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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
The finest work by the great Russian writer Teffi, in a new selection by the acclaimed Robert Chandler__________'Heartbreaking as well as very funny. I wish she were still alive, and I could have met her... I can't recommend her strongly enough' Guardian'Teffi is one of the great writers of early 20th century Russia, from Nicholas II's reign to the Revolution afterwards. Her writing, whether stories or reportage or memoir is witty, elegant, fantastical, yet sharp and acute and playful' Simon Sebag Montefiore'One of the great twentieth-century writers. At their best her short stories are to my mind the equal of Chekhov's' John Gray__________Teffi's literary genius made her a star in pre-revolutionary Russia, beloved by Tsar Nicholas II and Vladimir Lenin alike. An extremely funny writer with a scathing critical eye, she was also capable of Chekhovian subtlety and depth of character.Ranging from humorous sketches of a vanished Russia to ironic, melancholy evocations of post-revolutionary exile, And Time Was No More showcases the full range of Teffi's gifts. A new selection by the celebrated Robert Chandler, it includes previously untranslated stories alongside more famous work, demonstrating the enduring freshness of one of the great wits of Russian literature.
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1‘Pushkin Press deserves our thanks for bringing Teffi to a much wider audience’
SPECTATOR
‘A writer who deserves her seat at the top table of Russian authors’
SARA WHEELER, WALL STREET JOURNAL
‘The translucent surface of her writing gives sight of the depths of the human spirit: its raging and yearning, its dark nights and joyous awakenings’
NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
23
AND TIME WAS NO MORE
ESSENTIAL STORIES AND MEMORIES
TEFFI
TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY ROBERT AND ELIZABETH CHANDLER
WITH MICHELE BERDY, ROSE FRANCE, ANNE MARIE JACKSON AND CLARE KITSON; AND WITH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM BEE BENTALL, MARIA EVANS, IRINA STEINBERG AND SIÂN VALVIS
PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS
Contents
Introductory Note
There are writers who muddy their own water, to make it seem deeper. Teffi could not be more different: the water is entirely transparent, yet the bottom is barely visible.
—georgy adamovich1
Teffi had a rare gift for establishing a sense of intimacy between herself and her readers. Nicholas Lezard, for example, began his review of Subtly Worded (our first selection of Teffi’s stories and memoirs), with the words, “Pushkin Press has done it again: made me fall in love with a writer I’d never heard of. […] I wish she were still alive, and I could have met her.”2 And Erica Wagner, in a review of Memories, wrote, “Teffi is a courageous companion for anyone’s life.”3 Other reviewers and readers have responded in a similar vein.
This sense of intimacy is to some extent an artistic construct; Teffi’s “memories” are not precise historical records and there are crucial turning points in her life about which she is startlingly reticent. Nevertheless, the clear-eyed goodwill that informs her writing was evidently characteristic of the real person. Leo Tolstoy wrote, “The poet takes the best things out of his life and puts them into his work. Hence his work is beautiful and his life bad.”4 This could not be said of Teffi: she was kind, tolerant and courageous. Few, if any, members of the fractious Russian émigré community in Paris, where she spent the last thirty years of her life, were so generally liked and admired. 8
Teffi’s life is emblematic of many of the most important aspects of twentieth-century history. She was one of a liberal, optimistic generation whose hopes were shattered by the advent of totalitarianism. Memories—her account of her last journey across Russia and Ukraine during the Civil War—is a vivid evocation of life as a refugee, of its tragedies, absurdities and unexpected moments of joy. Teffi is also central to the history of women’s writing. In about 1898, probably on the edge of an emotional breakdown, she left her husband and three small children and returned to Petersburg to begin a career as a professional writer. A letter written nearly fifty years later to her elder daughter Valeria is both a self-justification and a confession of guilt. After saying she had been a bad mother, she backtracks, “In essence I was good, but circumstances drove me from home, where, had I remained, I would have perished.” It should be no surprise that Teffi seldom spoke of a sacrifice that must have been almost unbearable.5
Our aim here has been not only to represent Teffi’s best work, but also to give an impressionistic account of her life. This collection begins with stories about her early childhood and moves on through her accounts of revolution, civil war and exile. It ends with stories and articles about her experience of old age. She suffered from poor health throughout her life and was close to death at least three times. Nevertheless, she lived to the age of eighty.
