The Story of a Life

34

A Shot in the Theatre

The polished parquet in the Assembly Hall was like a calm lake reflecting blue rows of schoolboys, in bright-buttoned uniforms, and flickering chandeliers. A low murmur reverberated in the hall and then died suddenly. In walked a short colonel with pale, protruding eyes, his spurs jangling. He stopped and stared at us. There came the brassy sound of bugles. We stood to attention.

The colonel – Nicholas II – was followed by a tall, thin woman, nodding left and right, in a stiff white dress and an enormous hat sprouting ostrich feathers. The woman’s face was lifeless, malicious and beautiful. It was Empress Alexandra.

Behind the empress in single file came their daughters. They had thin pale lips and were wearing equally stiff white dresses. The dresses didn’t crease or fold as they walked and looked as if they had been made of cardboard. Following the little girls – the grand duchesses – waddled an enormous lady, rustling loudly in a lilac dress with black lace and a satin sash across her chest, a gold-rimmed pince-nez on the tip of her nose – old Lady in Waiting Naryshkina. The fat bulged over her tight silks. She fanned herself with a little lace handkerchief.

So began the centenary celebration of our gymnasium.

The royal suite blocked our view of Nicholas. All we could see was the carefully plastered hair around the ministers’ bald spots, scarlet ribbons, white trousers with gold braid, patent leather shoes held tightly in place with foot straps, the generals’ sharovary and silver sashes.

Nedelsky, our school’s finest elocutionist, welcomed the tsar with a poem of his own composition. He spoke in a loud, dry voice and addressed the tsar with the informal ‘ty’. Then the suite parted, leaving a wide passage through which Nicholas approached us. He stopped, rubbed his light brown beard and said slowly and with a slight burr: ‘Greetings, gentlemen.’

We answered – distinctly but not too loudly – as we had been instructed: ‘We wish Your Imperial Majesty good health!’

Being the shortest boy in the top form, I was standing at the end of my row. Nicholas came up to me. His cheek twitched slightly. He gave me a distracted look and smiled, but only with his eyes. ‘What’s your name?’

I answered.

‘Are you Ukrainian?’

‘Yes, Your Majesty.’

He looked me over with a brief, bored glance and moved on to my neighbour. He stopped to ask each of us our names. A concert followed the inspection. Since the tsar listened standing up, so did we.

Nicholas made it quite clear that he was bored with the gala reception and had no intention of wasting his time on some school concert. He kept plucking impatiently at the glove he had removed from his right hand. The concert was cut short. The school orchestra played ‘Glory, Glory to Our Russian Tsar’, someone recited the ‘Song of Oleg’ and the choir sang a cantata.

The whole event was boring and pointless. The ministers yawned behind the tsar’s back. It was too painful to watch the musicians, who were quaking with fear, so we watched the ministers and the rest of the suite instead. We were shocked by the difference between the tsar and the men around him. Nicholas looked plain and even a bit awkward. He was lost amid his large suite that flashed and gleamed in their silver and gold, in their tall polished boots, epaulettes, sword knots, spurs, pelisses and medals. Even when the courtiers stood still, a faint ringing could be heard from all their regalia and weaponry.

Nicholas listened to the concert with a stony expression and then left. He was not satisfied. He had a score to settle with our school. Two days earlier a former pupil named Bogrov had shot Minister Stolypin in the Opera House, mortally wounding him. Of this I shall say more later.

On our centenary it had been decided to promote the school from the rank of a ‘gymnasium’ to that of a ‘lycée’. An edict to that effect had been prepared. But after the shooting in the theatre it was no longer deemed fitting for a gymnasium that had turned out political criminals to be granted the special privileges and prestige of a lycée. And so instead our school received nothing more than a new name – the Imperial Alexander Gymnasium, in honour of Emperor Alexander I – and a new coat of arms with a large ‘A’ and crown. The boys at Kiev’s other gymnasia liked to make fun of our rather pompous new coat of arms, which led to more than a few brawls. We boys in the top form refused to change our old school badges for the new ones. The school officials objected, but we insisted that we didn’t have the money for new badges and buckles. In the end, the officials let the matter go. We just weren’t worth the effort considering we would soon be leaving school.

All sorts of festivities were arranged in honour of Nicholas’s visit to Kiev. An ugly bronze statue of Alexander II was unveiled and even uglier plaster statues of Saint Olga and Saints Cyril and Methodius. Military manoeuvres were conducted on the outskirts of the city. Everywhere one looked there were inaugurations, pageants, processions, ceremonial illuminations. Flags hung from every house and building for the whole week of the tsar’s stay.

After a horse race, the boys and girls from all Kiev’s gymnasia were paraded around the track. We kicked up a cloud of dust as we passed in front of Nicholas. The setting sun was in our eyes. We couldn’t see a thing and mixed up our ranks. A military band blew with all its might. Our school distinguished itself by forgetting to acknowledge the tsar’s greeting. A full general in the army galloped up and gave us a dressing down. His chestnut steed had flattened its ears and stamped angrily as the general jerked at the reins.

A gala performance was planned for the Opera House which Nicholas would be attending. Boys and girls in the top forms from a number of schools, including ours, were also invited. We were led up a dark back stairway to the gallery and locked in. We could not leave and go down to the lower tiers. A few decent but rather brazen police officers were stationed at the doors. When some pretty schoolgirl wanted to get out of the gallery, they’d give each other a sly wink and let her pass.

