"Was anyone here to see you today?" I asked.
"Indeed! I'll bet your whole class was here. Kostya, Labanda, Zoya and
Stepan, of course. They were all here. They lit the stove and boiled the
kettle. But they didn't feel like having any tea. What's the matter? Why
aren't you drinking yours? See, I said it wouldn't be any good without
sugar. Well, if you're not going to have it, we might as well try walking
again. Give me a hand. I think I feel stronger after your brew. Come on,
give us a hand here!"
The Commissar leaned on me and tried learning to walk again.
Our wandering school moved from one place to another, and Schwambrania
wandered along with it. The turbulent events in the life of Pokrovsk and our
school naturally affected the internal affairs and geographical location of
the Big Tooth Continent. There were constant disorders in Schwambrania,
because it was forever changing the order of things in the country.
Lice had come out from hiding in Pokrovsk and had become official.
Typhus had put red crosses on everything. Oska insisted we have a death toll
in Schwambrania, too, and I had to agree. The statistics of real-life
situations called for a death toll in Schwambrania. That was why a cemetery
appeared there. We then went over the list of Schwambranian kings, heroes,
champions, villains and seafarers, and spent a long time deciding whom we
would bury. I tried to limit the death toll to such insignificant
Schwambranians as the former Royal Water-Carrier, or the Master of Foreign
Affairs. But my bloodthirsty brother would have nothing of the kind. He
demanded great losses, as was only true in real life.
"What kind of a game is it if nobody dies? They just go on living and
living! Let somebody die who we'll feel sorry for."
After long deliberations Jack, the Sailor's Companion died in
Schwambrania. The cruel Count Chatelains Urodenal had filled his kidneys
with stones. As he lay dying. Jack, the Sailor's Companion, exclaimed,
leafing through the last page of the conversation manual: "Je vais a.... Ich
gehe nach.... Ferma la machinal Finished with engine!"
He then departed, and though he wanted to wish everyone well, there
were no such words in the manual. A brass band played at his funeral. There
were life buoys instead of wreaths, and a gold anchor and visiting card
adorned his grave.
Despite the terrible loss, the constant changes in climate and
politics, the Big Tooth Continent extended across our every thought and
deed.
The Black Queen, Keeper of the Secret, pined away in cobweby loneliness
behind the brass gate of the seashell grotto. Schwambrania lived on.
One day Oska came hurrying home from school. He was terribly excited,
for a soldier had come up to him on the street in broad daylight and asked
for directions to Schwambrania. Oska had become so confused he had run away.
We set right out to find the mysterious stranger, but there was no trace of
him. Oska said that maybe he was a real live lost Schwambranian. Naturally,
I made fun of him, reminding him that we had invented Schwambrania and all,
its inhabitants. Still and all, I noticed that Oska had begun to sort of
believe in its actual existence.
Schwambrania soon became known to Oska's classmates. From the very
start he had made a name for himself in school. One of the boys had asked
the teacher where sugar came from.
"I know," Oska had replied. "Sugar comes from school."
That was the day Kocherygin, the temporary principal, was keeping the
children in check, since the botany teacher was absent. "That's where it
comes from," he said. Then Oska said that sugar came from kerosene which
spurted up from the ground.
Kocherygin seemed stumped. The next day he told the children that he
had looked into the matter and learned that saccharine came from the ground,
but from coal, not kerosene. However, he regarded Oska with new respect.
Oska immediately took advantage of this and drew the outline of
Schwambrania on the large wall map in the classroom. Since the geography and
botany teacher was still absent, Kocherygin took over once again. His finger
suddenly got lost in the mountains of the Big Tooth Continent.
"What country's this?" he said, pointing to the strange land. "Hm?
Anybody knows?"
Nobody did.
"It's Schwambrania," Oska teased.
"What's that?"
"Schwambrania!" Oska became serious.
"Never heard of it."
"I did. A soldier I know even left for there yesterday."
"How come it's not in the book?" his classmates demanded.
"It's not on the map yet, because it's a very new country."
"Go on, tell us about it," Kocherygin said.
And so Oska went over to the big map and spent the rest of the lesson
talking about Schwambrania. He spoke in detail of the flora and fauna of the
Big Tooth Continent, and his classmates listened with bated breath to his
story of the wild 1 rum-toddies who inhabited the canyons of the Northern
Candelabras. He told them of the wars against Piliguinia, of the overthrow
of Brenabor, of the adventures of the deceased Jack, the Sailor's Companion,
of the evil deeds of Chatelains Urodenal. Kocherygin was quite pleased with
the Schwambranian geography lesson.
Oska returned home in the best of spirits. He was beaming. "We're
studying about Schwambrania in school now," he said proudly.
I nearly collapsed.
However, the very next day Kocherygin brought a very embarrassed Oska
home. He was holding Oska's hand, trying to talk him out of his
Schwambranian fantasy. A group of his classmates followed, shouting
"Schwamp! Bramp!" The new principal told our parents of Oska's strange idea
of geography and asked them to somehow influence the stubborn Schwambranian.
Oska sniffled and spoke of the mysterious soldier who had asked for
directions to Schwambrania.
A few days later Oska and I were out for a walk. Two poorly-dressed
young peasants came up to us on the square. They were carrying knapsacks. We
were overcome by a terrible premonition.
"Listen, boys, can you tell us how to get to Red Army Headquarters?
We're looking for Captain Schambardin."
So that was who the mysterious soldier had been looking for!
Typhus rolled along the streets in step with the even tread of the
stretcher-bearers and pallbearers. Typhus raged in the delirious cries of
the stricken and was a murmur in the funeral corteges. The Tratrchok camels
pulled the hearses.
Our school was moving again.
Schwambrania dashed about in search of a stable policy, changing
rulers, climates and latitudes. Our house alone stood steadfastly at its
moorings at the same old latitude and longitude. It had rusted and sunk into
the riverbed and was no longer a boat but heavy, stranded barge that had
turned into an island. Storms had not yet invaded it, since Mamma was afraid
of draughts and kept the windows closed.
Still, some changes had taken place. Papa now wore an army field jacket
instead of a morning coat. The red cross on his breast pocket signified that
he was an army doctor. He was attached to the casualty-clearing station.
Then, the people who we had once been told were undesirable acquaintances
and had only come up the back stairs were now all coming to the front door.
Even the water-carrier, who, it would seem, would save time and effort by
coming straight into the kitchen, now rang the front doorbell insistently.
He trudged through the apartment, leaving puddles and wet tracks, and his
pails were full of dignity.
Oska and I welcomed this degradation of the front hall. A draught of
disrespect had now been established between it and the kitchen. We could now
strike out the first point on our list of the world's injustices (concerning
"undesirable acquaintances").
The plumber and the carpenter were the first to ring the front doorbell
after the revolution. Annushka opened the door and asked them to wait while
she went to tell Papa that "two men wanted to see Comrade Doctor".
"Who are they?" Mamma wanted to know.
"Well, sort of men," Annushka said. (She divided all of Papa's patients
into gentlemen, men and peasants.)
Papa went out into the front hall. "There's something we'd like to
discuss," one of them said.
"What seems to be bothering you?" Papa asked, for he thought he was a
patient.
"They've no sense of duty," the plumber said. "The town council closed
down the hospital under Kerensky, and that means the working people won't
get any care when they need it. We've been appointed commissars."
Papa could never forgive Kerensky, because during his short reign in
Russia the rich, tight-fisted town fathers had closed down the municipal
hospital, saying, as they usually did, "No need for it."
And now two Bolshevik commissars had come to see him and tell him that
the Soviets had decreed that the hospital was to be opened immediately and
that Papa was to be in charge of it.
Papa asked the commissars to have tea with him. After they had gone, he
paced up and down humming happily, "Marusya took some poison, to the
hospital she'll go."
"This is a real government! It's showing good cultural sense. How can
you even compare your Constituent Assembly to it? It was just like our
district meeting. 'No need for it' on a nation-wide scale."
"Your Constituent Assembly" was said especially to spite my aunts. At
the time, starving aunts seemed to have descended upon us from all over
Russia. One had come from Vitebsk the other had escaped from Samara. The
Samara and Vitebsk aunts were sisters. Both wore pince-nez on black silk
cords and looked very much alike. Papa had nicknamed them the Constituent
Assembly. Oska and I nicknamed them Aunt Neces and Aunt Sary.
They were both terribly educated and spent hours discussing literature
and arguing over politics, and if some of their information jarred with the
encyclopaedia, they would say it was a printing error.
Then a third aunt arrived from Petrograd. She said she was as good as a
Bolshevik.
"Will you be better'n a Bolshevik soon?" Oska asked.
However, months passed, but our aunt still did not become a Bolshevik.
She was now saying that to all intents and purposes she was nearly a
Communist.
The Petrograd aunt found a job at Tratrchok, while Aunt Neces and Aunt
Sary both went to work for the District Food Committee. In their free time
they told us "true life stories", had heated discussions and meddled in our
upbringing. Our aunts insisted that we be tutored at home, for they were
firmly convinced that the Soviet school system was detrimental to upbringing
of a child from an intellectual family and to his sensitive personality (I
believe that is the way they put it).
