The Story of a Life

24

Diky Lane

Borya was still living in a furnished room at the Progress boarding house on dirty Zhilyanskaya Street near the station. He greeted me warmly, and as if he wanted to be my protector.

‘Good for you’, he said, ‘for deciding to stand on your own two feet. Come and live with me for a while, and then we’ll find something better for you. You won’t want to live here.’

‘Why?’

‘You’ll see.’

I saw quite soon. After Borya left for the Polytechnical Institute, a puffy-looking young man with a face like sauerkraut appeared in his room. Hanging on him were a dusty student’s jacket and green trousers with baggy knees. His bulging, empty eyes slowly took in the room, the shelf laden with food, and me.

‘Count Potocki,’ the puffy man introduced himself. ‘Your brother’s closest friend. Former student at the Polytechnical Institute. Forced to leave due to an incurable illness.’

‘What’s wrong with you?’ I asked sympathetically.

‘My illness cannot be described,’ replied Count Potocki as he proceeded to grab a handful of Borya’s cigarettes from a box on the table. ‘My suffering is beyond words. Due to my illness Professor Paton failed me in my exams for three years running. Do you know Paton?’

‘No.’

‘A savage beast,’ said Count Potocki, taking a whole sausage from the table, giving it a quick inspection and then slipping it into his pocket. ‘The foe of every last person seeking success. The only medicine that offers me any relief is ordinary creosote. My parents are late with my allowance and so quite understandably I’ve run out of money and can’t go to buy more at the chemist’s. Any chance you might consider it?’

‘Consider what?’ I asked, puzzled.

‘All right, all right!’ said Count Potocki with a good-natured smile. ‘Enough fooling around. I had wanted to ask Borya for three roubles but I missed him. Perhaps you might have a little green one on you?’

‘Yes, of course!’ I dived into my pocket and pulled out my money. ‘Three roubles, you said?’

‘Oh, my dear young man!’ exclaimed a disappointed Potocki. ‘If a lout asks to borrow money, he always asks for more than he needs, but if it’s an honest fellow, he asks for less. Were I, God forbid, a lout, I would have asked for twenty roubles. But I’ve asked for only three! You may well ask, where does the truth lie in this matter? As always, truth lies in the middle. Twenty minus three makes seventeen. We divide seventeen by two and get eight and a half. A little bit of rounding and we’re left with ten. Simple and easy.’

I held out my hand with the ten roubles. He took them in such a strange way that I didn’t even notice how they ended up in his hand – they just seemed to vanish in the air. While we’d been talking the door kept creaking. But as soon as the money had vanished, the door flew open and a little woman in a dressing gown raced into the room. With every step her slippers gave the floor a mighty slap. They were too big for her.

‘Why?’ she screamed in a strange voice. ‘Why are you giving money to this monster? Hand it over!’ she hissed, grabbing Count Potocki by his jacket.

She tore the sleeve clean off. The count escaped and raced into the hall, the woman close behind, her heels firing like pistols.

‘Hand it over!’ she cried. ‘If only three roubles! Or just two!’

But the count was too fast for her, and he slid down the stairs out into the street and was gone. The woman in the dressing gown slumped against the wall and began to sob in an unnatural, unpleasant sort of way. Lodgers began poking their heads out of every door. This allowed me to see them all at once. A pimply youth fixing a pink celluloid collar to his purple shirt stepped out.

‘Madame Humenyuk,’ he instructed, ‘take measures!’

The proprietress of the Progress boarding house, Madame Humenyuk, a stout woman with tender, languid eyes, appeared in the hall. She approached the woman in the dressing gown and said to her in a clear and wicked voice: ‘March! Back to your room! Stop this ruckus or I’ll call the police, upon my word of honour as a woman!’

The woman quietly returned to her room. The hallway hummed for quite some time with chatter about the affair of Count Potocki. When Borya arrived I told him everything. He commented that I had got off cheaply and told me to be more careful in the future. Count Potocki was no count and no former student, but a law clerk who’d been fired for drunkenness.

‘They’re afraid of me,’ Borya remarked, ‘but given your character you’d be wise to steer clear of them. This place is full of riff-raff.’

‘Why do you live here then?’

‘I’m used to it. And they know not to bother me.’

A month later Borya found me a room with full board at the home of old Pani Kozlovskaya, an acquaintance of Mother’s in Diky Lane. I received some money from my father and reckoned that even if he didn’t send me any more I had enough for three months before I’d need to start giving lessons.

No one lived in the flat with Pani Kozlovskaya other than her son, Romuald, a lieutenant in the infantry. The flat was cramped, the floors sticky from cheap paint. The windows looked out onto a barren garden in which all but two or three trees had been chopped down. In the winter they flooded it to make a small skating rink. Fir saplings were sunk into the snowbanks around the edge of the ice. They quickly turned yellow. It was a cheap rink, used only by the little boys from Glubochitsa and Lvovskaya Streets. It didn’t even have a band, just a gramophone with a giant purple horn.

Diky – ‘wild’, that is – Lane truly was wild. It led nowhere, petering out into wasteland buried under snowdrifts and piles of ash that emitted greyish wisps of smoke. This land always smelled of something burning. I decorated my closet of a room with portraits of Byron, Lermontov and Hugo. In the evenings I’d light the kitchen lamp, which fell only on the desk and the portrait of Hugo. The bearded writer sat, sadly resting his head on a hand extending from a round starched cuff, and gazed at me, as if to say: ‘Well, young man, now what are you going to do?’ I was enthralled at the time with Hugo’s Les Misérables. More than the story of the novel itself, I loved especially old Hugo’s furious excursions into history.

I managed to read a great deal that winter. I simply could not get used to my loneliness, and books helped me to escape it. I frequently recalled our life on Nikolsko-Botanicheskaya Street, Lena, the cheerful artillerymen, fireworks in the old park at Rëvny, Bryansk. I had always been surrounded by lots of interesting and kind people. Now I felt nothing but a humanless void. The lamp hissed strangely, and this sound intensified my loneliness.

But a month passed, then another, and I experienced a change. I began to notice that the worse reality appeared, the more fully I could find all the good that was hidden inside it. I was beginning to realise that in life the good and the bad lie side by side. The good can often shine through a fog of lies, poverty and suffering, just as at the end of some rainy days the fire of the setting sun can pierce the grey clouds with its rays. I tried to find signs of the good everywhere. And, of course, I often did find them. They might shine unexpectedly, like Cinderella’s glass slipper peeping from under the tattered, grey hem of her dress or like the attentive, tender gaze of her eyes meeting mine in some street. ‘’Tis I,’ this gaze said, ‘did you truly not recognise me? Now I’m a pauper covered in rags, but all I need to do is take them off and I’ll become a princess. Life is full of the unexpected. Believe me. Don’t be afraid.’

Such muddled notions filled my head that winter. I was just starting out on the road before me but was certain I already knew where it would lead. I was struck by some lines of Fet that appeared to capture what lay ahead: ‘Out of the realm of blizzards, ice and snow, how fresh and pure your month of May springs forth.’

I would read these lines aloud. Pani Kozlovskaya listened from the other side of the wall. Lieutenant Romuald always returned late or sometimes not at all. Pani Kozlovskaya was lonely and so glad of the sound of any human voice.