The Story of a Life

14

Water from the Limpopo

On the table in our classroom stood a row of sealed bottles filled with yellowish water. Every bottle had a label on it. An old, uneven hand had written on the labels: ‘Water from the Nile’, ‘Water from the River Limpopo’, ‘Water from the Mediterranean’.

There were many bottles. They held water from the Volga, the Rhine and the Thames, the Dead Sea, the Amazon and Lake Michigan. No matter how long we stared at the bottles, all the water looked equally yellow and boring. We pestered our geography teacher, Cherpunov, to allow us to taste the water from the Dead Sea. We wanted to find out if it really was that salty. But Cherpunov never allowed us to. Small, with a long grey beard practically down to his knees, and slits for eyes, Cherpunov looked like a wizard. It was with good reason his nickname was Chernomor after the evil sorcerer from Pushkin’s Ruslan and Ludmila. Cherpunov was always bringing curious objects with him to class. Most of all he loved bringing bottles of water. He told us how he himself had collected the water from the Nile near Cairo.

‘Look how much sediment there is,’ he said, shaking the bottle. ‘This sediment from the Nile is worth more than diamonds. The culture of Egypt was built on this mud. Markovsky, tell the class what we mean by the word “culture”.’

Markovsky stood up and said that culture was the cultivation of cereals, raisins and rice.

‘Stupid, but there’s a bit of truth in that!’ commented Cherpunov and began showing us the various bottles. He was particularly proud of the water from the river Limpopo. A former pupil had sent it to him as a gift. Cherpunov devised special visual aids to help us remember all sorts of geographical facts. Once he drew a large ‘A’ on the blackboard. In the right-hand corner of this ‘A’ he wrote a second, smaller ‘A’ and then a third still smaller one in it, and in the third, a fourth. And then he said: ‘Now remember: A is for Asia, Arabia is in Asia, Aden is in Arabia, and in Aden there sits an Anglo-Saxon.’

We memorised this immediately and never forgot it for the rest of our lives.

The older schoolboys told us that Cherpunov had put together a small geographical museum in his flat, but the old man would not let anyone see it. It was said to include a stuffed hummingbird, a butterfly collection, a telescope and even a nugget of gold. Upon hearing this, I began to organise my own museum. It was, of course, rather modest, but, in my imagination, it amounted to a realm of astonishing things. Each object had its own colourful story behind it – be it a button from the uniform of a Romanian soldier or a dead praying mantis.

Once I came upon Cherpunov in the Botanical Gardens. He was sitting on a bench still wet from the rain and poking the ground with his walking stick. I doffed my cap and bowed.

‘Come here!’ Cherpunov said, holding out a fat hand. ‘Have a seat. Tell me, what’s this I hear about you organising a small museum? What sort of things do you have in it?’

I shyly gave him a list of my simple treasures. Cherpunov smiled. ‘Most commendable!’ he said. ‘Come and visit me on Sunday morning. You can have a look at my museum. I don’t doubt that if you devote yourself to such matters you’ll become a geographer or explorer one day.’

‘With my mother?’ I asked.

‘Your mother?

‘Should I come with my mother?’

‘No, why? Come by yourself. Mothers don’t understand the first thing about geography.’

On Sunday morning I put on my new school uniform and went to call on Cherpunov. He lived in the Pechersk neighbourhood in a low outbuilding located deep inside a courtyard. The building was so overgrown with lilac bushes that all the rooms were dark. It was late autumn, but the lilacs, wet with mist, were still green. Down below on the Dnieper the steamers hooted as they departed Kiev to winter in the south. I climbed the front steps and saw next to the door a brass plate and round doorbell knob. I pulled on the knob. I could hear the tinkle of bells inside. Cherpunov opened the door. He was wearing a thick grey jacket and felt shoes.

The miracles began right there in the front hall. Reflected in an oval mirror was a small schoolboy, red with embarrassment, struggling with stiff fingers to undo the buttons on his coat. It took me some time before I realised that it was my own reflection. Still struggling with the buttons, I noticed the mirror’s frame. It wasn’t a frame, but a wreath of delicately painted glass leaves, flowers and bunches of grapes.

