The Story of a Life

1

The Death of My Father

I was in my last year of school in Kiev when the telegram came saying that my father was dying on the farm at Gorodishche, near Belaya Tserkov. The next day I arrived at Belaya Tserkov and stopped at the house of my father’s good friend Feoktistov, head of the local post office. He was a short-sighted old man with thick glasses and a long beard and wore a shabby old official’s jacket with the brass insignia of the postal service, crossed horns and lightning bolts, on his lapels.

It was the end of March. Rain was coming down in a steady drizzle. Naked poplars stood shrouded in fog. Feoktistov told me that the ice on the swiftly flowing river Ros had gone out the night before. The farm where my father was dying was on an island in the middle of this river, twenty verstsfn1 from Belaya Tserkov. A stone causeway across the river led to the farm. Flood water was now pouring over the causeway in waves, and no one, of course, would agree to take me to the island, not even the most reckless of coachmen.

Feoktistov thought for a long time, contemplating which coachman in Belaya Tserkov was the most reckless. In the half-light of Feoktistov’s drawing room his daughter Zina, a schoolgirl, sat diligently practising the piano. The music caused the leaves on the ficus to tremble. I stared at a pale, dried-out piece of lemon on a small dish and kept silent.

‘Well, let’s call Bregman, the old rascal,’ Feoktistov finally decided. ‘Nothing frightens him.’

Soon, into Feoktistov’s study, overflowing with volumes of The Planted Field in their gold-tooled covers, walked Bregman the driver – ‘the biggest rascal’ in all of Belaya Tserkov. He was a dwarfish, thick-set Jew with a scraggy beard and the blue eyes of a cat. His weather-beaten cheeks were the red of heavenly apples. He twisted in his hands a small whip and listened, sceptically, to Feoktistov.

‘Oy, what a misfortune!’ he said at last in a falsetto voice. ‘Oy, what bad luck, Pan Feoktistov! My carriage is light, and my horses are weak. Gypsy horses! They won’t pull us across the causeway. We’ll all drown – the horses, the carriage, the young man and the old driver. And they won’t even bother so much as to print a word about it in Kievan Thought. Well, that’s just unbearable, Pan Feoktistov. Go? Well, of course, we can go. Why not? You yourself know a driver’s life is worth no more than three silver roubles – or maybe five, or let’s say ten, I won’t argue.’

‘Thank you, Bregman,’ said Feoktistov. ‘I knew you’d be willing. You’re the bravest man in Belaya Tserkov. For this I’ll buy you a subscription to The Planted Field for the rest of the year.’

‘Well, if I’m really so brave,’ Bregman laughed with a squeak, ‘then you’d better make it The Russian Invalid. At least there I can read all about the young soldiers and the knights of St George. The horses will be at your door in an hour, Pan.’ Bregman left.

There had been a strange sentence in the telegram I received in Kiev: ‘Bring a priest with you from Belaya Tserkov, either Orthodox or Roman Catholic, it doesn’t matter, just so long as he comes.’ I knew my father and so the sentence bothered and upset me. My father was an atheist. His jokes about priests of both confessions had led to endless clashes with my grandmother, a Pole and a religious fanatic like so many Polish women.

I guessed that my father’s sister, Feodosia Maximovna, or, as everyone called her, Aunt Dozia, had insisted on the priest. She rejected all church rites except absolution. She had replaced the Bible with Shevchenko’s Kobzar,fn2 which she kept hidden in an iron-bound trunk and which was just as yellowed and wax-splattered as a Bible. Sometimes at night Aunt Dozia would take it out and read ‘Katerina’ by candlelight, constantly dabbing her eyes with a dark kerchief. She grieved over Katerina’s fate, so similar to her own. In the damp grove behind her cottage was the grave, covered in greenery, of her son, ‘the little fellow’, who had died many years ago when Aunt Dozia was still quite young. This boy had been, as people used to say, her ‘unlawful’ son. The man Aunt Dozia loved had betrayed her. He left her, but she remained true to him until death, and she kept waiting for him to return to her. For some reason she was certain he was sick, penniless, ill-fated, and she, after having cursed him out as he deserved, would in the end take him back and treat him with kindness.

None of the Orthodox priests would go to Gorodishche, claiming to be sick or too busy. Only one young Catholic priest was willing to go. He warned me that we’d first have to stop at the church for the Holy Sacrament needed for the dying man’s last rites, and that no one was allowed to speak with someone carrying the Holy Sacrament. The priest wore a long, pleated overcoat with a velvet collar and a strange round hat, which was also black. It was gloomy and cold inside the church. Wilted red paper roses hung at the base of the crucifix. Without candles, without the ringing of bells, without the rolling of the organ, the church had the appearance of the wings of a theatre by dull daylight.

