My Several Selves, Imaginary and Real 2 страница
What will she decide about Ania? What will she do? I knew that the others in their beds were, like myself, wondering and waiting for her arrival in a state of barely tolerable suspense.
She came at last, walking faster than usual, with a rustle of her silk skirts, and went straight to Ania, still huddled on the floor by her bed. In the hushed silence of the dormitory we heard her soft, precise voice saying in tones of unusual urgency:
‘Dooshechka, you must not sit on the floor —you will catch a chill. Please get up and get into your bed at once.’
Ania’s voice, several notes deeper than Nachálnitsa’s and muffled by the bedclothes, came in reply: ‘I don’t want to. I want to catch a chill!’
‘Doóshechka, be reasonable! You must get into bed. I don’t think you can be well. I shall have to write to your parents about this!’
Ania emitted a long, loud wail. The headmistress made a sign to Dasha, who was standing by, and now made another attempt to raise Ania on to her bed. This time, inexplicably, Ania allowed herself to be lifted and lay on the bed, face downwards. The headmistress watched Dasha undress her, and as soon as Ania was inside the bedclothes, she turned and walked out, accompanied by Fräulein Schmiedel and the matron.
For the first time since I became a boarder I was diverted from the contemplation of my own misery by thoughts about the predicament of another. My feelings about Ania were confused. I marvelled at her pluck in defying the authority of the adults on whose goodwill she had to depend. Yet I found her so plain and pitiful in her defiance that my admiration for her courage was mingled with revulsion. I could not imagine myself doing the sort of thing Ania seemed to be doing so readily: putting her tongue out at the other girls, saying ‘I won’t’ to Nachálnitsa, sitting on the floor when told to go to bed. She behaved like a big baby, really, and if I had been subjected to the same treatment, I would have felt deeply humiliated. But did it mean that she was brave and I — a coward? Why did she not care what anybody thought of her? With these questions in my mind I fell asleep for the first time without the tears of homesickness burning my eyes.
At a quarter past seven the clamour of the morning bell crashed into my dreams, and my first thought on waking was of Ania. Across the room, she seemed to be still fast asleep, the tufts of her ginger hair showing between the pillow and the bedclothes she had drawn over her face. When I returned from the washing-room, she was awake, and the matron was standing over her, thermometer in hand. One of the older girls, detailed to plait my hair, called me at that moment, and then the rush to get dressed in time for prayers, breakfast and the beginning of lessons diverted my thoughts from Ania’s predicament until lunch time.
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She was not there at lunch and someone whispered that she had been taken to the lazaryet, the school sickbay in a separate house, which stood between the main building and the garden. That evening her bed was empty, and a few days later we were told that her mother had come and taken her away.
Was her mother asked to take her away? With a triumphant snigger, Fatima hinted as much, but I was fast learning to mistrust Fatima. All the same, what happened to Ania was an object lesson to me. I understood that she had been judged ‘unsuitable’ as a boarder, and a thought, blinding and alarming like lightning, flashed through the gloom of my depression. Was this a way out for me? But, like lightning, it was gone in a second, leaving me more depressed than ever. I knew that I could not put up that kind of show and go through with it. If Ania was brave, then I was a coward; if she felt no shame, then I had the capacity of feeling ashamed enough for both of us. The school was indeed a prison, but I had to look for another, more dignified way of escape.
Coming to Terms
A naturalist once described a lion cut which tried to push its head through the iron bars of a cage so persistently that its nose bled, yet it went on trying for the rest of the night. A young child under constraint will struggle hard against the much greater strength of an adult. The struggle ends in exhaustion; for a time, the cub or the child gives it up. Then comes the renewal of strength and hope, and the struggle to get free begins anew — until despair sets in.
The letters I wrote to my mother during my first two or three months at the school were just such hopeless rushes at the bars of the cage, desperate calls for rescue. Some of those she kept ended in a threat of suicide: if she did not take me away, I would throw myself out of the window and kill myself.