Teffi’s work is extremely varied—both in tone and in subject matter. It is not unusual for a writer to be pigeonholed, but few great writers have suffered from this to such a degree; many Russians still know only the light satirical sketches she wrote during the very first years of her career. Like Chekhov, she fuses wit, tragedy and a remarkable perceptiveness; there are few human weaknesses she did not relate to with compassion and understanding. And like her close friend Ivan Bunin and many other great Russian prose 9writers, Teffi was a poet who turned to prose but continued to write with a poet’s sensitivity to melody and rhythm.
If anyone wishes to read more about Teffi, I wholeheartedly recommend Edythe Haber’s exemplary biography: Teffi: A Life of Letters and of Laughter.10
Notes
1 Review of The Book of June, Illiustrirovannaia Rossiia, 25 April 1931.
2The Guardian, 24 June 2014.
3New Statesman, 13 May 2016.
4 27 November 1866. (Jubilee Edition, vol. 48, p. 116).
5 Edythe Haber, Teffi: A Life of Letters and of Laughter (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019), p. 20. Hereafter: Haber, Teffi.
PART ONE
Childhood
Like the Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot—another great woman artist who was famous in her lifetime but then largely forgotten for several decades—Teffi portrays children without the least hint of sentimentality. She is aware of the complexity of children’s emotions and of the intensity with which they can feel not only love and joy, but also rage, jealousy and despair. Her psychological understanding is profound yet unobtrusive. She herself wrote:
During those years of my distant childhood, we used to spend the summer in a wonderful, blessed country—at my mother’s estate in Volhynia province.1 I was very little. I had only just begun to learn to read and write—so I must have been about five. […] What slipped quickly through the lives of adults was for us a matter of complex and turbulent experience, entering our games and our dreams, inserting itself like a brightly coloured thread into the pattern of our life, into that first firm foundation that psychoanalysts now investigate with such art and diligence, seeing it as the prime cause of many of the madnesses of the human soul.212
The first story in this section is taken from the collection Witch (1936), which Teffi particularly valued. In a letter sent to a historian friend in 1943, she wrote, “In Witch you find our ancient Slav gods, how they still live on in the soul of the people, in legends, superstitions and customs. Everything as I encountered it in the Russian provinces, as a child.”3
Most of Teffi’s stories about her childhood are written in the first person. When she writes about herself in the third person, she usually calls herself either Katya or Lisa.
Notes
1 Volhynia (now a part of western Ukraine) was then part of the Russian Empire.
2 From the opening of “Katerina Petrovna”, in The Book of June (Teffi, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Lakom, 2000), vol. 4, p. 45).
3 Teffi, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow: Lakom, 1999), vol. 2, p. 9.
Rusalka
We had many servants in our large country house. They lived with us for a long time, especially the most important of them: the coachman, who so astonished us little ones when we once saw him eat an entire black radish; Panas, who was our head gardener and the village wise man; our elderly cook; the housekeeper; Bartek the footman; and Kornelia the chambermaid. These were all a part of the household, and they stayed with us for many years.
Bartek was a rather picturesque figure. Short, with a distinctive forelock. His walk and some of his other mannerisms were very like Charlie Chaplin’s, and he too was something of a comedian. I think he must have been with us a good ten years, since he appears in every one of my childhood memories. Yes, at least ten years, even though he was fired every year, always on Whit Monday.
“It’s his journée fatale,” my elder sister liked to pronounce.
Bartek could never get through this fateful day without running into trouble.
Much was expected of servants in those stricter times. Some of the transgressions for which poor Bartek was dismissed can hardly be described as serious.
I remember one occasion when he let a dish of rissoles crash to the floor. And there was the evening when he spilled a whole 14gravy boat down an elegant lady’s collar. I also remember him serving chicken to a particularly stout and self-important gentleman. Evidently not someone who liked to rush at things, this gentleman studied the pieces of chicken for a long time, wondering which to choose. All of a sudden, Bartek—who was wearing white cotton gloves—pointed daintily with his middle finger at a morsel he thought particularly tasty.
