The Story of a Life

66

The Hotel Great Britain

In Yuzovka I took a cheap room in the Hotel Great Britain. This fetid dump had been named in honour of Hughes and Balfour,fn1 two Englishmen who owned enormous factories and mines in the Don Basin.

Today there is nothing left of old Yuzovka. What had once been a dirty and shabby town ringed by wooden huts and earthen hovels is now a pleasant, well-ordered city. These nasty areas went by a number of nicknames all reflecting a black humour commensurate with their miserable appearance: ‘She-Devil’, ‘Bitch’, ‘Dark Angel’. In the same hollow as the town stood the Novorossiisk Factory, where I had been sent to work. Smoke belched from its massive chimneys and poured from its various workshops. The smoke was the yellow of fox fur and stank like scorched milk.

An extraordinary crimson flame danced above the tops of the blast furnaces. Greasy soot dripped from the sky. Due to the smoke and soot, the colour white had disappeared from Yuzovka. Everything that had started out white had turned a dirty grey with yellowish blotches: grey curtains, grey sheets and pillowcases, grey shirts. Even white horses, cats and dogs had turned a dingy, yellow-speckled grey.

It seldom rained in Yuzovka, and a hot wind blew day and night to form clouds of rubbish, coal dust and chicken feathers. Every street and courtyard was covered in sunflower shells. The layer grew thicker after every holiday. The locals had their own word for chewing sunflower seeds. ‘Husking’ they called it. Every last person in Yuzovka husked. It was rare to encounter someone without bits of sunflower shell stuck to their chin. Many locals were true virtuosos in the art of husking, particularly the women gossiping at their front gates. They husked unbelievably fast and had a miraculous way of flicking the seeds into their mouths with their thumbnails, never once missing their target.

Husking at their gates still left them plenty of time to badmouth their neighbours, as only lower-middle-class women in the south know how – in dirty, evil language tinged with an element of naïve impudence. Every one of these women was, of course, ‘the queen of her yard’. When not husking and gossiping, the women would fight. As soon as two women flew at each other, screeching and clawing at each other’s hair, a cackling crowd formed around them. An old drunk would whip off his torn cap and pass it around taking bets – two kopecks on the favourite. It often happened that the women had been intentionally provoked.

Sometimes the fight grew and grew and got out of control. It wasn’t long before the whole street joined in. Men rushed out of their houses pulling up their trousers and carrying lead-tipped whips and knuckledusters. Noses were broken and eyes blackened, blood flowed. Then, from the ‘New World’, where the managers of the mines and factories lived, a Cossack patrol trotted up and scattered the combatants with their horses and their lashes.

It was difficult to understand who these inhabitants of Yuzovka were. The hotel’s imperturbable porter told me they were ‘hangers-on’ – rag-and-bone merchants, money lenders, market women, kulaks, tavern owners, all of them feeding off the workers and miners from the nearby villages. Factories belched smoke from all sides. Dusty, grey pyramids of slag from the mines lined the horizon.

The Hotel Great Britain deserves to be described, like some long-extinct fossil.

Its walls had originally been painted the colour of rancid beef. After some time the hotel’s owner came to find this uninspiring and had them redone with murals in the then fashionable ‘Decadent’ style – white and purple irises and the heads of women peeping out coquettishly from behind water lilies. The entire hotel reeked of cheap face powder, strong medicines and burnt fat from the kitchen. The electric lights produced nothing more than a smudgy yellow glow, too dim to read by. The beds had broken springs and a deep valley down the middle. The young maids ‘received guests’ at any hour of the day or night. Downstairs, sickly-looking youths wearing bow-ties and caps cocked at a raffish angle played snooker on the table’s torn and patched baize. Every night someone got his head bashed in with a cue. The stakes were high. The money was kept in the pockets of the billiard table. The players never took their eyes off it since quick-fingered petty crooks lurked about waiting for their opportunity.

