The Story of a Life

7

Elderwood Balls

Small, soft white balls rolled around inside a box. I would drop one into a bowl of water. The ball would begin to swell, and then open up and transform itself into either a black elephant with red eyes or an orange dragon or a rose with green leaves. These magical Chinese balls made of elderwood had been a gift from my godfather and uncle, Iosif Grigorievich, or, simply, Uncle Yuzia, who’d brought them from Peking.

‘An adventurer, pure and simple!’ Father would say of him, although not with disapproval, but in fact a touch of envy. He envied Uncle Yuzia because he had travelled all over Africa, Asia and Europe, and not as some well-behaved tourist, but as a crusader, noisy, rowdy, insolently daring, and with an unquenchable thirst for every improbable kind of affair in any corner of the globe: from Shanghai to Addis Ababa, from Harbin to Mashhad. All these affairs had ended in failure.

‘I should stake a claim in the Klondike,’ Uncle Yuzia liked to say. ‘I’d show those Americans a thing or two.’

Just what it was exactly he was going to show those inveterate gold prospectors in the Klondike remained unclear. But it was perfectly obvious that he would have shown them something so stupendous that his fame would resound all across the Yukon and Alaska. Perhaps he had been born to be a famous explorer or discoverer like Nikolai Przhevalskyfn1 or Livingstone. But life in Russia back then in those days – what my father called ‘untimely’ – had ruined Uncle Yuzia. His noble passion for travel became in the end a haphazard and fruitless wandering. All the same, I am indebted to Uncle Yuzia, for his stories made the world a desperately interesting subject for me, and I have kept this feeling my whole life. Grandmother Vikentia Ivanovna regarded Uncle Yuzia as a form of ‘divine retribution’ and the black sheep of the family. When she was angry at me for some prank or being naughty, she’d say: ‘Mind yourself or you’ll turn out to be a second Uncle Yuzia!’

My poor grandmother! She had no idea that my uncle’s life seemed to me utterly splendid. My sole dream was to become ‘a second Uncle Yuzia’. Uncle Yuzia always turned up unexpectedly at our home in Kiev or at our grandmother’s in Cherkassy only to disappear just as unexpectedly, and then reappear in a year or eighteen months with his deafening ring at our door and fill the flat with his hoarse voice, his coughing, swearing and infectious laughter. And every time right behind Uncle Yuzia would be the cab driver dragging heavy trunks across the floor filled with all sorts of treasures.

Uncle Yuzia was a tall, bearded man with a broken nose, hands of steel – he could bend silver roubles – and suspiciously calm eyes, in whose depths always lurked a glint of cunning. As my father would say, ‘He has no fear of God, Satan or death,’ although he’d go all to pieces at the sight of a woman’s tears or when confronted by a capricious child. The first time I ever saw him was after the Boer War. Uncle Yuzia had joined the Boers as a volunteer. This heroic and unselfish act had greatly raised his stock among all the relatives.

All of us children were shocked by this war. We felt sorry for the Boers fighting for their independence and hated the English. We knew the details of every battle fought on the other side of the earth – the siege of Ladysmith, the clash at Bloemfontein, the assault on Diamond Hill. Our heroes were the Boer generals De Wet, Joubert and Botha. We despised the haughty Lord Kitchener and laughed at the English soldiers in their red coats. We were intoxicated by a book called Pieter Maritz, a Young Boer from the Transvaal. But it wasn’t just us – the entire civilised world followed with a sinking heart the tragedy being played out on the plains between the Vaal and the Orange River, appalled at the unequal fight of a small nation against a great world power. Even the organ grinder in Kiev, who until then had only played ‘The Parting’, began to play a new song: ‘Transvaal, Transvaal, you burn in flames’. For this we gave him the five-kopeck pieces we’d saved up for ice cream.

For young boys like me the Boer War ruined the exotic dreams of childhood. Africa, it turned out, was not at all as we had imagined it to be based on the novels published in Around the World or from engineer Gorodetsky’s house on Bankovaya Street in Kiev. The walls of his grey house, which looked like a castle, were decorated with sculptures of rhinoceroses, giraffes, lions, crocodiles, antelopes and other African beasts. Instead of drainpipes, elephant trunks made of concrete hung down over the pavement. Water dripped from the jaws of rhinoceroses. Grey stone boa constrictors reared their heads from the façade’s dark recesses.

The owner of the house, engineer Gorodetsky, was a fanatical hunter. He had even travelled to Africa to hunt. It was in memory of these hunting expeditions that he decorated his house with these stone figures of wild beasts. Grown-ups said Gorodetsky was a bit mad, but we little boys loved his strange house, and it had done much to shape our fantasies about Africa. But now, even though we were still little, we understood that a huge struggle for human rights was being waged on the so-called Dark Continent, where until then we had thought only of the trumpeting of wise elephants, the miasmas of the tropical jungles, and the hippopotamuses quietly snorting in the slimy ooze of great uncharted rivers. Until then, Africa existed as the land of explorers, of various Stanleys and Livingstones.

