by Teffi
Childhood and Boyhood became part of my own childhood and girlhood, merging with it seamlessly, as though I wasn’t just reading but truly living it.
But what pierced my heart in its first flowering, what pierced it like a red arrow was another work by Tolstoy—War and Peace.
I remember…
I’m thirteen years old.
Every evening, at the expense of my homework, I’m reading one and the same book over and over again—War and Peace.
I’m in love with Prince Andrei Bolkonsky. I hate Natasha, first because I’m jealous, second because she betrayed him.
“You know what?” I tell my sister. “I think Tolstoy got it wrong when he was writing about her. How could anyone possibly like her? How could they? Her braid was ‘thin and short’, her lips were puffy. No, I don’t think anyone could have liked her. And if Prince Andrei was going to marry her, it was because he felt sorry for her.”
It also bothered me that Prince Andrei always shrieked when he was angry. I thought Tolstoy had got it wrong here, too. I felt certain the Prince didn’t shriek.
And so every evening I was reading War and Peace.
The pages leading up to the death of Prince Andrei were torture to me.
I think I always nursed a little hope of some miracle. I must have done, because each time he lay dying I felt overcome by the same despair.
Lying in bed at night, I would try to save him. I would make him throw himself to the ground along with everyone else when the grenade was about to explode. Why couldn’t just one soldier think to push him out of harm’s way? That’s what I’d have done. I’d have pushed him out of the way all right.
Then I would have sent him the very best doctors and surgeons of the time.
Every week I would read that he was dying, and I would hope and pray for a miracle. I would hope and pray that maybe this time he wouldn’t die.
But he did. He really did! He did die!
A living person dies once, but Prince Andrei was dying forever, forever.
My heart ached. I couldn’t do my homework. And in the morning… Well, you know what it’s like in the morning when you haven’t done your homework!
Finally, I hit upon an idea. I decided to go and see Tolstoy and ask him to save Prince Andrei. I would even allow him to marry the Prince to Natasha. Yes, I was even prepared to agree to that—anything to save him from dying!
I asked my governess whether a writer could change something in a work he had already published. She said she thought he probably could—sometimes in later editions, writers made amendments.
I conferred with my sister. She said that when you called on a writer you had to bring a small photograph of him and ask him to autograph it, or else he wouldn’t even talk to you. Then she said that writers didn’t talk to juveniles anyway.
It was very intimidating.
Gradually I worked out where Tolstoy lived. People were telling me different things—one person said he lived in Khamovniki, another said he’d left Moscow, and someone else said he would be leaving any day now.
I bought the photograph and started to think about what to say. I was afraid I might just start crying. I didn’t let anyone in the house know about my plans—they would have laughed at me.
Finally, I took the plunge. Some relatives had come for a visit and the household was a flurry of activity—it seemed a good moment. I asked my elderly nanny to walk me “to a friend’s house to do some homework” and we set off.
Tolstoy was at home. The few minutes I spent waiting in his foyer were too short to orchestrate a getaway. And with my nanny there it would have been awkward.
I remember a stout lady humming as she walked by. I certainly wasn’t expecting that. She walked by entirely naturally. She wasn’t afraid, and she was even humming. I had thought everyone in Tolstoy’s house would walk on tiptoe and speak in whispers.
Finally he appeared. He was shorter than I’d expected. He looked at Nanny, then at me. I held out the photograph and, too scared to be able to pronounce my “R”s, I mumbled, “Would you pwease sign your photogwaph?”
He took it out of my hand and went into the next room.
At this point I understood that I couldn’t possibly ask him for anything and that I’d never dare say why I’d come. With my “pwease” and “photogwaph” I had brought shame on myself. Never, in his eyes, would I be able to redeem myself. Only by the grace of God would I get out of here in one piece.
He came back and gave me the photograph. I curtsied.
“What can I do for you, madam?” he asked Nanny.
“Nothing, sir, I’m here with the young lady, that’s all.”
Later on, lying in bed, I remembered my “pwease” and “photogwaph” and cried into my pillow.
At school I had a rival named Yulenka Arsheva. She, too, was in love with Prince Andrei, but so passionately that the whole class knew about it. She, too, was angry with Natasha Rostova and she, too, could not believe that the Prince shrieked.
I was taking great care to hide my own feelings. Whenever Yulenka grew agitated, I tried to keep my distance and not listen to her so that I wouldn’t betray myself.
And then, one day, during literature class, our teacher was analysing various literary characters. When he came to Prince Bolkonsky, the class turned as one to Yulenka. There she sat, red faced, a strained smile on her lips and her ears so suffused with blood that they even looked swollen.
Their names were now linked. Their romance evoked mockery, curiosity, censure, intense personal involvement—the whole gamut of attitudes with which society always responds to any romance.
I alone did not smile—I alone, with my secret, “illicit” feeling, did not acknowledge Yulenka or even dare look at her.
In the evening I sat down to read about his death. But now I read without hope. I was no longer praying for a miracle.
I read with feelings of grief and suffering, but without protest. I lowered my head in submission, kissed the book and closed it.
