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Vera Vorotyntseva was fourteen years younger than her only brother, and so they had not shared their childhood. Georgi had graduated from cadet school, and been assigned to a regiment while Vera was being tutored for high school. In the year of his wedding she hadn’t yet taken off her schoolgirl’s apron. When she moved to Petersburg, Georgi had already been pushed out of the Academy and sent to Vyatka.
Because they had not shared their childhood they remembered their mother and father differently, as they had appeared to two different pairs of childish eyes. In Georgi’s childhood his parents were his friends, full of fun, with lots of hopes, with all of life ahead of them. In Vera’s childhood they had seemed old, sad, and estranged from one another. The little girl had realized it very early, and it had saddened her more than anything, though the reason for it remained an enigma to her all her life. When she was old enough to look back and think things over she reflected that her own birth, that she herself, should have reinforced family ties—and so she did, but not for long. If Vera had been as old as Georgi, she would have looked more deeply and understood what he in his self-absorption would never even think of looking for: what had happened between Mama and Papa. There seemed to have been no explosion, no quarrel, no rupture, they had each of them gradually withdrawn into separate worlds of their own, becoming more and more self-centered. There were kisses, affectionate words, but there seemed to be something missing. They were probably very well aware of it themselves, but never put it into words. They needed each other less and less, the bonds between them slackened, each of them was alone with a bitter sense of being deserted. How had it all fallen apart? Was there really no way of mending things? The reasons remained hidden, reproaches remained unspoken, both were noble creatures, and both set hard in a hopeless fixity.
Their marriage had collapsed.
Zastruzhe too differed just as much in the memories of brother and sister. For him it was the scene of happy family invasions, always full of life, for her it was an eerie place, half deserted, with a melancholy, gray-headed father, who had given up his post in Moscow, sought solitude in a Zastruzhe as decrepit as himself, to indulge his misery to the full—and died there, snowbound and alone.
Vera and Georgi had not shared their childhood, but one thing, unique and unchanging, they had in common; their nurse Polya, the very same Pelagea Ivanovna who had always paid occasional visits to her native village, and had gone back there for good when Georgi was a big boy, but then Vera was born, and the nannying she had loved so much began all over again. Their experience of their nanny was so exactly similar, and gave brother and sister so much in common, that it was as though they had in fact grown up side by side. All sorts of little details came back to them simultaneously, and in identical form. Polya’s village, Muratovo, standing on the banks of the Oka—although they had never seen it, they saw it all, from the copse over the steep riverbank down to the last blade of grass in the pasture, no less vividly than their own Zastruzhe. Nanny spinning fine flax—stretching it over the frame, combing the tow out, then spinning. Her younger brother, the horse thief, who was beaten up by Bashkirs, and her older brother, the barge master, he wasn’t as famous as their uncle, but plying between the Moscow wharf and Nizhny he’d never run a barge train aground. A lot of men in their village, from their grandfathers’ and great-grandfathers’ time, had worked as bargemen along the Oka—that’s what Muratovo was famous for—and nanny Polya herself in her young days, when her cheeks were red as apples, had traveled on her brother’s barge from spring thaw to autumn, cooking for everybody, washing their clothes, and singing them songs. She had sung to Georgi too, and later on to Vera—religious songs on church holidays, sentimental or jolly songs on other days, the same songs with an interval of fourteen years. It was a remarkable form of kinship—she was not a blood relation, she had not suckled them, but she had reared them and they became her kin. This peasant woman’s life story entered into the children’s minds almost as though it was part of their own family history, indeed it was often more real and vivid than anything they heard from their parents. The village had known Polya as a modest, hardworking girl, and she could have made a good match, but every suitor wanted to take her to his home, no one could be drawn into her own poor home, to share it with her old mother and her nieces, the horse thief’s children. Then her brother, the bargeman, brought her a good suitor, Ivan, from the river, not from Muratovo, they lived together for two happy years, a son was born and the only upsetting thing was that the priest christened him Arkhip, although Polya cried and cried, because it was a name she very much disliked. Whether because nanny had made so much of it, or because they themselves had, one apparently unimportant detail stood out in their memories, lodged there as long as they lived: how nanny Polya had taken her little Arkhip to the water meadow where his father was mowing, and the spring flood had left behind big puddles, with big fish in them as if caught in a trap, little Arkhip sat on a stone, staring and staring at the water. Whether or not she had felt some foreboding, sensed some menace, nanny pronounced the words “staring and staring at the water” in a special way that made the children’s blood run cold.
