by Teffi
“Who’d have thought it? Such refinement. What makes them want to douse themselves with eau de cologne when they’re in such danger, when every moment is precious?”
His explanation was simple enough. The eau-de-cologne was a substitute for vodka, which was no longer obtainable.
After catching a few of his bandits, the commissar would join our little circle in the evening. He would show deep feelings; he would express astonishment that we really were the people we said we were. And at the end of the evening he would walk me home. There was something rather frightening about walking at night, down the bleak streets, beside this extraordinarily tall figure. All around us were alarming rustles, stealthy footsteps, screams, sometimes shots. Yet none of these was as frightening as the giant who was my guard.
Sometimes the telephone would ring late in the evening. It was our guardian angel whose heart had awoken. He was phoning to check that everything was all right with us.
After we’d recovered from the shock of the sudden ringing, we would recite:
Nightmare demons
stalk the sinful;
guardian angels
talk to children.[17]
Our guardian angel kept an eye on us until the very moment of our departure. He took us to the railway station and guarded our luggage, which was clearly an object of interest to the Cheka officers there.
•
All of us who were leaving felt a great deal of sorrow. There was a sorrow we all shared, and then we each had our own individual sorrow. Sorrow lay somewhere behind our eyes, deep behind our pupils. There it glimmered—like the skull and crossbones on the forage caps of the Prussian Death’s Head Hussars. But this was not something we spoke about.
I remember the delicate profile of a young harpist. About three months after we left, she was betrayed and executed. I remember my distress over my young friend Leonid Kannegisser. A few days before the assassination of Uritsky,[18] he’d heard that I was in Petersburg. He telephoned me and said that he very much wanted to see me—but only on neutral territory.
“Why not in my apartment?”
“I’ll explain when we meet.”
We agreed to meet for a meal at the home of some mutual friends.
When we met, Kannegisser said, “People are following me. I don’t want to lead them to your apartment.”
I put this down to adolescent posturing. It was a time when many young people were assuming mysterious airs and pronouncing enigmatic phrases. I thanked him and inquired no further.
He was very melancholy that evening, rather silent.
We recall all too often how, when we last saw some friend of ours, they had sad eyes and pale lips. And we always know, once it is too late, what we ought to have done back then, how we should have taken our friend by the hand and led them away from the shadow of darkness. But there is a mysterious law that does not allow us to disrupt the appointed order, the decreed rhythm. And this is in no way mere egotism or indifference—sometimes it would be easier to stop than to walk on by. The author of The Life of Leonid Kannegisser required us to walk on by, not to disrupt the decreed rhythm of his tragic novel. As if in a dream: You can see everything, you can feel everything, you almost know everything, but you’re unable to stop. You’re compelled to walk on.
Yes, we writers—in the words of a contemporary French colleague—are “imitators of God,” imitators of his creative work. We create worlds and people and we determine their fates, often cruel and unjust. Why we act one way and not some other way, we don’t know. We simply have no choice.
I remember a young actress approaching me during a rehearsal of one of my plays and saying timidly, “May I ask you something? You won’t get angry?”
“You may. I won’t get angry.”
“Why did that poor boy in your play have to be fired? Why do you have to be so cruel? Couldn’t you at least have found him some other job? And then in another play there’s a poor traveling salesman who ends up with egg on his face. Why? It’s horrible for the poor man. Surely there’s some way you can put these things right?”
“I don’t know . . . I can’t . . . It isn’t me who decides.”
But her lips were trembling, and she was pleading so pitifully and so touchingly that I promised to write a separate fairy tale in which I would bring together all those I had injured in my plays and stories and somehow compensate them for their suffering.
“Wonderful!” said the actress. “That will be paradise!”
And she kissed me.
“But there’s a problem,” I interrupted. “I’m afraid that this little paradise of ours won’t really comfort anyone at all. No one will believe us. They’ll know we’ve just made it up.”[19]
•
The day comes. Our train is leaving this morning.
