My civilian outfit was of a kind fairly widespread in Russia. It consisted of a Russian shirt [with buttons on the left side of the chest], a broad belt, and a light, sand-colored overcoat bought in Gulaspov’s store [in Tbilisi]. It was strange to see our Voznesenskii Street neighbor and buddy, Sandro, as manager there. He also sold me a stylish cap with a hard celluloid peak.
I am alone in the railroad car of a train heading westward to Batumi. I am traveling at night in order to save time and hotel expenses. It is uncomfortable on the hard bench and there are too many thoughts in my head to sleep anyway. I tour the city, write postcards and leave on a ship of the Russian Navigation and Travel Association. It is a third class ticket, but I can move into second class for an extra five rubles if the seas get rough. I do so in Poti, having spent a night lying on hawsers and inhaling oil fumes. In the second-class cabin I sleep on clean sheets like a lord. In the morning I marvel at the forested mountains on my right and the blue expanse on my left, and decide to stop at New Mount Athos on the way back, money permitting. Next we hit rough water and there was great relief when the ship entered the bay of Novorossiisk.
As proper for a tourist, I immediately set off to view the city. But there was no city. It was all piers after piers, wharves, a railway shop, dirt and endless dust. I pressed on in search of the vanished city and finally reached the public gardens. They were colorless and dusty, but I never did find the city, only insignificant rural buildings, insignificant shops, and the smell of anthracite. In memory that smell is Novorossiisk to me.
Next day at dawn we reached Kerch. What a lively place. Just outside the town is Mitridat Mountain [mentioned by Pushkin]. There is no sand or pebbles on the beach—only pea-size seashells. It was good to bathe in the clear, glassy water. The people here were different from those in Tbilisi. They behaved as if they had nothing to do but bathe in the clear water, dry in the sun and drink black coffee in the Turkish taverns.
Feodosiia was even more attractive. This was the real Crimea and the people on shipboard were in a mood of high anticipation: tomorrow at dawn we would be in Yalta. The Yalta where Chekhov himself lives. The city was still asleep; the sun barely breaking through the clouds in the east. It had just rained. The sand squeaked under foot and the air was such that words fail me.
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Chapter Four
I asked the captain’s assistant how much time we had. He did not give me a clear answer. Two or three hours, he said, depending on the time it takes to unload and load. I’m off down the embankment hoping by some miracle to see Chekhov or at least his house. It would be unconscionable to disturb him at such an early hour. I ask a policeman for Chekhov’s house but, alas, this name, so precious to us, is unfamiliar to the corpulent policeman. He knows neither house, nor Chekhov. I asked several passersby and one of them ventured a guess that the house was three or four kilometers away in Autka. I was in a quandary. Would I find the house? Would the ship leave without me? And then I shamefully surrendered: had tea in a restaurant built on pilings overlooking the sea. The tea was very good, and the sweet rolls even better. I tried to console myself with the fancy that perhaps Chekhov frequented this place, sat in this very chair and looked at the sea just as I was doing.
Sevastopol. What a celebrated name. The bay, the surrounding mountains, and even the earthen mounds and the old fortress. Where and how did they fight here? The question brings the recognition that my knowledge of the defense of Sevastopol is pitiful. I’ll have to read Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Stories. I hasten on to Kiev. The frequent changing of trains is quite tiring. At Tatiana Pavlovna’s, a family friend, I rested up for two days while she spoiled me with all kinds of tasty dishes. The rooms smelled of mothballs, but even this smell seemed cozy and cool to me.
And Lida. I couldn’t admire her enough. She was already in the upper classes of the gimnazium. She read a lot, daydreamed, and surely went out with her girlfriends. She was mother’s favorite and I wrote home about her, Tatiana Pavlovna, and their farmstead.
I continued west to the border where I met a veterinary student who was a distant relative of one of my Tbilisi cadet friends. He convinced me to buy a ticket not to Freiberg, but to Zurich where he himself was going to university. In my father’s absence it seemed best to follow his wishes and forget about the mining institute in the Schwarzwald and save my parents the money which would have gone for my tuition. As it turned out later, father had changed his mind and sent me a cordial and supportive letter to Freiberg in which he praised my persistence and promised to send tuition money. I never did get that letter, and found out about it only upon returning to Tbilisi.
In Vienna the veterinary student and I stayed in a splendid hotel not far from the Cathedral of St. Stephen. In the evening we went to the famous Prater where everything was very decorous except for the roller coaster which was the source of great screeching, especially when the cars would plunge into water. It also struck me that the fashionable women along the vaunted Ringstrasse were not as stylishly dressed as we at home imagined. “Viennese chic” was not evident. There was a strange combination of colors—bright
Oleg Pantiukhov, A Student’s Summer
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yellow and violet. But expensive shops, especially flower shops, drew one’s attention. The museums were overwhelming. Palaces, royal carriages, thousands of military men in strange, semi-civilian uniforms. Newspapers sold briskly on the streets. A nervousness was felt in the air, but perhaps it was Viennese everyday life.
We arrived in Zurich groggy, having spent the night in a packed car full of Tyroleans smoking their long ceramic pipes. A beautiful lake and beautiful mountains in the distance. But first we had to find a room for the week. We wandered around the city for a long time. Once, at the entrance of a house, we saw a sign advertising rooms, but we decided to investigate around the block and return. But we never found the house; it seemed to have been swallowed up by the earth. We kept wandering and for some reason attracted the attention of a dignified man in civilian clothing who asked us to go with him. We did so with mounting curiosity. It turned out that he was a policeman who brought us to a precinct where we were politely questioned and asked to show our passport and money. Then we were given the “For Rent” page of a newspaper and told how to get to a particular street. The incident struck us as curious—something to tell the folks back home. Later we encountered signs with “Entry to Russians Forbidden” written on them. This was offensive, but it became understandably cautionary when we learned that Zurich was the headquarters of Russian revolutionaries and terrorists. We once even visited a Russian students’ eating house to peek at typical Russian “nihilists” of the sort found in novels. But the prices in the eating house were high and we retreated. I was saving my money for something more productive. I wanted to hike into the mountains and paint. So I bought a box of oil paints which cost almost all of ten rubles. I traversed the nearby mountains, saw the life of this toy-like country, beautiful as a wrapped chocolate, and painted the landscape.