My Several Selves, Imaginary and Real 10 страница
Mademoiselle Vinogradova was sympathetic, but her bird-like cheerfulness jarred on me, and I almost disliked her for it. Seeing that I could not be comforted, she said she would send me some books tomorrow if my temperature went down to normal, and left, smiling. The nurse came, took my temperature and said it wouldn’t go down unless I stopped crying. Later on, one of the maids brought me a light meal on a tray. I left most of it untouched and cried myself to sleep.
The next day the Headmistress came to visit me. She sat beside my bed, exhaling a faint fragrance of scent, her mid-blue silk dress spread about her chair, her small hands in black lace mittens folded on her lap, and talked in her gentle voice of the time when she was a little girl, a year or two younger than me, at the Institute for the Daughters of the Nobility in St Petersburg, and how a whole class of them were laid low with chicken-pox. ‘Can you imagine, dooshechka, two long rows of beds with a little girl in each one of them, her face and hands absolutely covered in red spots? Well, the doctor just stood there and laughed! What a spectacle!’
I felt too much reverence for her to do anything but listen, yet her story, especially the fact that the girls were younger than I, had the effect of reducing the intensity of my self-pitying mood, and of making me smile. The Nachálnitsa’s manner, too, was much warmer than Mademoiselle Vinogradova’s: she gave me a feeling that she really knew how I felt.
Later in the afternoon the Director came. I had not expected these important visits, and was both flattered and embarrassed by them. He did not tell me a story but gave me two oranges, then sat and looked at me with his kindly, humorous eyes. The sympathy which radiated from him nearly broke through the thin crust of resignation which had grown round my wounded heart during the day, but fortunately my respect for him inhibited tears.
I was kept in ted for a week, a tormented soul, longing for the intimacy and warmth no sympathetic strangers could supply, tantalized by the visions of Shrovetide celebrations at home. The dreary little room with the lower window panes painted white was a prison cell to me. The two oranges and some pretty Crimean apples on a plate were the only spot of colour which enlivened it and gave me pleasure. Anna Avdyéevna brought the apples. She came every day and turned my soul inside out by asking questions about my sister and home. But she also brought books, and as soon as my temperature was normal, I was permitted to read them and to escape from my prison into the world of The Prince and the Pauper, of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Hours passed without my noticing; dusk crept into the room; soon it was supper-time and the injunction to settle down to sleep. The light was turned out, but I remained awake, staring at the pale stars through the upper panes of the window which had been left clear.
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I had always liked being alone at the top of an apple tree covered with blossom or in the clearing of a forest, bright with the green of young birch trees. But this was a new kind of solitude: in a room of a house where nothing was familiar and where no one slept but myself — or so I thought. Yet, strangely enough, I was not afraid. The fear that haunted me in those early years was not a fear of something real, that could happen, but of bad dreams. I would dream of dead people who rose from their graves and pursued me, or of white-clad ghosts coming to seize me. So often did I have such dreams between the ages of nine and eleven that I was terrified of going to sleep. I prayed to God to stop me dreaming them, and because my prayers were not answered, I began to have my first doubts concerning the kindness of God.
An unexpected effect of boarding school-life on me was the virtual disappearance of these dreams, as if the real stresses of separation and adjustment had literally pushed out stresses and fears due to imagination. At first I hardly noticed this, then I realized that I was no longer afraid of going to sleep but, on the contrary, welcomed it as an escape from grim reality. Nor did I remember my dreams as well as I used to: the clanging of the morning bell sent them scurrying away.
One dream, however, the last ghost dream I have ever had, stands out in memory as vividly as if I had it yesterday.
I returned to the school dormitory before the end of the Shrovetide holiday, saddened and matured by my experience of the unkindness of ‘Fate’ and of a new kind of solitude. Tania and Stassia had not yet returned; Fatima’s and Mílochka’s beds were some distance from mine. In my dream I had the illusion of awakening in that very dormitory to a grey morning of unwonted stillness. I sat up and saw that on each empty bed there stood a new coffin. The coffins were brightly varnished and piled with brilliantly coloured flowers. Awed and fascinated, I gazed at the scene expecting the lids of the coffins to fly open and the dead in their shrouds to rise from them. I waited — but nothing happened. Suddenly a feeling of extraordinary relief came over me. I heard myself saying: ‘This is a joke. There’s no one in these coffins ... I am not afraid any more . . . and I opened my eyes to the clanging of the morning bell in the real dormitory, on a real grey morning. Fatima and Mílochka were stirring and yawning in their beds. The other beds were empty. My fear of ghosts had completely gone.
