The Story of a Life

67

Notebooks and Memory

Writers are often asked whether they keep notes or rely solely on memory. Most writers keep notebooks but rarely use them for their work. Their diaries and journals exist as a separate literary genre, and this is why they are sometimes published side by side with an author’s novels and stories.

I remember old Shulgin, our Russian literature teacher back at the gymnasium, always telling us that ‘culture is memory’. At first, we didn’t really understand what Shulgin meant by that, but with time we realised that he was right.

‘We hold entire centuries in our memory,’ Shulgin liked to say. ‘It’s memory that preserves the history of the world, all our thoughts, ideas and visions, and it is the memory of all that has come before that stimulates the human mind to further creation. Had we no memory, we would live like blind moles.’

For a writer, memory is nearly everything. It not only stores gathered material, it also acts like a magical sieve, separating out and preserving what is most valuable. The dust and dross pass through and are carried away by the wind. What remains are small bits of gold, and it is from these, I believe, that works of art are made.

I have a reason for discussing notebooks. A few years ago I was shown the notebook of a dead writer. I started to read it and soon became convinced that these were not the usual short notes of random impressions one would expect to find, but a fairly consistent description of some seaside town. Let me try to reconstruct this description as accurately as possible.

As I read along, forgotten colours and smells and details of the place came back to me, but I couldn’t place them. They appeared out of the mist or as fragments of an old dream that you try to piece together like a broken statue. What was it about these notes? Most of all it was the description of trees, especially the acacias:

The trees’ flowers are touched by a soft yellow and pink bloom and appear to be a bit dried out. The leaves cast feathered shadows on the white walls and stir from an undetectable breeze. The sight of these living shadows is enough to tell you that you are in the south and not far from the sea. When the flowers drop, the wind scoops them up and rolls them down the street where they crash, murmuring like the surf, against fences and the exteriors of the houses.

I also found in the notebook a description of a slope leading down to the port. The way down to the harbour and out to the ships and the open sea is not as easy to describe as might be supposed:

Cobblestones leading down to the port polished to a leaden sheen by the hooves of carthorses. Spilled grains of oats and wheat sprout in the cracks between the stones. Steep breastworks overgrown with broom. It hangs over from above, like an arrested waterfall – a dense tangle of branches, leaves, thorns and yellow flowers. Deep recesses have been hacked out here and there in the dusty greenery. Each one is home to a little coffee house or shop. Here you can buy seltzer water or baklava, a flaky Greek pastry made with honey. All the coffee houses have glass fronts. You can look through to see card players in the faded striped vests worn by sailors gambling furiously. And there’s more. Old women seated along low benches sell roasted chestnuts. The coals in the braziers throw off heat. There’s a constant popping sound – bursting chestnut shells.

A sharp turn – down below lies what looks like a toy port straight out of a children’s picture book. Narrow piers overgrown with grass. It covers the railway tracks. A pity. Otherwise I’d be able to see the rusty red rails and the white heads of the daisies clinging to them.

The barrels of the iron harbour guns, like drinking glasses, are filled with brackish water. If you bend over a gun, your heart beats faster – the water smells of the ocean and wormwood, it’s a smell that clears your head and reminds you of long sea voyages, the kind that heal your soul and quicken the mind.

Small, greenish waves dance around the pilings. Seagulls screech and squawk greedily high overhead, having spotted a school of unsuspecting little fish.

The beating of the waves against the base of the signal beacon’s hollow iron tower at the end of the pier makes a ringing sound. Mysterious signs – spheres and cones – hang from the harbour masts. What do these black spheres predict? Perhaps a storm. Or perhaps a dead calm. The transparency of the air infuses the seawater all the way to the bottom. No, it must mean a storm. The black sails of the fishing boats flap with alarm. Deck lights blink in the twilight.

The idea of a long sea voyage has already taken root in my mind, yet nevertheless it will be hard to leave this pleasant little town, where blue and green shutters rattle against the walls in the breeze and lighted interiors reveal rooms lined with shelves of big books – no doubt complete bound editions of The Planted Field, Around the World, Our Motherland.

