My Several Selves, Imaginary and Real 17 страница
‘In the boat?’ said Zena.
‘Could we?’
‘Pinky’ meanwhile was climbing the track leading to the house and Hovra was running to meet us, so that she could get a ride of a few yards, perched on the step of our buggy. I knew I should feel sorry for Hovra, and I was in a way, but like everybody else in the house I regarded her mainly as a nuisance. She received many more slaps than caresses from her own mother who complained that the child always got in her way. Aunt Katia suspected her of pinching sugar from the sugar basin, and Hovra was not allowed into the living-rooms unless accompanied by her mother. So Hovra tried to follow her mother everywhere. When driven off by her, she would attach herself to Zena, who seemed to be flattered by her devotion and treated her as if she were a little slave, protectively, yet capriciously.
When we came into the dining-room my aunt took a sharp look at Zena, and as they left the room together I heard her ask: ‘You’ve been crying? Has she been saying things to you again?’ I did not hear Zena’s reply but saw her shake her head. My aunt returned and took her place at the table. She still glanced at me with suspicion, but looked puzzled rather than annoyed and I felt incredulous and elated at having gained my first victory.
My confidence grew as I began to receive proofs of Zena’s increasing trust and affection. At the same time I noticed that her parents’ attitude towards myself became more, rather than less, suspicious and disapproving. Naively, I had assumed that they would like me better when I got on better with Zena, but I soon came to realize that it was not so at all. The quirks of human nature revealed themselves to me in all their alarming, chilling complexity. My aunt’s acid comments on my appearance and conduct became more pointed and frequent. My uncle began to interfere in whatever Zena and I did together, under the pretext that Zena should play less and work more.
‘It’s all very well for you,’ he would say, ‘you’re clever. But our Zena will get stuck in her class for another year if she doesn’t work much harder!’
Did he, by making these remarks which hurt Zena’s pride, hope to break up our friendship? This thought, incredible as it seemed, occurred to me — but I noticed the way Zena looked at her father when he was speaking. Certainly, her anger with him was not projected on to me, and unpleasant as it was to be the object of this grown-up hostility, I found I could brace myself against it with Zena on my side.
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Zena was not unintelligent but quite exceptionally uninformed and unread. I discovered that she did not know any of the stories which had been my staple diet from the age of five or six — Pushkin’s folk-tale poems, Hans Andersen’s fairytales, and later Lermontov, Gogol and Tolstoy. Her imagination was a virgin field for me to scatter seeds over, and I could not help myself scattering them in some profusion. At that time I was devouring historical novels by the dozen. They were mostly foreign history. Although I read some novels by Zagoskin and liked Yuriy Miloslávsky very much, the descriptions of life in pre-Petrine Russia held no romantic appeal for me. Aesthetically, I was repelled by the pictures of the bearded boyars in their long, heavy coats, and by the low-ceilinged houses with tiny windows in which they immured their women. I imagined them as always indulging in gluttonous eating and drinking, or occupied in poisoning or beheading one another. Russian history was acceptable to me only up to the Mongolian invasion; after that it was something to be regretted, almost to be ashamed of. Foreign ways of dressing and behaving as I saw them in pictures and knew them by description, had the appeal of ‘something different’ much more elegant and sophisticated, and I was fascinated by foreign history, especially that of France and of England. I became an addict of Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and Lord Lytton.
In my games with Zena I improvised incidents and conversations in which she had to participate, but she seemed unable to improvise her part and I had to tell her what to say. Often it was very heavy going, irritatingly so, and I had to exercise much self-control not to let fly at Zena on such occasions.
The time for such games was usually Saturday evening — on weekdays I had my homework to do, and Zena was kept at her books by her jealously watchful parents. But on Saturdays she begged to be allowed to sleep in my room, so that we could act our dramas without being disturbed or disturbing anybody. Her mother reluctantly agreed to that.
