Days in the Caucasus

by Banine

  That was easier said than done.

  3

  One day Maria Nikolayevna (the schoolmistress) came to find Gulnar and me.

  ‘My dear girls,’ she said solemnly, ‘I think your minds and, better still, your hearts are open to our cause. Would you like to prove it to me now through actions rather than words?’

  ‘Yes, we would, very much.’

  ‘Good, we are setting up commissions to compile inventories of all the villas in the neighbourhood. It’s an easy job, but rather tedious. It requires pencil, paper and patience, as you have to write down everything that you find in the houses. Would you like to help?’

  This was a delicate matter. It was all very well playing at being communists behind our own four walls, but it was more serious to go out with the commission and write inventories of the villas of people who all knew us. Maria Nikolayevna talked to us at length. She understood our hesitation, our fear of offending the family and the family’s friends; on the one hand, she praised our sensitivity, but on the other she encouraged us to overcome it. ‘Nothing in life is easy,’ she declared. ‘Everything requires determination and resolve.’ If we really wanted to liberate ourselves, we had to start somewhere.

  Gulnar and I discussed it at length. In the event, it was me who decided we would agree. Gulnar was enthusiastic where flirtation was concerned, but more circumspect than me when it came to anything else. Fräulein Anna and my aunt tried in vain to dissuade us, pointing out how awkward it would be and how shocking it was for us to belong to a movement that ‘even if by some miracle it should prove to be excellent’ was nonetheless responsible for the imprisonment of my father, Leyla’s husband and other members of our family. But all the arguments, all Grandmother’s outrage and scathing insults were water off a duck’s back: we were carried away by revolutionary enthusiasm. With Lenin’s portrait pinned prominently to our dresses, we sallied forth, pen and paper in hand, to conquer our destiny, which we already saw as intimately bound up with communism.

  Maria Nikolayevna, Gulnar and I, with a tall, shy young man as our leader, did not make up a very imposing Inventory Commission. I’m not even sure that we would have completed our task without Maria Nikolayevna, who spurred us on with all her zeal.

  Sergey, the shy young man, took a piece of paper out of his pocket. ‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘We’re to begin with your neighbour, Mustafayev.’

  ‘Oh no, not him!’ Gulnar and I cried in unison.

  ‘Very well’—he read the second name on his list—‘then we’ll go to the next one, Mukhtarov.’

  ‘Oh no, that’s even worse: he’s got a very bad temper and is really unpleasant.’

  ‘Well, what are we to do? The next one is someone called Akbarov.’

  ‘My God, he’s worse still. He’s known us since we were babies and won’t hesitate to throw us out.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ Maria Nikolayevna said. ‘We’re not talking about a pleasure trip but a duty. We will begin as is right and proper with the first name on the list.’

  Gulnar and I gazed at her, appalled. The first person on the list, Mustafayev, was a harmless, doddery old man, but his wife was a distant cousin of Grandmother’s, a redoubtable woman who might have a nasty surprise in store for us. We tried in vain to dissuade Maria Nikolayevna, but she remained adamant.

  ‘We must do our duty,’ she repeated without listening to us, ‘and not look to enjoy ourselves. One must be able to take responsibility for one’s actions.’

  We felt only a hint of pride when Maria Nikolayevna rang the Mustafayevs’ bell with an eloquent energy. At that moment historical materialism seemed more agreeable in books than in practice. A gardener who knew Gulnar and me opened the gate and, thinking of course that we had come to pay a visit, greeted us with much bowing and scraping, full of respect and cordiality.

  ‘Balaja Khanim will be glad to see you. She is sad. It looks as though those Russian pigs are going to take her house, a plague on the lot of them and the sooner the better! I think these must be your friends! So they only speak their pig language’—he winked at us—‘and don’t understand what I’m saying. Ay Allah, ay Allah, what hard times! What is the world coming to?’

