Life and Fate Page 18

  He thought for a moment.

  ‘Don’t hand in your notice today, Yevgenia Nikolaevna. Tonight I’m going to a conference arranged by the secretary of the obkom. I’ll talk to him about you.’

  Yevgenia thanked him, thinking he would forget about her as soon as he put down the telephone. Still, she didn’t hand in her notice and merely asked Rizin whether he would be able to get her a ticket, through the Military District HQ, for the steamer to Kazan.

  ‘That’s no problem,’ said Rizin, spreading his hands helplessly. ‘The police are impossible. But what can one do? Kuibyshev comes under special regulations – they have their instructions.’

  Then he asked: ‘Are you free this evening?’

  ‘No,’ answered Yevgenia angrily.

  On the way home she thought that very soon she would see Viktor, Nadya and her mother and sister. Yes, life in Kazan would be easier than in Kuibyshev. She wondered why she had got so upset, shrinking with fear as she walked into the police station. They had rejected her application and to hell with it! And if Novikov wrote, she could ask her neighbours to forward the letter to Kazan.

  The following morning she was called to the telephone as soon as she arrived at work. An obliging voice asked her to call at the passport bureau in order to collect her residence permit.

  Footnotes

  fn1 This was in fact a death-sentence.

  25

  Yevgenia got to know one of the other tenants, Shargorodsky.

  If Shargorodsky turned round abruptly, it looked as though his big, grey, alabaster head would come off his fine neck and fall to the ground with a crash. Yevgenia noticed that the pale skin on the old man’s face was faintly tinged with blue. The combination of his blue skin and the light blue of his cool eyes intrigued her; the old man came from the highest ranks of the nobility and Yevgenia was amused at the thought that he would have to be drawn in blue.

  Vladimir Andreyevich Shargorodsky’s life had been still more difficult before the war. Now at least he had some kind of work. The Soviet Information Bureau had asked him to supply them with notes on Dmitry Donskoy, Suvorov and Ushakov,fn1 on the traditions of the Russian officer class, on various nineteenth-century poets . . .

  He informed Yevgenia that on his mother’s side he was related to a very ancient princely house, one even older than the Romanovs. As a young man he had served in the provincial zemstvofn2 and had preached Voltaire and Chaadayev to the sons of landlords, to young priests and village schoolteachers.

  He told Yevgenia about a remark made to him forty-four years before by the provincial marshal of the nobility:

  ‘You, a descendant of one of the oldest families of Russia, have set out to prove to the peasants that you are descended from a monkey. The peasants will just ask: “What about the Grand Dukes? The Tsarevich? The Tsaritsa? What about the Tsar himself . . . ?”’

  Shargorodsky continued his subversive teaching and was finally exiled to Tashkent. A year later he was pardoned; he emigrated to Switzerland. There he met many of the revolutionary activists; Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, SRs and anarchists all knew the eccentric prince. He attended various gatherings and debates, was friendly with some of the revolutionaries but agreed with none of them. At that time he was a friend of the black-bearded Lipets, a student who was a member of the Jewish Bund.

  Shortly before the First World War he returned to Russia and settled down on his estate, now and again publishing articles on historical and literary themes in the Nizhnii Novgorod Listok. He didn’t concern himself with the actual management of the estate, leaving that entirely to his mother.

  In the end he was the only landlord whose estate was left untouched by the peasants. The Committee of Poor Peasants even allocated him a cartload of firewood and forty cabbages. He sat in the one room of the house that was still heated and had its windows intact, reading and writing poetry. He read one of his poems to Yevgenia. It was entitled ‘Russia’:

  Insane carefreeness

  Wherever one looks.

  The plain. Infinity.

  The cawing of rooks.

  Riots. Fires. Secrecy.

  Obtuse indifference.

  A unique eccentricity.

  A terrible magnificence.

  He pronounced each word carefully, pausing for each punctuation mark and raising his long eyebrows – somehow without making his large forehead appear any smaller.

