The war caught up with Eugenia in 1919, when the Red Army took the city. For Eugenia, Sasha, and those of their theater colleagues who stayed behind, it would have been a terrifying time. Once again, food disappeared from the shelves. Kharkov’s Chekists, or Bolshevik secret police, were known for plunging a victim’s hand into boiling water and peeling the skin off like a glove. (Other Chekists devised tortures out of Eugenia’s worst nightmares: they buried victims alive or interred them in coffins with corpses.) Despite the chaos and terror, though, some semblance of normal life seems to have continued, as it almost always does. There was still theater, which meant there was still work. A touring company from the legendary Moscow Art Theater even arrived in Kharkov in May, though performances began at 6:00 p.m. so guests could be home before the 9:00 p.m. curfew.
Sasha and her theater friends did their best to keep their spirits up. At night, they turned their depressing hotel rooms into little salons, reciting poetry and performing theatrical scenes by the dim light of a tiny lamp, acting as if they were still carefree artists in Moscow.
Eugenia, meanwhile, found work with a theater founded by the Moscow actor and director Vsevolod Alexandrovich Blumental-Tamarin, though apparently their relationship ended badly when she refused his advances. In a photo taken at that time, she’s dressed in what looks like a low-cut nurse’s costume, an exaggerated cross on a thick chain hanging around her neck. Her light brown curls are tucked into an oversize white cap. Rather than conventionally beautiful, Eugenia was what the French call jolie laide—striking from some angles and plain from others, with a slightly bulbous nose and a long chin. In that picture, though, as she gazes out with hooded, sultry eyes, she appears very much the ingénue.
Soon the city changed hands once again. The Moscow Art Theater was performing The Cherry Orchard when a commotion from the street interrupted the second act. Going outside, the stage manager learned that the forces of General Anton Denikin, head of the anti-Bolshevik White Army, were entering the city, and the Red Guards had fled. The audience broke into cheers, and the play resumed where it had left off.
The restaurants opened; once again there was food in abundance. “Where did all this come from?” Eugenia wondered with amazement.
The White Army was certainly no more humane than the Red; it was viciously anti-Semitic and implacably antidemocratic. Whenever it seized a town, soldiers were given a couple of days to plunder the property of local Jews. In a demented inversion of Bolshevik terror, some Whites shot workers just for being workers, their slogan, “Death to the Callused Hands!” echoing the Reds’ “Death to the Burzhoois!”
Yet people such as Eugenia and Sasha, aristocratic and essentially apolitical, were safe behind White lines. When summer came, mother and daughter moved to Kislovodsk, a fashionable spa town in the Caucasus that the Whites had taken in January.
For Eugenia, Kislovodsk was “an enchanted corner” amid the squalor and terror of the war. She would take long walks through the surrounding forests and the city’s public parks, while Sasha luxuriated in the town’s thermal baths. One day, Eugenia returned from one of her walks to find a White Russian army officer in her hotel room. At first, she was startled and afraid. Then she recognized him. It was Vava Tretiakovy, her childhood playmate.
Vava had a guileless face, pleasing but largely nondescript, and gray eyes. His head was completely shaved. Eugenia found him to be devastatingly handsome. Her heart beat fast and her words came out awkwardly when she asked him, “What brings you here?”
“I came to see you,” he replied.
It had been five years since they’d last met. Vava was now twenty-three and a lieutenant in the White Army. He’d contracted typhus—there was a raging epidemic of the lice-borne disease throughout the country—and had been sent to a sanitarium in Kislovodsk to recover. At first, they were shy and hesitant with each other, but eventually their old rapport returned, and soon they were joking and laughing. Then the conversation turned serious, and Vava told Eugenia he’d been pursuing a career as a composer when the war interrupted his studies. He’d also gotten married, though it was a loveless match, and he and his wife were close to separation.