They took it upon themselves to tutor us, as they considered themselves
authorities in the field of child psychology. Their constant admonitions
exhausted us. They wanted to take part in everything we did, to play all our
games. They were overjoyed when they discovered the existence of
Schwambrania and said it was so-oo exciting and simply divine. They begged
to be let in on the secrets of our world of make-believe and promised to be
of help. Schwambrania was in danger of being overrun by aunts.
That was when the Schwambranian commanders played a trick on them. They
led the aunts off into the heart of Schwambrania and there, during an
initiation ceremony, painted them with water colours, made them crawl under
beds, locked them in a cave with wild beasts, which meant locking them in a
storeroom with wild rats, and made them sing the Schwambranian anthem ten
times in a row.
"'Hoo-ray, hoo-ray!' they all shouted, the Schwambranians," our tired,
painted aunts sang in the darkness. " 'Hoo-ray!' Eeek! Something's crawling
up my skirt! 'Hoo-ray, hoo-ray!' They were clouted! Do-re-mi-nians!"
However, when we then explained the rules and holds of wrestling and
told them to wrestle without breaks or a time limit to a final victory, our
poor aunts became indignant. They said Schwambrania was a crude game and a
stupid country, unworthy of well brought up boys. This was why the famous
Schwambranian poet (obviously inspired by Lermontov) wrote the following
stanza in his Aunt Neces' autograph book.
Three lively aunts all live in our apartment,
Thank God there are no more in this department!
"Your father's an intellectual, but he's all right," Stepan Atlantis
said. "You can see he's on our side. And you're an all-out sympathizer. One
of your aunts has an idea of what's going on, but those other two are
awfully backward." He was leaving our house after a two-hour long discussion
on the individual and society.
The Constituent Assembly aunts used such long words that I caught my
Petrograd aunt sneaking off to the dictionary every now and then to look up
unfamiliar "isms" and "substances". According to my first two aunts, the
free intelligent self was the core, and everything else revolved around it.
And whatever the self believed, was so. Whatever it wished things to be was
the way they were, and to hell with everything else! Stepan, however, argued
that, like the saying went, you didn't call off a wedding if one guest was
missing. He said that the group, with everyone pulling together, was the
main thing. As for the self, if it got too stuck-up you could always catch
it by the collar and give it a good shake. My aunts replied that Stepan and
I were crude realists, believing only in that which everyone could see and
feel. Realists were also called materialists. They believed that the world
undoubtedly existed and governed all ideas and individuals. But my aunts did
not agree with this. They got terribly excited and even shouted. They said
the world had no right to order free ideas and the individual around,
because, they said, perhaps the world would never have existed without
ideas. Yes, undoubtedly, only the reasoning individual existed. Perhaps
everything else existed only as it appeared to it, only as in a dream.
"Are we individual?" Oska wanted to know.
"As far as you yourselves are concerned, undoubtedly," Aunt Sary said.
We thought this was a great idea and decided it would all come in very
handy in Schwambrania.
Indeed, what if we were really Schwambranians and Pokrovsk, our school,
home and the revolution were all a part of some dream? We were stunned by
the very thought of it.
Our aunts sat down on the couch and Aunt Neces began reading aloud from
a Russian history book: "The Vikings, Rurik, Truvor and Sinehus came to rule
Ancient Rus."
Oska and I decided to have a look at Schwambranian history, meanwhile,
and began singing, throwing chairs around and making as much of a racket as
possible. Our aunts asked us to be a little more considerate. They said it
was a lack of respect for the individual.
"Our individual is dreaming that you're not here at all," Oska said.
"Maybe we just imagined you?" I added.
Our aunts spoke about our behaviour to Mamma. She came in to have a
look but we were doubtful of her existence as well. Mamma burst into tears
and spoke about our behaviour to Papa.
"What sort of nursery solipsism is this?" Papa demanded. "I'm going to
suddenly imagine that the two of you have been sent to stand in a corner at
this advanced age."
We were given no dinner. Papa said that, after all, the soup was only a
dream, and Oska and I were such free-thinking individuals, it wouldn't take
any effort on our part to imagine that we were full, while he said that he
recalled dreaming that we had had our dinner and had even said "thank you".
In a word, we had to accept the fact that our soup was not an idea but
reality, and that there were millions of other individuals except ourselves,
and that we could not exist without them.
The self had been tossed out of the centre of the universe as far as we
were concerned. We were caught up in the great whirl of events in school and
on the street. However, the centrifugal forces could do nothing about the
state of affairs at home. Our home staunchly remained the reliable core of
our existence. We felt that everything else was whirling around it like some
great and dangerous merry-go-round. Such was the case until the day on which
a stocky man appeared in the front hall during Papa's office hours. He had
on a pair of black boots protected by galoshes and a holster, and carried a
briefcase. Annushka said it was one of the commissars.
"Sorry to inconvenience you, but I'm going in next. I'm here on
business," he said to the patients in the waiting room. "We're all here on
business!" "Who does he think he is?"
"He thinks he's a gentleman," a fat farm woman said. A sack on her lap
moved, and a live duck-offering quacked inside it.
Water splashed in the washstand in the office. Then the door opened and
a man came out, buttoning his shirt collar. The Commissar went right in.
"Good day. I'm sorry to bother you, coming in out of turn, but it's
revolutionary duty, Comrade Doctor. You see, I'm here as the Commandant of
Pokrovsk."
"Sit down, Comrade Usyshko," Papa said, recognizing the shoemaker who
had formerly made all our shoes and had often borrowed books from Papa's
library. "What's the good news these days?"
"You'll have to move to another apartment, Comrade Doctor. Tratrchok is
expanding. They don't have enough space any more. I'm sorry to bother you,
but you'll have to move in two days."
"Well. They've finally got to me," Papa said to himself. Aloud he said,
adjusting his breast-pocket flap with the red cross on it. "I'm going to
protest. Comrade Usyshko. I won't let anyone throw me out so high-handedly
in two days' time, as if I were some bourgeois. I believe that the working
intelligentsia has the right to expect a more considerate approach on the
part of the government with whom it is working in complete contact."
"All right. I'll give you an extra day, but no more. I won't argue
about that contact part. And I've personally found you a fine place on
Kobzar Street. It's in Pustodumov's former house. A fine apartment. And
we'll take care of the moving."
"You understand that I'll have to see it first."
"As you like. We don't charge any for looking. So I'll send the wagons
over on the sixth. I'll be going now." As he turned, his eyes fell on Papa's
shoes. "You still wearing them?"
"Yes!" Papa said angrily.
"How's the left one? Not too tight? Remember, I said it'd only be tight
at first and that it'd stretch?"
"To be frank. Comrade Usyshko, I think you were better at that job,
ah...."
"That depends which way you look at it. Comrade Doctor." The Commandant
chuckled. "You used to order your shoes, but now some things, if you'll
pardon my saying so, aren't done to your measurements any more. Maybe some
things don't fit very well."
The news of the coming move stunned Oska and me. We saw that centre of
the world had shifted, and history was not made according to the wishes of
our home.
Copernicus' contemporaries had most probably found themselves in the
same predicament. They had always believed that Man was the centre of the
Universe and that the Earth was the centre of Creation. Then they were told
that the Earth was only a speck among thousands of similar planets, and that
it travelled around the Sun, governed by forces that were not of its
creation.
A most unusual caravan was moving along Breshka Street. Ten camels of
the Tratrchok were carrying our possessions.
The drapes and curtains were rolled up like campaign banners. The
dismantled beds, adorned by shiny brass knobs, clattered and jangled like a
collection of maces belonging to a Cossack chief. The armoured coats of the
samovars gleamed. The large pier glass spread out like a lake, with Breshka
Street splashing in it upside-down. The innerspring jelly of the mattresses
jiggled. A set of hobbled bentwood chairs jostled and trotted atop another
wagon like a little herd of colts.
The piano in its white cloth cover rode along in an upright position.
Seen from the side, it resembled a surgeon in a white smock, but from the
front it was a steed wearing a horse-cloth. The merry driver had one hand on
the reins and the other stuck through the slit in the cloth. He was poking
at the keys, trying to pick out a simple tune as the wagon rolled along.
Our belongings looked indecent. The washstand and sideboard, which had
always been upright, lay on their backs with the doors gazing at the sky.
Passers-by stared at us. Our personal, private life was bared to all eyes.
We felt uneasy and wished we could renounce it all. Papa walked along the
sidewalk, as if none of this had anything to do with him, but Mamma walked
bravely on at the head of the procession, right behind the first wagon, as
wan and unhappy as a widow following the pallbearers. She was holding a list
of our belongings, quite like a list of the dead for a church service.
Oska walked ahead of us, carrying the cat. Annushka sat on a high pile
of things on the first wagon like a maharaja atop an elephant, and the front
of a potted palm served as a fan. She was holding a stuffed owl. I came
next, carrying the precious grotto and its chess-piece prisoner.
Schwambrania was moving to a new geographical location.
A line of aunts brought up the rear.
The new apartment greeted us with a hollow chill. A taunting echo
mimicked us.
The drivers were busy moving our heavy bookcases. Papa poured some pure
alcohol into a measuring glass, added water and treated the drivers to it. I
could hear the' men talking.
"It goes right through you!"
"It's the best medicine! Castor oil for your brains. Cleans them out in
a flash."
"Get over on the other side. Look at all them books! What do they want
with so many?"
"You think it's easy poking about in somebody's insides? It takes a lot
of reading, maybe a thousand books, and then you can make a mistake and sew
up the wrong thing."
