The Story of a Life

17

Just a Little Boy

Inspector Bodyansky walked briskly into our third-form classroom. He was wearing his new uniform frock coat. The inspector’s cunning eyes flashed. We rose to our feet.

‘On the occasion of the Imperial Manifesto granting civil liberties to the nation, the school will be closed for three days,’ Bodyansky said. ‘Congratulations! Now put away your books and go home. And I advise you to stay out of the grown-ups’ way for the next few days.’

We raced out of the school. Autumn that year was remarkable. The sun was still hot in October. The trees in the parks glittered with a powdery gold, none of which they let fall on the paths, and shone in all their fiery beauty. We were still going about in our summer coats. Pouring out into the street, we noticed crowds with red flags near one of the large university buildings. They were listening to speeches being delivered from the top of the steps and shouting ‘Hurrah!’ Hats were being tossed in the air.

We climbed up on the railings of Nikolaevskaya Square and also began to shout ‘Hurrah!’ and toss our hats in the air. They got stuck in the chestnut trees as they fell. We shook the trees, and the leaves, along with our hats, dropped on us like crackling rain. We laughed with delight. We had already pinned red ribbons to our coats. In the middle of the square stood Nicholas I in blackened bronze, one foot thrust forward, looking from atop his pedestal with arrogant disapproval upon this disorder. The crowd fell silent, the red flags were lowered and we heard solemn voices in song: ‘You fell as victims in the fateful struggle …’

Everyone began to drop to their knees. We took off our hats as well and sang along with the funeral march, although we didn’t know all the words. Then the crowd rose and set off along the railings of the square. I caught sight of my brother Borya in the crowd with our lodger, a Montenegrin student named Marković.

‘Go home at once!’ my brother said. ‘And don’t you dare go out again by yourself.’

‘Can’t I stay with you?’ I asked timidly.

‘You’ll be crushed. Off you go. You can see everything tomorrow.’

I so wanted to march off together with that joyous and triumphant crowd, but Borya had already disappeared. Somewhere far ahead a band struck up ‘The Workers’ Marseillaise’, and I recognised its famous, ringing notes: ‘Let us denounce the old world, / Let us shake its dust from our feet!’

I climbed through the railing and joined the crowd. A girl in an astrakhan hat, most likely a university student, reached out her hand to me and we walked on together. I couldn’t see a thing in front of me other than the backs of other marchers. People were standing on the rooftops and waving their hats at us. As we were passing the Opera House, I heard the clop of hooves. I climbed up onto the kerb and saw a line of mounted police. They were moving back, making way for the crowd to pass. The fat chief of police made way as well, holding a long salute and smiling condescendingly. I jumped down from the kerb and once more couldn’t see a thing. I could tell where we were going only by the shop signs. Now we were descending Fundukleevskaya Street past the Bergonie Theatre, next we were turning onto Kreshchatik and walking past the Kirchheim pastry shop. Then we passed Lyuteranskaya Street and the Idzikovskaya Library.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked the girl in the astrakhan hat.

‘City Hall. There’s going to be a meeting. We are now free as birds. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, I do,’ I replied.

‘Where do you live?’ she asked all of a sudden.

‘On Nikolsko-Botanicheskaya Street.’

‘Do your parents know you’re here at the demonstration?’

‘Everyone’s at the demonstration,’ I replied, trying to avoid the subject of my parents.

We passed Balabukha’s dried-fruit shop and Nikolaevskaya Street and stopped. It was impossible to go any farther. A dense crowd stretched all the way to the city hall. On its roof sparkled the gilded figure of St Michael – the symbol of Kiev. I could see the large balcony now filled with bare-headed people. One of them started to speak, but we couldn’t hear a thing. I could only see how the wind ruffled his grey hair. Someone grabbed me by the shoulder. I turned around and saw our Latin teacher, Suboch.

‘Konstantin Paustovsky,’ he said sternly, even though his eyes were laughing. ‘What are you doing here? Go home this instant.’

‘Don’t worry, he’s with me,’ said the girl.

‘I beg your pardon, Mademoiselle, I didn’t know,’ Suboch politely replied.

The crowd moved back and separated us from Suboch. The girl took my hand and we tried to push our way through to the pavement.

