The Story of a Life

72

The Journalists’ Café

The year 1918 began with a thaw, dirty snow and a sky so overcast and heavy that upon making contact with the impenetrable clouds the smoke from the factory chimneys spread out in thick coils. The Moscow streets still smelled of printers’ ink, and tattered scraps of old newspapers and posters clung to the walls. The decrees of the Soviet government had been pasted over them, but they showed through this layer of dull, cheap paper. Day by day, with an inexorable logic, these harsh, pitiless decrees demolished the foundations of the old world, hurled them aside and proclaimed the principles of a new life. It was difficult to imagine what this life would be like. The change to our basic understanding of things had happened so unexpectedly that at times everyday life lost its sense of reality and became as fluid as quicksand. A chill gripped one’s heart. The weak in spirit reeled like drunkards.

My room by Nikitsky Gate had been destroyed by the shelling. So I moved into a dreary brick wing of a house on Granatny Lane, next door to the house where I had been born twenty-five years before. The landlady was a morose widow who let rooms to students. My neighbour was a freckled student named Lipochka. She was the daughter of a village teacher, and her relatives and friends often came to visit from the country near Ryazan. They brought with them the aroma of apples, homespun and frost. For some reason I found the apples’ strong smell and the homespun’s suggestion of warmth and durability comforting.

I asked them about life in the country. They sighed, hesitated and then whispered that no one really knew what was happening. It was as though a large wave had washed through the village, but what would come next was anyone’s guess. Maybe the wave had brought a thick new layer of topsoil, or maybe it had washed away all the seed. That’s how things were in the village – a mix of terror and joy. The main thing was that the peasants had finally taken the land for themselves, and no one would ever take it back.

Since my return from Kopan in September I had been working as a reporter for the newspaper the People’s Power. It was one of those newspapers with a short life. A great many of them had sprung up in those days. Before long they were all quickly liquidated.

The paper was published by the Popular Socialist Party, the so-called NS. Some of its contributors lacked a clear understanding of the party’s rather vague programme. All we knew for certain was that the paper was run by quite cultured and educated people, imbued with liberal impulses which they would not be able to follow through on. At the top was an attractive and imposing older ‘NSer’ by the name of Yekaterina Kuskova. She spoke in a deep Gypsy voice and looked down condescendingly on us reporters, especially after someone wrote some unkind words in indelible pencil on her office door:

Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Little cuckoo bird,

You’ve been cuckooing far too long.

O Madame Kuskova, you must’ve heard

That the past’s both dead and gone.

The newspaper’s editors did not demand any tendentiousness from us reporters – that was provided by the head writers and better-known journalists. I was utterly consumed by my sleepless life as a newspaper reporter, crowded with events – large and small, with scandals, arguments, mass demonstrations, marches and gun battles. The sharp air of that revolutionary winter went to our heads. Our hearts glowed with a woolly romanticism. I could not resist it, nor did I want to. Our faith in universal happiness shone like an undying light over the chaos of our lives. That happiness was sure to come. We naïvely believed that our wish to be its creators and witnesses was enough to guarantee its arrival.

We searched for universal truths in everything we read. We sought in the events taking place around us echoes of past eras. The French Revolution, the Decembrist uprising, the Paris Commune, the revolution of 1905 – all cast their shadow on contemporary reality, making it still more vivid and exciting. Whatever its internal contradictions, even the poetry of Verhaeren (which I was in love with at the time) burned with an old revolutionary flame:

To the square with the guillotine’s blade,

To the streets ringing with the tocsin’s savage cry,

Our mad dreams fly!

All the confusion and fever of the day was justified given our youth and hunger to hurry the arrival of the new order. Everything that I had learned as a result of my restless youth, particularly from my experiences in the war, I forgot. The recent events had somehow transported me back ten years to a time when I was still in thrall to my unripe and childish notions. It seemed to me as though I had grown stupid. I could feel no ground under my feet. I was embarrassed and at times angry at my inability to find a consistent attitude to what was happening around me. At times it struck me as wonderful and praiseworthy and then as wrong, one minute great and mighty, the next a parody of greatness to justify unnecessary cruelty, one moment radiant with promise, the next as dark and terrible as a stormy sky.

Only one thing was clear – life had settled its accounts with the past and was racing towards a new shore, one which had to secure, of course, freedom and justice and to lift up the people to undreamed-of heights and provide the means to develop all their talents. For me the ultimate point of the revolution was that it would gather together the finest things life and culture had to offer in order to raise the human spirit. I was told that this was not the goal of the revolution but its result. But I believed that the result must be the goal and that this truth could not be denied.