The walls between the rooms were thin. At night I heard sighs, moans, arguments and, sometimes, women’s bloodcurdling screams. When that happened, the porter was summoned, the door was broken in, a sobbing woman in dishevelled clothing – usually one of the hotel maids – ran from the room, and some drunken youth with a sweaty mop of hair was dragged out, cursing and swinging left and right at anyone within reach. He was tied up and given a stern lecture as they pushed him out of the hotel and took him away: ‘Cheated that poor girl again, didn’t you? You dog. Hanging’s too good for you!’ The maids rushed to the girl’s side. Still sobbing, she showed them the few coins – proof she had been swindled – clutched in her fist. They counted the money and gasped, insisting in unison that all men deserved to be drowned in sulphuric acid.

A regular participant in these scandals was a short, grey-haired commercial traveller – a representative of Mandel & Company, purveyors of ready-to-wear clothing. He wore a loose-fitting cherry-red suit and sturdy yellow shoes with bulging toes. He always comforted the insulted women.

‘Musya, you oughtn’t to take it so much to heart,’ he would say. ‘You need to adopt a more philosophical approach to such matters. Just look at me.’

‘You know what you can do with your advice!’ Musya replied through her tears. ‘I hope you choke on all your helpful ideas. I know all about you and your philosophy!’

‘The ancient Greeks’, he went on, unperturbed, ‘believed that serenity was the ultimate foundation of happiness. The ultimate foundation! Understand? Ultima ratio! And so, how much, ultimately, did he cheat you out of?’

‘A rouble, the snake!’ she said, having stopped crying.

‘Here’s a rouble for you. Now dry your tears, fix yourself up all nice and pretty as you were before, and then bring a bottle of wine, another of Borjomi and some biscuits to my room.’

‘You know where you can go!’ said the girl indignantly. ‘Think you can have me for a rouble? You smelly old rat!’

He took no offence. Hands in his pockets, the old man just strolled up and down the corridor, singing:

Beneath an Argentine sky so sultry,

Where the women, like pictures, are so lovely,

And the southern breezes blow quite softly,

Dear Joey fell in love with his little Chloë.

Everyone’s favourite in the hotel was a lodger known as ‘Uncle Grisha’. A beaten-down, quiet man with a brownish beard and baby-blue eyes, he went around in an alpaca jacket with nothing underneath. He kept the jacket wrapped tightly around his naked body out of modesty and was always shaking, though not from the cold but because he was perpetually hungover.

It was said that Uncle Grisha was the son of a senator from Petersburg, that he had graduated from college, squandered a great fortune in Paris, then had become a piano player in a cinema (or ‘L’Illusion’ as it was called), and now lived on charity and the odd rouble or two he earned at parties singing tragic romances and demonstrating his virtuosity on the guitar. Uncle Grisha was so miserable that even the hotel proprietor, an obese gentleman in a bowler hat and tight, checked trousers, took pity on him and gave him a job stoking the boiler that heated the water for tea. In return, Uncle Grisha lived for free in the small room with the boiler.

His cubbyhole became a sort of club room. Here the ‘permanent residents’ of the hotel gathered to play dominoes and cards (almost always durakfn2), told fortunes and discussed current events, while the maids darned socks, sewed or ironed.

Once a birthday party was thrown here for Lyuba, the second-floor maid. Four of the lodgers, including myself, were invited, ‘out of respect’. The other three were Faina Abramovna, an elderly dentist; a tall man on crutches who worked for a Kharkov newspaper; and Albert, a chemist’s assistant with delicate, freckled skin and an insolent smile plastered to his face. The old commercial traveller tried to gatecrash, but the maids wouldn’t let him in. The girls were all done up in their finest, and Lyuba, pale and silent in a black dress, looked, in the words of Albert, like ‘la reine Margot’. Too excited to talk, Lyuba occasionally raised her long eyelashes and looked at us intently. Each time I was amazed by the innocent sparkle in her eyes.

It was hard to believe this was the same Lyuba who had been sobbing a few nights before, covering a breast with her torn muslin nightdress and pressing her round, bare knees together as she swore at the top of her lungs (‘Bastard! Swine!’) at the dirty, thick-set lodger from Room 34.

