The Flight

by Gaito Gazdanov

  GAITO GAZDANOV

  THE FLIGHT

  Translated from the Russian by

  Bryan Karetnyk

  PUSHKIN PRESS

  LONDON

  Contents

  Title Page

  The Flight

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  THE FLIGHT

  EVENTS IN SERYOZHA’S LIFE began on that memorable evening when, for the first time in many months, he saw in his room, above the bed where he slept, his mother—wearing a fur coat, gloves and an unfamiliar black velvet hat. There was a look of alarm on her face, so unlike the one that he had always known. He was unable to account for her unexpected appearance at this late hour, for she had left almost a year ago and he had grown used to her continued absence. Yet now, here she was, standing at his bedside. She sat down quickly and whispered to him not to make a fuss, telling him to get dressed and to come home with her right away.

  “But Papa didn’t say anything to me,” Seryozha said.

  She offered no explanation, however, and just kept repeating, “Come now, Seryozhenka, quickly.”

  She then carried him outside—it was a cold, misty night—where a tall woman in black was waiting for her; a few steps later, around the corner, they got into a motor car that immediately set off at a phenomenal speed, bearing them along unfamiliar streets. Later on, half dreaming, Seryozha glimpsed a train, and when he awoke it turned out that he was in fact on board this train, but something had imperceptibly altered; then, at last, his mother told him that he was going to live with her in France, not with his father in London, that she would buy him an electric train with all sorts of carriages and wagons, and that now they would never again be parted, although Papa would sometimes come to visit.

  Seryozha would later recall that evening time and time again: his mother’s unfamiliar, tender face, her hurried whispers, the alarming quiet in his father’s cold house in London, and then the journey by car and by train. Only later did he learn that they had crossed the Channel by steamer, but he did not harbour even the faintest memory of it, for he had been sound asleep and had no idea how he had arrived at his destination. He was seven years old at the time, and this journey marked the beginning of myriad other events. After this, he travelled far and wide with his mother; one summer’s day, however, towards evening, on a terrace overlooking the sea, where he and his mother were taking dinner together, Seryozha’s father calmly strode in, took off his hat, bowed to Seryozha’s mother, kissed Seryozha and said:

  “Well, well, Olga Alexandrovna. We’ll consider today the end of this little romantic episode, shall we?” As he stood behind Seryozha’s chair, his great hand tousled the boy’s hair. He glanced at his wife and broke into quick German. Seryozha did not understand a word of it until his father said in Russian: “Really, Olya, aren’t you tired of all this?” Recollecting himself, he immediately switched back into German. A few minutes later, Seryozha managed to catch another phrase that he could understand—this time it was his mother who uttered it: “Darling, you never did understand, and you’re incapable of understanding it. You’re in no position to judge.” Seryozha’s father nodded cynically in agreement. Waves lapped beneath the terrace while a brown-green palm drooped motionlessly over them and the dark-bluish water glittered in the little bay, not far from a narrow road. Amid the silence Seryozha’s mother swung her tanned leg, looking serenely and expectantly at the boy’s father, as though studying him, despite the fact that he was just the same as always—tall, immaculate, broad and clean-shaven.

  “German’s such a wretched language,” he said at last.

  “Inherently so?”

  He laughed and said, “Yes, even independent of the circumstances that…”

  Seryozha’s mother sent him to his room.

  “Won’t Papa be leaving?” he asked, immediately finding himself high up in the air in front of his father’s smooth face with its large deep-blue eyes.

  “No, Seryozha, I’m not leaving. Not again,” he said.

  His parents had a long conversation on the terrace. Seryozha managed to read half a book, but still they went on talking. His mother then made a telephone call; Seryozha listened, lying on the floor, as she said:

  “Impossible ce soir, mon chéri.” And then, “Si je le regrette? Je le crois bien, chéri.”*

  Thus Seryozha understood that chéri would not be coming today, and so he was left feeling very pleased, since he did not like this man, whom, after his mother, he had also called chéri, thinking it to be his name, eliciting laughter from that dark face with its fixed grin, above which hung tight, thick curls of hair, as black as the Devil himself. Chéri never showed up again after that. There was, however, another man, somewhat similar to him, who also spoke with an accent, both in French and in Russian.

