“So that’s your attitude toward your civic duty, is it?” the maiden replied, gasping hysterically. “Well, you haven’t heard the last of this!”
How I wished she would go away! Never would I let her get her fishy fins on my beloved guitar, on my singing joy!
The “sickly element” would, no doubt, overtighten the pegs and then begin to strum away:
How horrible!
I so love her, my “seven-stringed friend.”[108]
Ever since I was a little girl I have known the power of strings.
I remember first hearing Zabel’s “Solo for Harp” during a ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre.[109] It affected me so deeply that, when we got back home, I went alone into the living room and wrapped my arms around a stiff sofa cushion. On it was a dog, embroidered in beads. I wept, pressing my face against its beaded paws until it hurt; I knew no way to speak of the ineffable bliss, the exquisite anguish that, for the first time in my life on earth, those strings had awoken in me.
The sound of strings was one of the first musical joys known to mankind. Still earlier, of course, came the pipe, the shepherds’ pipe. But in the first prayers, in the first places of worship there was always the solemn, exalted song of the strings.
Egyptian women and Assyrian priestesses, with small harps that they held in their hands…
The Book of Psalms. David’s instructions to the choirmaster: “With stringed instruments, upon an eight-string lyre. A psalm of David.”[110]
Then lyres and lutes and—at last—the guitar. The strings of the guitar sounded all through the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, making them sing, making them weep. Through their songs the minstrels, minnesingers, and wandering poet-musicians spread love charms and the sorcery of the grimoires. And so, through strings, all the poetry of medieval life found its way into people’s hearts.
In the depths of the Middle Ages, when silent recluses concealed their true thoughts like secret lamps in the dark cells of the monasteries, when their agonized search for some great principle of reason in life was meeting no reward but the fires of the Inquisition—in those dark days the joys of this earth were known only in song, in songs spread by singer-poets with guitars in their hands.
In Russia, only the gypsies understood the guitar’s true beauty. The Russians themselves treated her as if she were a mere balalaika. They strummed drearily away or picked out the harmonies as they sang: “I shall go to the banks of the strea-ea-eam…”
Gypsies never strum. They know how to make guitar strings speak, how to make them burst out in fiery cries of emotion, how to silence a stormy chord in an instant with a gentle but commanding hand.
Everyone has their own way of touching a string—and the string, in turn, responds differently to each person. The string too has its moods and does not always give the same response even to a touch it knows well. “It’s the humidity,” people say, or “It’s the dryness.”
Maybe. But then are not our own moods affected by our milieu—by the humidity or dryness around us?
My old, yellowed guitar with its slender and resonant sound-board—just think how many sounds it has accumulated over the years, how many vibrations from fingers that have touched it in song! A guitar like this will sing of its own accord—you need only reach out to it. Within it there is always a string attuned to some string deep within you, to some string that will respond with a strangely physical sensation of melancholy and passion deep in your chest, in what was understood by the ancients to be the home of the soul.
No, I could not yield my guitar to the pike-maiden for the entertainment of some “sickly element.”
20
THAT MORNING Smolyaninov came to see me. He was in charge of various administrative tasks on our ship. In his previous life he may have worked for The New Age,[111] though I don’t know for sure.
“I have to tell you,” he said, “that some of the passengers are unhappy that you didn’t join in yesterday when they were gutting fish. They’re saying you’re work-shy and that you’re being granted unfair privileges. You must find a way to show that you are willing to work.”
“All right, I’m quite willing to show my willingness.”
“But I really don’t know what to suggest. I can hardly make you scrub the deck.”
Ah! Scrubbing the deck! My childhood dream!
As a child I had once seen a sailor hosing the deck with a large hose while another sailor scrubbed away with a stiff, long-handled brush with bristles cut at an angle. I had thought at the time that nothing in the world could be jollier. Since then, I’ve learned about many things that are jollier, but that stiff, oddly-shaped brush, those rapid, powerful splashes as the water hit the white planks, and the sailors’ brisk efficiency (the one doing the scrubbing kept repeating “Hup! Hup!”) had all stayed in my memory—a wonderful, joyous picture.
There I had stood, a little girl with blue eyes and blonde pigtails, watching this sailors’ game with reverence and envy, upset that fate would never allow me this joy.
But kind fate had taken pity on that poor little girl. It had tormented her for a long time, but it never forgot her wish. It staged a war and a revolution. It turned the whole world upside down, and now, at last, it had found an opportunity to thrust a long-handled brush into the girl’s hands and send her up on deck.
At last! Thank you, dear fate!
“Tell me,” I said to Smolyaninov. “Do they have a brush with angled bristles? And will they be using a hose?”
“What!” said Smolyaninov. “Do you mean it? You’re really willing to scrub the deck?”
“Of course I mean it! Only don’t, for heaven’s sake, change your mind. Come on, let’s go…”
“You must at least change your clothes!”
But I had nothing to change into.
For the main part, the Shilka’s passengers wore whatever they could most easily do without. We all knew that it would be impossible to buy anything when we next went ashore, so we were saving our everyday clothes for later. We were wearing only items for which we foresaw no immediate need: colorful shawls, ball gowns, satin slippers…
I was wearing a pair of silver shoes. Certainly not the kind of shoes I’d be wearing next time I had to wander about searching for a room.
We went up on deck.
Smolyaninov went off for a moment. A cadet came over with a brush and a hose. Jolly streams of water splashed onto my silver shoes.
“Just for a few minutes,” whispered Smolyaninov. “For appearances’ sake.”
“Hup! Hup!” I repeated.
The cadet looked at me with fear and compassion.
“Please allow me to relieve you!”
“Hup-hup!” I replied. “We must all do our share. I imagine you’ve been humping coal; now I must scrub the deck. Yes, sir. We must all do our share, young man. I’m working and I’m proud of the contribution I’m making.”
“But you’ll wear yourself out!” said somebody else. “Please allow me!”
“They’re jealous, the sly devils!” I thought, remembering my childhood dream. “They want to have a go too! Well, why wouldn’t they?”
“Nadezhda Alexandrovna! You truly have worn yourself out,” said Smolyaninov. “The next shift will now take over.”
He then added, under his breath, “Your scrubbing is abominable.”
Abominable? And there I was, thinking I was just like that sailor from my distant childhood.
108
An allusion to a famous “gypsy song” by the poet Apollon Grigoriev. It begins: “O speak to me, you at least, my seven-stringed friend!”
109
Albert Zabel (1834–1910) was a teacher, a composer, and the main harpist at the Mariinsky Theater.
110
Both the Hebrew and Church Slavonic bibles, unlike the King James Bible, include instructions of this kind before the main text of each psalm.
111