The gentleman looked up in some indignation.
“Blockhead! How dare you?”
It was Whit Monday, and Bartek was duly dismissed.
But I don’t think he was ever dismissed for long. He may, perhaps, have gone on living in some little shed behind the wing. Then he would come and ask for forgiveness and everything would go smoothly until the next Whitsun.
He was also famous for having once shot, plucked, roasted and eaten a whole crow. All purely out of scientific interest.
He loved telling our old nyanya about this,1 probably because the story really did make her feel very queasy.
“There’s nowt quite like it, my dear Nyanya. No, there’s no flesh so full o’ goodness like that of a crow. Brimful of satiety, and how! The ribs be a little sour, mind, the loins a little like human flesh. But the thighs—so rich, so dripping wi juice they are… After a meal of crow, it be a whole month till you next feel hunger. Aye, it’s three weeks nah since I last put food in me mouth.”
Nyanya gasped. “So you really… You well and truly ate a crow?” she would ask.
“That I did, Nyanya—and washed it dahn wi good strong water.”
The heroine of this tale, Kornelia the chambermaid, was another of these important, long-term servants. She was from a family of Polish gentry and some of her elegant mannerisms 15seemed affected. She was, therefore, known as the “Pannochka”—the Polish for “Mademoiselle”.
She had a plump, very pale face and bulging eyes. The eyes of a fish—yellow with black rims. Her fine eyebrows were like an arrow, cutting across her forehead and giving her a look of severity.
Kornelia’s hair was extraordinary. She had long plaits that hung down below her knees but which she piled up in a tight crown. All rather ugly and strange, especially since her hair was a pale, lacklustre brown.
Kornelia was slow and taciturn, secretly proud. She spoke little, but she was always humming to herself, through closed lips.
“Kornelia sings through her nose,” Lena and I used to say.
In the mornings she came to the nursery to comb our hair. Why she had assumed this responsibility was unclear. But she wielded the comb like a weapon.
“Ouch!” her victim would squeal. “Stop! Kornelia! That hurts!”
Calm and deliberate as ever, Kornelia just carried on, humming away, her nostrils flared and her lips pursed.
I remember Nyanya once saying to her, “What a slowpoke you are! For all I know, you could be asleep. You working or not?”
Kornelia looked at Nyanya with her usual severe expression and said in Polish, “Still waters break banks.”
She then turned on her heels and left the room.
Nyanya probably couldn’t make head or tail of these words, but she took offence all the same.
“Thinks she can scare me, does she? Coming out with gobbledygook like that—the woman’s just plain workshy!”
On Sundays, after an early lunch, Kornelia would put on her best woollen dress—always decorated with all kinds of frills and bows—and a little green necktie. She would slowly and carefully comb her hair, pin it up, throw a faded lace kerchief over her 16shoulders, tie a black velvet ribbon with a little silver icon around her neck, take her prayer book and rosary and go to a bench near the ice house. She would then solemnly sit down, straighten her skirt and begin to pray.
Lena and I were intrigued by Kornelia’s way of praying. We always followed her to the ice house and observed her for a long time, unabashed as only children and dogs can be.
She would whisper away to herself, telling the long oval beads of her rosary with her short, podgy fingers and looking piously up at the heavens. We could see the whites of her bulging eyes.
The hens bustled about and clucked. The cock pecked away crossly, right next to the Pannochka’s fine Sunday shoes. Rattling her keys and clattering her jugs, the housekeeper went in and out of the ice house. Aloof as ever, her pale, plump face plastered with face-cream, Kornelia seemed not to notice any of this. Her beads clicked quietly, her lips moved silently, and her eyes seemed to be contemplating something unearthly.
She ate her meals apart from the other servants, fetching a plateful of food from the kitchen and taking it to the maids’ room. Arching her neck like a trace horse, she always put her spoon into the right-hand corner of her mouth.
