My Several Selves, Imaginary and Real 19 страница
These readings usually took place in my father’s absence from the house. Shoora was not inhibited by the presence of my mother, though she did not really approve of the poem or of his manner of reading it: she had her own views on Russian history which resembled those of the Slavophils. I heard her say more than once that Peter the Great’s reforms were ‘criminal’ and that he did much harm to Russia by forcing her off her natural course of development. My own sympathies were on the side of the ‘Westerners’, but I, too, disliked the violent, despotic ways of Peter the Great. As for Alexéy Tolstoy’s poem, I sensed in it a cynicism which made me uncomfortable, and Shoora’s sneering manner aroused resistance in me, making me reluctant to smile and encourage him. This spurred him on to greater efforts until my brother would put his hands over his ears and tell him to ‘stop shouting like a peacock’.
I preferred quieter evenings when Shoora was not there. Kolia Avílov would ask my sister to ‘play something on the piano’, and when she agreed, they would go to the ballroom, half-lit by the lamp in the adjoining room, and Maroossia would play some simple ‘romance’ while Kolia sat close by, watching her. I would creep in and sit in the rocking chair by the window — they did not mind that — and when the music stopped, I could hear Kolia’s voice talking on, softly, like a burbling brook, with a brief, infrequent answer from my sister.
During that holiday I discovered that Kolia could draw rather well, and I asked him to do some illustrations for my novel about Henri and Margot. Ready to oblige, he agreed, and I watched him, excitedly, trying to make my fantasies concrete. He succeeded better than I had — I could only draw faces in profile — but once again the drawing, the realization of something imagined, proved to be quite different from what I wanted to see. All the same it made me like Kolia more for having tried, and it looked most impressively professional.
My friendship with Zena made my return into the bosom of the Martsinovsky family more tolerable. Her evident pleasure and eagerness on seeing me helped me over the first few dreary evenings of settling down.
Anna Avdyéevna, too, seemed pleased at seeing me back, but she had a special smile as she looked me up and down.
‘You’ve grown again,’ she said. ‘Isn’t this dress getting a little too short?’
I was conscious of her looking at my legs and wondered what was the matter with them. I knew they had changed shape gradually since I had started skating: my calves were getting bigger. Otherwise I was only vaguely conscious of the changes in my developing body. I liked using my body in the ways I enjoyed — for climbing trees, dancing and riding — and I was proud of being able to do these things well, but I felt no interest in it apart from its athletic achievements. Somewhere behind this there was an attitude unconsciously and imperceptibly acquired that using my femininity as a means of attracting attention was undignified, almost contemptible. If I was to be liked, I wanted to be liked for being myself — a whole person, and not merely a girl of a certain shape with this or that colour of eyes or hair. This wish was combined with my holding in mind a classical ideal of beauty against which I measured my own appearance and found it wanting in almost every detail. I examined my face in the looking-glass and felt I would like to change its lower half, leaving the upper half more or less as it was. I was always disappointed in my own photographs. My mother often said: ‘It isn’t like you at all, ’ and once Shoora, who happened to be present, smiled a proprietary smile and remarked: ‘Her expression changes so quickly: no photograph can catch it on the wing. Anything static is false as far as she’s concerned.’ I felt flattered despite myself: it meant I did not always look as awful as I did in those photographs.
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In any case our school regulations did not encourage personal vanity, and Anna Avdyéevna was punctilious in applying them and adding some of her own. She insisted on all of us doing our hair more or less the same way and allowed no embellishments in the form of combs or ribbons. Our brown serge dresses with high collars had no trimmings except a narrow white edging round the neck which had to be fresh every other day, and our black alpaca pinafores had no flounces on the shoulders or on the bottom edge. Anna Avdyéevna tolerated no exceptions or deviations on that score.
Critical and dissatisfied with my physical appearance, I was obtaining some compensation from my growing reputation as ‘a writer’, ‘a poet’ and ‘an explainer’ of lessons. This was a function into which I drifted gradually, rather puzzled by discovering that some of my schoolmates were able to memorize the contents of a lesson better by listening to me ‘explaining’ it, than by reading it to themselves at home.
