When I first met Tamara—to give her a name concolorous with her real one—she was fifteen and I was a year older. The place was my parents’ estate in the rugged but comely country (black fir, white birch, peat bogs, hayfields, and barrens) just south of St. Petersburg. A distant war was dragging on. Two years later, that trite deus ex machina, the Russian Revolution, came, causing my removal from the unforgettable scenery. In fact, already then, in July, 1915, dim omens and backstage rumblings, the hot breath of fabulous upheavals, were affecting contemporary Russian poetry, which I had just begun to enjoy.
During the beginning of that summer and all through the previous one, Tamara’s name had kept cropping up at various spots on our estate and on my uncle’s land beyond the river. I would find it scrawled in the reddish sand of a park, or pencilled on a whitewashed wicket, or freshly carved in the wood of some ancient bench, as if Mother Nature were giving me mysterious advance notices of Tamara’s existence. That hushed July afternoon when I discovered her standing quite still in the emerald light of a birch grove (only her eyes were moving), she seemed to have been spontaneously generated there, among those watchful young trees, with the silent completeness of a mythological manifestation.
She slapped dead the horsefly that she had been waiting for to light, and proceeded to catch up with two other, less pretty girls who were calling to her. Presently, from a vantage point above the river I saw them walking over the bridge, clicking along on neat high heels, all three with their hands tucked into the pockets of their navy-blue jackets and, because of the flies, every now and then tossing their beribboned and beflowered heads.
In a day or two, I traced Tamara to the modest summer cottage that her family rented in the village. I would ride my horse or my bicycle in the vicinity, and with the sudden sensation of a dazzling explosion (after which my heart would take quite a time to get back from where it had landed) I used to come across Tamara at this or that bland bend of the road. But not until well into August did I muster sufficient courage to speak to her.
Seen through the carefully wiped lenses of time, the beauty of her face is as near as ever and as glowing. She was short and a trifle on the plump side but very graceful, with her slim ankles and supple waist. A drop of Tartar or Circassian blood might have accounted for the slight slant of her merry dark eyes and the duskiness of her blooming cheeks. A light down, akin to that found on fruit of the almond group, lined her profile with a fine rim of radiance. She accused her rich-brown hair of being unruly and oppressive and threatened to have it bobbed, and did have it bobbed a year later, but I always recall it as it looked first, fiercely braided into a thick plait that was looped up at the back of her head and tied there with a big bow of black silk. Her lovely neck was always bare, even in winter in St. Petersburg, for she had managed to obtain permission to eschew the stifling collar of a Russian schoolgirl’s uniform. Whenever she made a funny remark or produced a jingle from her vast store of minor poetry, she had a most winning way of dilating her nostrils with a little snort of amusement. Still, I was never quite sure when she was serious and when she was not. The rippling of her ready laughter, her rapid speech, the roll of her very uvular “r,” the tender, moist gleam on her lower eyelid—indeed, all her features were ecstatically fascinating to me, but, somehow or other, instead of divulging her person, they tended to form a brilliant veil in which I got entangled every time I tried to learn more about her. When I used to tell her we would marry in 1918, as soon as I had finished my Gymnasium schooling, she would quietly call me a fool. I visualized her home but vaguely. Her mother’s first name and patronymic, which were all I knew of the woman, had merchant-class or clerical connotations. Her father, who, I gathered, took hardly any interest in his family, was the steward of a large estate somewhere in the south.
Autumn came early that year. Layers of fallen leaves piled up ankle-deep by the end of August. Tamara and I would meet in the park of my uncle’s estate; he was in Italy, and we had it all to ourselves. The tutor to whose care my brother and I were entrusted that season—by far the most doltish and insipid of a long series—instead of limiting himself to coaching us in tennis and doing our summer school work for us, used to hide in the shrubbery in order to spy upon Tamara and me with the aid of an old telescope he had found in the attic. I soon put a stop to that by complaining to my mother. Not that I told her much about Tamara, but she disliked the idea of anybody’s spying upon me and my mysterious friend.
