My Several Selves, Imaginary and Real 15 страница
‘Yes . . . with some advice from me. You see, he’s not exactly what you would call an artistic photographer.’
‘He made her look older than she is,’ said my mother.
I did not know what to say. The imagined and the real never coincided — that I had already found out — but the impact of this discovery would continue to be distressing for years to come. That portrait was not at all my idea of what a young poetess should look like. But Mitya was so eloquent in its defence, that shortly before I left home for school, it was framed and standing on my mother’s dressing-table.
A Family not Like Ours
The recurrent experience of parting from my mother had blunted the sharp point of pain and turned it into a dull ache, tinged with nausea. As I went to bed in an austere, small room in Uncle Vladímir’s house and closed my eyes, it was the image of my own room at home with its warm colours and shaded lights that sprang up before my mind’s eye. At that moment I missed the place more than any person in it. Homeliness was entirely absent from this household, and I sensed it from the moment my mother and I crossed my uncle’s threshold.
I remember well my introduction to the Martsinóvsky family. My uncle was short and stocky with a bullet-shaped head covered with thick, greying hair cut en brosse. He had a short moustache and his colour was high. His eyes were deep-set with no spark of humour in them. Aunt Katia was short and plump, and she walked with tiny steps, like a ball rolling. She had small, pale-blue eyes which did not rest on you but darted about as she spoke to you. In any case she hardly spoke at all during that uncomfortable forty minutes we spent over the tea table with them. Neither of them smiled once the whole time.
Zena, their only daughter, was also unsmiling and silent. Taller than her mother by half a head, she had a broad Russian nose, an un-Russian head of coarse light-brown curls and large, round eyes. She sat close to her mother and watched me sombrely across the table, rather as one would watch an unpredictable, possibly dangerous animal.
She turned red in the face when my mother addressed her, asking what class she was in at her school, and failed to reply. Her father answered the question for her.
‘She’s in the second class . . . really ought to be in the third, like your Leda, but with all the moves and changes we’ve had following the regiment. . . well, she’s had no chance of proper schooling. She’ll have to work hard to be moved up next year.’ He stressed the words ‘work hard’ and looked at his daughter, who seemed to take this as a reproof and was on the point of tears.
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‘In my Ghymnasia we count our classes backwards,’ I chipped in. ‘I’m in the fifth.’
My mother must have noticed Zena’s distress and suggested that if we had finished our tea, she might show me my room.
The corners of her mouth still drooping, Zena looked at her mother.
I heard Aunt Katia whisper: ‘Go!’ Reluctantly, Zena dragged herself off her chair and led the way through the red plush drawing-room and a chilly hall to a small bedroom, the window of which opened on to a rather neglected garden. The room contained a small work table with a drawer, a narrow bed, a small wardrobe and two chairs. There was a shelf for books and a mirror over a wash-stand. I was aware that Zena was watching me while I looked the place over. Neither of us said a word until I went to the window and looked out into the garden.
The house stood on a hillock and the ground fell away steeply from the edge of a flower garden, fringed with syringa and lilac bushes. I could glimpse a stream at the bottom of the drop, and beyond it the gently rising slopes of another hillock over which young birches grew freely with plenty of space between them. Though my heart was heavy with the sense of approaching separation, I felt soothed by this spectacle and glad that the repellent, blind window-panes of the boarding school dormitory would no longer stop me from looking out on the world outside.
‘Can one bathe in your river?’ I asked Zena.
‘Yes.’ Her voice, which I heard for the first time, was low and a little husky.
‘Can you swim?’
‘No.’
‘Is the river deep?’
‘In some places.’
‘Shall we go out and have a look?’
‘If you like.’
We made our way between half-empty flower beds to some earth- and-wood steps which descended towards the stream. ‘A boat!’ I exclaimed on seeing one tethered to a pole at the comer of a small landing stage. ‘Is it yours?’
‘Yes.’
Was she ever going to say anything more than ‘yes’ or ‘no’?
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‘Can we go in it?’
‘I don’t know.’
I felt suddenly annoyed, irritated by her lumpishness and lack of any effort to be hospitable or pleasant.
