Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (Penguin Classics)

by Chandler, Robert

  When he reached the turning, he looked back: the woman was still standing there, pressing her muff to her bosom, like a shield; her narrow shoulders were shivering with cold; the wind cynically flicked her skirt and lifted up the lappets of her coat.

  ‘Tomorrow. Everything tomorrow. But now…’ And, quickening his pace, Sutulin turned resolutely back.

  ‘Right now: while everyone’s asleep. Collect my things (only the necessaries) and go. Run away. Leave the door wide open: let them. Why should I be the only one? Why not let them?’

  The apartment was indeed sleepy and dark. Sutulin walked down the corridor, straight and to the right, opened the door with resolve and, as always, wanted to turn the light switch, but it spun feebly in his fingers, reminding him that the circuit had been broken. This was an annoying obstacle. But it couldn’t be helped. Sutulin rummaged in his pockets and found a box of matches: it was almost empty. Good for three or four flares – that’s all. He would have to husband both light and time. When he reached the coat pegs, he struck the first match: light crept in yellow radiuses through the black air. Sutulin purposely, overcoming temptation, concentrated on the illuminated scrap of wall and the coats and jackets hanging from hooks. He knew that there, behind his back, the dead, quadraturinized space with its black corners was still spreading. He knew and did not look round. The match smouldered in his left hand, his right pulled things off hooks and flung them on the floor. He needed another flare; looking at the floor, he started towards the corner – if it was still a corner and if it was still there – where, by his calculations, the bed should have fetched up, but he accidentally held the flame under his breath – and again the black wilderness closed in. One last match remained: he struck it over and over: it would not light. One more time – and its crackling head fell off and slipped through his fingers. Then, having turned around, afraid to go any further into the depths, the man started back towards the bundle he had abandoned under the hooks. But he had made the turn, apparently, inexactly. He walked – heel to toe, heel to toe – holding his fingers out in front of him, and found nothing: neither the bundle, nor the hooks, nor even the walls. ‘I’ll get there in the end. I must get there.’ His body was sticky with cold and sweat. His legs wobbled oddly. The man squatted down, palms on the floorboards: ‘I shouldn’t have come back. Now here I am alone, nowhere to turn.’ And suddenly it struck him: ‘I’m waiting here, but it’s growing, I’m waiting, but it’s…’

  In their sleep and in their fear, the occupants of the quadratrures adjacent to citizen Sutulin’s eighty-six square feet couldn’t make head or tail of the timbre and intonation of the cry that woke them in the middle of the night and compelled them to rush to the threshold of the Sutulin cell: for a man who is lost and dying in the wilderness to cry out is both futile and belated: but if even so – against all sense – he does cry out, then, most likely, thus.

  Written in 1926; first published in 1989

  Translated by Joanne Turnbull

  VERA MIKHAILOVNA INBER (1890–1972)

  Inber was born in Odessa. Her father worked in publishing and her mother taught Russian. As a young woman Inber lived for several years in France and Switzerland, returning to Russia shortly before the First World War. Between 1914 and 1922 she published three volumes of poetry; her poem ‘Five Nights and Days’ (1924), written in memory of Lenin, brought her wider recognition. She travelled regularly, making three trips to Western Europe between 1924 and 1934, as well as visiting Georgia and Soviet Central Asia.

  Like all of her contemporaries, she was subject to a variety of pressures to write what was acceptable to the authorities. The critic Catriona Kelly observes that Inber ‘complied partly because she felt under constant threat, being a first cousin of Lev Trotsky, and partly because she knew that literary conformity would secure her the trips abroad which were her one source of unalloyed pleasure’.1 Inber is best known for the poetry and diaries she wrote between 1941 and 1943, during the Siege of Leningrad. The fame of her patriotic writing has perhaps led critics and readers to overlook the witty and graceful stories she wrote in the 1920s; several of these, like ‘Lalla’s Interests’, are about children.

  LALLA’S INTERESTS

  The lift was old and very lonely in its cage. Embittered by incessant tottering from floor to floor, it had begun snapping the gate shut with a vicious click and whimpering on the way down like a wounded wolf. Sometimes it went out of service altogether and sulked between floors, glowering at people trudging up the stairs.

