The Story of a Life

53

The Ocean Liner

Portugal

The summer of 1915 was hot and dry. From the windows of the train we watched brown curtains of dust sweep over the fields of Poland. The army was retreating. The dust of defeat, with its bitter smell of charred ruins, covered everything – the soldiers’ faces, the grain in the fields, the guns, the train. Our red goods wagons had turned grey. Now we never stopped anywhere for longer than three or four hours. The train was in constant motion. The wounded kept coming. Once we stopped to pick up some wounded men along the right bank of the Vistula in Praga, a suburb of Warsaw. Fighting was taking place in a section of the city near the Mokotów Gates. Small fires reflected off the waters of the Vistula. Smoke and darkness had settled over the houses. Gunshots crackled on the far side of the river. It sounded as if someone were tearing heavy cloth in short, violent bursts.

The wind was blowing from the east. It filled Praga with the fresh air of the night. But the train held onto the hot stuffy air of the day, especially in my operating carriage, whose windows were sealed up tight; the smell of dressing and bandages had no escape. At the time we were carrying casualties from Poland to Gomel. As soon as the train reached Polesia, the air became fresh again. The damp forests and quiet rivers of Belorussia seemed to us a cool paradise. The wounded men came to life and lifted their heads to gaze at the rustling groves of aspen or the evening sky as it faded to green.

By the middle of summer, the train had become so worn out that it was ordered to the railway workshops in Odessa for urgent repairs. We went through Kiev, the city of my childhood. I saw it once again from a siding at dawn. The sun was already gilding the tops of the poplars and burned in the windows of the tall houses built from the yellow Kiev brick. I recalled the city’s morning streets, freshly sprinkled and still full of shadows, its housewives carrying home warm rolls and bottles of cold milk in their bags. But for some reason nothing tugged at me to return to the coolness of these streets – Kiev had receded into the irredeemable past. The past was gone for good reason. I convinced myself of this later on the two or three occasions when I tried to relive it. ‘Nothing in life ever returns,’ Father loved to say, ‘except our mistakes.’ And the fact that nothing in life ever does repeat itself is one of the things that makes our existence so endlessly fascinating.

After Kiev the soft, sun-drenched hills of Ukraine rolled by our windows. Somehow the smell of marigolds, growing in yellow clumps around every crossing keeper’s hut, managed to find its way into the train. The steppes, cut by golden swathes of sunflowers, stretched out before us. All day long the air in the glassy distance shimmered through a film of haze. I tried to convince Romanin that the lustre spreading across the horizon was caused by reflections, high up in the atmosphere, of the sun’s rays refracting off the sea. For once Romanin neither argued nor made fun of me. Instead, he recited at the top of his voice in the dispensary:

Behold the sea, a turquoise flame,

How it glistens, its foam so pearly.

Wave after wave, each the same,

Crashes on its banks, so troubled, so heavy.fn1

I woke up outside Odessa. The train was standing at a halt. I jumped from the platform onto the railway bed. Cockle shells crunched under my feet. I saw the halt’s small station building with its red-tiled roof. Tall maize was growing up beside a white wall; the wind ruffled its long leaves. The red of the roof and the green of the corn highlighted the sky’s magnificent blue.

‘Now that truly does look like the sun’s reflection off the sea,’ Romanin said to me, poking his head out the window.

There was the smell of sage. It was then that this bitter smell became forever associated in my mind with the Black Sea. Sage and sea became so linked in my imagination that later, even in the north, when I caught the scent of sage I would involuntarily listen for the distant sound of the sea. Sometimes I actually thought I heard it, only to realise that this was the wind in the pines, not the waves crashing against the shore. I was happy to know that in a few hours I would be back by the sea. Ever since childhood, its cheerful, frothy vastness had imprinted itself on my soul.

We stopped to unload at the goods yard in Odessa. From there, the sea was not visible; all I could see was the main railway station, gleaming brightly in the distance. Nonetheless, everything around me seemed touched by the sea; even the puddles of oil on the tracks were shot with the blue of its waters. Some old buffers from a scrapped engine lying on the ground were covered with ship’s rust, or so it seemed to me at the time.

