The Story of a Life

64

The Suburb of Chechelevka

In February Mama and Galya left for Kiev. I stayed in Moscow, hoping to find a job. Just then Uncle Kolya, an artillery engineer, was transferred from Bryansk to Moscow and attached to the French military mission. The mission had been sent to Russia to organise the manufacture of high-explosive grenades. Aunt Marusya joined Uncle Kolya in Moscow. They were given a government flat in a little building on 1st Meshchanskaya Street.

French artillerists from the mission often dined at their flat. I was invited to a few of these meals and liked to observe the Frenchmen. Their light blue uniforms smelled of eau-de-Cologne. Most of the officers brought Aunt Marusya flowers, and they were to a man exceedingly courteous. But beneath the charm and exquisite manners, I caught a whiff of Dumas’s The Three Musketeers.

This was most apparent after some Russian vodka. They joked and roared with laughter, the noise grew louder, and then they all broke into a song about a station master. The song, a favourite of French railway passengers, had been composed with the sole intent of driving station masters mad with rage. As the station master came out onto the platform to see the train off, the passengers would line up at their open windows and begin to sing in time with the rhythm of the wheels – first slowly and then faster and faster – as they bowed in unison like Chinese puppets. ‘Il est cocu, le chef de gare. Il est cocu, le chef de gare,’ went the song over and over. ‘He’s a cuckold, the station master. He’s a cuckold, the station master.’

The officers mimicked the scene. Their old colonel, who had a little yellow beard, was particularly funny as the station master.

Sometimes the officers quarrelled, and you could almost smell gunpowder in the air of Uncle Kolya’s small dining room and imagine the men reaching for their swords. Eyes flashed, thin moustaches twitched, insults flew across the table, until finally the colonel raised a hand in his fine tailored shirt. In an instant, everyone fell silent.

According to Uncle Kolya, the officers were knowledgeable engineers. The colonel was considered one of France’s leading metallurgists and had written several books on the subject. Uncle Kolya had connections at a number of metallurgical works. I asked him if he could get me a job as a factory hand somewhere. He was not in the least surprised by my request and found a position for me as an inspector of shell casings at the Bryansk Works in Yekaterinoslav.

But first I was required to get some training at a factory in Moscow on inspection methods and the working of hydraulic presses. Casings in those days were made on such presses. I was sent to the Gustav List Works on the Sofiiskaya Embankment. I began by learning to read blueprints – smudgy drawings of the component parts of hydraulic presses on pages of blue paper. You could go blind trying to read them. I was also taught how to use sophisticated measuring instruments to inspect the quality of casings and fuses.

I returned home from the works to our deserted flat. Mama had sold the little furniture we had, and it was now empty as a barn. All that remained was a camp bed and a chair. I liked the solitude. No one interrupted my reading until all hours of the night. I was free to smoke and think. I thought about all the books I knew I just had to write. I ended up writing completely different books, but that’s another matter.

Soon I left Moscow. I boarded the wrong train and had to get off at Rzhava, south of Kursk. I sat here for a few hours waiting for my train, which was running late. The wait didn’t bother me. I enjoyed sitting in the third-class waiting room, reading the timetables, listening to the bells and punctuated tapping of the telegraph machine, and going out onto the platform to watch the express trains rush through. They went so fast the small station shook. I walked around in the nearby fields. Spring had already arrived here. The snowbanks had shrunk into the ground and those that remained were riddled with holes like pumice stone. Clouds of jackdaws circled and cawed. At that moment, and at many since then, I wanted to walk off into those wet fields of spring and never come back.

In Yekaterinoslav I rented part of a room in a house in the suburb of Chechelevka, not far from the Bryansk Works. I was down to my last twelve roubles. The house belonged to the widowed lathe operator. He lived with his only child, a 25-year-old daughter named Glasha, who was ill with tuberculosis. I had rented for myself one corner of the kitchen. A riveter from the Bryansk Works – a tall fellow with wild eyes – had rented another corner. I never heard him make a sound. He never once responded to any of my questions, as if he were stone deaf. Every night he brought back with him on his way home from the factory a bottle of cloudy Yekaterinoslav boza, drank it down, passed out in his clothes on his shabby mattress on the floor, and slept as if dead until the first factory whistle blew in the morning.

Our landlord had a black moustache and talked almost as little as the riveter. He was utterly indifferent to us lodgers. Nevertheless, he did once speak to me: ‘You’re some kind of student, right? You might give me some sort of book to read. It’d help clear my head.’

I had no books. He was silent and then said: ‘If Glasha weren’t sick I’d marry her off. To you. You’ve got some sort of future. I see you up all night writing. If you two got married, you wouldn’t have to lie about there under the sink. The tap’s always running, dripping. Can’t imagine you can get much sleep.’

He said all this in a bored way, as though just to make conversation, without really expecting anything to come of it. That night I heard Glasha tell him off through the door: ‘Why do you have to bother every lodger with your nonsense? You’re always trying to pawn me off on someone. I’m not some lazy mouth you have to feed. I’m the one doing all the work around here.’

