and would not hurt anyone, after which the men would curl up by the door and
go to sleep. Whenever a little girl came for a piano lesson, they would
crowd around the piano and follow her rippling fingers up and down the
keyboard admiringly. "Just look at that!. No bigger'n a baby, but watch
those fingers go!" they would say.
Strangers kept drifting in and out of every door, but they all seemed
to be desirable acquaintances. Mamma soon got used to the draughts. The
draughts drew the red flags in through the windows. The house became a
thoroughfare, with the corridor serving as an extension of the street. For
some reason or other, no one noticed the gate, and so they passed through
our apartment to reach the back yard from the street. Day and night
typewriters clattered overhead in the army office on the second floor. One
night they clattered louder and faster than usual, and in the morning we
discovered that the people upstairs had been testing a new machine-gun. Tin
pails clanged in the yard near the tethering post. Hardened deserters who
were under arrest sat around on the porch railing. Sentries walked up and
down with measured steps. Oska hopped and skipped along behind them, trying
to keep in step and looking very intent as he shouldered his toy gun. He
would peep into Bags-and-Sacks' windows as he paraded back and forth, since
our manuscripts were locked up in the desk there. Oska was guarding
Schwambranian property.
The Commissar was reading his way through the third volume of the
encyclopaedia before going to bed. He had already read the first two volumes
and intended to go through the entire set. My aunts despised him in their
hearts and cautioned me against being too friendly with, as they referred to
him, a martinet. However, Oska and I tagged along after him whenever we
could. We accompanied him to the stables to groom the army horses and shared
his dream of big ships.
Bags-and-Sacks' room reeked of perfume. Cuff links, little bottles,
boxes, wine glasses, cigarette holders and nail files were scattered all
over the windowsills. There was a photograph of Vera Kholodnaya, a popular
silent screen star, on the wall. Bags-and-Sacks was polite. He always
stepped aside to let someone pass in the cramped corridor and often clicked
his heels. My Petrograd aunt said he was certainly more like a marquis than
a Marxist. The marquis entertained every evening. His visitors were ladies
in uniform and men in civilian clothes, the ex-town fathers and ex-volunteer
nurse's aides. Bags-and-Sacks' guests were very noisy. A guitar twanged
mournfully far into the night, while he sang in a grating voice of the King
of France playing chess on the parquet floor with his jester. Aunt Neces
would wake up and sigh.
"He's a very fine gentleman," she said. "It's certainly no fault of his
that he has neither a voice for singing nor an ear for music. I simply can't
understand why he insists on singing."
One day La Bazri de Bazan got the Commissar drunk. Chubarkov kept
refusing, but the marquis kept coaxing him to drink. "Go on, drink up. The
proletariat has nothing to lose but its chains."
After a while the Commissar came into our room in his stocking feet
with the straps of his breeches dangling. "I'm nearly through with the third
volume, Doctor, but what's the use? I guess hauling sacks is my limit.
That's for sure." And he kneeled over. When someone tried to help him to his
feet he jumped up and dashed out into yard. Five minutes later he entered
from the street. He was tightly belted and every button of his tunic was
buttoned. He was very official-looking. His spurs jangled. His face was
strained and intent.
"Where's that Army guy who just made a fool of himself?" he rasped.
"Lolling around drunk, disgracing our Soviet system. Where is he? He's under
arrest! And that's that." He searched the room. Papa stood in front of the
mirror, so the Commissar would not find himself. Before leaving, Chubarkov
turned in the doorway and shook an unbending finger at everyone. "See it
doesn't happen again! And that's that!"
A terrible discovery was made one evening. La Bazri de Bazan had gone
off somewheres and Mamma wanted to see if the package was still in the desk
drawer. It was not. The precious package containing the worthless money and
our manuscripts was gone, as were four bars of fine toilet soap that she had
also kept there. They were all gone. The Schwambranian secrets had been
pilfered.
Papa and Mamma went back to the dining-room. We were gathered around
the table for a meeting of the family council.
"So that's what your marquis is like," Papa said.
"Impossible!" all three aunts protested. "You can tell he's from a good
family. The Commissar probably picked the lock and requisitioned everything,
as they say."
"Such audacity!" Mamma moaned. "And there was the soap, too. I couldn't
care less for the money. It was just a pile of paper that should have been
thrown out long ago."
"Why'd you hide it then?" I asked.
"Well, you never can tell...."
We sat around in silence for some time, staring at the oilcloth. It
seemed that misfortune was spread out on the table like a dead fish.
Papa rose and said he would notify the authorities.
My aunts were aghast.
"You must be out of your mind! How can you complain to robbers about
the doings of robbers? Why, they'll arrest you and shoot you!"
But Papa brought his fist down on the table and the Constituent
Assembly said no more. Then Papa cranked the telephone.
"The Special Section, please," he said in a special voice. "It's busy?
Then the Cheka."
"Shhh!" Aunt Neces said in a frightened voice. She was used to uttering
these words in a fierce stage whisper.
Two men came to the house shortly afterwards. They were both tall and
olive-skinned and both had small black moustaches. They were dressed in
leather jackets and looked like drivers. Papa had informed Chubarkov that
they were coming, and the Commissar joined them when they entered
Bags-and-Sacks' room. The marquis was at home. He seemed taken aback for a
moment, but then greeted the unexpected visitors with his usual familiarity.
"Come on in. Prenez vos places, as they say. May I offer a little
refreshment?"
They searched the room. The lost soap fell out of an overturned
suitcase.
"It's ours," Papa said.
"I must disagree. It's mine," the marquis said.
The worthless paper money was mixed up with some other papers and
charts. Oska and I exchanged glances.
One of the men leafed through the papers, reading aloud: " 'Letter to
the tsar', 'Battle map', 'Guide to the city of P.' 'Secret Instructions',
'List of conspirators'. What's all this?"
"I don't know," the marquis replied. He had turned pale when he
realized that this was beginning to smell worse than merely soap.
"How did you come by all this?"
"I don't know. My word of honour. None of this belongs to me. Nor the
soap. I don't know a thing about it."
Chubarkov went right up to him and cursed through his teeth. It was
very much as if he had spat in his face.
Suddenly Oska made his way through to the front. I waved him back. I
rolled my eyes like a jack-in-the-box, but he paid no attention.
"That's ours! Tell him to give it back, 'cause it doesn't belong to
him."
The two men were examining the charts. They exchanged glances.
"Mm?" one said quizzically.
"Uh-huh," the other agreed.
"Comrades!" I said. "My brother and I were playing, and we hid all this
next to the soap. That's all there is to it," I said.
"We'll straighten it all out at headquarters," was the reply.
Then one of the men put through a call. "That you? This is Schorge.
I've got him here. Yes, we found it. Yes, he confessed he stole it. But we
found something funny here. Yes. The boys say it's theirs. Yes. I doubt it.
What? Both of them? All right!" and the receiver clicked like a pair of
heels. He then went over to Chubarkov and spoke to him. Chubarkov looked at
us awkwardly.
"I'll tell you what, boys," the Commissar said. "Let's all go for a
ride in an automobile. The chief has specially invited you over. He wants
you both to tell him all about those papers of yours. And that's that. I'm
going along for the ride. All right? Then that's that."
My aunts fainted like so many tenpins rolling over. I, too, felt a
little queasy. ' A large automobile took us to the Cheka. The night rushed
at us. Like true Schwambranians, we were anxious to reach the scene of
adventure.
The office was still. Two men were bent over our papers. The light of
the table lamp was reflected on the shiny bald head of the fat man in
eyeglasses. The other was a Lett. His blond eyelashes fluttered.
"Well, boys, sit down and tell us all about it," the fat man said. He
seated Oska on his desk. There was a Browning gun on it.
"Is it loaded?" Oska asked matter-of-factly and then went back to his
usual tone of voice. "Who are you? The chief chief? Are you? Then tell him
to give us our papers. You know how long it took us to draw everything?"
"We'll do just that, but first I want you to tell us all about it from
the very beginning. All right?"
The Lett's eyelashes fluttered again as he read our Schwambranian
letters. I felt very ill-at-ease.
"This is just a lot of nonsense!" he said in an angry voice and handed
the papers to the fat man, who looked them over carefully.
"Where's the city of P.?" the fat man asked.
"That's Port Folio. The port in Folio."
"And where would that be?"
"In Schwambrania," Oska piped up. "It's a make-believe country. My
brother discovered it all by himself. We've been playing it all our lives."
"Your brother's a real Columbus, isn't he? Well, if it's only a game,
why'd you hide all this?"
"So's it would be real secret. It's more interesting when everything's
secret."
The chief was intrigued. He asked us to tell him all about
Schwambrania. We began our story rather reluctantly, but were gradually
carried away by our old game. We interrupted each other as we spoke of life
on the Big Tooth Continent. We told them what the coat-of-arms stood for and
all about the map. We enumerated all the members of the Brenabor Dynasty,
described the wars, journeys, revolutions and tournaments, while Oska even
recalled the name of the last Minister of External Affairs. We stood to sing
the Schwambranian anthem and were about to argue over the last cemetery
reforms when....
The chief was laughing. He was roaring, choking and wiping his tearing
eyes. He slapped his bald pate and shook his head, but could not stop
laughing.
The angry-looking Lett was laughing, too. His body shook, though his
pale lips did not open and his eyes were shut tight. Something squeaked in
his throat.
