My Several Selves, Imaginary and Real 20 страница
I jumped up gasping with indignation, appealing to my mother to stop him blaspheming, and I ran to my room where I wept with distress and horror at what I had been forced to hear. I wondered whether by hearing what my brother had said I had participated in his sin, the unforgivable sin against the Holy Ghost. It was dreadful to suggest that a priest could get merry on the wine of the Eucharist. But could it be true? Forbidden thoughts, like these, driven underground, persisted in returning . . . they were doing their insidious, corroding work.
Perhaps if I had not come upon The Gadfly then, my crisis of belief might have been delayed by a year or more. But suddenly, in a flare-up of intense compassion for the principal character of that novel, I discovered that I shared all his feelings and convictions: his hatred of authority, his devotion to freedom, his anger at the injustice of God and men and his love-hate for his father. Arthur Burton was as real to me as if I had met him in real life. I admired him for his strength and pitied him for his vulnerability. I was in love with him and I also identified myself with him. I pitied his father, too, and longed for them to forgive one another and to be reunited: I wanted love, not duty, to prevail. Perhaps when I wept passionately over this book I was grieving for my own unattainable father. But at the time I would have smiled, incredulous, if anyone had suggested this.
Through the alchemy of imaginative identification what had happened to a fictional character in the Italy of the Risorgimento had become immediately relevant to what was happening to me. Arthur Burton lost his faith because he had found that the priests of his religion had betrayed his trust; I lost mine because I thought I had discovered that what I had been taught as truth was not true. The Gadfly fought the Austrians, the oppressors of his country; my country, too, was oppressed—by the monarchy and its servants. Therefore I also should do something to fight the monarchy. The Gadfly was a hero, terribly wounded by men and Fate, therefore all revolutionaries must be unfortunate heroes, deserving admiration and respect.
This, too, was not a sudden discovery. In 1912 the revolution of 1905 was far from forgotten, and from conversations around me I gathered that most, if not all, university students were revolutionary or ‘red’. My sister, whose opinions at that age I took on trust, spoke of ‘the revolutionaries’ with a sad and respectful fervour. In her small, very attractive voice she would sing the ‘funeral march’ of the revolutionaries: ‘You fell, the victims of a fatal strife . . . ’ and the affecting words and melody went straight to my heart. She herself, and her university friends, all spoke with contempt of the students who held monarchist views: they were either fops to whom they referred as ‘white coat- linings’, or anti-semites, described as ‘black hundreds’.
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My father, of course, served the monarchy as a provincial governor but I do not recollect him at the time expressing any political views. If I had thought of it at all, I must have assumed that he disapproved of ‘the Reds’ just as he disapproved of pogroms or of drunks —because they created disturbances and disorder. My mother disliked violence for whatever cause, and spoke of ‘the terrorists’ with horror and of the Imperial family with compassion. I remember her saying that governing Russia was ‘a cross’ which the Tsar and his family had to bear. It was a duty imposed on them by their birth, and they had no choice but to accept it. The Empress Alexandra was ‘a tragic figure’; after having waited for years for a son, she at last gave birth to one but he was a haemophilic whose life was threatened by the slightest cut or scratch, which could cause him to bleed to death. The Tsar was ‘a kindly man of simple tastes, devoted to his wife and children’. He would ‘willingly give up his throne if his sense of duty were less strong’. His reign had been ‘bedevilled by the double disaster of the war with Japan and the revolution of 1905’. He and his wife were ‘not to blame’ for these misfortunes: they should be ‘pitied and prayed for’.
I felt that my mother’s views had a great deal of truth in them, except for the idea of ‘bearing the cross’, which laid stress on a submissiveness against which I revolted. Why could not the Tsar share his burden with a popularly elected parliament, I asked. ‘The Russian people are not ready for it,’ my mother said. ‘The majority of the peasants are illiterate.’ ‘Then teach them!’ cried Shoora Martynov. ‘They’ll never be educated as long as monarchy lasts.’ He was all for a republic, for ‘getting rid of the Romanovs’ and ‘despatching Nicholas, the Fool, to the land of his ancestors’. I demanded hotly to know whether he would also murder the Tsar’s innocent children, and, to provoke him, held up and kissed the portrait of the young heir to the throne. Contemptuously magnanimous, he replied that he would ‘let the brats go’ on the condition that they renounced all their rights to the throne.