  For chaperon the lift had Yakov Mitrokhin, someone’s eleven-year-old son. He had appeared from the yard; the night watchman had taken to him and he to the lift. In accordance with his instructions from the house-manager’s office, Yakov Mitrokhin did not allow anyone into the lift unaccompanied. He took everyone up himself and exacted from each, again as per his instructions, a fee of five kopeks.

  During the long evening hours, while a blizzard hissed, howled and ran riot outside, Yakov Mitrokhin, ever at his post by the lift and waiting for people who had gone to the theatre or to see friends, would reflect upon life. He would reflect upon life, upon the fact that his felt boots were full of holes, that his adoptive father the night watchman Mitrofan Avdeyich hit hard and, worse, for no reason, and that it would be nice to find a pencil and take up book learning. Again and again he would examine the lift’s mechanism, its inner workings, its seats, its buttons. One button in particular, a little red one: press it hard and the lift would stop dead. Very interesting.

  In the evenings, when the grownups were out at the theatre or sitting quietly at home, giving their guests tea, boys in fur hats and sheepskin coats from all over the yard would come by for some talk with Yakov Mitrokhin. He was even visited, on occasion, by a velvet-bonneted six year old by the name of Lalla. Lalla’s mother, a stout woman resembling a round chest of drawers, was deeply distressed by this friendship and always said, ‘Why he’s nothing but a waif, Lalla, wipe your nose! He could kill you or kidnap you, don’t suck your thumb! Isn’t there anyone else you’d rather play with?’

  When Yakov Mitrokhin heard remarks like that, he would snort reproachfully, but he never said anything.

  Lalla’s nanny, a venerable old lady, was even more distraught: ‘Lallachka, stop this foolishness, don’t you even look at him! To think what you’ve found: a little lift boy, when your papa’s writing desk is covered in leather and you drink hot cocoa every day. A treasure, you say? Don’t be silly! He’s not your sort!’

  But little Lalla, fair and round as a button, invariably walked past Yakov Mitrokhin as close as she could, and smiled up at him.

  One day downstairs by the lift, on the wall where people usually put up announcements to do with the building, there appeared one more:

  All children what live in this house are invited to a meeting tomorrow after 5 under the stairs where the old coat is laying. Very importint things will be said. Enter free. The ones not from this house will have to pay (two licoriss sticks).

  The announcement was unsigned.

  The first to notice it was Lalla’s mother. She read it through her pince-nez, then with her naked eye, and immediately rang the bell of the house-manager’s office on the second floor. The house-manager’s deputy emerged.

  ‘What can you be thinking of, comrade Pelageyaitis?’ said Lalla’s mother. ‘How can you permit such a thing?’ She jabbed the notice with her reticule. ‘Our children are being corrupted while you stand idly by! Why don’t you say anything? Of course, my Lalla won’t go, but that’s not the point, what about the principle?’

  Comrade Pelageyaitis blinked, blew his nose and took exception: ‘I don’t see anything wrong, ma’am. Children have a right to coorganize themselves for the protection of their professional interests.’

  Lalla’s mother spluttered with indignation and clenched her teeth: ‘What interests can they possibly have when their noses are always running? I’m quite sure this is the work of that boy Yury from apartment eighteen. His
father’s a senior secretary.’

  Senior secretary Seleznyov, a gloomy man with bad kidneys, looked askance at the announcement and thought: ‘I can see that’s Yury’s writing. Who he’ll be when he grows up, I don’t know! An adventurer like that Pilsudsky.’

  The children seemed not to notice the announcement. Only the stairs became unusually grubby with the marks of small boots, while the demand for liquorice sticks at a nearby co-operative rose so sharply that a fresh supply had to be laid in.

  The night passed uneventfully, but the morning turned anxious.

  To begin with the milkmaid arrived with the news that out-of-doors there was such a snowstorm you couldn’t see an inch in front of your face and she’d nearly harnessed her horse the wrong way round, in consequence of which milk had gone up a kopek. A sense of trouble brewing hung over the house. But Seleznyov still went to the office with a dietetic lunch in his briefcase, while Lalla’s mother set off for private trader Lapin’s to see about this complication with the milk.

  The children sat in their rooms and kept suspiciously quiet.

