by Teffi
It all sounded so nice and easy—and, more important still, the debate was a whole six weeks away.
I agreed, of course—and the young man, elated, went on his way.
The days passed. No one bothered me; no one so much as mentioned the debate to me. I forgot all about it.
Then one dull evening when I had nothing to do and didn’t feel like seeing anyone, I went to the Liteiny Theatre. I went partly out of boredom and partly for professional reasons. Several of my plays were in repertoire, and I needed to go along now and again to keep an eye on things. The actors often got so carried away (they were all young, bright and talented) and would do so much “embellishment” (their term for adding words of their own) that by the tenth or twelfth performance some passages had moved so far from the original that even a play’s author might fail to recognize it as their own creation. And an author who left the actors to their own devices for a while and then went along to the twentieth or thirtieth performance might feel genuine puzzlement: What was this jolly nonsense? None of it made any sense, yet it all seemed vaguely familiar.
I still vividly remember a very talented actor in my play Diamond Dust.[131] He was playing the enamored artist. Instead of saying to his beloved, “I’ll follow you like a black slave,” I heard him clearly and distinctly pronounce, “I’ll follow you like a black sleigh.”
I thought I’d misheard, or that the actor had simply come out with the wrong word. I went backstage and asked: Had I simply imagined this black sleigh?
“No, it’s something I thought up myself.”
“But why?” I asked in bewilderment.
“Because it’s funnier like that.”
I was at a loss what to say.
But there are worse things than black sleighs.
Once, after not seeing one of my plays for a long time, I went to the theater and heard the actors spout such a load of nonsense that I took fright. I rushed backstage. The actors greeted me with cheery pride.
“So! Do you like what we’ve done with your play? Works well, doesn’t it? The audience just loves it!”
“It’s absolutely enchanting, of course,” I replied. “But I must, I regret to say, ask you to return to my humble text. I don’t feel comfortable putting my name to someone else’s work.”
They seemed surprised.
And so, there I was, on my way to the Liteiny Theatre. It was an evening I shall not forget.
It was nearly ten o’clock and the performance had evidently begun some time ago. I had free entry, so I went to the back of the hall and found a seat.
There were a lot of people, but . . . what was this play? And why were the house lights on?
Up onstage is a table covered with green cloth. Behind the table, sitting in the middle, is Meyerhold—I recognize him instantly. Arabazhin is standing up; he’s saying something. Volynsky’s there too. And sitting at the end of the table is some young man. Meyerhold screws up his eyes and stares at me; evidently he recognizes me. He beckons to the young man (whose face seems strangely familiar) and says something, pointing toward me . . . The young man nods and makes his way offstage.
What’s happening? I suppose he just wants to be courteous and offer me a seat further forward . . . But what’s going on? What are they all doing here?
In the meantime the young man has entered the auditorium through a side door and is purposefully making his way toward me.
He stops beside me.
“Would you rather speak now,” he asks, “or after the interval?”
“I . . . erm, no, not right now . . . I don’t understand . . .” I stammer in total bewilderment.
“All right then, after the interval,” says the young man in a matter-of-fact tone. “In any event, I’ve been asked to invite you to join us onstage and take your place at the table. Let me show you the way.”
“Oh no . . . no . . . I can manage. Goodness! What’s going on?”
He raises an eyebrow in surprise and returns to the side door.
At this point I start to take in some of what’s being said on stage:
“The Great Mute . . .”
“The role of the Cinema . . .”
“Whether or not it can be called Art . . .”
And something begins to dawns on me. Some thought begins to take shape—a shape that, though still vague, is distinctly unpleasant.
I get up quietly and make my way to the exit. Beside it I see an enormous poster: The Cinema—a Debate.
And there in the list of speakers is my own name, plain as day.
I rush back home. There I frighten my poor maid out of her wits, telling her to put the door on the chain and not to open it on any account to anyone. I take the telephone off the hook, get into bed, and hide my head under the pillow. Dinner is ready, but I’m too scared to go and eat it.
I am afraid that if I go to the dining room, it will be easier for “them” to find me.
How fortunate that everything in the world comes to an end.
29
AND so the day came for me to travel to Yekaterinodar, to take part in the two evenings of my work being put on at the local theater.
Tired and downcast, I left Novorossiisk at nightfall. The train was overflowing, hordes of soldiers and officers filling every car. Evidently they were on their way north, to the front. But they did not look as if they had been on leave for any length of time; they looked too drawn, too worn out, too haggard. Perhaps they were simply being flung from one front to another. I don’t know.
I found myself squashed into a third class car with a broken window and no lighting.
Everywhere I looked—on the benches, on the floor—were figures in brown greatcoats. The car was stifling and full of smoke.
Many of the soldiers fell asleep before the train had even set off.
Standing diagonally across from me, leaning against the side of the car, was a tall, emaciated officer.
“Andreyev!” someone called out. “Come and sit down, we can squash up a bit.”
“I can’t,” the officer replied. “I’m better off standing.”
