by John Metcalf
“And, of course, he’s also a great playwright.”
“Plays, is it?”
“Yes, like The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard.”
The partial face disappeared.
Forde raised an eyebrow at Sheila.
A knee slammed into his right kidney.
“And what is it about? This Cherry Orchard?”
“Well, it’s about upper-class life in pre-revolutionary Russia and…”
“Upper class, is it.”
To the armrest gap Forde said, “But it’s more about class paralysis and stagnation. It gives a sense…”
“Sense, is it?”
Again a knee.
Forde rolled his eyes at Sheila.
“How do you do, Mr. Chekhov?” said Father Keogh.
“Well, well, I thank you, Father,” said the minder. “In the pink.”
“And how is your cherry orchard?”
“Laden, Father, absolutely. Yes, it is,” said The Minder. “The branches all bent and weeping with fruit.”
The partial face reappeared.
“‘And the land shall yield her fruit, and ye shall eat your fill, and dwell therein in safety.’”
“Will you please stop banging your knees into my seat!”
“And a blessing it is,” said The Minder. “A blessing it is.”
*
Chekhov had lived in the White Dacha with his mother, Eugenia, and his sister, Maria, called Masha, and his wife, the actress Olga Knipper. Chekhov had lesions on both lungs and coughed out his life in these rooms while summoning the heroic energy to write the three great final plays.
For years he had suffered from colitis, diarrhoea, and haemorrhoids. For the haemorrhaging from his lungs he took creosote, which destroyed his stomach. To stave off pleurisy he endured compresses of cantharides. To sleep he drank chloral hydrate. As the pain and weakness bit in, he was given injections of camphor, arsenic, morphine, opium, and heroin. As his heart deteriorated, he was treated with digitalis. And through all this horror, he wrote.
But to Forde’s disappointment the house gave up nothing of this. It remained resolutely ordinary. The feel was very Victorian and respectable, much more Masha than Anton. Chairs covered in loose slipcovers, every table covered with fringed tablecloths, along the top of the piano, with its brass swing-out candle brackets, a long runner crotcheted like a doily. Pelmets and flouncy valances. Massy, unattractive furniture. Iron bedsteads. Heavily framed photographs.
Forde prowled the house on his own, photographing the rooms hoping for some emanation of the spirit who’d written Uncle Vanya, who’d delighted in catching crayfish and picking mushrooms and wild berries, who’d loved a pet mongoose called Sod, which roamed the house at night extracting corks from bottles.
Each room was closed off to visitors by a furry rope across the open doorway. Taking pictures was difficult because of the ropes and because of the reflections off the glass framing the photographs on the walls. Forde leaned into the sitting room trying to take a photograph of a portrait of Chekhov, which stood on top of the piano. The glare of the glass was defeating him. He leaned in further over the rope. There was some sort of bustle and to-do in the hall behind him, shuffling, a sudden uprush of conversation, someone calling out. He glanced round and saw the museum guide rounding up stragglers and ushering people towards the front door.
“We must go now,” he called back, “and the door be locked.”
“Forde!” called Sheila.
“Coming!” he called back, his eye still at the viewfinder.
He turned to see Sheila alone in the hall. She was laughing.
The guide took Forde by the arm.
“Sorry,” said Forde.
“You must be quick!” said the guide.
Unhooked the furry rope, which blocked entrance to Chekhov’s study. Gestured Forde in.
“Get in front of the couch,” said Sheila unzipping her camera.
Forde stood just to one side of the Isaak Levitan painting of the Istra River.
“Hurry!” said the guide. “Hurry, hurry.”
The guide was shifting his agitated weight from foot to foot.
Took Forde’s arm again, snapped the furry rope into place, hurried them to the front door and out into the small forecourt where the bus people were milling about.
“Well!” Forde said to Sheila. “What in hell was that all about!”
“I told him you were also a writer and how much it would mean to you.”
“Good God!” said Forde.
“Very un-British, I know,” said Sheila.