Our aunts tracked along behind the drivers to see that they didn't
pinch anything, for, as our aunts said, nowadays people were very free and
easy with other people's possessions. There was an elegant chandelier with a
fringe of glass beads in one of the rooms. It had been left behind by
Pustodumov. My aunts stood admiring it.
"Well? I see you've put up a chandelier," the commandant said, for he
had just arrived on the scene. "That's some fine light! I'll bet it came all
the way from Petrograd."
My aunts seemed embarrassed. As I opened my mouth to tell him whose it
was, my Aunt Neces stepped in front of me, blocking me like a screen. "Yes,
you're right. It was made in Petrograd," she said quickly.
After he had gone my aunts explained rather sheepishly that what they
had done was right, since Pustodumov would never get it back anyway, and the
country would manage without it.
The rooms were no longer as hollow-sounding, for our furniture muffled
the echoes. We found a cosy corner for the Queen's grotto that we could turn
into a circus, railroad station or prison.
Schwambrania was re-established.
Papa climbed the stepladder and stood there, hammer in hand, to hang up
a portrait of Doctor Pirogov and a portrait of Lev Tolstoy by the
Academician Pasternak. Papa was making a speech. The ladder was his rostrum.
"Today I had occasion once again to see that we are all the miserable
slaves of our possessions. This tremendous pile of junk has us in its power.
It has bound us hand and foot. I would have gladly left half of all this
behind! Children! (Take that nail out of your mouth this minute, Lelya!
Haven't you ever heard about hygiene?) As I said, children, learn to despise
possessions!"
Then Oska and I went off to the dining-room to hang up a hand-painted
plate in bas-relief. Sticking up from the surface of the plate was a castle
and knights on prancing steeds. The nail came loose, sending the plate
crashing to the floor. The knights perished. The castle was in ruins.
Papa came running at the sound of china breaking. He shouted at us. He
called us vandals and barbarians. He said that even bears could be taught to
handle things carefully. He went on to enumerate a long and woeful list of
things which we had annihilated: the black queen, his cane, fountain pen,
etc., etc.
We sighed. Then I reminded Papa that he had just told us to despise
possessions. At this he hit the ceiling. He said that one should first learn
to take care of things, then to earn the money to buy them, and then only
could one begin to despise them.
That evening Mamma wandered about desolately. She had made a list of
all the small things, so as not to misplace them and then waste time looking
for them. She had been searching for the list for over an hour.
The sand went slowly to the bottom in the stirred water of the
fishbowl. Fish darted through the emerald-green water plants like
brightly-plumed hummingbirds, swishing close to the green-glowing glass and
feeling quite at home.
The walls of our new apartment had lost their chilling strangeness. The
rooms were becoming lived in. The cosiness of our former home was
transported to our new one. Gazing up at the chandelier during supper. Papa
said, "The revolution ... (eat your carrots, Oska, they're full of
vitamins!) The revolution is full of cruel justice. Indeed. Whom should this
apartment belong to? A moneybags merchant or a doctor? Actually, I believe
that the proletariat and the intelligentsia can find a common language."
"Goodness! Aren't we all Communists at heart!" my aunts exclaimed.
The following day our piano was rolled away.
A gala event was being planned by the Tratrchok offices. An army choir
was rehearsing a Red Cross Cantata. The choir needed the use of a piano for
a week, and so they requisitioned ours.
Mamma had gone out. In her purse was the license, issued to her by the
District Department of Education. It stated that she was a music teacher and
verified her ownership of the piano. Papa made a small speech to the
abductors on the subject of the intelligentsia and the proletariat, and also
mentioned the need for mutual contact. However, this made no impression on
them. Then Papa said that it wasn't a matter of the piano, it was the
principle of the thing that counted, and that he would not sit idly by, but
would go as high as Lenin if need be. Then Papa sat down to write a letter
to the editors of Izvestia, a newspaper published in the capital.
They carried the piano out like a body at a funeral, with Annushka
bewailing its fate and my aunts dropping copious tears.
When Mamma returned and learned of what had happened she sank down on a
chair and blinked rapidly. Then she spoke very quickly, saying: "Did you
take out the package?"
At this Papa, too, plopped into a chair. My aunts seemed petrified. We
then learned that Mamma had tied a little bundle to the inside of the piano
top. It contained four pieces of expensive toilet soap and a sheaf of
now-worthless, pre-revolutionary paper money. It was Oska's and my turn to
become terror-stricken now, for a week before we had seen Mamma tying up the
little bundle and had decided that she would hide it in a very safe place.
Since we, too, had quite a few things that were to be kept in secret, we had
stuck a sheaf of official Schwambranian papers into the bundle when Mamma
had gone out of the room. Our sheaf contained maps, secret campaign plans,
Brenabor's manifestoes, coats-of-arms, letters of famous men, metaphorical
posters and other secret manuscripts from the Schwambranian chancellery. Now
all this had been carted off to Tratrchok. Schwambrania was in danger. The
piano tuner might discover our cache.
Mamma rose, wiped her eyes and set out for Tratrchok. I said I would
accompany her. She was very touched and did not suspect that we were on our
way to salvage Schwambrania's valuables.
When we got to Tratrchok Mamma told a commander who had a drooping
moustache that she had to remove a package of personal letters from inside
the piano. He winked at her meaningfully, said "Aha! Love letters!" and told
her to go right ahead.
The piano was in a large hall. It seemed to be crouching fearfully in a
far corner. Red Army soldiers sat around on the benches, chewing on
sunflower seeds. Two men were sitting on crates by the piano. They were
trying to play "Chopsticks". They stopped when they saw us. Mamma went over
to the piano and caressed the keys with a delicate, rippling scale. The
piano whinnied like a horse that has recognized its master. The soldiers
stared at us. The commander untied the package, winked at Mamma again and
again said, "Love letters".
" 'Hooray! Hooray!' they all shouted," I hummed as we left the
Tratrchok premises.
As we were crossing the square, someone behind us shouted: "Hey,
Madame! Come on back!"
It was the commander. He was out of breath from running when he reached
us. Mamma trembled as she pressed the package to her breast. At that moment
an earthquake shook Schwambrania.
"Come on back, lady. The boys are awfully mad. They say you spoiled the
piano on purpose, so it won't be of any use to us. They say you took
something out of it and now it's ruined."
"You're talking nonsense! That's probably because none of you know how
to play."
"You're wrong there. It was all right until you took that package out.
So you'll have to come back and tie it inside again."
We trudged back to Tratrchok.
The soldiers greeted us with an angry rumble. They crowded around the
piano. They were shoving and shouting, saying that Mamma had spoiled
national property on purpose, that this was sabotage, and that people got
themselves shot for being saboteurs.
"Take it easy, boys," their commander said, but we could see he was
also upset.
Mamma strode over to the piano. The soldiers stopped talking. She
played a chord, but the piano did not respond with its usual fine sound. The
sound it made was dull and barely audible. It rose and died away like some
distant thunder.
Mamma looked at me. She was aghast. Then she brought her hands down on
keys as hard as she could, but the chord was a whisper again. The soldiers,
however, roared.
"You spoiled it! She did it on purpose!"
"It's the soft pedal!" I cried, guessing what the matter was.
When the commander had pulled the package out he had tripped the soft
stop, lowering the strip of felt onto the strings. Mamma yanked at it and
the piano responded with such a loud chord it was as if cotton wads had been
removed from our ears.
The soldiers beamed. They asked us to tie the package back inside the
piano again, just to make sure. We did, but the piano did not sound any
louder. We were then told we could have our package back. The shamefaced
young soldiers asked Mamma to play something lively.
"I don't play polkas, comrades," Mamma said acidly. "You had better ask
my son."
They did and I clambered up onto a crate. I was surrounded by beaming
faces. As I could not reach the pedals from my high perch, one of the
soldiers volunteered to help. He depressed it carefully and kept his foot on
it all through my performance. I played every single march, polka and ditty
I knew, and all of them as loudly as possible. Some of the men were soon
tapping in time, and then, suddenly, a young soldier dashed to the middle of
the room, spread his arms wide, as if he were going to embrace someone, and
tapped his foot gingerly, as though to test the floor. Then he began to
dance inside the wide circle that formed in an instant. He tossed his head
and stamped as he danced. Then he began to sing a ditty in a clear voice:
It's a pity, it's a shame,
It's an awful darn disgrace!
See the bourgeois and their dames
Crawling out from every place!
The commander cut him short. Then he turned to Mamma and said in a very
polite and respectful manner: "Madame, I mean, as we now say. Citizen, would
you please play us something yourself? Something more inspiring. The boys
and I would all appreciate it very much. Say, some overture from an opera."
Mamma sat down on the crate. She wiped the keys with her handkerchief.
My pedal specialist offered his help and foot again, but Mamma said she'd
manage herself.
Mamma played the Overture from "Prince Igor" for them. She was very
serious and played exceptionally well.
The soldiers stood around the piano in silence. They followed her
fingers with rapt attention, leaning over each other's shoulders. Finally,
Mamma removed her hands slowly and gently from the keyboard. The last chord
drifted up in their wake like a wisp of cobweb and then died away.
The men all moved back as she raised her hands, but were silent for
several seconds after. It seemed they were listening to the last, fading
notes. Then only did they begin clapping wildly. Their arms were extended as
they clapped, and they held their hands close to Mamma's face, for they
wanted her to see that they were clapping, not merely to hear them.
