by Teffi
•
We left Kiev late at night. Cannons were booming somewhere close by.
The crush at the station was unimaginable. Troop trains were occupying nearly all the lines. We didn’t know whether they were just arriving or just departing. They probably didn’t even know themselves.
Everyone looked bewildered, resentful, and tired.
With some difficulty we made our way to our allocated train car. It was third class, which seemed to mean three tiers of sleeping boards. Our cases were thrown in after us.
The train stood at the station for a long time. Official and unofficial departure times had all long come and gone. We were on the second track and there were trains full of soldiers on either side of us. We could hear yells and shots. Through the gaps between cars we could see people rushing about in panic.
Sometimes people would come to our car with the latest news.
“We’re all going to be thrown out. The train’s being requisitioned for troops.”
“Anyway, you can only go about seven miles. Then there’s a junction controlled by the Bolsheviks.”
“A train that came under fire has just pulled in. With dead and wounded on board.”
Dead. Wounded. How accustomed we had grown to these words. No one felt any particular alarm or distress. No one said, “How awful!” or “What a tragedy!”
Our way of life had changed, and, in accord with this new way of life, we just thought, “Remove the dead and bandage the wounded.”
The words were a part of our everyday language. And we ourselves could well become “dead” or “wounded,” perhaps at this next junction, perhaps soon after it.[64]
Someone’s teapot had been stolen. And this occasioned as much (if not more) interest and discussion as the question of the Bolshevik-controlled junction—or the possibility of our train crew now being so frightened that we might not even leave the station at all.
All of a sudden a cardboard box fell on someone’s head. This was a good sign. A newly attached locomotive had sent a jolt through the carriages.
We were off.
We stopped many times. At dark stations or in the middle of nowhere, where there was more yelling and shooting and dancing pinpoints of light.
Soldiers with bayonets appeared in the doorways.
“Officers! To the end of the car!”
There were no officers in our car.
I remember seeing people running beside the track, past our windows. Breathless soldiers stormed into the car and stabbed under the benches with their bayonets.
And nobody knew what was going on, and nobody asked. Everyone sat quietly with their eyes closed, as if they were dozing, as if to show that they did not consider any of this to be in the least out of the ordinary.
We arrived in Odessa at night, to an unexpected welcome—we were locked inside the railway station and told we would not be allowed out until morning.
And that was that.
We arranged our things on the floor and sat down on top of them. It all felt very cosy. We were not being searched and we were not being shot at—what more could we want?
Hovering near me just before dawn, I saw a shadowy figure, a yellow vanity case in a delicate hand.
“Armand Duclos?”
“Yes.”
He too had been on our train. He sat down beside me and started talking. In his vanity case he was carrying some exceptionally important documents. He had already been offered a million dollars, but nothing would induce him to part with them.
“I think you should part with them.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I really don’t know. But it’s exhausting me terribly—never being able to let go of this vanity case.”
I dozed off. When I awoke, Armand was no longer there. By my feet lay his treasure, abandoned.
In the morning the station doors were unlocked and we were free to go out into the city. When the porters were piling our luggage into cabs, Armand’s vanity case, which had no lock, fell open—and out tumbled a bottle of Rue de la Paix[65] and a nail file. And nothing more.
Time passed without any of us so much as glimpsing Armand. In the end we placed an advertisement in the paper: “Can the clairvoyant Armand Duclos please divine the location of his vanity case!”
Followed by a name and address.
•
So began our days in Odessa.
The same faces appeared once again. And once again people came out with all the same nonsense.
People we thought had returned to Moscow proved to be here in Odessa. Those who should have been in Odessa had long since returned to Moscow.
And nobody knew anything for certain about anyone.
The man in charge of Odessa was the young, gray-eyed General Grishin-Almazov—and no one knew anything for certain about him either.[66] Even he himself seemed a little unsure how he had come to be the city’s military governor. He was, I suppose, a minor Napoleon—and his personality, like Napoleon’s, mattered less than the historical forces at play around him.
Grishin-Almazov was energetic, cheerful, and strong. He flaunted his buoyant energy; he wanted everyone to know about it. He loved literature and theater and there were rumors that he had once been an actor.
One day he even called on me and very kindly offered me accommodation at the Hotel London. And so I got a wonderful room—number sixteen. Vladimir Burtsev had stayed there before me and so there were piles of The Common Cause in every corner.[67]
Grishin-Almazov liked pomp and ceremony. When he visited me in the hotel, he always left a whole entourage in the corridor and two guards at the main entrance.
He was kind and considerate, easy to be with. He often spoke as if he had stepped straight from the pages of Yushkevich’s Leon Drey.[68]
“It’s very cold today,” he would say. “I emphasize the word: very.”
“Are you comfortable in this room? I emphasize the word: you.”
“Do you have books for reading? I emphasize the word: for.”
He encouraged the hotel commandant—a bearded colonel who used to walk around all day long with two wonderful white spitzes—to take special care of me.
Grishin-Almazov was, in short, extremely courteous.
These were difficult months for him.
