The Story of a Life

88

The Last Shot

With each passing day, life in Odessa became more alarming. Soviet forces had almost reached Voznesensk by now.

Ships swarming with refugees were leaving for Constantinople. Almost all these ships – dirty, rusty, black paint peeling from their sides – chugged their way out of port low in the water, listing to one side, and belching thick black smoke that blanketed all of Langeron and our Chernomorskaya Street. But the newspapers still came out. The White authorities knew that the end was no more than hours away, but they did everything in their power to hide the fact from the civilians, especially the refugees from the north. The papers carried telegrams stating that the Bolshevik advance had been stopped and that French troops with artillery and poison gas were on their way to Odessa from Thessaloniki.

These rumours were spread to try to stop the crush of panicked refugees fleeing to the south in the hope of reaching Constantinople, which would hamper the White Army’s escape. Only a few ships were left in port, and Denikin’s men were saving them for themselves. The officers, who had long ago given up all hope, could be found at the Yellow Canary Café reading stories in the papers that kept trying to convince everyone of the hackneyed expression from the days of Napoleon’s invasion that ‘Moscow has burned down, but Russia still stands’. The newspaper where I worked kept rehashing this same theme in every last article, editorial and poem.

One day Bunin dropped into our office. He was worried and wanted to know what was happening at the front. He stood in the doorway, struggling to take off the glove on his right hand. It was a cold, rainy day, and the wet kid glove had stuck to his fingers. Finally, he pulled it off and, after scanning our small, smoky room with his grey eyes, said: ‘No, not much of a place you have here.’

For some reason we felt put out.

‘What do you expect, Ivan Alexeevich?’ Nazarov replied. ‘We’ve already got one foot in the grave.’

‘By the way,’ said Bunin, ‘you don’t happen to know where that expression comes from, do you?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Oh well, anyway – you’re right. We’ve reached the end!’ he said and then paused. ‘Rain, cold, darkness, but my heart’s at peace. Or rather, it’s empty. Like death.’

‘Feeling low, Ivan Alexeevich?’ asked Nazarov cautiously.

‘No, not really,’ Bunin answered. ‘It’s just the world’s become such an uncomfortable place. Even the sea smells of rusty iron.’ He got up and went to our editor’s office.

I had loved Bunin since a boy for his gloomy, merciless precision; for his devotion to Russia, his incredible knowledge of its people, his profound admiration of the world in all its diverse beauty, his vigilance; and for his own clear, unmistakable understanding that happiness is everywhere, but only for those who know it. Even then Bunin for me belonged to the classics. I knew many of his poems by heart and sections of his prose as well. My favourite work of his for its bitter suffering and unerring language was ‘Elijah the Prophet’, a short story of no more than two or three pages. Given all this, I was terror-struck and didn’t dare to so much as utter a word in his presence. I lowered my head, listening to his monotone voice, glancing up at him rarely, fearful of catching his eye.

Many years later I read his Life of Arseniev. For me, some of its chapters belong to the finest poetry and prose ever written, especially the passage where Bunin writes about the bones of his mother, buried in the cold clay earth of Yelets, about the inevitable loss of the people we love most, and about the despair and loneliness all of us know in our hearts. He knew how to use simple, painful words:

A widow wept one night –

She’d loved the baby tenderly, but it had died.

The old neighbour wept too, pressing his sleeve to his eyes,

The stars shone, and the kid wept in the sty.

A mother wept in the night.

Her night tears led another to cry.

The stars fall like tears from the night sky,

The Lord weeps, pressing his sleeve to his eyes.

Bunin soon left. I could not work any longer, correcting the illiterate, fabricated scribblings of the Odessa reporters, and so I went home to Chernomorskaya Street.

A black wind blew from the leaden sea. Sullen curtains of rain hung over the water. The acacia leaves that had once floated on the clear puddles had all drowned. Now they lay under the water, covering the pavement in thick, yellow layers of rot. Only the wet ivy in the back gardens glistened, offering proof of life. I walked towards the sea, down towards the Arcadia district. The watery desert swirled and washed silently upon the smooth sand. The vast, bleak gloom of the autumn sea flooded me with a diffuse and cold sense of anguish, which I did not resist.

How many times had I looked back upon my life? Now, going over it year by year once again, I realised that nothing but the future could give meaning, direction and justification to my disjointed and conflicted past. Perhaps the future would sift from my life, from all that I had experienced, everything touched by genuine human warmth and poetry and help me to stitch these untidy fragments into a meaningful, coherent story. And who knows, just maybe this story might answer some need in others as well and not only in me, helping them through their own personal storm to a distant patch of sunlight amid the dark clouds. I could see such a patch ahead of me, slowly spreading over the sea to the south and promising to release the pale autumn sun from its gloomy captivity.

Overnight, the clouds dispersed, and in the morning I awoke to an improbably blue sea outside my windows. A thin, sharp north-easter was blowing, bringing with it as always cold, clear skies. The withered grass, covered in shining, ringing hoar-frost, twisted in the wind. Slow, heavy surf pounded the sea cliffs, leaving behind a white crust of ice. The wind tore dollops of salt foam as thick as whipped egg whites from the tops of the waves. Ragged mounds of it billowed and quivered on the beach, and it was easy to believe the ancient Greeks that it had given birth to Aphrodite.

