by Teffi
The old woman, who is wearing a brown shawl and a dark headscarf, is hunched into a little ball. She’s blowing onto the kindling, clanging the iron poker against the stove. I look at the little window. Sunlight is playing against the frost on the glass.
No sooner has the light of dawn
Begun to play with the clear frost
Than…
Just like in the song. How does it go on? Ah, that’s right:
Than the samovar has begun to boil
On the oak table…1
Yes, there’s the samovar, boiling on the table in the corner, a little steam escaping from under its lid. It’s boiling and singing.
Along the bench outside struts the cockerel. He comes up to the window, tilts his little head to one side and looks in, his claws clicking against the wood. Then he moves on.
But where’s the cat? I can’t live without the cat. Oh, there he is, stout and gingery, purring as he warms himself on the table behind the samovar.
Someone has begun stamping inside the porch, shaking snow from their felt boots. The boots make a soft thudding sound. The old woman has got laboriously to her feet and waddled to the door. I can’t see her face, but it doesn’t matter. I know who she is…
I ask, “Who’s that?”
She replies, “It’s that fellow, what’s his name…”
I can hear them talking together. The old woman, standing on the threshold, says, “Well, I suppose I could roast it.”
There in her arms, upside down, is an enormous bird, black with thick red eyebrows. A wood grouse. It’s been given to us by the huntsman.
I must get up.
Next to the bed are my felt boots—my beloved white valenki. Long ago in St Petersburg the Khanzhonkova film company organized a hunting trip for a group of actors and writers and their friends. We were meant to be hunting for elk. They drove us out over the firm white snow to Tosno, where we had a long, convivial lunch with champagne. Early the next morning we set out on low, wide sledges to the edge of the forest. How I loved my pointy-toed white-felt skiing valenki. I remember my white cap, too. Against the snow neither my head nor my feet would be visible. No beast would recognize me as a human being. It was a hunting ruse all of my own invention.
A steward of some sort showed us all to our correct spots. We were told not to smoke or talk, but we decided it couldn’t do any harm if we only talked and smoked a little bit. I was standing with Fyodorov, the writer. We could hear the cry of the beaters. Later we found out that some elk had come, taken a look at us through the bushes and gone away. They hadn’t liked what they’d seen. Instead of the elk, some hares leapt out—one of them right in front of me. Not moving at any great speed, it slipped slyly from bush to bush—neither quite running away nor quite taking cover. Fyodorov quickly raised his gun and took aim. “Don’t you dare!” I yelled, jumping up and flinging my arms open right in front of him. He began yelling even louder—something like “You foo—”, except that the word got stuck in his throat, and “That could have been the end of you!” I didn’t mind him yelling at me. What mattered was that we’d saved the hare. My white, slim, nimble valenki did a little dance in the snow.
Later my valenki went missing. The maid’s husband, a drunken layabout, had stolen them and sold them for drink. But now they’d come back again. Here they were by my bed, as if this were the most ordinary thing in the world. I slipped my feet into them and went into the little box room to get dressed.
There’s a narrow window in the box room, and a small mirror on the wall. I look at my reflection. How strange I seem. My face could be from a childhood photograph. Anyone would take me for a four-year-old. I have a cheeky smile and dimples. As for my hair, it’s short, with a fringe. It’s fair and silky and it lies close to my head. It’s just like it was when I used to walk down Novinsky Boulevard with my nanny. And I know exactly how I used to look then. When we were going down the front staircase, the big mirror on the landing would reflect a little girl in an astrakhan coat, white gaiters and a white bashlyk hood with gold braid. When she lifted her leg up high you could see her red flannel pantaloons. Back then all of us children wore red flannel pantaloons. And reflected in the mirror behind this little girl would be another figure just like her, only smaller and wider. Her little sister.
I remember how we used to play on the boulevard, my sister and I and other little girls like us. Once a lady and a gentleman stopped and watched us for a while, smiling.
“I like that little girl in the bonnet,” said the lady, pointing at me.
The thought of her liking me was intriguing. I immediately opened my eyes wide and puckered my lips, as if to say, “Look at me! Aren’t I wonderful?” And the gentleman and his lady smiled and smiled.