Oska and I looked at them reproachfully. Then we smiled. Soon we were
laughing, too.
"Oh! You're better than a circus!" the chief panted. "I thought I'd
die. Ah.... What did you call him? Brenabor? How'd you ever think of it? You
had it all figured out! I haven't heard of anything so good in a long time."
Then he suddenly became serious and said, "Do you find it very difficult to
govern the country?"
"It's not too bad. We manage. But sometimes things get mixed up."
"Why'd you have to invent all that?"
It was a serious question. I took a deep breath and said, "We wanted
everything to be beautiful. And everything really is in Schwambrania. All
the streets are paved, and all the boys have big muscles. And parents don't
interfere. And you can have as much sugar as you like. There are hardly any
funerals, and you can go to the movies every single day. As for the weather,
it's always sunny and it's cool in the shade. All the poor people are rich.
And everybody's happy. And there aren't any lice at all."
"You're wonderful boys!" the chief said warmly. "We've got to make all
these dreams come true. And we'll have paved streets everywhere, and big
muscles, and movies every day. And we'll call off the funerals and outlaw
the lice. Just wait! It's easier said than done, so we'll call off the
dreaming and get down to work. I have no time to lecture you, not this late
at night. Look at the younger Schwambranian yawning. He's opening his mouth
so wide he might swallow the whole continent. And I'm sure your mother's
worried. I'll phone her."
The chief took us home in his car. He let Oska toot the horn before we
said goodbye. He laughed and said he was very happy to have met some members
of the Schwambranian tribe. He said we should establish Soviet power in
Schwambrania soon and then stop dreaming and help lay real pavements.
"What happened to Bags-and-Sacks?" I said, feeling that we were well
enough acquainted by now for me to ask him.
"We'll send him off to ... uh ... what's its name ... Pi-li-guinika.
You know, he invented himself, too. But he's a sleazy character and he was
playing for money. Well, goodnights, boys! Happy Schwambranian dreams and
good real times ahead!"
We were soon asked to move again. This time we were given an apartment
on Atkarskaya Street. It was very far from the centre of town. The
centrifugal forces were at work.
The actual moving was not too much of a strain, for we had by then
become used to all sorts of changes. The greatness of the Home (with a
capital "H") had long since been debunked. Our belongings crawled
shamefacedly into the crowded corners of our new place of habitation. Since
there was not enough room for everything, a wardrobe and a table wandered
off to our friends' house on the way.
Our moving coincided with new great changes in Schwambrania. Once again
this island roaming in search of a single, common universal truth had
undergone considerable displacement. After our visit to the Cheka we
approached the goal of all our wanderings in the great wide world.
However, a new, an entirely new passion gripped Schwambrania. Three
days later we decided that this passion was at last the truth.
It was the theatre.
The Lunacharsky Municipal Theatre was opened in Pokrovsk in the defunct
Dawn Cinema. The troupe was made up of actors from Petrograd and Moscow who
had chosen to forego future fame in the capital for satisfactory food
rations in the provinces.
We were immediately captivated by the actors' names, which had a true
Schwambranian ring. There was Enriton, Polonych and Vokar, for example.
True, we later discovered that some of the names had simply been reversed,
so that a very ordinary Rakov had become Vokar.
Kholmsky was head and shoulders above all the other actors of the
troupe. He was a man of many talents whom I met in Moscow several years
later, when he was the manager of the popular Theatre of Satire. Kholmsky
played either villains or Napoleons. Besides, he was the playwright and
designer. The City Council commissioned him to do the murals for the new
theatre. Soon the walls were covered with centaurs, troubadours, muses,
prophets and such like. Kholmsky was a man who was easily carried away and
was liable to run to extremes. He bundled some of his painted characters
into suits of mail, but had not a scrap of covering left for the others. He
coloured their bodies purple, which was wholly in keeping with the freezing
temperatures inside the unheated building. Kholmsky drew Venus de Milo at
the entrance. He added a pair of arms at the suggestion of the council
members. The inscription on the pedestal was: "Sow ye all kindness and
wisdom eternal! Sow ye! The people will thank you sincerely."
The people of Pokrovsk did not like his work.
"He's supposed to be a Party man, but he's gone and drawn a bunch of
naked people. You'd think the theatre was a bathhouse!" the audience
complained.
Our Petrograd aunt turned out to be a great theatre-goer, and she took
us to every single premiere. In no time we were able to recognize the
members of the troupe, both coming and going. We were mesmerized by the
theatre. We liked everything about it: the gong, the intermissions, the line
at the box office.
At the time, the theatre resembled a railroad station, and the curtain
was often delayed, as were the trains. The floor was littered with butts and
sunflower seed shells. The audience sat bundled in winter coats with raised
collars. The applause was wild, no matter that gloves and mittens muffled
the sound. All through the performance the inclined floor of the hall shook
lightly and emitted a rumbling sound. This was the people in the audience
tapping their feet softly to keep their toes warm.
"The heat is excruciating! There's not a breath of air!" the queen on
stage fumed as she fanned herself, though steam escaped from her mouth in
the cold air and she had on a heavy quilted jacket under her flimsy robes.
The prompter's whispering steamed upwards from his booth.
The audience reeked of disinfectant. We were doused with the
foul-smelling liquid before going to the theatre and were inspected by
candle light in the front hall upon returning.
The Constituent Assembly sometimes went to a play and then spent the
rest of the week criticizing it. Aunt Sary was nearly run out of the theatre
once. The curtain had just gone up, and there was a strong draught from
backstage. My aunt's voice complained from the front row: "There's a
draught! Shut whatever it is!" She said this loudly as if the curtain, that
magic veil that separated the two worlds, was no more than a window.
The audience was truly offended.
We were dying to go backstage. Grisha Fyodorov, an influential, kind
soul and the son of the troupe's hairdresser, took us to that workshop of
wonders. We were stunned at the sight of the unbelievable, crude props, the
toy fruit and sackcloth scenery. But we gazed in awe at the grown people who
played at other people's lives every single day. This was better than
Schwambrania.
There was a painted inscription in the hall over the stage that read:
ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE, AND ALL THE MEN AND WOMEN MERELY PLAYERS
(Shakespeare)
This quotation became the new motto of Schwambrania.
The Schwambranians took to the stage. The world was now divided into
actors and audience. Daytime in Pokrovsk was like a drawn-out intermission.
"Art takes one's mind off one's dull, uninteresting life," my aunts
said. "It transports one into a world of beauty."
They argued heatedly and nearly quarrelled when they discussed the
actions of the various characters in the previous evening's play. They
accused these invented personages, defended them, loved or hated them,
exactly as Oska and I did when we played Schwambrania. That was when we
decided that the theatre was Schwambrania for grown-ups. They were very
serious when they played their game.
Once, during a performance of Sunset, the lights went out. The play
continued by the light of kerosene lamps which sent sooty streaks across the
painted sky. The action was drawing to a close. The father had decided to
kill his daughter and had picked up his revolver.
At that very moment I noticed that the lamp closest to the wings had
begun to smoke badly. The flame appeared as a tiny fountain over the rim of
the lamp glass. The father walked towards his daughter. The flame reached
the edge of the sackcloth pavilion. The father raised his gun. The scenery
was about to catch fire. The daughter wrung her hands. I am positive that
many other people besides myself were aware of the fact that the faulty lamp
might at any moment set fire to the scenery. However, the daughter fell to
her knees and no one said a word. They were afraid to spoil the murder.
Schwambrania reigned in the theatre. The father cocked his gun.
The scenery began to smoke.
"Die, wretched woman!" the father exclaimed.
"The lamp's smoking!" I shouted, breaking the spell.
The nimble actor was up to par. He turned the wick down with one hand
and killed the ingenue with the other.
The theatre was saved. However, no sooner had the curtain come down
than the people sitting next to me began scolding, saying that the theatre
was no place for boys, that I might have waited before I shrieked, and that
now, instead of a murder, they had seen a stupid comedy, and they were sorry
they had wasted their money on tickets. In my heart of hearts I had to
confess that for the first time in my life I had betrayed Schwambrania.
There were two things that had been bothering me for several years.
These were an old locomotive that had sunk into the ground on Skuchnaya
Street and the mysterious charm-word "mitac" which had been a part of
Annushka's card trick.
Now, at last, I discovered the meaning of "mitac". A simple street sign
held the answer. It proved more knowledgeable than the teachers in my old
school or the encyclopaedia. I couldn't believe my eyes when I read the word
"MITAC" on one of the houses on Breshka Street, now renamed Communard
Square. I ran over and read the following: "Municipal Institute of the
Theatre and Cinema".
Pokrovsk was captivated by the theatre. Everybody and his brother was
now an amateur actor. Tratrchok, the Department of Education, the Food
Committee and Volga Shipping all had their own troupes. Theatrical studios
mushroomed. Finally, all the small studios joined forces to become MITAC,
which then established a children's studio. Since our school was closed
down, Oska and I enrolled. Stepan Atlantis and Taya Opilova soon followed
our example.
We were rehearsing a play called Prince Fork de Forkos. The prince was
in love with a princess, but the queen, her mother, was very proud and a bad
lot in general, and so the prince was shown the door. Then he broke the
spell that had been cast over a mushroom, and a fairy came out of it and
gave the prince an apricot. The queen ate it, and her nose began getting
bigger and bigger. Meanwhile, back on Rodos Island, where the prince
lived.... In a word, the plot was very involved.
