Ice Trilogy Page 3

  I was being intensively prepared for the high school: I studied Russian and arithmetic with Didenko, and French and German with Madame Panaget. Lessons progressed much faster than before as well.

  Even our two pugs, Kaiser and Shuster, ran faster now, barked louder, and pooped on the rug more often.

  We celebrated Christmas 1917 at the large house of Father’s new friends. By that time Father had suddenly stopped all his trips and given himself over entirely to a new, menacing word which, like a powerful broom, had swept “trains of chipped lump sugar” and “cars of soap shavings” out of our home. This word was “the Duma.” Like fat Patsiuk from Gogol’s Christmas story, it had entered our parlor and settled in for the duration. Along with it, Papa’s new friends began to come by and sit until late at night. Almost all of them were outwardly identical and entirely different from my tall, gaunt father: they were short, lively, sturdily built, with shaved wide necks, clipped beards, and curled mustaches; they smoked a lot and argued incessantly. Then, once they’d had enough arguing and smoked until they were hoarse, they would write something, dictating to one another at the same time, then father would drink wine with them and they’d go off to dine at Ernest or the new Donon’s. Now father was involved only in politics; he would go to meetings of the mighty, mysterious Duma, and in conversations with Mama often talked about some kind of abscess that was “just about to burst” and how “we must seize the moment.”

  After the beginning of the war, the banker Riabov became Father’s best friend in Petrograd. He was also in the Duma.

  I fell in love for the first time in my life with the Riabovs’ eleven-year-old daughter, Nika. It was Christmas morning and we children were acting out the Christmas story. The Riabovs’ older son, Riurik, played Herod; Nastya, the angel of the Lord bringing good tidings; Vanya, Ilya, and Arisha, the three kings; Vasilisa, the Mother Mary; and some overgrown high-school student was Joseph. Children we didn’t know well played angels, devils, and slaughtered infants. Nika and I each played two parts: first, Herod’s soldiers searching for male children; and then the ass and the ox who warmed the Christ child in the manger with their breath. The Christ child was played by the Riabovs’ youngest son, Vanyusha, who was five. When he was successfully born in the second act, and Nika and I fastened on the cow and donkey papier-mâché masks and readily poked our muzzles forward to warm him with our breath, Vanyusha burst into tears. We looked at each other through the cutout eyes and giggled quietly. Nika’s brightly sparkling black eyes framed by the donkey’s enormous eyelashes, her soft laughter, and the fragrance of some saccharine-sweet perfume elicited an unexpected rush of tenderness in me. I took her moist hand and didn’t let go until the end of the act.

  I sat next to her at dinner, crowding out a little girl. My feelings for Nika grew with every dish that was served. I chatted with her, talking all kinds of nonsense. While we ate crepes with caviar, I pinched her on the elbow in nervous gaiety; over tea and biscuits, I stuck her finger in my dish of apricot preserves.

  Nika laughed.

  And there was understanding in her laugh. It seemed she liked me too. After dinner a children’s masquerade and dance was held around the Christmas tree. And when the men set off upstairs to smoke and play cards, and the ladies headed to the veranda in the winter garden to trade news, it was proposed that the children play charades. Two lovely English governesses helped us.

  “Whaaat to due wiss ziss pepper?” the redheaded, incredibly freckled governess asked, painstakingly pronouncing the Russian words as she pulled little slips of paper with our names out of a box pasted with stars.

  “Bark at Nika!” I shouted louder than the others.

  We barked at her, sprayed her with water, and carried her around the Christmas tree...

  Nika laughed for me with her black eyes. I wanted terribly to do something with her so that everyone else around would disappear. The scene I had witnessed in the hut had nothing to do with this feeling. Nika, being the older of us, understood me. She suddenly decided she wanted to switch her wolf mask for the Baba Yaga witch mask.

  “Sasha, let’s go, you can help me,” she said, running up the stairs to her room.

  Once in her room, she ignored me, but her face burned with excitement as she fell on her knees and began to search furiously through a starry violet bag of masks.

  “Where is it...? Oh, mon Dieu! Here it is!”

  I kneeled down next to her, hugged her tightly around the neck, and kissed her cheek.

  “Sasha, you’re so funny,” she muttered, staring at the big-nosed witch mask.

  I kissed her again. My heart fluttered. She turned toward me, closed her eyes, and pressed her face to mine. We froze. And for the very first time, I felt that time could stand still.

