The Last and the First E-Book

Нина Берберова

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

The first English translation of celebrated Russian writer Nina Berberova's debut novel: an intense story of family conflict and the struggle over the future of émigré life On a crisp September morning, trouble comes to the Gorbatovs' farm. Having fled revolution and civil war in Russia, the family has worked tirelessly to establish themselves as crop farmers in Provence, their hopes of returning home a distant dream. While young Ilya Stepanovich is committed to this new way of life, his step-brother Vasya looks only to the past. With the arrival of a letter from Paris, a plot to lure Vasya back to Russia begins in earnest, and Ilya must set out for the capital to try to preserve his family's fragile stability. The first novel by the celebrated Russian writer Nina Berberova, The Last and the First is an elegant and devastating portrayal of the internal struggles of a generation of émigrés. Appearing for the first time in English in a stunning translation by the prize-winning Marian Schwartz, it shows Berberova in full command of her gifts as a writer of masterful poise and psychological insight.

Leseprobe

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NINA BERBEROVA

THE LAST AND THE FIRST

Translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz

PUSHKIN PRESS

LONDON

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGETRANSLATOR’S NOTECHAPTER ONECHAPTER TWOCHAPTER THREECHAPTER FOURCHAPTER FIVECHAPTER SIXCHAPTER SEVENCHAPTER EIGHTCOPYRIGHT

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THE LAST AND THE FIRST

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TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

Between 1917 and 1920, millions of Russians fled the Revolution and Civil War, hundreds of thousands of them finding refuge in France. By the 1920s, many émigrés feared that the Bolsheviks might prevail and prevent their eventual return, yet they had failed to make new lives for themselves in emigration and faced an uncertain and frightening future. By then, too, Soviet Russia had realized that it needed educated professionals to rebuild the economy and so had initiated a campaign of “returnism,” which was aimed in part at luring émigrés back to Russia.

In Berberova’s novel, Shaibin and Vasya believe that they are “lasts,” representatives of the past who can never adapt to the new era. Torn by competing ideas and emotions, they wonder whether they must inevitably accept defeat and go back to Russia. Others, like Ilya, are “firsts,” forging a difficult 8future in their new environment—raising the contentious issue of assimilation in the process—all the while refusing to abandon Russia and all hope of return.

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CHAPTER ONE

On the morning of 20th September 1928, between nine and ten, three events occurred that set the stage for this tale. Alexei Ivanovich Shaibin, one of its many heroes, turned up at the Gorbatovs’; Vasya, the Gorbatov son, offspring of Stepan Vasilievich and Vera Kirillovna and stepbrother of Ilya Stepanovich, received a letter from Paris, from his friend Adolf Kellerman, with important news about Vasya’s father; and finally, a poor wayfarer and his guide arrived at the Gorbatovs’ farm in a broad valley of the Vaucluse.

No one knew this man’s name. Who was he? What road had led him to his present wanderings? He had passed through here the previous year, in the spring, and he was already known in the surrounding area; at that time he was still sighted and walked alone, an old Astrakhan cap pulled to his eyes, sending up white dust and bowing to those he met. He had spoken with 10Ilya and with Vera Kirillovna herself for a long time; he’d drunk, had dinner, and spent the night. But neither Vasya nor his sister Marianna saw the wayfarer the next morning. He had left at dawn, blessing the house, the orchard, and the cowshed where the oxen slept, and the attic where Ilya slept. Later, people said he’d gone west, but more likely he’d gone southwest, past Toulouse, to see the Cossacks who had settled in those parts.

Now he was blind, and that same Astrakhan cap had slipped over his shaggy eyebrows. A dark blue scar ran across his face, and he had no beard growing on his cheeks; you could tell a regimental doctor had once mended his face in haste, slapping together the torn pieces of his no longer young, swarthy skin. He was tall and ominously thin, and his military trousers sported red patches in many places—possibly scraps from someone else’s service trousers, but French, trousers that had once known the defense of Verdun. The wayfarer walked with his harsh withered hand resting on the shoulder of his guide, a black-eyed girl of about twelve whose name was Anyuta.

They stopped at the gate and the old man took off his cap. The girl looked over the low stone wall. There she saw an orchard, a vegetable plot, and a house with outbuildings partially hidden by stocky willows. In the 11silence and cool of the morning, the house stood low, burned by the sun over the long summer, with a north-facing porch and squat asparagus shoots, while farther away, past the dark blue shadow of moribund cypresses, plowed fields spread out, ready for winter crops.