Of all the NSers who worked in the newspaper’s editorial office, Mikhail Osorgin was the only one we young reporters made friends with. He had returned from abroad and was completely overwhelmed by the situation in Russia, which left him all at sea. It even showed in the expression of his bright, anxious eyes. He was kind and ingratiating with everyone, and he believed everything everyone told him. Despite Osorgin’s best efforts to hide it, his appearance and even his weary voice betrayed a deep sadness. He longed for Italy, where he had spent many years. Back in Russia, he always seemed to be only half awake. We sometimes tried to convince him to return to Italy, telling him there was nothing for him to do here and that there he could at least write his unpretentious stories. He would say in a guilty voice: ‘You’ve got to understand, I’m a Russian and I love Russia so much that it breaks my heart. But I don’t recognise her anymore. Sometimes I think: this can’t be possible, is this really Russia I see here before me? Even the intonation in people’s voices has changed. It doesn’t sound like Russian anymore. Clearly, there’s no hope for me.’

Osorgin was especially at a loss whenever old Gilyarovsky, the ubiquitous ‘king of reporters’, burst into the office, drowning out everything and everyone with his hoarse, thundering voice and his smoker’s hack.

‘Novices!’ he roared at us young reporters. ‘NSers! Rotten liberals! You don’t know a thing more about the Russian people than that fool Madame Kuskova with her ‘Je ne vais pas’ and her ‘Je ne sais pas’! A newspaper has to breathe fire. It has to be too hot to hold in your hands. It has to make the reader gasp for breath. And what does your rag do? It mumbles. You ought to be writing novellas about anaemic young women. I know the Russian people. Just you wait – they’re gonna give you hell!’

Osorgin smiled guiltily, and an angry Kuskova slammed her office door. Gilyarovsky nodded at her office and said in a carefully articulated whisper: ‘Of course, it’s possible for a lady to play politics on her little spider’s legs from inside her office. And, yes, she can even shed tears over the articles she writes about the hardy Russian peasant. But just one true word from a real peasant and you’d all have fits. The same thing goes for the populists! Farewell! We’ll talk more another time, but I can’t say I care to sit around here any longer gabbing with the likes of you.’ He left, but a tense silence hung in the air for some time, for fear the old man might return.

We young reporters loved Gilyarovsky for his showy gifts, his inexhaustible imagination and his old man’s despair, and he loved us, in his own mocking way. From the People’s Power he usually wandered off to another nearby editorial office, where, depending on the circumstances, he would launch into another round of attacks, or collect the latest news, or regale his audience with stories about Chekhov, Kuprin, Chaliapin or General Skobelev.

Whenever we ran into each other, he fixed me with his indignant round eyes and said: ‘It’s time you changed your type, young man, from Brevier to Bourgeois, and then to bold. Eight-point Brevier is for newspapers, nine-point Bourgeois for poetry, and bold, that’s for prose. So, strap yourself to that chair of yours and get to work.’

The grey-moustachioed old man in his Cossack jacket and astrakhan hat was Russian expansiveness, wit, cunning and goodness personified. Journalist, poet and writer, he was also an art lover and a famously generous Moscow host. He overflowed with jokes, stories, gags and improvisations, and without all his fooling around he would have withered away. This stentorian old man was at bottom a child. He loved, for example, to post letters to non-existent addresses in various exotic-sounding countries – Australia or the Republic of Costa Rica. These letters always came back to Moscow marked ‘undeliverable’ in some foreign language and covered with bright stamps and seals. He examined each one carefully. He even sniffed the envelopes, thinking he might pick up the sweet scent of tropical fruit, but they only smelled of leather and sealing wax. Who knows, perhaps these letters were a pitiful substitute for his dreams of travelling the world – having a good laugh with the coachmen of Paris and African kings along the banks of the Zambezi, treating them all to a pinch of his snuff – and then returning home with such remarkable tales that everyone in old Moscow would sit up and listen.

Gilyarovsky greeted the revolution as the most tremendous of news stories and an expression of the Russian spirit of revolt. He sought its origins in Stenka Razin and Pugachëv, in peasant uprisings, in ‘red cocks’ and other examples of rebelliousness.fn1 He knew the life of Moscow like no one else, especially its hidden side that kept out of sight of the Soviet authorities: the Gypsy nightclubs at Pokrovskoe-Streshnevo, the sectarian chapels around Rogozhskaya Zastava, the gambling dens on Brestskaya Street and the howling mobs of aesthetes who met at the home of Pertsov near the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. The leader here was a certain poet with a lisp and the long, soft hair of a child. He wore a smoking jacket and a monocle and was so frail you didn’t dare shake his hand for fear that his pale, transparent fingers might be left in yours as a relic.

The times were still quite unsettled. They threw together a great many unlikely and incompatible people, most of whom one had never noticed before. The revolution had flushed them out of their corners, as though it had shaken a large barrel of stagnant water and suddenly all sorts of sand, leaves, twigs, beetles and grubs rose from the depths and up to the surface, where they swirled round and round on the eddy, bumping and colliding, finally sinking once again and settling on the bottom.

