First Meeting with Love and Death

 

It was almost possible to forget the war in the Caucasus: the front was so far away. Back at M* we were very much aware of its nearness, especially when the news of the reverses on the Polish front and of the refugees streaming into Bielorussian villages and towns began to reach us. There was no question, however, of M* itself being threatened, and the term at the Ghjmnasia started at the appointed time. My sister returned to her teaching and I to my studies: my brother was still with us because his autumn term did not begin until October. My mother was away for a short time staying with my father at B*. We seemed to be settling down to a winter of what I felt to be ‘living at half-cock’: the brightness of the present dimmed for the young by an indefinite postponement of most things the young crave for: change, excitement, new impressions, beauty, interesting social contacts. Some grown-ups of our acquaintance talked of ‘life’ as if it were a kind of present we were going to receive when we were ready for it; others in tones of warning, as if it were a harsh lesson we would be made to learn. ‘Your life’s only beginning: you have all your future before you . . .’ or ‘You don’t know what “real” life is. It is not what you imagine’, and so on.

It made me angry to hear them talk like that. The future might be good, but what of the present? Nothing worth while was happening to us in the present!

Then things began to happen. My mother arrived from B*, looking very grave. She called us all to her room and spoke to us in a low and troubled tone of voice. ‘Your father has given up his post . . . ’

If her manner had prepared us for bad news, this, as far as I was concerned, was the last I expected to hear.

We sat for a few seconds in stunned silence.

‘Why did he do that?’ asked my brother.

My mother explained that my father had been struggling for weeks with the problem of refugees. They had been pouring into his province from the villages and towns nearer the front, and there was nowhere for them to live and very little to eat. The movements of troops had clogged the railways and the supplies of food were not reaching our province in sufficient quantities. There came thousands of women, old people and children, many of them destitute and diseased. My father found that all the steps he was taking to relieve their plight brought very little result. He could not bear to see them homeless and hungry; his health was breaking under the strain . . . He resigned so that a younger man could take over from him.

My sister was the first to speak again. ‘Perhaps it is for the best,’ she said. My mother sighed and shook her head.

‘I don’t know how we shall manage without his salary. The estate only just pays its way. ’

‘There is my salary,’ said Maroossia.

‘Vova and Leda have still to get their university education . . . ’

My brother asked where my father was at the moment. My mother told him that he was at Fyeny.

‘What about the house at B*?’

‘We may have to sell it.’

The questions I might have asked had been asked by others; those that really perturbed me I could not ask without revealing more of my feelings than I cared to put into words. Here was another proof that the image of my father I had built up from my earliest impressions was a false one! The man who spoke to me about his health on the balcony at Piatigorsk, and whose compassion for the refugees now made him give up his post, touched my heart in a way my father had never touched it in the past. I was so accustomed to think of him as strong and impervious to softer emotions that I needed time to blend the two images into one. And it hurt me to think that he could be so concerned about the refugees, yet had never shown much concern for me . . .

I was also distressed by the thought that our house at B* might have to be sold. I felt a sudden nostalgia for its sunny rooms, for my own bedroom overlooking the orchard, for the shape of the trees in it I knew so well — the tall pear tree which was my crow’s nest, an old cherry tree on which I perched while learning my grammar. I could not imagine the house occupied by strangers and myself unable to go in.

I hardly had time to assimilate these shocks when we heard the startling news that M* was to become the seat of the General Staff Headquarters. The Chief of Staff, the Tsar’s uncle, Grand Duke Nikolai, was to take up residence in the commandant’s house, and accommodation would have to be found in private houses for several hundred of his entourage.

The excitement this caused among the town population spread to all of us; but the main subject of conversation among the older schoolgirls was the probability of visits from the young Grand Dukes whose photographs in uniform began to appear in shop windows and in newspaper kiosks. Liolia agreed with me that the Grand Duke Dimitry was the handsomest of all, but she liked also Igor and Oleg, the Tsar’s cousins, sons of his uncle Konstantin, whereas I pronounced them loose-lipped and undistinguished. We all admired the appearance of Prince Felix Yusupov and his young wife, the Grand Duchess Irina, a niece of the Tsar. We had heard that the Grand Duke Dimitry and Prince Yusupov were close friends and that they both disapproved of Rasputin’s influence on the Empress. This gave them an additional glamour in our eyes. The Grand Dukes were expected to visit the General Staff Headquarters, and Liolia and Ania Bielynóvich were all agog at the thought of meeting them in the street, or in the public gardens which adjoined the grounds of the Commandant’s house, now ‘the palace’ of the Tsar’s uncle.

M*, like many a town in that region, was situated on a high bank of the Dniepr, a large working-class suburb facing it from the opposite, low bank. ‘The Ramparts’ public garden was perched on the edge of a steep drop and might have been at one time a part of the town’s fortifications. It was the town-people’s favourite place for evening walks and it had a pavilion where a band used to play on Sundays in the summer. This entertainment ceased at the beginning of the war, not only because the garrison of the town with their band had been sent off to the front, but also because to enjoy anything at all was felt to be somehow improper and almost disloyal to ‘our brave fighters out there’. This highly moral attitude, however, could not be maintained indefinitely, and in the following spring some breaks in the gloom were beginning to appear. The Duke’s personal body-guard consisted of the Kazaks who brought with them their own band, and in the first spell of fine weather the inhabitants of M* were thrilled to read a notice, exhibited at the entrance to ‘The Ramparts’, which informed them that the Kazak band would be playing there on Sunday evenings. Their playing had a panache which the old band had entirely lacked, and the people of M* flocked to the garden to hear them. They were also hoping to catch a glimpse of some member of the Imperial family.

I recollect an occasion on which Liolia told me about her meeting with the Grand Dukes. Rather late one evening, she said, she was sitting on a bench in ‘The Ramparts’ garden when she saw the Grand Duke Dimitry and his cousin Igor walk past her. One of them said something to the other, and suddenly they turned back and came towards her. They sat down on either side of her and tried to engage her in conversation. ‘I was so excited that I couldn’t stop laughing most of the time,’ Liolia told me. ‘They asked whether I would like to come to the cinema with them, but of course I couldn’t. . . Mamma would have been beside herself with worry if I didn’t come back at the usual time. ’

We all knew that Liolia’s mother kept her on a very tight rein, and that she dared not be late home after school without asking her mother’s permission and telling her exactly where she was going. I doubted very much that she could have been sitting on a bench in the Rampart gardens so late in the evening, and the whole story of her flirtation with the Grand Dukes sounded suspect to me. I knew her habit of embellishing and romanticizing every tale she had to tell, and found it somehow embarrassing. Did she tell us this in order to impress us? I could not bring myself openly to express my doubts. I merely told her that I wished I, too, had been there to meet the handsome Grand Duke Dimitry in the flesh. I carried his photograph in my satchel, and was immensely flattered when one of the women teachers to whom I showed it, asked: ‘Is this your brother? He looks like you.’ It was curious! There was indeed a likeness between us, especially in the upper part of the face, in the eyes and forehead. I recollected my mother telling me that I looked like the Romanov family because she had gazed at the portrait of the Tsaritsa while pregnant with me!

As it happened, the only member of the Tsar’s family I saw at close range was the Grand Duke Alexéy, the heir to the throne. That was in the second summer of the war. I was passing the cordoned-off part of the Rampart gardens adjoining the house then occupied by the Tsar, when I saw a boy in a soldier’s long overcoat walk into it. He was accompanied by a tall man in a trilby hat and cloak, and a sturdy fellow in seaman’s uniform. I at once recognized the Tsesarievich, who was always attended by his French tutor and his personal servant, the sailor Doroshenko. The Grand Duke Alexéy was limping slightly and sat down as soon as they reached the nearest garden bench. I recollected that not so long ago he had had a fall which started a haemorrhage and that he had lost a lot of blood before it could be arrested.

As soon as the Grand Duke and his companions sat down, a group of local boys appeared from somewhere and started a game a few yards away from him. It was a simple game called zhgoot (the strap). A handkerchief, twisted to make it hard, was used as a striking weapon. The boys formed a ring with their backs outwards. One boy was chosen to run round the outside of the ring and to strike anyone he chose across the shoulders with the zhgoot. This boy then had to chase the first one and wrest the strap from him. The role of the others was for some to assist the escaping boy, while the rest had to put obstacles in his way, thus assisting his pursuer. There were shrieks and tussles and many dull thuds as the strap came down on the boys’ shoulders. The Grand Duke took a lively interest in the game: unable to participate in it because of his station, or his lameness, he was playing it by proxy, encouraging the players with gestures and shouts: ‘Faster, run faster! Harder, hit harder! That’s a good one! ’

He fidgeted on his bench and clapped the most successful rims. The boys, though they were playing for his amusement, seemed to enjoy themselves greatly: no doubt, they received money and gifts for doing this. They were all boys from the ‘town’ schools, that is, children of small tradesmen and artisans, and one Jewish boy was particularly conspicuous among them, more vociferous, active and self-assured than the others, behaving as if he were the leader of the group.

I watched this scene for a quarter of an hour, moved by its pathos, an object lesson to all who envied the ‘great’, their exalted position and their riches. Perhaps, I said to myself, my mother was right after all, and health was more important for personal happiness than almost anything else in life. The lame boy who could never safely enjoy the ordinary rough-and-tumble, who could bleed to death from an accidental bruise or cut — what was his life worth to him? I thought his life would be tragic. He was barely twelve years old at the time: I could not foresee the tragedy of his death at the age of fourteen.

 

We began two new subjects at school in the autumn term and a new teacher was appointed to instruct us in them. The subjects were pedagogy and psychology, so the new teacher was immediately nick-named ‘the pedagogue’. Until then all our male teachers were middle-aged. This one was young, but like the others he was a seminarist, that is, the product of a training college for the sons of priests, who were preparing to be priests. Some of them, however, became teachers instead, and a school like ours preferred to appoint them rather than university men, perhaps on the assumption that they were less ‘corrupted’ by progressive ideas.

Evghéniy Rjevsky was good-looking in a raw, slightly uncouth way: long-headed and loose-limbed, he made one think of an overgrown colt. He stood over six feet tall, looked at the world with a pair of childlike blue eyes, did not know what to do with his hands and had a tuft of hair at the back of his head which refused to lie down. We took malicious pleasure in his obvious embarrassment when dealing with a class of adolescent girls. The less industrious among us decided at once that he would never have the courage to give them really bad marks, and so they need not do any work at all in his subjects. We watched him with ghoulish delight blushing and stumbling through his explanations. We felt he was defenceless and at our mercy, and we enjoyed our unaccustomed sense of power.

