New Friendships, Expectations and Disappointments

 

The house my mother took at M* in the autumn of 1914 was smaller than our house at B*. It had a garden but no stables or dog kennels; the only animal we brought with us was my cat Kady. Of the servants only Aniuta and Mitrofan, the newly engaged cook, came with us. Galaktyón, the old cook, Maxim, the coachman, and Piotr, my father’s valet, stayed with him at B*.

Uncle Vladímir and Zena were our first visitors. While uncle was talking to my mother in the sitting-room, complaining of the rising cost of living and of the possibility that Stan, his coachman, might be called up, I took Zena to my bedroom and showed her my pencil drawings of the Duke of Reichstadt which I had copied from picture postcards. One of these was a sketch made of him when he was lying in his coffin, hands folded on his chest, a large star pinned to his white uniform, his features sharp and pointed, a lock of blond hair falling upon his forehead, wide, like his father’s. I held it up for her to see, rather proudly, thinking of it as one of my more successful attempts at portraiture.

‘Don’t you think it’s rather good?’ I asked, fishing for a compliment.

Zena’s eyes filled with tears.

‘He died . . . What good is there in that?’ she murmured.

‘But ... he looks beautiful . . . ’ I protested.

‘He looks better in that! ’ She pointed at the other sketch representing the Duke standing upright with his hand inside his half-buttoned tunic, his father’s favourite pose.

‘Well , . . yes,’ I admitted, ‘but more ordinary.’

Zena was not looking well. Her complexion was sallow with a greenish tint, her mouth drooped at the comers. I knew she was disappointed at my not returning to live with them, and I felt sorry for her. I visualized her trailing dejectedly from room to room, looking for something to do, or picking over her food, seated at table between her silent parents. I told her that she must come and stay with us as often as she liked. ‘If they would let me, ’ she murmured mournfully.

During tea my mother remarked that Zena seemed to have a poor appetite.

‘She won’t eat anything at home,’ my uncle declared heavily. ‘Why Zena! Living in the country with all that air and exercise? Doesn’t it make you hungry?’ My mother spoke cheerfully, but Zena’s face grew tearful, while my uncle continued: ‘Exercise! Fresh air! All she does is to sit in the water. True, it has been hot, but that doesn’t mean you have to sit in the river all day. You can’t get her out of it.’ ‘That is unhealthy, Zena,’ said my mother. ‘Why, my dear child, you’re crying! We don’t mean to be unkind . . . Your father’s just concerned about you.’

‘That’s right,’ said my uncle. ‘Now she’ll behave like a little victim — her mother’s trick. I’m a brute, and she’s an innocent lamb led to the slaughter. ’

Zena rose from her chair and walked out of the room, her hands against her face. I followed her. She threw herself on to my bed.

‘He goes for me like this all the time,’ she sobbed, ‘and all because he knows I love Mamma and don’t love him.’

‘But surely he does this . . . because he loves you, Zena?’

‘Loves me! What kind of love is this? He’s so mean, he won’t give Mamma any money to buy me clothes. He says she can buy them out of her own money. Look at my dress! She made it herself from a piece she had in her drawer for the last fifteen years. Don’t tell me it’s pretty: I won’t believe it.’

I did not think it was pretty, and so kept silent: to pretend in order to please was something I could never learn. But I promised to myself that I would try to get Zena to come and stay with us as often as possible, and make sure of my mother’s and sister’s support in that.

After our visitors had driven off in the familiar buggy drawn by the pink horse, with Stan on the box, my mother said to us that she had suggested to Uncle Vladímir that he should have Zena examined by a good doctor. He replied, however, that he did not believe in doctors, and that he considered Zena quite healthy. My sister thought Uncle Vladímir should be persuaded to do what my mother had suggested, but I could not see her taking the initiative in that. She had just passed through a period of most painful indecision which left her nervously exhausted. The State examinations she took at the Petersburg University in order to qualify as a teacher had strained her health, and after she came home, she could not make up her mind whether she really wanted to teach, and where. I think my mother had assumed that she would obtain a post in our Ghjmnasia and live at home, but even when the post was offered her, Maroossia could not decide whether to accept it. There were long discussions and emotional arguments between her and my mother; Maroossia talked of being independent and ‘having life of her own’. I naturally wanted her to stay with us and was relieved when she finally yielded to family pressure and accepted the post at the Ghjmnasia. But I had the sad experience of seeing her depressed and below par for weeks after that.

My sister was almost eight years older than I, and in my early childhood I saw little of her because she was at school in another town. When she came home for holidays, she gave me a great deal of attention: she liked dressing me in my winter clothes before taking me out, and I loved being whirled in her arms when she danced the waltz with me. Her tender affection enveloped me as if in a soft embrace, and I responded with a devotion which equalled only that which I felt for my mother. In those early years she seemed to be uncritical of me, and I of her. This mutual love continued throughout my first year or two at school. I received from her and accepted as my own her exalted ideas about the revolution and the heroes who fought the government in order to liberate Russia from its oppressive rule. Without yet having read a single line of Byron’s verse, I shared her admiration for him as a fighter for the freedom of Greece, and a man who was irresistible to women, yet whom no woman could make happy. I fully entered into her feelings when she talked of the injustices and sufferings our great poets had to bear; I grieved with her over the deaths of Pushkin and Lermontov. And I drank her words when she described the operas and plays she had seen in Petersburg and Moscow.

But inevitably, as I grew older, differences in tastes and preferences began to appear. Some of Lev Tolstoy’s ideas on social justice appealed to Maroossia’s gentle nature — maybe even to the inferiority and guilt feelings which undoubtedly afflicted her. I remember her quoting Tolstoy in connection with the work of domestic servants. ‘Tolstoy says that the servant’s job is one of the least rewarding . . . Our Aniuta is not working for herself, in her own family or house . . . We all should do our own domestic work and live as simply as possible . . . ’ This to me was less than convincing, and I watched with a touch of disapproval her attempts at helping Aniuta by going round the rooms with a duster. Why, I asked, should I waste time on dusting furniture when I wanted — and could — write poems? Anyway, I was inclined to share my mother’s opinion of Tolstoy. She called him a hypocrite because he preached poverty and dressed like a peasant but in fact lived in luxury. Nor did I have a particular liking for Tolstoy as a writer. His characters were too much like the people one met in real life; his descriptions of their appearance and states of mind were too prosaic for my taste, his style too pedestrian. I wanted to meet unusual people, to be shown strange and exceptional aspects of life — and so I was fascinated by Dostoyevsky. If, as some critic had written, it was impossible for anyone to feel affinity with both these writers and one had to choose between the ‘breadth’ of one and the ‘depth’ of the other, I could tell myself that I had chosen ‘depth’ and feel rather proud of my choice.

I could not share my sister’s fondness for walks in cemeteries. I accompanied her unwillingly: the beautiful trees and luscious grass growing among the graves made me think of all the dead disintegrating in the ground below. ‘But that is what Tolstoy used to say when he was young! ’ my sister exclaimed. ‘One should think of the peace the unhappy people find here.’ ‘The peace of death!’ I mocked bitterly, for I regarded death as an outrage, an almost personal act of aggression on the part of God. ‘We don’t know what death is ... ’ said my sister.

‘We know that it’s the end of life!’ I declared.

‘The end of this life . . . that may be ... ’ she mused aloud. But I continued arguing against this, not knowing how passionately I wanted to be refuted.

In quite another domain our relationship changed in a somewhat unusual way. Partly by nature and partly because as a child I had played mostly with boys, I liked to be physically active and did my best to achieve fair competence in more than one kind of thing. I could ride a bicycle or a horse, play tennis, swim, row a boat, climb trees, skate and walk on skis. My sister was afraid of horses, could not swim, never learned to ride a bicycle competently, and was only good at ice skating.

I have a memory of her getting on to a horse at a picnic, mainly to please me, and, as the horse began to trot, clutching at branches above her head, in an attempt to stop it. She was apt to lose her head in minor emergencies such as this, and I can still see her, in my mind’s eye, careering madly on her bicycle down a short steep decline of the road near my uncle’s dacha. ‘Use your brake !’ I shouted, but she did not do so and crashed at the bottom of the slope from sheer fright. Fortunately it was a soft, dusty road and she was not hurt. On another occasion, when the two of us and Zena were together in a boat, Maroossia was to push us off. She stood up to do this but held on so long to a post on the bank, that she could not recover her balance and fell helplessly into the river while the boat slipped away from under her feet. This kind of ineptitude puzzled me, made me feel sorry for her and want to help her as if she were, in fact, the younger sister, and I more of a brother than a sister.

The great timidity I sensed in her also puzzled me and aroused a wish to discuss it, to prove its unreasonableness. Whenever she herself or a member of the family was to go on a journey, Maroossia would grow anxious and her face would become blotched with red. With the arrogance of adolescence I believed that most, if not all, unreasonable fears could be conjured away by proving that they were unreasonable. Why, I insisted, need she be so agitated? ‘We . . . (or he) might miss the train . . . ’ In vain did I point out that there was plenty of time and that we had never missed a long distance train before: Maroossia’s agitation continued and often ended in a sick headache. She used to have these sick headaches with an alarming regularity, and I, who was hardly ever sick, suffered with her in uncomprehending sympathy.

And so I came to feel protective towards her, and when we walked arm-in-arm on slippery, snow-covered pavements, I supported her by the elbow like a chivalrous caraliere servante and warned her about the patches of ice on the road. I felt rather proud of my role. In winter she used to wear a little round seal cap, and because of that and for the reason that her nose was rather broad, I used to call her ‘my duckling’. She continued to call me her ‘mite’ or '’króshka’ although I was already an inch or so taller than herself.

I remember one particular walk when we talked of happiness. We must have talked of happiness more than once before, but on that winter evening I was, for no obvious reason, in an exceptionally heightened mood. It may have been the effect of the magical beauty of sky and earth after a very clear sunset. Its glow was still in the west, but above it the sky was faintly green and the snow on the road, roofs and trees was taking on the lilac tint of the increasing shadows. The familiar places had a look of mystery and promise.

‘I don’t know about happiness,’ Maroossia said. ‘It may be only a matter of moments . . . moments like this, perhaps . . . ’Moments like this! ‘But I’m not happy! ’ I protested. ‘This is beautiful . . . but it only makes me crave for happiness all the more. Surely people can be happy longer than just a few moments? Why do they talk of ‘happy lovers’ and of ‘happy marriages’?

She glanced at me sideways from under her little fur cap, just like a somewhat alarmed duck, her gentle brown eyes uneasy with doubt.

‘I think happiness is very rare,’ she said. ‘People are too complicated to stay happy for long . . . ’

‘But I want to be happy, I want to ... I must be!’ I repeated, my distress mounting as I began to feel myself in danger of being convinced by her words.

‘What do you think would make you happy?’ Maroossia asked.

‘Oh, a lot of things. I want to travel - go anywhere I like - I want to become a famous writer ... To fall in love with someone who would also love me very much and who would also be famous in some way, a musician, perhaps. I would like to have children — no more than two, I think ... a boy and a girl. And . . . ’

‘You may have all these things and yet not be happy for long . . . ’ my sister said.

‘Why are you saying this?’ I asked reproachfully. She was causing me pain, an inchoate sensation tugging at my heart.

‘Because I think it might be true . . . ’

‘She may be right, she may be right, and you are just being foolish,’ a small voice whispered inside my head. But I did not want to believe it; I repeated to myself that much depended on my own will and determination. True, my dreams of travel had to be postponed and my chances of meeting the ‘prince’ had been greatly diminished — the war was the cause of that. But becoming a writer was something I could go on striving for. My reputation as a ‘poetess’ was established at school; I was aware of being pointed out to younger pupils in the assembly hall; one bright girl from an upper form came up to me during the lunch break and walked and talked with me for a full half-hour about literature — an unusual and flattering happening. Shimkóvich, the most exacting of teachers, now always praised my essays and read them in class; and I was proud of this, and told myself that although I could not hope to concert which was planned in aid of the Red Cross and the wounded soldiers.

I was proud of this, and told myself that although I could not hope to equal Lermontov or Pushkin, I could become perhaps the best woman writer in Russia. And with a touch of irony at my own expense, I reminded myself that my task would not be so very hard: there were so few women writers in Russia.

My mother and sister liked my poems and often asked me to read them to their friends. I doubt that my father ever read any of them, and as for my brother, he professed scorn for poetry in general and for female poets in particular. If he came upon a poem of mine, he would read it aloud in such a manner that it appeared ridiculous and false. Once he got hold of my diary and read passages from it in the same way. For the first few moments I was dumbfounded; to me, his behaviour was monstrous, not merely dishonest but dishonourable, like opening and reading other people’s letters. Then I rushed at him to snatch my diary away, but he dodged round the table, still reading, and finally escaped into the sitting- room where he defended himself against me by throwing himself backwards on to a sofa and lifting his feet in the air.

I knew that if I struck him, I would hurt my hands more than I could hurt him, so I called him a coward and said I despised him — and I meant it. I had suspected him of lacking in courage ever since he, as a boy of ten, had sent me, a girl of six, to bring down his arrow from the roof of the house. He would not ride a horse after having been thrown once and was not interested in any sport except ice-skating. I cannot remember having ever seen him do a dangerous or a daring thing. Heaven knows, time was to prove me wrong in judging him to be devoid of courage — but how was I to know?

I took my revenge on him in a way not many younger sisters could, and my mother was the one to suggest it, although she did so without any thought of revenge. My brother was a very able boy, but his best subject was mathematics and he found essay writing difficult. One evening in his last year at school, my mother found him worrying over an essay on some semi-abstract subject he had been set to write at home. She suggested he should ask me to write it, and after some hesitation, he swallowed his pride and did so. I enjoyed writing it, the more so as it proved that I was not as infantile and ridiculous as he chose to picture me. He copied my essay and was given a good mark for it, but was too self-conscious even to thank me for my effort on his behalf.

Despite his sedate, quiet manner in the presence of strangers, Vova was a highly-strung and sensitive youth. I remember him frantic with irritation, trying repeatedly to straighten a moderately straight parting in his hair, or standing before a full-length looking-glass, pulling at the tail of his school tunic and complaining in exasperation that the fold would not lie flat. He obviously hated the thought of not looking ‘just right’. He was not handsome but had a fine forehead with well-marked, straight eyebrows and wide-set greenish-grey eyes. The extreme leanness of his face exaggerated the width of his mouth. His profile was long with a slightly receding chin, and it must have been that which made him declare, with a characteristic, self-deprecatory humour that he looked ‘like an Egyptian dog-minder’. There was indeed some slight resemblance between his features and those rigid, two-dimensional figures represented on Egyptian frescoes with their arms extended, holding back elongated dogs which strain at their leash. His comment on himself showed a degree of critical detachment which was disarming, but I could not let myself be disarmed for long, always expecting him to return to attack.

I often wondered in later years whether members of a family ever really know one another. We all assume they do — but I believe this happens only when there is a deep affinity between them, such as existed, despite all our differences, between me and my sister. There was no such affinity between myself and the others, not excluding my mother, and my brother and father especially remained familiar strangers, whose actions and words I must have misinterpreted most of the time. Members of a family stand too close to one another, and this very closeness makes them inyopic, prevents them from seeing one another whole, predisposes them to make more of one another’s faults and weaknesses than of their virtues and strengths. They may be fond of one another, but they often reserve their respect for people outside the family circle. Familiarity,

I believe, does not necessarily breed contempt, but it often distorts our view of those whom we see acting and talking only in the narrow framework of a home.