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With the Shrovetide holiday irretrievably lost to me, there was now only Easter to look forward to. It seemed very far away, and between it and the present there was an important date, March 23rd, my name-day.
On your name-day you prayed to your patron saint. Mine was Lydia, and my mother told me that she was not a martyr, merely a Roman lady of noble birth who became a saint. My mother declared that she had determined not to call any of her children after martyrs — that would be inviting misfortune. My sister, Maria, was called after Mary of Egypt, and my brother, Vladímir, after the saintly Prince of Kiev.
At school, as the day approached, I looked back with nostalgia on my past name-days. How mischievous I used to be in trying to find out in advance what present my mother was going to give me! I went as far as abstracting the key of a great oak chest which stood in the hall and digging among the spare rugs, lace curtains and shawls for a suspicious- looking parcel I had seen my mother deposit there after a trip to M*. How ashamed of myself I had been once when my mother discovered that I had opened the parcel and seen the splendid doll which she meant to be a surprise to me! It was one of the rare occasions on which I saw my mother looking really angry, and her face, as I saw it then, remained long in my memory.
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On the Day I was given my favourite breakfast, curd cheese with sour cream and fresh French rolls. And for the main meal of the day there was, of course, the name-day pirógh, a large pie stuffed with minced meat and chopped egg; and another pie, a sweet one stuffed with apples, for tea, when children came to the party and brought boxes of sweets and gateaux in pretty boxes tied with ribbons.
At school nothing like this was going to happen. I had to rise with the morning bell and sit through the lessons in my class as if it were an ordinary day. Stassia and Tania were the only ones who knew and who congratulated me. I received a parcel from home, of course, and Fatima commented on this —just to make sure that I would not dodge offering her some of its contents. My mother wrote to wish me happiness and health: health was the main thing she seemed to worry about as far as we were concerned, all the time I can remember. She explained that she was not sending me a pirógh because it would not keep fresh long enough but that she would make me one when I came home for Easter. The parcel contained the usual supply of short pastries and sweetmeats. My sister, more imaginatively, sent me an album for picture postcards, which I had begun to collect, and filled the first two pages with pretty pictures of lambs and foals gambolling among forget-me-nots and lilies- of-the-valley. I was delighted with them.
Yet a real surprise awaited me when I took my place that morning beside Margóolina in the classroom. After one of the pupils had read the prayer and we had all sat down, I opened my desk and found a wrapped- up book with my name on it. It was a handsome Edition Rouge-et-Or volume, and on the fly leaf there was an inscription in a round, rather childish hand: ‘To L. Rayévskaia from A. Saburova on the occasion of her Name-Day. ’ And underneath in smaller letters Anna Avdyéevna had written: ‘You will be surprised how much French you will learn if you read half a page of this every night. ’
I was conscious of blushing to the tips of my ears as I raised my head and met the governess’s moist brown eyes gazing at me across the gap between her desk and mine, while the corners of her mouth curled up in a hardly perceptible smile. Just then the teacher came into the room and we all rose to our feet. A few seconds later the lesson began. While it lasted I avoided looking in Anna Avdyéevna’s direction. I felt more embarrassed than pleased with her gift: I was quite unaccustomed to receiving presents from persons who were not members of my family, and did not know how to behave on such occasions. I was overcome with shyness, almost with shame at the thought of having to thank her for it. Shame was somehow linked with gratitude: in my experience, only the poor received gifts from strangers, and the poor — the beggars — showed gratitude in such a humiliating way. I wished the lesson would go on for ever and the moment of confrontation would never come.