Then Ivan was taken away to be a soldier, out of turn for some reason, though he’d been given a deferment. There was no war on, but she still cried when she saw him off—forever. He wrote for a year, said they’d even promised to make him a sergeant if he signed up to do extra time. Then his letters stopped, and notification came that, in nanny’s words, “Ivan Tikhonov is not alive.” There was no explanation, and Polya never learned anything more, just that he “was not alive.”
That same autumn little Arkhip kept walking about in water, and one day he came home all wet, with his teeth chattering. Nanny Polya gave him hot milk and put him on the bench by the stove, but by morning his throat was so sore he couldn’t speak. She had buried him. So she went on the last autumn steamer to Murom to look for a place with a family.
From their earliest years the children saw Nanny’s face more often than Mama’s. And the icon they remembered best was not over their own bed, but over Nanny’s: St. Nicholas, a bent old man walking through a dense forest with a bundle over his shoulder. In the children’s imagination all pilgrimages were like that. (Georgi wrote that he had recognized the Grünfliess Forest as the one in Nanny’s icon.) There was also a china egg on a silk ribbon hanging next to the icon, and if you held it up to the light and looked through a little hole, you saw Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. Nanny told the story of Judas and of Our Lord’s Passion very clearly and begged Mama to let them go to church more often, and send them without fail to the all-night service on the eve of Good Friday (Papa and Mama never went to church themselves).
Nanny firmly believed that she would meet her litle Arkhip in the life to come. Nanny’s beliefs were not just simple, they were almost comically naïve. She said prayers to time the boiling of eggs: for soft-boiled—two Our Fathers and three Hail Marys. One night in the nursery as she was saying bedtime prayers, she bowed down to the floor and her eyes strayed under Vera’s bed. She interrupted herself: “Just look at that”—she sounded worried—"I haven’t put your potty down here for the night!” And in the same breath went on with her prayers. Was such simple faith a sign of weakness or of strength? The older Nanny Polya got, the more sure she was that all the trivial events of life took place in the sight of God and the angels, and that there was no need to be ashamed of any of them. Georgi, always on the move, careering boylike about the world, parted company with most of his childish beliefs: traces remained at the deepest level of his soul, but up above all was eroded by the wind of action, of violent movement, and of battle. But Nanny’s little world, her simplehearted scheme of things, lived on in his sister, was her natural element. She had, as it happened, read many more books than her brother, many controversial theories and ways of thinking had flowed into her mind, but none of them could harm Nanny’s lesson of gentleness and kindness. It might have existed o
n a different plane.
Nanny became a member of the Vorotyntsev family, and was greatly offended if anyone called her a servant (although, unlike their town-bred maidservant, she called Mama and Papa “master” and “mistress,” never by name and patronymic). When Vera was a bit older her mother would tell her in moments of anger that Polya was stupid. This upset Vera, who didn’t see it that way. Patiently and sympathetically, she read out letters from Polya’s village with long, long lists of greetings and good wishes, and wrote replies in the same vein dictated by Polya. Although Nanny lived away from her native village, she still lived in it. From what she earned, and from presents given to her (every Christmas and Easter, and on Georgi’s and Vera’s name days, she got a gold ruble from each of their parents), she bought presents and sent them home, although her nieces were the closest relatives of hers left there. She had arranged with the church to remember in its prayers some two or three dozen names. An educated woman could never have compiled such a list: she would have a much narrower conception of kinship and of Christian duty. When the children were old enough, Polya sometimes asked for leave to visit her village. She would make lengthy preparations, tying up bundle after bundle of presents, and take a hackney cab to the harbor, but instead of embarking on the steamer like everybody else she would spend several nights in the bargeman’s shelter on the quay, making tea and cooking for the men just like in her young days. Until a barge from Muratov put in and she could sail with it.