  “Now who do you think could be hiding in here?” came a feigned query, accompanied by the loud rustle of skirts.

  Hateful time started up again. And along with it the mistress of the house and a lady with a green fan entered the room. I didn’t have time to release Nika from my embrace.

  “They’re being amorous!” the lady exclaimed rapturously, aiming her lorgnette at us. “Nina Pavlovna, just look at them! How sweet!”

  But Nika’s homely, taciturn mother was clearly displeased. She looked at us — we were blushing and pressed to each other — attentively.

  “Put on the masks. And go downstairs,” she said.

  We grabbed the tiger and Baba Yaga masks and ran downstairs.

  Nina Pavlovna didn’t say anything to my parents. But she did everything possible to make sure Nika and I didn’t see each other again. My requests to my mother to “definitely visit Nika” came to naught: Nika was either “under the weather,” or “visiting relatives,” or (despite the Christmas holidays!) “intensively studying arithmetic.”

  A month and a half of unrequited desire to see my black-eyed love threw me into a feverish state. I lay in bed hallucinating for three days with a high temperature. I would surface from terrifying, colorful dreams into Mother’s cool hands placing a towel soaked in water and vinegar on my brow, and bringing me a cup of cranberry mors to drink. I never saw my Mountain in any of those dreams. I glimpsed a human sea, a boundless ocean of voices, faces, dresses, and tuxedos, that rolled powerful waves at me. I drowned in them, floundered, attempted to swim out past them, but again and again they covered my head. I knew that somewhere nearby, in the same place, Nika was floundering. But the harder I searched for her in whirlpools rustling with women’s dresses, the more furiously I was tossed through endless suites of rooms into smoked-filled parlors and stuffy bedrooms. My head was bursting with voices. Finally I broke through to her and saw my love in her little white dress, wearing a Baba Yaga mask. I ran over to her, grabbed the endlessly long, bumpy nose of the mask, and tore it off. But under the mask I found Nika with a live donkey head. She was chewing on something and stared straight at me with donkey eyes. I awoke with a cry.

  I came to on the fourth day.

  Neither Mama nor the nanny was anywhere to be seen. I raised my head: the drapes were drawn tight, but through a crack you could see daylight. I got out of bed. My head swam from weakness. Swaying, wearing a nightshirt that went to the floor, I headed for the door, opened it, and frowned: our huge apartment was bathed in sunlight. It issued from the parlor. I headed that way, my bare soles shuffling along the cool parquet floor. In the parlor, all their backs turned to me, stood our family. The windows were open and the spring sun beat blindingly through them. Everyone standing there was looking out the window. I walked over to Mama. She grabbed me, kissed me, hugged me hysterically, and picked me up. I could see our street, Millionnaya Street, out the window. It was usually quiet and almost empty, but now it was flooded with people. The crowd surged, roared, and crawled toward something. Here and there strips of red fabric could be glimpsed.

  “What is it, Mama?” I asked.

  “It’s the Revolution, son,” Mother answered.

  Later everyone in the
family joked: Sasha slept through the Russian Revolution.

  Revolution

  They had been talking about it for a long time. For me it didn’t happen on that sunny February day, but earlier, on a winter evening. Madame Panaget and I had been coloring pictures in coloring books. Then I had jangled awhile at the piano and drunk a glass of milk with my favorite Ciy biscuits. After that I was supposed to recite my evening prayer to Mama and then go to bed. But Father showed up. Without even taking his coat off he came over to Mama.

  “That’s it,” he said glumly, “there’s no more Duma.”

  Mama stood up quietly.

  “Miliukov and Rodzianko got what they wanted,” Father said, tossing his fur coat into the maid’s waiting arms and lowering himself into an armchair in exhaustion. “They killed off the Duma. The bastards. They managed to murder it after all. Buried it alive.”

  He pounded his fist on the armrest.

  I felt a chill: the Duma, that unseen and powerful Patsiuk who had lived with us for two years, was murdered and buried.

  “What will happen now, Dima?” Mama asked.

  “Revolution!” Father shook his head darkly, but with a kind of angry pride.

  And I, eight years old, suddenly imagined it, this mysteriously menacing Revolution, as the image of the Snow Queen, for some reason holding in her hand that very same “cockroach-eaten” sickle.

