this broad face beneath a soldier’s cap would appear to recollect itself, furrowing its brow and squinting fiercely. I felt that the authorities must have forgotten to explain to the poor audience that no particular understanding of cultural matters was being required of it—they had been summoned to the barrack simply to be entertained.

The stutterer refused to relinquish his assigned role. We kept begging him not to exhaust himself, but he insisted on going onstage before each number and coming out with all sorts of nonsense. He introduced me as Averchenko, Averchenko as “an actress in transit,” and everyone else simply as “eh… eh… eh…”

Gooskin, for his part, was behaving like a true impresario—pacing up and down with his hands behind his back, thinking, scheming, muttering under his breath. Sometimes he went and whispered a few words to somebody. Finally we glimpsed this somebody: an unknown gentleman in sky-blue satin pantaloons, a red velvet kaftan and a dashing Cossack hat on the back of his head.

Elbowing us out of the way, this figure ran out onstage and began singing, “Sleep, Fighting Eagles.”[29] His voice was appalling but very loud.

The stutterer, who had only just got through his ‘eh… eh… eh’ and hadn’t yet left the stage, was rooted to the spot, his mouth twitching violently.

“Who is it?”

“What’s going on?”

“He can’t sing,” we said anxiously. “His voice is quite dreadful.”

Gooskin looked away in confusion, then replied, “Yes, he sings like the day he was born.”

“Gooskin, what’s going on? Who is this man? Why has he suddenly started singing?”

Gooskin looked around.

“Shh… Why has he started singing? He wants to get across the border to the Ukraine. He’s taking yarn with him. What else can he do?”

The singer got the last note hopelessly, hopelessly wrong. More wrong than anyone could have done on purpose. And the audience at once began roaring and clapping their approval. They loved his Fighting Eagles.

Sweating and happy, the singer reappeared backstage.

“Well, it seems your yarn’s safe for the time being!” And Gooskin, his hands behind his back, added his usual rhetorical question: “Ri-ight?”

At the end of the evening we all went back onstage for our curtain call. Our surprise singer darted to the front of the stage and began bowing and pressing his hand to his heart as if he were some famous star.

The audience went wild, clapping long and loud.

“Bravo! Bravo!”

And then from somewhere up on the right, from the gallery-hayloft, I heard a few voices quietly but insistently calling my name.

I looked up.

Women’s faces, infinitely weary, hopelessly sad. Crumpled little hats, worn-out dark dresses. Craning down toward me, the women were saying:

“Sweetheart! We love you! God grant you get out of here soon!”

“Leave this town, sweetheart, leave this town!”

“Leave as quick as you can!”

Never, at any of my performances, have I heard such chilling words from an audience.

And what tense desperation, what determination there was in those voices, in those eyes. Speaking to me so openly, they were taking no small risk—though the top brass had already left and, with all their clapping and shouting, the small fry were making such a racket they probably wouldn’t be able to hear anything.

“Thank you!” I said to them. “Thank you! One day, perhaps, we’ll meet again.”

But they had disappeared. I could no longer see their pale faces. I heard only one more word: a short and bitter “No.”