  Seryozha’s father did not leave that day, but stayed on for a fortnight, only to disappear early one morning without saying goodbye. After that, in Paris, at a railway station, he met his wife and child with flowers, sweets and toys; he carried the flowers in his hand, but the rest of it lay waiting in that same long dark-blue motor car that Seryozha remembered from London. They installed themselves in an enormous new mansion block, where Seryozha was able to ride a bicycle from one room of the apartment to the next; everything was going well until Seryozha’s mother left once again, taking with her only a small nécessaire and showering Seryozha in kisses. She returned, in any case, exactly ten days later, but discovered her husband gone, finding only a laconic note: “I consider a period of absence to be necessary and in our mutual interest. I wish you…” Two days later, in the evening, the telephone rang—Seryozha’s mother was not at home, although she was expected at any moment; Seryozha was called to the telephone and heard from afar his father’s very funny (or at least so it seemed to him) voice, asking him whether he had been bored. Seryozha said no, the day before he and his mother had pretended to be robbers and it had been a lot of fun.

  “With your mother?” enquired his father’s odd-sounding voice.

  “Yes, with Mama,” said Seryozha and, turning around, he saw her. She had come in without Seryozha’s noticing her light footsteps on the rug. She took the receiver from him and launched into rapid conversation.

  “Yes, again,” she said. “No, I don’t think so… Of course… Well, to each his own… Yes… When?… No, just repaying kindness with kindness; remember, you met me with flowers… What, the flowers are for him?… The toys will do just fine… All right.”

  “Why are you always going away?” Seryozha asked his mother. “Are you bored here with us?”

  “My silly Seryozhenka,” his mother said. “My silly boy, my silly little fair-haired one. When you grow up, you’ll understand.”

  Just as Seryozha, from his very first days of consciousness, could remember his mother and father, so too, clearly and abidingly, could he remember his Aunt Liza, her black hair, her red lips and an aroma that mixed the tobacco from the English cigarettes she smoked with her perfume, warm, silky fabrics, and that light acidity of her own. It was a very faint smell, but it was so characteristic of her that it was impossible to forget, just like her peculiar voice, which always sounded distant and strangely pleasant. Yet however much the lives of Seryozha’s mother and father were full of apologies, conversations in that incomprehensible German, departures, journeys, returns and surprises, Liza’s existence was by the same measure devoid of any irregularity. Truly, she was a living reproach to Seryozha’s parents—everything in her life was so clear, perfect and crystalline that Seryozha, lying in his favourite position on the floor in the hallway, once caught his father saying to his mother:

  “To look at Liza, one could never think that she might suddenly give birth to a child one day, but then again…
”

  Seryozha’s mother would always regard Liza with slightly guilty eyes; even his father seemed to shrink in her presence, and everyone would almost apologize to Aunt Liza for their personal imperfections, which were particularly ugly in light of her incontestable moral grandeur. However, an elusive memory dimly surfaced in Seryozha’s mind: when he had been very little, Aunt Liza had taken him out for a walk, and with them had come a man who talked animatedly with his aunt. But this had happened so very long ago, and the memory of it was so indistinct that Seryozha was no longer sure that it had not all been a dream. Aunt Liza’s natural state was one of quiet surprise. She was amazed by everything: the behaviour of Seryozha’s parents, the very possibility of such behaviour, the books and newspapers she read, the crimes they contained; the only things that failed to amaze her were improbable and heroic deeds—for example, when a person laid down his life for someone, rescued a group of people or chose death over ignominy. She was slim, her skin was almost as smooth as Seryozha’s father’s, she was immaculate, and her hands were always cold and rather hard. One day, when all four of them—Seryozha, his parents and Aunt Liza—happened to be driving past a shooting stall in the street, Seryozha’s father suddenly stopped the car and said:

  “Well, ladies, shall we relive the good old days and have a shot?”