‘Calm down, citizens!’ a hoarse voice ordered nearby. The girl and I reached the pavement, and she pulled me to the wall of a yellow building with an arched gateway, which I recognised as the post office. I didn’t understand why she was holding my hand so tightly and pulling me into the gateway. I couldn’t see a thing other than people’s backs and pigeons flying over the crowd. They looked like pieces of paper as they caught the light. A trumpet blared in the distance – Ta-ta-ta-ta! Ta-ta-ta-ta! And then all was silent again.

‘Comrade soldiers!’ shouted the same hoarse voice, and then all of a sudden there came a terrible cracking sound, almost as if a heavy sheet had been torn in two. Next, plaster was raining down on us. The pigeons flew off, leaving the sky empty. There came a second crack, and the crowd raced for the sides of the buildings. The girl tugged me into the courtyard, and the last thing I saw on Kreshchatik was the sight of a thin student in an unbuttoned greatcoat leaping onto the window ledge of Balabukha’s shop and drawing a black Browning.

‘What’s happening?’ I asked the girl.

‘They’re shooting! The troops are shooting.’

‘Why?’

She didn’t answer. We ran through tangled, narrow courtyards. Behind us we heard screams, gunshots, the pounding of feet. The day suddenly grew dark, shrouded in a yellow smoke. It was hard for me to run with my heavy satchel; the books kept banging against my back. We kept running through courtyards until we came out onto Proreznaya Street and then headed up towards the Golden Gate. Two shiny ambulances raced past. A panting, pale-faced group caught up with us and then kept on running. A Cossack unit galloped down Proreznaya Street, led by an officer wielding a drawn sabre. Someone let out a piercing whistle behind them, but they didn’t stop.

‘My God, what a foul deed!’ the girl kept repeating. ‘It’s a trap! With one hand they give us freedom, while with the other they shoot us down!’

We had run in a large circle and after passing St Vladimir’s Cathedral returned to Nikolaevskaya Square, the very spot where I’d only just hung from the railings, cheered ‘Hurrah!’ and waved my cap.

‘Thank you,’ I said to the girl. ‘I’m not far from home. I can make it on my own.’

She walked off. I leaned against the railing and took off my hat – it hurt and I had a terrible headache. I was frightened. An old man in a bowler walked past and asked what was the matter. I couldn’t even answer. The man shook his head and walked on. I pulled on my hat and headed for home. It was already getting dark. A crimson sunset was reflected in the windows. This was the hour when the street lamps were usually being lit, but now for some reason it wasn’t being done. At the corner of our street I saw Mama. She hurried towards me. She grabbed me by the shoulders and then suddenly screamed: ‘Where’s Borya? Have you seen Borya?’

‘Over there!’ I pointed in the direction of Kreshchatik.

‘Go home!’ Mama said and ran off down the street.

I stood and watched her go, and then went home. Our street was deserted as usual. The lights were on in the windows, and I saw the lamp with the green shade in my father’s study. Liza, our maid, stood next to the open gate. She took my satchel and wiped my face.

‘Such a naughty boy, you’re always running off somewhere!’ she said. ‘It’s enough to drive one crazy. Come along, it’s time for a wash.’

Only Galya and Dima were home. Galya was going from room to room bumping into the furniture and asking over and over: ‘Where is everyone? Where is everyone?’ Dima sat on the windowsill listening to the noises outside. He hadn’t made it to the demonstrations, and he was hoping to catch the sound of gunfire. He thought the windowsill would be the best place. I got cleaned up, and Liza gave me some warm milk. I couldn’t stop shuddering.

‘Did you see any dead bodies?’ Dima asked me.

‘Ugh …’ I stuttered, not sure what to say.

‘Leave him alone!’ Liza snapped. ‘Can’t you see the state he’s in?’

Finally, Mama came home with Borya. He was all dirty and had lost his hat. He had a strange smile on his face, as if he’d lost his hearing. Soon after, the student Marković arrived. He told us that he’d seen many dead and wounded. Mama let down the blinds on all the windows and told Liza not to open the door to anyone without first making sure who it was. Then Mama sent me to bed. Before lying down, I lifted the blind and looked out into the street. The lamps still hadn’t been lit. An eerie grey light shone on the rooftops. It was so quiet it seemed as if the city had died. A horseman galloped down the neighbouring street, and then all was quiet again.