Since the night before, Gooskin has been rushing from me to Averchenko, from Averchenko to his impresario, and from his impresario to the actresses. He keeps going into the wrong apartments and phoning the wrong numbers. At seven o’clock he bursts in on me, panting, covered in sweat, like an overheated horse. He looks at me, then spreads his hands despairingly in the air.
“Of course! Wonderful! Late for the station!”
“Surely not! What’s the time?”
“Seven o’clock, almost ten o’clock. The train leaves at ten. That’s it—it’s all over now.”
Someone gives Gooskin a lump of sugar. Gnawing on it like a parrot, he calms down a little.
A horn sounds in the street below, from the motorcar sent by our guardian angel.
It’s a wonderful autumn morning. Unforgettable. Up above—pale blue, and golden cupolas. Down on the earth—gray and heavy, and eyes glazed over in deep sorrow. Some Red Army soldiers herding along a group of prisoners. A tall old man in a beaver hat carrying a bundle wrapped in a woman’s red calico kerchief. An old lady in a soldier’s greatcoat looking at us through a turquoise lorgnette. A line by a dairy kiosk with a pair of boots displayed in the window.
“Goodbye, Moscow, dearest Moscow! It’s not for long. Just a month. I’ll be back in a month. In one month. And then . . . No, best not to think.”
“When you’re walking a tightrope,” an acrobat once told me, “you must never imagine that you might fall. On the contrary. You have to believe that everything will work out—and you must hum some little song to yourself.”
A jolly little tune from Silva is going round and round in my head. The words are stunningly inane:
Cupid can’t be canned,
Cupid can’t be kind.
Stupid Cupid turns a man
Blinder than blind.
What goose could have composed a jingle like this?
Gooskin is waiting outside the main entrance to the station, along with the commissar whose heart had awoken.
“Moscow, dearest Moscow, farewell! See you in a month!”
•
That was ten years ago.
3
OUR JOURNEY got off to a fairly smooth start.
We were in a second-class train car, each with a seat of our own. We were sitting the way passengers are generally meant to sit—no one was curled up underneath the seats or lying up above in the luggage rack.
My impresario, the pseudonymous Gooskin, became very agitated: Why was the train taking so long to leave? And then, when it finally did leave, he said it was ahead of schedule.
“And that’s a bad omen. Goodness knows what will happen now!”
The moment Gooskin climbed into the train car, his appearance changed bizarrely. Anyone would have thought he had been traveling for ten days—and in the most appalling conditions. His shoes were unlaced, his collar unbuttoned, and there was a round green spot beneath his Adam’s apple—evidently from a copper stud. Strangest of all, his cheeks were covered in stubble—as if he had been three or four days without shaving.
Along with our own group, there were three other ladies in the compartment. They were talking very quietly, sometimes even in a whisper,
about matters all too close to our immediate concerns: who had managed to smuggle their money and diamonds abroad, and how.
“Have you heard? The Prokins managed to get away with their entire fortune. They used their old grandmother as a mule.”
“But how come the grandmother didn’t get searched?”
“How can you ask? She’s so unpleasant. Who would dare?”
“As for the Korkins, they were really smart. And all on the spur of the moment! Madame Korkina, who’d already been searched, was standing to one side. And then, all of a sudden—‘Ow! Ow!’—she twists her ankle. She can’t walk, she can’t even take a single step. Her husband, who hasn’t been searched yet, says to a Red Army soldier, ‘Please pass her my stick. She needs it.’ The soldier gives her the stick. And it’s the stick they’ve hollowed out and stuffed with diamonds. How do you like that?”
“The Bulkins have a teapot with a false bottom.”
“Fanichka took a huge diamond out of the country—you’ll never believe this—by stuffing it up her own nose.”
“All very well for her—she’s got a fifty-carat nose. But we aren’t all as lucky as her.”