Eugenia started taking her long walks with Vava. He spoke to her about all the death he’d seen and read her poems he’d written at the front, which she found captivating. As the summer went on, they admitted, to themselves and each other, that they were utterly in love. Acquaintances warned them not to spend so much time together, especially in public—he was, after all, still a married man. Eugenia, characteristically, didn’t care. She had learned from her mother to ignore petty gossip and conventional opinion.
Their summer idyll, of course, soon came to an end. One day, as fall approached, Vava told his sweetheart he had to return to the war. They were sitting in the garden of Eugenia’s boardinghouse. Eight decades later, she still remembered the small waterfall there and the green, moss-covered rocks beneath the water. Vava read her another poem he’d written for her, and she begged him, in vain, not to go.
They had three more days together, and they spent them returning again and again to the places they’d frequented during the summer, engraving them in their memories. On one of their walks, they ran into a photographer who made a living snapping vacationers. In the picture he took of them, they’re sitting on the grass, leaning into each other. Vava is dressed in his uniform, while Eugenia wears a long, loose dress or skirt and high-heeled boots. Her smile is warm. His is faint and anxious.
His departure should have been the kind of scene later immortalized in countless war movies. She accompanied him to the station, which was full of people, anguished relatives bidding good-bye to soldiers trying to remain stoic. Tobacco smoke and the sound of women’s sobbing filled the air. Eugenia must have prepared for a dramatic farewell, to wave at her love until the train disappeared.
Yet the train never came, and Vava walked her home. “See you soon, my little girl,” he said on the threshold to her house. The next morning, when she went to find him, he’d already left.
They wrote each other regularly, letters that were passionate and fervidly romantic, almost religious in their youthful ecstasy. At one point, Eugenia decided to travel to the front herself to see her lover, but he begged her not to come, saying it was too dangerous.
Already the war’s privations were coming to serene Kislovodsk. Eugenia traded most of her remaining clothes and jewelry for food. Her mother had already left town for another job. Eugenia headed to Pyatigorsk, a city in the Caucasus where an old friend was living. Once again, she found work in the theater.
Vava’s letters, once so regular, stopped arriving, and she waited in a panic as months went by. Then five came at once, and she could see his despair building from one to the next. First, he hoped he’d soon be transferred to a town where they could meet. Then he started fearing they’d never see each other again. He felt desperately alone in the army; another soldier had struck him, and Vava’s failure to avenge himself had left him humiliated. He was even considering deserting. Eugenia wrote to console him, but she never heard back.
By the spring of 1920, the White Army was almost completely defeated, and those who survived fled to Paris, Berlin, or Constantinople. Eugenia wrote to officials in all those countries, seeing if any knew of a Lieutenant Tretiakovy. The absence of any news about Vava tormented her. She worried that he had fallen in one of the final battles, or even committed suicide, though she also nurtured fantasies that he’d escaped to the other side of the world, “for example to Patagonia,” a destination that, she wrote, had fascinated him.
She would never see or hear from him again.
That line about Patagonia is her first and only mention of Vava’s love of the wild desert region stretching across Chile and Argentina. She doesn’t tell us why her lover dreamed of South America, but the memory seems significant, since she would start a new life there more than sixty years later.
Eugenia had lost contact with her mother. At one
point, she thought Sasha had joined the White Russian exodus to Constantinople. More than one hundred thousand Russians had fled there along with the White Russian general Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel, and the city was full of Russian theaters, clubs, and restaurants where aristocratic Russian women waited table.
Yet a friend who’d recently been in that city assured Eugenia that her mother wasn’t there, so Eugenia set off through the cities of Russia and the Caucasus searching for her, refusing to entertain the thought that she might be dead. These trips, which would have been taken in filthy, crowded third-class trains, amid a wrathful peasantry eager for revenge against the upper classes and the ever-present threat of arbitrary arrest, were probably harrowing. Her account of them, though, has a picaresque tone, as she eludes danger time and again.