On this Novinsky Boulevard I so loved there was also a big, bad boy, about eight years old, who hung around being naughty and picking fights. His name was Arkasha. Once he climbed up on top of a bench, tried to look impressive and poked his tongue out at me. But I stood up for myself. Even if he was big, I wasn’t afraid of him. I taunted him, saying, “Arkasha eats baby kasha! Arkasha eats baby kasha!”
And he said, “Yah, you’re just a little squirt.”
But I wasn’t afraid of him and I knew I would always be able to make fun of spiteful fools, no matter how high they climbed.
Then there was that proud moment of my first bold triumph, my first triumph of ambition. There on that same boulevard. We were walking past our house when Nanny pointed to a short, stout figure standing on the balcony.
“Look, there’s Elvira Karlovna. She’s come out for some fresh air.”
Elvira Karlovna was our nursery governess. We were little and her name was so hard for us to say that we just called her “Baba”. But suddenly I felt bold.
“Irvirkarna!” I called. Not “Baba” but “Irvirkarna”—like a big girl. I said it in a loud ringing voice so that everyone would hear that I could talk like a big girl. “Irvirkarna!”
Evidently I had once been bold and ambitious. Over the years I lost all this, more’s the pity. Ambition can be a powerful force. If I had been able to hold onto it, I might have shouted out something for all the world to hear.
But how wonderful everything was on that boulevard. For some reason it’s always early spring there. The runnels gurgle as they start to thaw; it’s as if someone’s pouring water out of a narrow little jug, and the smell of the water is so heady that you just want to laugh and kick up your heels; and the damp sand shimmers, it’s like little crystals of sugar and you want to put some of it in your mouth and chew it; and a spring breeze is blowing into my woolly mittens. And off to one side, by a little path, has appeared a slender green stem. It stands there, quivering. And the lamb’s-fleece clouds whirling about in the sky look like a picture from my book about Thumbelina. And the sparrows bustle about, the children shout, and you take all this in all at once, all in one go, and all of it can be expressed in a single whoop of “I don’t want to go home!”
All this was in the days when my hair was fair and silky. And now, all of a sudden, my hair’s like that again. How strange. But is it really so very strange? Here in this little house with the cockerel strutting along the bench, what could be more ordinary?
Now I’ll put on my little cap, the one I wore on that hunting trip, and go out on my skis.
I walk out onto the porch. There, standing against the wall, are my skis. No sign of the old woman and the huntsman. Eagerly I slip my feet into the straps. I grab the poles, push off and glide down the slope.
Sun, the odd powdery snowflake. One snowflake falls onto my sleeve and doesn’t melt; it’s still crystalline when it blows away. I feel so light! I’m held by the air; happiness is carrying me along. I’ve always known and I’ve often said that happiness isn’t a matter of success or achievement—happiness is a feeling. It’s not founded on anything, it can’t be explained by anything.
Yes, I remember one morning. It was very early. I’d been on my knees all night l
ong, massaging the leg of a very sick patient. I was numb from cold and trembling from pity and fatigue as I made my way home. But as I was crossing the bridge, I stopped. The city was just beginning to wake up. The waterside was deserted apart from a longshorewoman the likes of whom you’ll see only in Paris. Young and nimble, a red sash around her waist and pink stockings on her legs, she was using a long stick to fish for rags in the dustbins. The still sunless sky was just brightening in the east, and a faint haze, like pencil shading on pink blotting paper, showed where the sun’s rays were about to burst through. The water below wasn’t flowing as water is supposed to flow but whirling around in lots of flat little eddies, as if dancing on the spot. It was waltzing. And trembling gaily in the air was a faint ringing sound—perhaps the sound of my fatigue. I don’t know. But suddenly I was pierced by a feeling of inexplicable happiness—a feeling so marvellous it made my breast ache and brought tears to my eyes. And reeling from fatigue, laughing and crying, I began to sing:
Wherever the scent of spring may lead me…
I hear a rustling behind me. The huntsman. Now he’s standing beside me. I know his face, his outline, his movements. His earflaps are down; I can only see him in profile. But who is he?
