My Several Selves, Imaginary and Real 5 страница
When Maria Ivanovna brought back the corrected essays, I saw that mine was on the top of the pile, and my heart leapt with premonition. Could it be the best of the lot? Surely, it could not be the worst! My mother had thought a great deal of my poems and fairy-tales and proudly showed them to her friends and acquaintances . . .Maria Ivanovna read it aloud to the whole class from beginning to end, stressing the passages she thought were particularly well-written and taking an obvious pleasure in doing so. I did not know where to look or what to do with my face, imagining that everyone had guessed whose composition it was and was watching me to see how I would behave. I wondered if I looked stupidly pleased, and felt now hot, now cold all over, with a prickly sensation spreading from my head to the whole of my body. Most of all I wondered whether Anna Avdyéevna was looking at me and what she was thinking about my composition, but I dared not glance in her direction. Why was the emotion that possessed me so like shame? When my mother used to read my stories to her friends I listened through a chink in the door to their laughter and comment. I remember one of them saying: ‘Could she have copied all this from some book or other?’ and I ran off, weeping with helpless anger, humiliation and disgust. From that moment I saw that person as my enemy. What I wrote was so much a part of myself that I took the slightest criticism as an attack on my integrity. Praise, on the other hand, gave me a feeling of wonderful elation.
‘It’s the best composition by an eleven-year-old that I’ve read for years,’ said Maria Ivanovna. ‘In fact, it’s quite outstanding — command of language, imagination, feeling for nature, it has it all ... ’
I hardly heard what she said afterwards about other essays, waiting tensely for the moment when my own would be returned to me. My heart was thumping when I opened my book and saw the marks —twelve plus — and the word ‘excellent’ in red ink under the last line of my sprawling writing. Margóolina was peeping at it over my shoulder. ‘Ooh!’ she whispered. ‘You’re going to be her favourite!’
She had said exactly the same thing about Anna Avdyéevna. I threw a quick glance in her direction. Her chin tucked into her high collar, she was looking straight at me and smiling her most seductive smile. I felt myself blushing violently and promptly looked away.
When the break came, my classmates crowded round me, to see what marks I had been given for my essay. The little crowd parted when Anna Avdyéevna came up, too.
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‘Can I borrow your composition, Rayévskaia? I should like to read it myself.’
She read it during the next lesson instead of doing her embroidery, and I watched her surreptitiously, instead of attending to the lesson.
Her lips were creased slightly as if she could not make up her mind whether to smile or not, and when now and again she glanced up at me, her eyes seemed to be swimming in oil. Did she really like my composition or was she merely amused? The torments of hope and doubt I went through during that half-hour were a true foretaste of the joys and pains of authorship, more intense perhaps than anything I have felt since. It seemed wrong to write about myself; it was embarrassing and frightening to reveal myself to all and sundry, yet I could not help writing about what I thought and felt . . .
I need not have tormented myself. Anna Avdyéevna liked my composition. She asked me if I had written stories. Yes, I had. My sister had told her, she said, that I wrote poems as well. I admitted I had. Could she see them? I told her that I had left them at home.
‘Haven’t you written any since you came to the boarding school?’ I shook my head. She was silent for a moment.
‘I see,’ she said. ‘You’re missing the fields and woods you like so much. Well, they’ll still be there when you go home. You’ll recover your inspiration. You have talent. You have so much in front of you.’ Again I stayed awake longer than usual that evening. The words of my Russian teacher and of Anna Avdyéevna went on echoing in my mind. ‘The best composition I’ve read for years.’ ‘You have talent. You have so much in front of you’ — So much ... of what? Was I right then, when I thought of myself as a poet? My mother and sister said I was — but then, they were very fond of me. My father, on the other hand, had said: ‘Everyone writes poetry when they’re young’, while my brother teased me by getting hold of my poems and reciting them with mock solemnity. But now these grown-up women, who had no reason to flatter me, were saying ... It must be true! I could become like Pushkin, like Lermontov — poet and writer in one. Different though, because I was a girl . . . the first great woman writer and poet in Russia! The first . . . shall I become famous? Shall I recite my poems in a great hall from a dais garlanded with flowers? Will the people in the audience present me with bouquets? Will they all applaud and call out my name? This — if it happened — was worth living for . . .