Uncle Grisha had shaved and put on a borrowed pink shirt fastened with a bronze tie pin in the shape of a lizard. We sat down at the table to a meal of leftover hors d’oeuvres from the hotel buffet and a few bottles of rowanberry vodka. In the centre stood a large bouquet of violet paper roses. Lyuba walked over to Uncle Grisha and stroked his few remaining hairs. He caught her hand and held it and, for a moment, Lyuba pressed his shaking head to her breast. She was looking over the top of it through the window and wore her typical calm expression. Flushed and happy, the girls kept offering us more food and vodka. They looked us sweetly in the eyes, saying: ‘Please, do help yourselves. Let’s drink to Lyuba’s health and happiness. Come now, don’t be shy! It’s all quite fresh, straight from the kitchen, you needn’t worry.’

Lyuba sat between Uncle Grisha and me. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ she said, ‘what is it you’re always writing? Every time I tidy your room, I keep finding little pieces of paper all over the place. What are you writing about? Something to do with happy lives filled with love and tenderness?’

‘Yes, Lyuba,’ I told her. ‘I’m writing about happy lives, about love and tenderness.’

‘Oh, if only my life were interesting,’ Lyuba sighed, ‘then maybe you could write something about me. A whole book even. People would read it and weep.’

‘Drink, Lyubka,’ Musya instructed her, ‘it’s the best thing to cure your grief.’

Lyuba’s eyes had darkened. ‘Shut up!’ she told Musya quietly. ‘I can handle my grief on my own.’

‘Sorry, Lyubka, I just meant I’m on your side,’ said Musya.

‘Do you also write songs?’ Lyuba asked, turning to me. ‘And by the way, don’t pay any attention to that fool Musya. Just ignore her.’

‘No, no songs. I used to write poems. I know a lot by heart.’

‘Romantic ones?’

‘Yes, some.’

‘Recite one.’

‘All right,’ I said. The vodka had gone to my head by now. ‘I’ll recite one, but just for you since it’s your birthday.’

‘Really, just for me?’ asked Lyuba, lightly tugging on the silver ring on my little finger. ‘Whose ring is this?’

‘Mine.’

‘It can’t be.’

The party had got noisy by now. I paused for a minute trying to think of something short and simple, but nothing came to mind. Oh well, I thought, either she understands it or she doesn’t. I began in a slightly sing-song voice:

No, it’s not you I love so ardently,

Not for me the radiance of your beauty:

I love in you my past suffering

And my lost youth.

Everyone fell silent.

Sometimes when I look at you,

And search your eyes intently:

I engage in a mysterious conversation,

Tho’ in my heart it’s to another I speak.

I stopped.

‘Well, go on!’ Lyuba said sharply. ‘Since you’ve started breaking our hearts, you might as well finish.’

I speak to a girl of my younger days,

In your features I seek those of another,

In living lips, lips long silent,

In living eyes, the fire of eyes long extinguished.

One of the girls drew a noisy breath and started to sob.

‘That’s Lermontov,’ said Uncle Grisha, tuning his guitar. ‘He’s better sung than recited.’ He strummed a soft chord and began to sing in a clear and pleasing tenor voice: ‘I set out alone on the road, the rocky path shining through the fog …’

‘Come on, everyone, join in!’ he ordered, and his guitar resumed its melancholy tune. ‘Everybody sing! “The night is still, the desert hearkens to God, the stars converse.”’

We all sang the end of the stanza softly together. Lyuba sat with her elbows on the table, her chin resting on her folded hands, gazing out of the window. Uncle Grisha played, his head raised, tears rolling down his cheeks. Just then the door flew open and in walked the dirty, thick-set lodger from Room 34. His lascivious eyes searched out Lyuba.

‘Lyubochka, my darling, I’ve been looking for you. Do come out for a minute. I simply must speak with you,’ he pleaded.

‘Talk?’ Lyuba asked. ‘You need to talk to me? In your room?’

‘Yes, why not, in my room. That would be best.’

Lyuba stood up. ‘You know what day it is. So why are you in here bothering me now, on my birthday? Can’t you stop pestering me? You’ll have to wait, you bastard, now get lost!’

‘Lyubka!’ Musya squealed, but it was too late. Lyuba had grabbed the bottle of rowanberry vodka and threw it at him with all her might. It hit him in the head and shattered. He put his hands to his fat face, now covered in blood and vodka, stumbled backwards out of the room, tripped over the threshold and crashed to the floor.

