The Story of a Life

68

The Art of Whitewashing

I was transferred from the Neuve, Wilde factory to the Vaksov oil mill. The summer of 1916 had come to an end.

The owner was a fat, incompetent young man believed by the people of Taganrog to be a millionaire. He always went about in a dirty, rumpled silk suit, scratching his patchy ginger beard with his five fingers and talking nonsense. Intent on demonstrating his patriotic fervour, Vaksov installed a hydraulic press at the oil mill and started manufacturing shell casings. Nothing, however, came of his big plan: Vaksov’s press produced nothing but rejects. There was nothing for me to do at Vaksov’s mill, so I sent a letter to my immediate superior, Captain Velyaminov in Yekaterinoslav, requesting that I be relieved of my duties. A week later I learned that my request had been granted.

I had been quick to leave my job at the mill because an old fisherman by the name of Mykola from Petrushin Spit, whom I had met at the Taganrog market, had agreed to take me on as his assistant. A fellow who said he was going to ‘some hellish farm’ farther up the road let me hitch a ride to Petrushin Spit on his oxcart. The wheels kept sinking up to the axles in the sandy dust. The man turned to me and said: ‘Just look at this damned stuff! Can’t hardly move. But there’s a way of dealing with it, you know. An old way, tried and true.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You spray the roads with seawater. The salt binds the dust just like cement. Our womenfolk pour salty water on the mud floors back home in our huts and so they’re as hard as stone. They do the same thing when threshing wheat to make the ground hard and flat. That’s how it’s done, sir! You’ve got to know what goes with what in this world or else you’re likely to make all sorts of mistakes.’

He dropped me off at the bluff above Petrushin Spit and drove on, shouting lazily at the drowsy oxen: ‘Get on, you devil’s slaves! May the cholera strike you dead!’

I looked down from the bluff onto a long sandy spit dotted with a few dazzlingly white huts. Fine pink nets hung drying on poles along the shore. Small black wooden fishing boats, what they called baidas, rocked gently in the clear water. There was nothing else, save for the indigo sky, the sea, the sun and some yellow grass which swayed in the wind.

Walking down the steep slope I spied three bare-footed, tow-headed children – two very little boys and a girl about eight or so – running as fast as they could straight towards me. The girl was ahead and turned to yell to the boys: ‘Faster! It’ll be too late to hide! Faster!’ Then all three of them disappeared as though they’d been swallowed up by the earth. But as I passed a tall clump of thistles, I heard a soft whimpering and a hurried whisper: ‘Stop crying! He’ll hear you. I’ll pull the splinter out for you.’

The children had hidden in the thistles. Once I had passed, they came out and followed me, though at a cautious distance. One of the boys was limping; he must have stepped on a thorn. I stopped and called out to the children. They approached, slowly, shyly, avoiding me with their eyes, and sniffling. The two boys tried to hide behind the girl.

‘Hello,’ I said to her. ‘Can you tell me where Grandpa Mykola lives?’

She started, looked up at me with a pair of shining blue-grey eyes, and smiled. That smile, just like her entire small, suntanned being, radiated friendliness, awkwardness and pride – pride that this mysterious stranger from the city had asked her and not the boys.

‘Come on, Uncle!’ she said boldly, taking me by the hand and leading me, happy and flushed, to the last of the tiny huts right on the water’s edge. Women of all ages suddenly appeared, as if by an invisible command, at their doorways. They hastily straightened the kerchiefs on their heads, greeted me warmly and teased the girl: ‘Natalka, where’d you find yourself such a handsome fellow? Aren’t you a clever little thing! We were all wondering who’s that she’s got with her – could it be the captain of the Kerch?’

The Kerch was the small paddle steamer that travelled between Rostov and Mariupol. Sometimes it stopped at the fishing villages on the various spits along the way to deliver supplies. Apparently, the children thought that the boat was something out of a fairytale.

Natalka walked proudly on, ignoring the women’s teasing comments. Her flushed cheeks, however, gave away her joy. The two boys, conscious of their insignificance, trudged along behind us in a deep, reverential silence. And so we walked to the hut of Grandpa Mykola, where Natalka delivered me into the hands of a skinny old woman with shrewd eyes – Grandma Yavdokha, Mykola’s wife.

These were the good omens that greeted me and my new life on Petrushin Spit.

Grandpa Mykola had been glad to hire me. All the young fishermen had been conscripted into the army and sent off to war, and so, in his words, ‘there was fabulously no one left to do the work’. Grandpa Mykola used the word ‘fabulously’ to mean all sorts of things. It could mean ‘completely’ or ‘undoubtedly’ or ‘many’ and even just ‘yes’. His answer to any sort of question was often ‘Fabulously!’

