by Teffi
“Who is it?”
“What’s going on?”
“He can’t sing,” we said anxiously. “His voice is quite dreadful.”
Gooskin looked away in confusion, then replied, “Yes, he sings like the day he was born.”
“Gooskin, what’s going on? Who is this man? Why has he suddenly started singing?”
Gooskin looked around.
“Shh . . . Why has he started singing? He wants to get across the border to the Ukraine. He’s taking yarn with him. What else can he do?”
The singer got the last note hopelessly, hopelessly wrong. More wrong than anyone could have done on purpose. And the audience at once began roaring and clapping their approval. They loved his Fighting Eagles.
Sweating and happy, the singer reappeared backstage.
“Well, it seems your yarn’s safe for the time being!” And Gooskin, his hands behind his back, added his usual rhetorical question: “Ri-ight?”
•
At the end of the evening we all went back onstage for our curtain call. Our surprise singer darted to the front of the stage and began bowing and pressing his hand to his heart as if he were some famous star.
The audience went wild, clapping long and loud.
“Bravo! Bravo!”
And then from somewhere up on the right, from the gallery-hayloft, I heard a few voices quietly but insistently calling my name.
I looked up.
Women’s faces, infinitely weary, hopelessly sad. Crumpled little hats, worn-out dark dresses. Craning down toward me, the women were saying:
“Sweetheart! We love you! God grant you get out of here soon!”
“Leave this town, sweetheart, leave this town!”
“Leave as quick as you can!”
Never, at any of my performances, have I heard such chilling words from an audience.
And what tense desperation, what determination there was in those voices, in those eyes. Speaking to me so openly, they were taking no small risk—though the top brass had already left and, with all their clapping and shouting, the small fry were making such a racket they probably wouldn’t be able to hear anything.
“Thank you!” I said to them. “Thank you! One day, perhaps, we’ll meet again.”
But they had disappeared. I could no longer see their pale faces. I heard only one more word: a short and bitter “No.”
5
EARLY morning. Rain.
Waiting in front of our house were three carts. Gooskin and Averchenko’s impresario were loading our luggage onto them.
“All right, Gooskin? All set for the journey?”
“Yes! We’ve got all our passes. And we’ve been promised an escort.” Gooskin sighed, then continued in a whisper, “Though it’s the escort that frightens me most!”
“But we need an escort—without one we’ll be robbed.”
“Isn’t it all the same who we’re robbed by? Whether we’re robbed by our escort or by somebody else?”
I agreed that it was, probably, all the same.
Two more carts pulled up. In one of them was a family with children and dogs. In the other, half-sitting, half-lying, was a very pale woman wrapped in a flannel shawl. Beside the cart was a man in a sheepskin coat. The woman looked very ill. Her face was completely still, her eyes staring straight ahead. Her companion was casting quick, anxious glances at her and seemed to be trying to stop anyone from noticing her, edging around the cart as he tried to shield her from our view.
“Dear, oh dear!” said the all-knowing Gooskin. “That’s that industrialist’s wife—the one who was robbed.”
“But what’s happened to her? Why does she look so ill?”
“She got stabbed in the side with a bayonet. But the two of them are doing their best to look as if she’s fit and healthy and has nothing to complain about, as if she’s just sitting there, journeying merrily along to the Ukraine—so I say we should go along with that and go sit with our things. Ri-ight?”
More carts appeared. In one of them sat last night’s singer, wearing a ragged little coat. The picture of innocence—and three suitcases (filled with yarn?).
We were going to be quite a caravan. So much the better—safety in numbers.
Finally our escort turned up—four young men with rifles. One of them barked, “Let’s get going! No time to waste!”—and off we went.
As we were leaving the shtetl, we were joined by a few more carts. Now at least a dozen strong, our caravan moved slowly on, the escort walking beside us.
It was all very dismal. Rain. Mud. Only damp hay to sit on. Ahead of us—the enigmatic border zone, all twenty-five miles of it.
We had covered about three miles. We were in the middle of nowhere, with only a ramshackle barn to our right, when all of a sudden we glimpsed six men in soldiers’ greatcoats, walking in single file across an empty field. Walking slowly, as if just out for a stroll. Our convoy came to a stop, though the greatcoats had given no indication of wanting anything from us.
“What’s up?”
I looked on as Gooskin jumped off the cart and walked briskly across the field, not toward the greatcoats, but toward the barn. Apparently in no hurry, the greatcoats turned toward the barn too—and everyone disappeared from sight.
“Diplomatic negotiations,” said Averchenko, walking over to my cart.
These negotiations lasted for some time.
Our guards, for some reason, took no part in them. On the contrary, having lost their air of authority and military bravura, they seemed to be hiding behind our carts. All very strange.
Gooskin returned, gloomy but calm.
“Tell me,” he said to my carter. “Are there going to be any turnings off this road?”
“No-ope,” my carter replied.
“If there’s a turning soon, then those young greatcoats will be able to cut across and intercept us again.”
“No-ope,” my carter said reassuringly. “Not in weather like this—they’re already on their way home to bed.”