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My imagination pictured her sitting in a circle of light, in a familiar room, reading my letter. I saw the birthmark on her cheek, her lips slightly pursed in concentration, her ash-blonde hair softly shining in the lamplight. The longing that filled my heart was bitter and the tears that sprang to my eyes were tears of outrage as well as of grief. She could not miss me as much as I missed her, otherwise how could she remain unmoved by my pleading? Or did she not believe that I would do what I threatened to do?
Did I myself believe it? As I gazed down into the school yard, its cobbles faintly blue and glistening in the rain, I could almost feel their hard, wet impact on my forehead, could almost see the ground rushing to meet me as I hurled myself out of the window into its terrifying embrace. The window panes at the back of the school were not painted over, but the eye, seeking escape from the confining walls, was not cheered by what it saw outside. A large section of the yard was filled with stacks of birchwood billets, cut and ready for use as fuel in the many class-room stoves. Beyond these was the fence separating the yard from the school garden, a sad garden with unfriendly, unclimbable trees, whose only function seemed to be keeping out the sunlight. On the right, the school extended its pale stuccoed walls with their rows of tall windows. On the left there was a shorter wing containing kitchen and store-rooms; a length of a brick wall with a door, always locked, leading into a side street, and a separate house with the sauna baths on the ground floor and the sickbay on the first. Nowhere was there a look-out on to a wider world, an open space, comforting to the eye. All one could hope to see if one stood watching for half an hour would be one of the maids passing between the kitchen and the sickbay, or the porter Kondratiy carrying a basketful of firewood. With a sinking feeling at the pit of my stomach, I wondered how long I might be lying there, with my head split open in a pool of blood, before anyone discovered that I had done this fascinatingly daring thing — ‘committed suicide’. The very words seemed to pierce me with a sensation of triumph and pain.
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But a closer look at the school windows should have convinced me that I had better wait until the Christmas holidays for an opportunity of throwing myself under a train. It was autumn, and the heavy casements were firmly shut and bolted: it would have taken me several minutes to unfasten one of them, and I would have been seen, for certain, before I had time to carry out my plan. Besides, each letter I wrote home was like Noah’s white dove, which might return with a message of liberation. Then my mother’s reply came, and, like my own letters to her, became stained with tears, for each was a confirmation of my growing realization that she did not really intend to rescue me.
She usually gave me the news of the household which she knew would interest me: the news of my favourite horses and my cat, and of the friends who had been enquiring after me or had asked to be remembered. This was, as a rule, followed by the admonition not to fret, to remember that she always prayed for me, and by the reminder that Christmas was not really far away and that Maxim, the coachman, was already looking out for a tall, thick fir tree to cut down at the proper time. The images of loved and familiar things thus evoked made the thought of suicide painfully irrelevant: if I killed myself I could never go home again, never see or do all that her letter promised. Yet I still shed tears over it — to me Christmas still seemed aeons of time away.
The school felt like a prison to me, but our letters were not censored. We sealed and stamped them ourselves and took them down to the entrance hall where they were collected and posted by one of the porters. I should have been outraged if it had been otherwise, for I had been taught to regard reading other people’s letters as something shabby, on a par with eavesdropping or peeping through key-holes. I remember feeling ashamed if, by accident, I happened to read a few words on a postcard addressed to someone else. And so I was shattered when one afternoon Fräulein Schmiedel held up a postcard, one of a bunch deposited by the porter Kondratiy on her table for distribution, and called out loudly: ‘This is for you, Rayévskaia! Signed “your devoted Edward”. You’re starting early — receiving letters from young men!’
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She had looked at the signature! She may have even read what was on the card!
‘He . . . she ... is really a girl . . . ’ I stammered, reeling inwardly under the blow.
‘A girl? Why does she call herself “Edward” then?’
‘It’s . . . it’s a game we used to have.’
‘What game?’
Did she really expect me to explain? I saw a grin on Fatima’s face, and I felt angry with her, with Fräulein Schmiedel for this brutal incursion into the intimacy of my past life, with the writer of the postcard for the embarrassment she was causing me, and with myself — for leaving her my address and for the ungenerous feeling towards her which now possessed me.
