by Teffi
Soon after Harry had left, Zina Katkova came back unexpectedly from the front. She at once began telling me a story I found terribly upsetting.
“Our field hospital,” she said, “had been set up on the edge of a forest. There was a great deal to do, but we had to leave the next morning. We were being rushed off our feet. At one moment I went out for a smoke—and suddenly there was a young soldier calling my name. Who do you think it was? It was Tolya. Tolya the dog. ‘Forgive me, darling,’ I say, ‘I’m in a desperate rush.’ ‘But I just want to know how things are with Lyalechka,’ he answers. ‘She isn’t in trouble, is she? For the love of God, tell me everything you know.’ But just then I heard someone shouting for me. ‘Wait, Tolya,’ I say. ‘The moment I’ve got this done I’ll be straight back.’ ‘All right,’ he says, ‘I’ll wait for you by this tree. We certainly won’t be going anywhere before tomorrow.’ And so I rushed back to my wounded. It was a terrible night. The Germans had got the range of our position, and at dawn we had to pack in a hurry. We didn’t lie down for even a minute. I got a bit behind with everything and I had to run to get to our roll call. It was a miserable morning—endless grey drizzle. I’m running along—and suddenly—oh, Lord! What do I see? Tolya standing by a tree, all grey and ashen. He had been waiting for me all night long. He looked so pitiful. His eyes were sunken, as if staring out from under the earth. And the man was smiling! Probably he’ll be killed soon. Just think—he had been standing there all night long in the rain! Just to hear news of you! And I couldn’t even stop for one moment. There was no time for anything. He thrust a slip of paper at me with his address. I shouted over my shoulder, ‘Don’t worry about Lyalya. I think she’s getting married soon.’ And then I worried I’d said the wrong thing. I might have upset him. Who knows?”
This story of Zina’s greatly disturbed me. I was in a bad way and I needed the friendship of a good man. And where would I find a better man than Tolya? I felt moved. I even asked for his address and tucked the slip of paper away.
After that visit I really felt I didn’t like Zina any longer. First, she had grown ugly and coarse. Second (and really, no doubt, I should have put this first), she treated me very coldly. More than that, she went out of her way to show her complete lack of interest in me and my whole manner of life. It was the first time, for example, that she had seen me with short red hair, but for some reason she behaved as if this wasn’t in the least surprising or interesting. I naturally found this hard to believe. How could she not want to know why I had suddenly cut my hair short? It was obvious that her apparent lack of interest in how I looked was simply a way of expressing contempt for me and my dissipated life—as if from her exalted heights she barely even noticed my foolish antics.
She did not even ask whether I was still having singing lessons, or what I was up to in general. To get my own back, I did my best to wound her: “I just hope the war comes to an end soon. Otherwise you’ll lose every last semblance of humanity. You’ve become a real old harridan.”
I then gave a mannered smile and added, “I, for my part, still acknowledge art alone. Your deeds will all pass away, since no one needs them. Art, however, is eternal.”
Zina looked at me with a certain bewilderment and left soon afterwards. No doubt she wanted nothing more to do with me.
That evening I wept for a long time. I was burying my past. I understood for the first time that all the paths I had taken, all the paths I had followed to reach my present position, had been entirely destroyed—blown up like railway tracks behind the last train of a retreating army.
“And what about Volodya?” I thought bitterly. “Is that how a true friend behaves? He didn’t ask any questions; he didn’t find out anything for sure; he just took one look at Harry, turned round and left. If they all think I’ve gone mad, that I’ve lost my way, then why don’t they come closer and help instead of just walking away? Why don’t they support me and try to make me see reason? How can they be so cool and indifferent? How, at such a black and terrible time, can they abandon someone they were once close to?”
“Very virtuous they all are!” I carried on. “And they certainly make sure their virtue gets noticed. But is it really so very praiseworthy? How many temptations are there going to be for a woman with a face like Zina’s? And Volodya’s always been cold and narrow-minded. His petty little soul’s as straight and narrow as they come. When did he last feel intoxicated by music or poetry? How much more I love my dear Harry, my dear and dissolute Harry, with his tender little song:
My heart hangs on a little white ribbon.
White, white, white—remember the colour white!
“They would say this is rubbish. They would rather have Nekrasov—and his plodding, four-square poems in praise of civic virtue.”
My green and hideous monsters now seemed nearer and dearer to me than ever.
They understood everything. They were my family.
But this new family of mine was now disappearing too. The cocaine addict was now fading away in a hospital. Yurochka had been packed off to the front. The consumptive schoolboy had volunteered for the cavalry because “he had fallen in love with a golden horse” and could no longer bear being with people.
“I’ve ceased to understand people or have any feelings for them,” he kept saying.
From Harry’s large retinue there remained only the hunchback.
He used to play ‘The Waves of the Danube’6 on a battered piano in a tiny cinema grandiloquently called The Giant of Paris—and he was slowly starving to death.
This was a very difficult time for me. I was kept going only by my anger towards those who had wronged me and by my overwrought and carefully nurtured tenderness towards my one and only Harry.
At last, Harry returned.