Taya Opilova was the princess. Both Stepan and I wanted to be the
prince. We nearly quarrelled over the part, because the prince was supposed
to declare his love for the princess, and the princess, we felt, would guess
that these were not simply lines from the text. Kramskoi, the director, said
Stepan would be the prince, since he was older than I and taller, and his
voice was deeper. As if I couldn't talk in a deep voice if I wanted to!
We coaxed Forsunov into being the great magician. Grisha Fyodorov was
our makeup man, as he was the son of a real hairdresser in a real theatre.
Our first performance was at the MITAC. I was the court jester and Oska
was a gnome. His was a non-speaking part. We were both jittery. Grisha had
made us up for our parts. The audience was buzzing impatiently out in the
hall, and the sound seemed dangerous, mocking and mysterious. It was time to
begin, but both Stepan and Forsunov were missing. The director paced up and
down backstage.
"Curtain time!" the audience shouted and stamped.
The boys finally showed up. They were sober-faced and in a hurry.
"So long, Leva!" Stepan said. "All the Communists have been mobilized.
We're being sent to the front lines. I'm a volunteer. I had a hard time
making them take me. They said I was too young. But they finally did. Our
train's leaving soon. Goodbye!"
Our hands met in a firm handshake. Stepan was silent for a moment, then
cleared his throat and said softly, "I'll bet you'll be seeing Taya home
alone now. Well, I don't mind if it's you. But don't let anyone else near
her, hear?"
The audience was in an uproar. Forsunov went out in front of the
curtain. He had on his knapsack. The audience calmed down. Forsunov adjusted
a strap and said, "The performance has been postponed."
"Till when?" the people shouted.
"Till we wipe out the Whiteguards!"
A day later Papa left for the Urals Front. Papa was heading into the
thick of the typhus epidemic, for the dread lice had infested the trenches.
Mamma and my aunts had packed three full suitcases for him. Papa took one.
He joked unhappily, saying that he didn't need a thing, since they wouldn't
put a burial mound over him and he didn't believe in the hereafter. Then,
according to the old Russian custom, we all sat down for a moment of silence
before the journey.
"All right," Papa said as he rose. He kissed each of us in turn.
"You're the man of the house now," he said to me.
As he was leaving, he collided with a patient who was just entering.
The man moaned and bowed to him.
"There are no more office hours. I'm leaving."
"Please, Doctor! It'll only take a minute! I can't stand the pain any
more. And who knows how long I'll have to wait till you get back. You might
even get yourself killed out there."
Papa looked at the wall clock, then at the man, and then at us. He set
down his suitcase. "Take off your things," he said in an angry voice,
ushering the man into the office. "Don't forget, seven drops after meals,"
he said to him ten minutes later as he got into the sleigh.
After the sleigh had borne Papa off, my aunts walked away from the
windows and all three began to wail.
"No more of that, hear me? Dry up," I said rudely.
My frightened aunts stopped weeping. However, the stillness that had
descended upon our suddenly empty house was still worse. I clenched my fists
and left the room, my gait very much that of the man of the house.
I don't recall how long it was after that, perhaps a year, but maybe
only a month. There were no calendars in the stores, and so it was difficult
to follow the passing of time, which had somehow lost its familiar quality.
When my old Boys School uniform was traded for a slab of bacon, for
instance, the days were swallowed up, as it were. Other, less filling days,
dragged on like weeks. Endless, hungry weeks. Our daily schedule was quite
unlike what it had once been. Before, dinner time had been the centre of the
day's activities, the traditional hour when the family gathered, a solemn
repast, a sacrament, the ceremony of partaking of food, the main meal, and
the hours were counted off in terms of: "before dinner" and "after dinner".
Now we often skipped dinner altogether. We ate whenever there was anything
to eat. At such times Mamma would say, "Let's have a bite."
And we ate on the run, standing up, like people at a railroad station,
since it was impossible to come in physical contact with the icy chairs. The
apartment was freezing, and each of us grudged sharing the warmth he had
hoarded up in his body with an inanimate thing like a chair.
We moved about, trying to avoid all cold objects, for they could snatch
away some of our body's warmth. We took turns being the fire-tender. The one
on duty would crawl out from under a pile of blankets and drapes in the
morning, when the thermometer pointed to 5 . The day's fire-tender, his
teeth chattering, would stick his feet into a pair of icy felt boots and
start a fire in the pot-bellied stove. It would become red-hot and as the
temperature rose, the inhabitants of our apartment would rise, too. The bare
and empty sideboard greeted us with open arms. Our breakfast consisted of
bland pumpkin mush, watermelon tea and saccharine.
Mamma was now a Music School teacher, but since the school had no
facilities for practising, the lessons were conducted in our house. The
little girls stepped on the piano pedals in their heavy felt boots and
roused the chilly innards of the piano with their icy fingers. Mamma,
dressed in her fur coat and gloves, would nimbly lift the stuck keys from
under their fingers.
I, too, was a tutor. A buxom girl named Anna Kolomiitseva, who was
older than I, came to the house to learn the three R's. The payment for
these lessons was pound of meat a month. It was hard-earned meat. That's
when 1 learned the real meaning of work. My pupil stubbornly refused to
trust the letters of the alphabet, relying mostly on her own intuition. For
instance, there was her own name, Anna.
"Aaa-nnn-nnaaa," she drawled. "Oh! It says Annie!"
One day we were tackling the word "parasol".
"Paa-raa-ss-sool," she stumbled along.
"Well? Read it all together," I said.
"Umbrella."
There-beyond sorrow's seas,
sunlit lands
uncharted.
Mayakovsky
After my pupil had gone, Oska and I went out to look for straw to heat
the stove a bit. We made use of its quick-heating qualities to set out the
dough for bread and took turns kneading the sticky mass with our ice-cold,
swollen hands. The job called for frenzied effort, and we imagined that we
were pummelling the hated guts of the enemies of revolutionary mankind, from
Chatelains Urodenal to Admiral Kolchak.
In the evening we all gathered at the table. There was no electricity.
The single nightlight was only put on on Sundays, which then truly became a
special day. The weekdays were illuminated by an oil wick lamp with a
twisted length of cotton for a wick. It was immersed in a cup of sunflower
or linseed oil. A tiny flickering flame burned at the tip of the wick,
filling the room with writhing black shadows.
My aunts moved the lamp closer. They sat in a row, stony- faced and
somewhat unreal. The lamp cast a faint light on them. The Constituent
Assembly resembled madonnas in pince-nez. My aunts read aloud in turn. Then
they spoke of the wonderful past and our ruined lives.
"My God! What a beautiful life it was! Remember the Sobinov recitals
and the literary magazines, and sugar was fifteen kopecks a pound. And now?"
"Aunts!" I said in a voice belonging to the man of the house. I sat in
a dark corner that was now Schwambrania. "Listen to me! I'm asking you once
and for all to keep your counter-revolutionary ideas to yourselves. It's no
skin off my nose, but it's wrong to be a bad influence on small children." I
would come closer to the table and glance meaningfully in Oska's direction.
For some time now I was aware that I was maturing at a tremendous speed.
This feeling of being responsible for the household, far from oppressing me,
actually inspired me. I felt that I had become more logical in my thinking,
that the necessary words came to me more easily, that I was more sure of
myself in many ways. I looked reality in the face now without fear or
reproach. Our straw patrol, frozen fingers and pumpkin mush did not dampen
my spirits. The absence of a calendar, eating standing up and wearing our
overcoats indoors made our way of life seem like something temporary and
transient, like something that was happening at a railroad station. However,
this was not but another stage of the Schwambranians' wandering. Life was
moving in a definite direction, though the road was an unusually difficult
one.
"Don't worry, Mamma," I would say on the days when there were no lentil
beans, no kerosene and no letters from Papa. "Keep your chin up. Imagine
that we're on a very long journey, travelling through deserts and over all
kinds of high mountains. We're on our way to a new land. A wonderful land."
"Where to? Your Schwambrania again?" she would reply in a hopeless
voice.
"No, not Schwambrania. A real land. Who cares about oil wick lamps and
carrying straw, and frozen hands? Honestly, Mamma. Remember our undesirable
acquaintances, Klavdia and Fektistka? Their whole lives were a hundred times
worse than what ours are now for just this little while. It'd really be
unfair if we'd go straight from one good life to another. We're just like
passengers as it is, not helping in any way. And my aunts didn't even bother
to buy tickets. They should be put off the boat. Papa's the only one, and
even though I miss him, I'm glad he's doing his duty at the front lines."
My aunts were horrified. "Goodness! Just imagine. They've had
everything! Even governesses! And look at them now! They're growing up to be
Bolsheviks!"
1 dreamed of the day Stepan returned. I would go out to meet him in my
patched felt boots, carrying an armload of rotten straw.
"Hello, Stepan," I would say. "Give me five (but don't squeeze hard, my
hands are swollen). See? I'm the man of the house now, and I've forbidden my
aunts to talk like counter-revolutionaries. I'm rather hungry, but that
doesn't matter. I'll gladly eat pumpkin mush till victory day."
"Good for you," Stepan would say. "Your thinking is all right. Hold
out. Mush is as good as bread."
"But I don't want to be a passenger. I want to be a member of the
crew!"
"Well, that's just what you'll be, a sailor of the revolution."