There once was a life. It was lived out and it finished.
1920
HEART OF A VALKYRIE
SOMETHING WAS GOING ON in the apartment block at No. 43. Monsieur Vitrou had died.
Many of those who heard the sad news could not immediately understand who was being spoken of. While he was alive, Monsieur Vitrou had never actually been called “Monsieur Vitrou”.
He had been called “the concierge’s husband”, or sometimes “that sot” or “that good-for-nothing”—which was how they all saw him. He was always spoken of with some degree of dissatisfaction.
Monsieur had never performed a single real deed—only misdeeds. Not real crimes, of course, but, literally, misdeeds.
He would forget to stoke the boiler for the central heating, or, on a warm day, he would so overheat the building that you could scarcely breathe. He would forget to take round the morning post, or else he would muddle up the letters and newspapers and then go back round the apartments pestering everyone to hand over letters already opened “by mistake”.
After all these misunderstandings, he’d take refuge in the bistro for days on end.
“Puisqu’on est toujours mécontent!”1
His appearance did not inspire respect. He was square and red, and he always looked embarrassed. This was because when he ran into people it was always either on his way to the bistro or on his way back home again. Whichever way he was headed, there was scant cause for celebration.
Everyone felt sorry for the concierge. She was a fine woman, reservedly affable and with elegantly greying hair.
“She has to support him. If only he’d pop his clogs, the old sot.”
She did not complain, nor did she quarrel with him, but her contempt was silent and fastidious to the point of disgust. She tolerated him like a mangy dog that you can’t quite bring yourself to put down.
And then he grew ill. Almost overnight he went from square and red to white and skinny.
He would si
t at the door, no longer embarrassed but reproachful.
Then he took to his bed.
“Now all he does is lie about in bed!” people said at No. 43.
“He’s only getting what he deserves,” they said at No. 45, where the bistro was situated.
And then he died.
He died at dawn. The first to learn of his death were the femmes de ménage,2 who delivered the news to every floor along with the milk and brioches.
Groups began to gather at the baker’s, the butcher’s and the Italian’s little shop, the women huddling in knitted shawls and swinging their string bags of provisions.
“He’s died, the husband of the concierge at No. 43. Monsieur Vitrou.”
They were like a gaggle of geese as they hissed and whispered their expressions of surprise and sympathy.
There was something frightening about the very unfamiliarity of the sentence “Monsieur Vitrou is dead.”
The words “Monsieur Vitrou” instead of “the concierge’s old sot” invited people to recognize this man as a human being, endowed, like everyone else, with a name of his own and not just an abusive enumeration of misdeeds. This person, evidently, had achieved something consequential and even lofty: he had died.
To think he’d been capable of such a deed!
The residents of No. 43 all became rather quiet. They closed the front door gently and darted quickly towards the stairs, casting sidelong glances at the concierge’s window.
The actress on the second floor performed in farces but was tragic by nature. She was constantly tormented by the thought that some role or other was passing her by. Now, too, on the death of Monsieur Vitrou, she felt forgotten in the wings. She would have been surprised if someone had explained to her that her despondency sprang from jealousy of the concierge’s husband, that she didn’t like being upstaged in the minds of her fellow tenants at No. 43. But in the evening she came up with a solution that soothed her nerves. A friend had brought her a basket of orchids; she ordered him to go down at once and place the flowers on the coffin of poor Monsieur Vitrou.
And while her aggrieved friend pursed his lips and carried his sumptuous gift slowly down the stairs, and as the ladies going the other way stood reverentially to one side, the actress leant over the balustrade and rapidly stamped her heels in sheer delight. In the concierge’s room, they would go “ooh” and “ah” in amazement. Yes, indeed, in this production she had ended up with a splendid role!
The sickly sweet smell of chlorine and formaldehyde rose up the stairs, slipped under doors and into people’s thoughts and dreams.
The elderly gentleman from the third floor suffered an asthma attack and made his daughter play cards with him until morning.
The actress from the second floor would not allow her friend to leave. She had a feeling that she was going to die soon, very soon. Smiling meekly, she closed her eyes.
The two old women from the ground floor wandered from room to room, startling one another, until late into the night.
The children on the first floor cried and wouldn’t let anyone put the light out.
In the morning the concierge’s son went round delivering invitations to the funeral. The invitation was an enormous sheet with a black border. There it was—on the pillow of the old man with asthma, on the actress’s lace-covered table, on the two elderly women’s chest of drawers, on the tablecloth on the first floor. Eyelashes fluttered over it; eyes came to rest upon it.
For the first time, the concierge, Madame Vitrou, saw her husband’s name in print and in the place of honour. For the first time, he had performed a socially acceptable, bourgeois deed that inspired everyone’s interest and even reverence. They were talking about him, asking about him, thinking about him on all five floors, and in the building next door, and across the street, and at the bakery, and on the corner.
He was Monsieur Vitrou. To be his wife was now an honour. For the first time, it was she who belonged to him, and not the other way around. She was his widow, rather than him being “the concierge’s husband”. And the priest, with whom she had discussed the funeral service, consoled her by saying, “Don’t cry. Think instead that you will soon be meeting him again.” It was as though even the priest recognized the contribution of Monsieur Vitrou, as if his status were somehow greater than hers.