As for his subjects, I, for one, found them disappointing. I had been looking forward to studying psychology, to discovering the complex mysteries of the human mind. What we found in our text-book were dry descriptions of Fechner’s and Wundt’s experiments and a brief outline of the theories of Locke. It was meagre fare after the richness of Dostoyevsky. As for pedagogy, I had no intention whatever of becoming a school teacher. It was quite entertaining however to watch our ‘pedagogue’ teaching us how to teach when he himself so obviously lacked the teaching skill. Yet I could not for long remain amused by the spectacle of another person’s torments, and soon my heart, always rather soft, became invaded by compassion.

Compassion was the emotion which I had come to consider as my principal ‘enemy within the gates’. From my earliest years I had suffered agonies on account of abandoned kittens and puppies, and of starved or maltreated horses and caged birds. My distress at seeing dumb, defenceless creatures in pain was intense and lasting. Even now I feel a slight pang at one particular memory which goes back to my eighth or ninth year. My brother was determined to catch a small bird which we saw fly in and out of a hollow tree. It must have had a nest there, and one day, when it flew in, my brother told me to put my hand inside and take it. His own hand was not small enough. He lifted me, so that I could reach the hollow. As the captured bird squeaked and fluttered in my hand, so my heart fluttered with emotion: pride at having caught it conflicting with remorse and pity which made tears spring into my eyes.

In those early years human suffering entered my experience only through what I read. Having never seen dire poverty or incurable disease, I used to declare that I pitied animals more than human beings because animals, dumb and captive, could not complain or retaliate. It was through the pain of intense self-pity during my year at the boarding school that I learned to pity others and became able to put myself in their place. I also learned to what extent my capacity for compassion made me vulnerable, perhaps even open to exploitation, and I began to think of the ways of defending myself against it. By the time I reached adolescence, my defence assumed a characteristically rational form. ‘Only the weak arouse pity,’ I reasoned. ‘One cannot respect the weak, so pitying someone leads to not respecting them. Pity, then, is a kind of alms one bestows on a person one feels to be inferior. One gives the alms and passes on as quickly as possible. And — to keep one’s self- respect — one should not pity oneself either. ’

Like many an adolescent — or for that matter like many an adult before me — I overestimated the power of reason and my own power in dealing with irrational urges in myself. It was not long before I became aware that the blend of amusement and compassion which the new teacher’s struggles with his duties aroused in me, was becoming complicated by the addition of tenderness.

It was like a wave rising up from somewhere inside me when I saw him enter the class-room, and it took time to subside and settle down. He called out our names from the register in alphabetical order and glanced at every girl as she half-rose from her seat. As he called mine and my eyes for a moment met the blue flash of his, my heart suddenly started thumping with the fear that he would at once see what I was feeling. I dropped my eyes and tried to listen to his voice beginning to explain our next assignment. He cleared his throat and stammered a little. Then I looked up again — and again it came — that treacherous wave of emotion invading me, that stab of affection for his person, his long brown neck in a starched white collar, the tuft of hair at the back of his head, the red hands and vivid blue eyes. It was absurd, bitterly sweet and deeply alarming.

Back at home, reading through the boring pages of his text-books — how irrelevant it all seemed to the real stuff of psychology, to these floods and ebbs of emotion invading me — I thought of him, of what he might be doing at that moment. I wondered what he might talk about if I had met him outside the school. I wished I could meet him —but how? We had no friends in common, and anyway, his circle of friends would be quite different from ours; the only person in whose company we had ever seen him was another teacher — from the seminary. My mother had not met him, so I could not ask her to invite him to our house. In any case it was exceptional for teachers at our school to be on visiting terms with their pupils or their parents: it would have been so easy for the envious to accuse them of partiality. Shimkóvich was an exception: his boats were burnt, everyone knew that he was seriously ill and he did not care what anyone said about him. But Rjevsky! How tongues would wag if he came to our house!

Anyway, I was not at all sure that I wanted him to come. I should have liked to be with him alone, perhaps in the Rampart gardens, on one of those seats overlooking the Dniepr, in the shadow of lilac bushes, in the spring ... I wanted to see his face lit up with animation close to mine, and his vivid blue eyes looking eagerly into my eyes; I wanted to be the only person he saw and talked to — not one of forty, in a classroom. And I imagined him falling in love with me, perhaps even having the courage to ask me to marry him, and my having to say ‘No’, while my heart was bursting with sympathetic pain. Because there was no question in my mind of a marriage between us — it was impossible. I had already mapped out my life: I would go to a university, take a degree in Russian language and literature, and become a lecturer in these subjects. In university vacations I would travel and write books. If I married, it would be someone very different from an awkward seminarist, a school-master in a provincial town, who would confine me to a life of narrow domesticity and the company of his seminarist friends.

No, I did not want him as a husband, I could not even briefly imagine him in that role. Nor did I picture him in my day-dreams kissing me or holding me in his arms. Why, then, did I long for him in this strange and irresistible way, so intensely at times that it made me weep in the solitude of my room? I longed to pass my hand over his hair, to see that obstinate tuft at the back smoothed down and ruffled up again under my touch ... I wanted to tell him to take no notice of the silly giggling girls in the class-room, to say to him: ‘Look, I am not laughing at you — I love you! ’

Love him? Was this pressure of thoughts and images, this tender craving really love? Could one love a person one hardly knew? Someone so unlike the kind of man one wanted to love? A man to whom one could never confess one’s love, whom one did not wish for a husband? What a bad joke, what a waste! Why should it happen to me? What was the sense of it?

These unanswerable questions I continued to ask in the poems I wrote about my love for Evghéniy, and I tried to answer them when I wrote letters to him, letters which I had no intention of ever posting. Into them I poured my tenderness and anger; derided myself for my weakness and foolishness; reproached him for his blindness and indifference; and bitterly accused myself of being merely in love with love.

I showed my poems to my mother and sister, assuming they would not guess who had inspired them. My mother, clearly fearing to offend me, said they were good but she liked my earlier poems better: ‘those in which you write about Nature’. My sister, probably suspecting the source of my torments and inspiration, made no comment. Shimkóvich, who asked to see some of my ‘more recent ones’, read them slowly, then took off his pince-nez, swung it on his finger for a few moments, and finally said: ‘Not like your usual writing . . . rather more like Nadson. I should say almost morbid . . . Have you been reading a lot of Nadson by any chance?’

I lived in fear that Anna Avdyéevna, or some of my classmates might notice that I was in love with the ‘pedagogue’. To put them off the scent I often joined in the derisive comment on his speech and manners, still indulged in by some of the girls, though afterwards I felt ashamed of this ‘betrayal’ and my hypocrisy. I kept my secret from the members of our band of five as well: they all looked down on Evghéniy for being a seminarist, and I felt I would suffer in their esteem from this revelation. The only person I could talk to about my love was Zena: she had never seen Evghéniy, and so could not hurt me by criticizing him, nor did she have anyone to whom she could chat lightly about my confidences. She had just returned home after a long stay at the hospital in Moscow, still rather pale and easily fatigued, but with a normal appetite and well on the way to a complete recovery. She said she was glad to be out of hospital, but showed singularly little eagerness to return to her parents’ house, and stayed with us for long week-ends.

Inarticulate and sympathetic in a depressed way, she listened to my outpourings after we had gone to bed, in a room where the only light came from the pale sky seen through the window. I could barely discern her tousled head against the blurred white of the pillow.

‘What are you going to do then?’ she asked in a tired voice.

‘What can I do? Nothing, absolutely nothing! My love is just wasted . . . it’s of no use to anybody . . . ’

‘It is of some use to you,’ said Zena. A catch in her throat made me pause for a moment, wondering what my confession was doing to her. But my own feelings were pressing too hard on me to let me consider hers.

‘It’s of no use to him,’ I continued vehemently, ‘because he shall never know that I had loved him. It’s of no use to me because it is just burning itself out in solitude, in pain and anger, and merely makes me desperately unhappy.’

‘I don’t see why you should be angry,’ said Zena slowly. ‘Angry . . . with whom?’

‘With myself mostly —for falling so stupidly in love with such a . . . with the wrong person. Angry with him — for being what he is. Angry with Nature — for setting me . . . us . . . such a trap! ’

Zena’s response to this pulled me up with a start.

‘I wish I could fall in love with someone,’ she said in a low voice, full of tears.

I got out of bed and went over to her. She was crying quietly, her face undistorted by grief.

‘Why, Zena? What did I say to make you cry?’

‘Nothing ... I think you’re lucky ... to be in love. I’m not in love . . . and I am unhappy. I think it is better to be                                                   in love … even if you are unhappy . . . ’

My bitterness suddenly stilled by her distress and by the obscure wisdom of her remarks, I remained silent, sitting on her bed, stroking her coarse, tangled curls until she stopped crying. Then, more calmly, I said: ‘I can’t bear just loving him and doing nothing for him. You know what I can do . . . with your help. When the spring comes, I will give him a large bunch of white narcissi. We’ll have to plan this: obviously, I can’t give them to him myself . . . But you will help me, won’t you?’ ‘Yes, if you tell me how.’

She sighed. I kissed her and returned to my bed.

 

I recollected that promise with a heavy heart when the spring came and Zena was not there to help me. A few days later she caught a chill on the way home from school; her father afterwards said she refused to wear a warm shawl over her shoulders when being driven in the open gig. ‘As if a girl of fifteen would want to look like an old woman of fifty!’ I thought indignantly. I could not help blaming Uncle Vladímir for what had happened. I felt that Zena should not have been sent to school so soon after her return from the hospital. She was not strong enough to stand exposure to bad weather.

We knew nothing of that until two days later. I was alone in my room, not concentrating at all well on a problem of algebra. Heavy rain was pouring down outside. My mother and sister were at the other end of the house and I could hear nothing except the noise of falling water like the rustling of a gigantic silk petticoat. Suddenly the front door bell clanged with a force such as no ordinary visitor would use. I sat up, my nerves taut, my mind an anxious blank . . . Who could it be? I heard the maid scurrying along to answer it, and got up and held my door ajar in order to hear better. There was a glazed veranda between the front door and the hall, and some of the drawing-room windows opened on to it. From my room, which adjoined the drawing-room, I could hear someone’s heavy, shambling footsteps treading the length of the veranda and entering the hall. My mother must have hurried to meet the visitor because the first voice I heard was hers, asking in alarm: ‘You, Volodia? What has happened?’