We orderlies were billeted in an old third-class passenger carriage. We quickly moved our things. A shunting engine then nudged our carriage out of the way, finally depositing us alongside a low fence surrounding an abandoned garden, and here we remained for our entire stay in Odessa. We liked our new home. In the mornings we washed at the water pump next to our train. The wispy shadows of the acacias caressed our windows.

From the other side of the garden came the sounds of a small market and beyond that lay the Odessa suburb of Moldavanka – the refuge of thieves, fences, swindlers, barrow boys and a great many other characters of dubious and murky occupation. The doctors and nurses had been put up at a country house in the Maly Fontan area not far from the city centre. We visited them almost every day.

I didn’t manage to get a look at the sea the day we arrived. The following day, I rose very early, bathed in the salty water alongside the tracks, and headed for the market for a glass of milk and something to eat. The market women sat on their stools with their sleeves rolled up and their faces red from the heat and from shouting. All day long they quarrelled and chattered among themselves and called out to customers, either beckoning them to their stalls or making fun of them. They swore at each other in intentionally shrill voices, one minute forgetting their own quarrels to mock the customers, then the next trying to ingratiate themselves, and at times even flirting with them, and all of this done in a friendly sort of way.

‘My boy!’ they cried to me. ‘Try some of my baked milk! It still has the skin on it! You know your dear sweet mama told you to drink milk with the skin on it!’

‘Toasted sunflower seeds! Sunflower seeds!’ cried others. ‘A pocketful for a kopeck! Just one old kopeck!’

The row of fishmongers was the most interesting. I loved to just stand there next to the cold zinc counters covered with fish scales and sprinkled with rock salt. Large flat turbot, bony purplish growths covering their backs, stared up at the sky with dimming eyes. Mackerel thrashed about in wet baskets, looking like blue mercury. Brown perch slowly opened their mouths and smacked their lips, as if tasting the market’s morning freshness. Bullheads were piled high – black ‘stonefish’, yellow ‘sandfish’ and reddish ‘whips’. A group of especially ingratiating market women sat around a few baskets of tiny fish called firinka. Women bought them as cat food, but that was it.

‘For your little kitties, ladies! For your kitty-cats!’ they called, doing their best to coax the housewives at the market.

Carts stood piled high with mountains of apricots and cherries. The owners of these riches, German colonists from Lustdorf and Liebenthal, lay asleep, snoring in the warm dust under their carts, while little Jewish boys from the cheder, hired to sell the fruit, sat up on top, their eyes closed, and, rocking to and fro as if in prayer, chanted plaintively: ‘Ai, ai, good people, ai, ai, good gentlemen! Cherries! Cherries and sweet apricots! Ai, ai, just five kopecks a pound! We’re giving them away! Ai, ai, good people, step up and buy, step up and try! Come, eat, eat!’

The ground was littered with apricot stones and cherry pits and bloody red pulp. I bought some raisin bread and walked over to the far edge of the market to eat next to a stand where Ukrainian sausages sizzled in frying pans and the unbearable Black Sea sun reflected off a line of boiling, dented old samovars set out on large tables. I sat down at the table. Its homespun tablecloth contained a message embroidered in cross-stitch: ‘Little Raichka, never forget your native Ovidiopol’. In the middle of the table peonies floated in a blue bowl of chipped enamel.

Having finished a plate of sausages and turning to my cup of hot, sweet tea, I decided that life in Odessa was beautiful. Just then a lean man in a sailor’s cap with a cracked leather peak sat down next to me. The sides of his ashen face were covered by stiff yellow whiskers that bristled like a lynx.

‘Excuse me, young man,’ he asked in a hushed voice, as if he were plotting something, ‘might you be an orderly?’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘From the train that arrived yesterday for repairs?’

‘Yes, from that very train,’ I answered, surprised by this all-knowing stranger in the broken cap.

‘Then allow me to introduce myself,’ he said, raising his cap with both hands and then placing it back down over his bald head. ‘Aristarkh Lipogon, retired coastal skipper and born sailor, at your service.’