  A little after five, when most parents – weary from the office, the blizzard and lunch – were resting, Pravda or Izvestiya slipping from their limp hands, small shadows began flitting down the stairs, clearly bound for the place where the old sheepskin coat was lying.

  Lalla’s mother, having stood in line at Lapin’s for an hour and ascertained that milk had indeed gone up and that there was no cottage cheese at all, was also resting on the ottoman amid a quantity of pillows, mostly round, some as large as automobile wheels, others as small as saucers. In the kitchen, Lalla’s nanny was arguing with the washerwoman about God.

  The central heating was quietly snuffling. Suddenly a door slammed.

  Lalla’s mother jumped, up only to discover that little Lalla – Yelena Yegorovna Antonova – had disappeared.

  Lalla’s mother threw something on, stormed across the hall and rang the bell. The door was opened by Senior Secretary Seleznyov himself, holding a hot-water bottle: ‘My Lalla is gone, and Yury, too, I imagine,’ said Lalla’s mother. ‘They’re having a meeting under the stairs, professional interests, but all they’ll wind up with is pneumonia.’

  ‘My Yury’s not here,’ Senior Secretary Seleznyov replied peevishly. ‘Must have gone, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was his doing. Let me put my coat on.’

  They walked out together and started down. Just then the decrepit lift began to groan, hobbling down from the seventh floor. Seeing the two of them on the stairs, Yakov Mitrokhin stopped the machine, clicked open the gate crisply and said: ‘‘Fyou please.’

  Downstairs, meanwhile, the little room – where the old sheepskin coat was lying and the street-watering hose hibernating – had become so jammed with children you couldn’t take a deep breath. The air was thick with the smell of liquorice.

  Yury Seleznyov was standing on an old chair and getting ready to preside. His assistant, Viktor, age twelve and not a party member, kept running up to him with questions.

  ‘Yury, there’s a girl from another yard here with a baby. Can the baby give her its vote or not?’

  Just then the baby began to vote all by itself, so loudly they were all nearly deafened.

  ‘Comrades,’ Yury tried to scream over it, ‘comrades, I hereby inform you that in order to vote you must be able to walk! Anyone else must abstain. Votes are not transferable. Please put your name down if you’d like to speak – we don’t have much time – about the problem of re-electing parents.’

  Lalla, pale, eyes sparkling, squeezed her way through to Viktor and said quietly, ‘Put my name down, too. I want to speak. Write: “Lalla from the fifth floor”.’

  ‘What do you want to speak about, comrade?’

  ‘About prickly woollies, so we won’t have to wear them any more. And lots of other things besides.’

  Yury waved a liquorice stick and began: ‘Comrades, I’d like to say a few words. All sorts of people – metalworkers, shop assistants, even bootblacks – have a union to protect them from exploitation, but we children can’t do anything like that. Every parent, whether father or mother, and especially if he has bad kidneys, does whatever he wants with us. This can’t go on. I suggest we present a list of demands and devise slogans in keeping with the times. Who’s in favour? Against? Abstentions?’

  ‘Yakov Mitrokhin’s name is down next,’ Viktor announced, ‘to speak about not letting them box our ears. But he’s not here.’

  Yury frowned knowingly and said, ‘Must be busy. He wouldn’t run off for no reason. It’s obviously something important. Leave him on the list.’

  The meeting was hectic. Many problems were raised, all of them so pressing that no one could keep quiet. They talked about the fact that parents think too much of themselves and even forbid children to play in the corridor in communal apartments,1 which is absolutely intolerable. They talked about the fact that washing one’s shoes in puddles was necessary, and about all sorts of other things.

  For the first time ever, the protection of children’s interests was put on a professional footing.

  The lift hung between the third and fourth floors for an hour and a half. Lalla’s mother banged and bustled about in vain and senior secretary Seleznyov clutched the small of his back, while Yakov Mitrokhin kept insisting that the lift’s insides were in a bad way and he couldn’t do anything about it: the lift would hang there a while, then start up again all by itself.

  When Lalla’s mother, half dead from worry and the tense wait, finally returned to her round pillows, she found Lalla sitting at her father’s writing desk. With a large blue pencil on a large sheet of paper she was painstakingly tracing out a slogan evidently devised at the meeting: CHILDREN, BE CAREFUL WHEN ELECTING PARENTS!