‘That’s Venetian glass,’ said Cherpunov, helping me with the last of my buttons, then taking my coat and hanging it up. ‘Take a close look. You can even touch it.’

I carefully touched a glass rose. The glass was opaque, as if it had been dusted with powder, but a shaft of light from the next room shone through it with a reddish glow. ‘It’s just like Turkish delight,’ I said.

‘Stupid, but there’s a bit of truth in that,’ Cherpunov mumbled.

I blushed such that even my eyes seemed to turn red. Cherpunov patted me on the shoulder. ‘Don’t be offended. It’s just a saying of mine. Come. We’ll have tea together.’

I hesitated, but Cherpunov took me by the elbow and led me into the dining room. It was more of a garden than a room. To get to my place at the table I had to carefully move aside the leaves of a philodendron and some branches with fragrant red cones dangling from the ceiling. The fronds of a palm tree hung over the white tablecloth. Vases of pink, yellow and white flowers crowded the windowsills.

I took a seat at the table, but immediately jumped up again. A petite young woman with brilliant grey eyes had come rushing into the room, her dress swishing as she walked.

‘Masha, this is the schoolboy I told you about,’ said Cherpunov, nodding at me. ‘Georgy Maximovich’s son. He’s embarrassed, quite naturally.’

The woman held her hand out to me. Her bracelet tinkled. ‘Are you really going to show him everything, Pëtr Petrovich?’ she asked, smiling as she scrutinised me.

‘Yes, after we’ve had our tea.’

‘Then I’ll use that time to walk into town. I want to go to Kirchheim’s pastry shop for a thing or two.’

‘As you wish.’

The woman poured me a cup of tea with lemon and pushed a plate of Vienna rolls in front of me. ‘You’ll need to build up your strength before the lecture,’ she said.

After tea Cherpunov lit a cigarette. He flicked the ash into a seashell edged with petrified foam of the most delicate pink colour. An exact duplicate of the shell stood next to it on the table. ‘This shell is from New Guinea,’ Cherpunov explained.

‘All right then, goodbye!’ the young woman said loudly, getting up and leaving.

‘Well now,’ said Cherpunov, following her out with his eyes before pointing to a portrait on the wall. It depicted a bearded man with an emaciated face. ‘Do you know who that is? One of Russia’s finest men. The explorer Miklukho-Maklai.fn1 He was a great humanist. I don’t suppose you know what that word means, but that doesn’t matter. You will in time. He was a great scholar who believed in humanity’s essential goodness. He lived all by himself, unarmed and dying of fever, among the cannibals of New Guinea. Yet he managed to do so much good for the savages and he showed them so much patience and kindness that when our corvette the Emerald came to bring him back to Russia, crowds came out to the beach in tears, reaching out their arms to the ship as they cried: “Maklai! Maklai!” And so, remember: with kindness you can achieve anything and everything.’

The woman returned to the dining room and stopped by the doors. She was wearing a small black hat and was pulling a glove onto her left hand.

‘By the way, what is poetry?’ Cherpunov asked out of the blue. ‘Please don’t even try to give me an answer. There isn’t one. Take this shell from the island where Maklai lived. If you were to stare at it for a long time, suddenly it would come to you that one morning long ago the sun landed on this shell and it will remain on it forever.’

The woman sat down on a chair by the door and began to take off her glove. I stared at the shell. For a moment I truly believed that I had fallen asleep and was seeing the slow dawn and the pink flash of the sun’s rays over the great translucent expanse of the ocean waters.

‘If you press the shell to your ear,’ Cherpunov said from somewhere far away, ‘you’ll hear a rumbling sound. I can’t tell you why this is. In fact, no one can. It’s a mystery. Everything that we’re unable to understand we call a mystery.’

The woman took off her hat and laid it on her lap.

‘Here, listen,’ said Cherpunov.

I pressed the shell to my hear and heard a sleepy murmur – as if a gentle surf were breaking on some shore far, far away.

The woman held out her hand: ‘Let me try. It’s been a long time since I listened to it.’

