The Story of a Life

41

An Unprecedented Autumn

I took the train from Kiev to Moscow. There were three of us riding in the cramped box room alongside the carriage heater: an older land surveyor, a young woman in an Orenburg shawl and myself. The woman sat on the unlit metal stove while the surveyor and I took turns sitting on the floor; there wasn’t room for two. Coal dust crunched under our feet. Before long the woman’s white shawl had turned grey. Nothing could be seen through the window, which was also matted with grey dust and flecked with dried streaks of rain. It wasn’t until we were outside Sukhinichi that I caught sight of an enormous blood-red sunset that filled the whole sky, a sight I’ve remembered to this day.

The surveyor, watching the sunset, said that out there, on the border, our soldiers were probably already fighting the Germans. The woman pressed the shawl to her face and started to cry: she was on her way to her husband in Tver and didn’t know whether or not he’d already been sent off to the front. I was on my way to Moscow to say goodbye to my brother Dima, who had also been called up. I was too short-sighted to serve in the army. Moreover, I was the youngest son and a student, and according to the law in those days youngest sons and students were exempt from military service.

It was almost impossible to leave the carriage heater, so crowded was the train. Mobilised soldiers were everywhere – sprawled out on the steps and the buffers, lying on the roof. Passing through the stations we were met with women’s wails, whistles, songs and the sound of accordions. The train would stop and immediately get stuck on the rails. It took two engines, and a heavy jolt, to get the overloaded train moving again.

Russia itself was on the move. Like a massive underground tremor, the war had loosened Russia from its foundations. In thousands of villages, church bells rang the alarm, announcing the mobilisation. Thousands of worn-out horses hauled peasant conscripts to the railheads from the most remote corners of the country. As the enemy invaded Russia from the west, a mighty human tidal wave rose up in the east to meet him. The entire country had been turned into an armed camp. Life became unrecognisable. Everything we had held as familiar and permanent had vanished in an instant.

For the whole way to Moscow the only food we had between the three of us was a stale loaf of bread with raisins and a bottle of cloudy water. It must have been for this reason that when I stepped out onto the damp platform at Bryansky station in Moscow I found the morning air so fresh and fragrant. The summer of 1914 was drawing to a close, that terrible and threatening first summer of war, and the Moscow air already held the smell of wilting leaves and stagnant ponds, those sweet, cool aromas of autumn.

Mama was living in Moscow then, near one of those ponds on Bolshaya Presnya Street. The flat’s windows opened onto the Zoological Garden. You could see the ruins of the red brick houses on Presnenskaya Street shelled during the December uprising of ’05 and the empty paths and the large, black pond of the Zoological Garden. The sunlight turned the pond scum into long green strips.

Never before had I seen a flat that so fully matched the character and life of its occupants as Mama’s on Presnya Street. It was bare, almost devoid of furniture, except for the tables in the kitchen and a few creaky bentwood chairs. The old blackened trees cast shadows into the rooms, filling the flat with a gloomy chill that never lifted. The tabletops covered with dull, sticky oilcloths were just as cold. Mama had developed a passion for oilcloths. They had replaced her linen tablecloths and acted as a persistent reminder of our new poverty and of how Mama was doing everything possible in her power to keep the house neat and tidy as in days past. There was simply no other way for her to live. Only Mama and Galya were there when I arrived. Dima had left for the firing range at Gravornovo to train reservists.

In the two years since I had last seen Mama her face had wrinkled and yellowed, yet her thin lips remained tightly pursed as before, a sign for others that she would never surrender before life’s hardships or the petty intrigues of her ill-wishers. Despite everything, she would come out the victor. As for Galya, she still wandered about the rooms, bumping blindly into the furniture, and questioning me about all sorts of nonsense: How much does a ticket from Kiev to Moscow cost now? Do they still have porters at the railway stations or have they all been sent off to the war? Mama seemed calmer than on previous visits. I hadn’t expected this. I couldn’t understand her mood, especially since Dima could be sent to the front at any moment. Mama herself explained: ‘Things are much better for us now, Kostik. Dima is an ensign, an officer, with good pay. I no longer worry that we won’t be able to pay the rent.’ She looked at me, uncomfortably, and added: ‘Not everyone who goes to war gets killed. I’m certain Dima won’t be sent to the front. His superior officers think highly of him.’

I agreed with her that not everyone gets killed. It would have been wrong to rob her of this meagre comfort. Looking at Mama, I understood how crushing this vulnerable daily existence was, how great was the universal need for a roof over one’s head and a bit of bread. But I couldn’t make peace with the thought that her happiness about the family’s pitiful new-found prosperity came at the expense of exposing her son to danger. There was no way she couldn’t have been aware of the risk. She had simply decided to try to ignore it.