Those profane thoughts that had plagued her when she realized her husband was dying—she now banished them from her mind. Thoughts that he was dying too late, when she had already grown old. Thoughts that, had this happened fifteen years earlier, when the widowed plumber had taken such an interest in the building, coming to check the taps as often as twice a day—then it would have been another matter altogether. That plumber now had his own shop in Rouen…
But after Vitrou’s death, now that life had taken such a solemn turn, she forgot all about the plumber.
The smell of chlorine and formaldehyde intensified and spread ever further, reverberating like a deep chord on the organ.
The terrifying words “Monsieur Vitrou has died” were alive and, before them, the whole of everyday life was dying. These words had a sound, a six-syllable descending melody. They had a colour—a broad black band around a white rectangle. And there was a smell—a terrible, heavy, sweet scent. The tenants of No. 43 did not want to eat; they were unable to sleep, to read, to converse. They were dying from the sound, from the colour, from the smell of “Monsieur Vitrou has died”.
The funeral was a solemn affair. The residents clubbed together to buy flowers—two vast wreaths made up of immortelles, hinting at immortality here on earth and saying that Monsieur le concierge would not be forgotten. And, in the place of honour, quivering at the head of the coffin, were the orchids, poisonously corrupt and gluttonous, beings from another world, paying a visit here, in the midst of bourgeois pink carnations, like a beguiling lady benefactress descending into a cellar to call on a sick laundress.
The widow Vitrou stood right at the front, but, turning slightly towards the coffin, she could see through her mourning veil how solemnly and sorrowfully the crowd of worshippers was listening to the De Profundis.
And many of them were weeping.
The old man from the third floor was shaking his head, as if to say he did not approve of this prank by old Monsieur le concierge. He would have preferred to be sleeping, but he had dragged himself along in the hope of somehow propitiating the nasty, frightening thing that had crept into the apartment building.
Bitterly weeping beside him was his daughter, who was thinking about how she was never going to get married. Her father had ruined her life, while he himself enjoyed a life of leisure, pretending to suffer from asthma and making her get up at six in the morning to brew his coffee.
Also weeping was the lilac-powdered actress from the second floor. She was imagining that she herself was lying there in the coffin, as if understudying the concierge in his magnificent starring role.
“Flowers and tears,” she was whispering. “Flowers and tears, but we, the dead, we no longer have need of anything.”
The old women from the ground floor also had a little cry. They never missed a funeral, if they could help it, because for them this was the most relevant of everyday events—the most pertinent, you might say, to the agenda of the day.
The widow Vitrou saw all this—all this sorrow and reverence for her husband. She heard the incomprehensible, wise and mysterious Latin words that the priest was speaking to him—to Monsieur Vitrou. And when the church warden thumped the ground with his mace and began slowly letting people come up to her to express their condolences; when, one after another, these people reached out to her and to her stocky sons Pierre and Jules; when she saw these people shaking her sons’ hands in their black Lisle gloves, which were all new and squeaky, she suddenly began to weep, loudly, sincerely and bitterly.
She was weeping for her husband, now majestic and proud and crowned with everlasting flowers; she was weeping for the “Monsieur Vitrou” before whom everyone was b
owing and thanks to whom they were pressing her gloved hand with such respect. She was weeping for Monsieur Vitrou; she took pride in him and loved him.
And when, after the funeral, the family members crowded into her small apartment began to relax and have something to eat, with a few sighs, yet not without appetite—what can one do, after all he may have departed to a better world, but we still have to nourish ourselves in order to keep going a little longer in this worse world—then the widow Vitrou said as she poured out the coffee:
“My dear André often used to say that coffee should be drunk very hot and with cognac.”
This was scarcely a pearl of wisdom, but she pronounced it with the restrained prophetic zeal with which one repeats the words of the great and the mighty.
And so it was understood. There was a meaningful hush and deep sighs. And these words were repeated with reverence to someone who had not quite been able to hear them.
1931
Notes
1 Puisqu’on est toujours mécontent: Because they’re never happy (French).
2 femmes de ménage: household staff (French).
ERNEST WITH THE LANGUAGES
THE STORY I’m about to tell you I didn’t witness first-hand, although some of the dramatis personae are people I used to know, some are people I’ve at least seen around, and the story itself is one I’ve heard so many times that I can vouch for the truth of it.
The main character was a tutor on a country estate. His name was Ernest Ivanovich. His last name I don’t remember—they just called him “Ernest with the languages”. And not without good reason.
First I must set the scene that prepares for the first appearance of Ernest Ivanovich. It was a hot summer’s day. In the drawing room, its blinds drawn to keep out the heat, sat the lady of the house, Alexandra Petrovna Dublikatova, wearing a fine cambric dressing gown. A widow of middling years, she was middling, too, in appearance, although the story does not require us to dwell on this. There she sat, sewing lace trim onto a blouse. She was in good spirits, humming something to herself as she examined her handiwork.
