My Several Selves, Imaginary and Real 25 страница
My mother pronounced him to be ‘a madman’ who deserved the severest punishment because he had ‘orphaned all those children’. My brother remarked that the children would, no doubt, be taken care of by the other Habsburgs, ‘of whom there seem to be an inexhaustible supply’. He professed to feel no sympathy for either the revolutionaries or the monarchists, affecting a somewhat cynical, detached attitude towards all.
My father left Fyeny for the town on the following morning. Events followed in quick succession but with their impact still blunted, at least for me, by incomprehension and inexperience. ‘General mobilization’ meant chiefly that our Ivan would have to leave our service, that he might even have to fight in a war against Austria. But why should Austria fight us when it was a Serb who killed the Archduke? Then in a matter of days Russia was at war with Germany, with which she had had no quarrel.
Mitya, who briefly visited Fyeny on my father’s behest, ostensibly to bring back some papers, but really to reassure my mother who was very worried by the turn of events, told us that ‘the war could not last’. ‘It’ll be over in a couple of months,’ he assured us. ‘The Austrians are no fighters. Besides, all the Poles and Slovenes in their army will be coming over to our side . . . ’
Mitya, being an only son, was exempt from being called up. My brother had a double exemption — as a university student and as an only son. Mitya begged my mother not to worry, telling her that my father did not want her to curtail her stay at Fyeny for his sake. But it was obvious that my mother was worrying. We heard her sigh as she went about the house. ‘This war is a calamity,’ she repeated. ‘What is going to happen to us all?’
Ivan had to report to his contingent at M*. We were heart-broken to see him go. He moved from foot to foot as we wished him good luck, then suddenly started sniffing.
‘Write to us, Ivan,’ I said, myself on the verge of tears.
‘Silly,’ my brother muttered after he had gone. ‘The fellow can only just sign his name . . . ’
As a matter of fact, Ivan came back to us after only a few weeks in the barracks: he was not yet needed at the front. ‘What was it like, Ivan?’ we pressed him. ‘Just ordinary, báryshnia . . . panich . . . ’ He smiled his huge smile. ‘Just as it used to be when I first went. Only the sergeant doesn’t hit you across the mug as he used to. Sort of more friendly now . . . ’
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In fact, everyone seemed ‘more friendly’ to one another. We read surprising news in the papers: students and factory workmen were demonstrating their devotion to the fatherland: they walked in patriotic processions to the Winter Palace in Petersburg, carrying church banners and portraits of the Tsar. The Duma declared their full support to the war effort. Germany was now the enemy: there was no question of fighting the government while Russia was at war. And the fact that Russia was fighting on the same side as England, a constitutional monarchy, and France, a republic, was to me a matter of great satisfaction, almost of pride. These countries had the freedoms Russia should have: the freedom of speech, of public assembly, of religious creed; they were our allies, and somehow this made us participate in their ‘freedoms’. Perhaps when the war was over we would obtain them, too, in our own right.
Goga Reingold suddenly arrived at Fyeny unannounced. My sister and I were on the veranda when I saw him coming towards us, threading his way between flower beds.
‘Look, it’s Goga!’ I turned excitedly to Maroossia.
She raised her eyes from her book and became quite still like a bird suddenly aware of a mortal threat. Her face turned pale, then flushed deeply.
Goga was wearing the uniform of a second lieutenant in the Grodno Regiment. He was smiling broadly as he saluted us.
Apologizing for not having written to warn us of his arrival, he explained that ‘things had moved rather quickly’. He was due to leave for the front tomorrow morning, so today was his only chance . . .
‘You see, it’s on my way, more or less . . . If I leave you tomorrow quite early, I’ll catch up with my regiment at G*. Armies are cumbersome things, as you know . . . they travel at a snail’s pace.’
