The crush at the station was unimaginable. Troop trains were occupying nearly all the lines. We didn’t know whether they were just arriving or just departing. They probably didn’t even know themselves.
Everyone looked bewildered, resentful, and tired.
With some difficulty we made our way to our allocated train car. It was third class, which seemed to mean three tiers of sleeping boards. Our cases were thrown in after us.
The train stood at the station for a long time. Official and unofficial departure times had all long come and gone. We were on the second track and there were trains full of soldiers on either side of us. We could hear yells and shots. Through the gaps between cars we could see people rushing about in panic.
Sometimes people would come to our car with the latest news.
“We’re all going to be thrown out. The train’s being requisitioned for troops.”
“Anyway, you can only go about seven miles. Then there’s a junction controlled by the Bolsheviks.”
“A train that came under fire has just pulled in. With dead and wounded on board.”
Dead. Wounded. How accustomed we had grown to these words. No one felt any particular alarm or distress. No one said, “How awful!” or “What a tragedy!”
Our way of life had changed, and, in accord with this new way of life, we just thought, “Remove the dead and bandage the wounded.”
The words were a part of our everyday language. And we ourselves could well become “dead” or “wounded,” perhaps at this next junction, perhaps soon after it.[64]
Someone’s teapot had been stolen. And this occasioned as much (if not more) interest and discussion as the question of the Bolshevik-controlled junction—or the possibility of our train crew now being so frightened that we might not even leave the station at all.
All of a sudden a cardboard box fell on someone’s head. This was a good sign. A newly attached locomotive had sent a jolt through the carriages.
We were off.
We stopped many times. At dark stations or in the middle of nowhere, where there was more yelling and shooting and dancing pinpoints of light.
Soldiers with bayonets appeared in the doorways.
“Officers! To the end of the car!”
There were no officers in our car.
I remember seeing people running beside the track, past our windows. Breathless soldiers stormed into the car and stabbed under the benches with their bayonets.
And nobody knew what was going on, and nobody asked. Everyone sat quietly with their eyes closed, as if they were dozing, as if to show that they did not consider any of this to be in the least out of the ordinary.
We arrived in Odessa at night, to an unexpected welcome—we were locked inside the railway station and told we would not be allowed out until morning.
And that was that.
We arranged our things on the floor and sat down on top of them. It all felt very cosy. We were not being searched and we were not being shot at—what more could we want?
Hovering near me just before dawn, I saw a shadowy figure, a yellow vanity case in a delicate hand.
“Armand Duclos?”
“Yes.”
He too had been on our train. He sat down beside me and started talking. In his vanity case he was carrying some exceptionally important documents. He had already been offered a million dollars, but nothing would induce him to part with them.
“I think you should part with them.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I really don’t know. But it’s exhausting me terribly—never being able to let go of this vanity case.”
I dozed off. When I awoke, Armand was no longer there. By my feet lay his treasure, abandoned.
In the morning the station doors were unlocked and we were free to go out into the city. When the porters were piling our luggage into cabs, Armand’s vanity case, which had no lock, fell open—and out tumbled a bottle of Rue de la Paix[65] and a nail file. And nothing more.
Time passed without any of us so much as glimpsing Armand. In the end we placed an advertisement in the paper: “Can the clairvoyant Armand Duclos please divine the location of his vanity case!”
Followed by a name and address.
So began our days in Odessa.
The same faces appeared once again. And once again people came out with all the same nonsense.
People we thought had returned to Moscow proved to be here in Odessa. Those who should have been in Odessa had long since returned to Moscow.
And nobody knew anything for certain about anyone.
The man in charge of Odessa was the young, gray-eyed General Grishin-Almazov—and no one knew anything for certain about him either.[66] Even he himself seemed a little unsure how he had come to be the city’s military governor. He was, I suppose, a minor Napoleon—and his personality, like Napoleon’s, mattered less than the historical forces at play around him.
Grishin-Almazov was energetic, cheerful, and strong. He flaunted his buoyant energy; he wanted everyone to know about it. He loved literature and theater and there were rumors that he had once been an actor.
One day he even called on me and very kindly offered me accommodation at the Hotel London. And so I got a wonderful room—number sixteen. Vladimir Burtsev had stayed there before me and so there were piles of The Common Cause in every corner.[67]
Grishin-Almazov liked pomp and ceremony. When he visited me in the hotel, he always left a whole entourage in the corridor and two guards at the main entrance.
He was kind and considerate, easy to be with. He often spoke as if he had stepped straight from the pages of Yushkevich’s Leon Drey.[68]
“It’s very cold today,” he would say. “I emphasize the word: very.”
“Are you comfortable in this room? I emphasize the word: you.”
“Do you have books for reading? I emphasize the word: for.”
He encouraged the hotel commandant—a bearded colonel who used to walk around all day long with two wonderful white spitzes—to take special care of me.
Grishin-Almazov was, in short, extremely courteous.
These were difficult months for him.
“The omens bode ill”—it was not for nothing that this was a catch-phrase of the time.
As the Bolsheviks drew nearer, people were little by little being robbed of all they owned; criminal gangs had taken over the abandoned quarries that formed entire catacombs under the city. Grishin-Almazov once tried to negotiate with one of the ringleaders—the notorious “Mishka the Japanese.”[69] This evidently achieved little—from then on Grishin was unable to drive around town at anything less than full speed, since he had been promised “a bullet at a bend in the road.”
Nevertheless, people did creep out of their unheated flats in the evenings. They went to clubs and theaters to entertain one another with terrifying rumors. When it was time to go back home, they would gather in groups and get themselves an escort—usually about half a dozen students, armed with whatever they could lay their hands on. Rings would be tucked away inside cheeks, watches hidden in shoes. This was of little help.
“So the scoundrel cocks his ear, then homes in on the ticking. I tell him, ‘That’s the sound of my heart, I’m frightened.’ But why would they believe an honest man?”
The brigands would stop cab drivers, unharness their horses, and lead them down into their catacombs.
But we were not easily deterred. All night long, the theaters, clubs and restaurants remained crowded with people. Fabulous sums were lost at cards.
64
In “Slain Servants of the Lord,” an article published in Kiev in December 1918, Teffi wrote:
Horror, and words about death, no matter with how much emotion they are pronounced, no longer disturb us. They are now our simple, everyday vocabulary, as normal for us as “health” or “money.”
They do not call up any vivid, or painful, image in our minds.
“Where’s A?”
“Seems he’s been shot.”
“Where’s B?”
“Seems he’s still alive.”
We all seem to be alive, or maybe we seem to have died.
There in that “seems” we sway, like ghosts in the mist on a moonlit night.
66
Alexey Grishin-Almazov (1880–1919) was, during much of 1918, in command of the White armies in western Siberia. He then moved to the south of Russia. In December 1918, the French, then in control of Odessa, appointed him military governor.
67
Vladimir Burtsev (1862–1942) was a historian and journalist who served time in prison under both the tsarist and Soviet regimes. His newspaper