by Teffi
He was in good spirits. He believed ardently in Kolchak and the White cause. “I will gladly, and with no thought for myself, carry out this mission that has been entrusted to me. I feel at peace with myself. Only one thing troubles me—my black opal ring. The opal has cracked—cracked in the shape of a cross. What do you think that means?”
I did not say, but there was no doubting this omen. Exactly a month later, M died.
He had very much wanted to get me out of Odessa. “The omens bode ill!”—as people kept saying.
M was leaving on a torpedo boat and he promised to secure me the necessary permissions. But the weather was vile, there were ferocious storms out at sea, and I refused to go with him.
Countless friendly voices were telling M that I would be all right, that he had nothing to worry about:
“No, if Odessa has to be evacuated, we certainly won’t forget Nadezhda Alexandrovna. Surely you understand that!”
“She’ll be first to board the steamer, I give you my word!”
“As if any of us could leave Odessa without first making sure she can leave too! How absurd can you get!”
(Things did indeed get absurd, but not in the way these people meant.)
I was awoken early in the morning. It was very cold. There were blue shadows on M’s pale cheeks.
When someone wakes you early on a blind winter’s morning, it’s always for a farewell, or a funeral, or on account of some misfortune, or some terrible news. And in the dim, sunless light your body trembles; every drop of blood in your body trembles.
There were blue shadows on M’s cheeks.
“Well, farewell. I’m going now. Make the sign of the cross over me.”
“God be with you.”
“This time it probably won’t be for long. Not long at all.”
But in that gloomy dawn, that ghostly image of my future, I had no hope at all of any sweet and simple joys. I repeated quietly, “God be with you. But as for whether we’ll see each other again—who knows? We know nothing at all—every time we part, it’s forever.”
And that was the last we saw of each other.
A year later, the Russian consul in Paris gave me the ring with the black opal.
All M’s other belongings had gone. After M’s death, some opportunist staying in the same hotel had gone into his room and taken everything. He had taken luggage, clothes, linen, rings, a cigarette case, a watch, even little bottles of scent, but he hadn’t dared touch the black opal. He must have sensed something about it.
That opal had an interesting history.
At one time—around the beginning of the war—I had had something of a passion for gemstones. I had studied them and collected legends about them.[79] And an old man by the name of Konoplyov used to come round, bringing precious stones from the Urals, and sometimes even from India. He was someone I felt at ease with—a sweet old man with only one eye. He would spread a piece of black velvet on the table, under the lamp, and with long thin tweezers he called “scoopers” he would reach into the box and take out little shining lights—blue, green and red. He would lay them out on the velvet, examine them, and tell stories about them. Sometimes a stone would misbehave, refusing to yield to the scoopers. It would struggle like a live fledgling, giving off sparks of fear.
“There’s a stubborn one for you,” the old man would grumble. “Balas ruby, orange—a hot orange, see? And here’s a sapphire. Look at how it flowers. Blue, green, like the eye on a peacock’s tail. What matters in a sapphire is not whether it’s light or dark, but at what point it turns lilac, at what point it flowers. You need to understand this.”
You could spend long hours sitting with the tweezers and turning over the cold little lights. I would remember legends: “If you show an emerald to a snake, tears will flow from its eyes. The emerald is the color of the Garden of Eden. Bitterly does the snake remember its sin.”
“Amethyst is a chaste and humble stone. Its touch is cleansing. The ancients used to drink from amethyst cups, lest wine intoxicate them. Of the High Priest’s twelve stones, none was more important than the amethyst. And the Pope blesses Books of Prayer with an amethyst.”
“Ruby is the stone of those who are in love. It intoxicates without touch.”
“Alexandrite—our astonishing stone from the Urals—was first found during the reign of Alexander II. Prophetically, it was named after him. Its shifting colors foretold the tsar’s fate—blossoming days and a bloody sunset.”[80]
“And the diamond, a clear jasper, symbolizes the life of Christ.”
I loved stones. And what wonderful freaks there were among them: a light blue amethyst, a yellow sapphire, another sapphire that was pale blue except for a bright yellow spot of sunlight. Konoplyov called this a “flaw”—but if you ask me, that sapphire had a hot little heart.
Sometimes he would bring a piece of gray rock containing a whole litter of little emeralds. Like children lined up by height—getting smaller and smaller, wan, blind as puppies. They had been hurt; they had been dug up too early. To come to maturity, they would have needed to stay deep in the hot ore for many more millennia.