In those early days of the revolution a lot of interesting people gathered in what was known as the Journalists’ Café on Stoleshnikov Lane. A group of journalists had pooled their resources and rented an empty second-floor flat, which they filled with little tables and chairs in the style of a café. Here, we passed many cheerful long nights in its smoke-filled rooms. Here you could meet Andrei Bely, the Menshevik Martov, Bryusov and Balmont, the blind leader of the Moscow anarchists Chërny, the writer Shmelëv, the actress Roxanova – Chekhov’s first ‘Seagull’,fn2 Maximilian Voloshin, Potapenko, and journalists and writers of all ages, views and characters. The kind-hearted poet Agnivtsevfn3 would always be there singing his simple little songs and sporting his usual enormous yellow tie wrapped around his long neck like a bandage and his baggy checked trousers covered with cigarette burns.

Coffee steamed in enamel mugs. It was as bitter as quinine; no amount of saccharine could sweeten it. Furious arguments broke out here and there, occasionally interrupted by the piercing crack of a slap in the face. Most often the face being slapped belonged to a handsome journalist with a dyed beard and a poisonous tongue. He hissed like a snake and poured his lethal venom over everything and everyone without exception. These slaps presented a fire hazard because the man with the dyed beard always had a lit pipe in his mouth. With every whack to the cheek, this pipe flew out of his mouth and spiralled over our heads like a firework, raining burning tobacco hither and thither. Immediately the stench of scorched wool filled the air. Everyone hurried to douse their smouldering jackets, trousers and tablecloths. The journalist with the dyed beard nonchalantly picked up his pipe from the floor, refilled and relit it, and walked out, being sure to announce to everyone present that he intended to report this outrage to a comrades’ court.

‘Go to hell!’ the others shouted. ‘Report it to the Revolutionary Tribunal if you want! Just get lost. We’re sick and tired of you! Damn provocateur!’

One day Maximilian Voloshin, the red-bearded, solidly built and short-sighted poet, came by and invited all of us to his lecture on poetry in the Hermitage Garden Theatre. Only a few people went. The others, bent over the café’s rickety tables, couldn’t tear themselves away from their heated political arguments.

I decided to go to the Hermitage. It was the end of March. The garden was dark and quiet. Melting snow slid from the trees. I caught the smell of rotting leaves, like the faint bouquet of wine, of bitter vegetable matter and last year’s thawed-out flowers, which seemed to be seeping out from deep down inside the damp, shelterless and long-untended soil. Nature had been forgotten in those days. We were busy with other things. Words rang out over the country – rejoicing, denouncing and exposing. Words called people to arms, words threatened one’s enemies. These words, as if some magnetic field, attracted millions of people. They summoned them both to destroy and to construct.

It was a time of sudden decisions and turbulence, not one for nature. Nevertheless, the wind still rustled as before in the deserted woods, and the frozen rivers turned from white to blue, filling with water. The same spiky hoar-frost covered the lime trees along the boulevards on those gloomy Moscow mornings. The sun set dutifully as always, and at night the stars shone timidly as though they understood that no one, not even astronomers and poets, gave them any thought. Everyone was besieged by their own mental storm. No one gave the natural world a second look, and if they did then with preoccupied, unseeing eyes.

People had been seized by different joys and passions. Even love, simple and unconditional as sunlight and air, gave way now and then before the torrent of events and was experienced as an attack of sentimentality requiring a cure. Loyalty to one’s duty required the rejection of all misplaced, or possibly even dangerous, movements of the heart. There would be time again for such matters, but only in some distant future. The ongoing gigantic upheaval claimed all our strength. Not an ounce of it could be wasted. Wasted? To sacrifice love was, of course, heroic, but also unreasonable, especially if the ones doing it knew what they were giving up.

Whatever I stopped to think about in those days – be it love, poetry or the meaning of the events happening around me – I found that I was unable to form any proper judgement. I longed for some clear sense of values, for without it, I found it hard to go on. Before long, however, I realised that it was too soon for this. My time would come, but later. For now, life was too chaotic, and I had no choice but to wait for the outlines of the new order to emerge from the chaos.

Voloshin’s lecture only added to the confusion. The theatre was practically empty. It was so cold inside my hands nearly froze. A few dusty electric lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling flickered off and on. A brown fog hung in the air. Voloshin seemed to be talking to himself, as though he had forgotten about the audience. He spoke of the war, of the iron age that had taken over our world, and asked, in a tragic monotone as he peered out into the depths of the empty hall, what use were poets and artists to such pitiless times. In England they had hanged the best Irish poets. In France three hundred poets had died in the first days of the war. One French general, who considered himself a lover and connoisseur of poetry, had said: ‘Let these rapturous young men lead the attack. Let them light a flame in the men who’ll follow.’