My brother, like my father, never condescended to talk to me as to an equal, but I knew that he sometimes confided things to my sister and my mother. He was a conscientious student, never took risks with his home work, but read little for interest or pleasure and was always greedy for food. I, for whom literature was a second life, thought him shallow, prosaic and limited to a degree. Yet, he finished school with a ‘small’ gold medal — that is, only one remove from the year’s top finalist — and was admitted, on his school record, to the Polytechnical Institute in Petersburg, one of the most selective specialist universities in Russia.

I think he made friends fairly easily, but I also remember my mother saying that he often chose them among the boys of a less privileged background than our own. I remember clearly one of them, a serious- looking, quiet-spoken Jewish boy, ‘Boma’ Litvinov by name, of whom my mother approved, and whom I thought rather handsome with his sleek, black hair and wide forehead. Like my brother, he was good at mathematics and near the top of the class. I remember him quietly holding forth on the, subject of the complete equality Jews enjoyed in other countries. In England, he told us, Disraeli, a Jew, had been a Prime Minister and a favourite of the Queen, while Mendelssohn, the composer, played the piano at the royal palace. I was much impressed by Boma’s knowledge of such things.

The aspect of my mother’s character of which I was most conscious was her worrying side. Our health seemed to be her main concern, and our future, in so far as it could be affected by the state of our health. My sister, she was convinced, had undermined her health by not feeding herself properly while she was a student at Petersburg. My brother’s health worried her because he had an enormous appetite, yet remained as thin as if he had been starving all his life. As for myself, I could not, in her view, be really well because I was too restless and nervous. Despite being herself a reader and lover of the Russian classics, she would interrupt my reciting of my favourite poems by anxious remarks on the prominence of my thyroid gland.

If we planned some excursion or a trip on the river, her thoughts would inevitably turn to the possibility of accidents or mishaps: the sky looked stormy — a wind might spring up and the boat might overturn — my sister could not swim . . . Or we would all get soaked through and catch pneumonia. So persistent was she in foretelling various minor disasters, and — curiously enough — so relatively often did her forecasts prove correct, that we nicknamed her jokingly ‘Elisavieta the Prophetess’. This was my sister’s invention: she had declared war on the family’s ‘addiction to gloom’, and her way to do this was to make us laugh at ourselves. She invented ironical nicknames for all of us: my father was to be ‘Vitaly the Silent’; my brother ‘Vladímir the Saint’ — a historical personage; myself ‘Lydia the Martyr’, an allusion to my tendency to make the most of my discontents; while for herself Maroossia reserved the most unlikely of titles, ‘Maria the Harlot’ —Mary Magdalene, of course. This made us all laugh, to her absolute delight.

At this distance in time, it is easy to see my mother’s anxiety on our behalf as a foreboding of the dark things to come. One of her remarks has firmly remained in my memory. We returned from one of our boating trips very hungry to a lamp-lit, cosy dining-room, and my brother and I fell upon our food like ravenous wolves. Having finished his, my brother said he was still hungry, and more food was brought. My mother, who, as a rule, encouraged us all to eat more, shook her head and said: ‘What is the matter with you today, my children? Can it be that you feel a famine is coming?’

‘There you go again, Mamma — prophesying,’ my brother replied, and we all laughed, but I remember a great unease coming over me, just as it had when my sister talked of happiness being only the matter of moments. Could that have been a foreboding, too?

I was often haunted by a sense of futility and a craving to escape — where to? I had no notion. On a golden autumn morning, transparent and absolutely still, the air chilled and fragrant like white wine, I walked to school up an avenue of maple trees which ran along the middle of our street. The large leaves of the maples had turned blood-red and amber- yellow, so that the path in front of me looked like a processional route richly adorned with banners. I felt its beauty intensely but my thoughts were fixed on its passing away, on the transience of all glory and the death of all things mortal. I felt a thousand years old and oppressed as if all the sorrows of the world were weighing me down. If all had to end in death, I wished I could die there and then.

When I was in these moods my sister told me I was suffering from Weltschmerz. Goethe, Lermontov, Byron, even Pushkin, had all suffered from it, she said; and every young person, aware of the evils and tragedies of life, suffers from it in some degree. The trouble with me was that I was having it rather badly. All the same, there were real and obvious reasons why we should feel sad and uneasy: our life had been made darker and poorer by the war. The only cinema in town had closed its doors; dancing was banned from public places; in school we knitted wristlets and gloves for soldiers, and in church, prayers were read for ‘our valiant warriors’. Some of the older boys we knew had become cadets in military schools and were due to join the fighting forces in the near future. These play-companions, who were too young to be taken seriously, could be killed in battle in a matter of months. One simply did not know how to treat them.

Fairly early in the autumn we received the news that Goga Reingold had been killed in the advance on Prussia. It was hard to imagine him dead, and his last visit to Fyeny stood out in memory, seen like a painting in a frame. My sister appeared to take the news almost calmly, as if she had long prepared herself for it. ‘Just think,’ she said to me, ‘he would have been still alive if he had not failed his school finals . . . ’ I burst out in a passionate denunciation of the forces which allowed the question of life or death and all the waste and grief that go with it, to be determined by chance. Maroossia merely shook her head. ‘Who knows that he hasn’t escaped something worse?’ she asked.

At home they saw me mostly in my depressed and discontented moods; at school, my other side, active and capable of enjoyment, came to the fore. Having lost my boarding-school friends in my second year at school, I became friendly with Mania Babina, a Jewish girl with blonde hair and grey eyes, who was my desk neighbour. We maintained a friendly rivalry for the top place in the class, she leading in arithmetic and I in Russian. I found her a very sensible, quiet companion in school hours, but when I went to her home and she came to my uncle’s, I discovered with surprise that she bored me. There seemed to be nothing we could do together except our home-work. Nothing I suggested could spark off her imagination. She could not swim and she was afraid to go out in the rowing boat. What dealt our friendship a final blow was my discovery that she did not know the names of the most common trees, to say nothing about her ever attempting to climb one. ‘Is this a maple?’ she asked, pointing at a lime. It seems that a kind of respect was the main ingredient in my pleasure in Mania’s company, and this display of ignorance on her part brought her down in my esteem with dramatic suddenness. The streets of our town were lined with trees; there were several public gardens where Mania had doubtless walked many a time, yet she had so little interest in nature that she had never bothered to look at trees and ask their names!

In my third year I was paired in the crocodile with Ania Bielynóvich and sat next to her in the class-room, but when it came to dancing, I always chose Liolia Tálina. Musically gifted, Liolia had a perfect sense of rhythm, and I could trust her literally never to put a foot wrong. She was always gay and given to irrepressible fits of giggles with which she often infected us. She lived with her mother in a small flat on the second floor of an apartment house. Madame Tálina was divorced from her husband, and the story we all knew about this filled me with respect for this small vivacious woman with a brusque manner and rather deep voice. She had been married to a wealthy landowner in the district, who had led a gay life before he married her and had a reputation of a Don Juan. She was recovering from her confinement with Liolia when she surprised him making love to the nurse. Immediately, Madame Tálina had her luggage packed, picked up the infant Liolia and walked out. We never talked about this in Liolia’s presence and did not know whether she had ever met her father. Madame Tálina was said to be very strict with Liolia, who was under instructions to come straight home after school. Liolia was thus led to practise mild deceitfulness in which she often needed our collaboration. If she happened to snatch a short stroll with an admirer from the boys’ Ghjmnasia - always a dangerous thing because she could meet her mother in the street — she would drag one of us up to her flat, whispering on the way: ‘I’m going to say we’ve been kept waiting to change books in the library. You say it, too.’

I became friends also with Tonia Rosen, the daughter of the ‘Leader of the Nobility’. I knew that the Leader was elected by all the ‘nobles’ of the province, including my father, but what his duties or functions were I had not the slightest notion and never troubled to find out. We teased Tonia with being ‘a baroness’: it sounded pompous. But there was nothing pompous about Tonia, and no one could accuse her of taking pride in her father’s title. In spite of her good looks she seemed to be quite without vanity. She had a perfect ‘Greek’ profile, the bridge of her nose forming a continuous straight line with her forehead. Her hair was blonde, but her eyes were dark brown and her strong eyebrows velvety black. As we analysed our own and one another’s appearance with the ruthless frankness of the very young, we decided that a Greek profile was much overrated and not such a thing of beauty as we had been led to believe, but that it had the virtue of rarity.

Tonia’s weak points were her inability to keep her hair in place or her clothes even moderately tidy. Strands of hair were always hanging over her forehead and getting into her eyes. As for her clothes, she relied too much on pins instead of hooks and buttons, and the pins were not always safety-pins. Once as she was passing me in the class-room, I caught her by the comer of her pinafore, wanting to speak to her —and nearly ripped off most of her clothes. The pins which held her dress and pinafore together flew out, and there stood Tonia with a gap in her side, holding up her falling skirt, both of us laughing too much to do anything about it.

She was also extremely absent-minded. One summer afternoon Liolia and I were on the balcony of Liolia’s flat waiting for her. We saw her coming along the street, late as usual. We called out to her. She waved back and shouted something about feeling very hot. Then she proceeded to remove her jacket, revealing that she was wearing no blouse but only a camisole and a lace ‘front’ under it. Hysterical with laughter, we could hardly speak and merely pointed, while Tonia gazed up at us, mystified. Only after she had walked up the stairs and we opened the door to her, did she realize that she had half-undressed herself in the street.

Two other girls who were friendly with Tonia and Liolia also became my friends. They were cousins, Katia Kign and Lena Kazanóvich. No two strangers could be less alike than these two: Katia, placid, quiet- spoken and studious, Lena excitable, voluble, mercurial and slap-dash. Katia was working up to the top of the class, only a few marks below Babina and myself. Lena, though no less intelligent, never did any home-work and so lagged somewhere in the middle. Katia was always so attentive and well-behaved that I cannot recollect her ever being reprimanded by a teacher or a dame-de-classe. Lena, on the other hand, was frequently in trouble —for talking during lessons, for prompting or being prompted, for writing and passing notes, or for her provocative manner. Everyone knew that Lena had a passion for boasting and telling fibs. She could tell them brazenly, with an air of innocence and an assurance which was almost disarming. Occasionally she would get away with an unprepared lesson by richly embroidering on the scraps of material she had gathered from the teacher’s explanation a few days before. She was resourceful but incautious and so was frequently caught out. She declared that she did not mind being punished at school by having lines to learn because her mother at home was much stricter than any dame-de-classe. Lena was an unusually big girl for her age and had a baby face, milky white and pink, with a pair of large brown eyes. She was rather proud of her hands, delicate and soft, with tapering fingers, more like the hands of a pampered young woman than of a growing adolescent.

Her cousin, Katia, was also tall but slender, and she had the habit of stooping which gave her a sunken chest. She was an orphan and had an elder brother who was at the Ghjmnasia in my brother’s class. Katia’s mother had died of consumption; her father, a local landowner, died of heart failure as he ran in heavy snow after a pair of runaway horses. After a spell at the boarding school, Katia became a day girl and lived in a flat with her brother and a devoted housekeeper, who also kept house for them during the school holidays when they returned to their country estate. Katia’s brother intended to run the estate himself as soon as he had left school. Katia said all four of us must come and stay with them in the summer holidays.

In the lunch break the five of us gathered in the downstairs hall, usurping a comer by the piano, and listened to Liolia’s singing or danced with one another. Liolia was fond of the gypsy romances which I rather despised, but she would also sing Schumann’s songs to Heine’s words, some of which were among my favourite songs. I felt at the time that only tragic or truly tender emotions were worthy of being expressed in music: musical gaiety, especially of a popular kind, annoyed and offended me. Katia could play the piano passably well, and whenever I could, I induced her to play Chopin’s waltzes and nocturnes. I was particularly fond of the Waltz Number 7, and I was planning to write a novel about unrequited love and call it The Seventh Waltz of Chopin. But mostly Katia played ordinary waltzes for us to dance to. Liolia, despite her plumpness, was very light on her feet, so I preferred her as a partner to the others. We danced the waltz with abandon until she became giddy and giggly, and implored me to stop. But I, impervious to dizziness and proud of it, continued whirling her around, while an amused crowd of girls from other classes watched us getting more and more out of breath and eventually flopping down on any chairs that happened to be near.

With Tonia I danced the dance d’apache, partly borrowed from a film we had seen and partly invented by myself. To the strains of ‘Tango Argentine’, I pulled her roughly about, threw her over my arm and finally dropped her on the floor, pretending to stab her. By that time most of her hairpins were scattered and her dress was gaping at the side. This dance was much appreciated by our spectators who clapped and cheered us. Our success made us reckless and we began to talk about dancing our tango on the table.

The room where all this was happening was used for examinations at the end of the school year, and the only table in it was the huge ‘examinations’ table’, covered with a heavy, green tablecloth. I had often pictured to myself with an inner shudder the scene when I, too, would have to draw my ticket from the urn - for examinations at our school were conducted as a kind of lottery. Each subject was divided into sections, and questions relating to these were typed or printed on slips of paper which the examinees drew in the presence of the examiners. The pupil then sat down with her ‘ticket’ and thought the questions over for about a quarter of an hour, when her name was called. Then she had to go up to the table and recite what she had prepared, facing a conclave of the Director, the Headmistress, the teacher concerned and several other teachers seated behind the table, any of whom could ask her questions on the section she had drawn. Fortunately, this ordeal was inflicted on the pupils only twice in their school life, at the end of the last but one, and in the final year.

The idea of dancing the tango on this important table appealed to our iconoclastic sense of humour, and, having posted Lena outside to watch out for possible adult intruders, we turned back the green tablecloth and climbed on to it, Tonia already giggling in anticipation. We took our stance and Katia struck the first notes of the ‘Tango Argentine’. But we did not get very far. The anteroom door was flung open and Lena rushed in, hissing: ‘Take care! The enemy’s coming!’ We only just had time to jump off, but could not manage to pull the cloth back over the table.

The enemy was a young dame-de-classe who had joined the school staff only that term. She was called Nadiézhda Miháilovna, had a fresh, supercilious kind of face and appeared to be devoid of humour. She was on the way to the Nachálnitsa’s flat, the door of which was at the far end of the hall. As she passed us, she threw a curious glance at the half-uncovered examination table, then at our faces which we were trying hard to keep straight.

‘Do you think she’ll tell Anna Avdyéevna?’ Lena asked after the young woman had gone in. ‘She looks the type that likes to make trouble.’

‘What can she tell her?’ retorted someone.

We soon knew that the woman had spoken because the following morning Anna Avdyéevna questioned Katia about what had happened in the examination hall ‘during the lunch break the day before’.

Katia was a truthful person but not to the extent of giving away her friends. She merely repeated Anna Avdyéevna’s question as if completely failing to grasp it. The dame-de-classe pressed her, and Katia told her, quite truthfully, that she had played the piano and the others danced — and that was all. Anna Avdyéevna got nothing more from her, and for some reason she did not question the rest of us.

 

The date of the concert at which I had to recite my poem was approaching fast. I had had several weeks to accustom myself to the thought of a public appearance and to write a poem suitable for the occasion. Verse writing was never practised at our school as part of Russian studies, and I was convinced that poems written ‘to order’ or for special occasions were bound to be vastly inferior to poems dictated by inspiration. I had discovered inspiration when I composed my first poem at the age of eight, and I knew it as a state of special awareness, of mounting excitement and the growing need to give my feelings a verbal and rhythmical shape. I was ‘inspired’ nearly always by something I saw in nature, and then I would move about in agitation, singing my lines, trying this word and that, elated when the word fitted perfectly, despairing when it eluded me. Indeed, often the experience was like wrestling with some force inside me, a voice insisting that I should express things for which I could find no words. The struggle set my head burning and my cheeks aflame; it set me wondering whether I looked, when possessed by inspiration, different from my usual self, and I wished I could see myself, or someone could see me and tell me what I looked like. Perhaps then people would realize what the real me was, and not be misled by my childish appearance into thinking that I was just an ordinary school - girl . . .

