My Several Selves, Imaginary and Real 12 страница
‘An Easter egg!’ he said with pride. ‘I made it myself.’
My brother came up to look.
‘Does it open?’ he asked.
‘No.’ Shoora’s tone of voice implied that the question was silly.
‘What is it for, then?’
‘What for? An ornament, of course!’
Try as I might, I could show no more enthusiasm for this present than my brother implied by his remarks. Among my toys I had a splendid bright red egg, the size of a baby’s head, made of wood. It was made to be taken apart, and it disclosed a blue egg inside. That one contained a yellow egg and the yellow a green one, then another red, until in the end you came to a tiny blue one which did not open. When you put all the halves together you had a row of at least ten coloured eggs of different sizes, and you could play at selling them or pile them on a plate like the eggs on the Easter table. This cardboard egg with its silver pattern already coming unstuck in several places was of no use to me at all.
I was a poor hand at pretending and my spiritless ‘Thank you very much’ would have chilled the heart of any but the most buoyant of craftsmen. Shoora, however, showed no sign of disappointment. Looking as pleased with himself as if I had paid him the highest compliment, he stuffed the tissue paper back into the box, put the egg half-in as into an egg cup and placed the whole thing on the drawing-room table, evidently to display its beauty to all who might come in.
My brother bent over it to take another look.
‘Is that what you do in your spare time, Martynov?’ he asked with a feint trace of mockery in his voice.
‘Yes. And why not?’ Shoora’s tone was challenging.
‘A bit juvenile . . . ’ said my brother.
‘Indeed! And how do you spend your spare time, pray?’
‘I go for walks,’ my brother said.
‘Very healthy, no doubt! Polishing the pavements!’ snorted Shoora.
I sat on the edge of a chair listening to this exchange with increasing astonishment and discomfort. To be discourteous to a guest as my brother was to Shoora was against all the rules of hospitality. Nor was it any less ill-mannered to be offensive, as Shoora clearly was, to one’s host. I knew that Shoora was a year older than my brother and one class above him; until last Christmas they knew each other only by sight, and I understood they were not ‘comrades’ in the sense the word was used by schoolboys. Yet Shoora had asked my brother to his Christmas party, and he had been to our house more than once, and now he was here again, despite the fact that every time he came, my brother and he invariably got across one another, prodding and sparring and being sarcastic at each other’s expense, until someone, usually my sister, managed to separate them. This enmity, which sprang up between them almost from the first meeting, grew more outspoken with every new encounter, and although I felt no tenderness towards either of the combatants, the combat itself distressed me.
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This particular duel, however, had no time to develop into a proper verbal fight, for my mother and sister came into the room. Shoora was clearly soothed by Maroossia’s appreciative comment on the ornamental qualities of his cardboard egg, and then we all went into the dining-room to have some food from the Easter table. Other visitors began to arrive, and soon the dining-room was full of people, chatting, clinking their glasses, being offered zakoóski, a slice of ham or pork, a taste of Paskha, a piece of almond shortcake or of a chocolate gateau. Almost all the visitors were men: women did not visit on Easter Sunday, but stayed at home to be visited by men. Most of the guests kissed my mother’s hand when ‘congratulating’ her with ‘the bright Day of Resurrection’ — Svjetloje Voskresyenie. It struck me for the first time that the word for ‘resurrection’ and ‘Sunday’ was the same.
When the visitors had gone and we returned to the drawing-room, my mother noticed the cardboard egg occupying a place of honour on a table.
‘Where did this come from?’ she asked.
‘Shoora Martynov brought it,’ said my brother. He always used this slightly contemptuous diminutive when speaking of Shoora out of his hearing. To his face he addressed him either as ‘Martynov’ or just as ‘you’. He added ironically: ‘He made it himself, of course!’
‘That’s obvious,’ said my mother. ‘Do you see him often at M*?’ ‘Only occasionally during breaks at the Ghymnasia.’
‘Yet he always comes to see you here . . . ’
‘He comes to see Leda, not me,’ said my brother.
I blushed violently, expecting everyone’s eyes to turn on me, including my father’s, who, I was sure, would disapprove. But he was rocking himself gently in the rocking chair, smoking a cigarette and seemingly not listening at all.
