On the Fontanka — the riverbank promenade with its light green and pale yellow villas and courtyards — people were clustering around fire pits where food was being prepared. The manicured city of the tsars seemed absurdly contradictory as a backdrop to these goings-on.
The Cossack had to stop three times to ask people about Thekla, and finally informed the speechless Stasia that he didn’t have the time to go looking for a landowner. At that moment, one of the girls clustering around the bonfire shouted that it must be the pretty yellow house up ahead on the left. Stasia didn’t know what she would have done if this girl hadn’t come to her aid.
She paid the Cossack, unloaded her luggage, and knocked on the classical villa’s monumental iron door — no, she positively hammered on it with the door knocker, as a column of shouting people was coming up the promenade towards her and if she didn’t get to safety right away she would be swept along by the crowd. Eventually, a frightened girl wearing a traditional Russian headscarf opened the door and hastily bundled Stasia into the house without saying a word. Then she slid home the numerous bolts and barricaded the door with furniture.
Cautiously, Stasia looked around. She found herself in one of the most beautiful houses she had ever set foot in. A marble staircase led up from the wide, welcoming entrance hall. The floor was inlaid with beautiful black and white tiles. Stasia was shown into a light, spacious drawing room, in which, to her surprise, there was no furniture beyond a fantastically long oak table and two chairs. The girl left her alone, telling her to wait there and not go anywhere.
After a while, she heard footsteps, and a woman appeared at the top of the staircase. She might have been in her mid-fifties, but she could have been older or younger: her biological age was masked by a thick layer of make-up. She was wearing a pale-pink dressing gown decorated with a feather collar, like a dancer in one of the morally dubious dance halls her father had so often warned her about. The figure rushed towards Stasia and wrapped her arms around her.
‘Oh God, such a big girl, the last time I saw my dear cousin was at the New Year’s ball in Kutaisi, I don’t believe it, what a beauty, you have his solemn eyes, so serious!’
She ordered the peasant girl, who was the only servant to have stayed on in the house, to prepare some strong tea and fetch some biscuits from the pantry.
‘But the biscuits are for emergencies,’ the girl muttered, before being silenced by a stern look from the lady of the house.
‘And what does this look like to you? My own flesh and blood, arriving here from my homeland, in times like these … What do you think it is?’ she called out after her.
Over hot tea and very dry biscuits (which to Stasia still seemed like the eighth wonder of the world), Thekla quickly told Stasia her whole life story. Stasia drew her own conclusions as to why she had never heard of Thekla-who-is-known-in-the-city.
Thekla was a member of the minor nobility from the valleys of central Georgia. She had realised very early on what she wanted from life, and also how to get it. Gossipy Kutaisi, her hometown, did not offer her enough breathing space, so she married young. Her husband was a rich merchant from Tbilisi, who managed a number of vineyards and sold Georgian wine to Russia. It couldn’t have been particularly difficult for Thekla to find a willing candidate: if you looked closely — once you had grown accustomed to the layers of make-up — she had a very delicate, soft face, a gentle aspect inviting daydreams, along with a truly voluptuous and appetising body which featured a high, larger-than-life bosom. But the marriage had been without passion: her husband had been more in love with his vines than with her, Thekla said, and on one of their business trips to Petrograd, or St Petersburg, as it was then, she had fallen in love with Alexander: irrevocably, powerfully, tremendously. Alexander Olenin, a descendant of the rich Petersburg Olenin dynasty, which had brought forth patrons of the arts, art collectors, and the founder of the St Petersburg Library, was an educated, elegant, free-spirited man — ‘outrageously beautiful, moreover’ — and a member of the tsar’s army.
Following her return to Tbilisi, Thekla informed her husband that she would forgo all privileges and leave his house without a gold ring, if he let her, because she had fallen irrevocably, powerfully, tremendously in love with another man.
Of course, there was a scandal. Her husband thoroughly destroyed her reputation and refused to divorce her for years. But, as the marriage was childless, Thekla was able to travel to Petersburg without a gold ring, although she was still officially married, and play at being Anna Karenina in the city of the tsars.
Olenin must have been an honourable man: unlike Count Vronsky, he stayed with his beloved and introduced her to St Petersburg society as his rightful wife. Although this society initially rejected her, Thekla managed to get a foot in the door, and even find friends. Eventually she managed to gather a real community around her, which must have been due to her truly unconventional and vivacious character. Her ‘outrageously beautiful’ Alexander bought his beloved this wonderful house, and began to enjoy the good things in life to the full with his Thekla, who was eager to experience them all. They lacked neither means nor opportunity, and invited artists and ‘all kinds of crazy people’ to the house, all of whom were ‘illicitly interesting’, thus continuing the Olenins’ tradition of patronage and engaging in philanthropy. They travelled around Europe and enjoyed the piercing beauty that the world has to offer when one is so ‘obliviously in love and beloved’.
‘Alexander and I were married for only two years,’ Thekla confessed sadly. It took a very long time for the Georgian to grant her a divorce, but when he did, Thekla and her Alexander were finally able to marry and seal their love.
‘We were as happy as children. Life was good to us. I know I have had a great deal of happiness in my life.’