This was a human habitation created not in struggle with nature but at one with it. The sun was already high in the untroubled sky, and birds flew swiftly in its gleam, like short, darting needles sewing through it.

Vasya and Marianna went over to the gate, even though they were up to their ears in work; they pushed back their round straw hats, which were as hard as tin, and their hands were covered in dirt.

“You could have sung something,” Marianna said. “Where have you come from?” She began examining Anyuta, her long colorful skirt and the narrow ribbon tied around her head.

The wayfarer made a low, unhurried bow.

“From the Dordogne, gentle lady,” he said. “We are on our way south, from the Dordogne to the Siagne River, to hot climes, to see good people, and in the spring back to our own people, for the summer. And there—God will provide. People know us.”

Vasya came closer, his face bathed in sweat.

“But what are you going there for?” he asked. 12

Anyuta gave him a frightened look. Her heart started pounding for fear they would have to leave without seeing the person they’d come to see, for the sake of whom they’d made a detour from the highway, past the river and mill. How can these people ask! How dare they! she thought.

“We walk, my dear boy,” the wayfarer replied, “because we’re too old and blind to work. We go to good people’s homes to eat and have conversations with good people, and we do not complain of our Lord God.”

Marianna shrugged lightly and grinned.

“Why do you speak so oddly? We were told you were an educated man, or else a priest.”

Anyuta rushed to the old man in despair.

“Granddad, can we go? Granddad?” she whispered, tugging on his sleeve. “Let’s go, dear Granddad. We can come some other time!”

The beggar put his hand on her shoulder but did not go where she was pulling him. He took two steps toward the wall, making a deep rut in the road dust with his staff.

“They told you wrong, my good lady,” he replied, and his micaceous eyes flashed. “I am no priest. Nor was I a doctor or an engineer. Allow us to sit on your little porch. I know in your part of the world porches 13always look into the shade, and if Vera Kirillovna can find a little water for us, Anyuta and I would be very grateful.”

And he bowed abruptly at the waist.

Marianna opened the gate, and the wayfarer passed between her and Vasya, Anyuta leading him. He walked majestically, without that grim fussiness so often characteristic of the blind. They passed slowly between the vegetable beds toward the house; from time to time the beggar lifted his right hand from Anyuta’s thin shoulder and made a fluid cross over the beds, and the house, and the bent pear trees’ smeared trunks. A sack hung motionlessly from his shoulder; the sack was military, like his trousers. No one knew this man’s name.

Marianna watched him go, grinned again, and leaned over the shoots poking out of the earth.

“Come on, let’s go, let’s listen,” Vasya said, “or does nothing have anything to do with you anymore?”

He wiped his wet face with his sleeve and looked at her expectantly.

“No, it doesn’t,” Marianna replied reluctantly. “There’s nothing for me to hear. But you go on.”

Something stirred in Vasya’s sleepy face; his gaze slid down Marianna’s back, her black gathered skirt, her wooden shoes.14

“I’ve just had a letter from Adolf,” he said sullenly. “Has that nothing to do with you?”

Marianna turned her merry, high-cheekboned face toward him.

“You mean he’s summoning you?”

“Yes. He writes about Father. Old Kellerman has come and wants a meeting with me. Father’s been found, and he has an important post.”

Marianna clapped her hands and gave her brother a frightened look.

“Ah, that Gorbatov!” she exclaimed. “He lets us know through Kellerman. He wants to lure you there!”

Vasya sat down beside her and put an arm around his knees.

“It’s time for me to go,” he said firmly. “Father is calling, demanding that at least one of us return. At first old Kellerman was going to demand Adolf get Ilya, but Adolf told him flat out that was impossible. Whereas I … I’ve been wanting to go there for a whole year, and Adolf has summoned me. He writes that my papers can be in order in two days.”

“A whole year!” Marianna said slowly.

“I never tried to pretend otherwise. Mama knows it, and so does Ilya. I just can’t here. My path takes me home, to Father, and this is the goal Kellerman and I share.” He dropped his head. “I know that Kellerman 15is trying to get in Father’s good graces, but does that matter, Marianna? I might have gone even without this.”

“No, you wouldn’t!”