My daydreams broke off here, like a broken reel in the movies, for I
did not know how to become a sailor of the revolution. And Mamma would never
have let me be one, anyway.
Still and all, Schwambrania lived on. It did not become any smaller
territorially, though it now took up much less of our time than before. One
day Schwambrania suffered a terrible blow. While we were out Mamma traded
the seashell grotto and its prisoner, the Black Queen, Keeper of
Schwambrania's Secret, for three litres of kerosene at the railroad station.
Thus did we lose her forever. For half an hour we were frantic. The sun of
Schwambrania was about to set for good. But that evening we turned on the
lamp.
Playing Schwambrania at that time was mostly having imaginary feasts.
Schwambrania was busy eating. It had dinners and suppers. It stuffed itself.
We savoured the fine-sounding long menus we found in the cook book. We
satisfied our raging appetites somewhat at these Schwambranian feasts.
However, Schwambrania's sugar stores were only disturbed on holidays.
Georges Borman was Head Chef of Schwambrania. We discovered him on an old ad
for cocoa and chocolate. Georges Borman was the last of the Schwambranian
personages, though he was a personage of gastric origin. He, certainly,
could not cause any new errors.
In general, Schwambrania was on the decline. However, unexpected
circumstances brought about a new flourishing of the Big Tooth Continent.
These circumstances lived in a large deserted house on our street.
UGER'S MANSION
The house had been built by a slightly mad rich German named Uger.
Uger's Mansion was one of the landmarks of Pokrovsk. People from out of town
were shown it. They marvelled at it. It was indeed a most fantastic
structure. The owner had been possessed by vanity and a consuming desire for
luxury. He had decided to beautify Pokrovsk by putting up a unique building.
He craved for fame. However, he did not trust the architect and so drew up
the blueprints himself. Construction proceeded under his watchful eye. The
house was three stories high and had a basement. The people of Pokrovsk, all
of whom lived in one-story houses, threw back their heads and counted the
floors on their fingers.
Uger's Mansion was a cross between a prince's towered manse, a
fairgrounds pavilion and the Hanging Gardens of Semiramis. The windows of
one floor were unlike those of the others. There were tall, round, square
and narrow windows. There were galleries with stained glass panels. Seen
from the side, the house resembled a patchwork quilt. The entire pediment
was covered with murals. Mermaids frolicked below, ships sailed along at the
second story level, while generals of all sizes and shapes adorned the
third. Under the eaves hunters in Tyrol hats were depicted shooting tigers
and lions.
The house would jingle and buzz at the slightest breeze, for twenty-two
weather-vanes and fifteen tin whirligigs spun and whirred on the turrets,
while eight huge fans clanged as they turned in the windows. This clanging
and jingling so puzzled the pigeons that they avoided the house, to say
nothing of prospective tenants.
In the beginning, the Junior High School was located there, but the
weathervanes and fans distracted the Juniors. A few heedless tenants tried
to live there for a while, but the Hanging Gardens of Semiramis would sway
whenever it was windy, the floors were springy, and the window frames
creaked. The mansion began falling apart like a house of cards. Uger died of
a broken heart. He was delirious at the end and said he wanted a weathervane
and a fan for a tombstone.
Meanwhile, the house kept on falling apart bit by bit. The door jambs,
banisters and sometimes whole galleries crumbled and disintegrated. The
nearby houses all sported panes of stained glass. Weathervanes that had
abandoned Uger's Mansion now spun on rooftops up and down the street.
When a blizzard hastened the process of destruction the neighbours
would converge, pulling sleds. They would take up their positions all around
the house and wait, sitting there like a pack of hyenas beside a dying lion.
They dragged the fallen pieces of the house off to their own houses on their
sleds, but did not have the courage to openly attack and loot this building
that was of no use to anyone any longer.
We knew that the huge dead house could be a new, convenient and
mysterious place for our game. Soon Schwambrania moved into all the
remaining rooms. Once again the game became fun. We were not at all dismayed
by the fact that everything was wrecked inside. Schwambranians brought new
life to the ruins, and the dead house put off the fall of Schwambrania for a
long time.
A rustling, creaking and echoing filled the remains of the mansion,
firing our imaginations. The wind swished up and down the rickety stairs.
Fear haunted the dim, musty hallways, and terror crept along the walls at
night.
This certainly was the best possible place for our Schwambranian
adventures. We quickly surveyed the house, giving each room a beautiful name
of a Schwambranian city. The country was being restored to life. However,
there was one place we had not yet explored. This was a dark, suspicious
passage that led to a basement filled with debris. We set out on an
expedition to this uncharted land. Our equipment consisted of long sticks
and a hanging votive light instead of a lantern. Then, following the best
advice of our various camping books, we tied a rope around our waists,
attaching ourselves thus to each other. We now looked like spelunkers.
We climbed down into the cave. The treads had long since fallen out of
the staircase. We skidded along slanted boards and scrambled over loose
bricks. I led the way. The light that was tied to the tip of my stick swayed
in front of me. Oska plodded along behind. He was very staunch and brave,
and, to prove it, he kept saying that he wasn't one bit scared, and that he
actually felt quite cosy. Just as he was saying how cosy he was feeling for
the sixth time, he fell through the floor. A rotten board had given way
under him, and Oska fell into the basement. Since we were tied together, 1
was dragged to the very edge of the hole and pulled flat against the
floorboards. The rope was very taut. It kept squeezing my waist tighter and
tighter, cutting painfully into my middle.
"Did you fall down?" I shouted into the black hole.
"Not yet. I'm flying and flying, but I can't fall down to the bottom."
I lit the votive light, which had gone out during the accident, and
lowered into the pit. There I saw Oska. He was suspended by the rope around
his middle and was revolving slowly. He kicked and squirmed as he tried to
touch the floor.
"Get me out of here, Lelya. It's awfully uncozy here. And the rope's so
tight."
I started pulling my brother up, straining as hard as I could.
Suddenly, there was a very unpleasant crack. The boards I had been lying on
crumbled. I fell into the blackness and landed on top of him.
"See? I fell down to the bottom. And the rope's not tight any more." He
sounded pleased.
The little light was smashed. Darkness billowed up around us in the
cave. A dense, sour-smelling darkness filled the basement. Wisps of grey
light filtered down through the hole we had made. When our eyes had become
accustomed to the dark we noticed quite a few strange objects that had been
concealed by the gloom. There was a crate on legs, some glass and metal
vessels, and strangely twisted and spiralling tubes. We stumbled over some
sacks filled to the top with something or other.
"It's hidden treasure," Oska said.
"A secret one," I whispered.
"This is big news!"
"It sure is! Real hidden treasure for Schwambrania! We'll set up a
wonderf...."
A sudden beam of light hit the floor between us. We tried to scatter,
but something grabbed us from behind and sent us sprawling. It was the
accursed rope that had caught us by the waists and tripped us up. A hand
pulled the rope towards a lantern. We saw a terrible mug above the lantern:
a glittering upper lip, flaming nostrils and white lids. The other features
of the mysterious face were lost in the darkness.
Then we heard a rough voice saying, "What the hell are you doing here?
Hm?"
The upper lip glistened and "Why the hell are you here? I'll kill you,
you brats! If I see you trying to give me the slip, I'll plaster you like a
pair of puppies." Some terrible cursing followed.
"What are you yapping about?" I said, trying to keep my teeth from
chattering.
"You're not supposed to curse in the presence of children," Oska said.
"Otherwise I will, too, and you'll be sorry."
The rope jerked, pulling us up to a huge fist that was illuminated on
one side by the lantern. It then revolved expressively, displaying, as some
menacing moon, all of its phases.
"Let go of the rope! Who said you could hold it like that? Who do you
think you are?" I shouted.
"He thinks this is tsarist times," Oska added. "We'll tell the Cheka
chief on you. He's a very good friend of ours. We'll tell him to arrest
you."
"Don't you threaten me, you!" At this the huge fist was raised over
Oska's head.
"Stop! Remove your hand, madman!" a voice piped up behind us. It
sounded strangely familiar. "And take the chains off the prisoners," it
continued in the same pompous vein. "Sit down, young wanderers. Greetings
from an old scholarly hermit. What brings you to my cave, troglodytes?"
The fist disappeared. Now a bald pate gleamed like a lagoon in the
light of the lantern. It belonged to E-muet, to the toadstool teacher
Kirikov.
"Sit down. I recognized you. You're a member of the wild tribe. You're
both sons of the great and noble land of Schwabria," Kirikov said.
"Schwambrania," Oska corrected him. "How'd you know?"
"I know everything. I live in the hallowed depths of your country, but
in my free time, when I'm not occupied with scholarly research, I surface,
0, Schwambrania, and the day before, and last week, I heard you playing
among these pitiful ruins. What I mean is, when you became inhabitants of
fair Schwambromania."
"Schwambrania," Oska said. He sounded annoyed. "What are you doing
here?"
"And what's all this stuff?" I asked.
There was a long silence.
"0, Schwambranians, you have carelessly touched upon the one secret of
my miserable life, a secret that gives me no peace of mind," Kirikov said in
an echoing voice.
"Do you only have a piece of mind?" Oska inquired. "Do you live in the
Iboney house?"