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And — to forestall the future — some of it did happen. I did recite my poems from a dais in a great hall — in Petrograd, at the age of seventeen. Anna Ahmatova was one of the participants in that ‘Evening of Women Poets’ arranged by a professor at the Women’s University, who had married a cousin of mine. And the audience applauded me more than they applauded Ahmatova — probably because I was so young. And one man presented me with a bouquet of flowers. But the time was February 1917, a few days before the revolution. The audience was mostly women; there were many empty seats in the hall; and the youth who gave me flowers was my ill-fated admirer from childhood days, Shoora Martynov, who was so plain and eccentric that his attentions only embarrassed me. Such are the dreams that ‘come true’ . .
Christmas at Home
I awoke one morning, surprised at the brightness of the room, and noticed that the cornices of the house opposite were white with snow. By lunch-time it melted, leaving everything darker than before. It was the first December snow — December, the month of Christmas! I shall go home for the whole three weeks . . . and after that — perhaps — my mother would let me be a day pupil!
At home I had been vividly aware of the change of seasons: the first snow, the first rooks, the first snowdrops. . . Leaves whirling down from trees in the autumn — I watched them dance in the air. Birds, gathering on roofs and telegraph wires—I stopped to listen to their excited twittering before they set off for warmer skies. Streams swelling with rain, snow melting, may-bugs buzzing in the branches of birch trees, dragonflies over the water, the red moon rising from lilac bushes, sunsets and summer lightning —all the wealth of nature was mine. Now, spending so much time indoors, I hardly knew what was happening outside.
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On one dreary evening, after I had drawn a house and a boat, and was looking at them with disgust, wondering why I could not draw them better, I noticed Stassia threading tiny imitation pearls and sewing them on to a piece of red velvet. I asked her what she was making.
‘A present for my mother,’ she replied.
‘You give presents to your mother?’
This surprised me. In my family we never gave presents to our elders. It seemed so obvious that we could not because all the money we ever had was our parents’ money. The privilege of making presents was entirely theirs.
‘I give Christmas presents to all members of my family,’ said Stassia with a touch of pride in her voice.
‘But what do you give them? What is this you’re making?’
‘This will be —when I’ve finished it — a tiny velvet mule, to hang up on the wall by the bed. My mother will keep her watch in it during the night.’ I could picture to myself my mother’s pleasure on receiving something made by myself, but . . .
‘Do you give a present to your father as well?’ I asked, my imagination boggling at the thought.
‘Yes, I’ve told you — to everybody —my brothers and sisters, too.’
‘What — do you give your father?’
Stassia shrugged her shoulders.
‘Oh! . . . anything. He’s not particular. Last Christmas I gave him a blotting pad. I cut triangles out of a piece of blue leather and stuck them on the comers of a piece of thick cardboard, then I put a sheet of yellow blotting paper over it. It looked quite nice.’
‘And he uses it?’
‘Of course.’
This was something which took me quite a time to digest. The distance which my father’s reserved and taciturn personality had established between us from my earliest days made such intimacy appear to me impossible. My father accepting a present from me! He, who, as I knew, regarded celebration of name-days, birthdays and giving of presents as so much silly nonsense . . . And anyway, what could I give him? Unless of course I made him a blotter, as Stassia did for her father . . .
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Curious how this seed took root in my mind, germinated and finally grew into a determination to give Christmas presents to every member of my family — including my father! Now I was not quite so eager that the weeks separating me from Christmas would flash by: I wanted, I needed, time to prepare my gifts.
Stassia became my inspiration and adviser, while Zoya Dmitrevna, the sewing mistress, acted as a sympathetic provider of practical help.