Then they told the tragic tale of how a certain Madame Fook cleverly hid a diamond in an egg. She made a small hole in the shell of a raw egg, put the diamond inside, and then hard-boiled the egg: Who could find her diamond now? So she puts the egg into her food basket and sits there calm as can be, smiling away. Along come some Red Army soldiers. They search the luggage. And then one of them grabs that very egg, peels it and wolfs it down before Madame Fook’s very eyes. The poor woman traveled no further. She got off at that station and trailed around after that wretched Red Army soldier for three days on end, not once letting him out of her sight, as if he were a little child.
“And then?”
“What do you think? Nothing! She went back home empty-handed.”
Then they started talking about all sorts of cunning ploys—things they did to trap spies during the war.
“They grew so crafty, those spies! Just imagine: They started drawing plans of fortresses on their backs and then coloring them over. Well, military intelligence aren’t stupid either, they caught on to this pretty quick. They started washing the backs of any suspicious characters. Of course, there were unfortunate errors. Back home in Grodno they caught this gentleman—he was dark-haired and suspicious as they come, but after a good wash he turned out to be the most honest of blondes. Military intelligence was most apologetic . . .”
Peaceful discussion of these alarming topics made our journey both entertaining and informative, but we hadn’t even been going three hours when the train stopped and everyone was ordered to disembark.
•
We get off the train, drag our luggage out, stand on the platform for about two hours, and then get onto a different train. This train is third class only and packed full. Some malicious-looking peasant women with pale eyes are sitting opposite us. They clearly don’t like the look of us.
“Here they be on our train,” says a woman with a pockmarked face and a wart. “Here they be on our train, but where and why they’re going, they haven’t a clue.”
“Like dogs off a chain,” agrees the other one. She has a grimy headscarf and is using the corners of it, rather gracefully, to wipe her duck-like nose.
What irritates them most of all is a Pekinese dog—a tiny, silken ball lying on the lap of the older of our two actresses.
“A dog on a train! Look at her—a hat on her head and here she be on a train with a dog!”
“Should’ve left it at home. Nowhere for folks to sit and here she be with this hound of hers!”
“But she’s not in your way,” says the actress, her voice quivering as she defends her hound. “Anyway, it’s not as though you’d be sitting here on my lap!”
“No, we’d not be travelin’ around with dogs,” the women continue relentlessly.
“I can’t leave her at home on her own. She’s delicate. She needs more care than a little child.”
“Huh?”
“What d’ye mean by that then?” shouts the pockmarked one, leaping to her feet in fury. “Here, listen to this! This one here with the hat says our children’s worse than dogs! We’re not standing for this, are we?”
“Huh? Us? We be dogs and she ain’t?”
Then this discussion—and there’s no knowing where it might have led—is interrupted by a wild shriek. The shriek comes from the space at the end of the train car. Everyone jumps up and rushes to investigate. The pockmarked woman goes as well, and, when she returns, she tells us in the most amiable of tones that a thief had been caught and that they’d been about to “drop ’im under the car”—only the thief had beaten them to it. He’d jumped off the moving train.
“Charming characters!” says Averchenko. “Try to ignore them. Think about something cheerful.”
I do as he says. Tonight, the lights will be switched on at the theater, people will gather and sit in their seats and will listen to:
Cupid can’t be canned,
Cupid can’t be kind.
Stupid Cupid turns a man
Blinder than blind.
Oh why do I have to remember this? This idiotic refrain—spinning round and round in my poor head!
The women carry on chatting happily about how jolly it would have been to throw the thief under the wheels and about how he must be lying on the ground now with a smashed head.
“Lynch every one of ’em! Yes, him and every one of his sort. Poke out their eyes, rip out their tongues, cut off their ears, and then tie a stone round their necks and—into the water with ’em!”
“Back in our village we’d drag ’em under the ice on a rope, from ice-’ole to ice-’ole . . .”
“Oftentimes they was burned on a fire.”
Thank God they were diverted by the thief. Otherwise who knows what they’d have done to us?
Cupid can’t be canned,
Cupid can’t be kind.
