My Several Selves, Imaginary and Real 4 страница
At last the bátiushka came out of the Holy of Holies with a silver cross in his hands. We headed the queue for kissing the cross, and a few minutes later, stretching and yawning out of sight of the governesses, we were back in the orphanage dining-hall, pulling on our galoshes and digging our overcoats out of a pile. The orphanage girls gazed after us wistfully as we trooped out of their door. I wondered if they thought we were lucky to be going out into the streets. If they only knew!
Oh, the boredom of those Sundays at the boarding school! I had never been bored at home, though I might have felt sad at times: there was always so much to see, to do and think about. At school we only had a few games: tiddley-winks, snakes and ladders, a pack of cards —but interest in these did not last for more than a couple of hours. Reading was a way out of boredom, but as far as I remember, even at that age I found a contrast between the world of fantasy and the real world too painful to seek this form of escape as a matter of course. Happy stories did not make me forget my own unhappiness, sad ones intensified my feeling of loss. Of my dormitory companions only Fatima and Tania Pánova stayed at the school on Sundays; the others were taken out by friends or relatives. Fatima was no friend of mine, and Tania was as depressed as myself. Casting around for relief, I wrote my mother, asking if anyone she knew could take me out on Sundays. She thought of Olia Rodionova, the daughter of my father’s former assistant, who was a day girl at the school and lived with her relations. Olia’s big cousin was also a pupil at our school, and one Sunday she came to take me to their house.
I had known Olia at home before either of us came to the school, but I found her too timid and slow, and was more friendly with her younger sister. We had hardly spoken to one another in class. She was far from bright but I felt even her company would be preferable to spending the whole of Sunday in the study-room, not suspecting that any home could be as dreary as Olia’s cousin’s proved to be.
I went there on several Sundays. Olia had nothing to say. We played cards, tiddley-winks and snakes and ladders. Tea was served on a table covered with cold oilcloth, unappetizing tea with bread cut too thick and jam full of sharp bits of crystallized sugar. The evening came, but for some reason the lighting of the lamp was delayed. We sat at the table waiting for nothing in particular. Across the street an uncurtained window of a house was lit up brightly, and I could see two children, a boy and a girl, leaning over a table, playing some game and laughing. A woman — their mother, no doubt — came in and spoke to them, smiling. She poured something into cups; the children drank. From where I was looking the room seemed extremely cosy and the children so obviously enjoying themselves, that my heart contracted with an envious pain, and I longed to be in their place, not to be myself, to know no more of Olia’s cousin, of the boarding school, of the life that was mine and that I found intolerable.
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When at last Olia’s cousin brought me back to school, I barely found the words to thank her. That Sunday outing had been a torment; I did not want to have another. Wearily, I was looking forward to the hour which at home I used to do my best to postpone — the hour of going to bed. I hurried through the usual preparations, was first in the queue for Dasha to comb my hair. ‘Did you enjoy yourself at Rodionova’s cousin’s?’ Fatima asked me, slyly. I did not reply.
The bed was cold to get into, but, curled into a ball, I soon got warm, and here at last, in a place of my own, between pillow, sheets and blankets, 1 felt almost secure — secure from intrusion, observation and the demands of all those people around me. The small lampáda before the icon of the Virgin in the comer of the room glowed in semidarkness. It was of red glass, like the one at home, but higher up and further away. My bed stood end to end with Tania’s, and for the rest of the night it became my castle, with the enemies, Fatima and Mílochka, kept out, and a friend, Tania Pánova, guarding the entrance. At home I used to like staying awake, weaving fantasies, playing wordless games, but here I wanted to fall asleep as soon as possible. When my eyes closed and sleep descended upon me, my weightless body floated up to the ceiling and through it, into the starlit space, a realm where the familiar and the new became mysteriously interwoven and blended in a fascinating pattern of a dream. And there I stayed, free, until the clanging of the morning bell shattered the intricate pattern and the mystery, and brought me down, back into my bed, the bed I had to leave promptly to begin another day, so much like the one before it and the one that was to follow...
