The Story of a Life

21

Artillerymen

The artillery officers at the Bryansk Arsenal liked to call Uncle Kolya ‘Colonel Vershinin’. Uncle Kolya, with his black beard and lively dark eyes, actually did look like Vershinin from Chekhov’s Three Sisters, or at least as we all imagined Vershinin must have looked.

Just like Vershinin, Uncle Kolya believed in and loved to talk about our bright future, and he was gentle and full of life. But unlike Vershinin, he was an excellent metallurgist and the author of many learned articles about the properties of various metals. He even translated these articles into French himself – he spoke the language perfectly – and published them in the Paris Revue de Métallurgie. His articles were also published in Russia, but not as often as in France. When I arrived in Bryansk, Uncle Kolya was engrossed in the production of Damascus steel. Uncle Kolya’s lust for life was remarkable. He seemed to be interested in everything. He subscribed to every literary journal, played the piano beautifully, knew astronomy and philosophy, and was a witty and indefatigable conversationalist.

Bearded Captain Rumyantsev was Uncle Kolya’s most devoted friend. He looked like Fet, except that he had bright red hair, bad eyes and a kindly disposition. He always looked uncomfortable and out of place in his officer’s uniform, and even the Bryansk schoolchildren teased him as the ‘paper soldier’.

It wasn’t easy to get a good look at Rumyanstev. He was always hidden behind clouds of tobacco smoke and was so shy he preferred to sit in the darkest corners of the living room. There he would sit hunched over a chessboard absorbed in a problem. If he succeeded in solving it, he broke out in laughter and rubbed his hands.

Rumyantsev rarely joined in the conversation. He would just sit and listen, occasionally clearing his throat and screwing up his eyes. But if the conversation turned to politics – the State Duma, say, or workers’ strikes – he came alive and expressed the most extreme opinions.

Rumyantsev was a bachelor. He lived with his three sisters – all of them petite and each with cropped hair and a pince-nez on her nose. All of them smoked and wore stiff black skirts and grey blouses to which they affixed a watch with safety pins in exactly the same spot, as if by mutual agreement. The sisters were always hiding people at their flat – students, old men in billowing cloaks and strange women as severe-looking as themselves. Uncle Kolya warned me never to say a word to anyone about the people staying at the Rumyantsevs’.

In addition to Rumyantsev and his sisters, another frequent visitor to Uncle Kolya’s was Staff Captain Ivanov, a meticulously neat and tidy man with delicate white hands, an exquisitely trimmed blond beard and a high, delicate voice. Like most bachelors, Ivanov had to find a home somewhere, which he did at Uncle Kolya’s. He came by every evening to sit and chat. Taking off his overcoat and undoing his sword belt in the front hall, he always blushed and explained that he just happened to be passing by or that he had some important matter to discuss with Uncle Kolya. But then, of course, he made himself comfortable and stayed until midnight.

I was grateful to Ivanov for breaking me of the habit of being ashamed of doing simple things for myself. Once I ran into him at the market. He was buying potatoes and cabbages. ‘Would you please help me carry all this to the droshky?’ he asked me. ‘Pëtr is sick, so I have to do everything myself.’ (Pëtr was his batman.)

As we were carrying a heavy sack of cabbages to the droshky, we met the young German teacher from the Bryansk gymnasium. In response to my bow, she turned up her nose and looked away. I blushed.

‘Don’t be embarrassed,’ said Ivanov. ‘You’re not doing anything to be ashamed of. My way of dealing with people who give me haughty looks is to stare straight back at them. It’s most effective.’

We took our seats in the droshky, now piled high with vegetables, and drove off down Moskovskaya Street, the main thoroughfare. We passed by many acquaintances. We even passed General Sarandinaki, head of the Arsenal, riding in a carriage and pair. All of them chuckled upon seeing us in the droshky with the vegetables, but Ivanov just stared them straight in the eyes. His gaze made them uncomfortable and they stopped chuckling and ended up giving us a friendly nod. Sarandinaki stopped his carriage and offered to send Ivanov his batman, but Ivanov politely declined the offer, saying that he could manage these simple chores just fine by himself. The general raised his eyebrows and gave his driver a gentle poke in the back with his black scabbard, and his grey horses set off at a trot.

‘You see how simple it is,’ Ivanov said to me. ‘Never give in to prejudice.’

I knew that Ivanov was right, of course, but nevertheless I had hated having all those mocking eyes directed at me. The bad habit was just too ingrained in me. I used to catch myself being frightened of not behaving like everyone else or being embarrassed about our poverty and trying to hide it from my schoolmates.

Mama had viewed our change in fortunes as the greatest of tragedies. She did everything possible to conceal it from her friends. They all knew that my father had deserted the family, but whenever someone asked, Mama always said that he had simply gone away for a while on a trip and that everything at home was just fine. She sat up at night darning and mending our clothes in the hope people wouldn’t notice any signs of our destitution. Mama’s courage had forsaken her, and we inherited her timidity.

As the droshky climbed the hill to Ivanov’s house, cabbages started to fall out of the sack, rolling and bouncing back down the road to the delight of a group of boys. The driver stopped. We climbed down and began gathering up the spilled heads of cabbage. I must have been red in the face from shame, because Ivanov took one look at me and said, ‘How about I do it myself. I think it’d be better you just went on home.’

If before I had been ashamed of picking up cabbages in front of passers-by, after Ivanov’s words I was so ashamed of myself that tears came to my eyes. I frantically gathered up the remaining cabbages and managed in between to cuff the ears of a small boy, the son of the local merchant Samokhin, who had been dancing about the pavement and shouting:

The silly schoolboy couldn’t control his baggage

And now look, just look at all the cabbage!