“How awful!” I say to Averchenko.
“Sh!”
“I don’t mean them,” I continue. “I have torments of my own, I can’t get Silva out of my head.”
I shall think instead about how we might have been roasted, maybe that will do the trick. First I think about the pockmarked woman sitting opposite me. She’d be hard at it! She’s thorough. She’d be blowing on the kindling. And Gooskin? He’d be shouting, “Please excuse me, but we have a legally binding contract! You are preventing her from fulfilling her part of our agreement, and you are bankrupting me as an impresario! First she must pay me a forfeit!”
The “stupid cupid” gradually withdraws. It fades and dies away.
The train pulls into a station. Women with bundles start bustling about. The thump of soldiers’ boots. Bags, sacks, and baskets obscure the light of day. And then, on the other side of the glass, I see Gooskin. His face is twisted in terror. For the past few hours he’s been in a different car. What on earth has happened to him?
He looks ghastly. White all over, gasping for air.
“Get out quick! We must take a different route. This route’s out of the question. I’ll explain later.”
Well then, so be it. We get off the train. I’m rather slow, the last one out. When I finally jump down onto the platform, a ragged beggar boy comes up to me and says very clearly, “Stupid Cupid can’t be canned. Fifty kopeks, please!”
“Wha-at?”
“Fifty kopeks! Stupid Cupid.”
It’s all over. I’ve gone mad. I’m hearing things. My weak nerves must have been incapable of withstanding the combination of Silva and the people’s wrath.
I look around for our group; I need moral support. Averchenko is studying his gloves with extraordinary attentiveness and doesn’t respond to my mute appeal. I slip the boy fifty kopeks. I still don’t understand, but I have my suspicions.
“Admit it!” I say to Averchenko.
He gives an embarrassed laugh.
“Wh
ile you were still in the train car,” he says, “I asked the boy if he wanted to earn a little money. I said a passenger in a little red hat was about to get off the train. ‘You go up to her,’ I told him, ‘and say, “Stupid Cupid can’t be canned!” She gives fifty kopeks to everyone who says that to her.’ Well, he seems like a bright boy!”
Gooskin, who’s been busying himself with our luggage, walks over. He is drenched in sweat.
“Wonderful!” he says in a ghastly whisper. “That bandit has gone and got himself shot!”
“What bandit?”
“That commissar of yours! What don’t you understand? Well? He’s been executed for robbery and bribe-taking. We can’t cross the border here. We’ll be fleeced—and then slaughtered to boot. We must cross somewhere else.”
All right then, a different border crossing it is. About two hours later we get onto another train and set off in another direction.
We arrived at the border station in the evening. It was cold. We wanted to go to bed. But we were anxious: What did this place have in store for us? When would they let us through and how would we continue our journey?
Gooskin and Averchenko’s impresario went off into the station building to assess the situation and conduct negotiations, giving us strict instructions to stay where we were. The omens did not bode well.
The platform was empty. Occasionally a dark figure would appear—maybe a guard, maybe a peasant woman in a soldier’s great-coat. This figure would cast a suspicious look in our direction, then disappear again. We waited for a long time. Finally, Gooskin emerged—escorted by no fewer than four men.
One of the four came rushing up to us. I shall never forget him: a thin, dark little man with a crooked nose, wearing a student’s cap and a huge, magnificent beaver coat that trailed behind him like a royal mantle in some throne-room portrait. The coat was brand new, evidently only just ripped off somebody’s back.
The little man ran up to us. With what seemed like a habitual movement he hitched up his trousers with his left hand, then raised his right hand high in the air with inspired rapture, and exclaimed, “Are you Teffi? Are you Averchenko? Bravo, bravo, and bravo! Here I am at your service, the commissar of arts for this shtetl,[20] here at your service! Our cultural needs here are immense. You, our dear guests, will stay with us and help me to organize a series of cultural evenings—you will give readings and the local proletariat will act out your plays, under your supervision.”