  Seryozha’s mother never once hit the bullseye; his father missed several times, although he generally shot very well, and only Aunt Liza, fixing the cardboard target directly in her sight, put five bullets right through it, knocking down ball after ball on the dancing jets of the fountain.

  “Your hand’s as steady as a rock, Liza,” Seryozha’s father then said.

  As Seryozha grew older, he began to understand people better, and his instinctive judgements about everything gradually gained perspective; he began to suspect that Aunt Liza was unlike other people, since everything would change over the course of their lives, depending upon circumstances, events and influences; they might find absurd what only a year ago had seemed completely practical, and so often they contradicted themselves and changed on the whole so much that it was difficult to tell who was clever and who a fool, even who was beautiful and who ugly; in other words, the strength of their resistance to the outside influences that defined their lives was negligible, and they exhibited constancy only in very rare and limited respects. Seryozha knew hoards of people, for through his father’s home passed the most varied stream of guests, visitors, petitioners, friends, women and relatives. Aunt Liza differed from them all in that nothing about her ever altered. That complex network of feelings, knowledge and ideas, which for others was shifting and fluid, remained for her just as constant and as static as it had always been—as if the world were some sort of fixed concept. So thought Seryozha about Liza; so, too, thought others about her, and this went on for many years until an event that displayed the manifest fallacy of these notions took place. However, even a few years prior to these events, Seryozha, who knew Liza more intimately than the rest, had begun to doubt the accuracy of the image of her that he had created, when Liza and his father had an argument in front of him about a recently published novel. The novel recounted the story of a man who had dedicated his life to a woman who did not love him, a woman for whom he had left another woman, to whom he had been dearer than anything on earth. Seryozha’s father defended this man. “You have to understand, Liza, the point is that he was drawn to the vilaine, whereas the other woman was almost totally irrelevant. So what if she loved him? That’s all well and good, but really, he wanted something else, you understand?”

  “I’m not saying that I don’t understand the reason,” said Liza. “The reason is clear enough. But the matter lies elsewhere: in the idiotic betrayal, in the futility of it. She deserved happiness more than that other woman.”

  “Happiness isn’t deserved, Liza,” said Seryozha’s father curtly. “It is either given to you or it isn’t.”

  “You’re wrong; it is deserved,” said Liza resolutely.

  Seryozha listened. He was surprised by his father’s soft, quiet voice, while Aunt Liza continued implacably to drive home her point, her eyes narrow and wild.

  Seryozha asked, “Papa, have you noticed how pretty Aunt Liza is?”

  His father became flustered and said that he had noticed it long ago and that everyone knew it to be true. Aunt Liza got up and left, leaving Seryozha’s father looking embarrassed, which might have seemed surprising, for the argument had been an abstract one and could not have borne any relation either to Seryozha’s father or to his aunt. That was the first time Seryozha had ever seen his Aunt Liza toppled from her immutable serenity.

  In general, Seryozha would see his mother and father relatively infrequently—Aunt Liza was his constant companion. His father had affairs to attend to, business, trips away; his mother led her own completely separate life. Often for two or three days at a time Seryozha would be deprived of her rapid footsteps, only for them to reappear later; she would come into his room and say: “Hello, Seryozhenka, hello, my darling, I’ve missed you so terribly.” She usually spoke to him in such warm, comforting terms, always latching onto what he was interested in at that very moment, playing with him enthusiastically, showing him kindness and tenderness for hours on end. She knew why some dogs had long tails, why cats were aloof, why horses have eyes on the sides of their heads and what the length of the average crocodile was. Aunt Liza knew all this, too, but her answers somehow never satisfied Seryozha, because they lacked something essential, perhaps this comfort and warmth. But Seryozha was happiest only after everyone had gone, and he was left alone in the care of the housekeeper. Such an event would usually be heralded by the arrival of Sergey Sergeyevich with some particularly intricate toy; Seryozha’s father would give it to him, expressing his hope that Seryozha would behave himself and asking him not to get upset; a few minutes later Seryozha would watch from the window as his father’s long motor car pulled away. Now he could do whatever he liked. He would shoot at a portrait of his grandmother with a bow and arrow, slide down the banisters, ride in the lift until his head hurt—up and down, up and down—spend all his free time lying on the floor, gorge himself on pastries, pour soup down the lavatory, eat handfuls of salt and refuse to wash. In the evening, as he lay on the floor, he would rub his eyes and be delighted to see green stars appear before him.