I remember one evening when we were enacting a scene from Ben Hur. We were already in bed — Zena propped up on the pillows and I standing up, draped in a sheet and declaiming some sort of speech in which I addressed Zena as ‘my gracious lady’. Suddenly the door was held ajar and my aunt’s head poked through. Startled, I shrieked and fell on my knees. Zena accused her mother of frightening me, of creeping in on us, of spying . . . She told her that she had interrupted me in the middle of an important speech and spoiled our scene. Aunt Katia defended herself: she only came to remind us not to stay up too late. Thus I became the cause of a quarrel between mother and daughter which did not improve my standing with Aunt Katia.
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From Ben Hur to King Henry of Navarre and Marguerite de Valois. Of course, I had to act the king, or rather Prince Henry when he was still the heir to the throne of Navarre — Zena was too passive a person to play the part of a man.
I told Zena that Prince Henry had been brought up in relative poverty in his native Navarre, and that Margot was a capricious and proud beauty who at first treated him disdainfully. Zena could be capricious, almost tyrannous with Hovra, and proud enough in her own way, that is, quick at taking offence; but she could not, for the life of her, act a proud beauty with me; could not provide me with a foil I needed in this fantasy of rejection and eventual triumph which became my dominant theme for the next two or three years.
‘You must flash your eyes at me when you’re saying this, Zena.’ Zena just gazed at me, her round eyes anything but disdainful. ‘You must stamp your foot! ’ A feeble effort at stamping without a trace of anger. ‘You must rush out of the room!’ Zena made a brave attempt but fumbled with the door handle. And so it went on. Frustrated in action, I turned again to writing. My so-called diary had begun with recording real happenings, but soon I felt this to be repetitive, too ordinary and dull. I began to write a fictional diary, which became the story of the courtship of Margot de Valois by Prince Henry of Navarre.
A whole series of incidents would be written during the week and ready for acting out on Saturday — and yet again I would be frustrated by Zena’s passive compliance, by her inability to sound convincing when I put words into her mouth. But she must have found some pleasure in all this, for throughout the months during which this game continued, she never once refused to play.
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‘Reality’ however kept breaking in and had to be dealt with to the best of one’s ability.
One afternoon, early in the autumn term, as I came out of school in company of other girls, a familiar grey uniform on the other side of the street caught my eye. A small group of Ghymnasia boys were standing there, watching the entrance to our school, and as one of them moved, I recognized the slouching gait and long swinging arms of Shoora Martynov. He took off his cap to me, then crossed the street to my side. My companions, with half-concealed but unmistakable signs of amusement, hurried forward, leaving me to shake hands with him. I knew I was blushing and felt angry with myself and with him for causing me this embarrassment. He walked with me all the way to the crossroads where Stan was waiting with the buggy and Zena already sitting in it. I took my leave from Shoora as quickly as I could, and we drove off, while he stood on the kerb, smiling, cap in hand.
This happened before the improvement in my relationship with Zena, and I was expecting her to make some disparaging comment. She merely asked: ‘Who was that ugly boy?’
I replied that he was someone my brother knew.
‘He’s your admirer, isn’t he?’
‘What has it to do with you?’
‘Does he meet you outside the school every day?’
‘He met me today, that’s all. Anyway, it’s not your business.’ ‘What an admirer to have!’
I was very annoyed because Zena’s remark echoed my own feelings and, I suspected, also the views of my schoolmates. When next day Shoora was seen again outside our school, they tittered and nudged me: ‘There’s your admirer, waiting for you!’ He certainly looked ungainly and odd with his close-cropped, acorn-shaped head, his small eyes and his peculiar walk. I could not understand how he had managed to get to his observation post so soon after the end of his lessons, unless he ran all the way. The boys’ Ghymnasia was at least ten minutes’ walk from ours, and our lessons finished at the same time. I did not want him to escort me every day and to appear to accept him as my ‘admirer’. What was I to do?
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One thing I could not do was to tell him bluntly to stop waiting for me outside the school. However annoyed and embarrassed I felt, I could not bring myself to do or say what I knew would hurt him. I was quite capable of saying hurtful things in the heat of the moment, as I did with Zena and my brother, but I could not do so with deliberate intent. This was going to prove a source of painful misunderstandings in my later relationships with men. Men, I discovered, could rarely believe that when a woman did not reject them outright, she might be merely being compassionate. They would rather believe that she was reluctant to admit that she reciprocated their passion.