“Wait,” I say. “I think I know you.”
“Of course you do,” he says.
“Only I can’t quite remember…”
“There’s no need to remember. What use is remembering? Remembering is the last thing you need.”
“But wait,” I say. “What’s that sentence that’s been bothering me? Something like: ‘Just one left till morning.’ What on earth does it mean? Something nasty, I think.”
“It’s all right,” he says. “It’s all right.”
I’ve been ill for so long, and my memory is poor. But I do remember—I made a note: I want to hear the Lohengrin overture one more time, and I want to talk once more to a certain wonderful person, and to see another sunrise. But Lohengrin and the sunrise would be too much for me now. Do you know what I mean? And that wonderful person has left. Ah, I remember that last sunrise, somewhere in France. Dawn had just begun to glow, its wine-red hue beginning to spread. In a moment the sun would come up. The birds were getting agitated, twittering and squawking. One little bird was loudly and insistently repeating, “Vite, vite, vite…”2 Tired of waiting, it was urging the sun on. I joined in this reproach to the sun, saying (in French, of course, since it was a French bird), “Il n’est pas pressé.”3 And suddenly there was the sun, round and yellow, as if breathless and embarrassed about being late. And it wasn’t even where I’d expected it to be, but somewhere far off to the left. Out came the midges, and the birds fell silent and got down to their hunting.
The poetic conceit that birds greet the rising of the sun god with a hymn of rapture is ever so droll. On the whole birds are a restless, garrulous tribe. They make just as much fuss when they’re going to bed as when they wake up, but you can hardly claim that they’re hymning the sun then, late in the evening. In Warsaw, I remember, in one of the squares, there was what you could call a sparrow tree. In the evening people would gather to watch the sparrows go to bed. The birds would flock around the tree and make a clamour you could hear all over the square. From the tone of their twittering you could tell that these were squabbles, disputes, brawls and just plain mindless chatter. Eventually everything would calm down and the sparrows would settle in for the night.
Although, I shouldn’t reproach the birds for this garrulousness. Nature gives each bird a single motif: “cock-a-doodle-doo” or “chink-chook” or just plain “cuckoo”. Do you think you could get your message across with a sound as simple as that? How many times would you have to repeat yourself? Imagine that we human beings were given a single motif according to our breed. Some of us would say, “Isn’t the Dnieper wonderful in fine weather?” Others would ask, “What time is it? What time is it?” Still others would go on and on repeating that “the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection.” Try using a single sentence like that to rhapsodize about the Sistine Madonna, to expound on the brotherhood of nations or to ask to borrow money. Although, maybe this is exactly what we do do and we just never realize it.
Sunrise! How varied it can be, and how I love it in all its guises. There’s one sunrise I remember well. I waited for it a long time; for some reason I was really longing for it. And there in the east was a strip of grey cloud or light mist. I raised my arms like an ancient pagan worshipping the sun and beseeched the heavens:
Sun, our god! Oh, where are you?
We are arrayed in your flowers,
Our arms upraised to the blue,
We are calling, invoking your powers…
And then there it was, an orange coal ringing through the grey mist. Slowly before us rose a bronze sun, swelling, incandescent, malicious. Its face was blazing with rage; it was quivering and full of hate. Sometimes sunrise can be like that…
And I remember another very curious sunrise.
In a patch of grey there suddenly appeared a round hole, like the spyhole in a stage curtain that actors look through to check the size of the audience. Through this little hole in the sky peeped out a hot yellow eye; then this eye disappeared. A moment later, as if deciding—Now!—out jumped the sun. It was very droll.
Sunset, on the other hand, is always sad. It may be voluptuous, and opulent, and as richly sated with life as an Assyrian king, but it is always sad, always solemn. It is the death of the day.
They say there is a reason for everything in nature—the peacock’s tail serves to perpetuate the species, the beauty of flowers attracts the bees that will pollinate them. But what purpose does the mournful beauty of sunset serve? Nature has expended herself in vain.
