A luxurious carriage had approached, not a carriage but a landau, containing a fat man in civilian clothes. He sat there, his entire body exuding confidence in himself, in his landau and his horses. Both hands rest on his widely spread knees, and the fingers are studded with rings, like shish kebabs on spits.
Next to the man is a pale, slim boy, long-nosed and dark-eyed, wearing a round, white-topped fur hat.
“Here’s Davidchik! Davidchik has come!”
Davidchik is the brother of Nino, the girl from the Caucasus.
David jumps from the carriage before it stops and runs toward Griboedov, hugs him heartily, and kisses him fervently.
The eyes of the beardless man who elevated himself so miraculously in Petersburg well up in a fatherly manner. He is taken aback.
“Davidchik has come!”
He shakes the fat man’s hand politely, absentmindedly, and only then looks at him, perplexed. And the fat man, who just a moment ago looked so lordly and aloof in his landau, hesitates; his neck swells like that of a startled boa constrictor and he speaks sweetly in French with a noticeable Greek accent:
“Welcome … welcome, Your Excellency!”
He is a Greek pretending to be a Frenchman.
Oh, how quickly Griboedov catches the whiff of that sweet, entangled, stranded family!
Oh, how Davidchik’s eyes resemble his sister’s, Nino’s!
Griboedov greets the Greek, the industrial magnate, as if they are of the same family, even though he is a rogue and a cheat. Even though his moustache is dyed, his speech false, and his papers fake.
The absurd, free-spirited family of people thrown together accidentally is buzzing and swarming over here, in Tiflis, at Praskovya Nikolaevna Akhverdova’s.
Her house, entwined and choked with ivy, is falling apart, the widow’s means are dwindling, but they eat and drink and dance at her place, and the youngsters are on fire, kissing in every corner.
“Davidchik, you’ve been growing a moustache! How sweet of you, how sweet of you to come out here to see me, dear boy!”
And the underlings are suddenly filled with a puppy’s joy, they feel a foolish tickling in their noses, and they are grateful to Davidchik for something they cannot quite articulate, and they mutter:
“Sweet, he is so sweet …”
And having recovered, they dig the next man in the ribs and say with a meaningful chuckle:
“Monsieur Sevigny has come to greet him too, you see …”
04
1
His arms and legs were being broken, his back thrashed. His mouth and face were flecked with foam.
A Tatar was thrashing him, torturing him intently, with a look of concentration on his face, showing his white teeth, as if eager to turn him into something new and rare. He changed the method of torture quite abruptly: drumming his back with his fists, then twisting his arms behind his back and simultaneously, in passing, thrusting a fist into his side.
Then he stretched Griboedov’s long legs until the joints cracked.
Griboedov lay exhausted, not understanding what was going on.
He breathed deeply.
The cracking of his bones was frightening; it sounded as though it had nothing to do with him. Strangely enough, there was no pain.
The Tatar crouched, suddenly jumped onto his back and began to grind on it with his feet, like a baker kneading dough in a tub.
Griboedov breathed deeply and slowly, as in childhood before falling asleep.
Then the Tatar stuck a wet cloth linen bag onto his fist, blew it up like a balloon, and punched it up and down Griboedov’s back, from feet to neck, and then hurled Griboedov with all his strength from the bench into the pool.
The marble pool was filled with very hot water.
Bebutov’s baths in Tiflis turn a man into an Asiatic, thrash out of him any remotely cold thought, rid him of his age, fill him with self-love as languid as soap bubbles and with an indifference toward everyone else, which is neither warm nor cold, like the edges of the pool. They are like the love of a very mature woman and feel very much like happiness.
Stretching like a cat, Griboedov went through to dress in a spacious dressing room. The Tatar, wearing wet, flimsy shorts—the Prophet orders the snake to be kept hidden—followed him confidently, used to nudity. People unused to nudity walk differently. Griboedov, naked in the Asian fashion, was approaching his European clothes in that manner.
The Tatar was chatting to another bath attendant.
“Why are you so red-faced, Ali?” the other bath attendant asked Griboedov’s Tatar.