For the first time in my life I tried to induce inspiration by pondering on the theme of ‘soldiers at the front’. The resulting poem of six stanzas was competent but hardly ‘inspired’ in my sense. I managed to express compassion for the men in the freezing trenches and a hope that the war would soon be over, with the sincerity I felt.

And I succeeded in controlling my nervousness well enough when the time came for me to recite my poem, even to the extent of being able to observe some of my audience. The Director was smiling into his beard, the Nachálnitsa was positively beaming, Anna Avdyéevna had a curiously intent and almost solemn look, Shimkóvich . . . There was a sad half-smile on his lips and a wistfulness in the tilt of his head which nearly made me lose the thread of my recitation. I remembered that he was said to be a sick man, and that my classmates assured me that he was ‘in love’ with me. Since my mother came to live with us at M*, he was a frequent visitor at our house.

My ears, which had been blocked by emotion when I started reciting, became unblocked and the long applause which greeted the end of my recitation sounded loud and good. Did I deserve it or were they applauding from kindness? If I were a musician I could get applause as often as I liked, every month or even every week . . . and I would know that I deserved it. But I had no gift for music-making, and this vision of glamour had to go the way of most day-dreams. Perhaps in my next reincarnation . . .

I joined my mother and sister in the second row of the seats. My sister’s eyes shone tenderly as she whispered: ‘You looked a very charming young poetess, króshka!’ I was not sorry that my brother was not there: he had begun his course at the Polytechnical Institute that autumn. And I was grateful for the absence of Shoora Martynov who was also studying in Petersburg. I would have found his attentions very embarrassing under the eye of all the teachers and girls from all the classes in the school.

With my mother were Zena and Aunt Katia.

‘I liked your poem ever so much,’ said Zena, beaming at me.

‘Yes,’ said Aunt Katia. ‘Only I know what some people would say . . . ’‘What would they say?’ my mother enquired with a touch of impatience.

‘They’d say: “Here’s a girl reciting a touching poem about the soldiers freezing and dying at the front, yet she’s wearing a pair of diaphanous stockings.” War poems and diaphanous stockings somehow don’t go together.’

‘I don’t think for a moment they would say that!’

My mother sounded quite cross: Aunt Katia would spoil anyone’s enjoyment. I too felt annoyed, but also guilty, aware that there was some truth in her rebuke. The stockings were my first pair of really fine ones, and I could not resist wearing them on that special occasion. But perhaps it was the wrong occasion? I almost wished my mother had advised me against it.

There was to be a dance after the concert and recitations; the ban on dancing was for once relaxed; it was, after all, a charity dance, and in a way private. Some young officers on leave, some cadets and older schoolboys were in the audience: they would no doubt stay after the show and partner the older schoolgirls. Liolia Tálina already had an officer friend, a blond, rosy-cheeked second lieutenant called Henryk Tomasov. Katia Kign’s brother, Dima, was also there; he was a bovine-looking youth with a loud voice and laughter which made me feel uncomfortable. I wanted to dance and wondered who, if anyone, would ask me. I hoped not Dima, who would probably dance clumsily. My sister had told me that at such school dances introductions were omitted: young men asked any girl they wanted to dance with, so I need not worry about not knowing anybody . . . But what if nobody asked me?

There is no equivalent of the phrase ‘wallflower’ in Russian, but the feeling attached to the situation is the same as anywhere else. I loved dancing, I could dance well, and to have a middle-aged teacher who could not dance sitting beside me and doing his best to entertain me by his conversation, was not a substitute for being whirled around the room to the strains of ‘The Hills of Manchuria’. Shimkóvich joined us as soon as we came down to the examination hall where the dance was held. For once his ironical comments, expressed with characteristic circumlocution, failed to hold my respectful attention. My eyes were following Liolia waltzing happily in Henryk’s arms and Tonia being jerked uncomfortably in Dima Kign’s embrace. I badly wanted to join them on the floor, and I feared that prospective partners would keep away as long as Shimkóvich looked as if he had secured my company for the evening. At the same time I wondered whether any of these young men would want to dance with me in any case. A small crowd of them were standing in the doorway, watching the dancing couples, trying to make up their minds ... I avoided looking at them in case they would imagine that I was longing for them to ask me. If anyone came, he must be good-looking and a good dancer. I should hate to dance with someone who trod on my toes. But there were so few really good dancers among those who waltzed past me. Boris Orlov, perhaps, with his straight back and arrogant air — but he had the reputation of being stupid . . .

The first waltz, my favourite dance, was over, and no one had asked me so far. I was doing my best not to look downcast, but knew that my face reflected all that I was feeling. Maroossia, who was sitting on the Shimkóvich’s other side, could do nothing except look sympathetic, which only increased my self-consciousness. A few minutes passed, then the band struck a polka. Adolphe, the teacher of mathematics, bald- headed and bespectacled, glided over the parquet to my sister and bowed with exaggerated courtliness. With an emotion near to despair I saw her accept and realized that now I had to take full notice and give sensible answers to whatever Shimkóvich was saying to me.

Just then I caught sight of a tall youth in a Ghymnasia uniform tunic carefully threading his way between the chairs ranged against the wall and the whirling dancers and gradually approaching the place where we sat. I looked away quickly: he must not think I was expecting it, and it would be so humiliating if after all he asked someone else. Shimkóvich was saying in his slow, deliberately seminarist accents: ‘I’ve never learned to dance . . . nor for that matter any fine manners. At the Seminary they didn’t teach us any airs or graces . . . ’

Without really looking, I saw that the tall youth had stopped in front of me and was bowing.

‘Kavalíerov,’ he introduced himself. ‘May I have the pleasure?’

I glanced up quickly. Yes, he was speaking to me, not to a girl on my left. I nodded and rose, remembering at the last moment to say: ‘Please excuse me’, to Shimkóvich. The youth Kavalíerov put his arm round my waist and we joined the round of dancers.

At fifteen I had grown out of liking the polka; I regarded it as a childish dance which I could only dance with abandon and enjoyment when acting a part for the benefit of my classmates. To stamp out its strong rhythms with a male partner whose sense of rhythm was clearly deficient was embarrassing and dissatisfying. The youth Kavalíerov had a very strong arm; he was taller than I by a whole head and he gazed steadily into my face with his dark, deep-set eyes all the time we were dancing.

He was very plain; his features large but somewhat flat, his eyes small, his mouth wide and his complexion sallow. There was a look of grave intentness about him which made me feel uncomfortable. He did not speak, and I wondered whether I should say something to him. But what could I say to a complete stranger which would not be so obvious as to sound inane? Should I ask him whether he had liked the concert? That would sound like fishing for a compliment. Ask him what class of the Ghjmnasia he was in? He might dislike the question if he is still in the seventh class: he should be in the eighth . . .

The band finished playing the polka before either of us had found his tongue. Kavalíerov offered me his arm and led me to a couple of empty chairs, not back to where Shimkóvich was sitting. I saw my sister going back to him; they both searched for me with their eyes. My sister saw me, smiled and nodded. Kavalíerov was turning his back on them and still staring at me.

‘My name is Fyedia,’ he said, ‘Fyedia Kavalíerov. Your sister knows my brother Leonid. He’s at the Military School in Petersburg.’

I replied: ‘Yes, I think I’ve heard of him.’ Then there was a pause.

‘You write poems?’ said Fyedia. ‘Have you written many?’

‘Not very many.’

‘It must be quite difficult . . . writing poems . . . ’

‘Sometimes it is.’

‘I should find it very hard if I had to. Mathematics is my strong subject.’

This was chilling. I could have replied: ‘Then we have nothing in common’, or ‘Mathematics bore me’, but it would not have been polite, so I said nothing. The band struck a vienghierka. Fyedia rose to his feet.

‘May I?’

I submitted to my fate. How could I refuse without offending him?

He did not leave my side for the rest of the evening, and when dancing was over, he introduced himself to my sister and accompanied us home. As she was saying good-bye she said to him: ‘Call on us some time, won’t you?’ He replied: ‘With the greatest pleasure’, and squeezed my hand so hard that I nearly gasped.

‘Why did you ask him?’ I turned on my sister as soon as the front door closed behind us and we started removing our coats.

‘But how could I not ask him? He has been dancing with you all the evening, and he took us home. He would have been hurt if we just said good-bye, thank you, and nothing else . . . Besides, I know his brother.’

‘I wish I hadn’t danced with him the whole evening,’ I cried. ‘I wish you hadn’t asked him to call. If he comes, don’t expect me to entertain him! I don’t want to, I don’t, I don’t!’

‘Króshka! What is the matter with you? Has something happened to upset you, or are you just over-tired?’

‘Nothing! Nothing happened! Nothing ever happens, that’s the trouble. No, don’t try to comfort me. I’m not a little girl any more . . . ’ I tossed in my bed, tormented with self-pity, my eyes hot and dry. As soon as I closed them, I saw the examination hall of the school, converted into a ballroom, looking festive with its shining parquet floor and all its wall lights draped in pink gauze. I saw the waltzing couples, Liolia laughing and chatting to her partner, Tonia languidly not-caring whether she kept time, Katia, solemn but obviously liking it, Lena muddling through with great aplomb. I saw myself with an elegant, handsome partner, perhaps a student of the Institute of Rail and Road Engineering, or a naval officer, dancing so well that people turned to watch us. ‘There goes Rayévskaia, the poetess . . . What a nice couple they make! ’ But even before I opened my eyes again, there intruded the memory of reality. Instead of the elegant partner, the uncouth Fyedia Kavalíerov. Instead of inspired dancing, a clumsy, jerky progress round the room. Instead of general admiration, perhaps a few amused glances from the group in the doorway, from others, sitting along the walls. My first success on the rostrum did not console me for the disappointment in my first dance. The dance seemed to matter more than the authorship of a poem. And I felt exasperated at the thought that I had acquired another very plain admirer, who, in contrast to Shoora Martynov, was inarticulate, and whose favourite subject was mathematics!

 

 

Winning my Freedom

 

The winter of 1914-15 was dark and damp: the snow would not settle and was piled along the pavements in dirty yellow ramparts over which you had to climb if you were in a hurry to cross the street. The news that reached us from the front was now encouraging and now depressing. It looked as if the war was not going to be over in a year, as some had foretold but might continue indefinitely.

Preparation for lessons I had to do at home occupied at least three hours every evening. I went to bed late and found it very difficult to get up in the mornings: Aniuta had to call me more than once before I could wrench my head from my pillow.

The poem I had recited at the school concert was printed in the local paper under my name. I felt very proud of my first appearance in print, almost as early as Pushkin’s or Lermontov’s! I snatched at the copy of the paper when it arrived and gazed at the smudgy lettering with the intensity of a lover gazing at the beloved’s face. How different it looked in print! How surprisingly compact and shapely! But even as I was re-reading it, my excitement was ebbing away. I could see its faults much more clearly; several weak rhymes, an awkward turn of phrase . . . but it was too late to improve it. My brief triumph was flawed with dissatisfaction and discontent.

I was in that kind of mood and deeply wrapped up in my thoughts when next morning at school I came down the stairs in the lunch break, on the way to the examination hall. The passage at the bottom of the stairs was poorly lit and I hardly saw the face of the woman who swept across it just as I reached the last step. I dipped a short, awkward curtsey and made for the door of the hall when the woman swung round and came towards me, her head high, her skirts swishing with the speed of her movement. I recognized Nadiézhda Miháilovna. She bore upon me with her characteristically arrogant air.

‘You did not curtsey to me, Rayévskaia, ’ she said. ‘The school regulations require you to curtsey to all members of the staff. Why did you not?’

My voice shaking with indignation at being so unjustly accused, I protested that I did so.

‘Do you mean to say that I am not telling the truth?’ she demanded.

‘I mean . . . you may not have noticed that I did. ’

She looked me up and down in silence, and walked off. I went into the hall. Katia, Liolia, Lena and Tonia were gathered round the piano. Liolia was singing ‘Ich grolle nicht’.

 

Ich grolle nicht, und wenn das Herz auch bricht

Ewig verlohrenes Lieb, ich grolle nicht . . .

 

‘I do! ’ I growled, leaning over the piano and striking the lid with my fist. ‘That beastly Nadiézhda Miháilovna!’

‘What’s the matter, Ziegfried?’

We have been learning about the Niebelungen, and my fair hair and fighting spirit earned me the nickname of Ziegfried. It was used interchangeably with ‘Eaglet’, for the members of our group of five knew of my fantasy of reincarnation and fell in with it.

I told them about my encounter with the governess. They were all indignant and sympathetic.

‘She’s bound to tell Anna Avdyéevna,’ said Katia.

‘I can just imagine what Anna Avdyéevna would say!’ Liolia broke into giggles, somewhat inappropriately, I thought.

‘Cheer up, my Gaetano!’ said Tonia. ‘Come and dance the tango with me.’

We danced the tango until the bell rang. Once in the class-room, a single glance at Anna Avdyéevna’s face was sufficient to tell me that she had already been informed. She looked upset, but I felt I had been wronged and was determined to stand my ground. When the lesson was over, she called me to her desk.

‘Rayévskaia, Nadiézhda Miháilovna tells me that you did not curtsey to her in the corridor, and that when she spoke to you about it you were discourteous.’‘I did curtsey to her, and I was not discourteous!’

‘She says you were, and I want you to apologize to her.’

‘I have nothing to apologize for,’ I said icily, although fire was flowing through my limbs.

‘I told her that she will receive your apology, and I insist on it. ’ ‘You want me to apologize to someone who is entirely in the wrong and is throwing the blame on me?’ I was trembling with indignation. ‘I will never do it, never!’

‘You must do it!’ Anna Avdyéevna spoke with something like desperation.

But I, too, was in a desperate mood. Apology in my mind was the equivalent of asking forgiveness, an admission of being in the wrong, and the whole of my being revolted against such humiliation. I could imagine a smirk of satisfaction on Nadiézhda Miháilovna’s pert little face as she watched me eating humble pie.

With my eyes fixed on Anna Avdyéevna’s pale and agitated face, controlling my own agitation as best I could, I repeated that I would never apologize. For a few moments the two of us gazed into each other’s eyes, she clearly taking the measure of my determination. Then she tossed her head and turned away from me. Released, I went quickly to my desk to pick up my books and leave the class-room. Two of my friends, Liolia and Tonia, were waiting in the corridor to walk home with me. They were curious to know what had passed between me and the dame-de-classe. I told them in some detail. They shared my indignation, but Tonia said: ‘She’ll do her best to make you do it, for certain.’ ‘Why should she be so keen on your apologizing to Nadiézhda Miháilovna?’ asked Liolia, ‘There’s no love lost between them.’ ‘That’s just the point! ’ Tonia looked her wordly-wise best as she said this. ‘Anna Avdyéevna and the other woman are rivals. Our Anna Avdyéevna claims to have the best-behaved class in the school. Nadiézhda Miháilovna dislikes her and is determined to prove that this isn’t true. She picked on you because she knows you’re proud and would not give in on a point of honour, so to speak. She wants to embarrass Anna Avdyéevna.’

