“Six-inch shells. No smaller,” said Dymbinsky and tapped the driver’s back. “Turn around!”
A large black Mauser suddenly appeared in his hand. Cussing, the cabby turned into a side alley. Far away, three men in overcoats were running along the lane. Somewhere beyond the houses shots rang out. A machine gun fired. The lady in the second carriage cried out and began to cross herself in a sort of mousy fashion. Dymbinsky swore in Polish. Father shouted at the driver. I felt a sudden, intense chill and moaned as I yawned with my whole mouth. A crack sounded right close by. The window glass in the houses rang. The horse whinnied and jerked. My tin with all my beloved things slipped out of my hands and rolled down the icy road.
Both carriages stopped. Father, Uncle, and Dymbinsky screamed at the drivers; the drivers, not understanding where to go, pulled on the reins. The horses snorted and backed up. I watched my tin box rolling. Like a lemon-yellow wheel it rolled, rolled and rolled, rolled until I cried, until there were sharp pains in my eyes. And in it, like a tin drum, was my tin cap gun. Suddenly, as if obeying some unforeseen order, I jumped out of the swaying carriage and rushed after my box.
“Alexander, come back! Come back this min — ” Father cried out.
And his voice was forever drowned in a terrible crashing sound. This crash swallowed all the voices in the carriages. The crash struck me in the back as though I was a rug hung out for cleaning. And a huge rumble, like a giant, thumped the dust out of me in one blow. I collapsed.
Then I opened my eyes. Very close to me I saw ice, soiled by horse manure. The ice was right near my nose. I wanted to get up, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t clear what stopped me. I couldn’t hear anything. I pushed against the ice. And with enormous difficulty I raised my head. In front of me was an empty lane. In the middle of it lay my yellow tin. I understood right away that the most important thing was behind me. So I began to turn my stiffened neck. It turned very badly. But it did turn.
I saw: smoke, overturned carriages, people lying down, and the horse thrashing on its side with its guts sticking out. And black earth on the ice. And something else black that lay quite close to me. I squinted at it. It was a leg in a black boot. And a gray-blue-white-striped wool sock. A fashionable American sock. The sock of Ernestcubantwodonons. A red leg stuck out of the sock. Sticking out from the leg was...something else.
I felt a warm trickle across my lips. I touched them and looked at my hand. It was covered in blood. I understood that I had to get up and go to Papa. Because he had called me. With great difficulty I managed to pull my legs up and rose to my knees. Then a carousel spun around me. Everything — the smoke, the house, the woman in the window, the earth, the leg, the horse and the men, the smoke, men, house, woman in the window — went around, and around, and around. From left to right. Left to right. Left to right.
And I fell back on the ice.
The Road
My childhood ended in Kiev on December 12, 1918. It was blown out of me by an exploding six-inch shell that took the life of my father, my brother Vanya, and Uncle Yury. One of the cabbies died as well. The servant Savely and the other cabby were injured, but they survived. Dymbinsky disappeared. Uncle’s mistress, Lidia Vasilevna Belkina, the widow of a staff captain in the czar’s army, received a serious concussion, as did I. The very same redheaded woman who had been closing her shutters picked us up and dragged us into her house. I couldn’t hear anything for three months. I couldn’t walk: my head spun, and I would have to sit down and close my eyes immediately. The most comfortable thing for me was to sit on the floor and stare at it. Over those three months I studied three floors: the clay wattle-and-daub floor covered with brightly colored homemade rugs, a parquet floor covered with huge Persian rugs, and the floor of a train car, covered in spittle and strewn with cigarette butts. The train floor swayed back and forth.
Belkina told me that my relatives had been buried in the Baikov cemetery. She helped arrange to send me with her cousin to Moscow. I set off but I didn’t get there. Armed men on horseback stopped the train. And it went off in an entirely different direction. First I ended up in Poltava, then in Kharkov. Then in Kursk. Then Rylsk. Then came the stations Krasnoye, Morshansk; the villages Golubino, Serpukhov; the settlements Pekhterevo, Podolsk.
I finally arrived in Moscow on August 2, 1922. During that time I had grown up. The explosion knocked not only childhood out of me but something else as well. It was as though it cut me off from my past. And along with my past — any love for it. Throughout four years of drifting I never once cried about my dead father. I remembered my mother frequently, I thought about her. But it didn’t occur to me to try and find her, to search for her. She had become inaccessible not only in the world around me but inside me as well. Only hunchbacked Nastenka, my favorite sister, reached out to me from the past that the explosion had cut off; she would appear at night and live for long periods in my tormented dreams of the familiar and what had been lost. I would awake in tears.