‘The game was pretending to be characters from books,’ I said at last.
‘This is illiterate writing. Whoever Edward is, he — or she — cannot spell,’ said the governess.
This was the end of the incident as far as she was concerned. But to me it brought a wave of nostalgia for the play companions I had left behind and whom I did not particularly value when I had them.
Until my brother left home to go to school at M* when I was eight and a half, he and his friends had been my constant playmates. There were no girls at hand. After my brother’s departure, I was thrown upon my own resources to a very large extent, and I made good use of them: inventing my own games, composing poems and stories, making excursions into the neighbouring fields and meadows. Then a family came to live opposite us in town and I became friendly with the children, two girls and a boy.
One of the girls, whom I liked best of the three, was younger than I, and she accepted my leadership. So did two Jewish girls of poor families, who attached themselves to me during one of my solitary walks and whom 1 afterwards brought into the house. Hanka, who had signed herself ‘your devoted Edward’, was one of them. During the summer when we lived on our country estate, two peasant girls from the village, called Mashka and Varka, became my play companions. In all these friendships I was the dominant partner, the giver rather than the recipient of favours, so it was a new experience for me suddenly to become a member of two large groups — the boarders and the day girls — and to be wooed by Margóolina, a little Jewish girl with whom I shared a double desk in my class.
Of the two groups I preferred the day girls who were all friendly, or at least looked so. There were forty of them and it took me some time to sort them out. The four of us, boarders, were distributed over the class-room, conspicuous among the dark brown and black of the day girls’ uniforms —brown serge frocks and black alpaca pinafores. We were distinguished from them by our white lawn capes and sleeves, attached by tapes to the short sleeves of our brown dresses, and by the length of our skirts which reached down to the ankles. Another distinguishing feature was our shoes, of soft glossy cloth, with only toes and heels of leather. They made no noise as we walked, and their unsuitability for any rough walking in country or town appeared to symbolize the sheltered condition of our existence in the school.
The school was one of a group run by a special department, known as the Department of the Empress Mary, and the boarders’ part, which was not large-about fifty girls in all-was modelled on those more famous boarding schools for girls in the capitals, called the Institutes for the Daughters of Nobility. Foreign languages were an important part of the curriculum, and the appointment of ‘dames-de-classe’ laid emphasis on the teaching of good manners. A dame-de-classe did not teach anything, she stayed with her class the whole day and right through the years the girls spent at school. Like the boarders’ governesses, she watched over our good behaviour, but unlike them, she gave us conduct marks. I soon discovered that to obtain less than full marks, that is, twelve, was almost unheard-of.
Our dame-de-classe was Anna Avdyéevna, a product of one of the Institutes. She was young, perhaps not much older than twenty, and her appointment to our school was, I think, her first. I did not know her age at the time, but even if I knew it, it would not have made any difference to the feelings she inspired in me. To a child an adult is as impressive at eighteen as he is at thirty or even fifty, for he appears as a person of infinitely superior experience and knowledge.
Anna, Avdyeevna was such a person to me. She made the decision as to who was to sit beside whom; she appointed monitors and assigned their duties for the week. They wore rosettes of blue ribbon and had to bring out and put away the class register, collect exercise books after a dictation, issue class library books and carry Anna Avdyéevna’s messages to other members of the staff.
She herself had a small desk facing the class in one comer of the room, to the side of and a little behind the teacher’s dais. From her place she could watch the girls during lessons and control whispered conversations, giggling, passing of notes or prompting. A glance, a frown or a shaking of the head was usually enough, but very occasionally she would act silently and quickly by walking up to the suspected rule-breaker and confiscating whatever should not have been there.
She was a tall, plumpish young woman with dark eyes and hair which she did in a high upward sweep. Her complexion was unhealthily pasty, and her mouth full-lipped and pale. I discovered much later that she was not really intelligent and that she had very definite ideas as to the kind of relationship which should exist between the girls in her class and herself. I was a rather guileless child and quite ready to respond to straightforward, reasonable demands: I wanted to please Anna Avdyéevna and conform to her standards of conduct in class. I could not foresee that her special interest in me was to make me into a rebel.
