The Story of a Life

62

A Dank Winter

In October there was a lull in the fighting. Our unit found itself in Zamirie, not far from the Baranovichi–Minsk railway line. I had never seen a more dismal village in my life. Low, tumble-down huts, flat, naked fields, and not a tree in sight.

Adding to this depressing picture was our transport corps – muddy carts, mangy horses and soldiers who by now had lost all spit and polish. Their shabby, fake sheepskin hats were in tatters, the earflaps sticking out like the wings of a shot bird, their quilted jackets were shiny with grease, their greatcoats held together with string, and a ragged, wet cigarette butt stuck to the lips of every other man.

Autumn arrived late, black and devoid of light. Thick condensation clung to the windows of our hut. It would build up and then pour down in streams so that we couldn’t see a thing outside. The wind howled at our door. The carts sank into the oozing mud, and we brought it inside with us on our boots. The conditions were miserable. Romanin and I had soon had enough. We scrubbed the floors and cleaned up the hut as best we could and didn’t allow anyone in except on business.

When I returned to the unit Romanin gave me a big hug as if there had never been anything wrong between us. Evidently, he had just been overtired. Turning away to hide his tears, he called me a swine and said I had caused him to go grey. With that he pointed to a grey streak of hair as proof. He had always had it, but, in all fairness, it was whiter and larger than before. I told him that Lëlya had died. He sat listening at the table and blew his nose a few times, and his eyes reddened. I tried not to look at him. He got up and went out. When he returned he was quiet, and drunk. He had never done such a thing before.

Gronsky was gone by the time I arrived. He had had a nervous breakdown and had to be taken to Minsk. He had been replaced by Kedrin, a lawyer and prominent member of the Kadet Party.fn1 Kedrin was a little old man with a silver imperial and imposing spectacles. In his grey fur jacket, he reminded one of a large, well-educated rat, and so he became known as ‘the Honourable Mr Rat’. Polite, boring, unbelievably naïve in military matters, ignorant of village life, and of life in general, he busied himself with writing political commentaries and ‘analyses of the developing situation’ and basically stuck out amid the rapidly disintegrating army like a sore thumb.

There were few refugees anymore, most of them having settled in the surrounding villages. Since we had nothing to do, Romanin decided to build a public banya there in Zamirie. Slowly more and more people, all of them out of work, were drawn into the project. It became a major undertaking. Officials, technicians, army engineers and experts on banya construction and heating systems from Minsk and even Moscow started to arrive. Romanin quarrelled with all of them. There were angry rows, and he even sent a few of them packing.

Crawling with lice, the troops waited for the opening of the banya as for a miracle. To them Romanin was a saintly father figure. Even the transport soldiers saluted him and acknowledged his authority. Kedrin gave a number of speeches, always eloquent and at times even lofty, devoted to the construction of the banya over our evening tea. He not only addressed the deeper philosophical justifications for the banya but explained how steam baths formed one of the basic principles of the Kadet Party’s progressive politics that would in the end bring happiness to our long-suffering ‘Mother Russia’. Kedrin sprinkled his speeches with famous quotations and names, including Tuhan-Baranovskyi, Struve and even Lassalle.fn2 Romanin liked to joke how Kedrin’s speeches were worthy of being delivered in front of the Imperial State Duma. Indeed, old Kadet Kedrin provided us with plenty of material for jokes. He didn’t take our teasing well and became terribly upset over every little jest.

One day a red-bearded man appeared in our hut. He had his greatcoat slung over his shoulders and a sheepskin hat that clung, as if by a miracle, to the back of his head. He had a loud but pleasant voice and eyes full of laughter. He presented himself as a specialist in banyas and delousing. No one knew his surname, so everyone just called him ‘Redbeard’.

He had burst into our hut and made himself at home, and from that moment the business of the banya took an unexpected turn. Conversations began about all manner of subjects, ranging from the possibility of constructing Roman baths to recollections of Moscow’s Sandunovskie banyas, the hot springs of Tiflis, the superlative description of them by Pushkin, Pushkin’s prose, prose in general – what Redbeard called the ‘God of the Arts’ – the question of whether Pushkin or Lermontov was the better prose writer, the plan for War and Peace (supposedly Tolstoy had been handed Lermontov’s own early rough drafts of the novel), Tolstoy’s funeral at Yasnaya Polyana, Anna Karenina, Levin shooting snipe, shooting in general, and Chekhov’s The Seagull. Eventually it emerged that Redbeard had visited Chekhov at Yalta and produced some of his plays at various provincial theatres, that he was fluent in French, and that he didn’t know the first thing about constructing a banya.

We failed miserably in trying to discover his profession. Whenever we asked him, he would respond with some lines by the poet Maximilian Voloshin. According to Redbeard, these verses perfectly captured the essence of his life:

Exiles, wanderers and poets,

Hungry for life, yet failures at living.

The beast has its dark lair, the bird its nest,

Yet for us, just a staff, penury and no rest.

Within two days of his arrival, we could not understand how we had managed to survive in God-forsaken Zamirie without him.