He found me in a very anxious state. I greeted him so joyfully that he was positively embarrassed. He hadn’t realized I could be like this.
His behaviour was enigmatic. He kept disappearing for days on end. It seemed he really was buying and selling something.
After bustling about for a couple of weeks, he decided that we must move to Moscow: “Petersburg is a dead city. Moscow’s seething with life. There are cafés springing up everywhere. You can sing there. You can read poems. One way or another you can earn a few roubles.”
Moscow also apparently offered more scope for his own new commercial activities.
We packed up and moved.
Life in Moscow really did turn out to be more animated, more exciting and more fun. There were a lot of people I knew from Petersburg. It was a familiar world and I found my place in it easily.
Harry kept on disappearing somewhere or other. He seemed preoccupied and I saw very little of him.
And he forbade me, incidentally, to sing his ‘Little White Ribbon’. Forbade me. He didn’t ask me not to sing it—he forbade me. And he seemed very angry: “How can you not understand that that song has now become superfluous, superficial and utterly inappropriate?”
And he also happened to ask several times whether I knew the address of Volodya Katkov. I put this down to jealousy on his part.
“He’s somewhere in the south, isn’t he, with the Whites?”
“Of course.”
“And he’s not meaning to come here?”
“I don’t know.”
“And none of his family are here?”
“No.”
He was strangely inquisitive.
Just what Harry was doing with himself was hard to understand. It seemed he was once again selling or supplying something. The good thing was that every now and then he would bring back some ham, flour or butter. Those were hungry days.
Once, as I was going down Tverskaya Street, I caught sight of a shabby figure that looked at me intently and then hurried across to the other side of the road. I felt I had seen this person before. I went on looking. It was Kolya Katkov! Volodya’s younger brother, the comrade of my dog Tolya. Why hadn’t Kolya said anything? He had clearly recognized m
e. Why had he been in such a hurry to slip away?
I told Harry about this encounter. For some reason my story made him very agitated. “How can you not understand?” he said. “He’s a White officer. He doesn’t want to be noticed.”
“But what’s he doing here in Moscow? Why isn’t he with the White Army?”
“They must have sent him here on some mission. How stupid of you not to have stopped him!”
“But you just said he doesn’t want to be noticed!”
“Makes no difference. You could have asked him back. We could have sheltered him here.”
I was touched by Harry’s generosity. “Harry, wouldn’t you have felt scared to be sheltering a White officer?”
He blushed a little. “Not in the least,” he muttered. “If you see him again, you really must bring him back with you. Yes, you really must!”
So Harry was capable of heroic deeds! More than that, he was even eager for a chance to prove his heroism!
It was a hot, sultry summer. A peasant woman who traded apples “from under her coat” suggested I go and live in her dacha just outside Moscow. I moved in with her.
Now and again Harry made an appearance. On one occasion he brought some of his new friends along too.
They were the same young Wildean poseurs as before. Green faces, the eyes of cocaine addicts. Harry too had recently taken to snorting a fair amount.
Most of his conversations with these new friends of his related to business.
Soon afterwards someone I knew showed up. He was from Smolensk province, from near our family home, and he brought me a strange little letter from my aunt.
“I’ve been carrying this letter around for the last two months,” he said. “I tried to find you in Petersburg, but I’d given up all hope. It seemed I was never going to find you. Then, quite by chance, I met an actress who told me your address.”
“Evidently my letters aren’t reaching you,” my aunt wrote. “But at least the money is in your hands now, and it’s a comfort to me to know this. I like your husband very much. He seems very enterprising—a man with a future.”
What all this meant was quite beyond me. What husband? What money? And just what was it my aunt found so comforting?
Harry appeared.
“Harry,” I said, “I’ve just received a letter from my aunt. She says she’s glad the money is in my hands now.”
I stopped, because I was struck by the look on his face. He was blushing so intensely that it had brought tears to his eyes. Finally I grasped what had happened: Harry had gone to see my aunt and had introduced himself as my husband—and the silly old woman had given him my money!
“How much did she give you?” I asked calmly.
“Around thirty thousand. Nothing much. I didn’t want us to squander it all on trifles, and so I put the money into this automobile business.”
“Mister Edvers,” I said, “in the whole of this story there is only one thing I find truly surprising: the fact that you can still blush.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“What I find surprising,” he said, “is that you haven’t once wondered what we’ve been living on all this time and how we found the money to move here from Petersburg.”
“So I’ve been paying my way, have I? Well, I’m glad to know that.”
He left. A few days later, however, he made another appearance—as if this conversation hadn’t happened at all. He even brought his friends again—two of the friends who had come the time before. They had brought with them some vodka and something to eat with it. One of them began making advances to me. They addressed each other—jokingly, I imagine—as “comrade”. Edvers too was a “comrade”. They asked me to sing. My admirer—whom I prefer not to mention by name—really appealed to me. There was something weary and depraved about him, something that reminded me of people from our “hideous green” Petersburg world. Without giving it any particular thought, I sang our ‘Little White Ribbon’: “My heart hangs on a…”
“It’s a sweet tune, but the words are idiotic!” said Harry. “Wherever did you get hold of such antediluvian nonsense?”