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‘So our króshka’s acquired an admirer,’ my sister said, smiling at me. She said this tenderly, but her tenderness did not compensate for the gentle mockery of her remark. I suddenly felt angry with her as I had never been before. I pushed away her arm which she put round my shoulders and ran out of the room.
My brother’s tepid welcome did not deter Shoora from coming to our house several times during the Easter holidays. After exchanging a few bantering remarks with Vova, he usually found his way to the day nursery where I was busy with a new project — making myself a dolls’ house. The success I had enjoyed with my Christmas presents to the family gave me a taste for making things with my own hands, and at once my imagination took charge, planning and visualizing on a grand scale. I decided to build a really large ‘country house’ with two drawing-rooms, one red, the other blue, and a suitable number of other rooms. Shoora, on hearing this, at once offered to make furniture for all of them.
He also helped with measuring out pieces of cardboard for the house, and drew and coloured the ‘tiles’ for the roof. Every time he came, he brought a few little cardboard chairs or beds which he had made at home. Like the Easter egg, they were covered with glossy paper and decorated with cut-out patterns of silver or gold, but his glueing once again proved less effective than it might have been and the decorations came unstuck even before the furniture could be used.
It was a new experience to have a boy of my brother’s age ready to share my interests and eager to help me to carry out my plans. My brother had always imposed his plans on me: when we had played together before he went to school, I had to play his games. I accepted Shoora’s ministrations with a slightly reluctant gratitude.
Then the ‘building materials’ ran short and the house was still unfinished when I had to return to school.
My departure from home this time was made easier by the knowledge that the summer vacation was only seven weeks away and that by my mother’s decision it was to be my last term as a boarder. I do not know what decided her eventually: my pleading must have played some part in it. Also she had heard from a cousin who had retired from the Army and bought a dacha near M*, so that his only daughter, a few months younger than I, could go to school there. My mother asked him and his wife whether they would be prepared to take me en pension, and they consented to do so. To me, any change from boarding school appeared as liberation.
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‘I think Zena, their daughter, has had very little proper schooling because her parents have moved about so much,’ said my mother. ‘She’s an only child and probably rather spoilt . . .
‘What is her mother like?’ I asked.
‘Aunt Katia is an institoótka,’ said my mother. ‘It means she has led a very sheltered life and knows little about practical things. She dotes on Zena . . . Her father does, too.’
I found this last bit of information very intriguing. Fortunate Zena, on whom her father doted! How different her father must be from mine. Or was it I who was different? Somewhere deep inside me a dark sediment of feeling which had never quite risen to the surface was stirred by these thoughts. I was on the point of formulating an accusation, of pronouncing a judgment - on my father, whose apparently complete indifference to myself I had until then accepted as being a characteristic of all fathers. Yet the idea of condemning him for this was so alarming that I promptly turned the judgment on myself: it must be I who was not the kind of daughter on whom fathers dote.
And yet . . . and yet! Was I not rather good at my lessons? After all, most of my marks for the term were ‘twelves’. And more than once I got a ‘twelve-plus’ for my compositions. Besides, I was a poet . . . My mother and Maroossia were proud of this — proud of me. Why was not my father? Perhaps he just did not like poetry? Perhaps he was like my brother who read historical novels about wars and religious persecution, or adventure stories by Fenimore Cooper and Mine Read, translated from the American? He might read Pushkin’s Captain’s Daughter, or Tolstoy’s Prisoner of the Caucasus, but I had never known him to read ‘Mtzyri’, my favourite poem by Lermontov. Perhaps most men looked down on poetry as unmanly, and on poets as time-wasters, not to be taken seriously. My brother could earn my father’s approval by being good at mathematics; I could not hope to earn it by being gifted in writing poetry.
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Spring weather made the indoor life at the boarding school more irksome but less depressing than it had been in the autumn when the days were short and dark. Getting up at the sound of the bell was less of a brutal wrench when one could see a strip of blue sky above the roof of a house opposite. Even Fatima’s and Mílochka’s meaningless gibes seemed more silly than offensive when the sun was shining. Or perhaps I had become less sensitive, more tough and less liable to be caught unprepared? I certainly felt stronger than I had a few months ago.