  Later, as he grew older, no one curtailed his freedom, and so he began to appreciate that his parents had essentially nothing to do with him. The constant stream of people that had lodged in his memory not only never halted, but in fact seemed to grow in strength—and he lived apart from this. When he was sixteen, he invited Aunt Liza to the theatre for the first time. By now her authority had somewhat diminished; she would laugh at some of the things he said, and ask for his opinion—and so Seryozha felt himself almost her equal. Both she and Seryozha spoke of his parents as “them”—as though subconsciously setting themselves apart. They read together, listened to the same music, liked the same books. Liza was a whole fifteen years older than Seryozha. He began to see her in his dreams, in blurry, surreal situations; then, one night—it was late spring, sometime after two o’clock in the morning, and Seryozha was reading in his room—light suddenly flooded the whole apartment, and footsteps and voices could be heard; Seryozha’s parents had returned from a ball, bringing with them a few people “to round off the evening” at home; a few minutes later there was a familiar knock at the door and in came Liza, wearing a revealing black dress that exposed her back, with her bare—cold, thought Seryozha—arms and a plunging neckline. Her eyes seemed bigger than usual beneath those erect lashes, and her excited smile was unlike the one that usually adorned her face. At that moment Seryozha was seized by an inexplicable urge, so much so that his voice broke when he began to speak.

  “You’ve been reading too much, Seryozha,” she said, sitting beside him and laying her hand on his shoulder. “I just came in to say goodnight.”

  And with that sh
e walked out, having failed to notice the strange frame of mind Seryozha seemed to find himself in. After the door had closed behind her, Seryozha just lay there without bothering to undress; he felt slightly nauseous—it was a vague, premonitory and pleasant sensation.

  And so, with incredible speed, in the two months that elapsed between that evening and Seryozha’s departure for the coast, a deep and lasting change took place, which began when the entire idyllic world of Seryozha’s lengthy, belated childhood crumbled, disappearing for ever. During this time, however, nothing altered substantially: his mother’s voice would sound just as warm and tender as it had done before, whenever she spoke to someone on the telephone; his father would travel back and forth across the city as he had always done; and by evening, just as before, the enormous rooms of the apartment would throng with various people, and everything would be as it had always been. But all of a sudden Seryozha came to understand a number of things of which he had already been aware, but concerning which he had fostered an entirely incorrect notion. Snatches of conversation between his mother and father now became intelligible to him, as did Liza’s tempered exasperation; he noticed many other things—that money was being thrown in all directions and expended in much vaster quantities than was necessary. He suddenly grasped how his mother lived—it aroused in him pity mixed with tenderness. Sometimes, when present during conversations in the drawing room, he would listen closely to what was being said, watch out for the most curious leaps of intonation and sometimes, wilfully closing himself off to the meaning of the phrases that had been uttered, listen to their musical excursions, as though it were some peculiar concert—with crescendos, diminuendos, monotone baritone notes, high-pitched women’s voices that would gasp and break off, only to rise again afterwards to the deep, tuneless accompaniment of a croaking bass; closing his eyes tight, Seryozha could see distinctly before him a bass drum with a taut, lifelessly impassive skin—right there, where there was no drum, but a venerable old chap, a philosopher and professional advisory specialist in matters of international law.