“When I bathe Russians,” replied Ali, “I pummel and turn them around a lot. I don’t pound our own people so much; I concentrate more on the washing. Russians come to our baths not for washing, but so that they can tell their friends. They come out of curiosity, so the baths master tells us to give them a good drubbing.”
Griboedov realized that they were talking about him—he did not know much of the Tatar language, but it seemed to him that the Tatar was speaking respectfully.
A small side door opens, and a head is thrust through. The head stares impassively at the bath attendants, and they go back to work at once. The bath keeper, “the master,” Mushadi, appears in the anteroom. His way of walking is light, like a dancer’s, unexpectedly elegant. It betrays the Persian: a delicate and pampered being, exquisite and secretive. Mushadi is an old friend. He puts his hand to his forehead with all the ease of a courteous Asian. Such Old World dignity in the bearing and gait of a bath owner!
“Ahvali djenabi shuma hude’est? Is everything to Your Excellency’s satisfaction?”
Mushadi has lived in Tiflis for a long time; he has almost forgotten Persia and speaks excellent Russian.
He was Griboedov’s first teacher of Persian, is pleased to see him, and is playing out a little comedy of Eastern greeting, glad to remind him that he used to be his teacher. He carries on with his impish courtesies:
“I trust your brain is in full working order?”
“Alas,” sighed Griboedov, “regrettably, in full order, Ivan Ivanych.”
All Russians living in Tiflis called Mushadi “Ivan Ivanych.”
Two limping old ladies hobbled in the direction of the square. Both limped with the right foot. Such limping old ladies were becoming a rarity in Tiflis. When Agha Mohammad had conquered the city, his soldiers raped the women and girls and cut their victims’ right-leg hamstrings—as a memento.
The day was windless, still, with unbroken sunshine; the old ladies walked slowly. Round the corner, two boys sang a song, possibly teasing the old women.
2
The year Griboedov was born in Moscow was the year when Tiflis was sacked. The execution lasted six days, and it was perpetrated by the eunuch Agha Mohamad, the Persian shah.
Of the two rapacious patrons, St. Petersburg’s Catherine the Great and Tehran’s Agha, Georgia, Imereti, and Mingrelia chose Catherine, the lesser and more distant of the two evils, and surrendered themselves to her protection. Such was the Peace Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca. Then Shah Agha Mohammad took his troops and marched on Tiflis. For a long time afterward, they were alternately compared to a storm cloud, to a plague of locusts, to a tornado, a flood, a wildfire, so it was hard to imagine that they were a half-naked, hastily armed host, thousands strong. It was indeed a host that had been sucked up as if by a whirlwind and brought together into a single entity.
And the city was defenseless.
Catherine sold it out, as a landowner relinquishes a litigious piece of land, somewhere deep in the steppes, in a troublesome area. To patronize a weak and alien people is easier than dealing with a strong one, a wealthy and willful city with its own rich traditions.
The city of Tiflis was left defenseless, and the misery of a defenseless city is greater than any other yearning on this earth. And in September 1795, Agha Mohammad razed the city of Tiflis to the ground. For six days, his soldiers burned everything that could be burned and slaughtered everyone who
could be slaughtered. When the curls of smoke went up toward the skies from Avlabari,1 the soft, red reek resembled that of herds of slaughtered sheep, and the wailing of the women, the shrieking of the children, and the screaming of the wounded animals were drowned out by the roaring of the flames.
Shah Agha Mohammad was of small stature, his face wretched and wrinkled like an evil urchin’s, and his buttocks were ample as an old woman’s. He would do anything not to be laughed at. But having compelled people to be afraid both of himself and of his shadow—his very name—he could not compel anyone to consider him as a man. He had heard about the tsar’s baths in Tiflis; he had been told that the baths were hot and pleasing and that they restored vigor and youth to a man and healed wounds. And so, after Agha Mohammad conquered the city of Tiflis, he ordered himself to be carried along the charred and empty streets to the baths. He examined them. The structure of solid stone and marble, with its wide marble pools, stunned him. He felt the stones and praised their smoothness.
