The Story of a Life

9

Winter Scenes

My father gave me a pair of Halifax ice skates for Christmas. Boys nowadays would laugh at such skates, but back then there were no better skates in the world than those from the city of Halifax.

Where is this city? I used to ask everyone. Where was this old city of Halifax, buried in snow, where all the boys had skates like mine? Where was this wintry land inhabited by aged sailors and bright schoolboys? No one could tell me. Borya, the eldest of us boys in the family, supposed that Halifax did not refer to a city, but to the name of the skates’ manufacturer. My father believed Halifax was a small town – yes, that’s right, he said, a town on the island of Newfoundland off the northern coast of America and it was famous not only for its ice skates but for its sled-dogs.

The skates lay on my table. I looked at them and thought about the town of Halifax. After receiving the skates, I immediately imagined this town and saw it so clearly in my mind that I could have drawn a detailed map with all its streets and squares.

I could sit at the table over my Malinin and Burenin arithmetic book – I was preparing that winter for my entrance examinations to the gymnasium – for hours on end thinking about Halifax. This aspect of my character frightened Mama. She worried about my ‘fantasies’ and liked to say that poverty and death in a ditch would come to little boys like me. This dismal prediction – ‘you’ll end up dead in a ditch’ – was popular back then. For some reason death in a ditch was considered to be particularly shameful. I heard this prediction often, but still more often Mama said that I had ‘dislocated brains that weren’t anything like other people’s’. She worried that I would end up a failure.

Father was furious whenever he heard this and would say to Mama: ‘Let him be a failure, or a beggar, or a tramp, or whatever, I don’t care, just as long as he doesn’t grow up to be one of those damned Kiev philistines!’

With time I too became rather afraid and embarrassed by my imagination. It seemed to me I was wasting my time on nonsense, while all around me everyone else was engaged in serious matters: my brothers and sister went to the gymnasium and worked hard on their lessons, my father served in the management of the South-West Railway, and Mama sewed and kept the house. I alone lived cut off from the general cares of the world, wasting my time doing nothing.

‘I wish you’d go skating rather than just sit around dreaming up heaven knows what,’ said Mama. ‘What a funny little boy! Just look at yourself!’

I went out to skate. The winter days were short. It grew dark while I was still on the ice. A military band appeared and started to play. Little coloured lights were lit. Schoolgirls in fur coats, their hands tucked inside small muffs, skated in large circles, swaying from side to side. The boys skated backwards or ‘pistol-fashion’ – crouched down on one leg with the other stuck straight out. This was considered the height of style. I envied them.

I returned home tired and red-cheeked from the cold. But my heart was still beset by worry, because even after skating, I could feel that same dangerous inclination to daydreaming.

On the ice I often met my sister Galya’s friend – Katyusha Desnitskaya, a pupil in the upper forms at the Fundukleevskaya Gymnasium for Girls. She also had Halifax skates, although her blades were made of burnished, black steel. My brother Borya, a pupil at the local maths and science school at the time, was courting Katyusha. They waltzed together on the ice. First, the speedskaters would clear a wide circle on the ice, cuffing the street boys on their homemade skates to get them to stop horsing around. Then, a slow, gliding dance would begin. Even Kovarík, the red-haired Czech bandmaster, turned round to watch the dance. A sweet smile stretched from ear to ear on his ruddy face.

Desnitskaya’s long plaits flew about in time with the music. They got in her way, and so, without stopping, she placed them on her chest and gazed haughtily out from under her half-closed eyes at her admiring public. I watched Borya with malicious joy. He did not dance as well as Katyusha. Sometimes he even lost an edge and slipped on his Yacht Club skates, which he was so proud of. I never could have imagined that day on the ice that Desnitskaya’s life would become more unbelievable than any of my fantasies.

One of the sons of the king of Siam, Prince Chakrabongse, had been a student at the Corps des Pages in St Petersburg. Once on his way home he fell ill with pneumonia and was brought to Kiev and placed in the tsar’s palace, where he was attended to by a number of local doctors. The prince recovered, but before he could continue his journey to Siam he first had to rest in Kiev for two months. He became bored. Every last effort was made to entertain him – he was taken to balls at the Merchants’ Club, to charity galas and raffles, to the circus, to the theatre.

At one of these balls the prince saw Katyusha Desnitskaya. She was dancing a waltz, just as she had done on the ice, her plaits falling down over her chest and her half-closed lids partially concealing her haughty blue eyes that she cast about the room. The prince was enchanted. A short man with tawny skin, slanting eyes and hair that shone as if it had been rubbed down with shoe polish, he fell in love with Katyusha. He departed for Siam, but then soon returned to Kiev incognito and proposed to Katyusha. She accepted. The girls at the gymnasium were shocked. With one voice they insisted that were they in her position none of them would marry an Asian no matter what, even if he were the son of a king.