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My only real red-letter days at school were the days when my uncle Fyodor came to visit me. The first time it happened, half-way through my first term at school, I was bowled over with surprise and excitement, hardly believing, in my slough of despair, that anything so good could happen to me.
I was half-heartedly trying to draw in the study-room one Saturday afternoon when the junior porter, Kondratiy, came in and spoke quietly to the governess in charge. She called me.
‘Rayévskaia, your uncle is here to see you. You can go down with Kondratiy.’
I jumped up in a flurry, aware that all the girls at my table were looking at me with interest, and some, no doubt, with envy. I almost forgot to curtsey to the governess and thank her as I left the room, and as I clattered down the iron stairs, I thought with horror that, if I had forgotten, she might have stopped me, in punishment, from seeing my uncle. I ran into the reception hall — and there he was, large, blond and balding, in features so obviously my mother’s brother, that I had to laugh through my tears as I hung upon his neck.
We sat in the corner by a window and I opened the box of chocolates he had brought me, excellent chocolates, for Uncle Fyedia did not share the idea some adults have about children not appreciating quality. We played the game of ‘guessing the filling’: if you guessed it correctly you could have another chocolate straight away. Then I sat on his knee and played with his long moustaches — a game that took me back to my earliest years. I pulled them down, put them up, twisted them into a variety of shapes and giggled at the changed appearance this gave him, while he frowned, squinted or stared to make himself look even more different, which sent me into fits of laughter. Tasked him to move his ears, a trick that to my mind verged on the miraculous, and he did it, as he used to do when I was quite small. I pulled out his gold watch from his breast pocket, and he opened the back lid and let me see the tiny cogs and wheels moving at different speeds. But this — disastrously — reminded him of time. He had to go. Already? Seeing my face, he asked: ‘Isn’t it Sunday tomorrow?’
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‘Oh, yes!’
‘Then I will take you out to lunch and tea . . . We will get your brother to come, too. ’That night I could not go to sleep for a long time with excitement.
Having lunch with Uncle Fyedia meant going to a restaurant, a place for grown-ups which I found impressively attractive. The chairs were so large and heavy that the waiter had to move one out for me and push it under me as I sat down. The spoons, forks and knives were also large and heavy, but I managed them myself somehow. The table-cloth and the napkin which stood up, stiff like a soldier, on my plate, were of shiny whiteness. There were large palms in pots opposite each tall window, and a pair of especially big ones flanking the door, which was opened and shut by a porter in a maroon coat with brass buttons. The people sitting at tables were mostly men in dark suits or uniforms, a few women, each with a male escort, well-dressed and perfumed, and no children except myself. One woman smiled at me, and several of the men exchanged greetings with my uncle.
We had bouillon with pirozkhi. The bouillon was very hot and I burnt my mouth with the first spoonful, which reduced my enjoyment of what followed — roast hare with mashed beetroot and cranberry jelly. I struggled with my knife and fork over a table too high for me.
‘Shall I cut it up for you, báryshnia?’ a respectful voice asked behind me.
I looked round: it was the kindly waiter who had moved my chair for me. My first impulse was to say ‘no’ to this rather humiliating offer, but my uncle nodded and the waiter, snatching up another knife and fork, promptly separated the meat from the bone, cut it all up and put the plate back in front of me with a flourish.
The best part of the meal was of course the sweet course: a large portion of ice-cream, mixed with bits of crystallized fruit and topped with a thick layer of whipped cream. It seemed incredible that Uncle should choose to eat jam pancakes instead, as if one could not have jam pancakes any time at home! But he said ice-cream made him feel too cold inside.
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After lunch Uncle and I went to his hotel where he read through some papers while I stood by the window looking out into the street. No white paint on these panes! And the street was busy with a lot of things to watch. Cabs passed, quiet on their rubber tyres, the horses’ hoofs clop-clopping on the cobbles — a sound I loved to hear. These people in cabs, people walking along the pavements, their faces seen dimly in the gathering dusk, who were they? . . . Where were they going? . . . I wished I could follow them, peep inside their houses as they opened their doors, see their children, ask them their names. There was a toy-shop on the opposite side of the road with dolls, and carts, and drums in the window. There was also a pastrycook’s with a display of tempting cakes and boxes of sweets. People were buying them —for whom? The bell above the door tinkled as they went in and out. All this life going on, and I just watching — but presently I, too, shall be in the street, still a free child, walking with Uncle to a cafe where we will meet my brother for tea.