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But at the usual hour the bell clanged in the corridor, the teacher picked up her books and walked out, and the girls began to stream out of the class-room. Anna Avdyéevna was waiting at her desk—waiting for me to come up and thank her, I was sure. Clasping my hands in front of me in the correct way, I went up and made the correct little curtsey. ‘Thank you very much, Anna Avdyéevna, for . . . the book . . . ’
I could not even bring myself to say ‘for the nice’ or ‘lovely’ book, lest this praise would be taken as an expression of hope for further gifts.
‘You will read a little every day, won’t you?’ she asked. ‘I know you can talk French, but reading will give you a much larger vocabulary. You will read it when you are at home during Easter?’
‘Yes, Anna Avdyéevna.’
‘Is this a promise?’
I hesitated a moment: the prospect did not appeal to me at all. I wanted to forget the school and its tasks during the holidays. But although her lips were smiling, Anna Avdyéevna’s dark eyes had a compelling look, and I dared not offend her. So I whispered: ‘Yes,’ again, and was glad when she let me go without asking anything more.
After the break I looked at the book again with the flap of my desk raised as a shield against curious glances. The story was about a family of children who travelled with a circus and lived in a caravan. There were many delightful pictures and the text did not seem too difficult. Yet mere guessing at the meaning was not going to satisfy me: I wanted to know the exact Russian equivalent of every unfamiliar word. I would need a dictionary . . .
Margóolina looked over my shoulder as she settled down in her place. ‘Oh, what a nice book!’ she said. ‘Who gave it to you?’
‘Never mind . . . ’ I muttered, aware that I was blushing again.
‘I know.’ Margóolina looked very pleased with herself. ‘I saw her put it inside your desk as we came into class this morning. I told you: you’re her favourite. Everybody knows it.’
I was flattered despite myself, still innocent at the time of the obligations the status of a ‘favourite’ was going to impose on me. I was only just beginning to recover from the wounds which separation from home and a partial loss of identity had inflicted on me. To get such individual attention from the dame-de-classe went a long way towards restoring my sense of personal value. At the same time the teachers’ praise of my work helped me to withstand the constant humiliation of an over-controlled existence. I did well in all my school work, probably because I was innocently eager for achievement, disliked making a fool of myself and had formed a habit of preparing work for my tutor before I went to school.
How well I remember the faces of the half-dozen masters and mistresses who taught us in my first year at school: the kind, soft- featured countenance of Maria Ivanovna, who hardly ever failed to read my compositions aloud to the class; the stem-looking, tetchy French mistress, Vera Petrovna, with a complexion of yellow parchment, whom we thought so irritable and who later died of cancer; the pretty German teacher, Fräulein Kurz, who had dark down under her chin (‘She shaves every morning,’ Fatima assured me). She was the only one who could be coolly sarcastic at our expense, and would ask on returning an untidy copy-book: ‘Have you by any chance dropped your book in a chicken run? These pages look as if chickens had scratched about on them.’ Only about her did I feel definitely that she did not like me. Nor did I like the language she taught so condescendingly, with its unnatural construction, the verb often coming at the end of a long sentence.
The French mistress could be sharp-tongued, too, but only when she was annoyed. She flared up at me once for ‘always asking irrelevant questions’. To me my question was far from irrelevant. I had wanted to know what happened to the boy in the story from which she had dictated a short passage. The passage stopped just as the boy had climbed up a tree to rob a rook’s nest and the rooks swooped down on him. Was not my question to be expected? But I was the only one who asked it. The whole class sat quiet, incurious, startled at my boldness and perhaps secretly pleased at my discomfiture.
Maria Ivanovna, who taught us history as well as Russian, did not mind questions being asked. She did not object even to my contesting that there had been no King Louis of France until Louis the Eleventh, as nothing was ever said about the first ten in our history books. She assured me, unemphatically, that they had really existed.
The masters were even more kindly than the kinder of the mistresses. I never really liked sums, but I liked ‘ Adolphe’, the arithmetic master, a whimsical, bald-headed, bespectacled man with a walrus moustache, who could not bear giving a pupil a ‘six’ mark because in a twelve-point system of marking it meant that she had failed. He had a trick of calling you out by reading your surname and Christian name in full from the register with a mock solemnity. In this way I discovered the rather exotic first names of my Jewish classmates. Surnames only were habitually used unless the girls became close personal friends; my being a boarder precluded close friendship with a day girl.