Dima returned, suntanned and brimming with self-confidence. He undid his brand new sword with its gilded hilt and hung it up in the hall. In the evening, after their single electric bulb had been switched on, the hilt glittered. It was the sole piece of luxury in Mama’s humble flat. Mama told me that Dima’s plan to marry Margarita had fallen apart since, it turned out, in Mama’s words, Margarita ‘was quite an unpleasant individual’. I didn’t say a word. A few days later Dima was posted to the Navaginsky Infantry Regiment. He packed up and left so quickly that Mama didn’t have time to realise what was happening. It was not until the day after his departure that she cried. Dima’s train was loading from a siding at Brestsky station. It was an ordinary day, a low sky and a mild wind blowing around some yellow dust, the kind of day you think nothing special can happen.

Our farewell with Dima was in keeping with the day. Dima was busy loading the men on the train. He spoke with us in brief snatches and then hurriedly said his goodbyes just as the train began to pull away. He raced after his carriage, jumped up onto the step, and then immediately disappeared from view behind an inbound train. Once the train had passed, Dima was no longer to be seen.

After Dima’s departure I transferred from Kiev to Moscow University. Mama let Dima’s room to an engineer named Zakharov who worked on the Moscow trams. To this day I still don’t understand what Zakharov could have found appealing about our flat. Zakharov had studied in Belgium and lived for many years in Brussels before returning to Russia not long before the war. He was a cheerful bachelor with a short grey beard. He was fond of baggy, foreign-made suits and wore glasses that gave his eyes a penetrating appearance. The table in his room was piled high with books, none of them technical, I noticed, but mostly memoirs, novels and editions of Knowledge. It was among the stack on Zakharov’s table that I came across for the first time French editions of Verhaeren, Maeterlinck and Rodenbach.fn1

Everyone that summer felt great admiration for Belgium, a small country which had taken the first blow of the German forces. We all sang the popular song about the defenders of besieged Liège. Belgium was smashed in a matter of days. It wore the crown of martyrdom. The Gothic stone lace of its city halls and cathedrals had collapsed and been ground into dust under the German soldiers’ boots and their cannons’ heavy wheels.

I read Verhaeren, Maeterlinck and Rodenbach, searching in their works for the clues to the riddle of their compatriots’ bravery. But I did not find any clues, not in the dense complexities of Verhaeren’s verse denouncing the evil of the old world, not in Rodenbach’s novels, as dead and brittle as flowers set in ice, not in Maeterlinck’s plays, written, so it seemed, in his sleep. Once I bumped into Zakharov on Tverskoy Boulevard. He took me by the arm and began to speak of the war, of this great blow to civilisation, of Belgium. He had a faint French accent.

Autumn that year in Moscow was magnificent. The trees’ gilded leaves dropped onto the gun barrels. Weapons and boxes of ammunition lined the Moscow boulevards, waiting to be shipped to the front. Over the city migrating birds passed through a clear and unbelievably blue sky lit by the fading radiance of the sun. And all the time the leaves kept falling and falling. They piled up on the rooftops, on the pavements and on the roads, and whispered under the brooms of house porters and the shuffling feet of the passers-by, as if trying to remind us that all around lay the forgotten earth, and that for the sake of this very earth, for the sake of the faint lustre of September cobwebs, for the sake of the clear, dry views of the horizon, for the sake of still waters rippling from the fall of a bit of tree bark, for the sake of the yellowing broom shrubs, for the sake of all of Russia, humming with life and blessed with rare beauty, for the sake of its villages, its peasant huts, creamy smoke rising up over their thatched roofs, for the sake of the bluish mist over its rivers, for the sake of Russia’s past and its future – for the sake of all this, every honest man and woman should come together and through their enormous united will put a stop to this war.

I understood, of course, that one could not count on this, that such thoughts were, as Borya loved to say, ‘pure Quixotism’. I also understood that the enemy who had raised the sword against us and our culture might well die from the sword but would never sheath it unless forced. Like an unstoppable force, the war moved ever closer. It seemed as if the smoke from its fires already clouded the skies over Moscow. And it truly was smoke, although not from the war, but from the burning forests and parched bogs near Tver.

Every morning when I awoke on the floor of my room – I had no bed – I looked through the window to see the leaves falling in the sky, twirling their way downwards. The windowsill cut off much of my view, and so all I could see was the sky; I never did know just where the leaves were landing. I couldn’t free myself from the thought that this long, slow flight of leaves that went on day after day would quite possibly be my last. The leaves seemed to be flying from west to east, trying to save themselves from the war. I’m not ashamed to admit to such notions – I was very young then. The world appeared to be overflowing with lyrical power, a feeling that undoubtedly emanated from my own self. At the time I mistook this for the essence of life itself.