‘What a disgusting plot! ’ Liolia could not help giving a nervous laugh as she made this remark. ‘So Anna Avdyéevna will insist on your apologizing just to prove to Nadiézhda Miháilovna that she can make you do it! ’ We reached the door of Liolia’s block of flats to say au revoir. Some passing youths made the sounds of kissing as we exchanged the usual schoolgirls’ embrace. ‘Silly creatures!’ said Liolia. ‘Au revoir, Ziegfried. Don’t give in to the dragons!’

Tonia and I continued along the darkening street. The snow was beginning to fall. We kissed au revoir outside the porch of her house.

‘Be firm, my Gaetano! ’ she said, acting her Spanish part. ‘I know you are brave. Au revoir!’

‘Ziegfried’, the ‘Eaglet’, ‘Gaetano’ — I needed all these alter egos to support me during the siege that followed.

Anna Avdyéevna spared no effort and neglected no kind of device to induce me to do what she desired in this triangular conflict between her, Nadiézhda Miháilovna and myself. She soon saw that mere insistence on her part was the least effective of weapons, so she tried persuasion on her favourite lines. The apology need not be formal, she said, Nadiézhda Miháilovna would be satisfied with just a few words on the first occasion I happened to meet her in the corridor. I just had to go up to her and say I apologized. This would cost me nothing, Nadiézhda Miháilovna would be pacified, and the reputation of our class as the best behaved in the school would be re-established.

‘Cost me nothing?’ I spoke with such force of suppressed anger that Anna Avdyéevna blenched. ‘To apologize to her just to satisfy her ridiculous vanity? Apologize for what? I would be lying if I apologized! I would despise myself!’

Changing her tactics, Anna Avdyéevna tried to gain her ends by flattering and cajoling me. She appealed to my generosity. Her argument went something like this: surely I could understand what it meant to her? The whole staff of the school would know that she had no control over the pupils in her charge. She had been proud of the way her class had always behaved; this was the first complaint she had ever had from the staff about one of her pupils. And it had happened to be me, the pupil in whom she had always taken a very special interest. I was very much in the limelight, she told me: the school was proud of me. Such a minor concession on my part could not do any harm to my reputation, but my stubbornness was doing a great deal of harm to hers, and to the reputation of the class. If I apologized, people would respect me more for having admitted so courageously . . .

I almost screamed with exasperation that I had nothing to admit!

‘Well, then,’ she said, ‘they will respect you for . . . for having done so in order to . . . restore my confidence in you . . . for my sake, if you like’.

I looked at Anna Avdyéevna with a sense of sudden illumination. It seemed as if something I had felt obscurely for a long time had become clear in a flash. She wanted me to sacrifice my pride to spare her pride.

The appeal to my generosity was the most difficult for me to withstand, but this last remark worked like a dash of cold water on hot metal; it made me harden. My own voice sounded strange to me as I replied with unnatural calm: ‘I can’t, Anna Avdyéevna.’

The siege continued for the best part of the week. The dame-de-classe kept me every day after the end of the lessons in the bleak, empty classroom to continue her pleading. She inveigled me into coming to her room during the lunch break. I returned home late, worn out and upset by her arguments and appeals. But although she occasionally reduced me to tears, my determination not to yield remained unshaken. As the struggle between us continued, its significance for me altered: from a clash of two kinds of self-regard it became a struggle for liberation, an all-out effort to free myself from a relationship which made upon me claims that I was not able to tolerate. Although I would not have used these words at the time, I became aware that I had been a victim of emotional blackmail, and that I had to break the bond between myself and Anna Avdyéevna in order to preserve my wholeness. I do not know how well she herself was aware of what was happening, but I believe that until the last moment she was hoping to win. The ‘last moment’, I think, was the occasion when I met the two dames-de-classe walking along the corridor together. I made a quick curtsey without looking up, and passed on. Anna Avdyéevna called me back.

To pretend I had not heard would have been an act of cowardice. I was already feeling cowardly for having passed them so quickly. I returned.

‘Rayévskaia,’ said Anna Avdyéevna in her most caressing tone of voice, ‘I believe there’s something you would like to say to Nadiézhda Miháilovna.’

I could never look straight at people I loathed, for my loathing seemed to invest them with an almost unbearable repulsiveness; and at that moment I loathed both the women standing before me. I hardly knew which of the two I loathed most.

‘I have nothing to say to her . . . ’ I spoke slowly and clearly.

‘Not to her, Rayévskaia. You know very well you must refer to people by their names! ’

‘I have nothing to say to Nadiézhda Miháilovna,’ I repeated, containing my mounting fury.

‘Are you quite sure?’ Anna Avdyéevna’s voice was still sweet and fluting.

‘Quite sure.’

I raised my eyes for a moment, just enough to see a kind of convulsion flitting across Anna Avdyéevna’s face, while the other woman turned to her with a slight smile and a remark: ‘Well, that settles it, does it not?’

‘It seems so,’ said Anna Avdyéevna in a cold, hostile voice.

They were talking as if they had made a bet on my response to their summons! I gazed them full in the face to show what I felt. Then, without another word or sign of dismissal both they and I walked off in opposite directions.

This was the end of the siege but not the end of the war. I realized it from the moment I saw Anna Avdyéevna’s face on returning to the class-room. I had defied her in the presence of a rival; I had made it clear that my affection for her was not strong enough for me to accept humiliation on her account, that her power over me was not as great as she had imagined. In fact, I had won a victory: it was she, not I, who had suffered humiliation, and she was unforgiving. But neither could I forgive her for the torment she had been inflicting on me. The conflict had been long and painful, and now, after the break had taken place, I felt relieved, almost exhilarated, almost exulting in having an enemy. Now we were enemies she could make no demands on me except that I conform to the school regulations like any other girl in the school. I should not have to watch her face for signs of displeasure, or try to divine the tortuous workings of her mind in order to justify her expectations or fulfil her wishes. I was free to be fully myself at last!

Despite my masculine alter egos and my long game of ‘prince and princess’ with Zena during which I impersonated the prince, I had never been ‘in love’ with any of my female friends, not even in the form of an intense desire to please or serve them. ‘Crushes’ on teachers or classmates were not the fashion in Russian day schools for girls, and Anna Avdyéevna’s demand for personal devotion to herself was imported by her from the Institute where she had been educated. I was brought up to feel that girls who talked of ‘adoring’ one another, or another female, were ridiculous, and when Margóolina made a fuss of me in my first year at school, I felt more embarrassed than flattered.

While my brother and his friends were my constant play companions, I accepted my feminine role naturally and without giving it a thought. They were generals, sailors or soldiers, and I took the part of a war nurse. But since my brother had gone away to school and I had to play alone, I began to pretend that I was a powerful masculine personality, a Caucasian Prince, or a French nobleman. Freud has a phrase for this: ‘identification with the lost love object’. There was not much love between my brother and myself, but there could be little doubt that I missed him, and that by pretending to be strong and a male, I was compensating for the loss. Then as I played with children of my own age, some of them socially less privileged, I assumed leadership as if by right. If we all pretended to be Kazaks, I had to be the Atamán. Masculinity became in my mind a symbol for initiative, leadership and a degree of power over others, as well as a defence against the deeply vulnerable, and compassionate aspect of myself.

This proud image of myself had been well-nigh shattered by the experience of exile from home to boarding school. I was revealed to myself in all my vulnerability and weakness, and in my intense self-pity there was an admixture of self-contempt. But having passed through this ordeal, I knew myself better, and I felt stronger. My life with Zena and her parents added to this self-knowledge: I discovered that I could use my powers to modify my own conduct and so to influence the conduct of others. I found I was able to turn Zena from an enemy into a friend.

I was fond of Zena, but I did not think her particularly attractive, and my fantasy of casting her into the role of princess with whom I was supposed to be in love, was a pretext for inventing interminable dialogues, not the means of giving vent to my real feelings for her. It seems that in the manner of all writers, I was split between my characters: the passionate words I addressed to Zena could be addressed to myself by a ‘real’ prince, and they gave me the double satisfaction of being both speaker and listener, a giver and a recipient in one.

In our group of five no one assumed the leadership: we were friends and play-companions in the gayest, freest and most natural way. I assumed the masculine role only when dancing with Liolia or Tonia; Katia and Lena did so, too, because they were taller than the others. When we talked of ‘love’, it was always in relation to young men: Liolia with her flirtatious manner was quite irresistible to them. Katia was inclined to be ‘serious’ and too quiet to attract attention to herself; Lena, despite her size, looked too babyish; Tonia gave the impression of not caring for anybody or anything; I was rather ashamed of my admirers. Shoora Martynov and Fyedia Kavalíerov, and shared with Liolia an infatuation with Moszhuhin, Polonsky and Maximov, the film actors whom I had seen, of course, only on the screen.

Innocent of the meaning of ‘love’ between persons of the same sex, I saw Anna Avdyéevna’s demands on me as a straightforward wish to have me in her power, and my revolt against it as the need to regain my freedom. If I had become aware that other emotions also played a part in her relationship with me, it was at first only briefly, during the scene of reconciliation which followed our last but one quarrel. It was the moment when she held my head against her bosom and comforted me as if I were a small child. That moment of surrender was followed by a strong inner recoil: I did not want such a situation to recur. Did I unconsciously wish it to recur? If so, I nevertheless did all I could to prevent it.

I am not sure even at this distance in time and with the knowledge I now have, to what extent the injury I felt so strongly that it made reconciliation impossible, was an injury done to my pride or to my affection for Anna Avdyéevna. The intensity of my revulsion could have been due to a disappointment in love. Whatever the cause, it made me realize by intuition perhaps above my years that further clashes between us were inevitable, and would be followed by further explanations, reproaches and reconciliations which I had found so exhausting and upsetting in the past. My gorge rose at the very thought of their recurrence. It was far, far better, I told myself, to have an enemy and to remain always armed, rather than make peace and live in an uneasy expectation of being attacked with your guard down, and perhaps at a moment when you were most vulnerable.

From that time on, until I left school to go to a university, Anna Avdyéevna and I hardly spoke to one another. I gave her few opportunities to find fault with me, as most of the time I managed to keep well within the school rules and regulations. She treated me most of the time as if I did not exist, but her disappointment in me must have been bitter and lasting, for now and again it broke through in some act of verbal violence which startled the class.

My classmates were of course well aware of this state of affairs between us, and, except for the two Komarovskayas, were mostly ‘on my side’. So were the teachers, who knew of the quarrel, and thought that both Anna Avdyéevna and Nadiézhda Miháilovna had been unreasonable in demanding an admission of guilt and apology from me with such uncompromising insistence. I knew this from Maroossia, who had described the split existing among the staff between the ‘institoótki’ and the ‘kurshtki’. Most of the dames-de-classe belonged to the former group: they were sticklers for manners and etiquette; they had a narrow outlook and little knowledge, except foreign languages. The teachers belonged mostly to the latter group and were women with a university education: they regarded the dames-de-classe as affected and rather silly. As for the male teachers, I realized from the remarks dropped by Shimkóvich when he visited us at home, that they all but despised the dames-de-classe.

Secure in the sympathy of the teachers, I had no fear that Anna Avdyéevna’s animosity would do harm to my relationship with them. I was sure of them all with one exception: the bátiushka, our priest. Anna Avdyéevna had given up her duties at the boarding school and rented a room in bátiushka’s house. A friendship sprang up between them which we regarded with suspicion. He had been fatherly and sweet to us when we were children who listened to him, open-mouthed, as he told us stories from the Gospels. But as we grew up and began to show signs of scepticism and ask awkward questions, his manner became more authoritative, his facial expression sterner. Disrespectfully, we wondered whether he would, if we confessed our misdemeanours to him, pass them, more or less casually, on to Anna Avdyéevna. Going to confession once a year was one of the school rules, and since I had lost my faith, confession had become to me an unpleasant and meaningless formality. I intended to drop it as soon as I had left school, but meanwhile I contrived to avoid confessing to bátiushka by going to our old friend, Father Ioann, at B*, during Easter holidays. I said nothing to him about my ‘atheism’ and he did not question me, perhaps because he was too old to be interested in the sins of the very young. In any case, he gave me a signed paper to say that I had been to confession, and I handed it over to bátiushka on my return to school.

If he resented my evasion of his pastoral supervision, he did not show it immediately: I was as good a student of his subject as of any other, and he could not but give me the highest mark. In the year of my break with Anna Avdyéevna he was instructing us in Church history, and one afternoon the subject of his lesson was the life of some Saint. This Saint was canonized, bátiushka told us, because his body was found ‘untainted’ on the sea shore, after having been washed up by the waves. Without any thought of provocation, I rose to ask whether the body was swollen, as bodies of drowned people normally swell up. Suddenly bátiushka turned on me in most un-Christian anger:

‘Now, Rayévskaia, you’re always asking provocative questions, attempting to throw doubt on religious truths. I won’t have you mocking religion and leading your classmates into temptation!’

‘I wasn’t mocking anything,’ I protested. ‘I merely asked . . . ’ But he silenced me by raising his voice.

‘It is quite obvious to me that you are asking these questions with the intention of discrediting the Church witness, and I’m not going to tolerate it.’

Thrown completely off my balance by the unexpectedness and violence of his attack — for I genuinely wanted to know whether the ‘untainted’ body of the Saint had also resisted the effects of floating for days in the water —I was further shaken by Anna Avdyéevna suddenly joining in the attack. She rose from her seat and spoke in a nervous, high-pitched voice.

‘Yes, I too have noticed for some time that Rayévskaia sits through your lessons with a sarcastic expression on her face . . . and I have observed signs of irreverence quite incredible in one so young . . . ’

This intervention was most unusual and uncalled-for: in all my school life I had never seen such a concerted attack on a pupil by a teacher and a dame-de-classe together. Indignant as I felt, I knew it was useless to protest my innocence, to say that I did not feel sardonic during bátiushka’s lessons: they could still assert that I looked it. My loss of faith was to me a serious and painful matter, not an occasion for priest-baiting or cheap amusement at his expense. Though I no longer believed in a personal God, I was, in the manner of Ivan Karamazov, still carrying on a dialogue with Him, holding Him responsible for all the evils and injustices of this world. And I still longed to believe in life after death, because a life which ended in complete annihilation seemed to me a diabolical joke the only dignified answer to which was suicide.

My mother had been saying regretfully that she wished I could discuss religion with a Roman Catholic priest: she thought they were better equipped educationally and intellectually than the Orthodox, and would be able to convince me of the error of my ways. But neither bátiushka nor Anna Avdyéevna knew anything of this: they merely detected ‘irreverence’ in my questions and in my facial expression.

‘This cannot go on!’ bátiushka finished grimly amidst the stunned silence of the class.

It did not go on, for from that day I refrained from asking questions during his lessons, and if his words were meant as a threat, it proved to be an empty one. We all knew that our Director, Ivan Kuzmich, was not on the side of ‘the reactionaries’, and if bátiushka chose to complain to him about our free-thinking tendencies, his complaints would most likely be dismissed with a smile. Nor did the Director approve of the dames-de-classe’s excessive attention to ‘inessential details’ of our appearance and behaviour: he let it be known, my sister had told me, that the staff existed for the pupils, not the pupils for the staff. The only harm bátiushka could do me would be to give me an ‘eleven’ mark for Religious Knowledge, instead of a ‘twelve’, which would have spoiled my chances of obtaining the gold medal, for which I was the favoured candidate at the end of the school course. Such an act on his part would have been dishonest, for he could not fault me on my knowledge: it would have been punishment for ‘irreverent’ behaviour, and behaviour was not his province at all. Anna Avdyéevna dealt with that, but anything except a ‘twelve’ for behaviour was an unheard-of thing in the upper forms of our school, and if she had the temerity to dock my behaviour mark, she would have to do a lot of explaining to our Nachálnitsa. Thus, I felt relatively safe, yet determined to avoid the repetition of the unpleasant scene in the class-room. Needless to say, this incident did not increase my respect for the clergy of the Orthodox Church.

