The Story of a Life

42

The Copper Line

I was taken on as a driver and posted to the Miussky tram depot, but I didn’t last long in that position. Soon I was made a conductor.

The Miussky yard was located on Lesnaya Street in a series of red-brick buildings covered in thick soot. Ever since those days I have disliked Lesnaya Street. I still consider it one of the dirtiest and ugliest in Moscow. My memory of the street is tied to the screech of trams as they crawled out of the depot’s iron gates at dawn, the strap of my heavy conductor’s satchel cutting into my shoulder and the sour smell of copper coins. The coins turned every conductor’s hands green from handling them all day, especially if one had to work the ‘Copper Line’.

The Copper Line was the name we gave to the B Line, which ran along the Garden Ring. None of us conductors liked the line, even though Muscovites affectionately called it ‘the Bug’. We preferred to work on the ‘Silver Line’ – the A Line – on the Boulevard Ring. Muscovites had a pet name for this line as well – ‘Annushka’ they called it. That name was fine with us, but we found ‘the Bug’ ridiculous.

The Bug served the crowded railway station squares on the dusty edges of Moscow. Its cars had trailers for passengers with large and heavy items. Most of the passengers were from the outskirts of the city – craftsmen, market gardeners, women selling milk. They paid in coppers, saving their silver and taking it out of their pockets and purses only reluctantly. Thus, the name ‘Copper Line’. The A Line was much smarter, serving the theatres and finer shops. The trams were all motorised – none were horse-drawn – and the passengers were different to those on the Bug – mostly well-educated urban types and state officials. The typical passenger paid in silver or banknotes. Through the open windows of the A Line tram you could hear the rustling of the trees which lined the boulevards. The tram slowly circled the centre of Moscow, past the bronze figures of a weary Gogol and a serene Pushkin, past the Trubny Market with its incessant twittering of birds, past the Kremlin towers, past the enormous golden-headed bulk of Christ the Saviour Cathedral and the curved bridges over the shallow waters of the Moscow River.

We took the trams out in the early morning and returned after midnight or later. Back at the depot I had to hand over the daily receipts, after which I could go home. I liked to slowly wander the dark streets of Moscow, making my way down Bolshaya Gruzinskaya Street with my empty satchel over my shoulder. The nickel-plated badge with my conductor’s number that I wore on my jacket glinted in the green light of the gas lamps. In those days only the main streets had electric lights.

At first, I took a long time to count the coppers before I could leave for home, but then Babaev – the old conductor who trained me – taught me how to get rid of them. From then on I returned to the depot at the end of my shift with nothing but large notes and some silver. The trick was quite simple. A couple of hours before returning to the yard we did everything possible to get rid of our small coins – change for a rouble we handed out only in copper and for three roubles, silver. Sometimes the passengers began to curse, and when they did we immediately acquiesced in order to avoid another avoidable quarrel in the tram. Babaev was full of such practical wisdom.

‘Passengers are anxious nowadays,’ he said. ‘You have to make allowances. You have to treat them kindly, and you even have to let some of them ride for free. I, for example, can tell right away when someone gets on if they don’t want to pay. It’s written on their face. You can see they need the ride, but they’re hiding from you in the back of the car – it’s obvious they haven’t got a single kopeck in their pocket. So don’t force that passenger to buy a ticket. Act as if you’ve already sold them one, even making sure it was properly clipped. Being kind is always the right thing to do, and especially in our walk of life as conductors. We’re dealing with the entire city of Moscow. And there’s more human sorrow in Moscow than there are grains of sand on the beach.’

Babaev taught me all the basic things I needed to know for my job as a conductor – how to clip tickets, the different colours of the tickets for each day of the week (to stop passengers from using those of the previous day), how to turn in the car at the end of the day to the depot supervisor, the parts of the city where the passengers liked to hop off the moving tram and so you had to be extra careful in stopping the tram to avoid an accident. My training with Babaev lasted ten days, after which I took the conductor’s examination. The most difficult part was the geography of Moscow. We had to know every square, street and lane, every theatre, railway station, church and market. And not only know them by name but be able to say how to go from one to the other. No one knew Moscow better than us, except perhaps the droshky drivers. It is thanks to my work as a conductor that I got to know Moscow so well, this confused and diverse city with all its inns, taverns, hospitals and poorhouses, its districts, neighbourhoods and endless confusion of tangled streets.