One summer, we arrived from Moscow to find all our servants present as usual, except that Kornelia was now living not in the maids’ room but in the little white annexe beside the laundry, right by the pond. We were told that she had married and was living with her husband, Pan Perkawski, who did not yet have a position on the estate.
Kornelia still came to do battle with our hair in the mornings and she still prayed on Sundays, now sitting outside her new home, where there was a sprawling old willow. One of its two trunks leaned over the pond; the other grew almost horizontally along 17its banks. It was on this second trunk that Kornelia now sat, her prayer book in her hands, her velvet ribbon around her neck and her skirt spread out decorously beneath her.
Her husband was nothing to write home about. Dull, pockmarked and—like Bartek—rather short. Most of the day he just hung about smoking. He’d acquired a chicken that he used to bathe in the pond. The chicken would struggle to get free, letting out heart-rending squawks and spattering him with water—but he was unflinching. Grunting and grimacing, with the air of a man who has sworn to fulfil his duty no matter what, he would plunge the chicken into the water. In other respects Pan Perkawski had little to distinguish him.
It was a rowdy and merry summer. There was a regiment of hussars stationed in the nearest town. The officers were frequent visitors to our house, which was always full of young ladies—my elder sisters, our girl cousins and a great many friends who had come to stay. There were picnics, expeditions on horseback, games and dances.
Lena and I did not take part in all this and we were always being sent away just as things were getting interesting. Nevertheless, we entirely agreed with the housekeeper that the squadron commander was a splendid fellow. He was short and bow-legged, and he had a moustache, a topknot and whiskers just like Alexander II. He would arrive in a carriage drawn by three frisky grey horses, caparisoned with long, colourful ribbons. On each side of the painted shaft bow was an inscription. On the front: “Rejoice, ladies—here comes your suitor!” On the back: “Weep—he is already married.”
The squadron commander was, in reality, a long way from being married. He was in a state of permanent infatuation, but 18with no one in particular. He offered his hand and his heart to each young lady in turn, took their refusals in his stride, entirely without resentment, and sped on to his next choice.
And he was not the only one to be in love. Love was the prevailing mood. Young officers sighed, brought bouquets and sheets of music, sang songs, recited poems and, narrowing their eyes, reproached the young ladies for their “be-eastly cruelty”. For some reason, they always pronounced the word “beastly” with a particularly long “e”. As for the young ladies, they grew more mysterious by the day. They laughed for no reason, spoke only in hints, went for walks in the moonlight and refused to eat anything for supper.
It was a shame that we kept being packed off to the nursery at the most interesting moment. Some of those moments have stayed with me to this day.
I remember a tall, pockmarked adjutant translating some English poem for one of my cousins:
Clouds bow down to kiss mountains…
Why should I not bow to kiss you?2
“What do you make of the poem’s last line?” he then asked, bowing every bit as impressively as the clouds.
The cousin turned around, caught sight of me and said, “Nadya, go to the nursery!”
Even though I too might have been interested in her opinion.
Other enigmatic dialogues were no less intriguing.
She (pulling the petals off a daisy): “Loves me, loves me not. Loves me, loves me not, loves me. Loves me not! Loves me not!”
He: “Don’t trust flowers! Flowers lie.”
She (glumly): “I fear that non-flowers lie still more artfully.” 19
At this point she noticed me. Her look of poetic melancholy changed to one of more commonplace irritation. “Nadezhda Alexandrovna, it’s high time you were in your nursery. Please go on your way.”
But this didn’t matter. What I’d already heard was enough. And in the evening, when little Lena bragged that she could stand on one leg for three days on end, I deftly cut her down to size: “That’s a lie. You just lie and lie, like a non-flower.”
That summer’s favourite entertainment was riding. There were a lot of horses, and the young ladies were constantly running out to the stables, bearing gifts of sugar for their favourites.
It was around this time that everyone became aware of the exceptional good looks of Fedko the groom.
“He has the head of Saint Sebastian!” enthused one of my sister’s student friends. “What a complexion! I really must find out what he washes with, to have skin like that.”