‘What’re you pestering the young man for?’ shouted a red-faced market woman who had served my tea. ‘Leave him be!’

‘Auntie Raichka,’ the born sailor replied with extreme politeness, ‘what gives you the damned idea you can go butting into other folks’ business? Why are you trying to steal every last crumb of bread out of my mouth? You, one can see, are fat and doing just fine, while I’m as hungry as an empty barrel. Understand?’

Auntie Raichka grumbled a bit but then stopped talking.

‘I’m pleased to be of assistance,’ Lipogon said. ‘I never shrink from offering whatever services might be required, be they for yourself or for your doctors who have taken up residence in that luxurious Bykhovsky country house in Maly Fontan. I work fast and cheap.’

‘And what exactly is it that you do “fast and cheap”?’ I asked.

‘I can get my hands on anything you might wish and deliver it to your carriage. Tobacco, for example, straight from Constantinople, and free of any import duty. But it wouldn’t be right to call it tobacco. Finely spun curls of gold would be more like it. Or maybe some nice, powdery French cocaine, or Greek vodka, or Messina oranges of the rarest aroma and flavour. And then there’s fresh tinned goods, bullfish in tomato sauce, canned this very day and straight from our Odessa factory. By the second day they’ve already lost a bit of their divine taste. I highly recommend! I have the widest network of contacts in the city and the port. You can ask anyone, and if he’s an honest man he’ll tell you: “Lipogon can do anything. Lipogon has twenty legs, forty hands and a hundred eyes.”’

‘But just one tongue, you crook!’ Auntie Raichka said crossly. ‘Just one tongue, like every mortal, but you wag it enough for seven.’

I told Lipogon that I didn’t need anything, but maybe the doctors and nurses might. I would ask them.

‘As it happens,’ said Lipogon, ‘I’m calling on them tonight. Nice meeting you, young man.’

Once more he raised his battered cap with both hands and then set it back down on his bald head before walking off, swinging his coat tails and singing casually:

There was a midshipman, young and fair,

Brown as the earth was his hair,

Odessa he did up and leave, that very city

He’d always found so pretty …

‘You have there before you, my son,’ said Auntie Raichka, ‘the perfect example of how too much imagination can ruin a man.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked, surprised.

‘There was a time’, she replied sadly, ‘when that man lived well. He sailed his little boat back and forth from Kherson to Odessa carrying watermelons to market. He wore a decent suit, had enough to eat every day, and an extra twenty in his pocket. But no! That wasn’t enough for him! I know him well, ever since we were children back in Ovidiopol. He lived next door to me. Never was satisfied to live life like the rest of us. “I can’t stand it, Raichka,” he’d say, “this boring grey existence is crushing my soul. Raichka, I want to live like they do in novels – full of tears and flowers, overflowing with music and passionate love. I have to risk it all, just like the writers describe it. I’ll either make it rich or be destroyed!”’

‘And we certainly know how that turned out!’ sighed another market woman, laying out her bluish aubergines along the ground. ‘He was destroyed!’

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘He got married,’ said Auntie Raichka, ‘but just you listen how, and to whom! We used to have a Romanian orchestra here in Odessa. It wasn’t really Romanian, but folks from all over. Some from the Caucasus, some from Kishinëv, some even from right here in Moldavanka. Well, there was this woman, Tamara, the orchestra’s cymbalist. She was beautiful, striking even, that’s the truth. So, he went and married her. He’d been dazzled by all the glitter, I guess, all the sequins, the velvet, the cymbals, the waltzes. “I’ll give her such a life,” he said, “that Vera Kholodnaya herself will be green with envy.”’fn2

‘He did that all right!’ the aubergine seller chimed in.