Papa and Mama died, and Georgi was lost to her, a rolling stone, but Vera, still unmarried, stayed with Nanny. Before the war she and the old woman, toothless but still clear-voiced, bestirred themselves and moved all the old Vorotyntsev furniture to Petersburg, where Vera had found employment as a bibliographer at the Public Library. If there was anything that the Vorotyntsevs could still call home—and her brother acquiesced in calling them that, when his wife was not listening—it was the three third-floor rooms that Vera shared with Nanny on the corner of Italyanskaya and Karavannaya streets, near the Mikhailovsky manège. Some of its windows gave an oblique view of the Fontanka, others looked out on a square with a monument, and in summer if you leaned out over the windowsill and looked along the meandering Karavannaya, you could see the Anichkov Palace. Vera had taken this apartment simply because it was near the library, just a pleasant ten-minute walk away. You could go either around by the Fontanka, along the canal, and up the Nevsky Prospect or else along Karavannaya, but Vera usually went past the Nobles’ Assembly Room, turned onto Ekaterinskaya, and in two more steps she was in the semi-darkness of the Public Library’s vaulted rooms. Between the eternally hushed shelves, which muffled all footsteps, with her eternally hushed steps, a narrow figure in a narrow space, in a dress as gray or dark brown as the bindings, she withdrew into her corner (looking onto the Aleksandrinka) to sit at her desk for two hours at a time without so much as a shrug of the shoulders, without a single movement except those of her fingers turning over pages. Nobody needed to tell Vera—smooth, noiseless, economical movement was natural to her. In the same way, her handwriting (in what she wrote for herself, not just in what she wrote officially for the library) consisted of small, neat, legible letters, slanting no more than you bend your head when you write, economical, without a single superfluous stroke of the pen—more of her time was spent on writing than on talking. So Vera’s life ran quietly on, morning and evening, and sometimes for weeks on end. She went backward and forward along the same few streets four or even six times a day, seeing nothing at all of the rest of Petersburg.
With Nanny to look after her, she hardly noticed how run-down Petersburg had become by that autumn. In the sections of the city she walked through there were no queues, and Vera, who scarcely glanced at or tasted what she was eating, would not have noticed what was missing except that Nanny never stopped groaning and telling her how awful things were: for as long as she could remember, in Muratovo or in Moscow, even during the other war and the troubles, you could always get whatever you wanted, walk up and buy it and off you go, so why all this standing in line staring at each other’s backs for an hour or two at a time, in the rain maybe? And even then not being able to buy all you needed? You had to stand in line for white rolls, stand in line for milk—we’re lucky we haven’t got any children! (What’s lucky about it? Life would be a lot brighter with children! But somehow they don’t want my Vera, my angel.) Sugar had nearly vanished—smack your lips and pretend, or buy candy or honey, now they’re on coupons, thank God. When the telegram came to say that Georgi was on his way, Nanny clapped her hands and wept and rejoiced, but above and before everything she beat her breast: Holy Mother of God, there’s only a handful of wheaten flour, you can’t buy any, and I must bake flat cakes, whatever happens! So make them with rye flour! What are you saying? He’s had all the rye he can swallow in the trenches!
