Sometimes he would bring a piece of gray rock containing a whole litter of little emeralds. Like children lined up by height—getting smaller and smaller, wan, blind as puppies. They had been hurt; they had been dug up too early. To come to maturity, they would have needed to stay deep in the hot ore for many more millennia.
During this time when I was so in love with stones, the artist Alexander Yakovlev had come round with a few opals.[81] They were strange, dark opals. Some other artist had brought them from Ceylon and asked Yakovlev to sell them for him.
“Opals bring bad luck,” I had said. “I’m not sure I want them. But let me have a word with Konoplyov.”
Konoplyov said, “If you have doubts, you really mustn’t buy them. But let me show you some stones myself, some quite wonderful stones. And I can let you have them for almost nothing. Here, look. A whole necklace.”
He unfolded a chamois cloth and, one after another, took out twelve enormous and unbelievably beautiful opals. Pale moonlit mist. And in the moonlight, crimson and green lights flashing: “Stop… Go… Stop… Go…” The shifting colors both enticed and confused….
“You can have them for nothing,” Konoplyov repeated with a smile.
I was held by the play of the moonlight. You could stare at it and see only a quiet mist. A flash of light—and then, beside it, a second flash that swelled up into a flame. It would engulf the first; then both would vanish.
“For nothing. But there’s something I must tell you. I sold these stones, just as you see them, to Mrs. Martens, the wife of the professor. She liked them very much and bought them. But then, only the next morning, her servant came round with the stones; Mrs. Martens wanted me to take them back. Her husband, Professor Martens, had passed away in the night, quite unexpectedly. So, it’s up to you. If this story doesn’t put you off, please take them, but I won’t try to persuade you.”[82]
I didn’t take Konoplyov’s opals, but I decided to have one of the black ones from Ceylon. That evening I looked at it for a long time. It was beautiful. It had two lights—green and deep blue. And the flame leaping out from the opal was so powerful that it seemed to have a life of its own. It shivered and shimmered not inside the stone but in the air just above it.
I bought one opal. M bought another just like it.
And that’s when it all began.
I can’t say that the opal brought me any specific misfortune. It’s the pale, milky opals that bring death, sickness, sorrow, and separation. This one simply snatched up my life and embraced it with its black flame—until my soul began to dance like a witch on a bonfire. Howls, screeches, sparks, a fiery whirlwind. My whole way of life consumed, burned to ashes. I felt strange, savage, elated.
I kept the stone for about two years and then gave it back to Yakovlev, asking him, if he could, to return it to whoever had brought it to him from Ceylon. I thought that, like Mephistopheles, it needed to retrace its steps, to go back the same way it had come—and the sooner the better. If it tried to go any other way, it would get lost and end up in my hands again. Which was the last thing I wanted.
As for Yakovlev, I know he kept one stone for himself. I don’t know if he kept it for long, but I know that he too was snatched away by a blue-green wave, which spun him round and hurled him into faraway slant-eyed Asia.
And the stone M bought did something similar to his own quiet and peaceful life. His life had been so tranquiclass="underline" a soft armchair, an ivory paper knife between the rough pages of a book by his favourite poet, languid hands with nails polished like precious stones, a grand piano, a portrait of Oscar Wilde in a tortoiseshell frame, Kuzmin’s poems copied out in a minuscule script…[83]
And then—the languid hands dropped the uncut book. War, revolution, an absurd marriage, being chosen as the “dictator of his home town,” putting his signature to monstrous decrees, guerrilla warfare on the Volga, Admiral Kolchak, a long and terrible journey across Siberia. Odessa. Paris. Death. A deep cross-shaped fissure cutting through the black stone. The end.
New refugees kept appearing in Odessa: from Moscow, Petersburg, and Kiev.
It was easiest to obtain a travel pass if you were an actor or singer. The amount of artistic talent in Russia proved truly remarkable—opera and theater companies began to head south in droves.
“We got out with no trouble at all,” you would hear some Petersburg hairdresser say, smiling serenely. “I was the leading man, my wife was the ingénue, aunty Fima was the coquette, Mama was in charge of the box office and we had eleven prompters. We all got through. Of course, the proletariat was a little puzzled by the number of prompters, but we explained that no element of the dramatic art is more important. Without a prompter a play can’t run at all. And prompters get worn out sitting so still in their booths—and so this crucial element of the art has to be repeatedly replaced by fresh elements.”
There was an opera company made up entirely of noble fathers.
And a ballet company that was all elderly nannies and headmistresses.
