You could take a stroll around the bedroom, with an agreeable buzzing in your head. The room was big enough to serve as Roman’s study in winter and to house their library. Half of the books were Irina’s, half of them Roman’s. Irina’s were a miscellany, in their original bindings. Roman had his rebound in uniform black covers, so that Pushkin and Gogol and all the others looked like volumes in one enormous “collected works.” The spine of each volume bore in gilt lettering the initials R. T., and on the front cover his full surname, R. Tomchak. Some six hundred identical volumes made a most impressive sight.
Yes, in the Fifth State Duma his radical program would astound them all. The autocracy must be whittled down—until it was little more than a plaything. Second, the philosophical work of the giant Tolstoy must be completed by administrative measures: the Church must be demolished! It must be stripped of its capital and its lands—property which lay idle and only hindered progress. The Church must become a mere appendage, to provide christening and burial services for those who wanted them, nothing more. Third … but you couldn’t of course turn everything upside down single-handed, you would have to create a party of capable people unlike any that Russia now possessed. In comatose, undifferentiated Asiatic Russia, while the so-called Kadets exchanged blows with their near neighbors to the left, the Social Democrats, there was no major party capable of action.
In came Irina, in a pinafore, flushed and happy.
“Well, how are things? Do you need anything?”
“Everything’s fine! D’you know, I might even say I’m glad the storm has broken, it’s woken me up! I’m even thinking of making this conference the beginning of a sort of movement, purely commercial to begin with, and only here in the Kuban at first, but later … It would confront the authorities with tough conditions. We’re the ones who feed them, so they would have to accept. Have you had lunch, by the way?”
“Have I! When you’re standing in the kitchen in that heat, tasting everything … Do you realize that, not counting snacks, but desserts included, we will have ten dishes tomorrow!”
“Whew!”
“Well, we can’t let ourselves down. Not on an occasion like this! And on your debut.”
“Another thing—I’ve been thinking about the car.”
She knew how it rankled. Last year when automobiles were requisitioned they had without so much as a by-your-leave taken the Rolls-Royce. It had cost him 180,000 rubles, and now it had ended up with Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, after his transfer to the Caucasus, or perhaps with some mere general, who could tell. For years Irina had pleaded with Roman not to provoke people by keeping a car.
“I’m thinking now that if this business gets off the ground perhaps I should put myself in the hands of Borée and Co. They sell only British cars, apparently with guarantees of exemption from requisitioning.”
“Just as you like,” Irina said, all smiles because he was so active and so nice to her. “I’ll always prefer trotting horses, you know that. But if things go as you expect you’ll shortly need a car, of course.”
“You are a darling.” He kissed her hot, pink cheek.
“I’ll come back and consult you on what I ought to wear tomorrow.”
“Do, please do.”
She was clever, Irina. And devoted. Young. And beautiful. For public appearances, for show, for his travels, he could not imagine a better wife. Everybody admired her, everybody envied him. But a glamorous exterior could be very deceptive: deep down there was something missing, that vital disturbing something that you might find in a homely girl in a bedraggled skirt. If only you had that little something, my darling, you wouldn’t need your weird and wonderful ideas, or your Winchester, or the 1914 Society.
Never mind, his political activity would necessitate frequent trips without his wife.
Irina meanwhile, happier still after her tête-à-tête with her affectionate husband, hurried away to the cold larder to see that the cakes had been put away carefully, then to the cellar to check the salted dishes, then back to the kitchen. It was a long time since she had been so preoccupied with tasks that were not of her own invention but obligatory. They had all been taught to cook at boarding school. You’d never make a good wife if you couldn’t. But in the Tomchak domain, to take a hand in the kitchen would have demeaned Irina herself and offended her mother-in-law. It would also have shown distrust of the servants: a regular visitor to the kitchen could not help noticing—as Irina had—how they put things aside for themselves and their families. So wealth had deprived her of the simple enjoyment which a woman can find in her kitchen.
These last few days had been different. She was planning the whole affair: the decoration of the dining room, the arrangement of dishes, and the order in which they were to be served. She had chosen and sampled everything on the menu, sauces and garnishes included. As the war went on, the possibilities had become more limited. Their stocks of certain items, now unobtainable elsewhere, were exhausted. (But there was still abundance and superabundance!) There was also a shortage of female help—some of the women servants had replaced full-time workers who had been called up, and there was only one housekeeper to look after the house and the yard, with no pantry maid to help her. So that today everyone was fully stretched, and Irina felt all the more needed—especially to help stuff the birds.
Tomorrow’s conference of steppe farmers differed from their usual gatherings in that only the farmers themselves were invited, no wives or daughters. Irina and her mother-in-law would be the only women at table. But it suddenly occurred to them that old Darya might take it into her head to appear. That would make a number of changes necessary, beginning with the placement.