And so he remained all through the night. His head was thrown back and I could see the whites of his half-closed eyes. On his brow, beneath the skewed peak of his cap, a round crimson spot was slowly going black. As if nailed to the mast like the captain of the Flying Dutchman, he stood there almost without moving, just rocking a little when the train gave a jolt, his long, thin legs spread wide apart. No one talked much, apart from one officer who was sitting beside the smashed window. This man was telling some endless story, never pausing, and I soon realized he was simply talking to himself and that no one was listening to him.
Then a man sitting near me asked somebody else a question: “Have you heard about Colonel K?”
This colonel was a man I had already heard about. Apparently the Bolsheviks had tortured this colonel’s wife and two children to death right in front of him. Ever since, whenever he took any Bolshevik prisoners, he had had them put to death then and there, and always in exactly the same way. He would sit on the porch drinking tea and have the prisoners strung up in front of him, first one, then another, then another.
While he carried on drinking tea.
This was the man my neighbour was asking about.
“Yes, I have,” came the reply. “He’s insane.”
“No, he isn’t. For him, what he’s doing is entirely normal. You see, after all he’s been through, it would be very, very strange if he were to act in a more ordinary way. That really would be insane. There’s a limit to what the soul can take, to what human reason can endure. And that’s as it should be. The way Colonel K behaves is, for him, entirely normal. Understand?”
The other man said nothing. But someone sitting a little further away, on the other side of the aisle, said loudly, “They gouged a boy’s eyes out, a ten-year-old boy. They cut them right out. If you’ve never seen a face like that with gouged-out eyes, you can’t imagine how terrible it looks. He lived on lik
e that for another two days, screaming the whole time.”
“That’s enough . . . Don’t . . .”
“And the agent—did you hear about him? They tied his hands and stuffed his mouth and nose with earth. He suffocated.”
“No, Colonel K is not insane. In his world, in the world he lives in, he’s perfectly normal.”
It was dark in the car.
The wan light coming in through the broken glass—moonlight, I think, although we could not see the moon itself—picked out the dark silhouettes of the men close to the window. Everyone else—those sitting further from the window or on the floor—formed a single, dense, murky shadow. This shadow muttered, swayed, cried out. Were these men asleep? Or awake but out of their wits?
One voice pronounced clearly, too loudly, and with excessive effort, “I can’t go on anymore. Since 1914 they’ve been torturing me, torturing me, and now . . . now I’m dead. I’m dead . . .”
It was the voice of a man who was not alive, a man no longer conscious of himself. It was like the voices of those who are no more—at a spiritualist séance or on an old gramophone recording. . . .
Our old, beaten-up train car was rattling every one of its bolts, its rusty wheels squealing and screeching as it rolled these semi-corpses along toward torment and death.
Day began to break.
In the half light the rocking heads and pale faces seemed more terrible still.
These men were asleep. Talking in their sleep. And if one of them awoke, he would at once quiet down, straighten his stiff shoulders, and smooth down his greatcoat. Calmly and simply, as if nothing were the matter. He didn’t know what his soul had been weeping about as he slept.
But most terrible of all was the man still standing upright before them, greatcoat wide open, his thin, dead head thrown right back, a bullet hole in his forehead.
He was facing us, like a commanding officer preparing to lead his men forward. A man with a bullet hole in his forehead, the captain of the Flying Dutchman—the ship of death.[132]
•
The train reached Yekaterinodar early in the morning. The city was still asleep.
The bright sunny day, the dusty streets, and the creaking horse-drawn cab quickly brought me back to my usual, more spacious state of mind. The previous night had vanished, dying away like a distant moan.
“It’s all right,” I said to myself encouragingly. “Soon the Shilka will be allowed to go east. And then in Vladivostok I’ll be with M, a loyal and devoted friend. I’ll get my breath back. And by then things will be a bit clearer . . .”
I began to think about these two evenings of mine; we needed to start rehearsing straightaway.
When I reached the house of the impresario who had invited me, the shutters were still closed. It seemed everyone was still asleep.
I rang the bell—and Olyonushka let me in. She was one of the company.
30
YEKATERINODAR was at this time our center, our White capital. And it really did have the air of a capital.
One glimpsed generals’ uniforms; one heard snatches of important conversations:
“I have ordered that . . .”
“The minister, however . . .”
“I shall issue a severe reprimand, without delay.”
Typewriters. Officials. Ordinary buildings now housing government institutions . . .
Unexpectedly, I received a letter from Novorossiisk—a request from the ship I had abandoned. I was being asked to go in person to the naval authorities and petition them to allow the Shilka to set sail for Vladivostok.
I cannot bear any kind of government institution or bureaucratic formality. Even just going to the post office to pick up an innocent registered letter has an unfortunate effect on me. The businesslike look on the face of the official asking for my signature instantly makes me forget the date, the year, and my own surname. You’re allowed to ask about the date, and if you look around you can sometimes spot the year on a wall calendar—but if you have to think about your own surname, the official will refuse to hand you the letter.
