Nanny was waiting for me in the hall.
The officer walked up to us, glanced at Nanny and chuckled: “Here to collect our Queen Cleopatra, are you?”
And then he fell silent, looked at me thoughtfully and said, simply and kindly, “Off you go. Off to bed with you, little one. You’ve gone quite pale. God bless you.”
I said goodbye and left, quiet and tired.
B-o-r-i-n-g.[2]
VALYA
I was in my twenty-first year.
She, my daughter, was in her fourth.[1]
We were not well matched.
I was rather nervy and unpredictable at that time, usually either crying or laughing.
Valya, on the other hand, was very even-tempered and calm. And from morning to night she was engaged in commerce—bargaining with me for chocolates.
In the morning she would not get up until she was given a chocolate. Nor would she go out for a walk, come back from a walk, have breakfast, have lunch, drink milk, get into the bath, get out of the bath, sleep or comb her hair except for a fee—a chocolate. Without chocolate, all life would come to a standstill, all activity replaced by a deafening, systematic howl. Then I would feel I was a monster, a child-killer. And I would give in to her.
Valya despised me for my lack of good sense—that was clear enough. But she didn’t treat me too badly. Sometimes she would even pet me with her soft, warm hand, which was always sticky from sweets.
“You’re so pretty,” she would say. “You have a nose like my elly-phant.”
Not particularly flattering. But I knew that my daughter thought her little rubber elephant more beautiful than the Venus de Milo. We all have our different ideals. So I was happy to hear her say this, although I tried not to encourage endearments from her when there were other people around.
Apart from sweets, Valya was interested in very little. Though once, while drawing moustaches on some elderly aunts in a photograph album, she asked in passing, “So where is Jesus Christ now?”
And, without waiting for an answer, she demanded a chocolate.
She was very strict about decorum. She insisted on being the first to be greeted by everyone. On one occasion she came up to me very upset and indignant indeed: “Motya the cook’s daughter has gone out on the balcony in only her skirt,” she said. “And there are geese out there.”
Yes, she was very punctilious.
It seemed that year as if Christmas would be a rather sad, anxious time. Sometimes I was able to laugh, since I wanted so badly to live on God’s earth. But more often I cried, since life was proving almost beyond me.
For days on end Valya talked with her little elephant about a Christmas tree. It was clear that I would have to get hold of one.
In secret, I ordered some Dresden ornaments from Muir and Mirrielees.[2] I unpacked them at night.
They were absolutely wonderfuclass="underline" little houses and lanterns, parrots in golden cages. But best of all was a little angel, all covered in gold glitter, with iridescent mica wings. The angel hung on a piece of elastic and its wings fluttered when it moved. What the angel was made of, I don’t know. It could have been wax. It had pink cheeks and it held a rose in its hands. I had never seen anything so marvellous.
And at once I thought, “Better not hang it on the tree. In any case its beauty will be lost on Valya. She’ll only break it. I’ll keep it for myself.”
So that’s what I decided to do.
But in the morning, Valya sneezed. She must have caught a cold, I thought. I was seized with anxiety.
She might look chubby, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t delicate. I didn’t take good enough care of her. I was a bad mother. And now, wanting to keep the best for myself, I’d hidden the angel. “Its beauty will be lost on her,” I had said to myself. But if that were the case, it was only because I hadn’t taught her to appreciate beauty.
On the night before Christmas, when I was decorating the tree, I took out the angel. I looked at it for a long time. What a pretty little thing it was, with that rose in its chubby little hand. It looked so cheerful, so rosy-cheeked, yet so gentle. An angel like that should be hidden away in a box, and only on bad days—when the postman brought me horrid letters, and the lamps burned low and the wind made the roof rattle—only then should I allow myself to take it out, to dangle it gently on its elastic and watch the glitter of the gold and the play of light on the mica wings. This might not sound like much. It might sound sad. But did I have anything better to look forward to?
I hung the angel high up on the tree. It was the most beautiful of all the ornaments, so it had to be in the place of honour. But all the time there was another thought in my head—a secret, mean thought. High up, it would be less obvious to smaller persons.
That evening we lit the candles on the tree. We invited Motka, and Lyoshka, the laundrywoman’s son. And Valya was so sweet and affectionate that my hard heart began to melt. I lifted her up in my arms and I showed her the angel.
“An angel?” she said in her businesslike way. “Give it to me.”
I gave it to her.
She looked at it for a long time, stroking its wings with one finger.
I saw that she liked the angel, and I felt proud of my daughter. After all, she hadn’t paid the least attention to the stupid clown, even though it was so brightly coloured.
Valya suddenly bent forward and kissed the angel. My darling girl!
At that moment Niushenka, one of our neighbours, arrived. She had brought a gramophone with her. We began to dance.
Really I ought to hide the angel, I thought. It’ll only get broken… But where was Valya?
Valya was standing in the corner behind the bookshelf. Her mouth and cheeks were smeared with something raspberry-coloured. She looked troubled.
“What is it, Valya? What’s the matter? What’s that in your hand?”
In her hand were the mica wings, crumpled and broken.
“It tasted a bit sweet,” she said.
I must wash her at once, I thought. I must scrub her tongue. That was what mattered—the paint might be poisonous. She seemed, thank God, to be all right. But why was I crying as I threw the broken mica wings in the fire? How very silly of me! I was crying!
Valya stroked me indulgently on the cheek with her soft hand, which was warm and sticky, and tried to comfort me:
“Don’t cry, you silly. I’ll buy you some money.”
STAGING POSTS
On that morning it was always sunny.
The weather was always bright and cheerful. So, at least, both Liza and Katya remembered it for the rest of their lives.[1]
On that morning, Nanny would always dress them in new, light-coloured dresses. Then she would go to the “big” dining room, where the adults were drinking tea, and come back up again with half a hard-boiled egg, a piece of kulich and a piece of paskha[2] for each of them.
Nanny herself always broke her Lenten fast early in the morning when she came back from the Liturgy. She would have cream with her coffee, and the children knew that she would grumble all day and start to feel out of sorts by evening.
2
Twenty years later, in 1947, Teffi ended her article about Baba Yaga, the archetypal old witch of Russian folk tales, with an almost identical single word paragraph: “B-o-r-i-n-g” (“
1
Teffi was young when she had her first child, but not as young as this implies. She married in January 1892 and, aged twenty, gave birth to her daughter Valeria in November that year. Her marriage was deeply unhappy and Teffi eventually abandoned her husband and children, returning to St Petersburg and soon beginning to earn her living as a professional writer.
2
A department store in Moscow run from 1880 to 1918 by two Scottish businessmen, on the site of what is now the Central Department Store (TsUM) on Theatre Square. “Dresden ornaments” were, for the main part, produced between 1890 and 1910. They were made from cardboard, dampened to make it flexible, and then gilded, silvered or painted.
1
In this story Liza represents Teffi herself, while Katya is Teffi’s younger sister Lena.