And the terrible, hardly recognizable voice of my uncle answered: ‘I’ve come . . . come to ask you to my daughter’s wedding . . . ’

The appalling sounds that his grief tore from him made me close my door promptly and cover up my ears to avoid hearing those inhumanly raucous sobs. Surely he could not mean that Zena was dead? Yet what else could he mean by that phrase about the wedding? A white bridal gown? The bride of Christ? I dared not come out and meet him. Trembling from head to foot, I repeated to myself: ‘It can’t be true, it can’t, it can’t!’ Several minutes passed. I gave a violent start when my door opened and Maroossia came in, looking grave, traces of tears on her face.

‘Is it really true?’ I asked her. She nodded.

‘This afternoon. Her temperature was almost normal this morning. The doctor came to see her, said her lungs were affected and told them to keep her warm in bed. Towards evening her temperature shot up, she lost consciousness, and . . . ’

‘But why, why?’

‘Her heart must have been weakened by her long illness last summer, by that anaemia. It couldn’t stand the strain of high fever ... It just gave out.’

Just gave out! I thumped my forehead with my clenched fist.

‘Her parents are real criminals! It’s their fault! They kept her short of everything . . . saving money to leave it to her . . . What’s the use of it now? Poor Zena . . . dead... dead at sixteen . . . ’

My sister sat beside me on the sofa, embraced me and begged me not to grieve so much. ‘Perhaps it is better so . . . Zena has been unhappy . . . she might have had a life of unhappiness if she had lived. ’

‘But she would have had a life . . . now she has nothing!...’

‘We don’t know that,’ said Maroossia stroking my hair.

Although she soothed me a little, I could not bring myself to come out to Uncle Vladímir that evening. His grief frightened me instead of arousing my sympathy. I doubt that he had noticed my absence. He had come to tell my mother because she was his first cousin, and more friendly towards him than his unhappy wife.

But during the next twenty-four hours I had to brace myself for a trip to their house to see Zena for the last time. I both wanted to see her and dreaded it, and I dreaded even more facing the desolation of Aunt Katia’s and Uncle Vladímir’s terrifying despair.

I had not visited the place for some time while Zena had been away in Moscow, and as we came up the rise leading to the vast courtyard, my eyes turned to the swing which I had so often shared with her. The posts were still in position, but the plank and the ropes had been removed. The thing was standing there, useless and vaguely sinister like a gibbet. The courtyard had a forlorn air; only the watch-dog rattled his chain and whined when he saw us. I looked at the house where I had spent many not very happy months: it seemed that the only good thing that had happened there during that time was the conversion of Zena from my enemy into my friend. And now Zena was dead. Could I have done more to relieve her unhappiness?

Uncle Vladímir met us in the doorway. One rapid glance at his face was enough for me: it was not so much changed as distorted by the blow that Fate had dealt him. His whole body had sagged under it, his thick shoulders were hunched, his neck drawn in, his gait weighted down as if with a heavy load. Aunt Katia appeared from her bedroom, her eyes swollen but dry, her face the colour of chalk. Tears began to flow down her cheeks as we all embraced her. Without speaking we followed them into the drawing-room. That room, which was hardly ever used when I lived with them because the Martsinovskys so rarely entertained, was now made beautiful for Zena: with curtains drawn and lamádas burning before the icons, it looked like a chapel and smelt of incense and flowers. Zena occupied the place of honour under the icons, on a table covered with Aunt Katia’s best linen sheets. She looked very much as she had been looking during the last few months, only her pallor was now tinged with yellow and the tip of her nose was no longer rounded but sharp. The look of weary bewilderment which I had so often seen on her face had disappeared: she was very calm, almost contented in her immobility. I came up close and stared at her face, wanting desperately to speak to her, to ask what she was feeling, to beg her to let me know what death was like. I thought of an evening some months ago when, half-jokingly, she, Shoora Martynov and I had solemnly promised to tell one another whether there was life after death: the one who died before the others was to appear to the other two and tell them — ‘if it were at all possible for him to do it . . .’I was sure Zena would keep her promise - if she could.

On the way back my mother talked to my sister while I listened with increasing exasperation.

‘Your uncle Vladímir told me he had been saving all he could, so that Zena would have money of her own when she got married. He could think of no other future for her except marriage, and now all his hopes, all his plans for her are brought to nothing. It is tragic.’

‘It might have been wiser to let Zena have some pleasure out of life while she was young,’ said Maroossia.

‘He could not foresee such a disaster,’ said my mother. ‘And I think Katia could have been more vigilant and more firm with regard to Zena’s health. She let her do more or less what she liked. That bathing . . . ’ My mother’s evident wish to find excuses for Uncle Vladímir hurt and angered me, but I felt too depressed even to protest. When we got home I went straight to my room and tried to read what I had to prepare for next day’s lessons. My efforts were of no avail. I leaned back in my chair and stared in front of me. Zena’s face, as I had seen it only a few days ago, was imprinted on my memory, and I compared it with that other face which I saw reclining, peaceful and waxy, on a frilled, white, pitilessly hard pillow. I gazed at the closed, white-painted door of my room and wished, straining all my will power, that it would open and Zena would enter, as she had promised, to tell me that there was life after death. I, who used to be so afraid of ghosts, now wished a ghost to appear to me.

‘Zena, do come! ’ I said aloud. ‘Don’t be afraid to frighten me. I won’t be in the least frightened. I want you to come!’

The tension I felt was such that it seemed to spread to the very air of the room. My ears were ringing. I waited — but the door did not open and no one came. Perhaps it was too early to call, I said to myself; after all, she had only been dead these two days . . . her body was still in that darkened room in her parents’ house. Her spirit might be there, close to me but unable to make itself visible . . .

Afterwards, I tried more than once to conjure Zena’s spirit to appear to me by using all the strength of will I could muster. I was unsuccessful. Was I the kind of person to whom ghosts would not appear? Or was it, as I had suspected all along, because there were no ghosts, no life after death and no possibility of communicating with the dead? Zena could not answer my call because she was no longer herself but a weight of inert flesh, disintegrating under the weight of earth in a comer of a wind-swept and rain-soaked cemetery.

There was something about the image of a body I had known and touched and now knew to be decaying in the grave which aroused in me the feeling of intense revolt and indignation. I could not accept the finality of death, the meaninglessness of life which ended in death. What had been the meaning of Zena’s life, or of her premature death? A child of unhappy, warring parents, she had seen little joy or pleasure while she was alive, and her death brought only grief and despair but no reconciliation between them. And if she had to die at sixteen, why was I privileged — if it was a privilege — to go on living?

I turned to my sister with some of these questions, hardly knowing what I hoped to hear from her. She was pained by the bitterness and violence of my remarks. If I did not believe in survival after death, she said, could I accept Tolstoy’s idea that the way to impart a meaning to one’s life was to do things for other people?

‘Why always other people?’ I protested. ‘What about ourselves? Are our own lives any less valuable? It is all very well for Tolstoy to preach self-denial — he’s an old man, he had lived a full life before he retired to Yasnaya Poliana and decided to live for others! I have my own life to live and I want it to be beautiful ... I want to be happy ... I want those I love to be happy too. I don’t believe in self-sacrifice! ’

The truth of the matter was that although I proclaimed myself to be an atheist, I could not really give up the hope of survival after death. I let myself think of Zena as being in some place where she was at peace with herself and could contemplate her past life and her parents with detached compassion. I liked to imagine that she was still fond of me. Perhaps, after all, she was not allowed to come and tell me what I had asked for. ‘A country from which no traveller returns’ . . . Perhaps that country was impossible to describe. But could she not just tell me that it existed?

My inner conflict continued. For weeks I dreamt of Zena being alive, of Zena looking ill and sad, and — a horrible dream — of Zena dead in a coffin with one eye disintegrating, bursting open and spilling on to her white dress.

 

When Shimkóvich, who had been a regular visitor at our house, sent a word to say that he was confined to his bed, my mother said: ‘I wonder if he will get up again.’

It looked as if at the Ghymnasia, too, they did not expect him to return to teaching. Ivan Kuzmich, our Director, took over from him in my class. With a pang of remorse I had to admit to myself that I found him more stimulating than poor Shimkóvich with his astringent humour and his addiction to ‘folk’ poets, such as Nekrasov, Nikitin and especially Koltzov. True, he had sometimes aroused my interest by asking general questions the answer to which was not to be found in our textbooks, and when the class remained decorously silent, he would turn to me with a smile, asking: ‘And what does our little grandmother think about this?’

— ‘I’m not joking’, he added, seeing that I looked disturbed and uncertain whether he was ironical. ‘You do often speak as if you had half a century’s experience behind you . . . ’

Ivan Kuzmich did not flatter me as openly as that, but his eyes often turned in my direction when he asked one of his general questions. His lessons consisted of almost nothing else: he would start by quoting some lines from Tolstoy, or Pushkin, or Shakespeare, then invite us to say what we understood the author meant by these words. Frequently he would pull one word out of its context and challenge us to define it.

 

... a thought,

A slumbering thought, is capable of years,

And curdles a long life into one hour . . .

 

‘Life,’ he would repeat slowly and solemnly, plunging his fingers into his long beard and surveying us with his piercing eyes: ‘What is life?’ Needless to say, very few of us attempted the definition, and those who did rarely produced anything original. Ivan Kuzmich must have derived plenty of amusement from our attempts, but he showed it only in his twinkling eyes: his mouth was well concealed under his beard. He did not slap down any feeble or muddled definition, he merely transferred his attention to the next speaker, and the next after her, until someone made a really creditable effort, and then he would purr his approval and go on to expounding and commenting on it for a little longer. I soon found myself among the few who received recognition from him, and I felt proud and relieved, for I had been passing through spells of depression and self-doubt alternating with spells of buoyant self-reliance.

These swings of mood are thought to be common in adolescence, but mine may have been intensified and made more poignant by Zena’s 10death and my unhappy love for Rjevsky. In my last two years at school I had moved to the top position in a class of eighty-four pupils (there were forty-two in my class and the same number in the parallel class, the two being treated as one form), and I retained this position without difficulty. I knew in my last year that I was the only candidate for the gold medal, while Katia Kign was the most likely pupil to get the ‘right’ to one. I was known to the whole school as ‘a poet’, and all the teachers, as well as personal friends, had praised my literary ability. Yet, on the threshold of university life, determined to make writing my main profession, I wondered whether all this was really true, and I compared myself to the ant in Krylóv’s fable, a creature who was the object of pride and admiration on his own ant-heap, but remained quite unnoticed when he took a ride to the market on a hay wagon and began to display his strength by lifting wisps of hay. Could not this happen to me when I found myself at a university, among other students who were all gold medallists, like myself? I even wondered whether Shimkóvich would have said all the flattering things he had said about my work if he had not been ‘in love’ with me. The Director’s encouraging nod was thus like a soothing balm on my exacerbated sensibility, and I looked forward eagerly to his lessons, feeling all the while that I was being disloyal to poor Shimkóvich, dying in his rooms half a block away from our school.

