by Unknown
‘How much did she give you?’ I asked calmly.
‘Around thirty thousand. Nothing much. I didn’t want us to squander it all on trifles, and so I put the money into this automobile business.’
‘Mister Edvers,’ I said, ‘in the whole of this story there is only one thing I find truly surprising: the fact that you can still blush.’
He shrugged his shoulders.
‘What I find surprising,’ he said, ‘is that you haven’t once wondered what we’ve been living on all this time and how we found the money to move here from Petersburg.’
‘So I’ve been paying my way, have I? Well, I’m glad to know that.’
He left. A few days later, however, he made another appearance – as if this conversation hadn’t happened at all. He even brought his friends again – two of the friends who had come the time before. They had brought with them some vodka and something to eat with it. One of them began making advances to me. They addressed each other – jokingly, I imagine – as ‘comrade’. Edvers too was a ‘comrade’. They asked me to sing. My admirer – whom I prefer not to mention by name – really appealed to me. There was something weary and depraved about him, something that reminded me of people from our ‘hideous-green’ Petersburg world. Without giving it any particular thought, I sang our ‘Little White Ribbon’: ‘My heart hangs on a …’
‘It’s a sweet tune, but the words are idiotic!’ said Harry. ‘Wherever did you get hold of such antediluvian nonsense?’
And he quickly changed the subject, evidently afraid I would tell everyone he had written the words himself.
Three days later I was supposed to be singing in a café. Our manager got very embarrassed when he saw me and muttered something about it no longer being possible for me to sing that night. I was very surprised, but I didn’t insist. I sat down in a corner. Somehow nobody seemed to notice me. The only person who did was Lucy Lyukor. In a poisonous tone of voice, the little poetess said, ‘Ah, Lyalya! I hear you haven’t been wasting time. They say you’ve dyed your little white ribbon red!’
Sensing my bewilderment, she explained, ‘Only the other day you were singing for a group of Chekists.7 I don’t imagine you treated them to your Little White Ribbon!’
‘What Chekists?’
She gave me a sharp look, then named the comrade who had been making advances to me.
I did not reply. I just got up and left.
I was terribly frightened by what had happened. Now Harry really had landed me in the dirt!
The incident with my aunt had not shocked me so very deeply. Nobody in our Bohemian world was particularly scrupulous about money. Though it was unpleasant, of course, that he had kept the whole business a secret from me. This, however, was another matter altogether. How could I stay with him now? He was crazed with cocaine and he was in cahoots with the Cheka. No, I couldn’t let comrade Harry call the tune any longer. Had he not been trying to use me to lure White officers into a trap? It was not just out of the goodness of his heart, I now realized, that he had wanted me to invite Kolya Katkov to stay.
I was in despair. Where could I go? There was not a single close friend or relative I could turn to, no one I could count on to show me even just a little everyday kindness. My aunt? But I would have to obtain a travel permit, and besides, I didn’t have a kopek to my name.
I went back home.
There was no sign of Harry. It was several days since I’d last seen him.
I did all I could. I went the rounds of different institutions. I wrote petitions and applications. I tried to get myself registered with the newly reconstituted Artists’ Union. Then it would be easier for me to get a travel permit.
And then one day I was walking down the street and all of a sudden … You could have knocked me down with a feather. Kolya. Kolya Katkov. There he was – right in front of my eyes.
‘Kolya!’ I shouted.
He appeared not to see me and quickly turned down a sidestreet. After a moment’s thought, I followed him. He was waiting for me.
I now realized why I had been slow to recognize him the previous time. He had grown a beard.
‘Kolya,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here? Why are you in Moscow?’
‘I’m leaving today,’ he replied. ‘But you shouldn’t have let it be seen that you know me. Isn’t that obvious?’
‘You’re leaving today?’ I exclaimed – and felt more despairing than ever. ‘Kolya!’ I said, ‘for the love of God, save me! I’m lost.’
He evidently began to feel pity for me.
