And Time Was No More, page 6
“Solovki”—an almost Bruegelesque account of the then-widespread practice of mass pilgrimage to holy sites—was inspired by Teffi’s own visit in 1916 to the Solovetsky Monastery on an island in the White Sea. After the Pechersk Lavra cave monastery in Kyiv, this was the most important pilgrimage site in the Russian Empire. Teffi’s visit clearly meant a great deal to her; she bought a small cypresswood cross in the monastery shop, kept it with her till her last days and ordered it to be placed with her in her coffin.1
Notes
1 Haber, Teffi, p. 224.
The Book of June
Avast country house, a large extended family, the spaciousness of the clear, bracing air—it could hardly have been more different from her quiet Petersburg apartment stuffed with carpets and furniture. Katya at once felt exhausted. She had been ill for a long time and had come to the country to convalesce.
Katya was staying with one of her aunts. This aunt was hard of hearing and so the whole house was constantly shouting. The high-ceilinged rooms reverberated, dogs barked, cats meowed, maids from the village clattered plates, and the children shouted and squabbled.
There were four children in all: fifteen-year-old Vasya, a bully and a tattletale studying in a Novgorod gymnasium,1 and two small girls, home from boarding school for the summer. And then there was the eldest, Grisha, who was the same age as Katya but was staying with a school friend in Novgorod. He would be back home soon.
They all talked about Grisha a great deal. He seemed to be a general favourite, even something of a hero.
The head of the family, Uncle Tyoma, who was plump and had grey whiskers, looked rather like a large cat. He was constantly teasing Katya. “What’s the matter, my little goose? Are you bored?” he would ask with a smirk. “Just you wait, young Grisha will be here soon. He’ll really turn your head!”
“Nonsense!” the aunt would shout (like all deaf people, she spoke louder than anyone else). “Katya is from Petersburg—she’ll hardly be impressed by a mere Novgorod student. Katya, my dear, I’m sure you have throngs of admirers. Come on now, admit it!”
And she would then wink at everyone. Knowing that all this was meant to be funny, Katya would attempt a smile, with trembling lips.
The two girls, Manya and Lubochka, gave her a warm welcome and reverentially inspected her wardrobe: a blue sailor jacket, a smart dress (starched piqué) and some white blouses.
“Ooh! Ooh!” repeated eleven-year-old Lubochka, sounding like a wind-up doll.
“I love Petersburg fashions,” said Manya.
“All so shiny, like silk,” Lubochka chimed in.
They took Katya for walks. Beyond the garden lay a marshy river dense with forget-me-nots. A calf had drowned there.
“He was sucked under. The bog sucked him under and that was it. We never saw him again—not even a bone. We’re forbidden to swim here.”
They swung Katya on the swing. But when Katya was no longer a novelty, things changed. The two girls even began to snigger at her behind her back. Vasya made fun of her, too, coming out with all kinds of stupidities. He would walk up to her, perform an exaggerated bow and say, “Mademoiselle Catrine, please be so good as to explain to me how you would say ‘gulch’ in French?”
All very tedious, unpleasant and wearying.
“Why is everything so ugly here?” Katya kept asking herself.
They ate suckling pig, carp with sour cream and pies with burbot. A far cry from the crisp, delicate grouse wings she enjoyed at home.
It was the housemaids who milked the cows. If you called them, they yelled back, “Wot?”
The girl who served them at table was huge. She had a moustache and looked like a soldier squeezed into a woman’s blouse. Katya was astonished to discover that this gigantic creature was only eighteen.
It was a relief to escape to the small garden. Clutching a slim volume of Alexey Tolstoy with an embossed cover, she would read aloud:
It isn’t he who holds you spellbound;
It’s not his own perfection that attracts you.
He’s nothing more than an occasion
For secret dreams of torment, bliss and rapture.2
Every time she came to the last words, her heart skipped a beat. Tears would have been sweet.
“Coo-ee, Katya! Tea-ea time!”
Once again, the shouting, the clamour, the general din. Excited dogs flailing hard tails against your leg. A cat suddenly up on the table, its tail flicking across your face. Animal heads. Animal snouts and tails.
Grisha returned shortly before Midsummer Day.
Katya was out when he arrived. Later, as she was going through the dining room, she glimpsed Vasya through the window. He was talking to a tall young man in a white naval jacket and with a very long nose.
“Auntie Zhenya’s invited a cousin to stay,” she heard Vasya say.
“What’s she like?”
“A blue-ish idiot.”
Katya moved quickly back from the window.
“Blue-ish? Or did he say ‘foolish’? How very strange.”
She went outside.
Long-nosed Grisha greeted her cheerily, stepped up into the porch and peered out at her through the small porch window. Screwing up his eyes, he made a show of twirling imaginary moustache.
“What a dolt,” Katya said to herself. She sighed and walked on into the garden.
At dinner Grisha was rather boisterous. He kept picking on Varvara, the huge girl with the moustache, telling her she had no idea how to wait at table.
“Enough of that!” said Uncle Tyoma. “Just look at you—that great beak of yours just keeps growing and growing.”