I was sitting in the back row and couldn’t see a thing. It was very hot. My head practically touched the ceiling. Not until the interval was I able to push my way up to the front. I leaned over the railing and looked out into the hall. It was veiled in a light haze through which I made out flashes of colour from the reflection of so many diamonds and jewels. The imperial box was empty; Nicholas and the rest of the royal family had moved to the avant-loge.

Ministers and courtiers were standing by the railing separating the hall from the orchestra pit. I stood looking down and listening to the murmur of voices. The musicians in their black frock coats were sitting in front of their music stands but none of them were bothering to tune their instruments as usual. Suddenly, there was a loud crack. The musicians jumped to their feet. There was another crack. I didn’t realise it was gunshots. The boys standing beside me shouted: ‘Look! He fell right on the floor!’

‘Who?’

‘Stolypin. Right there, next to the railing!’

I looked. The theatre was now strangely quiet. By the railing a tall man with a bushy black beard and a sash over his shoulder was sitting on the floor. He was grasping at the railing as if he wanted to grab hold and pull himself up. The space around Stolypin was empty.

A young man in a tail-coat was walking away from Stolypin towards the exit. I couldn’t see his face from where I stood. All I noticed was that he was in no hurry and walked calmly. Someone began to scream. There was a thud. An officer had jumped out of the lower boxes and grabbed the young man by the arm. They were immediately surrounded by a crowd.

‘Everyone out of the gallery!’ I heard one of the policemen say behind me.

They hurried us out into the corridor. The doors to the hall were closed. We stood there with no idea what was happening. We could hear a muffled hum coming from the hall. It died down, and then the orchestra played ‘God Save the Tsar’.

‘He’s killed Stolypin,’ Fitsovsky whispered to me.

‘No talking! Leave the theatre at once!’ shouted a police officer.

We went down the same dark set of stairs and out into the brightly lit square. The square was empty. Lines of mounted police were moving the crowds outside the theatre away and down into the side streets, farther and farther back. The horses stamped their feet nervously, the sound echoing down the streets and filling the square. A bugle sounded. An ambulance carriage drove into the square at a swinging trot and stopped in front of the theatre. A few medical orderlies jumped out and raced up the steps carrying a stretcher.

We began to leave the square. We walked slowly because we wanted to see what would happen next. The police tried to move us along, but they looked so confused themselves that we didn’t bother to pay them any attention. We saw Stolypin carried out on a stretcher. The orderlies placed him inside the carriage, and then they took off down Vladimirskaya Street with a police escort galloping alongside.

I returned home to Lukyanovka and told Grandmother and Gattenberger that Stolypin had been murdered. Grandmother said it was never right to shoot in a theatre since innocent people could be hurt. Gattenberger became all excited, puffed agitatedly on his cigar, said that the scoundrel Stolypin should have been killed sooner, and then raced off to the city centre for the latest news. He returned after midnight and told us that straw had been laid down all along Malaya Vladimirskaya Street, which is where the hospital was that Stolypin had been taken to, and that the Black Hundreds were calling for a pogrom against the Jews.

‘As if we haven’t had enough already!’ cried Grandmother, furious at the thought of it.

Gattenberger said that as long as the tsar was in Kiev there would be no pogrom.

‘Are you going back into town?’ Grandmother asked me the next morning.

‘Yes, to school.’

‘Why?’

‘We’re rehearsing for the tsar’s visit.’

‘Don’t go. You can tell them you were sick,’ Grandmother said. ‘What nonsense! Doesn’t the tsar have anything better to do than show himself off to a bunch of schoolboys?’

I said that of course she was right.

‘Well, then, don’t go! Everyone’s rushing hither and thither in town all because of this Nicholas. They’re wasting time on mere trifles, as if God will somehow make it up to them. Stay at home. Perhaps you’ll have a headache? Just sit and read in the garden. I’ll bake you a strutzel.’ (Grandmother never could say ‘strudel’ properly.) ‘I don’t understand how people can go around wasting time like this. It makes no sense, it’s pointless, especially in this weather!’

I listened to Grandmother and skipped the rehearsal.

The weather was indeed wonderful. The leaves on the apple trees had turned pink and begun to dry out. Some of them had shrivelled up into little funnels and were wrapped in cobwebs. Red and white asters were flowering along the paths. Yellow butterflies fluttered among the trees. They settled in clusters on the surfaces warmed by the sun – the stone steps of the verandah, the metal watering can left out on the lawn. As though diminished by the autumn, the sun travelled slowly overhead, taking a long time to reach the tops of the walnut trees.

I sat in the garden reading in Grandmother’s wicker chair. Now and then a few notes of music reached me from the city. I put down my book and looked at the path. It had been cut through the lawn’s thick grass and along its sharp edges grew a fringe of velvety dark green moss. A small patch of white stood out against the moss. For a second time a wood anemone had sprouted here from a seed which had somehow been blown into the garden. A white duck waddled in from the yard. Upon seeing me, it stopped, quacked with displeasure and left, teetering from side to side as it went. My presence had obviously upset the poor creature. Sparrows sat on the roof preening themselves and craning their necks to see whether there wasn’t something interesting in the garden. Finding nothing, they waited.

Grandmother came out onto the verandah wrapped in a warm shawl and tossed a handful of breadcrumbs. The sparrows flew down and began hopping about on the ground like small grey balls.

‘Kostik,’ she said, ‘come in for dinner.’

She was standing on the steps of the verandah. I stood up and went over to her. From the house came the smell of apple strudel.

‘Now here’s a true royal feast for you!’ Grandmother said, looking out at the garden. ‘But still folks feel the need to dream up all sorts of nonsense for this Nicholas the Second!’

She was right. The garden truly was a feast of sunlight and fresh warm air.