The Story of a Life

63

A Grievous Commotion

Mama had completely shrivelled up and grown shorter. Her face still wore her old wounded expression of repressed grief which no one could understand. I arrived a month after the death of my brothers. Mama rarely cried. She never had been given to tears. Galya shook whenever she talked of our brothers, but only if Mama wasn’t present. She held herself together when she was.

By then I had seen enough human grief to realise that people almost always look for ways to lighten it. This came most naturally to the old who believed in a reunion after death and a blessed hereafter for the souls of the departed. What else was there? Memories, friends, nature, knowledge of the fact that the deceased is remembered fondly, concern for those dear ones who are left behind.

Mama and Galya’s grief was restrained, locked away. They had to go on living. Mama had to live for Galya, and Galya so that Mama could go on looking after her. I didn’t know how to help. I, too, had been utterly crushed by the death of both my brothers at the same time. We had had little in common. We were all quite different, but this merely intensified the sorrow I felt for them, now no longer among the living.

Relief came quite by accident. I asked Galya what she and Mama knew about the circumstances of our brothers’ deaths. It turned out that they knew nothing.

‘We need to find out.’

‘How?’ asked Galya.

‘Write to their regimental commanders. Find their army mates, those who were with them the day they died. Request their letters, diaries, any documents they might have left behind.’

I never could have imagined the effect my words would have. Life now had a purpose. There was a job to do.

Galya told this to Mama, and the very next day saw the start of a tenacious and feverish effort that refused to acknowledge any obstacles. The two of them wrote letters to the front. They relentlessly hunted down Dima’s and Borya’s comrades, even those who were in hospital or had been invalided out. They discovered the names of the soldiers under their command. They sent requests for information everywhere. At the same time, Mama began to seek my brothers’ pensions. Replies began to arrive. Mama and Galya now began to spend most of their time discussing them, piecing the facts together surrounding my brothers’ deaths, and writing responses for further, clarifying details. It turned out that Dima had kept a diary – just a few pages of scribbled notes. Mama and Galya spent whole days trying to decipher his handwriting.

Many people were drawn into their correspondence. Each one of them made casual references to the circumstances of their own lives, and so new acquaintances, blessed by the memory of my brothers, were made by post. Mama and Galya took a genuine interest in the lives of their new acquaintances. Mama, who had had a long habit of, as she liked to say, instructing others ‘how to act honestly and correctly’, wrote them long letters full of advice and suggestions, complete with examples from her own experience. For me it was both touching and sad to see this unhappy old woman, her own life in ruins, teaching others how they ought to live. Thus her sorrow gradually dissolved into the lives of others; it faded thanks to feverish activity and this grievous commotion. This made me happy even though I knew it could not go on like this forever. I worried what might follow.

My Aunt Vera Grigorievna, who lived in Kiev, had a small, wooded estate called Kopan on the river Pripyat. She had long been concerned by the fact that the estate was rarely used and no one was looking after it. More than once she had suggested to Mama that she should go and live at Kopan with Galya, but Mama had always declined since she had to stay in Moscow with Dima and Galya. Now, when Aunt Vera invited Mama once more, she readily accepted.

The decision had been made to leave in early spring. From that very minute Mama found some peace of mind and even cheered up. A bit of light had begun to shine. Mama had already started making plans to revive the estate and with only modest investments make it so prosperous that ‘muddle-headed Aunt Vera would never dream it could have been possible’. Mama was not worried about me. I overheard her talking to Galya.

‘Why doesn’t Kostik worry as much as we do?’

‘He’s had a different life,’ said Mama. ‘He’s travelled a good deal, seen lots of things, and met all sorts of people. He has so many different interests. He’s a born vagabond! Like your father.’

There was, of course, a touch of disapproval in Mama’s comment. My father’s inability to stay in one place, in her opinion, had been the cause of our family’s impoverishment and ruin. Only one thing existed in this world for Mama – duty. Duty and nothing else. The fulfilment of self-imposed duties was the only happiness she had ever known. My father, on the other hand, had been ‘greedy for life’, as Mama used to say. To her, only selfish people were capable of such a thing. Such was Mama’s philosophy of life in her old age.

The Union of Cities had given me two months’ convalescent leave. I was to return to the unit in March. Meanwhile, the union offered me a job shipping medicines and food from Moscow to the front. This meant additional pay, and so I accepted. We needed to save some money for Mama’s trip to Kopan.