On dark, rainy evenings, I would load the acetylene lamp of my bicycle with magical lumps of calcium carbide, shield a match from the gusty wind, and, having imprisoned a white flame in the glass, ride cautiously into the darkness. The circle of light cast by my lamp would pick out the damp, smooth shoulder of the mud road, between its central system of puddles and the long bordering grasses. Like a tottering ghost, the pale ray would weave across a clay bank at the turn as I began the downhill ride toward the river. Beyond the bridge, where a footpath between dripping jasmine bushes ascended a steep escarpment, I would dismount and push my bicycle up the path. As I reached the top, my pale light would flit across a six pillars white portico at the back of my uncle’s silent, shuttered house. There, in a corner of that arched shelter, Tamara would be waiting for me. I would put out my lamp and go up the slippery steps. In the restless night, centenary limes that surrounded the house would creak and heave. The rain pipe at the side of the porch, a small busybody of water, would be steadily bubbling. At times, some additional rustle, troubling the rhythm of the rain in the leaves, would cause her to turn her head in the direction of an imagined footfall, and then, by a faint luminosity—now rising above the horizon of my memory despite all that rain—I could distinguish the outline of her face, but there was nothing and nobody to fear, and presently she would gently exhale the breath she had held for a moment and her eyes would close again.
With the coming of winter, our reckless romance was transplanted to grim St. Petersburg. We found ourselves horribly deprived of the sylvan security we had grown used to. Hotels shady enough to admit us stood beyond the limits of our daring, and the great era of parked amours was still remote. The secrecy that had been so pleasurable in the country now became a burden, but still neither of us could face the notion of chaperoned meetings at her home or mine. Consequently, we were forced to wander a good deal about the town, and this permanent quest for some kind of refuge produced an odd sense of homelessness that, in its turn, foreshadowed other, much later and lonelier, roamings.
We skipped school. We huddled together on cold benches—after having removed first their tidy cover of snow, then our snow-encrusted mittens. We haunted museums. They were drowsy and deserted on weekday mornings, and thermally warm, in contrast to the red sun that, like a flushed moon, hung in the eastern windows. There we would seek the quiet back rooms, the foggy Dutch icescapes that nobody looked at, the etchings, the medals, the paleographic items, the exhibit that told the Story of Printing—poor things like that. Our best find, I think, was a room where brooms and ladders were kept. The Hermitage, St. Petersburg’s Louvre, offered nice nooks, in a certain hall on the ground floor, among cabinets filled with scarabs and behind the sarcophagus of Nana, high priest of Ptah. In the Russian Museum of Emperor Alexander III, two halls (Nos. 30 and 31, in its northeastern corner), harboring repellently academic paintings by Shishkin (“Clearing in a Pine Forest”) and by Harlamov (“Head of a Young Gypsy”), offered a bit of privacy—because of some tall stands holding drawings—until one got caught. So from these great museums we graduated to smaller ones, such as the Suvorov, where I vividly recall a most silent room full of old armor and tapestries and torn silk banners, with several bewigged, heavily booted dummies in green uniforms standing guard over us. But wherever we went, invariably, after a few visits, this or that hoary, blear-eyed, felt-soled attendant would grow suspicious and we would have to transfer our furtive frenzy elsewhere—to the Pedagogical Museum, to the Museum of Imperial Carriages, or to a tiny museum of old maps, which guidebooks do not even list—and then go out again into the cold.
On late afternoons, we got into the last row of seats in one of the two movie theatres on Nevsky Avenue, the Parisiana and the Piccadilly. The art of the cinema was progressing. Sea waves were tinted a sickly blue, and as they rode in and burst into foam against a black, remembered rock (the Rocher de la Vierge, Biarritz—funny, I thought, to see again the beach of my cosmopolitan childhood), there was a special machine that imitated the sound of the surf, making a kind of washy swish that never quite managed to stop short with the scene but for three or four seconds accompanied the next scene or the next feature—perhaps a newsreel showing a brisk funeral or shabby prisoners of war with their dapper captors. As often as not, the title of the main picture was a quotation from some popular poem or song and might be quite long-winded, such as “The Chrysanthemums Blossom No More in the Garden” or “Her Heart Was a Toy in His Hands and Like a Toy It Got Broken.” Female stars had low foreheads, magnificent eyebrows, lavishly shaded eyes. The favorite actor of the day was Mozzhukhin. One famous director had acquired in the Moscow countryside a white-pillared mansion (not unlike that of my uncle), and it appeared in most of the pictures he made. Mozzhukhin would drive up to it in a smart sleigh and fix a steely eye on a light in one window while a celebrated little muscle twitches under the tight skin of his lower jaw.
VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER
Chain-Smoking the Pain Away
When museums and movie houses failed us and the night was young, we were reduced to exploring the wilderness of the world’s most gaunt and enigmatic city. Solitary street lamps were metamorphosed into sea creatures with prismatic spines by the icy moisture on our eyelashes. As we crossed the vast squares, various architectural phantoms arose with silent suddenness right before us. We felt a cold thrill, generally associated not with height but with depth, as if an abyss had opened at our feet, when great, monolithic pillars of polished granite—polished by slaves, repolished by the moon, and rotating smoothly in the polished vacuum of the night—zoomed above us to support the mysterious rotundities of St. Isaac’s Cathedral. We stopped on the brink, as it were, of these perilous massifs of stone and metal, and with linked hands, in Lilliputian awe, craned our heads to watch new colossal visions rise in our way—the ten glossy-gray atlantes of a palace portico, or a giant vase of porphyry near the iron gate of a garden, or that enormous column with a black angel on its summit that obsessed, rather than adorned, the moon-flooded Palace Square.
Tamara contended afterward, in her rare moments of moodiness, that our love had not withstood the strain of that winter. A flaw in our relationship had appeared, she said. The winter was followed by a distressing and harrowing spring, during which her mother kept wavering between renting the same cottage again and economically staying in town. Finally, under a certain condition, accepted by Tamara with the fortitude of Hans Andersen’s little mermaid, the cottage was rented and a glorious summer immediately enveloped us, and there she was, my happy Tamara, on the points of her toes, trying to pull down a bird-cherry branch in order to pick its puckered fruit, with all the world and its trees wheeling in the orb of her laughing eye, and a dark patch, from her exertions in the sun, forming under her raised arm on the raw shantung of her yellow frock. We lost ourselves in mossy woods and bathed in a fairy-tale cove and swore eternal love by the crowns of flowers that, like all little Russian mermaids, she was so fond of twining, and early in the fall she moved to town to search for a job (this was the condition set by her mother), and in the course of the following months I did not see her at all, engrossed as I was in the kind of varied experience that I had begun to think an elegant littérateur should seek. Not only is the experience in question, and the shadows of the charming ladies involved, of no use to me now in recomposing my past, but it creates a bothersome defocalization, and no matter how I worry the screws of memory, I cannot recall the way Tamara and I parted. There is possibly another reason for this blurring: We had parted too many times before. That last summer in the country, we used to part forever after each secret meeting when, in the fluid blackness of the night, on that old wooden bridge between masked moon and misty river, I would kiss her warm, wet eyelids and rain-chilled face, and immediately after go back to her for yet another farewell—and then the long, dark, wobbly uphill ride home, my slow, laboriously pedalling feet trying to press down the monstrously strong and resilient darkness that refused to stay under.
I do remember, however, with heartbreaking vividness, a certain evening in the fatal summer of 1917 (Kerensky and his government were still struggling up their hopeless hill) when, after a winter of incomprehensible separation, I chanced to meet Tamara on a suburban train. For a few minutes between two stops, in the vestibule of a rocking and rasping car, we stood next to each other, I in a state of intense embarrassment, of crushing regret, she consuming a bar of chocolate, methodically breaking off small, hard bits of the stuff, and talking of the office where she worked. On one side of the tracks, above bluish bogs, the dark smoke of burning peat was mingling with the smoldering wreck of a huge amber sunset. My last glimpse of Tamara’s face came when she turned for an instant on the steps to look back at me before descending into the jasmine-scented, cricket-mad dusk of a little station.
When, at the end of the year, Lenin took over, the Bolsheviks immediately subordinated everything to the retention of power, and a regime of bloodshed, concentration camps, and hostages entered upon its stupendous course. At the time, many believed one could fight Lenin’s gang and save the achievements of the March Revolution. My father, who had been elected to the Constituent Assembly, which in its preliminary form strove to prevent the entrenchment of the Soviets, decided to remain as long as possible in St. Petersburg but to send his large family to the Crimea, a region that was still free.
(Its freedom was to last for only a few weeks longer.) We travelled to two parties, my brother and I going separately from my mother and the younger children. At several points on the long southward journey, the train, including our sleeping car, was invaded by more or less Bolshevized soldiers, who were returning to their homes from the front. (One called them either “deserters” or “Red heroes,” depending upon one’s political views.) My brother and I thought it rather fun to lock ourselves up in our compartment and thwart every attempt to disturb us. He was a first-rate actor and managed to simulate all the symptoms of a bad case of typhus, and this helped us out when the door finally gave way.