Verhaeren had to deny the whole meaning of his life and was forced to learn to hate. Jules Lemaître,fn4 shocked by the absurdities of war, fell ill and forgot how to read. He could no longer comprehend what the letters meant and had to be taught all over again from the beginning like a child. The frightful list of the war’s crimes against art mounted. Voloshin’s voice grew flatter as he spoke. What he said was right, but what was the solution? About this he was silent.

There were many remarkable people among the café’s regular patrons. They were all individuals, different in their own way, but together they made for a jeering and even ruthless tribe of journalists.

Only one of the patrons, Alexander Yakovlev, a young writer from the Volga town of Volsk, kept to himself. Yakovlev was an expert on peasant life, about which he wrote some magnificent articles. Everyone treated this shy and reserved man with respect, which he earned not only from his excellent writing, but also from his rare talent for travelling to the remotest regions of Russia and always managing to return unharmed despite the total collapse of the country’s railways. These journeys were feats of daring and endurance. He risked his life nearly every time.

The demobilised army poured along the railways, leaving ruin and destruction in its wake. Everything in the carriages that could be broken, stripped and stolen had been broken, stripped and stolen. Even the rusty sheet-iron had been wrenched off the roofs. At the Sukharevka Market there was a lively trade in stolen wash-basins, mirrors and strips of bald red plush upholstery cut from the carriages’ benches. Bandits and thieves, dressed up as soldiers, egged on the demobilised men to acts of excess. At the stations they broke all the windows and tore apart fences and sometimes even entire railway workers’ huts for wood to stoke the engines. Even cemeteries were looted – first they stripped the wooden crosses from the graves to feed the boilers and then the soldiers ripped off the rusty tin wreaths of lilies and roses and hung them on the trains as decoration. The wind rushing over these graveyard flowers made a mournful whistle.

The station officials scattered and hid long before a train full of demobilised soldiers shook the rails and burst into the station to the noise of bandit whoops and accordions and the clatter of machine-gun fire. The slightest delay of the train ended in savage retribution to any on-duty officials who had failed to run away. At the sound of the mob’s cry of ‘Get ’er movin’, Gavrila!’ the engine drivers quaked and the blood drained from their faces. Any plain civilian or government official who by some miracle had managed to board would usually be grabbed by the soldiers and thrown from the moving train.

Yakovlev had been thrown off three times but was somehow still alive. The most amazing thing was that Yakovlev returned from these life-threatening journeys refreshed, excited, full of the fascinating things he had seen and heard, and always insisting that no price was too high to pay for the material he had gathered. He made his way to the most moth-eaten, isolated little towns – Khvalynsk, Sarapul, Serdobsk – places so remote from Moscow that they had become almost mythical. It was difficult to believe they even existed.

It seemed as though Russia had gone back in time to the appanage period of small independent principalities, cut off by the lack of roads and the breakdown of the post and telegraph, by dense forests, marshes and demolished bridges, and by distances that had grown immeasurably longer overnight. In these forgotten corners of the country, home-grown republics were proclaimed, each with its own crudely printed currency (although typically postage stamps, not banknotes, were traded as money). All this was jumbled together with remnants of the past – balsam in the window boxes, the ringing of church bells, prayer services, wedding feasts celebrated to the accompaniment of drunken salvoes from sawn-off shotguns, fields heavy with grain or bitter yellow winter cress, and talk about the end of the world when nothing of Russia would be left but ‘the black of night and three pillars of smoke’. Yakovlev described all this in a leisurely manner, with taste, enjoyment and the skill of a saddler stitching a saddle girth with a coloured length of sturdy waxed thread. Our paths crossed from time to time over the years, and I was always impressed by his essential good-naturedness and his love of the simple Russian people. Characteristically, his dying wish was to be buried not in Moscow, but on the banks of the Volga in his hometown of Volsk.

Every so often a small, nondescript man in a soft hat with a drooping brim called in at the café. It seems he had worked for a time for a newspaper in either Tula or Orël. Once he was involved in an amusing, and barely believable, incident with Mikhail Prishvin that the latter loved to tell.fn5

Prishvin was moving from Yelets to Moscow. At that time anti-profiteer detachments of lawless sailors from the Baltic fleet controlled the railway junctions. Prishvin had sewn all his things, including his manuscripts and notebooks, into several sacks and dragged them onto the train with him. At a junction near Orël, a detachment of sailors took his sacks, despite his protests and appeals. Prishvin jumped from the train and ran off to find the commanding officer in the station. This turned out to be a broad-faced sailor with a Mauser on his belt and a pewter ring in one ear. He was shovelling salted fish into his mouth with a wooden spoon as though it were porridge and refused to listen to Prishvin.

‘Typical intelligènt!’ he said. ‘One more squawk out of you and I’ll arrest you for sabotage. I’m sure a revolutionary tribunal could dig up something on you if asked. So, my friend, get lost while you’re still in one piece.’