For the entire four years I was constantly on the move, traveling and traveling. One enormous, endless road stretched under my feet and pulled me, tearing me away from every comfortable situation, promising and menacing, scary and calming. I didn’t understand where I was going or why. I was simply led. I was never alone, I never suffered from hunger, and I never once passed the night outdoors under a fence or in a haystack. I was never robbed, never beaten in the face, never stabbed with a knife. People took care of me. I was passed from hand to hand, like some precious thing forever lost by its owner. A thing that for some reason definitely had to be preserved. There was a kind of miracle in all of this. Mama’s dependents, hopelessly distant relatives, Father’s passing acquaintances and business associates, colleagues of my late brother Vasily, a teacher’s sisters, and simple strangers turned out to be in the necessary places at the necessary times in order to help “Snegirev’s son.” Some made sure I got on an overfilled train, others chanced to meet me on the platform, some called to me on the street, and still others arranged places for me to pass the night. Coincidence became the norm. I stopped being surprised by it. I just traveled. But I didn’t know where I was going or for what reason. Turning up in some city, town, or village, I knew immediately that I wouldn’t stay there forever. The blast had knocked a sense of home out of me. I no longer had any home. There was no longer anywhere I yearned to be. Vaskelovo and Basantsy remained only in memory. And I understood this.
Having lived a month or two in a new place, with new people, I would feel that it was time to move on. So I’d say, “It’s time.”
Surprisingly, my words had an effect on host after host. Without asking where I was heading, they would immediately begin to figure things out, get moving, undertake something, send someone a note, make an agreement with someone else, and a day or two later I would be on the train or catching a ride with some freight to a place where I was expected.
The road led me.
It took me four years to get to Moscow.
During that time a lot of things happened. The Bolsheviks won a definitive victory. The war ended.
Russia became Red.
Petrograd
Having ended up in Moscow, I set off for Ostozhenka Street, to find my grandmother’s cozy wooden house. But grandmother wasn’t there anymore. Nine worker families lived in the house. A woman washing clothes in the courtyard told me that “the old lady died as soon as the authorities ‘condensed’ the living space.” That had happened a year earlier.
I knew no one in Moscow.
Aunt Flora remained in Petrograd. I made it to there on a freight train and found my aunt’s apartment on the Moika. Aunt Flora was alive, although she had aged drastically. She didn’t recognize me immediately. And she was terribly frightened when I entered. She thought she was seeing my deceased brother Vasily. Then she cried and tried to kiss me on the top of my head as she did when I was a child. But I had grown and she couldn’t manage it. I told her everything. She crossed herself and cried. And again tr
ied to kiss me. I bowed my head.
Aunt Flora told me that two of our relatives had been shot, one had left for Paris, and that her sister had disappeared without a trace during the Civil War. The estate in Vaskelovo had become a boarding school for homeless and orphaned children. She had heard that the estate in Basantsy had been burned. I had also heard that in Kharkov. The regional housing department had occupied our apartment on Millionnaya Street in Petrograd.
Aunt Flora’s four-room apartment had also been “condensed” and four families had been moved in. My aunt, as a single woman, the widow of a bourgeois, occupied the former pantry. In that dim little room stood an iron bedstead, a mahogany chest of drawers, a Singer sewing machine, and a few icons. From under the bed Aunt pulled out a folded Persian rug that used to lie on the parlor floor, set one of her large embroidered pillows on it, and declared, “It’s crowded, Sashulenka, but it’s all yours, the more the merrier! Make yourself at home!”
I settled in on that folded rug, next to the door.
Auntie Flora hated the Bolsheviks fiercely, believing them to be the servants of the Antichrist. Her life was closely tied to the church. Childless, widowed early, Auntie had spent most of her time in the church. But she did not want to shave her head and enter a nunnery, as many of her pious friends had done after the Bolshevik victory. She made money to feed herself by sewing clothes and once in a while sold something of the little that remained from her former, prosperous life. The main family valuables had been confiscated from her during a search.
The first thing Auntie did was to sew me a shirt and a pair of trousers. While she worked, she gave me instructions for the future: I must finish high school, enter the university, and receive a higher education.
“While you are young — fill your head!” she would repeat, pumping the pedal of the sewing machine with her small but strong legs.
Arriving at my high school on Kriukov Canal, I noticed that it had been renamed the Herzen School. Of the former teachers there remained only the German woman Violetta Nikolaevna Knorre. Of my classmates only two continued to study there — the fat clodhopper Shtiurmer and the sarcastic, restless, dumpy little fellow Yanovsky. Boris Ivanovich Diakov had become the director; he was a typical member of the Russian intelligentsia who had fallen in love with the Revolution. After an interview with him, I was placed in the fifth class. Studies were to begin on the eighth of September, and the director, who taught history, told us, as he triumphantly polished his pince-nez, how he had spoken to Lenin twice.
I studied three years in that school. At first I enjoyed learning new things and I quickly caught up with what I had missed. It was a progressive school: we didn’t take final exams. The teachers whom Diakov invited were genuinely enthusiastic about their profession; they lived for the school, took us on excursions, played lapta and handball with us, set up debates, and in the winter, when the school wasn’t heated, they shared their clothes. Almost all of them supported the Bolsheviks. Only the gloomy, pensive drawing teacher was a convinced anarchist and often said that Lenin and Trotsky were restoring the state machine for suppressing individuality.