Then he left his retinue behind, went down to the hot sulfur pool, and spent half an hour there. By that time, the best and most experienced bath attendants had been summoned to massage the shah’s body. The walls were so thick that the sounds of the shots and the collapsing houses could not be heard from inside. The baths were cordoned off by soldiers and well guarded. So the shah lay on the marble bench and looked up at the ceiling, on which artists had painted a simple but infinite pattern soothing to the eye. So he lay until the evening. Then he got up and slowly felt his body all over. He was dressed. Walking past a big basin of cold, calm water, he stopped and studied his reflection for a long, long time. After he had left the baths, he ordered them to be razed to their foundations. After the six-day-long slaughter, he left the ruined city and took half its inhabitants with him into captivity. And then the city began to build itself up again, furtively, fearfully. The chimneys sticking out all over it, like memorial columns, began to form walls again. And the humpbacked lanes led once more, as before the fire, either to a cobbler’s shop or a baker’s house.
Life was quite different, though. More subdued now.
This was Griboedov’s home away from home, the place of his hard, eight-year-long labors. One memorable day, he had fled Petersburg, a callow youth with no future, was formed here, achieved maturity and a settled life; and he and the city had recovered from their wounds together. Now Tiflis once again had twenty thousand inhabitants. From the adjacent mountains, it looked like a large, stone frying pan, into which a cook kept adding more gray, dark mushrooms—the houses.
In the square, the heels of the Armenian vendors drummed under the tall boardwalk canopies; taciturn Persians fanned the coals to a glow in their braziers; donkeys with heads down trotted along, bearing their bundles of firewood—or small logs, vine prunings. And in the evenings, rouged women appeared on the flat roofs, and when they danced, their veils and shawls fluttered like the wings of bats.
The houses stuck to one another, climbed on top of one another, as if seeking refuge from the heat. They were bursting with balconies. Those cluttered, chaotic, jumbled balconies, screened by wooden balustrades, were the places where they dined, quarreled, slept, made love, cherishing the coolness like every drop of a precious, vintage wine. From here each night, generation after generation listened vacantly and fervently to the goatlike bleating of the zurna.2 In his blind thirst for change, as crude as a soldier’s lovemaking, Ermolov ordered the demolition of those balconies, the remnants of the old Asia. He was eager to make a European city out of Tiflis; he hacked his way through streets in military fashion, as though cutting a path through a forest.
The city fought back.
The balconies flew off; the houses stood like plucked chickens. Griboedov had been horrified at the thought that Tiflis would melt in the heat. In that struggle, he was on the side of the city. Asia was sluggish and filthy, but its sweat was cooling. Europe à la Tiflis looked like a row of barracks. That is what the main streets looked like.
The city gardens, with their dark foliage, streetlamps, and garden paths, were the soldier’s unrequited love.
In the side streets, the balconies grew like swallows’ nests.
Ermolov backed down. The city won. Tiflis had been, and remained, a city of many balconies.
Now it had spruced itself up, as if expecting a promotion. The striped bridge railings looked a bit like foppish constables. The policemen in their new uniforms, all spick-and-span, sweated profusely at the crossroads of the streets. Matassi’s tavern, which was the Russian underlings’ mecca, was shut down. The sentry’s mournful, sickroom appearance at the door was reminiscent of wartime. Dusty provisions carts stood in a row at the entrance to the long, two-story building where Griboedov had first seen Ermolov. But if you turned right, then went straight on and kept walking up and up, you would reach a wooden house surrounded by a garden. The large wooden house was the place where happiness dwelled.
3
A stone house is built not for convenience but according to the calculations of people who won’t live in it. For those who do, it often proves uncomfortable. Soon they begin to feel like animals in a cage.
A wooden house is built without calculation. A few years after its construction, the mistress of the house notices with astonishment that the house has changed beyond recognition. To the right, an annex has cropped up out of proportion to the rest of the house; on the left, the cornice (a fine idea—at first) has collapsed, the ivy is madly overgrown and has completely screened the balcony, which has already been patched up a number of times. That the cornice has fallen is probably a good thing; it would have been out of place by now.
