My Several Selves, Imaginary and Real 14 страница
Shoora’s visit ended in a rather disturbing way. Although my brother and he sparred and teased one another continuously, giving one another contemptuous nicknames — Shoora nicknamed my brother ‘Baldwin’, a play on the Russian word ‘baldá, a blockhead — they had never shown real anger with one another. Then one morning, the day before Shoora was due to leave, something happened.
We had a full house that fortnight and my brother was sharing his room with Shoora. It was in the mezzanine, across the landing from the room I was sharing with my sister. I was still in bed, in that delightful, indeterminate state between sleep and waking when the body is almost weightless and the mind just aware of the sunshine pouring in and the jubilant birds outside. I was about to sink into a dream again when the sound of shuffling and bumping close to our door brought me back to the surface with a jerk. I thought I heard my brother’s halfstifled voice telling someone to ‘leave me alone’ and ‘let go’. Then there was some more shuffling and grunting.
I sat up in bed and was about to speak to Maroossia when I saw that she, too, was awake and on the alert.
‘It must be Vova and Shoora! What are they doing?’
In a second we were both out of bed and on the way to the door, but before we reached it, we could hear footsteps hurrying up the stairs. They were to quick to be my mother’s, but the voice we heard was certainly her voice. She sounded deeply alarmed.
‘Don’t open the door!’ my sister whispered, but I had already pulled it ajar. My brother and Shoora in their pyjamas were confronting my mother who was in her dressing-gown with her hair in papillottes. Their faces were flushed, my brother was scowling while Shoora smiled a contorted smile, trying not to look at anybody.
‘I’m sorry, Elisavieta Matvyeevna,’ he muttered. ‘We were just wrestling . . . ’
‘You had your knee on his chest and your hands round his throat,’ my mother said, short of breath. ‘What kind of wrestling is that?’
Vova growled something to the effect that he would have sent Shoora flying down the stairs if she had not come up just then, then brushed past her into the bathroom while Shoora sidled back into their room. My mother came into our bedroom and sat down, visibly shaken.
‘That boy is dangerous . . . quite unbalanced . . . she said. ‘I do believe that if I hadn’t come up in time, he might have strangled our Vova ... I wish I had not asked him to stay . . . ’
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My brother would not tell us what caused their quarrel except that Shoora’s teasing had made him lose his temper, so it looked as if it was he who had started the fight. This was most unlike him: as a small boy he was not a fighter and he disliked taking physical risks. I had never forgotten how he sent me up on the roof of the house to get his arrow, and from that time on I suspected him of not being really ‘brave’. He knew he could tease me with impunity because I could not really hurt him, and when in exasperation I would rush at him with my fists raised to strike, he would throw himself on to a sofa and hold his feet up in the air, to keep me at a safe distance. It was not until a year or two later, however, when I entered the phase of criticism and re-appraisal characteristic of adolescence, that I began to tell him he should have been born a girl, and I a boy.
Without Shoora and Vera life at Fyeny flowed much more evenly. Our next diversion was provided by a wedding in the village. My mother gave a dress to the bride, and Aniuta, our maid, was going to the wedding. She asked if she could take me with her and my mother consented.
The village church was tiny, whitewashed inside and out, with an iconostasis of painted wood and primitive icons. The bride’s white dress set off her deeply sunburnt face and hands. The bridegroom wore a red sateen shirt and black trousers tucked inside high boots. I noticed that the bride’s eyes were swollen. ‘With crying . . .’ Aniuta whispered into my ear. ‘Oh, Lord! how she cried when they were plaiting her hair this morn . . . ’
‘Didn’t she want to marry him?’ I whispered back.
‘I’ll tell you afterwards . . . ’
‘There's something knocking and stamping hard . . .
‘See, Mother dear, who’s in our yard?’
‘They’ve come for you, Daughter, they’ve come for you,
‘And for the goods that you bring with you!’