However hard she tried to ignore my existence, Anna Avdyéevna could not resist giving vent to her animosity now and again. I soon realized that what annoyed her most was that none of my friends had changed towards me as a result of her disfavour, and that the class as a whole seemed to sympathize with me, or at least to remain neutral, with the usual exception of the two Komarovskayas. She would have liked to see me ostracized and avoided like a plague, while I often found myself at the centre of a group - of my personal friends or of those of the class who came to me asking for ‘explanation’ of a current lesson. In addition to this, my ‘fame’ as a poet spread to the rest of the school and even some of the youngest girls came to know me by sight, and would surround me outside their class-room, clamouring for me to read them one of my poems.

One day the youngest of all pulled me into their class-room while their dame-de-classe was absent, and I talked to them jokingly from behind the teacher’s desk. Anna Avdyéevna happened to be passing; she heard the children squealing with laughter and caught a glimpse of me through the half-open door. She swept in, her chin up, an expression of righteous indignation on her sallow face.

‘Please leave these children alone!’ She spoke in a husky voice.

The school bell was already tolling, so I followed her out of the room, waving good-bye to the puzzled and silent children.

‘I forbid you to go into the infants’ class-room again! ’ Anna Avdyéevna continued angrily. ‘They must be safeguarded from a pernicious influence like yours! ’

I could not have felt more insulted if she had struck me. I stopped and looked straight at her for a moment: I was capable of striking her then. My eyes must have told her as much because she dropped hers and swiftly went into our class-room ahead of me.

I discovered then that I could hate, and that I hated Anna Avdyéevna.)

 

Thinking about Feelings

 

The war emptied the town of young men with the exception of older schoolboys, such as Fyedia Kavalíerov, or university students who came home for the holidays. I regarded schoolboys of my own age or slightly older as ‘too young’, and found them uninteresting or plainly boring. Schoolboy-and-girl parties with their games of forfeits, which usually meant kissing, annoyed me. I believed that only lovers should kiss, and my idea of a lover remained exalted. I still saw him as a kind of Oniéghin or Pechorin — a daemonic charmer, whose image was sometimes embodied in one of the most accomplished actors of the cinema. Early Russian films were highly romantic: their plots were frequently taken from famous novels; there was one made of War and Peace. My sights were set high, my appraisal of physical appearance very critical: I could admire only the handsome, the elegant, the well-bred, the sophisticated and the slightly wicked; and I could not fall in love without admiring — or so I thought.

The reality was very different. Fyedia Kavalíerov, who became an assiduous visitor at our house, was very plain and had no conversation whatsoever. Nor did I know what to say to him. To my great embarrassment he made me a present of an album for my picture postcards. It was bound in red velvet and had my initials, and his, forged in silver and firmly clipped to the binding. ‘To L.R. from F.K.’ It was there for all to see. It was no doubt quite expensive, and I knew that his parents were far from rich. They were myeschane, that is, petty bourgeois, and we never met them socially.

My other ‘admirer’ and frequent visitor at our house, Shimkóvich, was a frail man of about fifty. He, too, made me a present on my name day — a beautifully bound and printed ‘Academy’ edition of a biography and poems by Ivan Koltsóv. Proud of his own ‘humble’ origin, Shimkóvich liked writers of peasant or petty bourgeois origin, and I knew he wanted me to come to love them as I loved the ‘aristocrats’, Pushkin and Lermontov. Dutifully, I ploughed through the Koltsóv book but failed to raise any enthusiasm for the poems, which were too folksy for my taste. Nor could I feel anything but pity for their author, the son of a village shopkeeper, who had lived a miserable life and died of consumption at the age of forty.

Shimkóvich would sit for hours at our tea table, eating almost nothing — for he was on a strict diet — and talking most of the time. Knowing that I had begun to teach myself English, he told us how during a short visit to Petersburg soon after the declaration of war, he met an English naval officer on one of the Neva bridges. The officer asked him a question in English, but our teacher of Russian had not been taught any modern language at his seminary. He replied to the officer in Latin, and to his delight they managed to explain themselves to each other in that language. Not only was he able to tell the officer the way to the Nevsky Prospect but they even exchanged their impressions of Petersburg.

Deeply patriotic, Shimkóvich hoped that Russia would come out of the conflict victorious and unshaken, and he wanted to see this with his own eyes. He knew, however, that his illness was incurable and wondered whether he would live long enough for that. I stumbled upon this discovery while amusing myself with a parlour trick, designed to look like an exercise in thought reading. Someone had shown me how to do it. You invited each person in the room to write a question on a slip of paper, to roll it up and put it into a hat. To these slips you surreptitiously added an extra blank one. The trick consisted in taking one of the slips out, holding it in your hand, unopened, pretending to concentrate, and then giving an answer to a non-existing question. Next, you opened the slip and ‘read’ aloud the invented question, while in fact memorizing the real one, written on the slip. As you picked up the next slip and ‘concentrated’ on it, you were really composing the answer to the preceding one, an answer you subsequently produced to everyone’s surprise. And so until the end, by which time all the real questions had been answered, and the first, ‘invented’ question and answer had been forgotten. It was a trick requiring a good memory and some ability to act.

On that particular occasion I entered with zest into my role as a thought reader, yet when I saw what Shimkóvich had written on his slip, I felt a sudden stab of remorse. Here was I, playing this comedy, and the question he was asking was a very serious one: ‘Shall I survive till the end of the war and see its results?’ I had intended to disclose later on how the trick was done — now I dared not think of it. I closed my eyes, regained some control over my feelings, then answered slowly: ‘You certainly will!’, wondering whether my prophecy would be fulfilled.

I felt I was blushing and avoided Shimkóvich’s eyes when he said how impressed he was with my gift for thought reading. ‘I’ve never known anyone so young who could do it,’ he said. My mother glanced at me anxiously: surely this kind of thing was a strain on my nervous system? Only Maroossia said nothing — until our visitor had gone.

‘There were four of us asking questions,’ she said, ‘but I remember you giving five answers. It was a trick wasn’t it? How did you do it?’

I told her and added that I could hardly bear the thought of Shimkóvich finding out. He would be hurt; I should fall very low in his esteem. I feared most of all that he might get the impression that I was heartless and frivolous enough to turn his grim preoccupation into a game.

My sister did her best to reassure me, but this incident put an end to my interest in parlour tricks for good and all.

My third ‘admirer’, Shoora Martynov, was away in Petrograd studying at the Institute of Rail and Road Engineering. In the holidays, however, he haunted our house from morning till night, sharing his time between B* where his parents lived, and M* where he stayed at his former school lodgings. The smart student’s uniform he was wearing did not improve his looks, and he had grown more revolutionary than ever in his political views. He never spoke of the Tsar otherwise than as ‘Nikolai the Dunderhead’. My mother, shocked by the violence of his language, reproved him.

‘You really ought to be more careful of what you say, Shoora! You may get yourself arrested for seditious talk one of these days.’

‘If I am, I’ll soon be out again,’ Shoora smiled a self-satisfied smile. ‘The Revolution will liberate me.’

‘So you still expect the Revolution to break out?’ my brother enquired, sardonically.

‘Of course! Quite soon, in fact!’ he declared.

During the Christmas holidays my brother brought a new friend to the house, a young man of rather striking appearance. With his sharply chiselled features, huge blue eyes and raven-black hair he did not look Russian at all. In fact, he was born in Russia, the son of an Austrian; father and a Polish mother. His father, a naturalized Russian, taught German at the Reálnaia School at M*. The young man was called Evghéniy Preyer. I thought him very attractive in an unusual way, but wished he were taller and did not stoop so much. I liked his name — Evghéniy —like Pushkin’s Oniéghin. My brother called him Zhenia. He was very shy and hardly said a word on the evening of his first visit to our house.

‘Why does your friend Zhenia look so sad?’ Maroossia asked my brother later that evening.

‘He’s a strange chap. He thinks the world’s a horrible place and life’s not worth living. He is a real melancholic,’ my brother said.

‘He looks a little like Vrubel’s Demon at the Tretiakovka,’ said Maroossia. ‘If he carried himself better, he could easily serve as a model for Vrubel’s paintings of the Demon.’

‘A little Demon . . . ’ I spoke under my breath, but my brother heard me, and at once took up my remark.

‘Yes! a romantic personage — and our little poetess will write a poem about him. There will be moonlight in it, and waving cypresses, and the scent of narcissi. It’ll be all frightfully romantic.’

‘And why not?’ Maroossia asked. I flared up with annoyance, aware that my brother’s arrow this time struck very near the mark. I could write a poem about Zhenia’s face because its sadness intrigued and attracted me. I had not seen Vrubel’s paintings, but I could imagine Zhenia as Lermontov’s Demon, brooding over the ills and beauties of this world on his Caucasian rock. But my brother’s irony was inhibiting.

Natural pride, as well as self-doubt, made me behave with reserve towards young men. I writhed inwardly at the thought of giving them an impression that I was pursuing them. This was reinforced by my mother’s and sister’s rather puritanical attitude towards so-called ‘coquettishness’ .

An incident remained in my memory. My sister’s ‘admirer’, Kolia Avílov, often came to our house in the university vacations. He was ‘in love’ with my sister but his willingness to spend some time on drawing illustrations to my novel earned him my affection and gratitude. I did not, however, regard him attractive as a male: he had small, short-sighted eyes, wore thick spectacles and cropped his almost flaxen hair in the German style.

One evening, after we had all been talking rather excitedly at supper, and Kolia had stayed longer than usual, I was surprised and hurt to hear my mother remark that I had behaved ‘flirtatiously’ towards him.

‘What do you mean? How did I behave?’ I questioned in genuine bewilderment.

‘You were shooting glances at him, your eyes sparkled and you talked to him in a coquettish manner.’

‘How could I help my eyes sparkling?’ I demanded to know. And deeply shocked to find myself so misunderstood by the women of my family, I left the room in protest.

Alone in my bedroom, I peered at my tear-stained face in the looking- glass. Anna Avdyéevna had told me more than once that my face ‘showed everything I felt’, that I ‘could not conceal anything’. But what I felt for Kolia was no more than ordinary friendliness . . . how could my face show anything else? And I certainly had no intention of ‘flirting’ with my sister’s young man! I was on the point of blaming my mother and sister for having esprit mal tourne, of seeing sex where there was none and of persecuting me undeservedly.

A few minutes later Maroossia followed me into my room and tried to soothe me, but the incident left a permanent impression, increasing my self-consciousness and inhibiting spontaneity. ‘Coquettishness’ became a danger to guard myself against.

That Christmas, the first Christmas of the war, university students whose homes were at M*, thought of collecting money for the Red Cross by taking around the ‘Star’ and singing carols. Some of the older schoolboys joined them, and Fyedia Kavalíerov was one of them. He suggested that I should come too, but I declined, wanting to avoid his company and his attentions. I had no doubt that he would use every slippery bit of the road as a pretext for taking my arm. The ‘Star’ duly came to our house, the choir sang, and we made our contribution. In the back row Fyedia’s head showed above most of the others, but close beside him there was another face I knew—Zhenia Preyer’s. The contrast between the two was most unflattering to Fyedia. Suddenly I decided that I would like to go with the choir, so that I could continue to watch that striking face.

While the choir was still singing, I started putting on my snow boots and overcoat. Fyedia watched me impassively, and as the group jostled itself out of the front door into the snowy street, I found him immediately at my side.

‘So you’ve decided to come?’ he asked me.

‘Yes . . . The night is fine, and it isn’t as cold as I had thought.’

The air in fact was very sharp, the sky clear and the whole scene drenched in moonlight. The snow glistened and squeaked under our feet as we followed the Star-bearers. I carefully avoided slipping so that Fyedia would not take my arm: I did not want Zhenia to think that Fyedia was a young man of my choice.

The students’ Star was a great success. At every house they were received warmly and generously; they collected a fair sum for the ‘wounded soldiers’. While the choir sang, I tried to place myself in a position from where I could watch Zhenia Preyer’s face. Like myself, he did not sing: he was simply one of the Star’s followers. He just stood in the back row, staring in front of him, his huge blue eyes shining in the candlelight, full of bewildered sadness like a fallen angel’s. I wondered what sort of person he really was. What did he feel so sad about? Could he be happy if he were loved?

I made no attempt to speak to him, nor did he say anything to me during the whole evening, but I had had my fill of watching him. When the choir dispersed about midnight, Fyedia accompanied me home. The streets were empty and I did not mind so much his taking my arm. He remained silent until we were about to say good-night before our front door. As I turned to face him, I was struck by the look of resentment on his usually impassive face. His voice, too, sounded different, stifled and broken, yet harsh, as he blurted out: ‘I know why you came with the Star tonight!’

I looked at him, startled and silent. This was a new Fyedia whose existence I had not suspected.

‘You came because Preyer was there. I saw you looking at him all the time! ’

Jealous emotion had quite distorted his face: he looked not merely plain but frighteningly ugly.

‘I can look at anyone I choose!’ I stammered. ‘Good night!’ And, turning my back on him, I pulled hard at the handle of the door bell.

My withdrawal was too much like a flight to be dignified, but my emotions, violently stirred, prevented deliberation. Surprise was immediately followed by indignation, and indignation by anger and something akin to shame. It had been stupid of me to underestimate Fyedia’s capacity for observation and foolish to stare at Zhenia in such a conspicuous way. But it was also presumptuous of Fyedia, to say the least, to reproach me for this, and quite outrageous to make a scene of jealousy. Did he imagine by any chance that I reciprocated his feelings just because I was courteous to him when he came to our house? The incredible vanity of men! I had never encouraged, I merely tolerated him. Why did I have to accept the convention that a man could ‘choose’ a girl to burden with his attentions while a girl would be despised if she behaved in that way to a man?

Perhaps I felt so indignant because I sensed that this particular convention had become a part of myself. I had not yet liked anyone enough to want to show what I felt, yet I knew myself incapable of courting a man’s attention, of doing anything at all in order to attract him. When I saw other girls transformed by the presence of a man, becoming excited and voluble, laughing excessively, hanging on his words as if he were the only person in the room capable of saying intelligent or amusing things, I felt embarrassed on their account, and on my own I could feel no respect for them.

Respect was to me a necessary part of friendship or love. I had yet to discover that lack of respect did not necessarily exclude affection: to me the two were absolutely incompatible. Love without respect, I would have said, was not ‘real love’. And ‘real’ love was something that happened once in a life-time . . .

What name then had one to give the feeling Liolia had for Henryk, the young officer with the pink face and wide smile, who danced with her the whole evening on the night of the school concert? One day in the spring, the first spring of the war, Liolia missed a day at school. I called at her house on the way home, and she threw herself into my arms, sobbing: she had heard that morning that Henryk had been killed at the front. For several days Liolia appeared inconsolable. Then, to my surprise, I heard her laughing again as she and Lena Kazanovich whispered to each other in the comer of the class-room. How could anybody recover so quickly from the loss of someone they had loved? I imagined my very life would end with the death of the person I loved. Or if it did not physically end, it could never be the same again: I was sure I would not be able to laugh, or dance, or be frivolous as I had been. If I were able to, it would surely mean that I had a shallow nature . . .