He made it sound as if he were going on a pleasure trip. I gazed at him, trying to imagine how he would fight: would he use his revolver which he now detached from his tunic belt and placed on the table beside my sister’s book? Or would he use his sword which he carried into the hall to hang beside the umbrellas? He came back, having also left his cap in the hall; his narrow, sensitive face was eager and smiling. He took a chair facing my sister’s; very trim and slender in his uniform, his hair beautifully glossy and his finely arched eyebrows whimsically raised, he looked attractive and not much older than when I first saw him, a schoolboy in a grey uniform coat.
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‘It’s some time since we last met . . . Let me see ... on the 22nd of May 1913, was it not? Now tell me about yourself—all you’ve been doing during that time?’
He leaned forward, clasping his hands together. I looked at his hands: they were not the kind of hands I could imagine in the act of killing. Nor was Goga the kind of man . . .
My mother’s voice called from the house. I ran to tell her the news. ‘He’s come to say good-bye, then?’ my mother said and went out hurriedly to greet him. I stood still where she had left me in a sudden realization what her words meant.
Of course! It was not just Goga who would have to shoot at the Germans: they would shoot at him, too. This farewell visit of his could mean that we were seeing him for the last time . . .
I now understood the emotion with which Maroossia saw him arrive. What were they talking about now? They had been friends from their schooldays: she used to meet him at the skating rink . . . skating was the only sport she was ever keen on. Was it because of Goga?
My unfinished, questioning thoughts kept me motionless in the empty hall where the voices of my mother and Goga conversing on the veranda reached me as mere patterns of sound without words or meaning. What was she saying to him? What could one say to a man who might be dead in a few weeks or even days?
I turned on my heels and on tip-toe, not wanting to be heard, ran through the empty rooms to the french window of the drawing-room and out into the part of the garden where a wide cut through the trees revealed a view of the distant river valley and the blue ring of the forest beyond. It was the view which never failed to exhilarate, to make me feel that however sad or stale life might be at the moment, this was something that could never pall, a beauty which somehow contained a promise of happiness and consolation. But this time the thought that pursued me was of death: somewhere over there, beyond that ring of forest was ‘the front’, and men like Goga, or like our Ivan, were killing and being killed in fields like these, the fields I could see from the window of my bedroom . . .
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Since my conversion to ‘atheism’, or what I chose to call by that name, I had been thinking a great deal about death, usually in bed, before going to sleep. I lay awake, trying to imagine that final, inevitable moment, until utter terror gripped me and pierced my body with a needle-sharp sensation, half-shudder, half-pain. This breast of mine will struggle for breath, this heart I can hear thumping will grow silent, these limbs will go stiff and cold, and I shall be put into a grave to be eaten by worms ! The thought horrified me, made me rear up with revolt. Why did we have to suffer this indignity? What was the sense of it all? If life had to end in complete annihilation, what was the sense of living at all?
When I returned to the house tea was being served on the veranda and everything looked ordinary and as pleasant as ever. Maroossia and Goga were talking of some of their former school-friends; of the evenings they spent rowing on the Dniepr and picnicking on its banks, of the fleeting encounters during lunch break in the main street of M*, where the boys’ Ghymnasia was situated.
‘Do you remember running into my old form master just as we were about to dive into Zavádsky’s cafe?’ Goga laughed. ‘He was a terror, that man!’
‘It was he, who — ’
‘Yes, it was. He failed me in maths . . . and that’s why I’m wearing this . . . ’ He twitched the lapel of his uniform tunic. ‘If it were not for him, I should now be sitting in a lecture-room at the Petersburg University, listening to some kindly professor rambling on about the Code Napoleon. No other faculty but Law would have accepted me, of course . . . ’
It was a general assumption and a standing joke among university students that only the least intelligent and the laziest of young people chose to study law: the body of codified law in Russia was barely a hundred years old.
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‘You would have made a very good advocate,’ my sister said. ‘I would indeed! I can go on talking for hours and say exactly nothing! ’
My mother remarked that I was looking tired and suggested that I should go to bed. For once I agreed without protesting. As I said goodnight, Goga stood up and clicked his heels.
‘I may not see you tomorrow, Lédochka. Good-bye, and — whatever happens, remember no ill of me . . . ’
This little phrase, so commonly used light-heartedly, nearly made me cry.
