The house was a picture of peace, with lamp and samovar. The older actress was giving her little dog some milk; Olyonushka was rehearsing a monologue for the performance to come.
What was I to read? What kind of audience would we have? Robespierre had said that they would be “enlightened spirits who had cast off the chains of the ages.” Did this mean they had all done forced labor? They would, moreover, be “true judges and connoisseurs of art.” What sort of art? Averchenko thought that Robespierre was thinking of the music of criminal slang.
But what was I to read?
“You must read poems of tender feeling,” said Olyonushka. “Poetry ennobles.”
“I think I’ll read that little police-station sketch of mine,” said Averchenko. “Not so very ennobling, but it’ll strike more of a chord with the audience.”
Olyonushka disagreed. On tour in the western provinces, she had read my poem about a beggar woman: “Around the country walked Fedosya, around the land the cripple wandered,” and so on (a piece much loved by actors and recited by them ad nauseam).
“And what do you think happened?” Olyonushka went on. “In the interval, this old Tatar comes backstage to see me. He’s quite a simple man, and with tears in his eyes he says, ‘Dear Miss Actress please read about that cripple woman again.’[27] The poem’s about Christ,”—Olyonushka now sounded more impassioned than ever—“so it’s the last thing a non-Christian should have wanted to listen to, yet he was truly moved.”
“Olyonushka, dear,” I said, “I don’t think your simple old man will be there tonight. Read something about an airplane—or roast mutton.”
Suddenly, from the entrance room, came the sound of Robespierre’s ecstatic voice.
I left the room.
Evening. Eight o’clock.
Time to set out to our much-vaunted show.
What to wear? A serious question. We think long and hard, then decide on skirts and blouses.
“If we wear anything at all smart, we’ll get robbed,” says the actress with the little dog. “Better not to let them even suspect that we own any decent dresses.”
“You’re right.”
We have to go on foot, over fences, across the railway line, and past some sheds. It’s raining. Where the mud’s thin, it slurps. Where it’s thicker, it squelches. In the darkness it seems almost to boil and bubble.
Olyonushka suddenly stops dead, squealing that her galoshes have been “swallowed up.”
Gooskin is swinging a shaded lantern over the road, as if censing the rain and the night.
How bleak it is—this dark road to the “Club of Enlightenment and Culture.”
“What would they want with anything better?” says an unfamiliar voice. “Nobody ever goes there anyway.”
Someone is slurping and squelching right beside me. A stranger. We must watch our words.
But even if we manage to get there, how can we appear on stage with clumps of mud all over our legs?
Averchenko’s impresario suggests we take off our shoes and stockings and walk barefoot. When we get to the club, we can ask for a bucket of water, wash our feet and put our shoes and stockings back on. Or the other way round—we can carry on through the mud in our shoes, ask for water when we get there, wash our feet and then appear barefoot on stage. Or best of all—wash our stockings at the club and put them on wet. Who’s going to notice?
“So you know how to wash stockings, do you?” asks a grim voice.
Gooskin plows through the mud in his clodhoppers and goes on censing the rain with his lantern. I catch a glimpse of bare feet—Olyonushka’s. But I can’t bring myself to take off my shoes. Robespierre has walked down this road today. Most likely he will have spat somewhere.
“Is this yours?”
Someone hands me something round and black. What is this filth?
“It’s your galosh… with your shoe inside it.”
“Gooskin!” I cry. “I can’t go any further. I’ll die.”
Gooskin walks briskly up to me.
“You can’t? All right, I’ll carry you, on my shoulders.”
I hear this as a metaphor. He is telling me, I think, that I am ruining everything and that it is he who has to shoulder the burden.
“Gooskin, I really can’t. Look at me. I’m standing on one leg like a heron. My shoe’s all covered in mud. How can I put it on now? Robespierre has passed this way. He may have spat on the ground right here… Gooskin, save me!”
“That’s why I’m telling you to get up on my shoulders. I shall carry you.”
I still find this hard to take in.
“You’re so huge, Gooskin. I’ll never be able to climb up that high.”
“Well, you can start by climbing onto that little fence. Or even… I can see a short little fellow over there, he’s probably quite young. Why not use him?”
Was I to ride on Gooskin? Like Gogol’s Vakula—the blacksmith who once rode on the devil?[28]
I had taken part in many performances. I had ridden to them in carriages, in motorcars, and in cabs, but never on my own impresario.
“Thank you, Gooskin. But you really are too huge. I’ll start to feel dizzy up there.”
Gooskin is nonplussed.
“Well then… do you want to wear my boots?”
At this, even without the advantage of height, I start to feel dizzy.
As happens in moments of supreme tension, my whole life flashes like forked lightning before my inner gaze: childhood… first love… war… third love… public acclaim… second revolution and—and to crown it all—Gooskin’s unforgettable clodhoppers. In the back of beyond, in the mud, in the dead of night—what an inglorious end! Because there is no way, you must understand, that I can come out of all this alive…
“Thank you, Gooskin. You are a man of high moral standing. But I’ll get there on my own two feet.”
Which, of course, I do.
We stand around for a while in the cubbyhole that serves as a dressing room for the “Messrs and Mesdames Artistes.” While someone wipes our shoes clean with newspaper, we peek at our audience through a crack in the wooden wall.
The barrack probably holds about a hundred people. On the right, supported by timbers, is some kind of gallery or hayloft.
In the front rows of the stalls are what one might call the top brass and aristocracy. All of them in skins (I am talking, of course, not about their own human skin but about the skin of calves and sheep—about the leather jackets and tall boots with gaiters so loved by our revolutionaries). Many are draped in bullet belts or are carrying guns. Some carry two revolvers as if, rather than being about to watch a performance, they are preparing for some military operation—a quick sortie, a dangerous reconnaissance, a skirmish with numerically superior forces.
“There, in the front row,” whispers Gooskin. “Yes, look, her in the middle!”
I see a dumpy, short-legged girl with a sleepy-looking face, a face as flat as if she were squashing it against a pane of glass. An oilskin jacket with cracked folds. An oilskin hat.
“A beast!” Gooskin hisses in my ear, in the same tone of horror as before.
A beast? I can’t see it. I don’t understand. Her legs are too short to reach the ground. She’s wide. Her flat face looks washed out, as if a sponge has been drawn across it. There’s nothing to catch your attention. No eyes, no eyebrows, no mouth. All her features are smudged, somehow blurred together. Nothing you could call diabolical here. Just a boring lump. The sort of woman you see in line at dispensaries for the poor, or at domestic service employment bureaus. Her eyes look so sleepy. Why do I seem to recognize them? I feel I’ve seen them before. A long time ago… in our village… the peasant woman who washed the dishes. Yes, that’s it, I remember now. When chickens had to be slaughtered, she always put herself forward. The old cook never had to ask her—she just went out into the yard and got on with it. Every time. Those very same eyes, yes, I remember them clearly.
27
The poem Olyonushka recites is “
28
In Gogol’s story “Christmas Eve” (1832), the blacksmith makes the sign of the cross over the devil. This forces the devil to let the blacksmith ride on his back.