Just then the man in the hat with the drooping brim walked into the station and, standing by the doors, said in a soft but clear voice: ‘Give the citizen his things back at once.’

‘And just who are you? I don’t take orders from some little mouse in a hat.’

‘I am Magalif,’ the man said in the same soft, clear voice, never once taking his eyes off the sailor.

The sailor choked on his fish and stood up. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said ingratiatingly. ‘My lads must have slipped up somehow. Got carried away, I guess. Lobov!’ he yelled. ‘Give this citizen his things back! That’s an order from an agent of the Magalif administration itself. Understand? Take them back to his compartment. On the double! Stealing from every last person, you fools. Use your heads!’

Out on the platform Prishvin started to thank the man, but he replied only that Prishvin ought to clearly write the word ‘Ethnology’ on all his sacks in indelible pencil. ‘A Russian is always impressed by a word he doesn’t know, especially if it’s foreign. You do that and no one will touch your things. I swear to it.’

‘Please excuse my ignorance,’ Prishvin said, ‘but what is this powerful organisation you are from, this Magalif, as you called it? Why is the mere mention of it enough to make the head of this detachment quake with fear?’

The man smiled guiltily. ‘It’s no organisation. It’s my surname,’ he said. ‘It’s uncommon, and so I find that sometimes it’s enough to do the trick.’

Prishvin roared with laughter. He followed Magalif’s advice and wrote the mysterious word ‘Ethnology’ on all his sacks. No one laid a finger on them after that. This happened about the time when all sorts of ridiculous abbreviated names and titles began to enter the language. It became a problem of catastrophic proportions. Within a few years there were so many of them that they threatened to turn the Russian language into something as inarticulate and pointless as Volapük.fn6

Every evening the journalist and well-known Muscovite bibliophile Shchelkunov walked into the café, wiping the condensation off his thick glasses and blindly stumbling into the tables. He invariably carried with him heavy batches of books tied together with telephone flex. Shchelkunov removed his shabby, old-fashioned overcoat with its beaver collar and hung it carefully on a peg, whereupon the sound of desperate miaowing filled the café. Shchelkunov had a habit of picking up stray cats as he walked the streets, stuffing them into the pockets of his coat, and carrying them around with him all day until returning home late at night and handing them to his wife to feed.

He looked like a provincial doctor. His beard always seemed to be wet and unkempt, and his jacket hung on him like a sack from the weight of all the books and manuscripts he had stuffed in his pockets. There were still no fountain pens back then, so Shchelkunov always carried with him a bottle of Vanka-Vstanka ink and several goose quills. He couldn’t write with a pencil, and it seems I was the only one who understood this fact about him and never made fun of his goose quills. I had always found anything written in pencil to be messy and unfinished. I believed that a clear idea ought to be clearly written. If it were possible, I would write only with Indian ink on thick, heavy paper.

Shchelkunov liked to sit down at a table, carefully sharpen a quill with a razor blade, and then, breathing heavily, begin to write up his notes in a hand that befitted a pre-Petrine scribe. He wrote about rare books, the discovery of famous lost paintings, exhibitions, bibliographic news and other curiosities. He left home early every morning in the hunt for valuable books and news, and he would turn up in the most unexpected places around Moscow. His notebook was full of addresses for pious old widows, retired buyers for the city’s various bookshops, bookbinders, dealers and fences. These were his suppliers. Most of them lived on the outskirts of the city – Izmailovo, Cherkizovo, Kotly and beyond Presnya. He made sure to visit all these places, by tram whenever possible, but mostly on foot.

He had a sixth sense for books. He could sniff out a rare edition and track it down with the patience of a retriever. He was not the only bibliophile in Moscow, however. Well aware of his uncanny ability to uncover rarities, the other collectors and dealers watched his every move closely and often tried to intercept his prey. Thus, he was always having to cover his tracks in the hope of throwing his rivals off the scent. This cloak-and-dagger business lent Shchelkunov a certain conspiratorial air. Perhaps this is why he always spoke in a muffled whisper, his narrow Tatar eyes glinting suspiciously.

‘It appears’, he confessed in a voice so low I had to lean far over the table to hear, ‘that in the next few days I shall uncover the secret location of Ivan the Terrible’s long-lost library. God forbid Lunacharsky gets wind of this.fn7 Don’t breathe a word!’

If anyone brought Shchelkunov a rare book for his opinion, he leafed through it, appeared to give it a sniff, twisted up his mouth and said: ‘It’s a well-known edition. You can pick one of these up any day of the week at the stalls by the Kitaigorod Wall. You’ve been had. I’m sorry. But if you like, I’d be happy to swap it with you for a first-edition copy of Chekhov’s Motley Stories? What do you mean, no?! A year from now you’ll be sorry. All right, then, fine! I’ll make it an Italian edition of Marco Polo. You’ll have it tomorrow.’