This was comforting, for she was something of an anomaly in the highly conventional setting of our school: this slender, dark-haired woman, whose way of moving and wearing her clothes was more that of an opera singer than of a teacher of little girls. She was temperamental, unpredictable, liable to flare up if she felt a girl behaved as if her subject had no importance. But when I told her I wanted to make something for my sister and mother, she became quite enthusiastic. She cut out a comb case which she thought would do nicely for my sister and an oval mat which she was sure my mother ‘would adore’ to use on her dressing table. Then she designed simple cross-stitch patterns for me to embroider on these things during her sewing lessons. But what about the men of the family? I did not want to ape Stassia by making a blotter for my father, but I was very tempted to imitate her by making a mule to serve as a case for his watch. Such a present seemed fantastically unsuitable, but the idea fascinated me. I consulted Stassia. She did not seem at all surprised. Yes, of course she would help me to make it. She cut the mule out of cardboard, and I covered it with a piece of red velvet and stitched the decorations of pearl beads over it. There still remained a present for my brother. What could I make for him? A blotter? . . .
‘Must you make a present for him? Why not buy him something from a shop?’ suggested Stassia.
But how could I get him something from a shop? When we were taken for a walk through the town, we could not stop and look at shop windows, and in any case I had no money to buy anything. Fortunately, my uncle Fyodor came to see me a few weeks before the Christmas holidays, and when we were out together, I saw a pretty paperweight in a stationer’s window, a statuette of a chestnut horse rearing, with mane and tail flying out as if in the wind. I fell in love with it; my uncle bought it for me — and then I remembered how my brother’s technical drawings got blown all over the room when the window was open . . .
It was a difficult decision, for I hated parting with the little horse, but I consoled myself with the thought that I would still see it, rearing up on his desk. Thus the problem of my brother’s present was solved —at some cost to myself. Perhaps the sacrifice we least like to make does the most good to our character . . .
On the evening of December 17th old Dasha collected the clothes we took off before going to bed, made us identify our own in the special wardrobe where they were kept, then laid them beside our beds. On the morning of the eighteenth, having dressed, we could hardly refrain from eyeing one another, surprised at finding how different we all looked out of uniform. I stared at my own legs, unfamiliar in their black stockings, after having been concealed for months under the long school dress. I felt tense, restless, waiting for my mother to come for me some time before lunch. She was arriving by train from B* —but there had been a heavy fall of snow in the night, and Fatima was holding forth, telling us how last Christmas holidays trains had been delayed for hours by a snow storm. Tania’s mother was coming all the way from the country by horse sleigh, and by twelve o’clock Tania was in tears, convinced that she would not arrive until the next day, or even the day after. Tania’s distress made me feel alarmed and tearful, too.
Then, as the strain of waiting was growing almost unbearable, one of the senior girls put her head through the door and called us. Behind her stood Kondratiy, the junior porter, ready to take our cases down.
In our rush downstairs we nearly forgot to report our departure to the governess on duty, and when she told us we were expected back on January 8th, we just gasped out our thanks and raced on — to meet that eternity of bliss — three weeks at home!
In the reception hall two women were sitting on chairs with their backs to the light, but though my mother was wearing unfamiliar winter clothes and I could not see her face, I knew at once which of the two she was and I ran straight up to her, forgetting to say good-bye to Tania, not even turning my head to see what her mother was like. Nor was she less oblivious of me than I of her. I am sure her face, like mine, was buried in her mother’s bosom, tears streaming from her eyes. When I could see through my tears, I looked up at my mother’s face and laughed — because she was wearing a short, wide-meshed veil, and the brown birthmark above one of her eyebrows fitted neatly into one of the meshes. Her green-grey eyes were fixed on me with an expression of anxious scrutiny. How very much the same she seemed! How strange that she was here, looking so much the same!
‘Are you quite well?’ she asked. ‘You look pale. Have you had a bad cold or something?’
She had brought my own overcoat with my ermine bonnet and muff. I pressed them against my cheek before putting them on: they could have been friendly little animals with their soft white fur and tiny black tails.
‘This coat is almost too short for you,’ said my mother. ‘I only hope that your new party frock will fit. ’
I was having a new party frock! ‘What colour, Mamma?’
‘White, on a blue silk sheath . . . You wanted a blue one this time, didn’t you?’
I knew my mother preferred pink for me, but my sister thought pink rather vulgar, so I felt divided.