  In 1926 Shargorodsky took it into his head to give lectures on the history of Russian literature; he attacked Demyan Byedniyfn3 and praised Fet;fn4 he took part in the then fashionable discussions about the beauty and truth of life; he declared himself an opponent of every State, declared Marxism a narrow creed, and spoke of the tragic fate of the Russian soul. In the end he talked and argued himself into another journey at government expense to Tashkent. There he stayed, marvelling at the power of geographical arguments in a theoretical discussion, until in late 1933 he received permission to move to Samara to live with his elder sister, Elena Andreevna. She died shortly before the war.

  Shargorodsky never invited anyone into his room. Once, however, Yevgenia glanced into the Prince’s chambers: piles of books and old newspapers towered up in the corners; ancient armchairs were heaped on top of each other almost to the ceiling; portraits in gilt frames covered the floor. A rumpled quilt whose stuffing was falling out lay on a sofa covered in red velvet.

  Shargorodsky was a very gentle man, and quite helpless in any practical matter. He was the sort of man about whom people say, ‘He’s got the soul of a child,’ or ‘He’s as kind as an angel.’ And yet he could walk straight past a hungry child or a ragged old woman begging for crusts, feeling quite indifferent, still muttering his favourite lines of poetry.

  As she listened to Shargorodsky, Yevgenia often thought of her ex-husband. There really was very little in common between this old admirer of Fet and Vladimir Solovyov, and Krymov the Comintern official.

  She found it surprising that Krymov, who was just as much a Russian as old Shargorodsky, could be so indifferent to the charm of the Russian landscape and Russian folk-tale, to the poetry of Fet and Tyutchev. And everything in Russian life that Krymov had held dear since his youth, the names without which he could not even conceive of Russia, were a matter of indifference to Shargorodsky – or even aroused his antagonism.

  To Shargorodsky Fet was a god. Above all he was a Russian god. Glinka’s Doubts and the folk-tales about Finist the Bright Falcon were equally divine. Whereas Dante, much though he admired him, quite lacked the divine quality of Russian music and Russian poetry.

  Krymov, on the other hand, made no distinction between Dobrolyubov and Lassalle, between Chernyshevsky and Engels.fn5 For him Marx stood above all Russian geniuses and Beethoven’s Eroica triumphed indisputably over all Russian music. Nekrasov, to him the world’s supreme poet, was perhaps the only exception . . . Sometimes Yevgenia thought that Shargorodsky helped her to understand not only Krymov himself but also what had happened to their relationship.

  Yevgenia liked talking to Shargorodsky. Their conversations usually began after some alarming news bulletin. Shargorodsky would then launch into a speech about the fate of Russia.

  ‘The Russian aristocracy,’ he would say, ‘may stand guilty before Russia, Yevgenia Nikolaevna, but they did at least love her. We were pardoned nothing at the time of that first War: our fools, our blockheads, our sleepy gluttons, Rasputin, our irresponsibility and our avenues of lime-trees, the peasants’ huts without chimneys and their bast shoes – everything was held against us. But my sister lost six sons in Galicia. My brother, a sick old man, was killed in battle in East Prussia. History hasn’t taken that into account . . . It should.’

  Often Yevgenia listened to his judgements on literature, judgements that were quite at odds with those of the present day. He ranked Fet above Pushkin and Tyutchev. No one in Russia can have known Fet like he did. Fet himself, by the end of his life, probably no longer remembered all that Shargorodsky knew about him.


  Shargorodsky considered Lev Tolstoy to be too realistic. Though recognizing that there was poetry in his work, he didn’t value him. He valued Turgenev but considered his talent too superficial. The Russian prose he loved most was that of Gogol and Leskov.

  He considered Belinsky and Chernyshevsky to be the murderers of Russian poetry.

  He once said to Yevgenia that, apart from Russian poetry, there were three things in the world that he loved, all of them beginning with the letter ‘s’ – sugar, sun and sleep.

  ‘Will I really die without ever seeing even one of my poems in print?’ he sometimes asked.

  Once Yevgenia met Limonov on her way back from work. He was walking along the street in an unbuttoned winter overcoat. A bright checked scarf was dangling round his neck and he was leaning on a rather knotted stick. This massive man in an aristocratic beaver-fur hat stood out strangely in the Kuibyshev crowd.