“The omens bode ill”—it was not for nothing that this was a catch-phrase of the time.
As the Bolsheviks drew nearer, people were little by little being robbed of all they owned; criminal gangs had taken over the abandoned quarries that formed entire catacombs under the city. Grishin-Almazov once tried to negotiate with one of the ringleaders—the notorious “Mishka the Japanese.”[69] This evidently achieved little—from then on Grishin was unable to drive around town at anything less than full speed, since he had been promised “a bullet at a bend in the road.”
Nevertheless, people did creep out of their unheated flats in the evenings. They went to clubs and theaters to entertain one another with terrifying rumors. When it was time to go back home, they would gather in groups and get themselves an escort—usually about half a dozen students, armed with whatever they could lay their hands on. Rings would be tucked away inside cheeks, watches hidden in shoes. This was of little help.
“So the scoundrel cocks his ear, then homes in on the ticking. I tell him, ‘That’s the sound of my heart, I’m frightened.’ But why would they believe an honest man?”
The brigands would stop cab drivers, unharness their horses, and lead them down into their catacombs.
But we were not easily deterred. All night long, the theaters, clubs and restaurants remained crowded with people. Fabulous sums were lost at cards.
In the morning, stupefied by wine, gambling, and cigar smoke, bankers and sugar manufacturers would emerge from these clubs and blink their puffy eyelids at the sun. Shadowy figures from Moldavanka[70] would be hanging about in doorways, sifting the piles of nutshells and sausage skins for scraps and leftovers. Their eyes h
ungry and sullen, they would stand and watch as the revelers walked away.[71]
13
The horses of Phoebus are racing downhill.
SO OUR days in Odessa went by. And then they started to fly faster and faster—so fast that they overtook one another.
Clubs, cabarets, little theaters, all came and went.
Some middle-aged gentlemen called round without introduction to ask me to “lend my name” to some kind of “salon.” A profoundly artistic salon. Including card games and a hot dinner.
“And what will my role be?”
“You will be the hostess and you will receive a monthly fee.”
“But I know nothing about card games and nothing about hot dinners. I think you’re a bit muddled.”
They shuffled about a little, then increased their offer.
It was clear that we did not understand one another.
In the end they managed to find some popular chanteuse. And everything went like clockwork. That is, they would be closed down, pay a bribe, reopen, be closed down again, pay another bribe, etc.
“Do your police take bribes?” I asked Grishin-Almazov.
“How can you ask such a thing! The money goes exclusively to charitable works. I emphasize the word: goes,” he replied buoyantly.
•
At first we refugees found life in Odessa most entertaining.
“Hardly a city at all—more like one long laugh!”
One Odessa actress kept phoning me. She wanted my songs. She had a grand piano—so I really must go to her apartment.
“All right. I’ll come round tomorrow, about five o’clock.”
A sigh.
“Could you possibly, perhaps, come at six? It’s just that at five we always drink tea . . .”
“Are you quite sure an hour will be long enough for your tea?”
Sometimes we would all get together in the evenings and read aloud from the newspapers. The writers liked to pile it on thick, and their articles contained many small gems:
“The ballerina danced beautifully, which is more than can be said of the scenery.”
“During the climatic scene of Ostrovsky’s The Storm, with Roshchina-Insarova playing the title role . . .”
“The artiste performed Ernst’s Elegy quite wonderfully and his violin wept, though he was only wearing a rather ordinary jacket.”
“A steamer drove straight up the pier.”
“On Monday night Raya Lipshits, the merchant’s daughter, broke one of her legs underneath her bicycle.’
But life in Odessa soon began to pall. A joke is not so funny when you’re living inside it. It begins to seem more like a tragedy.
But there was one ray of light. Our much-loved editor Fyodor Blagov[72] arrived in Odessa and started gathering around him the former staff of the Russian Word. The Russian Word was to come out in Odessa. There were a number of us who were keen to write for it, and things quickly began to fall into place.
Around the beginning of spring, the poet Maximilian Voloshin[73] appeared in the city. He was in the grip of a poetic frenzy. Wherever I went, I would glimpse his picturesque silhouette: dense, square beard, tight curls crowned with a round beret, a light cloak, knickerbockers, and gaiters. He was doing the rounds of government institutions and people with the right connections, constantly reciting his poems. There was more to this than was at first apparent. The poems served as keys. To help those who were in trouble Voloshin needed to pass through certain doors—and his poems opened these doors. He’d walk into some office and, while people were still wondering whether or not to announce his presence to their superiors, he would begin to recite. His meditations on the False Dmitry[74] and other Russian tragedies were dense and powerful; lines evoking the fateful burden of history alternated with soaring flights of prophecy. An ecstatic crowd of young typists would gather around him, oohing and aah-ing, letting out little nasal squeals of horrified delight. Next you would hear the clatter of typewriter keys—Voloshin had begun to dictate some of his longer poems. Someone in a position of authority would poke his head around the door, his curiosity piqued, and then lead the poet into his office. Soon the dense, even hum of bardic declamation would start up again, audible even through the closed door.