"A great talent. No doubt about it," the commander said and sighed.
We had once again reached the middle of the square, but the applause
coming from the porch of Tratrchok continued. Mamma listened to it modestly.
"You can't imagine the ennobling effect music has on people!" she said
later to my aunts.
"You can't ennoble such people. If they'd been ennobled, they'd have
returned the piano," Aunt Sary said.
A month later, after the piano had long since been returned, the
following lines appeared in the "Replies to Our Readers" column of Izvestia:
To a Doctor from Pokrovsk
You piano has been illegally requisitioned as it is a means of
livelihood.
Papa was jubilant. He carried the clipping around in his wallet and
showed it to all his friends.
When Stepan Atlantis found out about it, he said, "Was that your piano
they wrote about in the paper? Hm! You sure spread it all over the country!
That's what private ownership does to you!"
The secret package was now tucked away into a drawer of Mamma's desk,
and the desk was now a part of the furnishings belonging to one of our
neighbours, for we now shared our apartment with others, having had three of
our rooms borrowed in succession. Chubarkov, who was recuperating, was given
one room, something that pleased us both immensely.
"Now we can be like Robinson Crusoe and Friday," he said, unbuckling
his belt and holster and laying them on the table. "Will you lend me the
book?"
"Sure!" I examined the gun. "Is it loaded?"
"Sure. Don't touch it."
My aunts peeped in, examined the Commissar's broad shoulders and
uptilted nose critically and departed with an indignant sniff. "No manners
at all! He's a regular martinet!"
The Commissar winked in their direction and said, "They don't look too
happy."
"They never are," I said.
"But we are," Oska said.
"That's that then. If boys like you are, I'll make out." Chubarkov
smiled fondly. Then he lifted Oska up and sat him on his knee. The blue
cloth of his narrow breeches was stretched tight. "Anybody here play
checkers?" His question was unexpected.
"That's no fun. Chess is much better. Do you play chess?"
"No. Never had a chance to learn."
"Lelya'11 teach you quick. He knows all the movings. The white ones,
and the black ones, and the back and front ones, too. All I know is how the
horse moves." Oska jumped down and began hopping in the squares of the
linoleum. He stopped suddenly, stood on one foot and said, "We put a queen
in jail. We put her away in a kennel long ago, when there wasn't any war,
but there was a tsar. That's how long ago!"
I glared at him, and he said no more.
In order to cut short this unnecessary and risky conversation, I
suggested that the Commissar and I have a game of checkers. He took a
printed checkerboard from his knapsack and dumped the checkers out of a
little pouch. Then he set them up, and we bent over the cardboard field,
forehead to forehead.
"Your move," he said.
In no time I saw I was up against a serious opponent. The Commissar
would send his pieces into the most unexpected squares with a light flick of
his middle finger. He set up traps and made two-for-one shots, scooping my
checkers up lightly and saying as he did, "Haven't had time to learn chess
yet, but I know a bit about checkers. What are you doing? Look here! You'd
better jump or I'll huff, that's for sure. Ah, that's better. Now here's
where we plaster back your ears. And reach the king row. My king. And that's
that."
Five minutes later I found myself with one blocked piece on the board.
It was a disgraceful defeat.
I immediately set up the pieces again and suggested we have another
game. Ten minutes later my last two pieces were blocked in a corner. The
Commissar had rolled himself a cigarette and was cheerfully blowing thick
clouds of smoke at that unhappy corner.
Oska was crushed by my defeat. He decided to try his own hand against
the invincible Commissar.
"Do you know how to play cat-and-mouse?"
"Cat-and-mouse?" The Commissar sounded genuinely puzzled.
"I'll show you," Oska said and got up on the Commissar's lap again.
"You put your hand out like this, and I'll try to slap it. But you have to
yank it away, so's I don't. If I miss, it's your turn to slap me. We all
play it in school."
"Let's give it a try." Chubarkov laid his huge hand, the hand of a
stevedore, on the card table.
Oska took aim. He raised his left hand but quickly brought down his
right. Slap! The Commissar did not have a chance to yank his hand away.
"What'd you know! You tricked me that time! Let's do it again. I think
I've got the hang of it. Go on, try again!"
Oska repeated the manoeuvre, but his palm came down hard on the table,
since Chubarkov had yanked his hand away at the very last moment. "Aha!" he
said and seemed very pleased with himself. "Now you put down your paw."
A short while later someone knocked and Papa entered. We quickly
removed our puffed hands from the table and hid them behind our backs, for
they were as red as a goose's feet and itched badly from the Commissar's
slaps. However, Papa must have heard something of what was going on from the
hall.
"What's wrong with your hands, boys?"
"Oh, Papa! Come on in! We're playing cat-and-mouse. The Commissar's
real good at it, too. Even better than Vitya Ponomarenko."
"He's a real sharp fellow, your Oska is," the Commissar said and he
sounded a bit embarrassed. "You have to keep your eye on him all the time.
But he cheats. He hits you in mid-air, and that's against the rules."
"No, I don't! I don't cheat! You're real sharp yourself!"
"This is abominable! Look at your hands! It's unhygienic. Pardon me for
saying so. Comrade Commissar, but my children are used to more intelligent
games. This is no way for them to be spending their time."
"They're getting hardened," Chubarkov said, trying to stick up for us.
"It's good training! You have to have a good eye and be quick."
"Nonsense! What a thing to be proud of! You don't need any brains for
this kind of a game."
The Commissar looked at him slyly. "I wouldn't say so. Doctor. It seems
easy when you're on the sidelines, but it takes some brains. Why don't you
try?"
"If you don't mind, I'd rather not."
"That's a pity."
"Come on, Papa!"
"He's scared! Papa's scared!" Oska shouted.
Papa shrugged. "I don't see what there is to be afraid of. And I don't
see that you need any brains for it, either. But if you insist. Well...."
"That's that," the Commissar said and put his huge paw on the table.
"Your turn, Doctor."
Papa raised his white, antiseptic, surgeon's hand high into the air. He
shrugged disdainfully again and smacked the empty table top in the place
where the Commissar's hand had just been lying, but had been suddenly
whisked away.
We were ecstatic.
"Well, Doc? You still say there's nothing to it?"
"One minute. That didn't count. One minute, please. I think I'm
beginning to see what it's all about. Very well. You put your hand here, and
I hit from here. Excellent. All right, let's try it again."
The Commissar, keeping a wary eye on Papa, placed his hand on the
table. He was ready to jerk it away in a flash. Papa made several false
moves, and each time Chubarkov's hand jerked slightly. Then Papa pinned down
the Commissar's hand with a sudden loud slap.
"Oho! You sure have a surgical sledge-hammer," Chubarkov said and
rubbed his swelling hand. "You'll make a good player. But you won't catch me
napping again, that's for sure."
"Come on, put your hand down. I have another turn. Wait a minute!" Papa
took off his jacket and pulled up a chair. "We'll see who's the smart fellow
here. Aha!"
When our aunts peeped into the room several minutes later they were
flabbergasted. The Commissar and Papa were sitting at the table, one with
his shirt out over his breeches and no belt on and the other in his
shirtsleeves. They were taking turns slapping each other's hands soundly,
missing and slapping the table top.
"Got you!" said the Commissar.
"Aha!" Papa boomed.
Oska and I were hopping around excitedly, egging them on, though they
were quite carried away with the game as it were. The little table creaked
and swayed under their blows.
The sacred rules of propriety hammered into us by our aunts were
creaking and rocking as well.
An elegant army man who wore laced boots moved into the second room. He
carried in his suitcase, examined the room, cleaned his nails, beat a tattoo
on the table with his finger-tips and said, "So".
"You can always tell a gentleman," my aunts, who had been watching him
stealthily, decided and entered to greet the newcomer.
The gentleman jumped up, kissed their hands in turn and gave each of
the three one of his gilt-edged visiting cards. The name on the card was
Edmond Flegontovich La Bazri de Bazan. The fine type in the lower left-hand
corner read: "Marxist".
Despite his fine-sounding name, Edmond Flegontovich La Bazri de Bazan
turned out to be completely non-Schwambranian in character. He actually did
exist, though, and was well known in Pokrovsk. La Bazri de Bazan first
appeared in town shortly after the revolution and became the editor of the
Volga Stormy Petrel, a small newspaper published in Pokrovsk. He became
famous after he printed a banner headline on Christmas, greeting all the
readers on behalf of "the 1918th anniversary of the birth of the Socialist,
J. Christ". The following day the paper had a new editor. At the time in
question, La Bazri de Bazan was on the Tratrchok staff. He held the rank of
aide-de-camp for special missions, but since he was chiefly responsible for
arranging lectures, shows and debates, he soon found his rank unofficially
referred to as "aide-de-camp for special intermissions". The soldiers
nicknamed him Bags-and-Sacks.
The Committee to Combat Desertion set up its headquarters in the third
room, and penitent deserters trooped in and out all day long. They trekked
in guiltily to the committee, but since they usually took the wrong turn in
the apartment, they would as often as not lay their guilty heads on our
tables and windowsills. They wandered through the rooms and held meetings in
the kitchen. In the mornings they would tramp into the parlour without
knocking and wake Oska and me and our aunts, who slept on the other side of
the wardrobes that divided the room. Our aunts would appeal to their
consciences, but the deserters would assure them that they were no strangers
"Indeed! I'll bet your whole class was here. Kostya, Labanda, Zoya and
Stepan, of course. They were all here. They lit the stove and boiled the
kettle. But they didn't feel like having any tea. What's the matter? Why
aren't you drinking yours? See, I said it wouldn't be any good without
sugar. Well, if you're not going to have it, we might as well try walking
again. Give me a hand. I think I feel stronger after your brew. Come on,
give us a hand here!"