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Often a few minutes before a lesson was due to start someone would appeal to our dame-de-classe: ‘Anna Avdyéevna, may I ask Rayévskaia to explain the lesson? And when, receiving a nod from her, I would begin re-telling, to the one who had asked, what I had myself prepared at home, a little group would assemble round my desk, listening hard, trying to retain at least the gist of it, so that they would not be completely at a loss if ‘called out’ by the teacher.
Often I was also asked by my classmates how to begin — or finish — an essay. This flattered me and amused Anna Avdyéevna, who nearly always permitted it.
In January we had two days when frost reached twenty-five degrees and we were told there would be no school while it lasted. Zena and I skated in bright sunshine, the sharp air cutting our breath, our heads swathed in bashlyks, our mittened hands tucked into fur muffs. This year I went home for the Shrovetide holiday and when I came back to my uncle’s house at the end of February, the fields and birch groves around it still looked wintry, but something undefinable was already in the air, telling us that spring was not far off. Day by day the signs grew more visible: the snow in the fields changed from white to faint grey; the brittle sound of frozen branches stirred by the wind grew softer as the thaw set in; the breeze itself brought with it new, more subtle scents. Then, suddenly, the air filled with the cawing of rooks — and we knew the spring had arrived.
While the ice on the river could still carry my weight, I used to cross to the other bank and go off on solitary expeditions through the empty fields and birch groves. These excursions, knee-deep in snow, did not attract Zena, and I had to admit to myself that this suited me very well. The sky, the trees, the whole of the countryside were closer to me when I was alone among them, the excitement of discovery was sharper, the enjoyment more intense. As I trudged through the soft snow, I began to sing, the shape of a poem gradually forming in my head ... or was it in my breast? The whole of me seemed to be involved, vibrating with emotion. I would stop and stare at the pattern of branches above my head, at the blue sky and white clouds shining through them. I would listen to silence, the seemingly absolute silence of woods under the snow, and hear the faint crackling of a small branch breaking, the soft thud of its fall, and then — was it possible — the hardly audible gurgling of water, very near, almost under my feet. I searched — and there it was! — a thread of a tiny brook finding its way through the snow crust towards some bigger brook, still bound and concealed under the ice. I would follow it a few paces, clearing its course of twigs and lumps of ice, then continue on my way, elated, as if I had really helped the spring to advance. Birds flew overhead, wild geese or cranes, calling as they flew, and a longing sprang up in me, a sharp access of wanderlust, which so often came to haunt me in later years. Pain and joy mingled; rebellion against being only human suddenly made my eyes burn with tears. I thought of the hours, days and years I was to spend in class-rooms, lecture-rooms, all kinds of rooms, imprisoned between walls, chained to my tasks, when I would much rather wander in strange countries, under new skies, in places with beautiful names — such names as Sorrento, Amalfi, Sevilla ...
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I wish I could fly with the birds
To a far-off country where the sun never sets,
Where men are free, not driven like herds
Into stuffy rooms — these restricting nets! . . .
These solitary walks were vivid emotional experiences, enriching and restoring, even though they made me feel more acutely the contrast between what was and what could have been. The atmosphere of my uncle’s house was depressing, and it seemed that for Zena the only way of escaping from it was her relationship with me.
