He repeats the words, quietly but no less seriously, “Lieutenant Schwenn.”
Then he turns on his heels and walks away. Victory! I run off to find Gooskin.
Hurrying about between the flickering beams from the lanterns is a shadowy figure. It is, of course, Gooskin.
“Gooskin! Gooskin! The soldier said ‘Lieutenant Schwenn.’ Do you understand me?”
“Huh! I’ve already heard that from at least a dozen people. Schwenn’s in there, with the officer in command. We have to wait.”
I go back to the others.
The soldier’s patriotism is now blazing so ardently that he can no longer quiet it. “Lieutenant Schwenn!” he repeats, looking away from us. “Nun? Lieutenant Schwenn.”
Eventually I say, “Schon! Already!”[44]
The soldier’s eyebrows and ears twitch a little. Then he calms down.
Gooskin comes back.
“Well?” I ask.
“A complete trifle! So cheap I felt well and truly ashamed! Ri-ight? But you have to go and talk to the officer yourselves. He’s the one who issues passes. He’ll give you one all right, but you must ask in person.”
Along we go, with no idea what we’re going to say to this officer.
We find him at his desk, a German with an entourage of junior Ukrainian officers.
“Why the hurry?” ask the Ukrainians. “Why not stay here for a while?”
“We’ve got no choice. We have to hurry. We’re performing the day after tomorrow in Kiev and we really must be there on time.”
Some of the officers have heard of us. They smile shyly and make little jokes.
“Instead of making us wait here, you should take some leave and come to see our show in Kiev,” says Averchenko. “We’re inviting all of you. Come along. Yes, you really must!”
The young officers look excited: “A show? And you’ll be performing? Oh, if only we could!”
“Quarantine? How can there even be any question of quarantine?” Gooskin interrupts. “These are Russian writers! They’re so brimming with health that God forbid—have you ever heard of a Russian writer getting ill? Huh! See what a Russian writer looks like!”
And he proudly exhibits Averchenko. He even pulls his coat open.
“Does he look like he’s sick? No, certainly not. And the day after tomorrow, they’re putting on a show. Such a show that I would certainly go flocking to it myself. A show that will go down forever in the canals of history. And if we really do need some quarantine, then we can find it in Kiev. Honest to God! We’ll find one of your quarantines and stay there for a while. Why not? Ri-ight?”
“Please say a word on our behalf to your German,” I ask the officers.
They click their heels, whisper among themselves for a few minutes, then put some documents in front of the German. At which point Gooskin turns to me and says with great seriousness, “And whatever you do, please be sure to say that it was I who went into quarantine first of all. Otherwise they might try and keep me here! And it’s five months now since I last saw my mama.”
Turning to the astonished officers, he pronounces in the most solemn of tones, “For five months now I have been located outside my mother.”
Once again we were on a train.
In Gomel, some kind people had suggested we go to Kiev by steamer: “You’ll go past an island that’s been taken over by some kind of armed band. They’ve got machine guns. They shoot at every steamer that goes by.”
Cosy as this sounded, we had chosen to go by train.
Our first-class carriage was entirely adequate, but there were few passengers and nearly all of them rather strange—peasants, it appeared, in peasant smocks. They sat without saying a word, moving only their eyebrows. There was also a bearded man with a gold tooth who didn’t look in the least like a peasant. His overcoat was rather grubby, but his hands were smooth and pudgy. The wedding ring on his ring finger had sunk deep into the flesh.
A strange lot. But there was no sign of any malice in their stares. It was not like when we were leaving Moscow; then people had looked at us with real fury—the intelligentsia suspecting we might be from the Cheka while the workers and peasants had seen us as capitalist landlords still drinking their blood.
“Well, not long now till Kiev,” said Gooskin, who was keeping us entertained with soothing chatter.
“In Kiev, I shall introduce you to a friend of mine,” he said to Olyonushka. “A very nice, profoundly cultured young man. Lotos.”
“What?”
“Lotos.”
“An Indian?” Olyonushka asked reverently. In her eyes I glimpsed a vision of yogis, of an apple tree she had planted and the fruit it was bearing.
“What makes you think that?” said Gooskin, offended on his friend’s behalf. “He’s a salesman, a salesman for Lotos. Optical glass. He’s from an aristocratic family. His uncle had a pharmaceutical warehouse in Berdyansk. He wants to get married.”
“And you, Gooskin? Are you married?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“My demands are excessive.”
“What are your demands?”
“First, she needs to be buxom.” Gooskin lowered his eyes, paused and added, “And of course, she must have a dowry.”
“And tell us, Gooskin! What’s your first name? The way we keep calling you by your surname feels a little strange.”
Gooskin gave an embarrassed smile.
“My name? You’re all going to laugh.”
“Heavens, what makes you think that?”
“Honest to God, you will. I’m not telling you.”
“Dear Gooskin, we won’t laugh! We give you our word. Tell us!”
“Olyonushka,” I whisper. “Don’t be too insistent. Maybe it sounds like some rude word.”
“Don’t be silly…. Please tell us, Gooskin. What’s your real name?”
Gooskin blushed. With a helpless shrug of the shoulders, he said, “My name is… I’m sorry, it’s a bit of a joke! Alexander Nikolaevich! Well, now you know.”
We had indeed been expecting anything but this.
“Gooskin! Gooskin! You’re killing us!”
Gooskin laughed louder than any of us.[45] He was wiping his eyes with a rag of indescribable color that, in more elegant times, had probably been a handkerchief.
7
THE CLOSER we get to Kiev, the more animated the train stations.
Station buffets begin to appear. Walking along the platforms are people with oily lips and shiny cheeks, still chewing. On their faces is a look of amazed satisfaction. Posters on the walls bear witness to a demand for culture: “A Stupendous Dog Show—After the Method of the Renowned Durovs”;[46] “A Troupe of Lilliputians”; “With a Full Local Repertoire—an Actress from the Alexandria Theater.”
“Well, life’s literally taking a full swing at us here!” says Gooskin. “Look at these posters! Nicely done. Ri-ight? I’d certainly go flocking to these shows myself!”
German policemen are everywhere—squeaky clean, brightly polished, and tightly packed with Ukrainian fatback and bread.
We have to change trains twice more. We have no idea why.
On a platform in one of the bigger stations, Averchenko, Gooskin, and the actress with the little dog, all conspicuously tall, are standing in the middle of a waiting crowd. A breathless figure with eyes darting about in bewilderment, with a bowler hat on the back of his head and an unbuttoned coat billowing like a lopsided sail, suddenly runs up to them and says, “Excuse me for asking—you’re not the Lilliputians, are you?”
45
At the end of the nineteenth century Jews constituted nearly forty percent of the population of Odessa. The ever-alert Gooskin, with his colorful way of speech, answers perfectly to the Russian stereotype of a Jewish Odessan businessman. The quintessential Russianness of his first name and patronymic is therefore unexpected. It is this that makes everyone laugh.
46
Anatoly Durov (1865–1916) and his elder brother Vladimir (1863–1936) were famous trainers of circus dogs. Unlike most trainers before them, who had relied on pain and fear, they used mainly positive encouragement—the carrot rather than the stick.