My brother Vladímir, or Vova as we called him, was older than I by four years. His visits to my school were a trial to both of us. I do not know whether he came because my mother had asked him to, or because he really wanted to see me, but the balance of my feelings at that time was so precarious that merely seeing him made me cry. Self-conscious and inexpert in the art of consolation, he could think of nothing to say except: ‘Don’t cry!’ and there we stood, facing each other between the window and the grand piano, in the only corner of that vast impersonal room where one could have some illusion of privacy. When in the end I managed to control my tears, we still found nothing to say to one another, our lives away from home being so different as to defy all attempts at communication. The visit was supposed to last no more than half an hour, and as soon as the hands of the clock above the door moved to three, my brother picked up his cap and gave me a wet kiss on the cheek, unhappily, yet obviously relieved to get away. I cried again, to see this living link with home slipping away from me. ‘It’s not so very long till Christmas, ’ he managed to say once, and I was grateful to him for that.
How different the mood when Uncle and I met him outside the cafe! We saw him pacing up and down, a tall, thin boy with flaxen hair, delicate complexion and lean, almost sunken cheeks. He raised his peaked cap to my uncle, smiling self-consciously; then they embraced and I received a peck on my cheek.
‘Well now, Vladímir!’ said my uncle. ‘You look ready for a meal. Come inside, quickly.’
The cafe was Zavádsky’s, the best in M*, as I soon learned from my schoolmates. My uncle ordered cups of chocolate, pirozkhi fried in deep fat, pastries and finally ice-cream. My brother ate a prodigious meal, leaving me way behind in the race. My uncle sipped a cup of black coffee. How could he drink something so bitter with such evident pleasure?
‘How’s your Latin, Vladímir?’ he asked my brother.
Why did boys have to learn Latin, as well as French and German, and girls only French and German?
‘It’s my best subject . . . five plus . . . ’ my brother muttered, his mouth full.
Why did boys have ‘five’ as the highest mark at their schools and the girls ‘twelve’.
I was thinking while they talked. The sky outside grew dark and the street lights came on.
‘Well, children, it’s time to say good-bye for the present.’
We came out. My uncle hailed a cab.
‘I’m taking your sister back to her golden cage,’ he told my brother. ‘Can I give you a lift?’
‘No, thank you, Uncle. I’m going in the opposite direction. I’ll walk. ’
We exchanged a feeble kiss and I climbed into the cab, my uncle helping me. As it jerked forward and my head lolled against the padded back, I watched my brother’s slender grey-coated shape stride away into the greyness of the autumn evening, my heart aching with pity for him, for myself, and for the passing of this rare, red-letter day. A memory floated up: my parents in the drawing-room of our house at B*, looking through the window at my brother, still in his short-trousered suit, walking along the street. ‘There he goes, nodding as usual,’ said my father and they both laughed affectionately at his peculiar, head- nodding gait. A sharp pang of jealousy shot through me at the sudden awareness of how much they loved him. Now he walked holding himself very straight, and there was only me to watch him, and only uncle to watch me disappear a few minutes later behind the heavy double doors of the school.
Because my brother used to tease and sometimes bully me, I came to think of him as an antagonist rather than as a friend, despite the fact that he had been my constant play companion before he left home to go to school. My sister, eight years older than I, was affectionate and maternal towards both of us, but she treated me with a special tenderness. She liked giving me pet names, sometimes taking them from a book, sometimes inventing them. The latest of these was króshka, a Russian word for ‘mite’ or ‘crumb’, and it was as ‘my darling króshka that she addressed me in her letters. The year I went to boarding school she was admitted as a student to Bestoózhevskiye Koorsj, the Women’s University in Petersburg, and it was from there that she wrote me, doing her best to amuse and comfort me. Professor Viengerov, who lectured to them on Pushkin, had a long white beard and was tiny, like the Chernomor who stole Ludmila from Russian on their wedding night. The French lecturer,
Monsieur Laronde, was almost round in shape and looked and talked like a purring cat. But he was a treacherous cat and could snarl and scratch, especially at dark-haired girls. He was said to give passes only to blondes. ‘So, dear króshka, you would be all right with him . . . ’
She wrote of the short days and long nights of Petersburg, of noiseless streets paved with wooden blocks, of the wonderful theatres, of the curly white chrysanthemums standing on her desk which Goga had brought her . . . Did I remember Goga? She mentioned that she had posted a parcel of nice things for me to eat, which she bought at the Yelisyeev’s, a splendid shop in the Nevsky Prospect, and she ended by reminding me that Christmas was approaching fast and begging me not to be sad. She ‘embraced and kissed me many times’.
