The Story of a Life

19

Deserted Tauris

That summer of 1906, after I turned fourteen, Mama insisted that instead of Rëvny we spend the summer in Crimea. She chose the quietest of the Crimean towns – Alushta. We travelled by way of Odessa. The hotels in Odessa were all full, so we had to stay at the guest house of the Athos Monastery near the railway station. The novices – pale youths in cassocks with black patent-leather belts – served us cabbage soup and dried anchovies. I fell in love with everything – the cabbage soup, the beautiful white city, the sparkling seltzer water, the port. Grey clouds of pigeons circled in the air over the city, mixing with the white clouds of seagulls. Once again, I had come to visit the sea, although here, on the edge of the steppe, it seemed gentler somehow than on the coasts of the Caucasus.

An old steamer, the Pushkin, took us to Yalta. The sea was dead calm. The oak gunwales were too hot to touch. Everything in the saloon shook and rattled from the steamer’s screw. The sun shone through the skylights, portholes and open doors. The intensity of the southern sun overwhelmed me. It made everything sparkle. Even the rough canvas sailcloth covering the portholes flickered like a flame. Crimea rose up out of the sea’s blue depths like a Treasure Island. Clouds hovered over the lilac mountain peaks. The white port of Sevastopol sailed slowly towards us and greeted our old steamer with a midday cannon salute and the blue crosses of St Andrew’s flags.

The Pushkin seethed and shuddered for a long time in the bay, sending up fountains of bubbles and roiling water, as she turned this way and that. We ran from one side of the boat to the other so as not to miss a thing. There was Malakhov Hill, the Bratskoe Cemetery, the Count’s Quay, Fort Konstantin, thrusting out into the breakers, and the mutinous cruiser Ochakov surrounded by pontoons. Naval cutters shot past us, throwing up wakes of malachite water. I looked at it all spellbound. It was all true and not simply something that existed in the books I had read – this city where Nakhimov had died,fn1 where cannonballs had exploded on the bastions, where the artillerist Leo Tolstoy had battled, where Lieutenant Schmidt had pledged his oath to the people. Here it was before me, this city, in the burning heat of the sun and the feathery shadows of the acacias.

The Pushkin reached Yalta in the evening. It slowly motored into the harbour as if entering a softly lit bower on a summer’s eve. We disembarked at a stone pier. The first thing that caught my eye was a swarthy pedlar with a cart. He had hung a lantern on top of a pole that shone a light on his downy peaches and large plums covered with a greyish bloom. We bought some peaches and headed off for the Dzhalita Hotel, followed by porters lugging our baggage. I was so tired I fell asleep as soon as I got to the room, not even noticing the centipede hiding in the corner or the black cypresses outside the windows. For a fleeting moment I heard the soft voice of the fountain in the courtyard, but then sleep enveloped me and carried me off in a gently rocking ship’s cabin to some magical land as mysterious as Crimea itself.

After Yalta with its magnificent seafront, Alushta, farther up the coast, struck me as dull. We settled on the edge of town, out beyond the Stakheevskaya embankment. There was nothing in the area but stony ground, thickets of strong-smelling thuya, the empty sea and the distant low mountains of Sudak. That is all there was in Alushta. But even this turned out to be enough, and I gradually reconciled myself to Alushta and then fell in love with it.

Galya and I often visited the neighbouring vineyard to buy the sweet-tasting shashla grapes, the strong, crisp chaush and pink muscats. The vineyard was full of singing cicadas. Tiny yellow flowers the size of pinheads grew all over the ground. An elderly woman by the name of Anna Petrovna lived there in a small white house. Her face was so tanned from the sun that her grey eyes looked white against her skin. She cut bunches of grapes from the vine for us. Sometimes she sent her daughter out to do it. Lena, a barefoot seventeen-year-old girl, had sun-kissed plaits arranged like a wreath on her head and her mother’s grey eyes. The adults called her ‘the mermaid’. Lena often passed our cottage at dusk on her way down to the sea. She bathed and swam for a long time, before returning with a towel over her shoulders and singing:

Out there in the wide blue sea,

In the azure waters of our tomorrows,

We’ll forget our grief,

And our earthly sorrows.

Galya made friends with Lena and learned everything she could about her. Galya always did love to question people about every last detail of their lives. She did this with the doggedness of a short-sighted and inquisitive person.