"My soul is pure, and my mind is clear, but I have been unjustly passed
over by my fellow-men and the authorities. I am insulted and humiliated. But
I am suffering for the good of mankind. If you swear you won't breathe a
word of my secret to anyone, I will preserve your secret, the secret of
Schwamburgia."
go to sleep. Whenever a little girl came for a piano lesson, they would
crowd around the piano and follow her rippling fingers up and down the
keyboard admiringly. "Just look at that!. No bigger'n a baby, but watch
those fingers go!" they would say.
Strangers kept drifting in and out of every door, but they all seemed
to be desirable acquaintances. Mamma soon got used to the draughts. The
draughts drew the red flags in through the windows. The house became a
thoroughfare, with the corridor serving as an extension of the street. For
some reason or other, no one noticed the gate, and so they passed through
our apartment to reach the back yard from the street. Day and night
typewriters clattered overhead in the army office on the second floor. One
night they clattered louder and faster than usual, and in the morning we
discovered that the people upstairs had been testing a new machine-gun. Tin
pails clanged in the yard near the tethering post. Hardened deserters who
were under arrest sat around on the porch railing. Sentries walked up and
down with measured steps. Oska hopped and skipped along behind them, trying
to keep in step and looking very intent as he shouldered his toy gun. He
would peep into Bags-and-Sacks' windows as he paraded back and forth, since
our manuscripts were locked up in the desk there. Oska was guarding
Schwambranian property.
The Commissar was reading his way through the third volume of the
encyclopaedia before going to bed. He had already read the first two volumes
and intended to go through the entire set. My aunts despised him in their
hearts and cautioned me against being too friendly with, as they referred to
him, a martinet. However, Oska and I tagged along after him whenever we
could. We accompanied him to the stables to groom the army horses and shared
his dream of big ships.
Bags-and-Sacks' room reeked of perfume. Cuff links, little bottles,
boxes, wine glasses, cigarette holders and nail files were scattered all
over the windowsills. There was a photograph of Vera Kholodnaya, a popular
silent screen star, on the wall. Bags-and-Sacks was polite. He always
stepped aside to let someone pass in the cramped corridor and often clicked
his heels. My Petrograd aunt said he was certainly more like a marquis than
a Marxist. The marquis entertained every evening. His visitors were ladies
in uniform and men in civilian clothes, the ex-town fathers and ex-volunteer
nurse's aides. Bags-and-Sacks' guests were very noisy. A guitar twanged
mournfully far into the night, while he sang in a grating voice of the King
of France playing chess on the parquet floor with his jester. Aunt Neces
would wake up and sigh.
"He's a very fine gentleman," she said. "It's certainly no fault of his
that he has neither a voice for singing nor an ear for music. I simply can't
understand why he insists on singing."
One day La Bazri de Bazan got the Commissar drunk. Chubarkov kept
refusing, but the marquis kept coaxing him to drink. "Go on, drink up. The
proletariat has nothing to lose but its chains."
After a while the Commissar came into our room in his stocking feet
with the straps of his breeches dangling. "I'm nearly through with the third
volume, Doctor, but what's the use? I guess hauling sacks is my limit.
That's for sure." And he kneeled over. When someone tried to help him to his
feet he jumped up and dashed out into yard. Five minutes later he entered
from the street. He was tightly belted and every button of his tunic was
buttoned. He was very official-looking. His spurs jangled. His face was
strained and intent.
"Where's that Army guy who just made a fool of himself?" he rasped.
"Lolling around drunk, disgracing our Soviet system. Where is he? He's under
arrest! And that's that." He searched the room. Papa stood in front of the
mirror, so the Commissar would not find himself. Before leaving, Chubarkov
turned in the doorway and shook an unbending finger at everyone. "See it
doesn't happen again! And that's that!"
A terrible discovery was made one evening. La Bazri de Bazan had gone
off somewheres and Mamma wanted to see if the package was still in the desk
drawer. It was not. The precious package containing the worthless money and
our manuscripts was gone, as were four bars of fine toilet soap that she had
also kept there. They were all gone. The Schwambranian secrets had been
pilfered.
Papa and Mamma went back to the dining-room. We were gathered around
the table for a meeting of the family council.
"So that's what your marquis is like," Papa said.
"Impossible!" all three aunts protested. "You can tell he's from a good
family. The Commissar probably picked the lock and requisitioned everything,
as they say."
"Such audacity!" Mamma moaned. "And there was the soap, too. I couldn't
care less for the money. It was just a pile of paper that should have been
thrown out long ago."
"Why'd you hide it then?" I asked.
"Well, you never can tell...."
We sat around in silence for some time, staring at the oilcloth. It
seemed that misfortune was spread out on the table like a dead fish.
Papa rose and said he would notify the authorities.
My aunts were aghast.
"You must be out of your mind! How can you complain to robbers about
the doings of robbers? Why, they'll arrest you and shoot you!"
But Papa brought his fist down on the table and the Constituent
Assembly said no more. Then Papa cranked the telephone.
"The Special Section, please," he said in a special voice. "It's busy?
Then the Cheka."
"Shhh!" Aunt Neces said in a frightened voice. She was used to uttering
these words in a fierce stage whisper.
Two men came to the house shortly afterwards. They were both tall and
olive-skinned and both had small black moustaches. They were dressed in
leather jackets and looked like drivers. Papa had informed Chubarkov that
they were coming, and the Commissar joined them when they entered
Bags-and-Sacks' room. The marquis was at home. He seemed taken aback for a
moment, but then greeted the unexpected visitors with his usual familiarity.
"Come on in. Prenez vos places, as they say. May I offer a little
refreshment?"
They searched the room. The lost soap fell out of an overturned
suitcase.
"It's ours," Papa said.
"I must disagree. It's mine," the marquis said.
The worthless paper money was mixed up with some other papers and
charts. Oska and I exchanged glances.
One of the men leafed through the papers, reading aloud: " 'Letter to
the tsar', 'Battle map', 'Guide to the city of P.' 'Secret Instructions',
'List of conspirators'. What's all this?"
"I don't know," the marquis replied. He had turned pale when he
realized that this was beginning to smell worse than merely soap.
"How did you come by all this?"
"I don't know. My word of honour. None of this belongs to me. Nor the
soap. I don't know a thing about it."
Chubarkov went right up to him and cursed through his teeth. It was
very much as if he had spat in his face.
Suddenly Oska made his way through to the front. I waved him back. I
rolled my eyes like a jack-in-the-box, but he paid no attention.
"That's ours! Tell him to give it back, 'cause it doesn't belong to
him."
The two men were examining the charts. They exchanged glances.
"Mm?" one said quizzically.
"Uh-huh," the other agreed.
"Comrades!" I said. "My brother and I were playing, and we hid all this
next to the soap. That's all there is to it," I said.
"We'll straighten it all out at headquarters," was the reply.
Then one of the men put through a call. "That you? This is Schorge.
I've got him here. Yes, we found it. Yes, he confessed he stole it. But we
found something funny here. Yes. The boys say it's theirs. Yes. I doubt it.
What? Both of them? All right!" and the receiver clicked like a pair of
heels. He then went over to Chubarkov and spoke to him. Chubarkov looked at
us awkwardly.
"I'll tell you what, boys," the Commissar said. "Let's all go for a
ride in an automobile. The chief has specially invited you over. He wants
you both to tell him all about those papers of yours. And that's that. I'm
going along for the ride. All right? Then that's that."
My aunts fainted like so many tenpins rolling over. I, too, felt a
little queasy. ' A large automobile took us to the Cheka. The night rushed
at us. Like true Schwambranians, we were anxious to reach the scene of
adventure.
The office was still. Two men were bent over our papers. The light of
the table lamp was reflected on the shiny bald head of the fat man in
eyeglasses. The other was a Lett. His blond eyelashes fluttered.
"Well, boys, sit down and tell us all about it," the fat man said. He
seated Oska on his desk. There was a Browning gun on it.
"Is it loaded?" Oska asked matter-of-factly and then went back to his
usual tone of voice. "Who are you? The chief chief? Are you? Then tell him
to give us our papers. You know how long it took us to draw everything?"
"We'll do just that, but first I want you to tell us all about it from
the very beginning. All right?"
The Lett's eyelashes fluttered again as he read our Schwambranian
letters. I felt very ill-at-ease.
"This is just a lot of nonsense!" he said in an angry voice and handed
the papers to the fat man, who looked them over carefully.
"Where's the city of P.?" the fat man asked.
"That's Port Folio. The port in Folio."
"And where would that be?"
"In Schwambrania," Oska piped up. "It's a make-believe country. My
brother discovered it all by himself. We've been playing it all our lives."
"Your brother's a real Columbus, isn't he? Well, if it's only a game,
why'd you hide all this?"
"So's it would be real secret. It's more interesting when everything's
secret."
The chief was intrigued. He asked us to tell him all about
Schwambrania. We began our story rather reluctantly, but were gradually
carried away by our old game. We interrupted each other as we spoke of life
on the Big Tooth Continent. We told them what the coat-of-arms stood for and
all about the map. We enumerated all the members of the Brenabor Dynasty,
described the wars, journeys, revolutions and tournaments, while Oska even
recalled the name of the last Minister of External Affairs. We stood to sing
the Schwambranian anthem and were about to argue over the last cemetery
reforms when....
The chief was laughing. He was roaring, choking and wiping his tearing
eyes. He slapped his bald pate and shook his head, but could not stop
laughing.
The angry-looking Lett was laughing, too. His body shook, though his
pale lips did not open and his eyes were shut tight. Something squeaked in
his throat.
