by Teffi
She suddenly leant forward and, with hands tightly encased in black gloves, seized hold of my arm.
“No, you’re joking! You will be going! Why wouldn’t you?”
“Because it’s of no interest to me.”
“And you won’t change your mind?”
“No.”
Her shoulders began to tremble. I thought she was weeping.
“I thought you were someone sincere,” she whispered.
I was at a loss.
“What is it you want from me? Does it upset you that I won’t be going? I don’t understand a thing.”
She seized hold of my arm again.
“I implore you by everything you hold sacred—please refuse this invitation. We have to get him to cancel this evening. He mustn’t leave Tsarskoye on Thursday. We mustn’t let him—or something terrible will happen.”
She muttered something, her shoulders quivering.
“I don’t see what any of this has to do with me,” I said. “But if it will make you feel any better, then please believe me: I give you my word of honour that I won’t go. In three days’ time I’m going to Moscow.”
Again her shoulders began to tremble, and again I thought she was weeping.
“Thank you, my dear one, thank you…”
She quickly bent over and kissed my hand.
Then she jumped up and left.
“No, that can’t have been Vyrubova,” I thought, remembering how Vyrubova had wanted to see me at that party I hadn’t gone to. “No, it wasn’t her. Vyrubova is quite plump, and anyway, she limps. It wasn’t her.”
I found our hostess.
“Who was that masked lady you just brought to me?”
The hostess seemed rather put out.
“How would I know? She was wearing a mask.”
While we were at dinner the masked figures seemed to disappear. Or perhaps they had all just taken off their fancy dress.
I spent a long time studying the faces I didn’t know, looking for the lips that had kissed my hand…
Sitting at the far end of the table were three musicians: guitar, accordion and tambourine. The very same three musicians. Rasputin’s musicians. Here was a link… a thread.
12
The next day Izmailov came over. He was terribly upset.
“Something awful has happened. Here. Read this.” And he handed me a newspaper.
In it I read that Rasputin had begun frequenting a literary circle where, over a bottle of wine, he would tell entertaining stories of all kinds about extremely high-ranking figures.
“And that’s not the worst of it,” said Izmailov. “Filippov came over today and said he’d had an unexpected summons from the secret police, who wanted to know just which literary figures had been to his house and precisely what Rasputin had talked about. Filippov was threatened with exile from Petersburg. But the most astonishing and horrible thing of all is that, there on the interrogator’s desk, he could clearly see the guest list, in Manuilov’s own hand.”
“You’re not saying Manuilov works for the secret police, are you?”10
“There’s no knowing whether it was him or another of Filippov’s guests. In any case, we’ve got to be very careful. Even if they don’t interrogate us, they’ll be following us. No doubt about that. So if Rasputin writes to you or summons you by telephone, you’d better not respond. Although he doesn’t know your address, and he’s unlikely to have remembered your last name.”
“So much for the holy man’s mystical secrets! I feel sorry for Rozanov. What a dull, prosaic ending…”
13
“Madam, some joker’s been telephoning. He’s rung twice, wanting to speak to you,” said my maid, laughing.
“What do you mean, ‘some joker’?”
“Well, when I ask, ‘Who’s calling?’, he says, ‘Rasputin.’ It’s somebody playing the fool.”
“Listen, Ksyusha, if this man carries on playing the fool, be sure to tell him I’ve gone away, and for a long time. Understand?”
14
I soon left Petersburg. I never saw Rasputin again.
Later, when I read in the papers that his corpse had been burnt, the man I saw in my mind’s eye was that black, bent, terrible sorcerer:
“Burn me? Let them. But there’s one thing they don’t know: if they kill Rasputin, it will be the end of Russia.
“Remember me then! Remember me!”
I did.
1932
Notes
1 Vasily Rozanov (1856–1919) was a controversial and well-known writer. His best work, much of it an attempt to reconcile Christian teachings with an assertion of the importance of sexuality and family life, is deeply personal. A somewhat Dostoevskyan figure himself, he married Polina Suslova, a woman twice his age who had once been Dostoevsky’s mistress. Rozanov died of starvation in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution.
2 Alexander Izmailov (1873–1921) was a prominent journalist and literary critic.
3 Alexander Kuprin (1870–1938) was a popular writer of short stories and novels. He emigrated to Paris in 1920. Impoverished and homesick, he returned to the Soviet Union in 1937 and died within the year.
4 Leonid Andreyev (1871–1919) was a prolific writer of short stories, plays and novels and one of the foremost representatives of Russia’s Silver Age of literature. Andreyev emigrated to Finland shortly after the Revolution.
5 “Madame V——” may refer to Anna Vyrubova (see below), although elsewhere Teffi refers to her by name.
6 Grigory (or Grisha) Rasputin is sometimes referred to as a monk, but he never took holy orders and had no official connection to the Orthodox Church. Here Teffi uses the vaguer term “elder”. Rasputin was often thought to have belonged to an extreme Christian sect known as the Khlysts, but these rumours have never been proven. There is no doubt, however, that he lived the life of a religious “wanderer” for several years and that he was widely believed to be endowed with healing abilities.