Eight in the morning seemed early for bed, but we were happy to take his word for it.
The carter pointed to the right with his whip—there on the horizon were six figures, moving away from us.
“Right, let’s get going,” said Gooskin. “There may be more people wanting to talk to us.”
The guards emerged from behind the carts and, with renewed bravado, walked on beside us.
It was all very dismal.
We kept going, with few stops. To relieve the tedium, we swapped places now and again to pay social calls on one another. Unexpectedly, one of the guards started talking to us. I replied rather coolly and then said in French to Olyonushka, who was sitting beside me, “Best not to get into conversation with them.”
The guard gave a slight smile and said, “What makes you say that? I’ve known you for a long time. You read to us once at the Technological Institute.”[30]
“But . . . what on earth’s brought you to these parts?”
He laughed. “Did you really think we were Bolsheviks? We’d been hanging around there for days, waiting for a chance to get out. There are four of us—two students and two former officers. Today, when it turned out you needed an escort, none of the Bolsheviks would volunteer—they didn’t want to miss out on their daily plunder. We saw our chance. We volunteered. We had a word with the right people and said we’d help out—and so we have. The only thing that really bothered them was my friend’s gold tooth. They wanted to pull it out. But in all the rush I think they simply forgot about it.”
We went on further.
We came to a copse. A wooden fence was blocking our way. Two German soldiers were standing by a gate. Not far from the gate was a barrack.
“Not the most welcoming of Guten Tags!” I said.
“Quarantine!” Gooskin explained gloomily. “Wonderful!”
Out came a somewhat more important German, wearing a somewhat darker greatcoat. He told us that we had to spend two weeks in quarantine.
Gooskin explained in his outlandish German that we were the most famous writers in the world and that we were “all so well that God help us—and Herr Officer too, of course!” And why would the officer want to waste quarantine space on us when there were others who needed it more?
But the German failed to understand what was in his best interests. He went back, slamming behind him the small wicket gate through which he had first emerged.
“Gooskin! We’re not going to have to turn back, are we?”
“Pah!” Gooskin answered contemptuously. “Back! Why turn back when we need to go forward? There’s always a way—you just have to look for it. All of you stay where you are! I’ll make a start.”
His hands behind his back, he started pacing up and down, looking attentively into the sentries’ faces. He walked past them once, then again, then a third time.
“What the hell’s he playing at?” Averchenko wondered aloud.
Trustingly and obediently, our entire caravan waited.
After walking past the sentries a fourth time, Gooskin made up his mind. Stopping beside one of them, he said, “Well?”
The sentry, of course, said nothing, but his eyes slid to one side. Once, twice, a third time . . . I looked across the road and caught sight of another German behind some bushes, innocently examining a branch of an elder tree. Gooskin didn’t look at this German but, like some bird of prey, began slowly circling around him. Then they both disappeared deeper into the wood.
Gooskin was not gone for long. Emerging from the wood, he announced loudly, “Nothing for it. We must all turn back.”
And so we obediently turned back. Obediently but with good cheer, because we had faith in the genius of Gooskin.
We went back the way we had come. After about a quarter of a mile, we turned off into the wood. Gooskin then jumped down from the cart and strode off, looking alertly around him.
We glimpsed a German greatcoat. Somewhere in the bushes. Gooskin homed in on it.
“You stay where you are!” he shouted out to us. “I won’t be long!”
This round of negotiations did not take long. Gooskin reappeared, now accompanied by two friendly Germans who, with both words and gestures, were explaining the path we should follow to avoid the quarantine post.
We did as they said and happened on another German. This time it took only a couple of minutes to reach an understanding. Next we happened on some peasant or other. We thrust a few coins at him too, just in case. The peasant took the coins, but he stood there for a long time, gazing after us and scratching behind his left ear with his right hand. It seemed we needn’t have bothered.
In the evening we saw the lights of Klintsy, the large Ukrainian shtetl that was our goal. Our caravan was already bumping along the cobbled street when, for the last time, Gooskin jumped down, ran up to a passerby and held out some money to him. First surprised, then frightened, the passerby shied away and refused the money.
And we understood that the zone, this enigmatic border zone, now truly did lie behind us.
•
Klintsy was a large shtetl with a railway station, cobbled streets, stone houses, and even, here and there, electric lighting.
Klintsy was full of people like us. Getting across the border was evidently not the end of the story. It did not entitle a person to roam freely about the Ukraine. Here too one had to run around getting all kinds of papers and documents from all kinds of bureaus and offices. All this took time—and so Klintsy was packed full of travelers.
We wandered about, seeking a haven. One by one, carts peeled off and disappeared. In the end, all that was left of our caravan was its head: our own little family of carts—wet, dirty, and despairing.
It was slow going. Gooskin walked beside us on the pavement, knocking on doors and shutters, asking if we could stay the night. Beards and hands were thrust out of windows. Gesturing and waving in different ways, they all refused us.
We sat there in silence, blank and downcast, chilled to the marrow. It was as if Gooskin had loaded three carts with worthless junk and was now trying to sell this junk to people who merely shooed him away.