At first we rode in silence. There was only the sound of Bregman smacking his lips and hurrying on his gaunt bays. He shouted at them as all drivers do – ‘G’on’ and ‘Ya!’ The unkempt gardens echoed with the sound of the rain. The priest held the pyx which had been wrapped in black serge. My grey school overcoat became soaked through and turned black. Out of the mist the famous Alexandria Gardens of Countess Branitskaya appeared to reach all the way up to the sky.fn3 These were extensive gardens, equal in size, Feoktistov told me, to those at Versailles. The snow there was melting, wrapping the trees in cold mist. Turning round, Bregman said there were wild deer in the gardens.

‘Mickiewicz loved these gardens very much,’fn4 I told the priest, having forgotten he had to keep silent the whole way. I had wanted to say something pleasant as a way of thanking him for agreeing to come on this difficult and dangerous trip. The priest smiled in reply.

Rainwater stood in the sodden fields, reflecting the jackdaws flying overhead. I raised the collar of my coat and thought of my father, about how little I knew him. He had been a statistician and had worked nearly his entire life on various railways – the Moscow–Brest, Petersburg–Warsaw, Kharkov–Sevastopol and South-Western lines. We had moved often from town to town – from Moscow to Pskov, then to Vilnius, and finally to Kiev. Father always had trouble getting along with his superiors. He was touchy and hot-tempered but a kind man. A year earlier my father had left Kiev and taken a job as a statistician at a factory in Bryansk, in Orël province. He had not been there long when he quite unexpectedly quit his job for no good reason and returned to my grandfather’s old farm at Gorodishche. His brother, Ilko, a village teacher, lived there, along with Aunt Dozia.

My father’s inexplicable act upset all his relatives, my mother most of all. At the time she was living in Moscow with my eldest brother. A month after arriving at Gorodishche my father fell ill, and now he was dying.

The road ran downhill through a ravine. At the road’s end could be heard the persistent sound of rushing water. Bregman began to fidget up in his box. ‘The causeway!’ he said, sombrely. ‘Now’s the time for my passengers to pray!’

The causeway suddenly came into view around a bend in the road. The priest made to stand up and grabbed Bregman by his faded red sash. The water was rushing fast between the granite rocks. At this spot the Ros breaks through the Avratinska Hills with a fury. The water was flowing over the causeway in a clear wave, cascading down like thunder and filling the air with a cold spray. Across the river, on the far side of the causeway, the enormous poplars seemed to practically leap into the sky, and one could make out a small white house. I recognised the farm on the island where I had lived as a small boy – its thickets and wattle fences, the tall yokes beside the wells, and the rocks by the riverbanks. They cut the river into separate, powerful streams. Long ago my father and I had fished for whiskered gudgeon from those rocks.

Bregman stopped the horses near the causeway, climbed down, straightened the harness with the handle of his whip, looked at his carriage doubtfully, and shook his head. At that moment the priest finally broke his oath of silence.

‘Jesus-Maria!’ he uttered in a low voice. ‘How are we going to get across?’

‘Ahh, how should I know?’ Bregman replied. ‘Just sit quiet. The horses are already shaking all over.’

The horses threw back their heads, snorted, and then walked into the rushing water. It roared and knocked the light carriage to the unguarded side of the causeway. The carriage shifted at an angle and began to move sideways, its metal wheels screeching. The horses trembled, tried to steady themselves, and nearly lay down in the water to keep from being swept away. Bregman swung his whip over their heads. Halfway across the causeway, where the current was strongest, making a loud ringing sound, the horses came to a stop. The foaming rapids beat against their thin legs. Bregman let out a wail and began to whip the horses mercilessly. They moved backwards, pushing the carriage to the very edge of the causeway. Then I caught sight of Uncle Ilko. He was galloping on a grey horse from the farm to the causeway. He was yelling something and waving a coil of thin rope over his head.

He rode up onto the causeway and tossed Bregman the rope. Bregman hurriedly tied it to something under the carriage box, and then the three horses – two bays and a grey – finally dragged the carriage onto the island. The priest crossed himself with a sweeping gesture. Bregman winked at Uncle Ilko and said that folks would long remember such a fine driver as that old Bregman. I asked about my father.

‘Still alive,’ Ilko replied, and kissed me, scratching my face with his beard. ‘He’s waiting for you. But where’s your mother, Maria Grigorievna?’

‘I sent her a telegram in Moscow. She should arrive tomorrow.’

Uncle Ilko looked at the river. ‘It’s still rising,’ he said. ‘That’s bad, my dear Kostik. Well, perhaps that’s the worst of it. Let’s go!’