We visited him in small groups of twos and threes after lessons. His face was the colour of yellow parchment and he looked very frail, but as neat and composed as ever, his beard carefully trimmed, his hair brushed smoothly away from his forehead. He talked to us in his familiar way with characteristically measured intonations, in a voice perhaps more husky than in the past. There were three of us there on one occasion, Katia Kign, Lena Kazanovich and myself, but as he talked, his eyes never left my face. We all sat awkwardly in a row on the edge of a settee. ‘Like swallows about to fly away,’ he said and smiled. That smile entered my heart and remained there like a great sharp splinter, making it ache whenever I thought of him.

When the Director, looking more grave than usual, entered our classroom one blustery February morning and began by saying: ‘I have sad news for you . . . ’ we knew at once that it was about Shimkóvich. He had died the previous night and the funeral was fixed for a date three days later, as was customary.

The upper classes of the school were told that they could come to the funeral. The funeral procession was quite long, but no relatives of the deceased were pointed out, and I wondered who was with him when he died. I thought with remorse about an incident which occurred a few months before, when at a school party he had offered me a posy of flowers and I tried to decline accepting it. At school parties a stand with posies of fresh flowers was usually put up. The men bought them as a matter of course and offered them to girls before the first dance. I was in a state of feverish excitement because I was hoping that Rjevsky would ask me to dance with him. I was chatting with Ania Bielynóvich and one of the Komarovskayas when I saw ‘the pedagogue’ picking his way through the crowd and coming towards us. He was wearing a new uniform tunic with shining buttons, his hair had been too obviously and frantically brilliantined, but the obstinate tuft was still rising up at the back. His blue eyes were luminous and his hand felt a little rough as he squeezed mine — for the first time since I set eyes on him. I trembled lest he would now ask Ania or Liuba for a dance. But he took the posy from his buttonhole and held it out to me. ‘May I offer you this? And would you grant me the pleasure of the first waltz?’

Would I not! I pressed the posy to my face, ostensibly to inhale its fragrance, but really to conceal the flush of delight which I felt flooding my cheeks. And then, out of the comer of my eye I saw Shimkóvich approaching slowly, hovering on the edge of our group, and finally greeting us all by shaking hands with each one in turn. He, too, had a posy in his hand. He seemed to be waiting for Rjevsky to go, but as the other man remained planted where he stood, Shimkóvich shuffled his feet a little, fingering his posy like a public speaker fingers his watch chain before beginning his speech. A desperate plea was running through my mind.

‘Don’t do that, please! Can’t you see that I have one already, and that the other two have none? Give it to one of them, do! ’

My embarrassment grew with the certainty that he was going to give it to me, and the others, watching and waiting in silence, added to my confusion.

‘Will you accept this from a man who cannot ask you to dance?’ Impulsively, foolishly, I blurted out: ‘But I have one already!’

As soon as I had said it, I could have bitten off my tongue. I saw that Shimkóvich was taken aback and hurt. The softness which lit up his face and stole into his voice while he was making his offer, had vanished, and after an awkward pause he said with a touch of irony: ‘Surely there is no harm in your having two, as I can’t claim a dance anyway?’

I took it, burning with shame at my tactlessness and the unfair distinction in being presented with two posies while my companions were still without any. Luckily, the band struck the first bars of the waltz and I could turn to Rjevsky and to the long-anticipated experience which would reduce the distance between us to a few inches of air and the thickness of our clothes. I expected an electric shock to go through me as our hands touched, and was tense with fear that he, too, would feel it, and would know what I felt.

A current did indeed nm through my body but it was mercifully earthed, and only a faint excitement persisted, which allowed me to waltz happily and almost without embarrassment. But the remorse remained: it gave my heart a twinge every time I swung past the doorway where Shimkóvich was standing, watching the dancers through his twinkling pince-nez. I had pinned one of the posies to my breast and held the other in my hand. It was awkward, for that hand rested on Rjevsky’s shoulder and the flowers were touching his cheek. They were Shimkóvich’s flowers, which added to the unfairness of it all. And the fact of being so near to the object of my desires — something which seemed so improbable when I had looked at him from my place in the class-room - suddenly dwindled in importance, was reduced to no more than a sensation of smooth cloth under my fingers, of an arm round my waist, and a faint smell of tobacco mingling with the fragrance of flowers.

I thought also of the occasion when I deceived Shimkóvich by pretending that I could ‘read’ without seeing the question which he wrote on a slip of paper and gave me to hold. He had asked: ‘Shall I live long enough to see the end of the war?’ And I replied: ‘You certainly will.’ and he looked so pleased and so impressed by my powers of clairvoyance. If there was life after death and if he now knew the truth, and saw me as I was, a vain creature, neither very honest, nor very brave, and besides hopelessly in love with a very ordinary young man, I hoped he would also know how genuinely sorry I was now for not having shown him all the respect and affection which I had felt for him. Why, oh why, I asked myself, with my throat constricted and my eyes burning but dry, why do we not remind ourselves more often that the people of whom we are fond can die at any moment, and when that happens, all we could and wanted to tell them, or do for them, would remain for ever not said and not done?

These thoughts goaded me into action when the spring came and Aunt Katia’s garden was again filled with white narcissi, which she had also planted on Zena’s grave.

‘Yes, you can pick as many as you like, ’ she told me when I came to see her one Sunday. ‘Now there’s no one but myself to take pleasure in them. ’She had not changed much, Aunt Katia, since Zena’s death, except for this letting up on what we called her stinginess. The loss of their only child did not bring Uncle Vladímir and her together; on the contrary they seemed more estranged. Aunt Katia came to see us more often and stayed longer, but her conversation was of trivial things, as before, and she seemed to spend her time at home reading light novels and doing a bit of gardening, almost devoid of human companionship but for Mavra, the maid of all works, and her daughter Hovra. It was a dismal house to visit, and I never stayed longer than I could help. I picked a very large bunch of narcissi, so large that I had to explain it, and I muttered something about distributing it among our several rooms.

In fact I gave half of the flowers to my mother and sister and took the rest to my room. ‘You should put them out for the night: the scent is too strong,’ said my mother. I ignored this. The scent was bright and incisive like the blade of a rapier. I sat and stared at a single flower, smiling at my thoughts. I saw it as a perfect symbol of hopeless love, its whiteness as the pallor of unacknowledged passion, the red circle round the centre as its fire almost stifled by neglect and the small yellow centre as the heart full of jealousy. A poem was forming in my mind: ‘White, yellow, red . . . three shades of meaning . . . ’

I threw myself on to my bed and repeated the phrase, lying on my back, staring at the ceiling. ‘White . . . yellow . . . red . . . ’ Each colour became crowded with associations. White became innocence as well as passion; it also stood for pride in suffering, for unavowed tenderness, for sadness and hopeless desire. Yellow stood for burning torments of secret jealousy, for restless, nervous, impulsive anger of unwanted love; it was the hate aspect of love. Red was ‘a flame and a thirst’, a fiery caress, the brightness of desire, the power of physical attraction — all these embodied in one flower, in the three colours of a white narcissus.

For an hour I tossed on my bed, paced up and down the room, plunged my fingers into my hair, and wrote, until all these meanings were packed into three stanzas of four lines. I reread them aloud and experienced a tremendous sense of relief from having given shape to so much turmoil within me in perfect anapaests and without a single weak rhyme. And it was true: I believed the words I had used were the nearest approximation to the intense and complex emotions that were tearing me apart.

On the following morning at school, while the others were dancing in the examination hall, I took Ania Bielynóvich aside and asked her whether she would do me a favour. She wanted to know what it was. I told her I wanted her to come for a walk with me that evening. ‘Is that all?’ she asked, incredulous. I promised to tell her more when we met after school.

My plan was to walk to the seminary at the far end of the town where Rjevsky lived and to hand a bouquet of white narcissi to the porter, to be passed on to him. I did not want to be identified as a pupil of my Ghjmnasia, so decided to disguise myself in my brother’s old clothes, trusting that the porter would take me for a boy. I needed Ania to keep me company in this rather hazardous undertaking — for I hardly dared imagine what would happen if a member of the school staff met me wandering the streets of the town, dressed up as a boy. If Anna Avdyéevna chose to dock my conduct mark even by one point, my gold medal was certain to go to someone else!

Ania looked a bit startled when I walked up to her in the porch of the cathedral church where we had agreed to meet. ‘What on earth . . .?’ she began, then, seeing in my hands a large object wrapped in paper, which could not be mistaken for anything but a bouquet, she said: ‘Ah! I understand . . . ’ and taking my arm, adjusted her pace to mine.

She looked more and more ironically understanding as we made our way through less frequented streets in the direction of the seminary.

‘How can you make sure that he gets it?’ she asked.

I told her that I had typed the name on a card and pinned it to the flowers inside the wrapping.

‘Even so, they might go astray.’

I told her to ‘stop croaking’. Normally, I was amused by her teasing but on that occasion it got on my nerves. I wanted Rjevsky to get these flowers; I pictured to myself the expression on his face when he received them—surprise, pleasure, embarrassment—if any of his colleagues happened to be there. ‘From one of your ghjmnazistkas?' they would ask. And he would blush, and laugh, and bury his face in the flowers, which I had held against mine only a short time before . . .

The seminary buildings, like a monastery, were enclosed within high, white walls, and one had to pull a handle of a resounding bell outside its gates to gain admittance. My determination was almost shattered by the noise. I was about to turn on my heels and run when the little shutter in the door slid open and a bearded face demanded to know what I wanted. I handed the bouquet to the porter with the words: ‘For Mr Rjevsky’. — ‘From whom?’ he asked. ‘From a friend of his,’ I muttered and walked off as deliberately as I could, feeling the man’s stare on my back.

We had a lesson in pedagogy on the following day. I could not bring myself to meet Rjevsky’s glance for fear that he suspected my secret and that my eyes would finally give me away. And I could not avoid seeing Ania’s lips curl in an ironical smile whenever she caught me glancing stealthily at him. He, on the other hand, appeared supremely unconscious of the currents of feeling flowing around him, and carried on with his exposition of Fechner’s theory of complimentary after- sensations in his usual genial manner. Was he just a little more pleased with life than usual? I saw no sign of his being in the seventh heaven of delight through having received a bouquet of white narcissi the night before, and I was disappointed . . .

But had I any right to be? Had I not wanted him to remain in ignorance with regard to the identity of the giver? Everything, positively everything in this one-sided love affair was to me a source of conflict and selftorment !