During this time when I was so in love with stones, the artist Alexander Yakovlev had come round with a few opals.[81] They were strange, dark opals. Some other artist had brought them from Ceylon and asked Yakovlev to sell them for him.
“Opals bring bad luck,” I had said. “I’m not sure I want them. But let me have a word with Konoplyov.”
Konoplyov said, “If you have doubts, you really mustn’t buy them. But let me show you some stones myself, some quite wonderful stones. And I can let you have them for almost nothing. Here, look. A whole necklace.”
He unfolded a chamois cloth and, one after another, took out twelve enormous and unbelievably beautiful opals. Pale moonlit mist. And in the moonlight, crimson and green lights flashing: “Stop . . . Go . . . Stop . . . Go . . .” The shifting colors both enticed and confused. . . .
“You can have them for nothing,” Konoplyov repeated with a smile.
I was held by the play of the moonlight. You could stare at it and see only a quiet mist. A flash of light—and then, beside it, a second flash that swelled up into a flame. It would engulf the first; then both would vanish.
“For nothing. But there’s something I must tell you. I sold these stones, just as you see them, to Mrs. Martens, the wife of the professor. She liked them very much and bought them. But then, only the next morning, her servant came round with the stones; Mrs. Martens wanted me to take them back. Her husband, Professor Martens, had passed away in the night, quite unexpectedly. So, it’s up to you. If this story doesn’t put you off, please take them, but I won’t try to persuade you.”[82]
I didn’t take Konoplyov’s opals, but I decided to have one of the black ones from Ceylon. That evening I looked at it for a long time. It was beautiful. It had two lights—green and deep blue. And the flame leaping out from the opal was so powerful that it seemed to have a life of its own. It shivered and shimmered not inside the stone but in the air just above it.
I bought one opal. M bought another just like it.
And that’s when it all began.
I can’t say that the opal brought me any specific misfortune. It’s the pale, milky opals that bring death, sickness, sorrow, and separation. This one simply snatched up my life and embraced it with its black flame—until my soul began to dance like a witch on a bonfire. Howls, screeches, sparks, a fiery whirlwind. My whole way of life consumed, burned to ashes. I felt strange, savage, elated.
I kept the stone for about two years and then gave it back to Yakovlev, asking him, if he could, to return it to whoever had brought it to him from Ceylon. I thought that, like Mephistopheles, it needed to retrace its steps, to go back the same way it had come—and the sooner the better. If it tried to go any other way, it would get lost and end up in my hands again. Which was the last thing I wanted.
As for Yakovlev, I know he kept one stone for himself. I don’t kn
ow if he kept it for long, but I know that he too was snatched away by a blue-green wave, which spun him round and hurled him into faraway slant-eyed Asia.
And the stone M bought did something similar to his own quiet and peaceful life. His life had been so tranquil: a soft armchair, an ivory paper knife between the rough pages of a book by his favourite poet, languid hands with nails polished like precious stones, a grand piano, a portrait of Oscar Wilde in a tortoiseshell frame, Kuzmin’s poems copied out in a minuscule script . . .[83]
And then—the languid hands dropped the uncut book. War, revolution, an absurd marriage, being chosen as the “dictator of his home town,” putting his signature to monstrous decrees, guerrilla warfare on the Volga, Admiral Kolchak, a long and terrible journey across Siberia. Odessa. Paris. Death. A deep cross-shaped fissure cutting through the black stone. The end.
•
New refugees kept appearing in Odessa: from Moscow, Petersburg, and Kiev.
It was easiest to obtain a travel pass if you were an actor or singer. The amount of artistic talent in Russia proved truly remarkable—opera and theater companies began to head south in droves.
“We got out with no trouble at all,” you would hear some Petersburg hairdresser say, smiling serenely. “I was the leading man, my wife was the ingénue, aunty Fima was the coquette, Mama was in charge of the box office and we had eleven prompters. We all got through. Of course, the proletariat was a little puzzled by the number of prompters, but we explained that no element of the dramatic art is more important. Without a prompter a play can’t run at all. And prompters get worn out sitting so still in their booths—and so this crucial element of the art has to be repeatedly replaced by fresh elements.”
There was an opera company made up entirely of noble fathers.