“Oh, that was so kind of you, Sheila, really… And of him. I mean just to up and chuck everyone out.”
“And after I told him how much it would mean to you,” said Sheila, “I gave him a bribe.”
*
As they waited in a little crowd for the steward to show them to tables, Roger was patiently explaining to his wife and another couple that Bronze Age palaces were bureaucratic centres of economic redistribution, that clay tablets, both cuneiform and Cretan Linear B, were essentially bookkeeping, lists of stocks, of oil, wine, arrows, slaves, spokes of wagon wheels, shields, sheep…
“Roger….” said his wife
Forde watched the girls circulating with the wine bottles.
There was something about girls wearing ties.
Bronwyn was sitting in solitary and bedizened state at a table for two. Forde smiled at her and gave a mock bow as they walked past. Their waiter presented them with the evening’s menu.
Forde looked up from reading it to see Father Keogh approaching with The Minder. His hand and arm rested on The Minder’s arm as if he were a woman being escorted at some formal function. His face was rubicund and sweaty. As they passed Bronwyn’s table, he pulled free of The Minder and veered towards her almost with a lurch, seeming then to crouch over her tiny figure. Forde could see only his back.
Bronwyn’s voice rang out.
“How dare you! How dare you!”
Father Keogh straightened up and turned.
“The inhabitants of the earth,” he pronounced in prophetic condemnation, “have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication.”
“Sot!”
Her voice followed after him through the generally subsiding conversation and rising tension.
“Hibernian sot!”
His face puce with drink and fury, Father Keogh passed their table, grinding out to The Minder, to the air, “‘THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS.’”
He turned back and, arm outstretched, pointed at Bronwyn.
“‘AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.’”
“Oh, dear, oh, dear,” said Forde. “Revelation. Always a bad sign.”
*
Forde and Sheila climbed the Potemkin Steps towards the Primorskiy bulvar, described in the bulletin as Odessa’s most graceful boulevard. They were free until ten a.m., when they were to meet at the Archeological Museum for a guided tour of the city. The influences were mainly classical, the buildings three-storey and based on the idea of the interior courtyard, the boulevards themselves tree-shaded. The town, they agreed, was rather like a miniature Paris or Madrid. They strolled to the end of Primorskiy bulvar and then all the way back again, past the Steps, to the Vorontsov Palace. Classical in style, still beautiful, but shabby now and run down, some doors and windows nailed up with sheets of plywood, and sadly still called Palace of the Pioneers.
The Pioneers was a Party organization with compulsory membership to indoctrinate elementary school children in communist thought. Upon completing the curriculum of the Pioneers, the children moved into the organization for teenagers, the Komsomol, before graduating into the full-blown embrace of Soviet life.
“Oh, fortunate Prince Vorontsov,” said Forde, “that he died in—what was it?—185
4.”
Forde had had no great expectations of the Archeological Museum and was pleasantly surprised by the Black Sea Greek finds, some vessel-shapes he’d never seen before. He suddenly wished he had hours to spend. But the highlight turned out to be the Gold Room, coins and jewellery of Black Sea civilizations. And the highlight of all for Forde was a hoard of Scythian silver tetradrachmas.
There must have been about fifty of them spilling out of a broken pot of greyish ware. The heaping coins and the smashed pot were dramatically displayed on rumpled black velvet. The coins were slightly smaller than quarters, but thicker. They were displayed, for some odd reason, just above floor level. Forde knelt the better to see them.
He was gripped by the iconography, fascinated by the way the style had perfected itself. The images were various, Zeus with an upright sceptre, Poseidon, Pallas, a bull, a lone elephant, Nike, a caduceus, but more common than any other image a horseman with a spear.
“Sheila!” he called. “Come and see how alive these horses are.”
*
In the precinct of the Ilinsky Cathedral, Alan and Martin pounced on two stalls, rough tables draped with old bits of carpet, the one displaying icons, the other naval memorabilia of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, badges, medals, epaulettes, oddments of uniform.
