In the morning, stupefied by wine, gambling, and cigar smoke, bankers and sugar manufacturers would emerge from these clubs and blink their puffy eyelids at the sun. Shadowy figures from Moldavanka[70] would be hanging about in doorways, sifting the piles of nutshells and sausage skins for scraps and leftovers. Their eyes hungry and sullen, they would stand and watch as the revelers walked away.[71]
13
The horses of Phoebus are racing downhill.
SO OUR days in Odessa went by. And then they started to fly faster and faster—so fast that they overtook one another.
Clubs, cabarets, little theaters, all came and went.
Some middle-aged gentlemen called round without introduction to ask me to “lend my name” to some kind of “salon.” A profoundly artistic salon. Including card games and a hot dinner.
“And what will my role be?”
“You will be the hostess and you will receive a monthly fee.”
“But I know nothing about card games and nothing about hot dinners. I think you’re a bit muddled.”
They shuffled about a little, then increased their offer.
It was clear that we did not understand one another.
In the end they managed to find some popular chanteuse. And everything went like clockwork. That is, they would be closed down, pay a bribe, reopen, be closed down again, pay another bribe, etc.
“Do your police take bribes?” I asked Grishin-Almazov.
“How can you ask such a thing! The money goes exclusively to charitable works. I emphasize the word: goes,” he replied buoyantly.
At first we refugees found life in Odessa most entertaining.
“Hardly a city at all—more like one long laugh!”
One Odessa actress kept phoning me. She wanted my songs. She had a grand piano—so I really must go to her apartment.
“All right. I’ll come round tomorrow, about five o’clock.”
A sigh.
“Could you possibly, perhaps, come at six? It’s just that at five we always drink tea…”
“Are you quite sure an hour will be long enough for your tea?”
Sometimes we would all get together in the evenings and read aloud from the newspapers. The writers liked to pile it on thick, and their articles contained many small gems:
“The ballerina danced beautifully, which is more than can be said of the scenery.”
“During the climatic scene of Ostrovsky’s The Storm, with Roshchina-Insarova playing the title role…”
“The artiste performed Ernst’s Elegy quite wonderfully and his violin wept, though he was only wearing a rather ordinary jacket.”
“A steamer drove straight up the pier.”
“On Monday night Raya Lipshits, the merchant’s daughter, broke one of her legs underneath her bicycle.’
But life in Odessa soon began to pall. A joke is not so funny when you’re living inside it. It begins to seem more like a tragedy.
But there was one ray of light. Our much-loved editor Fyodor Blagov[72] arrived in Odessa and started gathering around him the former staff of the Russian Word. The Russian Word was to come out in Odessa. There were a number of us who were keen to write for it, and things quickly began to fall into place.
Around the beginning of spring, the poet Maximilian Voloshin[73] appeared in the city. He was in the grip of a poetic frenzy. Wherever I went, I would glimpse his picturesque silhouette: dense, square beard, tight curls crowned with a round beret, a light cloak, knickerbockers, and gaiters. He was doing the rounds of government institutions and people with the right connections, constantly reciting his poems. There was more to this than was at first apparent. The poems served as keys. To help those who were in trouble Voloshin needed to pass through certain doors—and his poems opened these doors. He’d walk into some office and, while people were still wondering whether or not to announce his presence to their superiors, he would begin to recite. His meditations on the False Dmitry[74] and other Russian tragedies were dense and powerful; lines evoking the fateful burden of history alternated with soaring flights of prophecy. An ecstatic crowd of young typists would gather around him, oohing and aah-ing, letting out little nasal squeals of horrified delight. Next you would hear the clatter of typewriter keys—Voloshin had begun to dictate some of his longer poems. Someone in a position of authority would poke his head around the door, his curiosity piqued, and then lead the poet into his office. Soon the dense, even hum of bardic declamation would start up again, audible even through the closed door.
On one occasion I too received a visit of this nature.
Voloshin recited two long poems and then said that we must do something at once on behalf of the poetess Kuzmina-Karavayeva, who had been arrested (in Feodosya I think), because of some denunciation and was in danger of being shot.[75]
“You’re friends with Grishin-Almazov, you must speak to him straightaway.”
I knew Kuzmina-Karavayeva well enough to understand at once that any such denunciation must be a lie.
“And in the meantime,” said Voloshin, “I’ll go and speak to the Metropolitan.[76] Karavayeva’s a graduate of the theological academy. The Metropolitan will do all he can for her.”
I called Grishin-Almazov.
“Are you sure?” he responded. “Word of honor?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll give the order tomorrow. All right?”