Oska and I looked at them reproachfully. Then we smiled. Soon we were
laughing, too.
"Oh! You're better than a circus!" the chief panted. "I thought I'd
die. Ah.... What did you call him? Brenabor? How'd you ever think of it? You
had it all figured out! I haven't heard of anything so good in a long time."
Then he suddenly became serious and said, "Do you find it very difficult to
govern the country?"
"It's not too bad. We manage. But sometimes things get mixed up."
"Why'd you have to invent all that?"
It was a serious question. I took a deep breath and said, "We wanted
everything to be beautiful. And everything really is in Schwambrania. All
the streets are paved, and all the boys have big muscles. And parents don't
interfere. And you can have as much sugar as you like. There are hardly any
funerals, and you can go to the movies every single day. As for the weather,
it's always sunny and it's cool in the shade. All the poor people are rich.
And everybody's happy. And there aren't any lice at all."
"You're wonderful boys!" the chief said warmly. "We've got to make all
these dreams come true. And we'll have paved streets everywhere, and big
muscles, and movies every day. And we'll call off the funerals and outlaw
the lice. Just wait! It's easier said than done, so we'll call off the
dreaming and get down to work. I have no time to lecture you, not this late
at night. Look at the younger Schwambranian yawning. He's opening his mouth
so wide he might swallow the whole continent. And I'm sure your mother's
worried. I'll phone her."
The chief took us home in his car. He let Oska toot the horn before we
said goodbye. He laughed and said he was very happy to have met some members
of the Schwambranian tribe. He said we should establish Soviet power in
Schwambrania soon and then stop dreaming and help lay real pavements.
"What happened to Bags-and-Sacks?" I said, feeling that we were well
enough acquainted by now for me to ask him.
"We'll send him off to ... uh ... what's its name ... Pi-li-guinika.
You know, he invented himself, too. But he's a sleazy character and he was
playing for money. Well, goodnights, boys! Happy Schwambranian dreams and
good real times ahead!"
We were soon asked to move again. This time we were given an apartment
on Atkarskaya Street. It was very far from the centre of town. The
centrifugal forces were at work.
The actual moving was not too much of a strain, for we had by then
become used to all sorts of changes. The greatness of the Home (with a
capital "H") had long since been debunked. Our belongings crawled
shamefacedly into the crowded corners of our new place of habitation. Since
there was not enough room for everything, a wardrobe and a table wandered
off to our friends' house on the way.
Our moving coincided with new great changes in Schwambrania. Once again
this island roaming in search of a single, common universal truth had
undergone considerable displacement. After our visit to the Cheka we
approached the goal of all our wanderings in the great wide world.
However, a new, an entirely new passion gripped Schwambrania. Three
days later we decided that this passion was at last the truth.
It was the theatre.
The Lunacharsky Municipal Theatre was opened in Pokrovsk in the defunct
Dawn Cinema. The troupe was made up of actors from Petrograd and Moscow who
had chosen to forego future fame in the capital for satisfactory food
rations in the provinces.
We were immediately captivated by the actors' names, which had a true
Schwambranian ring. There was Enriton, Polonych and Vokar, for example.
True, we later discovered that some of the names had simply been reversed,
so that a very ordinary Rakov had become Vokar.
Kholmsky was head and shoulders above all the other actors of the
troupe. He was a man of many talents whom I met in Moscow several years
later, when he was the manager of the popular Theatre of Satire. Kholmsky
played either villains or Napoleons. Besides, he was the playwright and
designer. The City Council commissioned him to do the murals for the new
theatre. Soon the walls were covered with centaurs, troubadours, muses,
prophets and such like. Kholmsky was a man who was easily carried away and
was liable to run to extremes. He bundled some of his painted characters
into suits of mail, but had not a scrap of covering left for the others. He
coloured their bodies purple, which was wholly in keeping with the freezing
temperatures inside the unheated building. Kholmsky drew Venus de Milo at
the entrance. He added a pair of arms at the suggestion of the council
members. The inscription on the pedestal was: "Sow ye all kindness and
wisdom eternal! Sow ye! The people will thank you sincerely."
The people of Pokrovsk did not like his work.
"He's supposed to be a Party man, but he's gone and drawn a bunch of
naked people. You'd think the theatre was a bathhouse!" the audience
complained.
Our Petrograd aunt turned out to be a great theatre-goer, and she took
us to every single premiere. In no time we were able to recognize the
members of the troupe, both coming and going. We were mesmerized by the
theatre. We liked everything about it: the gong, the intermissions, the line
at the box office.
At the time, the theatre resembled a railroad station, and the curtain
was often delayed, as were the trains. The floor was littered with butts and
sunflower seed shells. The audience sat bundled in winter coats with raised
collars. The applause was wild, no matter that gloves and mittens muffled
the sound. All through the performance the inclined floor of the hall shook
lightly and emitted a rumbling sound. This was the people in the audience
tapping their feet softly to keep their toes warm.
"The heat is excruciating! There's not a breath of air!" the queen on
stage fumed as she fanned herself, though steam escaped from her mouth in
the cold air and she had on a heavy quilted jacket under her flimsy robes.
The prompter's whispering steamed upwards from his booth.
The audience reeked of disinfectant. We were doused with the
foul-smelling liquid before going to the theatre and were inspected by
candle light in the front hall upon returning.
The Constituent Assembly sometimes went to a play and then spent the
rest of the week criticizing it. Aunt Sary was nearly run out of the theatre
once. The curtain had just gone up, and there was a strong draught from
backstage. My aunt's voice complained from the front row: "There's a
draught! Shut whatever it is!" She said this loudly as if the curtain, that
magic veil that separated the two worlds, was no more than a window.
The audience was truly offended.
We were dying to go backstage. Grisha Fyodorov, an influential, kind
soul and the son of the troupe's hairdresser, took us to that workshop of
wonders. We were stunned at the sight of the unbelievable, crude props, the
toy fruit and sackcloth scenery. But we gazed in awe at the grown people who
played at other people's lives every single day. This was better than
Schwambrania.
There was a painted inscription in the hall over the stage that read:
ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE, AND ALL THE MEN AND WOMEN MERELY PLAYERS
(Shakespeare)
This quotation became the new motto of Schwambrania.
The Schwambranians took to the stage. The world was now divided into
actors and audience. Daytime in Pokrovsk was like a drawn-out intermission.
"Art takes one's mind off one's dull, uninteresting life," my aunts
said. "It transports one into a world of beauty."
They argued heatedly and nearly quarrelled when they discussed the
actions of the various characters in the previous evening's play. They
accused these invented personages, defended them, loved or hated them,
exactly as Oska and I did when we played Schwambrania. That was when we
decided that the theatre was Schwambrania for grown-ups. They were very
serious when they played their game.
Once, during a performance of Sunset, the lights went out. The play
continued by the light of kerosene lamps which sent sooty streaks across the
painted sky. The action was drawing to a close. The father had decided to
kill his daughter and had picked up his revolver.
At that very moment I noticed that the lamp closest to the wings had
begun to smoke badly. The flame appeared as a tiny fountain over the rim of
the lamp glass. The father walked towards his daughter. The flame reached
the edge of the sackcloth pavilion. The father raised his gun. The scenery
was about to catch fire. The daughter wrung her hands. I am positive that
many other people besides myself were aware of the fact that the faulty lamp
might at any moment set fire to the scenery. However, the daughter fell to
her knees and no one said a word. They were afraid to spoil the murder.
Schwambrania reigned in the theatre. The father cocked his gun.
The scenery began to smoke.
"Die, wretched woman!" the father exclaimed.
"The lamp's smoking!" I shouted, breaking the spell.
The nimble actor was up to par. He turned the wick down with one hand
and killed the ingenue with the other.
The theatre was saved. However, no sooner had the curtain come down
than the people sitting next to me began scolding, saying that the theatre
was no place for boys, that I might have waited before I shrieked, and that
now, instead of a murder, they had seen a stupid comedy, and they were sorry
they had wasted their money on tickets. In my heart of hearts I had to
confess that for the first time in my life I had betrayed Schwambrania.
There were two things that had been bothering me for several years.
These were an old locomotive that had sunk into the ground on Skuchnaya
Street and the mysterious charm-word "mitac" which had been a part of
Annushka's card trick.
Now, at last, I discovered the meaning of "mitac". A simple street sign
held the answer. It proved more knowledgeable than the teachers in my old
school or the encyclopaedia. I couldn't believe my eyes when I read the word
"MITAC" on one of the houses on Breshka Street, now renamed Communard
Square. I ran over and read the following: "Municipal Institute of the
Theatre and Cinema".
Pokrovsk was captivated by the theatre. Everybody and his brother was
now an amateur actor. Tratrchok, the Department of Education, the Food
Committee and Volga Shipping all had their own troupes. Theatrical studios
mushroomed. Finally, all the small studios joined forces to become MITAC,
which then established a children's studio. Since our school was closed
down, Oska and I enrolled. Stepan Atlantis and Taya Opilova soon followed
our example.
We were rehearsing a play called Prince Fork de Forkos. The prince was
in love with a princess, but the queen, her mother, was very proud and a bad
lot in general, and so the prince was shown the door. Then he broke the
spell that had been cast over a mushroom, and a fairy came out of it and
gave the prince an apricot. The queen ate it, and her nose began getting
bigger and bigger. Meanwhile, back on Rodos Island, where the prince
lived.... In a word, the plot was very involved.