But how did I know that I was not in fact shallow? I knew I could feel strongly, even passionately, but could I feel deeply as well? And what did depth of feeling really mean? Did it mean constancy, or intensity, or both, and something else besides? Could depth of feeling be measured by the pain it gave you? And if I fell in love, how would I know that it was real love, that is, a feeling that was deep, passionate and constant, not a mere infatuation? I did not want to ‘fritter myself away in small change’, as a Russian saying goes: if I met someone I could love in that true sense, I would want no other for the rest of my life. So I told myself. None of ‘the four’ with whom I was most friendly in my last years at school were particularly interested in my speculations on love, and through one of those quirks of adolescent secretiveness, I really preferred to keep them to myself. I did however try to talk about it to Zena when she came to spend the night at our house. I talked to her in bed, in the dark, grateful for the wide-eyed silence in which she so often listened to my speculations. In the dark I could only just see her eyes, but suddenly I became aware that they shone with something more than their normal brilliance. Then I heard her gently catch her breath.

‘What is it, Zena? You’re not crying?’

‘No.’ Her voice however belied her denial.

‘Why are you crying?’

‘I . . . I’m not feeling very well . . . ’

She had not, in fact, been looking at all well since the end of the summer when my uncle complained of her spending too much time in the river. Her complexion, always rather pale, had acquired a greenish tinge, and my brother teased her about it, calling her jokingly ‘our fresh young greens’. I had long ceased to think of her as a spoiled only child, the pampered daughter of her doting parents, and saw her now as she was, a pathetic, lonely girl, marooned on a desert island of a home, an object of dispute between her warring progenitors. The anxieties of war had intensified the already strong vein of parsimony in Uncle Vladímir’s character, and he economized on everything, even on the trips Stan and the pink horse made from his place to the town. As a result of these economies Zena was often left to walk home from school, and was so tired when she arrived that she refused her evening meal.

‘One more economy!’ my brother commented sarcastically.

We all felt sorry for Zena and often asked Aunt Katia to let her stay the night at our house. Permission was given grudgingly, and we did not doubt that on the evenings Zena stayed with us, her parents ate their supper in their separate rooms.

On the particular evening I remember, Zena came to us straight from school by previous arrangement. She went to my sister’s room to tidy her hair, complained of feeling dizzy and suddenly sank on to her bed in a fainting fit. My mother was seriously alarmed and made her stay in bed the following morning. When Uncle Vladímir came to take her home, my mother pressed him to take Zena to a good doctor. He resisted, saying that Zena was all right, she was ‘just growing’, that was all. And of course all that bathing in the summer had not done her any good. My mother then said she herself would take Zena to a doctor and pay his fee. Uncle Vladímir laughed. His laughter, like his voice, was affected by a permanent frog in his throat.

‘Do if you must,’ he said. ‘I’m sure she’s as strong as a heifer.’

Zena stayed with us for a few days after the visit to the doctor, waiting for the analysis of her blood to be made. She alarmed us by more fainting fits, and by the slow, lifeless cadences of her speech and movements. Then we had the doctor’s letter addressed to my mother: Zena’s complaint had been diagnosed as pernicious anaemia. She had to be treated at once; everything had to be done to increase the amount of red corpuscles in her blood. Her condition was serious: no time should be lost. Prescriptions for medicines and diet were attached to the letter. Uncle Vladímir was shocked and bewildered by this news.

‘But where are we to get it from, all that he says she must have: prime beef and calf’s liver, and fresh fruit in winter? And even if we get it, the blessed girl won’t touch it, I’m sure!’

Zena cried as she said good-bye to us, and turned a pathetic, imploring face towards me while Stan tucked her into the sleigh beside Uncle Vladímir: the snow was now lying thickly over the ground. She might have been going into Siberian exile, instead of to her home.

My sister and I went to see her the following Sunday. Zena was in bed, a plate of uneaten food on a tray beside her, and both her parents cajoling and scolding her because she refused to eat it up. It was the only occasion on which I saw them in agreement, but not for long. A few moments later my uncle was saying that no wonder Zena would not eat the food: it was abominably cooked, because Mavra could not cook and my aunt didn’t know how to teach her, while Aunt Katia was looking daggers at him without speaking.

When we told my mother what we had seen on our visit, she decided that Zena must go somewhere where she would be looked after properly. A cousin of hers, another Martsinovsky, was a physician attached to a famous hospital in Moscow. He was well-known for his work on malaria: he could use his influence to get Zena admitted to the hospital for the treatment she needed. There was a great shortage of beds because of war casualties, but my mother was sure that Zena would not get better unless she went away from home. She took the matter in hand, and Uncle Vladímir, now thoroughly frightened and humbled, agreed to everything she said.

We saw Zena off at the railway station. She was too ill to react to what was happening with much emotion. Her father was accompanying her to Moscow, while Aunt Katia either from economy, or from the inability of these two to co-operate in anything, was to stay behind. As silent tears streamed down her face, Zena repeated in a feeble voice: ‘Don’t cry, Mamma!’ Uncle Vladímir’s face by contrast was the colour of brick and his eyes bloodshot.

‘I’ll be back in a couple of days,’ he told my mother. ‘Can’t afford the trip really, but I must see her settled. Cousin Ivan, I dare say, will put me up for a few nights . . . ’

Aunt Katia came back to our house and spent the night but would not stay longer. Her deep concern for Zena did not prevent her from also being concerned, somewhat excessively, we thought, with the house, left in charge of Mavra and Stan. ‘You can’t rely on servants these days . . .’she murmured. ‘Without me there, young Hovra will get her fingers into every jam jar . . . Mavra is honest enough, but she indulges that child. And as for Stan, he’d go out with girls and leave the house without a man to guard it...’

After Aunt Katia had left us, we talked about the Martsinovsky family with a sense of frustration, almost of hopelessness, and again promised ourselves to get Zena to come and stay at Fyeny in the school holidays. But this was looking too far ahead with too much confidence.

 

The preceding summer - before the war was declared — was a crowded one for me. First, Shoora Martynov managed to get himself invited to Fyeny early in the holidays. Somehow it was taken for granted that he would. He had no real home of his own - his mother was a chronic invalid in a mental hospital.

His attachment to me persisted, apparently undiminished by distance or separation. He would stay in the room where I was, and leave it when I went out. During walks and picnics he was always at my side: if I climbed a tree, he would climb it also; if I scampered down a sandy cliff, he would follow, even when his precarious balance made him trip and slither. ‘A rhinoceros pursuing a goat,’ my brother would comment caustically. Shoora merely grinned and growled: ‘Shut up, Baldwin! You would never dare!’ which was probably true.

Shoora positively flaunted his subservience to my wishes. I told him I had been the King of Rome in my previous existence, so he began to call me ‘Your Majesty’, but to my annoyance would refer to me as a ‘queen’, not a king. His obedience to my commands was so much taken for granted by the whole household that I was expected to stop arguments between him and my brother. Shoora’s voice was most penetrating when he was excited, ‘like a peacock’s’, my mother said, and she would protest to him about this without him apparently hearing her. She would then turn to me.

‘Leda, do tell him to speak quietly!’

I did so, and at once he would lower his voice.

I accepted his company in my hours of leisure, but I also wanted to work, which was impossible with Shoora always there. It was then that I had the idea of making him into my secretary. I would dictate my stories to him, instead of writing them myself. Shoora fell in readily with this suggestion, and my mother approved, too, because ‘it would keep him quiet’.

Several of these literary sessions passed off smoothly enough. Shoora sat at my desk while I walked up and down the room, dictating. His sprawling handwriting devoured page after page of my note-books which I liked to look neat and compact. I told myself with some irritation that I would have to copy it all over again. Yet we were doing something, not merely wasting time. But soon we began discussing what I was dictating and arguing about some relatively trivial point, such as the best way of dressing children. Little boys in my story were dressed in short socks and sandals. Shoora declared perversely that when he had children, he would ‘put the boys into high boots’. I protested that high boots were ugly and hot in the summer; he retorted that if children climbed trees in short socks and sandals, they would scratch their legs.

We had had only about five dictation sessions and the story was far from finished when one of these arguments ended in a most unexpected way. Annoyed by what Shoora was saying, I declared that I was going to punish him by cutting off some of his hair. He laughed. I seized a pair of scissors, and snipping off a few hairs from the crown of his head, scattered them over the page of the note-book before him. Suddenly my hand was caught between Shoora’s face and the book. He fell down on it like a man parched with thirst falling upon water, pressing his mouth to it, covering it with kisses. Petrified with shock for a few seconds, I pulled my hand away and stared at him as he rose and stood facing me, flushed, half-smiling, swaying slightly, as if he had indeed been drinking something much stronger than water. Revulsion and fear surged up in me, constricting my throat. The silence that followed was so charged with emotion that it could not be borne for more than a few moments. I turned and fled.

As if in a travesty of Paolo and Francesca’s story, ‘we read no more that day’, nor any other day. On the following morning I found a note from Shoora on my desk. It contained three sentences: ‘I could not help it. I love you. You are my life, my happiness, my all.’

As I read it, tears of anger sprang into my eyes. Why, oh, why, did he have to tell me this? It was the end. Never could I feel natural with him again! How wicked of him to thrust such a responsibility upon me! ‘My life,’ ‘my happiness’, ‘my all’ ... It was far too early to be told this at the age of fifteen. I did not want to be, I could not be ‘his life’, his ‘all’: I was not able to give him any happiness.

Until that happened I had been aware of Shoora’s ungainly appearance; now I could hardly bear to look at him. I feared finding myself alone with him lest he spoke to me again of his love and forced me to say that I could never return it. The fear of wounding him blended with a feeling of intense aversion, a physical shrinking, a sensation I had never before experienced in anyone’s presence. I begged my sister never to leave me alone with him. She raised her eyebrows.

‘But why not?’

‘I can’t bear it.’

‘But you’ve been able to until now.’

‘Something’s happened. Don’t ask me. I’ll tell you afterwards . . . some time. But I assure you, it’s serious. Please, please, don’t leave us alone together!’

Maroossia promised, but did not always remember. On the first occasion when she walked out of the room where Shoora and I were reading at the same table, I was about to jump up and run after her. However, pride and the convention of ‘good manners’ held me in my place, tense and silent, in an atmosphere charged with agitated expectancy. I dared not raise my eyes from my book, convinced that Shoora’s stare was fixed upon me and that he would speak as soon as I looked up. He cleared his throat. I leapt to my feet, and, forcing myself to walk slowly, went to an open window. My father’s red setter was frisking about in front of the house, leaping over flower beds. I called him, and he came bouncing, put his paws on the window ledge and licked my hand as I stroked him. I heard Shoora’s footsteps behind me, and again had to force myself not to move away. His hand stretched out beside mine and also stroked the dog who was wriggling with pleasure.

‘You lucky devil,’ he said under his breath.

Behind us the door swung open and my brother entered, announcing that we were going to have wild duck for supper. I waited a few minutes, listening to his distasteful account of how many ducks they had shot that morning, then left the room as casually as I could. I found my sister upstairs arranging her hair.

I reproached her passionately for having left me alone with Shoora after she had promised not to do so. ‘But what is the matter?’ she asked again. ‘You used not to object to his company.’

I told her of the incident with the snippets of hair and showed her the note he had sent me, which, for reasons obscure to myself, I had not torn up. Maroossia read it and did not smile. ‘Poor Shoora!’ she sighed.

I was almost angry with her for pitying him rather than me. Should he have not spared me this? I asked. Why couldn’t he be content with my friendship? What more did he want from me at this time of my life, from me as 1 was, for himself as he was? Didn’t he — by telling me that I was his ‘all’ —make claims on my life? The whole of my nature revolted against such a monstrous claim. Yet I dreaded the moment when I should be forced to tell him that, and I spent the rest of that fortnight dodging being left alone with him, until I was able to leave Fyeny for Diedlovo.

Katia’s invitation to entertain all four of us classmates at her country home came just in time. It was to be a rather unusual country house party, for there was to be no adult with us except the housekeeper. Katia’s brother, Dima, aged eighteen and only just out of his school uniform, could hardly be regarded by our parents as old enough to act as host to four girls of fifteen. Yet they raised no objections, obviously confident that we would behave sensibly. And so we did, while thoroughly enjoying our freedom.

I can see the house at Diedlovo quite clearly in my mind’s eye. It was built of wood, like ours, but had no upstairs rooms. There was a glass porch in front and a veranda at the back; not much of a flower garden, and the view from the back windows was cut off by a tall hedge of spruce. A soft track led to the front of the house, joining it to the highway and continuing into the stable-yard. Beyond the spruce hedge, vast orchards spread for acres towards the adjoining cornfields, and beyond them there was, as at Fyeny, the distant forest encircling it all.

When I arrived, the other three were already there. In the dining room a long table was loaded with food, and Katia introduced me to Panna Rosa, the housekeeper, a quiet, youngish woman with a pleasant face, who presided over the samovar. She was, Katia told me, a daughter of a neighbouring smallholder, a shliahtich; that is, her family belonged to the Polish petty gentry, of whom there were many in Bielorussia. These shliahta, though hardly better off or more educated than the peasants, were very proud of their ‘nobility’, and their women always wore hats to go to church on Sunday, even if they had to ride there in peasant carts. They were Roman Catholic and spoke a mixture of Polish and Bielorussian dialect among themselves.

What do I remember from those days — almost a whole month of them — during which freedom reigned? Dima got up at dawn and was out in the fields, supervising his workmen, most of the day, for he took his apprenticeship in farming seriously. Then he suddenly went off to Petersburg — to visit his fiancée, Katia told us - and he stayed away for the rest of our visit, thus clearly showing that he had no interest in the company of mere schoolgirls. I welcomed his disappearance because he was in the habit of teasing us by telling farmyard anecdotes at table — a brand of humour I found distasteful.

Left to our own devices, we called ourselves the ‘Republic of Five’ and pleased ourselves entirely, which meant that we wasted the freshness of summer mornings by getting up late. We drifted over to the breakfast table on the veranda whenever we were ready, rarely all together, and ate whatever food we found there, under wire-mesh covers, protecting it from ubiquitous flies. The samovar and the coffee pot on a spirit lamp kept tea and coffee hot for late-comers. Then, as we yawned, and blinked, and stretched in the bright sunshine, Katia would appear and ask: ‘Girls, what would you like to do today?’

My choice was always riding. We rode every day, sometimes twice a day. Katia generously let me ride her Bedouin, a horse which could not tolerate being overtaken. At first I was terrified of him because he would spring forward as soon as I was on his back and was very difficult to stop. Soon, however, I learned his ways and managed to stop him, once even when he had bolted, by taking him into a freshly ploughed field. We went on horseback to visit Katia’s grandmother and her funny little aunt on a neighbouring estate. They were a curious pair: ‘Auntie Olia’, who was about forty, had never been away from her mother’s house, and she was so afraid of thunder that she would run upstairs, bury her head in a pillow and weep when she saw a rain storm approaching. Young as we were, we thought her very childish. We loved our rides back through woods and fields in the dusk, the horses for once not competing but trotting peacefully side by side, while we sang the Pedlar’s Song which goes so well with the rhythm of horses’ hooves. We shared the chocolate bars Grandmamma gave us at parting and wiped our fingers on the horses’ manes. And at the supper table we fell upon our food like hungry wolves, yet often had to stop eating because we laughed so much — riding invariably put us into a happy, laughing mood.

We did some silly things, of course. Once, as we lounged on the lawn, eating wild strawberries and cream, I threatened to put some down the opening of Tonia’s blouse if she continued arguing with me. She did continue, and I carried out my threat, and then perversely locked her out of the house when she wanted to wash. We both laughed so much that we could hardly stand up. On another occasion, when we were riding in the forest on a very hot day and stopped for a rest, I stripped completely and danced round a tree, pretending to be a nymph. My companions were mildly amused but declined to follow my example: they only took off their blouses and long riding skirts. With the exception of Katia, we all rode side-saddle.

