She kept pointing things out to us and explaining things. She very much wanted to help—to help us live in the world.
“How wonderful it is here,” enthused our hostess. “After the lives we led under the Bolsheviks! It’s barely believable. You turn on a tap—and water comes out. You go to light the stove—and there’s firewood already there.”
“Eat up, my angel,” the girl whispered. “Your food will go cold.”
We talked until it grew dark. The fair-haired girl had for some time been repeating something to each of us in turn. At last somebody paid attention.
“You need to catch the seven o’clock train,” she had been saying. “You must go to the station straight away.”
We grabbed our things and ran to the station.
There we had one last, hurried conversation.
“We need to buy Madame Zaitseva a dress tomorrow. Very modest, but showy. Black, but not too black. Narrow, but it must look full. And most important of all, one she won’t grow tired of.”
“Let’s take Natasha with us. She can advise us.”
And off we went again: Contemporary Notes, Gorky, French literature, Rome…
And the fair-haired girl was walking about, saying something, trying to convince us of something. At last, somebody listened.
“You need to go over the bridge to the other platform. Don’t wait till the train comes in or you’ll have to rush and you might miss it.”
The next day, in the shop, the graceful figure of Madame Zaitseva was reflected in two triple mirrors. A little salesgirl with pomaded hair and short legs was draping one dress after another over her. And on a chair, her hands politely folded, sat the fair-haired girl, dispensing advice.
“Oh!” said Madame Zaitseva, flitting about between the mirrors. “This one is lovely. Natasha, why aren’t you giving me any advice? Look, isn’t that beautiful—with the grey embroidery on the front. Quick, tell me what you think!”
“No, my angel, you mustn’t buy a dress like that. How could you go about every day with a grey stomach? It would be different if you had a lot of dresses. But as it is, it’s not very practical.”
“Well, fancy you saying that!” her mother protested. But she didn’t dare disobey.
We began to make our way out.
“Oh!” cried Madame Zaitseva, “Just look at these collars! They’re just what I’ve been dreaming of! Natasha, take me away from them quickly, don’t let me get carried away!”
Concerned, the fair-haired girl took her mother by the hand.
“Come this way, my angel, don’t look over there. Come over here and look at the needles and thread.”
“You know what?” whispered Madame Zaitseva, with a sideways glance at her daughter. “She heard what we were saying about Lenin yesterday. And in the evening she said, ‘I pray for him every day. People say he has much blood on his conscience. It’s a burden on his soul… I can’t help it,’ she said to me, ‘I pray for him.’”[5]
Part III
HEADY DAYS: REVOLUTIONS AND CIVIL WAR
NEW LIFE
It was not long after the war with Japan.[1] Forty-five years ago. An extraordinary time, and it comes back to me in bits and pieces, as if somebody had shuffled the pages of a diary, mixing up the tragic entries with stories so ridiculous that one can only shrug in disbelief. Did all that really happen? Was life really like that? Were other people, were we ourselves, really like that?
But yes, that is exactly how it was.
Russia had swung to the left overnight. There was unrest among the students, there were strikes among the workers, and even old generals could be heard snorting about the disgraceful way the country was being run, and making sharp criticisms of the Tsar himself.
Sometimes all this became the stuff of farce. In Saratov, the Chief of Police joined up with Topuridze—a revolutionary who had just married a millionairess—to publish a legally authorized Marxist newspaper.[2] Things could hardly have got more absurd.
The Petersburg intelligentsia took keen delight in the new political climate. One of our theatres put on The Green Cockatoo[3]—a previously censored play about the French Revolution. Journalists wrote satirical pieces undermining the establishment, poets wrote revolutionary verses and actors declaimed them on stage to enthusiastic applause.
The university and the technological institute were temporarily closed, and political meetings took place in their buildings. Ordinary, respectable city folk would wander quite freely into these meetings, draw inspiration from the shouts of “Hear, hear!” and “Down with this! Down with that!”—still a novelty at the time—and take any number of half-baked, badly formulated ideas back home to their friends and families.
New illustrated journals appeared: one, edited by Shebuev, was called the Machine Gun.[4] The cover of one issue, if I remember correctly, was adorned by a bloody handprint. These publications took the place of the respectable Wheatfield[5] and sold out quickly, bought eagerly by a rather surprising readership.
I remember once, at my mother’s house, meeting one of her old friends, the widow of an important dignitary. This dignitary had been a friend of Katkov and a diehard conservative of the type we later came to call “bison”.[6]
“I should like to read the Machine Gun,” said this dignitary’s widow, for some reason pronouncing the dreadful word not with a “u” but with a clipped “e”: “Machine Gen”. “But I don’t dare buy it myself, and I don’t like to send Yegor out to get it. I feel Yegor doesn’t approve of the latest tendencies.”
Yegor was her old manservant.
There was also an occasion when my uncle and I were at my mother’s. This uncle had been close to the royal court and, when we were children, he had often brought us sweets from the Tsar’s table (which was quite the done thing back then). The sweets were made by the Tsar’s own confectioner, and were in white wrappers with trimmed edges. We had chewed on them with awe. Now, pointing at me, my mother said to my uncle, “This young lady mixes with socialists.”
It was as if she were talking about some savage she had seen devouring a raw partridge, feathers and all. Something rather revolting—yet still impressive.
“Now there’ll be trouble,” I thought.
But to my surprise, there was nothing of the kind.
My uncle smiled archly: “Well, my dear,” he said, “young people must move with the times.”
This was the last thing I had expected.
So how was it I began to move with the times?
In our circle of friends there was a certain K.P.,[7] the son of a senator. Much to his father’s chagrin, he was closely involved with the Social Democrats.[8] He was a restless soul, torn between Lenin’s pamphlet “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back”[9] and the poems of Balmont.
“You really must go and see Lenin in Geneva,”[10] he would say to me.
“Why Lenin? Why should I go and see Lenin?”
“Why? To study with him. That’s just what you need.”
5
Here Teffi touches on controversies within Russian Orthodoxy. Earlier in the story one of the speakers casually equated Lenin with Judas. Praying for Judas is considered a sin, in part because he was a suicide, but more importantly because of his role in condemning God to death. Lenin, like Judas, may be considered a traitor, but that is not relevant to the question of whether or not one should pray for him. Most White Russians, naturally, would have found it hard to bring themselves to pray for Lenin. Natasha’s desire—or rather need—to pray for him is an indication of her extraordinary open-heartedness; it may also be Teffi’s delicate way of hinting to the émigré community that it is better not to identify matters of faith with matters of political ideology.
1
Russia’s defeat in this war (1904–05) further undermined the authority of the already unstable regime.
4
A radical satirical journal produced by the journalist Nikolai Shebuev in 1905–06. The back page of the first issue carried a photograph of the Tsar’s “October Manifesto” with a bloody handprint across it and the caption “Major General Trepov had a hand in this document”. Trepov had played an important role in the suppression of the many strikes and rebellions that swept Russia in 1905. Only five issues of the journal were printed. Shebuev was arrested and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment.
5
6
The word “bison” (
8
The Russian Social Democratic Party was a revolutionary socialist party formed in 1898. In 1903 it split into two factions: the Bolsheviks (led by Lenin) and the Mensheviks.
9
“One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (The Crisis in our Party)”, was published in Geneva in 1904.
10
After a period of internal exile in Russia, Lenin had left for Geneva in 1900. At the time Switzerland was something of a hotbed of radicalism—a number of Russian revolutionaries studied at the universities of Geneva and Zurich.