But, since then, she had not been back to her homeland.
In the accursed year of 1904, Alexander fell in battle in Japan, a war hero. Something in Thekla was forever broken by his death. It took years for her to get over it, she said — but then, to honour his name, she used her lavish inheritance to help out wherever she could. She went on hosting the salons, the literature and music circles, at their house. She took trips to health spas, made new friends, and, above all, put the money to good use.
‘But Alexander and I had to pay a high price for our happiness: he went before God had blessed us with children.’
With that, Thekla brought her account to an end, and sipped from the expensive porcelain cup that the housemaid had produced from the kitchen.
In terse sentences, exhausted and shivering slightly, Stasia then told the story of her journey to Petrograd, of her new husband, his inexplicable disappearance, and her own desperate situation.
‘If I could just stay here for a few days — you know, until I’ve found Simon. I won’t be any trouble. And I can help with the housekeeping,’ Stasia murmured shyly, before she was silenced by Thekla’s mighty laugh.
‘What housekeeping, my dear? Of course you can stay. The house is big enough. Those swine may have taken away everything they could find, but I’m permitted to remain in the house. There are two beds left. And I think this is a temporary state of affairs. Those imbeciles can’t stay in power forever, the resistance is too great, and then … Then everything will go back to how it was before. I’m glad you’re here, Anastasia. Since those idiots started rampaging around, a lot of my friends have fled abroad or taken to hiding in their houses, and it’s grown rather lonely here. But we two can have fun again — splendid!’ Thekla cried triumphantly.
The keen-sightedness of our days is the sort that befits the dead end
whose concrete begs for spittle and not for a witty comment.
Wake up a dinosaur, not a prince, to recite you the moral!
JOSEPH BRODSKY
The house really was outrageously large. But the absence of furniture made it seem like a strange, pur
poseless palace. Like the warped memory of a place from before.
The old wallpaper, the few expensive curtains that remained at the tall windows, and the isolated pieces of furniture that had been spared hinted at its former glory. Thekla also kept a large, secret cellar of provisions, which the Bolsheviks had not been able to access. It was full of wonderful things: peppers pickled Venetian-style, artichokes from Greece, chocolates from Moscow, jams from the Crimea, Spanish ham, English butter biscuits, and several bottles of expensive wine, cognac, and even champagne.
Every day, Masha, the peasant girl, who had remained with her mistress more out of hopelessness than loyalty, conjured up a small portion of these delicacies to go with the daily bread rations and the two or three eggs she managed to obtain on her forays into the city. She was the only one who left the house.
Thekla spent most of the day in the half-empty bedroom on the second floor. From time to time, she could be heard singing, or playing one of her gramophone records — always French chansons or Russian love songs. Or she would sit wrapped in a blanket in the spacious reception room, reading a romantic novel, of which she owned a large number, and in which the Bolsheviks had apparently shown no interest.
There was enough tea in the house and, on special days — Thekla decided which days counted as special — there was coffee, too.
Stasia noticed that sometimes, before the peasant girl set out into the city, Thekla would slip her a necklace or a ring and whisper something to her. On those days Masha usually brought back more than just eggs and bread.
Stasia occupied Thekla’s former dressing room, which was as large as the dining room of their house in Georgia. She was given clothes, scented soaps, and a pair of wonderful leather boots. It grew steadily colder, and Stasia was grateful for such a present.
The lady of the house had as little interest in knowing about the civil war raging around her as did the house itself. Thekla dressed and made herself up as if she was hosting a gala dinner in the house every night — as if, at any second, they would smell the aroma of delicious food, the great front door would open, the high society guests would stream in, an orchestra would immediately start playing, and stylish ladies and gentlemen would take to the floor for a foxtrot, just like before.
The house had been looted months ago, but Thekla had succeeded in bribing the Bolsheviks to let her stay: it must have cost her a great deal of money, or other goods, as they were in the middle of a brutal war over expropriation and living space.
Through Masha she maintained a little contact with the outside world. But when Masha so much as started to report some event or other from outside, Thekla would wave her white, manicured hand, signalling to her to be quiet.
Thekla harboured the illusion that one merely had to wait it out, to make it through the winter, and soon this idiotic putsch would be over, too, and everything would be the same as before. Thekla didn’t want to move away from her beloved Petersburg (definitely not Petrograd!). Countless friends had already left the country, or had simply disappeared, but she refused even to entertain this possibility for herself. She lived in hope, and she needed this hope like she needed air to breathe.
Thekla missed her salon, the loud gatherings, the guitar and piano players, the gypsy songs, and the debauched nights with the rich and beautiful denizens of the city, so this young, doe-eyed relative came as a welcome diversion. They played cards together in the evenings, ignoring the noise outside, the screams, the footfalls, the slogans, the threats, the hammering, and, yes, also the occasional shot. During the long, silent evenings of sombre loneliness in the house, they gradually grew closer: the taciturn Stasia and the voluble Thekla. The girl with the endless plaits and simple clothes, and the glamorous lady in her feather boas. The waiting united them: it made them into silent accomplices in the creation of a spectacle, the outcome of which was still uncertain. Outside, hundreds of thousands of workers went on strike against the ‘dictatorship of the communists’, businesses were crippled, hunger brought more and more criminals into the city, pogroms took place as regularly as clockwork, and the bread ration fell to a hundred grams, while the Cheka, which was already operating successfully, went on arresting and shooting people. Meanwhile, the two of them sat there, drinking tea and playing patience, in the belief that the horror would not find its way into the house.