And a ballet company that was all elderly nannies and headmistresses.
Every new arrival adamantly asserted that the Bolshevik regime was falling apart and that, to be honest, it was hardly even worth unpacking one’s bags. But unpack them they did . . .
There was a general air of excitement, though you couldn’t quite call it high spirits.
“The Entente! The Triple Entente!”
We looked out to sea, hoping to glimpse British or French “pennants.”[84]
Money started slowly disappearing. Shopkeepers would give change in their own special notes, which they would later sometimes fail to recognize.
Everything was getting more expensive by the day. Once, a salesman pointed with tragic solemnity at a piece of cheese he was wrapping for me and said, “Keep an eye on it—it’s growing more expensive by the minute!”
“Well, wrap it up quickly,” I said. “Maybe the paper will slow it down.”
And then, all of a sudden, we lost Grishin-Almazov. He left Odessa incognito, without a word to anyone. There were urgent matters he needed to discuss with Kolchak. It was not long before we heard the tragic news. He was intercepted by the Bolsheviks while crossing the Caspian Sea. Seeing an approaching ship with a red flag, the gray-eyed governor of Odessa threw several cases of documents into the water, leaned over the side, and put a bullet through his forehead. He died the death of a hero.
A hero, Grishin-Almazov. I emphasize the word: hero!
His death evoked little response in Odessa. I noticed only that the hotel commandant’s greetings became more perfunctory and his fluffy dog stopped wagging its tail at me. One day the commandant knocked on my door. Sounding preoccupied, he informed me apologetically that he had found me a room in the International, since the whole of the London was being requisitioned for use as a military headquarters.
I was very sorry to leave my dear room number sixteen where at six o’clock every evening the radiator would warm up a little, where the mirror above the mantelpiece had sometimes reflected the faces of people I loved—the dry, aristocratic face of Ivan Bunin, the pale cameo silhouette of his wife, the piratical Alexey Tolstoy and his lyrical wife Natasha Krandievskaya, and Sergey Gorny, and Lolo, and Nilus and Pankratov.[85]
So there I was, another stage of my journey now over. There were now many behind me—though still many ahead . . .
And around us we began to glimpse a kind of man we hadn’t seen before—coat collar turned up, constantly looking over his shoulder, quick to slip behind the nearest gate.
“They’re sneaking in already. Yes, I assure you, we are being infiltrated. We saw a face we’d seen before—a commissar from Moscow. He pretended not to know us and made himself scarce.”
“It doesn’t matter . . . The Entente . . . they’ll ship in reinforcements. . . . It’ll be all right.”
And then, all of a sudden, a familiar phrase. It had caught up with us. It might be out of breath, but there it was: “The o-mens boode ill!”
Yet again!
14
THE FIRST issue of Our Word came out. The general mood of the paper was combative and buoyant.
My feuilleton “The Last Breakfast” struck completely the wrong note. In it I wrote about the nightlife of the wealthy, the ominous silence all around, the rustles and whispers in the underground world that “they” were already infiltrating—and a prisoner’s last breakfast before his execution.[86]
This was not what people wanted.
“Why all this doom and gloom? Why the ominous prophesies? Now of all times—with the Entente . . . with fresh troops being shipped in . . . with the French . . .” And so on and so forth.
“Are you blind? Just look at all the activity in the harbor!”
“. . . the pennants!”
“. . . the Triple Entente!”
“. . . the soldiers from France!”
I must have been very mistaken indeed.
A plucky group of writers and actors decided to open a “cellar” on some rooftop or other. À la Stray Dog of course. All they needed was some money and the right name. The way everyone was talking about the French, I suggested they call it “L’Entente de ma Tante.”
The International, I heard people saying, was also going to be requisitioned and turned into a military headquarters. If so, I would once again be homeless. I recalled with horror my first days in Odessa—an icy room in a private apartment where snow blew straight into the bathroom through a broken window. I used to stand at the washbasin while the snow fell onto my head. The owner used to walk to the bathroom in an overcoat with the collar turned up and wearing a sheepskin hat. His wife somehow managed to wash with her hands tucked in a muff. Perhaps their hats and muffs really did keep the two of them nice and warm, it’s hard to say. I just shivered and sneezed and tried to warm up by doing exercises from every gymnastic regime then in existence. This was not an experience I wanted to have to go through again. Even though it was spring, and even though spring can’t but lead to summer—which meant that there was no real need to be worrying about the cold—the thought of another difficult search for somewhere to live was upsetting. It was exhausting merely to think about it. Better not to think about anything at all. Not least because I was unable to imagine myself living a settled life in Odessa. While I was still in my room in the London, visitors often used to say to me, “What a wonderful view you’re going to have in spring!”
