In june that year he was a guest on our estate – he was always considered one of the family: his late father had been a friend and neighbour of my father. On 15th June Ferdinand was killed* in Sarajevo. On the morning of the 16th the newspapers were brought from the post office. With a Moscow evening paper in his hand, my father came out of his study into the dining room, where Mama, he and I were still sitting at the tea table, and said:
“Well, my friends, it’s war! The Austrian Crown Prince has been killed in Sarajevo. It’s war!”
On Peter’s Day* a lot of people descended on us – it was my father’s name day – and at dinner he was declared my fiancé. But on 19th July, Germany declared war on Russia…
In September he came to see us for just twenty-four hours – to say goodbye before leaving for the front (everyone thought then that the war would soon end, and our wedding had been postponed until the spring). And so our farewell evening arrived. After supper the samovar was brought, as usual, and looking at the windows that had misted over because of its steam, my father said:
“It’s an amazingly early cold autumn!”
We sat quietly that evening, just occasionally exchanging insignificant, exaggeratedly calm words, concealing our secret thoughts and feelings. And it was with feigned naturalness that Father had spoken of the autumn. I went up to the balcony door and wiped the glass with a handkerchief: in the garden, in the black sky, pure, icy stars were glittering clearly and sharply. Father was lying back in an armchair smoking, gazing absent-mindedly at the hot lamp that hung above the table, and under its light Mama, wearing glasses, was diligently mending a little silk pouch – we knew what it was, and it was both touching and horrible. Father asked:
“So you nevertheless want to go in the morning, and not after lunch?”
“Yes, if you’ll allow me, in the morning,” he replied. “It’s very sad, but I’ve not yet finished making arrangements about the house.”
Father gave a little sigh:
“Well, as you wish, my dear. Only in that case it’s time for bed for Mama and me, we want to be sure to see you off tomorrow…”
Mama stood up and made the sign of the cross over her future son, and he bent over her hand, and then over Father’s. Left alone, we stayed in the dining room a little longer – I took it into my head to play patience, while he walked from corner to corner in silence, and then asked:
“Do you want to go for a little walk?”
My heart was becoming heavier and heavier, and I responded with indifference:
“Very well…”
Putting on his things in the hall, he continued thinking about something, and with a sweet smile recalled some lines of Fet:
“Oh, what an extremely cold autumn!
To put on your housecoat is wise…”
“I don’t have a housecoat,” I said. “How does it carry on?”
“I don’t remember. Like this, I think:
Oh see – through the black of the pine trees,
It looks like a fire on the rise…”*
“What fire?”
“The moon rising, of course. There’s a sort of rural, autumnal delight in those lines. ‘To put on your housecoat is wise…’ Our grandfathers’ and grandmothers’ times… Oh, my God, my God!”
“What is it?”
“Nothing, darling. I do feel sad, you know. Sad and happy. I love you very, very much…”
After putting on our things, we went through the dining room onto the balcony and down into the garden. At first it was so dark that I held on to his sleeve. Then in the lightening sky black branches began to be revealed, sprinkled with stars that shone like minerals. Pausing, he turned around towards the house:
“Look at how the windows of the house shine in a very particular way, autumnally. As long as I’m alive, I shall remember this evening for ever…”
I looked, and he put his arms around me in my Swiss cloak. I drew my downy scarf back from my face, and bent my head back slightly for him to kiss me. He kissed me, then looked me in the face:
“How your eyes are shining,” he said. “You’re not cold? The air’s quite wintry. If I’m killed, you won’t forget me immediately, will you?”
I thought: “And what if he really is killed? And will I actually forget him after a certain time – everything gets forgotten in the end, doesn’t it?” And I replied hastily, frightened by my thought:
“Don’t talk like that! I won’t survive your death!”
After a pause he slowly uttered:
“Well then, if I’m killed, I’ll wait for you there. You live, be happy in the world, and then come to me.”
I began crying bitterly…
In the morning he left. Mama put that fateful pouch she had been mending in the evening around his neck – in it was a little gold icon which her father and grandfather had worn in war – and we all made the sign of the cross over him with a sort of impulsive despair. Gazing after him, we stood for a while on the porch in that torpor which is always there when you see someone off before a long separation, feeling only the amazing incompatibility between ourselves and the joyous, sunny morning that surrounded us, glittering with rime on the grass. After a while we went into the emptied house. I set off through the rooms, my hands clasped behind my back, not knowing what to do with myself now, nor whether I should burst out sobbing, or singing at the top of my voice…
He was killed – what a strange word! – a month later in Galicia. And now thirty whole years have passed since that time. And many, many things have been lived through during those years, which seem so long when you think about them carefully, when you pick over in your memory all the magical, unintelligible things, incomprehensible both for the mind and the heart, that are called the past. In the spring of 1918, when neither my father nor my mother was alive any more, I was living in Moscow, in a basement, with a tradeswoman from the Smolensk Market who was forever mocking me: “Well, Your Majesty, how would your riches be?” I was engaged in trade as well, selling, as many were selling then, some of the things I had left – now some ring or other, now a crucifix, now a moth-eaten fur collar – to soldiers in Caucasian fur hats and unbuttoned greatcoats, and it was there, trading on the corner of the Arbat and the Market, that I met a man of rare, fine spirit, a middle-aged, retired military man, whom I shortly married and with whom in April I left for Yekaterinodar. We were almost two weeks travelling there with his nephew, a boy of about seventeen, who was also stealing through to the Volunteers* – I as a peasant woman in bast shoes, he in a worn, homespun Cossack coat with a growth of black beard streaked with grey – and we spent more than two years on the Don and in the Kuban. In winter, in a hurricane, we sailed from Novorossiisk for Turkey with an innumerable crowd of other refugees, and on the way, at sea, my husband died of typhus. After that I had only three people dear to me left in the world: my husband’s nephew, his young wife and their little girl, a child of seven months. But the nephew and his wife sailed away too after a certain time to the Crimea, to Wrangel,* leaving the child in my hands. And it was there that they went missing. But I continued to live in Constantinople for a long time, making a living for myself and the child by really hard unskilled labour. And then, like many, where didn’t I roam with her! Bulgaria, Serbia, Czechia, Belgium, Paris, Nice… The girl grew up long ago and stayed in Paris; she had become completely French, very pretty and utterly indifferent to me; she worked in a chocolate shop beside the Madeleine, using her well-groomed little hands with silver nails to wrap boxes in satin paper and tie them with golden strings – while I lived, and still do live in Nice, as before, any way I can. I was in Nice for the first time in 1912 – and could I have thought in those happy days what it would one day become for me!
And thus I survived his death, having once precipitately said that I would not survive it. But, recalling all that I have lived through since then, I always ask myself: yes, and what has there been in my life after all? And I answer myself: only that cold autumn evening. Did it really once happen? And after all, it did. And that is all there has been in my life – the rest is an unwanted dream. And I believe, I fervently believe: somewhere there he is waiting for me – with the same love and youth as on that evening. “You live, be happy in the world, and then come to me…” I have lived, have been happy, and now I shall soon be coming.
3rd May 1944