And so Gooskin and I parted amicably. After we had finished all our goodbyes, he poked his head through the door again and asked anxiously, “Do you eat curd fritters?”
“What? When?” I asked in surprise.
“Some time,” Gooskin replied.
And so we parted.
Olyonushka was the next to leave. She had been offered work at a theater in Rostov.
Just before leaving, she said she wanted to have a heart to heart with me, to ask my advice about a matter of great complexity.
I took her to a patisserie where, dripping tears into her hot chocolate and whipped cream, she told me her story: Vladimir was terribly in love with her and he lived in Rostov. But Dmitry, who lived here in Kiev, was also terribly in love with her. Vladimir was eighteen and Dmitry was nineteen. Both were officers. She loved Vladimir, but she had to marry Dmitry.
“Why?”
Olyonushka sobbed and almost choked on her cake: “I must! I simply m-m-m-ust!”
“Wait, Olyonushka. And please don’t howl like that. If you want to know what I think, you must tell me everything.”
“It’s not easy,” said Olyonushka, still weeping. “It’s all quite awful! Awful!”
“Stop it, Olyonushka! Stop it! You’ll make yourself ill.”
“I can’t, the tears just keep coming….”
“Well, at the very least, stop eating cakes. You’re on your eighth now, you’ll make yourself ill.”
Olyonushka gave a despairing shrug. “What do I care? I’d be only too happy to die—it would solve everything. But yes, you’re right. I am starting to feel a little sick….”
Olyonushka’s story was indeed emotionally complex. She loved Vladimir, but he was someone bright and cheerful and always lucky in life. Whereas Dmitry was very poor and somehow always unlucky. Everything was going wrong for him and she didn’t even love him. All this meant that she simply had to marry him. It just wasn’t right for someone to have to suffer so much: “It’ll be the death of the poor man!”
At this point her howls became so alarming that the elderly owner of the café came out from behind the counter, shook her head sympathetically and gently stroked Olyonushka’s hair.
“She’s a kind woman!” sobbed Olyonushka. “You must give her a good tip!”
Three days later we saw Olyonushka off on her way to Rostov.
The trains were all crammed with people, and it was only with difficulty that we managed to get her a seat. We sent a telegram to the ticket office in Kharkov, to reserve a sleeping berth for her in the night train from there to Rostov, and we gave her a letter to show when she reached Kharkov.
A week later we received a letter from Olyonushka, telling the awful story of how a certain determined officer had insisted on his right to die.
There had been only one berth left in the sleeper from Kharkov, and this was duly assigned to Olyonushka. But an officer standing just behind her in the line demanded that he himself should be given this berth. The man in the ticket office argued with him, showing him our telegram and explaining that the berth was reserved. But the officer remained intransigent. He was an officer, he said, and he had been fighting for the fatherland. He was exhausted and needed to sleep. In the end, Olyonushka gave up her berth to him and crossly took a seat in a second-class carriage.
In the middle of the night she was woken by a terrible jolt and almost thrown from her seat. Cardboard boxes and suitcases flew down from the overhead luggage racks. The frightened passengers all rushed to the end of the carriage. The train was not moving. Olyonushka jumped down and ran toward the front of the train, where there was a crowd of shouting people.
Under full steam, their locomotive had collided with a freight train. The two front cars had been smashed to splinters. Having so eloquently asserted his right to die, the unfortunate officer was being retrieved from the wreckage piece by piece.
“So you don’t always help someone by giving in to them,” Olyonushka concluded.
The thought that the officer had died “because of her” was evidently causing her great distress.
A month after this we received a telegram: “Vladimir and Olyona ask you to pray for God’s blessing.”
We understood that they had married.
I began work at Kiev Thought.[53]
These were wild and hectic times. The air was full of confused rumors about Petlyura.[54]
“Who is this man anyway?”
“An accountant,” said some.
“An escaped convict,” said others.
