The Story of a Life

47

Russia in Snow

We made a few trips on the train from Moscow to various cities in central Russia – Yaroslavl, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Samara, Arzamas, Kazan, Simbirsk, Saratov, Tambov, and several others. For some reason I have largely forgotten these cities. I recall much better the little towns we visited, such as Bazarny Syzgan, the isolated villages and one lone peasant hut buried in snow on the edge of a remote settlement. I can’t even remember which province that was – maybe Kazan or Tambov or possibly Penza.

I can still see that hut. And a tall old man with a sheepskin coat thrown over his bony shoulders. He had just come out of his low door and stood there holding it open with one hand as he watched our long train with the red crosses painted on its sides go past. The wind was blowing snow down from the roof onto his shaggy head. It was winter. Russia lay buried in snow.

When the train was full of wounded, I was too busy to notice a thing. But on our return trips, with each of us orderlies alone in his scrubbed, empty carriage, we had all the time in the world to look out of the window, read or catch up on our sleep. What I remember of those trips was the impression of never-ending snow, its whiteness flooding the carriage with light, and of a low-hanging pewter sky. A few lines of verse I had once read kept running through my head: ‘The silent country, bedecked in white, like the bride in her veil.’fn1 I was aware of a strange connection between the snow and the verse and the snow-white caps and gowns of the nurses making their morning rounds up and down the train when it was full.

Bazarny Syzgan. I remember this station because of one minor incident. We stood there all night in the sidings. There was a blizzard. By morning the entire train was covered in snow. I went with an orderly from the next carriage, Nikolasha Rudnev, a good-natured country bumpkin who was a student at the Petrovskaya Agricultural Academy, to buy some rolls in the station buffet. As always after a blizzard the air was sharp and clear. The buffet was empty. Hydrangeas, shrivelled from the cold, stood on a long table covered with an oilcloth. A poster of a mountain goat on a snowy peak in the Caucasus hung by the door. The caption read: ‘Drink Saradzhev Cognac’. The buffet smelled of coffee and burnt onions.

A snub-nosed girl wearing an apron over a short, fur-trimmed jacket sat at a small table with a sad expression on her face. She was watching a boy with a sallow face and a long, translucent neck which had been rubbed raw by the collar of his peasant coat. Thin flaxen hair fell over his forehead. The boy sat drinking tea from an earthenware mug, snow melting onto the floor from his worn-out boots beneath the table. He broke off big chunks of rye bread. When he had finished, he gathered up the crumbs from the table and poured them into his mouth.

We bought some rolls, sat down at the table and ordered tea. A samovar gurgled behind the wooden partition. The girl brought us our tea with two withered lemon slices. She nodded at the boy and said: ‘I always feed him. Out of my own pocket. He lives off charity. He goes from carriage to carriage every time a train comes in.’

The boy finished his tea, turned over his mug, stood up, turned to the poster advertising Saradzhev cognac and crossed himself. He then lifted his chest, gazed out of the wide station window and began to sing. Apparently, he sang as a way to thank the compassionate girl. He sang in a high, mournful voice, and at the time it seemed to me that his song was the finest expression of the sadness of Russian village life. I remember only a few words:

… and he buried her

In the damp pine woods,

Beneath the log of oak,

Beneath the log of oak …

I automatically looked where the boy was staring. A road buried deep in snow ran down into a gully between rows of trees covered with hoar-frost. Beyond the gully and the thatched barn roofs, chimney smoke rose from the huts towards an unassuming grey sky. The boy’s eyes were filled with longing, for the things he didn’t have, like a simple hut with wide benches around its walls, a broken window covered over with paper, and the smell of warm rye bread with cinders baked into the crust. I thought of how little it takes to make someone happy when they have nothing, and how much, once we have a little.

Over the years I have often spent time in peasant huts and have come to love them for the dull sheen of their timber walls, the smell of ashes in the stove and their simple austerity, similar to that of fresh water from a spring, a bast basket or the unprepossessing flowers of a potato patch. No one can be fully human without a feeling for their homeland, with all its simple and endearing little details. This feeling is selfless and fills us with a profound interest for everything around us. Alexander Blok wrote during those distant, troubled years:

Russia, poor Russia,

Your grey huts,

Your wind-snatched songs

Move me like the first tears of love.

Blok was right, of course. Especially with that comparison, for just as there is nothing more human, more emotionally devastating, than tears of love, so is there nothing more loathsome than indifference to one’s country, to its past, present and future, to its language, its customs, its fields and forests, to its villages and people, be they geniuses or village cobblers.

It was during my years of service on the hospital train that I first became aware of myself as Russian to my very core. I dissolved, as it were, in that human flood, among soldiers, workers, peasants and craftsmen. This gave me an inner confidence. Not even the war could shake it. ‘Great is the God of the Russian land,’ Nikolasha Rudnev liked to say. ‘Great is the genius of the Russian people! We’ll never be anyone’s slaves. The future belongs to us!’