‘Yes, I had a pink one last year,’ I said.
A two-horse sleigh was waiting outside. We picked my brother up at his lodgings on the way to the station. He, too, was ready, waiting, in his uniform overcoat, light grey with shiny buttons, and a bashlyk loose over his back. My mother could not prevail on him to put it over his ears.
We had lunch at the station restaurant before boarding the train. My brother wolfed his food while I toyed with mine, and my mother sighed as she watched us both and commented on my brother’s looking pale and thin.
In the train my brother entertained her with stories of the jokes his schoolmates played on the German teacher, while I sat on the little table by the window watching the countryside. It was deep in snow and looked deserted except for the occasional heavy flight of a crow disturbed by the approaching train. Here and there the whiteness was broken by a group of trees, or a sudden view of brown log houses, always some distance from the railway. The air was still and the trees stood motionless, the tangle of their branches transparent against the pale sky tinged with green; the distant huts looked like mushrooms springing up from a field silvery with dew. When the train entered a forest of firs and pines, the movement of air it produced dislodged layers of snow from the broad, sloping branches. The snow slid off and fell silently, breaking into lumps some of which rolled down the slope towards the train and became snowballs before stopping at the bottom. I peered into the shadowy tunnels and caverns under the trees: there the snow was speckled and strewn with fallen pine and fir needles. In some places I noticed a string of small shallow footprints, and I thought with delight of the wild animal — a fox or a hare — which must have passed there.
Suddenly I began to recognize familiar landmarks: a windmill, its sails motionless against the darkening sky, a clump of ash trees, a stretch of wattle fencing, then a few lights . . .
‘Is this B*, Mamma? Is it?’
‘Yes, of course it’s B*,’ said my brother, a seasoned traveller between school and home.
‘Next stop B*! Next stop!’ called out a passing conductor.
My mother hurriedly looked round for small objects that might be left on the seats. My brother put on his peaked cap, adjusted it. ‘Mamma, look! Is it straight?’
Yes, it was B*. The dear little station, a yellow and white house with tall, low-set windows, clumps of lime trees at each end, paraffin lamps in glass lanterns on wide-spaced lamp posts . . . The platform was powdered with freshly fallen snow.
‘Vova, go and call the porter. Hurry!’
But my brother did not know how to hurry, and before he reached the end of the corridor, two or three porters had already erupted into it and were shouting their way along it. Our friend, Number One, was in the lead. He touched his cap to us, grinned, and in a few seconds had all our luggage in his hands, under his arms and hanging over his shoulder on a strap.
‘Your coachman’s here, bárynia,’ he told my mother.
Maxim! He was standing by the greys’ heads, wearing his blue padded coat, a fur cap and huge mitts. The greys were covered with blue nets, to prevent the snow thrown up by their hooves flying into our faces. He took off his cap when we appeared and, giving the greys an order which they appeared to understand, hurriedly came to hold back the bearskin cover of the seat.
‘Wish you good health — zdraveia zhelaiu, bárynia, báryshnia, panich!’(This curious mixture of Russian and Polish address was always used by servants in Bielorussia.) He answered my joyous greeting by the familiar military phrase — zdraveia zhelaiu — and as he fastened the cover round us, I could see by the glint in his eye and the expression on his face that he was pleased to see me almost as much as I was to see him.
The sky had turned violet, and the whiteness around us was tinged with lilac as we drove home. A silent voice inside me was singing in tune with the gentle music of the harness bells. Some of the houses we passed had their lights already on with their shutters still open, and I caught glimpses of Christmas trees and of tinsel decorations on the walls. We drove through the centre of the town; familiar shops flashed by; suddenly the great mass of the Catholic church loomed up above me. Beyond the railings of the church enclosure with its great birch trees I could see the front of our house, the porch, the row of windows, unlit, but dimly shining with the light of a lamp burning in one of the farther rooms. Maroossia, my sister, would be sitting in the zala, reading, or playing the piano. She used to dance the waltz round the zala with me in her arms when I was small . . . My heart now danced with the thought of embracing her.
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