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Shoora was not a Gadfly; he was not a revolutionary I could fall in love with, yet he must have played some part in making my ‘conversion’ possible. When it came, it was overwhelming, and for years afterwards I could not read certain chapters of that novel without tears of pity, bitterness and pain.
I wept so much over it during that first reading that I had to hide myself, and I could not talk about it even to my sister. I suddenly saw the ‘liberation’ of my own country from ‘tyranny’ as a glorious task I ought to set myself. I saw myself as a young terrorist throwing a bomb at the Tsar . . . But would it not be much simpler to shoot him, first securing my father’s revolver? If I killed the Tsar, I could not even be hanged, because of my age. And in any case his death would mean the end of monarchy: the revolutionaries would at once take over, and I would be acclaimed as a heroine, one who opened the way to liberation.
When I shared this fantasy with Vera, who was again our guest that summer, she was very matter-of-fact about it. She pointed out that it was very difficult to shoot straight with a revolver and that in all probability I would miss the Tsar. Even if I killed him, she did not think ‘liberation’ would immediately follow. ‘They would at once put the young Alexéy on the throne, and you wouldn’t have the heart to kill him, would you?’ she said. I had to admit that I would not.
Vera’s day-dreams were of a more personal kind. She told me she was determined to be an actress and have a lot of beautiful dresses, and that to achieve this she was prepared to run away from home, for her parents, she thought, would never let her do what she wanted. I had neither reason nor wish to run away from mine, but from an early age I had a passion for wandering on my own — which produced another crisis in my life that particular summer.
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We drove out to bathe in a small river some few miles from home, my mother, my sister, Vera and myself. After a swim Vera and I got dressed before the others and the two of us started walking along the river bank towards a mass of floating logs we could see in the distance. As we came closer we saw that it was timber floating down the river and that the logs covered it from bank to bank. Immediately it occurred to me that we could cross the river by walking on them, and Vera needed no persuasion to agree that it would be fun. I leapt on to the nearest log, Vera followed. The log dipped under my weight and began to roll; quickly I stepped on to the next one, expecting to find it firm — and only just managed to keep my balance. The log was slippery and the water covered my feet. Fear gripped me, but I had just enough presence of mind to turn back at once and to shout a warning to Vera. She had already realized the danger we were in, and in a few seconds we were back on the bank, our feet soaked and our hearts thumping.
I told Vera that I had thought the logs would be like a raft and that it was stupid of me — but I still wanted to get to the other side and explore the forest there. Further up the river there was a small, one- man ferry, and I led the way towards it. I heard my sister’s voice calling after us, and I shouted back: ‘Soon! ’ or some such word just to reassure them. We jumped on to the ferry just as it was pushing off and, between us, we had enough kopecks to pay our fare to the other bank.
The forest was mostly birch and fir, and we plunged into it and walked on without giving a thought to where we were going. My impulse was to get to a place ‘where no light could be seen between the trees’, for only there did I feel I was in ‘real forest’. Vera shared some of my excitement, although she remained a little uncomprehending and confessed to being somewhat afraid. ‘What if we lose our way?’ she asked.
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I replied that we could then sleep in the forest — it was warm and the ground was dry — but that I was quite sure we would find our way back however far we went.
We went too far, and though we did find our way back to the ferry, it was after some hours of wandering. We had to walk all the way home, and it was quite dark when we arrived.
The first thing I saw as we approached the house was the figure of my sister fluttering among the flower beds. She walked quickly towards us and spoke in a whisper as if afraid that we might disappear again if she raised her voice. Her first words were: ‘Thank God!’ and then she told us that my mother was ‘beside herself’ with anxiety on our account.
I asked apprehensively whether my father knew of our disappearance. Maroossia told me that he had gone on horseback with the bailiff and one of the workmen to search for us in the forest.