‘There’s nothing I can do now, Lyalechka. I’m a hunted beast. And anyway, I’m leaving today. There really is nothing I can do. I’ll ask someone to call round.’
I remembered Harry and the people he now brought to my lair.
‘No,’ I said, ‘you mustn’t send anyone round.’
And then I had another thought, a thought that brought warmth to my heart.
‘Kolya,’ I said, ‘is there any chance you’ll be seeing Tolya?’
‘It’s certainly possible,’ he answered.
‘Tell him, for the love of God, that Lyalya is calling on her dog for help. Remember my words and repeat them exactly. Promise me. And tell him to leave a note for me in the café on Tverskaya Street.’
‘If all goes well,’ he said, ‘I’ll be seeing him in about five days time.’
Kolya was in a great hurry. We parted. I was crying as I walked down the street.
Back home I thought everything over very carefully and decided not to say anything to Harry. Instead I would try and trick him into handing over some of the money – money that did, after all, belong to me!
My efforts to get hold of a permit met with success, and soon nearly everything was ready.
And then the day came …
I’m sitting in the dacha on my own, leafing through some papers in my desk, when I begin to feel that someone is looking at me. I turn around – a dog! Large, brownish-red and thin, with matted fur – a German Spitz or Chien-Loup. It’s standing in the doorway and looking straight at me. ‘What’s going on?’ I think. ‘Where on earth’s this dog come from?’
‘Kapitolina Fedotovna!’ I call out to my landlady. ‘There’s a dog in here!’
Kapitolina Fedotovna comes in, very surprised. ‘But the doors are all shut,’ she says. ‘How did it get in?’
I wanted to stroke the dog – there was something so very expressive about the way it was looking at me – but it wouldn’t allow me to. It wagged its tail and retreated into a corner. And just kept on looking at me.
‘Maybe we should give it something to eat,’ I say to Kapitolina. In reply, she mutters something about there not being enough food any longer even for human beings, but she brings some bread anyway. She throws a piece to the dog. The dog doesn’t touch it.
‘Better throw the dog out!’ I say. ‘It’s acting strange. It might be sick.’
Kapitolina flung the door open. The dog went out.
Afterwards we recalled that it never once let us touch it. Nor did it once bark, nor did it ever eat. We saw it – and that was all.
Later that day Harry appeared.
He looked awful – well and truly exhausted. His eyes were bulging and bloodshot, his face taut and sallow.
He walked in, with barely a word to me.
My heart was beating frantically. I had to speak to him – for the last time.
Harry slammed the door. He was terribly edgy. Something had happened to him – or else he had overdone the cocaine.
‘Harry,’ I said finally. ‘We need to talk.’
‘Hang on a moment,’ he said confusedly. ‘What’s the date today?’
‘The twenty-seventh.’
‘The twenty-seventh! The twenty-seventh!’ he muttered despairingly.
What was so astonishing about this I really don’t know, but his repeated exclamation made the date stick in my mind. And subsequently this turned out to be very important.
‘What’s that
dog doing in here?’ he shouted all of a sudden.
I turned round – there in the corner of the room was the dog. Taut, pointing, it was looking at Harry intently, as if it were nothing but eyes – as if its eyes were now its entire being.
‘Get that dog out of here!’ Harry screamed.
There was something excessive about his fear. He rushed to the door and flung it open. Slowly the dog began to move towards the door, not taking its eyes off Harry. It was slightly baring its teeth, its hackles raised.
Harry slammed the door after it.
‘Harry,’ I began again. ‘I can see you’re upset, but I just can’t put this off any longer.’
He looked up at me, and then his whole face suddenly twisted in horror. I could see he was now looking not at me but past me. He seemed to be looking at the wall behind me. I turned round: there outside the window, with both paws on the low sill, was the reddish-brown dog. It dropped back down at once, perhaps startled by my movement. But I managed to glimpse its raised hackles, the muzzle it had thrust alertly forward, its bared teeth, the terrible eyes it kept fixed on Harry.
‘Go away!’ Harry shouted. ‘Get rid of it! Drive it away!’