The house, however, does not crumble instantly into dust and rubble; rather, it sprawls. All of its parts may undergo alteration, but it is still standing.
The fate of families depends on whether they breed in a stone house or in a wooden one. Animals in cages are always eager to escape. And the parents in a stone house begin to think about how to arrange their son’s career: should it be civil or military, to whom should they marry off their daughter, the old prince or the young bounder.
And the children fly the nest. They leave the stone house like birds on the wing. In a twinkling, the family disintegrates into dust and rubble. Until two little birds are left and they twitter about their estates and the ball and the theater and how expensive everything is and discuss their friends’ flaws. They hobble along for the time being.
In a wooden house, the family does not disintegrate, it sprawls. An absurd annex rises. Someone gets married, bears children, the wife dies. The widower, overgrown with ivy, builds a new cornice—and then, see what happens!—he remarries. Children again, and now the husband dies. The widow remains, and the children have female and male friends from the neighboring house, which has also sprawled, and its bones have already collapsed into the green earth. And the widow takes over the neighbors’ brood as her charges. All of them grow, laugh, seclude themselves in dark corners, kiss, and then two of them get married. An old friend comes for a visit, the widow hasn’t seen her for thirty years and the friend stays forever, and another annex is built, and it looks like nothing on earth.
Which is the mother? The daughter? The son?
Only the house knows the answers: it sprawls.
All its parts are now new.
It’s a mistake to believe that a wooden house is worth less than a stone one: it’s much more valuable. Someone’s piece of inheritance is being sold, someone’s dowry is perishing in the corner; the widow’s capitals plummet, collapse like the cornice, and once again—see what happens!—the money appears as if from nowhere.
At the age of thirteen, Petersburg fledglings and Moscow nestlings, stuck in their boarding schools, write wise, comforting letters to their mother on the occasion of their fathers’ deaths.
At the age of thirteen, they experience a Petersburg white night and a rouged woman. An adolescent may accidentally think about his own mother: not bad-look
ing at all! And whether by the age of twenty, he will be a clerk or a great poet, or he will break into the safe of his rich and powerful uncle while remembering the delicate verses of a fashionable poet, Evgeny Baratynsky—no one can tell. And then, riding thoughtlessly in a cheap cab along a resounding boulevard, he may feel the warmth of the sun on his nose, tenderly lemony. And he will never forget it.
In a wooden house, an elderly general suffering from gout addresses a complete stranger of a woman (according to the marriage certificate), younger than himself, as “dear mama” and kisses her hand. The general is covered in wrinkles and scars; each scar has a history, but the general is kissing somebody in the corner, oblivious of everything. He feels the warmth of the human cowshed, and like the bullock calf, lows to a strange woman: “dear mama.”
Such is Praskovya Nikolaevna Akhverdova’s muddled household.
General Fyodor Isayevich Akhverdov, the chief of the Caucasus artillery, had a wife, née Princess Justiniani, a Georgian, and a wooden house surrounded by a green garden in Tiflis by St. David Hill. His wife died and left him with two children: Yegorushka and Sonechka. The general did not hang about and, at once, in military fashion got married to Praskovya Nikolaevna. After that, he quickly started to become overgrown with ivy, did not hesitate to sire a daughter, Dashenka, and died soon afterward. Praskovya Nikolaevna was put in charge of the house and the estate, which were left in trust to Egorushka, Sonechka, and Dashenka.
The neighbors’ house was that of the general’s friend, also a general, Prince Alexander Gersevanovich Chavchavadze, and it too had been sprawling. The prince was a poet, a nobleman, jovial and quick-witted, educated at one of the best boarding schools that Petersburg had to offer; he was ten years older than Griboedov. In his youth, he had happened to take part in the Ananuri rebellion, and on that account had been sent into a boring but honorary exile to the Russian town of Tambov. Eight years later, he took part in the suppression of the Kakheti peasant rebellion—and washed off the stain of suspicion. During the 1812 campaign, he was Barclay de Tolly’s adjutant, took part in the conquest of Paris, looked down on the city, covered in thick fog, from the heights of Montreuil, and remembered it forever.
The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar Page 22