Although old Darya, Foma Mordorenko’s widow, had divided her whole estate between her three sons, who themselves now had grown-up children, her power was still so great that her sons considered themselves accountable to her. She might very well want to come and listen, and even make herself heard. She kept an even tighter rein on the servants: none of them had rooms of their own, they slept higgledy-piggledy in the marble vestibule, and personal attendants on the floor outside the master’s or mistress’s door. Old Darya was indomitable, and even the authorities at Armavir danced attendance on her. On one occasion 500 rubles were missed in her office. A police inspector, two policemen, and a tracker dog were summoned from Armavir. The servants were made to stand in a ring, the dog was brought out of the office, and they all shook in their shoes. The dog sniffed around for a while, went up to Avraam, the clerk, and placed its paws on his shoulders. (His was of course the only scent it would have picked up in the office.) The clerk, a gangling, sickly fellow, turned pale. The inspector struck him repeatedly. They strapped a sack of bricks on his back and sent him off to Armavir, eighteen versts away. There he was beaten and grilled, while the inspector sat enjoying the old lady’s hospitality, inquiring from time to time by telephone how the interrogation was going. The clerk confessed, saying first that he had hidden the money in a barn, then that it was near the latrine, and Darya had all the servants digging. Meanwhile the clerk died from the beatings he had received. (Some years later one of Darya’s daughters-in-law, dying young of tuberculosis, confessed to the crime: “I’m being punished for Avraam: I was the one who stole it.”)
But Darya’s power was fraying at the edges. Her widowed son had imported a replacement for his wife—a cabaret singer. The family ceased visiting him, and the chanteuse received other guests in lacy negligee, with nothing but a knitted bodice underneath.
Whether she had really been a chanteuse, whether she had ever sung little ditties somewhere, Irina did not really know, but she used the odious word “chanteuse” to describe, collectively, the whole category of women of ill repute who sapped the foundations of family life. She stigmatized them, willed them out of existence, would not hear them mentioned, tried not even to think of them, but that scene which someone had once described to her—the chanteuse receiving her guests—had etched itself on her memory an
d continually returned to trouble her. Nothing but an undergarment and a lacy negligee! She shuddered.
She still had to decide what to wear tomorrow. There would be no other women present, so she must dress austerely. A waist-length jacket with astrakhan trimming.
She still had to visit the laundry, where the head laundress was ironing, on a special table made for Irina’s voluminous duvet covers, the tulle curtains for the main reception room.
The sun had almost set when Irina, tired out, left the house for her usual evening walk across the park.
The weather, in early November, was still warm and mild, and, as usual in the southern autumn, windless. But for the fallen leaves and the early sunset, it was more like summer, and Irina felt too warm in her woolen blouse. Nor was there any dew.
The first, crooked avenue was strewn with big, violet pods. A twig fell into the oval ornamental pond, and expanding circles wrinkled its surface, then, rebuffed by the concrete rim, splashed backward, forming strange patterns in which reflected treetops danced, the unshed leaves of plane trees, inordinately large, and other leaves, green and yellow, elongated and drooping like the ears of some strange creature.
As soon as dusk fell the silvery Himalayan firs quickly changed color. They became dark. And a large bird of some sort could be seen darting about in them.
Looking back through the firs toward the house, she could see that, upstairs and downstairs, lights were going on, variously colored by lampshades and curtains. Out there walking it was easy to imagine that this was not her house, the uncommonly comfortable house which had nonetheless palled on her, in which she knew where every object stood or lay or hung, and just what every person was doing or was about to say—no, this was the fascinating abode of chivalrous and high-souled strangers, and the life lived there was noble, radiant, dignified, such a life as you would rarely meet even in books.
There was more light in the outermost avenue, lined with chestnut trees. Big chestnuts in spiky shells lay uncollected underfoot.
The chestnut avenue led into a pleached corridor of Chinese acacias, with little chains of poisonous-looking fruits. There too it was dark again.
This, on the westernmost edge of the park, was where Irina always walked in the evening, passing from light to twilight, and back again from twilight into the light. There she indulged her fantasies about yogis, theosophists, and the transmigration of the soul. She was very ready to believe in the transmigration of the soul, and found that some Oriental ideas fitted in beautifully with Christian truths, and saw it all as so many hypostases of beauty. Irina liked imagining who she had been before, and who she was going to be afterward, and wondering whether she would reach the stars before she was reincarnated. She liked thinking about a tremulous, unrealizable beauty meant not for us but for liberated souls.
A pure sky, without a single pink cloud, was making way for a still night, waiting for the stars and the Milky Way to show through, and the moon, past its full and veering leftward each day, to rise. As the light waned, bonfires stood out clearly here and there. They were burning the haulm of sunflowers out on the steppe, making potash. There was a labor shortage, and tasks unfinished were left for autumn nights. All through the endless war, which could not be seen or heard from here, the steppe, God’s bountiful tablecloth, continued to yield its gifts to mankind as generously as ever, asking only that their hands should not forget it.
Anyone looking out from the second-story balcony would see the steppe lit by these sporadic fires. Suddenly—a vision: out there, countless nomads advancing on Russia like a plague of locusts had halted for the night, and these were their campfires.
