Days in the Caucasus

by Banine

  ‘Yes, I do admire him. Men are like objects, made of either precious or lowly materials. I don’t think there’s any base metal in Andrey’s make-up: he is all nobility, lofty ideals and courage. When we fought side by side to take Kronstadt, his indifference to danger was inspiring and I took courage from it too. The lack of food, the cold, the pain, nothing disturbed his composure. He keeps a grip on his mind, as though it were a malleable object. It’s wonderful when you think he’s only twenty-five!’

  I was intoxicated by these eulogies.

  We were devastated by Gregory’s departure. The day before the separation we spent all afternoon on the rock and returned in the evening after dinner. When night fell, we were still there beneath the vast, star-studded sky, and I knew without seeing them in the darkness and the silence that Gulnar and Gregory were in one another’s arms. It was an easy transposition to see Andrey and me in their place, his black uniform blending into the night and my white dress looking like a great white bird perched on the rock. We would embrace until we had no strength left, after which nothing would matter any more.

  4

  We returned to the city on 1st September, when the weather was hotter than ever. Our departure was coloured by considerable sadness: we were all more or less certain that we had lost our estate for good.

  We had to find somewhere to live in the city as best we could. Our house had been permanently requisitioned, but Aunt Rena had managed to keep two rooms on the top floor, the rest of which was occupied by a military band, and took me in. We ate, got up and went to bed, all to the accompaniment of music produced by dozens of wind instruments, each playing as it saw fit. The result was a tremendous din, a circus cacophony that filled every moment and was impossible to escape. Only my blessedly deaf uncle could cope, much to the annoyance of my aunt. Highly strung at the best of times, Aunt Rena now became alarmingly so; everything was liable to irritate her, but her husband remained the scapegoat of choice. He exasperated her so much that she openly wished he had been arrested.

  ‘It’s too bad,’ she cried at the top of her voice to make herself heard. ‘Most wives can enjoy peace and quiet today with their husbands in prison. I’m the only one unlucky enough to have to put up with you. No,’ she would sigh loudly to make sure it was noticed, ‘I’ve never had any luck.’

  As for my uncle, he would shrug disdainfully, his hand still cupped behind his ear, and shout in the manner of deaf people, ‘You’ve never had any brains.’

  On the fallacious pretext that I was an orphan in need of protection, Aunt Rena made me sleep in her husband’s bed, while he was relegated to a small couch, which was too short for him, in the second room. In the morning we would find the poor man on his Procrustean bed, his feet dangling off the end, his mouth open and snoring with a near grandiose power; he could even drown out the discordant music of the musician soldiers. Faced with this graceless spectacle, Aunt Rena cried, ‘My poor girl, if I can give you one piece of advice, it is never to marry. A husband will annoy you during the day, bother you at night, demand everything and give nothing. That one hasn’t even managed to give me a child and God knows, he has worn me out with his demands.’

  I didn’t believe a word: Andrey Massarin would never annoy me; he would never snore, his mouth inelegantly open; he could only light up the life of the woman at his side. But I didn’t argue.

  Since her husband irritated her, Aunt Rena liked to irritate him back. She had found a simple but effective way of doing it: she would talk and not shout so that my poor uncle could not hear anything. He would strain to pick something up, desperately trying to read her lips, but all he could make out were fragments of words.

  ‘What did you say? What did you say?’ he would yell, infuriated. Then Aunt Rena would nod towards the door that separated us from the rooms where the soldiers lived and put a finger on her lips. My uncle would be left guessing, eaten away by thwarted curiosity.

  I loved Aunt Rena very much, perhaps because she had always been good to me. But I also loved her generosity, her grumpy kindness, her broadmindedness, her touching desire for culture, her dissatisfaction that kept her from the mindlessness into which inferior creatures easily sink. I even loved her tics, her sharp tongue, her malicious gossip, her passion for cards. Unable to sleep, we would often talk all night, lying side by side. My uncle would be snoring in the next room, the soldiers blowing into their instruments and the eternal winds of Baku, or Ba-de-Kuba,* replying in the chimney. Without the benefit of opportune deafness and both suffering from persistent insomnia, we would chat in the darkness, sometimes until dawn.