The examiner was a rather caustic old man in a full-skirted coat. He would ask us in a mild voice as he sipped his cold tea: ‘Now then, my good fellow, what’s the quickest route from Marina Roshcha to Khamovniki? Eh? What’s that? You don’t know, do you? By the way, do you happen to know how it got such an awful name – Khamovniki? “Kham”, why, that’s a boor, a lout, that’s what that is. Now, Moscow isn’t known as a boorish place. Moscow was Russia’s first capital, after all! It’s just scandalous!’

The old man picked on us mercilessly. Half of us failed. Those who did went to complain to Chief Engineer Polivanov, a marvellously groomed gentleman with exquisite manners. With a slight tilt of the head, his silver hair parted neatly down the middle, Polivanov answered that knowledge of Moscow was essential to a conductor.

‘A conductor is not just an animated ticket dispenser, but a guide to Moscow as well. It’s a huge city. Not even old Muscovites know all of it. Just imagine the mess that would result if our conductors could not help passengers, especially those from out of town, find their way in this dizzying network of blind alleys, gates and churches.’

I soon realised that Polivanov was right.

I was assigned to Line 8 – the accursed railway station line, considered even worse than the B Line. This line connected Brestsky station with the three railway stations on Kalanchevskaya Square (Nikolaevsky, Yaroslavsky and Kazansky) and also ran through Sukharevskaya Square and along both New and Old Bozhedomka Streets. At Yaroslavsky station the tram was often ‘over-run’, as we conductors liked to say, by the train arriving from the Holy Trinity Monastery of St Sergius. The tram would be crammed with religious pilgrims and impecunious believers. Not knowing Moscow at all, these God-fearing old women wandered aimlessly from one church to another. The city left them as terrified and flustered as a brood of hens.

Day after day it was the same old story: one poor woman needed to go to the Church of St Nicholas the Miracle Worker on Chicken’s Feet, another to the Church of the Life-Giving Trinity of Little Droplets and a third to the Church of St George on the Edge of the Field. You had to explain to the old woman very slowly and carefully how to get to each and every church, after which she pulled a handkerchief from a pocket in one of her underskirts. The handkerchief was always tied into thirds: one held her kopecks, another her two-kopeck coins, and the last her five-kopeck pieces.

She tugged and tugged at the tight knots with her teeth for a long time and then reluctantly counted out the fare. In her haste she often picked the wrong corner of the handkerchief. Then she had to tie it up tight again with her teeth and start on another. It was misery for us conductors. We were supposed to have handed out all the tickets by the time we reached Krasnye Vorota, but the old women were so slow that we never managed in time. The tram inspectors waiting at Krasnye Vorota, always on the lookout for the slightest mistake, fined us for working too slowly.

Once Babaev took me to his home. He lived with his daughter in a ramshackle little house near Paveletsky station. His daughter worked as a seamstress.

‘Sanya, look here, I’ve brought you a fine young man,’ Babaev bellowed cheerfully from the door.

I could hear her rummaging about behind a calico partition, but Sanya did not come out. A few cages covered with newspaper hung from the low ceiling. Babaev pulled off the newspaper to reveal several canaries that immediately began singing and hopping about in their cages.

‘I find canaries restful after being around humans,’ Babaev explained. ‘Passengers feel no sense of shame before us conductors. They reveal their worst selves to us, and so it’s not surprising we have a rather jaundiced view of humanity.’

Babaev was right. I don’t know why, but people saved their worst behaviour for trams. Even courteous people became infected with boorishness as soon as they entered. At first this surprised me, then it began to get on my nerves, and in the end it depressed me so much that I found myself waiting for an opportunity to quit my job and regain my former friendly disposition towards people.

Sanya, a gaunt young woman, came out, nodded silently, placed a gramophone with a red trumpet on the table, wound it up and left. That was the last I saw of her. The gramophone played an aria from Rigoletto. Immediately the canaries fell silent and began to listen.

