The buffet is stuffy and it looks like there will be a long wait. I leave the station building.
The cheerful, sunny day will soon have faded. But the streets are full of life, with people hurrying from store to store… And then I see a wonderful and unprecedented scene, like a dream from a life forgotten, something improbable, exhilarating and even awe-inspiring—in the door of a bakery stands an officer with epaulettes on his shoulders, eating a cake! An officer with e-pau-lettes on his shoulders! Eating a cake! So there are still Russian officers in the world who can stand outside on a bright sunny afternoon with epaulettes on their shoulders. Instead of hiding away in basements like hunted animals, sick and hungry, wrapped in rags, knowing that their very existence threatens the lives of their loved ones…
Just imagine—daylight, sunshine, people everywhere, and in the officer’s hand, an unseen, unheard-of luxury, the stuff of legend—a cake!
I close my eyes and open them again. No, it isn’t a dream. So it must be real life. But how very strange this all is…
Might we all have grown so unaccustomed to life that we can never find our way back into it again?
My first impression is that the whole world (the whole of Kiev) is brimming with food, bursting with food. Steam and smoke billowing out of every door and window. Shops crammed with hams, sausages, turkeys, stuffed suckling pigs. And on the streets, against the backdrop of these stuffed suckling pigs—le tout Moscou et le tout Pétersbourg.
8
FOR A MOMENT all this seems like a festival.
But soon it begins to feel more like a station waiting room, just before the final whistle.
The hustle and bustle is too restless, too greedy to be a true festival. There is too much anxiety and fear in it. No one is giving any real thought either to their present or to their future. Everyone just grabs what they can, knowing they may have to drop it again at any moment.
The streets are swarming with newcomers. People have grouped together in the oddest of combinations: a Moscow city councillor with an actress from Rostov, a balalaika player with a lady who had been an eminent public figure, an important courtier with a smart, young provincial reporter, a rabbi’s son with the governor of a province, an actor from a small cabaret with two elderly ladies-in-waiting… And they all appear somehow bewildered—they keep glancing around, clutching at one another. Never mind who your companion may be—at least there’s a human hand, a human shoulder, close beside you.
The seven pairs of clean beasts and seven pairs of unclean beasts must have felt something similar in Noah’s ark. They had only just met, they were still introducing themselves, giving one another a friendly sniff—and then there they were, all feeling seasick together as they were rocked about by the rising waters.
Promenading along Kreshchatik[49] are many of those who had gone missing without a trace. Here is the public figure who, only a month before, flaring his nostrils impressively, had declared that we must not leave, that we must work and die at our posts.
“But how come you’ve left your post?” I call out unkindly.
“It had come to be too much of a whipping post, my dear!” he replies, doing his best to brazen it out. “First let me get my strength back a little. And then—who knows?”
And all the while his eyes dart anxiously about. Here, there, and everywhere.
Kreshchatik bustles with life. It is a place for both business and pleasure. In the middle of the pavement stands a well-known, all-knowing journalist. Like the host at some grand reception, he nods this way and that way, shakes hands to his left and to his right, walks a few steps with particularly eminent figures, grants others only a casual wave.
“Ah! At last!” he calls out to me. “We were expecting you here last week.”
“We?”
“Kiev!”
The crowd carries me forward and Kiev shouts after me, “See you tonight! You know, at—”
That’s all I manage to hear.
“We all dine there,” says a voice beside me.
It’s a lawyer I know. He too had disappeared from Petersburg without warning.
“How long have you been here?” I ask. “Why didn’t you come and say goodbye before you left? We were worried about you.”
He gives an embarrassed shrug.
“You know, the way it all happened… It really was most absurd…”
I hear cheery greetings from all sides—more than I have time to acknowledge.
