The Story of a Life

10

The Midshipman

Spring in Kiev began when the Dnieper overflowed its banks. All one had to do was go out onto Vladimirskaya Hill on the edge of town and there before your eyes lay an expansive sea of bluish water.

But it wasn’t just the Dnieper that flooded. Every spring Kiev witnessed a flood of sunlight, of freshness and of soft, fragrant breezes. On Bibikovsky Boulevard the cone-shaped poplars blossomed and filled the neighbouring streets with the smell of incense. The chestnut trees put out their first leaves – translucent, wrinkled and covered with a faint reddish fur. By the time the yellow and pink candles had blossomed on the chestnut trees, spring had reached its height. Waves of cool air, the scent of young grass and the sound of new, rustling leaves poured out of the ancient parks and into the city streets.

Caterpillars crawled along the pavement, even on Kreshchatik. The wind swept dried petals into piles. Cockchafers and butterflies flew into the trams through the open windows. The nightingales sang in the dark, front gardens. The fluff from the poplars swirled over the pavements like the surf upon the Black Sea. Dandelions yellowed along the roadside. Striped awnings were lowered against the sun over the open windows of the pastry shops and coffee houses. Sprigs of lilac, sprinkled with water, stood in vases on the restaurant tables. The young girls of Kiev searched among the lilacs for a five-petalled bloom. Under their straw summer hats the girls’ faces acquired a matt ochre hue.

Spring was the season of Kiev’s parks. I spent all my days in them. I played there, did my lessons there, read there. I went home only to eat and sleep.

I knew every corner of the enormous Botanical Gardens with its gullies, its pond and the thick shadows of its ancient lime-tree allées. But my favourite was Mariinsky Park in Lipki near the palace. It overlooked the Dnieper. Its walls of purple and white lilac, three times a man’s height, swayed and hummed with great swarms of bees. Fountains scattered among its meadows shot water high into the air.

A wide belt of parks stretched along the red-clay cliffs overhanging the Dnieper – Mariinsky Park, Palace Park, the Tsars’ Park and the Merchants’ Park, which was famous for its expansive view of Podol. The people of Kiev were especially proud of this view. A symphony orchestra played in the Merchants’ Park all summer long. The only thing that disturbed the sound of the music were the long hoots of the steamers’ whistles that wafted up from the Dnieper. The final park along the banks was Vladimirskaya Hill. Here stood the monument to Prince Vladimir, holding a large bronze cross in his hand. Electric lights had been affixed to the cross. When they turned them on at night the fiery cross appeared to hang high up in the sky over the steep slopes of Kiev.

The city was so beautiful in the spring that I never could understand Mama’s passion for those obligatory Sunday trips out to Boyarka, the Voditsa Woods or Darnitsa in the surrounding countryside. I was bored by the Voditsa Woods and their dachas, each one just like the others, indifferent to Boyarka and its scraggy allée dedicated to the poet Nadson,fn1 and hated Darnitsa with its pines ringed by trampled grass and its thick, heavy, cigarette-butt-littered sands.

One spring day I sat reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island in Mariinsky Park. Galya, my sister, sat next to me reading as well. Her summer hat lay beside her on the bench. The hat’s green ribbons stirred in the wind. Galya was short-sighted and very trusting and it was almost impossible to upset her gentle nature.

It had rained that morning, but now a clear, bright spring sky shone overhead. Now and then a few last raindrops fell from the lilacs. A girl with bows in her hair stopped in front of us and started skipping with a rope. She was disturbing my reading. I shook the lilac tree. A light rain splashed the girl and Galya. The girl stuck out her tongue at me and ran off. Galya just wiped the raindrops off her book and continued reading.

It was at this very moment that I caught sight of the man who for a long time to come was to poison my mind with dreams of an unattainable future.

Casually strolling down the allée came a tall, tanned midshipman. A straight, black cutlass hung from his shiny belt. Black ribbons decorated with bronze anchors fluttered in the breeze. He was all in black. A few glittering gold stripes were the only bits of colour on his severe uniform. Sailors were a rarity in land-locked Kiev, and we almost never saw them. Yet here was a visitor from the remote and legendary world of the great sailing ships, like the frigate Pallada, from the world of all the oceans and seas, all the ports, all the winds, and all the fascination that goes with the exotic life of a seafarer. His old, black-hilted sword appeared in Mariinsky Park as if it had just leapt from the pages of Stevenson.

