The Story of a Life

6

Pink Oleanders

My grandmother always kept oleanders in green tubs on the verandah of her home in Cherkassy. They had pink petals. I liked their greyish leaves and pale flowers very much. For some reason I associated them with the sea – a distant, warm sea bathing the shores of a land that blossomed with oleanders. Grandmother had a way with flowers. Her bedroom in the winter months was always overflowing with fuchsias. In the summer the garden exploded with flowers, taking on the appearance of a giant bouquet, and burdock crowded the fences. The scent of all those flowers made its way inside to Grandfather’s room on the mezzanine and drove out the tobacco fug. Grandfather would angrily slam the windows shut. He liked to say that the flowers aggravated his chronic asthma.

At the time I imagined the flowers to be living beings. Mignonette was a poor girl in a darned, grey dress, but her remarkable scent gave away her fairytale lineage. The yellow tea-roses were young beauties who had lost their rosy cheeks from drinking too much tea. The bed with pansies looked like a masked ball. These were not flowers, but happy and playful Gypsies in black velvet masks, florid dancers – now blue, now purple, now yellow. I didn’t like the daisies. With their faded pink dresses, they reminded me of the little daughters of the schoolmaster Zimmer, my grandmother’s neighbour. The girls were tow-headed and had no eyebrows. Every time you met them, they would curtsy, their fingers daintily touching the edge of their skirts. The most interesting flower was, of course, the purslane – a creeper covered with the purest colours. Instead of leaves the purslane had soft, juicy needles. If you gave them a slight squeeze, they’d spray green juice in your face.

Grandmother’s garden and all the flowers in it acted on my imagination with uncommon force. My passion for travel must have been born in that garden as well. In my childhood I used to imagine a faraway country that I was certain to visit. It was a hilly plain covered as far as the horizon with grass and flowers and hidden in among them were villages and towns. When express trains crossed the plain, thick pollen would cover the sides of the carriages. I would tell this to my brothers, sister and Mama, but no one cared to understand me. Rather, when he first heard this, my elder brother called me a ‘dreamer’, a contemptuous nickname that stuck.

Perhaps the only person who understood me was my Aunt Nadya, the youngest of my grandmother’s daughters. She was twenty-three at the time and studying singing at the Moscow Conservatory. She had a beautiful contralto voice. She would come to Grandmother’s in Cherkassy for Easter and the summer. The quiet, spacious house became noisy and crowded as soon as she arrived. Slender and graceful, with tousled fair hair and fresh lips parted ever so slightly, she played with us and rushed headlong up and down the polished floors, laughing as she went. Flecks of gold sparkled in her grey eyes. These eyes responded to everything with a laugh: to any joke, joyful word, even to Anton the tomcat, who looked upon our games disapprovingly with a most critical expression.

‘It’s all fun and games for Aunt Nadya!’ Mama liked to say, with mild criticism. Her happy-go-lucky nature was proverbial in our family, and she was always losing things – her gloves, her powder, her money – but she never let anything upset her. We opened up the piano the day she arrived, and it remained open until Aunt Nadya left for her cheerful, hospitable Moscow. Piles of sheet music littered the chairs. The candles smoked. The piano rumbled, and sometimes at night I awoke to the sound of her deep yet delicate voice singing a barcarolle: ‘Sail, my gondola, lit by the moon. Ring out, barcarolle, over the slumberous waves.’

And in the morning, I was awakened by an ingratiating voice, almost a whisper, by my ear, and Aunt Nadya’s hair tickling my cheeks as she sang: ‘It’s time to get up, it’s no time to slumber, your eyes closed, having abandoned yourself to your reveries. The robins have been calling for some time, and for you the roses have opened up!’

I opened my eyes, she kissed me, and then suddenly disappeared, yet a moment later I could hear how she and her brother, Uncle Kolya, a cadet, were twirling through the hall in a rushing waltz. He too sometimes came to visit my grandmother from St Petersburg for Easter. Then I would hop out of bed, sensing that the day was going to be wild, cheerful and full of surprises. When Aunt Nadya sang, even Grandfather up on the mezzanine opened his door to the stairs and would later say to my grandmother: ‘Where on earth did Nadya get her Gypsy blood?’