Without waiting for the unguarded owner’s consent, Shchelkunov tucked the rare edition into his fat briefcase, snapped the lock and, glancing around, waited for the perfect opportunity to slip out. As best I can remember, none of these simpletons ever managed to get their books back once they had been engulfed by Shchelkunov’s briefcase. It was useless to make a scene. At the first sign, Shchelkunov silently threw on his coat, lowered his head and charged out of the café like a bull. Nothing and no one was strong enough to stop him. Breathing heavily through his nose, he was obstinately silent and deaf to even the most terrible insults.

Once Shchelkunov invited me to come along with him to a doss house near Vindavsky station. He had learned that a self-taught poet from Tula was living there. The man was broke but still owned some valuable books and manuscripts that Shchelkunov hoped to wheedle out of him. We took the tram to the station but got off one stop early to be cautious. For some reason Shchelkunov was convinced that his eternal bibliographical enemies were onto him that day and were watching his every step in the hope of beating him to the poet from Tula. All of a sudden, he grabbed me by the arm and pulled me behind a hoarding. We hid there for a moment, and Shchelkunov, struggling to catch his breath, said: ‘Right there! It’s a broker. Look, just there on the pavement opposite the doss house. The old man in the tattered panama hat and the billy-goat beard. This is why I brought you along. I need your help.’

‘How can I help?’

‘I’ll duck into that chemist’s shop, which will give me a good view of the house from the front window. I’ll wait there. You’ve got to get rid of him. If he sees me go into the house, I’m done for. I’ve been searching for this damned poet for over two months.’

‘How am I supposed to get rid of him?’

‘Pretend you’re a detective. That’ll scare him off. He’s got dirty hands. He once sold me books stolen from the Museum of History.’

Shchelkunov didn’t give me a moment to think before slipping away to hide in the chemist’s. There was nothing left for me to do but play my part. But how? I pulled my cap down over my eyes, thrust my hands into my pockets and sauntered over to the doss house. A few steps short of the old man in the panama, I stopped, leaned back against a fence and began to examine the house with exaggerated attention. It was an old, four-storey building with a crack in its façade that ran all the way from the roof to the cellar. A notice written in alternating blue and red pencil had been stuck to the outer door: ‘All Callers Are Hereby Forewarned: Silence on all floors!’

The old man in the panama shot me a glance. I stood there, my expression impassive and perhaps, so I thought, even a bit insolent, and then looked down into my cupped hand and stared closely, as though surreptitiously comparing the man’s face with a photograph. He turned abruptly and began to hurry away. But then he made a mistake: he pulled out his cigarette case and lit up. I followed, keeping a close eye on him. The obvious tension in his frightened, spindly back told me he was doing everything in his power not to break into a run. I caught up with him and asked in a polite tone: ‘Could I have a light, citizen?’

With that, the old man let out a wild scream, jumped straight up in the air, and then, knees bent, scuttled away like a crab, ducking through a nearby gate and vanishing from sight. The whole scene was bizarre and mildly terrifying.

Meanwhile, a satisfied Shchelkunov was rubbing his pudgy hands. He had beaten the dealers and managed to buy a letter of Leo Tolstoy from the Tula poet. As for me, I was angry with Shchelkunov and after this stupid business decided not to have anything more to do with him. I thought that, like most book collectors, Shchelkunov never read any books and just wanted to collect them, regardless of what they were about. I was soon proved wrong, however.

One day at the Journalists’ Café Shchelkunov gave a lecture on the history of books. It was less of a lecture, however, and more of a poem or even a rapturous encomium to books. Books, he said, are the sole repository of human thought and its only mode of transmission from century to century, from generation to generation. They preserve it through all time in its primordial freshness and its variations of tone and meaning, as though it were newly born. Although made by human hands, books have become part of the eternal, like space and time. Mortals have created something of immortal value. But in the commotion of our daily lives, we continually forget this.

We try to grasp the cadence of Homer’s measured verses and a miracle happens right before our eyes – Homer’s petrified, thousand-year-old shepherd’s staff blossoms with the flowers of living poetry. Our first encounter with an idea, even one that has come down to us over an unthinkable measure of time, is always fresh and immediate. We, children of the twentieth century, experience the same shock of novelty that our distant ancestors once did. The centuries of the past have receded into an impenetrable fog, but human thought shines brightly through that fog like the bright blue star Vega, as if it had absorbed every last glimmer of light from the entire universe. And just as the ‘black coalpits’ of space cannot put out the light of this purest of stars, so none of history’s epochs of ruin and destruction or the dark spaces of time have the power to destroy an idea embodied and preserved in all the hundreds, thousands and millions of manuscripts and books.