‘I got the gramophone for the canaries. I’m teaching them to sing,’ Babaev said. ‘They’re natural mimics.’ He told me that canary owners had their own tavern in Moscow where they would meet on Sundays with their birds for singing competitions that attracted large crowds. Even Chaliapin and the millionaire Mamontov had come once.fn1 They were, of course, important, famous men, but didn’t know the first thing about canaries. They wanted to buy two birds for an enormous sum, but their owners, after a series of apologies, turned them down since there was no good reason to entrust a canary to inexperienced hands. It was easy to spoil them, and a lot of work to keep and train them. Moreover, a canary isn’t some plaything; the bird requires the proper handling. And so, Chaliapin and Mamontov went away empty-handed. An angry Chaliapin sang in his booming bass as he left, ‘As the King went off to war …’ Everyone rushed to grab their prized birds and hurried out of the tavern – the canary is a nervous creature and if frightened it may stop singing for good, and then it’s not worth a single kopeck.

The dry autumn was followed by incessant rains. This was the most difficult time for us conductors. Draughty cars, floors covered with slippery mud and torn ticket stubs, the musty smell of wet clothing, smudgy windows, and outside, the never-ending procession of small, dark wooden houses and rain-lashed warehouse signs. On such days everything got on our nerves, especially the passengers’ obnoxious habit of drawing faces (for some reason always with big noses) on the steamy windowpanes or plastering them with wet tickets. The tram was transformed into a dirty boarding house, its passengers a random bunch of quarrelsome boarders. Moscow seemed to fall in upon itself. The city hid under black umbrellas and the turned-up collars of overcoats. The streets emptied. Only the Sukharevka Market throbbed, like some vast sea, as the dingy waves of humanity rushed back and forth.

The tram had to fight its way through the noisy crowds of buyers, middlemen and sellers. Just inches from our wheels, the sound of Vyaltseva’s alluring yet sinister voice hissed from the gramophones: ‘Hurry on, troika, the snow is light and fluffy, and the night dark and cold!’fn2 The music faded away, lost in the triumphant roar of the Primus stoves which, thrusting their whistling blue flames into the sky, submerged every last sound.

Damp mandolin strings jangled. Little toy rubber devils with enamelled crimson cheeks deflated towards their inevitable death: ‘Away! Away!’ they wheezed. Pancakes sizzled in enormous frying pans. The air smelled of horse dung, mutton, hay and carpenters’ glue. Raspy voices haggled, followed by the loud slap of hands shaken over hard-fought bargains. Carts clattered. The thick, steamy breath of sweaty horses filled the trams’ platforms. Chinese jugglers squatting on the streets shouted out in falsetto voices: ‘Foo-foo! Abracadabra!’ Church bells clanged, and from under the black gate of the Sukharev Tower a sobbing woman’s voice cried out: ‘Lay your pale hand on my withered breast.’ Pickpockets swarmed about, a pair of trousers slung over one arm as though for sale. Their eyes were quick and evasive. Police whistles blew like nightingales. Shabby pigeons, released from inside the shirt fronts of little boys, beat their heavy wings, climbing into the muddy sky.

It is impossible to capture in words this gigantic Moscow bazaar that stretched practically from Samotëka to Krasnye Vorota. You could buy everything there – from a three-wheeled vélocipède to icons, from Siamese fighting fish to Tambov ham and cloudberry preserves. Yet all of it was somehow damaged, rusted, full of wormholes or a bit smelly.

Gathered here were beggars, tramps, crooks, thieves and pedlars from every part of the Russian Empire – poor, scruffy, shifty people. The very air of the Sukharevka seemed to be filled with nothing but the hunger for easy money and a helping of calves’ foot jelly. It was an unimaginable gathering of people from every epoch and condition – from the ‘holy fool’ with downcast eyes, clanking his rusty fetters and trying to catch a ride without buying a ticket, to the poet with the billygoat beard and green velours hat, from Tolstoyans, their bare feet red from the Sukharev mud, to corseted ladies who, as they crossed this same mud, made certain to lift their heavy skirts.

One dark rainy day a man in a black hat, a tightly buttoned-up coat and brown kid gloves entered my car on Yekaterinskaya Square. His long, well-groomed face expressed a stony indifference to the Moscow slush, the tram’s squabbling passengers, me and everything else in the world. Yet he was most civil, this man: having received his ticket, he actually tipped his hat and thanked me. The other passengers were left dumbfounded by this, and they stared at this strange man with hostile curiosity. When he exited at Krasnye Vorota, the entire carriage unleashed a storm of jeers. ‘Herr von Baron’ they called him, and ‘Russia’s greatest forgotten actor’. I too was curious about this passenger with his haughty yet shy expression and the clear mixture of an accentuated refinement and provincial affectation.