‘You goose,’ said her father unperturbed, almost tenderly. ‘You broody hen, you! It’s your happiness I’m thinking of. You can’t spend your whole life in that little room of yours, staring at the wallpaper.’

‘There’s no happiness left for me in this life,’ said Glasha. She burst into tears. ‘You yourself don’t know why you had me. You can’t bear to think about it. My life will be over by the spring.’

Her father left the house in a temper. Having dried her tears, Glasha came out into the kitchen to ask whether I could give her something to read – something about undying love. Her face was heavily powdered. The powder together with the underlying paleness of her face made it look as though she were wearing a cardboard mask. She reeked of sugary-sweet perfume. I told her I didn’t have any love stories, certainly none about undying love.

‘Oh, I’m so sick of you lodgers!’ she said.

She locked herself in her room, wound up her old gramophone and put on a record of nonsense songs by the popular Moscow clowns Bim and Bom:

Lucretia did fry up,

Some dumplings in a pawnshop,

While Monna Giovanna did quicken

To douse with perfume her chicken.

Often at night Glasha had coughing fits. Gasping, she would say to the walls: ‘O Lord, if only some kind person would come along and shoot me like a dog.’ Feeling sorry for her I borrowed a copy of Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea, the story of the sailor Gilliat’s undying love, from the local library. She devoured the book in one night. I was lying on my mattress on the floor reading. The riveter was grinding his teeth in his sleep. Suddenly, the door to Glasha’s room sprang open and Hugo’s book flew through the air, pages scattering this way and that, before it smacked onto the floor next to my mattress.

‘Keep it!’ shouted Glasha. ‘Keep your filthy book! It’s poison! I hope your Frenchman chokes on it. It’s all lies! He lies like a dog! Nothing of the sort ever happened. It couldn’t! Would I be living like this if such a man existed? I’d have found him by now if he did, and I’d worship the ground he walked on.’

‘Such men do exist,’ I said. ‘And stop shouting!’

‘Shouting, am I? Now there’s a bit of news. What would you rather I do, sing? How about “Everyone says I’m frivolous, / Everyone says I’ve many lovers!” Or would you rather I dance the maxixe? I hate you!’ she shouted, knocking the gramophone off the table. ‘I hate you! I wish I’d never laid eyes on you! May you burn in hell!’

She tore off a loose strip of wallpaper. Dust flew. The riveter jumped up and ran to the sink to wash. He thought he had heard the morning’s first whistle. Just then the lathe operator came in. He tried to grab Glasha by the arms, but she broke free, and with blazing eyes and clenched teeth, her skin a deathly white, she tore at the wallpaper, strip by strip, until the room looked black and bare, as though it had been turned inside out.

The soft blue of a spring dawn shone through the window. It all ended when Glasha began coughing up blood and was taken to the factory hospital. The lathe operator started to drink. The riveter was unfazed by the state of the flat or the fate of the landlord and just went on downing his nightly bottle of boza and sleeping in until his next shift.

Soon after Glasha’s death the riveter moved out and the flat became empty. One evening, as I lay alone in the flat on my mattress reading, I heard a soft but insistent knock at the door. I opened it. It was Bugaenko, from my workshop at the factory. Normally a quiet, sarcastic sort of fellow, he was obviously upset.

‘Can I come in?’ he said. ‘I need to talk to you.’ He gazed at the bare black walls and sighed. ‘You’ve had bad luck ending up here. The landlord’s a fool. You should move.’

‘I won’t be staying here in Yekaterinoslav much longer,’ I said. ‘It’s not worth it.’

‘He’s a fool,’ Bugaenko repeated. ‘He’s drowning himself in vodka, trying to run away from life and his comrades. He’s an embarrassment to the proletariat. Most of us are stronger than that.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘The workers you’ve got there are among the best.’

‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. We’ve had our eye on you for some time now. You must have noticed.’

‘But why?’ I asked, nervously.

‘We’ve been trying to figure you out,’ replied Bugaenko. He grinned. ‘You have to be careful around others nowadays. It’s hard to know who you can trust.’

‘So, what have you figured out?’

Bugaenko sat down, lit a cigarette and started talking, almost as if he were speaking to himself. He said that they had observed me for quite some time until becoming convinced, in his words, that although I was not part of the revolutionary movement, nonetheless I was someone with possibilities. The thing was, they wanted to put out a leaflet attacking the arbitrary nature of rule in the country, but they had no one to write it. It would be good if I, clearly an educated man, would write the leaflet for them. They, the workers, would look it over and then ‘put it into circulation’.

I said yes. I wrote the leaflet, filling it with as much pathos as I could muster. I like to think the ghost of Victor Hugo watched over me as I wrote.

Bugaenko wasn’t pleased. ‘You missed the target,’ he said. ‘It’s good, it’s well written, polished, but beautiful writing tends to smooth things over, it calms people down, which is all fine and good, but only when called for. What we need is clarity. It has to be simple so everyone can understand it, even the most illiterate. It has to make them angry, so angry that they want to act. Their hands should ball into hard fists as they read it. I know this isn’t easy. It’s harder than writing something pretty. Give it another try.’