It turned out that Anna Petrovna was a widow, a former librarian from Chernigov, and after Lena had fallen ill with tuberculosis her doctor had recommended that they move to Crimea. Anna Petrovna had moved to Alushta, where she had married an old Ukrainian, the owner of the vineyard. The old man died soon after and so Anna Petrovna and Lena were the sole proprietors of the vineyard. Lena lived in Yalta in the winter and attended the gymnasium there but returned to Alushta every Sunday to see her mother. She was by now fully recovered from her illness.

Lena planned to become a singer after finishing school. Galya tried to talk her out of it. In her opinion, the only worthy occupation for a woman was teaching. Galya herself wanted to become a village schoolteacher. We were all tired of listening to Galya talk about this, especially since she would go on and on about her calling and kept insisting that there was no better occupation in the world than pedagogy even though none of us ever disagreed with her. Something about Galya’s attempts to change Lena’s mind made me angry. I loved the theatre. To spite Galya I loved to tell Lena about all the amazing plays I had seen: The Blue Bird, A Month in the Country, Madame Sans-Gêne, Woe from Wit.

I exaggerated a great deal. I predicted an alluring future for Lena. I liked to imagine that someday this thin, tanned girl, who swam better than any sailor, would make her way onto the stage dressed in an elegant dress with a long train, her bronzed skin showing through her makeup and a dark flower trembling on her breast as she sang. I wove my unrestrained daydreams around Lena. She listened to me, her head thrown back as if by the weight of her plaits, faintly blushing. Now and then she would ask: ‘Oh, admit it, you’re just making all this up? Right? Admit it. I won’t be angry.’

She addressed me with ‘vy’, the formal ‘you’, even though she was only three years older than me. In those days only the closest of friends used ‘ty’, the informal ‘you’.

I could not admit it since I truly believed in everything I imagined. This habit of mine would be the cause of many future troubles. And what was most astounding to me is that I have never met anyone in my entire life who made any effort to try to understand my habit or at least to try to excuse it. But Lena believed me. She wanted to believe everything I told her. If I didn’t go with Galya to the vineyard for two or three days, Lena would bring us grapes herself, saying shyly to Mama: ‘Anna Petrovna told me to give you these as a gift.’ Then she’d steal a moment and quickly whisper to me: ‘You’re simply horrid! Why have you been staying away?’

Father did not stay long in Alushta. He had business to attend to in St Petersburg. Next, Borya left – he had to sit his entrance exams for the Kiev Polytechnical Institute. Father’s departure upset Mama for some reason, and she stopped paying us any attention. She preferred it when we would simply disappear for the entire day down by the seaside, never even thinking to worry about us. I spent my days in the sea up to my waist in water hunting for crabs under the rocks. This ended one day after I stayed in the water until late in the evening and caught a cold that turned into pneumonia. To make matters worse, that first night as I lay bed with a fever, I was stung by a scolopendra.

August came. The school year was soon to start. We would have to return to Kiev. My illness upset all our plans. In the end, Mama sent Galya home with Dima and she remained with me in Alushta. I was seriously ill and for a long time. I could barely sleep at night. It hurt to breathe. I had to take slow, shallow breaths as I lay staring miserably at the room’s white walls. Centipedes crawled in and out of the walls’ cracks. A lamp burned on the table. The shadows cast by the medicine bottles formed prehistoric monsters, their long necks stretching up to the ceiling.

I turned away and looked at the black window. It reflected the light from my lamp. I could hear the rumbling of the sea outside. A moth beat against the glass. It was trying to escape the stuffy, medicinal smell of my room. Mama was sleeping in the next room. I called to her to ask for some water and to let the moth out. She opened the window and it flew away, and after that I calmed down. But then, I don’t know how, but I saw that the moth had landed on the dry grass just outside, where it rested briefly before flying back through the window into my room. It looked huge now, the size of an owl. It settled on my chest. The moth felt so heavy on me, like a stone big enough to crush my heart. I called to Mama again and asked her to get rid of the moth. Her lips pursed, Mama removed the hot compress from my forehead and wrapped a blanket around me.

I lost count of the nights filled with a strange droning and the dry heat of the bedclothes. One day Lena came to see me. At first, I didn’t realise it was her. She was wearing a brown school dress, a black pinafore and small black shoes. Her fair hair had been neatly plaited and hung down on either side of her suntanned face. She had come to say farewell before her departure for Yalta. When Mama left the room, Lena put her hand on my forehead. It was as cold as ice. The end of one of her plaits brushed my face. I caught the warm, fresh scent of her hair. Mama returned. Lena quickly removed her hand, and Mama said that Lena had brought me some wonderful grapes.