I could almost feel her soft cheek against mine as I read these words, and of course I cried a little over her letter, but for a while it took my thoughts away from home, as I imagined her walking along the Nevsky, all bright lights and lacquered horse-carriages with coachmen in livery. I thought of Goga, her schoolboy friend, who had failed his finals at the Ghymnasia and had to enter a military school in Petersburg. He gave her white chrysanthemums, rare and expensive flowers . . . was he in love with her and she with him? But this was only a fleeting thought, a faint prick of curiosity: love between grown-ups was still a closed book to me which I was not ready to open. My thoughts turned to the parcel which I knew would arrive in a day or two.
A parcel from Petersburg! No other girl in my dormitory could boast of a prospect like this! My sister knew what would please me: she sent me a box of pastila — little bars of fruit-flavoured marshmallow — a box of marmalád, another kind of fruit sweets of delectably natural flavour, and a box of tianoóchki, a kind of soft, creamy fudge, every bar of which could be pulled out to twice its length without breaking it. My delight in the pretty pictures on the boxes, of children playing with young foals or lambs in flowered meadows, was almost as great as in the sweets themselves.
I wrote the same evening to thank her and tell her of my continuing misery. But was it in fact as acute as it had been six weeks or even a month ago? Time was doing its reviving and deadening work. My pain had become deadened, a mere dull ache in the background of my mind; my interest in people and things was reviving. Class work helped me to recover my sense of reality, and the praise of the teachers was gradually restoring my damaged self-esteem. I liked my lessons. Russian language became, perhaps inevitably, my favourite subject.
The teaching methods in my school — as in most Russian schools of the day — were of a formal kind; a more or less identical pattern was repeated day after day. At the start of a lesson the teacher explained the contents of the next one and set us our homework. Then she called our names from the register, and the pupil she called had to give an account of what she had prepared of the contents of the previous lesson. She had to hold forth until she had nothing more to say. The plight of one who had not done her homework can easily be imagined: she might find herself standing completely silent in front of the waiting teacher, surrounded by the half-sympathetic, half-derisive audience of her classmates. The teacher gave marks for every ‘call out’ and entered them in the register against the pupil’s name. In the course of a lesson there was time only for a few interrogations of this sort, and a fair proportion of pupils, especially those whom the teacher knew to be able and conscientious, might be ‘called out’ no more than three or four times in the whole term. All the pupils, however, had to take dictation and write compositions in class and at home, and no one could count on escaping the teacher’s attention indefinitely. Some teachers had the reputation of catching pupils out by ‘calling’ them on two consecutive occasions. The French teacher, Vera Petrovna, dry-voiced, precise, with an unhealthy yellowish complexion, was reputed to be capable of such treacherous behaviour. Not so Maria Ivanovna, our teacher of Russian, a somewhat untidy, plumpish woman, who walked with a waddle and had loose strands of hair hanging about her face. I was drawn towards her from the start.
The first composition she set us during my first term was on the usual school theme of the summer holidays. As the previous summer had been my last summer of freedom, I wrote with abandon about St John’s night in the country, when peasant youths and girls jump over bonfires holding hands, to see whom they would marry, and girls alone float wreaths of wild flowers with lighted candles on them down the woodland stream, to see who would die that year and who would prosper. I wrote about myself, describing how I went into a dark wood, half-believing that I would find the blue flower of the fern which blooms only on the Eve of St John’s, and makes the ground transparent, showing you where the buried treasure lies.
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