  Limonov walked Yevgenia home. She invited him in for some tea. He looked at her thoughtfully. ‘Well yes, thank you. I suppose really you owe me some vodka for your residence permit.’

  Breathing heavily, he began to climb the stairs. Then, as he walked into Yevgenia’s little room he said: ‘Hm, there isn’t much space for my body. Perhaps there’ll be lots of space for my thoughts.’

  Suddenly, in a somewhat unnatural tone of voice, he began explaining to her his theory of love and sexual relationships.

  ‘It’s a vitamin deficiency,’ he said, ‘a spiritual vitamin deficiency! You know, the same terrible hunger that drives cows, bulls and deer when they need salt. What I myself lack, what those close to me lack, what my wife lacks, I search for in the object of my love. A man’s wife is the cause of his vitamin deficiency! And a man craves in his beloved what for years, for decades, he has been unable to find in his wife. Do you understand?’

  He took her by the hand and started to caress her palm. He moved on to her shoulders, her neck, and the back of her head.

  ‘Do you understand?’ he asked ingratiatingly. ‘It’s really very simple. A spiritual vitamin deficiency!’

  Yevgenia watched with laughing, embarrassed eyes as a large white hand with polished fingernails moved from her shoulders down to her breast.

  ‘Vitamin deficiencies can evidently be physical as well as spiritual,’ said Yevgenia. ‘No, you mustn’t paw me, really you mustn’t,’ she scolded him, sounding like a primary school teacher.

  He stared at her, dumbfounded. Instead of looking embarrassed, he began to laugh. Yevgenia laughed too.

  They were drinking tea and talking about the artist Saryan when old Shargorodsky knocked at the door.

  Limonov turned out to know Shargorodsky’s name from someone’s manuscript notes and from some letters in an archive. Shargorodsky had not read Limonov’s books but likewise he had heard his name – it was mentioned in newspapers in lists of those writing on military-historical themes.

  They began to talk, growing happy and excited as they discovered they shared a common language. Their conversation was full of names: Solovyov, Mereshkovsky, Rozanov, Hippius, Byeliy, Byerdyaev, Ustryalov, Balmont, Milyukov, Yevreinov, Remizov, Vyacheslav Ivanov.

  It seemed to Yevgenia as though these two men had raised from the ocean-bed a whole sunken world of books, pictures, philosophical systems, theatrical productions . . .

  Limonov suddenly gave voice to her thought.

  ‘It’s as though the two of us have raised Atlantis from under the sea.’

  Shargorodsky nodded sadly. ‘Yes, yes, but you’re only an explorer of the Russian Atlantis; I’m one of its inhabitants, someone who sank with it to the bed of the ocean.’

  ‘Well,’ said Limonov. ‘And now the war’s raised you up.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Shargorodsky. ‘The founders of the Comintern proved unable to think of anything better in the hour of war than the old phrase about “the sacred earth of Russia”.’ He smiled. ‘Just wait. The war will end in victory and then the Internationalists will declare: “Mother Russia’s equal to anyone in the world!”’

  Yevgenia sensed that if these two were talking so animatedly and wittily, it was not only because they were glad to have met one another and to have found a topic so close to both their hearts. She realized that both these men – one of them very old and the other middle-aged – were conscious of her listening to them and that they were attracted to her. How strange it was. She was quite indifferent to all this, she even found it rather absurd – and yet it was very pleasing, not in the least a matter of indifference.

  As she looked at them she thought: ‘How can one ever understand oneself? Why does the past make me so sad? Why do I feel so sorry for Krymov? Why can’t I stop thinking about him?’

  Once she had felt alienated by Krymov’s English and German comrades; but now, when Shargorodsky mocked the Comintern, she felt sad and angry . . . She couldn’t make head or tail of it. Not even Limonov’s theory of vitamin deficiencies was any help now. Nor was any other theory.

  Then she had the idea that she must be worrying so much about Krymov only because she was longing for someone else – a man she hardly ever seemed to think about.

  ‘Do I really love him?’ she wondered, surprised.