“I don’t know. It’s impossible for me here. Father’s working with Kellerman there and despises our settling here. I’m going. I’ll have money, I’ll have the life I want. I didn’t choose this one. And you know, it’s essential to me—I mean, roots are absolutely essential.”

“Ilya says we should have roots in the air.”

“Ilya’s always going to say something you don’t know how to answer. But there, Father’s a big shot. He sent Kellerman to Paris on business and he’s going back in a month. You have to understand. I’ve been waiting a whole year for this, waiting for Gorbatov to turn up and summon me. Adolf has worn me down!”

“He’s the one who won you over, and he’s the one sending you after your roots. He’s a scoundrel, your Adolf, and Gorbatov’s a fine one! To lure you away, to tempt you … Oh, Vasya, dear Vasya, what an automaton you are, my God! If I were Ilya I would lock you in the attic and go to Paris myself and demand that Kellerman back off. If they don’t leave you in peace—someone should lodge a complaint. There’s manure to shovel here and you’re leaving!” 16

Vasya was quiet for a moment.

“It’s true, Vasya. Let Ilya go to Paris. Wait for him. This is all about your weak will. You’re flattered that a passport will be ready in two days, that—don’t laugh—that there’s a direct train to Negoreloye, I know. Old Kellerman is clearly trying to curry favor with Gorbatov, he’s promising to return his sonny boy, promising sonny boy his roots … It would be better if Gorbatov went missing altogether, there’d be more left of him. Did Mama really not talk to you?”

“What can Mama say? Anything she’s going to say will be less than what she’s doing. If, she says, if you don’t see what our whole life’s been for, I can’t help you. If you haven’t understood why we’re living like this, so be it. Come back when you have. But Gorbatov, she says—him I curse.”

Vasya stood up and wrung his hands in anguish.

“Go,” Marianna said, bending over. “She’s right. You didn’t start this, those scoundrels did, and that includes Gorbatov. Go.”

Vasya waited, but Marianna didn’t straighten up, and he slowly walked away. Dirt stuck to his wooden shoes. He clasped his hands behind his back. He hesitated as to where to go and started uncertainly toward the house. The kitchen door was wide open, Anyuta was sitting in the doorway, and her slender little fingers 17were sorting through a bunch of dark, dusty grapes. The wayfarer’s low, placid voice reached her from the kitchen.

Through her spread fingers Marianna clearly saw which way Vasya had gone. As soon as he disappeared into the kitchen, she jumped up, let down her tucked skirt, wiped her hands on her hem, straightened the hat on her short, thick hair, and ran out of the gate.

There wasn’t a soul on the road at that already hot morning hour. The untouched track made by the postman who’d buzzed by here on his bicycle an hour before lay calmly in the dust. The black fields and the bands of meadows that had been mowed for a third time were empty and scentless, as they are in the autumn. Marianna ran tentatively at first and then faster and faster. When she finally reached the main road, she shot off like an arrow down the dismal old boundary path, her heavy strapped wooden shoes pounding. She flew past the stubble field and skirted the old farm; a dog yelped and wet linens rustled in the wind. She ran as far as the grove and stopped. Something cracked in the branches.

“Gabriel!” she called quietly.

Somewhere cows were moving, their bells tinkling, and the young oaks smelled of the Provençal valleys’ eternal freshness. 18

“Gabriel,” Marianna repeated, trying not to breathe too loudly or step too heavily. Just then she saw a cap on the ground. Gabriel was asleep, his head resting on the back wheel of his bicycle. Marianna flung herself at him and shouted right in his ear—“Gabriel!”—so that he started, swept his arm around her neck, and pulled her toward him. He smelled of pine needles and clabber, and she kissed him hard.

His apron, draped over one shoulder, was, as usual, covered in blood spots, and his cowlick was pomaded down. Marianna was crazy about his tiny teeth and early mustache, and she sat on a hummock to take it all in. Excitement and happiness had transformed her face.

“What did your father say?” she asked in French, with a faint Provençal accent, as she always spoke, as her neighbors had taught her. “Did you talk to him?”

“He said yes,” Gabriel replied, glancing slyly at her. “He said yes, but he asked who exactly I was in love with, you or Ilya.”

Marianna blushed.

“What did you say?”

“Botheration! With you! Then he started laughing and said that according to his information I was in love with Ilya, at least that’s what people in town said, and just about me.”19

“So he said yes?” Marianna repeated, gasping.