7 Anna Vyrubova was a close friend of the Tsaritsa and an intermediary between Rasputin and the royal family. She was also a childhood friend of Prince Felix Yusupov, the orchestrator of the plot to murder Rasputin.
8 The Khlysts were a mystical sect. Often the subject of lurid speculation, they observed ascetic practices and ecstatic rituals as a way of attaining grace.
9 This is how the Orthodox Church refers to the women who, early in the morning of the third day, came to Christ’s tomb and found it empty.
10 Alexey Frolovich Filippov was a banker and the publisher of writings by Rasputin. Ivan Fyodorovich Manasevich-Manuilov was a police agent. He had “suggested that Filippov organize a literary soirée, and he himself had told Tsarskoye Selo about the soirée, attributing the initiative to Filippov. And he had passed on to the security branch […] the list of literary invitees. All the people on it were well-known ‘leftist writers’. Which was why there had been a call from Tsarkoe Selo interrupting the meeting.” See Edward Radzinsky, Rasputin: The Last Word (London: Phoenix, 2000), p. 403. Manasevich-Manuilov had evidently wanted to compromise Filippov both in the eyes of the tsarist authorities and in the eyes of Rasputin himself. In the original, Teffi uses abbreviations to refer to Filippov and Manasevich-Manuilov, probably in order not to embarrass people still living.
PART III
1920s and 1930s in Paris
QUE FAIRE?
I HEARD TELL of a Russian general, a refugee, who went out onto the Place de la Concorde and looked around. He looked up at the sky and round at the square, the houses, the shops and the colourful, chattering crowd. He scratched the bridge of his nose and said, with feeling:
“All this, ladies and gentlemen, is well and good. Even very well and good, all this. But, well… que faire? What is to be done? Fair’s fair, but que bloody faire with it all?”
The general was by way of an appetizer. The meat of the story is still to come…
We—les russes, as they call us—live the strangest of lives here, nothing like other people�
�s. We stick together, for example, not like planets, by mutual attraction, but by a force quite contrary to the laws of physics—mutual repulsion. Every lesrusse hates all the others—hates them just as fervently as the others hate him.
This general antipathy has given rise to several neologisms. Hence, for example, a new grammatical particle, “that-crook”, placed before the name of every lesrusse anyone mentions: “that-crook Akimenko”, “that-crook Petrov”, “that-crook Savelyev”.
This particle lost its original meaning long ago and now equates to something between the French le, indicating the gender of the person named, and the Spanish honorific don: “don Diego”, “don José”.
You’ll hear conversations like this:
“Some of us got together at that-crook Velsky’s yesterday for a game of bridge. There was that-crook Ivanov, that-crook Gusin, that-crook Popov. Nice crowd.”
A chat between business people might go like this:
“I’d advise you to get that-crook Parchenko in on this deal. Very useful chap.”
“But isn’t he, er… Can he be trusted?”
“Good Lord, yes! That-crook Parchenko? Trust him with my life! He’s pure as the driven snow.”
“Wouldn’t we be better off with that-crook Kusachenko?”
“Oh no. He’s a great deal crookeder.”
New arrivals are startled to begin with, even alarmed, by this prefix.
“Why a crook? Who said so? Have they got proof? What did he do? Where?”
And they’re even more alarmed by the nonchalant reply.
“What… Where… Who knows? They call him a crook and that’s fine by me.”
“But what if he isn’t?”
“Get away with you! Why ever wouldn’t he be?”
And that’s right—why wouldn’t he?
The lesrusses sticking together here by mutual repulsion fall into two distinct categories: those selling Russia and those saving Russia.
The sellers lead a merry life. They frequent theatres, dance the foxtrot, have Russian cooks and invite the saviours of Russia over to share their Russian borscht. In the midst of all this frivolity, they don’t neglect their main occupation, but if you should ask how much they’re selling Russia for these days, and with what conditions attached, you’re unlikely to get a straight answer.
The saviours are a very different kettle of fish. They’re hard at it day and night—constantly on the move, always ensnared in political intrigues and forever denouncing each other.
They rub along quite happily with the sellers and get money from them to save Russia. But they loathe one another, with a white-hot passion.
“Did you hear about that-crook Ovechkin? What a snake he’s turned out to be! He’s selling Tambov.”
“Well, I never! Who to?”
“What do you mean ‘who to’? To the Chileans.”
“What?”
“To the Chileans—that’s what!”
“What do the Chileans want with Tambov?”
“What a question! They want a Russian base!”
“But Tambov doesn’t belong to Ovechkin. How can he be selling it?”
“I told you, he’s a snake. He and that-crook Gavkin played a really dirty trick on us: can you imagine, they took—they lured—our young lady over to them with her typewriter, at the very moment when we should have been supporting the government of Ust-Sysolsk.”
“Does Ust-Sysolsk have a government?”
“Did have. But not for long, it seems. There was a lieutenant colonel—can’t remember his name—who proclaimed himself its government. He managed to hold out for a day and a half. If we’d come to his aid in time we could have saved the situation. But how can you get anywhere without a typewriter? That’s how we let the whole of Russia slip through our fingers. And all because of him—because of that-crook Ovechkin. And what about that-crook Korobkin—have you heard? That’s pretty rich, too. He accredited himself as ambassador to Japan.”