Taya Opilova was the princess. Both Stepan and I wanted to be the
prince. We nearly quarrelled over the part, because the prince was supposed
to declare his love for the princess, and the princess, we felt, would guess
that these were not simply lines from the text. Kramskoi, the director, said
Stepan would be the prince, since he was older than I and taller, and his
voice was deeper. As if I couldn't talk in a deep voice if I wanted to!
We coaxed Forsunov into being the great magician. Grisha Fyodorov was
our makeup man, as he was the son of a real hairdresser in a real theatre.
Our first performance was at the MITAC. I was the court jester and Oska
was a gnome. His was a non-speaking part. We were both jittery. Grisha had
made us up for our parts. The audience was buzzing impatiently out in the
hall, and the sound seemed dangerous, mocking and mysterious. It was time to
begin, but both Stepan and Forsunov were missing. The director paced up and
down backstage.
"Curtain time!" the audience shouted and stamped.
The boys finally showed up. They were sober-faced and in a hurry.
"So long, Leva!" Stepan said. "All the Communists have been mobilized.
We're being sent to the front lines. I'm a volunteer. I had a hard time
making them take me. They said I was too young. But they finally did. Our
train's leaving soon. Goodbye!"
Our hands met in a firm handshake. Stepan was silent for a moment, then
cleared his throat and said softly, "I'll bet you'll be seeing Taya home
alone now. Well, I don't mind if it's you. But don't let anyone else near
her, hear?"
The audience was in an uproar. Forsunov went out in front of the
curtain. He had on his knapsack. The audience calmed down. Forsunov adjusted
a strap and said, "The performance has been postponed."
"Till when?" the people shouted.
"Till we wipe out the Whiteguards!"
A day later Papa left for the Urals Front. Papa was heading into the
thick of the typhus epidemic, for the dread lice had infested the trenches.
Mamma and my aunts had packed three full suitcases for him. Papa took one.
He joked unhappily, saying that he didn't need a thing, since they wouldn't
put a burial mound over him and he didn't believe in the hereafter. Then,
according to the old Russian custom, we all sat down for a moment of silence
before the journey.
"All right," Papa said as he rose. He kissed each of us in turn.
"You're the man of the house now," he said to me.
As he was leaving, he collided with a patient who was just entering.
The man moaned and bowed to him.
"There are no more office hours. I'm leaving."
"Please, Doctor! It'll only take a minute! I can't stand the pain any
more. And who knows how long I'll have to wait till you get back. You might
even get yourself killed out there."
Papa looked at the wall clock, then at the man, and then at us. He set
down his suitcase. "Take off your things," he said in an angry voice,
ushering the man into the office. "Don't forget, seven drops after meals,"
he said to him ten minutes later as he got into the sleigh.
After the sleigh had borne Papa off, my aunts walked away from the
windows and all three began to wail.
"No more of that, hear me? Dry up," I said rudely.
My frightened aunts stopped weeping. However, the stillness that had
descended upon our suddenly empty house was still worse. I clenched my fists
and left the room, my gait very much that of the man of the house.
I don't recall how long it was after that, perhaps a year, but maybe
only a month. There were no calendars in the stores, and so it was difficult
to follow the passing of time, which had somehow lost its familiar quality.
When my old Boys School uniform was traded for a slab of bacon, for
instance, the days were swallowed up, as it were. Other, less filling days,
dragged on like weeks. Endless, hungry weeks. Our daily schedule was quite
unlike what it had once been. Before, dinner time had been the centre of the
day's activities, the traditional hour when the family gathered, a solemn
repast, a sacrament, the ceremony of partaking of food, the main meal, and
the hours were counted off in terms of: "before dinner" and "after dinner".
Now we often skipped dinner altogether. We ate whenever there was anything
to eat. At such times Mamma would say, "Let's have a bite."
And we ate on the run, standing up, like people at a railroad station,
since it was impossible to come in physical contact with the icy chairs. The
apartment was freezing, and each of us grudged sharing the warmth he had
hoarded up in his body with an inanimate thing like a chair.
We moved about, trying to avoid all cold objects, for they could snatch
away some of our body's warmth. We took turns being the fire-tender. The one
on duty would crawl out from under a pile of blankets and drapes in the
morning, when the thermometer pointed to 5 . The day's fire-tender, his
teeth chattering, would stick his feet into a pair of icy felt boots and
start a fire in the pot-bellied stove. It would become red-hot and as the
temperature rose, the inhabitants of our apartment would rise, too. The bare
and empty sideboard greeted us with open arms. Our breakfast consisted of
bland pumpkin mush, watermelon tea and saccharine.
Mamma was now a Music School teacher, but since the school had no
facilities for practising, the lessons were conducted in our house. The
little girls stepped on the piano pedals in their heavy felt boots and
roused the chilly innards of the piano with their icy fingers. Mamma,
dressed in her fur coat and gloves, would nimbly lift the stuck keys from
under their fingers.
I, too, was a tutor. A buxom girl named Anna Kolomiitseva, who was
older than I, came to the house to learn the three R's. The payment for
these lessons was pound of meat a month. It was hard-earned meat. That's
when 1 learned the real meaning of work. My pupil stubbornly refused to
trust the letters of the alphabet, relying mostly on her own intuition. For
instance, there was her own name, Anna.
"Aaa-nnn-nnaaa," she drawled. "Oh! It says Annie!"
One day we were tackling the word "parasol".
"Paa-raa-ss-sool," she stumbled along.
"Well? Read it all together," I said.
"Umbrella."
There-beyond sorrow's seas,
sunlit lands
uncharted.
Mayakovsky
After my pupil had gone, Oska and I went out to look for straw to heat
the stove a bit. We made use of its quick-heating qualities to set out the
dough for bread and took turns kneading the sticky mass with our ice-cold,
swollen hands. The job called for frenzied effort, and we imagined that we
were pummelling the hated guts of the enemies of revolutionary mankind, from
Chatelains Urodenal to Admiral Kolchak.
In the evening we all gathered at the table. There was no electricity.
The single nightlight was only put on on Sundays, which then truly became a
special day. The weekdays were illuminated by an oil wick lamp with a
twisted length of cotton for a wick. It was immersed in a cup of sunflower
or linseed oil. A tiny flickering flame burned at the tip of the wick,
filling the room with writhing black shadows.
My aunts moved the lamp closer. They sat in a row, stony- faced and
somewhat unreal. The lamp cast a faint light on them. The Constituent
Assembly resembled madonnas in pince-nez. My aunts read aloud in turn. Then
they spoke of the wonderful past and our ruined lives.
"My God! What a beautiful life it was! Remember the Sobinov recitals
and the literary magazines, and sugar was fifteen kopecks a pound. And now?"
"Aunts!" I said in a voice belonging to the man of the house. I sat in
a dark corner that was now Schwambrania. "Listen to me! I'm asking you once
and for all to keep your counter-revolutionary ideas to yourselves. It's no
skin off my nose, but it's wrong to be a bad influence on small children." I
would come closer to the table and glance meaningfully in Oska's direction.
For some time now I was aware that I was maturing at a tremendous speed.
This feeling of being responsible for the household, far from oppressing me,
actually inspired me. I felt that I had become more logical in my thinking,
that the necessary words came to me more easily, that I was more sure of
myself in many ways. I looked reality in the face now without fear or
reproach. Our straw patrol, frozen fingers and pumpkin mush did not dampen
my spirits. The absence of a calendar, eating standing up and wearing our
overcoats indoors made our way of life seem like something temporary and
transient, like something that was happening at a railroad station. However,
this was not but another stage of the Schwambranians' wandering. Life was
moving in a definite direction, though the road was an unusually difficult
one.
"Don't worry, Mamma," I would say on the days when there were no lentil
beans, no kerosene and no letters from Papa. "Keep your chin up. Imagine
that we're on a very long journey, travelling through deserts and over all
kinds of high mountains. We're on our way to a new land. A wonderful land."
"Where to? Your Schwambrania again?" she would reply in a hopeless
voice.
"No, not Schwambrania. A real land. Who cares about oil wick lamps and
carrying straw, and frozen hands? Honestly, Mamma. Remember our undesirable
acquaintances, Klavdia and Fektistka? Their whole lives were a hundred times
worse than what ours are now for just this little while. It'd really be
unfair if we'd go straight from one good life to another. We're just like
passengers as it is, not helping in any way. And my aunts didn't even bother
to buy tickets. They should be put off the boat. Papa's the only one, and
even though I miss him, I'm glad he's doing his duty at the front lines."
My aunts were horrified. "Goodness! Just imagine. They've had
everything! Even governesses! And look at them now! They're growing up to be
Bolsheviks!"
1 dreamed of the day Stepan returned. I would go out to meet him in my
patched felt boots, carrying an armload of rotten straw.
"Hello, Stepan," I would say. "Give me five (but don't squeeze hard, my
hands are swollen). See? I'm the man of the house now, and I've forbidden my
aunts to talk like counter-revolutionaries. I'm rather hungry, but that
doesn't matter. I'll gladly eat pumpkin mush till victory day."
"Good for you," Stepan would say. "Your thinking is all right. Hold
out. Mush is as good as bread."
"But I don't want to be a passenger. I want to be a member of the
crew!"
"Well, that's just what you'll be, a sailor of the revolution."
My daydreams broke off here, like a broken reel in the movies, for I
did not know how to become a sailor of the revolution. And Mamma would never
have let me be one, anyway.