Whether he was an accountant or a convict, he had also worked for Kiev Thought, if only in a modest capacity. Apparently he had been a proofreader.
The place where we newly arrived “scribes” met most often was the house of the journalist Mikhail Milrud.[55] He was a wonderful man. And we were given a warm welcome by his kind and beautiful wife and their three-year-old son Alyoshka. Alyoshka had been born into the world of journalism, and the games he played were always linked to political events. He would be a Bolshevik, a White, a member of some unidentified “band” or, later on—Petlyura himself. On one occasion, under cover of the scraping of chair legs and the tinkle of teacups and spoons, “Petlyura” crept up to me on all fours, let out a wild shriek, and sank his sharp teeth into my leg.
Milrud’s wife had never before been involved in any kind of charitable work. Nevertheless, when crowds of hungry soldiers—former prisoners of war released from camps in Germany—began to arrive in Kiev and representatives of various organizations took to pontificating about our duty to society and how dangerous it would be to create a class of angry and embittered young men, who would be only too ready to listen to Bolshevik propaganda, she at once began cooking cabbage soup and buckwheat. Without the least drama, without making any political demands of anyone, she would go quietly along to the barracks with a few servants and feed up to twenty soldiers a day.
More and more people kept arriving in Kiev.
I met some old acquaintances from Petersburg—a very senior official, almost a government minister, and his family. The Bolsheviks had tortured and killed his brother, and he had only just managed to escape them himself. Shaking with hatred and sounding like an Old Testament prophet, he would repeat, “I will not know peace until with my own hands, there on the grave of my brother, I have slaughtered enough Bolsheviks for the blood to seep down into his coffin.”
He is now working quietly in an office in Petersburg. It appears he has, after all, managed to find peace, with or without seeping blood.
Vasilevsky appeared, with plans for a new newspaper. People got together, conferred, and drew up agendas.
Then Vasilevsky disappeared.[56]
In the weeks before Petlyura’s arrival people were disappearing all the time. Anxiety was in the air. Even the slightest tremors registered on the sensitive membranes of the most alert souls—and these souls quickly took their bodies somewhere calmer and safer.
I had an unexpected visit from a tall young man in a strange dark-blue uniform—one of the Hetman’s retinue. With great eloquence he tried to persuade me to become involved with a new newspaper that the Hetman was setting up. He said that the Hetman was a colossus and that I must support him with my feuilletons.
53
During her three months in Kiev, from October 7, 1918, until January 1919, Teffi published at least twenty articles and sketches, gave public readings, and helped to arrange for the production of several of her plays, as well as writing a new one-act play for the opening night of a new theater (
54
Symon Petlyura (1879–1926), a writer, journalist and socialist politician, was the leading figure in Ukraine’s unsuccessful struggle for independence. After the February 1917 revolution, he joined the Ukrainian Central Rada (“council”), which in June 1917 proclaimed Ukraine an autonomous republic. Soon after this, however, the Germans occupied Ukraine and established a puppet government led by Pavlo Skoropadsky, who was officially known as “the Hetman” (a historic title that had not been used since the seventeenth century). When the Germans withdrew, Petlyura, now heading the five-member directorate of the Rada, seized power. Petlyura then had to confront both the Reds and the Whites. When the White armies, which had occupied Ukraine and replaced Petlyura’s government at the end of 1918, withdrew in the autumn of 1919, Ukraine fell under Soviet authority. During the Russo-Polish War of 1919–20 Petlyura allied with the Poles. The Poles repelled the Red Army from Poland itself but failed to secure independence for Ukraine.
55
Mikhail Milrud (1883–1942) had previously, like Teffi, worked for the
56
Ilya Vasilevsky (1883–1938) was a prominent journalist. Together with his wife, he left Kiev for Odessa and then Constantinople. Vasilevsky later returned to the Soviet Union in 1923. He was shot in the purges: http://www.bulgakov.ru/b/belozerskaya/.