“Not right off, don’t imagine that. First he asked whether I really wanted to go from shopkeeper to peasant. Then I told him I wanted to be a landowner.”

“Is that so! You were able to put it that well?”

“Well, yes. I explained I was going into business with Ilya, that we were thinking about the future. Yes, he said, you mean the free farms on the other side of Saint-Didier and the canning factory? Ilya told me about them. But did he really decide to sow wheat this year anyway? After all, it’s much less profitable than, say, raising silkworms or even growing strawberries. Wait, I told him. Ilya’s already thought about strawberries, but it’s a secret, and besides, he’d been thinking about asparagus. But wheat, as he puts it, for him, it’s a matter of conviction, wheat is essential. My father laughed again. I know all your secrets. Ilya tells me them himself. Why don’t you tell me instead what you think about her being a foreigner? I could tell from his sniff that he’d discussed that with Ilya. What do you think yourself, Papa? I asked, because I had no idea what to say. And then he started rambling so that I didn’t understand half of it. Turns out, he wanted to say that in our case it doesn’t matter, but if I stayed at the shop you would have a bad time of it. Or some 20other nonsense. ‘La terre? La terre?’ he kept saying. ‘C’est tout autre chose.’ But right then Lucie wheeled Mama in, and I’d barely managed to tell him that Ilya was going to start building a new cowshed soon when everyone started bellowing, Mama blessed me, and Lucie asked whether she could do something with the asparagus too. And I think I bellowed like a pig too.”

“How muddled you tell it!” Marianna threw up her hands. “I can’t make head or tail of anything.”

“There’s nothing more to tell.”

“Well then, tell it one more time.”

Gabriel crept toward her, put his arms around her shoulders, and smothered her with kisses.

“Do you love me?” he asked.

“I do,” she replied.

“Now you ask,” he said, twirling her hat in his hands.

“There’s nothing to ask. I already know.”

“What do you know?”

“That you do.”

“Do what?”

“Love me.”

“Yes, and then Ilya. But you more, because kissing you is so sweet.”

Marianna lowered her head. Her heart was pounding.

“Well then, kiss me,” she said. 21

He embraced her again.

“What do you think? How will it all be?” she whispered.

“I think it will all be good.” He rocked her, his arms firmly around her shoulders. “When will you come?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Come at this same time, no later. On Sunday my father’s going to go see your mother after church. You tell her.”

“She already knows everything.”

“Then tell Ilya that on Saturday after dinner I’m coming to saw planks so he should leave the saw in the yard for me if he goes away.”

“He’s probably going to Paris.”

“Paris! Now that’s splendid.”

“He may even go tomorrow, but he’ll be back in a few days. He has business there.”

“Well, give him my regards.”

“All right.”

“You won’t forget?”

“No.”

“And tell him that he’s all anyone in town is talking about.”

“What are they saying?”

“All sorts of things. That ten years from now he’ll be the top man here.” 22

“Ten years!” A shadow crossed Marianna’s face. “Not another word about that.”

Gabriel hugged her again, cheerfully and roughly, and hopped on his bicycle. There was a basket tied to the bars and something wrapped in a newspaper bobbing around in it.

“I’m delivering a roast to the miller’s wife,” he explained, and he cocked his cap back on his head. “Two and a half pounds of filet. She has guests coming. Goodbye!” And he rode over the pine needles to the edge of the forest.

Marianna shouted and waved, ran back down the boundary path, over the stubble-field, past the old farm, and down the highway and road, but not in the same kind of hurry now, as if deep in thought. One time she stopped and gazed into the distance. She thought she saw a black dot moving in the field where the willows bristled, extending their branches into the sky’s blue clarity.

“Ilyusha!” she shouted as loudly as she could, but no one answered and the dot disappeared. She stood for a minute. The sun spread across the sky, and she smelled the dry earth; a thousand thoughts raced inside her, awful, joyful. She ran on farther, not stopping now until she reached the kitchen door.

The beggar was sitting at the table with his back to the window and his hands palm down on the coarse 23tablecloth. He’d just finished eating, his dishes had been cleared, and the bread and cheese were still on the table. Anyuta was sitting on the small bench by the door, propping herself up on both arms, occasionally glancing out of the window, as if expecting someone. Vera Kirillovna Gorbatova was sitting opposite the visitor, her arms folded and her head tilted very slightly, and listening.

