The Story of a Life

36

A Tale about Nothing

The thaw started in February. A thick fog kept settling over Kiev, only to be chased away by a warm wind. Lukyanovka smelled of melting snow. And of wood bark. It blew in on the wind from beyond the Dnieper, near Chernigov, where the forests were darkening with the approach of spring.

Water dripped from the roof and the melting icicles, and only at night, and even then not often, did the wind tear away the clouds, so that the puddles froze and the stars came out. You could see them only in the outskirts of the city where we lived. In town there was too much light from the houses and street lamps for anyone to even suspect their presence. Grandmother’s cottage was warm and cosy on the raw February nights. The electric lights glowed inside behind the closed shutters, while the wind blustered in the empty garden.

I had begun writing a new story – about Polesia and the Old Men of Mogilëv. I couldn’t stop tinkering with it, and the more I tinkered, the more I drained the life out of the story. It ended up limp and stale. Nevertheless, I finally finished the story and took it over to the editors of Lights. Their office was on Fundukleevskaya Street in a small room facing the yard. A cheery-looking and rather tubby little man was preparing his tea and slicing sausage on a pile of galleys. He wasn’t surprised in the least by the appearance of a schoolboy with a manuscript. He took the story, quickly glanced at the ending, and said that he liked it but that I’d have to wait for the editor. ‘Did you use your real surname?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Bad idea. We’re a left-wing magazine. And you’re just a schoolboy. There could be trouble. Think up a pseudonym.’

I obediently crossed out my name on the last page and wrote down ‘Balagin’ instead.

‘That’ll do!’ he said approvingly.

A thin man with a sallow complexion, a tangled beard and sunken piercing eyes walked into the room. He had trouble taking off his large snow boots, and then began cursing and coughing as he unwound his long scarf.

‘Here’s the editor,’ said the tubby fellow, who stopped peeling the sausage and pointed at the newcomer with his penknife.

Without bothering to even glance in my direction, the editor went over to his desk, sat down, stretched out a long arm and then said in a flat and terrifying voice: ‘Give it here!’

I placed the manuscript in his outstretched hand.

‘Are you aware that rejected manuscripts are not returned?’ the editor asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Magnificent!’ he grumbled. ‘Come back in an hour. I’ll have an answer for you.’

The tubby man winked and gave me a smile. I left discouraged and wandered up and down Kreshchatik for a long while before going to the library, where I ran into Fitsovsky. He had just picked up a volume of Ibsen and began to berate me for not reading more of him. He insisted that Ibsen’s Ghosts was the greatest work of literature in the world. We left the library together. It was still too early to return to the editorial office. We ducked into a dark courtyard to smoke. We were forbidden to smoke and didn’t want to be seen out on the street by a teacher or any of the school officials.

Fitsovsky walked with me to the office and said he would wait outside. He wanted to find out the editor’s decision, but I asked him to leave. I was terrified and didn’t want Fitsovsky to see me if they rejected my story. I went in. The editor just looked at me closely for a while without saying a word. I didn’t say a word either. I could feel my face becoming warm and damp. I was aware that I was blushing terribly.

‘May I have my manuscript back?’ I asked.

‘Your manuscript?’ the editor said and began choking with laughter. ‘Yes, of course, please, here you are. You can have it back and then toss it in the fire. It’s just that I want to publish your story. Can you imagine, I actually liked it.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realise,’ I mumbled.

‘Such a hot-tempered young man! Since you’re going to be a writer, please show a little patience. Come and pick up your honorarium on Wednesday,’ he said icily, before changing his tone: ‘And do me the favour of bringing in whatever you write next.’

I dashed out of the office. Fitsovsky was standing by the front gate. He hadn’t left as I had told him to.

‘Well?’ he asked nervously. ‘Did they accept it?’

‘Yes, they did.’

‘Let’s go to my place!’ he said. ‘I’ve got a bottle of muscatel and some pickled apples. We must celebrate!’

We drank the bottle of muscatel, and I didn’t get home until very late, after the trams had stopped running. I walked along the empty streets. All the lights were out. Had I encountered a beggar I would have given him the coat off my back or done something else just as rash. But the only thing I met was a white dog. It was cold and wet, sitting by a fence. I dug around in my pockets but didn’t find anything to give it. I patted it and then walked off. The dog got up and followed me. I talked to the dog all the way home. It kept jumping up and nipping at my coat sleeve, as if to show me it understood.