The Doors Open

 

Since he had given up his governorship of B*, my father spent most of his time at Fyeny, preferring us to visit him rather than come to us at M*. When he came, he often looked preoccupied and would talk to no one except my mother. These conversations usually took place when my sister and I were both at our school, and we knew of it only from what my mother told us afterwards. She said that my father was worried about the future. He had always lived on good terms with his peasant neighbours: he ran a model farm to show them the more up-to-date methods of land cultivation, and some of them had followed his example and accepted gifts of better seeds. He encouraged them to give up the custom of holding land in separate strips, and a fair number of families moved out of the village and settled down on hootors, separate cottages on a few acres of their own. Shoora Martynov declared that this policy was pursued by the government with the aim of splitting up the village community and making revolution more difficult, and he would argue with my sister who maintained that it also led to greater prosperity among the peasant owners. The movement, however, had been slowed down by the war, and the vicinity of the front brought its own disturbing repercussions. Army deserters were seen roaming in the district and there had been cases of arson on neighbouring estates. There was also shortage of labour, the income from the estate was shrinking, and having to run two establishments and make an allowance to my brother in Petersburg was proving a strain. My mother, however, made it clear to us that she had no intention of going to live at Fyeny, at least not until I had left school.

It did not occur to me at the time that these changes of fortune might affect my future. My final examinations were fast approaching. I managed to work quite hard despite my love-sickness and the emotional storms for which I found relief in writing, though often quite exhausted by them. I was nervous but no longer terrified of examinations, as I used to be years before. I found that I could accustom myself to any threat if I was allowed to contemplate it in imagination over a period of time. In this way I was able to control my nervousness during the examinations of the previous year. I did very well in them and in the course of my last year at school my position at the top of the class made it as certain as it could be that I would earn the ‘large gold medal’, the highest reward the Ghymnasia could confer and a sure way of entering a university. Katia Kign was next on the list as one to obtain ‘the right to a gold medal’, and Mania Babina was to get the silver one. How did we know all that? I think the teachers talked about it in their common-room and these conversations somehow seeped through. In any case, the ‘twelve’ mark which stood against my name in the register in all subjects, could not but guarantee success.

I had little doubt that Anna Avdyéevna would have dearly loved to give me an ‘eleven’ for conduct but I also knew that she would never dare. I was sure of that since the incident of the drawing examination which happened in my last year but one. No one took that examination very seriously: we had no gifted artists among us, and the kind Arkády Mihailovich would give a good mark to anyone who tried to do her best.

I was sure to get a ‘twelve’ because he knew I was top of the class in all other subjects and would not like to spoil the appearance of my last school report.

On that particular morning I came to school with my hair freshly washed and tied at the back with a black satin bow. As I was about to enter the class-room, Anna Avdyéevna, who was standing in the doorway, gave me one look and told me in a peremptory manner to ‘go to the wash-room at once and do my hair properly’. Ribbons were allowed only to tie the ends of pigtails, and my hair was pinned up. I protested that I could do nothing with it when it had just been washed. My sister had helped me to put it up: if I untied the ribbon, I would never be able to gather it up again. All this was true, but she would not listen; she merely repeated that she would not allow me into the class-room with my hair like that’, and she stood on the threshold, barring my way. I flared up.

‘Then I shall have to ask the Director himself if I may go in. ’

As I ran downstairs I could hear nothing but the noise of my blood pulsating in my head. Anger and sense of outrage were choking me. I knocked on the half-open door of the Director’s study, heard his voice faintly, answering, and went in. He looked up at me with some surprise: he probably noticed that I was trembling.

‘May I go in to the drawing examination with my hair like this, Ivan Kuzmich?’

‘With your hair like this? What do you mean? Why not?’

‘Because . . . because Anna Avdyéevna says I mayn’t. She won’t let me in. ’

His benign look changed perceptibly, darkening with annoyance. ‘Of course you can go in,’ he said. ‘And ask Anna Avdyéevna to come down to see me.’

I curtseyed automatically and left the room. The two Komarovskayas were outside in the small ante-room, waiting for me. They had run after me, I was told later on, because Anna Avdyéevna turned to the class, looking ‘as pale as death’, and said I had gone to the Director to complain of her. Now they walked upstairs, one on each side of me, muttering that I ‘shouldn’t have done it’. ‘Done what?’ I snarled back. ‘It’s wrong to complain of one’s own dame-de-classe,’ they said. ‘I didn’t complain: I just asked whether I could go into the class-room with my hair like this! She would have kept me out . . . made me fail the exam! ’ The silence in the class could not have been more complete when I came in than if I had been the Director himself about to announce the results of the final examinations. Anna Avdyéevna was sitting at her table, not looking at me, but the eyes of all the girls were on me. This brief battle of wills left me deeply shaken, yet poised on the pinnacle of triumph. I crossed the room and gave her the Director’s message.

As soon as she was out of the room, there was an uproar. I was surrounded and had to tell them exactly what had happened. The drawing master came in on this scene. He looked far from pleased at our lack of preparedness, judging us to be deficient in respect for his subject. When we got back to our places, he produced a small bust of Beethoven from his portfolio, placed it on his table, draped the stand with a piece of cloth and told us we had exactly fifty minutes to draw it. Just then Anna Avdyéevna returned from the Director’s study. She had left the class-room looking very pale; she came back as red as beetroot. We could see it almost without looking at her.

We talked about it again after the exam. The two Komarovskayas were the only ones who were decidedly on the side of the dame-de-classe and who condemned my action as ‘disloyal’. My four special friends were defending me while the majority of the class remained more or less neutral, sympathetic to me and interested in our feud mainly as a spectacle.

By a strange coincidence there was a witness of what had passed between the Director and Anna Avdyéevna, and he happened to be our frequent visitor and my devoted teacher, Shimkóvich. The men teachers’ common-room adjoined the Director’s study, with a door opening on to the same ante-room, and Shimkóvich came into it at the moment when Ivan Kuzmich was seeing Anna Avdyéevna out of his study. He heard the Director say to her: ‘I won’t allow you to upset pupils during examinations!’ and Anna Avdyéevna looked flushed and very upset.

I have to admit that I felt not the slightest regret, nor a trace of sympathy for Anna Avdyéevna; on the contrary, I was tremendously gratified by the knowledge that in the Director’s eyes my well-being mattered so much more than the silly rules a dame-de-classe might choose to impose. As for ‘loyalty’ to her, who had treated me so unfairly, the idea struck me as utterly ridiculous.

During my last term at school, Anna Avdyéevna maintained an attitude of icy politeness towards me and there were no more open clashes between us. I felt for her a dislike tinged with contempt — of a kind one might feel for an enemy one had conquered but not forgiven. ‘She dares not touch you,’ said my friends, intending to flatter me. I merely shrugged. They did not know how little this now mattered to me. The approaching day of parting with Rjevsky preoccupied me even more than the impending final examinations.

A few days after I had handed the bouquet of narcissi to the seminary porter, Aniuta answered the door at our house and brought in a large envelope addressed to me in an unknown handwriting. It contained a sepia copy of ‘The Red Boy’ painting by Lawrence! Strange, that it should be the same picture my sister gave me several years ago! There was nothing written on the back and there was no verbal message. Aniuta told me a boy whom she had never seen before, handed it in.

I was puzzled and not really pleased, though I liked the picture. Maroossia, whom I had taken into my confidence after my expedition to the seminary, suggested that the picture was from Rjevsky, sent me in gratitude for the flowers. ‘But he did not know they were from me! And why this particular picture?’ I wanted to know. My sister smiled. ‘Perhaps it is a hint — that you are still very young . , , that a boy like this is a more suitable companion . . . ’ I must have looked very angry at this because she hastened to add that she was only joking.

But the sting remained in the wound, tormenting me. I raged inwardly against the handicap of my youth, angry with myself for being so young, for looking even younger than my age. So he could not take me seriously, he was thinking it was just calf love! But I could not even be sure that he knew of my love or was thinking of me at all! Life was not worth going on with, I felt. Suicide was an act of courage to be admired. It was far, far better to die before ‘life’ made a miserable coward out of you.

When my brother went to Petersburg, he left his small revolver behind, and I took possession of it. Between studying for examinations and writing ‘letters’ to Rjevsky, I would take it out, hold it on the palm of my hand and tell myself it was the easiest thing in the world to put it to my head and release the trigger. The thought excited and fascinated me. Evening after evening I would do that, yet all I did in the end was to write a long essay and call it ‘A Suicide’s Letter’. It expressed my belief that life was certain to disappoint and damage and distort the personality of the writer. Otherwise, why should it have been said: ‘Those whom the gods love die young’ ... 2 Hence it was better to put an end to it before these things happened.

Why did I not commit suicide then? Mainly, I think, because I feared the unknown, shrank from the possibility of merely wounding myself, and could picture to myself too well the effect my suicide would have on my mother and sister. And though I liked imagining the shocked faces of Rjevsky, of Ivan Kuzmich and even of Anna Avdyéevna, and hearing in my mind what they would say about me with regret and remorse, some kind of faint hope was still flickering ahead, the hope that I might do something worthwhile with my life.

The final examinations took place at the end of May in brilliant, hot weather. The bird-cherry in the Rampart gardens was in bloom and the air was heavy with its penetrating fragrance, but we could not spare the time to go for walks. We were given from one to three days to prepare each subject, that is, to revise what we had learned during the year. This involved quite intensive reading. I preferred to work on my own, but when Tonia or Ania Bielynóvich asked me to combine with them,

I was quite ready to do so. Helping my schoolmates gave me a pleasurable feeling of power; I was pleased with myself not because I was doing them a good turn but because I could do these things.

But I believe power over myself gave me the greatest satisfaction.

Even as a child of eight or nine I used to train myself to do things I wanted to shirk, such as washing my neck in cold water or going into a dark room to find matches for my mother. The most difficult thing was to refrain from running on the way out, when you turned your back on whatever might be lurking in the darkness, waiting to spring on you from behind.

I learned to control my nervousness during examinations and even enjoyed them in a somewhat paradoxical way because I had this control over myself. But I had been living for weeks in a state of high nervous tension, anticipating the strain of the last day at school, when our ‘release’ —vypoosk is the Russian word for this event — would be celebrated with prayers, the presentation of prizes and end in final farewells.

The day however came, as all days, dreaded or desired, inevitably do. On the occasion we still had to wear our uniform, but it was a ‘parade’ one, the white pinafore, of fine cambric trimmed with lace, over a brown serge dress. And our hair was no longer subject to regulations: many blossomed into curls, large bows and high combs. Everyone in the school, the staff and the girls, was assembling in the upper hall for the religious service. Bátiushka would give us his pastoral advice for the last time, then the Director and the Headmistress would take their turn to speak. Fortunately, no speeches were expected from us. Our medals would be handed to us, copies of The Gospels would be distributed, congratulations would follow.