  With every step we took towards the house, the little confidence we had melted away. Balaja Khanim had a near legendary reputation: she chased her daughters with a broom, beat her husband, threw jars of jam at passers-by whom she didn’t like the look of; she was said to carry a revolver in the folds of her skirt, not because she intended to use it but because she enjoyed being like a man. Wagging tongues said her husband was senile largely because she treated him so badly (which shows that even in Muslim countries wives torture their husbands). When her daughters really annoyed her, Balaja Khanim would lock them in their room, sometimes for as long as a month. And we were going to compile an inventory of this woman’s house…

  My overactive imagination pictured the reception Balaja Khanim would give us when she learnt the reason for our visit: she would shower us with insults, throw various objects at our heads, spit in our faces (why not?), get out her famous revolver and threaten us at the very least (but you never knew—she might even fire it, if not to kill us, then to lodge some bullets in the ceiling, something she had done before).

  My legs had turned to jelly and I had forgotten all my Marxist enthusiasm by the time I saw Balaja Khanim before me, veiling her face because of our companion and fixing us with her baleful, eagle eye.

  ‘May Allah keep you! I am glad to see the granddaughters of Musselma Khanim in my home. What brings you here? And who are these people with you?’ she asked in Azeri. Like all the women of her generation, she did not speak Russian.

  ‘These people… These people…’ I stammered desperately. ‘We… I mean they… I mean,’ and suddenly I had a flash of inspiration: ‘These people are living in our house. They are dreadful; they make us follow them everywhere to help them. They want to count all the objects that are in your house. We wanted to refuse, of course, but they threatened to throw us in prison. So please forgive us, Balaja Khanim, we have to do what they tell us.’

  Maria Nikolayevna and Sergey listened to my speech without understanding a word. They realized I had to explain the situation to Balaja Khanim and waited patiently.

  ‘May cholera eat away their bowels! May Allah punish them to the fourth generation! May he turn them into a public urinal! May he make all their teeth fall out! May he impale them on hot iron! May they be sodomized by donkeys! May their tongues dry up in their mouths! May Allah increase their misfortunes and prolong their lives!’

  ‘Is she cross with us?’ Maria Nikolayevna asked.

  ‘Yes, a little,’ I replied tactfully. ‘But it will pass. It’s bound to.’

  ‘Then let’s make a start anyway! I’ll stay in this room with you. Gulnar and Sergey can make an inventory of the next room.’

  She sat down calmly at the table and began to count the furniture and write it down, without paying the slightest attention to Balaja Khanim, who was becoming ever more virulent in her choice of insults.

  ‘And what have you got pinned on there?’ she asked me suddenly, interrupting her flow and pointing at Lenin’s portrait. ‘A picture of a man? Have you no shame? Not only do these hussies flaunt themselves in public without a veil, they stick men on their chests! Who is it?’

  ‘It’s their leader. They forced me to wear this portrait. What can I do?’

  I sighed.

  ‘Dogs, pigs, jackals!’

  She went into the next room, where it was Sergey’s turn to endure a flood of insults; had he understood half of them, he would have died of embarrassment. Then we could hear them no more; it was prayer time.

  Our work was long and tedious; we had to include everything in the house in the inventory—from spoons to carpets, taking in bed linen and saucepans along the way. Maria Nikolayevna gave herself gladly to the task in hand, no doubt believing that with each scratch of her pen the revolution gained in vigour. The
presence of the blonde Sergey was compensation for Gulnar, as he was starting to grow on her. As for me, I was just longing for the job to end, as it was deadly boring. On top of that, though my lie had been ingenious, I was sick with anxiety at the thought of being found out and Balaja Khanim descending on me with her unused stock of jibes and insults. I was in a hurry to see the back of my Marxist apprenticeship.

  That evening we were worn out, but had to face the censure of three women: Grandmother, my aunt and Fräulein Anna, who sat in a circle around us and upbraided us severely. We were insolent in our replies, claiming total independence and taking the opportunity to spread communist propaganda.