Katyusha went off to Siam. Soon thereafter the king died of some tropical disease, and then the eldest prince, and heir to the throne, also died. Katyusha’s husband was the late king’s second son. He had had little hope of ascending the throne. But following the death of his brother he became the lone heir and was crowned the new king. Thus Katyusha, a carefree schoolgirl from Kiev, became the queen of Siam.

The courtiers hated their foreign queen. Her very existence violated the traditions of the royal court of Siam. Katyusha ordered that electricity be brought to Bangkok. This was the straw that broke the courtiers’ backs. It is said that they decided to poison this queen who had sought to improve the nation’s ancient customs. And so, they supposedly gathered old electric lightbulbs and ground the glass into a fine powder that they mixed into her food. Within six months she was dead from intestinal bleeding.

Her king erected a memorial on her grave. A tall elephant of black marble, a golden crown on its head, its trunk hanging despondently, was placed in thick grass that reached up to its knees. It is beneath this grass that Katyusha Desnitskaya, the young queen of Siam, lies.fn1

Afterwards, every time I set foot on that ice, I recalled Katyusha waltzing to ‘Irretrievable Time’ under the direction of the bandmaster and the way she would brush the snow from her forehead and brow with her mittens, and I recalled her skates of black steel – those skates from the city of Halifax, home to all those kind-hearted old sailors. I wish I could have told them the story of Katyusha. At first, they would have gaped in astonishment, then flushed with anger at the courtiers, and finally just shaken their heads as they contemplated the vicissitudes of human fortune.

In the wintertime I went to the theatre with my family.

The first work I saw was The Capture of Izmail. I didn’t like it all. This was because I had spied a man wearing glasses and shiny velvet trousers in the wings standing next to Suvorov who then proceeded to shove him so hard in the back that Suvorov leapt out onto the stage crowing like a cock. The second, however, Rostand’s La Princesse Lointaine, took my breath away.fn2 It had everything to stir my imagination: a ship’s deck, enormous sails, troubadours, knights, a princess.

I fell in love with the Solovtsovsky Theatre, with its powder-blue velvet upholstery and its cosy boxes. After each performance my parents could not drag me out of the theatre no matter how hard they tried until all the lights had been extinguished. The darkness of the hall, the lingering smell of perfume and orange peel – all this enticed me so that I dreamed of hiding under my seat and spending the whole night alone in the empty theatre. As a child I was unable to distinguish between the drama on the stage and real life, and so I genuinely suffered and even fell ill after every performance.

The theatre fed my passion for reading. It was enough just to see Madame Sans-Gêne to make me devour every last book about Napoleon. The various periods and people I had seen on the stage came to life for me in a miraculous way and were filled with a rare attraction and charm.

It wasn’t just the plays that I loved. I loved the theatre’s long corridors with their mirrors in faded gilt frames, the dark cloakrooms that smelled of fur, the mother-of-pearl opera glasses, the impatient stamping of horses’ hooves waiting before the entrance. During the interval I liked to run to the end of the corridor to look out of the window. It was pitch black outside. All I could make out was the white of the snow on the trees. Then I would quickly turn round to take in the light of the sumptuous hall, the chandeliers, the lustre of the women’s hair, their bracelets and earrings, and the velvet stage curtain that gently rippled in a warm draught. I did this over and over – first looking out of the window, then at the hall, then out of the window, then at the hall. It made me so happy.

I did not like opera. Apparently, this was because the first one my parents took me to was Rubinstein’s Demon.fn3 The lead performer had heavy lips and a greasy, impudent face, and he sang his part of the demon in a lazy and sloppy sort of way. He wore hardly any makeup. This large, pot-bellied figure of a man looked silly in his long black muslin shirt, complete with spangles, and wings affixed to his back. He sang with such a pronounced burr that I couldn’t keep from laughing. Mama became indignant and never took me to the opera again.

Aunt Dozia came to stay with us from Gorodishche every winter. Mama loved to take her to the theatre. She always had trouble sleeping the night before. Several hours before the performance even started, she put on a loose-fitting dress of brown satin, embroidered with yellow flowers and leaves, tossed a matching brown shawl over her shoulders, and grabbed her tiny lace handkerchief. A bit anxious but now looking a good ten years younger, she and Mama would leave for the theatre in a droshky. Just like all women from the Ukrainian countryside, Aunt Dozia covered her head with a black kerchief decorated with little roses.

Everyone at the theatre couldn’t help but stare at Aunt Dozia, but she was so taken by the performance that she didn’t notice a thing. Mama took her mostly to Ukrainian plays and operas – Natalya from Poltava, A Cossack beyond the Danube and Shelmenko the Driver. Once Aunt Dozia jumped out of her seat at a performance and shouted in Ukrainian at the villain: ‘Such impudence! Just what do you think you’re doing, you wretch!’ The audience roared with laughter. Down came the curtain. Aunt Dozia cried the whole next day from shame and kept apologising to my father. Nothing we did could calm her down.