And I had always replied, “I’m not sure. I can’t see myself here in the spring. The omens bode ill . . .”
One bright sunny day I was walking along the street when I saw something unprecedented—black soldiers marching along from the quay, leading heavily laden donkeys. As they approached, I could see the gleaming whites of the soldiers’ eyes. This, evidently, was the French Army. The enthusiasm of the city’s inhabitants was muted:
“A fine lot they’ve sent us. Is this the best they could do?”
The negroes grinned, baring their fierce teeth, and shouted out something that sounded like “Habdallah Amdallah”[87]—there was no knowing whether they were swearing at us or greeting us.
But then, what did it matter? We would learn soon enough.
The donkeys we
re gaily swishing their tails. This was a more cheerful omen.
“So? What do you think to Odessa? Ri-ight?”
A strangely familiar voice.
“Gooskin!”
“Ri-ight? It’s hardly a city—more like one great tangerine. But how come you aren’t sitting in a café? That’s where literally all the whipped cream of society rises.”
Gooskin. But I hardly recognized him. All elegantly turned out in subtle shades of dove gray: jacket, tie, hat, socks, gloves. A perfect dandy.
“Oh Gooskin! It seems I’m about to be homeless. I’m in despair.”
“Despair!” said Gooskin. “Well, despair no more. Gooskin will find you someplace. You’ve probably been telling yourself, ‘That Gooskin, he’s just—pff!’ ”
“I assure you I’ve never thought you were ‘just—pff!’ ”
“But the fact is, Gooskin, Gooskin is . . . Do you want some carpets?”
“What?” For a moment I felt quite scared.
“Carpets. These here Moroccaneers have brought all sorts of junk with them. Absolutely wonderful things, and they’re dirty cheap. So cheap they’re literally going for a singsong. To give you an idea, I can quote you an exact price: a wonderful carpet, the very latest antique quality, eight and a half foot in length by five and a half foot . . . no, by five foot six in width . . . Well, for a carpet like that you’ll be paying . . . what’s comparatively a very modest price.”
“Thank you Gooskin. Now no one can possibly swindle me. I know exactly what I should pay.”
“Ach, Madame Teffi, what a shame you changed your mind back then about going on tour with Gooskin. Not long ago I was touring with this singer. Sobinov—rather a louse, you know. As a matter of fact, I once took a shot at him.”
“You tried to shoot Sobinov? Why?”
“Well, I took aim at him, which comes to more or less the same thing. Yes, I took aim at Sobinov, but somehow nothing much came of it. You see, I’d brought this louse of a singer to Nikolaev. I’d rented a hall, sold tickets, got him an audience, everything! And you know what? The scoundrel didn’t hit a single high note. Wherever there should have been a high note, what he did—and God knows where he got the idea from!—what he did was take out his handkerchief and blow his nose as if blowing one’s nose on stage were the most natural thing in the world. The audience had paid good money—and there they were, waiting for their high notes, but that scoundrel just kept blowing away. Anyone would have thought he was on his way to Siberia. And then he went to the cashier and demanded his fee. I got angry then, I couldn’t have been more like a lion. When I’m angry, my rages are terrible. I said, ‘Excuse me, but what about your high notes?’ Yes, those were my exact words. He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “If I hit high notes in Nikolaev, what notes am I supposed to hit in Odessa? Or London, or Paris, or even America for that matter? Or are you going to tell me Nikolaev is as much of a city as America?’ Well, what could I say to that? There was no mention of high notes in the contract. So I said nothing at all, although I did say, ‘Well, you probably don’t even possess any high notes.’ And he said, ‘Actually I have a great many high notes, but I prefer not to let you call the tune. Today you want a high “la” in an aria—tomorrow, in the very same aria, you’ll be wanting a high “si.” And all for the same price. Well, you go and find yourself some boy to sing for you. This is a small town and it really doesn’t need any high notes,’ he said, ‘especially with all this revolution and brotherly butchery round about.’ Well, what could I say to that?”