This song had been pursuing me all the morning as I wandered about the orchard where it adjoined the kitchen gardens of the cottages. The lilt of the song was nostalgic, the words reflected a mood of conflict — the girl’s fear that the bridegroom’s friends might not come to fetch her for the wedding ceremony and the hope that, if they failed, she would remain at home with her mother. The song was familiar to me from early childhood: my brother and I knew the words and sometimes we teased Aniuta with it, singing it to remind her that she was still unmarried at the age of twenty-two.
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I had heard that village mothers-in-law often maltreated their sons’ wives, and I wondered whether this particular bride had cried so much because she expected this to be her fate. I stared closely at her as she stood there with her eyes downcast. What was she thinking? Did she really mean it when she repeated after the priest the promise to honour and obey her husband? I saw the priest putting a ring on to her finger, and another one on the bridegroom’s. I craned my neck, trying to see what they did next. The priest joined their hands and led them round the praying desk three times, while two sturdy young men followed, holding crowns, heavy and bulging like Russian bishops’ mitres, over their heads. Why?
As I watched the ceremony, I became conscious that I, too, was being watched — by a small barefoot child dressed in nothing except a white linen shift. Holding on to his mother’s skirt, he was staring hard at me: it seemed that to him I was more of a spectacle than the crowned couple in all their finery. But as soon as I met his gaze, he dropped his eyes and edged away to hide behind his mother.
The procession that made its way back to the cottages from the church door was very different from the orderly cortege that arrived there less than an hour before. It sprawled and straggled all over the wide, dusty street, eddying and spilling over into the neighbouring yards and gardens. The bridegroom’s friends, with their jackets off and thrown over their shoulders, had picked up their accordions and were playing and singing as they went along. The girls in bright head scarves linked arms and led the way, laughing and cracking sunflower seeds. The older men, joining in groups, were talking loudly with guffaws of laughter. Only the newly married couple and their parents walked demurely and quietly in the middle of the road, but no one looked solemn any longer and the bride was smiling.
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Aniuta and I walked alongside the girls who offered us sunflower seeds. My skill in shelling them was vastly inferior to theirs. They put them between their teeth: there was a cracking sound and instantly the husk was spat out and the kernel eaten. The girls hardly seemed to use their hands at all, and to be eating the seeds all the time. When I tried to imitate them, I found I was chewing the husk as well as the seed.
I recollected Aniuta’s promise to tell me more about the bride.
‘Why was she crying this morning? She’s quite cheerful now.’
The girls stopped giggling among themselves and listened.
‘She’s got to cry to keep the bad luck off,’ Aniuta said. ‘And she’ll be leaving her own father and mother . . . ’
‘Where is she going to live then?’
Aniuta indicated a cottage a few yards ahead of us.
‘But it’s almost next door to her parents!’
Aniuta shrugged. We were about to enter the bride’s former home. We stepped over a high threshold into the syeni, a windowless, unheated room which divides a Russian peasant cottage in two parts — the best room and the ‘black’ izba. A young calf was lying on some straw in the far comer of the syeni, but, hemmed in as I was by Aniuta and the girls, I could not get across to stroke it.
In the cottage best room red geraniums in pots and muslin curtains screened the two small windows, but the sunshine outside was so strong that the low-ceilinged, white-washed room looked cheerfully light. Several wooden trestle tables, put end-to-end, stretched right across it with plates and many dishes of food displayed on them, among which pigs’ trotters in jelly drew my attention. They looked like large lumps of glass with objects captured and immobilized inside them. There were also dishes of eggs, sliced salt herrings decorated with rings of onion, piles of boiled potatoes, salt cucumber and beetroot, and many loaves of bread. Several dishes were piled with rolls of a peculiar shape, patterned as if with scales.
‘Fir cones,’ Aniuta told me. ‘You’ve got to have them. They bring luck.’
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We all sat on wooden forms: there were no chairs. Aniuta and I had the seats of honour on the left of the bride who was sitting beside her husband. On his right sat his parents, and opposite us the parents of the bride. Her father picked up the nearest bottle of vodka — several of them stood between dishes of food all along the table - and asked us to hold out our glasses. ‘No, no,’ Aniuta said warding off his hand, ‘báryshnia can’t have any, and I never take it either . . . !’
Our host protested strongly: we had to have ‘a drop, for the newly- marrieds’ health and happiness’. A chorus of voices supported him.