I worked hard on it for several nights in a row before I managed to put down on paper something simple and direct. The leaflet was copied on a hectograph machine and then pasted on the factory walls and circulated among the workers. I was proud of my work but, unfortunately, my authorship had to be kept a secret. I wanted to keep one copy for myself as a memento, but Bugaenko took it from me, saying I was a lousy conspirator. Still, he was pleased with the leaflet. Smiling at me through his trimmed, tobacco-stained moustache and shifting into Ukrainian dialect, he said: ‘Oh yes, some fine Cossack boys we’ve got here in our little Zaporozhian troop.’

My job at the works was to inspect the shell casings. They were stacked up in piles on trestle tables. I shone a small electric torch into each case, checking for blisters and overburns. Next I measured the diameter with callipers. I marked each defective shell with a cross in white chalk. There were a lot of them. The old women in our crew carted them back to the smelters.

I worked next to a large circular saw that cut the metal into pieces. The shriek it made was unbearable. It sent cold shivers down my spine and set every single nerve on edge. It bored into my brain like a drill. I thought I was going deaf and blind from the racket and would have blown that saw up with a bomb if I could have. A worse assault on one’s brain, heart, nerves – on one’s entire being – would be hard to imagine. It was even worse when the saw stopped, because we stood there in terror waiting for it to start up again. The anticipation made one sick. Within minutes, the saw howled back into life in triumph and began once again to cut metal with its savage, whirling teeth amid a fountain of burning red sparks.

I did not report to the factory boss, but to the representative of the Artillery Command attached to the Bryansk Works, a Captain Velyaminov, sent down from Petrograd. I was required to go and see him every three or four days with an update on my work. For a long time I couldn’t think of who he reminded me of, until finally it came to me: the Decembrist Yakubovich.fn1 Velyaminov had the same lean face, dark drooping moustache and black bandage over his forehead.

Velyaminov lived on Bolshoi Avenue. The windows of his room looked out onto the river Dnieper and the surrounding gardens. The trees were now in full bud. The barely perceptible greenish haze of early spring hung in the air. Velyaminov’s room was cluttered with blueprints, books and all sorts of things that had nothing to do with his work in artillery.

He had a passion for photography and the local history of Russia’s forgotten towns and villages. The windowsills were crowded with flasks, graduated glasses and trays for developing and printing. The room had the acidic smell of fixing solution. Photographs lay beside a potted philodendron on a round table covered with a velvet cloth. They were views of provincial towns – Porkhov, Gdov, Valdai, Loev, Roslavl and many others. Velayminov found some interesting feature in each of them to photograph. Smoke curling from the ever-present cigarette in his mouth, he would tell me in a smug but excited voice about all of his discoveries as he showed me the photographs. It might be a wooden gate from the era of Peter the Great, or simply a fancy balustrade on a balcony, sometimes a row of shops, or maybe a watchtower straight out of Gogol.

Velyaminov spent every holiday travelling to forgotten, out-of-the-way places. He visited the decaying country manors of the provincial nobility to photograph their collections of paintings, exquisite tiled stoves and sculptures still preserved in their crumbling ballrooms and neglected gardens, and then took the photographs back to Petrograd with him to show his friends who were connoisseurs of art. With restrained pride he told me how he had managed to find the grave of Pushkin’s nanny, Arina Rodionovna, in the village of Suida near Luga, as well as a bust by the noted sculptor Kozlovskyfn2 and two paintings by the French artist Poussin in a boarded-up mansion near Cherepovets.

I loved to sit there for hours looking at Velyaminov’s photographs. He served me tea from a thermos and sausage sandwiches. It was nice and warm in his cluttered room. I kept putting off leaving for Chechelevka and the bare kitchen where the rust-coloured cockroaches, practically transparent from hunger, raced up and down the walls. One day Velyaminov said: ‘It’s time you stopped moping in that place over in Chechelevka and going deaf from that saw. I’m sending you to Taganrog. It’s a wonderful town. Along the way I’m going to have you stop at Yuzovka and look in on the Novorossiisk Factory so you can show them how they ought to be inspecting the casings. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks. Does that sound good to you?’

Needless to say, I said yes, it did. Before parting, he gave me my pay and money for the journey and promised to come and see me in Taganrog in the summer.

Back in the kitchen at Chechelevka I hardly slept all night. We had to leave the light on to keep the cockroaches away. In the dark they would slither out of the walls and crawl all over our faces and hands. As I lay there, a crazy idea came to me: why not put off going to Yuzovka for five or six days and use the time to visit Sevastopol? Velyaminov would never know. I had been to Sevastopol once as a boy on the way from Kiev to Alushta with my entire family and had never forgotten it. I had often dreamed about it – a small, picturesque town bathed in the sea’s reflected light and smelling of seaweed and the smoke of steamships.

Water dripped from the tap, the cockroaches drank from a small puddle on the floor, a drunk sobbed and yelled in the street below – ‘Shoot me, Judas! Stab me in the back!’ – but none of it bothered me. I could already smell, as I dozed off, the almond-scented air of Sevastopol’s gardens.