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘Here is a family of five people that has thirty-four saucepans, two dozen sets of cutlery, two hundred and thirty plates and so on, and keeps all these while some workers’ families have nothing at all. No, no, a thousand times no. You’re all heartless, the lot of you…’

  ‘The fires of hell are waiting for you, ass heads, hussies,’ shouted Grandmother. ‘While your relatives are rotting in prison, you go off and have fun with those people…’

  ‘We are not having fun with them, we are making our modest contribution to the emancipation of suffering humanity,’ Gulnar declared sententiously.

  ‘Stupid idiot’—this was Gulnar’s mother now—‘if your father were here, he would give you a good beating, then you’d lose some of your airs and graces and forget about “emancipating suffering humanity”. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have given myself the trouble of bringing you into this world. That’s all the thanks I get.’

  ‘I didn’t ask you to,’ Gulnar screeched. ‘If you gave birth to me, it’s because you wanted to, you and your husband.’

  The dispute carried on in this vain for another hour. Afterwards, we still had the strength to go and cry in Gregory’s arms. He explained that nothing could be achieved in life without opposition. ‘One has to suffer to become communist,’ he concluded with a smile.

  We worked hard for the revolutionary cause, compiling inventories of some twenty villas to the growing outrage of our relatives and their friends. The family used our age as a weak excuse for our shameful behaviour, but in a country where a girl is a mother at fourteen this pretext wasn’t very convincing. Marxism had us in its thrall; Gulnar less than me, as she only wanted to please the revolutionaries staying with us, while my faith was sincere. Only my father’s imprisonment stopped me from expressing absolute enthusiasm. Aunt Rena and Leyla were going to great lengths in Baku to get him released; they haunted the anterooms of various people’s commissars and used all their connections; they got in touch with the workers in our former oilfields to beg them to sign petitions for his release. So far all these efforts had been in vain and my father remained in prison, where life was at least bearable. He had work as a mechanic in a workshop, which came as a great relief to him as he had always enjoyed working with his hands. But it was dangerous to be in prison at such a time. Not that Baku had the terrorism that was rampant in Russia after the resistance of the Whites: things seemed to have passed off without tragedy; none of our relatives or friends had been shot. If the worst of my father’s problems were a few months in prison, that would not be too bad. Many people were now being released, and this gave us hope that he too would soon be freed. That said, he was more important than some and might stay in prison a long time. He sometimes wrote us letters full of the oriental fatalism that helped him bear his situation, which, he said, was dependent on the will of Allah; he did not mope and complain, but let destiny take its course. When I felt the stirrings of conscience and remorse about him, I responded that I was not to blame for having been born into a family of plutocrats; I did not have to hate communism, to which I felt attracted heart and soul, because my father was in prison. Gregory fanned my flames daily.

  The three of us held our conferences on the rock every day now. When the heat had eased a little towards evening, around six, we would make our separate ways there so as not to attract attention. Gulnar and Gregory would lie next to one another on the top of the rock, while I settled lower down on the sloping part, and we would talk. Gregory would often stop talking, and I knew that he was caressing Gulnar. I would close my eyes and keep quiet until he started talking again. By now we knew all about his life: we knew his joys and his sorrows and the people who were important to him. We shared his enthusiasms and his friends, too. We were impatient to meet one of them, whom the party was to send to Baku and who had promised to come and see Gregory in the country. What Gregory said to us about him was just right to excite a young imagination: he talked of his heroism, his intelligence, his rectitude.

  ‘He’s the most rounded person I know—a man of steel but poetic too at times. A precise thinker yet also a dreamer. An intellectual and a man of action. He can be tender and he can be cruel; he can be everything! He is a man of many contradictions!’

  A military man, he was a member of a revolutionary committee and it was on committee business that he was to come to Baku. Gregory spoke so warmly about him that I began to dream of Andrey Massarin as though I already knew him. Since the age of ten I had been tormented by the need to love to the extent that it had become endemic. What mattered to me was not so much the object of my love: it was the love itself that I had to find an object for at any cost. Since I was accustomed to collective love affairs with my sisters, their departure had left me floundering, incapable of choosing a man for myself. Gregory’s descriptions came at the right time to feed my dreams. I wanted to love Andrey Massarin and wanted to be loved by him; it did not cross my mind that it was absurd to desire a stranger in this way. I looked forward to the arrival of this foreigner, as though he were my fiancé.