I was curious to have it. Aniuta, flushed and flustered, had her hand forced. Someone put a plate piled with food in front of me, and urged me to take a sip from my glass, half full of an almost colourless liquid. I did so, and something like a ball of fire travelled right through my middle down to my legs and feet. It was a pleasantly alarming sensation, and as it ebbed away, I suddenly thought it funny and began to laugh.
‘Eat something, lovey, eat!’ Aniuta urged me.
Meanwhile, all the men in the room, glass in hand, shouted: ‘Bitter, bitter! Gorko, gorko!’ and would not drink until the young couple kissed each other. The men went on shouting this at intervals, and I began to feel sorry for the bride and bridegroom who could not settle down to their food, but had to wipe their mouths with the back of their hands and go through the ritual of a ceremonious kiss every time. The guests then drank, smacked their lips and declared: ‘Tepier sladko!’ - now it is sweet.
Voices were getting louder and faces redder when Aniuta leaned across the table and whispered to the bride’s mother that she had to take me home. As we rose to go, hands stretched towards us pressing fir-cone rolls upon us.
‘For your Papa and Mamma, báryshnia, and some for yourself and your brother and sister. From the bride and bridegroom! They’ll bring you luck.’
We went home by a short cut through some cottage gardens and a hole in the fence which gave access to our orchard. Aniuta looked uneasy as we approached the house.
‘You didn’t have much of that vodka, lovey, did you?’ she asked.
I told her that I had had half a glass, which I thought she knew.
‘But you don’t have a headache, do you, dearie?’
I confessed that I felt a little dizzy. She assured me that I would be all right in a short while. She did not want my mother to get worried, she added. I told her I would say nothing about it unless my mother asked me. Aniuta sighed. She could not have made her wishes plainer, and I did not want to be scolded.
My mother and sister were reading on the veranda when I walked up the steps, my arms full of fir-cone rolls.
‘These are for you — from the bride and bridegroom!’
‘Why this shape?’ my mother wondered.
‘Something to do with fertility,’ my sister said. And she began to talk of old customs, superstitions and remnants of pagan rites among Russian peasants, which she was studying in a seminar at her Koorsy. The many seeds of the fir-cone might stand for a large harvest of corn or a large family of children. Throwing confetti at the bride and bridegroom must have the same origin. And in some parts of Central Russia they had a marriage custom of serving the newly-wed with an omelette on their first morning as man and wife. The assembled relatives watched the husband cut the omelette. If he cut it crosswise it meant his wife was a virgin when he married her, if he made a circular cut, it meant that she was not, and all her family were disgraced.
‘What a barbarous custom!’ said my mother. ‘Our Bielorussians here are much more civilized.’
I remember this conversation, I think, because for a moment I identified myself with the bride, and was shocked by the cruelty of this custom. Vaguely I knew what virginity meant and I accepted the unspoken assumption that a girl should remain a virgin until she was married. All the same, my sympathy was with the girl who had been ‘seduced’, rather than with her husband who maltreated her on that account. But the whole subject of sex and marriage was not yet a matter of much interest to me: it seemed too prosaic compared with what happened before marriage — a meeting between two kindred souls and their falling in love.
For this I required the most romantic setting — France in the times of King Henry of Navarre — which of course I found in The Three Musketeers. I was still enough of a child to make the couple in my story begin as children, high-spirited, mischievous, always on the look-out for adventures such as I myself should have liked to have. In the course of the story they grew up, fell in love and became engaged to be married — but the character in my story who fascinated me most was King Henry himself, whom I hero-worshipped after reading Dumas. The boy in the story was a page of his, and the girl his ward. I suspect Henry of Navarre was to me an ideal father-figure who treated the two children as I wanted my father to treat me. He could be strict with them, but most of the time he was kind and gay, and able to share in their fun and some of their adventures. The boy, also called Henry, was passionately devoted to him. And so was I. With them I led a life of pageantry and excitement, for which a part of me must have craved.
But most of myself was deeply involved with my native countryside.
