“And it’s really true, what he said about me? That I’m…”
Liza was embarrassed to repeat those extraordinary words (“a mag-ni-fi-cent wo-man”).
“Of course it’s true,” said Zuzu, in a matter-of-fact way. “It’s what Vera Yaroslavtseva told me. Do you think she’d make up something like that just for fun? She’s probably bursting with envy.”
“But all the same, don’t you think it might be a sin?” Liza fretted. And then: “Wait, there’s something I wanted to tell you. And now I’ve forgotten. Something important.”
“Well, it’ll come back to you. We’re being called to breakfast.”
In the evening, when she was going to bed, Liza went up to the mirror, looked at her fair hair, at her sharp little face with its freckled nose, smiled and whispered, “A magnificent woman.”
The night was black.
Over to starboard, the sea flowed into the sky and it seemed that there, quite close, only a few metres from the ship, lay the end of the world. A black void, space, eternity.
Over to port, one or two little lights glimmered in the distance. They were alive, flickering, moving. Or were we just imagining this, since we all knew there was a town there? Living people, movement. Life.
After two terrible, boring weeks on board, with nobody sure where they were going and when they would arrive, or whether they would ever feel the earth beneath their feet again, or whether that earth would be kind to them or whether it would lead them to sorrow, torment and death; after that, how frustrating it was to see those living lights and not dare to sail towards them.
In the morning the captain promised to contact the shore, find out the situation there and then decide what to do.
Who was in the town? Who had control of it? Friend or foe? Whites or Reds? And if it was in enemy hands, where could we go? Farther east? But we wouldn’t get far on this little coaster. We’d be drowned.[8]
Tired people wandered about on deck, looking towards the lights.
“I don’t want to look at those lights,” said Liza. “It makes me feel even more hopeless. I’d rather look at the black, terrible night. It feels closer to me. But isn’t the sea making a strange booming sound? What is it?”
A sailor passed by.
“Can you hear?” asked Liza. “Can you hear the sea booming?”
“Yes,” said the sailor, “it’s church bells from the shore. That’s a good sign. It means the Whites are there. Today is Holy Thursday. The Feast of the Twelve Gospels.”
The Twelve Gospels. A memory comes back, from long ago. Black, gold, candlelight. The pale blue smoke of incense. A little girl with blond braids clasps her hands around a wax candle that drips and flickers. She clasps her hands and weeps, “What can we do, how can we make amends, how can we silence that cry, so that we need no longer hear it: ‘Crucify Him! Crucify Him!’”
How strangely and clearly it all came back to her! So much time had passed, such a vast life, and then suddenly that moment—which, at the time, she had forgotten almost immediately—had suddenly come right up to her, in the form of church bells booming over the water, in the form of lights glowing on the shore like wax candles. It had caught up with her and now it was standing there beside her. It would never go away again. Never again? And Zuzu? Would Zuzu come running up again too, to buzz, to dance, to fly around her? The Zuzus of this world run fast, after all. They always catch up…
“And the second time the cock crew…”
THE WHITE FLOWER
Our friends the Zaitsevs live out of town.[1]
“The air is so much better out in the suburbs,” they say.
That is, they can’t afford to live where the air is bad.
A small group of us went to visit them.
We set off without any mishap. That is, apart from minor details: we didn’t take enough cigarettes, one of us lost her gloves, another forgot her door key. And then, at the station, we bought one ticket less than we needed. Well, anyone can make a mistake. We counted wrong. Even though there were only four of us.
It was a little awkward, actually, that we counted wrong. Apparently, in Hamburg, there was once a horse that could count beautifully, right up to six…
And we got out without any mishap at the right station. Though we did get out once or twice before—at every station, as a matter of fact. But every time, realizing our mistake, we had, very sensibly, got back in the carriage.
When we arrived at our destination we had a few more awkward moments. It turned out that none of us knew the Zaitsevs’ address. Each of us was relying on the others.
A quiet, gentle voice came to our aid: “You’re here!”
It was the Zaitsevs’ daughter: a girl of eleven, clear-eyed, with blond Russian plaits just like I had had at that age (plaits pulled so many, many times by other children, plaits that brought me no end of grief!).
She had come to meet us.
“I really didn’t think you’d get here!” she said.
“Why?”
“Well, Mama kept saying that you’d either miss the train or get the wrong one.”
I was a little offended. I’m actually very punctual. Recently, when I was invited to a ball, not only did I not arrive late—I was a whole week early.
“Ah, Natasha, Natasha!” I said. “You don’t know me very well yet!”
Her clear eyes looked at me thoughtfully, then down at the ground.
Delighted that we now knew where we were going, we decided to go and sit in a café for a while, then to hunt down some cigarettes, then try to telephone Paris and then…
But the fair-haired girl said very seriously, “No, you absolutely mustn’t. We must go back home right away. They’re expecting us.”
So, shamefaced and obedient, we set off in single file behind the young girl.
We found our hostess at the stove.
She was looking bemusedly into a saucepan.
“Natasha, quick! Tell me what you think? What is this I’ve ended up with—roast beef or salt beef ?”
The girl had a look.
“No, my angel,” she said. “This time it looks like beef stew.”
“Wonderful! Who’d have thought it?” cried Madame Zaitseva, delighted.
Dinner was a noisy affair.
We were all very fond of one another, all enjoying ourselves, and all in the mood to talk. We all talked at once. Somebody talked about the journal Contemporary Notes.[2] Somebody talked about how you shouldn’t pray for Lenin. That would be a sin. After all, the Church didn’t pray for Judas. Somebody talked about Parisian women and dresses, about Dostoevsky, about the recent spelling reform,[3] about the situation of writers abroad and about the Dukhobors,[4] and somebody wanted to tell us how the Czechs cook eggs, but she never succeeded. She kept talking away, but she was constantly interrupted.
And in all the hubbub the young girl, now wearing an apron, walked round the table, picking up a fork that had fallen onto the floor, moving a glass away from the edge of the table, seeing to all our needs, taking our worries to heart, her blond plaits glinting as bright as ever.
At one point she came up to one of us and held out a ticket.
“Look,” she said. “I want to show you something. In your own home, is it you who looks after the housekeeping? Well, when you next buy some wine, ask for one of these tickets. When you’ve collected a hundred tickets, they’ll give you six towels.”
8
This last section of the story evidently takes place during the Russian Civil War. After being evacuated from Odessa in April 1919, Teffi was on board a small ship bound for Novorossiisk, the Black Sea port from which she soon afterwards set off for Constantinople. For a more extensive treatment of this episode see Teffi,
3
Soon after the October Revolution there was an official reform of the Russian alphabet, the aim being to simplify the spelling. Many émigré publications, however, continued to use the old orthography for several more decades.
4
A pacifist Christian sect, the Dukhobors rejected both the tsarist regime and the Orthodox Church. Many emigrated to Canada in the early twentieth century.