‘Why don’t you know? If it’s yours, surely you can go in it?’ Zena, who had been looking merely glum, now turned sulky again. ‘There are no paddles,’ she muttered.
‘Haven’t you got any, anywhere?’
She did not reply.
‘I suppose you don’t know,’ I said waspishly. ‘Do you know anything at all?’
Zena reeled back as if I had struck her, and glared at me with her mouth skewed.
‘Don’t you dare say such things to me!’ she spluttered after a pause of stunned silence.
‘I didn’t say anything, I merely asked you,’ I retorted. ‘Perhaps you don’t know the difference . . . ’
Zena suddenly recovered her full voice and her power of speech. ‘You’re showing off!’ she shouted. ‘You’re mocking me because I’m only in the second class at a private school, and you’re in the third at the Maryínskaia. It isn’t my fault, it isn’t! It’s mean of you to tease me about that.’
It was my turn now to be surprised.
‘I didn’t mean that at all . . . ’ I began.
‘Yes, you did! You ate mean! I’ll tell my mother . . . ’
Tears were beginning to trickle down her cheeks. I shrugged my shoulders and turned away. I felt embarrassed, annoyed, but not really sorry for her. It was ridiculous to be so touchy and to cry like a three- year-old.
I heard her scramble up the steps and knew she was running back to her mother, but made no attempt to detain or to follow her. When I could no longer hear her footsteps I sat down on a backless wooden seat by the landing stage and gazed at the scene before me. The birch trees clustered thickly over my head and the water at my feet looked deep and dark. The sluggish stream seemed hardly to be moving, and the only sign of a current was the slight bumping of the boat against a pile of the landing stage. The air was still, and the occasional yellowed leaf which detached itself from the branches above floated slowly down before it finally landed on the surface of the river and began to glide along with it. I was suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of ineffable sadness: it was like a sensation of nausea and it made me double up on my perch. The dark water, the yellow falling leaves meant the end of summer . . . and of freedom — the beginning of another year of trial away from home. My first encounter with Zena did not augur well. I wondered what she was going to tell her mother. I did not like my uncle or his family on this first meeting, and I felt they were not going to like me. I wondered why my mother had chosen this household to put me into. She had told me, of course: because they were her relatives, and I should be ‘well-looked- after’ and have a companion of my own age. A companion indeed! She — my mother — wanted me to be ‘looked after’ well, no matter how unhappy I was in myself! Not having yet experienced any physical deprivation, I felt happiness was preferable by far, and that my mother was wrong in putting material well-being first and happiness second. I was making this judgment and condemning my mother without yet formulating my thoughts in words.
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I do not know how long I sat there staring at the river and the yellow leaves floating past before I heard my mother calling me. She was standing at the top of the steps in her grey suit and hat, and the dull ache inside me suddenly mounted and ended in a stab of pain as I realized that the moment of parting was upon us.
I went up to her. She was looking grave.
‘Did anything happen when you were with Zena?’ she asked. ‘She seemed upset when she came in from the garden, but she won’t say anything.’
This surprised me. I had expected Zena to complain at once to her mother. But perhaps she would tell her when they were alone . . .
I told my mother that nothing really happened and that I thought Zena took offence far too readily. She shook her head and said that this might be true and that Zena, being an only child, was probably spoiled, but that I should try for my own sake to make friends with her.
We returned to the house and soon afterwards my mother said good-bye to my uncle’s family and myself. With great difficulty I managed to prevent my distress rising to my mouth and eyes: my throat was blocked with it. I did not want the Martsinovsky family to see me crying. My uncle’s buggy and horse, a strawberry roan, were waiting outside the porch. I watched my uncle get into the buggy with my mother: he was accompanying her to the station. I was on the point of asking: ‘Can I come, too?’ but, fearing refusal, remained silent. The young coachman shook the reins and the pink horse gingerly trotted down the slope towards the open gates. From the house porch I watched the buggy climbing up the opposite slope and roll away in a cloud of dust along a grey ribbon of a road, which went winding across the burnt yellow of the fields covered with stubble. Soon it became a mere dot against the faded blue of the sky, but I lingered in the porch, reluctant to turn round and meet the stare of those two pairs of eyes: Zena’s and her mother’s.