“Who appointed him?”
“No one knows. He’s making out it was some kind of government of Tiraspol Junction station. That existed for all of fifteen or twenty minutes… through some misunderstanding. Then it got embarrassed and dissolved itself. But that Korobkin, he didn’t waste a moment—in those fifteen minutes he managed to wangle the whole thing.”
“But does anyone recognize him?”
“Oh, he doesn’t mind about that. All he wanted out of it was a visa—that’s why he accredited himself. It’s a disgrace!”
“But did you hear the latest news? They say Bakhmach has been taken!”
“Who by?”
“No one knows.”
“Who from?”
“We don’t know that either. It’s disgraceful!”
“Where on earth did you find all this out?”
“On the radio. We get the Kiev Telegraft and listen to Bullshevik Broadcasting from Moscow – and now we’re got our own pan-European station, Eurogarble News!”
“What does Paris make of it?”
“Paris? We all know Paris won’t lift a finger. Like dogs in their cosy French manger! Makes no difference to them.”
“Now tell me—does anyone understand any of this?”
“Not really. You must know what Tyutchev said all those years ago: ‘You cannot understand Russia with your mind.’1 And since the human body has no other organ of understanding, all we can do is throw up our hands in despair. They say one of our public figures was starting to understand with his stomach. So they sent him packing.”
“Hmm…”
“Hmm…”
So anyway… this general looked around and said, with feeling:
“All this, ladies and gentlemen, is well and good. Even very well and good. But que faire? Fair’s fair, but que bloody faire?”
Que indeed.
1923
Notes
1 Fyodor Tyutchev (1803–73) is commonly seen as the finest Russian lyric poet after Pushkin. Avril Pyman has translated the relevant lines of his as follows: “Russia is baffling to the mind, / not subject to the common measure; / her ways—of a peculiar kind… / One only can have faith in Russia.” See Robert Chandler (ed.), Russian Poetry from Pushkin to Brodsky (London: Penguin, 2014).
SUBTLY WORDED
LETTERS BEGAN TO APPEAR from the Soviet Union. More and more often.
Strange letters.
The kind of letter that lends strength and credence to the rumour that everyone in the Soviet Union has gone crazy.
Journalists and public figures trying to draw conclusions from these letters about the economic and political situation in Russia—or even just everyday life there—got caught in such dense thickets of nonsense as to arouse scepticism even among those whose faith in the infinite nature of Russia’s potential was usually unshakeable.
Several such letters have come my way.
One of them, addressed to a lawyer by his doctor brother, began with the words: Dear Daughter!
“Ivan Andreyevich, how come you’ve ended up as the daughter of your own brother?”
“I’ve no idea. I’m scared to think.”
The letter contained the following news: Everything’s splendid here. Anyuta has died from a strong appetite…
“He must mean appendicitis,” I guessed.
And the whole Vankov family have also died from appetite.
“Hmm, something’s not right.”
Pyotr Ivanovich has been leading a secluded life for four months now. Koromyslov began leading a secluded life eleven months ago. His fate is unknown.
Misha Petrov led a secluded life for only two days, then there was a careless incident with a firearm he happened to be standing in front of. Everyone feels awfully delighted.
“Dear God! What is all this? They’re not people but beasts. A man perishes in an unfortunate accident and they feel delighted!”
We went round to your apartment. There’s a lot of air there now…
“What on earth! What’s that meant
to mean?”
“I’m scared to think. I don’t want to know.”
The letter finished with the words:
I write little because I want to continue to mix with society and not to lead a secluded life.
This letter weighed on me for a long time.
“What a tragedy,” I said to people I knew. “The brother of our Ivan Andreyevich has lost his mind. He calls Ivan Andreyevich his daughter, and he writes such nonsense I’d be embarrassed to repeat it.”
I felt very sorry for the poor fellow. He was a good man.
Then I heard there was some Frenchman offering to take a letter right into Petrograd.
Ivan Andreyevich was delighted. I decided to add a few words too. Maybe the man wasn’t yet quite off his rocker, maybe he’d understand a few simple words.
Ivan Andreyevich and I agreed to compose the letter together. So it would be clear and simple and not too much for a mind whose powers were failing.
We wrote:
Dear Volodya!
We received your letter. What a pity everything is so terrible for you. Is it really true that people have now begun eating human flesh? How horrific! What’s got into you? They say your death rate is terribly high. All this worries us like crazy. Life’s going well for me. If only you were here, too, everything would be quite wonderful. I’ve married a Frenchwoman and I’m awfully happy.
Your brother Ivan.
At the end of the letter I added:
My warmest greetings to all of you,
Teffi
The letter was ready when a mutual friend dropped in, a worldly-wise and experienced barrister.
Learning what we had been doing, he looked very thoughtful and said in a serious tone, “But did you write the letter correctly?”
“Er, what do you mean, ‘correctly’?”
“I’m asking if you can guarantee that your correspondent will not be arrested and shot because of this letter of yours.”