My grandmother would assure him that Nadya’s blood wasn’t Gypsy, but Polish. Citing examples from literature and the early history of Poland, she showed him that Polish women were often uncontrollably cheerful, whimsical and carefree.

‘Exactly!’ my grandfather answered caustically and then slammed the door shut. ‘Exactly!’ he repeated loudly behind the closed door, sitting down to roll a cigarette.

I recall one year when Easter came late and the gardens in Cherkassy were already in bloom. We arrived by steamboat from Kiev, followed by Aunt Nadya from Moscow. I loved Easter but not the days leading up to it because I was forced to grind almonds and beat egg whites with a spoon. I found this exhausting and would quietly cry to myself. Also, Grandmother’s house was thrown into disorder before Easter. Women with their skirts tucked up were busy washing the ficus plants, rhododendrons, the windows and floors, they beat the rugs and the furniture, they polished all the brass handles and fittings on the doors and windows. And they forever chased us from one room to another.

After the cleaning came the solemn rite – Grandmother made the dough for the Easter cakes or, as our family called them, ‘satin cakes’. A quilt was laid over the tub filled with bubbling yellow dough, and until the dough had risen, no one was allowed to run around, slam the doors or even speak in a raised voice. A cab driving by the house filled my grandmother with horror: the slightest shaking could cause the dough to ‘sink’, and then goodbye to the tall, spongy cakes smelling of saffron and covered with sugary icing.

Along with the cakes, my grandmother also baked a number of different biscuits with raisins and almonds that we called ‘mazurkas’. When the baking tins with the hot mazurkas came out of the oven, such delicious smells wafted through the house that even Grandfather in his mezzanine would get all worked up. He would open the door and peer down into the drawing room at the long marble table already covered with heavy tablecloths. With Holy Sunday, a cool cleanliness and calm finally reigned in the house. In the morning we were given a cup of weak tea with sugar and rusks, and we did not eat another thing until after matins the following day. We liked this short-lived hunger. The day seemed very long, we felt a faint ringing in our ears, and Grandmother’s insistence that we stop talking so much put us in a solemn mood. At midnight we left for matins. They dressed me in long sailor’s trousers and a jacket with brass buttons and brushed my hair so hard it hurt. Looking at myself in the mirror, I saw a terribly excited and flushed little boy and was very pleased.

Aunt Yevfrosinia Grigorievna came out of her rooms. She was the only one who did not take part in the Easter preparations. She was always ill, spoke very little, and did nothing but gently smile at our cheerful banter. She wore a drab blue dress with a gold watch chain around her neck and a pretty bow on her shoulder. Mama explained to me that the bow was called a ‘cipher’ and had been awarded to Aunt Yevfrosinia Grigorievna for graduating with high honours from the institute she had once attended.

Mama wore her special grey dress, and Father his black suit and white waistcoat. Then Grandmother would make her grand appearance – beautiful and all in black silk with an artificial heliotrope pinned to her corsage. Her smooth dress rustled as she walked along so lightly – Grandmother became younger on those nights. She lit the lamps before the icons and then pulled on her black lace gloves and Father held out her mantle with its black ribbon ties.

‘You’re not coming to Mass, I take it?’ Grandmother asked him with chilly politeness.

‘No, Vikentia Ivanovna,’ Father replied with a smile. ‘I think I’ll lie down for a while. They’ll wake me when you’re back from church.’

‘Oh,’ said my grandmother and shook her shoulders, adjusting her mantle. ‘My only hope is that God has had enough of your jokes and has given up on you as a lost cause.’

‘I’m also counting on that very much,’ Father answered politely.

Grandmother went upstairs for a moment to say goodbye to Grandfather. When she came back down, Aunt Nadya, who was always late, appeared in the hall. She didn’t so much walk as fly, just like a petite, shimmering bird, in her white silk dress with a train and puffed sleeves. She was breathing heavily, and the yellow rose on her breast fluttered. It seemed as if all the light and joy of the world were shining in her eyes. Grandmother stopped on the stairs to put her handkerchief to her eyes. She could not hold back the tears at the sight of her youngest daughter’s beauty. It was clear she thought about Aunt Nadya’s fate, about what would become of her in this harsh world, and these thoughts could not keep my grandmother from crying. When we returned from church this time, Father was not asleep. He had opened the windows of the drawing room that looked out onto the garden. It was very warm.