Early on the second or third morning, at a stop, I took advantage of a lull in these merry proceedings to get a breath of fresh air. I moved gingerly along the crowded corridor, stepping over the bodies of snoring men, and got off. A milky mist hung over the platform of an anonymous station—we were somewhere not far from Kharkov. I wore spats and a derby. The cane I carried, a collector’s item that had belonged to a great-granduncle of mine, was of a light-colored, beautifully freckled wood, and the knob was a smooth pink globe of coral cupped in a gold coronet. Had I been one of the tragic bums who lurked in the mist of that station platform where a brittle young fop was pacing back and forth, I would not have withstood the temptation to destroy him. As I was about to board the train, it gave a jerk and started to move; my foot slipped and my cane was sent flying under the wheels. I had no special affection for the cane (in fact, I carelessly lost it a few years later), but I was being watched, and the fire of adolescent amour propre prompted me to do what I cannot imagine my present self ever doing. I waited for one, two, three, four cars to pass—Russian trains were notoriously slow in gaining momentum—and when, at last, the rails were revealed, I picked up my cane from between them and raced after the majestically receding bumpers. A sturdy proletarian arm conformed to the rules of sentimental fiction (rather than to those of Marxism) by helping me to swarm up. Had I been left behind, those rules might still have held good, since I would have been brought near Tamara, who by that time had also moved south and was living less than a hundred miles from the scene of that ridiculous occurrence.
I learned unexpectedly of her whereabouts soon after my arrival in southern Crimea. We lived in the vicinity of Yalta. The whole place seemed completely foreign one. The smells were not Russian, the sounds were not Russian, the donkey braying every evening just as the muezzin started to chant from the village minaret—a slim blue tower silhouetted against a peach-colored sky—was positively Bagdadian. And there was I, standing on a chalky bridle path near a chalky stream bed where separate, serpent-like bands of water thinly gilded over oval stones—there was I, holding a letter from Tamara. She wrote that she was dying of boredom in a tiny Ukrainian hamlet and wondered whether I was really in the Yalta region, as somebody from there had written her. I looked at the abrupt Yaila Mountains, coated up to their rocky brows with the karakul of the dark Tauric pine, at the maquis-like stretch of evergreen vegetation between mountain and sea, at the translucent pink sky, where a self-conscious crescent shone with a single humid star near it, and the whole artificial scene struck me as something in a prettily illustrated, albeit sadly abridged, edition of “The Arabian Nights.” Suddenly I felt all the pangs of exile. There had been the case of Pushkin, of course—Pushkin, who had wandered in banishment here, among these naturalized cypresses and laurels—but though some prompting might have come from his romantic lyrics, I do not think my exaltation was a pose. Thenceforth the loss of my country was equated for me with the loss of love, and in many ways this has proved to be a most fertile emotion.
Meanwhile, the life of my family had completely changed. Except for a few jewels concealed in a talcum-powder container, we were absolutely ruined. But this was a very minor matter. When the local Tartar government was swept away by a brand-new Soviet regime, we were subjected to the preposterous and humiliating sense of utter insecurity. During the winter of 1917-18 and well into the windy, blue Crimean spring, idiotic death toddled by our side. Every other day, on the white Yalta pier (where, as you remember, the lady of Chekhov’s “Lady with the Dog” lost her lorgnette among the vacation crowds), various harmless people were shot and, with weights attached to their feet, thrown into the sea by tough Bolshevik sailors imported from Sevastopol for that purpose. My father, who was not harmless, had joined us by this time, after some dangerous adventures, and, in that region of lung specialists, had adopted the disguise of a doctor without changing his name. (Simple and elegant, as would have been said of a corresponding move in chess.) We dwelt in an inconspicuous villa that a kind friend, Countess Sophie Panin, had placed at our disposal. On certain nights, when rumors of nearing assassins were especially strong, the men of our family—my father, my brother, and I—took turns patrolling the house. The slender shadows of oleander leaves would cautiously move in the sea breeze along a pale wall, as if pointing at something with a great show of stealth. We had a shotgun and a Belgian automatic and did our best to pooh-pooh the new decree to the effect that anyone unlawfully possessing firearms would be executed on the spot.
Then one spring day in 1918, when the pink puffs of blossoming almond trees enlivened the dark mountainside, the Bolsheviks vanished and a singularly silent army of Germans replaced them. Patriotic Russians were torn between the animal relief of escaping native executioners and the necessity of owing their reprieve to a foreign invader—especially to one with the atrocious reputation the Germans had. The latter, however, were losing their war in the West and came to Yalta on tiptoe, with diffident smiles and mousy ways. This army of gray apparitions was easy for a patriot to ignore, and ignored it was, save for some rather ungrateful snickers at the half-hearted “Keep Off the Grass” signs that appeared on park lawns. A couple of months later, the Germans faded out, in their turn; the Whites trickled in from the east and soon began fighting the Red Army, which was attacking the Crimea from the north. The kind of brash, hectic gaiety associated with White-held towns brought back, in a vulgarized version, the amenities of peaceful years. Cafés did a wonderful business.