  We were filthier than pigs. There were problems with the city’s water supply during the intense heat of early autumn, problems that no one seemed able to fix. We bought drinking water from water vendors who walked the streets crying hoarsely in Russian and Azeri, ‘Water, water. Su, su.’

  Water was measured by the glass in this parched land, and there was no question of having a wash while the water supply and sewerage systems were out of action. We lived in filth and grime, waiting for them to be repaired; we were spared nothing, not even lice. I still remember my shudder of disgust when I found a particularly fine specimen in my comb for the first time. I shuddered at the sight of my first louse, but was indifferent to the sight of my hundredth.

  There was a stench too. The musician soldiers had put buckets in their rooms, which they rarely emptied, and even more rarely washed for lack of water. They gave off a powerful smell that pervaded the whole apartment—no, the whole house; right from the foot of the stairs you were caught up in this swirl of smells, rising, falling, permeating everything and mingling with the sound of the brass instruments. I remember this as a colourful time amid the smell, the music and the filth. Difficult though it was, I don’t resent it: it taught me resignation.

  Thank God, we did not suffer hunger. The Caucasus was a land of plenty where one could find practically everything. Generously blessed with natural resources, it continued to produce abundantly, and since chaos in the transport system made exports impossible, goods stayed where they were, creating a surfeit, while in many parts of Russia people were suffering from famine. Life was, therefore, much easier in the Caucasus than in the rest of Russia. So much easier that even vodka remained on sale, something forbidden elsewhere. There was no lack of hardy souls willing to go to Moscow to sell the precious liquid at a premium; they risked prison or worse, but if the trip were a success, they would come back rich.

  My sister Leyla had a servant, Catherine, who regularly made this heroic journey in trains so crowded that no one knew if, how or when they would reach their destination. The smugglers had a method of choice, which the providentially skeletal Catherine was ideally placed to make use of. Aluminium containers, mimicking the various curves of the body, were attached to the smuggler’s person and filled with vodka; surrounded by these liquid fortifications, they sallied forth to conquer the world. Being extremely thin, Catherine could carry several litres of vodka, which allowed her to make an outrageous profit. She brought this back to Leyla to spend on her son, whom the good woman had always loved fiercely and passionately, and for whom she was prepared to do anything.

  I had been in the city for a week, when prison visiting-day came round. The prison was a long way away, in the oil-producing district of Bibi Heybat at the gates to the city, which like all oil-producing districts was a bleak, smoke-filled place where neither trees nor grass grew. On a stiflingly hot afternoon, Leyla and I made our way there; Leyla carried a large saucepan full of a delicious mutton stew, while I was laden with packages. First we had to take the konka, a tram pulled by two wretched nags, the only means of transport in this city of millionaires. Sensitive souls got off the tram sick at heart; it was terribly sad to see those two undernourished horses, ribs about to break through their skin, drag the tram, which was always packed to the running boards. The driver beat them constantly, and it was only those ferocious blows that kept the poor creatures pulling their b
urden of scrap iron and humanity.

  The prison was several kilometres from the konka’s terminus. The road edged the sea, without any shade to protect it from the final heat of the year, which was putting in a last hurrah before disappearing until spring.

  On the other side of the road grey derricks rose awkwardly towards the sky. We had driven this road across Bibi Heybat hundreds of times by car, as we left the city and entered the countryside, barren desert like all the environs of Baku but at least lapped by the sea. As we walked that road now to go and see my father in prison, I pictured all those past excursions, and my heartache, amplified by the physical discomfort of the excessive heat, grew with every step. The only remedy I found was daydreaming. I could no longer hear Leyla complaining about her husband and the heat and the revolution; from time to time I made an indeterminate sound to give the impression I was listening, allowing me to dream in peace. Prince Andrey was in Baku; maybe at this very moment he was, like me, looking at the sea; chance might lead him along the same road as me; he was suffering from the heat, like me; it united us, just as my thoughts did.