They bought an icon each, the wood distressed and pitted with precision worm-holes, but were even more overjoyed by the Russian high-peaked officers’ caps, the badges worked in gold wire against an oval ground of white felt. They rummaged through the caps until they found snug fits and then fussed around each other tugging and tilting. Martin also bought epaulettes to sew onto his bomber jacket. They begged tour members to take their photos on the cathedral steps.
Alan saluted.
Flash
They mugged.
Flash
Linked arms.
Soyuz Sovetskikh, intoned Martin, Sotsialistichesskikh Respublik.
He turned his head to one side, and with a rigid forefinger at the cap’s rear edge, tipped it rakishly forward over one eye.
Flash
Forde feared that they might, in tandem, clack into slick dance steps.
*
Outside the Ilinsky Cathedral the lady guide brandished her purple umbrella and cried, “Towards the bus!”
Their destination was the Monument to the Unknown Sailor, a granite obelisk on the cliff edge overlooking Odessa’s harbour and wharves. They watched the performance of the Honour Guard. The three boys in the front row carried assault rifles held across their chests, the three girls behind them marched with their arms rigidly at their sides. They were all in ceremonial sailor uniform, white belts with gold buckles, gold lanyards, white gloves. The girls in blue serge skirts. They marched down the ceremonial approach past the flanking red polished granite gravestones of resistance fighters killed in World War II, and took up positions of respect at the monument’s cardinal points.
The guide said the ceremony was repeated every hour throughout the day, the cadets drawn in rotation from Odessa’s high schools. The goose-step marching was obviously inherited from the Russians. Forde was rather chilled by it, having seen it displayed by the Nazis, the Soviets, Il Duce’s Fascists, by the dementedly vigorous North Koreans, and by Hezbollah parading through Beirut. The very youth and attractiveness of the cadets added to his discomposure. Such marching, he thought, proclaimed the suppression of the individual and implied what Yeats had meant by “the blood-dimmed tide.”
They made halting conversation with the cadets, the girls in white knee socks and improbable, strapped high heels. Was this, Forde wondered, sanctioned formal attire in the Ukraine? Or were the girls naughty and illicitly changed into such shoes after leaving the house? The girls were so pretty in the morning sun but probably doomed, thought Forde in a sudden descent of gloom, to grow to great bulk and play the accordion.
People dawdled back towards the bus, reminding Forde of a herd of heifers on a country road.
Then the driver switched on the engine, the Baden Powell man shouting about having the radio turned off… eleven, twelve, thirteen… the Honour Guard marching stomp, stomp, stomp back up the avenue and an old man stood suddenly to photograph them through the window and dropped with a cry, felled into his seat by the overhead storage rack.
“And now,” cried the amplified guide lady, “away we go to the Lenin Monument!”
*
“I thought you liked churches.”
“I tire,” said Forde, “of the odour of sanctity.”
Sheila glanced at him.
“Watch it, Forde,” she said.
The church sat across the top end of the long rectangular park, which sloped downhill to the immense, black Lenin Monument brooding over the harbour. He sat on a bench waiting for her and enjoying the sun on his face. He watched a toddler gathering leaves and filling her push-chair with them, enjoyed the scent of late-blooming roses in the flower beds behind him. Sheila waving to him.
“Let’s see the Monument,” she said.
“I’m not going to look at bad Soviet art. It only encourages them,” said Forde. “And I particularly don’t want to look at a statue of that venomous bastard! You go. I’ll wait for you here.”
He watched her as she traipsed off to look at the statue and doubtless to read whatever plaques and notices were on offer. Her dedication to plaques and notices had mildly irritated him all their married life. He sometimes suspected that she preferred reading maps to looking at the landscape they represented. Similarly with attributions in art galleries. He, on the other hand, always wanted urgent, unmediated contact with things. If they appealed, he always told her, he’d find out more.
As she trudged back up the hill, he got up and advanced upon her with both arms out in front of him, his hands clenched into fists.
“What? What?”
He grinned at her.
