He was very melancholy that evening, rather silent.
We recall all too often how, when we last saw some friend of ours, they had sad eyes and pale lips. And we always know, once it is too late, what we ought to have done back then, how we should have taken our friend by the hand and led them away from the shadow of darkness. But there is a mysterious law that does not allow us to disrupt the appointed order, the decreed rhythm. And this is in no way mere egotism or indifference—sometimes it would be easier to stop than to walk on by. The author of The Life of Leonid Kannegisser required us to walk on by, not to disrupt the decreed rhythm of his tragic novel. As if in a dream: You can see everything, you can feel everything, you almost know everything, but you’re unable to stop. You’re compelled to walk on.
Yes, we writers—in the words of a contemporary French colleague—are “imitators of God,” imitators of his creative work. We create worlds and people and we determine their fates, often cruel and unjust. Why we act one way and not some other way, we don’t know. We simply have no choice.
I remember a young actress approaching me during a rehearsal of one of my plays and saying timidly, “May I ask you something? You won’t get angry?”
“You may. I won’t get angry.”
“Why did that poor boy in your play have to be fired? Why do you have to be so cruel? Couldn’t you at least have found him some other job? And then in another play there’s a poor traveling salesman who ends up with egg on his face. Why? It’s horrible for the poor man. Surely there’s some way you can put these things right?”
“I don’t know… I can’t… It isn’t me who decides.”
But her lips were trembling, and she was pleading so pitifully and so touchingly that I promised to write a separate fairy tale in which I would bring together all those I had injured in my plays and stories and somehow compensate them for their suffering.
“Wonderful!” said the actress. “That will be paradise!”
And she kissed me.
“But there’s a problem,” I interrupted. “I’m afraid that this little paradise of ours won’t really comfort anyone at all. No one will believe us. They’ll know we’ve just made it up.”[19]
The day comes. Our train is leaving this morning.
Since the night before, Gooskin has been rushing from me to Averchenko, from Averchenko to his impresario, and from his impresario to the actresses. He keeps going into the wrong apartments and phoning the wrong numbers. At seven o’clock he bursts in on me, panting, covered in sweat, like an overheated horse. He looks at me, then spreads his hands despairingly in the air.
“Of course! Wonderful! Late for the station!”
“Surely not! What’s the time?”
“Seven o’clock, almost ten o’clock. The train leaves at ten. That’s it—it’s all over now.”
Someone gives Gooskin a lump of sugar. Gnawing on it like a parrot, he calms down a little.
A horn sounds in the street below, from the motorcar sent by our guardian angel.
It’s a wonderful autumn morning. Unforgettable. Up above—pale blue, and golden cupolas. Down on the earth—gray and heavy, and eyes glazed over in deep sorrow. Some Red Army soldiers herding along a group of prisoners. A tall old man in a beaver hat carrying a bundle wrapped in a woman’s red calico kerchief. An old lady in a soldier’s greatcoat looking at us through a turquoise lorgnette. A line by a dairy kiosk with a pair of boots displayed in the window.
“Goodbye, Moscow, dearest Moscow! It’s not for long. Just a month. I’ll be back in a month. In one month. And then… No, best not to think.”
“When you’re walking a tightrope,” an acrobat once told me, “you must never imagine that you might fall. On the contrary. You have to believe that everything will work out—and you must hum some little song to yourself.”
A jolly little tune from Silva is going round and round in my head. The words are stunningly inane:
What goose could have composed a jingle like this?
Gooskin is waiting outside the main entrance to the station, along with the commissar whose heart had awoken.
“Moscow, dearest Moscow, farewell! See you in a month!”
That was ten years ago.
3
OUR JOURNEY got off to a fairly smooth start.
We were in a second-class train car, each with a seat of our own. We were sitting the way passengers are generally meant to sit—no one was curled up underneath the seats or lying up above in the luggage rack.
My impresario, the pseudonymous Gooskin, became very agitated: Why was the train taking so long to leave? And then, when it finally did leave, he said it was ahead of schedule.
“And that’s a bad omen. Goodness knows what will happen now!”
The moment Gooskin climbed into the train car, his appearance changed bizarrely. Anyone would have thought he had been traveling for ten days—and in the most appalling conditions. His shoes were unlaced, his collar unbuttoned, and there was a round green spot beneath his Adam’s apple—evidently from a copper stud. Strangest of all, his cheeks were covered in stubble—as if he had been three or four days without shaving.
Along with our own group, there were three other ladies in the compartment. They were talking very quietly, sometimes even in a whisper, about matters all too close to our immediate concerns: who had managed to smuggle their money and diamonds abroad, and how.
“Have you heard? The Prokins managed to get away with their entire fortune. They used their old grandmother as a mule.”
“But how come the grandmother didn’t get searched?”
“How can you ask? She’s so unpleasant. Who would dare?”
“As for the Korkins, they were really smart. And all on the spur of the moment! Madame Korkina, who’d already been searched, was standing to one side. And then, all of a sudden—‘Ow! Ow!’—she twists her ankle. She can’t walk, she can’t even take a single step. Her husband, who hasn’t been searched yet, says to a Red Army soldier, ‘Please pass her my stick. She needs it.’ The soldier gives her the stick. And it’s the stick they’ve hollowed out and stuffed with diamonds. How do you like that?”
“The Bulkins have a teapot with a false bottom.”
“Fanichka took a huge diamond out of the country—you’ll never believe this—by stuffing it up her own nose.”
“All very well for her—she’s got a fifty-carat nose. But we aren’t all as lucky as her.”
Then they told the tragic tale of how a certain Madame Fook cleverly hid a diamond in an egg. She made a small hole in the shell of a raw egg, put the diamond inside, and then hard-boiled the egg: Who could find her diamond now? So she puts the egg into her food basket and sits there calm as can be, smiling away. Along come some Red Army soldiers. They search the luggage. And then one of them grabs that very egg, peels it and wolfs it down before Madame Fook’s very eyes. The poor woman traveled no further. She got off at that station and trailed around after that wretched Red Army soldier for three days on end, not once letting him out of her sight, as if he were a little child.
“And then?”
“What do you think? Nothing! She went back home empty-handed.”
Then they started talking about all sorts of cunning ploys—things they did to trap spies during the war.
“They grew so crafty, those spies! Just imagine: They started drawing plans of fortresses on their backs and then coloring them over. Well, military intelligence aren’t stupid either, they caught on to this pretty quick. They started washing the backs of any suspicious characters. Of course, there were unfortunate errors. Back home in Grodno they caught this gentleman—he was dark-haired and suspicious as they come, but after a good wash he turned out to be the most honest of blondes. Military intelligence was most apologetic…”
19
This conversation is condensed from “Repentant Fate,” first published in 1913 and included in the collection