And he quickly changed the subject, evidently afraid I would tell everyone he had written the words himself.
Three days later I was supposed to be singing in a café. Our manager got very embarrassed when he saw me and muttered something about it no longer being possible for me to sing that night. I was very surprised, but I didn’t insist. I sat down in a corner. Somehow nobody seemed to notice me. The only person who did was Lucy Lyukor. In a poisonous tone of voice, the little poetess said, “Ah, Lyalya! I hear you haven’t been wasting time. They say you’ve dyed your little white ribbon red!”
Sensing my bewilderment, she explained, “Only the other day you were singing for a group of Chekists.7 I don’t imagine you treated them to your ‘Little White Ribbon’!”
“What Chekists?”
She gave me a sharp look, then named the comrade who had been making advances to me.
I did not reply. I just got up and left.
I was terribly frightened by what had happened. Harry had well and truly landed me in the dirt!
The incident with my aunt had not shocked me so very deeply. Nobody in our bohemian world was particularly scrupulous about money. Though it was unpleasant, of course, that he had kept the whole business a secret from me. This, however, was another matter altogether. How could I stay with him now? He was crazed with cocaine and in cahoots with the Cheka. No, I couldn’t let Comrade Harry call the tune any longer. Had he not been trying to use me to lure White officers into a trap? It was not just out of the goodness of his heart, I now realized, that he had wanted me to invite Kolya Katkov to stay.
I was in despair. Where could I go? There was not a single close friend or relative I could turn to, no one I could count on to show me even just a little everyday kindness. My aunt? But I would have to obtain a travel permit, and besides, I didn’t have a kopek to my name.
I went back home.
There was no sign of Harry. It was several days since I’d last seen him.
I did all I could. I made the rounds of different institutions. I wrote petitions and applications. I tried to get myself registered with the newly reconstituted Artists’ Union. Then it would be easier for me to get a travel permit.
And then one day I was walking down the street and all of a sudden… You could have knocked me down with a feather. Kolya. Kolya Katkov. There he was—right in front of my eyes.
“Kolya!” I shouted.
He appeared not to see me and quickly turned down a side street. After a moment’s thought, I followed him. He was waiting for me.
I now realized why I had been slow to recognize him the previous time. He had grown a beard.
“Kolya,” I said. “What are you doing here? Why are you in Moscow?”
“I’m leaving today,” he replied. “But you shouldn’t have let it be seen that you know me. Isn’t that obvious?”
“You’re leaving today?” I exclaimed—and felt more despairing than ever. “Kolya!” I said, “for the love of God, save me! I’m lost.”
He evidently began to feel pity for me.
“There’s nothing I can do now, Lyalechka. I’m a hunted beast. And anyway, I’m leaving today. There really is nothing I can do. I’ll ask someone to call round.”
I remembered Harry and the people he now brought to my lair.
“No,” I said. “You mustn’t send anyone round.”
And then I had another thought, a thought that brought warmth to my heart.
“Kolya,” I said, “is there any chance you’ll be seeing Tolya?”
“It’s certainly possible,” he answered.
“Tell him, for the love of God, that Lyalya is calling on her dog for help. Remember my words and repeat them exactly. Promise me. And tell him to leave a note for me in the café on Tverskaya Street.”
“If all goes well,” he said, “I’ll be seeing him in about five days�
�� time.”
Kolya was in a great hurry. We parted. I was crying as I walked down the street.
Back home I thought everything over very carefully and decided not to say anything to Harry. Instead I would try to trick him into handing over some of the money—money that did, after all, belong to me!
My efforts to get hold of a permit met with success, and soon nearly everything was ready.
And then the day came…
I’m sitting in the dacha on my own, leafing through some papers in my desk, when I begin to feel that someone is looking at me. I turn around—a dog! Large, brownish red and thin, with matted fur—a German spitz or chien-loup. It’s standing in the doorway and looking straight at me. “What’s going on?” I think. “Where on earth’s this dog come from?”
“Kapitolina Fedotovna!” I call out to my landlady. “There’s a dog in here!”
Kapitolina Fedotovna comes in, very surprised. “But the doors are all shut,” she says. “How did it get in?”
I wanted to stroke the dog—there was something so very expressive about the way it was looking at me—but it wouldn’t allow me to. It wagged its tail and retreated into a corner. And just kept on looking at me.
“Maybe we should give it something to eat,” I say to Kapitolina. In reply, she mutters something about there not being enough food any longer even for human beings, but she brings some bread anyway. She throws a piece to the dog. The dog doesn’t touch it.
“Better throw the dog out!” I say. “It’s acting strange. It might be sick.”
Kapitolina flung the door open. The dog went out.
Afterwards we recalled that it never once let us touch it. Nor did it once bark, nor did it ever eat. We saw it—and that was all.
Later that day Harry appeared.
He looked awful—well and truly exhausted. His eyes were bulging and bloodshot, his face taut and sallow.
He walked in, with barely a word to me.
My heart was beating frantically. I had to speak to him—for the last time.
Harry slammed the door. He was terribly edgy. Something had happened to him—or else he had overdone the cocaine.