We sat down at the table to break the fast. The night hovered all around us. The stars shone straight into our eyes. From the garden came the twittering of a bird. We spoke little and everyone listened to the rising and falling sound of the bells in the darkness. Aunt Nadya sat pale and tired. I had seen that my father had handed her a blue telegram in the entrance hall while helping her off with her cloak. She had blushed and crushed the telegram in her hand. After we had eaten, I was sent straight to bed. I awoke late to the clinking of cups in the dining room where the adults were already drinking coffee. At dinner Aunt Nadya said that she had received a telegram from her friend Liza Yavorskaya in the neighbouring town of Smela. Liza had invited Aunt Nadya to come and spend the day with her at her home near Smela.

‘I want to go tomorrow,’ said Aunt Nadya, looking at Grandmother, and then added: ‘And take Kostik with me.’ I blushed with joy.

‘All right,’ Grandmother replied, ‘go, but take care you don’t both catch cold.’

‘They’re sending horses for us,’ said Aunt Nadya.

It was an hour’s ride on the train from Cherkassy to Smela. Liza Yavorskaya, a plump and cheerful young lady, met us at the station in Smela. In a carriage and pair we drove through the clean and pretty little town. The river Tyasmin had overflowed its banks at the foot of some steep green hills, its slow current swirling with quiet eddies that appeared silver in the light. It was hot. Dragonflies flew over the river. We drove through a lonely park outside town and Liza Yavorskaya said that Pushkin had loved to go for walks here. I couldn’t believe that Pushkin had visited these places and that I was now where he had been. At that time Pushkin seemed to me to be a purely legendary being. There was no way his spectacular life could have had any connection to this Ukrainian backwater.

‘The Raevskys’ old estate, Kamenka, is nearby,’ said Liza Yavorskaya. ‘He stayed with them for a long time and wrote a marvellous poem there.’

‘Which one?’ asked Aunt Nadya.

‘Play, know no sorrow, Adele, / For you’ve been crowned by the Charites and Lel, / ’Twas they who rocked your cradle so well …’

I did not understand what ‘the Charites’ or ‘Lel’ meant,fn1 but the music and power of these verses, the expansive park, the ancient lime trees, and the sky with its drifting clouds – all combined to put me in a magical mood. The whole day remained in my memory as a quiet and lonely celebration of spring. Liza Yavorskaya got the carriage to stop in a broad allée. We got out and went up to a house on a path lined on either side with dog-rose. Suddenly, at a turn in the path, out popped a well-tanned, bearded man without a hat. He had a double-barrelled shotgun over his shoulder, and in his hand he carried two dead ducks. His jacket was undone, exposing his strong, brown neck. Aunt Nadya stopped, and I saw that she had gone very pale.

The tanned man broke off a large branch of dog-rose covered in small thorns, bloodying his hands, and handed it to Aunt Nadya. She carefully took the spiky rose and extended her hand to the old man, and he kissed it.

‘Your hair reeks of gunpowder,’ said Aunt Nadya. ‘And your hands are all cut up. You must have the thorns removed.’

‘It’s nothing!’ he said and smiled. He had nice, straight teeth. Now, close up, I noticed he was not an old man at all. We made our way to the house. The bearded man talked most strangely, about everything all at once – about how he had arrived from Moscow two days ago, how wonderful this place was, how the day after tomorrow he had to take his paintings to an exhibition in Venice, how he’d been bewitched by a Gypsy – a model of the artist Vrubelfn2 – and how he was a lost soul who could be saved only by the voice of Aunt Nadya. Aunt Nadya was smiling. I watched him. I liked him very much. I guessed he was an artist. He really did smell of gunpowder. His hands were covered in pine sap. Now and then bright blood dripped from the ducks’ black bills onto the path. The artist had cobwebs stuck in his thick hair, along with some pine needles and even a dry twig. Aunt Nadya took him by the arm, made him stop and pulled out the twig.

‘You’re hopeless!’ she said. ‘Just a little boy,’ she added, smiling sadly.

‘Try to understand,’ he mumbled in a begging voice, ‘it was wonderful! I forced my way through a young pine forest, and yes, I got all torn up, but what smells, what dry white pinks, what red pine needles, and what a spider’s web! Such delights!’

