The Story of a Life

49

Rain in the Carpathian Foothills

We were on our way from Brest to Keltse, but it looked as if we’d never make it to this distant Polish town. We were forever being held up. For more than a week we remained stuck at the junction near Skarzhisko. In those days many of these junctions, built at the intersection of several rail lines far from any human settlement, were quite astonishing places. A large station with a restaurant, bright incandescent lights, dozens of lines, a smoky depot, small wooden shacks for the railway workers set amid a stand of acacias and beyond these – nothing but empty fields. Crows spun in the windy air, and no matter what direction you looked, there was nothing – no hut, no chimney smoke, only the straight, dusty track of the high road stretching to the edge of the earth.

This is how it was at Skarzhisko. A hundred paces from the main station, the larks trilled in the sky and a narrow road vanished into the swaying fields of grain. An enormous unfinished stone church stood in a field not far from the station. Whoever would have thought to build such a thing in this deserted spot? Who needed a church out here? No one could say. Swifts darted between the roofless walls. A flight of stone steps, its railing gone and now covered in grass which swayed softly in the wind, led up to a gallery. After tidying up the operating carriage, I would take a book by Tagore and walk over to the church. I liked to read sitting on an unfinished wall that faced the fields. Sometimes my mind would wander and I would forget what I was reading, but this was no less enjoyable.

The children of the Polish railway workers liked to follow me in single file into the church. The dogs followed them, and soon the church became a playground. The children were quiet, almost timid, with very attentive eyes, in whose depths a trusting smile always seemed to be on the verge of breaking out. I tried to speak to them in Polish, but they just looked at each other with an awkward expression: none of them could understand me. I was speaking a horrible mix of Polish-Russian-Ukrainian that passed for Polish back in Kiev.

After a while Romanin, Nikolasha Rudnev and Yelena Petrovna Sveshnikova, one of the nurses, came with me to the church. Everyone called her simply Lëlya. She was a headstrong girl with something of a husky voice and a pale face. She looked as though she was trying to hide some inner turmoil. We had become friends while still working on a train in the rear. One night during her rounds she found me asleep on duty, and while trying to wake me up accidentally dripped hot candle wax on my face.

I jumped to my feet, blinded by pain. Lëlya bandaged me up, one moment crying from shame and fear and the next laughing at her own stupidity and my pathetic appearance. Once Lëlya sneaked up behind me in the church, ripped Tagore from my hands, and flung the book as far as she could. It flew through the air, its pages flapping, and landed in the grass. I turned and was met by Lëlya’s eyes, black with anger.

‘You’ve had plenty enough of your dusty old philosophy!’ she said.

I sat there not saying a word. Neither did Lëlya. Then she asked: ‘What’s that off in the distance?’

‘The peaks of the Carpathians.’

‘Are you angry with me?’ she asked. ‘If so, I’ll go and find your book.’

‘No, don’t bother.’

‘Fine then! Let’s go and have a look at the bridge.’

We set off for the railway bridge, which crossed a small stream whose banks were overgrown with brambles. We stood by the bridge for a long time, looking at the Carpathians, which were piled up along the horizon like storm clouds. A sentry came by, stopped and also looked off into the distance.

‘However much we try,’ he eventually said, ‘it’s hard for fellows like us to get used to foreign lands. Even the rain here is different. The grass looks like grass, but it’s not like ours.’

‘Is that bad?’ asked Lëlya.

‘No, it’s not bad, miss,’ the soldier said, mildly annoyed. ‘Sure the great expanse is nice, but there’s something cold about it too. Like the strange feeling you get waking up from a nap.’

Lëlya laughed. The soldier sighed and walked off. ‘You can’t stand here,’ he said in an uncertain voice as he went. ‘Even if you are one of us, no one is allowed to be here.’

Lëlya was to be the cause of one of the greatest humiliations in my life.

I was sent once from Brest to Moscow to pick up some medical supplies. All the doctors, nurses and orderlies asked me to run errands for them and gave me letters and notes to deliver; at the time everyone tried not to use the postal system in order to avoid the military censorship. Lëlya entrusted me with her gold wristwatch and asked me to give it to her uncle, a professor in Moscow. The fancy gold watch embarrassed her; it was, of course, utterly out of place in a hospital train. She also gave me a letter for him, filled with compliments about me and asking her uncle to take me in if I needed a place to stay.