But I had no choice. I wanted to do our dear Shilka a good turn, and the thought of sailing east was appealing. Until now fate had only driven us straight down the map. Why shouldn’t we go sideways for a change?
I asked where the naval authorities were now housed and set off.
I was directed to a tall gentleman with a bright ginger beard. I no longer remember his name, only that he had ginger hair, that he was very courteous, and that his naval authority was considerable.
He didn’t ask me the date and he already knew my name, so I was able to babble out the Shilka’s request quite spiritedly.
He paused for a moment, then surprised me by saying, “Tell me, what makes you so eager to drown? Captain Ryabinin has made this request before. We refused it. The Shilka is a small vessel, and Captain Ryabinin has never sailed to Vladivostok. He’ll send you to the bottom of the sea.”
I defended the Shilka. So what if she wasn’t so very big? That hadn’t stopped her from reaching the Black Sea. And where had she sailed from? Vladivostok!
“We see that as a happy accident unlikely to repeat itself. If she makes the journey again, she’s sure to be caught in a typhoon.”
It didn’t feel right to explain that for me personally this would be the most interesting part of the journey. I only said I was certain that the Shilka could cope with any storms or typhoons.
The naval authority laughed. He did not share my confidence.
“It would be the end of the Shilka. Your Captain Ryabinin is a brave man, but we cannot permit such madness.”
I sent a sad telegram to the Shilka and gave up my attempts to intervene.
•
The rehearsals and the two evenings took up three or four days. Throughout this period I stayed with the impresario.
He was a very sweet man of French descent who had retained only one custom from his forgotten homeland: If roast chicken was being served, he liked to carve it himself, at the table.
Several months previously he had married a young actress from his company. She had quickly fattened up from her new life of plenty and had left the stage. Plump, pink, and sleepy, she flounced about in extravagant muslin frills, called her husband “Papa” and talked like a doll: “Pa-pa! Baby wants watermelon! Pa-pa!”
The house was always full. There were actors, actresses, and critics, and there were always people staying on for one meal or another. It was noisy, convivial, and chaotic. There was little talk of politics. People who had to return to Moscow, and who were free to return, mingled with people who knew they could never return. Not that anyone really knew anything anyway—it seemed easier to leave the understanding and decision-making to those of a more activist disposition. In this little artistic bohemia, people lived purely for their professional pursuits. Probably everyone was simply too frightened to give any real thought to what was going on around them.
More and more people kept appearing. By hook or by crook, new troupes of actors were constantly finding their way through from the north.
An elderly theater critic arrived. He had sent a telegram saying he was unwell and asking for a room to be made ready for him. Someone booked him into a hotel and two tenderhearted actresses went to the station to meet him.
“Everything’s ready,” they told him. “We’ve even ordered you a bath!”
“A bath?” repeated the now frightened critic. “Is my condition really so very serious?”
The actresses were embarrassed.
“No, no, of course not! It’s just so you can have a good wash after your dreadful journey.”
The critic smiled condescendingly.
“If that’s all there is to it, my dears, then I have to say that a bath is not something for which I feel any particular need.”
The two people I most remember from this motley crew are the silent cinema star Osip Runich and the comic actor and light opera singer Alexander Koshevsky[133]—a tragic in
dividual who was always imagining himself to be mortally ill. Even as he was piling a third helping onto his plate, he would say despairingly, “Yes, I know my loss of appetite is most suspicious. Undoubtedly an early symptom of meningitis . . .”
He had an interesting wife, about whom one actress said, “She’s from a very interesting family. Apparently Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov is modeled on her auntie.”
Then the day came. They were putting on three of my little skits; the actresses were also going to read some of my short stories, sing a few of my songs, and recite some poems.
The impresario insisted that I read too. I fought long and hard, but in the end I was forced to yield.
Our actresses were getting excited. One after another they were rushing up to me and asking if I would allow them to do my makeup for me before I appeared on stage.
“What are you going to read?” they kept asking.
“I haven’t yet made up my mind.”
“What? I don’t believe it!”
In the evening, with much squealing, shrieking, and shouting, the house’s entire population hurried off to the theater. I decided to go a little later.
I quietly got dressed and went out.
It was a still night; the sky was dark and studded with stars. This made my soul too feel strangely still.
There are moments when threads snap—all the threads that tie what is earthly in the soul to the earth itself. Your nearest and dearest become infinitely distant, barely even a memory. Even the events in your past that once mattered most to you grow dim. All of the huge and important thing we call life fades away and you become that primordial nothing out of which the universe was created.
So it was on that night—the black, empty, round earth and the boundless starry sky. And me.
How long this moment lasted I can’t say. I was brought back by the sound of voices: People were walking past, talking loudly about the theater. And I remembered everything. This, I remembered, was my evening. I was going to have to hurry. I seemed to have wandered a long way—beside me I could see a bright strip of water and some little black walkways.