The Commissar leaned on me and tried learning to walk again.
Our wandering school moved from one place to another, and Schwambrania
wandered along with it. The turbulent events in the life of Pokrovsk and our
school naturally affected the internal affairs and geographical location of
the Big Tooth Continent. There were constant disorders in Schwambrania,
because it was forever changing the order of things in the country.
Lice had come out from hiding in Pokrovsk and had become official.
Typhus had put red crosses on everything. Oska insisted we have a death toll
in Schwambrania, too, and I had to agree. The statistics of real-life
situations called for a death toll in Schwambrania. That was why a cemetery
appeared there. We then went over the list of Schwambranian kings, heroes,
champions, villains and seafarers, and spent a long time deciding whom we
would bury. I tried to limit the death toll to such insignificant
Schwambranians as the former Royal Water-Carrier, or the Master of Foreign
Affairs. But my bloodthirsty brother would have nothing of the kind. He
demanded great losses, as was only true in real life.
"What kind of a game is it if nobody dies? They just go on living and
living! Let somebody die who we'll feel sorry for."
After long deliberations Jack, the Sailor's Companion died in
Schwambrania. The cruel Count Chatelains Urodenal had filled his kidneys
with stones. As he lay dying. Jack, the Sailor's Companion, exclaimed,
leafing through the last page of the conversation manual: "Je vais a.... Ich
gehe nach.... Ferma la machinal Finished with engine!"
He then departed, and though he wanted to wish everyone well, there
were no such words in the manual. A brass band played at his funeral. There
were life buoys instead of wreaths, and a gold anchor and visiting card
adorned his grave.
Despite the terrible loss, the constant changes in climate and
politics, the Big Tooth Continent extended across our every thought and
deed.
The Black Queen, Keeper of the Secret, pined away in cobweby loneliness
behind the brass gate of the seashell grotto. Schwambrania lived on.
One day Oska came hurrying home from school. He was terribly excited,
for a soldier had come up to him on the street in broad daylight and asked
for directions to Schwambrania. Oska had become so confused he had run away.
We set right out to find the mysterious stranger, but there was no trace of
him. Oska said that maybe he was a real live lost Schwambranian. Naturally,
I made fun of him, reminding him that we had invented Schwambrania and all,
its inhabitants. Still and all, I noticed that Oska had begun to sort of
believe in its actual existence.
Schwambrania soon became known to Oska's classmates. From the very
start he had made a name for himself in school. One of the boys had asked
the teacher where sugar came from.
"I know," Oska had replied. "Sugar comes from school."
That was the day Kocherygin, the temporary principal, was keeping the
children in check, since the botany teacher was absent. "That's where it
comes from," he said. Then Oska said that sugar came from kerosene which
spurted up from the ground.
Kocherygin seemed stumped. The next day he told the children that he
had looked into the matter and learned that saccharine came from the ground,
but from coal, not kerosene. However, he regarded Oska with new respect.
Oska immediately took advantage of this and drew the outline of
Schwambrania on the large wall map in the classroom. Since the geography and
botany teacher was still absent, Kocherygin took over once again. His finger
suddenly got lost in the mountains of the Big Tooth Continent.
"What country's this?" he said, pointing to the strange land. "Hm?
Anybody knows?"
Nobody did.
"It's Schwambrania," Oska teased.
"What's that?"
"Schwambrania!" Oska became serious.
"Never heard of it."
"I did. A soldier I know even left for there yesterday."
"How come it's not in the book?" his classmates demanded.
"It's not on the map yet, because it's a very new country."
"Go on, tell us about it," Kocherygin said.
And so Oska went over to the big map and spent the rest of the lesson
talking about Schwambrania. He spoke in detail of the flora and fauna of the
Big Tooth Continent, and his classmates listened with bated breath to his
story of the wild 1 rum-toddies who inhabited the canyons of the Northern
Candelabras. He told them of the wars against Piliguinia, of the overthrow
of Brenabor, of the adventures of the deceased Jack, the Sailor's Companion,
of the evil deeds of Chatelains Urodenal. Kocherygin was quite pleased with
the Schwambranian geography lesson.
Oska returned home in the best of spirits. He was beaming. "We're
studying about Schwambrania in school now," he said proudly.
I nearly collapsed.
However, the very next day Kocherygin brought a very embarrassed Oska
home. He was holding Oska's hand, trying to talk him out of his
Schwambranian fantasy. A group of his classmates followed, shouting
"Schwamp! Bramp!" The new principal told our parents of Oska's strange idea
of geography and asked them to somehow influence the stubborn Schwambranian.
Oska sniffled and spoke of the mysterious soldier who had asked for
directions to Schwambrania.
A few days later Oska and I were out for a walk. Two poorly-dressed
young peasants came up to us on the square. They were carrying knapsacks. We
were overcome by a terrible premonition.
"Listen, boys, can you tell us how to get to Red Army Headquarters?
We're looking for Captain Schambardin."
So that was who the mysterious soldier had been looking for!
Typhus rolled along the streets in step with the even tread of the
stretcher-bearers and pallbearers. Typhus raged in the delirious cries of
the stricken and was a murmur in the funeral corteges. The Tratrchok camels
pulled the hearses.
Our school was moving again.
Schwambrania dashed about in search of a stable policy, changing
rulers, climates and latitudes. Our house alone stood steadfastly at its
moorings at the same old latitude and longitude. It had rusted and sunk into
the riverbed and was no longer a boat but heavy, stranded barge that had
turned into an island. Storms had not yet invaded it, since Mamma was afraid
of draughts and kept the windows closed.
Still, some changes had taken place. Papa now wore an army field jacket
instead of a morning coat. The red cross on his breast pocket signified that
he was an army doctor. He was attached to the casualty-clearing station.
Then, the people who we had once been told were undesirable acquaintances
and had only come up the back stairs were now all coming to the front door.
Even the water-carrier, who, it would seem, would save time and effort by
coming straight into the kitchen, now rang the front doorbell insistently.
He trudged through the apartment, leaving puddles and wet tracks, and his
pails were full of dignity.
Oska and I welcomed this degradation of the front hall. A draught of
disrespect had now been established between it and the kitchen. We could now
strike out the first point on our list of the world's injustices (concerning
"undesirable acquaintances").
The plumber and the carpenter were the first to ring the front doorbell
after the revolution. Annushka opened the door and asked them to wait while
she went to tell Papa that "two men wanted to see Comrade Doctor".
"Who are they?" Mamma wanted to know.
"Well, sort of men," Annushka said. (She divided all of Papa's patients
into gentlemen, men and peasants.)
Papa went out into the front hall. "There's something we'd like to
discuss," one of them said.
"What seems to be bothering you?" Papa asked, for he thought he was a
patient.
"They've no sense of duty," the plumber said. "The town council closed
down the hospital under Kerensky, and that means the working people won't
get any care when they need it. We've been appointed commissars."
Papa could never forgive Kerensky, because during his short reign in
Russia the rich, tight-fisted town fathers had closed down the municipal
hospital, saying, as they usually did, "No need for it."
And now two Bolshevik commissars had come to see him and tell him that
the Soviets had decreed that the hospital was to be opened immediately and
that Papa was to be in charge of it.
Papa asked the commissars to have tea with him. After they had gone, he
paced up and down humming happily, "Marusya took some poison, to the
hospital she'll go."
"This is a real government! It's showing good cultural sense. How can
you even compare your Constituent Assembly to it? It was just like our
district meeting. 'No need for it' on a nation-wide scale."
"Your Constituent Assembly" was said especially to spite my aunts. At
the time, starving aunts seemed to have descended upon us from all over
Russia. One had come from Vitebsk the other had escaped from Samara. The
Samara and Vitebsk aunts were sisters. Both wore pince-nez on black silk
cords and looked very much alike. Papa had nicknamed them the Constituent
Assembly. Oska and I nicknamed them Aunt Neces and Aunt Sary.
They were both terribly educated and spent hours discussing literature
and arguing over politics, and if some of their information jarred with the
encyclopaedia, they would say it was a printing error.
Then a third aunt arrived from Petrograd. She said she was as good as a
Bolshevik.
"Will you be better'n a Bolshevik soon?" Oska asked.
However, months passed, but our aunt still did not become a Bolshevik.
She was now saying that to all intents and purposes she was nearly a
Communist.
The Petrograd aunt found a job at Tratrchok, while Aunt Neces and Aunt
Sary both went to work for the District Food Committee. In their free time
they told us "true life stories", had heated discussions and meddled in our
upbringing. Our aunts insisted that we be tutored at home, for they were
firmly convinced that the Soviet school system was detrimental to upbringing
of a child from an intellectual family and to his sensitive personality (I
believe that is the way they put it).
They took it upon themselves to tutor us, as they considered themselves
authorities in the field of child psychology. Their constant admonitions
exhausted us. They wanted to take part in everything we did, to play all our
games. They were overjoyed when they discovered the existence of
Schwambrania and said it was so-oo exciting and simply divine. They begged
to be let in on the secrets of our world of make-believe and promised to be
of help. Schwambrania was in danger of being overrun by aunts.