Howling and rubbing his eyes, little Samokhin ran home and hid.

I looked at Ivanov and, judging by his sly expression, felt certain that he had spilled the cabbages on purpose.

After that I began to show off. Every morning I went out with a wooden shovel to clear the snow in front of our house, I split firewood and kept the stove burning, and far from trying to avoid chores asked to be given as many as possible. As for little Samokhin, he never stopped yelling at me from the safety of his fenced yard: ‘Blue beef!’ (All of us boys from the gymnasium were called ‘blue beef’ because of our blue school caps.) But Samokhin’s mocking no longer bothered me in the least.

Ivanov’s lessons in life were reinforced by those I received from Lieutenant-Colonel Kuzmin-Karavaev, a narrow-chested man with steely grey eyes. He had founded the first consumers’ cooperative in Bryansk and opened the town’s first grocery shop on Volkhovskaya Street. He purchased all the goods and wares himself and then sold them from behind the counter of his packed little store. This venture of Karavaev caused a commotion among the merchants of Bryansk. The local head of the Merchants’ Guild sent letters denouncing him to the Artillery Staff Headquarters in St Petersburg. The town’s intelligentsia and the workers of the Arsenal, however, stood firmly behind Karavaev, and the denunciations did no good. His shop grew and prospered with each passing day.

We all took turns helping Karavaev in his shop, and he even hired me as his regular assistant. I spent almost all my free time there, breaking open the smelly crates of groceries and weighing out salt, flour and sugar. Protecting his elegant officer’s uniform beneath a heavy apron like a blacksmith might wear, Karavaev worked fast, but still managed to joke with his customers and tell me interesting things about where all the different wares and foods came from. Karavaev’s shop sold goods from all over the country – tobacco from Feodosia, wines from Georgia, caviar from Astrakhan, lace from Vologda, mustard from Sarepta, chintz from Ivanovo-Voznesensk and glassware from the Maltsov workshops. The shop smelled of herring brine and soap and, most of all, the heavenly aroma of fresh sacking kept in the back room.

In the evening Karavaev locked and bolted the shop door, and we sat down to a cup of strong tea. While the kettle rattled on the iron stove, Karavaev would cut the sugar with a flat Japanese bayonet, sending blue crystal sparks into the air, and I fetched the zhamki – sweet honey cakes – from a wooden bin.

Someone always came by the shop to tea – either Ivanov, or the Rumyantsev sisters, or Aunt Marusya. Ivanov would sit down on an empty crate and, without bothering to remove his overcoat or even his gloves, try to prove to Karavaev that Russia had not developed enough to even need shops like his. Karavaev coughed as if he were being suffocated and did his best to ignore Ivanov’s arguments. Aunt Marusya always brought her homemade biscuits and cakes. The Rumyantsev sisters, their pince-nez flashing, drank tea from their saucers. They called Karavaev ‘Don Quixote’ and said that he was wasting his time with his shop. Russia, they insisted, didn’t need petty little things like grocery stores, no, what Russia needed were great upheavals. At this point Ivanov would begin to jingle his spurs and burst into his rendition of ‘Malbrough s’en va-t-en guerre’. The Rumyanstev sisters would then call him a reactionary, get up and leave.

Early in the spring the shop burned down. It had been a crude and obvious case of arson – the shop door had been smashed in and the goods doused with paraffin. The whole town knew that the Bryansk merchants had set the fire, but the investigation dragged on and on and in the end no one was ever arrested. Karavaev grew thin and haggard, his cough got worse, but he refused to take it seriously, saying: ‘Finita la commedia! The only thing that might save our country is some great upheaval. Pull all Russia up onto its hind legs, then we’ll finally get somewhere.’

The losses from the fire were considerable. The members of the cooperative – workers from the Bryansk Arsenal and Karavaev’s fellow artillery officers – had difficulty covering them. Remarkably, Staff Captain Ivanov paid for the lion’s share of the losses himself. He was a frugal man and had managed to save several thousand roubles during his years of service at the Arsenal. He gave almost all his money to Karavaev.

I spent the winter and summer in this friendly family of officers. But the pain of what had happened back in Kiev never left me. I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother and father, and at times I felt so ashamed to be living in this warm and welcoming home where the mood was always happy and relaxed. I could see before my eyes our cold cellar flat, the empty table with its few scraps of bread, Mama’s worried expression, and Dima, exhausted from tutoring. Mama wrote seldom; Galya and Dima not at all. Sometimes I wondered whether Mama didn’t write because she couldn’t even afford postage stamps. I had to do something to help her, but I didn’t know what.

I could not get used to the Bryansk gymnasium. All the boys in my form were much older than me. As the days passed, I missed my old school more and more and tried to find some way to return to Kiev. In the end I wrote a letter to Suboch, our Latin teacher. I told him everything that had happened to me and asked whether I might be able to come back. Soon after, I received an answer.

‘With the start of the school year this autumn,’ Suboch wrote, ‘you will once again be a student of the First Gymnasium, in my form, and will not be obliged to pay any school fees. To help you support yourself in a modest but fully independent manner, I can offer you several tutoring jobs. You won’t be a burden to anyone. Don’t torment yourself over what has been – tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis – we must hope that we change for the better.’

I read this businesslike letter and a spasm gripped my throat. I realised the affection in it and, at the same time, I realised that from this moment on I alone, relying on no one, was responsible for my life and future.

The realisation was terrifying, even though I was almost sixteen years old.