Redbeard took Kedrin for an utter nobody. When Kedrin started on one of his numbing monologues, thus putting an end to our conversations, Redbeard would turn to him and say with a good-natured smile: ‘Hold on there, old man! It’s not your turn, but we’ll let you know when it is.’

Sometimes, usually at night, our conversations turned to matters of burning importance. We talked of revolution. Romanin was drawn to the Socialist Revolutionaries – the SRs – Kedrin droned on and on about the Kadets in the manner of some tedious professor, and Redbeard responded by saying the workers’ revolution was going to send both of them to hell. More and more often were heard the words ‘International’ and ‘Lenin’.

When Redbeard spoke, everyone was quiet. It was as if you could hear the roar of the crowds, the roar of the revolution itself sweeping over Russia and wiping it clean. Not even Kedrin interrupted Redbeard. He just sat there polishing his spectacles with shaky hands, shrugging his shoulders and snorting violently. This was the most extreme form of protest he permitted himself, along with the frequent refrain of ‘I beg your pardon!’ He liked to say this in a haughty and defiant tone. But this was as far as Kedrin would usually go before he withdrew to bed, muttering something under his breath, carefully folding his Zemgor uniform and placing it neatly on a chair.fn3

One day, however, when a nurse known as the ‘Black-Eyed Beauty’ came to visit from a neighbouring medical unit, Kedrin revealed himself as an incorrigible Don Juan. He dug a bottle of Coty perfume from Paris out of his suitcase and presented it to her. The nurse made eyes at him and giggled with delight. He minced about her, rubbing his hands, until Redbeard raised his voice: ‘Calm down, old man! We’ll let you know when it’s your turn.’

After the February Revolution Kedrin served for a time as a commissar in the Provisional Government on the western front. It’s easy to imagine all the insipid and nauseating speeches he made in front of the soldiers. Kedrin was lucky they didn’t kill him.

I visited a lot of small towns and villages that winter, either on horseback or by train. Romanin was always sending me off to gather building material for the banya, first to Nesvizh, then to Mir, Slutsk and Minsk. Belorussia at the time looked like an old landscape you might see hanging on the wall of a fly-blown buffet in some railway station near the front. Traces of the past were visible everywhere, but they were nothing more than a façade – the contents had disappeared.

I saw the great houses of the Polish aristocracy – Prince Radziwiłł’s in Nesvizh was particularly sumptuous – the nobles’ folwarks, the picturesque though cramped and rundown Jewish villages, the old synagogues and the Gothic churches which, amid the stunted woods and bogs, looked like foreign visitors. I saw the black and white striped verst markers still standing from the time of Nicholas I.

But the magnates and their glittering, reckless lives were no more, gone along with their obedient serfs, gone with the home-grown rabbi-philosophers and their terrifying warnings about the Day of Judgment that once reverberated in the synagogues, gone with the rotting banners of the ‘First Rebellion’ that had hung over the altars of the Catholic churches.fn4 True, the older Jews of Nesvizh could still tell stories about the luxurious pleasures of the Radziwiłłs, about how their thousands of serfs used to stand at attention with torches along the road all the way to the Russian frontier when the prince rode out to meet his lover, the English adventurer Miss Kingston; about the roisterous hunts and feasts, about the swagger, arrogance and petty tyranny that counted in those days as the hallmark of Polish nobility. But their stories were now all second-hand.

The war was busy erasing what remained of that old way of life together with any dim memories of it. The war trampled on it, drove it into hiding, drowned it out with its rough cursing and the lazy grunt of its guns, which fired even in winter, as if just to clear their throats. But through all the confusion and turmoil of wartime, the features of a new, transitional era could already be seen, and people felt tense and anxious as at the slow approach of a thunderstorm. It was a dank winter. The snow fell and then melted. For weeks on end, dirty, mushy slush covered the ground. Damp, persistent winds blew from Poland, scratching at the wet straw covering the Belorussian huts.

I loved my travels because I liked being alone. I still couldn’t move past the memories and feeling of alienation that had gripped me since the previous autumn. Daily life had begun to blur Lëlya’s image. I was terrified to notice I was having trouble remembering the sound of her voice. During those journeys I subjected myself to all manner of hardships and privations with an obstinacy I still can’t explain: I let myself be drenched by snow and sleet, I froze to the bone, I slept in barns or on the ground out in the open, I ate practically nothing and just smoked one damp, harsh cigarette after another. The slightest thing set my nerves on edge and filled me with feelings of grief and confusion.

This happened to me in Molodechno. I had spent the night in an empty, unheated third-class carriage in a station siding. I awoke at dawn. It was one of those cold, miserly dawns that come to drive away an equally miserly night. Winter belongs to the night; the days are but its poor relations who do their best to stay out of the way.

Lying under my greatcoat on a wooden bench, I managed to feel a bit of warmth. A bugle sounded somewhere down the tracks. There must have been a troop train at the station. The bugle made a plaintive, ringing sound. I shook inside, and suddenly, listening to the cry of the bugle, I realised the utter helplessness of my world, the utter pointlessness of my unsettled, miserable and lonely life. I thought of Mama, of my brothers off fighting on some neighbouring front, of Lëlya and of how the heart turns hard when deprived of care and human tenderness.