And last of all there would be final handshakes. In agonized anticipation of saying good-bye to Rjevsky, I had not given a thought to what I would do about Anna Avdyéevna. In fact, I had decided long beforehand that I would ignore her, and then dismissed the thought from my mind. But as I was walking up the iron staircase — so memorable from my first day at the boarding school — I saw the Nachálnitsa descending it with a rustle of silk skirts, spreading a delicate fragrance of scent around her. She was dressed up for the ceremony, wearing her decoration, a little white cross on a blue ribbon, pinned to her chest. I stopped on the landing to let her pass. She stopped, too.

‘Doóshechka — my little soul — ’ she said. ‘I beg you, do speak to Anna Avdyéevna on this day — your last day at school! Do say good-bye to her! ’

Her mittened hand was on my shoulder and her kindly eyes searched mine with a beseeching look. I was startled, taken aback for a moment — how did she guess what I intended to do? Then all the suppressed bitterness and anger of the long-drawn-out feud rose up in me. Anna Avdyéevna had persecuted me because I would not be completely ruled by her. She had played on my feelings. I could not forgive her that. It would be hypocrisy on my part to give her my hand.

‘I’m sorry,’ I murmured. ‘I can’t.’

‘Won’t you try?’ she pleaded.

I shook my head. I was so touched by her pleading that I was on the point of tears and could not speak. I would have even preferred to do what she was asking, but some force within me made it quite impossible. The Nachálnitsa seemed to realize what I was feeling and told me she had not wanted to upset me. She said softly: ‘What a pity!’ and kissed me on the cheek. Then she continued on her way down, and I tried to run upstairs but my knees were weak with emotion, stirred up in me by this meeting on the staircase. And it was concerned not only with the subject raised by the Headmistress but with something I did a few moments before. I had slipped a note into the pocket of Rjevsky’s overcoat which was hanging in the main hall. It was foolhardy of me because I could have been seen by the chief porter Klementiy who was almost always there, or by anyone who happened to be passing through the hall. The school’s best finalist, the recipient of the gold medal, caught putting her hand in the pocket of a teacher’s overcoat! But I was in a desperate mood. As it was with Steinberg, the conductor, I could not bear the thought that my love for Rjevsky only gave me pain, and no pleasure or joy to him. I decided that he must know that he had been loved, even if he was not told by whom. I would throw my confession like a flower at his feet; he could trample on it if he so chose, but at least it would do something to him — flatter him, or make him smile...Yes, even an amused smile from him was better than nothing!

I wrote on a slip of paper: ‘I loved you deeply, desperately, without hope — and you haven’t even noticed it!’ Without signing or putting it in an envelope, I waited around the hall — where we were supposed not to linger — until it was empty, then swept past the teachers’ coat hangers and pushed the folded note into Rjevsky’s pocket.

Though I made an effort to alter my handwriting, I knew I really wanted him to recognize it. He would not see it until the school-leaving ceremony was over, and then I should be out of the building, out of his reach — unless . . . But I was too painfully aware how improbable was this ‘unless’, and how useless any move on his part would be, even if he made it.

This knowledge was gnawing at my heart all the while the prayers were being said. We, the finalists, were lined up in front of the other pupils, facing the officiating priest. At a right angle to our group stood the members of the teaching staff, with the Director and the Nachálnitsa in the centre of the first row. My sister’s gentle face showed above the Nachálnitsa’s shoulder, but I had to avoid looking at her, much as I wanted to, because Anna Avdyéevna was close beside her. Nor could I glance too often to the right of them where Rjevsky towered over the other teachers, his long neck sticking out above their heads. I stared at bátiushka and thought he was looking sternly at me, knowing me as an atheist and a ‘bad influence’ on the religious among my schoolmates.

At last the climax of the whole ceremony was reached. Ivan Kuzmich read out the names of the pupils who were awarded the highest distinctions, my name the first among them. I went up and he handed me a small flat case, open to reveal a large medal in pale gold with the profile of the Empress Maria Fyódorovna imprinted on it. We shook hands, he congratulating me, and I curtseying and thanking him. Then the Nachálnitsa embraced and kissed me with tears in her eyes. I would have been more moved had I not known that tears came rather readily to her eyes. Then I went aside and waited for the teachers to make the first move. They all came and shook hands, and complimented me, except Anna Avdyéevna, who stayed where she was, her face grey, unhealthy and grim. My classmates went up to her and she spoke to them without a smile. Many pupils asked the teachers for their photographs and gave them theirs. I braced myself to ask Rjevsky for his. ‘Only in exchange for yours!’ he said. His eyes shone like blue stars.

The whole crowd of us went into the adjoining class-room in order to inscribe and exchange photographs. They were taken for the occasion and provided the town photographer with a small yearly income. Strangely enough, these photographs fared better at the hands of time and fate than some other relics of my past. My early stories and novels have been destroyed, but this collection of youthful faces and their farewell dicta, written on the back, were preserved by my sister, and I have looked at them since. How unexpected some of these written farewells turned out to be! I was amused at Babina, usually as quiet as a mouse, producing a quotation from an unknown author: ‘Those only deserve happiness and freedom, who fight for them day after day! ’ Ania Bielynóvich, a provocative critic in daily life, chose to be nostalgic, and refer to our partnership in the publication of the class magazine. Calling me by my Spanish nickname, she wrote: ‘To dear Gaetano, the retiring Editor, from his former (alas! alas!) editorial assistant. Remember our motto: Liberté, egalité, fraternité.’ Alas, indeed! I had quite forgotten it had been our motto; I even had difficulty in remembering that we had produced a magazine. Tonia Rosen also called me her ‘darling Gaetano’, for was I not her partner in the ‘Danse d’Apache’? ‘Do not forget your loving Annunziata and be faithful to the end (faithfulness to the grave is a great virtue), and I will not forget you on account of a few bright moments. ’ Was she thinking of the moment when I put strawberries and cream down her neck? Lena called me ‘dear Eaglet’ and bade me remember our happy days at Diedlovo. But the most emotional farewell came from Sonia Ivanova, a girl who was outside our group of five, whom I visited during the summer holidays and who wrote: ‘You are my dearest friend; my brightest and happiest memories are of you. My heart grows light when I think of your goodness to me. I love you very much. Remember our walks among the com and in the meadows at B*.’ I read this with a kind of shame, for I could not think of Sonia as my best and dearest friend.

And Rjevsky? He just wished me ‘a bright and happy future’. Always the future, never the present! On his photograph he looked gay and sure of himself, quite free from the shyness and awkwardness that used to move me to such excesses of tenderness. I gazed at this false image of him, my heart aching with hopeless regret. On the back of my own photograph I had scribbled: ‘Perhaps we shall never meet again . . . ’

Was it really possible, was it conceivable that we never should? There must come a day, I told myself, when he would be proud of having that photograph and my scribble on the back of it!‘

 

Life’ is about to Begin

 

During our last term at school, we, the five friends, had discussed among ourselves our plans for the future and knew that some of us were going to continue our education in Petersburg. Liolia was to study singing. Her mother, not wishing to part with her, decided to move house to Petersburg. Tonia was to enter a Modern Languages College and be a boarder there, while I applied for admission to the Faculty of Philology and Russian Literature at the Bestoózhevskiye Koorsy where my sister had obtained her degree. Our admission, on the strength of our school records, was assured, and we promised ourselves to continue our friendship in the capital. Ania Bielynóvich told me that she, too, was going to study for a French degree in Petersburg, but Sonia Ivanova’s parents decided to her distress that she was to go to Moscow. With most of our friends and brothers in Petersburg, we tended to look down on Moscow as provincial and somewhat barbaric.

Katia and Lena, the two cousins, seemed to have no plans, but soon after the school-leaving ceremony, they surprised us by announcing that they had become engaged to General Staff Officers, and Katia invited us to her wedding that very summer.

The town of M* had not been the same place since the General Staff made it its headquarters. A large number of middle-aged, apparently unattached men had descended on it and many were lodging with the town families. We had several friends among the ‘Staff people’ as we called them, who visited our house, most of them far too old to interest me. Anyway, the thought of marriage did not enter my head at that time, except as a day-dream for a distant future, with someone rather remarkable and quite different from the men I saw around me. The news of Katia’s engagement shocked me, while the thought of Lena as a married woman just made me laugh.

It never occurred to me that Katia, who had won ‘the right to a gold medal’ would not continue her studies; I felt it was ‘a waste’ to throw away her achievement by becoming a mere wife. Besides, I regarded it as stupid to get married at the age of barely seventeen, before one had tasted ‘freedom’ and independence.

I was even more distressed when I met her future husband, a military engineer, Kozlóvsky. He was short, half a head shorter than Katia, and had black hair, a longish dark moustache and small, dark eyes behind glasses. Immediately I became convinced that he dyed his hair, was bad-tempered and was marrying Katia because she would inherit her grandmother’s estate. We, as a group, regarded Katia as very practical but entirely without sex appeal, and we knew she had never had a flirtation with anybody. Katia herself told us that her fiancé was forty-four years old — old enough to be her father. What possessed her, I wondered, to agree to marry him, and in such haste! Of the five of us, I thought Liolia was the one to make an early marriage; Tonia would be next . . . not Katia!

Lena, her cousin, was a different matter. She told us dramatically many a time how much she disliked living with her mother and how beastly her mother was to her, so for her marriage was a way of escape. But she looked so incongruous in her grown-up clothes, with her face and body of an outsize baby, beside her pleasant, middle-aged husband that I had to look away when talking to them.

Liolia, Tonia and I went to Katia’s wedding which was celebrated at Fyodorovka, her grandmother’s estate. Our mood on arrival was very different from the carefree enjoyment of the previous summer. The more I saw of Kozlóvsky, the less I liked him, and my annoyance with Katia gave way to pity for her. Resentfully, I watched her fiancé ordering her about while she meekly submitted to whatever he wished her to do. The atmosphere of the place was subdued, unspontaneous, and the three of us agreed that it was more like a funeral than a wedding. Liolia however amused herself by flirting with the brother of Dima’s wife. Dima, of course, was there and Olga, his wife, a cold arrogant woman, who, we understood, had made Katia’s life impossible at Diedlovo.