That was when the Schwambranian commanders played a trick on them. They
led the aunts off into the heart of Schwambrania and there, during an
initiation ceremony, painted them with water colours, made them crawl under
beds, locked them in a cave with wild beasts, which meant locking them in a
storeroom with wild rats, and made them sing the Schwambranian anthem ten
times in a row.
"'Hoo-ray, hoo-ray!' they all shouted, the Schwambranians," our tired,
painted aunts sang in the darkness. " 'Hoo-ray!' Eeek! Something's crawling
up my skirt! 'Hoo-ray, hoo-ray!' They were clouted! Do-re-mi-nians!"
However, when we then explained the rules and holds of wrestling and
told them to wrestle without breaks or a time limit to a final victory, our
poor aunts became indignant. They said Schwambrania was a crude game and a
stupid country, unworthy of well brought up boys. This was why the famous
Schwambranian poet (obviously inspired by Lermontov) wrote the following
stanza in his Aunt Neces' autograph book.
Three lively aunts all live in our apartment,
Thank God there are no more in this department!
"Your father's an intellectual, but he's all right," Stepan Atlantis
said. "You can see he's on our side. And you're an all-out sympathizer. One
of your aunts has an idea of what's going on, but those other two are
awfully backward." He was leaving our house after a two-hour long discussion
on the individual and society.
The Constituent Assembly aunts used such long words that I caught my
Petrograd aunt sneaking off to the dictionary every now and then to look up
unfamiliar "isms" and "substances". According to my first two aunts, the
free intelligent self was the core, and everything else revolved around it.
And whatever the self believed, was so. Whatever it wished things to be was
the way they were, and to hell with everything else! Stepan, however, argued
that, like the saying went, you didn't call off a wedding if one guest was
missing. He said that the group, with everyone pulling together, was the
main thing. As for the self, if it got too stuck-up you could always catch
it by the collar and give it a good shake. My aunts replied that Stepan and
I were crude realists, believing only in that which everyone could see and
feel. Realists were also called materialists. They believed that the world
undoubtedly existed and governed all ideas and individuals. But my aunts did
not agree with this. They got terribly excited and even shouted. They said
the world had no right to order free ideas and the individual around,
because, they said, perhaps the world would never have existed without
ideas. Yes, undoubtedly, only the reasoning individual existed. Perhaps
everything else existed only as it appeared to it, only as in a dream.
"Are we individual?" Oska wanted to know.
"As far as you yourselves are concerned, undoubtedly," Aunt Sary said.
We thought this was a great idea and decided it would all come in very
handy in Schwambrania.
Indeed, what if we were really Schwambranians and Pokrovsk, our school,
home and the revolution were all a part of some dream? We were stunned by
the very thought of it.
Our aunts sat down on the couch and Aunt Neces began reading aloud from
a Russian history book: "The Vikings, Rurik, Truvor and Sinehus came to rule
Ancient Rus."
Oska and I decided to have a look at Schwambranian history, meanwhile,
and began singing, throwing chairs around and making as much of a racket as
possible. Our aunts asked us to be a little more considerate. They said it
was a lack of respect for the individual.
"Our individual is dreaming that you're not here at all," Oska said.
"Maybe we just imagined you?" I added.
Our aunts spoke about our behaviour to Mamma. She came in to have a
look but we were doubtful of her existence as well. Mamma burst into tears
and spoke about our behaviour to Papa.
"What sort of nursery solipsism is this?" Papa demanded. "I'm going to
suddenly imagine that the two of you have been sent to stand in a corner at
this advanced age."
We were given no dinner. Papa said that, after all, the soup was only a
dream, and Oska and I were such free-thinking individuals, it wouldn't take
any effort on our part to imagine that we were full, while he said that he
recalled dreaming that we had had our dinner and had even said "thank you".
In a word, we had to accept the fact that our soup was not an idea but
reality, and that there were millions of other individuals except ourselves,
and that we could not exist without them.
The self had been tossed out of the centre of the universe as far as we
were concerned. We were caught up in the great whirl of events in school and
on the street. However, the centrifugal forces could do nothing about the
state of affairs at home. Our home staunchly remained the reliable core of
our existence. We felt that everything else was whirling around it like some
great and dangerous merry-go-round. Such was the case until the day on which
a stocky man appeared in the front hall during Papa's office hours. He had
on a pair of black boots protected by galoshes and a holster, and carried a
briefcase. Annushka said it was one of the commissars.
"Sorry to inconvenience you, but I'm going in next. I'm here on
business," he said to the patients in the waiting room. "We're all here on
business!" "Who does he think he is?"
"He thinks he's a gentleman," a fat farm woman said. A sack on her lap
moved, and a live duck-offering quacked inside it.
Water splashed in the washstand in the office. Then the door opened and
a man came out, buttoning his shirt collar. The Commissar went right in.
"Good day. I'm sorry to bother you, coming in out of turn, but it's
revolutionary duty, Comrade Doctor. You see, I'm here as the Commandant of
Pokrovsk."
"Sit down, Comrade Usyshko," Papa said, recognizing the shoemaker who
had formerly made all our shoes and had often borrowed books from Papa's
library. "What's the good news these days?"
"You'll have to move to another apartment, Comrade Doctor. Tratrchok is
expanding. They don't have enough space any more. I'm sorry to bother you,
but you'll have to move in two days."
"Well. They've finally got to me," Papa said to himself. Aloud he said,
adjusting his breast-pocket flap with the red cross on it. "I'm going to
protest. Comrade Usyshko. I won't let anyone throw me out so high-handedly
in two days' time, as if I were some bourgeois. I believe that the working
intelligentsia has the right to expect a more considerate approach on the
part of the government with whom it is working in complete contact."
"All right. I'll give you an extra day, but no more. I won't argue
about that contact part. And I've personally found you a fine place on
Kobzar Street. It's in Pustodumov's former house. A fine apartment. And
we'll take care of the moving."
"You understand that I'll have to see it first."
"As you like. We don't charge any for looking. So I'll send the wagons
over on the sixth. I'll be going now." As he turned, his eyes fell on Papa's
shoes. "You still wearing them?"
"Yes!" Papa said angrily.
"How's the left one? Not too tight? Remember, I said it'd only be tight
at first and that it'd stretch?"
"To be frank. Comrade Usyshko, I think you were better at that job,
ah...."
"That depends which way you look at it. Comrade Doctor." The Commandant
chuckled. "You used to order your shoes, but now some things, if you'll
pardon my saying so, aren't done to your measurements any more. Maybe some
things don't fit very well."
The news of the coming move stunned Oska and me. We saw that centre of
the world had shifted, and history was not made according to the wishes of
our home.
Copernicus' contemporaries had most probably found themselves in the
same predicament. They had always believed that Man was the centre of the
Universe and that the Earth was the centre of Creation. Then they were told
that the Earth was only a speck among thousands of similar planets, and that
it travelled around the Sun, governed by forces that were not of its
creation.
A most unusual caravan was moving along Breshka Street. Ten camels of
the Tratrchok were carrying our possessions.
The drapes and curtains were rolled up like campaign banners. The
dismantled beds, adorned by shiny brass knobs, clattered and jangled like a
collection of maces belonging to a Cossack chief. The armoured coats of the
samovars gleamed. The large pier glass spread out like a lake, with Breshka
Street splashing in it upside-down. The innerspring jelly of the mattresses
jiggled. A set of hobbled bentwood chairs jostled and trotted atop another
wagon like a little herd of colts.
The piano in its white cloth cover rode along in an upright position.
Seen from the side, it resembled a surgeon in a white smock, but from the
front it was a steed wearing a horse-cloth. The merry driver had one hand on
the reins and the other stuck through the slit in the cloth. He was poking
at the keys, trying to pick out a simple tune as the wagon rolled along.
Our belongings looked indecent. The washstand and sideboard, which had
always been upright, lay on their backs with the doors gazing at the sky.
Passers-by stared at us. Our personal, private life was bared to all eyes.
We felt uneasy and wished we could renounce it all. Papa walked along the
sidewalk, as if none of this had anything to do with him, but Mamma walked
bravely on at the head of the procession, right behind the first wagon, as
wan and unhappy as a widow following the pallbearers. She was holding a list
of our belongings, quite like a list of the dead for a church service.
Oska walked ahead of us, carrying the cat. Annushka sat on a high pile
of things on the first wagon like a maharaja atop an elephant, and the front
of a potted palm served as a fan. She was holding a stuffed owl. I came
next, carrying the precious grotto and its chess-piece prisoner.
Schwambrania was moving to a new geographical location.
A line of aunts brought up the rear.
The new apartment greeted us with a hollow chill. A taunting echo
mimicked us.
The drivers were busy moving our heavy bookcases. Papa poured some pure
alcohol into a measuring glass, added water and treated the drivers to it. I
could hear the' men talking.
"It goes right through you!"
"It's the best medicine! Castor oil for your brains. Cleans them out in
a flash."
"Get over on the other side. Look at all them books! What do they want
with so many?"
"You think it's easy poking about in somebody's insides? It takes a lot
of reading, maybe a thousand books, and then you can make a mistake and sew
up the wrong thing."