I made my way to the professor’s door in Moscow and rang the bell. No one opened for a long time. Finally, a peevish female voice from inside asked who it was and what I wanted. A cross-eyed old maid opened the door. Towering behind her stood a tall old lady, as imposing and majestic as a monument, in a white starched blouse and black bow-tie. Her silver hair had been piled up in a haughty swirl and it glistened like the glass in her pince-nez. This was the professor’s wife. She stood guarding the door to the dining room, where the family were drinking their morning coffee. I could hear the sound of clinking spoons. I gave her the box with the watch and the letter.

‘Wait here,’ she said and went into the dining room, but not before giving the maid a knowing glance. She immediately began pretending to dust the front-hall table, which, by the looks of it, had already been polished to a glossy sheen earlier that morning.

‘Who rang?’ came a raspy old voice from the dining room. ‘What do they want?’

‘Imagine,’ she said, rustling a piece of paper (she had apparently opened Lëlya’s letter), ‘off at the front in the middle of a war but Lëlya’s still as featherbrained as always. She sent her gold watch. With some soldier, no less. How could she be so careless? Just like her mother!’

‘Mmmmm,’ mumbled the professor, his mouth full of food. ‘She’s lucky he didn’t keep it.’

‘Really, I don’t understand her at all,’ she went on. ‘She writes here that she’d like us to take him in. Where are we supposed to put him? We don’t have any room. As it is Pasha has to sleep in the kitchen.’

‘That’s all we need,’ groaned the professor. ‘Give him a rouble and see him out. Lëlya ought to know by know how I hate strangers in the house.’

‘Seems too little, one rouble,’ she said doubtfully. ‘What do you think, Pëtr Petrovich?’

‘All right, then two roubles.’

I opened the front door, exited onto the landing and then slammed the door behind me so hard that something inside the professor’s flat fell and crashed to the floor with a loud bang. I froze. Immediately, the door flew open. Behind the maid, who had made certain to keep the chain on the door, stood the entire family: the professor’s haughty wife, her horse-faced student son and the old professor. A napkin covered with yellow egg stains hung from the collar of his shirt.

‘What is the meaning of this outrage?’ screamed the maid. ‘It’s disgraceful! And from a soldier sent to the front to defend the Fatherland, no less!’

‘Tell your masters’, I said, ‘that they are swine.’

With that there was a scuffle in the vestibule. The student lunged at the door and tried to undo the chain, but his mother pulled him back.

‘Leave him be, Genya!’ she shouted. ‘He’ll kill you. These soldiers from the front are used to killing.’

The old professor pushed himself forward. His clean little beard quivered with indignation. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted through the chink in the door: ‘Hooligan! I’ll turn you over to the police!’

‘Oh, you,’ I said. ‘The shining light of science.’

His wife yanked the old man back and then slammed the door.

Ever since I’ve had a life-long distrust of those so-called ‘high-priests of learning’, that tribe of pseudo-scholars who are so proud of their erudition yet remain forever nothing but vulgar philistines. There are more forms of vulgarity than we can register. Even such an unerring expert on vulgarity as Chekhov never could have described all its manifestations. How I loathe those academic families with their ridiculous, sanctified family ways, with their inflated sense of decorum, their arrogant politeness, their venerable pedant-fathers, pompously opining on the number of hairs on a worm, their smooth grammatical speech, their prim, prudish wives and their secret balance sheets recording the successes and failures of their rivals! And those professors’ flats with their disciplined servants and their unbearable tedium – tried and tested and never to be changed until death itself.

I didn’t tell Lëlya about this incident. We loved to talk, argue and spend our evenings in a little café, where we drank coffee, ate homemade pastries and watched the old proprietress embroider red flowers on a linen tablecloth. Once more, there was nothing to remind us of the war. If it weren’t for the sentry by the bridge, we might have thought we were on holiday deep in the Polish countryside. And any thoughts of war seemed utterly incongruous with Lëlya’s virginal pallor and Tagore’s teachings on cleansing the human soul of evil. Quiet sunsets faded over the fields and the far-off peaks of the Carpathians. Our days, filled with meditation and happiness, ended in their smouldering depths. Boys and girls like us were more prone to introspection than adults back then, and were, of course, much happier, even in wartime.