I can still remember this Fedko. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen. Creamy pink cheeks, bright, lively eyes, dark hair cut in a fringe and eyebrows so defined they could have been drawn with a brush. All in all, handsome as handsome can be. And he seemed well aware of his charms: he arched his eyebrows, gave little shrugs and smiled contemptuously. He could have been a society beauty.
And so the young ladies began plaguing Fedko with questions, wanting to elicit from him the secret of his good looks.
“Tell me, Fedko,” said my sister’s friend. “What do you wash with, to have such a fine complexion?”
He did not seem in the least taken aback. “With ear-r-rth, Pannochka. Ear-r-r-th.”
“What do you mean?” squeaked the young ladies. “Earth isn’t liquid!” 20
“So what?” replied Fedko, preening himself. “I rub some ear-r-rth on me face, wipe it away—an’ I’m set.”
Probably he would have liked to top this with something still more startling. But since nothing came to mind, he just said, “Aye, that’s how I am.”
The young ladies realized they’d forgotten to bring any sugar. So I was sent to Kornelia.
Kornelia must have been halfway through her elaborate coiffure. She finished it in a hurry and, just as she got to the stables, her hair cascaded down to her knees.
“Jesus Mary!” she exclaimed affectedly.
“Kornelia!” my sister’s friend exclaimed in astonishment. “You’re a rusalka—a real Russian mermaid! Isn’t her hair remarkable, Fedko?”
“Her ’air? There be enough on ’er for four mares’ tails.”
Sensing that these words had not gone down particularly well, he added, with a languid sigh, “Beauty—our world be not without beauty!”
Probably, though, it was his own beauty that he had in mind.
At this point I turned to look at Kornelia. Her jaw had dropped, her cheeks had gone pale and her bulging, fishlike eyes were fixed on Fedko. It was as if her whole being had frozen in some intense, astonished question. Then she gasped and dropped the plate of sugar. Without picking it up, she turned around and walked slowly out of the stable.
“Kornelia’s upset,” whispered the young ladies.
“Silly girl! What’s there to get upset about? On the contrary.”
There are moments when the line of our fate suddenly fractures. And moments of this kind are not always noticeable. Sometimes 21they bear no sign or seal and are lost among our ordinary routines. We watch without interest as they slip by, and only later, when we look back after some train of events has reached its conclusion, does their fateful impact become clear.
Kornelia still came every morning to yank at our hair. She was still as quiet and slow as ever. She would still sit every Sunday on the bough of her old willow. Only, instead of reading her prayer book and telling her rosary, she’d be combing her hair with a large comb. And instead of singing “through her nose”, she’d be singing aloud. One and the same Polish song.
“Golden plaits, golden braids…”
She sang quietly and with poor articulation. Apart from these golden plaits and braids, there was barely a word we could make out.
“She’s singing about the Lorelei!” my eldest sister said in surprise. “The fool really does seem to fancy she’s some kind of rusalka!”
One evening, Lena and I went out with Nyanya to water the flowers. First we went down to the pond to fill our watering cans. We heard a lot of splashing, which turned out to be Kornelia and Marya the washerwoman bathing. Kornelia’s hair was like a long cloak, floating behind her. When she raised her head, however, it seemed more like the skin of a walrus, fitting perfectly over her strong, gleaming shoulders.
Loud shouts rang out from somewhere off to one side: “Hey there! Rusa-a-alka!”
Fedko and another man were bathing the horses.
Marya screamed and plunged down deeper. All we could see of her was the top of her head.
But Kornelia quickly turned her whole body away from us, towards the shouting. She stretched out her arms and began to 22shake with hysterical, staccato laughter. Then she began to leap up and down, her whole upper half rising out of the water. Her nostrils flared and her eyes opened wider than ever—round, yellow and full of wild animal joy. With the fingers of her outstretched hands, she seemed to be beckoning.
“The horses! Kornelia’s luring the horses!” cried Lena.
This startled Kornelia. She shot up higher still, then sank out of sight, deep into the pond.
Then came more shouting, “Hey, Rusa-a-alka!”
Nyanya grabbed us crossly by the hand and led us away.
Autumn was approaching.
Like a noisy flock of birds, the love-sick officers took off and left. Their regiment was being posted elsewhere.