It was with Aunt Dozia that we went to the cinema for the first time. Back then the cinema was called ‘L’Illusion’ or ‘Cinématographe Lumière’. The first showing was arranged in the Opera House. My father was ecstatic over the illusion and hailed it as one of the marvellous innovations of the twentieth century.

A damp grey sheet had been stretched across the stage. Then the chandeliers were extinguished. A sinister greenish light appeared on the sheet followed by some jumping black spots. Directly over our heads a smoky shaft of light coursed through the darkness. There came a horrifying sizzling sound, as if someone were roasting a whole wild boar behind our backs. Aunt Dozia asked Mama: ‘Why does it crackle like that, this illusion? Do you think we’ll all be burnt like chickens in a coop?’

After a lot of blinking a title appeared on the sheet: The Terrible Eruption of Mount Pelée and Destruction of St Pierre, Martinique. A Travel-Film. The screen shook and then, as if through a dust storm, a volcano appeared. Burning lava erupted from deep inside. Everyone was overwhelmed by the spectacle, and they began making a loud noise that spread throughout the hall. Next we were shown a comic picture about life in a French barracks. A drummer beat his drum as soldiers woke up, jumped out of bed and began to pull on their trousers. A large rat fell out of one soldier’s trouser legs. It ran around the barracks as the soldiers, terrified and their eyes bulging in exaggerated fashion, climbed onto their beds and hung from the doors and windows. With that, the film ended.

‘Pure buffoonery!’ Mama said. ‘Just like the shows they put on at the Contract Fair, except those are much more interesting.’ Father remarked that unimaginative folks had laughed in just the same way at Stephenson’s steam locomotive,fn4 and Aunt Dozia, in an attempt to make peace, said: ‘Who needs these illusions anyway? Not the sort of thing for us women to bother ourselves with.’

The side-shows at the Contract Fair were in fact quite interesting. We loved the fair and waited anxiously all winter long for it to open. It always took place at the end of winter in the Podol part of town in the old Contract House and the many wooden booths set up around it. The fair typically opened during the first thaw when the dirt roads all turned to mud. The strong smells of the various wares travelled far – new barrels, leather, gingerbread and calico. I especially liked the merry-go-round, the toys and the panopticon. Buttery blocks of vanilla and chocolate halva crunched under the salesmen’s knives. Translucent pieces of rose and lemon Turkish delight stuck to my teeth. Huge earthenware platters were piled with pyramids of sugared pears, plums and cherries – the work of Kiev’s famous confectioner Balabukha.

Roughly carved wooden soldiers finished in cheap paint stood in rows on bast mats laid out over the muddy ground – Cossacks in tall hats and wide trousers with crimson piping, drummers with fierce, bulging eyes, buglers with tassels on their horns. Clay whistles lay in piles. Cheerful old men jostled through the crowd hawking strange and alluring toys, like the ‘Man from the Sea’, which turned out to be just a small rubber figure in the shape of a devil that dived and twisted about in a glass jar filled with water.

We were immersed in a deafening noise – the hawkers’ cries, the clang of metal cart wheels, the bells of the Bratsky Bogoyavlensky Monastery ringing for Lent, and the squeals of little boys on the merry-go-round. For a few kopecks extra, the merry-go-round spun so fast that everything turned into a motley confusion of grinning, papier-mâché horses’ heads, neckties, boots, swelling skirts, coloured garters, lace and kerchiefs. Sometimes the relentless twirling caused a necklace to break, sending glass beads flying like bullets into the faces of the spectators.

The panopticon scared me a little, especially the wax figures. The murdered French president Carnotfn5 lay smiling on the floor in his dress coat with a ceremonial star pinned to it. Unnaturally thick blood – it looked like red Vaseline – oozed down his shirt front. Carnot seemed pleased at having died so efficiently. A wax Cleopatra pressed a black asp to her firm, greenish breast. A mermaid with violet eyes lay in a zinc bathtub. Her grimy scales reflected the dim light of a single electric bulb. The water in the tub was murky. A boa constrictor slept on an eiderdown in an open trunk covered with wire netting. Every so often he tensed his muscles, and the visitors stepped back in fear.

A stuffed gorilla, surrounded by dense foliage of painted wood shavings, carried off a swooning girl with long, flowing blond hair into the forest depths. For three kopecks you could shoot at the gorilla with a Monte Cristo pistol and try to save the girl. If you hit the round target on its chest, the gorilla dropped what proved to be a rag doll. A thick cloud of dust went up every time she hit the floor. Next, a chintz curtain was drawn for a minute, and then the gorilla reappeared, as fierce as before, and once again he carried the girl off into that dense and oddly coloured forest.

We also loved the Contract Fair because it heralded the approach of Easter, our trip to Grandmother in Cherkassy, and then the always magnificent and unforgettable Kiev spring.