‘I’ll kill you!’ Lyuba shouted wildly. ‘I’ll kill all of them, the mad dogs! All of them! Don’t touch me! Don’t even come near me! I’ll get even with every last one of them, the swine, even if it means forced labour in Siberia for me. I’ll do it, I’ll do it, I tell you!’

She collapsed onto a chair and laid her head on the table. ‘Oh, my friends!’ she said quietly, her voice full of grief. ‘Dear girls, won’t they ever leave us in peace, to just be as we wish, free of their dirty wickedness?’ She sat there trembling. After a while she said, ‘It’s as if I’ve had a lovely dream … Thank you, Uncle Grisha, thank you, for this day, my darling. Thank you all.’

Lyuba began sobbing and coughing. Uncle Grisha stood next to her, shaking and fighting to hold back his tears. I put my hands on her shoulders. Even through her dress I could feel how hot they were. I knew that she needed to hear those most important words that one hears but once in a lifetime, words that can save your life. Yet I was incapable of saying them, of coming to her rescue. Perhaps I should have lied. Perhaps I would have if I had been certain it would have made things better for Lyuba. I had spoken those words already, long ago in Belorussia, when Lëlya, dying, her eyes full of tears, had gently pushed me away.

But Lyuba didn’t need to hear the words from me. She needed Uncle Grisha to say them, but he, a drunken, shaky, feeble old man who lived on charity, was unable. So, I said nothing. I took Lyuba’s hand and held it firmly. She looked at me through the tears clinging to her eyelashes and stroked my cheek. No matter how serious people may smirk, no matter what they may say about sentimentality, I have never forgotten that look of hers and I never will.

Loud voices rang out in the corridor, followed by hurried steps and the jangle of spurs. I stuck my head out to look. The whole corridor was full of frightened lodgers. A tall thin sergeant followed by several policemen entered the room. They politely removed their hats.

‘Please, come along, miss,’ the sergeant said firmly but with a note of pity.

Lyuba got up at once and walked out without looking at anyone. She didn’t even turn round.

They took the dirty, thick-set lodger away. The girls fell, crying, into each other’s arms, while Uncle Grisha grabbed a bottle of vodka with a violently shaking hand and drank down glass after glass as though it were water. At this point, the man on crutches, who had not said a word all evening, got up, shut the door, and said: ‘We’ll be called as witnesses. At the trial we must say that this man attacked Lyuba, that he cursed at her and beat her, and she hit him with the bottle in self-defence. And this old man’, here he pointed a crutch at Uncle Grisha, ‘has to be stone-cold sober. And he has to give the same testimony as the rest of us.’

Upon hearing this, Uncle Grisha rose. He stared the man straight in the eye and said with authority: ‘My dear sir! It’s not for you to give me instructions on how a gentleman is to treat a lady. I learned this at my mother’s knee. Although fate has seen fit to bring about my ruin, this does not give anyone the right to insult my honour. Be that as it may, I shall forgive you, but only because you acted out of chivalry.’

Uncle Grisha took the man’s hand and shook it firmly.

Something shifted in my consciousness that night. I no longer shunned all those things that had once disturbed me. I stopped treating people so casually – I now understood that I had an obligation to look for every spark of humanity in the people I encountered, no matter how different or unappealing they might seem. There is something in every human heart that responds, no matter how faintly, to that which is true and good.

Not long after the incident with Lyuba I moved out of the Hotel Great Britain and into the draughtsmen’s office at the shell casing workshop in the factory. It was the draughtsman Grinko, the thin, consumptive-looking former SR, who had helped me make the move. He had visited me once at the hotel and was so disgusted by the smell that he talked me into moving even though I would not be staying in Yuzovka much longer. Grinko was the only one who worked in the office. I left the workshop late and slept on a wooden bench.

Life at the factory was so different from the suffocating life at the hotel that they might have been hundreds of versts apart. In the evening after work I went to the Bessemer shop. I could stand there for hours watching the molten steel pour from the gigantic tilting furnaces that looked like black pears three storeys high. I also went to watch the iron being poured from the open-hearth furnaces. It was a sinister sight. The molten iron ran into trenches in the ground amid clouds of blood-red steam. Everything around was either coal-black or burning red. The workers, lit by the hot liquid iron, looked like demons from hell.