We were met on the porch by Aunt Dozia, all in black, her eyes dried out from so much crying. The stuffy rooms smelled of mint. At first I did not recognise my father in the yellowed old man with the grey stubble on his cheeks. My father was only fifty years old. I had always remembered him as a slightly stooped but well-built man, elegant, dark-haired with an unusually sad smile and attentive grey eyes.

Now he sat in his chair, breathing heavily, and looking intently at me, a lone tear running down his dry cheek. It stuck on his beard, and Aunt Dozia wiped it away with a clean handkerchief. My father couldn’t speak. He was dying of throat cancer. I sat by my father all night. Everyone else slept. The rain stopped. The stars shone sullenly outside the windows. The river raged ever louder. The water kept rising. Bregman and the priest could not get back and were now trapped on the island. My father stirred in the middle of the night and opened his eyes. I leaned over him. He tried to put his arms around my neck but couldn’t and then said in a raspy whisper: ‘I fear … your lack of character … will be the ruin of you.’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘That won’t happen.’

‘When you see your mama,’ he whispered. ‘I failed her … May she forgive me …’

He grew quiet and weakly squeezed my hand. At the time I did not understand his words, and only much later, after many years, did their bitter meaning become clear to me. I also came to understand much later that my father had never really been a statistician at all, but a poet. He died towards dawn, but at first I didn’t realise this. It seemed to me that he had quietly fallen asleep.

An old man named Nechipor lived with us on the island. We called him to come and read the psalms over Father. Nechipor frequently broke off his readings to go out into the front hall and smoke his cheap tobacco. There in a whisper he’d tell me the simple stories that stirred his imagination – about a bottle of wine he’d drunk the previous summer at Belaya Tserkov, about how he’d seen Skobelev himself,fn5 so close in fact ‘as that hedge right there’, at Plevna, about an amazing American threshing machine powered by a lightning rod. Old man Nechipor was, as they said on the island, ‘a simple man’ – a liar and a gasbag. He read the psalms all day and throughout the following night, picking wax off the sides of the candles with his black fingernails, falling asleep where he stood, snorting himself awake, and then carrying on with his mumbled prayers.

That night someone on the other side of the river began yelling and waving a lantern. I went to the riverbank with Uncle Ilko. The river was raging. The water raced over the causeway in an icy cascade. It was late and dark, not a single star shone over our heads. The wind blew the raw freshness of the flood and thawing earth into our faces. And the whole time someone on the far bank kept shouting and waving a lantern, but not a word could be made out over the noise of the river.

‘That must be Mama,’ I said to Uncle Ilko, but he did not respond.

‘Let’s go,’ he said, and then was quiet. ‘It’s cold out here on the banks. You’ll catch cold.’

I didn’t want to go back to the house. Uncle Ilko was silent for a while and then left, but I stayed and kept watching the lantern in the distance. The wind blew ever stronger, bending the poplars, and carrying the slightly sweet smoke of burning straw from somewhere far off. We buried Father in the morning. Nechipor and Uncle Ilko dug a grave in the grove on the edge of the ravine. From there one could make out the woods beyond the Ros in the distance and the whitish March sky. We carried the coffin from the house on wide, embroidered straps. The priest walked in front. He looked straight ahead with his calm, grey eyes and murmured Latin prayers.

Once we got the coffin out onto the steps, I caught sight on the far side of the river of an old carriage with some untethered horses and a small woman in black – Mama. She was standing motionless on the riverbank. She saw that we were carrying Father from the house. She dropped to her knees and her head fell to the ground. The tall, gaunt driver went up and leaned over her. He said something, but she just lay there, not moving. Then she jumped up and began running along the bank towards the causeway. The driver grabbed her. She sank helplessly to the ground and covered her face with her hands.

We carried Father along the road to the grave. At the bend, I turned to look. Mama was still sitting with her face buried in her hands. We were all silent, but Bregman kept slapping his whip against the side of his boot. By the graveside the priest lifted his eyes to the cold sky and then said clearly and slowly in Latin: ‘Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis!’ Grant unto him eternal rest, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.

Then the priest fell silent and listened. The river roared and overhead the tomtits called to each other in the branches of the old elms. The priest sighed and began to speak again about man’s eternal longing for happiness and the valley of tears. These words were remarkably fitting for my father’s life. They made my heart ache. Ever since I have often felt that same pain when confronting this thirst for happiness and the imperfection of human relations. The river kept on roaring, the birds whistled cautiously, and as the coffin was slowly lowered on its straps into the grave it knocked loose clods of damp earth. I was then seventeen.