Few admirers could have had less encouragement than Shoora received from me. When he joined me outside the school, I hardly spoke to him and I walked so fast that even he had to lengthen his stride to keep pace with me. Yet, once I had let him carry my books, I could not withdraw this privilege without giving a reason, and so he took them from me as if by right, and I appeared, in my schoolmates’ eyes, to encourage his attentions. They, on their side, all scuttled as he approached, as if to show me they did not want to be de trap, whereas what 1 wanted least of all was to be conspicuous, walking alone with Shoora.
Would I have reacted differently if my ‘admirer’ were not Shoora, but some elegant and handsome boy? Most probably I would have been flattered and might have enjoyed it, for I was as much aware of beauty in human beings as I was of beauty in Nature — even if my ideal of male beauty at the time was a young man with long locks of hair and the feathered hat of a sixteenth century cavalier. I found it almost painful to look straight at Shoora.
Our brief encounters were apparently not enough for him. One Sunday afternoon I had the shock of seeing him arrive in the company of my brother at my uncle’s dacha. Knowing how indifferently the two got on together, I even felt a faint trace of admiration at the thought of the devices Shoora must have used to induce my brother to bring him along. My brother rarely came to see me: he was a studious boy and had heavy assignments to prepare every evening. Besides, he was always ready for food, and at my uncle’s house he could not count on a really good meal. Incredible as it was to us, the Martsinovsky family were stingy with their food: there was never an abundance of cold meats, cheese, jams and pastries on the tea table, such as we had at home. ‘She watched every spoonful of jam I took,’ my brother said about Aunt Katia.
Shoora appeared quite unaware of the lack of welcome at my uncle’s house. He helped himself unconcernedly to one piece of bread-and- butter after another and talked away as he ate and drank his tea, while Zena and her mother listened and watched in unsmiling silence, and my uncle grunted now and again and muttered: ‘Nothing to boast about! ’
He was referring to Shoora’s stories about his school: the ingenious ways in which the boys baited the German master, the stupid answers some of the boys gave to the masters’ questions, the tricks they played on one another, and such like. Shoora seemed not to notice that the Martsinovsky family were not amused by these stories and that Aunt Katia was obviously disapproving. On my part, I felt responsible for his being there and thus included in the family’s disapprobation. I knew I did not deserve it, and felt annoyed with everyone in the room, including my brother who — weak character that he was! — had allowed Shoora to come with him.
Next moment I felt grateful to him when, soon after tea, he said they ought to be starting for home. Shoora protested that ‘there was no hurry’, but my brother insisted that he ‘still had a lot of geometry to do’. They bickered for a while but as none of us said a word to suggest they were welcome to stay longer, they took their leave in the end.
‘That Shoora of yours has got an appetite! ’ my aunt said as she helped Mavra to clear the table.
‘He’s got a queer shaped head,’ said my uncle. ‘An odd boy, altogether.’
These comments were milder than I was expecting, but I made the excuse of unfinished homework to spare myself hearing more. In the quiet of my room I opened the fat exercise book in which I was writing my novel. I began:
‘Henri saw from his window that Margot was picking flowers by the big fountain which thrust its silvery spears into the air under the weeping willows of the park. At once he decided to join her . . . ’
Outside, in the thickening dusk the flower garden looked battered, strewn like a battlefield with fallen leaves, and the half-denuded trees were bending over them with agitated autumnal gestures. I wished passionately, almost with tears, that I were Henri or Margot, living in the sixteenth century and picking flowers by a fountain in the park of a French chateau on a hot summer day. I did not mind whether I was one or the other, boy or girl, so long as I was not myself, not in this house, with these dour, unfriendly people. I wished Shoora were not a very plain schoolboy in the fifth form but a dashing young cavalier from a book by Dumas. I wished my brother were an ally of mine instead of an unhelpful occasional visitor . . .
I embarked on a dialogue between Henri and Margot and wrote on until I was tired and wanted to go to bed. But although my discontent was stilled by the effort of using it creatively, the scenes I described did not quite compensate me for the drabness of my real surroundings, did not make me forget who I was and where I lived. Pangs of regret that my fantasies were not reality made me turn in bed many a time before I went to sleep that night.
