And Time Was No More, page 18
And the nights did not bring calm, did not cover our eyes in peaceful darkness. Day would fade; it would turn a pale pink, but never depart.
People would wander about, pale, languid, listening intently—like poets in search of a rhyme for an image already clear in their minds.
It grew difficult to live an ordinary life.
What could one do? Fall in love? Write poems about love and death?
Not enough, not nearly enough. Our northern spring is too powerful. With all its light, with all its whispers, rustles and ringing, it lures us away—towards the open horizon, towards free Volya.
Volya is not at all the same as freedom.
Freedom—liberté—is the rightful state of a citizen who has not infringed the laws governing his or her country.
“Freedom” can be translated into all languages and is understood by all peoples.
Volya is untranslatable.
When you hear the words “a free man”, what do you see? You see this: A gentleman walking along the street, cap tilted slightly back, cigarette between his teeth, hands in his pockets. Passing a watchmaker’s, he glances at the clock, nods—yes, he still has time—and goes off into the park, along the embankment. He strolls about for a while, spits out his cigarette, whistles a few notes and enters a little café.
What do you see when you hear the word Volya?
An unbroken horizon. Someone striding along, sure-footed but not thinking about tracks or paths, not going anywhere in particular. Bareheaded. The wind ruffles his hair and blows it over his eyes—since for his kind, every wind is a tail wind. A bird flies by, spreading its wings wide, and this man waves both arms high in the air, calls out to the bird in a wild voice, then bursts into laughter.
Freedom is a matter of law.
Volya takes no account of anything.
Freedom is an individual’s civil status.
Volya is a feeling.
We Russians, the children of Old Russia, were born with this feeling of Volya.
Peasant children, children of the rich bourgeoisie, children of the intelligentsia—regardless of background and upbringing, all sensed and understood the call of Volya.
Thousands of vagrants, such as you’d never see in any another country, answered this call. And if there were fewer vagrants in other countries, this was not because their better living conditions and stricter laws meant that there was neither need nor opportunity to leave the home nest. We too treated vagrants strictly. We arrested them, sentenced them and tried to force them to settle. Anyway, it’s not as if every Russian who left their home had a hard life there. No, there must be some other explanation.
Was it simply a love of journeying?
But if you buy one of these vagrants a ticket, send them with money, in luxury, to some wonderful destination, to the Caucasus or the Crimea, they will jump out somewhere near Kursk, drink away the money and head off north to Arkhangelsk on foot. Why?
“Wood tar’s cheap up there.”
“And why do you need wood tar?”
“Well, you never know.”
The point isn’t the tar, it’s the need for movement. To follow your nose, to go where your eyes look.
There we have it—the eternal aim of the Russian soul.
To go where your eyes look.
Like in the old fairy tales—to go thither, I know not whither.
Old and young walk and walk. They walk the length and breadth of Russia—this way and that way, along her roads, along her paths, across her virgin soil.
Catch one of these wanderers, take them back to their birthplace—and they’re off again at once. In the North we used to call them Spiridon-Turnabouts.1
A Spiridon-Turnabout strides along the road, wearing heaven knows what kind of hat—a Jewish kippah, a monk’s skullcap, a crush hat, a Panama hat without a brim or even a Panama without a top. You name it—even a woman’s kerchief. Shoes falling apart and no footcloths;2 a knapsack or cloth bundle on his back. A tin kettle hanging at his side.
He strides along as if that were his be-all and end-all in life, but he has no idea where he’s heading, or why.
Among these Spiridon-Turnabouts are representatives of every class—from runaway monks to the sons of village priests or rich merchants.
In Novgorod province—as I remember—there lived an old district police superintendent. As in a fairy tale, he had three sons. Except that it was not only the two older ones who were normal and sensible. All three were regular, sensible boys, and all three went to military school. The eldest, who was in good health and good spirits, graduated from the school and received his commission. Then he went back home for a few days. He seemed lost in thought. But not for long. One morning they found his boots and uniform in his room, but no sign of the boy himself. Where he’d gone and what he was now wearing, no one knew.
A few months later, he returned. Though that’s hardly the word—he made a brief appearance, and in such a state that it would have been better if he hadn’t shown up at all. He was drunk, dressed in rags—yet full of joy, even ecstatic.
His father was in despair. He did all he could. He revoked his paternal blessing. He cursed and wept. He offered his son money. He took to drink himself. Nothing helped.
The only response to his arguments and entreaties was a load of balderdash about the importance of understanding the fern flower,3 and about the birds in heaven—how they pray to God every dawn.
And with that the boy went on his way.
And two years later, the second son left home in exactly the same fashion.
When the third son turned sixteen, the father decided not to wait for him to get lost in thought. He summoned three policemen and ordered the boy to be flogged. Strangely enough, this had a positive effect. The boy graduated successfully and even got started on his military career. Maybe he’d have been all right anyway; maybe he wouldn’t have got lost in thought and his father’s heroic measures were neither here nor there. But we didn’t keep in touch, and I’ve no idea what became of him.
