“So! Do you like what we’ve done with your play? Works well, doesn’t it? The audience just loves it!”
“It’s absolutely enchanting, of course,” I replied. “But I must, I regret to say, ask you to return to my humble text. I don’t feel comfortable putting my name to someone else’s work.”
They seemed surprised.
And so, there I was, on my way to the Liteiny Theatre. It was an evening I shall not forget.
It was nearly ten o’clock and the performance had evidently begun some time ago. I had free entry, so I went to the back of the hall and found a seat.
There were a lot of people, but… what was this play? And why were the house lights on?
Up onstage is a table covered with green cloth. Behind the table, sitting in the middle, is Meyerhold—I recognize him instantly. Arabazhin is standing up; he’s saying something. Volynsky’s there too. And sitting at the end of the table is some young man. Meyerhold screws up his eyes and stares at me; evidently he recognizes me. He beckons to the young man (whose face seems strangely familiar) and says something, pointing toward me… The young man nods and makes his way offstage.
What’s happening? I suppose he just wants to be courteous and offer me a seat further forward… But what’s going on? What are they all doing here?
In the meantime the young man has entered the auditorium through a side door and is purposefully making his way toward me.
He stops beside me.
“Would you rather speak now,” he asks, “or after the interval?”
“I… erm, no, not right now… I don’t understand…” I stammer in total bewilderment.
“All right then, after the interval,” says the young man in a matter-of-fact tone. “In any event, I’ve been asked to invite you to join us onstage and take your place at the table. Let me show you the way.”
“Oh no… no… I can manage. Goodness! What’s going on?”
He raises an eyebrow in surprise and returns to the side door.
At this point I start to take in some of what’s being said on stage:
“The Great Mute…”
“The role of the Cinema…”
“Whether or not it can be called Art…”
And something begins to dawns on me. Some thought begins to take shape—a shape that, though still vague, is distinctly unpleasant.
I get up quietly and make my way to the exit. Beside it I see an enormous poster: The Cinema—a Debate.
And there in the list of speakers is my own name, plain as day.
I rush back home. There I frighten my poor maid out of her wits, telling her to put the door on the chain and not to open it on any account to anyone. I take the telephone off the hook, get into bed, and hide my head under the pillow. Dinner is ready, but I’m too scared to go and eat it.
I am afraid that if I go to the dining room, it will be easier for “them” to find me.
How fortunate that everything in the world comes to an end.
29
AND so the day came for me to travel to Yekaterinodar, to take part in the two evenings of my work being put on at the local theater.
Tired and downcast, I left Novorossiisk at nightfall. The train was overflowing, hordes of soldiers and officers filling every car. Evidently they were on their way north, to the front. But they did not look as if they had been on leave for any length of time; they looked too drawn, too worn out, too haggard. Perhaps they were simply being flung from one front to another. I don’t know.
I found myself squashed into a third class car with a broken window and no lighting.
Everywhere I looked—on the benches, on the floor—were figures in brown greatcoats. The car was stifling and full of smoke.
Many of the soldiers fell asleep before the train had even set off.
Standing diagonally across from me, leaning against the side of the car, was a tall, emaciated officer.
“Andreyev!” someone called out. “Come and sit down, we can squash up a bit.”
“I can’t,” the officer replied. “I’m better off standing.”
And so he remained all through the night. His head was thrown back and I could see the whites of his half-closed eyes. On his brow, beneath the skewed peak of his cap, a round crimson spot was slowly going black. As if nailed to the mast like the captain of the Flying Dutchman, he stood there almost without moving, just rocking a little when the train gave a jolt, his long, thin legs spread wide apart. No one talked much, apart from one officer who was sitting beside the smashed window. This man was telling some endless story, never pausing, and I soon realized he was simply talking to himself and that no one was listening to him.
Then a man sitting near me asked somebody else a question: “Have you heard about Colonel K?”
This colonel was a man I had already heard about. Apparently the Bolsheviks had tortured this colonel’s wife and two children to death right in front of him. Ever since, whenever he took any Bolshevik prisoners, he had had them put to death then and there, and always in exactly the same way. He would sit on the porch drinking tea and have the prisoners strung up in front of him, first one, then another, then another.
While he carried on drinking tea.
This was the man my neighbour was asking about.
“Yes, I have,” came the reply. “He’s insane.”
“No, he isn’t. For him, what he’s doing is entirely normal. You see, after all he’s been through, it would be very, very strange if he were to act in a more ordinary way. That really would be insane. There’s a limit to what the soul can take, to what human reason can endure. And that’s as it should be. The way Colonel K behaves is, for him, entirely normal. Understand?”
The other man said nothing. But someone sitting a little further away, on the other side of the aisle, said loudly, “They gouged a boy’s eyes out, a ten-year-old boy. They cut them right out. If you’ve never seen a face like that with gouged-out eyes, you can’t imagine how terrible it looks. He lived on like that for another two days, screaming the whole time.”
“That’s enough… Don’t…”
“And the agent—did you hear about him? They tied his hands and stuffed his mouth and nose with earth. He suffocated.”
“No, Colonel K is not insane. In his world, in the world he lives in, he’s perfectly normal.”
It was dark in the car.
The wan light coming in through the broken glass—moonlight, I think, although we could not see the moon itself—picked out the dark silhouettes of the men close to the window. Everyone else—those sitting further from the window or on the floor—formed a single, dense, murky shadow. This shadow muttered, swayed, cried out. Were these men asleep? Or awake but out of their wits?
One voice pronounced clearly, too loudly, and with excessive effort, “I can’t go on anymore. Since 1914 they’ve been torturing me, torturing me, and now… now I’m dead. I’m dead…”
It was the voice of a man who was not alive, a man no longer conscious of himself. It was like the voices of those who are no more—at a spiritualist séance or on an old gramophone recording….
Our old, beaten-up train car was rattling every one of its bolts, its rusty wheels squealing and screeching as it rolled these semi-corpses along toward torment and death.
Day began to break.
In the half light the rocking heads and pale faces seemed more terrible still.
These men were asleep. Talking in their sleep. And if one of them awoke, he would at once quiet down, straighten his stiff shoulders, and smooth down his greatcoat. Calmly and simply, as if nothing were the matter. He didn’t know what his soul had been weeping about as he slept.