The cadets tried to push the cow away with long boat hooks, but it kept coming back. It floated about for a long time, a monstrous, swollen balloon, now moving away a little, now bobbing up right beside us.
Those of us still left on the Shilka wandered about dejectedly.
To your left, if you went up on deck, you saw a silent city, all dust and debris, exhausted by anxiety, fear, and typhus. And to your right lay the boundless sea, the waves hurriedly and mindlessly buffeting one another, mounting one another and then dropping back down, crushed by other, newer waves that spat at them in foaming fury.
Agitated gulls were swooping about, bitterly flinging what sounded like last words—hopeless, fragmentary last words—at one another.
Gray sky.
It was all very dismal.
At night, the thudding and crashing overhead made it impossible to sleep. If you left your airless cabin and went up on deck, the wind would spin you round, seize hold of you, slam the door behind you, then drag you away into the darkness, where it whistled and howled as it harried a frightened crowd of waves, driving them off, driving them away….
Away from these shores of despair. But where? Where to?
Soon we too might be driven away by the raging elements, but where would we go? Where in the wide world?
And so you would return to your cabin.
And lie on your hard wooden bunk and listen to the midshipman strumming his out-of-tune guitar and to the violent coughing of the old Chinese cook—the man who had once “got so angry his heart broke.”[123]
I was wandering about the city, hoping to find something out. I came upon what had once been the editorial office of what had once been the Novorossiisk newspaper. But nobody there knew anything. Or rather, everybody there knew a great deal, each knowing the exact opposite of what everyone else knew.
On one thing, however, they were all agreed: Odessa was now in the hands of the Bolsheviks.
Once, as I was walking about the town, I saw Batkin, the famous “sailor.”[124] He turned out to be a young dandy of a student, always strolling about the city with a crowd of admiring young ladies. He would tell them the story of how he had almost been shot by a firing squad. Only thanks to his extraordinary eloquence had he gotten away with his life. But he told all this without much conviction or flair and didn’t seem particularly bothered about whether or not his story was believed. The only dramatic moment was when he was facing death with the name of his beloved on his lips. At this point the young ladies would all lower their eyes as one.
Looking at this sleek, well-groomed student, I remembered the fiery sailor who used to come out on stage at the Mariinsky Theatre, stand in front of a large Saint Andrew’s flag,[125] and passionately exhort the audience never to give up the fight. Correspondents from the Evening Stock Exchange[126] would then clap and cheer from the royal box.
This sailor might have been a phoenix, he might have risen from the flames, but he too was soon whirled away by the northeasterly… Only dust and debris… Later, or so I heard, he offered his services to the Bolsheviks. It’s not impossible.[127]
Dust and debris.
But I shall not forget the evenings I saw him standing in front of the Saint Andrew’s flag.
I continued to wander about the city.
I began to come across new groups of refugees. Among them were people I had already met elsewhere.
In their faces I saw something new. What struck me, what stayed in my mind, was the way these people’s eyes were constantly darting about. Shifting about in embarrassment, in confusion, and even—momentarily—taking on a look of insolence. As if they needed just a few more seconds before they could settle into this insolence, before they could feel secure in it.
I understood later that these were people who, like poor Alexandr Kugel, were troubled by a sense of uncertainty: On whose side were might and right now?
These people were waiting to see which way the wind was blowing. They wanted to establish themselves here while keeping in with the authorities back there.
I happened to meet the senior official who, in Kiev, had declared he would not rest until he had slain seven Bolsheviks on the grave of his executed brother “so that their blood seeps through the earth, so that it seeps down to my brother’s tortured body!”
He was not looking especially militant. Shoulders hunched, he was constantly turning this way and that way, looking around furtively, glancing slyly out of the corners of his eyes.
His whole manner with me was rather strained. He did not so much as mention his seven Bolsheviks and he made no great display of feeling. He seemed more like a man trying to make his way across a swamp, struggling to keep his footing on a narrow log.
“But what about your family?” I asked. “Where are they?”
“At the moment they’re in Kiev. Still, we’ll be seeing each other soon.”
“Soon? But how are you going to get back to Kiev?”
For some reason he looked around him. The same new look of furtive resentment.
“Soon there’ll probably be all kinds of opportunities. But this isn’t really the moment to be talking about them.”
Opportunities did indeed soon arise for him. And he remains an esteemed and successful figure, working in Moscow…
My memories of those first days in Novorossiisk still lie behind a curtain of gray dust. They are still being whirled about by a stifling whirlwind—just as scraps of this and splinters of that, just as debris and rubbish of every kind, just as people themselves were whirled this way and that way, left and right, over the mountains or into the sea. Soulless and mindless, with the cruelty of an elemental force, this whirlwind determined our fate.
27
THIS WHIRLWIND did indeed determine all our fates—tossing us to the right, tossing us to the left.
A fourteen-year-old boy, the son of a sailor executed by the Reds, made his way back north in search of his relatives. He was unable to find even one of them. And then, within a few years, he had joined the Communist Party. As for the family he had been trying to find, they had all emigrated. When they spoke of their son, it was with shame and bitterness.
An actor who sang popular Bolshevik songs and ditties happened to get left behind in some town or other after a Bolshevik withdrawal. He refashioned his songs till they sounded appropriately anti-Bolshevik and then remained White forever more.
Eminent artistes ended up stranded in the south. Far from their theaters and loved ones, they found life unbearable. Lost and bewildered, they span around for a while in the White whirlwind. Then, breaking free, they were swept north like migrating birds, flying over rivers and burning cities, obedient to the pull of their native roosts.
Enterprising little gentlemen began to appear, shuttling between Moscow and the south along paths known to them alone. Bringing things to us in the south and taking things back to Moscow on our behalf… They would politely offer to deliver money to relatives; or they could go and fetch things we had left behind in Moscow or Petersburg.
These little men were strange. It was clearly not merely to be of service to us that they went on these long journeys. But what was the reason for their constant shuttling? Who were their masters? Whom were they serving? Whom betraying? No one seemed very bothered by any of these questions. People just said, “So and so is going to Moscow soon. He knows a way through.”
123
This is inconsistent with Akyn’s earlier account on page 171: “He had once got so very angry… that he had ‘torn his throat.’” Teffi may have intended the reader to understand that she herself heard different stories about this cook—or, more likely, this is simply a mistake on her part.
124
Fyodor Batkin (1892–1923) fought in World War I, first as a volunteer in the Belgian army, then in the Russian Army. During the summer of 1917, as the leader of the “Black Sea Delegation” set up by Admiral Kolchak to combat defeatism, he gave impassioned patriotic speeches in Moscow and Petrograd.
126
The evening edition of
127
After fighting for the Whites, Batkin emigrated to Turkey. There, in 1920, he was recruited by the Cheka. In 1922, however, after returning to Russia without authorization, he was arrested and shot.