‘I’m afraid these were the best we had,’ Lena replied. She was looking not at Mama, but at me, as if there was something important she wanted to say. Then she left. I heard her running down the stairs. Everyone had departed, and so every little sound reverberated clearly in the empty house.

From that day on I began to improve. The doctor said that even after I was well enough to get out of bed, I would have to remain in Alushta for at least two months, until the beginning of November. I needed to rest and regain my strength. And so, Mama decided to have Liza sent down from Kiev to look after me. Mama was in a hurry to get back to Kiev, although I still don’t know why. A week later Liza arrived and the next day Mama took the horse-drawn coach to Simferopol. Liza gasped at every last thing. Mama had brought Liza to Kiev from the Bryansk woods, from Rëvny, and she had never before seen the sea, cypress trees or vineyards. I remained with Liza. I could get out of bed but wasn’t allowed to leave the house. I spent the days reading on the glass-enclosed terrace under a cool autumn sun. I had found a copy of Tristan and Isolde in a chest of drawers. I read this marvellous legend several times, and each reading left me sadder and sadder. I decided to try to write my own legend in the spirit of Tristan and Isolde and spent several days working on it. In the end, I didn’t get any further than a description of a stormy sea and the rocky shore.

At the end of September, the doctor finally gave me permission to go outside. I wandered about deserted Alushta all by myself. I loved going out to the wharf when the sea was rough and the waves came crashing in and shot up through the gaps in the wooden jetty. Once I visited Anna Petrovna. She served me coffee and said that I must come and visit again on Sunday because Lena was planning on returning home that day from Yalta. I couldn’t wait for Sunday to arrive and to see Lena.

To this very day I still remember that Sunday as if it were yesterday thanks to two events.

I knew that Lena was arriving from Yalta on the morning cutter. I went down to the jetty to wait for her. But as soon as the cutter appeared around the cape, I hid behind the old wooden kiosk where they sold picture postcards of Crimea. I sat down on a rock and didn’t move as the cutter moored at the jetty. Lena walked off and looked about for a familiar face and then, seeing none, slowly began walking towards home. I was afraid she’d see me. The whole thing was utterly foolish. She looked back a few times and then returned to the jetty and stood about for a time pretending to read some old posters that hung down in tattered strips from a signpost. I watched her furtively. She wore a heavy kerchief over her head. She had grown thin and pale in Yalta. She didn’t move from the posters, but quickly stopped pretending to be reading them and dropped her eyes to the ground. Then she started for home again. This time for good. I waited a bit before walking home myself. I was ashamed of what a coward I had been.

I didn’t know whether or not I should go and see Lena. I couldn’t eat any dinner. Liza threatened to telegraph Mama about this, but seeing as how she could hardly read, I wasn’t too worried.

After dinner I screwed up my courage, put on my coat and headed out. Liza shouted at me to button up my coat, but I paid no attention. I approached the vineyard. It was already bathed in crimson. I opened the gate. Just then the door to the white house flew open, and there was Lena. She was running towards me in nothing but her dress.

It was a good day. I overcame my shyness and told her all about Rëvny, my geography teacher Cherpunov and Aunt Nadya. Lena kept surreptitiously piling grapes and plums, greengages, on my plate. Then she said: ‘Why didn’t you bother to button your coat in this cold weather? Who are you trying to impress, you little dandy?’

‘What about you? You ran out without any coat, just in your dress!’

‘Because …’ she said, and then hesitated. ‘Because … I didn’t have pneumonia.’

She blushed. Anna Petrovna looked at Lena over her spectacles and shook her head. ‘Lena, don’t forget you’re no child anymore. You’re seventeen now.’ She said this as if Lena were already a grown woman and well past such foolishness.

Anna Petrovna and Lena walked me back and came in to see how I was getting by without Mama. Liza, embarrassed, turned red but quickly recovered herself and began to tell Anna Petrovna how disobedient I was and how I had left without bothering to button my coat. Anna Petrovna told her to come to her for anything she might need. Liza was delighted. She didn’t know a soul in Alushta. Once in a while she would go for walks with me and pick wormwood which she hung up to dry in her room. The rest of the time she played patience. Liza had red cheeks and kind, puffy eyes. She was hopelessly naïve and believed whatever nonsense she was told.