Shchelkunov was convinced that there were lost manuscripts waiting to be discovered, particularly in the ancient lands of the Bible. Their discovery would enrich humanity with lost philosophies and pearls of poetry. Recently, a city built by the Ptolemies had been discovered in the mountains of Sinai. It had lain hidden in the hot canyons of the desert. Every structure of this lost city was an architectural masterpiece. And if whole cities could be found, then why not scrolls and old books as well?

After hearing about the lost cities of Arabia from Shchelkunov, I became interested in the East and its poets. Shchelkunov gladly gave me books by Saadi, Omar Khayyam and Hafiz.fn8 It may seem strange that at a time of revolution, of the breaking of all familiar concepts and ways of living, some people, along with just trying to survive such times, would find themselves drawn to the East, to poetry and to a great many other things. But, in fact, there was nothing particularly remarkable about this since the human mind’s thirst for knowledge is stronger than might be expected. The harsh vigour of the revolution’s first years was so powerful and stimulating that it touched all our thinking. It seemed obvious to me that the people of our era, all of us children of the revolution, must possess not only the high moral qualities that in earlier times had been attributes of no more than a few outstanding men and women, but also the spiritual riches of the past and of every country. I sought this enrichment wherever I could find it, including in Eastern poetry.

I was encouraged in my infatuation for the East by a journalist named Rozovsky, a lazy older man with a wavy auburn beard. He went about all winter in a long and once luxurious but now bedraggled episcopal fur coat, and, despite his Jewish origin, had the distinct appearance of an Orthodox priest. He spent all his free time in his room lounging on a battered old ottoman covered with a Turkoman rug and engrossed in books about the East. He was an expert in Islam, particularly the various Muslim sects. He was convinced that of all the sects, only the Persian Bahá’í led by Abdu’l-Bahá were truly revolutionary.fn9 He believed that this sect would bring about the downfall of Islam and usher in a spiritual renaissance in the lands of the Middle East.

Before the revolution Rozovsky had been to Turkey and Persia to study these lands and their cultures first hand. He was a solitary, independent man who loved to travel. He lived for almost a year in Asia Minor, mostly in the ancient Turkish capital of Bursa. He had much to say about Turkey, but he did it in his own unique way. He never began with the main point of his story, but with little details, often irrelevant bits of information. But gradually, bit by bit, the details would build up into a fascinating story, and he told it in such a precise way that had you written down his words, they could have been published without changing a thing. But Rozovsky was so terribly lazy that he wrote little and published even less. As soon as he sat down at his desk to write, he was overcome by boredom, dropped his pen and went off to his newspaper or the Journalists’ Café to find someone to chat with.

I recall Rozovsky’s stories about the old wooden house where he lived in Bursa. He never began the story with a description of the house, but with an elaborate discourse on the distinctive smell of Turkish wooden houses. According to Rozovsky, they all smelled of the warm dust of rotting wood and of honey, particularly on hot, still afternoons when if you so much as touched the verandah railing it would singe your hand. The smell of dust was always mixed with a faint hint of dry roses. The smell of honey came from the surrounding olive gardens filled with wild roses. The flowers attracted swarms of honeybees which built their combs in the attics; the sweet aroma wafted throughout the house. Rozovsky first encountered the thick smell of dried roses and honey in Constantinople, when he was shown the gem-encrusted casket holding the green banner of the Prophet. The banner was wrapped in layers of rotting silk and sprinkled with dry rose petals.

Rozovsky helped me understand the meaning behind much of the obscure Arabic imagery in Bunin’s poems about the East. Because of Bunin, Islam appeared to me as a religion of dreams, torpor and patience, like the mood he experienced upon reading the Qur’an:

In the sultry hour when the unruffled mirage

Melts the whole world into one great dream,

My soul is carried away, beyond the edge of this sad world,

Into the infinite brilliance of the gardens of the Jinns.

There, beyond the mists, flows the river of rivers,

There, the azure al-Kauthar streams,

Promising all the earth, all tribes and nations

Peace. Be patient, pray – and believe.

When I mentioned the passivity and torpor of Islam to Rozovsky, he said that was sheer nonsense. All religions could be militant or fanatical, he said, and especially Islam. All it took was to declare a holy war and raise the green banner of the Prophet for Islam to swoop down on the world like a devastating black simoom blowing out of the desert. I pictured that storm to myself – a low, whirling darkness, the cries of the mounted warriors and the flash of their bared swords like lightning over the dry sands.

I cannot, of course, describe all the patrons of the Journalists’ Café, even though they deserve it. Nevertheless, it isn’t possible to avoid mentioning one particular specimen of old Moscow, namely the chairman of the Society of Lovers of Canary Singing, the reporter Saveliev. This giggling old man was the main supplier of political gossip and rumour. He never got into any trouble over this because he talked through his nose in an unintelligible patter. Supreme concentration was necessary to even guess at what he was talking about.