Stassia, the Polish girl, had to practise the piano for half an hour every night. She usually went to the upstairs hall which was used for gym lessons and for religious services on special occasions when the whole of the school would be present. She said it was ‘rather lonely up there’, and at once I thought I should like to accompany her, and escape the confinement of the study-room, so wearisome after the freedom I had enjoyed at home. The boarders had no other room where they could play games or read, and when they had finished their homework, they could only stay at their places, reading or sewing, always under the eye of the governess on duty. Even if she seemed absorbed in her book or her piece of embroidery, the knowledge that she could look up and watch you whenever she chose, constrained and created tension.
Mademoiselle Vinogradova was on duty when I plucked up my courage to ask her whether I could keep Stassia company while she practised the piano upstairs. She said, yes, I could go, but we must not chat and waste Stassia’s practice time.
Before I came to the school, I persuaded my mother not to have me taught music there —because my sister had told me that the boarders’ music teacher was very bad-tempered. I loved music however, and it often moved me to tears. At the age of seven or eight I dreamed of being a musical prodigy, like Mozart or Haydn, whose childhood was described in one of the books I had been reading. Mozart could compose at the age of three — but when I put my fingers on the keys of the piano and waited for inspiration, no melody poured out from under my hands, and, deeply discouraged, I did not try again.
Reading came easily to me, but musical notation bewildered me by its complexity, and I admired Stassia, who could extract from this maze of black dots and circles, with or without tails, the beautiful sounds of Mozart’s sonatinas. And after she had played her practice pieces and scales, I would ask her to play ‘something longer’ and she would treat me to one of ‘The Seasons’ by Chaikovsky, or to a part of a Beethoven sonata. My favourite piece however, was the transcription of the funeral march from the ‘Eroica’.
The large empty hall was lit with a single lamp which shone on the open score and on Stassia’s grave, thin, almost transparent face. Her hands looked too small for the sounds she produced and caused to reverberate from the bare walls with a resonance that sent a shudder down my spine. While she played, I walked up and down the hall, from the patch of lamplight into the shadows and back, mourning over the unknown hero who was a part of myself, the music and my emotions carrying me along like a flood. I took my predicament very tragically: my mother had betrayed me; she had handed me over to the gaolers; my life was no longer my own — I might just as well be dead! Before I died, I would leave a letter asking that this march be played at my funeral. .. The abreaction was complete and brought an immediate, though temporary relief.
Stassia showed no surprise at my choosing such tragic music as my favourite listening piece. Compared to myself, she was quite settled at the school but, although we had never talked about it, I knew by her looks that she had passed through the same searing experiences I was going through. Playing what I asked was her act of friendship, and I was aware of that, and grateful without telling her so.
A grown-up, who should have known better, lacked the insight which made Stassia’s company such a help to me in my time of need. One evening while Stassia was playing and I sitting beside her, the door at the end of the hall opened before the next girl was due to arrive for her piano practice.
‘Look who’s come!’ whispered Stassia. ‘It’s Anna Avdyéevna!’
It was indeed our dame-de-classe. We were surprised to see her because she had nothing to do with the boarding school and lived in rooms or a flat of her own. She came straight towards us. We stood up and dropped our curtseys.
‘Go on with your music,’ she said to Stassia. ‘I don’t want to interrupt you. I’ve just come to see . . . ’
She did not finish her sentence, but looking down at me with a smile, asked: ‘Has your sister written you from Petersburg?’
My sister, who entered the Women’s University in Petersburg in the same year as I became a boarder, had lavished affection on me and treated me with even greater tenderness than my mother. To be reminded of her so suddenly brought all my dammed-up grief to the surface. My eyes filled with tears and I could not speak. I shook my head. Anna Avdyéevna put an arm round my shoulders and led me away from Stassia, to the far end of the hall.
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