One morning, on a mountain trail, I suddenly met a strange cavalier clad in a Circassian costume, with a tensely set, perspiring face painted a fantastic yellow. He kept furiously tugging at his horse, which, without heeding him, proceeded down the steep path at a curiously purposeful walk, like that of a person leaving a party in a huff. I had seen runaway horses, but I had never seen a walkaway one before, and my astonishment was given a still more pleasurable edge when I recognized the unfortunate rider as Mozzhukhin, the actor. The film “Hadji Murad” (after Tolstoy’s tale about that gallant, rough riding mountain chief) was being rehearsed on the alpine pastures of the range. “Stop that brute!” Mozzhukhin said through his teeth as he saw me, but at the same moment, with a mighty sound of crunching and crashing rocks, two authentic Tartars came running down to the rescue, and I withheld my help.
And through all those months, every time a bag of mail managed to get from the Ukraine to Yalta, there would be a letter for me from Tamara. Nothing is more occult than the way letters, under the auspices of unimaginable carriers, circulate through the weird mess of civil wars, but whenever there was some break in our correspondence, owing to that mess, Tamara would act as if she expected deliveries to be as smoothly automatic as in ordinary times and accuse me of not answering her, when in fact I did nothing but write her and think of her during those months.
Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives. I wish I had kept the whole of our correspondence that way. Tamara’s letters were a sustained conjuration of the rural landscape we knew so well. Just how, I can’t be sure, but her highschool-girls prose could evoke with plangent strength every whiff of damp leaf, every autumn-rusted frond of fern in the St. Petersburg countryside. “Why did we feel so cheerful when it rained?” she asked in one of her last letters, reverting, as it were, to the pure source of rhetoric. “Where has it gone, all that distant, bright, endearing world?”
Tamara, Russia, old gardens grading into the wildwood, the sight of my mother getting down on her hands and knees to kiss the earth every time we came back to the country from town in May—these are things that Fate one day bundled up pell-mell and tossed away, completely severing me from my boyhood. I wonder, however, whether there is really much to be said for more anesthetic destinies—for, let us say, a smooth, safe, small-town continuity of time, with its primitive absence of perspective, when at fifty you are still dwelling in the same clapboard house in which you lived as a child, so that every time you clean your attic you come across the same pile of old brown school books, still together among later accumulations of dead objects, and where, on summery Sunday mornings, your wife stops on the sidewalk to endure for a minute or two that terrible, garrulous, dyed, church-bound McGee woman, who, way back in 1915, used to be pretty, naughty Margaret Ann of the mint-flavored mouth and cold, nimble fingers.
The break in my own destiny affords me in retrospect a syncopal kick that I would not have missed for worlds. Ever since that exchange of letters with Tamara, homesickness has been with me a sensuous and particular matter. Nowadays, the mental image of matted grass on the Yaila, of a canyon in the Urals, or of salt flats in the Aral region affects me nostalgically and patriotically as little, or as much, as, say, Utah, but give me anything on any continent resembling the St. Petersburg countryside and I am your man. What it would be actually to see again the surroundings of my boyhood, I can hardly imagine. Sometimes I fancy myself revisiting them with a false passport, under an assumed name. It could be done.
But I do not think I shall ever do it. I have been dreaming of it too idly and too long. Similarly, during that last Crimean winter I planned for so long a time to join the White Army, with the intention of reaching Tamara on the mainland, that the White Army ceased to exist by the time I had made up my mind. In March of 1919, the Reds broke through in northern Crimea, and from various ports a tumultuous evacuation of anti-Bolshevik groups began. Over a glassy sea in the Bay of Sevastopol, under wild machine-gun fire from the shore (the Bolshevik troops had just taken the port), my family and I set out for Turkey and Piraeus, on a small and shabby Greek ship carrying a cargo of dried fruit. I remember trying to concentrate, as we were zigzagging out of the bay, on a game of chess with my father—one of the knights had lost its head, and a poker chip replaced a missing rook—and the sense of leaving Russia was totally eclipsed by the agonizing thought that, Reds or no Reds, letters from Tamara would still be coming, miraculously and needlessly, to southern Crimea and would search there for a fugitive addressee and weakly flap about like bewildered butterflies set loose in an alien zone, at the wrong altitude, among an unfamiliar flora. ♦
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