I rarely saw my mother look as severe and solemn as she was when she met me that evening. Having satisfied herself that we were both unharmed, she told Aniuta to serve us with some supper, which we ate in penitent silence. I was anxious to get into bed as soon as possible, not only because I was very tired, but also because I dreaded facing my father when he returned from his search. My mother let me escape upstairs, but when I was in bed, she came up and spoke to me.
She said I had behaved in a most thoughtless way and caused her hours of anxiety. I protested that she need not have worried, that I could always find my way out of any forest, and had proved it many a time when we went for picnics or mushroom-gathering in the past. She replied that losing my way was not the only danger, and again I argued that wolves did not attack people except in winter when they were hungry and went in packs. As for the gypsy stories, they were all nonsense. Finally she told me that some men, escaped convicts or deserters from the army, could be more dangerous than wolves, and still I remained unconvinced and uncomprehending — for it never entered my head that men could or would attack girls sexually.
I remember her actual words because I was struck by the obvious effort it cost her to tell me. ‘Haven’t you seen paragraphs in newspapers . . . about girls violated by men?’ she asked me.
I was startled into silence. I did recollect having seen such paragraphs, usually in small print at the bottom of a page. I had felt vaguely disturbed by them, but not sufficiently interested, it seems, to ask what ‘violation’ meant.
My mother now explained that ‘violation’ meant sexual assault, rape — and that a girl wandering alone in solitary places ran the risk of being assaulted in that way. She made me promise that I would never do so again.
Shocked and speechless, I let her leave the room without asking the question I might have asked if she had been less upset and more accessible. Why, I wondered desperately, should any man want to impose himself in that way on any woman or girl? Were such men criminals or madmen? If so, the danger was real, and not merely another example of my mother’s habit of worrying excessively about the health and safety of her children.
I remained awake a long time, battling with a wave of mounting depression. Did this mean that I was no longer to enjoy my solitary explorations of the countryside I loved so much? That I could no longer pursue the experience of being ‘in possession’ when I was deep inside a forest, utterly alone and feeling utterly safe? That I would never rediscover the emotion, verging on ecstasy, of being one with Nature? It felt as if the world had suddenly become an alien place: all the sweetness and splendour had gone out of it, driven out by this grim revelation.
Preoccupied as I was with these feelings and thoughts, I was yet on the alert, listening to the sounds of the searchers’ return, fearing whatever might happen when my father came back that night. I wondered whether he might not come upstairs to speak to me. He had never done so in the past — but this time . . . after what my mother had told me . . . Anything was conceivable after that. Hours seemed to pass before I heard the sound of horses’ hooves outside my window. The returning searchers spoke softly: I could not hear what was being said. I guessed rather than heard the horses being led away, footsteps of someone walking up the steps of the porch, movement and conversation in the house. Someone started walking up the stairs leading to the mezzanine, too lightly for it to be my father’s footsteps. Nevertheless I sat up in bed tense with anxiety. The door opened quietly and my sister came in. She started slightly when she saw me sitting up in bed, and asked why I was not asleep.
‘They’re back?’ I asked.
My sister nodded. I could hardly bring myself to ask what ‘they’ said, meaning of course no one but my father.
‘He asked whether you’d been found,’ my sister told me. ‘He’s now talking to Mamma in her room.’
She began to get ready for bed without lighting a candle as if she knew that I would rather not be seen. I was glad to have her in the room and relieved that she did not say anything more, except to tell me to go to sleep. I found that I could not talk even to her about the thoughts and feelings which were oppressing me.
She spared me the news I was to hear next morning and which was to haunt me with guilt for many a month. While they were riding at random through the forest in search of Vera and me, one of the horses put its foot through a molehill and broke its leg. The horse had to be destroyed.