A few days later I had an evening off and went to the Polytechnical Museum for a literary recital by the poet Igor Severyanin. ‘What was my surprise’, as writers used to say, when out onto the stage walked my passenger in a black frock coat. He leaned against the wall and, having lowered his eyes, stood waiting a good long while until all the excited shouting and applause died down. Dark red roses rained down at his feet, but he didn’t bother to move and did not pick up a single one. Finally, he took a step forward, the hall fell silent, and I sat listening to the slightly burred singing of his verses that were filled with music and the mood of the salons:

Champagne in a lily! Champagne in a lily!

It sparkles and shines with chastity.

Mignon and Escamillo! Mignon and Escamillo!

Champagne in a lily – ’tis a sacred wine.fn3

There was a certain magic in this, in the sing-song of these verses that had melody but no real meaning. It was language as music with no other demands upon it. Thought was replaced by the shimmer of sequins and the touch of perfumed satin, by the languid swaying of ostrich fans and the effervescence of champagne.

It was strange and outrageous to hear such words when thousands of Russian peasants were standing in trenches, up to their waists in mud, holding back the well-aimed gunfire of the advancing German army. And yet here was Lotarëv, the former realist writer from Cherepovets and now the ‘genius’ Igor Severyanin, chanting in a French accent lines about lovesick Nellie in her boudoir. In the end, he caught himself and began to sing a few affected verses about the war and how, were the last Russian commander to die, then he, Severyanin, ‘our one and only, shall lead us all to Berlin’.

Such is life that even a drop of poetry can redeem the most insincere of men, and Severyanin had a good deal more than that in him. In later years he began to dispose of this frippery, and his voice became more human. The clean air of the countryside found its way into his poetry and its affectation was replaced by a lyrical simplicity: ‘What tenderness ineffable, what warmth of heart enazures and endawns your face.’

I had few evenings off. My days were filled with gruelling work that stretched into the night, always on my feet, teeth clenched, hurrying the entire time. All of us conductors found it exhausting. When we had reached our limit, we asked our bosses to let us work for a few days on the ‘steamer’ – this is what we called the steam tram that ran from Savëlovsky station to the Petrovsko-Razumovskaya Agricultural Academy. The work here was the easiest of all the lines. It was the closest thing to what we conductors called ‘country leave’ that existed in Moscow.

The little steam engine, rather like a samovar, was hidden along with the funnel in a metal box. The only thing that gave away its presence was a feeble little whistle and some puffs of steam. It pulled four suburban carriages which were lit at night by candles since the ‘steamer’ had no electricity.

I worked on the line that autumn. I quickly handed out the tickets and then sat down on the open platform, mindlessly watching the beauty of the season flow past. My face felt damp from the remaining leaves in the stands of birch and aspen. These groves were followed by a blaze of colour from the academy’s magnificent park. A golden stillness hung over it. The massed lime trees and maples, together with the lemon-yellow aspens, spread out before my eyes like the gateway to some luxuriant and peaceful realm. Here the many colours and textures of autumn had been subjugated to human will and talent. The entire park had been laid out by our finest botanists, true masters of the art of landscape.

Ever since childhood I had been under the power of a single passion – the love of nature. At times this passion became so intense it frightened my family. When I returned to school in the autumn from the Bryansk woods and Crimea, I was overcome by a painful longing to go back. I couldn’t sleep and appeared to be withering away before everyone’s eyes. I tried to hide my condition, for I knew it would provoke nothing but bewilderment. It was proof of my ‘thoughtless attitude to life’, which, according to my loved ones, characterised me and would always hold me back. How could I explain to them that my feeling for nature was more than just a sense of wonder at its perfection, more than a mere aesthetic enjoyment; rather it was an acknowledgement of that environment without which our full potential could not be realised. Most people think of nature as an escape, as a holiday. For me, life in nature ought to be our permanent condition.

I recall this now because back in the autumn of 1914 my feeling of connection to the natural world was unusually strong. Nature was also under attack by the war, not here, in Moscow, but there, in the west, in Poland, and this made my love for it all the stronger.

I watched the smoke from the funnel of the ‘steamer’ drift across the yellowing groves. Just beyond, in the evenings, the faint bluish glow of Moscow could be seen. The sight of these trees on the far edge of the city conjured up all sorts of thoughts about Russia, about Chekhov, Levitan, the Russian spirit, about the creative talents buried in our people, their past and their future, which, no doubt, was certain to astound us all.