  Lalla’s mother was so horrified she turned pale green.

  The next day she received a letter via Lalla’s nanny. To her surprise, the bedraggled envelope contained something round. She opened it. Inside was a large, sticky fivekopek coin. The note said:

  Ma’am, I’m giving you back your five kopeks for the lift. To be fair. I held you there on purpose so as your daughter Lalla could speak about all her interests.

  For illiterate Yakov Mitrokhin,

  Yury Seleznyov

  First published in 1925

  Translated by Joanne Turnbull

  MIKHAIL AFANASYEVICH BULGAKOV (1891-1940)

  Born in Kiev, Bulgakov studied medicine at Kiev University and served as a doctor during the First World War, working in both military and civilian hospitals in the provinces. He abandoned medicine in 1920 and moved to Moscow in 1921; like Chekhov, Russia’s other doctor-writer, he made his living from writing humorous sketches for newspapers. His early works, Notes on the Cuff, The Diaboliad and The Fatal Eggs, were well received, but the more sharply satirical The Heart of a Dog was declared unpublishable. During the late 1920s several of his plays were performed in leading Moscow theatres, but they were removed from the repertoire after official criticism. He then applied for permission to emigrate; this led to a telephone call from Stalin himself. Bulgakov – unlike Zamyatin – was refused permission to emigrate, but The Days of the Turbins (Bulgakov’s adaptation of his Civil War novel The White Guard) was restored to the repertoire of the Moscow Arts Theatre, and Bulgakov was allowed to work there as an assistant producer from 1930 to 1936. The Days of the Turbins was one of Stalin’s favourite plays, in spite of its sympathetic portrayal of the White Guard.

  During the 1930s Bulgakov wrote two novels which he knew would not be published in his lifetime: A Theatrical Novel (translated as Black Snow) and The Master and Margarita. The latter, a complex novel written in a variety of styles from the laconic to the baroque, is Bulgakov’s masterpiece. It is made up of three main elements: first, the story of Yeshua (Jesus) and Pontius Pilate; second, the story of the Master – the writer of the Pontius Pilate story – and his love for Margarita(Bulgakov introduced this element in 1931, shortly before his marria
ge to his third wife, Elena Shilovskaya); third, a visit paid to Moscow by the Devil, along with a retinue that includes an irrepressible black cat. The novel is frequently self-referential. In 1930, for instance, in a moment of despair, Bulgakov burned his first draft; his Master, in a similar despairing moment, also burns his manuscript – which is restored to him by the Devil, who remarks that ‘Manuscripts don’t burn.’

  The Master and Margarita made a huge impact when it was first published in Moscow (in censored form) in 1966-7. In the critic Lesley Milne’s words, ‘it brought a sense of liberation akin to revelation’.1 Two phrases, at least, quickly achieved proverbial status among the intelligentsia: ‘Cowardice is the most terrible vice’ – which was obviously intended to refer not only to Pontius Pilate but to the behaviour of Soviet society as a whole; and ‘Manuscripts don’t burn’ – a declaration of faith on the part of Bulgakov that is sometimes repeated too glibly by those who wish to deny reality. The Master and Margarita survived, but there are works by Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Platonov and many others that did not.

  ‘The Embroidered Towel’ is an example of Bulgakov’s realistic manner; it is one of a group of semi-autobiographical stories published in periodicals in the 1920s and collected posthumously to form A Country Doctor’s Notebook (1963). Doris Lessing says of this ‘little book’ that it ‘has an epic quality because of the background of Russia’s vastness, the great distances, the weight of the ignorance, the need’.2 It has recently been established that Bulgakov originally set the story in the ‘unforgettable year’ of 1917; his editor changed the year to 19163 – a change I have reversed. Bulgakov clearly intended the young girl, ‘bloodless but still alive and beautiful none the less’, as an image of Russia after the October Revolution. The red cockerel on the towel, for all its beauty and vitality, is an image of danger. This was a time when, all over Russia, peasants were setting fire to their landlords’ estates, and the Russian idiom ‘to let loose the red cockerel’ means ‘to commit arson’. This multi-faceted story can also be read as an account of an initiation into manhood and sexuality.