One day, she was pulled off a train en route from Tiflis. This is how she recalls the conversation with her interrogator, a Russian military policeman:
“Were you in Tiflis?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“What were they doing there?”
“Who? Everyone?” she replied mockingly. “Some are newspaper sellers, others work in the restaurants, and others are actors and actresses, like me.”
Such insolence could have gotten her killed. Instead, as she tells it, the guard took her to a house where she could stay overnight. She thought he was going to protect her, but in the middle of the night, there was a pounding on her door. “Police! Open the door!” came their shouts. It was the Cheka. Eugenia had the presence of mind to hide Vava’s letters between a picture and its frame—had the secret police found them and realized she was the girlfriend of a White soldier, she’d have been executed. Instead, she was merely arrested.
Her memoirs suggest that she spent only a few days in jail, but it was probably quite a bit longer. Upon coming to the United States in 1947, she had to report any imprisonments on an INS form. On it, she said she’d been held for a month, and a few years after that, she told an INS agent that it had been a couple of weeks. Devi, unlike most modern memoirists, tended to play down her own misfortunes, casting a rosy, magical glow around her history. She could never afford to dwell on trauma, and eventually she made letting go of the past the centerpiece of her personal spirituality.
After being released, as she told the story, she went back to the house where she’d been arrested to get Vava’s letters. There she found the military policeman who’d betrayed her, and she bitterly reproached him about her unjust imprisonment. Then, right in front of him, she took the letters from their hiding place. “If you want to arrest me, you can do it now, this instant,” she exclaimed.
“You must burn those immediately!” he shouted.
“I wouldn’t do it for anything in the world!” she said triumphantly, pressing them against her chest.
There’s no way, of course, to confirm that this anecdote is true. It may well be simply what she wished had happened. Indisputably true, though, is the way Eugenia would make an aura of invulnerability a cornerstone of her persona.
From there, Eugenia traveled back to Kislovodsk. Then she heard, likely from someone else in the theater, that her mother was in Odessa, so she traveled to that city. By the time she arrived, Sasha had moved on.
Months passed before she finally tracked her mother down to a town on the Russian-Polish border. Sasha was thin, her clothes worn, and she was living in a modest, spartanly furnished room. She had hooked up with a dozen other Russian actors, and they eked out a living performing in the small cities and towns nearby, while making plans to flee Russia. Eugenia joined them, devoting herself to plans of escape.
By this time, Latvia had declared its independence, commencing two decades as a sovereign republic. Eugenia’s grandmother had returned to Riga. Technically, Eugenia and Sasha should have been able to get Latvian passports and leave Russia legally. Yet Eugenia felt paralyzed by the almost Kafkaesque process that getting such papers would entail. Sneaking over the border into Poland seemed more straightforward.
The region of Russia where they were living was separated from Poland by a river, which was then frozen. Eugenia, her mother, and her mother’s friends paid two men to help them across.
On the night they left, each took only what he or she could carry in a small bag and walked to an appointed place near the river at the city’s edge. Banks of snow almost hid the river’s frozen surface from view. They were told to run as fast as they could when they heard a whistle. One sounded, and they took off. The Russian guards had been bribed, and rather than shooting at the fleeing party, they shot into the air. In a few minutes, the actors arrived in Poland. There, the Polish authorities quickly arrested them.
They were brought to what Eugenia recalled as a stately house that had been transformed into a prison. Being with Sasha made imprisonment an entirely different experience—having craved closeness with her mother all her life, Eugenia was thrilled that they could finally have long, unbroken conversations. Along with the actors, there were common criminals in the prison, who tried to comfort the new arrivals, even promising to come back and rescue them if they were set free first. “Smiling to myself,” Devi writes, “I thought, ‘Look who are my best friends: bandits!’ ”
Soon the actors were released, and they started performing again, in the small cities along the border, finding an audience among the Russian landowners who lived in Poland. Yet, if life improved, Eugenia was still desperate in her search for Vava. She continued sending out an endless stream of letters, all of them disappearing into the ether. At night, she reread his letters and poems, or compulsively copied them in her own hand. She grew morbid and would spend hours alone in the small chapel of a nearby cemetery.