This outcome of my adventure so horrified me that for a time I could not even give way to my distress and remorse: I could not cry. Why, why, I kept on asking myself, should an innocent creature die owing to my thoughtless behaviour? A horse, too, one of my favourite animals ! It felt too much like punishment, a lesson, intended for me . . . But as I was now a non-believer, who could have intended me to learn this lesson? My mother would say that the punishment and the lesson were sent me by God, and this thought added fuel to my smouldering anger with Him. What kind of God was He, who made others suffer so that we should profit? How cruel He must have been to sacrifice His Son in order to ‘save’ mankind! Long before I read Dostoyevsky, I felt, like Ivan Karamazov, that I did not want to be saved if someone had to die for it — even if that ‘someone’ was only an animal.
My mother must have been aware of the state I was in and refrained from piling coals of fire on to my head. She decided I needed a change and suggested I should go with Vera to my Uncle Fyodor’s house where Vera was to join her parents after staying with us. I seized upon this offer with the eagerness of a criminal given the chance of escaping from the scene of his crime. I saw my beloved Fyeny through dark glasses, and for the first time in my life found no joy in my familiar surroundings.
My uncle’s house at G* was always full of people in the summer, for his Polish wife had several grown-up step-children by her first marriage, and, being a generous woman, she enjoyed them coming to see her with their families and staying as long as they liked. It was a good place to be in, for Aunt Stefania was devoted to children and her devotion showed itself in providing them with plenty of good things to eat and leaving them to their own devices. To be noticed as little as possible was just what I wanted in my mood of self-dislike and remorse.
That summer the interest of the gathering was centred on the newly- married couple, Nina, Aunt Stefania’s youngest daughter and the only child of her marriage to my uncle, and her husband Vladislav. Nina had just completed a course in Russian language and literature at the Bestoózhevskiye Koorsy in Petersburg, where my sister was a student, and I was puzzled by her having chosen to marry Vladislav, who was an officer in one of the privileged Guards’ regiments. I had been accustomed to hearing my sister and her student friends talking scornfully of the military whom they considered to be brainless and uneducated. I assumed that Nina, a very independent and intelligent young woman, shared these views, and I remembered her saying that when she had finished her course, she would like to run a school of her own. Vladislav was a languid young man, rather plain, and, in my eyes, not sufficiently attractive as a husband. Why, I wondered, did Nina choose to marry him?
I shared my musings with Vera who then solemnly imparted to me a secret — she did not say from whom she had learned it; Vladislav had threatened to kill himself unless Nina married him, and this was the reason why she agreed to be his wife. ‘He swore he would marry her when she was only a schoolgirl of thirteen, and he a cadet in a military school. She said ‘No’ for years, but then it came to a head — and, after all, she could not let him die, could she?’
Knowing how vivid Vera’s imagination could be, I did not quite believe this story, but even so, it added piquancy to my observation of the couple. I noticed a change in Nina’s personality. I used to be a little afraid of her because of her forthright, almost brusque ways. But now she was subdued, and, strangest of all, she waited on Vladislav!
The ideas I had at that time concerning relationships between the sexes belonged more to the days of chivalry than to modem times. I assumed that a man showed his love for a woman by doing his best to serve her, forestalling her wishes, being courteous, tender and respectful. As far as this couple were concerned, these roles seemed to be reversed: it was Nina who insisted on doing everything for Vladislav, and it was he who seemed to expect to be served and adored. I was puzzled and quite disappointed in Nina.
Vera’s own family provided another diversion from my personal preoccupations. It was not a particularly pleasant family. Her father, a colonel in the Army, was a smallish man with pince-nez and the manners of a martinet. Her mother had a precise, imperious voice and a coldly observant eye which made me feel nervous of her, as I knew Vera was. Vera’s elder brother, Pyetia, a cadet in a military school, talked out of the corner of his mouth and looked at his sister and me down his nose. Her younger sister and brother, Aníchka and Andríusha, were charming enough, but they always needed to be entertained — a task which their mother expected Vera to fulfil. As Aníchka usually burst into tears if she lost a game, Vera and I did our best to evade this obligation. I saw what Vera had meant when she told me that her mother favoured the younger children and was severe with her. It struck me as a very strange thing that a mother should dislike one of her children, and Vera and I discussed this in whispers late into the night without finding any definite answers to our questions.
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