I felt uneasy, not to say unhappy, the whole time I was there. Strange things were happening on the estate itself. Though Katia’s grandmother was still the owner of acres of field and forest, local peasants were cutting trees in her forest without her permission and openly carting the timber through her own court-yard to their village building sites. ‘We’re obliged to tolerate this while the war is on, ’ muttered Kozlóvsky. ‘Law can’t be enforced in these conditions . . . But it will be, yes, it will be later on! ’

The wedding was celebrated with some pomp. Semion, in a crimson satin shirt and a velvet cap with a peacock’s feather, drove the couple to church in a four-horse carriage. After the wedding lunch, they were again driven off, this time in a Staff motor car, to M*, where Kozlóvsky had rented a flat. We heard later that the car broke down half-way to town and the newly-marrieds had to continue their journey by peasant cart and train. Motor cars were always breaking down in those days.

I returned to Fyeny in a dejected mood but was suddenly stirred into life by finding that we had a visitor — Zhenia Preyer. He had been to our house at M* more than once during the year, but had always remained so reserved and silent that I felt I knew him no better than the first time I met him. He was studying at the same Institute in Petersburg as my brother, and they drew close enough together for Vova to invite him to Fyeny.

I felt a certain amount of excitement at the thought of getting to know him better. One of our Staff friends had remarked about him that ‘even when he smiled, he looked as if he were about to burst into tears’. I repeated this remark to my sister and asked her whether she thought Zhenia ever really enjoyed himself. She replied that she was sure of it. As she had had his company for some days before I arrived, I pressed on with my questions.

‘What does he enjoy?’

‘Nature mainly. He is also very fond of his dog and enjoys him a lot '

‘Does he talk about it?’

‘Oh, yes, he does talk, but mostly during our walks together . . . not when other people are about.’

So he talked to Maroossia when alone with her! He trusted her but chose to remain a closed book to me. The thought gave me a pang, and immediately I put myself in the dock. Was I envious? I had never envied my sister before. But here was this young man of romantic appearance, nearer to me in age than he was to my sister and much more acceptable than either Shoora or Fyedia — and yet he preferred her company to mine! My immediate impulse was to withdraw, to make it more difficult for him to approach me. Not for anything in the world would I thrust myself forward, or attempt to compete with my sister. But it would have been the same if it were anyone else. I could imagine nothing more humiliating than competing with another woman for the affection or even attention of any man. If he had already chosen — and chosen badly — tant pis pour lui! If my rival happened to be a pretty but stupid or frivolous girl, my respect for the man would dwindle to almost nothing. I might feel bitter or even cynical about such a choice. If, on the other hand, she were admirable in more than one respect, I would feel humbled and sad — and that was how I felt on this occasion, believing Zhenia preferred Maroossia to myself.

We all went for walks together: my brother, Zhenia, my sister and I. Zhenia usually walked beside my sister, and addressed his remarks to her. He talked about his dog, Jackie, whom he had left at home, telling her how intelligent he was and how devoted to him — ‘the best friend he had in the world’. It made me think of Knut Hamsun’s Pan. Like the hero of that novel, Zhenia loved nature, professed to prefer solitude to company and regarded his dog as his only real friend. Pan was fiercely in love with a proud girl who was bent on humiliating him, but he broke away from her and decided to move to a more distant part of the forest. As he was saying good-bye to her, the girl asked him for a favour, the gift of his dog. He promised this, then shot the dog and left its corpse on her threshold. I wondered if Zhenia were capable of such a gesture if he were really in love. I suspected he would not be: he had a rather weak chin and mouth. His forehead, eyebrows and eyes were magnificent: they could belong to a great poet or to Lermontov’s Demon — but Zhenia was only a little Demon —he was to be pitied, not feared ... I decided to write a story about him and call it ‘The Little Demon’.

I watched him, to see how much he really enjoyed of what we could offer him at Fyeny. He liked rowing, so we took him on the river and treated him as an expert — which clearly pleased him. He was ready to prove his strength to do all the work with the oars, but Maroossia insisted that we should take turns to row in pairs, using one oar each. She soon found however that the effort defeated her. Good as she was in responding to rhythm in music and dancing, she could not keep in unison with another person when trying to row. With her and myself at the oars, the boat wobbled feebly from side to side, making no headway at all, and my brother at the tiller complained that we made steering impossible. With an apologetic smile, Maroossia would accept Zhenia’s offer to replace her, and then Zhenia and I, sitting close together, our shoulders nearly touching, made the boat go forward at a spanking pace. I enjoyed sharing this sustained effort with him, and wondered if his pleasure in rowing was increased by having me beside him — but found it impossible to tell. As for myself, whatever mood I was in, being on the river, inhaling the fresh smell of water, watching its powerful, massive flow always had a soothing effect on me.

We knew our guest was fond of cycling: he cycled to Fyeny all the way from M*, undeterred by the cobbles of the highway or the deep sand of country roads. But I had left my bicycle at M*. What was the sense of cycling when there were horses available? I held forth about this in front of Zhenia who listened in silence. I did not suggest riding to him for fear he might decline, and I would feel snubbed and suspect him of timidity. However, next morning when I came down to breakfast in my riding habit, he asked me shyly whether he might come with me. He had only once been on a horse before, he said, but if he could have a quiet one, he might not fall off right away . . .

I was very pleased. As neither my brother nor sister rode, I would have him on my own and at last would be able to find out what sort of person he was.

He was certainly not a coward. He was ready to trot and even gallop on our first ride together. He was obviously uncomfortable trotting as he could not yet rise in his stirrups in rhythm with the horse’s step, but he persevered, steadily and bravely, with a frown of concentration on his face. I did my best to pass on to him all the basic ‘rules’ Maxim had taught me about riding: ‘Sit well back, hold your elbows close to your sides. Have the reins fairly short but don’t pull on them. Never tug at the reins when you rise to the trot. Tuck your knees well into the saddle; hold your toes up and your heels down; keep your stirrup- iron under the ball of your foot.’

Conscientiously, Zhenia tried to follow my instructions; one thing he could not do was to hold his shoulders back. His natural posture was to hunch his shoulders, a habit which I felt he ought to be able to correct.

We had quite a few of these solitary rides together. I remember a luscious meadow where we dismounted and picked lilies-of-the-valley, and a boggy piece of ground across which we urged our horses — the animals, being wiser than us, refused to go, and we had to turn back. Once we lost ourselves and rode into the yard of some estate to ask our way; a woman who came out to speak to us looked us over curiously; I felt as if I were a person in a story . . ,

Zhenia looked happy during these rides, yet when he made some remark it was nearly always pessimistic. We talked about the characters of our horses and he would go on to say that he liked animals far better than people. Animals were ‘better’: they did not lie or betray you, they were without guile, without vindictiveness . . . yes, even the wild ones, lions and tigers, killed only in order to survive. I was ready to agree, yet - just because his pessimism seemed so dogmatic and final - I was impelled to argue that not all people were bad and life must hold something good in store for us. He would not concede this, and it angered me. Perhaps, half-consciously, I wished that he would fall in love with me and find life worth living for that reason. But he showed no sign of falling in love with me: when we both patted a horse’s neck and our hands touched, he made no attempt to hold mine. Nor did I find myself falling in love with him - partly because I was still tormentedly in love with Rjevsky.

Alone in my room, I would take out his photograph and gaze at it with the exasperated curiosity of an explorer who knows that he will never be able to penetrate this particular country. Perhaps if I had got to know him better this painful longing would have dropped away. He was, after all, a very ordinary person — and yet he had this power of making me weep, compose poems, write impassioned letters which he would never read, rage at myself and at him — and all to no apparent purpose, no gain of any kind either to him or myself. I was not even sure that what I experienced was ‘real’ love or being in love with love . . . How should I ever know? When real love came, how would I recognize it? This pain I was feeling was real enough — but was it the pain of love?

Zhenia attracted me but I did not fall in love with him: something was lacking in his personality which Rjevsky possessed —an impression of strength, perhaps? We both kept our reserve. After he had left Fyeny, I settled down to writing my story about him. The character of the girl in the story with whom ‘the little Demon’ falls in love had certain features of my own — it could hardly have been otherwise — but I think I was fairly successful in drawing the character of the ‘Demon’. Anyway, when a few years later I showed that story to Professor Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky, a leading literary critic of those days, he told me that although it showed the influence of Hamsun, it was good enough to go straight into print. As it happened, it never reached the printers - by then, Russia was in the throes of Civil War and no printing was done except of military decrees and single sheet newspapers. But when I wrote it at Fyeny the war with Germany was still in full swing and the Tsar’s residence at M* gave the inhabitants a sense of relative security. That summer Shoora Martynov did not invite himself to our country home, and my brother told us that he was spending most of his vacation in Petersburg. This was most unusual. Why did he choose to do that? My brother shrugged and murmured something about Shoora’s ‘dabbling in politics’. ‘He’ll burn his fingers if he’s not careful,’ he added.

The day when my new life was due to begin was now very near. A letter arrived informing me that I had been admitted to the Faculty of Philology and Russian literature at the Bestoózhevskiye Koorsy, and that the autumn term began on the 10th of October. My mother decided that we must return to M* well before that date, and my sister was to go to Petersburg a few days ahead of me to find a room on the Vassilevsky Ostrov, as near the Koorsy as possible. My parents had been having long conversations in my mother’s room at Fyeny, and we guessed that Father was trying to persuade her to come and live there, now that only Maroossia would remain with her at M*. In the end, however, she came to M* with us, and things remained as they had been for the last two years. I believe she did this in order to be ‘nearer the children’ and because she wanted Maroossia to have the comforts of a real home. She told us that, however much she liked nature, she found life in the country rather limiting and boring; confidentially she admitted that she would miss the cinema — which only recently she had pronounced to be ‘a horror’!

We knew she would have preferred my father to come and live with her and Maroossia at M*, leaving the estate in charge of the bailiff: she was worried by the rumours of arson and plunder of country houses in the district not very far from us. But my father must have felt that the estate required his personal attention. That summer he was more than usually preoccupied and more taciturn than ever. When he was not out on the estate, he would walk up and down the drawing-room and the adjoining dining-room, his hands clasped behind his back, his neck rigid, his eyes fixed on the empty space before him. There was an unseeing look in his eyes: he would pass me several times as I sat at the dining-room table, without noticing that I was doing something of which he strongly disapproved — reading while having a meal. His deep absorption in his thoughts alarmed me. What was he thinking about? Perhaps regretting that he had ever had a family? And I wished my mother would share her time more equally between Fyeny and M*, between him and us.

