Speak, Memory

I did not quite lose track of Lenski. On a loan from his father-in-law, he started, while still with us, some fantastic business that involved the buying up and exploiting of various inventions. It would be neither kind nor fair to say that he passed them off as his own; but he adopted them and talked about them with a warmth and tenderness which hinted at something like a natural fatherhood—an emotional attitude on his part with no facts in support and no fraud in view. One day, he proudly invited all of us to try out with our car a new type of pavement he was responsible for, composed of (so far as I can make out that strange gleam through the dimness of time) a weird weave of metallic strips. The outcome was a puncture. He was consoled, however, by the purchase of another hot thing: the blueprint of what he called an “electroplane,” which looked like an old Blériot but had—and here I quote him again—a “voltaic” motor. It flew only in his dreams—and mine. During the war, he launched a miracle horse food in the form of galette-like flat cakes (he would nibble some himself and offer bites to friends), but most horses stuck to their oats. He trafficked in a number of other patents, all of them crazy, and was deep in debt when he inherited a small fortune through his father-in-law’s death. This must have been in the beginning of 1918 because, I remember, he wrote to us (we were stranded in the Yalta region) offering us money and every kind of assistance. The inheritance he promptly invested in an amusement park on the East Crimean coast, and took no end of trouble to get a good orchestra and build a roller-skating rink of some special wood, and set up fountains and cascades illumed by red and green bulbs. In 1919, the Bolsheviks came and turned off the lights, and Lenski fled to France; the last I heard of him was in the twenties, when he was said to be earning a precarious living on the Riviera by painting pictures on seashells and stones. I do not know—and would rather not imagine—what happened to him during the Nazi invasion of France. Notwithstanding some of his oddities, he was, really, a very pure, very decent human being, whose private principles were as strict as his grammar and whose bracing diktantï I recall with joy: kolokololiteyshchiki perekolotili vïkarabkavshihsya vïhuholey, “the church-bell casters slaughtered the desmans that had scrambled out.” Many years later, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, I happened to quote that tongue twister to a zoologist who had asked me if Russian was as difficult as commonly supposed. We met again several months later and he said: “You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about those Muscovite muskrats: why were they said to have scrambled out? Had they been hibernating or hiding, or what?”

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