“No. Come over here—the light’s better. Now what do you call this? What’s this if it isn’t a gray hair?”
“I can’t see even a hint of gray. But as for me! Look—in the light!”
“No. You’re being mean and obstinate!”
“No, it’s me who’s gone gray. You’re just wanting an argument.”
“Some things never change. A true gentleman. Outshining us nobodies in every way!”
The hosts tiptoed reverently out of the room.
After these first moments of shared joy, M told me many interesting things.
M had, in the past, been anything but a military man—though he had served his country during the war. After the revolution, he had returned to his estate. When his hometown was besieged by the Bolsheviks, he had been chosen, as he put it, “to be the town dictator.”
“You won’t believe me, of course, but I have risked my life by carrying in my greatcoat lining decrees bearing my own signature.”
He showed me these decrees. He was telling the truth.
“The Bolsheviks brought up their artillery and began shelling us. We had to run,” he continued. “So there I was, riding through a field of rye. And then I saw two cornflowers right next to each other. There were none anywhere else, just these two. Like two blue eyes. And, would you believe it, I forgot where I was. I didn’t even hear the guns any longer. I stopped my horse, got down, and picked the cornflowers. All around me people were running, shouting, falling to the ground. But somehow I wasn’t even in the least scared. Why was that? Was it bravery?”
He stopped to think.
“And then?”
“Next it was the Volga. It’s absurd! I was in command of a fleet. We didn’t fight at all badly. Remember what a fortune-teller said to me around five years ago? How not long before my death I’d be an officer in the navy? And everyone made jokes about a big stout man like me wearing a hat with little ribbons. Well, the fortune-teller was right. Now I’m on my way to Paris and then—via America and Vladivostok—back to Admiral Kolchak. I’ll return his admiral’s cutlass to him, the one he threw into the water. The sailors fished it out and said I must take it back to him, with their compliments.”[78]
He said he’d seen Olyonushka in Rostov. She was acting in a theater there and living very happily with her husband, who looked like a schoolboy in military uniform. Olyonushka had become a strict vegetarian—she would cook some sort of twigs for herself and steal pieces of meat from her husband’s plate.
“Why not just put some meat on your plate to begin with, Olyonushka?” M had asked.
Olyonushka’s little husband had gone red in the face with agitation: “Oh no, no! Don’t say such things. You’ll make her angry. She has her convictions.”
M was preparing for a long journey. He was in a hurry. It was important to establish more reliable communications with Kolchak and, in particular, to pass on to him various decisions taken by the authorities in Odessa. M was the first messenger to have got through from Kolchak.
He was in good spirits. He believed ardently in Kolchak and the White cause. “I will gladly, and with no thought for myself, carry out this mission that has been entrusted to me. I feel at peace with myself. Only one thing troubles me—my black opal ring. The opal has cracked—cracked in the shape of a cross. What do you think that means?”
I did not say, but there was no doubting this omen. Exactly a month later, M died.
He had very much wanted to get me out of Odessa. “The omens bode ill!”—as people kept saying.
M was leaving on a torpedo boat and he promised to secure me the necessary permissions. But the weather was vile, there were ferocious storms out at sea, and I refused to go with him.
Countless friendly voices were telling M that I would be all right, that he had nothing to worry about:
“No, if Odessa has to be evacuated, we certainly won’t forget Nadezhda Alexandrovna. Surely you understand that!”
“She’ll be first to board the steamer, I give you my word!”
“As if any of us could leave Odessa without first making sure she can leave too! How absurd can you get!”
(Things did indeed get absurd, but not in the way these people meant.)
I was awoken early in the morning. It was very cold. There were blue shadows on M’s pale cheeks.
When someone wakes you early on a blind winter’s morning, it’s always for a farewell, or a funeral, or on account of some misfortune, or some terrible news. And in the dim, sunless light your body trembles; every drop of blood in your body trembles.
There were blue shadows on M’s cheeks.
“Well, farewell. I’m going now. Make the sign of the cross over me.”
“God be with you.”
“This time it probably won’t be for long. Not long at all.”
But in that gloomy dawn, that ghostly image of my future, I had no hope at all of any sweet and simple joys. I repeated quietly, “God be with you. But as for whether we’ll see each other again—who knows? We know nothing at all—every time we part, it’s forever.”
And that was the last we saw of each other.
A year later, the Russian consul in Paris gave me the ring with the black opal.
All M’s other belongings had gone. After M’s death, some opportunist staying in the same hotel had gone into his room and taken everything. He had taken luggage, clothes, linen, rings, a cigarette case, a watch, even little bottles of scent, but he hadn’t dared touch the black opal. He must have sensed something about it.
That opal had an interesting history.
At one time—around the beginning of the war—I had had something of a passion for gemstones. I had studied them and collected legends about them.[79] And an old man by the name of Konoplyov used to come round, bringing precious stones from the Urals, and sometimes even from India. He was someone I felt at ease with—a sweet old man with only one eye. He would spread a piece of black velvet on the table, under the lamp, and with long thin tweezers he called “scoopers” he would reach into the box and take out little shining lights—blue, green and red. He would lay them out on the velvet, examine them, and tell stories about them. Sometimes a stone would misbehave, refusing to yield to the scoopers. It would struggle like a live fledgling, giving off sparks of fear.
“There’s a stubborn one for you,” the old man would grumble. “Balas ruby, orange—a hot orange, see? And here’s a sapphire. Look at how it flowers. Blue, green, like the eye on a peacock’s tail. What matters in a sapphire is not whether it’s light or dark, but at what point it turns lilac, at what point it flowers. You need to understand this.”
You could spend long hours sitting with the tweezers and turning over the cold little lights. I would remember legends: “If you show an emerald to a snake, tears will flow from its eyes. The emerald is the color of the Garden of Eden. Bitterly does the snake remember its sin.”
“Amethyst is a chaste and humble stone. Its touch is cleansing. The ancients used to drink from amethyst cups, lest wine intoxicate them. Of the High Priest’s twelve stones, none was more important than the amethyst. And the Pope blesses Books of Prayer with an amethyst.”
“Ruby is the stone of those who are in love. It intoxicates without touch.”
“Alexandrite—our astonishing stone from the Urals—was first found during the reign of Alexander II. Prophetically, it was named after him. Its shifting colors foretold the tsar’s fate—blossoming days and a bloody sunset.”[80]
“And the diamond, a clear jasper, symbolizes the life of Christ.”
I loved stones. And what wonderful freaks there were among them: a light blue amethyst, a yellow sapphire, another sapphire that was pale blue except for a bright yellow spot of sunlight. Konoplyov called this a “flaw”—but if you ask me, that sapphire had a hot little heart.
78
In June 1917, mutinous sailors of the Black Sea Fleet decided to confiscate their officers’ weapons. Rather than surrender his ceremonial cutlass, Kolchak threw it into the sea. It was later returned to him, with a respectful message.
79
Teffi’s first books, both in fact published several years before the beginning of the War, were two volumes titled
80
This stone was first discovered in April 1834, on the sixteenth birthday of the future Tsar Alexander II. Green or bluish-green in daylight, it turns a soft shade of red under incandescent light. “The bloody sunset” refers to the tsar’s assassination in 1881.