Our aunts tracked along behind the drivers to see that they didn't
pinch anything, for, as our aunts said, nowadays people were very free and
easy with other people's possessions. There was an elegant chandelier with a
fringe of glass beads in one of the rooms. It had been left behind by
Pustodumov. My aunts stood admiring it.
"Well? I see you've put up a chandelier," the commandant said, for he
had just arrived on the scene. "That's some fine light! I'll bet it came all
the way from Petrograd."
My aunts seemed embarrassed. As I opened my mouth to tell him whose it
was, my Aunt Neces stepped in front of me, blocking me like a screen. "Yes,
you're right. It was made in Petrograd," she said quickly.
After he had gone my aunts explained rather sheepishly that what they
had done was right, since Pustodumov would never get it back anyway, and the
country would manage without it.
The rooms were no longer as hollow-sounding, for our furniture muffled
the echoes. We found a cosy corner for the Queen's grotto that we could turn
into a circus, railroad station or prison.
Schwambrania was re-established.
Papa climbed the stepladder and stood there, hammer in hand, to hang up
a portrait of Doctor Pirogov and a portrait of Lev Tolstoy by the
Academician Pasternak. Papa was making a speech. The ladder was his rostrum.
"Today I had occasion once again to see that we are all the miserable
slaves of our possessions. This tremendous pile of junk has us in its power.
It has bound us hand and foot. I would have gladly left half of all this
behind! Children! (Take that nail out of your mouth this minute, Lelya!
Haven't you ever heard about hygiene?) As I said, children, learn to despise
possessions!"
Then Oska and I went off to the dining-room to hang up a hand-painted
plate in bas-relief. Sticking up from the surface of the plate was a castle
and knights on prancing steeds. The nail came loose, sending the plate
crashing to the floor. The knights perished. The castle was in ruins.
Papa came running at the sound of china breaking. He shouted at us. He
called us vandals and barbarians. He said that even bears could be taught to
handle things carefully. He went on to enumerate a long and woeful list of
things which we had annihilated: the black queen, his cane, fountain pen,
etc., etc.
We sighed. Then I reminded Papa that he had just told us to despise
possessions. At this he hit the ceiling. He said that one should first learn
to take care of things, then to earn the money to buy them, and then only
could one begin to despise them.
That evening Mamma wandered about desolately. She had made a list of
all the small things, so as not to misplace them and then waste time looking
for them. She had been searching for the list for over an hour.
The sand went slowly to the bottom in the stirred water of the
fishbowl. Fish darted through the emerald-green water plants like
brightly-plumed hummingbirds, swishing close to the green-glowing glass and
feeling quite at home.
The walls of our new apartment had lost their chilling strangeness. The
rooms were becoming lived in. The cosiness of our former home was
transported to our new one. Gazing up at the chandelier during supper. Papa
said, "The revolution ... (eat your carrots, Oska, they're full of
vitamins!) The revolution is full of cruel justice. Indeed. Whom should this
apartment belong to? A moneybags merchant or a doctor? Actually, I believe
that the proletariat and the intelligentsia can find a common language."
"Goodness! Aren't we all Communists at heart!" my aunts exclaimed.
The following day our piano was rolled away.
A gala event was being planned by the Tratrchok offices. An army choir
was rehearsing a Red Cross Cantata. The choir needed the use of a piano for
a week, and so they requisitioned ours.
Mamma had gone out. In her purse was the license, issued to her by the
District Department of Education. It stated that she was a music teacher and
verified her ownership of the piano. Papa made a small speech to the
abductors on the subject of the intelligentsia and the proletariat, and also
mentioned the need for mutual contact. However, this made no impression on
them. Then Papa said that it wasn't a matter of the piano, it was the
principle of the thing that counted, and that he would not sit idly by, but
would go as high as Lenin if need be. Then Papa sat down to write a letter
to the editors of Izvestia, a newspaper published in the capital.
They carried the piano out like a body at a funeral, with Annushka
bewailing its fate and my aunts dropping copious tears.
When Mamma returned and learned of what had happened she sank down on a
chair and blinked rapidly. Then she spoke very quickly, saying: "Did you
take out the package?"
At this Papa, too, plopped into a chair. My aunts seemed petrified. We
then learned that Mamma had tied a little bundle to the inside of the piano
top. It contained four pieces of expensive toilet soap and a sheaf of
now-worthless, pre-revolutionary paper money. It was Oska's and my turn to
become terror-stricken now, for a week before we had seen Mamma tying up the
little bundle and had decided that she would hide it in a very safe place.
Since we, too, had quite a few things that were to be kept in secret, we had
stuck a sheaf of official Schwambranian papers into the bundle when Mamma
had gone out of the room. Our sheaf contained maps, secret campaign plans,
Brenabor's manifestoes, coats-of-arms, letters of famous men, metaphorical
posters and other secret manuscripts from the Schwambranian chancellery. Now
all this had been carted off to Tratrchok. Schwambrania was in danger. The
piano tuner might discover our cache.
Mamma rose, wiped her eyes and set out for Tratrchok. I said I would
accompany her. She was very touched and did not suspect that we were on our
way to salvage Schwambrania's valuables.
When we got to Tratrchok Mamma told a commander who had a drooping
moustache that she had to remove a package of personal letters from inside
the piano. He winked at her meaningfully, said "Aha! Love letters!" and told
her to go right ahead.
The piano was in a large hall. It seemed to be crouching fearfully in a
far corner. Red Army soldiers sat around on the benches, chewing on
sunflower seeds. Two men were sitting on crates by the piano. They were
trying to play "Chopsticks". They stopped when they saw us. Mamma went over
to the piano and caressed the keys with a delicate, rippling scale. The
piano whinnied like a horse that has recognized its master. The soldiers
stared at us. The commander untied the package, winked at Mamma again and
again said, "Love letters".
" 'Hooray! Hooray!' they all shouted," I hummed as we left the
Tratrchok premises.
As we were crossing the square, someone behind us shouted: "Hey,
Madame! Come on back!"
It was the commander. He was out of breath from running when he reached
us. Mamma trembled as she pressed the package to her breast. At that moment
an earthquake shook Schwambrania.
"Come on back, lady. The boys are awfully mad. They say you spoiled the
piano on purpose, so it won't be of any use to us. They say you took
something out of it and now it's ruined."
"You're talking nonsense! That's probably because none of you know how
to play."
"You're wrong there. It was all right until you took that package out.
So you'll have to come back and tie it inside again."
We trudged back to Tratrchok.
The soldiers greeted us with an angry rumble. They crowded around the
piano. They were shoving and shouting, saying that Mamma had spoiled
national property on purpose, that this was sabotage, and that people got
themselves shot for being saboteurs.
"Take it easy, boys," their commander said, but we could see he was
also upset.
Mamma strode over to the piano. The soldiers stopped talking. She
played a chord, but the piano did not respond with its usual fine sound. The
sound it made was dull and barely audible. It rose and died away like some
distant thunder.
Mamma looked at me. She was aghast. Then she brought her hands down on
keys as hard as she could, but the chord was a whisper again. The soldiers,
however, roared.
"You spoiled it! She did it on purpose!"
"It's the soft pedal!" I cried, guessing what the matter was.
When the commander had pulled the package out he had tripped the soft
stop, lowering the strip of felt onto the strings. Mamma yanked at it and
the piano responded with such a loud chord it was as if cotton wads had been
removed from our ears.
The soldiers beamed. They asked us to tie the package back inside the
piano again, just to make sure. We did, but the piano did not sound any
louder. We were then told we could have our package back. The shamefaced
young soldiers asked Mamma to play something lively.
"I don't play polkas, comrades," Mamma said acidly. "You had better ask
my son."
They did and I clambered up onto a crate. I was surrounded by beaming
faces. As I could not reach the pedals from my high perch, one of the
soldiers volunteered to help. He depressed it carefully and kept his foot on
it all through my performance. I played every single march, polka and ditty
I knew, and all of them as loudly as possible. Some of the men were soon
tapping in time, and then, suddenly, a young soldier dashed to the middle of
the room, spread his arms wide, as if he were going to embrace someone, and
tapped his foot gingerly, as though to test the floor. Then he began to
dance inside the wide circle that formed in an instant. He tossed his head
and stamped as he danced. Then he began to sing a ditty in a clear voice:
It's a pity, it's a shame,
It's an awful darn disgrace!
See the bourgeois and their dames
Crawling out from every place!
The commander cut him short. Then he turned to Mamma and said in a very
polite and respectful manner: "Madame, I mean, as we now say. Citizen, would
you please play us something yourself? Something more inspiring. The boys
and I would all appreciate it very much. Say, some overture from an opera."
Mamma sat down on the crate. She wiped the keys with her handkerchief.
My pedal specialist offered his help and foot again, but Mamma said she'd
manage herself.
Mamma played the Overture from "Prince Igor" for them. She was very
serious and played exceptionally well.
The soldiers stood around the piano in silence. They followed her
fingers with rapt attention, leaning over each other's shoulders. Finally,
Mamma removed her hands slowly and gently from the keyboard. The last chord
drifted up in their wake like a wisp of cobweb and then died away.
The men all moved back as she raised her hands, but were silent for
several seconds after. It seemed they were listening to the last, fading
notes. Then only did they begin clapping wildly. Their arms were extended as
they clapped, and they held their hands close to Mamma's face, for they
wanted her to see that they were clapping, not merely to hear them.