  If life in Petrograd before the Revolution had moved faster than usual, now everything fairly whizzed by. And immediately there were more people. The streets were almost always full. It became hard to drive, not only in an automobile but in a horse and buggy as well. I learned new words and terms: “sovdep,” “revolutionary masses,” “interim government,” and “queue.” The unfamiliar sovdep, in Father’s words, sat itself down in the Tauride Palace and, as the first order of business, drank up all the wine and stole the silver spoons from the restaurant. The revolutionary masses often drifted past our windows; everyone, including the cook, was continually talking about the interim government; and the lines for bread grew and grew. I couldn’t understand it: Why were people standing in line for bread? The adults’ explanations, that there wasn’t enough bread for everyone, didn’t satisfy me: there was always so much wheat after all; the wheat fields in the Ukraine were endless! I was certain that bread was limitless, like water, like the sky. We always had bread left over after dinner.

  And it was strange for me to hear “Give us a bit of bread!” on the streets.

  We spent the summer of 1917 in Vaskelovo. It was a surprisingly beautiful, calm, long summer. I had never had such a wonderful, free summer. It was as though I was saying farewell to my former carefree, happy life. And that life, departing forever, said farewell to me, through Vaskelovo’s huge, dark fir trees, still lake, forest berries, after-dinner naps on the veranda, my sisters’ innocent laughter, the glassy sounds of the piano, and rainbows after the rain.

  At the end of the summer I entered the lycée. A chauffeur with the funny surname Kudlach drove me there in a blue automobile. And he drove me every day. It was mostly the children of the rich who attended that school on Kriukov Canal. Many of them were driven in automobiles. But not right up to the school — that was considered “inappropriate.” The autos stopped a short distance from the school, and we would get out and walk the rest of the way. That was how it was done.

  The lessons were interesting for me. At the lycée there were teachers entirely unlike the homely Didenko and the quiet Madame Panaget. They knew how to speak well for a long time. I particularly liked the ever-cheerful mathematician Terenty Valentinovich; the small but incredibly active physical education teacher Monsieur Jacob, nicknamed the Pocket Bonaparte; and the loud Frenchwoman Ekaterina Samuilovna Babitskaya, who always smelled of rose oil. The lycée director, Kazimir Efimovich Krebs, a tall man with a huge head, thick beard, three-fingered left hand, and deep, sonorous bass voice, whom the pupils dubbed Nebuchadnezzar, put me into a state of enraptured fear.

  Not three months of my school life had passed when another Revolution struck. Father called it the “Bolshevik distemper” and promised that “this scum won’t last long.”

  He was sorely mistaken.

  Everything was different during the second Revolution: only soldiers in overcoats and sailors ran downs the streets, rode on horses, and passed by in trucks. And they all had rifles. Citizens moved about cautiously, trying to keep closer to home. At night you could hear shots.

  Then time seemed to condense. It flew so fast that everything whisked by and got confused: people, events, seasons.

  Despite the “Bolshevik distemper,” classes continued in the lycée until the spring of 1918. And they stopped for a very simple reason: a large portion of the pupils and their wealthy parents fled Petersburg. And Russia.

  Our family was ripe for flight in July. Things had changed. Ilya, who had taken a fancy to Marxism while still in school, became a Red and went over to the Bolsheviks. He broke ties with Father. He sent Mama a couple of letters through someone, in which he wrote that he was fighting for a free Russia. Then Ilya disappeared forever. Vasilisa quickly married a silent, hook-nosed lieutenant who had been demobilized because of a wound (in his left knee), and just as swiftly left with him for his mother’s home in the Crimea.

  Father, who had lost everything in Russia, intended to take us to Warsaw at first. There he had “a little something,” I never did understand what — a house or a business. Then he planned to go farther — to Zürich, where he had “something.” The banker Riabov, who had acquired a house there before both revolutions, made his way to Zürich with his family. In the summer of 1918 the road to Europe lay through Kiev. Dymbinsky, a man with a small mustache, took it upon himself to see Mama and my sisters to Warsaw first, and then Father, Vanya, and me. Father needed another couple of weeks in order to “sort out some business in Peter.” Those two weeks turned out to be fateful for the family. Mama, Nastya, and Arisha had barely left when my brother Vanya came down with typhoid fever. He lay in bed for a month, but fortunately recovered, although he had grown very thin and yellow. Then Father was taken by the Cheka. For three months there was no news of him. Our pious aunt Flora, Mother’s sister, who took Ivan and me to live at her house on the Moika Canal, prayed every day for our arrested father. And a miracle happened — they let him out. He returned from the Cheka slumped and gray-haired. But he said that in three months in prison no one had once hit him in the face.