  After an hour’s walk, we were at last in the prison courtyard, already full of visitors. We had to wait a long time. Accustomed to oriental resignation, we patiently baked beneath the ferocious sun, fighting a losing battle against the crowd of flies attracted by the smell of our provisions. When we had been waiting for an hour a soldier appeared, who began to call us in alphabetical order. I should remark in passing that it is unfair luck (as is all luck), and invaluable, to have a surname beginning with the first letter of the alphabet, as is mine. How much waiting time is cut short as a result! And I was first to put the stew and everything else into military hands. After this event, we were entitled to another wait in another courtyard, which was also full of visitors. This wait was a long one. Then a soldier came and led us to a third courtyard, divided in two by a grille, behind which I saw my father gripping the bars, my father dressed in prison rags, my father, his frame skeletal and his beard thick. He held out his thin brown hands through the bars. I covered them in kisses, sobbing, sick with pity for him.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ he said, ‘you can see I’m not so badly off.’

  I couldn’t reply because of my tears, but his words cut me to the quick. Thin, dirty and in prison, my father did not think he was badly off; to me this resignation held far more pathos than any complaint.

  A vivid memory has stayed with me from this period of painful prison visits, which shows how a seemingly trivial gesture can bring happiness and light up the darkness.

  One day I came back exhausted from a prison visit. It was freezing cold and snow, a rarity for Baku, covered the pavements where my poorly shod feet (even our personal effects had been confiscated) slipped in the slush.

  Once I got home, incapable even of speech or complaint, I fell onto my bed, hoping to sleep and forget the sadness of the prison, our precarious existence, our fall. But the cold of the poorly heated room stopped me sinking into dreams. I curled up on myself, a block of ice, shivering from exhaustion. And suddenly a miracle: a quilt fell onto me, bringing me warmth and release; it was heaven and I fell asleep. I will never forget the feeling of well-being descending from above that this compassionate gesture brought me. Dear Aunt Rena had understood my distress, physical and moral.

  * Ba-de-Kuba means ‘City of Winds’ in Persian.

  5

  Gulnar’s family were back from Turkestan. My cousin was overjoyed, not so much at their reunion but because their return allowed her to get married at last.

  ‘Virginity is weighing me down,’ she declared to me one day. ‘When I think that some women carry that burden all their lives! Look at Fräulein Anna.’ She plunged into theological considerations: ‘It’s ridiculous. If Allah gave us sex organs, it wasn’t to let them get dried up and covered in cobwebs—it was to use them. If I were the Creator, I’d be angry if people didn’t enjoy the pleasures I’d been good enough to give them.’

  Her father’s house had been requisitioned, like all the former oilmen’s grand, and not so grand, residences. The seven members of the family had to settle for lodgings in two small rooms in a modest house on the edge of the city. They immediately turned the tiny apartment into a chaos of clutter, a turbulent parliament. This madhouse was dominated by my uncle, whose aristocratic stature and hawkish demeanour did not reflect his nature at all.

  ‘Me, I couldn’t give a damn about breeding or refinement; what matters to me is money,’ he liked to say, rubbing thumb against forefinger.

  His family had always been uncouth, given to untidiness and fisticuffs, but this had been less evident when they were spread out in a large, well-appointed house full of servants. Now in a confined space, deprived of domestic staff and decorum, the family showed itself in all its primitive splendour. The father and mother quarrelled all day long; the five children quarrelled with their mother and with one another. The shouting, slapping and swearing only came to an end at night when it was replaced by the snoring of half the family. Once, I had to spend the night with them and couldn’t sleep. That said, it didn’t take much to give me insomnia.

  Gulnar’s fiancé Selim came every day. Uncommonly shy, he felt that to sit in her presence was too bold for him, and he consented to do so only after numerous invitations. He would perch on the edge of a chair in the corner and observe with gentle admiration the actions, words and gestures of his terrible in-laws, whom he considered remarkable, lovable and distinguished in every respect. For Gulnar he felt only humble adoration. He hung on her every word, devoured her with his gaze and ascribed to her qualities she did not possess.