‘And that’s why I love you,’ Aunt Nadya said softly.

Suddenly, the artist took the gun from his shoulder and fired both barrels into the air. Bluish smoke swirled from the end of the gun. Dogs began barking and running towards us. A frightened hen could be heard squawking.

‘A salute to life!’ said the artist. ‘It’s a hell of a marvellous thing to be alive!’

We made our way to the house with the excited dogs barking around us. The house was white with columns and striped curtains covering the windows. A little old lady – Liza Yavorskaya’s mother – came out to greet us in a pale mauve dress and holding a lorgnette, her hair a pile of grey curls. She screwed up her eyes and, clasping her hands, extolled Aunt Nadya’s beauty at length. A breeze blew through the cool rooms, tugging at the curtains and sweeping copies of The Russian Word and Kievan Thought off the table. The dogs wandered about, sniffing here and there. All of a sudden, they heard some suspicious noises coming from the park and raced outside, yelping loudly and falling all over each other as they went.

Patches of sunlight, chased from room to room by the breeze, picked out things along the way – vases, the brass castors on the piano legs, gilt picture frames, the straw hat Aunt Nadya had tossed onto the windowsill. We drank strong coffee in the dining room. The artist told me about how he had caught a fish in the centre of Paris on the embankment across from Notre-Dame. Aunt Nadya watched him, a gentle, amused smile on her face, and Liza’s mother kept repeating: ‘Oh, Sasha! When will you finally grow up? It’s high time already!’

After our coffee the artist took Aunt Nadya and me by the hand and led us to his room. Brushes and squeezed paint tubes lay all about. An air of total disorder reigned in the room. He quickly gathered up some dirty shirts, boots and bits of canvas, shoved them under the sofa, then filled his pipe with oily tobacco from a blue tin, lit it, and ordered Aunt Nadya and me to sit down on the windowsill. We sat down as ordered. The sun was very warm on our backs. The artist went up to a picture on the wall covered by a cloth and removed it. There it is,’ he mumbled in an embarrassed voice. ‘I’ve managed to botch every last bit of it.’

It was a portrait of Aunt Nadya. Back then I didn’t know a thing about painting. I had overheard my father and Uncle Kolya arguing about Vereshchaginfn3 and Vrubel, but I’d never seen a good picture in my life. The ones at my grandmother’s house were gloomy landscapes with dull trees and stags beside a stream or still-lifes of dead ducks hanging upside down. When the artist revealed the portrait I couldn’t help laughing from sheer delight – the portrait captured the essence of Aunt Nadya’s springtime beauty, and also the golden cascade of sunshine that poured down into the old park, the breeze wafting through the rooms and the greenish reflection of the leaves. Aunt Nadya looked at the portrait for a long time, then she playfully ruffled the artist’s hair and hastened out of the room without saying a word.

‘Well, thank God!’ the artist sighed. ‘That means I can take the work to the exhibition in Venice.’

That afternoon we went for a boat ride on the Tyasmin. A green crenellated wall, the shadow cast by the trees in the park, lay on the water. In the depths the round leaves of young water lilies could be seen straining to reach the surface. In the evening, before we left, Aunt Nadya sang in the cosy music room, accompanied by the artist, whose fingers, still smeared with pine sap, kept sticking to the piano keys: First meetings, last meetings, the dear sound of a beloved’s voice …

Then we drove back to Smela in a carriage and pair, along with the artist and Liza. The horses’ hooves clanged on the hard road. From the river came a damp breeze and the croaking of frogs. High overhead, a single star burned in the sky. At the station Liza took me to the buffet to get ice cream while the artist and Aunt Nadya sat down on a bench in the little garden out front. The buffet didn’t have any ice cream, of course, and when we returned, Aunt Nadya and the artist were still sitting on the bench, lost in thought.

Soon after this Aunt Nadya left for Moscow, and I never saw her again. At Shrovetide the following year, she sang in an open troika while riding to Petrovsky Park and caught a chill that soon developed into pneumonia. She died just before Easter. My grandmother, mother and even my father went to her funeral. I missed her terribly, and to this day I cannot forget Aunt Nadya. She has always remained for me the embodiment of feminine youth, warmth and happiness.