The visitor from Leningrad also brought with him a gleaming nickel-plated saxophone. In the mornings, when he practised the high notes on this strange and unheard-of instrument, our landlady's pensive-looking goat would start bleating plaintively and the chickens would scatter in all directions squawking as if a hawk were lurking overhead.
The Leningrad artistes took lodgings two doors away from us, near the brine baths in Primorskaya Street. We decided to ask them for help in our enterprise.
Arkady Ignatievich listened to my stumbling request and said weightily: "In other words, local manners are to be parodied? Very well, let us stir up this bog of petty-bourgeois sentiment!"
.. .Sometimes after that I peeped into the rehearsal room where the people from Leningrad and Tolya Golovatsky were selecting performers for the show. Arkady Ignatievich was usually leaning back in his chair with a guitar in his hands. He had a long, gaunt face with a jutting chin and clean-cut profile. His wife, the frail, graceful Ludmilla, in a blue sports frock with red pockets and an anchor on the front, would sit beside him, tapping her foot in time with the music. Golovatsky paced about behind them, stern and important-looking.
At one of the rehearsals I saw Osaulenko, the lad who had changed his name. He had dropped in at the club on Golovatsky's invitation and was rather worried, thinking that Tolya might want to have another chat with him [about his tattooing. When he learnt what was afoot, however, Misha, still
nicknamed "Edouarde," readily agreed to take part in our scheme. There was some hidden power in this tousle-headed lad, who was decorated from top to toe with mermaids, monkeys, and old-time frigates. He wanted to do everything at the show—dance, and juggle with ten-pound dumb-bells, and even sing, although "Edouarde's" voice was not exactly tuneful and often cracked on the high notes. When I glanced into the rehearsal room, Misha was dancing. He was hopping about wriggling every part of his body and kicking his legs wide. From time to time he would crouch down nearly touching the floor, then straighten up wagging his finger and shuffling his feet in a kind of scissors movement.
"What do you call that dance?" Golovatsky asked dubiously.
"Black Bottom!" Misha replied, panting for breath.
"Where did you learn that?" Tolya went on.
"A sailor was dancing it at the 'Little Nook.' The chaps who've been overseas say it's all the rage abroad nowadays."
"Do you know what 'black bottom' means?" Golovatsky asked.
"Well, it's the name of the thing . . . like 'waltz,' for instance."
"But what does the name actually mean? Do you know that?" And Tolya winked across at Arkady Ignatievich.
"Can't say I do..." Misha replied hesitantly.
"Well, you are a coon, aren't you! Just repeating other people's words like a parrot and not even troubling to find out what they mean! Are you really going to live your whole life in such a dull, lazy fashion? 'Black bottom,' in Russian, means 'chornoyedno,' the lower depths. Do you want to sink to the lower depths?"
Misha grinned flashing his silver teeth: "N-n-no, I don't!"
"I should think not either! Let those who think that dance fashionable do that, we'll find something a bit more cheerful. We've got to stride on towards the light, not sink to the lower depths!"
... When tickets for our youth show were distributed at the works, I took two extra tickets and sent them by post to Angelika Andrykhevich. Instead of writing my own address on the bottom of the envelope, I wrote: "From Lieutenant Glan." What gave me the idea, I don't know. I suppose I just did it out of devilment.
As I had expected, Angelika turned up at the show with Zuzya Trituzny. He sat in the third row, oozing with self-importance. Now and then he offered Angelika fruit drops out of a blue tin and whispered in her ear, grinning at his own jokes.
As I watched him paying his attentions to Angelika, I thought to myself: "Wait a bit, Zuzya, old chap! You can't imagine what a treat's in store for you!"
In spite of Zuzya's attempts to amuse her, Angelika was glum and gazed at the stage with a far-away look in her eyes. From time to time she pushed her hair back carelessly in a way that suggested she would be only too glad to be rid of her tiresome companion. She did not even smile, as many did, when Golovatsky began his introductory speech.
"People who don't realize that youth can get fun and pleasure out of doing something useful are downright stupid!" were Golovatsky's opening words. What the audience was to see he called "only our first attempt to show in its true light the depravity of the old life that still surrounds us, and to brand for ever the aping of things foreign."
"The decadent music of the dancing-saloon and night club," said Golovatsky, "gives rise to feelings of impotence and apathy, it lowers a man's working ability. And it is no accident that our enemies use it as a
weapon against us. But while branding what is rotten and alien to us," he went on, "we must learn from what is good, seek it out and cherish it, show everything that is genuinely of the people."
Golovatsky's words, which seemed to promise a very unusual spectacle, were listened to attentively by the large audience in the club hall. Besides the young people of the works, there were old workers and their wives among the audience. In the front row I saw Rudenko, the director, Flegontov, and Kazurkin, the secretary of the Town Party Committee.
I had heard Kazurkin speak once at a production meeting in the foundry, when he had called on us to combat spoilage and not to hold up the other shops. Turunda had told me that during the Civil War Kazurkin had been with Budyonny's cavalry in its campaign from the Azov steppes right across the Ukraine to Lvov. It was not for nothing that he wore on his white tunic the gleaming Order of the Red Banner, a very rare award in those days.
Kazurkin had helped us to prepare the show. After Golovatsky went to see him, everything was available— materials for the costumes, make-up men, balalaikas from the local watermen's club, Caucasian daggers that the militia had taken from captured Makhno bandits...
As soon as Golovatsky had finished speaking, I slipped over to the signal bell. From there I could watch not only what was happening on the stage, but also what took place in the hall. True, it was rather difficult for me to read the large notice bearing the title of the show which was revealed as the curtain went up:
CHARLESTONIADA or DOPE FOR DANDIES
The club decorators had reproduced the Rogale-Piontkovskaya dancing-saloon in detail. The tall papier mache columns placed along the sides of the stage were as greasy and finger-marked as they were in reality.
The title notice was raised out of sight and a pianist in a long dress-coat appeared on the stage—an exact replica of the pianist at Madame Rogale-Piontkovskaya's. In a squeaky affected voice he started praising the dances that the "mademoiselles" and "messieurs" could learn at the saloon for fifty kopeks an evening. Then he skipped over to the piano and the rattle of the Charleston filled the hall.
To the sound of the music, dancing couples began to appear from the wings.
First a titter of amusement skimmed across the hall like a puff of wind heralding a storm, then the titters swelled into loud laughter, and soon the audience was laughing fit to break every window in the club. The club artists had done a fine job! Working with the make-up men they had made the dancing couples into almost photographic images of the regulars at Madame's saloon.
Madeleine the plater jerked wildly on to the stage. She was wearing a sailor's suit with a broad collar and her fringe was so low that she seemed to have no forehead at all. Her friends were kicking their feet in such high heels that the audience could scarcely understand how they managed to move on them at all.
The girls' lips were vividly painted, not in "bows," however, as fashion demanded, but in huge ribbons! Nearly every dancer had a lurid blob under her nose, about the size of a hen's egg. And the coiffures the make-up men had given them! Fringes reaching to their plucked eyebrows, turbans of hair rising in spirals on top of their heads, birds' nests protruding from the back of their necks, spaniel curls in huge abundance.