And Vasya, always the bully and troublemaker, declaimed in a sing-song voice:
Monstrous nose, awful nose
With room inside its flaring holes
For fields and farms and villages,
For cupolas and palace halls.
“Such great big boys,” yelled the deaf aunt, “and they still keep on squabbling!” Turning to Auntie Zhenya, she went on, “Two years ago I took them with me to Pskov. It’s a historic city and I wanted them to see something of it. I had things to do in the morning, so I went out early. Before I left, I said, ‘Ring down for some coffee and then go and have a look round. I’ll be back for lunch.’ I get back at two—and guess what! The blinds are still down—and they’re both still lying there in bed. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I ask. ‘Why are you still in bed? Have you had your coffee?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why on earth not?’ ‘Because this blockhead wouldn’t ring for it.’ ‘So why didn’t you ring yourself?’ ‘Me? Why? Why should he lie in bed while I run around at his beck and call?’ ‘But why should I have to do all the work!’ says the other blockhead. And so the two of them just lay there until two o’clock in the afternoon.”
The days went by, noisy as ever. With Grisha back home there was, if anything, even more shouting and arguing.
Vasya had an air of constant grievance. He seemed full of spite and was rude to everyone.
One evening at dinner, Uncle Tyoma, who in his youth had greatly admired Alexander II, showed Katya his huge gold watch with a miniature of the tsar and tsaritsa inside its lid. He told her how he’d made a special trip to Petersburg in the hope of somehow getting a glimpse of His Majesty. “He wouldn’t have travelled that far just to see me,” Vasya muttered crossly. “That’s for sure.”
Grisha grew ever more indignant about Varvara and her moustache. “She comes bantering on my door in the morning with those great fists of hers—and that’s my whole day ruined.”
Vasya shrieked with laughter. “Bantering! I ask you! I think he’s trying to say battering!”
“She’s no maid, she’s a bloke. A peasant bloke. I’m telling you, I don’t want to wake up to the sight of her. End of story.”
“He’s upset because they’ve got rid of Pasha,” Vasya shouted. “Pasha was very pretty.”
Grisha leapt to his feet, red as a beetroot. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking at his parents but pointing at Vasya. “I cannot sit at the same table as this relative of yours.”
Grisha took no notice of Katya at all—except once, when he saw her in the garden with a book in her hands. “May I enquire what you’re reading?” he asked with exaggerated politeness. He then went on his way before she could answer.
Varvara happened to be passing by, too. Bristling like an angry cat and glaring at Katya with eyes that seemed almost white, she said, “So young ladies from Petersburg like good-looking boys, do they?”
Katya did not understand this, but she felt scared by the look in Varvara’s eyes.
That evening Katya spent a long time with Auntie Zhenya making pastries. It was the eve of Saint Artyom’s day—the name-day of her Uncle Tyoma. When they’d finished, she went out into the yard to look at the moon. Not far away, in the wing, she could see a light in one of the windows. Standing on a log she must have just put there herself, Varvara was gazing into the room.
Hearing Katya’s footsteps, she beckoned and hissed, “Here!” Seizing her by the arm, Varvara pulled her up onto the log.
“Look!”
Vasya was lying fast asleep on a small sofa. Grisha was lying on the floor, on a straw mattress. He was reading, his face very close to the book, and the book very close to the candle.
“What is it?” Katya asked in surprise. “What are you looking at?”
Varvara hushed her.
Varvara’s face was both tense and vacant. Her mouth was half open and her eyes were staring. She seemed bewildered, transfixed.
Katya managed to free her arm and get away. Varvara really was very strange.
The following day the house was full of guests. There were merchants, other landowners and the abbot of the nearby monastery—a huge, broad-browed man who looked like one of Vasnetsov’s warriors.3 He arrived in a two-wheeled carriage and talked all through the meal about crops and haymaking. Uncle Tyoma kept complimenting him on his management of the land.
“What weather!” said the abbot. “What meadows! What fields! June! Wherever I go, it’s as if a book of untold wonders is being opened before me. June!”
These words made an impression on Katya. She listened to the abbot for some time, hoping he’d say more in this vein. But he spoke only of the price of fodder and the purchase of a small area of woodland.
That evening, Katya sat in front of the mirror in her chintz dressing gown. She lit a candle and studied her thin, freckled face.
“I’m boring,” she said to herself. “Everything’s boring, so boring.”
She remembered the word that had upset her: Blue-ish. It was true. She was blue-ish.
She sighed.
“Tomorrow’s Saint John’s day. We’ll be going to the monastery.”
Everyone was still up and about. Behind the wall she could hear Grisha, playing billiards in the games room.
Suddenly the door burst open. Varvara tore in, red-faced, her teeth bared in a wild grin.
“Not asleep yet—an’ why not? What ye waiting for, eh? I’ll put you to bed meself. Aye, I’ll put you to bed right now.”
She grabbed hold of Katya, held her tightly and began to tickle her, laughing loudly as she ran her fingers over the girl’s thin ribs. “Not asleep yet?” she kept repeating. “An’ why not?”