‘Well, he did try to do his best for the woman,’ Auntie Raichka replied in Lipogon’s defence. ‘And he still does. Since the day of their wedding, he’s chased after every last kopeck. He even took to smuggling contraband on his boat. He got caught, of course, and they took away his import licence. He’d have gone to prison if he hadn’t paid them off. He ended up on the streets, but still he managed to find a flat for her. And what a flat it was! More like a box of fancy chocolates all tied up with a pink ribbon and fine lace! After losing his boat he took to second-hand dealing and accepted all kinds of petty jobs. His reputation was ruined, and he sank lower and lower. But he’s never given up on his grand designs. Nothing but lies and more lies! He hides his poverty from Tamara. She’s a lazy woman and a bit touched herself. Can’t be bothered with anything. Lies about all day long by her window reading tattered old books and playing her gramophone. Puts on a record– ‘The Night’s Breath’ or ‘I Dreamed of You Last Night’ – and just reads and reads. She’s no good. She doesn’t give a damn about anything, along as she’s got herself a bit of halva. She doesn’t want to open her eyes and see how this man has destroyed himself for her, how he’s gone to the dogs. All she cares about are her stupid romance novels. Tfu! I say, to hell with her!’

With that, Auntie Raichka spat crossly. ‘That man will end up in the army’s penal battalions, mark my words, young man!’

I went back to my carriage and was about to go down to the seashore when we were ordered to the railway workshop to help the workers scrape all the old paint off the train. We worked all day. I went home to clean up and then left for the country house in Maly Fontan. There at last, from the top of a cliff, I saw the sea. The evening’s misty haze had merged with the pale blue expanse of the water. The waves far below rumbled faintly over the shingle, and the first star of the night began to glow beneath a silver bird-wing of a cloud.

The lighthouses were dark. The hulking mass of a ship could still be made out on the darkening horizon. This was the Turkish cruiser Medjidie, shelled by our coastal artillery and gone aground on the rocks. It still hadn’t been towed away. The cruiser was slowly being consumed by the twilight and before long disappeared.

I ran down a steep path to the sea. Dry acacias clung to the stony soil. Large flat stones skittered under my feet. Stiff broom pointed dark arrows in all directions; yellow flowers shone, somehow, in the darkness. I smelled mussels and fried mackerel – the nurses were cooking on an open fire near the house. Reaching the sea, I undressed and walked out into the dark, fresh water until it was up to my neck. The reflections of the stars swam about me like tiny jellyfish. I tried not to move to keep them from breaking into dozens of rocking sparks. It took a long time until they settled down and reappeared as reflected stars. With all my body I felt the restrained but powerful pulse of the sea. It rocked back and forth ever so slightly.

The sea lay just below my eyes, at the level of my chin. My heart pounded at the thought that before me was nothing but an expanse of water stretching far into the distance, to the Bosphorus, to the shores of Greece and Egypt, to the Adriatic and the Atlantic, that before my very eyes began the great oceans that stretched around the world. The smell of stocks floated over the water. Far off in the direction of the Dniester estuary, a cannon shot rang out and echoed along the shore. The war had even made its way to these lands that seemed to have been created specifically for a happy, constructive life, the life of sailors, gardeners, winemakers, artists, children and lovers, lands that promised a carefree childhood, a productive adulthood and an old age as bright and clear as a September day.

The nurses called to me from the shore. I got out of the water, dressed, and went up to the house. There, under the verandah’s striped awning, stood Lipogon, cap in hand, ingratiating himself with the nurses. He had already managed to sell them a small canvas bag of Greek olives. We went back to town together.

‘I gather’, Lipogon said to me on the tram, ‘that you’re a true lover of the sea.’

I said he was correct.

‘Then you shouldn’t be riding about on a train, in those beaten-up old goods wagons, you belong on a hospital ship. The hospital ship Portugal is in Odessa harbour right now. It’s an old French steamer.’

‘Well, I suppose so,’ I said cautiously, ‘Sure, I’d love to be on that steamer.’

‘I can fix it!’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘I know a way. I am acquainted with the ship’s junior doctor. I supply him with contraband tobacco. Be at the Quarantine Pier tomorrow at one o’clock. I’ll be waiting for you by the Portugal. I won’t charge you anything. Just treat me to a nice meal in town and we’ll call it even!’

He was quiet for a few moments.