She was a full forty years old. An early marriage, children, a strong secret passion, and Russia’s demise had made of her what she had become. Tall and dark-haired, with dark gray eyes (on Marianna, these same eyes were burdened by her father’s shaggy eyebrows, while on Vasya they had faded to his father’s muddy blue), Vera Kirillovna was still beautiful. There wasn’t a single gray hair in her simple, smooth coiffure; but after ten years of constant, hard, and brutal work, her hands had lost their suppleness and gentle color and that special “maternal” smell she’d exuded in her youth. It was not her forbidden passion that had stolen this inexplicable fragrance; labor, not women’s labor but human labor and now the black Provençal earth, had stolen from her soft hands the youth her body still retained in full. On Sundays, in town, many gave her admiring looks when she passed in her black pleated cotton dress, straw hat, and city shoes and stockings, 24when she walked down the main street past the tobacco shop, the hairdresser’s, the butcher’s and the other, horsemeat, butcher’s, accompanied by a tall, fair-haired young man wearing a suit tailor-made somewhere else, with a ruddy face, blue eyes, broad shoulders, and long arms. On Sundays, oh, many watched her, admiring her and saying, “Look, there goes the Russian woman from the farm. She’s handsome and young. That young man is her stepson, but she has grown children of her own. Her daughter’s engaged to the butcher’s son, not that one, the other, the horsemeat one, and her son will soon be twenty, he’s educated and polite, and he resembles her in the face.”

Many would bow to her, recognizing her, and she would smile at them with her eyes, and the fair-haired young man would doff his hat, or simply carry it, and the quiet Sunday breeze would blow across his clear face.

Vera Kirillovna was sitting at the table wearing a full apron, her hands folded, listening to the wayfarer. The kitchen shutters were half open, and a ray of light fell through the window and onto the hearth, benches, cupboard, and scrubbed utensils, and a small, unsealed barrel of tomatoes. Steam rose over the stove, linens boiled in a tall vat, and the sweet smell of turnips and 25leeks escaped a pot lid. The beggar was talking, and he seemed to turn his dark, blind face with its sickly, uneven beard most eagerly of all toward Vasya, who was standing by the lintel. A cigarette stuck to his lip and an early furrow between his eyebrows, Vasya couldn’t help but catch this cold, senseless gaze that didn’t mesh with the blind man’s sad voice.

“May God bless you, my dear friends. I should be back by Easter. I won’t forget your kindness and will stop by on my final journey to say goodbye. I won’t last the spring. It’s time for me to go to my long rest, a repose without tears. Vera Kirillovna, my last concern in this life is Anyuta. This isn’t the time to say who she is or where she comes from, and it’s too soon to entrust her to anyone. Let her go with me and learn how Russian people live, in Old Testament labor and Christian thought. God bless us and have mercy upon us!”

He crossed himself.

“For you, Vera Kirillovna, a special prayer to God. Last spring I didn’t expect you would become so firmly established in your life, be worn so smooth. I’d like to sing you a song they sing in the Dordogne. It would please you. It’s as though it were a song just for you.”

“Sing it,” Marianna said, sitting down beside Anyuta. 26

“For you, for you, my dear young lady, and for you, my dear boy.” The old man turned to Vasya. “This song gives you the answer, the answer most understandable for Russian people, the most modest. Hold on, it says, hold on, Russian man! … I’ll tell you in all confidence, I think the song is about Ilya Stepanovich.”

Vasya grinned.

“Let’s hear,” he said, crossing his arms at his chest.

That very moment, someone’s shadow passed across the window, someone’s not-too-quickly-stepping shadow, a man in a brimmed hat, tall but round-shouldered, and there was something wrong with his gait. Vera Kirillovna looked up. The stranger’s steps were heard on the porch behind Marianna. It was definitely a man with an irregular, even weary gait. It was Alexei Ivanovich Shaibin, arrived from Africa.

His pale face was covered in light perspiration, and everything about him said that he had come from town on foot and had been traveling for more than a day.

“Alyosha!” Vera Kirillovna exclaimed, rising from the table. “My God, Alyosha!”

“Hello,” Shaibin said, removing his hat and revealing a half-gray head. “It just so happened that I arrived earlier than I’d intended.”27