‘Listen,’ I said and stopped. The dog’s ears went up. There was a rustling sound coming from the gardens along the street, as if last year’s leaves were being stirred. ‘Do you know what that means?’ I asked. ‘That’s the sound of spring. And after that it’ll soon be summer. That’s when I’ll be leaving. And maybe then I’ll meet a woman, perhaps the finest woman in the world.’

The dog jumped and snapped at my sleeve, and we walked on.

Every window was dark. The city slept. How could it? I thought to myself. No one should be sleeping on such a splendid night. Everyone ought to be up and outside to witness the dark passage of these clouds and to listen to the soft gurgle of the melting snow and the muffled dripping of water within the hollowed snowdrifts.

I don’t know how I got home. Grandmother was asleep. The dog followed me quietly into my room. Supper, long gone cold, was waiting for me on the table. I fed the dog a bit of bread and meat and made it a bed in the corner by the stove. It lay down and fell fast asleep. Now and then it wagged its tail without waking, as if in gratitude. Grandmother wasn’t angry when she saw the dog in the morning. She felt sorry for it, called it Cadeau, started feeding it, and in the end the dog stayed with her for good.

Spring grew closer with each day. Along with it came our final examinations. To pass we had to revise everything we had ever learned in school. This was difficult, especially in springtime.

Uncle Kolya arrived from Bryansk at the end of the Easter holidays to visit Grandmother for a few days. He stayed with me in my room. Aunt Vera was offended he didn’t live with her family in the big house, but he brushed the matter off with a joke. Lying in our beds in the evening, Uncle Kolya and I talked and laughed. When she overheard us, Grandmother got up out of bed, dressed and came and sat with us until late in the night.

One evening Uncle Kolya and I attended another of Aunt Vera’s stuffy command supper parties. She gathered around her what Grandmother called a collection of ‘monstres et créatures’. I felt a particular dislike for the noted Kievan oculist Dumitrashko, a small man with a squeaky voice, a wavy beard and flowing locks of golden hair that pooled over the collar of his black frock coat. As soon as he arrived, poison began to fill the air. Rubbing his puffy hands, Dumitrashko would immediately begin spouting all sorts of nasty filth about the intelligentsia. Aunt Vera’s husband, a businessman with a dark complexion and a face covered in blackheads, always egged him on. And then there was Piotukh, a retired general whose arrival no one ever seemed to notice. He came with his three daughters, all of them old maids, and talked almost exclusively about the price of firewood, which he bought and sold on the side.

Aunt Vera tried to be a witty hostess but had little success. She began nearly every sentence with her beloved words ‘Do keep in mind’. ‘Do keep in mind,’ she would say, ‘Madame Bashinskaya wears only lilac dresses’ or ‘Do keep in mind, the apples in this pie come from my own garden.’ Her attempts to start a conversation never went anywhere.

She forced her daughter Nadya to play the piano and sing as the evening’s entertainment. Terrified by the intense stares the general’s daughters gave her, Nadya would pick away hesitantly at the piano as she tried to sing in her weak, shaky voice the once fashionable romance ‘The Swan’: ‘The creek sleeps, silent is the glassy water …’ Her German music teacher sat quietly, her eyes anxiously watching Nadya. The woman had a large and unusually thin nose such that when she sat next to a bright lamp, the light shone through it. Above this nose rose a tall pile of hair on her head held in place by a garland of flowers.

After supper Uncle Kolya and I returned to the cottage. ‘Ugh!’ he said with a deep exhale. ‘That was just awful!’ In order to forget what we had just sat through and to try to cheer ourselves up, Uncle Kolya invited Gattenberger over to Grandmother’s room for a small concert. He sang Polish folk songs for her accompanied by Gattenberger on the cello:

O Vistula, so blue,

Like some wondrous flower.

To foreign lands you flow, such is your power,

Your path so long and so true!

Grandmother listened, her hands folded in her lap. Her head shook ever so slightly, and tears clouded her eyes. Poland was far, far away. Grandmother knew she would never again see the Niemen or the Vistula or Warsaw. Walking had become difficult for her, and she had even stopped going to church.

The day he left Uncle Kolya told me that he planned to return to Rëvny next summer and made me promise to come and join him. I was only too happy to say yes.

Once I knew I would be going back to Rëvny, everything looked different. I even began to believe that I would have no trouble passing my final examinations. The promise of happier days was a long way off, however, and so there was nothing I could do but wait. But then, sometimes it’s the mere anticipation of happy days – and not the days themselves – that is the most enjoyable part. At the time I knew nothing about this strange quality of life, but I would become convinced of it later.