‘Someday,’ he said, leaning in close so I could hear him over the rumble of a passing tram, ‘I’ll tell you all about myself. People say the worst things about me. The fact is my life is like one of those serialised novels you read in the magazines. I’ve got a secret life. Of course, fate has dealt me some harsh blows. But I dare say no one’s more respectable than I. The fact is I’ve just had rotten luck, and that’s why my plans have no room to blossom.’

Out of the dark night, cold blasts of air tore through an open window of the unlit tram. At the time, the lights had been turned out in all the port cities.

‘If I had my way,’ said Lipogon, ‘I’d sail the seven seas. What a life that’d be. Like a painting by Aivazovsky!’fn3

The next day I arrived at the Quarantine Pier at ten o’clock in the morning instead of one in the afternoon. Alongside the breakwater a white ocean liner with two huge red crosses on its sides was dissolving in the dazzling, dry sunlight. On the stern I read an inscription in gold French lettering: ‘Portugal-Marseille’.

There was something unreal about the whiteness of the ship, its ethereal masts, rigging and bridges, its shiny brass, the gemlike sharpness of its portholes, and the sparkle of its decks, as if this ship had arrived from some festive other world, as if it had been made from hardened light. This was a passenger liner of the French company Messageries Maritimes. Before the war it had plied between Marseilles, Madagascar, Syria and Arabia, and for some reason had sailed into the Black Sea. There it was caught by the war with Turkey, and so by agreement with the French government the Portugal was handed over to us for use as a hospital ship. We painted it white. Young nurses in grey summer dresses and sailors in white were walking about on the decks of the Portugal. I didn’t want to be seen waiting, and so left to stroll around the port until one o’clock.

At precisely one that afternoon I returned to the ship. At the foot of the gangway stood Lipogon chatting casually with a young naval doctor. The doctor had sarcastic dark eyes and a red neck, as if the white collar of his tunic were too tight. He gave me a brief handshake before turning once more to Lipogon: ‘All right then, goodbye, skipper! Bring me some more tobacco once I’m back from my trip.’

‘Aye aye, sir!’ Lipogon said with exaggerated enthusiasm, before saluting and walking off.

The doctor took me by the arm and led me to his cabin. He squeezed my arm so tightly that you would have thought he feared I might slip on the glassy-smooth decks, fall and, God forbid, break some shiny instrument or shatter a glass door. I didn’t care for this at all, but I kept my mouth shut and didn’t try to pull my arm away.

‘In short,’ the doctor said once we had reached his cabin, which smelled of a mixture of fresh salty sea air and fine tobacco, ‘I need another orderly for the dressing station. You’re a student? Excellent! And you brought your documents?’

‘Yes.’

‘Let me see.’

I handed him my documents. He took a quick look and gave them back.

‘Consider the matter settled,’ he said. ‘Come back the day after tomorrow. We just have a few formalities to take care of, and after that we’ll need you to remain on board. It’s likely we’ll be sailing soon.’

I was dazed. I couldn’t believe that I’d soon be sailing on an ocean liner. My childhood dreams had come true. Of course, I’d miss the train and my comrades, but my desire to head out to sea trumped everything. The doctor escorted me back to the top of the gangway. A little old man, as fidgety as a monkey, was standing there in some sort of naval uniform that clearly wasn’t Russian. Given all the gold braid on his sleeves, I assumed he must be someone high up in the chain of command.

‘Our captain, Monsieur Bayard,’ the young doctor whispered in my ear.

He bowed to the captain and said in French: ‘Monsieur le Capitaine, may I present our new orderly. He is a student from Moscow.’

I bowed.

‘My God, it’s simply incomprehensible!’ Monsieur Bayard exclaimed, throwing both hands into the air. ‘Instead of getting on with their courses, students here are busy spooning kasha into the mouths of Russian peasants. Nobody in this confounded country does what they’re supposed to. Nobody!’

With his small but strong brown paws, he grabbed my shoulders, swung me around and looked me straight in the eyes. ‘Oh … oh … oh, yes, yes indeed,’ he said. ‘We’ve all been through this before. I know all about you. Dreams, yes, dreams, of course! But no, no,’ he suddenly yelled, ‘you’ve got it all wrong, my friend. Look, there’s the sea, out there!’