Here’s the huntsman again, standing beside me.
“Where’s your gun?” I ask.
“Here.”
It’s true, I can see his gun behind his back.
“And your dog?”
“There.”
Up bounds his dog. Everything’s as it should be.
I feel I ought to say something to the huntsman.
“How do you like my little house?” I ask. “When it gets dark, you know, we light a lamp.”
“Does Nanny light it?”
“Nanny? Oh yes, yes, the old woman—that’s Nanny,” I say, remembering.
Nanny… She had died in an almshouse. She was very old. When I visited her, she would ask, “Just what are these granchilder? Some country folk keep coming round and saying, ‘But Grandma, we’re your granchilder.’”
“They’re your daughter Malasha’s children,” I explained.
Malasha had been our housemaid when I was little.
I remember it all so vividly it’s uncanny. Someone has spilt some needles on the window sill and I’m stroking them. I think they’re absolutely wonderful. And someone is saying, “Lyulya has spilt the needles.”
I hear but I don’t realize that this Lyulya is me. Then someone picks me up; I’m touching a plump shoulder tightly encased in pink cotton. This, I know, is Malasha. And as for the needles—I’ve loved needles and everything sharp and glittery all my life. Maybe I began to love them back then, before I realized that Lyulya was me. We were talking about Nanny. She was very old. And now she’s here in this little house. In the evening she lights the lamp; from outside the little window shines orange, and out from the forest comes a fox. It comes up to the window and sings. You’ve probably never heard the way a fox sings? It’s just extraordinary. Not like Patti or Chaliapin, of course—but far more entertaining. It sings tenderly and off-key, in a way that’s utterly bewitching: very soft, yet still audible. And the cockerel’s outside, too, standing on the bench, its comb like raspberry gold with the light shining through it. It stands there in profile and pretends not to be listening.
And the fox sings:
Cockerel, cockerel,
With your comb of gold,
Your combed little beard,
And y
our shiny little head,
Come look out the window.
But the cockerel clicks its claws on the bench and walks away. Yes, at least once in your life you should listen to a fox singing.
“It sings at night,” says the huntsman, “but you don’t like night, do you?”
“How do you know? Does that mean you’ve known me a long time? Why is it so hard for me to remember you when I’m quite certain that really I know you very well?”
“Does it matter?” he says. “Just think of me as a composite character from your previous life.”
“If you’re a composite character, then why are you a huntsman?”
“Because all the girls of your generation were in love with Hamsun’s Lieutenant Glahn.4 And then you spent your entire life seeking this Glahn in everyone you met. You were seeking for courage, honesty, pride, loyalty and a passion that ran deep but was held in check. You were, weren’t you? You can’t deny it.”
“But wait… You said I don’t like the night. That’s true. Why? What does it matter? Tyutchev said, and he’s probably right, that it’s because night tears away the veil that prevents us from seeing the abyss.5 And as for the anguish inspired by the stars—‘The stars speak of eternity’—what could be more terrible? If a person in pain gazes up at the stars as they ‘speak of eternity’, he’s supposed to sense his own insignificance and thus find relief. That’s the part I really can’t understand at all. Why would someone who’s been wronged by life find comfort in his complete and utter humiliation—in the recognition of his own insignificance? On top of all your grief, sorrow and despair—here, have the contempt of eternity, too: You’re a louse. Take comfort and be glad that you have a place on earth—even if it’s only the place of a louse. We look up at the starry sky the way a little mouse looks through a chink in the wall at a magnificent ballroom. The music, the lights, the sparkling apparitions. Strange rhythmical movements, in circles that move together and then apart, propelled by an unknown cause towards an incomprehensible goal. It’s beautiful and frightening—very, very frightening. We can, if we like, count the number of circles made by this or that sparkling apparition, but it’s impossible to understand what the apparition means—and this is frightening. What we can’t understand we always sense as a hostile force, as something cruel and meaningless. Little mouse, it’s a good thing that they don’t see us, that we play no role in their magnificent, terrible and majestic life. Have you ever noticed how people lower their voices when they’re looking at the star-filled sky?”