The midshipman walked past, the gravel crunching under his feet. Galya was too short-sighted to notice my disappearance. All my dreams of the sea were embodied in this man. I had often imagined the sea, foggy and gold in the evening calm, and myself on some distant voyage, the whole world changing before my eyes like the quickly shifting shapes in a kaleidoscope. My God, if only someone had thought at the time to gift me a piece of crusty rust off an old anchor! I would have cherished it like a jewel.

The midshipman stopped and looked around. On the black ribbon of his sailor’s cap I read the mysterious word Azimut. I later learned that this was the name of a training ship of the Baltic fleet. I followed him down Yelizavetinskaya Street, then down Institutskaya, and Nikolaevskaya. He saluted the passing infantry officers with such casual style that I became ashamed of our clumsy Kievan warriors. He looked back a few times and then stopped at the corner of Meringovskaya Street and called me over.

‘Little boy,’ he asked playfully, ‘why are you following in my wake like some tugboat?’

I blushed and said nothing.

‘I see. Dreams of becoming a sailor, does he?’ the midshipman said, referring to me for some reason in the third person.

‘I’m short-sighted,’ I told him despondently.

The midshipman placed a lean hand on my shoulder. ‘Let’s go to Kreshchatik.’

We walked side by side. I didn’t dare to look up and kept my eyes on his stout boots, which had been polished to an impossible shine.

When we reached Kreshchatik the midshipman led me into Café Semadeni and ordered two pistachio ice creams and two glasses of water. We sat down to eat our ice cream at a small three-legged marble table. The marble was very cold and covered with scribbled figures: brokers from the stock exchange gathered at Semadeni and counted their profits and losses on the tables. We ate our ice cream in silence. The midshipman took from his wallet a photograph of a magnificent corvette fully rigged and with a large funnel. He handed it to me and said: ‘Keep it as a memento. This is my ship. I sailed on her to Liverpool.’

He gave me a firm handshake and left. I sat a while longer until the sweaty businessmen in their boaters started to stare. I got up and stumbled out and then ran all the way back to Mariinsky Park. The bench was empty. Galya had gone. I realised that the midshipman had felt sorry for me and learned for the first time that pity leaves a bitter feeling in one’s heart.

After that encounter the desire to become a sailor tormented me for many years. I yearned for the sea. I had seen it once when I visited Novorossiisk with my father for a few days. But that, of course, had not been enough. For hours I would sit with my atlas, studying the coastlines of the oceans and looking up obscure ports, capes, islands and estuaries. I dreamed up a complicated game. I created a long list of steamers with important-sounding names: North Star, Walter Scott, Khingan, Sirius. The list grew daily. I had become the owner of the largest fleet in the world.

It goes without saying that I sat in my own shipping office, enveloped in cigar smoke and surrounded by colourful posters and sailing schedules. My large windows looked out onto the quay, quite naturally. The steamers’ yellow masts clanked from the rhythmic rocking of the water, and I could see the elms swaying in the gentle sea breeze. Smoke from the ships wafted through the open windows and mixed with the smell of old brine and fresh, new matting. I plotted the most astonishing routes for my ships. They visited every possible corner of the globe. They even sailed to the islands of Tristan da Cunha. I switched the steamers from one route to another. I followed my ships’ sailings and always knew exactly where they were at any moment, be it the Admiral Istomin, for example, loading bananas in Singapore on the same day that the Flying Dutchman was unloading flour in the Faroe Islands. Running such an enormous shipping operation required a great deal of information. And so, I pored over guidebooks, nautical reference works and anything else that had the remotest connection with the sea.

It was then I heard the word ‘meningitis’ from Mama for the first time. ‘Lord knows what all your games will lead to,’ Mama said. ‘As long as it doesn’t end with meningitis.’

I had heard that meningitis was a disease that struck young boys who learned to read at too young an age, and so I just laughed at Mama’s fears. It ended, in fact, with my parents’ decision to spend our summer holiday at the sea. Now I realise that Mama had hoped this would cure me of my extraordinary infatuation with the sea. She thought that, as usually happens, I would be disappointed after encountering the reality of my dreams, dreams which I had been chasing with so much passion. And she was right, but only partially.