[61]
Zakhar Tomchak had spent his early days in beggarly adobe huts, with roofs so low that he had to bend double in the doorway, and even inside could not quite straighten his burly frame, which was why he had taken such a liking to high ceilings. He might never have imagined what it was like to have such a thing if he had not visited some of Rostov’s more notable buildings, the Bank and the Exchange in particular, just when he was about to build himself a new house. He had decreed then that both floors of the house on his new estate should be seven arshins (nearly fifteen feet) high—unheard of in these parts—and the main reception room on the first floor eight arshins, which meant raising the floor of the upstairs family living room, to which all the old furniture was relegated.
The main reception room was decorated with pink and gold paint, made to look like wallpaper. The ceiling was not the same color all over: plump white clouds floated there, with little cherubs winging their way between them—mischievous little things, not the kind you see in church—and peeping down at the guests. A chandelier with twenty electric bulbs hung from the ceiling, and there was a curved bracket with three lamps on the wall between each pair of windows. In one corner of the room—as a concession to Tomchak’s daughter and daughter-in-law: all respectable people had one—stood a grand piano with a mahogany frame, flanked by two palms. Another corner, by contrast, was decked with icons; this was, after all, a Christian household. In a third corner stood a palm tree so large that it took the combined exertions of all four Cossacks to move it. One wall was adorned with a huge mirror, three times the length of a man’s outspread arms, with a carved and gilded frame—the gilt, though, was dull, not shiny (another sign of good taste)—and the mirror itself had been made at His Imperial Majesty’s own glass, porcelain, and crystal works. Against the other long wall, between the wide double door of the entrance and the dining-room door, loomed a huge pink-tiled stove. One of the shorter walls was glassed, to give a view of the winter garden with its exotic hothouse flowers, while the other short wall had been removed, leaving only an archway through which guests could pass four abreast if they so pleased, into the drawing room. The drawing room was painted blue, and whether you chose an upright chair, an armchair, or a sofa they were all of highly polished rosewood. The floor of the drawing room was permanently covered with a French carpet. When autumn came around they laid a Turkmen carpet in the main reception room, as they had now for the meeting.
That room was so vast and so beautiful that they couldn’t think what to use it for. Dine in it? They dined elsewhere. A ball? The steppe farmers weren’t much for dancing. They might want to play cards, but it was too cavernous, and the family living room was the place for that. In the six years of the estate’s existence there had probably never been a better opportunity, never been any occasion to assemble all the neighboring steppe farmers, whether friends or outsiders with whom they had never drained a glass at the same table, and to talk business. That spacious hall was the reason why they had agreed to assemble at Tomchak’s.
On yet another fine day of sunshine and cobwebs, toward noon, describing an arc on the front courtyard and another on the ramp up to the front porch, the steppe farmers began arriving in a steady stream, in cars, phaetons, traps, and four-wheelers. The Stundist came in a two-wheeled charabanc, without a coachman—a wonder it wasn’t an oxcart, funny folks those nonconformists!
Zakhar Fyodorovich, wearing a lilac-colored cheviot suit and a tie (damned piece of string around your neck, enough to choke you!), stood on the porch and was kept busy shaking hands, descending to greet some guests in their carriages, and retreating up the steps to await others. Three Mordorenko cubs, all hefty fellows with topknots, two sons of Foma and one of Akim, arrived separately. Darya, to everyone’s relief, did not appear. Little Tretyak lowered his rotund person from a high seat, as cautiously as a spider moving about its web, looking around as if he expected to be stung. As always, even in summer, he was wearing his old black overcoat, unbuttoned, with its skirts sweeping the ground. Chepurnykh drove in behind his mettlesome troika. His head was shaven so close that it shone like a mirror (he used to wear a Cossack pigtail but people had made fun of it in Rostov, so he had recently shaved it off), but his mustaches stuck out sideways like Cossack lances. After him came the Myasnyankins, uncle and nephew, as thick as thieves, both purple in the
face—they must have been knocking it back since morning. There were also two Molokans from distant homesteads. And of course the Stundist.
As for Vladimir Rudolfovich von Shtengel, not only did he not deign to appear himself, he didn’t even send his bailiff. He wanted nothing to do with peasants.
They trooped into the vestibule, where Ilya, the footman, wearing gray side whiskers, by order from above, and full-dress livery, stood waiting. He accepted hats, coats, and canes and, with a low bow, showed each guest the way to the main reception room.
Where, though, should Roman position himself? Pride had prevented him from telling his father anything about the substance of his speech, and pride had prevented his father from asking. But they had also omitted to discuss how they would receive their guests. Ought Roman to station himself beside his father on the porch? If he did he might cease to look important in his own right. In the vestibule, then? Impossible, with the footman there. So Roman received the guests in the main reception room itself, looking austere and businesslike, with no trace of a smile (he knew, from the mirror and from Irina, that smiling did not suit him—it made him look somehow menacing). He greeted them, showed them to seats there or in the drawing room, and made a few quick businesslike remarks intended to put the steppe farmers in a mood for strenuous intellectual effort rather than the usual gabbling and gobbling.
November 1916 Page 115