Anyway, I can’t leave because there are no steamships in the port. They’re all lying far out in the roadstead. No steamships at all? There is, of course, a tugboat, snorting happily by the landing stage. And an old schooner, Toiler of the Sea, as well as two disarmed corvettes. They were towed in a long time ago to be broken up for scrap, but there they stand in the middle of the port, their heavy anchor chains reaching down into the water like outstretched arms. The corvettes dream of their past when they sailed through the Strait of Magellan and their bows sliced through the oily waters of the Aegean. If you look carefully you can make out through the dark their curved ram’s-head bows, bowsprits and funnels.

By day you can take a little boat out to one of the corvettes, and if you give the watchman a packet of Gypsy Ada cigarettes he’ll let you spend as long as you want reading on deck in the shade of the funnel. Read whatever you like, but such a spot is best suited to poetry or tales of travel, such as The Frigate Pallada or The Journals of Captain Cook. Or let the old sun-bleached deck and the smell of the seaweed clinging to the boat’s iron sides along the waterline suggest something else.

From the decks of these corvettes, witnesses of past glories from the four corners of the globe, you get a good view of the sea. You see it doesn’t sparkle with azure, turquoise, sapphire, aquamarine or any other jewels of the southern seas. The sea here is greenish and still. Its only ornament is the clouds, which the sea happily reflects.

The clouds slowly rise from the south and take on the appearance of medieval cities with their towers, cathedrals, basilicas, triumphal arches, glittering oriflammes and distant backdrop of snow-covered mountains – Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa.

Some eccentric artist has lit this town in a whimsical mood. The clouds shine, burning in the sunset with all the half-tones of the evening light, from blue to gold, from purple to silver.

I read this description with a nagging sense of familiarity. I kept looking for some name – of a street, a square, anything – that would tell me what town this was. Deep down I had a feeling I knew, but I wasn’t certain.

And then, finally, there it was. ‘Surprisingly, there is no mention of any of this – the sea, the port, the acacias, the black sails – in the books of one of our greatest writers who happened to be a native of this town.’ These words held the key. Of course, this was Taganrog, Chekhov’s birthplace. As soon as I realised this, everything I had read lost its aura of strangeness and became vividly real. Yes, this was Taganrog as I had seen it in 1916 when I arrived from Yuzovka and stayed on until late autumn. I saw it this way because I was young and a romantic. I lived on poetry and seafaring tales and I saw what I wanted to see. This is why I didn’t want to return to Taganrog for a long time as an adult, for fear it would be a completely different town from the one that I remembered. But in the end, I did. And with age we tend to lose the life-saving faculty of exaggeration.

I ended up back in Taganrog in the autumn of 1952 purely by chance, and I saw that the first impression of my youth had been right. Taganrog was the same – it had not lost any of its charm even though the character of the town had changed. Now it was a city of students – of boys and girls with armfuls of books, happy loud voices in the streets, laughter, arguments and songs. And where, in 1916, modest suburbs had encircled the old town, nice little towns for the workers at the new factories had sprung up. But the old town of Taganrog was just as cosy, quiet and deserted as before. The fishing boats with their black sails left the shore and headed out to sea so smoothly that from up on the hill where the monument to Peter the Great stands you would think the wind was blowing black autumn leaves across the water.

In 1916, I took a room in the Kumbaruli Hotel. Large, empty and cool, it had been built back in the days of yore when Taganrog was the richest settlement on the Sea of Azov – the centre for traders from Greece and Italy. In those days Taganrog had hosted extravagant performances of Italian opera, welcomed Garibaldi and Shcherbina – the poet and lover of ancient Greecefn1 – and witnessed the death of that bald dandy, Alexander I. It wasn’t long, though, before Odessa and Mariupol surpassed its wealth, and Taganrog emptied and fell silent.

The rooms at the Kumbaruli were so vast, the ceilings so high, that at night the lamps couldn’t reach to the four corners. It felt as though one had ended up in a dark tunnel. The murky frescoes on the walls depicted classical landscapes with ruins, gentle waterfalls and languishing shepherdesses in red skirts. They were, of course, busy weaving garlands.

For the first two months I worked at the boiler works owned by Neuve, Wilde & Company, a Belgian concern. The factory stood outside town in the middle of the hot steppe. From the workshops you could hear the chirring of the grasshoppers.