I, just like the other boys, was sorry to lose that Africa where we had wandered in our dreams, to say goodbye to lion hunts, dawns over the sands of the Sahara, rafts on the Niger, whistling arrows, the furious shrieks of monkeys, the dark gloom of impenetrable forests. Danger awaited us there at every turn. In our imagination we had already died many times of fever or wounds behind the log walls of a fort listening to the whizz of a lone bullet, breathing the poisonous vapours of the swamps, gazing with inflamed eyes into the black velvety sky at the dying glimmer of the Southern Cross. How often had I died regretting my short, young life and my never having crossed mysterious Africa from Algiers to the Cape of Good Hope, from the Congo to Zanzibar!

Nevertheless, it was impossible to erase this image of Africa from my mind completely. It had a life of its own. Hence, the shock, the wordless amazement I felt at the appearance in our prosaic Kiev flat of a bearded man, burnt by the African sun, sporting a wide-brimmed Boer hat and an open-necked shirt with a cartridge clip on his belt – Uncle Yuzia. I followed his every step, I gazed into his eyes. I couldn’t believe that these eyes before me had seen the Orange River, Zulu kraals, British cavalrymen and storms on the Pacific. This happened just as the president of the Transvaal, the corpulent old Kruger,fn2 had come to Russia to request help for the Boers. Uncle Yuzia had travelled with him. He stayed in Kiev just one day and then departed for St Petersburg right behind Kruger. Uncle Yuzia was convinced Russia would help the Boers. But from Petersburg he wrote to Father: ‘Overriding considerations of State have forced the Russian Government to make an ignominious decision: we will not be helping the Boers. This means everything is lost, and I’m heading back now once more to the Far East.’

My grandfather – on my mother’s side – had not been a wealthy man. He would not have been able to educate his many children – five daughters and three sons – had he not sent all his sons to the Kiev Cadet Academy, where education was free. Uncle Yuzia had studied there together with his brothers. All went well for four years, but then in his fifth year Uncle Yuzia was transferred from Kiev to the penal ‘convict’ academy in the town of Volsk on the Volga. Cadets were sent to Volsk only for ‘serious crimes’. Uncle Yuzia had committed just such a crime.

The kitchen of the Kiev Cadet Academy was in the cellar. Before one of the holidays a large number of buns had been baked and left to cool on a long kitchen table. Uncle Yuzia got hold of a pole, fixed a nail to it, and used it to fish out through an open window a few dozen brown buns, after which he laid on a magnificent feast for his classmates. Uncle Yuzia spent only two years in Volsk. In his third year he was expelled from the Cadet Academy and demoted to the rank of private for striking an officer – the officer had stopped him in the street and reprimanded him harshly for some trifling fault in his uniform.

Uncle Yuzia was given a soldier’s greatcoat and a rifle and sent off from Volsk on foot to join an artillery unit in the town of Kutno near Warsaw. He crossed the country from east to west in winter, reporting to the various garrison commanders along the way, begging for his food in the villages, sleeping where he could at night. He left Volsk a hot-headed boy and arrived in Kutno an embittered soldier. In Kutno he advanced to ensign, the lowest of the officers’ ranks.

Uncle Yuzia was plagued by the worst possible luck in his military career. He was transferred from the artillery to the infantry. His regiment was sent to Moscow to do guard duty during the coronation of Nicholas II. Uncle Yuzia’s company was ordered to guard the river embankment alongside the Kremlin. Early on the morning of the coronation, my uncle saw his soldiers race down to the river’s edge where a violent melee had broken out. Gripping his sabre, he ran to join the soldiers. There in the mud on the riverbank he encountered a terrifying creature with a bronze head entangled in tubing. The soldiers had knocked the creature down and piled on top of it, and it was awkwardly trying to kick them off with its enormous lead boots. One of the soldiers wrapped a thick rubber hose around the creature’s copper head and it let out a hoarse rattle and soon stopped resisting. My uncle then realised that the creature was in fact a diver, screamed at the soldiers and began to quickly unscrew the copper helmet, but by then the diver was already dead. Neither my uncle nor the soldiers had been informed that divers would be searching the bottom of the Moscow River that morning for devilish devices.

After this incident Uncle Yuzia was discharged from the army. He left for central Asia, where he served for a while as the chief of camel caravans travelling from Uralsk to Khiva and Bukhara. At the time central Asia had yet to be linked to Russia by the railway, and so all goods had to be unloaded from the trains at Uralsk and transferred onto camels and transported thence by caravan. During one of these caravan trips my uncle made friends with the Grum-Grzhimailo brothers,fn3 explorers of central Asia, and hunted tigers with them. He sent Grandmother a gift of one of his tiger skins that had such a ferocious expression on its dead face she immediately hid it in the cellar, after first sprinkling it with mothballs.