I gave her the shell. She pressed it to her ear, smiled and opened her mouth just enough for me to see her teeth. They were small, very white and wet.

‘Aren’t you going to Kirchheim’s, Masha?’ Cherpunov asked.

The woman got up. ‘I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to go all by myself. Excuse me if I’ve disturbed you.’ She left the dining room.

‘Well, all right then, let’s continue our conversation, young man,’ said Cherpunov. ‘There are some black boxes over there in the corner. Fetch the top one, but do be careful about it.’

I got the box and placed it on the table in front of Cherpunov. The box turned out to be quite light. Cherpunov slowly removed the lid. I peeped over his shoulder and let out a shriek. An enormous butterfly, bigger than a maple leaf, was lying in the box on a piece of dark silk and shimmering like a rainbow.

‘No, that’s not how you’re supposed to look at it!’ he said crossly. ‘Like this!’ He took me by the crown of my head and began to turn it to the right and then the left. Each time the butterfly erupted with colour – white, then gold, then purple, then blue. It was as if its wings were being burned by a miraculous fire that would never go out.

‘A most rare butterfly from the island of Borneo!’ Cherpunov announced with pride and then replaced the lid.

Next Cherpunov showed me an astral globe, old maps with different roses of the winds on them, and a few stuffed hummingbirds with long beaks like awls.

‘Well, that’s enough for today,’ he said. ‘You’re tired. You can come visit me any Sunday you like.’

‘Are you always at home?’

‘Yes, I’m too old now to travel the world, my friend. And so now I wander about here in my rooms, exploring the things on my tables and walls.’ He waved a hand at the bookshelves and the dead hummingbirds.

‘Did you do a lot of travelling?’ I asked timidly.

‘No less than Miklukho-Maklai.’

The young woman came in as I was hurriedly trying to put on my coat and having trouble finding my sleeve. She was in a short, close-fitting jacket, hat and gloves. A small dark veil covered her eyes, making them appear dark blue. ‘Where do you live?’ she asked.

I told her.

‘So, we are going the same direction as far as Kreshchatik. Shall we?’

We left. Cherpunov stood in the doorway and watched us go. Then he said in a loud voice: ‘Masha, please do be careful. And hurry back.’

‘All right,’ the woman replied, without bothering to turn round.

We passed the Nikolsky Fort with its bronze lion heads on its gates, walked through Mariinsky Park, where I had earlier met the midshipman, and turned onto Institutskaya Street. The woman was silent. So was I. I was afraid she would ask me something and I would have to answer. On Institutskaya Street, she finally did ask me something: ‘What did you like the most at our museum?’

‘The butterfly,’ I said, before pausing and adding: ‘Although I feel bad for it.’

‘Really?’ she said, surprised. ‘Why do you feel bad?’ She addressed me with ‘vy’, the formal ‘you’, which no one had ever done before. This made me all the more nervous.

‘It’s so beautiful, but almost no one gets to see it,’ I answered.

‘What else did you like?’

On Kreshchatik we stopped in front of Kirchheim’s. The woman asked: ‘Are you allowed to visit pastry shops for cocoa and sweets?’

I didn’t even know whether or not I was allowed, but I did recall that once Galya and I had been with Mama to Kirchheim’s, and we had indeed drunk cocoa on that occasion. So, I said that yes, of course, I was allowed to treat myself at Kirchheim’s.

‘Wonderful! Let’s go.’

We took a seat in the back. The woman moved a vase of hydrangeas off to the side of the table and ordered two cups of cocoa and a small cake.

‘What form are you in at school?’

‘The second.’

‘And how old are you?’

‘Twelve.’

‘I’m twenty-eight. At twelve you can believe anything.’

‘What?’ I interrupted.

‘Do you enjoy playing games and making things up?’

‘Yes.’

‘So does Pëtr Petrovich. But I don’t, unfortunately. Maybe you could include me in some of your games. We could have fun together.’

‘What sort of games?’ I asked, curious. The conversation was getting interesting.

‘What sort? Let’s see. Perhaps Cinderella or trying to escape from an evil king. We could even think up a new game. We could call it “The Butterfly from the Island of Borneo”.’