‘Why?’ I murmured. ‘I know nothing bad about you . . . ’
They all laughed. I gave Goga my hand; he raised it to his lips and kissed it.
So this was good-bye! Swallowing my tears, I walked up the steps of the winding staircase to the mezzanine, and got ready for bed without lighting a lamp or a candle. The bright moonlight outside threw the pattern of my window on the bedroom floor: the brightness was checkered with black bars, prison-like, sinister. I went to the window and flung it open to get rid of them. Then, seeking relief from emotions and thoughts which oppressed me, I followed a familiar urge: to get right outside and as high as I could. I stood on the protective bar of the french window and hauled myself up on to the roof.
The air was damp and fresh, and I shivered in my nightdress as I crouched beside a chimney-stack, my shoulder pressed against its brick still warm with the day’s sunshine. All was still: not a sound or movement came from the faintly luminous distance where a light mist was trailing along the curves of the invisible river. I looked in vain for the twinkling fires around which peasant boys camped in the pastures with their horses. The even, white light which flooded everything from above seemed cold, relentless . . . Nature did seem to be indifferent to our sufferings, as poets and philosophers had said.
I threw back my head to look at the sky. How vast it was! A few stars were holding their own against the all-pervading moonlight. I thought of what I had learned recently: some of these stars were mere ghosts: they might have become extinguished thousands of years ago. The thought frightened me. If whole stars disappeared, could the life of a human being matter much?
By dint of gazing long at the sky I began to distinguish more stars, and, as my vision filled with light and space, a kind of peace descended upon me, and a notion of time fell away until a sound of voices talking reached me from below.
I glanced down: two figures etched in dark silhouettes against a background submerged in moonlight were strolling along the edge of the terrace. Maroossia and Goga! I could just hear their voices without distinguishing the words. I gazed at them, my breast aching with longing and compassion. What were they saying to each other? Could they be . . . was it possible that they were in love?
I saw Goga taking Maroossia’s hand. I had seen Kolia Avílov do that, and Maroossia withdrawing it at once, embarrassed, almost annoyed. She did not take her hand away from Goga. He continued speaking in a low voice, then bent his head and kissed it. A few moments later they went in.
I slipped down the side of the roof and got inside the room a moment or two before Maroossia entered it.
‘Aren’t you asleep yet?’ she asked, startled, as she saw me sitting up in bed.
‘I’ve been on die roof,’ I said.
She stood in the middle of the room looking at me. In her white dress, her face pale in the moonlight, she looked like the ghost of a bride haunting her bridal room. She knew I went up on the roof when I felt troubled or unhappy, and she was not sure whether it would hurt me to speak of it. But her own feelings were brimming over, and a moment later she was sitting beside me, her arms around me, her cheek against mine. She called me her ‘króshka’, her favourite caressing name for me, and pleaded with me not to give way to sadness. We could not know what the future held for us — perhaps it was not as dark as it looked at present. Perhaps the war was not going to last . . .
I felt her tears on my cheek and knew that she, too, needed comforting. I could think of no consoling words, so I just held her tighter and let our tears mix. We stayed together like that for a few soothing tension- relieving minutes. Then she made me lie down, covered me up and kissed me on the head. After a time I went to sleep.
When I came down the following morning, Goga had already left. Maxim had driven him to the station to catch the early train to G*.
On the same day my father came to Fyeny for one night on his way to another part of the province. After supper my mother and he withdrew to his study and talked together for a long time; they were still talking when I put my head through the door to say good-night. After my father had left, my mother told us of her decision to take a house at M*, so that she could live with us for the duration of the war. ‘Your father expects to travel a good deal, but he will come and stay with us whenever his duties allow it,’ she said. We guessed that Father was far from enthusiastic about this plan, but that Mother, anxious as ever about our well-being, prevailed upon him to agree. Was she in this decision ruled by feeling or by her sense of duty? If the latter, then she must have felt her duty as a mother came before her duty as a wife. I never knew for certain, but it was most welcome news to me.
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