  Footnotes

  fn1 Donskoy, Suvorov and Ushakov are Russian military heroes.

  fn2 Zemstvo: a local government institution.

  fn3 Byedniy was a mediocre propagandist poet at the time of the Revolution.

  fn4 Fet was a lyric poet of the late nineteenth century, a precursor of the Symbolists.

  fn5 Dobrolyubov (1836–61) and Chernyshevsky (1828–89) were among the ancestors of the Russian revolutionaries.

  26

  During the night the sky over the Volga cleared. The hills floated slowly past beneath the stars, separated one from another by the pitch dark of the ravines.

  Now arid again a shooting-star flashed by and Lyudmila Nikolaevna silently prayed: ‘Don’t let Tolya die!’

  That was her only wish: she asked Heaven for nothing else.

  Once, when she was still a student in the Maths and Physics Faculty, she had been employed to do calculations at the Astronomical Institute. She had learned then that meteors came in showers, each meeting the earth in a different month. There were the Perseids, the Orionids, probably the Geminids, the Leonids. She no longer remembered which meteors reached the earth in October and November . . . But don’t let Tolya die!

  Viktor had reproached her for her unwillingness to help people and for her unkindness to his relatives. He believed that if Lyudmila had wanted it, his mother would have come to live with them instead of remaining in the Ukraine.

  When Viktor’s cousin had been released from camp and sent into exile, she hadn’t wanted to let him stay the night, afraid that the house management committee would find out. She knew that her mother still remembered how Lyudmila had been staying at the seaside when her father died; instead of cutting short her holiday, she had arrived back in Moscow two days after the funeral.

  Her mother sometimes talked to her about Dmitry, horrified at what had happened to him.

  ‘He was honest as a boy and he remained honest all his life. And then suddenly – “espionage, plotting to murder Kaganovich and Voroshilov” . . . A wild, terrible lie. What’s the point of it? Why should anyone want to destroy people who are sincere and honourable?’ Once Lyudmila had told her: ‘You can’t vouch for Mitya entirely. Innocent people don’t get arrested.’

  She could still remember the look her mother had given her.

  Another time she had said to her mother about Dmitry’s wife: ‘I never could stand the woman and I’m not going to change my mind now.’

  ‘But just imagine!’ her mother had protested. ‘Being given a ten-year sentence for not denouncing your husband!’

  And once she had brought home a stray puppy she’d found on the street. Viktor hadn’t wanted to take it in and she’d shouted: ‘You’re a cruel man!’

  ‘Lyuda,’ he had answered, ‘I don’
t want you to be young and beautiful. I only want one thing. I want you to be kind-hearted – and not just towards cats and dogs.’

  She sat there on the deck, for once disliking herself instead of blaming everyone else, remembering all the harsh things that had ever been said to her . . . Once, when he was on the telephone, she’d heard her husband laugh and say: ‘Now that we’ve got a kitten, I sometimes hear my wife sounding affectionate.’

  Then there was the time when her mother had said to her: ‘Lyuda, how can you refuse beggars? Just think: you’ve got enough to eat while someone else is hungry and begging . . .’

  It wasn’t that she was miserly: she loved having guests, and her dinners were famous amongst her friends.

  No one saw her crying there in the darkness. Yes, yes, she was callous; she had forgotten everything she had ever learnt; she was useless; no one would ever find her attractive again; she had grown fat; she had grey hair and high blood pressure; her husband no longer loved her and thought she was heartless. But if only Tolya were still alive! She was ready to admit everything, to confess to all the faults her family accused her of – if only he were still alive!

  Why did she keep remembering her first husband? Where was he? How could she find him? Why hadn’t she written to his sister in Rostov? She couldn’t write now because of the Germans. She would have told him about Tolya.

  The sound of the engine, the vibrating deck, the splash of water, the twinkling of the stars, all merged into one; Lyudmila dozed off.

  It was nearly dawn. A thick mist swayed over the Volga and everything living seemed to have drowned.

  Suddenly the sun rose – like a burst of hope. The dark autumn water mirrored the sky; it began to breathe and the sun seemed to cry out in the waves. The steep banks had been salted by the night’s frost and the red-brown trees looked very gay. The wind rose, the mist vanished and the world grew cool and glass-like, piercingly transparent. There was no warmth in the sun, nor in the blue sky and water.