When I arrived the factory was assembling the very first hydraulic press for the manufacture of shell casings. Belgian engineers in panama hats and brightly coloured braces hurried about in the light, empty workshops. They treated us Russian workers with arrogance and distrust, or at least we never saw them without a sour expression on their faces. The factory was experiencing a go-slow at the time. Almost nothing was getting done. It took a full two months just to assemble the base for the press.

Food had become scarce in town. Sometimes there wasn’t even enough bread. Prices were rising, and we lived chiefly on seltzer water and salty hard tack, cases of which were somehow being surreptitiously obtained from the quartermaster’s stores and shared among the workers in our shop.

I could no longer afford to stay in the hotel so I rented a room from a certain Abrasha Flaks, a loud, carefree broker. Abrasha Flaks was convinced that along with my work at the factory I was writing stories about Jack the Ripper and the famous American detectives Nick Carter and Nat Pinkerton in my spare time. This was the only type of literature Abrasha deigned to acknowledge. His messy flat was strewn with tattered dime-store thrillers printed on cheap, dull paper but with bright, colourful covers depicting the most shocking crimes together with the equally shocking exploits of the detectives.

I particularly remember one cover that showed Nat Pinkerton falling into the clutches of a Black murderer. The killer held Pinkerton by the waist out over the edge of a bottomless precipice, while Nat coolly pointed his two revolvers at him. The moral was obvious: if the killer released his grip, Nat would fall to his death, but not before he pumped two bullets into the man. Clearly, neither could kill the other without being killed. Abrasha Flaks adored the cover.

Abrasha had a small, whining wife with black ringlets, an irritated voice and scrutinising eyes. ‘Don’t let her size fool you,’ Abrasha said to me in a confidential whisper. ‘She’s as mean as a feral cat. Better to go and drown yourself at sea than to live with such a woman.’

Abrasha never did drown himself, but he did look for distractions on the side. Once I ran into him on the pier with a mincing, ox-eyed girl. Red velvet poppies bobbed up and down on her hat while she coyly twirled a Japanese parasol decorated with pictures of dusky bathing beauties. Abrasha hired a boat and off they went for a ride. Once they had gone out a way from the pier the girl began to make suspicious giggles and squeals. The boatman, Lagunov, a severe, disapproving sort, said that Abrasha Flaks was a rogue and a skirt chaser and eventually he’d pay the price for it. Letting a man like that take a boat out was nothing but polluting the sea.

Every time Madame Flaks learned of his latest affair, the house exploded in a furious uproar. Madame Flaks would run into the yard in her dressing gown, fling her thin arms up to the heavens and begin screaming in a heart-rending voice: ‘Listen to me, all good women, listen, listen to what I have to say! He’s been at it again with that vile creature, that nasty Lyuska! May I never see my home again if I don’t kill that viper, and poison myself with sulphuric acid. Hand her over, I say! Let me get my hands on her!’

After this Madame Flaks dashed into the street, apparently to the chemist’s for some sulphuric acid or, perhaps, in search of Lyuska. Her compassionate neighbours ran after her, brought her home sobbing, and tried to calm her down: ‘Don’t get so upset, Madame Flaks, you’ll give yourself a heart attack. Think of your nerves! No man is perfect.’

‘Go and fetch my mama!’ sobbed Madame Flaks. ‘My dear old mama. She’s at 5 Telegrafny Lane! And fetch my little sister Berta. And Aunt Sofochka. And my clever Borechka. Let them come and judge him as on Judgment Day! And be sure to go and fetch him too, that dog, or else I don’t know just what I might do.’

She threw herself on the floor, rolling this way and that, thrashing and screaming. The women moaned and fussed about her and administered essence of valerian until finally, her ‘dear old mama’, a fat and threatening woman with a dark moustache, appeared.

‘I need quiet!’ she thundered in a bass voice before reaching the front door. ‘What the devil’s going on here? What’s this circus? Dump a bucket of cold water on her!’

Madame Flaks calmed down in an instant and began twittering softly like an injured bird.

‘I’m fed up dealing with this ridiculous fool!’ roared dear old mama. ‘Shut up, you lunatic! Take a good look at yourself! Just as ridiculous as Khivrya herself.fn2 Get up, wash your face, and may I never hear another word out of you, you idiot!’

A couple of hours later the family trial was held in the yard under my window. Everyone came, including little sister Berta and clever Borechka. It was inexplicable and vile that this nasty family squabble had to be played out in front of others, in the courtyard, in the presence of all the curious and gossipy neighbours.