Sometimes I walked over to the rail-rolling shop. Enormous rollers, screeching and shuddering, grabbed the white-hot pig-iron and bit down hard with their cold metal jaws, turning the short, fat billets into long, thin bars. Each bar went from roller to roller, being stretched and pressed thinner and thinner, until it finally emerged a deep-red length of rail. The finished rails skidded inches from your feet on metal rollers amid a heavy shower of sparks. The vast dark space roared and shook, screeched and rattled, thudded, clanked, smoked, sparked and hissed with steam. Through the din came long, loud cries of ‘Watch out!’ as workers raced past with steel carts carrying glowing pig-iron. If you didn’t jump out of the way in time your clothes began to smoulder, while overhead, a crane swung with another mass of hot pig iron clutched in its claws like some massive crab.

Grinko left the office late. He was a bachelor and in no hurry to get home. After he had left, I lay down on the couch to read. I liked hearing the rumble from the factory. It calmed me to know that nearby hundreds of men were hard at work through the night. A portrait of Bessemer, the man who had invented this new way of making steel, hung on the wall. I dropped off to sleep to the shaking, whirring and humming of the factory and dreamed that I was travelling along on a fast-moving train.

Seated at his slanted draughting table with his long nose and floppy hair, Grinko looked like a caricature of Gogol. The similarity was highlighted by Grinko’s black hat and cloak with lion-head clasps. Such cloaks had once been worn by naval officers. One day I told him about the hospital train. It was then that he told me how Sokolovsky had got him out of prison. I tried not to talk to Grinko about politics. I couldn’t understand how a former revolutionary could be employed at an ordnance factory, and as a draughtsman no less. Grinko talked with a contemptuous smirk, bored by everything, except for those rare moments when a spark of malice flashed in his eyes.

I noticed that the workers laughed at him behind his back. They called him the ‘retired carnival barker’, clearly a sly dig at his former revolutionary activity. Once, while shining my electric torch into a shell casing, I found a note inside: ‘Don’t trust the draughtsman. Burn this note.’ I did burn it, and from that moment I began to watch closely all the workers who delivered the casings, but their faces never gave anything away.

The day before I left Yuzovka I found a hectographed leaflet slipped into a casing. The words ‘Workers of the World, Unite!’ had been stamped in the top right corner. It was a Bolshevik proclamation, calling for the end of the imperialist war between nations and the start of a civil war between the classes. I read the proclamation and then stuck it back in the casing. When I returned to the workshop after lunch it was gone. The workers looked at me and smiled, but no one said a word.

The train for Taganrog left in the evening. I said goodbye to Grinko.

‘You had no reason to distrust me,’ he said, sitting sullenly at his table and not raising his eyes. ‘Yes, I was once an SR, but now I’m an anarchist.’

After a moment he said in voice that suggested he doubted his own words:

‘Anarchy is the only way of constructing a rational human society.’

‘Well, all right then,’ I said, ‘God help you!’

‘Either you’re an opportunist or a cynic,’ he said quietly though in a voice filled with anger. ‘And I thought I was dealing with a fellow progressive.’

‘As you can see from my identity papers I’m nothing more than a child of a petty-bourgeois family from the village of Vasilkov in the province of Kiev. So what do you expect? But anyway, I’m grateful to you for your hospitality and the last thing I want is to quarrel with you.’

‘It’s clear you’ll go far,’ he said rudely, no longer trying to hide his feelings.

‘Well, not as far as you! I’ll swear to that. Goodbye.’

I picked up my suitcase. Grinko sat there, still just as sullen. He snorted and watched me go with his beady eyes but didn’t say a word. I left.

I waited for the night train to Taganrog in the gloomy buffet at the station in Yasinovataya. I couldn’t help but think that another brief stage of my life had passed and brought me nothing but more grief. But strange as it may seem, this grief did not weaken but actually strengthened my faith that better days were coming, that the people’s freedom lay ahead. It would come, I told myself. It couldn’t fail to come, if only because so much enormous creative energy had been spent in expectation of its arrival.