With that he took off his gold-braided cap and pointed to his grey, closely cropped head. ‘It’s all here in your head, it is, all those magical nights along the equator, the sunsets in Bengal, the smell of cinnamon and all that other nonsense. It’s all just right here! What can I say? You’re ill, young man, and the fact is I don’t know a single medicine that can cure you. And so, I’m very glad to welcome you aboard my ship.’

He turned on his heels and trotted off to the captain’s bridge. The doctor watched him go with an amused but respectful smile. ‘That’s our captain,’ he said. ‘A splendid man from Gascony. Well then, until the day after tomorrow.’

The following day I treated Lipogon to lunch at the Dardanelles Restaurant on Stepovaya Street. In fact, it was less of a restaurant and more like a fly-infested cafeteria. Romanin and Nikolashka Rudnev joined us. Both of them were upset by my decision to leave the train and, strange as I found it, neither of them envied me. On the contrary, they seemed to disapprove of my action.

Lunch at the Dardanelles ended in scandal. We were served mutton stew. We ate it and then Lipogon immediately summoned our lazy waiter. ‘Fetch the proprietor,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘It’s not your place to ask.’

The proprietor, a fat man with a greenish face and a sleepy expression, reluctantly shuffled out of a back room. ‘What’s the problem?’ he asked in a hoarse voice. ‘If the food’s not good enough, you’d be better off taking your fancy ways over to the restaurant in the Hotel London. That’s not the kind of place I’m running here.’

‘The problem is, Mr Kamenyuk,’ Lipogon said sinisterly, ‘that you’ve been serving your customers tainted mutton, and so very likely sending them off to heaven for their next meal.’

‘You think so?’ Kamenyuk asked ironically. ‘Well, well, tainted, you say? I’ll have you know I serve only the highest-quality mutton.’

‘And I tell you it’s tainted!’

‘Then why did you eat all of it?’ Kamenyuk asked, the note of irony in his voice now tinged with a hint of danger. ‘You’ve left nothing but the bones. You even mopped the plates with your bread. Don’t take me for a fool. I wasn’t born yesterday.’

‘Oh, really? So your mutton isn’t tainted after all?’ exclaimed Lipogon, with an odd air of triumph. ‘Then I humbly request you bring us four more servings of your lovely ragout.’

Kamenyuk clearly did not care for Lipogon’s last words. ‘We’ve run out of mutton,’ he said, blanching. ‘There’s no more! Understand? And I’m not serving you another thing.’

‘In that case,’ Lipogon sighed, ‘you’ve left me no other choice than to fetch the policeman, Mr Skulsky. It’s now up to the law to decide the matter. And if there’s trouble, Mr Kamenyuk, don’t blame me.’

Kamenyuk slammed his fist on the table. ‘Get out, now, before there’s trouble! Just get out. I don’t want your money. I’m through with you.’ He stared Lipogon straight in the face. ‘And may you choke on that money of yours, you scum!’

We were so shocked by this unexpected turn of events that none of us could get a word out. I did manage to pull out some money and lay it on the table, but I doubt all of it found its way into Kamenyuk’s pocket, for he angrily flung the money at Lipogon, who picked it up and then, with a dramatic show of disdain, flung it back at Kamenyuk. The number of banknotes that Lipogon threw at Kamenyuk, I did manage to notice, was considerably fewer than what Kamenyuk had thrown at Lipogon.

Shaking with anger, I asked Lipogon once we were out on the street: ‘Why did you make that ridiculous scene?’

‘Because you’re students,’ said Lipogon, ‘and you’ve got empty pockets. And that Kamenyuk is getting rich off tainted meat.’

‘But that mutton wasn’t tainted!’

‘Not today, but tomorrow for certain,’ Lipogon said unruffled. ‘You saw how he squirmed when I asked for a second helping. That’s because that son of a bitch wasn’t sure it was still good. If he’d given us that second helping, and it really was tainted, then I’d have material proof for the police. Better for him to get rid of us than take the risk.’