A round table covered with a crochet tablecloth and a few rickety bentwood chairs were dragged into the yard. Everyone took a seat at the table, all except Abrasha, that is, who sat a bit off to the side, a defeated look on his face, as though to signal his status as the accused. The trial did not begin right away. The rabbi still hadn’t arrived. Meanwhile, the family waited in silence, staring reproachfully at Abrasha. He always appeared before the court in complete disarray – a wrinkled undershirt, no collar, his boots untied. Perhaps Abrasha was appealing for pity, or perhaps his appearance was intended to signal his repentance, a substitute of sorts for the ancient custom of sprinkling ashes over the head.

Eventually the good-natured old rabbi arrived, blew his nose loudly enough for the whole street to hear, took a seat in a heavy armchair and proceeded to leisurely stroke his beard with a checked handkerchief for a time until finally opening his mouth: ‘So, you’ve been up to your same old tricks, eh?’ And with that, the proceedings began. The trial was conducted in Yiddish, but this fact in no way lessened the interest of the large crowd of Russian onlookers who followed every twist and turn of the family drama.

Every trial ended in reconciliation. The rabbi was then invited in to dine with the family, and peace was restored to the household, for a time.

There was little work for me at the factory. I would go home early and did a lot of reading and writing. I got a reader’s card for the municipal library. A few special shelves held books donated to the library by Chekhov. You couldn’t read the books yourself, but sometimes they showed them to visitors. The books were by half-forgotten authors – Potapenko, Shcheglov, Ertel, Izmailov, Barantsevich, Muyzhelfn3 – with the authors’ autographs or their inscriptions to Chekhov, all of them in a light, spidery hand, similar to doctors’ prescriptions.

My life was so easy that I felt the need to establish some sort of order. I decided to write at home and then go and read in the harbour on one of the old corvettes, usually the Zaporozhets. I had become friendly with the watchman and he let me visit the corvette whenever I wanted. Sometimes, on warm nights, I even slept on the Zaporozhets. I would hire a boat from Lagunov, row myself out, tie up to the ship’s iron ladder and climb to the top deck. I brought a bit of food with me, and together the watchman and I would prepare tea. It seemed to me that the combination of the sun and little food – which were constants then – made me stronger and healthier, and perhaps it really was so.

I read book after book of poetry that I borrowed from the library. Much of it I memorised. The music of poetry had captivated me. Only in verse could the full musical splendour of the Russian language reveal itself. In poems words sounded as if new, as if they had just been discovered and spoken for the first time. I was amazed by their precision, their expressive power, their lustre.

I could repeat endlessly my favourite lines, and every day I discovered new favourites. One stanza replaced another. I remembered now Lermontov’s ‘The silent steppe turns ever blue, embraced by the Caucasus in its crown of silver’; now Pushkin’s words about how ‘every hour carries away a bit of life’, now Tyutchev’s spring storm, which reminded me of how ‘carefree Hebe, while feeding the eagle of Zeus, spilled her boiling cup of thunder and laughed with mirth as it rained down over the earth’; or Fet’s spring – ‘From the realm of ice, from the realm of snow, how fresh and clean, your month of May explodes’.fn4

I was surrounded by poets. I held conversations with them, my head swirled with their wealth of ideas and the richness of their images. Where did it all come from, I wondered? From what clear well-spring of the human soul? I felt I was the possessor of incredible riches. Leconte de Lisle, Heine, Verhaeren, Burns – not only did they speak to me, but they shared the very best that they had to say. Was this not happiness? I was surprised then, as I still am today, by those who fail to appreciate or recognise this joy.

I even became convinced that foreign poets sounded better in Russian translations than in their own languages. I particularly recall the poems of Heredia.fn5 They matched perfectly the Azov shores with their rocky promontories, steppe and aura of antiquity, and they echoed the poetry of Lev Mei,fn6 with his golden-haired Apollo, his seascapes and crimson sunsets. Reading the verse of Mei called to mind the lines of Alexander Blok, as spacious and fresh as the morning air:

O spring without end, without limits –

An endless and limitless dream!

I recognise you, life! I embrace you!