Uncle Yuzia loved to tell how he could kill jackals on the spot just by sneezing at them. Out in the desert at night he’d lie down with his head on the knapsack containing his food and pretend to fall asleep. The jackals would creep up with their tails between their legs. Once the most brazen of them began to carefully pull the knapsack with his teeth out from under our uncle’s head, he’d let out a deafening sneeze and the cowardly jackal would drop dead of heart failure right there without letting out so much as a yelp. We believed him because we knew how loudly Uncle Yuzia sneezed in the morning as he prepared for the day. Those sneezes caused the glass in the windows to rattle and the terrified cat to race about the room trying to escape. Uncle Yuzia’s tales were more interesting to us than the adventures of Baron von Munchhausen. We had to conjure up Munchhausen in our imaginations, whereas Uncle Yuzia was right there – alive, enveloped in clouds of tobacco smoke, shaking the sofa with his laughter.

After this, a sketchy period in Uncle Yuzia’s life began. He roamed about Europe; he played, so some say, the roulette tables in Monte Carlo; and then he turned up in Abyssinia from where he returned with an enormous gold medal conferred upon him by the Negus Menelik.fn4 The medal looked like the sort of badges worn here by janitors.

Uncle Yuzia had trouble finding his place in life until his gaze turned toward the mists of the Far East, to Manchuria and the land of the river Ussuri. It was as if this country existed solely for people like Uncle Yuzia. There one could live freely, expansively, to the full extent of one’s unbridled nature and ambition without having to submit to any ‘asinine laws’. This was the Russian Alaska – untamed, rich and dangerous. No better place on earth for Uncle Yuzia could have been invented. The Amur, the taiga, gold, the Pacific Ocean, Korea, and then beyond – Kamchatka, Japan, Polynesia. A vast, unknown world thundered like the surf on the shores of the Far East, exciting the imagination of such men.

Uncle Yuzia went off to the Far East, but only after having taken for himself a wife, a young religious ascetic, or so Mama insisted since in her opinion only some sort of ascetic could stand being married to such an awful man as my uncle. There he took part in the defence of Harbin during the Boxer Rebellion, in fights with the honghuzi and in the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway, interrupting these undertakings only to go to the Transvaal. After the Boer War he returned to the Far East, although not to Manchuria, but to Port Arthur, where he worked as an agent of the Russian Volunteer Fleet. Uncle Yuzia wrote to us that he’d fallen in love with ships and the sea and regretted not having become a sailor in his youth.

About this time his wife died, and Uncle Yuzia was left with two little daughters on his hands. An affectionate though somewhat bungling father, he raised them with the help of his old Chinese servant, whom my uncle called ‘Fetch Me-tea’.fn5 Uncle Yuzia loved this devoted man nearly as much as his own daughters. He loved the Chinese in general and liked to say that this splendid, kind and wise people had but one shortcoming – a fear of rain.

During the Russo-Japanese War Uncle Yuzia was called up into the army as a former officer. He sent his daughters and ‘Fetch Me-tea’ off to live in Harbin. After the war he visited us in Kiev. This was the last time I saw him. By then he was already grey and staid, but those rambunctious and merry sparkles still flickered from time to time in his eyes. He told us all about Peking, about the gardens of the Chinese emperors, about Shanghai and the Yellow River. After such stories China became for me a land of eternal warm and clear nights. Maybe that impression was due to the fact that Uncle Yuzia no longer made things up, no longer rolled his eyes or roared with laughter, but spoke in a tired voice, constantly flicking the ash from his cigarette.

That was in 1905. Uncle Yuzia had little understanding of politics. He considered himself an old soldier, and he was – honourable and loyal to his oath. When my father began one of his critical and dangerous speeches, Uncle Yuzia fell silent, walked out into the garden, sat down on a bench and smoked in solitude. He considered Father ‘more leftist than the left’. In the autumn of ’05 a battalion of sappers together with a company of bridge engineers mutinied in Kiev. The sappers fought their way through the city, holding off a company of Cossacks sent in to put them down. The workers of the South Russian Machine Works joined the sappers. A crowd of children ran in front of the rebels. The Azov Sapper Regiment opened fire on the mutineers at the Galitsky Market, killing a great many children and workers. The rebellious sappers couldn’t return fire because of a crowd of civilians between them and the Azov men.

Uncle Yuzia became very agitated when he learned of the day’s events; pacing back and forth in the garden, he chain-smoked and swore under his breath. ‘The Azovs,’ he muttered, ‘those fools. What a disgrace! And those sappers are no better – not marksmen, but petty thieves!’

And then he vanished without notice, and by evening had still not returned. He didn’t come back that night or the next day. In fact, he never returned. Finally, six months later a letter arrived from one of his daughters in Harbin. She informed us that Uncle Yuzia had settled in Japan and asked us to forgive him for his sudden disappearance. Much later we learned that Uncle Yuzia had gone over to the sappers and was so enraged by the sight of the massacred children that together with Lieutenant Zhadanovsky, the leader of the rebellion, he organised a group of sappers and they had unleashed such a fusillade on the government’s troops that they had been forced to retreat. After this Uncle Yuzia had no choice but to flee. He left for Japan, where he soon died in the city of Kobe from cardiac asthma and that most horrible of illnesses – homesickness. Towards the end of his life, this enormous and ferocious man would cry at the slightest reminder of Russia. In his last letter he asked, almost as if in jest, to send him in an envelope the most precious gift he could think of – a dried leaf from a Kiev chestnut tree.