Further, after having chased her mother for so many years, Eugenia now found she disliked performing with her mother’s group. She longed to do real theater instead of gaudy, improvised entertainments and wondered what would ever become of the great plans and ambitions she’d nurtured through her adolescence. In her diary, she wrote that she felt weighed down as if by a bag of stones.
In this sad, unsettled new life, Eugenia turned to an old fantasy to sustain her: India. The dream that had been born when she encountered Ramacharaka’s book all those years ago had never left her. Amid the chaos and ugliness all around her, she writes, “India appeared to me as a country that was fresh, colorful and beautiful.”
Yet that escape would come later. Throughout 1922, Eugenia and Sasha had made endless, seemingly futile trips to Polish government offices, trying to get papers that would allow them to move abroad. Finally, toward the end of the year, they succeeded—thanks, Eugenia writes, to a bureaucrat who was a devoted fan of a Russian singer whom Sasha knew.
So, in 1923, Eugenia and Sasha arrived together in Berlin, the dazzling, depraved, and intrigue-filled capital of the White Russian emigration. It was the year that lunatic inflation erased the savings of the German middle class and Hitler staged his famous Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. Yet Berlin was madly festive, perhaps the most artistically vibrant city in the world, and for a while, Eugenia would revel in it.
· CHAPTER 3 ·
AS THE WHITE ARMY collapsed in Russia, unmoored Russians streamed into Berlin in one of the largest mass emigrations of modern times. They arrived in a city that was already growing explosively: Berlin’s population had doubled from two million in 1905 to four million in 1920, and the Russians added another half million. So many Russians settled in Charlottenburg, a once-fashionable neighborhood in western Berlin, that it became known as Charlottengrad, and the Kurfürstendamm, the boulevard bordering the neighborhood, was dubbed the Nevsky Prospekt, after the main street in St. Petersburg.
“After the war, Berlin had become a kind of caravansary where everyone traveling between Moscow and the West came together,” Marc Chagall would recall years later. “In the apartments round the Bayrische Platz [sic] there were as many samovars and Theosophical and Tolstoyan countesses as there had been in Moscow…in my whole life I’
ve never seen so many wonderful rabbis or so many Constructivists as in Berlin in 1922.” Russian restaurants lined the streets. There were three Russian newspapers, five weekly magazines, and an endless profusion of publishing houses.
Eugenia and Sasha quickly made themselves at home in Berlin’s Russian colony. They found rooms in Charlottenburg, and were soon reuniting with friends they’d lost track of during the revolution and civil war. Sasha found work with one of Berlin’s Russian theaters, while Eugenia gloried in the city’s febrile artistic atmosphere, its heady mix of innovation, insecurity, decadence, and mysticism.
At the time, Berlin was the most modern city in Europe, a gritty, jittery metropolis given to both extravagant cynicism and desperate grabs at redemption. Germany’s defeat in World War I had led to the abdication of the Kaiser and the birth of a weak, unstable liberal democracy. The economy had been savaged by the war, and as the government borrowed and printed money to pay its war debts, hyperinflation destroyed both the German mark and the whole country’s sense of material security. In July 1922 the dollar was worth 493 marks. By March of 1923, a dollar bought more than 20,000 marks, and by the end of the year, it was worth a ludicrous 4.2 trillion marks.
The berserk inflation made hard assets paramount, and Russians who’d smuggled jewels out of their country could often live comfortably by peddling the ornaments of their vanished privilege. “Herds of foreigners wandered along the Kurfürstendamm: they were buying up the remnants of former luxury for a song,” wrote Ilya Ehrenburg, the Russian author and journalist.
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