“Yes,” said Olyonushka, as if guessing my thoughts. “He’s carting us around as if we were young calves! But then why shouldn’t he? We’re not much different from calves—all we want is something warm to drink and a place to lie down for the night.”
Eventually, by the gates of a newly built two-story house, Gooskin entered into so animated a dialogue with an elderly Jew that our carters stopped the horses. Experienced as they were, they understood that this might be leading to something. The dialogue was intensely theatrical. One moment—all sinister whispers; the next—frenzied yells. Both parties spoke at the same time. And then, at a moment when they were both waving their arms in the air and shouting what seemed like the most terrible of curses, making Olyonushka cling to me and shout, “They’re going to throttle each other!”—at this alarming moment Gooskin calmly turned toward us and said to the carters, “Well, go on. What are you waiting for? Drive into the yard.”
While the old man began to open the gates.
•
The house we now entered was, as I have said, new. It had electric lighting, but the layout of the rooms was unusual—the front door opened straight into the kitchen. We, as honored guests, were taken further, but the owners themselves—the family who must have built this mansion—appeared to have gotten stuck in the kitchen. The whole of this huge family huddled together there, on beds, chests and benches and on blankets spread out on the floor.
The head of the family was an old woman. Next came the old woman’s husband—the tall bearded man who had let us in. Then the daughters. Then the daughters’ daughters, the daughters’ husbands, the son of the son’s wife, the son’s daughters and some kind of a shared grandson whom they were all bringing up together, with much love and shrieking.
The first thing we did, for form’s sake, was to ask the old woman how much she would be charging us. This truly was just for form’s sake—there was nowhere else we could have gone.
The old woman pulled a mournful face and threw up her hands: “Ach, don’t talk money! How can anyone make money out of the misery of others? Out of the misery of those who have nowhere to lay their head! We have enough space and we have all we need (here the old woman turned to one side and spat, to ward off the evil eye), so what do we want with your money? Go and rest, my daughter’s daughter will give you a samovar and anything else you need. But first of all, get yourselves dry. And don’t worry about anything. What do I want with money?”
Moved by her words, we made eloquent protests.
I studied this remarkable woman. As her faith required, she was wearing a wig—or rather, a piece of black cloth with white stitching to represent a parting.
“No,” Averchenko said to Gooskin. “We can’t possibly take advantage of such magnanimity. We absolutely must make her see reason.”
Gooskin smiled enigmatically.
“Huh! You really don’t need to worry on that score. Believe me!”
None of us was more deeply moved than Olyonushka. With tears in her eyes, she said to me, “You know, I think God has sent us on this journey to show us that there are still kind, magnanimous people in the world. Here we have a simple old woman. She is not rich but she is gladly sharing with us her last mite. Though we are complete strangers to her, she has taken pity on us!”
“An astonishing old woman,” I agreed. “And, most astonishing of all, she doesn’t really . . . she doesn’t have a particularly nice face.”
“Yes, it just goes to show. One really mustn’t judge by appearances.”
We were both so moved that we even turned down the offer of fried eggs. “Poor old woman . . . giving us her all and everything!”
Meanwhile Gooskin and the old man, wasting no time, set about the complex task of trying to obtain all the necessary passes and documents—so we could be sure to be on our way in the morning.
&n
bsp; First, the old man went off somewhere on his own. Then he came back to fetch Gooskin and take him along too. They came back together—and Gooskin went off again on his own. Then Gooskin came back and announced that the authorities required me and Averchenko to present ourselves to them, without delay.
It was already eleven o’clock and we wanted to go to bed, but what could we do? Off we went.
We had only the vaguest idea what kind of authority to expect. Commandant, commissar, Cossack junior officer, clerk, provincial governor . . .“Here we are—at your bidding!” We were long accustomed to being without rights; we no longer even inquired where we were being dragged to, whom we had to see next or why. Olyonushka was right—we were little different from calves.
We came to an official-looking building. Something between a post office and a police station . . .
In a small whitewashed room, an officer was sitting at a table. By the door stood a soldier. A new kind of uniform, which meant they must be Ukrainians.
“Here you are!” said Gooskin and stepped aside.
Our patron—the old woman’s husband—took up position by the door, looking very alert indeed. At the first hint of trouble, he’d be off in a flash.
The officer, a young blond fellow, turned toward us, studied us attentively and, all of a sudden, broke into a broad, joyful, and astonished smile.
“So it’s true? Say who you are.”
“I’m Teffi.”
“I’m Averchenko.”
“The Teffi who used to write for the Russian Word?”
“Yes.”
“Ha-a! I used to read it all the time! And I used to read Averchenko too, in Satirikon.[31] Ha-a! Well this is a miracle! I thought this scoundrel here was lying. And then I thought he might not be. And that this might be my one chance to set eyes on you. I’ve never been in Petersburg and, to be honest, this was a chance I couldn’t let slip. Ha-a! Well, I’m overjoyed. I’ll send you both your travel passes this very day! Where are you staying?”
At this point the old woman’s husband moved away from the door and recited his address, testifying to its authenticity with the words, “So help me God!”