Trembling all over he rushed into the hallway and bolted the door.
‘This is terrible, terrible!’ he kept repeating.
I sensed that I too was shaking all over, and that my hands had gone cold. And I understood that we were in the middle of something truly awful, that I ought to do something to calm Harry, to calm myself, that I had chosen a very bad moment indeed, but for some reason I was quite unable to stop and I hurriedly, stubbornly, went on:
‘I’ve taken a decision, Harry.’
His hands trembling, he struck a match and lit a cigarette.
‘Oh have you?’ he said with a nasty smirk. ‘How very interesting.’
‘I’m leaving. I’m going to my aunt’s.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s better not to ask.’
A spasm passed across his face.
‘And if I don’t let you?’
‘What right do you have to stop me?’
I was speaking calmly, but my heart was racing and I could hardly breathe.
‘I have no right at all,’ he answered, his entire face trembling. ‘But I need you here now, and I won’t let you go.’
With these words he pulled out the drawer of my desk and immediately saw my new passport and papers.
‘Ah! So it’s like that, is it?’
He snatched the entire sheaf and began tearing the papers first lengthways and then crossways.
‘For your dealings with the Whites I could easily …’
But I was no longer listening. I leaped on him like a madwoman. I was shrieking; I was clawing at him. I hit him on his hands and arms. I tried to tear the papers out of his hands.
‘Chekist! Thief! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!’
He grabbed me by the throat. Really he was not so much strangling me as just shaking me; his bared teeth and staring eyes were wilder and more terrible than anything he actually did. And the loathing and hatred I felt for those wild eyes and that gaping mouth made me begin to lose consciousness.
‘Somebody help me!’ I gasped.
Then it happened – something truly weird. There was the sound of smashing glass, and something huge, heavy and shaggy jumped into the room and crashed down on Harry from one side, bringing him to the floor.
All I can remember is Harry’s legs twitching. They were poking out from under the red, tousled mass that covered his body, which was almost completely still.
By the time I came to, it was all over. Harry’s body had been removed; the dog had torn his throat out.
The dog had disappeared without a trace.
Apparently, some boys had seen a huge hound, leaping across fences as it ran past.
All this happened on the twenty-seventh. That is important; much later, when I was a free woman, in Odessa, I found out that Kolya Katkov had passed on to Tolya my appeal for help, and that Tolya had dropped everything and rushed to my rescue. That meant trying to slip through the Bolshevik front line. He was tracked down, caught and shot – all on the twenty-seventh. The twenty-seventh, that very day.
That’s the whole story; that’s what I wanted to tell you. I’ve made nothing up; I’ve added nothing; and there’s nothing I can explain – or even want to explain. But when I turn back and consider the past, I can see everything clearly. I can see all the rings of events and the axis or thread upon which a certain force had strung them.
It had strung the rings on the thread and tied up the loose ends.
Baba Yaga
(1947 article)
In the words of the old magic tales: ‘Baba Yaga has one bone leg. She rides around in a mortar and pushes herself along with a pestle, and she sweeps up her tracks with a broom.’
And in the words of teachers of literature: ‘Baba Yaga is the goddess of whirlwinds and snowstorms.’
In the books we had when we were children, Baba Yaga was depicted as a thin, unkempt old woman, with evil green eyes, with grey tousled hair and a fang sticking out of her mouth. She was gaunt and bony. She was very, very scary – and she ate children.
The word ‘goddess’ conjured up images of beauty – of Venus or Diana. We’d seen statues of them, images of perfection. We’d heard people say, ‘She looks like a goddess.’ And then it turned out that our own goddess, our own Russian goddess, is this terrible witch – this hideous, vicious old woman. It seemed ridiculous and absurd.
But if we’re going to be honest about it, can any of our ancient gods be called beautiful? Lel’, perhaps, the god of spring? But he wasn’t very popular and didn’t survive in folk memory. Few people have even heard of him.
The figures who have survived are the house spirit, the forest spirit and Baba Yaga. All have turned negative.