His pockets were always stuffed with hard, sticky sweets that he passed out to us smokers. He pushed these sweets on us, insisting we have one, even though they always came out of his pockets with bits of lint, dirt and other rubbish stuck to them. As soon as we saw him coming, we rushed to put out our cigarettes in the hope of avoiding these sweets.

Saveliev’s nickname was ‘de Mortuis’ because all he did at the newspaper was write obituaries. These always began in one of two ways, either ‘Death has torn from our ranks’ or ‘Our society has suffered a grievous loss’. All of us were so tired of his obituaries that one of the paper’s editors decided to liven things up – and to have some fun at Saveliev’s expense – by inserting the words ‘At long last’ before the usual ‘death has torn from our ranks’. A terrible scandal ensued. The editor was sacked, and everyone felt terrible about the whole episode, even though the obituary had been for some disagreeable old professor. Saveliev spent the entire day at his desk, blowing his nose.

‘I’ve seen hundreds of people off into the next world,’ he muttered, ‘but I have never once sinned against their memory. It’s not my place to judge. And I’ve never agreed to write even a single line about any scoundrels.’

Still drying his tears, Saveliev went to see the editor-in-chief and told him, although barely able to speak, that he could no longer work for a newspaper where such shameful things were possible. The editor’s best efforts to get him to change his mind failed. Saveliev left the office for good, and it wasn’t long before everyone at the paper began to miss his giggling and his silly way of talking and even his sticky sweets covered with pocket grit and fluff.

Saveliev died soon after. His obituary was indistinguishable from every other boring and unfeeling obituary: ‘Death has torn from our ranks a humble worker in the newspaper field …’ Et cetera, et cetera. He had been a bachelor, and the only living creature left behind in his small stuffy room was an old parrot. The bird hung upside down from its perch and giggled like its late owner and, from time to time, screamed wildly: ‘Polly, want a candy?’ The building’s porter adopted the parrot, and thus were all Saveliev’s outstanding accounts settled.

Always the last to burst into the café was the polite but noisy Oleg Leonidov, also known as the ‘King of Scoops’. He purposely arrived late, just at the moment when the newspapers, damp with printers’ ink, were rolling off the presses. By then Leonidov could safely share with the competing reporters all the scoops he had made that day without fear they might end up in any of the other papers. They all turned green with envy, but there was nothing to be done about it.

It was no use trying to follow him. He was too elusive. No one knew how or when he managed to worm his way into the innermost recesses of the new Soviet governmental departments and kindly, gently, with an ingratiating smile extract from them their most sensational stories. Nor could he be tricked or fooled. He was a master of those arts himself. Just once, during the war, did he fall for a fake story fed to him by an incautious Kievan journalist. Leonidov nearly got sacked, but his revenge was so complete that after that no one even dared to joke with Leonidov, much less make a fool of him.

On the surface, Leonidov’s ploy looked quite simple. He sent the journalist in Kiev a cryptic telegram: ‘IN DORPAT IN ODESSA TSARITSYN IN CRIMEA FEED OATS ONLY LAST.’ It was wartime. The telegram came to the attention of the military censors, who deemed it a coded message. Espionage was suspected. The journalist was arrested.

No one knows how long he would have sat behind bars if one of the investigators hadn’t hit upon the idea of combining the first letter of each word in the telegram in the hope of cracking the code. They read ‘IDIOTIC FOOL’. The journalist was eventually freed, although utterly frightened, while Oleg Leonidov calmly strolled about Moscow, basking in his new reputation as a dangerous wit.

The Journalists’ Café closed down at the end of the summer of 1918 due to a lack of funds. We were all sad to see it go, and not just us reporters from the various newspapers, but writers and artists as well, everyone for whom this flat with its low ceiling and absurd pink wallpaper had been their club, a comfortable, inviting place where we could speak our minds.

I was especially fond of the club at twilight. Through the open windows, beyond the bell tower of the fire station and the pedestal where Skobelev’s statue had recently stood, the warm glow of the sunset faded in the golden dusk. The noise of the city, or rather its soft hum (in those days there were few cars and the trams went by rarely), gradually died away, and nothing but the popular sounds of the ‘Song of Warsaw’ could be heard in the distance.

More and more often at this hour it made my heart ache to recall that out there, beyond Brestsky station, beyond Khodynka Field, where the sun had slowly set, the dew was already covering the birch groves and the clear water was gurgling over the snags in the river outside Moscow. The cool river smelled of mud and rotting timber piles. The deserted dachas were dark, and the peonies, planted long ago, blossomed in solitude. Drops of dew fell from the roofs onto the glass tops of the boarded-up verandahs, and their rhythmic sound was all that could be heard in the thickening dusk. The parks and fields and woods, left for a while in peace, stood close to the agitated city of Moscow, listening drowsily to its excited rumble.