I recall Rozovsky’s stories about the old wooden house where he lived in Bursa. He never began the story with a description of the house, but with an elaborate discourse on the distinctive smell of Turkish wooden houses. According to Rozovsky, they all smelled of the warm dust of rotting wood and of honey, particularly on hot, still afternoons when if you so much as touched the verandah railing it would singe your hand. The smell of dust was always mixed with a faint hint of dry roses. The smell of honey came from the surrounding olive gardens filled with wild roses. The flowers attracted swarms of honeybees which built their combs in the attics; the sweet aroma wafted throughout the house. Rozovsky first encountered the thick smell of dried roses and honey in Constantinople, when he was shown the gem-encrusted casket holding the green banner of the Prophet. The banner was wrapped in layers of rotting silk and sprinkled with dry rose petals.
Rozovsky helped me understand the meaning behind much of the obscure Arabic imagery in Bunin’s poems about the East. Because of Bunin, Islam appeared to me as a religion of dreams, torpor and patience, like the mood he experienced upon reading the Qur’an:
In the sultry hour when the unruffled mirage
Melts the whole world into one great dream,
My soul is carried away, beyond the edge of this sad world,
Into the infinite brilliance of the gardens of the Jinns.
There, beyond the mists, flows the river of rivers,
There, the azure al-Kauthar streams,
Promising all the earth, all tribes and nations
Peace. Be patient, pray – and believe.
When I mentioned the passivity and torpor of Islam to Rozovsky, he said that was sheer nonsense. All religions could be militant or fanatical, he said, and especially Islam. All it took was to declare a holy war and raise the green banner of the Prophet for Islam to swoop down on the world like a devastating black simoom blowing out of the desert. I pictured that storm to myself – a low, whirling darkness, the cries of the mounted warriors and the flash of their bared swords like lightning over the dry sands.
I cannot, of course, describe all the patrons of the Journalists’ Café, even though they deserve it. Nevertheless, it isn’t possible to avoid mentioning one particular specimen of old Moscow, namely the chairman of the Society of Lovers of Canary Singing, the reporter Saveliev. This giggling old man was the main supplier of political gossip and rumour. He never got into any trouble over this because he talked through his nose in an unintelligible patter. Supreme concentration was necessary to even guess at what he was talking about.
His pockets were always stuffed with hard, sticky sweets that he passed out to us smokers. He pushed these sweets on us, insisting we have one, even though they always came out of his pockets with bits of lint, dirt and other rubbish stuck to them. As soon as we saw him coming, we rushed to put out our cigarettes in the hope of avoiding these sweets.
Saveliev’s nickname was ‘de Mortuis’ because all he did at the newspaper was write obituaries. These always began in one of two ways, either ‘Death has torn from our ranks’ or ‘Our society has suffered a grievous loss’. All of us were so tired of his obituaries that one of the paper’s editors decided to liven things up – and to have some fun at Saveliev’s expense – by inserting the words ‘At long last’ before the usual ‘death has torn from our ranks’. A terrible scandal ensued. The editor was sacked, and everyone felt terrible about the whole episode, even though the obituary had been for some disagreeable old professor. Saveliev spent the entire day at his desk, blowing his nose.
‘I’ve seen hundreds of people off into the next world,’ he muttered, ‘but I have never once sinned against their memory. It’s not my place to judge. And I’ve never agreed to write even a single line about any scoundrels.’
Still drying his tears, Saveliev went to see the editor-in-chief and told him, although barely able to speak, that he could no longer work for a newspaper where such shameful things were possible. The editor’s best efforts to get him to change his mind failed. Saveliev left the office for good, and it wasn’t long before everyone at the paper began to miss his giggling and his silly way of talking and even his sticky sweets covered with pocket grit and fluff.
Saveliev died soon after. His obituary was indistinguishable from every other boring and unfeeling obituary: ‘Death has torn from our ranks a humble worker in the newspaper field …’ Et cetera, et cetera. He had been a bachelor, and the only living creature left behind in his small stuffy room was an old parrot. The bird hung upside down from its perch and giggled like its late owner and, from time to time, screamed wildly: ‘Polly, want a candy?’ The building’s porter adopted the parrot, and thus were all Saveliev’s outstanding accounts settled.
Always the last to burst into the café was the polite but noisy Oleg Leonidov, also known as the ‘King of Scoops’. He purposely arrived late, just at the moment when the newspapers, damp with printers’ ink, were rolling off the presses. By then Leonidov could safely share with the competing reporters all the scoops he had made that day without fear they might end up in any of the other papers. They all turned green with envy, but there was nothing to be done about it.
It was no use trying to follow him. He was too elusive. No one knew how or when he managed to worm his way into the innermost recesses of the new Soviet governmental departments and kindly, gently, with an ingratiating smile extract from them their most sensational stories. Nor could he be tricked or fooled. He was a master of those arts himself. Just once, during the war, did he fall for a fake story fed to him by an incautious Kievan journalist. Leonidov nearly got sacked, but his revenge was so complete that after that no one even dared to joke with Leonidov, much less make a fool of him.
On the surface, Leonidov’s ploy looked quite simple. He sent the journalist in Kiev a cryptic telegram: ‘IN DORPAT IN ODESSA TSARITSYN IN CRIMEA FEED OATS ONLY LAST.’ It was wartime. The telegram came to the attention of the military censors, who deemed it a coded message. Espionage was suspected. The journalist was arrested.
No one knows how long he would have sat behind bars if one of the investigators hadn’t hit upon the idea of combining the first letter of each word in the telegram in the hope of cracking the code. They read ‘IDIOTIC FOOL’. The journalist was eventually freed, although utterly frightened, while Oleg Leonidov calmly strolled about Moscow, basking in his new reputation as a dangerous wit.
The Journalists’ Café closed down at the end of the summer of 1918 due to a lack of funds. We were all sad to see it go, and not just us reporters from the various newspapers, but writers and artists as well, everyone for whom this flat with its low ceiling and absurd pink wallpaper had been their club, a comfortable, inviting place where we could speak our minds.
I was especially fond of the club at twilight. Through the open windows, beyond the bell tower of the fire station and the pedestal where Skobelev’s statue had recently stood, the warm glow of the sunset faded in the golden dusk. The noise of the city, or rather its soft hum (in those days there were few cars and the trams went by rarely), gradually died away, and nothing but the popular sounds of the ‘Song of Warsaw’ could be heard in the distance.
More and more often at this hour it made my heart ache to recall that out there, beyond Brestsky station, beyond Khodynka Field, where the sun had slowly set, the dew was already covering the birch groves and the clear water was gurgling over the snags in the river outside Moscow. The cool river smelled of mud and rotting timber piles. The deserted dachas were dark, and the peonies, planted long ago, blossomed in solitude. Drops of dew fell from the roofs onto the glass tops of the boarded-up verandahs, and their rhythmic sound was all that could be heard in the thickening dusk. The parks and fields and woods, left for a while in peace, stood close to the agitated city of Moscow, listening drowsily to its excited rumble.