The house spirit is a stern little monster. He used to look after hearth and home, but he behaved like some old-style landowner. He brawled. He made a racket. He tormented the horses, got up to all kinds of mischief in the stables, and he pinched the girls till they were black and blue all over. He had a sense of justice, but he was scary, wilful and autocratic: ‘Maybe I’ll take a liking to you, or maybe I won’t. And if I don’t, you’ll soon wish you were dead.’
As for the forest spirit, you have to be feeling brave even to mention him. He made wild hooting noises, he led people into impassable thickets, he made them lose their way. He did not have a single good deed to his name. He had an evil temper. All he ever wanted was to scare people, to lead them astray, to bring them to a bad end and then plait a tangle of grasses and weeds over the scene of the crime.
Only the spirit of the pools and rivers was in any way beautiful. But if she allowed herself to be seen, it was so that her tender beauty would lure people to their doom. She made people feel pity for her – that was how she touched them so deeply. You would see her sitting there on a branch – a little woman, though she wasn’t really a woman at all, since her lower half was the tail of a fish. And so there she would be, sitting just above the water, hiding this tail of hers in the weeds. A little woman, shy, tender and delicate – and always weeping bitterly. Had she merely sat there and beckoned, most people wouldn’t have come any closer. But how could they help coming closer when they saw her weeping? They felt pity for her. Her lure was pity. A very dangerous goddess indeed.
But Baba Yaga is the most terrifying of them all, and the most interesting. And the most Russian. Other nations did not have goddesses like Baba Yaga.
Baba Yaga lived on the edge of the forest, in a windowless, doorless hut that stood on chicken’s legs. Though, in fact, the hut always did have a door – facing the forest. So the brave young hero, having somehow learned the words of the spell, had only to say, ‘Little hut, little hut, turn your face towards me and your back on the forest!’ And the hut would turn round.
Baba Yaga lived alone. Alone except for a tomcat. Total solitu
de was too much even for Yaga. The cat gave off a sense of warmth and cosiness. It purred and it had soft fur. That was why Yaga liked to have a cat around.1 As for people, she hated them and never sought them out. People came to her of their own accord to discover various wise secrets, and they always managed to cheat her. She knew only too well that every human approach brought with it deception and hurt.
‘I can smell the smell of a Russian’ meant that she could expect trouble.
Some ‘brave young hero’ would tell her a pack of lies, make some false promises, discover from her all that he needed to know, cheat her and somehow manage to slip away. She could expect neither gratitude nor honest payment.
And every time she heard the words of the spell, every time the hut turned round on its chicken’s legs, Yaga knew there was going to be trouble. And every time, she still stupidly believed in the honesty of the human soul: ‘It’s just not possible. They can’t all be like that.’
One day a poor little orphan girl turns up. Her stepmother has thrown her out; her stepmother has sent her off to a certain death. Baba Yaga knows very well that no human whelp, however little, however poor and pitiful, is without its share of guile. And as well as guile, this little pup of a girl will have brought with her a little comb, a little towel and a piece of fatback. The girl will feed the fatback to the cat – and the cat will betray his owner. That warm, soft, purring puss, that flatterer and caresser – he too will betray her. And the squeaking gates will betray her – the girl has only to smear them with oil. Wherever she looked, Yaga saw treachery and betrayal. It was a sad and tedious business.
There she sat, cross as cross can be, sharpening the fang that stuck out of her mouth.
‘I should eat up every one of these boys and girls. But they’re cunning, they don’t give me a chance. They show up at the door, they pay homage to my great wisdom, they cheat and they lie – and then they take to their heels, every time.’
The treacherous cat and the dishonourable gates release the cunning little runt of a girl. Yaga rushes off in pursuit. The girl throws down her comb – and a dense forest appears. Yaga gnaws her way through the trees. The girl throws down her towel – and a broad, flowing river appears. Yaga begins to drink up the river – but the girl is soon far away, out of reach. And the vile little creature has run off with all Yaga’s secrets.