The young ladies quietened down and grew less interested in riding. They ate more, dressed worse and ceased to speak in subtle hints.
Those who were studying talked more often about the exams they had to retake. Or rather, other people began to mention these exams more often. It was not a subject the girls were keen to bring up themselves.
Soon we would all be leaving. This was sad and unsettling.
One evening, after supper, Nyanya decided to go down to the laundry to ask about a missing pillowcase.
I trotted along at her heels.
The laundry was in the annexe, next to where Kornelia now lived with her husband. Just by the pond.
Water, damp, slime. The square orange window looked out onto the path, close to the water. Through the murky glass I could see a table. On it were a small lamp and a plate of food. And a 23quiet, dark figure was sitting there, barely moving. Who was it? Kornelia’s husband—her Pan?
Marya met us on the threshold and at once started whispering to Nyanya.
“Lord have mercy!” sighed Nyanya. “Anyone else would have chased her away with a stick.”
More whispering. And then, once again, I made out a few words of Nyanya’s: “So, he just sits there, does he?”
She must have been asking about the still, silent figure at the table.
“Bathing at night! The housekeeper said she’d speak to that priest of theirs.”
“Her sort shouldn’t be allowed communion. And there’s no getting away from it—she smells of perch. We should speak to the mistress, really—but do our masters ever believe us?”
Whisper, whisper, whisper.
“Are you all right here, Marya? You don’t feel frightened? Sleeping here, I mean?”
Yet more whispering.
“Does she still wear her cross?”
As we left, Nyanya took my hand and didn’t let go of it until we were back inside the house.
We heard a low moan from the pond. Was someone singing? Or crying?
Nyanya stopped for a moment and listened. “Howl all you like!” she said fiercely. “But wait till he grabs you by the legs and drags you down under—that’ll put an end to your howls!”
When she came to the nursery the following morning, Kornelia’s eyes were red from crying.
Nyanya didn’t allow her into the room.
“Get out!” she said sternly. “This nursery’s no place for your 24sort. Go plait the beard of the pond sprite. Tie him a tithe of harvest wheat.”3
Kornelia did not seem in the least surprised. She turned round and left without a word.
“Fish tail!” hissed Nyanya. “Slimy and slippery.”
“Nyanya,” asked Lena, “is Kornelia crying?”
“Crying! Her sort are always crying. But don’t you go pitying her—every tear will cost you dear. Why, oh why, has the mistress not noticed? But do our masters ever believe us? More foolish than fools, they are. God help us.”4
And that was the last we saw of Kornelia in the nursery.
I recall that day clearly. I’d had a headache all morning and the bright sun hurt my eyes. And little Lena was whimpering, stumbling and knocking against my shoulder. Her eyes looked murky, bleary, and we were both feeling sick. In the blur around us we could hear a tambourine and the squeals of a violin—a village wedding.
The bridegroom turned out to be Fedko. He was red-faced, sweating and a little drunk. He was dressed in white—in a new Ukrainian smock. Around his neck was the little green tie that Kornelia used to wear on Sundays, when she sat outside and prayed.
The bride was young, but startlingly ugly. Her long pockmarked nose poked out from beneath the white linen cloth that, in those parts, took the place of a Russian bridal headdress.
Together with Fedko, she threw herself down several times at Mama’s feet, offering her the wedding karavay—a round loaf of pimply, sour-smelling rye bread.5
It was strange to see a woman with pockmarks like hers beside the handsome Fedko. 25
People began to dance in the huge hall, from which our two giant tables of Karelian birch had been temporarily removed. Young boys and girls whirled around, stamping grimly away in their heavy boots. Bartek the footman, sticking out his lower lip with a look of contempt, wandered about with a tray of boiled sweets and small glasses of vodka. The violin continued its plaintive squeals.
Lena and I huddled in a corner of the sofa. Nobody paid any attention to us. Lena was quietly crying.
“Why are you crying, Lena?”
“I’m sc-a-ared.”
All around us were rough, scary people we didn’t know. Stamping and leaping.
“Look, there’s another wedding going on over there!”
“Where?”