He took me on for ‘grub without pay’. In other words, Grandpa Mykola was obliged to feed me, and in return I declined any money from the sale of our catch. I ate so little that the deal proved to be a good one for Grandpa Mykola, so good in fact that he and Grandma Yavdokha couldn’t help discussing it between the two of them. They found my agreeing to these terms something of a mystery and became convinced that I must be a bit touched and something of a ‘holy fool’.

I began my education in ‘the science of fishing’. It truly was a sort of science, a complicated craft that demanded ‘fabulously’ great experience and a special knowledge handed down from generation to generation of fishermen that was not to be found in any book. Grandpa Mykola initiated me into this science slowly, little by little, both by showing me how it was done and by sharing stories from his past. Gradually I learned the various kinds of fish in the Sea of Azov and their habits as well as the main routes by which they travelled. I learned how to read the sea’s weather patterns and its winds (of which there were many) – ‘Tramontane’, ‘Bora’, ‘Mountain’, ‘Delta’, ‘Chaser’, ‘Lower’, ‘Upper’, ‘Kerch’, ‘Levant’ and still others, more rare.

Every fisherman had his own ‘place’ on the sea where he set down his nets. Everyone was careful to respect these boundaries. The first thing Grandpa Mykola taught me was how to orient myself on the water by taking my bearings from landmarks on shore.

‘Look right there,’ he would say. ‘When that dead tree on the slope hides the cross on Taganrog Cathedral from view, that’s our line. We need to stick to it and move fabulously straight along just like on a string until the nearer of those two burial mounds hides the one a bit farther on. Where the two lines meet is our place and we can stop and let down our nets.’

In calm weather it was easy to hold to the line, but when the wind was blowing I fought with the oars for a long time until I learned how to manoeuvre the awkward baida to the correct spot. We let down our nets every evening and pulled them up every dawn, regardless of the weather. Only in the worst of storms did the fishermen stay at home. They never admitted that it was too dangerous to go to sea, saying instead that the rough waters had ‘upset’ all the fish and so there was no point in checking the nets.

I saw many dawns at sea. Some were warm and gentle. The morning’s glow was born in the stillness of the night. A soft blue began to appear in the eastern sky, the stars faded – not all at once, but slowly, as if they were moving farther and farther away, growing paler and shrinking into the depth of the sky – and a light fog drifted over the crystal-clear water. By the time we had reached the nets the sun was up. Our baida cast a shadow, turning the water a deep malachite green. It was so still that the clunk of an oar against the side of the boat could be heard far out at sea and as clearly as across a room. The fishermen called mornings like this ‘angel dawns’. But some dawns were chilly, grey and raw. The wind whipped reddish-brown waves, and a dirty white haze swirled along the horizon. Some dawns were black and stormy with torn skies; some were a dull green and spat spray in your face. A red dawn with a fevered sky and a cutting wind always meant a storm, but these were rare – it was August, the calmest, warmest month on the Sea of Azov.

Grandpa Mykola sold his fish directly to dealers – loud, sharp-tongued women – or sometimes on a Sunday he took it himself to the market in Taganrog. He was a quiet, almost sullen-looking old man, unlike the other fishermen on the spit. Yavdokha was an ailing, gentle sort who sighed and held her tongue in his presence but loved to complain of his miserliness behind his back.

It was a custom on the spit to whitewash all the huts on the same day. They did this often – before every holiday and after every rain. The women got together early in the morning and whitewashed one hut after another, beginning with Grandpa Mykola’s, the last hut on the spit. These were cheerful occasions. The women – their skirts hitched up over their sturdy, suntanned legs, their faces flushed, their white teeth flashing – yelled back and forth, joked, laughed, jingled their necklaces and gave suggestive looks at the menfolk from under their long eyelashes. ‘Sorcery’, Grandma Yavdokha called it, ‘bewitchment’.

The best whitewasher was Natalka’s mother, Khristina – a thin, friendly woman with a bright coral necklace dangling from her brown neck. Her husband was away in the army, so she and Natalka fished together on their own small baida. Using nothing more than a crude piece of tree bark, Khristina painted clean, neat borders of blue and green around the windows. I remembered what the oxcart driver had told me about salt and recommended to the women that they add a bit to the lime in their whitewash to keep it from smearing and make it last longer. They did and were pleased. To show her gratitude, Khristina painted beautiful big blue roses and cockerels on the stove in Grandpa Mykola’s hut.