“No, not tomorrow,” I said. “Today. And it’s got to be a telegram. I’m very concerned—we might be too late already!”
“Very well. I will send a telegram. I emphasize the words: I will.”
Kuzmina-Karavayeva was released.
In Novorossiisk, in Yekaterinodar, in Rostov-on-Don—at all the remaining staging posts of our journey—I would again encounter the light cloak, the gaiters, and the round beret crowning the tight curls. On each occasion I heard sonorous verse being declaimed to the accompaniment of little squeals from women with flushed, excited faces. Wherever he went, Voloshin was using the hum—or boom—of his verse to rescue someone whose life was endangered.
My old friend M appeared in Odessa. Bearing a dispatch from Admiral Kolchak in Vladivostok,[77] he had made his way across the whole of Siberia, through areas controlled by the Bolsheviks; the dispatch—written not on paper but on thin cloth—had been sewn into his greatcoat lining. His hosts, a family we both knew, told him I was in Odessa and telephoned me straightaway to tell me to come round. Our meeting was joyful, but strange. M’s hosts were all huddled together in one corner of the room so as not to be in our way. Overcome with emotion, an old family nanny was peering through a crack in the door. Everyone went quiet, waiting with baited breath, imagining the scene they were about to witness: a meeting between two friends each of whom had thought that the other had died. Many tears would be shed…What times we were living through…
I went in.
“Michel! My dear! I’m so glad to see you…”
“Not as glad as I am! Things haven’t been easy. Look at all my gray hairs!”
“Nonsense. I can’t see a single one. But as for me! Just take a look at my left temple. Please don’t make out you can’t see them!”
“Not one. Literally, not even one.”
70
The Moldavanka was a poor part of Odessa, with a reputation for criminality. The writer Isaak Babel was born there, and it provides the setting for his “Odessa Tales,” a cycle of stories about the life of Jewish gangsters.
71
This paragraph is, in effect, a condensed version of “The Last Breakfast,” the last article Teffi published in Odessa. See appendix, p. 231.
72
Fyodor Blagov (1886–1934), the last editor of the
73
Maximilian Voloshin (1877–1932) was a leading figure among the Russian Symbolist poets of the early twentieth century. For over a decade his large house in Koktebel, where he both wrote and painted, was a refuge for writers and artists of all political and artistic persuasions. Among his hundreds of guests were Maxim Gorky, Nikolay Gumilyov, Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam, and Marina Tsvetaeva. In 1924 the house became a “House of Creativity” for Soviet writers, the first of the many such closed-access hotels that were a central part of the Soviet cultural world. In spite of a number of facile professions of faith in Russia’s purification through suffering, Voloshin’s poems about the Civil War and the subsequent Red Terror in the Crimea are courageous and incisive. Voloshin was steadfast in his refusal to accept any ideology as absolute truth. A poem titled “Civil War” ends:
Voloshin’s belief in the power of his words—what Marianna Landa refers to as “his Dostoevskian faith in the divine spark in the soul of the abominable criminal, and his Symbolist belief in the magic of the poetic word”—seems to have been unshakeable; his personal appeals to Red and White officials and commanders, on behalf of individuals in trouble, and his verse-prayers addressed to God, on behalf of his country, have much in common. Voloshin believed he could affect the course of events—and sometimes he did. That he escaped arrest and execution is astonishing. See
74
Grigory (or Grishka) Otrepyev, popularly known as “The False Dmitry,” was a monk who claimed to be Dmitry, the murdered son of Ivan the Terrible. He reigned for eleven months during 1605–6.
75
Yelizaveta Kuzmina-Karavayeva (1891–1945) was elected deputy mayor of the southern Russian town of Anapa in 1918. When the Whites captured the town, she was put on trial as a Bolshevik but acquitted. Her judge, Daniil Skobtsov, who had once been her teacher, then married her; their marriage (her second) fell apart in the late 1920s, but her writings are often published under her married name of Skobtsova. In 1932, in Paris, she took monastic vows, assuming the name of Mother Maria. During World War II she helped many Jews to escape the Nazis, often by providing them with baptismal certificates, but she was eventually sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. In March 1945, a week before the camp was liberated by the Red Army, she was sent to the gas chamber; according to one testimony, she voluntarily took the place of a Jewish woman. In 2004 she was canonized as a saint by the Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople. See also
76
In the Russian Orthodox Church a metropolitan is a high-ranking clergyman, senior to an archbishop and second only to a patriarch.
77
Admiral Alexander Kolchak (1874–1920) established a right-wing government in Siberia in late 1918 and was recognized as Supreme Commander by the other leaders of the White forces, not only in Siberia but also in the south of Russia.