I lowered the blind, undressed and got into bed. I gazed at the thick walls and told myself our two-storey house was like a fortress. No bullet could penetrate it. The greenish flame of my lamp crackled. I began to doze off, and then I heard the doorbell and hurried steps, followed by my father’s voice. He was pacing back and forth in the dining room, talking incessantly.

The next morning Mama told me that I wasn’t to set foot beyond our courtyard. I was so upset by this I decided not to leave the house at all. I threw on my heavy coat and went out onto the balcony to read the Nekrasov poem we’d been given as homework.fn1 All I managed to memorise were the first two lines: ‘It is late autumn. The rooks have flown. The forest is bare, the fields are empty.’ Everything distracted me. A fire brigade drove past. Then Staff Captain Zadorozhny, a Black Hundredfn2 and a scoundrel who lived in a wing of the house, came out of his door. He was wearing his grey army greatcoat, a sword belt and a revolver which hung at his side. His wife, tall and thin as an ironing board with dishevelled hair and dark circles under her eyes, followed him out onto the steps. Her black Japanese kimono with embroidered peacocks fluttered about her.

Zadorozhny had recently returned from the Japanese war with two massive trunks stuffed with lengths of silk, kimonos and even a curved Chinese sword. ‘The Hero of Mukden!’ my father jokingly called Zadorozhny.

‘Georges,’ his wife whined in an affected voice, ‘do keep in mind that I worry.’

‘It’s nothing, my dear!’ Zadorozhny gallantly replied and then kissed her hand. ‘We’re just going to put an end to this nonsense.’ And off he went without a backward glance.

The war with Japan had just ended, and we children were as upset and indignant about it as the grown-ups. We heard their conversations about the incompetence of our High Command, about ‘lazybones’ Kuropatkin, the treachery of Stessel,fn3 the surrender of Port Arthur and the embezzlers in the commissariats. Autocratic Russia had come unravelled like a piece of rotten old cloth. At the same time we heard the grown-ups talk about the courage and great tenacity of the Russian soldier, and about how things could not go on like this any longer, for the people’s patience had reached its limit. The worst blow for us had been the loss of the Russian fleet at Tsushima. Once Borya showed me a piece of paper with some faint violet-coloured lines copied on a hectograph. You could barely read it.

‘Is it a leaflet?’ I asked. I had already read several leaflets pasted on the walls of our school.

‘No,’ Borya replied, ‘it’s a poem.’

I could barely make out the beginning:

Enough, enough, O heroes of Tsushima!

You fell as the last victims.

It’s close now, it’s at the door,

Liberty for our native land!

Liberty! At the time I still had only a vague notion of what that meant. I imagined it to be like the allegorical painting that hung in Father’s study: a wrathful but radiant young woman with a firm bare breast standing atop the barricade. In one hand she held high a red banner and in the other she was lighting a cannon with a smouldering fuse. This was Liberty. Crowding around her were men in blue shirts with rifles in their hands, exhausted but exultant women, little boys, and even a young poet in a tattered top hat, and all of them singing with inspiration what must have been ‘La Marseillaise’: ‘To arms, citizens! Our day of glory has arrived!’

To the beating of drums, the blowing of trumpets, Liberty strode triumphantly across the land, greeted everywhere by the people’s riotous cries. Behind Liberty walked a man very similar in appearance to the student Marković – just as swarthy, with burning eyes. In his hand he held a pistol. One day I had looked into Marković’s room through the balcony window and saw him cleaning a black steel Browning while humming a tune. Small brass bullets lay on an open medical textbook on his desk. Marković saw me and immediately covered the Browning with a newspaper.

The next morning Liza removed the icons from the walls and placed them in the windows facing the street. Ignaty, our porter, took some chalk and drew a large cross on our front gates, which he then closed and bolted. We found ourselves in a locked fortress. Mama said a pogrom against the Jews had broken out in the city. ‘On orders from St Petersburg,’ she added. Liza whispered that looters had descended on Vasilkovskaya Street and the rioting was getting close to us. Marković left with Borya. Marković had first put on his boots and student uniform, held tight with a belt. Mama didn’t want to let Borya go, but Father snapped at her. And so, she made the sign of the cross over Borya, gave him a kiss and let him go. As the two descended the stairs, Mama kept begging Marković to look after him.

‘Where are they going?’ I asked Father.

‘To the Students’ Combat Brigade. To defend the Jews,’ he said.