Still and all, Schwambrania lived on. It did not become any smaller
territorially, though it now took up much less of our time than before. One
day Schwambrania suffered a terrible blow. While we were out Mamma traded
the seashell grotto and its prisoner, the Black Queen, Keeper of
Schwambrania's Secret, for three litres of kerosene at the railroad station.
Thus did we lose her forever. For half an hour we were frantic. The sun of
Schwambrania was about to set for good. But that evening we turned on the
lamp.
Playing Schwambrania at that time was mostly having imaginary feasts.
Schwambrania was busy eating. It had dinners and suppers. It stuffed itself.
We savoured the fine-sounding long menus we found in the cook book. We
satisfied our raging appetites somewhat at these Schwambranian feasts.
However, Schwambrania's sugar stores were only disturbed on holidays.
Georges Borman was Head Chef of Schwambrania. We discovered him on an old ad
for cocoa and chocolate. Georges Borman was the last of the Schwambranian
personages, though he was a personage of gastric origin. He, certainly,
could not cause any new errors.
In general, Schwambrania was on the decline. However, unexpected
circumstances brought about a new flourishing of the Big Tooth Continent.
These circumstances lived in a large deserted house on our street.
UGER'S MANSION
The house had been built by a slightly mad rich German named Uger.
Uger's Mansion was one of the landmarks of Pokrovsk. People from out of town
were shown it. They marvelled at it. It was indeed a most fantastic
structure. The owner had been possessed by vanity and a consuming desire for
luxury. He had decided to beautify Pokrovsk by putting up a unique building.
He craved for fame. However, he did not trust the architect and so drew up
the blueprints himself. Construction proceeded under his watchful eye. The
house was three stories high and had a basement. The people of Pokrovsk, all
of whom lived in one-story houses, threw back their heads and counted the
floors on their fingers.
Uger's Mansion was a cross between a prince's towered manse, a
fairgrounds pavilion and the Hanging Gardens of Semiramis. The windows of
one floor were unlike those of the others. There were tall, round, square
and narrow windows. There were galleries with stained glass panels. Seen
from the side, the house resembled a patchwork quilt. The entire pediment
was covered with murals. Mermaids frolicked below, ships sailed along at the
second story level, while generals of all sizes and shapes adorned the
third. Under the eaves hunters in Tyrol hats were depicted shooting tigers
and lions.
The house would jingle and buzz at the slightest breeze, for twenty-two
weather-vanes and fifteen tin whirligigs spun and whirred on the turrets,
while eight huge fans clanged as they turned in the windows. This clanging
and jingling so puzzled the pigeons that they avoided the house, to say
nothing of prospective tenants.
In the beginning, the Junior High School was located there, but the
weathervanes and fans distracted the Juniors. A few heedless tenants tried
to live there for a while, but the Hanging Gardens of Semiramis would sway
whenever it was windy, the floors were springy, and the window frames
creaked. The mansion began falling apart like a house of cards. Uger died of
a broken heart. He was delirious at the end and said he wanted a weathervane
and a fan for a tombstone.
Meanwhile, the house kept on falling apart bit by bit. The door jambs,
banisters and sometimes whole galleries crumbled and disintegrated. The
nearby houses all sported panes of stained glass. Weathervanes that had
abandoned Uger's Mansion now spun on rooftops up and down the street.
When a blizzard hastened the process of destruction the neighbours
would converge, pulling sleds. They would take up their positions all around
the house and wait, sitting there like a pack of hyenas beside a dying lion.
They dragged the fallen pieces of the house off to their own houses on their
sleds, but did not have the courage to openly attack and loot this building
that was of no use to anyone any longer.
We knew that the huge dead house could be a new, convenient and
mysterious place for our game. Soon Schwambrania moved into all the
remaining rooms. Once again the game became fun. We were not at all dismayed
by the fact that everything was wrecked inside. Schwambranians brought new
life to the ruins, and the dead house put off the fall of Schwambrania for a
long time.
A rustling, creaking and echoing filled the remains of the mansion,
firing our imaginations. The wind swished up and down the rickety stairs.
Fear haunted the dim, musty hallways, and terror crept along the walls at
night.
This certainly was the best possible place for our Schwambranian
adventures. We quickly surveyed the house, giving each room a beautiful name
of a Schwambranian city. The country was being restored to life. However,
there was one place we had not yet explored. This was a dark, suspicious
passage that led to a basement filled with debris. We set out on an
expedition to this uncharted land. Our equipment consisted of long sticks
and a hanging votive light instead of a lantern. Then, following the best
advice of our various camping books, we tied a rope around our waists,
attaching ourselves thus to each other. We now looked like spelunkers.
We climbed down into the cave. The treads had long since fallen out of
the staircase. We skidded along slanted boards and scrambled over loose
bricks. I led the way. The light that was tied to the tip of my stick swayed
in front of me. Oska plodded along behind. He was very staunch and brave,
and, to prove it, he kept saying that he wasn't one bit scared, and that he
actually felt quite cosy. Just as he was saying how cosy he was feeling for
the sixth time, he fell through the floor. A rotten board had given way
under him, and Oska fell into the basement. Since we were tied together, 1
was dragged to the very edge of the hole and pulled flat against the
floorboards. The rope was very taut. It kept squeezing my waist tighter and
tighter, cutting painfully into my middle.
"Did you fall down?" I shouted into the black hole.
"Not yet. I'm flying and flying, but I can't fall down to the bottom."
I lit the votive light, which had gone out during the accident, and
lowered into the pit. There I saw Oska. He was suspended by the rope around
his middle and was revolving slowly. He kicked and squirmed as he tried to
touch the floor.
"Get me out of here, Lelya. It's awfully uncozy here. And the rope's so
tight."
I started pulling my brother up, straining as hard as I could.
Suddenly, there was a very unpleasant crack. The boards I had been lying on
crumbled. I fell into the blackness and landed on top of him.
"See? I fell down to the bottom. And the rope's not tight any more." He
sounded pleased.
The little light was smashed. Darkness billowed up around us in the
cave. A dense, sour-smelling darkness filled the basement. Wisps of grey
light filtered down through the hole we had made. When our eyes had become
accustomed to the dark we noticed quite a few strange objects that had been
concealed by the gloom. There was a crate on legs, some glass and metal
vessels, and strangely twisted and spiralling tubes. We stumbled over some
sacks filled to the top with something or other.
"It's hidden treasure," Oska said.
"A secret one," I whispered.
"This is big news!"
"It sure is! Real hidden treasure for Schwambrania! We'll set up a
wonderf...."
A sudden beam of light hit the floor between us. We tried to scatter,
but something grabbed us from behind and sent us sprawling. It was the
accursed rope that had caught us by the waists and tripped us up. A hand
pulled the rope towards a lantern. We saw a terrible mug above the lantern:
a glittering upper lip, flaming nostrils and white lids. The other features
of the mysterious face were lost in the darkness.
Then we heard a rough voice saying, "What the hell are you doing here?
Hm?"
The upper lip glistened and "Why the hell are you here? I'll kill you,
you brats! If I see you trying to give me the slip, I'll plaster you like a
pair of puppies." Some terrible cursing followed.
"What are you yapping about?" I said, trying to keep my teeth from
chattering.
"You're not supposed to curse in the presence of children," Oska said.
"Otherwise I will, too, and you'll be sorry."
The rope jerked, pulling us up to a huge fist that was illuminated on
one side by the lantern. It then revolved expressively, displaying, as some
menacing moon, all of its phases.
"Let go of the rope! Who said you could hold it like that? Who do you
think you are?" I shouted.
"He thinks this is tsarist times," Oska added. "We'll tell the Cheka
chief on you. He's a very good friend of ours. We'll tell him to arrest
you."
"Don't you threaten me, you!" At this the huge fist was raised over
Oska's head.
"Stop! Remove your hand, madman!" a voice piped up behind us. It
sounded strangely familiar. "And take the chains off the prisoners," it
continued in the same pompous vein. "Sit down, young wanderers. Greetings
from an old scholarly hermit. What brings you to my cave, troglodytes?"
The fist disappeared. Now a bald pate gleamed like a lagoon in the
light of the lantern. It belonged to E-muet, to the toadstool teacher
Kirikov.
"Sit down. I recognized you. You're a member of the wild tribe. You're
both sons of the great and noble land of Schwabria," Kirikov said.
"Schwambrania," Oska corrected him. "How'd you know?"
"I know everything. I live in the hallowed depths of your country, but
in my free time, when I'm not occupied with scholarly research, I surface,
0, Schwambrania, and the day before, and last week, I heard you playing
among these pitiful ruins. What I mean is, when you became inhabitants of
fair Schwambromania."
"Schwambrania," Oska said. He sounded annoyed. "What are you doing
here?"
"And what's all this stuff?" I asked.
There was a long silence.
"0, Schwambranians, you have carelessly touched upon the one secret of
my miserable life, a secret that gives me no peace of mind," Kirikov said in
an echoing voice.
"Do you only have a piece of mind?" Oska inquired. "Do you live in the
Iboney house?"
"My soul is pure, and my mind is clear, but I have been unjustly passed
over by my fellow-men and the authorities. I am insulted and humiliated. But
I am suffering for the good of mankind. If you swear you won't breathe a
word of my secret to anyone, I will preserve your secret, the secret of
Schwamburgia."