At the Herzen School I chose a profession. Or, rather, it chose me. As it happened, after that fateful blast, it turned out that I had a strange and unique ability. Recovering from my concussion in bed and unable to hear anything, I entertained myself by counting the objects around me. At first I simply counted them. Then I began to count their corners. I suddenly noticed that this was very easy. Counting the Japanese shelf of the late Ernestcubantwodonons, which was half hidden by a curtain, I could easily imagine it in space and calculated the number of corners it had: 46. Then I calculated Uncle’s desk: 28. A chandelier with octagonal crystal pendants peeking out from the parlor came next: 226. I gradually calculated all the corners in Uncle’s apartment. There were 822 of them. After this I was satisfied. When I got better, I entirely forgot this unusual activity.
However, when we began to learn geometry, I remembered it. I was good at geometry. Not just good but, in the words of my teacher Georgy Vladimirovich, “simply extraordinary.” I solved problems easily, plotted cross-sections, saw and understood what was difficult for others. Moreover, I could count very fast. After the explosion, mathematics became an intelligible element for me. But I can’t say that geometry or mathematics excited or attracted me. The same was true of other subjects: I was indifferent to history, zoology, literature. Drawing and singing seemed meaningless activities to me. Russian was difficult for me. And French — I had just known it since childhood. The only thing that vaguely excited me was astronomy. Not exactly astronomy itself but the heavenly bodies, hanging in space. Imagining the Universe, it was as though I lost myself. And my heart would begin to throb. However, they didn’t teach us astronomy. Mathematics and geometry were quite easy for me. That was what decided my goal.
“Only the exact sciences, Snegirev! Don’t even think about anything else!” Georgy Vladimirovich would say, categorically wagging his goatlike beard.
I began to prepare for the entrance exams to the university. The director helped me to get through four external-course exams; at age seventeen I received my high-school diploma and easily gained admission to the physics and mathematics department of the university. But even in the first year, sitting through lectures on higher mathematics, I realized that the world of numbers, theorems, and equations held no interest for me. Nor did physics, for that matter. Descriptive geometry had been clear to me since grade ten; neither it nor analytic geometry held any attractive mysteries for me. I was openly bored in class, absorbed in my own thoughts. But these thoughts were not productive. I fell prey to a sort of internal stupor, and plunged into it like a pleasantly warm bath. It should be said that the blast had not only separated me from the past. It had, in effect, halted my development. Previously, I had been a lively, social, merry, fidgety boy. I loved to talk to everyone. And I loved movement. It was hard for me to sit still for even a minute. I never thought about anything for very long. After the blast everything changed: I became quiet, closed, sedentary, pensive, and asocial. I had virtually no friends at school. Girls, who were in class with us after separate education was abolished, didn’t interest me, either. Rita Reznikov, with her curly black hair and black eyes, sat next to me and loved to poke fun at my introversion and reticence.
“You’re so dull, Snegirev, like porridge,” she’d say.
I would just answer with a crooked grin. I didn’t like to joke and fool around between classes. I would wander the schoolyard, avoiding all my noisy, frolicking classmates.
I was no more social at the university. University life didn’t interest me at all. The auditoriums seethed with discussion, lectures grew into debates. There was an ongoing struggle between the “Red” professors and the old, “bourgeois” professors. The Komsomol committee played a significant role in this struggle. The Komsomol could disrupt a professor’s lecture with an accusation of “disguised counterrevolution” or “religious obscurantism.” Famous Bolsheviks were invited to the university for open debates. Lunacharsky argued with the Metropolitan Vvedensky about the existence of God; Zinoviev gave a lecture on the role of the Komsomol in building the new society; Krupskaya led a debate on the women’s question.
I was distant from all of this. After classes I would wander around the city. I wasn’t anxious to go home: Auntie’s sewing machine chirred away; the neighbor women argued in the communal kitchen. Wandering around Petersburg, I touched the stones. I liked to place my hands on the cold granite. The stones exuded a calm that didn’t exist in people. I touched the battered pedestals of building, stroked the smooth columns of St. Isaac’s, touched the manes of granite lions, the polished toes of Atlases, the breasts of marble nymphs, and the wings of marble angels. Stone sculptures calmed me.
Arriving home, I would eat the meager dinner that Auntie had left for me, and lose myself in books I took out of the university library. For the most part these were books on astronomy and the story of
the Universe. I was excited by the planets and the infinity of the starry world that surrounded the Earth. Sometimes I took out books on mineralogy: I didn’t read them, just spent long stretches looking at the color illustrations of stones. I could do this for hours, lying on my rug. I didn’t read books on mathematics and physics at all, making do with what I heard in lectures. Literature didn’t interest me: the world of people, their passions and ambitions — all that seemed petty, fussy, and ephemeral. You couldn’t rely on that like you could on stone. The world of Natasha Rostova and Andrei Bolkonsky was really no different from the world of my neighbors who fought and swore in the kitchen over Primus stoves or the slop bucket. The world of planets and stones was richer and more interesting. It was eternal. I tore a picture of Saturn from an astronomy atlas and hung it on the wall. When Auntie sat down to sew, her head was on the same level as Saturn. But could Saturn be compared in any way with Aunt Flora’s head, muttering something about the Bolsheviks, Renovationists, and the price of woolen cloth and crepe de chine?
Ice Trilogy Page 4