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Zena did not like reading or school work; if she had any friends at her school, they lived too far to visit her. She became very dependent on me and lent herself willingly to my inventions and fantasies, the passivity in her nature responding to the initiative in my own. I thought up a new game which took the form of a romance between the King of Rome, Napoleon’s son, and his cousin, Princess Pauline Bonaparte. Having made a jump from the seventeenth into the nineteenth century, from the court of Henry IV of France into Napoleon’s court, I did not hesitate to make havoc of history by re-arranging dates and events to please myself and by ignoring the facts that did not suit me. My own part in the game was that of the principal character, Francois-Charles-Joseph-Napoleon, the King of Rome, the Duke of Reichstadt, l’Aiglon — and Zena was Pauline, my cousin. The year was 1827 and I was sixteen, but the great Napoleon, my father, was not dead. He was still the Emperor of the French and we still lived at the Tuilleries and spent summer months at Fontainebleau. France was the mistress of Europe, and my mother, Marie-Louise of Austria, still a loyal wife to Napoleon I. Pauline in my story was the daughter of Napoleon’s beautiful youngest sister, Pauline, who married the Prince of Borghese, and she was my parents’ guest at Fontainebleau. We rode and walked together, we had quarrels, explanations, reconciliations, plans for the future and scenes of jealousy. My father sometimes called me to order, reminding me of my duties as the future Emperor. The brilliant court with its splendid marshals and diplomats was always in the background, but though proud of my birth and status, I was also an adolescent rebel, defying its conventions and demands.
Thus, parallel to my sober, hard-working school life with its trials and rewards, its restriction of freedom and compensation in achievement, this other, fantasy life went on, half-secretly satisfying a need for which there was no provision in real life. Was all this built up to satisfy my deepest and least conscious need for the all-powerful yet loving father, to whom I wanted to be as precious as Napoleon’s son was to him? I collected all the picture postcards I could find in which they were represented together, and I pondered over them wondering longingly — could not this tender Napoleon have been my father in some previous life? 1 almost came to believe in reincarnation and transmigration of souls. Surely one life was not enough for everything we wanted to feel, see and do?
Once again my diary became a record of imaginary events, of scenes and conversations which took place between the young Napoleon and the Princess Pauline. It had become, in fact, the diary of my alter ego. The material never lacked, and page after page was filled with it. Soon what I described was no longer happening even in play: the royal romance continued only on paper.
Yet however much I became engrossed in my fantasy, the frontier between the imagined and the real never became confused. All the time I knew that I was I, and Zena was not Pauline, and often I felt annoyed at myself and at her for not helping me to forget it. I gave her a rendezvous under the birch tree; she was to leave the ‘palace’ in secret, and suddenly there was excitement, an expectation of adventure in the air . . . But Zena rarely managed to escape her mother’s or Hovra’s observation. ‘Where are you going?’ one or the other would ask her. She would answer evasively, but Hovra would attach herself to her, and — if driven off — would watch us from a distance. There could be no real rendezvous with Hovra watching us, and the fact that Aunt Katia also knew of it completely shattered the spell.
Nor could Zena really act the Princess. She had a kind of inertness, a lack of sparkle which baffled me. Despite all my prompting as to what she had to say and how, or perhaps because of it, her responses were never convincing and often made me fling up my arms in despair.
When we were not Prince Napoleon and Princess Pauline, we were teaching ourselves to swim. A little beyond the landing stage the river was shallow with a sandy bottom, and after splashing about in it fruitlessly for some days, we hit upon the idea of using a skipping rope as ‘reins’ to guide and support one another in our efforts to stay afloat. We practised this in turn until one day Zena let the rope go and I found I did not sink. I shouted: ‘I’m swimming!’ and Zena laughed and answered by a shout of confirmation, proud of her part in my success. It was only a few strokes, but it was real, all the same.
Zena’s success followed closely upon mine, and soon we were sufficiently sure of ourselves to swim across the river in the deepest part. This added an extra dimension to our existence. Zena especially became keen on bathing. As the days grew hotter, she would run to the river as soon as she had returned from school, and she had to be called several times before she agreed to come out of the water and eat her meal. Often her body was covered with goose-flesh and her teeth were chattering when she finally came in, yet she denied that she was cold and stubbornly ignored her mother’s insistence that it ‘couldn’t be good for her’. Her father would on occasions suddenly become aware of what was happening, and from the edge of the high bank would shout to her to ‘come out at once and get dressed’. But as often as not Zena and I were left to our own devices.
We got the sculls out of the shed and taught ourselves to row. We spent long evenings in May boating up and down the river by ourselves. Although Zena did not talk about it at the time, I knew she was unhappy and I wondered how she would fare when I left her for the long vacation, at the end of May.