On the night of Ivan Kupala, the 24th of June, we watched peasant youths and girls jumping over a bonfire in the neighbouring field. They did this in pairs, a youth holding a girl’s hand, and the point of this was that if the couple landed on the other side of the fire with their hands still joined, the girl would become the bride of the man. Ivan Kupala would see to that: St John’s night was a magic night.

Liolia and I decided to jump together, but two village lads rushed to separate us and made us jump with them. I managed to pull my hand away before we landed on the other side, and Liolia’s partner fared no better. But after that one of the youths was bold enough to approach Katia and ask her to jump with him. I heard Panna Rosa mutter under her breath: ‘This Vanka has the cheek! ’ But Katia agreed, and when they jumped there were tremendous cheers on the other side, indicating that Vanka had been successful in retaining her hand.

Those who take the all-pervasiveness of sex for granted would be surprised to hear how relatively little we, five adolescent girls left to ourselves, were concerned with sex. We did of course talk about young men, mostly about film actors, famous at the time. We had our favourites among them: Liolia ‘adored’ Moszhuhin; I liked Maximov, Tonia Polonsky. Katia and Lena expressed no preferences and declared themselves unromantic. As it happened, they were the first of us five to get married! We discussed our heroes’ appearance, their behaviour as characters in the films, their attractiveness as possible lovers, but the words ‘passionate’ and ‘passion’ still meant to us little more than flashing eyes and prolonged kissing, the ‘rest’ being tacitly regarded as the prosaic aspect of married life or as a sordid mishap which sometimes befell servant girls or wild young women in avant-garde novels. I was quite sure that, like myself, neither Katia, nor Lena, nor Tonia had been kissed by young men except perhaps in the game of ‘forfeits’. About Liolia — remembering Henryk — I had some doubts but I knew she had very few chances of ever being alone with a young man.

We knew ‘the facts’, and I, for one, found them singularly unattractive — more than that, repulsive. I was not in the least interested in the physiology of sex. My own body was of interest to me only in so far as it could do what I wanted, that is: ride, swim, skate, climb trees, keep balance on a plank thrown across a stream, jump and run. When I was about twelve, I came upon the Latin tag ‘mens sana in corpore sano’, and determined to adopt it. It provided a good reason for doing the physical things I liked doing and a counter-weight to the studious side of my nature. My mother, holding the view that we should know ‘the facts’, chose the translation of August Forel’s Physiology of Sex and of Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character as suitable for this purpose. If her intention had been to put me off the subject, she could not have succeeded better. I found the two thick volumes of Forel particularly forbidding. My brother and sister had them first, probably much earlier than I did. When they were passed on to me, I took them to my room and put them underneath a pile of my school books. These had to take precedence over any reading I did in term time; I was always short of time: Forel and Weininger had to wait.

I remember looking at the portraits of the authors: the patriarchal, bearded and benevolent face of Forel, and the much younger, thick- lipped unmistakably Semitic face of Weininger. Someone had told me that he had been a woman-hater and had committed suicide. He regarded women as inferior to men, as creatures whose function was to submit and to serve men. Why, I asked myself, should I read a book I was bound to dislike, by a man whose face I disliked already? I could not even bring myself to begin. It may have been fear — the fear of being wounded or even finding confirmation of some of my own self-doubts. ‘Later on . . . when I have more time . . . ’ I said to myself, closing the book on that unpleasant face. But in fact I never got on to reading Sex and Character: there never seemed to be time enough for it. As for the Physiology of Sex, I made a determined effort to get myself interested in it. It was at least ‘scientific’ . . . Too much so! I found the descriptions at first repellent, then boring, and gave up after reading the first chapter. The books remained on my desk during the whole of my last year at school without my opening them again.

Whatever crumbs of knowledge I collected and retained from this attempt to inform myself, they aroused no strong emotion, stirred up no new line of thought. ‘Sex’ apart from ‘love’ made no sense to me; without love, it reduced human beings to animals, and I was not yet ready to accept the animal side of human nature. I was unpleasantly surprised when I learned that the sexual act was not merely the means of ensuring the preservation of the human species, occurring only when children were desired. But the impact of this discovery was far less powerful than being told about menstruation when I was fourteen. This I really regarded as a monstrous imposition of Fate, or the Deity, or most likely the Devil himself. My mother made things rather worse by impressing upon me that when this condition arrived I should take no violent exercise of any kind. I stormed, and cried, and almost blamed her for getting me to be born a woman . . . But that summer at Diedlovo, at the age of fifteen, I was still free from ‘the curse’, and did not have to forego once the pleasures of riding.

Our last fling before we returned to our own homes was to drape ourselves in sheets and, late at night, drive on the biegovyie drozhki, the lightest vehicle in existence, through silent villages, howling, to make the inhabitants think we were ghosts. It was a complete failure: the inhabitants were fast asleep and did not even trouble to open their window shutters. No rumours were started in the countryside as a result of our escapade. But it was very exciting while it lasted.

The ‘Republic of Five’ was short-lived but memorable. Its experiences were never repeated, for that very autumn Dima got married, and Katia ceased to be the mistress of Diedlovo.

 

 

A Journey and a Romance

 

Of the countries I loved in my imagination the Caucasus was the first.

I was very young when my mother read to me Tolstoy’s simple story ‘The Prisoner of the Caucasus’. As soon as I could, I read it myself, along with Pushkin’s poem of the same title and Lermontov’s stories and poems on Caucasian themes. In my solitary games, dressed in my brother’s Circassian tunic and cloak, I pretended to be a Circassian prince, riding fiery horses. A few years later I shared Mtzyri’s longing for freedom and learnt by heart whole passages from Demon. The power and beauty of Lermontov’s verse took possession of me and made me long to see what he had seen and described — the places where he had lived and died.

Towards the end of that crowded summer my mother was to take a course of treatment at Essentuki, a spa in the Northern Caucasus, and I was to go with her. She decided on this because I had been having pains in my arms and legs which she thought might be due to rheumatism. Essentuki was the spa for such complaints. My father had gone ahead of us to Piatigorsk for a course of waters and baths. For some months his health had not been good, and he was able to obtain four weeks’ leave to undergo this treatment. We were to join him later at Piatigorsk.

I was looking forward with great excitement to seeing the Caucasus and to my first long journey. We were to spend two and a half days on. the train! Any new experience was welcome to me, and sleeping on the train was one of them. At the same time I wished I could stay awake all night, so as not to miss the countryside through which we would be passing. During the day I hardly left my seat by the window until it got too dark to see anything. Great stretches of forest in the early part of the journey, were followed by villages of grey log cabins, separated by their yards and cart-sheds. These gave way to more open countryside, to fields and meadows with isolated, white-washed houses, set among cherry orchards and hollyhocks. Bielorussia became Ukraina, and Ukraina became Novorussia, the true steppe, seemingly featureless but with a sunset sky which affected me like the music of ‘The Swan Lake’, nostalgic and enticing at the same time. On the morning of the third day the train began to climb the vast plateau of Pryed-Caucasia, and suddenly an apparition on the horizon changed the whole character of the countryside. At first one could not tell whether they were mountains or clouds. To see them better I thrust my head out of the window, ignoring my mother’s protests. My eyes unfocused by the glitter of sunlight on leaves as the train rushed past the rows of tall Lombardy poplars, caught a glimpse of a white pointsman’s cottage and of a slender, dark-haired woman chasing an infant, clad only in a short white shift. I gulped the bracing air of higher lands and told myself that for the first time in my life I was looking at real mountains. The train crept up and up, but they did not seem to come any nearer, they only became less like clouds, sharper, harder, more glistening.

I asked my mother, who had been to Essentuki before, whether the big summit we could see was Elbruss or Kazbek. She told me it was Elbruss, which could be seen quite well from Essentuki.

Our train was running late, and my mother was not pleased when the conductor told her that we would not be arriving at Essentuki before dark. I, on the other hand, was delighted. There were few things that fascinated me more than arriving at a new place in the dark. And so it was in this case. The contrast between the cosy smallness of the train compartment and the vastness of the balmy southern night into which we emerged, and then between the brightly lit station hall and the patchwork of light and shade under the acacia trees outside, where the jingling cabs were competing for our custom ... an oriental face with a hooked nose and darting black eyes which peered closely into mine, and a voice with a strange, guttural ring demanding to know where we were going . . . being carried softly along a wide road fringed with trees to our ‘destination’ ... or was it ‘destiny’? I had never seen such trees covered with blossom at such an unseasonable time... I should never know who lived in those silent, shuttered houses standing so still beyond them . . . Why was the sky so black, with the blackness of velvet, despite being filled with huge stars? Why did the stars quiver so? Why was the air so soft and light that it made me want to rise on my toes? And what was that fragrance, drifting out of the mysterious garden behind a stone wall — a scent sweet and bitter, a blend of scents, such as I had never met before? That scent! From the moment I first inhaled it it had become for me the very essence of the South, instantly evoking the whole magic of southernness.

Such a first encounter with a place in the dark can never be repeated. The place you see in daylight is never the same place, nor does it become so when the night comes again. You have now seen it in daylight and you remember — the mystery is gone.

This did not mean that I was not delighted with the real Essentuki when I walked out into the strong sunshine rather late on the same morning, strolling beside my mother. It was different from any place I had seen hitherto: acacias were flowering with incredible profusion, there were trees covered with deep pink blossom the name of which I did not know, the wide streets were crowded with well-dressed people, and on the way to the park we met girls in Georgian national dress, very beautiful girls with olive complexions, eyes glowing like coals and plaits of raven hair hanging down to their knees. The park was large and shady with a covered dais for open-air concerts, fountains, flower-beds and many garden seats. A programme of concerts was posted beside the dais. Music from Chaikovsky’s ballets was billed for the evening. The conductor’s name was Steinberg. ‘A German or a Jew,’ my mother said.

The same afternoon she took me to see one of the spa doctors. He was a florid man with greying hair and suave manners. He took me behind a screen where I had to lie on a couch while he felt my limbs, asking where it was hurting. As he did so, he breathed heavily and stared at me in the semi-darkness. I found this embarrassing and unpleasant, and must have shown it, because he smiled reassuringly and said there was nothing seriously wrong. He repeated this to my mother but added that a course of mud baths and of drinking the Essentuki waters three times a day would do me good. My mother was to have similar treatment, and he wrote out prescriptions for both of us to take to the thermal establishment.

I was curious to see what ‘mud baths’ really were, and was disappointed that they were not baths at all. A friendly, sturdy Kazak woman, the bath attendant, who wore nothing under her white overalls, took me to a small room with no furniture except a wooden bench and a stool. Stripped of my clothes, I had to lie on my back while she plastered my arms and legs with steaming black mud from a tub. The mud was heavy and left me pinioned to my couch while rivulets of perspiration streamed down my face, tickling my cheeks and chin, driving me frantic with irritation. I decided that the legendary Chinese tortures must have included such refinements as these. The Kazak woman pattered in from time to time to see how I was faring and mopped my face with a towel, but almost as soon as she left me, the exasperating sensation as if of flies creeping down my cheeks was back again.

The effect of these ‘baths’ on me was fatiguing and depressing. My mother complained of my irritability. The truth of the matter was that, after the novelty had worn off, I began to feel disappointed with Essentuki. The place was crowded: at the restaurant where we took our meals we often had to wait to be served for what seemed to me an interminably long time. Many visitors were parents with young children; there were few girls of my own age and almost no young men: they were at the front. With Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time in my mind I must have hoped half-consciously for a romantic meeting with someone like Pechorin. Essentuki, however, was not a place for wounded heroes but a spa for people suffering from rheumatic diseases and obesity. My mother drew my attention to a large number of fat Jewish couples in the park: Caucasian resorts had been opened to them for the first time because of the war. They all used to go to German spas, she told me.

She insisted that I should rest after lunch, which I found tiresome. In the late afternoon we usually returned to the park in time for the daily concert. I soon decided that these concerts were the best thing in Essentuki. The orchestra was large and, in my inexperienced judgment, it played very well. The conductor’s selection of pieces was orthodox and middlebrow: the orchestra never attempted Beethoven’s symphonies but acquitted itself creditably in such respectable works as Zuppe’s ‘Poet and Peasant’, Strauss waltzes and Mendelssohn’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’. A novice in the art of listening, I responded to music on the plane of the senses and imagination: it painted pictures for me, it stimulated feeling, it aroused longings and increased my dissatisfaction with reality. After listening to Chaikovsky’s ‘Swan Lake’ overture, I could hardly tolerate being recalled to the prosaic business of living by questions such as my mother would ask me on the way back to our hotel — for instance, had I remembered to drink my second glass of Essentuki water that afternoon?

I snapped back that of course I had, and she remarked that music was obviously bad for my nerves, to which I replied, it was not music but the perpetual talk about health which upset me. My mother would then come out with her favourite dictum about health being the most important thing in life, and I would retort that I would much rather have talent than health.

‘Talent,’ said my mother, ‘is not much use without good health. Look at Steinberg . . . ’

‘What about him?’ I asked.

She told me what she had gleaned from conversations with other concert-goers — in the intervals she always talked to people sitting near her, while I wished she would not. Steinberg, she said, was one of the conductors at the Maryinsky theatre in Petersburg. He was tubercular and northern climate was harmful to him, so he spent as much time as he could conducting in the Caucasus or the Crimea. No one knew how ill he really was, but he clearly was not very strong.

‘Look at Steinberg’ ... I could not help looking at him unless I closed my eyes when he was on the rostrum. Before I saw him conduct, I used to regard conductors as something of a nuisance. They were just men gesticulating to music, distracting me from it, whose gestures were often ugly, sometimes funny, but never relevant to what was happening in the orchestra, as they seemed to come after, not before the sounds of the instruments.

Steinberg was the first conductor whose movements enhanced the impression the music produced on me. He was dignified, graceful and restrained. Aged about fifty, tall, with a slight stoop and greying hair, he had a lean face of a distinctly Jewish cast, yet without its less attractive features. When the audience applauded at the end of a piece, he turned and bowed with a look of melancholy pleasure which touched off some deep chord of sympathy in me and set me wondering what kind of man he really was. As I watched his stooping figure in black mount the rostrum evening after evening and stretch his arms like a priest over the heads of his receptive orchestra, this sympathy gradually developed into a feeling of passionate compassion. I wondered whether he was not in fact too ill to be doing all this standing about and gesturing, and whether he had to do this in order to keep the wolf from the door. Perhaps he could not afford to take a proper holiday ... I tried to imagine the way he lived when he was not in the public eye. I began to weave a fantasy around him. He had a wife who was rather common and matter-of-fact and was not in the least interested in music. He found nothing to say to her when he returned home tired, after conducting. He had two children, a boy and a girl, aged perhaps sixteen and fourteen, who were always quarrelling and made a dreadful noise when he needed silence and peace. He felt alone in the midst of his utterly uncongenial family. If only he could live his life all over again, be young again! As he sat musing in a darkened room, he recollected a young girl’s face gazing up at him from the audience when he made his bow in response to their applause. He could tell that she admired him, that if he chose to make the first step, she would be ready to love him . . . But how could he - ill and tired, and unhappily bound to his wife and family? . . .

Love takes many forms, and my intense concern for Steinberg was a kind of love. I could not bear to miss any of his concerts, and I felt disappointed and anxious when, on some evenings, a handsome young man in Kazak uniform would stride on to the dais instead of him. I found this other conductor’s brisk, energetic gestures almost offensive in their crudity and longed for the slower, softer movements of the older man. Why did he fail to appear? Was he feeling more ill than usual?