After a time, Stasia could stand it no longer, and started sneaking out of the house with increasing frequency, against Thekla’s strict instructions. She searched the Reds’ bases for Simon Jashi, but nobody seemed to know him; nobody seemed to have any information about him.
*
Autumn fell suddenly over the white city. It was not the mild and gentle autumn Stasia was familiar with from her homeland, and waiting for a message from Simon was hard. It paralysed everything, made her body lethargic and her mind fearful. Stasia hated this waiting. She spent hours sitting by her bedroom window, staring through the little hole she had made in the sheet that hung over it, and hoping, without knowing what she was hoping for. Stasia’s only regular contact with the outside world was the telegrams to and from home.
Some days, she was overcome with an almost hysterical euphoria, and then she would run down the wide staircase into the kitchen, light candles or paraffin lamps, and clatter about, making noise just to reassure herself that she was still alive, that she had not already become a ghost. She ran out into the drawing room, through the guest room, into the guest bathroom, back up the stairs and down again, and then, cheered by her own energy and driven by a strange desire, she began to dance. She whirled, leapt, flew, and, for a few moments, forgot the world around her. The world outside the house, and the world inside it.
As the cold set in, it seemed to spur the people on to greater bitterness and cruelty. Here and there, government buildings and houses in the neighbourhood were burning. And the shots were now an everyday occurrence.
The ominous quiet of isolation reigned in the big house on the Fontanka, an ice-cold peace and a preserved past; but the present reigned outside, on the streets, on the grand promenades and riverbanks, and it was cruel, bloody, dangerous, full of hunger and want.
*
As October reached its end, Thekla was seized with a peculiar apathy. She locked herself in her bedroom and remained shut in there for days at a time. Masha and Stasia did everything they could to tempt her out, but she refused anything more than the little food that Masha left outside her door. Stasia thought long and hard about how she could cheer up and reinvigorate the lady of the house, and then it came to her: her father’s life-changing, happiness-bringing chocolate, the recipe for which she had carefully committed to memory. And so, for the first time since she had come to live in the house, she asked Masha for the key to the cellar. Masha just gave one of her it’s-all-the-same-to-me shrugs and handed her the key. She found everything there. Apart from sugar and butter, all the ingredients she needed to prepare the chocolate were to hand, and she asked Masha to procure the rest on the black market, promising her a silk scarf she had been eyeing up in return.
In the night, Thekla was woken by a heavenly scent, and she hurried into the kitchen, somewhere she hardly ever set foot.
She found Stasia at the stove, stirring a black substance, and, in that moment, Thekla was bewitched by the little girl with the long plaits. She was bewitched by this sight and this smell, by the promise of something that would make her forget everything else. Especially in that dying world the two of them found themselves in, the magic must have had an almost irresistible effect. And when at last she was served the chocolate, Thekla was utterly lost.
From then on she often begged like a dog, screamed and stamped her pointed boots on the marble floor of her house, and shed tears like a child, wanting Stasia to make the chocolate for her.
*
They celebrated the New Year with a little fir tree branch, a bottle of champagne, the rest of the butter biscuits, th
e strawberry jam, and three slices of ham, behind windows that had been barricaded with table-tops. The frost that was spreading through the house made the mood tense and irritable, and, to top it off, on the first day of the New Year, Masha gave her notice. She was going to join her fiancé in Volgograd. He was fighting there, and she was fed up with making this ‘inhuman’ effort, in this ‘godless’ city, and receiving no recognition for it whatsoever from the mistress of the house.
Stasia and Thekla knew neither what to do in the miserably long bread queues to make sure they actually got bread, nor even where the black market was located. Without Masha they would starve, they would perish, and they would quite certainly go mad — of this they were sure.
But then came temporary relief, albeit one that at the same time provoked great anger in Stasia. A letter reached her from Simon:
My little dove, how miserable I feel to have brought you this heartache, and how worried I have been since I heard that you were residing here. What an Amazon I have married, bravely taking this long road to reach me! I bow down before you, my sunshine. I want you to take care of yourself. Your father wrote to tell me that you are staying with a relative. We are making slow progress: the resistance has many sympathisers and therefore many helping hands, but we believe in the final, rightful victory! I would like you to seize the very first opportunity to go home. Travel via Odessa — it is still the least dangerous route. It is not safe for you in Petrograd and I will come and visit you just as soon as I can. I love you and am with you in my dreams. Your Simon.
The letter made Stasia want to scream. He should be with her in reality, not in his dreams. The very least he should have written was that he was going to drop everything and hurry to her side; that would have been an appropriate recompense. She wrote back to him with a trembling hand, telling him of the ordeal of the last few months and firmly requesting that he come for a few days, at least. She signed herself Your wife, which she had never done before.
The Eighth Life Page 8