‘Yes!’ I said, flushed with excitement. ‘We could go to an enchanted forest in search of living water.’

‘At great risk to our lives, of course?’

‘Yes, of course, at great risk.’

‘We would carry this water cupped in our hands,’ she said and lifted her veil. ‘When one of us became tired, the other would carry it. We’d have to pour it back and forth very carefully to make certain we didn’t spill a drop.’

‘But one or two drops would have to spill out and fall to the ground, and there …’

‘And there,’ she interrupted, ‘in those spots, large bushes with white flowers will sprout. And then what, what will happen next, do you think?’

‘We shall sprinkle this water on the butterfly, and it will come back to life.’

‘And it will turn into a lovely maiden?’ the woman asked and laughed. ‘Well, it’s time to go. They’re probably waiting for you at home.’

We left. She accompanied me as far as Fundukleevskaya Street. I turned and watched her go. She was crossing Kreshchatik and had turned to look at me too. She smiled and waved. Her hand was small, and she wore a black glove. At home, I didn’t tell a soul, not even Mama, that I had been at Kirchheim’s. Mama couldn’t understand why I had no appetite for dinner. I just sat there, obstinately silent. I kept thinking about that woman, but nothing made any sense. The next day I asked one of the older boys at school who the woman was.

‘You mean you’ve really been to Cherpunov’s?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you saw his museum?’

‘Yes.’

‘Lucky you,’ the boy said. ‘That’s his wife. He’s thirty-five years older than her.’

I didn’t visit Cherpunov the following Sunday since he had been ill and didn’t come to school much of the week. A few days later Mama suddenly asked me over evening tea whether I had seen a young woman during my visit to Cherpunov’s.

‘Yes, I did,’ I said. Then I blushed.

‘Well, so it’s true,’ Mama said turning to my father. ‘They say he was so good to her! She lived like a princess in a golden cage.’

My father said nothing.

‘Kostik,’ Mama said, ‘you’ve had your tea. Go to your room. It’s nearly your bedtime.’

She had sent me off so she could talk to Father about Cherpunov. I didn’t eavesdrop, even though I really wanted to know what had happened. Soon enough I heard all about it at school. His wife had left him and gone off to St Petersburg. The old man was sick with grief and wouldn’t see anyone.

‘Serves Chernomor right,’ said my classmate Littauer. ‘He shouldn’t have taken a young wife!’

His words made us angry. We were all fond of dear old Cherpunov. So we got even at the start of the next lesson. When our French teacher, Sermout, came flying into the classroom, the whole class screamed in one voice: ‘Littauer! Ittauer! Tauer! Auer! Er!’

Then the room fell silent.

Sermout flew into a rage and, failing to understand just what had taken place, as always, yelled: ‘Littauer, get out!’ He then gave Littauer a poor conduct mark.

We never saw Cherpunov again. He didn’t come back to school. A year later I met him on the street. His face was yellow and puffy, and he was dragging himself along with the aid of a heavy cane. He stopped me, asked how I was doing at school, and said: ‘Do you remember the butterfly? The one from the island of Borneo? Well, I don’t have it anymore.’

I was silent. Cherpunov watched me closely.

‘I gave it to the university. Not only that one, but my entire collection of butterflies. Well, all the best. I’m glad we met.’

Cherpunov died not long afterwards. I thought about him and the young woman for a long time. A strange feeling of sadness overcame me when I recalled her veil and how she smiled and waved as she crossed Kreshchatik. Years later when I was in the last form at school, our psychology teacher, while discussing the creative power of the imagination, suddenly asked: ‘Do you remember Cherpunov and his water from various rivers and seas?’

‘Yes, of course, we remember,’ the whole class replied.

‘Well, I can inform you that those bottles were filled with nothing but ordinary city tap water. You may ask why Cherpunov deceived you. He quite rightly believed that this was a way of stimulating your powers of imagination. Cherpunov placed great value in this. More than once he commented to me that what separates man from beast is the ability to imagine. Imagination created art. It expanded the boundaries of the world and the capacities of our mind and it gave to our lives that special quality we call poetry.’