My leisurely thoughts were interrupted by the thunder of artillery. It slammed down on the city like a great iron paw. The whole sanatorium shook and rattled, tiles fell from the roof, crashing into pieces on the ground. This shot was followed by a second, then a third, and a fourth …

A French battle cruiser anchored in the roadstead was firing into the steppe. The shells flew over the city and exploded so far away that the sound didn’t reach Odessa. Looking out of my window, I saw ‘Yasha on Wheels’ race into the yard. He opened the stairway door and shouted at the top of his lungs, his words echoing through the empty building: ‘The Bolsheviks have broken through over by the Tiligul estuary. They’ve almost reached Kuyalnik. It’s all over!’

Kuyalnik was only a few kilometres east of Odessa.

Yasha ran into my room. Nazarov followed. Yasha, still shouting, said that the Whites had fled without firing a single shot. There was panic in the port, the French cruiser was firing blindly into the steppe, and we had to immediately throw a few essentials into a small bag and hurry to the port. They had already started loading the steamers.

‘Well, okay then,’ I told him. ‘Go. It’s up to you and your conscience. As for me, I cannot imagine giving up on my country, or my people, no matter what.’

‘True,’ said Nazarov. ‘Life without Russia would be meaningless for me. But Yasha, if your life is so precious, although I’m not sure to whom, run along. To hell with you.’

‘Nonsense!’ Yasha muttered. He turned red and tears appeared in his eyes. ‘It’s just that everybody’s fleeing. Maybe I just got carried away. You know I’m not going anywhere.’

There was little time to think. A moment of hesitation could save one’s life or destroy it. Yasha ended up staying. He was visibly relieved not to have to think about it anymore. He put on some water for tea. We drank a quick cup and then headed off to Alexandrovsky Park. From the park’s old pavilion on the edge of a cliff one had a clear view of the entire port and all that was going on down there.

For a long time after I could not shake the haunting impression that I had already witnessed this epic flight in a painting by some pitiless artist: those mouths, twisted in cries for help; eyes bulging from their sockets; green, deeply etched faces gripped by the fear of death; the blind terror when people can see only one thing – the rickety ship’s gangway with its handrails snapping under the crush of human bodies; rifle butts crashing down on heads; mothers holding up their crying babies in outstretched arms over the crazed human herd; a woman trampled underfoot, still writhing and screaming on the quay …

People were literally destroying each other, preventing even those who had reached the gangway and grabbed the railing from saving themselves. I saw one lucky man take hold of the railing only to be immediately clutched at by many hands. He inched his way forward, dragging these people along with him up the gangway, but then lost his hold and fell together with the others still clinging to his body into the sea. Unable to free himself from this terrible human load, he went down into the water and disappeared.

All the roads leading to the port were jammed with crowds of people. The throngs seemed too big for the roads to handle, and it looked as though the fences and houses might be crushed at any moment. That would have helped to save lives, but the houses were all made of heavy stone and didn’t give way. Instead, one heard the constant breaking of glass and splintering of timber as people were squeezed through windows and doors.

Crushed suitcases, bundles and baskets slithered downhill underfoot like grotesque living creatures. Clothes were spilling out and winding themselves around people’s feet. Women’s lace and nightgowns, children’s frocks and ribbons trailed behind the fleeing mass, and the sight of these homely things made their flight seem even more tragic. Cold clouds of dust hung over the roads.

Groups of officers and soldiers scattered and were lost in the crowds of civilians, and only the felt cloaks of the men from the Caucasus stood out in the crowd, swinging like black bells and making it difficult for them to run. The men tore off their cloaks and threw them in the air, where they hung for a moment, caught by the wind, as though gliding on their own like so many flying carpets down to the port.

A jet of steam spurted up into the murky sky over the bridge of one of the steamers, followed by a heavy, shuddering whistle. Immediately taking up the sound, all the other ships began whistling in various keys. This was the chorus of departure. It sounded like a prayer for the dying, for those who were departing their homeland and their people, leaving Russia’s fields and woods, her springtimes and winters, renouncing their share in our common suffering and joy, in our past and present, in the genius of Pushkin and Tolstoy, and in that great filial love we all feel for our beautiful land.

Soviet cavalry had by now made their way into the city. Several of the horsemen had ridden out to the end of the breakwater, where they now sat motionless on their horses. A minesweeper, convoying the ships, fired two pointless rounds that exploded over the city with a thin crack. This was their parting gift. The Soviet guns did not return fire.

Silent crowds stood on the breakwaters, the boulevards and the bluffs over the sea, watching the heavy hulks of the departing ships grow dim in the smoke and dusk. The silence of the victors conveyed a painful reproach. Before long, the ships disappeared in the mist. The winter wind was blowing again from the north-east, as though turning over a new page. On it was to be written a heroic story of Russia – long-suffering, unique and beloved to our dying breath.