Mályevich, the geography master, was also bald, but had a beard. While ‘Adolphe’ paced the room between the blackboard and our desks, gesticulating with a piece of chalk while he taught, Mályevich would loll in his chair, eyes turned up at the ceiling, and drone on in a soft, nasal voice, telling us about date palms in the Sahara, or mosses in the tundra. He hardly ever troubled to disturb the second-year girls on the back seats by asking them questions which he knew they could not answer - at least not until the very end of the term when they had to have some marks against their names in the register. Then he would make a day of it, calling them out one after another and asking each the same gentle question: ‘What have you prepared for today?’
‘About the Sahara’ ... or ‘About tea plantations . . . ’ the girl replied.
‘Well then . . . what can you tell me about the Sahara?’
‘In the Sahara there are . . . oases . . . ’ she would begin with a desperate brightness. A long pause would follow.
‘Yes . . . there are oases in the Sahara,’ Mályevich would at last confirm softly. ‘What else can you tell me about that famous desert?’ ‘It’s . , . it’s all covered with sand. Sometimes mirages happen . . . ’ Another long pause. A few more questions would reveal that the girl retained hardly anything from all the lessons she had sat through during the term and that she had probably never opened her geography book.
‘You may sit down,’ Mályevich would tell her just as gently as he had put his question, and trace delicately an unmistakable ‘seven’ in the register against her name, and the girl would sigh with relief, for a ‘seven’ was the lowest pass mark in our school. The same procedure would be repeated with every ‘second-yearling’ until they all had a mark for the term, and Mályevich could discreetly leave them in peace for the next couple of months.
Bátiushka, the school priest, was an impressive figure, tall and broad, made to look even bigger by the long cassock with wide sleeves which he always wore. He had a brown beard and a thick mane of straight brown hair, brushed back and reaching down to his shoulders. His voice was rich and deep like a violoncello, and the stories from the Gospels sounded beautiful when told in that voice. I remember him telling us the story of the resurrection and describing how Mary Magdalene met Jesus in the garden where He had been buried, and mistook Him for a gardener.
‘Jesus spoke to her and said ‘ ‘Maria! ” ’ - Bátiushka’s voice might have been the voice of Jesus Himself, from the intense emotion which ran through me like an electric current.
The drawing master, whom we called behind his back by his first name — Arkády — was a very different type of man: small, dapper, voluble and fussy. He spoke with a lilt, a singing intonation characteristic of Moscow where he was born and had received his training. He tended to boast of this and to criticize the speech of the Bielorussians.
‘You all say dz instead of d,' he would tell us. ‘In Moscow we speak beautifully. ’He had little patience with the uninterested or lazy and would compare their efforts with the scratchings of hens. He was inclined to help the more able or conscientious by adding a few expert strokes to an insipid though honest attempt, thus transforming a pale ghost of a cube or a pyramid into a substantial, life-like object. But instead of feeling gratitude for such help, I was annoyed and discouraged by it. I would much rather he told me how to do it instead of doing it himself. He had changed my drawing out of all recognition, so that it was no longer mine, and he did it with such enviable ease and speed. How could I ever hope to achieve such a standard? And when he gave me a mark, was it really my work or his own that he was assessing? I was not sure whether I liked Arkády as much as the other masters - or whether I liked him at all.
In Favour and in Disgrace
‘The rooks are here again . . . ’ A poem I learned almost before I could read began with these words. It meant that winter silence was over: the air was full of cawing voices and of flapping wings; the pale sky patterned with the dark tracery of their flight. I was standing at the window of the drawing-room, looking up at the birch tree tops in the Catholic church enclosure. The rooks have returned . . . from where? Were they the same rooks which made their nests in these trees last spring, before I went to school? Were they glad to be back? I was glad to see them because they came with the spring, and I was weary of winter for the first time in my short life. The joy of welcoming the spring had an undertow of sadness when I thought of all the bright winter days which I had spent indoors, at the school, with no toboganning, no building of snowmen, no sleigh rides . . . And next winter will be the same, and yet another, and another ... It will go on for ever! I wished I were a bird . . .
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