Until recently there were always pilgrims in Russia. They went from monastery to monastery and were not always led by religious feeling. What mattered was simply to be on the move. They felt the same pull as migratory birds. A mysteriously strong pull. We Russians are not so cut off from nature as Europeans. We have only a thin overlay of culture; nature can quickly and easily pierce through it. In spring, when the earth awakes and her voices grow louder, summoning us to Volya, we have no choice but to follow her resonant call. We are like mice in thrall to a medieval sorcerer playing a pipe.
I remember how my first cousin, a fifteen-year-old cadet, a quiet, obedient boy and a good student, twice ran away from his military school and made his way deep into the northern forest. When he was tracked down and returned to his home, he was quite unable to explain himself. Both these occasions were in early spring.
“What were you thinking of?” we asked.
He smiled shyly. “I don’t know. Something was pulling me.”
Later, as an adult, he would look back on this chapter of his life with a kind of tender astonishment. He was unable to understand or explain what it was that had so pulled him.
He had been able to imagine his mother’s anguish and had felt desperately sorry for her. And he’d known very well what a hullabaloo there’d be at his military school. But all that had been a mere blur. His ordinary life had seemed like a dream. And his wonderful forest life had felt real. He even found it hard to understand how he could have lived such a tedious, difficult and unnatural life for so long—for fifteen whole years.
But he hadn’t done very much thinking. For the main part, it had been a time of feeling. He had felt Volya: “Dense forest. You wander along without a path. Only pine trees and sky—no one else in the world. And suddenly, with all your might, you let yourself go. At the top of your voice, you let out a cry of such wild, primal joy that for hours afterwards all you can do is laugh and shake.”
Later, he said more: “Once I was lucky enough to see a bear enjoying music. He was lying on his back beside a giant tree felled by a storm. It was a very old tree. The trunk had split apart and the wood was all splintered. And there was the bear, stretching out a front paw and plucking the wood. The slivers hummed and buzzed, creaked and cracked. And all the time, the bear was letting out quiet growls of pleasure. He certainly liked this music… Then he seized some more slivers and played with them too. I’ll never forget the sight. A white night, a northern white night. In the far North, by the way, a white night isn’t as pale as, say, in Petersburg. In the far North it’s pinker, because there’s always a glow in the sky. Dawn starts to brighten before the evening light fades. There’s a rosy haze in the forest and, in this haze—a remarkable picture: a bear making music and a boy watching him from the bushes and almost crying—maybe he really does cry—out of love and delight. Who could ever forget this?”
This boy, incidentally, had been hard to track down. Information about him had been sent to police all over northern Russia, but it was only by chance that he was caught—in the north of Olonets province. On his way through a village, he stopped at an inn. He’d spent the night in the woods. It was a cold day and it was raining. He was chilled to the bone and he wanted a hot meal. He asked for some cabbage soup.
“What kind?”
“With meat,” he replied.
The innkeeper was shocked. “What do you mean? It’s Friday. What kind of person eats meat on a Friday?” And he sent for the constable.
The constable came and asked for his passport. The boy, needless to say, didn’t have a passport. He was arrested and questioned. He burst into tears and confessed all. And so ended his days of Volya.
Nowadays, you often hear talk like this:
“Oh to be in Russia. Even for just one day. I’d go to the forest—that can’t have changed. I’d go for a good wander. I’d get a lungful of sweet Volya.”
I too have my memories. There, it’s always spring. A white night. The small hours, perhaps two o’clock. It’s light, there’s pink in the sky.
I’m standing on a terrace. Below me, beyond the flower garden— a river. The muffled sound of a bell, and the cries of a young boy goading his oxen along the towpath. A barge is being towed towards the distant Volga.
My heart misses a beat, and my tired, sleepless eyes half close in the pink light.
Across the river, someone overwhelmed by joy belts out a wild, senseless, ecstatic song:
The boy lived free, freer than free;
The boy lived free as the wind.
If a bird flew by, high in the sky,
He shot—not once did he miss.
If a maiden came by,
Brightening his way,
He swiftly gave her a kiss.
And then the refrain—heart-rending, piercingly joyful, like a sudden yelp, coming from somewhere too deep in the soul:
O to live free, free as the wind!
Sing Volya, Volya, Volya!
And somehow, not knowing what I’m doing, I raise my hand and wave at the dawn and this wild song. And I laugh, and cry out, “Vo-o-o-lya-a-a!”
1936
translated by robert and elizabeth
chandler and maria evans
Notes
1 Saint Spiridon (c.270–348) is honoured in both Eastern and Western Christian traditions. According to the Julian calendar (used in Russia until 1918), his saint’s day falls close to the winter solstice and so he is known as Spiridon Povorot or Spiridon Solntsevorot (Spiridon-Turnabout or Spiridon-Sunturn). This term was sometimes used to describe people returning illegally from exile (Olga Atroshinko, Russkii narodnyi kalendar’. Etnolingvisticheskii slovar’ (Moscow: AST-Press, 2015), pp. 414–15).