I had composed my first poem one spring morning when I was eight years old. Perhaps if I had not had Pushkin read to me when I was very young, I should not have conceived that love for words arranged in rhythmical, rhymed patterns, which now compelled me to put my feelings and thoughts in the form of verse. Perhaps if my mother had not been impressed by my early poems and had not shown them proudly to her friends, my first attempts at writing poetry would have remained my only ones — mere scribbling in a child’s exercise book, to smile at when one happened upon it in later years. How can one tell? Personally, I have a feeling that it was not all nurture. The intense emotion which things of Nature - flowers, cornfields, streams, clouds, stars, swallows — aroused in me pressed for expression, and poems were a means that lay at hand. No doubt, if we had been a musical family I might have chosen music as my means: in fact, I always sang my poems while I searched for the best words and rhymes before putting them on paper. But when I tried to learn the piano I found it slow and laborious, whereas verse meters came to me easily and almost unerringly after the first few attempts. My verse improved so rapidly that at the age of eleven I was already smiling at the inexpert poems I had written when I was eight. I learnt pages of Pushkin and Lermontov by heart with ease; reading poetry aloud became a passion. To me it was music and painting combined and brought to a perfect art: music of words, rhymes and rhythm, evoking images of Nature and people in action as vivid as life itself.
Only the women of my family showed an interest and appreciation of my literary pursuits. My father ignored them. The only occasion when I heard my mother speak to him of my poems, he remarked that ‘everyone writes poetry when they are young — even I did! ’ This seemed to me so incredible that I assumed he was joking. My brother, on the other hand, seized upon my poems as an ideal means to tease me with. He used to get hold of the exercise book in which I wrote them and which I tried to keep in a secret place, and read them aloud in tones of exaggerated pathos. Or he would lisp and babble like a very small child, conveying in this way that they were very babyish stuff. This drove me frantic and often ended by my bursting into tears.
That summer I found an unexpected ally in my father’s young secretary, Dimitry Aleksyeich, or Mitya, as we soon came to call him. He would chase my brother and rescue my poems from him. He came to help my father with some letters and stayed a week. He wore his hair a little longer than was customary and had gentle, deferential manners which pleased my mother. She told us that he reminded her of Lensky, Oniéghin’s poet-friend. In fact, he confided to her and me that he, too, wrote poems, so I let him read mine. He declared them to be ‘quite remarkable’ and offered to make a book of them — typed, of course, not printed. I was delighted with the idea, and let him take away my precious exercise book when he went back to B*.
Every morning after that I expected a parcel in the post, but it did not arrive until three weeks later. It was well worth waiting for. My poems were typed on thick, glossy paper, each with a vignette around it, so that each poem was set in a kind of frame. Mitya contributed an introduction in verse, in which he called me ‘a fellow-traveller to Parnassus’!
But his conception of what was due to me as a poet did not stop at this. He had the idea that my portrait ought to accompany my ‘book’, and when we returned to B*, he persuaded my mother to let him take me to a photographer. He took me to Perelmuter, who had photographed us as children several times before, but this time he was not permitted to have his customary way. Perelmuter was Jewish, as were most of the men who ran their own small businesses in my part of Russia. He was lively, chatty, and plausible — I had believed him when he told me to watch for a little bird which would fly out of his black box. Now, of course, I was too old to be told such tales. Anyway, Mitya had his own ideas on how a young poet should be photographed. He removed the traditional palm in a pot from the rickety bamboo stand and made me lean on the stand with my elbow, propping my chin with one hand. Screens with clouds painted on them were arranged behind my back. I was not to look at the black box but ‘into the far distance’.
A few days later he arrived at our house with an air of discreet satisfaction and produced a fat envelope from his breast pocket which he handed my mother with a bow.
The photographs! I ran up to look. My mother examined them critically. They were quite large, and - a most unexpected thing — they were partly in colour! My hair had been given a yellowish tinge, my eyes and the bow in my hair were the same shade of blue, while my lips and cheeks were lightly touched in with carmine. The bamboo stand had disappeared, and my elbow was supported instead by a large crescent moon coloured the same shade of yellow as my hair.
My mother looked doubtful. ‘Did Perelmuter put the colouring in?’ she asked.
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