  As a result, it was winter before we made it to Kiev. We settled in Lipki, a wealthy, well-tended neighborhood, in the large apartment of Papa’s brother. The absolute opposite of Father, Uncle Yury, an enthusiastic, whimsical, loud man who had no intention of leaving his native Kiev, received us as though there had been no Revolution or war at all. At home, his table was always groaning with greasy Ukrainian food, a neatly dressed servant served champagne, and Uncle, a bit grayer and thinner, was always talking boisterously and drinking the health of some Hetman I knew nothing about. After stern Petersburg with its bread lines, Uncle’s abundant table seemed incredible. But the most incredible thing turned out to be that Mama and my sisters, who had stayed with Uncle Yury, had set off for Warsaw at the beginning of November, and no one knew whether they had arrived or not. However, everyone knew that there was a revolution in Warsaw as well, and that Pilsudski had declared independence. Father was in a frenzy: he screamed at Uncle, calling him a milksop of a bumpkin, and stomped his feet. Uncle Yury tried to calm him as well as he could. He swore up and down that Mama and my sisters were alive and safe.

  Uncle Yury was our favorite. He didn’t have his own children, he was an incorrigible bachelor. He loved us to death. We loved him in our child’s way, like a peer or overgrown child. Long ago, Vanya and Ilya had come up with a complicated nickname for him. The name jumped out of Uncle’s mouth every time he visited us in Petersburg. A fancier of restaurants and café chantants, Uncle would invariably demand on the first night of his visit that Father accompany hi
m “somewhere.” Father, knowing how these excursions “somewhere” ended, would always mutter that “now there’s not even anywhere to go.” To which Uncle, throwing his handsome head back, would reproachfully spread his hands, which were long like Father’s, and flex his fingers.

  “Please, Dima! You have Ernest, Cuba, and two Donon’s.”

  These were the names of the four most luxurious restaurants in the city. After which Father and Uncle disappeared until the morning. So for us, Uncle Yury became Ernestcubantwodonons. When his carriage drove into the gates of the northern estate, Nastenka and I would race around the rooms, shouting “Ernestcubantwodonons has arrived!”

  While feeding us, Uncle assured everyone that we would be setting out for Warsaw ourselves in a matter of days. Dymbinsky was prowling the city in search of some “devilishly important papers.” This dragged on for several weeks: Uncle was waiting for help from his German friends. But the Germans suddenly left Kiev without even informing Uncle. And somehow Petliura with his “barbaric, primitive hordes” suddenly approached Kiev very quickly. People talked about him with horror. Petliura entered the city in order to “hang officers, kikes, and ‘Moscvitoes.’” He was Ukrainian. People said he left only Ukrainians alive. I imagined him as the sorcerer in Gogol’s “Terrible Revenge,” the most terrifying story on earth. As soon as the Germans ran off, Dymbinsky disappeared. And our jolly self-assured uncle became panicked. He shook Father by the shoulders and shouted that “you must run from Lipki as fast as you can.” He was certain that Petliura’s people would come right straight here to pillage, to the wealthiest neighborhood. Father began to shout back that he knew how to shoot. But he soon dismissed Uncle with a wave of his long hand and began to pack. In the morning we left Lipki in two carriages. Father and I sat in the first one; in the second was Ernestcubantwodonons with a heap of things and his old servant, Savely. There was a slight frost. Despite the fact that it was December, not much snow had fallen. But after a sleepless night of packing and shouting I was chilled and shivering, and desperate to sleep. I was dozing in the carriage, slouched against Father and clutching a Ciy biscuit tin in my hands. I had all my treasures in it, a jumble of beloved objects — a collection of pencils, a Swiss penknife, and a tin pistol with a box of percussion caps. Twice we stopped and I woke up: the first time was when a small, plump, very anxious lady with two traveling bags took a seat with Uncle; the second time was on some terribly crooked street when Dymbinsky, holding a briefcase and dressed in a gray summer suit and fuzzy sheepskin hat, his arm bandaged, squeezed in with us. He handed Father the briefcase and kept muttering hoarsely and insistently about a place called Pushche-Voditsu and some barracks. His eyes were red, and the fuzzy hat made me sleepy. I dozed off again. And opened my eyes at the sound of nearby thunder. Both wagons stood on a street with one-story houses surrounded by gardens lightly covered in snow. A fat redheaded woman wearing a nightgown, her braid half undone, was hurriedly closing the shutters. There was another rumble, even closer.