She backed away from him.
“What is it?”
“Come here.”
“Is it alive? Is it something alive?”
“Fresh-firecoal chestnut falls.”
“What!”
“Look!”
He turned each fist over and opened his fingers.
Glowing on his palms.
“Conkers!”
*
Stained concrete. Shabby storefronts stuffed with shoddy goods side by side with stores selling international brand names. SONY, NIKON, PANASONIC, TOSHIBA. Abandoned lots strewn with rubble and refuse. Decaying buildings. Broken bottle-glass. Doorways reeking of piss. A used-up place, an old rind, all the juice squeezed out of it. And a miasma over all of a scarcely ousted bureaucracy.
Romania’s principal seaport, Constanza, depressed them. According to the daily bulletin, the city had been founded in the seventh century B.C. by Greek colonists from Miletus in Asia Minor. It had then been known as Tomis. In the first century B.C. the Romans annexed the region and in the fourth century A.D. Constantine the Great reconstructed Tomis and renamed it Constantiana.
Tapping the bulletin, Forde said, “Ovid was exiled here in 9 A.D.” He waved his arm in an encompassing gesture. “Look at it! Look at this bloody place. Ovid!”
They looked down onto the mosaic floor, which was protected from the weather by an open-sided, tin-roofed shed. The mosaic was dirty and the colours dull. Bits were missing, the patches filled with raw concrete.
“What’s it depicting?” said Forde.
“Well, flowers,” said Sheila. “And there’s a bird. Oh, and a wine jar. And isn’t that a Double Axe?”
“Yes, it’s a labrys all right but why? What was this place?”
She shrugged.
“It’s not gripping, is it?” said Forde.
Lunch was served in an echoing cafeteria. Forde ordered scrumbie la gratar which turned out to be a herring. Sheila was less happy
with mititei, which when they arrived, were small, skinless sausages. With coffee Forde drank a couple of shots of a drink called tuica that someone at their table had recommended. It was a potent plum brandy and it cheered him up. They were then shepherded onto buses for the hour’s drive to the ruins of Histria, Romania’s oldest city, also founded by colonists from Miletus in the seventh century B.C.
Forde watched the passing countryside. It was as sad and bleak as the city. His tuica-induced cheer ebbed. Single fields stretched seemingly for miles with no trees or hedges in sight. Tractors ploughed six abreast. He began to brood about the destruction wreaked upon these people. The farms and smallholdings must have been collectivized during the Soviet period after 1945. It saddened him to think of homesteads destroyed, families forced out, trees felled, footpaths ploughed up, hedges grubbed out, memories obliterated, history erased. Mile after mile of meaninglessness.
The two villages they passed through were in vibrant contrast to this agricultural Passchendaele. They were squalid, ramshackle, two- or three-room houses patched with corrugated tin, beaten-earth yards with hens, ducks, and geese pecking over the garbage, fly-twitched donkeys and ponies tethered to fruit trees. In the gardens, cabbages and beans and grapes. In some stood stooks of cut rushes drying for bedding.
Pony-drawn carts with motor-tire wheels bowled along, stacked perilously with reeds and rushes. The grimy men driving them and lying across the reeds to steady the loads looked villainous. Children in gardens waved at the bus. A woman in a drab brown apron stared from a kitchen doorway.
“It’s a bit Fiddler-on-the-Roofy, isn’t it?” said Sheila.
“But muckier,” said Forde.
The sky was darkening as they neared Histria, and by the time the buses bumped up onto the museum’s parking lot of broken brick mixed with asphalt the sky had become electric with gloom and tinged with yellow and unearthly green, the sort of sky that Forde always thought of as Old Testament sky.
Histria was set at the edge of a vast reed-fringed swamp. The museum was a glass box set on a raised, concrete platform. Mosquitoes whined. No rain had yet fallen. All was unnaturally still. On a tussock of reeds rising above the water some fifty yards out stood a large bird startlingly white in the weird light, a crane perhaps, or an ibis.