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I did not eat much at supper that evening and my aunt inquired somewhat acidly whether her food was not to my taste and what I was accustomed to eat at home. I replied that I was not hungry. But it was also true that I did not like her food, and that I was at that age a small and fastidious eater.
I shed some tears in my bed that night. In the morning, Mavra, a strapping, youngish woman, the family’s bonne-à-tout-faire, came to wake me. I took to Mavra at once: in contrast to her employers she looked straightforward and almost cheerful.
‘Get up, báryshnia, the samovar’s boiling,’ she told me. ‘And Stan’s getting the horse ready to take you to school.’
It was arranged that Stan, the coachman, would take Zena and me every morning as far into M* as the corner of a certain boulevard, which was about the same distance from our two schools. At the end of the school day he was to meet us at the same place and drive us home.
On the way out that morning Zena remained silent and morose. Concluding that she was still resentful because of my remarks yesterday,
I decided to ignore her, and, diverted by the pleasant drive, almost forgot about her. Home-sickness receded into the background before the excitement of returning to school as a full-fledged day pupil, of seeing Anna Avdyéevna and my school-mates again.
That summer, with the help of my sister’s dictionary, I had managed to read most of Madame de Segur’s story about the circus children, and I was looking forward to showing my dame-de-classe the list of words I had learned and to earning her approval.
To walk along the street in M*, unaccompanied by any adult, was exciting - almost an adventure - enhanced by my wearing a new uniform. No longer was I trammelled by the long skirt or made self-conscious by the white cape and sleeves, worn by the boarders. Quite a number of girls dressed like myself in a brown serge dress and a black pinafore were walking in the same direction: girls alone, girls in pairs or in small groups, some with satchels on their backs, others swinging their book- carriers on their arms, chattering, laughing, calling out to one another. Suddenly I saw Margóolina, my desk companion of last year. She, too, saw me, and stopped, her mouth half-open in surprise.
‘What! You, Rayévskaia?’ she said. ‘You’re no longer a boarder?’
‘No, I’m not, thank goodness!’ I replied cheerfully. ‘I’m now living at my uncle’s and I’ll be coming to school every morning, just as you do.’
She said nothing, but as we walked on together, she glanced sideways at me now and again, as if still uncertain of my identity. Only later did I understand that the attentions she used to lavish on me were inspired by the fact of my being ‘different’, no matter that the difference was mainly one of uniform.
We were met at the main door by Klementiy, the senior porter, who looked rather pleased at starting the new school year. You could never catch Klementiy actually smiling, but you could always tell by his face whether he was pleased or faintly disapproving. He told us, as he held open the door, that ‘báryshnias of the fifth class had their coat stands in the second hall, Kondratiy’s.’ So Margóolina and I, and other fifth formers found our way through a part of the school I had not been in before, and were greeted by Kondratiy, the junior porter, the same Kondratiy who had carried me to the lazaryet, such a long time ago, it seemed! He showed us where to leave our hats and told us how to get to our class-room. It was on the second floor, next to the one we had during the previous year.
Anna Avdyéevna was standing just inside the class-room door and we all curtseyed to her before coming in. She smiled with the whole of her face when my turn came and her eyes appeared to be swimming in oil. As she looked me up and down, I wondered in some confusion whether my dress was too short or my shoes not properly cleaned.
‘You’ve grown inches!’ she said.
We waited for her to tell us where and with whom we were to sit this year. I was given the equivalent of my old place in the second row on the window side, but my desk companion this time was to be Mania Babina. I knew that she had finished last year with top marks in all subjects, obtaining what was called ‘a round twelve’, which meant that she had done better than I, who had eleven marks in two subjects, arithmetic and German. Mania was blonde and had grey eyes, unusual colouring for a Jewish girl, and she wore her straight hair in a single plait which reached below the small of her back. She was a quiet, hardworking, serious-looking girl who hardly ever smiled. I, on the other hand, was subject to fits of giggling during lessons, and Anna Avdyéevna might have decided to pair us, hoping to neutralize this propensity of mine which even she had sometimes found infectious.