Every new arrival adamantly asserted that the Bolshevik regime was falling apart and that, to be honest, it was hardly even worth unpacking one’s bags. But unpack them they did…
There was a general air of excitement, though you couldn’t quite call it high spirits.
“The Entente! The Triple Entente!”
We looked out to sea, hoping to glimpse British or French “pennants.”[84]
Money started slowly disappearing. Shopkeepers would give change in their own special notes, which they would later sometimes fail to recognize.
Everything was getting more expensive by the day. Once, a salesman pointed with tragic solemnity at a piece of cheese he was wrapping for me and said, “Keep an eye on it—it’s growing more expensive by the minute!”
“Well, wrap it up quickly,” I said. “Maybe the paper will slow it down.”
And then, all of a sudden, we lost Grishin-Almazov. He left Odessa incognito, without a word to anyone. There were urgent matters he needed to discuss with Kolchak. It was not long before we heard the tragic news. He was intercepted by the Bolsheviks while crossing the Caspian Sea. Seeing an approaching ship with a red flag, the gray-eyed governor of Odessa threw several cases of documents into the water, leaned over the side, and put a bullet through his forehead. He died the death of a hero.
A hero, Grishin-Almazov. I emphasize the word: hero!
His death evoked little response in Odessa. I noticed only that the hotel commandant’s greetings became more perfunctory and his fluffy dog stopped wagging its tail at me. One day the commandant knocked on my door. Sounding preoccupied, he informed me apologetically that he had found me a room in the International, since the whole of the London was being requisitioned for use as a military headquarters.
I was very sorry to leave my dear room number sixteen where at six o’clock every evening the radiator would warm up a little, where the mirror above the mantelpiece had sometimes reflected the faces of people I loved—the dry, aristocratic face of Ivan Bunin, the pale cameo silhouette of his wife, the piratical Alexey Tolstoy and his lyrical wife Natasha Krandievskaya, and Sergey Gorny, and Lolo, and Nilus and Pankratov.[85]
So there I was, another stage of my journey now over. There were now many behind me—though still many ahead…
And around us we began to glimpse a kind of man we hadn’t seen before—coat collar turned up, constantly looking over his shoulder, quick to slip behind the nearest gate.
81
Alexander Yakovlev (1887–1938) was a painter and graphic artist. Like Teffi, he worked for both
82
Friedrich Martens (1845–1909) was a Russian diplomat and lawyer who made important contributions to the field of international law. Valerie Sollohub, the widow of Martens’s grandson Count Nicholas Sollohub, writes, “I fear this story must be apocryphal. Professor Martens died in the daytime, in Livonia, on the railway station platform, unbeknown to his wife who was at their country house, Waldensee, with the telephone out of order. From the depths of the country she would not have been sending servants out with opals nor, indeed, was she inclined to buy precious stones; she left all that kind of thing to her husband.” (Personal email, May 2014. There is no knowing whether Konoplyov’s story is his own invention or Teffi’s.)
83
Mikhail Kuzmin (1872–1936) was one of the finest poets of his time. He also wrote plays and composed music. In 1906, he published
84
The Triple Entente was the alliance that, from 1907 until the end of World War I, linked France, Russia, and Great Britain—a counter-weight to the “Triple Alliance” of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. There were French forces in Odessa in early 1919, but the French intervention in Crimea and southern Ukraine was brief, badly planned, and unsuccessful (See Ivan Bunin,
85
Ivan Bunin (1870–1953) remained in Odessa after it fell to the Bolsheviks in April 1919. The Whites, however, recaptured the city in August and Bunin was able to leave Russia in January 1920. He settled in France, where he and Teffi became close friends. In 1933 he became the first Russian to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was married to Vera Muromtseva (1881–1961). Alexey Tolstoy (1883–1945), nicknamed the Comrade Count, was a gifted but opportunistic writer, best known for his science fiction and historical novels. He settled in Paris in 1920 but returned to the Soviet Union three years later; he was awarded a Stalin Prize three times. His wife Natalya Krandievskaya (1888–1963) was a poet and memoirist; the couple separated in 1935. Sergey Gorny (the pen name of Alexander Otsup [1882–1948]) was a poet and satirist; during the Civil War he served as an engineer in the White navy. Pyotr Nilus (1869–1943) was a Russian Impressionist painter. From 1920 he lived in Paris, initially sharing a house with Ivan Bunin. Alexander Pankratov (1871–1922) was a journalist; like Teffi, he had worked for the