‘Well, my friend,’ said Zakharov, ‘haven’t you had enough by now of wandering around the city suburbs in your dreamy condition? Why, Maria Grigorievna told me that this week alone you’ve managed to take in both Arkhangelskoe and Ostankino.’fn2 ‘Take in’ Zakharov said in a particular tone, the one he always used for Russian words he was still a bit unfamiliar with.

‘Yes, I visited both Arkhangelskoe and Ostankino,’ I admitted. ‘But what sort of dreamy condition are you referring to?’

Zakharov grinned. ‘You behave as if the world exists solely to fill your head with interesting ideas.’

‘Well, so what?’ I asked, getting angry. ‘Why is everyone always accusing me of acting like a little boy?’

‘It’s just that you’ve made yourself sick reading all those modern poets,’ he said. ‘Yes, truly sick,’ he added, pleased with himself.

‘Judging by your books, you prefer literature to trams.’

‘The fact is,’ explained Zakharov, ‘Belgium is the country of trams. And of mystical poetry. I was sent there while still a young boy. I made Belgium my home and graduated from the Institute of Engineering in Liège. But all this is beside the point. The point is there’s a war on. That’s what you need to recognise!’

Military music and lengthy cheers of ‘Hurrah!’ wafted in from Strastnaya Square. Reserve battalions were forming there in preparation for leaving for the front.

‘I’ve just come from the square,’ Zakharov added. ‘I had forgotten so much about Russia. But it wasn’t my fault. Anyway, I pushed through the crowd to the very front rows to get a good look at the soldiers. They smelled of bread. What a smell! Listening to the Russian people, you begin to believe no one can defeat them.’

‘What about Belgium?’ I asked.

‘What about it? I don’t understand.’

I grinned and then said the first thing that came to mind: ‘And why do the Belgians fight so fearlessly against the Germans?’

‘Oh là là! They’re a small nation living on the memory of past greatness. I respect them for this. Take Maeterlinck. A mystical poet with a misty eye and misty ideas. The traditional Catholic God annoys him. He’s simply too coarse for such a refined nature as Maeterlinck. And so, he replaced God with the Great Beyond – it’s more up-to-date, more poetic. It’s also a more deadly poison than religion itself. So be it. More importantly, Maeterlinck is a citizen. That’s how he was raised, those are the traditions he grew up with. And as a citizen, he picks up his rifle and shoots with his mystical fingers just as well as any soldier in the king’s army. No one cares about Maeterlinck the mystical-poet. But everyone cares about Maeterlinck the citizen. So, nobody bothers with his poetry. That’s Belgium. What else is there to say? It’s a wonderful country. It’s swept by sea breezes and is full of happy people. People who know how to work, I’d add. What else do you want to know about Belgium? Anything? Well, okay then, enough about Belgium; let’s talk about things closer to home.’

By ‘closer to home’ Zakharov meant offering me a job as a Moscow tram driver. ‘The fact is,’ he explained, ‘practically all the conductors and drivers have been called up, and you can’t expect a huge city to go without trams in wartime. They’re hiring new conductors and drivers right now.’

I was taken aback. The transition from Maeterlinck to tram drivers had been too abrupt. Since my school days I had thought only of becoming a writer. I had learned to view all of life’s unexpected turns as my training for this. One had to embrace life, not try to avoid it, for this was the only way to acquire experience, to build up that storehouse of ideas, moments, stories, words and images that I could later draw upon. Moreover, I knew that I couldn’t leave Mama. She needed me now. And with this offer, a job and some money had fallen right into my hands. So I agreed. When I told Mama and Galya about my decision, Mama let out a sigh and said that she had never been ashamed of any sort of work and had tried to instil in us the same attitude. Galya, however, was worried: I might be electrocuted.

‘I read somewhere’, she said, trembling, ‘about a circus elephant electrocuted in a tram. Is that possible?’

‘Utter nonsense,’ I told her.

I had to get out and headed for the tavern on Kudrinskaya Street. It was filled with steam from the samovars. A mechanical instrument, a sort of organ referred to as the ‘machine’, was wildly churning away, its little bells and drums clanging like mad, and playing an old folk song: ‘Away the troika races, along the wintry ice of the Mother Volga …’

At the table next to me sat an old man in a jacket with a turned-up collar. He was busy writing something. He constantly dipped his quill in an inkwell, picked off little bits of fuzz, and then got back to writing. I felt like writing to one of my family members, or a friend, about myself, about how my life had changed so unexpectedly, about how I was going to be working as a driver on a tram, but in an instant I realised I had no one to write to. The ‘machine’ roared on – ‘The coachman fell silent, and angrily shoved the long whip back beneath his belt …’

So great was the noise that the empty glasses on the tables began to rattle and ring.