And greet you with the clang of the shield!fn7

Poetry was as real to me as bread, as my work at the factory, as the sun and the air. It forced me to live in a constant state of tension, in an unpredictable and infinitely varied world. It swept me along, just like a torrent carries away a branch broken from a tree. I couldn’t resist it.

I perceived my surroundings through the lens of poetry. At first I thought that this lens imparted to my surroundings a new and different dimension, an exaggerated shine, that they did not truly possess. But that wasn’t the case. And I have never regretted for a moment my youthful obsession with poetry. Because I know that poetry is life – life carried to its greatest power of expression. It is the world revealed in all its depths. It offers us the power to see things usually invisible to our indolent gaze.

In Taganrog, for the first time in my life, I was not living by the sea as a visitor. The impressions it made on me were no longer fleeting. They deepened and grew stronger. For this reason, I found myself particularly drawn to poems full of seaside life. I checked them against my own experiences.

I often took a rowing boat far out to sea – usually in the evening, after work. The sun was setting. I stopped rowing; water dripped from the oars. The sight of the sun going down called to mind the words ‘The golden disc of the sun, leaving the azure wilderness, slowly submerges into the quiet embrace of the ripples …’ I was struck by the accuracy of these words. The sun’s golden disc really did descend from the desert of the sky and slowly disappear into the soft ripples of the sea. There was nothing grandiloquent or pompous about these words, but somehow they possessed a profound solemnity. Try as I might, I could never put my finger on that precise moment in the poem when this quality emerged and then went on to fill the rest of the lines.

I liked the little steamship offices in the port, the air dusky blue from tobacco smoke, the walls covered with timetables. Most of the people working in them were Greeks. I unconsciously applied to them the meaning of the lines ‘My searching glance has so often been answered by the same glances of some Ulysses in the haze of the steamship offices, or some Agamemnon scoring billiards in a tavern’. I felt certain that I would find my Ulysses among these people. And I did. His name was Georgy Sirigos. A dried-up man with a leathery brown face and sad black eyes, a string of amber worry beads forever dangling in his lean hand, he worked as an agent for one of the steamship lines.

Whatever the weather, Sirigos rowed himself out in a small boat to the steamers anchored in the roadstead. He was considered the greatest living expert on the Sea of Azov. By the colour of the sky he could tell where the wind would be the following day or whether schools of herring would be running in the mouth of the Don. He could predict the direction of the wind within a degree, better than any wind gauge.

Sirigos had a beautiful daughter. She often came to her father’s office and liked to sit on the windowsill absorbed in some book. If anyone spoke to her, she took a while to respond, raising her head slowly as though awakening from a dream. Her dark blue eyes never smiled, and her long black plaits smelled of lavender. She wore a sailor’s pewter bracelet on her thin wrist. She never spoke to anyone. Sometimes I saw her down in the port. She would sit along the breakwater, dangling her legs. The splashing waves dotted her black dress with water. Like so many Greek women, she was fond of the colour black. A great many sailors wooed her, but she turned them all away.

I thought about Sirigos and his daughter for a long time. I don’t know how many romantic adventures I dreamed up in which his daughter and I were the heroes of the story.

About a mile out to sea from Taganrog stood a signal beacon on some low rocks. It was called the ‘Sea Turtle’. I liked going out to the Sea Turtle in fine weather. I tied up to its metal railing and dropped my line in. I mostly caught black gobies. They wore focused expressions on their faces, as though they weren’t upset at their misfortune, but were simply trying to figure out how it had happened. Clear water rippled among the rocks. Off in the distance I could see Taganrog sitting on the promontory, the cathedral domes, the lighthouse and the sloping rust-coloured shore.

One day while fishing at the Sea Turtle I lost track of time and suddenly realised it was almost dusk. I was sitting with my back to the open sea when I heard a softly approaching rumble. I turned. The wind had come up. A murky haze lay along the horizon, lit now and then by flashes of lightning. In an instant the water blackened, steel-grey ripples raced over the surface.

I untied the boat and started rowing back to shore. The wind strengthened so quickly that within minutes waves were splashing over the sides. As frequently happens on the Sea of Azov, the wind changed direction and began blowing from Taganrog, driving me out to the open sea. A small, noisy waterspout went splashing by. The sun went down, and the Taganrog lighthouse blinked on. Depending on your distance from shore, the lighthouse’s beam changed colour. I don’t recall the exact sequence of these lights, but it seems to have gone from red when you were close in, then green a bit farther out, and finally white at the greatest distance from shore. I looked. The light was white. It was a long way back to the harbour.