"A great talent. No doubt about it," the commander said and sighed.
We had once again reached the middle of the square, but the applause
coming from the porch of Tratrchok continued. Mamma listened to it modestly.
"You can't imagine the ennobling effect music has on people!" she said
later to my aunts.
"You can't ennoble such people. If they'd been ennobled, they'd have
returned the piano," Aunt Sary said.
A month later, after the piano had long since been returned, the
following lines appeared in the "Replies to Our Readers" column of Izvestia:
To a Doctor from Pokrovsk
You piano has been illegally requisitioned as it is a means of
livelihood.
Papa was jubilant. He carried the clipping around in his wallet and
showed it to all his friends.
When Stepan Atlantis found out about it, he said, "Was that your piano
they wrote about in the paper? Hm! You sure spread it all over the country!
That's what private ownership does to you!"
The secret package was now tucked away into a drawer of Mamma's desk,
and the desk was now a part of the furnishings belonging to one of our
neighbours, for we now shared our apartment with others, having had three of
our rooms borrowed in succession. Chubarkov, who was recuperating, was given
one room, something that pleased us both immensely.
"Now we can be like Robinson Crusoe and Friday," he said, unbuckling
his belt and holster and laying them on the table. "Will you lend me the
book?"
"Sure!" I examined the gun. "Is it loaded?"
"Sure. Don't touch it."
My aunts peeped in, examined the Commissar's broad shoulders and
uptilted nose critically and departed with an indignant sniff. "No manners
at all! He's a regular martinet!"
The Commissar winked in their direction and said, "They don't look too
happy."
"They never are," I said.
"But we are," Oska said.
"That's that then. If boys like you are, I'll make out." Chubarkov
smiled fondly. Then he lifted Oska up and sat him on his knee. The blue
cloth of his narrow breeches was stretched tight. "Anybody here play
checkers?" His question was unexpected.
"That's no fun. Chess is much better. Do you play chess?"
"No. Never had a chance to learn."
"Lelya'11 teach you quick. He knows all the movings. The white ones,
and the black ones, and the back and front ones, too. All I know is how the
horse moves." Oska jumped down and began hopping in the squares of the
linoleum. He stopped suddenly, stood on one foot and said, "We put a queen
in jail. We put her away in a kennel long ago, when there wasn't any war,
but there was a tsar. That's how long ago!"
I glared at him, and he said no more.
In order to cut short this unnecessary and risky conversation, I
suggested that the Commissar and I have a game of checkers. He took a
printed checkerboard from his knapsack and dumped the checkers out of a
little pouch. Then he set them up, and we bent over the cardboard field,
forehead to forehead.
"Your move," he said.
In no time I saw I was up against a serious opponent. The Commissar
would send his pieces into the most unexpected squares with a light flick of
his middle finger. He set up traps and made two-for-one shots, scooping my
checkers up lightly and saying as he did, "Haven't had time to learn chess
yet, but I know a bit about checkers. What are you doing? Look here! You'd
better jump or I'll huff, that's for sure. Ah, that's better. Now here's
where we plaster back your ears. And reach the king row. My king. And that's
that."
Five minutes later I found myself with one blocked piece on the board.
It was a disgraceful defeat.
I immediately set up the pieces again and suggested we have another
game. Ten minutes later my last two pieces were blocked in a corner. The
Commissar had rolled himself a cigarette and was cheerfully blowing thick
clouds of smoke at that unhappy corner.
Oska was crushed by my defeat. He decided to try his own hand against
the invincible Commissar.
"Do you know how to play cat-and-mouse?"
"Cat-and-mouse?" The Commissar sounded genuinely puzzled.
"I'll show you," Oska said and got up on the Commissar's lap again.
"You put your hand out like this, and I'll try to slap it. But you have to
yank it away, so's I don't. If I miss, it's your turn to slap me. We all
play it in school."
"Let's give it a try." Chubarkov laid his huge hand, the hand of a
stevedore, on the card table.
Oska took aim. He raised his left hand but quickly brought down his
right. Slap! The Commissar did not have a chance to yank his hand away.
"What'd you know! You tricked me that time! Let's do it again. I think
I've got the hang of it. Go on, try again!"
Oska repeated the manoeuvre, but his palm came down hard on the table,
since Chubarkov had yanked his hand away at the very last moment. "Aha!" he
said and seemed very pleased with himself. "Now you put down your paw."
A short while later someone knocked and Papa entered. We quickly
removed our puffed hands from the table and hid them behind our backs, for
they were as red as a goose's feet and itched badly from the Commissar's
slaps. However, Papa must have heard something of what was going on from the
hall.
"What's wrong with your hands, boys?"
"Oh, Papa! Come on in! We're playing cat-and-mouse. The Commissar's
real good at it, too. Even better than Vitya Ponomarenko."
"He's a real sharp fellow, your Oska is," the Commissar said and he
sounded a bit embarrassed. "You have to keep your eye on him all the time.
But he cheats. He hits you in mid-air, and that's against the rules."
"No, I don't! I don't cheat! You're real sharp yourself!"
"This is abominable! Look at your hands! It's unhygienic. Pardon me for
saying so. Comrade Commissar, but my children are used to more intelligent
games. This is no way for them to be spending their time."
"They're getting hardened," Chubarkov said, trying to stick up for us.
"It's good training! You have to have a good eye and be quick."
"Nonsense! What a thing to be proud of! You don't need any brains for
this kind of a game."
The Commissar looked at him slyly. "I wouldn't say so. Doctor. It seems
easy when you're on the sidelines, but it takes some brains. Why don't you
try?"
"If you don't mind, I'd rather not."
"That's a pity."
"Come on, Papa!"
"He's scared! Papa's scared!" Oska shouted.
Papa shrugged. "I don't see what there is to be afraid of. And I don't
see that you need any brains for it, either. But if you insist. Well...."
"That's that," the Commissar said and put his huge paw on the table.
"Your turn, Doctor."
Papa raised his white, antiseptic, surgeon's hand high into the air. He
shrugged disdainfully again and smacked the empty table top in the place
where the Commissar's hand had just been lying, but had been suddenly
whisked away.
We were ecstatic.
"Well, Doc? You still say there's nothing to it?"
"One minute. That didn't count. One minute, please. I think I'm
beginning to see what it's all about. Very well. You put your hand here, and
I hit from here. Excellent. All right, let's try it again."
The Commissar, keeping a wary eye on Papa, placed his hand on the
table. He was ready to jerk it away in a flash. Papa made several false
moves, and each time Chubarkov's hand jerked slightly. Then Papa pinned down
the Commissar's hand with a sudden loud slap.
"Oho! You sure have a surgical sledge-hammer," Chubarkov said and
rubbed his swelling hand. "You'll make a good player. But you won't catch me
napping again, that's for sure."
"Come on, put your hand down. I have another turn. Wait a minute!" Papa
took off his jacket and pulled up a chair. "We'll see who's the smart fellow
here. Aha!"
When our aunts peeped into the room several minutes later they were
flabbergasted. The Commissar and Papa were sitting at the table, one with
his shirt out over his breeches and no belt on and the other in his
shirtsleeves. They were taking turns slapping each other's hands soundly,
missing and slapping the table top.
"Got you!" said the Commissar.
"Aha!" Papa boomed.
Oska and I were hopping around excitedly, egging them on, though they
were quite carried away with the game as it were. The little table creaked
and swayed under their blows.
The sacred rules of propriety hammered into us by our aunts were
creaking and rocking as well.
An elegant army man who wore laced boots moved into the second room. He
carried in his suitcase, examined the room, cleaned his nails, beat a tattoo
on the table with his finger-tips and said, "So".
"You can always tell a gentleman," my aunts, who had been watching him
stealthily, decided and entered to greet the newcomer.
The gentleman jumped up, kissed their hands in turn and gave each of
the three one of his gilt-edged visiting cards. The name on the card was
Edmond Flegontovich La Bazri de Bazan. The fine type in the lower left-hand
corner read: "Marxist".
Despite his fine-sounding name, Edmond Flegontovich La Bazri de Bazan
turned out to be completely non-Schwambranian in character. He actually did
exist, though, and was well known in Pokrovsk. La Bazri de Bazan first
appeared in town shortly after the revolution and became the editor of the
Volga Stormy Petrel, a small newspaper published in Pokrovsk. He became
famous after he printed a banner headline on Christmas, greeting all the
readers on behalf of "the 1918th anniversary of the birth of the Socialist,
J. Christ". The following day the paper had a new editor. At the time in
question, La Bazri de Bazan was on the Tratrchok staff. He held the rank of
aide-de-camp for special missions, but since he was chiefly responsible for
arranging lectures, shows and debates, he soon found his rank unofficially
referred to as "aide-de-camp for special intermissions". The soldiers
nicknamed him Bags-and-Sacks.
The Committee to Combat Desertion set up its headquarters in the third
room, and penitent deserters trooped in and out all day long. They trekked
in guiltily to the committee, but since they usually took the wrong turn in
the apartment, they would as often as not lay their guilty heads on our
tables and windowsills. They wandered through the rooms and held meetings in
the kitchen. In the mornings they would tramp into the parlour without
knocking and wake Oska and me and our aunts, who slept on the other side of
the wardrobes that divided the room. Our aunts would appeal to their
consciences, but the deserters would assure them that they were no strangers