A Summer of Cries
Our class-room library did not consist entirely of translations of Charles Dickens. It included some modern Russian fiction, among them books for young readers by a woman writer, Lydia Chárskaya. She had written several books about the same child, a girl of ten or eleven, a motherless tomboy, who lived in the Caucasus, dressed in Circassian clothes, rode fiery horses and was much indulged by her father — a kind of heroine who could not but appeal to me. So that summer —my second summer vacation from school - I arrived at Fyeny loaded with books by Chárskaya, in addition to a French and a German book, selected for me by Anna Avdyéevna.
One afternoon my sister suggested that I would do better if I came for a walk with her rather than go on reading ‘that trash’.
Surprised and hurt, I protested that the story by Chárskaya I was reading was not trash at all. It was unusual for my sister to express herself so strongly about other people’s preferences.
‘Not trash?’ she repeated. ‘Look what Chukovsky says about her.’ And she put a copy of Ogoniok on the table beside my book.
Standing on my dignity, I ignored it and continued reading my story. The heroine had just been sent to a boarding school in Petersburg, and she was as unhappy there as I had been in mine. Her wild locks had been twisted into tight plaits and she had to wear long dresses instead of a beshmiét and trousers. She was planning to run away.
P My sister went for a walk without me. After a while, feeling curious, picked up the magazine, turned over a few pages and saw the article entitled ‘Chárskaya’. Reluctantly, I began to read. Chukovsky, one of the leading literary critics of the time, wrote in a light, witty, bantering style, all the more effective for not appearing to take his subject too seriously. He pictured to himself, he said, Madame Chárskaya sitting down to write one of her books. She had in front of her a typewriter which had only a few keys. These keys were labelled with sentences such as ‘a fainting fit’, ‘a storm of tears’, ‘fell into each other’s arms’, or with punctuation marks, such as three dots and an exclamation mark. Madame Chárskaya, he assumed, would hit these keys more or less at random for an hour or so, and - hey, presto! - another book was ready to go into print! The only difference between all these books consisted simply in the number of exclamation marks or fainting fits they contained.
Appalled and distressed by this exposure of my favourite author’s triviality, I went on reading all the same, and by the time I had finished the article, the glamour of Chárskaya’s world had turned into ashes: 1 knew that Chukovsky was right. I was suddenly and permanently cured of my infatuation with ‘valueless’ literature.
Soon afterwards, looking through the pile of my sister’s small yellow books, I came upon one called The Gadfly, a translation from the English, yet by an author with a strangely un-English name — Voynich.
I must resist the temptation to retell the story, the impact of which on my mind was as dramatic as some conversions of sinner into saint. Only in my case the conversion was from a traditional faith to unbelief, from conformity to rebellion, and it took place almost overnight.
Conversions, it is said, are never really sudden: a hidden ferment must have been at work in my mind for some time before it happened. As a young child I questioned the goodness of a Deity who allowed the innocent to suffer and who created apparently useless and dangerous animals — such as crocodiles and snakes. I began to wonder whether my own faith was genuine when I found that I could not ‘move mountains’, and I was disappointed at failing to experience the ecstasy I was reaching out for at the great religious services of Christmas and Easter. Still I continued to hold on to what I had been taught, even while I pondered over it and asked unanswerable questions. The traditional beliefs were still sacred to me, and I felt hurt and offended by the derision with which Shoora Martynov and my brother talked about the rites and teachings of the Orthodox Church.
That summer, before I read The Gadfly, I remember asking my mother whether she really believed that the bread and wine we received in Holy Communion did turn into Christ’s flesh and blood during the prayers which the priest read over them at the altar. As I waited for her reply, my brother, who was in the room, guffawed with laughter.
‘I’ll tell you what really happens,’ he said. ‘After he has given you your spoonful of bread and wine, the priest goes into the Holy of Holies, so-called, and gobbles up all that remains in the cup, and then most likely takes another drink from the bottle behind the icons.’
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