I agreed with Rudnev. For me, Russia in those years was embodied by all those soldiers, peasants and villages, so poor in their material possessions, so rich in their grief. I saw so many Russian cities and industrial towns for the first time. They melted into one in my mind and left behind a love for the common, everyday things they all shared. I remember Arzamas with its wicker baskets overflowing with crisp red apples, and its equally red cupolas, so many of them that the town seemed to have been sewn together in red and gold thread by the hands of master artists. Nizhny Novgorod welcomed me with a gust of wind from the Volga which brought with it the smell of sacking. This was the city of Russian enterprise, of warehouses, barrels and crates – Russia’s bustling wharf from which goods were shipped far and wide. Then there was Kazan with its snow-dusted statue of Derzhavin.fn2 Here, in the opera house, I found myself too tired to stay awake and dozed off in the gallery during a performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Snow Maiden. All I can remember were a few words that penetrated my sleep: ‘Are all the doors really locked to the girls, all the entrances forbidden?’

I woke up in the middle of the night. The night watchman grabbed me and took me to the police station. It smelled of sealing wax. An obese sergeant wrote up a report about my ‘sleeping without authorisation in a theatre hall’. I walked back to the train. The wind from the Volga plastered my face with snow, and I felt sorry for Derzhavin, frozen through and staring out into the darkness with his hard bronze eyes.

I was in Simbirsk on another winter night. The deserted town was covered in frost. The trees in the neglected gardens seemed to be made of tinfoil. I looked out towards the Volga from Stary Venets Square, but all I could see was a misty frozen darkness. I didn’t know then that Lenin was from Simbirsk. Now, of course, I seem to think that I saw his wooden house. This must be because there are many warm timber houses like this, their windows casting shafts of light on the narrow streets at night. All I knew at the time was that Goncharov had lived in Simbirsk, that plodding man who possessed an almost magical gift for the Russian language. His light, true and vigorous prose lives on in his books.

Saratov struck me as proper and a bit boring. The town exuded an aura of self-important prosperity and strict order. That was the impression I gathered from the main streets in the centre. Then I found the alleys and back streets and Babushka Hill, where little boys were sledging through mounds of puffy dry snow. The boys let me join in. I loved rushing, face down on the toboggan, past the small houses with geraniums glowing in their windows. I actually envied the people who lived in them.

One of the boys took me to have some warm milk in the home of a certain Sofia Tikhonovna, who lived in one of these houses. We were shown into a glassed-in front porch. Pale sunlight, cut into four squares by the windowpanes, lay on the clean floor. In the corner of the warm anteroom stood a bucket of cold water; a wooden jug floated on top. The door opened to a parlour with dark red velvet curtains over the windows. A wall clock with enormous hands ticked so loudly that we had to raise our voices to talk to Sofia Tikhonovna, a quiet old woman. On a little table covered with a lace cloth by the window lay a thick stack of copies of The Planted Field in blue paper covers and a vase of long-dead flowers. Along with some photographs and watercolours there hung on the wall a large, yellowing poster for Maxim Gorky’s Children of the Sun.

‘My son’s an actor,’ said Sofia Tikhonovna. ‘In St Petersburg. He visits me every summer, either on his way to or from Mineralnye Vody.’

I tried to imagine such a life spent in waiting for her son. It must have been hard, but the old woman bore it lightly and without complaint. Every object in the house had been washed, polished and cherished for the sole purpose of possibly being of use to her son for those fleeting seven days out of the long year he came to visit. What if he suddenly looked over at her and asked: ‘Mama, where’s that brass night lamp?’ Or, ‘What’s happened to the Crimean stone I brought you from Simeiz five years ago?’

And so the brass night lamp had been polished with tooth powder and stood shining in its regular place. And lying on top of the stack of copies of The Planted Field was the flat Crimean stone – the very same stone known to half of Russia, with its ‘Greetings from Crimea’ painted on it in crude colours, along with a cypress tree and an azure sea, a white dot for a sailing boat.

There were a great many towns. Spring came at last with its fragrant, slightly sticky young leaves to gladden the empty provincial wastelands and the dirty streams. That spring we visited Kursk, which seemed to be filled with enormous flowering bushes that reached as high as the eaves. The famous Kursk nightingales sang and then paused, as if to listen to themselves, in the damp woods. The cold and lazy river Tuskar flowed between its low banks overgrown with yellow marsh marigolds. Kursk is a strange town. Many people love it even though they’ve never been there, mostly because it’s the gateway to the south. Looking out of the dusty windows of the Moscow–Sevastopol Express and seeing the houses and churches on the town’s hills, the passengers knew that within twenty-four hours they would wake up to the haze of a seaside dawn pink with almond blossoms and would recognise by the brilliance of the horizon that they had arrived.

Spring had come to Russia. We found it in Vladimir, in Klyazma, in Tambov, in Tver – wherever we took the wounded. With every run we noticed that the wounded were more silent. They had become harder and more withdrawn. The entire country itself had fallen silent, as if it were thinking about how to parry the blow that had been struck against it.

Soon our entire unit was transferred to the front. We left on our first trip to the west, to Brest-Litovsk and the battle lines.