“So, do you continue to maintain,” the dignitary would say, his voice as deep and booming as that of any general, “do you really continue to maintain that curd dumplings are tastier than cold botvinya soup?”[112]
And he would shake his head reproachfully.
“Ay, ay, ay! Can you really not see that curd cheese is something truly vile?”
“No, curd dumplings are delicious,” the teacher would reply, pouting her lips. “You just want to tease me. That’s the kind of man you are.”
What she meant by this was unclear. But the dignitary liked it anyway and looked at the teacher with pleasure. She was as round as a cherry; she had tight pigtails and wore a dirty raspberry-pink ribbon around her neck.
O the engineer had taken on the role of chief mechanic and was spending most of his time in the engine room.
V, who had gotten me out of Odessa, had sunk into melancholy. He ate double portions of rice to which he would add slices of stone-hard salami bought long ago in Sebastopol. After eating all this with gusto and with tears in his eyes, he would say, “I’m afraid we’ll end up starving to death.”
There was a young woman who had been a maid to a count. She would emerge from the hold in the evening, wrapped in a precious Manila shawl, and stand sadly by the ship’s rail. Resting her chin on her fist, she would quietly sing:
Once, we happened to anchor for a few hours alongside a coal freighter. The freighter was black all over, all smoke and soot. She was called the Violetta.
One of her sailors, himself as black as a lamp wick, kept staring at this count’s maid wrapped in a shawl. He would move away from the side of the ship, then reappear. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.
“Looks like our Traviata has made a conquest!” the passengers joked.
But the proud maid did not deign even to glance at the soot-covered sailor.
But when the Violetta weighed anchor, the sailor suddenly leant over the side of the freighter and shouted, “Anyuta! Is that you?”
The maid was dumbfounded. She looked up. She turned white.
“Lord have mercy! I don’t believe it… Your Excellency! It’s the count, our count… Heavens! Who’d have thought it?”
And turning to face us, she said, as if in a trance, “No one had any idea what had become of him. I did my best, I took care of his belongings for a long time, but in the end everything was looted anyway.” As she spoke, she kept twisting the ends of the precious shawl in her hands. “Everything went, everything was looted.”
How long had we been at sea? Eight days? Ten days? One person said eleven. Surely not!
In the afternoon, when my cabin-bathroom was unoccupied, I would lie on the narrow bench and think about how very little there was—only a thin layer of wood and metal—between me and the cold blue abyss. There were fish swimming about not far below; jellyfish were coiling and uncoiling their long arms and a crab was waving his claws. The crab had hooked itself to a deep underwater cliff and was staring after the bottom of our ship as it glided by: Maybe someone would come tumbling down for its breakfast. Wasn’t there sure to be at least one person who had reached the end of their tether? And still further down were rocks, seaweed, and some whiskered monster slowly moving its tentacles, waiting.
They say the ocean carries the bodies of the drowned to the shores of South America. Not far from these shores lies the deepest spot in the world—and there, some two miles down, can be found crowds of the dead: fishermen, friends and foes, soldiers and sailors, grandfathers and grandchildren—a whole standing army of the dead. The strong salt water preserves them well, and they sway there gently year upon year. An alien element neither accepts nor changes these children of earth.
I close my eyes and gaze into the transparent green water far beneath me… A merry shoal of tiny fish is swimming by. A school of tiny fish. Evidently they are being led by some wise fish, some fish sage and prophet. With what touching obedience the entire shoal responds to his slightest movement. If he moves to the right, they all move to the right too. If he turns back, so do they all. And there are a large number of these fish. Probably about sixty of them. Circling, darting this way and that way, wheeling about… Oh little fish, little fish, can you trust this leader of yours? Are you sure your foremost philosopher-fish is not simply a fool?
Soon we would be in Novorossiisk.
No one was particularly happy about this. It was, rather, a source of anxiety.
Those with family in Novorossiisk were no happier than anyone else. Would their family still be there? What might have happened to them was anyone’s guess.
The Shilka’s radio was now more or less functioning, but we had been unable to make contact with anyone. We were sailing into the unknown. It might be good; it might be evil.
The days dragged by, long and dreary.
How strange it was several years later to hear these ragged lines—now smartened up and set to music—being sung from the stage of the Salle Gaveau…[113]
As if I’d thrown the lines out to sea in a sealed bottle—and the waves had carried this bottle away to distant, happier shores. Someone had found the bottle and opened it. There had been a public announcement. People had come together and my SOS had been read aloud to everyone… To everyone, I repeat everyone, everyone without exception…
22
EARLY one morning I was woken by the bellow of the ship’s horn.
What was going on up above me?
I went up on deck and was met by a sight the like of which I had never seen. A pearl-gray fog, thick and motionless, gripped hold of me and cut me off from the entire world. I took a few steps—and could no longer find the ladder I had just climbed. I stretched out my arms—and lost sight of my own fingers.
Meanwhile, the horn continued to bellow in alarm, and the whole ship was shivering, shuddering.
Had we come to a stop or were we still moving?
Somewhere nearby, as if they too were muffled by the fog, I could hear indistinct voices. Otherwise everything was unusually quiet, like a dream—a cloudy dream.
I didn’t know if I was alone on deck or if there were people around me. Maybe everyone on board had gathered here, near this bellowing horn, and I was only imagining that I was alone.
I took a few steps forward and stumbled against some kind of barrier. I held out my arms and touched… the ship’s rail. I was standing beside the rail. Beyond it lay the pearly void.
112
A cold soup made from
113
Like many of Teffi’s poems, this poem, written on the