“There.”
“But that’s a mirror!”
“No, it’s a door. Another wedding!”
And I too begin to think that it’s not a mirror but a door, and that beyond it are other guests, celebrating another wedding.
“Look! Kornelia! She’s dancing!”
Lena closes her eyes and lays her head on my shoulder.
I half get to my feet. I’m looking for Kornelia. The people in this other wedding are all rather green—cloudy and murky.
“Lena! Where is Kornelia?”
“There!” she gestures, not opening her eyes. “Kornelia’s weeping.”
“What did you say? Weeping? Or leaping?”
“Don’t know,” Lena mutters. “I don’t know what I’m saying.”
I look again. My head whirls. And green evil people are whirling around, stamping stubbornly, as if trampling someone 26into the ground. And isn’t that Kornelia, all dark and blurry? With huge, staring, fishy eyes? And then she leaps up, like that time in the pond, naked down to the waist. She stretches out her arms and beckons, beckons. Below her breast, she is all fish scales. Her mouth is wide open and she half sings, half cries, “O-o-ee-o-o!”
In a frenzy, trembling all over, I shout back, “O-o-ee-o-o!”
Then came a whole string of long days and nights. Heavy and murky. Strangers came and went. There was an old man, a water spirit, who tapped on my chest with a little hammer and pronounced, “Scarlatina, scarlatina. Yes, they’ve both got scarlatina.”
Spiteful old women kept whispering about Kornelia, “I don’t believe it! How could she? Some evil spirit must have dragged her down.”
I had no idea who these old women were.
Apparently, the pond was drained.
“They searched and they searched, but they found nothing.”
“Not till they looked in the river, behind the mill.”
That is all I know about Kornelia’s life. And only many years later did I realize what it was they found in the river. Nobody ever said anything more in our presence. And when I got over my scarlet fever and began to ask questions, all I ever heard was, “She died.” And on another occasion, “She’s gone.”
Once we had recovered, we were taken back to Moscow.
What are we to make of this story? Did Kornelia love this Fedko? It’s not impossible… Fedko in his white kaftan, with her little green tie… Kornelia dying on the very day of the wedding…
Or did love have nothing to do with it? Did Kornelia simply go mad and slip away, like a rusalka, into the water? 27
But if I’m ill, or lying half-asleep in the small hours, and if among the clouded memories of childhood I glimpse her strange, distant image, then I believe that the real truth is the truth we two little sick children saw in the mirror.
1931translated by robert and elizabeth chandler
Notes
1 On nyanya, see “A Note on Russian Names”.
2 The poem “translated” by the adjutant is almost certainly Shelley’s “Love’s Philosophy”(1819). The second of its two stanzas reads:
See the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother:
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea—
What is all this sweet work worth,
If thou kiss not me? 238
3 A joking reference to the custom, common to many parts of Europe, of leaving a small patch of corn unreaped—to propitiate the fertility god or goddess and so ensure an abundant crop the following year. In Russia, the ears were knitted together—and this was known as “the plaiting of the beard of Volos”. In 1872 William Ralston wrote, “The unreaped patch is looked upon as tabooed; and it is believed that if anyone meddles with it he will shrivel up and become twisted like the interwoven ears” (republished in The Songs of the Russian People (Miami, FL: Hard Press, 2017), p. 251).
4 The hero of Teffi’s story “The Limit” asserts that a rusalka, unlike a Western mermaid, “knows one cannot tempt a Russian soul with the body alone. One must capture a Russian soul through pity. Therefore what does a rusalka do? She weeps […] If she simply sat or beckoned or something—some might not approach. But if she weeps, how can you help but approach?” (Haber, Teffi, p. 118).
5 Traditionally, seven women, including the bride, would help to make this large, rich, sweetened and highly decorated loaf of bread. It was presented to the bride and groom just before they married.
The lifeless Beast
The christmas party was fun. There were crowds of guests, big and small. There was even one boy who had been flogged that day—so Katya’s nyanya told her in a whisper. This was so intriguing that Katya barely left the boy’s side all evening; she kept thinking he would say something special, and she watched him with respect and even fear. But the flogged boy behaved in the most ordinary manner; he kept begging for gingerbread, blowing a toy trumpet and pulling crackers. In the end, bitter though this was for her, Katya had to admit defeat and move away from the boy.