On one occasion I too received a visit of this nature.
Voloshin recited two long poems and then said that we must do something at once on behalf of the poetess Kuzmina-Karavayeva, who had been arrested (in Feodosya I think), because of some denunciation and was in danger of being shot.[75]
“You’re friends with Grishin-Almazov, you must speak to him straightaway.”
I knew Kuzmina-Karavayeva well enough to understand at once that any such denunciation must be a lie.
“And in the meantime,” said Voloshin, “I’ll go and speak to the Metropolitan.[76] Karavayeva’s a graduate of the theological academy. The Metropolitan will do all he can for her.”
I called Grishin-Almazov.
“Are you sure?” he responded. “Word of honor?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll give the order tomorrow. All right?”
“No, not tomorrow,” I said. “Today. And it’s got to be a telegram. I’m very concerned—we might be too late already!”
“Very well. I will send a telegram. I emphasize the words: I will.”
Kuzmina-Karavayeva was released.
In Novorossiisk, in Yekaterinodar, in Rostov-on-Don—at all the remaining staging posts of our journey—I would again encounter the light cloak, the gaiters, and the round beret crowning the tight curls. On each occasion I heard sonorous verse being declaimed to the accompaniment of little squeals from women with flushed, excited faces. Wherever he went, Voloshin was using the hum—or boom—of his verse to rescue someone whose life was endangered.
•
My old friend M appeared in Odessa. Bearing a dispatch from Admiral Kolchak in Vladivostok,[77] he had made his way across the whole of Siberia, through areas controlled by the Bolsheviks; the dispatch—written not on paper but on thin cloth—had been sewn into his greatcoat lining. His hosts, a family we both knew, told him I was in Odessa and telephoned me straightaway to tell me to come round. Our meeting was joyful, but strange. M’s hosts were all huddled together in one corner of the room so as not to be in our way. Overcome with emotion, an old family nanny was peering through a crack in the door. Everyone went quiet, waiting with baited breath, imagining the scene they were about to witness: a meeting between two friends each of whom had thought that the other had died. Many tears would be shed . . .What times we were living through . . .
I went in.
“Michel! My dear! I’m so glad to see you . . .”
“Not as glad as I am! Things haven’t been easy. Look at all my gray hairs!”
“Nonsense. I can’t see a single one. But as for me! Just take a look at my left temple. Please don’t make out you can’t see them!”
“Not one. Literally, not even one.”
“No. Come over here—the light’s better. Now what do you call this? What’s this if it isn’t a gray hair?”
“I can’t see even a hint of gray. But as for me! Look—in the light!”
“No. You’re being mean and obstinate!”
“No, it’s me who’s gone gray. You’re just wanting an argument.”
“Some things never change. A true gentleman. Outshining us nobodies in every way!”
The hosts tiptoed reverently out of the room.
After these first moments of shared joy, M told me many interesting things.
M had, in the past, been anything but a military man—though he had served his country during the war. After the revolution, he had returned to his estate. When his hometown was besieged by the Bolsheviks, he had been chosen, as he put it, “to be the town dictator.”
“You won’t believe me, of course, but I have risked my life by carrying in my greatcoat lining decrees bearing my own signature.”
He showed me these decrees. He wa
s telling the truth.
“The Bolsheviks brought up their artillery and began shelling us. We had to run,” he continued. “So there I was, riding through a field of rye. And then I saw two cornflowers right next to each other. There were none anywhere else, just these two. Like two blue eyes. And, would you believe it, I forgot where I was. I didn’t even hear the guns any longer. I stopped my horse, got down, and picked the cornflowers. All around me people were running, shouting, falling to the ground. But somehow I wasn’t even in the least scared. Why was that? Was it bravery?”
He stopped to think.
“And then?”
“Next it was the Volga. It’s absurd! I was in command of a fleet. We didn’t fight at all badly. Remember what a fortune-teller said to me around five years ago? How not long before my death I’d be an officer in the navy? And everyone made jokes about a big stout man like me wearing a hat with little ribbons. Well, the fortune-teller was right. Now I’m on my way to Paris and then—via America and Vladivostok—back to Admiral Kolchak. I’ll return his admiral’s cutlass to him, the one he threw into the water. The sailors fished it out and said I must take it back to him, with their compliments.”[78]
He said he’d seen Olyonushka in Rostov. She was acting in a theater there and living very happily with her husband, who looked like a schoolboy in military uniform. Olyonushka had become a strict vegetarian—she would cook some sort of twigs for herself and steal pieces of meat from her husband’s plate.
“Why not just put some meat on your plate to begin with, Olyonushka?” M had asked.
Olyonushka’s little husband had gone red in the face with agitation: “Oh no, no! Don’t say such things. You’ll make her angry. She has her convictions.”
M was preparing for a long journey. He was in a hurry. It was important to establish more reliable communications with Kolchak and, in particular, to pass on to him various decisions taken by the authorities in Odessa. M was the first messenger to have got through from Kolchak.