  Although he looked like my uncle, he was his opposite in character; that is to say, his appearance was off-putting, coarse, almost brutal, while his soul was the most delicate imaginable. He wept when he heard of another’s misfortunes, paled at the sight of blood and rushed to everybody’s aid. Should someone in his presence allude to financial difficulties, he would immediately offer assistance. The four brothers were aware of this trait and the two older ones in particular did not hesitate to empty his wallet on various pretexts. This did not last long, however; nobody’s fool, despite her young age, Gulnar took control of her fiancé’s finances, protecting them from the depredations of her own family. Attacks on his wallet were not the only kind Selim had to put up with: he also faced assaults of a far more unusual nature. I have already said that pederasty flourished in Islamic society in Baku; many men were ‘one of them’, to use the expression of Baron de Charlus, though that didn’t mean they despised women. Put simply, they could be said to be bisexual. Gulnar’s twin brothers Asad and Ali, who were one year younger than her and very beautiful, knew how to make use of this to sweeten their material existence. So when they saw Selim’s sudden reluctance to lend them money, they did not hesitate to use all their charms to seduce him—once Gulnar’s back was turned, that is. But the trick did not escape the perceptive fiancée and she went to complain to her parents, spitting venom. I had the extraordinary luck to arrive right in the middle of the drama, finding Asad and Ali both slumped on chairs, flushed and dishevelled, their collars and ties torn. Uncle Suleyman went from one to the other, slapping them, shaking them by the shoulder and heaping abuse on them. The guilty parties eventually began to cry hot tears; the mother sobbed in compassion, and the two younger brothers followed suit. Gulnar observed the scene coldly, clearly satisfied with the result.

  ‘Everyone does wrong in their youth,’ Uncle Suleyman shouted hoarsely, ‘but trying to seduce Selim, your sister’s fiancé…’

  ‘Yes, my fiancé,’ Gulnar chipped in.

  ‘And what for?’ Uncle Suleyman continued. ‘To cadge money off him?’

  ‘Yes, to cadge money off him, my fiancé. No one’s rolling in money any more after all that’s happened.’

  Another slap, a barrage of sobs in reply. Gulnar persisted: ‘And the two of them were seducing him! The two of them together! That’s how they do everythi
ng, hand in hand. I wonder what they would have done to him, poor Selim, whom even a little child could abuse.’

  This time she was the one to receive a slap.

  ‘Shut up, you little snake! A bit more decency wouldn’t hurt you,’ yelled Uncle Suleyman. ‘You shouldn’t know about such things at your age.’

  Gulnar angrily shrugged her shoulders, but kept quiet. A flash of contentment lit up Asad and Ali’s mournful eyes, but it was fleeting, as a fresh round of slaps rained down on them, leaving them gasping for breath. Between sobs they cast looks of hatred that seemed to say, ‘Just you wait. You’ll see.’ But nothing frightened Gulnar, and nothing got in her way either. She wore down her parents with her brazen insistence she get married as soon as possible, and they agreed to celebrate her wedding one month after the family’s return from Turkestan. ‘Celebrate’ is too strong a word: the hard times ruled out any festivities and a richer pilaff than usual for the relatives was all that followed the Islamic marriage contract, instituted under Shariat.*

  This contract is simplicity itself: in the presence of the husband, the woman’s father or guardian and the witnesses, the mullah draws up a legal document under which Mr X marries Miss Y and undertakes to pay her a dower if he should disown her. And that’s it: the marriage has been contracted. Gulnar acquired the right to lead Selim by the scruff of the neck to their new home, three minuscule rooms that constituted one floor of a minuscule house in old Baku.

  Once there, she instituted an authoritarian regime that brooked not even the faintest opposition. Selim never questioned her decrees and agreed in advance to all her whims, without even knowing what they were. Gulnar was delighted: with her house, with Selim, with the act of love. No, she had definitely not been sold a dud.

  ‘That’s the kind you want to choose—tender, weak, in love…’ She talked about husbands as though they were chickens for sale at the market, ‘Oh,’ she continued, rolling her eyes, ‘if only you knew how good it is to make love. All that fuss is no exaggeration. But it’s much more tiring than I expected. I hope you’ll get to do it soon too. How’s it going with Jamil?’