Anna Petrovna and Lena left. I became bored. A long evening lay ahead of me. I wanted to go back to their house by the vineyard, but I knew this kind of thing ‘wasn’t done’. So I decided to go back to my story. I lit the lamp and sat down at the desk. But instead of a story, I began to write my first poem. I no longer remember it, except for the first line which has stuck in my memory: ‘Oh, pick the flowers on the drooping stems …’

I liked the poem. I decided to keep writing late into the night, but Liza came in. ‘What is this?’ she said. ‘You’ll ruin your eyes! Besides, it’s long past your bedtime!’ With that, she blew out the light.

I lost my temper. ‘I’m not a baby anymore,’ I said, and then called her an idiot. Liza burst into tears and went to her room. In a pathetic voice she said, ‘I’m leaving tomorrow for Kiev, on foot. You can do what you like here on your lonesome.’

I was quiet. Then Liza said she was going to send Mama a telegram tomorrow informing her of my behaviour. She muttered on and on to herself for a long time and then said with a sigh: ‘Well, whatever. I’m done with the entire business. Go to sleep. Oh my, and what a horrible wind there is tonight on top of all this!’

A round wall clock hung over my head. Every time it struck two o’clock in the morning it woke me up. It happened again this morning and for a long time I could not understand what had happened. A crimson light was flickering on my wall. My window looked out onto the sea. Outside, the wind was howling. I sat up in bed and looked out of the window. A faint glow along the horizon lit up the low clouds and the rough water. I began to dress quickly.

‘Liza!’ I shouted. ‘There’s a fire out at sea!’

I heard her move, jump out of bed and also begin to throw on her clothes.

‘What could possibly burn out on the water?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Then why did you get up?’ She was still half asleep and confused.

‘I’m going down to the shore.’

‘I’ll come too.’

We went out. The wind rushed around the house and hit me with a cold blast. The glow had spread higher up into the sky. The local Tatar man who looked after the cottage was standing by the gate. ‘A steamer’s on fire,’ he said. ‘It’s horrible, but what can we do?’

We ran down to the shore. A bell, perhaps from the lifeboat station, was clanging near the jetty. Crowds stood all along the seashore, and I immediately lost Liza in the darkness. Fishermen in high boots and oilskins were dragging a boat over the pebbly beach to the water. I heard snatches of agitated voices: ‘A passenger ship … Two miles out … Hold tight to the stern, all right? Don’t let her roll …’ The wet fishermen hopped into the boat and grabbed the oars. The boat rode up onto a wave and headed out to the open sea. Someone took me by the elbow. I turned round. Lena was standing beside me. In the faint glow I could see a stern look on her face. We stood in silence on the edge of the jetty. A white flare went up over the sea, then another.

‘That means help’s on the way,’ said Lena. ‘If it weren’t for Mama, I would have gone with the fishermen in the lifeboat. I really mean it.’

She was silent for a moment and then asked: ‘When are you leaving?’

For the first time she stopped addressing me with the formal ‘you’. My heart skipped a beat.

‘In a week, I guess.’

‘So I’ll still get to see you again. I’ll try to come by a bit earlier.’

‘Please do, I really want to see you too,’ I answered, feeling as though with these frightful words I had fallen off a cliff.

‘What should I do?’ she asked, softly. ‘Mama is frightened. She’s here somewhere, over by the quay. You’re not angry with me, are you?’

‘What for?’

She didn’t answer.

‘Lena!’ Anna Petrovna called from out of the darkness. ‘Where are you? We’re going home!’

‘I’m leaving tomorrow by the early coach,’ Lena whispered. ‘Don’t think of seeing me off. Goodbye.’

She shook my hand and left. I watched her go. For a few seconds I managed to follow the white kerchief on her head before it vanished.

The glow upon the sea dimmed. It was replaced by the green ray of a searchlight. It came from the destroyer Intrepid that was on her way to help the burning steamer. I found Liza, and we returned home. I wanted to lie down and fall asleep as soon as possible to keep from thinking about that amazing and wonderful moment that had just taken place between Lena and me. In the morning, when the glow had been replaced by some wispy smoke, I went down to the quay and learned that the steamer had been lost. People said that a bomb had exploded in the hold, but the captain had managed to beach the steamer on some rocks offshore.

