Here’s one for Petrik, Petrik, our little boy,
Our little Colonel, no bigger than a toy.
It was impossible to get anywhere near the consulate door. Hundreds of people were sitting and lying about on the dusty ground waiting their turn. Some had been waiting for over a month, listening to the song about little Petrik over and over, vainly trying to ingratiate themselves with the consul’s nanny, and slowly being driven insane by the utter uncertainty of their situation.
I realised that I would have to sneak over the border without official permission. I learned that several Petrograd journalists from the so-called ‘boulevard press’ were planning a trip to Ukraine. Their documents were in order. A local reporter introduced me to them. With a certain reluctance, they agreed to take me with them and to help me at the frontier, although, as their leader, an irritable man who wore a gold pince-nez and grey spats, said, ‘only within the bounds of reason’. On where exactly these bounds lay, he was silent. And I knew well myself that if I were caught, no one would be coming to my defence.
The plan was to leave in three days. Nothing much happened during those days, other than that I learned Romanin had arrived in Moscow. I raced over to the house in the Yakimanka neighbourhood where he typically lodged, but the surly woman who opened the door refused to let me in and said that he stayed there only a few nights a month. I left a letter for him but never heard from Romanin again. Once more I felt that familiar bitter sadness of losing another beloved friend. People kept passing through my life, and no one remained beside me for more than a few years. They appeared out of nowhere, and then just as quickly vanished, and I knew I would most likely never see them again. I recalled Lermontov’s words about ‘the ardour of the soul, squandered in the desert’. They brought me a bit of comfort.
Before leaving, I visited my favourite places in Moscow one last time. From Noevsky Gardens I looked out at the Kremlin. A thunderstorm was gathering overhead. The domes of the Kremlin cathedrals smouldered with a dark fire, the wind from the approaching storm tore at the red flags, lightning sparked and flashed, illuminating an enormous yellow bank of clouds from deep inside. Suddenly, as though bursting from the crowded city, thunder rolled across the sky. The clouds opened up, and rain crashed down into the streets.
I took shelter in the empty conservatory. A single vase with a flowering pelargonium had been left behind on one of the shelves. It didn’t look well. It was stretching all its leaves and flowers towards the air and rain falling on the other plants that had been taken outside. I took it down off the shelf and placed it next to the other plants. Battered by the raindrops, it shuddered and then seemed to come back to life right before my eyes. For some reason the memory of that plant in the conservatory stayed with me. It was one of my last impressions of Moscow. I left not knowing what lay ahead of me, never suspecting, of course, that I would be gone from Moscow for five long years or that my life would be so much like fiction that I would find it hard to describe.
So far in this work I have written only about things that I have seen and heard myself. For this reason, there are a great many important events I haven’t mentioned. My intention is to speak as a witness, and I have no desire to write here in these pages, nor could I if I did, a general history of these revolutionary years. I began writing this story of my life a long time ago. I am old now, and still I have only managed to bring my story up to the time of my early manhood. I don’t know whether I will be able to finish it. If I were ten years younger, I might write another, more interesting, story of my life – not about my life as it was but as it could have, and should have, been had its arrangement depended solely on me and not on a host of external and often hostile circumstances. It would be a story of what never happened, of all the things that ruled my heart and soul, of a life that gathered all the colour, light and excitement of the world into itself. I can see many chapters of that book as clearly as though I had lived them several times over.
78
The Riga–Orël Goods Wagon
Ever since childhood I’ve been in love with railways. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that my father worked on them. Not surprisingly, my love in those days expressed itself in childish ways. Whenever our family passed the summer holidays near a railway station, I spent hours there meeting and seeing off every single train together with the station guard in his red cap. Even now, every last thing about railways still has for me the poetry of travel about it, all the way down to the smell of the coal smoke from the engine.
I would watch with amazement as the oily, green locomotive, its shiny pistons churning ever slower, came to a stop near the water tower and released a great, whistling stream of steam into the sky as though panting from exertion. I could see before my eyes the engine’s iron breast piercing fierce winds, the dark of night and dense forests, making its way through the flowering wilderness of the earth, its whistle echoing far from the tracks, perhaps all the way to some cottage in the woods where a little boy like myself was imagining the fiery express racing through the barren night, and a fox, its paw raised, watched it from a distance and yelped with an inexpressible pain – or perhaps with joy.
After the passenger train pulled out, the station sank back into a drowsy silence. The hot boredom of the station reclaimed its rightful place. Warm water dripped from the green tub on the platform. Impudent hens strutted back and forth over the rails. The flowering tobacco plants closed themselves to wait for evening. The glare from the rails, polished by the wheels of hundreds of carriages, was blinding. Tethered to the back of a goods wagon standing on the sidings, a chestnut mare slept. Now and then the skin on her back twitched to shake off the persistent flies.
Then a trembling, piercing whistle was heard in the distance. This was a non-stop goods train. Beyond the station, the tracks curved in a big, wide arc before disappearing into the pine woods. The trains always exploded out of the woods unexpectedly, twisting and leaning on the curve. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. The train flew into the station at full speed, pouring thick steam, and swept past, a rush of clanking metal, pounding wheels and tornadoes of dust. It made my head spin. I sometimes thought the train was about to take flight, to leave the rails and pull all of us off the platform and up into the air in its wake like so many dried leaves. The first to go, naturally, would be the station guard in his red cap.
The goods trains flashed by so fast it hurt my eyes, but sometimes I managed to read the white letters painted on their sides that indicated the various rail lines: RO (Riga–Orël), MKV (Moscow–Kiev–Voronezh), SW (South-West), SPBW (St Petersburg–Warsaw), RU (Ryazan–Urals), PRIV (Privislinskaya line), MVR (Moscow–Vindavo–Rybinsk), SV (Syzran–Vyazma), MKhS (Moscow–Kharkov–Sevastopol) and dozens more. Occasionally, I saw some I didn’t know – USS or SPBS – and then I’d ask my father and he’d tell me that that was the Ussurskaya line in the Far East or the St Petersburg–Sestroretsk line, a short stretch of tracks that ran north from the old capital along the Gulf of Finland. I envied those inanimate carriages because they never knew where they would be sent next – perhaps to Vladivostok, and from there to Vyatka, and on to Grodno, Feodosia and then the little station of Navlya in the heart of the dense Bryansk forest.
Were it possible, I would have climbed aboard any one of those goods trains and let it take me away. What lovely days I would have spent on the sidings where goods trains were always getting held up for a few hours. I would have stretched out in the warm grass at the foot of a hill, drunk tea with the station guards at the back of the wagon, bought wild strawberries from the leggy peasant girls, and swum in the cool water of the little river nearby where the yellow water lilies blossomed. Once under way, I would have sat dangling my legs in the open doors of the wagon, the wind, warmed by the earth, hitting me in the face, as the long, running shadow of the train raced over the fields and the sun, like a golden shield, sank into the hazy distance of the Russian plain that rolled on and on, leaving behind its wine-gold trace on the burnt-out sky.