The Story of a Life

77

A Few Explanations

The People’s Power was closed in the middle of the summer of 1918, just like every other newspaper that called itself ‘independent’. Soon after I received a letter from my sister, Galya, from Kopan. A railway guard from Bryansk had dropped it off at my lodgings while I happened to be out, and he left no information behind for me to look him up. The letter was tattered and creased and stained with engine oil. It had travelled for over a month to reach me in Moscow. Galya wrote:

You promised Mama you’d come and visit in the spring, yet you still haven’t come and we’re losing hope of seeing you. Mama has aged a great deal in recent days. You wouldn’t recognise her. She goes days without saying a word, and then at night, when she thinks I’m asleep, she cries so loudly that even I can hear it, and I, dear Kostik, have lost almost all my hearing in the past year.

Is it really impossible for you to give her this last bit of joy? We talk of nothing but you and know nothing of how you are getting along, what you are doing or even if you’re well. We’re terrified at the thought of what might happen to you. Your life is so rich and full, and Mama has no one but you. Please try to understand this, Kostik.

Yesterday Mama said that if you don’t come by the middle of August, then she and I will leave here together on foot for Moscow. Mama is convinced we’ll make it, somehow. We’ll leave everything here – it’s no use to us anymore! – and take nothing but our knapsacks. We have little money, but Mama always says the world is full of good people and so she fears nothing. We have to leave while it’s still warm, well before winter. Maybe we’ll even manage to travel by train part of the way, although we hear that they aren’t running anymore.

My dear Kostik, let us hear from you, somehow, tell us how you are and whether we should wait for you. We’ve been living all by ourselves in these woods. It’s like being trapped in a lair, and we can’t understand why it is we haven’t been murdered yet.

I felt like someone had taken a razor to my heart. I had to go. But how? How could I make my way to Ukraine? At the time, Ukraine, the Donbass and Crimea were occupied by the German army. Kiev was under the control of a German puppet – Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi,fn1 a polished, long-legged and stupid officer. Ukrainian newspapers praised him for his disapproval of décolletage, but other than this they could find nothing positive to say. Even the Germans made rude jokes about their fake hetman.

It would take more than a month to acquire an exit visa from the Commissariat of Internal Affairs to leave Soviet Russia. It was already late July, and I figured I wouldn’t receive the visa until the end of August. I knew Mama – no matter what, she and Galya were certain to set out on foot in mid-August for Moscow, regardless of the risk to their lives. I didn’t have a day to waste. I had to leave immediately.

It turned out that to enter Ukraine I had to acquire a visa from the Ukrainian consul as well. I walked over to the consulate, located off the courtyard in the back of a large building on Tverskaya Street. A faded yellow and blue flag hung limply from a pole tied to the railing of a balcony. Washing had been hung up to dry on the balcony, and the consul’s baby lay asleep in a pram. An old nanny sat rocking the pram gently with her foot and singing softly:

The doves have come to pay a call,

And they’re carrying figs for one and all,

Here’s one for Petrik, Petrik, our little boy,

Our little Colonel, no bigger than a toy.

It was impossible to get anywhere near the consulate door. Hundreds of people were sitting and lying about on the dusty ground waiting their turn. Some had been waiting for over a month, listening to the song about little Petrik over and over, vainly trying to ingratiate themselves with the consul’s nanny, and slowly being driven insane by the utter uncertainty of their situation.

I realised that I would have to sneak over the border without official permission. I learned that several Petrograd journalists from the so-called ‘boulevard press’ were planning a trip to Ukraine. Their documents were in order. A local reporter introduced me to them. With a certain reluctance, they agreed to take me with them and to help me at the frontier, although, as their leader, an irritable man who wore a gold pince-nez and grey spats, said, ‘only within the bounds of reason’. On where exactly these bounds lay, he was silent. And I knew well myself that if I were caught, no one would be coming to my defence.

The plan was to leave in three days. Nothing much happened during those days, other than that I learned Romanin had arrived in Moscow. I raced over to the house in the Yakimanka neighbourhood where he typically lodged, but the surly woman who opened the door refused to let me in and said that he stayed there only a few nights a month. I left a letter for him but never heard from Romanin again. Once more I felt that familiar bitter sadness of losing another beloved friend. People kept passing through my life, and no one remained beside me for more than a few years. They appeared out of nowhere, and then just as quickly vanished, and I knew I would most likely never see them again. I recalled Lermontov’s words about ‘the ardour of the soul, squandered in the desert’. They brought me a bit of comfort.

Before leaving, I visited my favourite places in Moscow one last time. From Noevsky Gardens I looked out at the Kremlin. A thunderstorm was gathering overhead. The domes of the Kremlin cathedrals smouldered with a dark fire, the wind from the approaching storm tore at the red flags, lightning sparked and flashed, illuminating an enormous yellow bank of clouds from deep inside. Suddenly, as though bursting from the crowded city, thunder rolled across the sky. The clouds opened up, and rain crashed down into the streets.

I took shelter in the empty conservatory. A single vase with a flowering pelargonium had been left behind on one of the shelves. It didn’t look well. It was stretching all its leaves and flowers towards the air and rain falling on the other plants that had been taken outside. I took it down off the shelf and placed it next to the other plants. Battered by the raindrops, it shuddered and then seemed to come back to life right before my eyes. For some reason the memory of that plant in the conservatory stayed with me. It was one of my last impressions of Moscow. I left not knowing what lay ahead of me, never suspecting, of course, that I would be gone from Moscow for five long years or that my life would be so much like fiction that I would find it hard to describe.

So far in this work I have written only about things that I have seen and heard myself. For this reason, there are a great many important events I haven’t mentioned. My intention is to speak as a witness, and I have no desire to write here in these pages, nor could I if I did, a general history of these revolutionary years. I began writing this story of my life a long time ago. I am old now, and still I have only managed to bring my story up to the time of my early manhood. I don’t know whether I will be able to finish it. If I were ten years younger, I might write another, more interesting, story of my life – not about my life as it was but as it could have, and should have, been had its arrangement depended solely on me and not on a host of external and often hostile circumstances. It would be a story of what never happened, of all the things that ruled my heart and soul, of a life that gathered all the colour, light and excitement of the world into itself. I can see many chapters of that book as clearly as though I had lived them several times over.