Katya could hardly breathe. Letting out little shrieks, she tried to escape, but Varvara’s strong hands held her fast, fingering her, twisting and turning her.
“Let go! I’m going to die! Let go of me!”
Her heart was pounding. She was choking. Her whole body was screaming, struggling, writhing.
And then she glimpsed Varvara’s bared teeth and white, glaring eyes. This was no joke and no game. Varvara was out to harm her, perhaps to kill her. Varvara was unable to stop herself.
“Grisha! Grisha!” Katya yelled desperately.
Varvara at once let her go. Grisha was there, standing in the doorway.
“Get out, you fool. Have you gone mad?”
“Can’t I ’ave a little fun?” Varvara said feebly. Everything about her—her face, her arms—had gone limp and droopy. She staggered out of the room.
“Grisha! Grisha!”
Katya had no idea what made her keep on screaming like this. Some kind of lump seemed to be filling her throat, making her gasp and wheeze and scream out Grisha’s name.
Still screaming, her legs still jerking convulsively, she reached out to Grisha, flung her arms around his neck and pressed her face to his cheek. Wanting protection, she was still calling out, “Grisha! Grisha!”
Grisha sat her down on the sofa and knelt beside her, gently stroking her shoulders through her chintz gown.
Katya looked into his face, saw the embarrassment and confusion in his eyes and wept still more bitterly.
“You’re a kind man, Grisha. You’re very kind.”
Grisha looked away a little. A thin little arm was fiercely embracing his neck and his lips were somehow brushing against it. Timidly, he kissed Katya in the crook of her elbow.
Katya was now still. Grisha’s lips were strangely warm. This warmth was spreading beneath her skin, ringing sweetly in her ears and suffusing her eyelids with a heaviness that made them slowly close.
Then she herself moved her arm to his lips, and Grisha kissed the very same spot once again. Again Katya heard the sweet ringing, and felt the same warmth, and the heavy, blissful languor that closed her eyes.
“Don’t be frightened, Katenka,” said Grisha, his voice faltering. “She won’t dare come back now. If you like, I can stay in the billiard room. And you can bolt your door.”
His face looked both kind and guilty. A vein stood out in the middle of his forehead. Somehow, the guilt in his eyes was frightening.
“You must go now, Grisha! Go!”
He gave her a scared look and got to his feet.
“Go!”
She pushed him towards the door and bolted it after him.
“Oh God! Oh God! This is awful.”
She raised her arm and cautiously put her lips to the spot Grisha had kissed. It felt warm and silky. She could taste vanilla.
Her strength failed her. She began to tremble and moan.
“Oh… oh… oh… How can I go on living? Lord help me.”
The candle on the table trembled and guttered, swaying its black flame.
“Lord help me. I am a sinner.”
Katya put her face to the dark rectangle of the icon and joined her hands in prayer.
“Our Father who art…”
But these weren’t the right words. She did not know what words would allow her to ask God for she did not know what, and to speak to him about what she did not understand.
She closed her eyes tight and crossed herself.
“God forgive me,” she began.
And again she felt that these weren’t the right words.
The candle went out, but the room only seemed brighter.
Dawn was drawing near. This white night would soon be over.
“Lord, Lord,” Katya repeated and pushed open the door to the garden.
She dared not move. She was afraid of clacking a heel or rustling her dressing gown, so ineffable was the silvery blue silence around her. The magnificent groves of trees were still and silent, as only living, sentient beings can be still and silent.
“What’s going on? What on earth’s going on?” thought Katya, almost paralysed with fear. “No, I’ve never known anything like this.” Everything was breaking down. The trees, the still air, the invisible light—everything was overflowing with some sort of extreme power, something insuperable and beyond our ken, for which we possess no sensory organ and for which there are no words in our language.
Katya was startled by a burst of sound. It was quiet, yet so sudden that it seemed loud. At once strong and delicate, there was no knowing where it sprang from. It flowed from goodness knows where and spilled over, bouncing back up like the most delicate of silver peas. Then it broke off.
A nightingale?
After this, the voices—“their” voices—grew still quieter, yet still more intense.
And “they” were all as one, all in concert. Only this little human creature, rapt and terrified, was alien. “They” all knew something. While this little human creature could only think.
June. She remembered the book of untold wonders. June.
And her small soul tossed about in anguish.
“Lord! Lord! To be in Your world is terrifying. What am I to do? And what is this? What is all this?”
And she kept searching for words, kept thinking that words would soothe and resolve.
She crossed her arms over her thin little shoulders, as if she were not herself, as if wanting to protect the fragile little body entrusted to her and to bear it away from the chaos of bestial and divine mysteries that had engulfed it.
She bowed her head in obedient despair and spoke the only words that are one and the same for all souls, great and small, blind and wise:
“Our Father… Hallowed be Thy Name… Thy Will be Done.”
1930
translated by robert and elizabeth
chandler with kathryn thompson
Notes
1 Tsarist Russia in many ways followed the German educational system. A gymnasium is an elite secondary school with a strong emphasis on academic learning, similar to a British grammar school or a prep school in the US. Gymnasiums for women were instituted in 1862.