The wind was raging. It blew in powerful gusts, first this way, then that, and whistled malevolently over the oars. The waves beat against the bow, the boat was lifted up in the darkness, and I could hear the sea hurling bucket after bucket of water into its bottom. The water was up to my ankles. I had to start baling. I dropped the oars and began feeling around for the scoop, but the waves spun the boat around. I lost my balance and then realised that the next big wave would flip it over.

I grabbed the oars and began rowing with all my strength. My wet shirt clung to me, making it that much harder to row. My hands were burning. I must have torn open some blisters. When I next looked up the light had turned to green. I was getting closer. ‘Just a bit more,’ I said to myself. ‘A little more! It’ll turn red any second and then you’re safe.’

I lost all sense of time. It must have been around midnight. The heavy darkness roared and raged around me. I couldn’t even see the foam on the waves as they crashed into the boat. I rowed and rowed, groaning from the strain. My wet hair covered my eyes, but I didn’t bother to brush it away since there was nothing to see and if I stopped rowing even for a second the wind pushed the boat farther out.

I looked again and swore – the beam was back to white. I was being carried away, and it seemed there was nothing powerful enough to push my boat forward against such a raging wind. I dropped the oars and began baling. A strange indifference took hold of me. As I baled, I recalled for some inexplicable reason Mama and Galya, the side street in Lublin where I had picked a sprig of lilac for Lëlya, the lowering sky over the road to Baranovichi, a woman’s warm palm gently stroking my cheek, the fire in the Kobrin synagogue. The memories came and went with no connection or logic, one after another. I felt for a while as though I couldn’t hear or see anything.

When I lifted my head again the light shone faintly far away on the horizon like a drowning star.

I picked up the oars and, now numb, began to row slowly, evenly. I was surprised to still be alive. A wave struck me, and for a time I wasn’t sure what had happened. After my head cleared, I looked up again. I saw a green light. Instead of feeling joy, I was seized by rage. I started to row so hard that the oars bent. I stood up and rowed, I leaned into the oars with my whole body. I was swearing and then began repeating the same ridiculous words over and over, unable to stop: ‘To hell with you! I’m not giving up!’

Time passed, and I felt certain that the night would never end. And then there came a new ungodly roar from behind my back. Turning, I saw the red beam of the lighthouse. The port was close now. The roar was that of the surf crashing against the pier and then rolling back and slamming into the oncoming waves. Columns of frothy black water shot up into the sky. The greatest danger lay at the entrance to the port – what the sailors call the ‘Devil’s Cauldron’. The only way in was through a thick wall of churning, roiling water.

Lights were burning on either end of the breakwater. I turned my boat towards the space in between. My body tensed at the threat of danger. Watching the lights, I tried to gauge where the waves were taking me, and then rowed furiously in the other direction. I screamed at the top of my lungs to make it easier. The boat tossed like a cork in a whirlpool. It flew up one side of a wave, and crashed down the other, its bow buffeted in all directions, its bottom shuddering under the blows.

A clear, white light exploded overhead. There was no way I could have known it at the time, but I had been spotted from the breakwater and a flare had been shot off. I caught sight of the black walls of the breakwater above me and felt the violent surging of the water begin to subside. The lights on the ends of the breakwater slowly receded and all at once the boat floated along smoothly. I could make out up ahead the corvettes’ familiar, tall bowsprits and the coiling reflection of lights over the water.

‘Hey, you, in the boat! In the rowing boat!’ someone shouted.

A lantern swung on the breakwater. I rowed over towards the light, found the stone steps and dropped the oars. A few of the port guards pulled me out of the boat and led me over to the guardhouse, where I saw myself in the blinding glare of an electric light – drenched to the bone, my clothes in tatters, my hands bloody and blue from the cold.

‘God was watching over you,’ said a white-haired port inspector with fierce eyebrows. ‘Why did you go out to sea when the storm signals have been flying since two o’clock?’

‘I can’t read the signals,’ I confessed.

‘I see,’ he said and then held out his silver cigarette case. ‘Remember, everyone has to be able to read storm signals. It’s true not only at sea, but in life too. If you want to avoid disaster.’