My brother! They hadn’t seen each other since the war began. And he hadn’t written very often. But even a few sentences on an army letter form kept alive what neither of them ever doubted and could never conceal: their simple awareness that neither time nor distance would ever make them strangers. Returning his feelings twofold, Vera never took offense, never waited for him to answer, but wrote a gossipy letter once or twice a month just as though she was talking to him. Not about Nanny or herself—there was never anything new there—but about Petersburg, the theaters, the controversies, its turbulent public life, and the many well-known personages who could not avoid the Public Library, or once inside a bibliographer named Vera Mikhailovna. Vera was proud of her acquaintance with many of them, remembered their pronouncements, or scraps of conversation, and was quite willing to evaluate and quote them in letters to her brother. He had no other source, it was all useful and necessary, he wanted to know as much as possible, but to pick it up out of the air without wasting time or sitting down to study. There in the trenches, in hours of empty boredom, letters with a dash of Petersburg life in them were bound to be all the more interesting to him. That autumn, in anticipation of his trip, he had scribbled a note from Romania to say that if he came to Petersburg he would like to meet any public figure she thought might interest him.
She had arranged such a meeting. As she went to meet her brother at the Nikolaevski station, Vera did not expect a single minute of embarrassment after her lively letters to him. Their meeting would be as relaxed as if it had not become something out of the ordinary. Just as long as … as long as he was coming without his wife. The telegram left it unclear.
Vera had seen Alina only very occasionally, and they did not correspond except to exchange greetings once or twice a year. There was no quarrel between them (nor for that matter were they friends, though Georgi longed to bring them together, and refused to accept the idea of their being strangers), but Alina’s presence now would strike a chill, create tension, spoil the whole encounter. Or rather, it would not be Alina but something about husband and wife together that would spoil it. In his presence Alina behaved better, was less abrupt and could hold her tongue. But in Alina’s presence Georgi too was different, although he seemed unaware of it, seemed not to be looking over his shoulder at her, not on the alert for signals from her—but suddenly his laugh would be not quite so carefree, his talk less enthusiastic, everything he said would be more trivial than you expected from him.
Georgi could without embarrassment complain to his sister that he was hungry or in need of sleep or out of funds or despondent—but he never spoke frankly about things at home. In all other areas of life friends and loved ones can warn, advise, and help, and a man has no difficulty in asking them to do so. But in this taboo area advice is forbidden, warnings are unacceptable, attempts to explain a man to himself are tactless. In this sphere alone a man proudly condemns himself, and is condemned by all those around him, to make the best of his own poor vision and his own uncertain movements, like someone playing blindman’s buff. And, however dearly loved a sister you are, though he might still playfully pull your ear or your hair, tha
t is one subject on which your views are not sought or welcomed.
Vera was still at school when she heard of her brother’s marriage. She was excited and happy about it, she could not wait to see Alina, to love her as an older sister—if my wonderful brother has chosen her she must be the nicest there ever was!
But their first few meetings put her off, left her feeling helpless. There was something missing, something not quite right, and she couldn’t really say what it was.
Later on she had said to him that marriage was more final than a transfer from one regiment to another, perhaps even than an order on the battlefield—and he had laughed heartily.
To give up her one and only, her brilliant, clever, brave brother to someone so alien and artificial? Was it really a love match? Your own unblinking eye saw it all so clearly—but your brother’s eyes saw nothing. But did Mama?
The little girl sensed that her mother did not like Alina either. But Mama would never venture to advise such a strong-willed son, even before he was thirty and a captain. Since he was a year old little Georgi had always known what he did and did not want, and no toy could ever distract him.
And anyway … there were such things as tact and good breeding. Mama could say nothing.
Masculine influence was completely lacking. Vera’s father had never made his will felt in the home, and his advice always fell flat.
How could it happen? Why couldn’t Georgi see for himself? He had looked at her more closely and longer and harder than anybody, and still he couldn’t see.
Every union of two people has its secrets. You see the outside, and it is bad, but perhaps inside what there is between them may be very good. And if whatever it is lasts one, then three, then five or even ten years, it must be good, and it is not for you to judge.
What was the point of passing judgment anyway? They were lawfully wedded husband and wife.
November 1916 Page 32