Father soon followed after Borya and Marković. Dima and I spent all morning playing aimlessly in the yard. Around noon we heard gunshots. The shooting quickly grew more intense. A fire broke out on Vasilkovskaya Street. Charred bits of paper began falling into the yard. Later that day Father brought home an old Jewish woman. She was in a state of confusion, a kerchief slipping off her grey head, and she was holding a speechless boy by the hand. We knew her son, the doctor. Mama went to see Ignaty in the kitchen and gave him ten roubles. But Ignaty gave the money back to Mama, saying: ‘I have already taken in Mendel the tailor and his whole family. Better you just make certain Zadorozhny’s wife doesn’t notice anything.’

Towards evening a short youth in a black hat came to our gate. A wet lock of hair hung down over his eyes. The shells of sunflower seeds stuck to his chin. He was followed by a tall, clean-shaven man in short trousers and a hat walking cautiously, along with a hatless fidgety man with swollen eyes and a fat face and a stout woman in a heavy shawl. Coming up behind these three was a group of thuggish-looking young men. We had seen the woman often before at the Galitsky Market. Now she was carrying an empty sack.

‘Open up!’ shouted the young fellow, pounding on the gate.

‘Ignaty came out from his lodgings.

‘Any Yids here?’ the fellow asked.

‘Sure, lots of them, just like you,’ Ignaty answered casually.

‘Taking in Yids, are ya?’ he screamed and shook the gate. ‘We know what’s going on here. Open up!’

‘Just you wait, I’ll call Colonel Zadorozhny over,’ Ignaty threatened. ‘He’ll take care of you.’

‘I couldn’t care less about those Jerusalem colonels. We’ll make mincemeat out of your colonel.’

At this point, Madame Zadorozhnaya, who had been listening from her window, could contain herself no longer. She came running across the courtyard like an angry hen, the sleeves of her black kimono waving and flapping as she went. ‘You scoundrel!’ she screamed and spat in his face through the gate. ‘How dare you insult an officer of the Imperial Army? You tramp! Vasily!’ she screeched. ‘Come here!’

A dumbstruck orderly came running out. He grabbed an axe from the woodshed and raced towards the gate. The youth jumped out of the way and ran off down the street, turning round as he went to make sure the orderly wasn’t chasing after him. His mates followed while the orderly shook the axe at their backs.

‘The idea!’ said Madame Zadorozhnaya, wrapping herself in her kimono and returning to her flat. ‘Every scoundrel is now going to start claiming that he’s a real Russian. Excuse me, but no! Be forewarned no one is going to get away with that this time!’

Thus the wife of the Black Hundred so unexpectedly drove the raiders from our door. The grown-ups laughed about this for a long time afterwards.

When the youth who’d run away stopped at a neighbour’s house and began to pound on their gate, Dima dragged me up to our attic. There was an enormous contraption up there that we’d dubbed the ‘Catapult’. It comprised a thick rubber band that the children of the previous tenants had nailed across the frame of a broken dormer window. I picked up off the floor a piece of yellow brick. Dima secured it to the outside of the band and together we pulled it back with all our might, aimed, and then launched the brick at the young fellow. The brick whistled through the air across the yard, knocking leaves off the trees, and landed at the feet of a tall old man who was walking along the pavement. It exploded into tiny fragments. We’d missed. Shocked, the old man dropped to the ground, then hopped up and took off running, while the youth, his boots hammering the pavement, followed.

‘Give me another brick!’ Dima shouted. But I was too slow, and the youth had already managed to get away.

‘You didn’t pull straight back, and that’s why we missed,’ Dima said. Dima always liked to blame others whenever something went wrong and then argue about it for a long time.

Even though we had missed, we were proud of our shot with the Catapult for a long while after. That evening Liza brought porridge to Ignaty’s lodgings for Mendel and his family. I went with her. All the windows had been covered. Ignaty sat on a stool softly playing his accordion and singing ‘On the Hills of Manchuria’ from the Russo-Japanese War – ‘Around us it’s calm, the hills, covered by mist …’ Mendel the tailor sat sewing a new jacket with white thread by the light of a paraffin lamp while his family slept.

‘They want to kill you,’ Ignaty said, ‘but you just go on sewing and sewing. And rightly so. One’s got to earn a living.’

Liza stood by the door and listened with growing sadness to Ignaty’s singing: ‘High up, a lonely moon sheds its light upon the soldiers’ graves …’