One evening the sun set in a leaden mist. That night rain drummed on the carriage roofs, and in the morning we left Skarzhisko for Keltse. The foothills of the Carpathians suddenly drew close. A damp air from the beech forests blew in through the train’s windows. Clouds drifted over the hilltops, now hiding, now revealing the roadside crucifixes. Suddenly, a heavy cannon shot rumbled lazily through the mist. The train seemed to slow down. There was a second shot, then a third, and then nothing but silence.

‘Romanin!’ I called through the partition. ‘Did you hear that?’

‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘And I’m surprised.’

‘Why?’

‘Come here and I’ll tell you.’

I went into the dispensary. I loved its cramped and cosy tidiness. It smelled of dried raspberries. Romanin was weighing out powders on his little scales with their mother-of-pearl pans.

‘Have a seat,’ he said. ‘Go ahead and smoke if you want. I’m going to. I have to admit I don’t even know why I’m surprised.’

‘Really? Don’t you?’

‘Let’s leave it. Probably not even worth trying to make sense of. Here, have a look around. Everything sparkles, everything is in its place. Every phial is in its little wooden holder. Cosy, right? I sit here all day, even when there’s nothing to do. I read, look out of the window. Sometimes I sleep here in my chair.’

He ran his eyes over the rows of porcelain phials and sighed. ‘One stray shell and all of this would be blown straight to hell. This is what surprises me. The closer we come to danger, the more we love these things – fragile phials, practically made out of air, books, cleanliness, peace and quiet, cigarettes.’

‘We’re not going to be hit by a shell! It’s not going to happen,’ I said.

Black sidings running this way and that sped past us outside the window. We were approaching Keltse. A soft rain drizzled through the shell holes in the station warehouses. We waited three days in Keltse for the wounded to arrive. The head doctor allowed Lëlya, Romanin and me to visit the village of Khentsiny near the front. An artillery unit was stationed at Khentsiny. Lëlya’s cousin served in it. We started late in the morning in a two-wheeled ambulance cart. It was still raining. Acrid smoke from the locomotives clung to the city. On the outskirts, red water pooled in the bottom of deep pits where they dug for clay; rust-coloured bubbles rose and then popped upon the surface. We passed a bombed-out brick factory. Women and children with empty sacks were rummaging about and looking for something amid the piles of broken bricks. We came out onto the main road leading to the front. It looked like a shallow river of mud.

Soldiers were trudging through the fields on either side of the road. Pulling up the wet skirts of their greatcoats with one hand, with the other they dragged spools of barbed wire affixed to wooden poles. A primitive ambulance had lost a wheel and been abandoned in a ditch by the roadside. Soldiers crowded around it and took turns crawling inside to smoke, sheltered from the rain. Each patiently waited his turn, his wet fingers rolling a cigarette made from cheap tobacco and damp newsprint. Then he climbed into the ambulance, lit up and, with a look of pleasure spreading across his face, took a deep draw of the harsh smoke. They stood hunched over, their hands pulled up inside the sleeves of their coats; every so often one of them would spit as he looked to the west. A raw, gusty wind blew from that direction, lashing the branches of the bushes and driving the clouds.

‘Nice spot for a smoke,’ our dark little driver said scornfully, his face hidden by the upturned collar of his greatcoat. ‘Amazing what a man will do for tobacco.’

‘What’s wrong with it?’ asked Romanin. ‘It’s out of the rain.’

‘The Germans are always shelling this bit of road,’ the soldier answered. ‘Every hour they send over two or three shells. As a warning. It’s like clockwork for them. The Germans fight according to their watches, don’t you know. So I keep an eye out and make sure to slip past right after one of their shells hits.’

‘Does that work?’

‘Depends,’ he replied, calmly. ‘Most of the time. But it doesn’t pay to try it every day. You’ve got to have some luck.’

Suddenly, the soldiers by the ambulance began to move. Some quickly squatted on their heels, others dashed towards a small depression by the side of the road. The smokers didn’t bother to climb out of the ambulance and went on puffing away, burning their fingers, and spitting.

‘Those German gunners have finished their cigarettes!’ the driver yelled in a mocking tone to the soldiers. ‘Just maybe they’ll let you finish yours! Good luck to you!’

Just then something flashed and screeched overhead, followed by a loud explosion. Not far from the ambulance a fountain of yellow mud erupted from the ground.

‘Get on with you!’ the driver yelled at the horses. ‘Damn! Good for nothing but sausage, you are!’