My work involved hiring draymen, collecting medicines and other supplies from a number of depots, and delivering them to the goods stations for shipment to the units of the Union of Cities. Every morning I went to Varvarskaya Square, where the draymen waited to be hired. Strict rules governed the process. No one was allowed to negotiate with any of the draymen individually. You could get beaten up for that. Huge, bearded peasants in heavy sheepskin coats over which they wore canvas aprons, the draymen stood waiting in a crowd on the square, joking and swearing like mad. They had to stand within sight of the foreman, who made sure no one tried to make a deal on the side and undercut the cooperative.

You had to walk through flocks of well-fed pigeons filling the square to reach the draymen. As soon as a customer appeared, the foreman whipped off his hat and passed it around so that each drayman could toss in his bronze number badge. Shaking the badges in his hat, the foreman then approached the customer, who pulled out as many badges as he needed carts. This lottery was preceded by furious bargaining, even though the rates for carrying and loading had been established by decades of tradition and were known to everyone.

After a month I knew nearly all the goods stations, depots and storehouses of Moscow. This was an enormous and little-known world with its own laws and customs. I got the impression that everyone stole – storehouse managers, watchmen, porters and especially the station clerks who weighed the goods. The draymen stole openly, and every time they were caught, they resorted to a well-tested response: they would start a fight amid a storm of overwhelming curses. Few people wanted to tangle with these raging giants, especially since they were duty bound to back each other up. Everything was stolen, from rusty old nails to bits of sacking.

This is what was happening down at the bottom. One could only guess what was happening up at the top. Everything dark, petty and grasping had been excited to the point of hysteria by the example of Rasputin. His name was on everyone’s lips. The horse thief of Tobolsk, the peasant with the lecherous eyes sat on the Russian throne and ruled over the country. ‘What’s Grishka Rasputin got that we haven’t?’ the draymen laughed, leering and whistling at the women passing by. ‘Grab while the going’s good, boys! It’ll soon be all gone! Grigory Yefimovich will back us up. We know how the old hypocrite does it, out stealing horses and the like.’

This band of thieves had only one holy and unbreakable rule: fair shares. Share the loot with each and every one who helped to steal it: give him his ‘lawful’ portion.

And the depots! I saw huge vaults stuffed with materiel for the army: hats that came apart in your hands, worthless greatcoats made of canvas, caps with broken peaks and badges that had already lost their shape, boots with rotten soles, undergarments made of calico that was so rough and full of sharp awns they would bloody men’s bodies. All this was sewn up in fresh-smelling new sacking and sent to the front. The sacking was, in fact, the only sound material in this pile of shoddy junk.

I couldn’t wait to get back to my unit. Distance had turned it into a comforting home. It seemed as though everything good and decent was there at the front, while here all was rotten.

Winter that year in Moscow, with its frequent thaws and dirty snow, its freezing drizzle, its black ice, reflected my feelings. The ice on the ponds in the Zoological Garden had melted. On one of them some sort of water bird let out a shrill cry: ‘What’s happened? Oh my God, what’s happened, what’s happened?’ We could hear it clearly from inside our flat.

I worked only half the day, came home early, had a meagre supper and retired to my cubbyhole of a room. Mama and Galya were busy sewing in preparation for the trip. The sewing machine chattered away until late into the night. The floor was littered with fabric scraps and bits of thread. I sat and wrote. About the war, about my generation. I was certain we would remake the world. We were a generation of restless dreamers and idealists. I naïvely believed that these qualities meant we would not allow ourselves to lead humdrum lives and die without having accomplished something, leaving nothing behind, as Romanin liked to say, ‘but our smell’.

Yet despite this certainty, I saw ever more clearly that alongside this generation of intelligènty and men and women who, imagining they belonged to no class, considered themselves to be the ‘salt of the earth’, there was the enormous mass of the narod, those millions of Russians who called themselves ‘brother workers’, who were living their own intense lives about which I knew almost nothing. These people possessed an undeniable life force, an intolerant, sober sense of right and wrong, born of the burdens carried on their backs. Their truth could not be charmed away by the melodic sounds of verse, no matter how beautiful, or obscured by the mists of Bergson’s fashionable philosophy. I sensed the omnipresence of this truth, as though being watched by an insistent and intense pair of eyes. It became unmistakably clear to me that it was impossible to live and work honestly in Russia without first determining one’s attitude to the working class, its struggle and its aspirations.