I come across a colleague of mine from the Russian Word. “You wouldn’t believe it!” he says. “The city’s gone mad! Open any newspaper you like—you’ll find all the best writers from both Moscow and Petersburg! The theaters have been taken over by the finest of artistic talents. The Bat is here. Sobinov is here. There’s going to be a cabaret with Kurikhin in it. Ozarovsky’s staging special evenings of short plays. New plays are expected from you too. You’ll be asked to write for Kiev Thought. Vlas Doroshevich is here already, I’ve heard, and Lolo’s expected any day. We’re soon going to have a new newspaper—financed by the Hetman and edited by Gorelov. Vasilevsky’s thinking of starting a newspaper too. We won’t let you go. Life’s in full swing here.”[50]
I remember Gooskin’s words about life “taking a full swing at us.”
“People here don’t know what’s hit them,” my companion continues. “Now they’ve seen what visitors are being paid, the local journalists are talking of going on strike. ‘We’re the only ones you can rely on,’ they say. ‘Any day now our visitors will be moving on.’ And the restaurants are simply inundated by all the new customers. Cultural ‘corners’ and ‘circles’ are springing up in every square. Yevreinov will be here soon—we’ll be able to open a ‘theater of new forms.’ And we really need a Stray Dog.[51] This is a matter of the utmost urgency whose day has well and truly dawned.”
“I’m only passing through,” I say. “I’m being taken to Odessa to give some readings.”
“Odessa? Now? What do you want to go to Odessa for? It’s chaos there. You should wait until things have settled down a little. No, we’re not letting you go.”
“We?”
“Kiev.”
Heavens!
Next I see a round, familiar face—a woman I know from Moscow.
“We’ve been here for ages,” she says proudly. “We are, after all, a Kiev family. My husband’s father used to have a house here, right on Kreshchatik. Yes, we’re true Kiev natives…. You know, they have very decent crêpe de chine here…. My dressmaker—”
“Will you be going to Mashenka’s tonight?”[52] interrupts the loud bass of an actor. “She’s here for a few guest appearances…. The coffee there is divine. Made with cream and cognac….”
Everyone eats and drinks. Everyone drinks, eats, and nods in agreement: Quick! Quick! All that matters is to have one more drink and one more meal and then to snatch up more food and drink to take with you! The last whistle is about to sound.
Olyonushka arranged for me to stay with some friends of hers. The eldest of the three girls worked in an office; the younger two were still in high school.
All three were in love with a tenor at the local opera; they were very sweet, gobbling away in their excitement like little turkeys.
They lived in a wing of a large house. The yard was so densely stacked with firewood that you needed a perfect knowledge of the approach channel in order to maneuver your way to their door. Newcomers would run aground and, their strength failing, start to shout for help. This was the equivalent of a doorbell and the girls would calmly say to one another, “Lily, someone’s coming. Can’t you hear? They’re in the firewood.”
50
Leonid Sobinov (1872–1934) was a well-known tenor; he remained in the Soviet Union. Fyodor Kurikhin (1881–1951) was a well-known actor; he too remained in the Soviet Union. Yury Ozarovsky (1869–1924) was an actor, director, theater critic and drama teacher; he died in Paris. Vlas Doroshevich (1864–1922) was a journalist and writer of short stories; after living in the Crimea from autumn 1918, he returned to Petrograd in May 1921 and died there in February 1922. According to the literary historian Yury Kaplan, as many as eighty newspapers, magazines, and almanacs opened in Kiev at this time (Haber, chapter 6). It was widely felt that the realistic theater had had its day, and there was a vogue for cabarets, sketches, and short plays of all kinds. Teffi’s graceful witty playlets—the best-known of which was
51
The Stray Dog was a café in Petersburg, a famous meeting place for writers and poets. Between January 1, 1912, and its closure on March 3, 1915, nearly all the main poets of the time—regardless of their political or artistic affiliations—gave readings there. Part of Teffi’s story “The Dog” (included in
52
Most likely, this was the actress Maria Zan’kovetska (1854–1934), a key figure in the revival of a Ukrainian national theater.