The test of my strength, however, came from quite a different quarter and it all but shattered my newly won, fragile self-confidence.
When we assembled in our classroom on the morning following my return, Anna Avdyéevna greeted me with a smile which I felt was a special one for me. She did not speak to me until after the first lesson: there was not enough time: prayers had to be read and books prepared before the teacher arrived. But in the first break, as I curtseyed to her on my way to the passage, she smiled again and asked ‘Are all your family well?’
I thanked her. Her brown eyes were bent on me with an expression of distinct benevolence: they were swimming in it as if in oil. I had noticed before this peculiar, moist or oily look in her eyes. The pale skin on her face also looked slightly oily.
‘You are looking much better than you did before the holidays,’ she said. ‘You have more colour: you must have been out of doors quite a lot. It did you good. But I hope you’ve done some reading, too . . . some of the good French of Madame de Segur. How far have you got in the story?’
Far from realizing what effect my reply was to produce, I blushed only a little while admitting my dereliction.
‘I didn’t read any of it,’ I said simply.
The eyes gazing down on me were still moist, but their expression became mournful. The smile disappeared from Anna Avdyéevna’s lips; her faint eyebrows went up in a painfully broken arch.
‘You didn’t read any of it?’ she repeated as if she did not quite believe what she had just heard. ‘After I had specially asked you?’
Aware that I had offended her in some incomprehensible way, and beginning to feel guilty, I tried to justify myself: ‘You see, there was so much to do.’
‘So much to do? The whole three weeks of the holiday?’
My face was now burning, and I began to stumble over my words. ‘Yes . . . we started making a dolls’ house and a lot of furniture . . . It took hours to ... ’
‘I see . . . ’ Anna Avdyéevna tossed up her chin, a gesture the meaning of which was to become all too familiar to me in subsequent years. Her eyes were no longer benevolent and were looking over my head, at the far wall of the classroom. Her silence seemed to indicate that our conversation was now over. I waited a moment or two for a clearer sign of dismissal, but none came, so I dropped another curtsey and trotted out of the room, feeling thoroughly unhappy.
For several days after that Anna Avdyéevna remained seemingly unaware of my existence. While before she often used to entrust me with small but responsible tasks, such as taking a message to the staffroom or issuing books from the class-room library, she now called upon other girls to do these things. She would not meet my eyes when I looked in her direction, but gazed straight past me with her lips compressed and no trace of a smile. This was so different from her former, almost caressing manner towards me that other girls in the class also noticed it. ‘I don’t think you’re her favourite any more,’ Margóolina said to me. ‘What have you done?’
I wondered myself. I had never before been subjected to this form of punishment, a punishment by complete withdrawal of attention, and I found it very painful. My suffering must have been pretty obvious, for at the end of the week, just when I was beginning to despair that my condition of ostracism was ever going to cease, Anna Avdyéevna allowed her eyes to descend from contemplating the ceiling of the class-room and to meet mine. Her gaze was still rather cold and distant but she seemed again to acknowledge my existence. And when at the end of the lesson I had to pass her desk on the way to the corridor, I felt I had to speak to her, to give her another, weightier reason for having neglected the holiday task she had set me. ‘I forgot to tell you last time . . . last time you spoke to me . . . that it wasn’t only making the dolls’ house ... it was also because I didn’t have a French-Russian dictionary . . . ’
Anna Avdyéevna said nothing for a few moments, her eyes fixed sombrely on mine.
‘I would have been content if you had read even a few pages,’ she spoke quietly, but with such force of expressiveness that I quivered. ‘It is your utter forgetfulness of my request, your putting everything else before it that I found so inconsiderate. And you did not even think it necessary to apologize . . . ’
I felt as if the ground were giving under my feet. Her accusation was true: I had not apologized because I believed that the explanation I had given exonerated me, as it would have done with my mother. At home, if an explanation was adequate, no apology was expected, and I had come to associate ‘asking forgiveness’ with an admission of guilt. I fumbled for words in an effort to explain further.