2 Lengths of cloth wound around the foot and ankle—more common in Russia, until the middle of the twentieth century, than socks or stockings. By the 1950s, however, they had largely disappeared—except in labour camps and the army.
3 In Slavic and Baltic mythology, this magic flower blooms on the eve of the summer solstice. In different versions of the myth, it bestows a variety of gifts on the person who finds it. These gifts include wealth, understanding of animal speech and the ability to open any locked door, but they seldom, if ever, bring the finder any real benefit.
And Time Was No More
“Just one left till morning.”
What does this mean? I keep repeating the words in my head. They’ve got stuck there. I’m fed up with them. But this often happens to me. A sentence or part of a tune will get stuck in my head and won’t leave me alone.
I open my eyes.
An old woman is kneeling on the floor, lighting the little stove. The kindling crackles.
And my stove is crackling away.
It lights up my bed in the corner
Behind the bright-coloured curtain.
How often I’d sung those lines.
The bright-coloured bed curtain is gathered into pleats; light is shining through its scarlet roses.
The old woman, who is wearing a brown shawl and a dark headscarf, is hunched into a little ball. She’s blowing onto the kindling, clanging the iron poker against the stove. I look at the small window. Sunlight is playing on the glass, which has frosted over.
No sooner has the light of dawn
Begun to play with the clear frost
Than…
Just like in the song. How does it go on? Ah, that’s right:
Than the samovar has begun to boil
On the oak table…
Yes, there’s the samovar, boiling on the table in the corner, a little steam escaping from under its lid. It’s boiling and singing.
Along the bench struts the cockerel. He goes up to the window, tilts his little head to one side and looks out, his claws clicking against the wood. Then he moves on.
But where’s the cat? I can’t live without the cat. Oh, there he is on the table, stout and gingery, purring as he warms himself behind the samovar.
Someone has begun stamping inside the porch, shaking snow from their felt boots. The boots make a soft thudding sound. The old woman has got laboriously to her feet and waddled to the door. I can’t see her face, but it doesn’t matter. I know who she is…
I ask, “Who’s that?”
She replies, “It’s that fellow, what’s his name…”
I can hear them talking together. The old woman, standing on the threshold, says, “Well, I suppose I could roast it.”
There in her arms, upside down, is an enormous bird, black with thick red eyebrows. A wood grouse. It’s been given to us by the huntsman.
I must get up.
Next to the bed are my felt boots—my beloved white valenki. Long ago in St Petersburg the Khanzhonkov Studio organized a hunting trip for a group of actors and writers and their friends. We were meant to be hunting elk. They drove us out over the firm white snow to Tosno, where we had a long, convivial lunch with champagne. Early the next morning we set out on low, wide sledges to the edge of the forest. How I loved my pointy-toed white-felt skiing valenki. I remember my white cap, too. Against the snow neither my head nor my feet would be visible. No beast would recognize me as a human being. It was a hunting ruse all of my own invention.
A steward of some sort showed us all to our correct spots. We were told not to smoke or talk, but we decided it couldn’t do any harm if we only talked and smoked a little bit. I was standing with Fiodorov, the writer. We could hear the cries of the beaters. Later we found out that some elk had come, looked at us through the bushes and gone away. They hadn’t liked what they’d seen. Instead of the elk, some hares leapt out—one of them right in front of me. Not moving at any great speed, it slipped slyly from bush to bush—neither quite running away nor quite taking cover. Fiodorov quickly raised his gun and took aim. “Don’t you dare!” I yelled, jumping up and flinging my arms open right in front of him. He began yelling even louder—something like “You foo—”, except that the word got stuck in his throat. And then, “That could have been the end of you!” I didn’t mind him yelling at me. What mattered was that we’d saved the hare. My white, slim, nimble valenki did a little dance in the snow.
Later my valenki went missing. The maid’s husband, a drunken layabout, had stolen them and sold them for drink. But now they’d come back again. Here they were by my bed, as if that were the most ordinary thing in the world. I slipped my feet into them and went into the little box room to get dressed.
There’s a narrow window in the box room, and a small mirror on the wall. I look at my reflection. How strange I seem. My face could be from a childhood photograph. Anyone would take me for a four-year-old. I have a cheeky smile and dimples. As for my hair, it’s short, with a fringe. It’s fair and silky and it lies close to my head. Just like it was when I used to walk down Novinsky Boulevard with my nyanya. And I know exactly how I used to look then. When we were going down the front staircase, the big mirror on the landing would reflect a little girl in an astrakhan coat, white gaiters and a white bashlyk hood with gold braid. When she raised her leg high you could see her red flannel pantaloons. Back then all of us children wore red flannel pantaloons. And there in the mirror behind this girl would be a second little girl just like her, only smaller and wider. Her little sister.
I remember how we used to play on the boulevard, my sister and I and other little girls like us. Once a lady and a gentleman stopped and watched us for a while, smiling.
“I like that little girl in the bonnet,” said the lady, pointing at me.
The thought of her liking me was intriguing. I immediately opened my eyes wide and puckered my lips, as if to say, “Look at me! Aren’t I wonderful?” And the gentleman and his lady smiled and smiled.
