Speak, Memory

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 career. 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 phase, 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 (this freedom was to last for only a few weeks longer). We traveled in two parties, my brother and I going separately from my mother and the three younger children. The Soviet era was a dull week old; liberal newspapers still came out; and while seeing us off at the Nikolaevski station and waiting with us, my imperturbable father settled down at a corner table in the buffet to write, in his flowing, “celestial” hand (as the typesetters said, marveling at the absence of corrections), a leading article for the moribund Rech (or perhaps some emergency publication) on those special long strips of ruled paper, which corresponded proportionally to columns of print. As far as I remember, the main reason for sending my brother and me off so promptly was the probability of our being inducted into the new “Red” army if we stayed in town. I was annoyed at going to a fascinating region in mid-November, long after the collecting season was over, having never been very good at digging for pupae (though, eventually, I did turn up a few beneath a big oak in our Crimean garden). Annoyance changed to distress, when after making a precise little cross over the face of each of us, my father rather casually added that very possibly, ves’ma vozmozhno, he would never see us again; whereupon, in trench coat and khaki cap, with his briefcase under his arm, he strode away into the steamy fog.

The long journey southward started tolerably well, with the heat still humming and the lamps still intact in the Petrograd-Simferopol first-class sleeper, and a passably famous singer in dramatic makeup, with a bouquet of chrysanthemums in brown paper pressed to her breast, stood in the corridor, tapping upon the pane, along which somebody walked and waved as the train started to glide, without one jolt to indicate we were leaving that gray city forever. But soon after Moscow, all comfort came to an end. At several points of our slow dreary progression, 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. Several soldiers traveling on the roof of the car added to the sport by trying to use, not unsuccessfully, the ventilator of our room as a toilet. My brother, who was a first-rate actor, 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 third morning, at a vague stop, I took advantage of a lull in those 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 my uncle Ruka, 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 thing (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 nightmarishly 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 in a Ukrainian hamlet less than a hundred miles from the scene of that ridiculous occurrence.

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