‘I didn’t think . . . ’ I began.
Anna Avdyéevna cut me short.
‘You didn’t think! You — whom I believed to be so thoughtful and sensitive . . . who write poems and the best essays in the class! You did not think of the effects your actions have on others?’
I stood before her speechless, bewildered and distressed. Until that moment I had imagined that I had merely failed to carry out a holiday task, and perhaps deserved to be reprimanded for that, but I had not realized that I had also shattered an illusion. This realization was borne upon me with a devastating force. I suddenly saw myself through Anna Avdyéevna’s eyes as a thoughtless, insensitive, ungrateful creature who deeply offended someone — a person who had behaved towards her with the greatest kindness and generosity. This revelation was so harrowing that I could no longer contain the tears which had been gathering deep behind my eyes for the last few minutes and were now beginning to burn my eyelids.
Anna Avdyéevna’s face became blurred, the blue of her dress grew misty. I cried silently, not daring to move or speak. I was utterly humbled and ashamed of both my ‘thoughtlessness’ and my weakness, my inability to check this flow of tears. I felt as if I had made myself contemptible and disliked for ever.
Then, with a shock of surprise I heard Anna Avdyéevna’s voice, soft and comforting, as her blurred face bent towards me and her misty blue figure came nearer.
‘Now, now,’ she said, ‘you mustn’t cry like this. I see you are really sorry for having caused me pain and disappointment. Where’s your handkerchief? Dry your eyes as quickly as you can. The break is nearly over and the girls will be coming back into the classroom very soon now. You don’t want them to see you crying . . . ’
If Anna Avdyéevna had expected her words of reconciliation to have an immediate effect, she had overestimated her power. Sympathy always stimulates self-pity, and I reacted by a renewed flow of tears. Anna Avdyéevna’s voice grew almost caressing.
‘Don’t, don’t,’ she said softly, laying a hand on my shoulder. ‘It might be better if you ran along to the wash-room and put your face into a basin of nice cold water. Next lesson is only sewing, and I’ll explain to Zoya Dmitrevna why you are going to be a little late - a headache, shall we say?’
The girls did, of course, notice that I had red eyes when I returned to the class-room, but some of them also heard the explanation Anna Avdyéevna gave to the sewing mistress when I did not reply to her calling out my name from the register. ‘You still have a headache?’ Margóolina asked me, sympathetically.
I nodded. I really had a headache now from having cried. But my dejection was less deep and my thoughts were no longer centred on the wrong I had done to Anna Avdyéevna but on the wrong she was prepared to do for my sake. She had volunteered to tell an untruth — I dared not call it a lie — to Zoya Dmitrevna, so that I should not be reprimanded for being late! This gave me enough material to ponder on, until I fell asleep in my bed at the end of that upsetting and bewildering day.
Summer Freedom
During my first two terms at the boarding school I refused to believe that I could ever be anything but intensely unhappy there. My mother’s suggestion that I could ‘get accustomed’ to it filled me with indignation. I took it to mean that I could become so dispirited a creature as not to mind confinement in a cage. I liked to think of myself as someone never to be tamed, like the boy in Lermontov’s poem ‘Mtzyri’, who was pining away because he was deprived of his freedom and who finally escaped from his monastery only to be found dying from his wounds in a forest after a fight with a leopard.
I must admit that this romantic vision of myself was rather blurred by the sober thought that there were no wild forests or mountains in the vicinity of the school, no tigers which would give me a chance of showing my courage by wrestling with them, and by the knowledge that the town streets, paved with cobbles, were of little use as a refuge for a fugitive. I disliked these facts but I could not ignore them, and it made my longing for freedom even more intense.
But as time went on and the pain of home-sickness abated, I ceased, almost without noticing it, to react to things and people as if I had been stripped of my skin. Probably because I now knew I would soon be rid of them, the personalities of Fräulein Schmiedel, of Fatima and Mílochka affected me less and less. I worked well in class and found satisfaction in learning and in the appreciation of my teachers. Except for occasional fits of giggles during lessons, from which most girls suffer, I gave little cause for Anna Avdyéevna to be displeased with me.
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