The evening was already drawing to a close, and the very smallest, loudly howling children were being got ready to go home, when Katya was given her main present—a large woolly ram. He was all soft, with a long, meek face and eyes that were quite human. He smelled of sour wool and, if you pulled his head down, he bleated affectionately and persistently: “Ba-a-a!”
Katya was so struck by the ram, by the way he looked, smelled and talked, that she even, to ease her conscience, asked, “Mama, are you sure he’s not alive?”
Her mother turned her little bird-like face away and said nothing. She had long ago stopped answering Katya’s questions—she never had time. Katya sighed and went to the dining room to give the ram some milk. She stuck the ram’s face right into the milk jug, 29wetting it right up to the eyes. Then a young lady she didn’t know came up to her, shaking her head: “Oh, dearie me, what are you doing? Really, giving living milk to a creature that isn’t alive! It’ll be the end of him. You need to give him pretend milk. Like this.”
She scooped up some air in an empty cup, held it to the ram’s mouth and smacked her lips.
“See?”
“Yes. But why does a cat get real milk?”
“That’s just the way it is. Each according to its own. Live milk for the living. Pretend milk for the unliving.”
The woollen ram at once made his home in the nursery, in the corner, behind Nyanya’s trunk. Katya loved him, and because of her love he got grubbier by the day. His fur got all clumpy and knotted and his affectionate “Ba-a-a” became quieter and quieter. And because he was so very grubby, Mama would no longer allow him to sit with Katya at lunch. Lunchtimes became very gloomy. Papa didn’t say anything; Mama didn’t say anything. Nobody even looked round when, after eating her pastry, Katya curtsied and said, in the thin little voice of a clever little girl, “Merci, Papa! Merci, Mama!”
Once they began lunch without Mama being there at all; by the time she got back, they’d already finished their soup. Mama shouted out from the hall that there had been an awful lot of people at the skating rink. But when she came to the table, Papa took one look at her, then hurled a decanter down onto the floor.
“Why did you do that?” shouted Mama.
“Why’s your blouse undone at the back?” shouted Papa. He shouted something else, too, but Nyanya snatched Katya from her chair and dragged her off to the nursery.
After that there were many days when Katya didn’t so much as glimpse Papa or Mama; nothing in her life seemed real any 30longer. She was having the same lunch as the servants—it was brought up from the kitchen. The cook would come in and start whispering to Nyanya, “And he said… And then she said… And as for you!… You’ve got to go! And he said… And then she said…”
There was no end to this whispering.
Old women with foxy faces began coming in from the kitchen, winking at Katya, asking Nyanya questions, whispering, murmuring, hissing: “And then he said… You’ve got to go! And she said…”
Nyanya often disappeared completely. Then the foxy women would make their way into the nursery, poking around in corners and wagging their knobbly fingers at Katya.
But when they weren’t there it was even worse. It was terrifying.
Going into the big rooms was out of the question: they were empty and echoing. The door curtains billowed; the clock over the fireplace ticked on severely. And there was no getting away from the endless “And he said… And then she said…”
The corners of the nursery started to get dark before lunch. They seemed to be moving. And the little stove—the big stove’s daughter—crackled away in the corner. She kept clicking her damper, baring her red teeth and gobbling up firewood. You couldn’t go near her. She was vicious. Once she bit Katya’s finger. No, you wouldn’t catch Katya going near that little stove again.
Everything was restless; everything was different.
The only safe place was behind the trunk—the home of the woollen ram, the lifeless beast. The ram lived on pencils, old ribbons, Nyanya’s glasses—whatever the good Lord sent his way. He always looked at Katya with gentle affection. He never made any complaints or reproaches and he understood everything.
Once Katya was very naughty—and the ram joined in too. He was looking the other way, but she could see he was laughing. 31Another time, when he was ill and Katya bandaged his neck with an old rag, he looked so pitiful that Katya quietly began to cry.