Why did I feel so lost and abandoned? I wanted to know. Evidently it was because we had been raised on books, on misty poetry and lofty ideas, and the narod – the Russian masses – had marched right past us, not only indifferent but completely unaware of our existence, the sons and supporters it had no need of.

In early December while riding back to Zamirie on one of my trips, I lost my way and ended up on a road near the front line. It was a gloomy evening. The road was covered in ice. My horse picked his way, trying not to fall. Soon it grew so dark I couldn’t even make out the bushes along the roadside.

I heard a distant rumbling up ahead. My horse hesitated and then began to prance. I listened and then recognised the familiar clatter of an artillery convoy on the move. Even though they were still far off, I carefully turned my horse to the side of the road: the recklessness of transport drivers was well known to everyone. Suddenly, there came a thin whine. Ahead on the road I saw the faint flash of an explosion. Then another, and another. The Germans were shelling the road. In between the explosions I could hear the convoy racing towards me at a gallop. The usual panic must have broken out. A shell burst next to me. I didn’t even notice it, but something had happened to my left leg. It had turned to cotton wool.

I quickly reached down to my boot and my fingers came in contact with something sticky and warm. Raising my arm, I felt a shooting pain as though my leg was being split in two. I grabbed for the pommel of my saddle but couldn’t hold on and dropped onto the road. I must have fallen on my wounded leg, for I lost consciousness for a moment.

When I came to, the furious thunder of the transport was upon me. I grabbed a stirrup and shouted at my horse, who, snorting and shivering, cautiously pulled me off the road and into the ditch. I lay there, clutching a stirrup, while right in front of my face the convoy roared past, the drivers yelling and whistling, the terrified horses snorting, the metal wheels crashing over the icy road. I felt as if it would never end.

And then everything was quiet. My horse sniffed me up and down and whinnied nervously. I took me a good five minutes to dig my electric torch out of my pocket and turn it on. I don’t remember a thing after that. It seems I passed out again, and the torch lay there shining at my side.

Some soldiers from the signal corps riding by in a two-wheeled cart saw the light. They picked me up, bandaged me as best they could and took me to the field hospital in Nesvizh. I stayed in hospital for almost a month. It was a light wound, and the bone had not even been grazed. I was the only one in the ward; there were no other wounded. Romanin came to visit often. The banya was about to open, and he was beaming. Kedrin, the Honourable Mr Rat, visited me twice. His eyes twitching, his silver imperial shaking with fear and indignation, he told me all about Rasputin and the ‘moral degradation of the Imperial Court’. At the time Nicholas II was making an inspection tour of the western front. He came to Zamirie. The order went out to tidy up the village before his arrival. This consisted of bringing in from the closest forest a great many fir trees and propping them up as camouflage in front of the most dilapidated hovels.

I read a great deal while recovering. The Scandinavians – Ibsen, Strindberg, Hamsun, Bang – were all the rage then. I read Ibsen – that great manual labourer of the human soul. Then I came across Muratov’s Images of Italy,fn5 and I lost myself in the faintly bitter air of the country’s museums and churches. I imagined I could see the high hills of Perugia, smudged by a light blue haze and softly radiant in the sun. I began reading Leonid Andreev’s Life of a Man but put it aside for Chekhov’s pure and direct The Steppe.

I was homesick for Russia. I kept thinking about the Bryansk forest, which I remembered as the happiest, most blessed place on earth. I could see its wooded ravines, its rivers and its patches of felled timber now home to young pine and birch, crimson willow-herb, and the white hats of the meadow rue. This was a golden land of peace and calm. I was desperate for such peace, and the realisation I might never know it again brought me close to tears.

Before long I was up and about on crutches and was even allowed to go into the village. I hobbled off to see a local watchmaker I knew. Surrounded by quietly ticking watches covering the four walls, a bunch of bright geraniums perched upon the windowsill, the watchmaker, his loupe screwed in place, filled me in on the local news.

I was given newspapers and magazines to read, most often Little Fire. I would look at the monotonous battle drawings by the artist Svarogfn6 and the endless photographs of officers killed at the front. The newspapers were full of vague rumours and suggestions about Nicholas and Alix, Rasputin and Goremykin;fn7 the black shadow of the raven’s wing was falling over Russia. Romanin often sent me small parcels of food – cheese, sausage, sugar – wrapped in newspaper.

With nothing better to do one day, I picked up a paper, crumpled and covered in greasy cheese stains, and began to read. Looking through the list of casualties from the front I saw written: ‘Killed on the Galician front, Lieutenant Boris Georgievich Paustovsky, Sappers’ Battalion,’ and a little farther down the page: ‘Killed in action near Riga, Ensign Vadim Georgievich Paustovsky, Navaginsky Infantry Regiment.’

Both my brothers killed on the very same day. Even though I was still quite weak, the hospital’s chief doctor released me. I was put in a cart and taken to Zamirie. That evening I left for Moscow to see Mama.