Upon hearing the news, I walked a long way down the road to Yalta. Just an hour earlier Lena had ridden in the coach along this same road. I sat down on the parapet overlooking the sea and stayed there for a long time with my hands tucked into the sleeves of my overcoat. I thought about Lena, and this made my heart ache. I recalled the smell of her hair, the fresh warmth of her breath, the troubled look in her grey eyes and the thin arch of her eyebrows. I couldn’t understand what was happening to me. A terrible longing gripped me, and I burst into tears. I wanted only one thing – to see her, to hear her voice, to be near her.

I had just about decided to walk to Yalta when a cart came rattling around the bend. I quickly wiped my eyes and turned to look at the sea. But all of a sudden they filled with tears again, and I could see nothing but a bright blue smudge. I was chilled to the bone and couldn’t stop shaking. The driver of the cart, an old man in a straw hat, stopped his horses and said: ‘Climb in, my friend, I’ll take you to Alushta.’

I climbed into the cart. The old man looked over his shoulder and asked: ‘You’re not from the orphanage, are you?’

‘No, I’m a pupil at the gymnasium,’ I said.

The last days in Alushta were unusually sad and beautiful, as it always is in those places we are sorry to have to leave. Fog rolled in from the sea, leaving the grass wet in front of our cottage. The sun seeped through the fog. Liza fed yellow acacia wood into the stove. The leaves were falling. But they weren’t golden, as at home in Kiev, but greyish with lilac-coloured veins. Waves rolled silently out of the fog and onto the shore and then silently back. Dead seahorses lay on the shingle. The peaks of Chatyr-Dag and Babugan-Yaila were wrapped in clouds. Fierce dogs glancing about distrustfully herded flocks of sheep down from the mountains. The autumn fog made everything so still that standing on my balcony I could hear voices coming from the village far down below. The flames of the braziers glowed in the market inn, and the smell of burnt fat and roast mullet hung in the air.

Liza and I had plans to leave on Monday morning. Liza had already hired a driver to take us to Simferopol. I waited for Lena all Saturday, but she never came. I walked past the vineyard several times but saw no one. Sunday morning there was still no sign of her. I walked over to the coach station. It was empty. Worried, I went home. Liza handed me an envelope.

‘Some boy dropped it off,’ she said. ‘It must be from Anna Petrovna. I expect they want you to come over and to say goodbye. You should go. They’re nice people.’

I went into the garden, ripped open the envelope and took out a strip of paper. ‘Come to the three plane trees at six. Lena.’

I got to the three plane trees not at six but at five. It was a deserted place. The three plane trees stood in a rocky ravine near a dried-up stream. Everything around was withered other than a few scattered tulips that had somehow managed to bloom. There must have been a garden here at some time. A small wooden bridge had been put up over the stream. At the base of one of the trees stood a rickety bench, its metal legs covered in rust. Even though I had come early, Lena was already there. She was sitting on the bench, her hands clasped between her knees. Her kerchief had fallen from her head onto her shoulders. She turned round when I approached.

‘You won’t understand,’ she said, taking my hand. ‘No, pay no attention to me … I’m always talking a lot of nonsense.’

Lena stood up. She smiled apologetically. She lowered her eyes and glanced up at me sullenly. ‘Mama says I’m mad. Well, whatever! Farewell!’

She grabbed me by my shoulders, pulled me towards her and kissed me on the lips. Gently pushing me away, she said: ‘Now go! And don’t look back! Please. Just go!’ Tears welled in her eyes. One rolled down her cheek and left a narrow, wet streak.

And so I went. But I couldn’t stop myself from looking back. Lena was holding onto the trunk of the tree, her head back as if from the weight of her plaits. She was watching me.

‘Go on!’ she screamed. Her voice sounded strange. ‘It’s just a load of nonsense!’

I left. It was already getting dark. The sun was setting behind Kastel Mountain. The wind blew from the Yaila, rustling the dry leaves. I didn’t realise at the time that it was finished, all over. Only much later did I come to understand that for some unknown reason life had taken from me then something that might have been happiness.

The next morning Liza and I left for Simferopol. Rain was pouring in the forests around Chatyr-Dag and it lashed the windows of our carriage all the way back to Kiev. No one took any notice of my return home. Something bad had happened to our family. But at the time I didn’t know what. I was actually glad no one paid me any attention. I spent all my time thinking about Lena, but I never could bring myself to write to her.

I did not return to Crimea again until 1921. By then everything that had happened between us was just a memory, one that no longer caused any pain but led me to reflect. We all have these moments of reflection, although I wonder whether they’re worth talking about.