Next day and all through the week Shoora met me outside the school, and on the following Sunday he arrived at my uncle’s dacha on his own. My first impulse on seeing him — from my perch on the swing — striding up the drive, was to flee and hide myself, but I got no farther than halfway across the yard when I realized what little chance of escape I had. It was easy to find anyone in my uncle’s grounds, denuded by the late October winds.
I went into the house and told Zena as calmly as I could: ‘Shoora Martynov’s come.’ ‘What, again?’ she exclaimed. ‘Yes, again. I didn’t ask him to come.’ ‘I know,’ she said, sympathetically.
My aunt, however, was not in the least sympathetic; and my face must have shown what I was feeling, yet again Shoora appeared unconscious of the tension he was causing and stayed, talking, until it began to grow dark.
He came again the following Sunday rather early, before I had time to finish my homework. As the rest of the household avoided him, I was left alone to entertain him, and I found his undiluted company a strain.
I also felt cheated of all the things I could have been doing if he were not there: reading, writing, playing with Zena . . . After he had gone, Aunt Katia pattered into the drawing-room.
‘Is he going to come every Sunday?’ she asked.
I told her I did not know and that I wished he would not.
‘Why don’t you tell him that you can’t spare the time . . . that you have your homework to do?’ ‘I can’t... he might not believe me . . . ’ And I added in desperation: ‘I wish you would tell him!’
Aunt Katia puckered her small forehead.
‘Very well, I will. Next time he comes,’ she said. She seemed rather flattered by my appeal for help.
I awaited next Sunday with some trepidation. It was a rainy day and immediately after lunch I went to my room and tried to concentrate on my geography lesson. Mavra putting her head through the door made me jump. ‘Panich Shoora’s here,’ she said, and he walked in.
‘I’ve come a bit earlier,’ he said, ‘so that I can start back before it gets dark.’
My guilty conscience made me stammer as I invited him to sit down. We hardly had time to exchange a few words when my aunt burst into the room like a ball flung by an angry hand.
‘Monsieur Martynov, ’ she addressed him in a high-pitched voice, her pale-blue eyes darting glints of steel, ‘your coming here every Sunday interferes with Leda’s school work and makes her sit up late into the night after you’ve gone. I am obliged therefore to ask you to stop your visits to my house from now on.’
She rattled off her piece very fast and rolled out of the room as quickly as she had come, leaving us standing face to face, but with our eyes averted from one another. My face was burning, and I felt so guilty and ashamed of my double-dealing that I could not bring myself to speak or to look at Shoora for what seemed an interminable time. At last he made a sound, clearing his throat, and a quick glance showed me — for the first time since I had known him — that he was thoroughly embarrassed and at a loss what to say or do. His mouth was skewed in a forced smile and his voice was hollow when he spoke.
‘Well, that’s that. I’ve been shown the door . . . a pity! The little witch meant it. Your aunt is dreadful, isn’t she? I’ll have to say au revoir. . . ’
He wrung my hand so hard that I bit my lip. ‘A pity!’ he repeated, and went out with a last glance at me, the glance of hopeful devotion which made me feel sorry for him and annoyed at the same time.
Remorse at having caused him pain wore off fairly soon: it need not have happened if he had been more observant and tactful. But the shame at my hypocritical silence when he blamed my aunt for prohibiting our meetings — while she did this on my request — remained with me for a long time. Blood would rush to my face whenever I thought of it.
Shoora continued meeting me outside the school, but sometimes I contrived to evade him by getting out a little earlier than usual, or by inducing Stan to meet me at the school entrance and to pick up Zena at the corner where he was supposed to wait for us both. It made life much easier to have Zena as an ally.
Compensations
That winter frosts came before the snow and suddenly the river below the steep bank at the end of the garden ceased to flow. It had been dark and sluggish for days, choked with fallen leaves and so visibly cold that merely looking at it made you shudder. The boat had been hauled out and carried up the steps and into a shed in the yard by Stan, with Mavra’s help.
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