We discussed the incident for a long time back at the train. In the evening we went to the country house so I could say my goodbyes to the doctors and nurses. Everyone there was stunned by my decision. Some were envious, others puzzled. Lëlya alone said nothing, biting her lips and refusing to look at me. We were sitting out on the dark terrace. Down below, the surf murmured softly. Lëlya grabbed my arm. ‘Come with me!’ she said.

We walked out into a darkened garden and then began to make our way down to the sea. Lëlya was still silent, but held me tightly by the arm, the way one holds a naughty boy being led to his punishment. Once we’d reached the water, Lëlya finally stopped. She was breathing heavily.

‘Dreamer!’ she said. ‘You’ve got your head in the clouds! You’re no better than some foolish schoolboy! First thing tomorrow you’re marching straight down to that ridiculous steamer and telling them you’ve changed your mind. Do you hear me?’

‘Why?’

‘Why? Oh my God! Do you really not get it? Because that’s no way to treat your friends, that’s why. Because it’s just not what people do! Of course, it’s much nicer to twiddle your thumbs in that floating drawing room of a hospital with its frilly curtains and scented dolls for nurses than it is to work in the mud and blood of a beaten-up old goods wagon. Even Romanin and Rudnev, and all the rest of your friends, feel uncomfortable about your decision. Don’t pretend you didn’t notice! Of course, no one would say that to your face. Except for me, that is. Because I care … Because I want to think well of you … And don’t ask me anything that you already know perfectly well yourself.’

‘I didn’t ask you anything.’

‘Fine! Well, go on, I’m waiting.’

A storm raged inside me. In some way, Lëlya was right, of course. But how could I give up this incredible opportunity to go to sea, how could I give up a dream I had waited so long for, ever since I was a young child?

‘No,’ I told her. ‘I can’t turn this down. It’s not at all what you think. You’d be better off not saying anything when you’re so angry.’

‘Very well then, farewell!’ Lëlya blurted, before turning and walking off into the darkness along the white edge of the surf.

I called to her. She didn’t answer. I followed her. She stopped and said in a cold, angry voice: ‘Don’t follow me. You’re being ridiculous! Goodbye. My regards to your new friend … what’s his name … Lipogon.’

She laughed. I waited. I heard her walk on, then stop, throw a few small stones into the sea and start singing, clearly to make fun of me:

If you knew how I mourn,

My heart, ripe with trust and nurture,

You’d come, and united we’d scorn

My fate savaged by strange torture.

I turned round, climbed the bank and, without stopping at the house, walked back home into Odessa. It was an unusually dark night. The gardens rustled with the sound of the wind. Twice I was stopped by patrols and asked to present my papers. I kept playing over in my mind everything that had happened, hour by hour, until suddenly I realised with horror that I myself wasn’t sure whether or not I was doing the right thing. I simply did not know!

‘What is this?’ I asked myself. ‘A want of moral decency? An illness? Simply a refusal to look matters squarely in the face? Am I really so flighty as that?’

One moment I thought Lëlya was perfectly right. The next just the opposite, that everything she had said was nothing more than hypocrisy and pretence. But why did Romanin and Rudnev refuse to look me in the eye? What was bothering them? Had they written me off as worthless? Why? And whoever came up with the notion that serving on a hospital ship was some sort of pleasure cruise? No, I would not pass up this opportunity, I was not going to give in. To hell with them! Naturally, I lost my way and didn’t get back to the train until after everyone had fallen asleep. This was fine by me.

The following morning, I went down to the Quarantine Pier, but the Portugal was gone, replaced by a rusty coal barge. A man on the barge cleaning sea roach told me that the Portugal had sailed the night before for Trebizond.

‘Why?’ I asked, confused. ‘She wasn’t supposed to leave for a few days.’

‘It happens,’ said the man with the fish casually. ‘They got their orders. Urgent, it was. There’s a war on, my friend. But she’ll be back, don’t you worry.’

I was ashamed to have to go back to my carriage and my friends, but I had no choice.

‘So what are you going to do now?’ Romanin asked in an offhand way.

‘Wait for the Portugal to return.’

‘Okay then, go on and wait. It’s none of my business, of course.’