  That day Gulnar and I went to the rock earlier than usual. Gulnar felt bitter about Gregory’s impending departure and complained to me about him for half an hour. She would have liked to love him completely; she found their caresses unsatisfying, fragmentary and irritating in the extreme. She set out the situation with her customary cynicism.

  ‘I cannot become his mistress since I’m not married yet; Selim has the right to my virginity. Gregory should stay here until I get married; then I could be entirely his. I want him so much. Oh, it’s all so stupid!’

  In her annoyance she was tearing out the moss that covered parts of the rock, without really noticing. She caught her finger, making it bleed, and began to swear. Then she suddenly stopped.

  ‘Gregory’s coming, but he’s not on his own.’

  I got up, keen to see, and with a hunch who it was. Gregory was walking towards us, his feet scrunching as they sank into the sand; he wove his way between the vines and fig trees, followed by someone with a decisive step. ‘It’s Andrey Massarin. It’s Andrey Massarin,’ I said to myself in delight.

  ‘I’m bringing Andrey Massarin to meet you,’ Gregory called from a distance, and immediately my throat dried up and my hands began to shake.

  It wasn’t revolutionary committee member Andrey Massarin, but Prince Bolkonsky, hero of War and Peace, who was walking towards me; his death had always seemed too inconceivable for me to be truly convinced of it. There he was before me, revived, with his disdainful bearing, his pensive face, his intense, serious expression; in a word, the way I had always known him.

  He sat down on the rock between Gulnar and me; slim and not very tall, he wore a snug-fitting black uniform that made him look heroic and sad at the same time.

  ‘My black knight, have you really come for me?’ my soul asked. I couldn’t speak, and I couldn’t take my eyes off Andrey either, who didn’t seem to have noticed and was chatting easily to Gulnar and Gregory.

  Then he said, ‘What strange countryside you’ve got! It’s quite a surprise to someone who’s just come from Russia. I’ve never seen such luxuriant vines, such a blue sea, so much sand. And if I’m right, this rock is your island?’

  He wasn’t smiling and seemed to be elsewhere.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied abruptly, though th
e question had not been addressed to me. ‘It’s our island—it’s our kingdom and we are its princesses. And you, you are Prince Andrey, Prince Andrey Bolkonsky.’

  Andrey Massarin paid attention to me for the first time.

  ‘Don’t take any notice of my cousin,’ Gulnar said. ‘She’s always talking nonsense.’

  Laughing, Gregory said, ‘I think that’s one too many titles for someone who wants to be a communist.’

  My prince still wasn’t smiling. ‘Do you think you’re Natasha?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I cried passionately. ‘I would never have betrayed you.’

  I immediately flushed scarlet. Gulnar and Gregory burst out laughing. The blush would not go and I wanted to die of shame. Then Andrey smiled—a smile that was as tender as it was unexpected. He bent towards me, took my hand and kissed it twice, gently. Then he turned back to Gregory and they started talking politics.

  He stayed only a few hours in the country. The car that had brought him took him away towards evening and I was left alone with his image in my mind. ‘Oh, God, make me die if I cannot see him again!’ I repeated this prayer all day long; he had only just appeared miraculously—was I to lose him so soon? The chance of seeing him again was minimal. Where? How? When Gregory had gone, the only possible connection between us would disappear too. I loved him regardless; I wanted to love; I gave in to my love with all the enthusiasm of my being, without a thought for the morrow. I blessed the goodness of the heavens for leaving me in the Caucasus. My only interest in geography now was in the place where Andrey was; I would have preferred a village lost in the frozen forests of Siberia to Paris, if Andrey were there.

  I became devilishly skilful at directing the conversation, so that Gregory was bound to talk to me about his friend. He was happy to do so, as what he felt for Andrey was more than friendship—it was admiration. One day I said as much and Gregory agreed.