But the horses kept on at their slow pace. A second shell exploded behind us by the roadside. For the first time in my life I heard the whizz of flying shrapnel. A young volunteer, practically a boy, ran up to our cart. His face was smooth and pale, as if he had just arrived at the front. By the look of him, it was obvious he was the sheltered city child of some educated family. He grabbed the back of the wagon and asked in a hesitant but very polite voice: ‘Could you tell me, please, whether they will stop firing any time soon?’

Taken aback by this surprising question, the driver groaned and stopped the horses. ‘Why don’t you ask ’em, ask those Germans, really nicely,’ he said, an icy sneer on his lips. ‘Get down on your knees. You’re an educated fellow. Maybe for you they’ll do this favour. Oh, all right! I can see it’s your first time. Climb in. But just don’t get your muddy boots on the hay. That’s not what it’s there for, got it?’

The boy hurriedly climbed in and, turning his head stiffly, as if it had been bolted on, gave us an apologetic look. A third shell landed behind us, a bit farther away than the previous one.

‘Well, that ought to do it!’ said the driver. ‘Now you can have a smoke. The Germans have finished their work and are now onto their coffee break.’

The soldiers were milling around the ambulance again. But they weren’t so calm now. We could hear them arguing. ‘What do you think you’re doing lighting up another one? Taking advantage of the shelling, are you, mangy dog? Climb out before we throw you out!’ ‘Don’t touch me, you ape! We’ve handled bigger than the likes of you!’ ‘Made a real home for themselves in there, just like a bunch of broody hens. The Germans certainly lent them a hand.’ ‘All right, all right, we’re coming out. Stop your barking. Get in.’

We drove on. Maybe it was because the danger had just passed, but the rain seemed warmer and the fields smelled of wet grass. A clear bright patch of sky showed on the horizon. The road ran between tall poplars. We had entered the foothills of the Carpathians. The rain clung to the hills like matted strings of oakum. Clear streams of rainwater rushed through the stone ditches on the roadside. The gravel glistened. Steam rose off the horses’ backs. Far off through the bluish haze of the clouds and rain we caught sight of a hillside town as small as a child’s toy. The sound of the town’s church bells floated on the wind.

‘That’s Khentsiny,’ said the driver. ‘Where do you want to go – the searchlight regiment or the artillery?’

‘Artillery.’

Our cart stopped in front of a two-storey house. There were no windows on the front, only a narrow door and over it a black crucifix. The crucified Christ pursued us the entire time we were in Poland. Some of the crucifixes had been made with such anatomical precision, down to the clots of blood oozing out of the emaciated Jesus’s pierced side, that they were truly repugnant. Romanin liked to say that he had had enough of all these corpses hanging at the crossroads. He wanted to go home, back to the Ural Mountains, where for hundreds of versts around there was nothing but the wooded slopes, the river Sakmara, full of pike, and his father’s beehives. Romanin’s father, a retired village doctor, was living out his days in a small country place on the Sakmara.

The artillery officers welcomed us. They gave us tea and let us lie down on their camp beds. We were soaked through. Soon we were drowsy from the tea and the warmth of the room. Before I knew it, I was fast asleep.

The roar of cannon fire woke me in the middle of the night. An artillery duel was going on around us. In the next room a candle flickered, and the officers were quarrelling in hushed voices around a table. They had taken off their tunics and were playing cards in their shirtsleeves. With each explosion the glass rattled in the windows and the church bell clanged over our heads. Rain was pouring down. A frighteningly black night loomed outside the windows. I lit a cigarette. Romanin shuffled in his bed.

‘Yes, indeed,’ he said to no one, ‘rivers of blood and all of it the fault of rogues and idiots.’

‘Who?’ I asked.

‘Id-i-ots!’ Romanin repeated, emphasising each syllable. ‘All those pompous Wilhelms and idiotic Nicholases. And those greedy businessmen. Half of them are cretins, the others reactionary scoundrels. But knowing all this doesn’t help us in the least.’

‘Listen,’ said Lëlya softly. She couldn’t sleep either. ‘Stop it or I’ll just burst …’

We were silent. The rain kept coming down. I was hungry, but morning was still a long way off. I began to doze off, and through my half-sleep I saw Lëlya get up and go over to the window. She stood staring for a long time at the darkness where from time to time something flashed, and then she sighed, straightened my greatcoat, which was slipping off of me, and sat down on a stool next to her bed, where she remained for a long time, as still as death, her hands clenched between her knees.