Despite her former profession as a governess, there was nothing stiff or prim about Amalia. She was simply a kind, boring and lonely woman. Amalia hated the Germans occupying Kiev and considered them boors. She treated me with an air of timid sympathy, apparently because I tended to read and write at night. She considered me a writer and from time to time even got up the courage to talk to me about literature and her favourite writer, Spielhagen. She cleaned my room herself, and sometimes I would come back to find a sprig of dried flowers or a picture postcard of a brilliant dahlia left between the pages of one of my books. But there was never anything intrusive about these little acts of kindness, and nothing ever interfered with our friendship.
Her friends – elderly German and Swiss governesses in gaiters and capes with satin ribbons, reticules in their hands – came to visit on feast days. Amalia put out a pile of napkins embroidered with kittens, puppies, pansies and forget-me-nots, spread these treasures on the table and served her famous Basel coffee (her family originally came from there). The governesses ate and drank daintily and carried on a conversation that consisted entirely of exclamations of astonishment or horror. Only one man was admitted to this select company – our house superintendent, a clerk for the South-West Railway. He had a most luxurious name: Pan Sebastian Kturenda-Tsikavsky.
He was a cocky little man with a crew-cut, the dyed moustache of a pimp and insolent little button eyes. He dressed in a navy-blue jacket with brown stripes cut for a much smaller man and had sewn to his breast pocket a strip of purple silk that was meant to act as a symbolic replacement for a missing and presumably fashionable handkerchief. He was fond of bow-ties and the pink celluloid collars that were then referred to as ‘bachelor’s luck’. There was no way to wash them and so his collars were always dirty. The only way to get the dirt out was to rub them with an ordinary schoolboy’s rubber. Pan Kturenda gave off a complex aroma of hair dye, stale tobacco and hooch, which he distilled himself in his own dimly lit room. Kturenda was a bachelor and lived with his mother, a timid old woman who was afraid of her son and especially of his learning. Pan Kturenda loved to impress the lodgers with it as well, always in the most florid language.
‘I have the privilege of informing you’, he liked to say mysteriously, ‘that Weininger’s Sex and Character is the formulation of the sexual question in its most articulate of expressions.’ Pan Kturenda never broached the subject of sex in his conversations with Frau Amalia, but he made the governesses quiver with his accounts of the divine origins of ‘the Most Noble Pan Hetman Skoropadskyi’. I have seen many fools in my life, but nothing to compare with the likes of this idiot.
Life in Kiev at the time reminded one of a feast in a time of plague.fn2 Many coffee houses and restaurants had sprung up, although none of them had enough sweets and food for even a dozen or so patrons. Still, they made an impression of shabby wealth. The population had nearly doubled in size from the influx of a great many Muscovites and Petrograders. Artsybashev’s Jealousyfn3 and Viennese operettas played in the theatres. German uhlans with lances and red and black pennants patrolled the streets. The newspapers carried little news about events in Soviet Russia. It was a touchy subject. The editors decided it was best to ignore such matters. There was no harm in letting readers think that life there was just fine.
Ox-eyed Kievan beauties and the Hetman’s officers roller-skated arm in arm on the city’s rinks. Gambling dens and brothels opened left and right. At the Bessarabsky Market, cocaine was sold openly and passers-by were accosted by prepubescent prostitutes. No one had any idea what was happening at the local factories and in the workers’ suburbs. The Germans didn’t feel secure, especially after the murder of General Eichhorn. One got the impression Kiev was determined to enjoy itself during the blockade. As for Ukraine, it was as though it didn’t even exist. Nothing beyond the ring of Petlyura’s men seemed real.
Some evenings I walked over to an arts club on Nikolaevskaya Street. Poets, singers and dancers who had fled from the north performed on a restaurant stage. Loud drunks liked to interrupt the long-winded poetry readings. It was hot and stuffy inside, even in winter, and so the windows were often opened a crack. Together with the frosty air, snow would blow into the brightly lit room, land and immediately melt. With the windows ajar, the nightly sound of the guns became more apparent.
One evening Vertinsky sang.fn4 I had never heard him perform before. I still remembered him as a schoolboy who wrote exquisite verses. It was snowing unusually hard that evening, and the flakes twirled round and round in the air, drifting all the way to the piano where they caught the multi-coloured lights of the chandelier. Petlyura’s guns were getting closer now. Their thundering made the glasses on the tables ring. The troubling sound of the glassware seemed to be sending us a warning signal, but everyone carried on smoking, arguing, making toasts and laughing. A young woman in a black evening dress with narrow eyes that reminded me somehow of Egypt had the most infectious laugh of all that night. Snowflakes were landing on her exposed back, and with each one she shivered and quickly turned round as if she wanted to see it melt, but by then it was already too late.
Vertinsky came out onto the stage in a black tail-coat. He was tall, thin and terribly pale. The room fell silent. The waiters stopped serving and formed a line at the back. Vertinsky twisted his long slender fingers together, held them out in front of him in an air of great suffering, and started to sing. He sang of the Cadets recently killed outside Kiev in the village of Borshchagovka, of the youths sent to a certain death against a dangerous gang. ‘I don’t know, who wanted this or why? What merciless hand sent these boys off to die?’
He sang of the Cadets’ funeral. Vertinsky ended with the words:
Mourners huddled silently, shivering in their coats,
A woman, her frenzied face hidden behind a hand,
Bent down and kissed the cold blue lips of a corpse
And flung at the priest her wedding band.
He was singing of an actual incident that had happened at the Cadets’ funeral. The audience applauded. Vertinsky bowed. A drunken officer seated at a table in the back blurted out: ‘Sing “God Save the Tsar”!’
The room erupted. A wizened old man who looked like a schoolteacher in a pince-nez and a coat shiny with age rushed at the officer. His pointy little beard shaking with rage, the man began pounding the marble-topped table with his bony fists and showering the officer with spittle as he screamed: ‘Riff-raff! Vermin! You and all the other officers! How dare you insult the people of Free Russia! Why aren’t you at the front fighting the Bolsheviks? Just another paper tiger!’
Everyone jumped up. The old man threw himself at the officer, but some patrons pulled him away. Red in the face, the officer slowly stood up, kicked away his chair and grabbed a bottle by the neck. The waiters rushed over to him. The woman in the black dress screamed and covered her face with her hands. Vertinsky banged a loud chord on the piano and raised a hand. The noise stopped. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen!’ he said in a clear and contemptuous voice, ‘This is just too tiresome!’ With that, he turned and slowly walked off the stage.