A kind of sad elation and excitement I felt at the prospect of living in Petersburg, clashed with the deeper sadness which descended upon me on the eve of our departure from Fyeny. I cannot honestly say that it was a premonition of still sadder things to come, but my mood that evening was unrelieved by even a small glow of hopefulness — an anticipation of eventual return which makes parting from a place one loves so much less wounding to the heart. My memory was thrown back to that other parting, when I went to boarding school, and had to say good-bye to every tree in the orchard at B*. A child then, a young girl now, I still wanted to take my leave from a group of aspens in the corner of a near-by meadow. I had climbed them so often, even quite recently; they were always whispering . . . that evening I imagined they were telling me not to go away. As I walked towards them through the long grass, a breeze blew into my face, lifting my hair off my forehead, bringing back another memory — of a game I used to play on my solitary walks, pretending that I had an assignation with my lover — Wind. Smiling at myself, I said: ‘So here you are again! You’ve been away a long time! ’ and was strangely comforted by this invisible presence.

The morning of the day was even worse. I felt quite guilty when saying good-bye to the unsuspecting horses, who would be hoping for my visit and the tit-bits I brought them, tomorrow and for days afterwards. I walked quickly through the downstairs rooms where the empty chairs seemed to reproach me for my desertion by holding open their arms — they would remain empty for a long time.

A few minutes before we were due to leave everyone assembled in the drawing-room: the bailiff, Piotr, Ivan, Maxim, Galaktyón, Aniuta, the gardener, as well as our family. My parents sat down, all of us following their example, and for a minute or so there was complete silence in the room. I had never before troubled to find out the meaning of this ‘sitting-down’ ceremony before a journey, though it always brought a spasm of emotion to my throat. When my mother rose, everyone stood up and we began to say good-bye. My father was accompanying us to the station, and as Aniuta was also coming to M* with us, we had to travel in two vehicles. I went with Aniuta who was delighted to be going back to M*. She, too, was fond of the cinema! I asked her whether she knew why people always sat down before a journey.

‘I reckon it’s for trying to remember not to forget something, báryshnia,’ she replied.

‘Is that the only reason?’

‘Well, the old people say it’s for luck . . . ’For luck! Perhaps just to have a respite from the flurry and hurry of preparations — or, as in church, to have a brief moment for meditation and prayer? Meditation ... as our buggy rolled along the soft, wide road where the shadows of great birch trees were already lengthening, I let myself think.

In a mood for self-examination, reminiscence and anticipation, aware of the present moment as something that was already a part of the past, I tried to see myself as I had been and as I was now, to sum up, as it were, my experience and discoveries, to find a patch of firm ground on which I could put both my feet —metaphorically —and say to myself: ‘Here I stand, and from here I can start this “real life”!’

I was at that stage painfully —not at all triumphantly — conscious of my youth, and I knew that I looked even younger than I was. My fond teacher, Shimkóvich, had remarked on seeing my photograph only a year before that I was looking ‘not a day older than thirteen’. But he had also referred to me in class, only half in joke, as ‘our little grandmother’. I had often felt centuries old, burdened with an infinite variety of experience — with all the emotions, philosophical musings, doubts and despairs that Dostoyevsky put into the mouths of Raskolnikov, Ivan Karamazov and Stavroghin. And had I not been hopelessly in love — a most maturing experience — with a man about whom I had no illusions, from whom I did not ask or expect anything in return? Before I was seventeen, I had written enough poems and stories to have the right to call myself an author, and the story I wrote about Rjevsky that summer, ‘His Eyes’, was unique in that there was not a single word of fiction in it. I prided myself on this absolute truthfulness, as if invention was an equivalent of a lie. I had been through the crises of belief, religious and political, and wrote in my diary, when I was thirteen, that I would dedicate my life to liberating my country from the Tsarist tyranny.

Yet what was I really at this particular moment of my life? An unbeliever still, but far less certain of my unbeliefs, and hankering, as in the past, for ‘life everlasting’. I was hungry for life and love, and bitter when I thought of the ‘love’ I had experienced so far. I was still fascinated by the thought of suicide, seeing it as an act of self-assertion and courage, but was unable to carry it out — partly because it would have been cruel towards my mother and sister, but I felt it was weak of me.

The change in my feelings towards them was perhaps a measure of my emancipation. My mother had helped it by sending me away to boarding school, thus giving me the proof that I was not indispensable to her. Gradually, she ceased to be the source of all the comforts, emotional and physical, the haven of security and the arbiter of values she had been to me until that critical separation. Some of her judgments and principles I assimilated and made my own, others I rejected as uncongenial. Her idea of the primacy of duty, the duty of children towards their parents, of parents towards their children, and of nationals towards their country, went much against the grain with me — I identified duty with compulsion. Love, and service given out of love, came, in my opinion, before duty. My intense affection for my mother had become a kind of compassion: I felt sorry for her because she was growing older, heavier and afflicted with varicose veins, and I felt-guilty at being irritated by her over-concern for my health. For my sister I still felt deep tenderness and respect, but these feelings were also tinged with compassion, for I had seen her in moods of anxiety and painful vacillation which puzzled me and made me wonder if she lacked strength of character.

I had no doubt that if I had committed my ‘philosophical’ suicide, it would have wounded them permanently. I also knew that my brother would not believe me capable of such an act of bravery, and if I had carried it out, I did not expect him to be broken-hearted about it. My attitude towards him had hardened into a conviction that I was completely misunderstood and unappreciated by him. He laughed at my writing and treated me as if I were still a child; he made me feel inferior by warning me not to attempt ‘clever conversation’ with his friends, as they would not be interested in what I had to say. I felt towards him a hostility which had in it an admixture of scorn — for did he not reject Dostoyevsky as ‘unreadable’ and prefer mathematics to literature? We had absolutely nothing in common.

As for my father — I had become almost resigned to the fact that the relationship between us could never be closer than it had been. The chance of renewing the fleeting contact that had been established between us when he spoke to me as to an equal on the balcony at Piatigorsk, had never recurred. The seed of compassion which was sown then, however, had grown and had driven out fear. I thought of my father now as a man who ought not to have had children: the love of a wife would have sufficed him. Now, in fulfilment of his duty he had to go on providing for us until we could stand on our own feet, accepting the fact that his wife felt her duty towards us had to come before her affection for him. I looked at him, as it were, across a gulf, doubting that my sympathy and respect could reach him.

Myself I saw as a disillusioned person. The apparent senselessness of Zena’s short life and unnecessary death had burned a deep wound in my soul: if that could happen to her, what right had I to expect that things should go well with me? Yet I was passionately wishing and hoping that life would prove worth living, and I was determined to live it as fully as I could. I was making definite plans for the future: I was going to work hard and do well in the examinations, so well that I would get on the staff of the University lecturers as soon as I had obtained my first degree. I would continue to write and make my name as a novelist and a poet. The manuscript of ‘His Eyes’ was in my suitcase, and I promised myself the bitter pleasure of sending Rjevsky a copy when it was published. I would, of course, go to plays and concerts; because of the war there would be, alas! no balls to satisfy my passion for dancing. My sister had described Petersburg to me as ‘a sombre city’, full of mists and rain, with snow sometimes falling in May, but I knew I was going to like it, because it was the city where Lermontov and Pushkin and Dostoyevsky had lived; where Oniéghin and Raskolnikov, almost as real to me as their creators, had walked the streets.

Aniuta’s voice broke in on my thoughts. ‘Here we are!’ she said, cheerfully. We had indeed arrived at the railway station. I said good-bye to Maxim and the horses. My father came on to the platform with us. I was the last to be embraced by him, and I noticed his eyes were moist: he was, of course, upset at parting from my mother. I saw him standing there as the train moved out of the station, holding his hat formally above his head, while Maxim’s broad smiling face loomed in the station doorway some distance behind him.

The weeks of final preparations at M* flashed by. My brother and I were to travel by a night train. One of our acquaintances on the General Staff secured for us the tickets in a sleeping carriage reserved for members of the General Staff. The trains were few and generally crowded: the officers of the General Staff were very obliging to their acquaintances and friends, and obtained seats for them whenever possible. My sister was already in Petersburg waiting for me to settle down in a room which she had found for me. My mother came to the station to see us off. All the way to the station and on the platform she was instructing us not to forget to wear our goloshes in wet weather, to go to bed early and not to neglect our food. She had heard that meat was getting scarce in Petersburg; horsemeat was being passed for beef; she would remind Father to send us parcels from Fyeny ... I was feeling impatient, and though sad at parting from my mother, wished that the moment of departure would come sooner. We went into the carriage: it was Wagons Lits Internationales, soft seats upholstered in strawberry-coloured damask, table lamps with pretty shades, a small lavabo compartment to share between two neighbouring coupes. My mother was satisfied that we would spend a comfortable night. Our luggage was on the racks and we stepped out again on to the platform.

Then, to our surprise, we saw Aniuta hurrying towards us. My brother saw her first and said with his characteristic phlegm: ‘There’s Aniuta! I wonder what she wants.’ My mother turned and drew in her breath, alarmed. Aniuta trotted up and took a folded slip of paper from her pocket.

‘A telegram came for you, bárynia, ten minutes after you’d left. I thought you might want to see it at once.’

My mother tore it open, read it, her forehead puckered, her lips pressed together.

‘Who is it from? What is it about?’ asked my brother.

‘From Papa. He telegraphs “Don’t send Leda off to Petersburg. Writing.”  That’s all.’

The three of us stood, dumbfounded, Aniuta stepping discreetly aside. A feeling of bitter, undeserved injury flooded my breast. I looked at my mother and she looked at me.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘I have discussed this with him over and over again, ’ said my mother. ‘He thinks the general situation and our own finances are so precarious that we should not take any more risks. But I don’t agree with him. Everything has been arranged: you have your place at the university, the room has been found, Maroossia is expecting you. You are going.’

A station porter pulled the cord of a shining bell outside the main station entrance. The first bell! My mother embraced my brother and me, then made hurried signs of the cross over our heads.

‘Get in quickly, the train is about to start!’

The second bell. My brother and I complied, getting into the carriage. We leaned out of the window. My mother looked upset but determined, with her lips pursed, her grey eyes anxious, Aniuta standing by her side. She repeated her admonitions.

‘Wrap yourself up well when you go out in cold weather . . . ’

‘Yes, Mamma.’

‘Try to go to bed early . . . ’

‘Yes, yes, I’ll try.’

The third bell. The engine at the far end of the train exploded in a large puff of white-smoke. The train started smoothly, slowly, almost soundlessly. As it accelerated and the platform began to slide backwards, Aniuta waved a handkerchief, and I could see my mother still making signs of the cross in our direction.

My ‘real’ life had begun.

 

Elizaveta Fen - a writer, prolific translator from Russian to English, a penname of Lydia Jackson, nee Rajevskaja, (1899-1983).

She was a close friend of George Orwell’s wife, Eileen.

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