On Sundays I took Natalka and the two boys out with me in a baida. We dropped anchor close to shore and fished for gobies. We always spoke in whispers. Natalka never stopped whispering about whatever passed through her head – all manner of news and gossip, like the story of an old woman with eyes of iron who roamed along the high road through the steppe and whoever she looked at was certain to immediately lose a relation or close friend at the front. Or how every night the thistles on the burial mound burned with a red flame (‘I haven’t actually seen it myself, but that’s what they say’) and some sailor from Mariupol had bet three roubles that he would go and light his cigarette from this flame.

‘Well, did he?’ the frightened boys asked.

‘Of course he did!’ Natalka answered nonchalantly. ‘And he didn’t even die. A sailor can do anything. Oh, and I saw lightning over the water all last night, but it wasn’t really lightning, it was the souls of dead soldiers killed at the front. They’re trying to make contact with us. They want to talk to us. Mama says that someday it could be Papa’s soul crackling over the water like that. Then she starts crying. I try to calm her down and always tell her that no bullet will ever take Papa away because I buried my little iron cross under the stone woman out in the steppe, and then hopped around it on one leg three times, saying: “Blessed St Nicholas of Myra, patron of all sailors, don’t let my Papa die.”

‘I suppose you think I’m lying,’ said Natalka anxiously. ‘But I’m not! God punish me if I say anything that’s not true.’ She crossed herself and then crossed her fingers as proof. The boys looked at her with terror in their eyes and furtively crossed their fingers as well.

One day in October Mykola brought me three letters from the post office in Taganrog – one from Mama, one from Romanin and a third in a clumsy, unfamiliar hand. For a long time I couldn’t bring myself to open them. Like the time in Odessa when I had wanted to join the hospital steamer Portugal, I felt as though I were a traitor. I had chosen an easy life for myself while the war still dragged on and there was the sense of a vague storm just over the horizon.

‘Of course,’ I told myself, ‘the simplest thing for me to do is stay here on the spit, to fish, enjoy the warm sun, build up my strength and read good books, as though there was no war on and all was right with the world. It’s no good telling myself that they wouldn’t let me return to the front or that I need to go out and collect all sorts of experiences in preparation for that “great future” of mine as a writer.’

For some reason I thought of the words of Polonsky: ‘A writer, being nothing but a wave on the sea that is Russia, cannot help but be carried along by the elements.’fn1 Polonsky had been right, of course. If I truly wanted to be a writer, then I needed to be in the thick of things and not hide away in the quiet of the steppes and soothe myself with the music of poetry, no matter how beautiful.

I decided to return to Moscow even before I had read the letters. I walked down to the shore where the baida lay half out of the water, climbed into the stern, opened the letters and began to read. Romanin wrote that our unit had moved to Molodechno near Minsk. There was little work at the moment, but he had no plans to leave because he foresaw significant events happening soon (these words he had underlined) and he had some other reasons of his own for staying in the army.

‘As for you,’ Romanin wrote, ‘I think they’d take you back in the unit now. See what can be done in Moscow and get back here. Gronsky has recovered and is with us again. He’s settled down and is very reserved. Kedrin is working in the administration in Minsk. Still making a fool of himself, as always. How are you, and where are you? Lord knows what you’ve got up to!’

Mama wrote that she and Galya were delighted with Kopan. The house and farm were keeping them very busy. She noted that it would be nice if I were to come and visit.

The third letter was from Lyuba in Kharkov.

I’m writing c/o general delivery in Taganrog on the off chance you might receive this letter. Faina Abramovna told me you were in Taganrog. Your deposition was read at the trial. Thank you, my dearest. I was acquitted and sentenced to just a month’s penance in a convent. Can you imagine that? Me, a nun? Uncle Grisha died of delirium tremens. The poor man. I’m so sorry he’s gone and can barely stand it. They buried him without me.

I’m in Kharkov now, selling tickets in a cinema. If I knew for certain where you were, I’d come and see you for a day, if only to talk – I feel so alone and there’s no one here I can talk to. I haven’t forgotten what you did and never will. Write should you have plans to pass through Kharkov. I’ll come to see you at the station, day or night.

Love and kisses. Your Lyuba.