I couldn’t bear staying in the carriage any longer, so I took the tram to Lustdorf. I spent the entire day on the beach in Lustdorf, a boring German colony. I didn’t eat a thing all day until evening when I bought myself a dozen apricots. I decided to take the last tram of the day back to Odessa, but it never came and so I walked. It was about twenty kilometres. Again, it was a dark, windy night. Again, the trees rustled in the gardens along the road and acacia seeds, bursting from their pods, peppered my face. I felt all alone in the world. How I wished to see Mama again, to have her ruffle my hair and say, ‘Oh, Kostik, you really are incorrigible!’

I sat down to rest next to the wrought-iron gates of a dacha. There was a stone wall cut with a deep recess for statues. The recess was empty, and so I crawled in, hugged my knees to my chest and sat there for a long time. Finally, I fell asleep. It must have been the presence of a schoolboy, standing with his bike and staring at me, a smile on his face, that woke me up.

‘Good morning!’ he said. ‘You look just like Antokolsky’s statue of Mephistopheles.’fn4

‘There’s no such statue!’ I snapped at him, even though I knew quite well there was. I slid down out of the niche and headed for town. The road was bordered by stone walls. Looking at them, I felt as though I’d seen them before. Could this be Maly Fontan? Off in the distance I could see a metal lantern hanging over the gate by the house where the doctor and nurses lived. I had completely forgotten that the road to Lustdorf passed by this part of town.

I went up to the gate, opened it and looked into the garden, which ran down to the white, calm sea. It was a cloudy, windless morning. A few drops of rain fell on my face and on the pathway, its pebbles white with dried sea salt. Dark wet spots formed where the rain fell, and then dried as I watched.

They must all still be asleep, I thought. I wished to see Lëlya. My feelings of loneliness from the night before returned. Did they know that the Portugal had sailed without me? Probably not. None of the orderlies had any plans yesterday to visit the house. I walked cautiously into the garden. Behind a tall trimmed box hedge I spied the familiar green bench. I sat down. No one could see me from either the terrace or the garden, which was fine with me. I would just rest a bit and then leave without being noticed. A few more drops of rain fell on my face. The gulls screamed over the sea. I raised my head. Someone was hurrying from the house to the gate. I peeped through a gap in the hedge and saw Lëlya.

She was wearing a raincoat but no hat, and her face was paler than I had ever seen before. She was walking fast, almost running. I stood up, parted the branches of the hedge and stepped through to meet her. Catching sight of me she screamed, fell to her knees and then, leaning on one arm, slowly let herself sink onto the grey gravel. Her eyes were closed. I ran to her and tried to lift her by the shoulders, but she didn’t move. She moaned quietly and in a faint voice said: ‘Oh God, he’s alive! Oh, dear God!’

‘I missed the Portugal,’ I said, searching for words, not at all certain what to say to calm her.

‘Help me,’ she said, lifting her tear-stained face. ‘Give me your hand.’ She got up with difficulty. ‘So, do you really not know?’

‘No,’ I replied, utterly at a loss.

‘Let’s go somewhere else, anywhere but here.’

We went into the neglected garden of an empty house next door. There Lëlya wearily sank onto a bench. ‘Oh, my God,’ she said, looking at me, her eyes full of tears. ‘You fool, you fool you! Here, read this!’

She pulled a sheet of paper out of her coat pocket. It was a special bulletin from the Odessa News. I unfolded the sheet and saw the black headline: ‘Latest German Atrocity. Hospital Ship Portugal Torpedoed By German Submarine On Its Way To Sevastopol. No Survivors.’fn5 I tossed the paper aside and put my arms around Lëlya. She was sobbing like a little child – without shame or embarrassment – and tears of relief poured down her face.

‘Good Lord!’ she said through her tears. ‘What am I crying for? What nonsense. Please don’t think I’ve gone and fallen in love with you. I was just scared, that’s all.’

‘Yes, of course, I don’t think anything of the sort,’ I answered, stroking her wet hair.

‘Honestly?’ she looked up and smiled at me. ‘Hand me my bag, please. I have a handkerchief. I was rushing into town for more news … maybe there are some survivors.’