I had not had many contacts with the day girls while I was a boarder, as we took our midday meal in our own dining-room while they ate their sandwiches in a passage outside the class-rooms. Now, perched on a low window-sill in this ‘corridor’ — which was in fact a kind of loggia, all windows on one side and class-rooms on the other — and chewing Aunt Katia’s rather dull sandwiches, I felt really one of them. Several of them came up to me, to comment on my transformation from a boarder to a day pupil. And as often happens in such small communities, mixed, yet closely bound by common interests and pursuits, I learned a lot about its various members, without asking questions and hardly remembering who had told me what.
Liolia Tálina, plump and cheerful, with a plait of hair as thick as a rope — she was the singer of the class and her sudden bell-like laughter made every head turn towards her and alerted the dames-de-classe along the whole corridor. Her mother lived, with Liolia, apart from her husband — an unusual and intriguing fact. Katia Kign, tall, slightly stooping, with a delicate complexion, dark eyes and dark hair —she was rich in her own right because she was an orphan: both her parents died within a few weeks, the mother from consumption, the father from heart failure, trying to stop a runaway horse. Surreptitiously, I searched her face for a stamp of tragedy, but she looked quite ordinary, a serene, well-behaved, rather silent girl; a great contrast to her cousin Lena Kazanovich, who always chattered. Lena made me think of a very large baby dressed in girl’s clothes. Her movements were clumsy, her cheeks pink and round, her mouth always moist, and her face habitually wore a look of startled innocence, intensified when she was detected in a fib. Tonia Rosen, ‘the baroness’, was the untidiest and perhaps the best looking girl in the class. ‘Her father is the Leader of the Nobility’ . . . but Tonia clearly did not care about her status or her appearance.
The two Komarovskayas — not sisters, but both Polish and Roman-Catholic: Liuba, plumpish, soft-voiced, dark-haired, with eyes like black olives; Masha, short, flaxen-haired, grey-eyed and determined. ‘These two are always making up to the teachers and to Anna Avdyéevna, ’ was the comment. Olia Rodionova, whom I knew before I went to boarding school . . . She looked sleepy most of the time. Fatima and Stassia in their boarders’ uniform were also there. I was glad to see Stassia again, but felt sad when she told me that Tania Pánova had left to go to an Institute in Petersburg. I could not imagine Tania happy in an Institute. A newcomer was Alma Fibikh, a German girl, who failed to pass into a higher class and whose face shone with health and cleanliness. ‘Her father teaches German in the higher classes. It’ll be awkward when he comes to teach us. He’ll have to be specially strict with her or everyone would think he favours her . . . ’ And besides Mania Babina and Margóolina, my former desk-companion, there were three more Jewish girls in the class, whose first names only they themselves seemed to know. Epstein, the smallest girl in the class, very plain, with black fuzzy hair and small restless eyes which darted about like little black mice whenever she was called upon to say what she had learned. ‘She learns everything by heart, word for word,’ I was told. ‘She’s always on her own, never talks to anyone . . . has nothing to say . . . But she’s very near the top of the class, especially in sums.’ The other two, Ginsberg and Rashal, had a great deal to say to one another, so much that Anna Avdyéevna had warned them they would have to sit apart if they went on talking during lessons. The two were bosom friends. Rashal had a deep voice, like a man’s, and a straight narrow face; Ginsberg was a good- looking, smiling girl who seemed older than most of us, more of a young girl than a child.
With these girls I was going to spend half the day during the best part of every year for the next five or six years! I did not mind this, I was quite looking forward to it.
But the evening of every day, except during school holidays, I was to spend with Zena. How long was that to go on for? I certainly could not envisage years and years of that!
One of a straggly group of girls, I walked at the end of the school day to the corner of the boulevard where Stan, the coachman, was to wait for me and Zena. She was already there, sitting in the buggy and looking like a storm cloud.
‘Look at that sulky girl there!’ one of my companions said to me. ‘And the funny pink horse!’ Then, seeing that I was about to join the object of her comment, she giggled and hurried off with a wave of her hand.
Deciding to be friendly, I asked Zena what the girls in her class were like.
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