My mother would remark that he was probably resting, and I wondered throughout the evening and the following day whether it was only that. Then the evening came, the lights on the dais were switched on, turning the dark foliage around it into a harsh, theatrical green halo, and the musicians trickled on to the stage with their instruments. A tall figure in black walked up the steps and the audience burst into applause, making my heart leap with excitement. Steinberg was back!

From my conviction that he was unhappy arose, perhaps inevitably, my wish to comfort and console. What was the use of love, I asked myself almost angrily, if I did nothing for the person I loved? But what could I do? I could not even let him know how much I admired him. He was not even aware of my existence. I was unique among these hundreds who applauded him because I loved him, but to him I was only a blurred face in the crowd, indistinguishable from other faces ... I came to feel that I had to do something to become someone to him.

I could not think of anything which would do justice to his qualities and express what I felt for him. I felt I could not write him a letter or hand him a bunch of flowers at one of his concerts, as some of the audience did. For some days I was a tormented and restless soul. Then one morning, on the way to the park, a florist’s window caught my eye. It was filled with a variety of exotic-looking plants but in the centre stood a vase with a few blue roses — ‘the colour achieved after many trials’, said the writing on a card beside it. Fascinated, I stood and gazed at them. Blue roses — the flowers for him, rare, exquisite, strange, a little sad . . . My mind was made up.

It was to be a farewell present, for our three weeks’ course of treatment had come to an end and we were due to join my father at Piatigorsk for the rest of our stay in the Caucasus. My grief at parting with Steinberg was tempered by the eager anticipation of seeing the place where Lermontov had lived and died. And anyway it was better than if Steinberg had to leave before me and I had to go on listening to concerts conducted by the other man. It was right, somehow, to give him flowers and leave the place on the following day, so that he would know my gift was entirely disinterested. The giving would be an act of pure homage, nameless and final, my only reward being that for a few days, perhaps, while the roses were still alive on his desk, he would remember the face of the girl who gave them . . .

My mother knew that I admired Steinberg and I did not attempt to conceal from her that I was going to give him flowers on our last night in Essentuki. She saw I was in a state of high nervous tension, and said nothing to ruffle me. We sat through the evening concert conducted by him, but before the final applause had died down, I left her and went out into the street along which Steinberg would pass on his way home. I bought two blue roses — they were expensive — and stood outside the shop, watching the gates of the park for the familiar figure to appear. My heart seemed to be beating in my throat and the tissue paper wrapped round the flowers quivered slightly.

The stream of people was slowly flowing out of the gates in eddies of twos and threes. Among them I saw my mother, and was suddenly afraid and angry at the thought that she might stop and watch me. I pretended not to see her, desperately pulled the paper off the flowers and held them to my face. Their fragrance was delicate and strange. I looked up, and my heart gave a great bound while my legs grew very limp. Steinberg was walking along the pavement on the other side of the street, accompanied by a woman !

This possibility had never entered my mind. I had braced myself for an act which, in my young pride, I felt to be an act of courage — because it could so easily be confused with the vulgar pursuit of a celebrity. But my imagination had pictured this scene as taking place in isolation, with Steinberg and myself alone, and only strangers passing by. Now there was this woman who would stand beside him, listening and looking while I offered him my flowers! Was she his wife? Or another admirer? Whoever she was, her presence changed everything ... I remained on my side of the road watching them walking slowly nearer.

The small tornado of emotions which swept through me during these few moments was like a passage from Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor. Wounded and rebellious, 1 was on the point of flight, but forced myself to go forward. Steinberg, in a grey overcoat and a felt hat — ‘He feels the chill of the evening even in this climate’, the thought stabbed me — stopped when he saw me approach. The woman stopped, too, holding herself a little behind him, effacing herself.

‘For you ... in gratitude for your music . . . ’

I held out the roses to him. He took off his hat, looked gravely, attentively into my face.

‘Thank you . . . thank you so much . . . ’

His voice was deep and pleasant. I suddenly felt like crying. I heard his voice for the first time — and the last! I stepped off the pavement quickly and crossed the street, mixing with the drifting crowd. My mother was waiting for me a few yards away. ‘What did he say to you?’ she asked. ‘You look so young ... a mere child . . . ’ I could not trust my voice to reply. I was thinking that if I had not gone forward, I would have shown myself to be a coward. My pride would have proved to be stronger than my love. ‘All he said was “Thank you” . . . twice . . . ’ I was still quivering from the effects of his voice. ‘I must... I will . . . ’ I said to myself, ‘I will remember the sound of his voice to the end of my life.’

 

My father met us at the station in Piatigorsk. He looked thinner and was clearly very glad to see my mother. It never occurred to me that he might also be pleased at seeing me: I took it for granted that my presence there was a matter of indifference to him.

As we drove to the hotel, I was too busy looking at Piatigorsk to listen to my parents’ conversation. The little town was quite different in character from Essentuki, more open, more animated. The mountains were nearer and bigger. Here were the streets through which Lermontov had walked, the very pavements, the trees, the houses on which his eyes had rested ... I was impatient to see the site of his duel, the house in which he had lodged. Where were they? I turned to my father to ask this question but saw that he was listening to my mother, and waited. My mother was commenting with dissatisfaction on the distance of the hotel from the park, which we had just passed, and my father was looking very concerned, almost contrite. I was struck by the effect my mother’s remarks produced on him, and suddenly felt I was on his side and against my mother in this matter. Feeling that way was so unexpected, so unusual for me, that I was made uncomfortable for the rest of the journey, and had not the heart to ask my question about Lermontov’s house.

My mother looked no more pleased when we finally arrived at the hotel. I ran out on to the balcony of our room to look at the view but I could hear from there my mother’s voice with its intonations of displeasure, and I caught a few phrases: ‘This hotel is in the wrong part of the town . . . You know I like being near the park . . . Why couldn’t you? . . . ’ My father did not speak except once when I heard him say: ‘The town is very crowded.’

A few minutes later he came out on to the balcony. I did not turn round but listened to his movements, wondering how he felt. He seemed to be re-arranging some chairs. The sun had set and southern dusk was thickening; the mountains in the distance had turned violet and one or two street lamps sprang into life and glowed green through the foliage. I could not bear the silence any longer.

‘The view from here is very good,’ I said.

My father cleared his throat. I hardly expected a reply but surprisingly, it came.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I hope your mother will like it better in a few days’ time. It is difficult to get rooms anywhere in Piatigorsk. No one can go abroad now . . . ’ Then suddenly, irrelevantly, he added: ‘I haven’t been feeling at all well . . . tired most of the time ... a sort of weakness.’

His voice broke. In the dusk I could hardly see his face, but his words made my heart turn over. Overwhelmed with compassion, I found I had absolutely nothing to say. This remote, reserved, silent man, my father, whom I regarded as immune from all human frailty, had suddenly come down to my level and was talking to me as to an equal!

This was a turning point in my feeling for my father: suddenly I ceased to fear him and saw him diminished, yet more lovable than he had been hitherto. I still could not call my feeling for him ‘love’, but I became able to put myself in his place, to see him as a person who needed sympathy, who could even seek it from me, young as I was. I also realized for the first time how deeply attached he was to my mother, and a thought entered my mind, which grew clearer and more definite as time went on, that in their relationship he was the giver and she the recipient. She was far more important to him than any of us, his children, while to her, I felt, we were more important than he.

Free from the daily torment of mud baths, I recovered my energy and the determination to drink as fully of the atmosphere of the Caucasus as was possible in the week or two that were left of our stay. Lermontov’s house on the edge of old Piatigorsk, a single-floor wooden structure with a porch and a few small rooms; a few pieces of furniture which he was reputed to have used; an old desk by the window on which he wrote: ‘I can see Kazbek from my window . . . ’ My prevailing mood of passionate compassion invested all I saw with a peculiar poignancy. Lermontov, who wrote at the age of fourteen ‘I lost the count of my years, And strive to capture the wings of oblivion’ and died at the age of twenty-six. He died unloved, unfulfilled, almost friendless, a fleeting visitor in this world . . . How could such a waste be justified? And now hundreds, no, thousands of young men were dying in the war . . . Compassion grew into a burning point of regret when I thought of Goga Reingold, who died in battle only a fee weeks after I had seen him alive. Gentle, chivalrous Goga —I would not let myself imagine how he met his death.

My thoughts swung back to Lermontov again, to his anticipation of the fatal duel in the scene of Pechorin’s encounter with Grushnitzkiy. The site of the duel, a small patch of even ground amidst the mountain scenery, was tame in comparison with its description in ‘The Hero of Our Time’ and the image in my mind. There was no yawning precipice over the edge of which the body of the unlucky duellist would inevitably tumble to his death. Nor was it secret or inaccessible. ‘It may have been different in Lermontov’s day,’ my mother remarked, aware of my disappointment. She complied with my wish to see and experience as much as I could, while my father, still a prey to lassitude, preferred to stay behind, sitting in a deck-chair and smoking on the balcony of our rooms, or on a seat in the park.

My mother and I went on excursions, a short one to a solitary place in the mountains from where an unimpeded view of Elbruss could be obtained, and a much longer one along the Military Georgian Highway as far as the highest point, a col where it begins to descend towards Tiflis. I should have dearly liked to go down into Georgia, but the rest of the road was closed to private travellers because of the war. On both occasions we travelled most of the way by horse-drawn vehicle and so had time to absorb the powerful magic of the mountain scenery rather than be stunned by it into a condition of speechless wonder.

A mountain meadow on the brink of a deep valley. The huge Elbruss, a perfect white cone glistening in the setting sun, its great mass dwarfing and dominating everything, seemingly so near, yet separated from us by a chasm full of dark shadows and rising mists. The extraordinary, exhilarating freshness of the air. A strange settlement of brown tents, friendly men in fleecy cloaks and tall sheep-skin caps, talking to our guide in a strange, guttural language. Hobbled horses around the tents and the dull jingling of their bells in the silence that magnified every sound. Large bowls of mare’s milk which the men brought us, and the delicious sharpness of its taste, as fresh as the air we breathed . . .

On the long excursion, driving up the Military Georgian Highway, we were slowly, gradually drawn into the very heart of the mountains. They advanced upon us, getting closer and higher all the time, and as the wall of rocks on our right got steeper, the stream at the bottom of the ravine on our left retreated farther and farther into the depth of the chasm. The stream was the legendary Tierek, a name I learned as a small child with my first poem by Lermontov, the ‘Lullaby of a Kazak Mother’. Afterwards it appeared in almost every story about the Caucasus I had ever read. It had become a living thing to me, and this was our first meeting. It was to accompany us to the end of our journey up the defile. But where was the end? As we looked ahead, the mountains stood right across the way, yet when we approached we saw that they were on the other side of the precipice, and our road swung round a corner, clinging to a forbidding wall of rock. The dusk rose from below, and the first stars trembled in the sky above our heads while we were still climbing. My mother had been asking the guide a little anxiously whether we should get to the inn before dark. But I wished this ride could go on for ever, except that I was feeling sorry for the horses. Then, as the last gleam of sunset disappeared from the mountain tops, we turned a corner and saw our first human habitation, a flat-roofed house clinging to the mountain-side. Its windows shone with a yellow light in the rapidly advancing darkness. ‘That’s the inn,’ said our guide. ‘We’ve arrived at Kazbek.’

I did not know how tired I was until we sat down to our meal. Slender girls with long plaits of black hair brought us dishes of freshly fried fish. ‘Trout,’ said our guide. ‘Straight from the Tierek. Caught today.’ It was my very first taste of trout, and it was delicious. Struggling to keep my eyes from closing, I finished my portion of pilaff, followed by a large slice of water melon. My mother urged me to go to bed at once, but I was determined to ‘have a look at the night’. As I staggered out on to the porch, the sharp air blew into my face and in an instant I was fully awake. For a few moments I stood, shivering and gazing around me, then, as the laughter and voices inside the house impinged on my ears,

I ran down the steps and walked along the road to get away from them. A wooden bridge hung over the stream on my left. I crossed it half-way and leaned over the parapet. Down below the Tierek was foaming and roaring, a white-crested dragon flinging itself against the confining rocks. Above my head, between the jagged edges of the massive mountain walls, the luminous river of the sky seemed to be flowing in the same direction. This serenity above and the wildness below, with myself suspended between them, struck such awe into my soul that, despite my loss of faith, the word ‘God’ formed on my lips. If God had created this, was His purpose to overwhelm man? How could creatures like myself matter when set beside this immensity? Of what consequence was my puny life? Yet, it must be of consequence because it was my life! If I accepted my utter insignificance, I could not live. I might as well fling myself down this precipice.

I gazed at the foaming Tierek beneath my feet, then at the sky again. A breeze, softer than the surrounding air, lifted my hair off my forehead and touched it like a friendly hand. My mother’s voice called from the porch of the inn: ‘Leda, where are you?’

I was brought back to reality by that breath of wind and that voice, yet needed a few moments longer to be able to meet it. As I lingered on the bridge without replying, my mother came towards me, looking quite alarmed. She began telling me that I was certain to catch a cold standing in the wind without an overcoat, but I could not bear listening to her, and walked past her into the hotel without replying.

Silently, I undressed and got into bed. I felt angry with my mother for being so out of tune with what I felt. Yet it was she who had opened the door into the enchanting world of poetry when she read Pushkin and Lermontov to me before I could read. I knew she loved poetry and nature — why could she not understand that my communion with nature was too precious to be intruded upon? How could she be so tactless as to talk of catching cold on such a night?

The next morning I looked longingly southwards, where the road began its descent towards Tiflis. The horses were being harnessed for our return journey. How I wished we could go on for many more miles, down into Georgia, to the coast of the Black Sea! I should have liked to cross the Caucasian mountains by the Military Ossietin Highway, said to be even more beautiful than the Georgian, and by the Military Sukhoom Road still unfinished and the wildest of all.

‘Why so impatient?’ said my mother. ‘You have all your life in front of you. There will be plenty of time to do all these things.’

Plenty of time! As I stood on the landing of the railway carriage taking us back to Piatigorsk from Vladikavkaz, I wished things would happen here and now, not in the indefinite time which lay ahead of me. I had left my mother talking to a travelling companion about dull prosaic things, and had come out on to the dark landing out of reach of their voices. The train was careering down a sloping plateau, wildly jerking and leaping like a runaway horse, filling the air with its clatter, emitting ear-splitting shrieks. The moon, half-lost in the broken clouds, played hide-and-seek with the countryside: mountains, trees, waterfalls would appear in ghostly whiteness, then fade into shadows until the whole scene became unreal as if in a dream. Swaying on my feet, clinging to cold railings, I let thoughts and emotions rush through my mind, images now light, now darkened, like this countryside fleeting past me. Life could be like that, vertiginous, full of contrasts, of unexpected romantic incidents . . . What has life given me in this beautiful, romantic setting, this Caucasian scene? A tiresome course of mud baths . . . hours of lonely contemplation of beautiful scenery but no one to share it with . . . hours of listening to music and watching a much-admired conductor . . . a strange condition of heart and imagination which could be called ‘love’ if I were sure that love was like that ... a state of passionate compassion which embraced the sick conductor, my father, Lermontov and all the strong men whose weakness I had intuitively understood and shared. Did all this add up to life, about which grown-ups were always talking? If this was life, it left my heart hungry and my imagination reaching out for experiences and impressions that had been foreshadowed but dimly in this, my first real journey. I had expected it to be a draught of intoxicating wine. I found it more bitter than sweet; it left a sediment of disenchantment and a thirst for more.

 

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