I decided to wait for the Kerch to take me to Mariupol and make my way from there by train to Moscow. I was putting off leaving because I was certain I would never see this blessed place again. Besides, the final days of October had been so calm and warm that I couldn’t tear myself away. It was a shame to forgo even a minute of this magnificent autumn. The beautiful, clear days broke slowly through the morning mist. Burning it away, a dazzling yet faintly chilly light shone all day long until the sun went down. The sea was dead calm, and every little sound carried far across the water. Unlike summer, the autumn was filled with a lingering resonance. Dead leaves crunching underfoot, a steamship’s distant whistle, women’s voices in the yards – nothing died away at once, rather an obscure vibration lingered in the air, like the slow tolling echo of a bell. It was as though the autumn air were a vast sensitised medium trying to preserve the sounds of each hour and moment – as though the autumn itself, sorry to have to leave these places and people, were listening and committing them to memory.

In the end, two events finally made up my mind to leave. The first happened in Taganrog. One day the fisherwomen returning from the market told us that there had been a disturbance in town. A crowd of hungry women and children had raided the bakeries and food shops and the Cossacks had refused to fire on them.

The second seemed insignificant by comparison. I was mending Grandpa Mykola’s nets when a lanky fisherman by the name of Ivan Yegorovich came over and sat down beside me. We each lit a cigarette and then he said: ‘For a long time now I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something that’s been on the minds of all of us here on the spit, but I’ve just not been able to bring myself to do it. You’re an educated man, so perhaps you look at things differently than we fishermen do. If so, I hope you’ll forgive me.’

‘What’s all this about?’ I asked.

‘Well, it just doesn’t seem right. All our young men are off in the army, and their wives and kids are back here on their own, and the womenfolk are thrashing about like a fish on dry land trying to get by and keep everybody fed. They’re out there fishing by themselves, and sometimes it’s just too much for them. And then here you are, a strong young man, working for Grandpa Mykola. You ought to go help one of the women, maybe Khristina in her baida. Now that seems fair. Folks here find the whole situation a bit strange. Grandpa Mykola is just using you so he can stuff a few extra roubles in his money box.’

I felt myself blushing. Ivan Yegorovich was right. Why hadn’t I thought of that? I told him that these things had never occurred to me, and now I was getting ready to leave so there was nothing I could do.

‘Well, why don’t you rethink that and stay here on the spit? Folks here would like that.’

‘No, I can’t.’

‘Well, then, I’m sorry I’ve bothered you,’ said Ivan Yegorovich. He rose. ‘It’s your business. You need to do what’s best. Good health to you.’

After this conversation I had no more desire to help Mykola and Yavdokha. I decided to leave the very next day for Taganrog, but to my surprise the Kerch arrived that same evening. It was sailing for Mariupol.

Everyone on the spit came to see me off. They wished me well and much success and gave me a parting kiss, but only after first carefully wiping their mouths with the back of their hands. Khristina, together with Natalka and the two boys, rowed me out to the Kerch. I said nothing to Khristina about my conversation with Ivan Yegorovich. I was too ashamed of my stupidity. I climbed up onto the deck, covered with hay bales, and found a place along the railing. The siren let out a ferocious bellow, quite out of keeping with the steamer’s shabby appearance and inconsiderable size. The paddle wheels set in motion, churning the water to a frothy green. Natalka was standing in the baida. She was frowning and then covered her face with her sleeve. I could see that she was crying. Khristina bent over her, ruffled her hair and laughed.

The baida began to move away, along with the shore, where the women stood waving white kerchiefs – it looked as though a flock of seagulls were weaving round and round low over one small spot of sand, unable to decide whether or not to land. Natalka, too, her face stained with tears, stood there waving a faded green shawl. The steamer carried me away from the steep shore. Once again, as with every big change in my life, my heart felt heavy. Making it worse was the sense that my life had no continuity. It seemed to be nothing but a series of disconnected fragments. People suddenly appeared in my life, and then they disappeared from it just as suddenly, perhaps forever.

From Mariupol I sent a telegram to Lyuba in Kharkov. I regretted it immediately, but by then it was too late.

The train arrived in Kharkov early one chilly morning. Lyuba was waiting for me on the platform. She was wearing a short jacket and a light shawl over her head. She was so cold her lips had turned blue. She raced towards me. We kissed. Then she looked carefully into my eyes, took me by the hand, and without saying a word we went and stood behind a boarded-up kiosk on the platform.

‘Don’t say anything,’ Lyuba said.

She put her arms around my shoulders and laid her head against my chest, as though seeking protection. I was silent. She held me tighter. Her head was trembling. We stood like this for several minutes. The third whistle blew. Lyuba looked up, quickly made the sign of the cross over me, turned and then walked off down the platform, the edge of her shawl pressed to her face. I got back into my carriage. The train moved off.