I began to write a story about a young man of my generation. I wrote it slowly over a long time. It followed me through the years of the revolution and civil war and began to ripen. I finally published it as The Romantics, but only much later in the ’thirties. I also wrote a few poems around this time and sent them to a famous poet. I had no hope he would respond, but he did. He sent me a postcard. In big, bold letters he wrote: ‘You live like an actor delivering his lines from off stage.’ That was all.

At the time I was leading a double life – one real, the other make-believe. This book is about the real one. My make-believe life existed independently and gave my real life all the things that it inevitably lacked – everything I held to be beautiful and alluring. My imaginary life was spent travelling the world, meeting fascinating people, taking part in important events. It was swathed in the mantle of love. And it was, in reality, one long, coherent dream.

Of course, now I can look back on my life at that age with a patronising smile. That’s easy. All of us, wise from experience, feel we are entitled to such an attitude. Or at least that’s how sober, mature people think who believe they alone are engaged in the serious business of life. But in the end they don’t have a right to this smile. They don’t have the right to laugh at the dreams of the young – dreams that sowed the first seeds of poetry in many a soul. These dreams possessed a purity and a nobility that have left their traces upon the whole of their lives. Everyone who enjoyed these gifts in their youth can agree with me in the knowledge that they once possessed inexhaustible treasures.

The world was ours. Neither time nor space had any limits. We could breathe the mushroom-scented air of the taiga one minute and that of the Parisian boulevards at dawn the next. We could talk to Hugo or Lermontov, Peter the Great or Garibaldi. We could declare our love to a seventeen-year-old girl in her brown school uniform as she nervously fidgeted with her pigtail or just as easily prostrate ourselves at the feet of Isolde. We could live with Miklukho-Maklai in the jungles of New Guinea, gallop with Pushkin to Erzurum, serve in the National Convention, cut the first paths through the wilds of Florida, languish in debtors’ prison with Little Dorrit’s father, or sail to England with the ashes of Byron. There were no borders in that world, and I have yet to meet the cynic who could honestly deny its value or its influence on our thoughts and actions.

This is what I wrote about. I wrote on a wide windowsill because I had no desk. I often stopped to look out of the window and gaze at the snow-covered lime trees in the Zoological Garden. I could hear the sad, unanswered cry of that bird on the lake: ‘What’s happened? Oh my God, what’s happened?’ As I was writing I received a letter from the Union of Cities. I had been summoned by its director, the prominent Kadet Shchepkin.fn1 I went to see Shchepkin the next morning. The union’s offices were in a large building next to the Moscow Arts Theatre. I was met by a small, elderly, amiable-looking man. He was wearing a displeased expression. ‘Well, my dear young man,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid I have some most unpleasant news for you.’

His words were straight from Gogol’s Inspector General, and it was evident that he was pleased with himself, for he cleared his throat, waved his pudgy hands in the air and repeated them: ‘Most unpleasant news! During your time in Zamirie with one of our hospital trains the emperor paid a visit.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that is correct.’

‘Yes,’ Shchepkin replied, ‘and something else is correct. Namely, that one of the members of the unit described the emperor’s visit to Zamirie in a rather satirical fashion. He wrote this in a letter to a friend, having forgotten, no doubt due to his youth and inexperience, about the military censorship. Does this also sound correct?’

‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘that is correct.’ While I had been in hospital in Nesvizh I had heard a great deal about the emperor’s visit and wrote about it in a letter to an old schoolmate in Kiev.

‘And we now know it is correct’, Shchepkin continued, ‘that the military censor opened this letter. The signature was illegible, but because the envelope bore the stamp of your unit, the censor entrusted the matter to us to discover the identity of the man who wrote this letter and forbid him from returning to the front. Is this your letter?’ He showed me the letter.

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve got off lightly,’ said Shchepkin. ‘From what I hear we are losing a good worker, but there’s nothing to be done about it. I’ll ask you to turn in your papers at once and collect what’s still owed you.’

I had been so intent on getting back to my unit, and this came as a harsh and devastating blow. I didn’t go home but walked over to the Tretyakov Gallery. It was empty. The old women attendants dozed in their corners. A warm draught emanated from the radiators. I sat down in front of Flavitsky’s Princess Tarakanova.fn2 I stared at it for a long time, over an hour. I stared because the woman in the painting looked like Lëlya. I didn’t want to go home. Now I finally realised that I had no home to go to.