We walked home, not terribly upset by what had just happened. The whole way Yasha kept waiting for someone to come and take my coat, but no one ever did. He became gloomy after a while and angry with me, as though it were my fault they took his coat and not mine. I got the feeling he actually wondered whether I had been in cahoots with the two thieves.
In general, Yasha was extremely unlucky. Nazarov always tried to convince us that Yasha was a Jonah. As proof, he offered two incidents. Unfortunately, I could not refute their veracity because I had seen them with my own eyes. The first involved a large jug of water, the second a thermometer.
At the time, Odessa was experiencing an acute water shortage. It had to be brought all the way from the river Dniester, over sixty kilometres away. The water pump on the Dniester was barely working. It had been shot up and attacked by numerous gangs. Odessa was hanging by a thread – it might be left without water at any moment. There was still water in the pipes, sometimes, but only in the areas of the city closest to sea level. Long queues of people from all over Odessa trudged to these more fortunate neighbourhoods from dawn until dusk, carrying with them every sort of pail, bucket, pitcher and kettle. Only a lucky few – the owners of carts – arrived with barrels to fetch water. We both envied and hated them, despite the fact that they had to harness themselves to their carts. It was painful to watch as they puffed and panted their way up the hills or chased, horrified, after these same carts when they got away from them and began careering back downhill, spilling a good half of the water.
We took turns fetching water over on Uspenskaya Street, a couple of kilometres away. I knew every cellar with a tap on that street so well I could find them all blindfolded. As we queued we heard all the latest news and gossip and the ‘regulars’ greeted each other as though they were dear old friends. The poet Vera Inber lived near us in shady Observatorny Lane.fn4 She always fetched water with the same vase, made of frosted, multi-coloured glass and decorated with purple irises in relief. Inber, a slight, frail woman, slipped one day and broke her vase. The following day, however, she was back with another one just like it. Out of sheer compassion, I carried the vase of water back home for her. Inber’s fear that I would drop and break this last vase of hers was exhausting and made my legs shake.
Quite naturally, I had to be careful carrying all that water. I always watched my footing and so came to learn everything there was to know about the roads and pavements between Chernomorskaya and Uspenskaya Streets. I became convinced that looking down as I walked was an alluring and at times even useful activity. There were a good many little objects to see, all of which stimulated various thoughts and ideas. Some of these objects were pleasant, some indifferent, and some were bad.
The worst, and most common, were drops, and at times whole pools, of blood and Mauser cartridges. The cartridges had an acrid smell of gunpowder. Empty purses and torn documents were also bad. Those were less common, however. There were fewer pleasant objects, but they were more varied. Typically, they were utterly unexpected – dried flowers from a bouquet, fragments of cut glass, desiccated crab claws, empty packets of Egyptian cigarettes, little girls’ hair ribbons, rusty fishhooks. They all spoke of a world at peace. The tufts of grass growing up here and there between the paving stones also counted among the pleasant things. As did the little flowers, most of them withered, and the round flat stones in the cement gutters washed clean by the rain. Most of the objects belonged to the indifferent category – buttons, copper coins, pins, cigarette butts. No one paid them any attention.
We poured our water into a large glass jug in the hall. One day, Yasha left his room and started screaming wildly. I rushed out into the hall and witnessed something inexplicable: right in front of Yasha and me, our enormous jug slowly began to tip over, pausing for a few seconds like the Tower of Pisa, before falling onto the floor and shattering into a thousand pieces. Our precious water ran gurgling down the stairs. We could have caught the jug, but for some reason we just stood there without moving as though bewitched.
The second incident, with the thermometer, was even stranger. I fell ill with Spanish flu. Thermometers in Odessa were as rare as pineapples. There was only a handful of them in the entire city. People treasured their thermometers no less than shipwrecked sailors treasure their last match.
Nazarov asked to borrow one for a couple of days from our editor, the illustrious Academician Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky. As a celebrated humanitarian and venerable guardian of Russia’s liberal traditions, Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky could not possibly say no. Biting his lips and groaning (the strongest expressions of displeasure he ever made), he gave Nazarov the thermometer with strict instructions to wrap it in cotton wool and keep it safely stored in a drawer. Nazarov, Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky warned, must cherish the thermometer like the apple of his eye.
Nazarov took my temperature, but he forgot about Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky’s instructions. He put the thermometer down on my bedside table and went off into town. I fell asleep. Yasha woke me up. He tried to open the door carefully, but it made a loud squeak. I glanced at the table and could feel the hair on my head rise – the thermometer had started to roll slowly to the edge of the table. I wanted to scream but couldn’t. I saw the look of terror in Yasha’s eyes. He too was watching the thermometer, motionless. It rolled off the table, fell and shattered on the floor. My fever broke, no doubt from the shock. I recovered almost immediately.
We racked our brains for a long time about how we were going to find another thermometer. The next two days Nazarov called in sick to avoid running into Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky. In the end, we had to resort to crime. We found the key to Dr Landesman’s office and found a thermometer in his desk drawer. To put it in the evasive language of thieves, we ‘took’ it (thieves never like to use the word ‘steal’) and returned it to Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky.
After these two incidents, Nazarov tried to convince me that Yasha was dangerous and urged me never to go out with him again. I just laughed at him, for which I was soon to be cruelly punished. In order to explain precisely what happened, I must first say a few words about Sturdzovsky Lane. It led to Chernomorskaya Street and was impossible to avoid.
This little street, named after the famous Alexander Sturdza, a contemporary of Pushkin, always evoked in us a sense of hidden danger, perhaps because the sides were lined with nothing but tall garden walls made of heavy stone, behind which large gardens stretched all the way to a high cliff overlooking the sea. The long, blank walls up and down Sturdzovsky Lane offered no protection, no cover. In those days, before walking down any street, we had all developed the habit of scoping out the quickest places to hide or take shelter from gunfire or drunken patrols. There wasn’t a single hiding place on Sturdzovsky Lane, unless one counted a sole two-storey house with its deeply recessed doorway. The house stood abandoned. Weeds grew out of the broken windows.
I paid Nazarov no heed, and late one autumn night walked back home again with Yasha from the office. Walking the streets at night required strict observance of a number of unwritten laws. First of all, no smoking, no talking, no coughing. Second, walk quietly, minimising the sound of one’s feet. Third, stick close to the walls or in the shadows of trees. Fourth, every forty or fifty steps, stop, look and listen, being sure to search the darkness for any movement. And fifth, at every intersection, scan the cross street to see that it was clear and then make a quick dash to the other side.