Notes from Those Days

Two and a half days — not a bite, not a swallow. (Throat tight.) Soldiers bring newspapers — printed on rose-colored paper. The Kremlin and all the monuments have been blown up. The 56th Regiment. The buildings where the Cadets and officers refused to surrender have been blown up. 16,000 killed. By the next station it's up to 25,000. I don't speak. I smoke. One after another, travelers get on trains heading back.

Dream (November 2,1917, nighttime).

We are escaping. A man with a rifle comes up from the cellar. I take aim with my empty hand. He lowers the rifle. A sunny day. We are climbing on some debris. S. is talking about Vladivostok.1 We are riding in a carriage through the ruins. A man with sulfuric acid.

LETTER IN A NOTEBOOK

If you are still alive, if I am to see you again —listen: yesterday, approaching Kharkov, I read Yuzhny Krai.2 9,000 killed. I cannot tell you about this night because it's not over yet. Gray morning now. I'm in the corridor. Try to understand! I'm riding, and I'm writing to you and right now I don't know . . . but here follow words that I cannot write down.

We are approaching Oryol. I'm scared to write to you the way I want to — I'm afraid I'll burst into tears. This is all a terrible dream. I try to sleep. I don't know how to write to you. When I'm writing, you are there —since I'm writing you! —and then, oh! the 56th Regiment, the Kremlin. (Do you remember the huge keys you used to lock the gate for the night?) But most important, most important, most important — you, you yourself, with your self-destructive instinct. Could you actually stay at home? If everyone stayed home, you would go out alone all

the same. Because you are irreproachable. Because you can't stand for others to be killed. Because you are a lion, giving away a lion's share: to give life —to everyone else, rabbits and foxes. Because you are selfless and balk at self-preservation, because "me" is not important for you, because I knew all of this from the first moment!

Should God grant this miracle — leave you among the living, I shall follow you like a dog.

The news is vague, I don't know what to believe. I read about the Kremlin, Tverskaya Street, the Arbat, the Metropol Hotel, Voznesensky Square, the mountains of corpses.3 In yesterday's (the ist) issue of the SR newspaper Kurskaya Zhizn I read that disarmament had begun. Other papers (today's) write of fighting. I'm not allowing myself the will to write now — but I've imagined a thousand times how I'll walk into the house. Will it be possible to enter the city?

Soon we'll be at Oryol. It's about two in the afternoon now. We'll be in Moscow at 2 in the morning. And if I walk into the house — and there's no one there, not a soul? Where shall I look for you? Perhaps the house is no longer there? I keep feeling — this is a terrible dream. I keep expecting that any second now something will happen and there won't have been any newspapers, nothing. That I'm dreaming, that I'll wake up.

Throat tight, as if fingers are squeezing it. I keep loosening my collar, pulling on it. Seriozhenka. I've written down your name and I can't write any more.

*

Three days —not a word with anyone. Only with soldiers, to buy newspapers. (Terrifying rose-colored sheets, sinister. Theatrical death posters. No —Moscow colored them! They say there's no paper. There was, but they used it all up. (To some that's all there is to it — to others — it's a sign.)

Finally — someone speaks: "What's wrong Miss ? You ain't even taken a bite of bread the whole trip. I been on the train with you since Lozovaya. I keep watching and thinking — when's our young Miss there going to eat? Then I think, there, she's getting some bread now—no — writing in that book again. What are you now, studying for an exam or something?"

I, vaguely: "Yes."

The speaker is a workman, black eyes, like coal, a black beard, something of an affectionate Pugachev.4 A bit eerie, and pleasant. We talk. He complains about his sons: "They're infected with this new life, they've caught this mange. You, Miss, you're a young person, you're likely to see things different, but to my way of thinking — all these red rabbles, these obscene freedoms — it's nothing but a temptation of the Antichrist. He's a Prince, and his power is great, he's just been biding his time, waiting till the right hour's come — gathering his strength. You come to the countryside now —life there's gray, the women are gray-haired . 'A devil,' people say, 'a clown.' Look — he's playing with cabbage stalks, tossing them in the air. But what kind of clown is he when he's a born prince, the light created. You can't fight him with cabbage stalks, you'll be needing the angelic hosts . . ."

A fat officer squeezes into the compartment with us: a round face, mustache, about fifty years old, a bit vulgar, foppish.

"I have a son in the 56th Regiment! I'm terribly worried. All of a sudden I think—what the devil if. . ." (For some reason I calm down immediately.) "And he's no fool either; why should he want to go into the thick of it?" (My calm passes instantaneously.) "He's an engineer, and bridges, well, it doesn't much matter who you build them for— a tsar, or a republic — as long as they hold up!"

I can't hold back: "My husband's in the 56th."

"Hu-usband!? You're married? Well, I'll be. I'd never have thought! And here I thought, Miss, you were finishing high school. In the 56th regiment is he? You must be worried sick."

"I don't know how I'll make it."

"You'll make it! And you'll see each other. Mercy me, with such a wife —how could he go into the shooting! Your husband wouldn't do himself in. He's very young then too?"

"Twenty-three."

"There now, you see! And you're still worried! Well, I can tell you, if I were 23 and had such a wife I wouldn't. . . But then again, here I am 53 and don't have anywhere near such a wife and I still. . ." (That's the whole point! I think to myself. But just the same, for some reason, clearly recognizing the ridiculousness of it all, I calm down.)

*

The workman and I arrange to ride from the station together. And although it's not at all on the way for either of us — he's going to Taganka and I'm going to Povarskaya — I continue to plan it out: a deferral of the next half hour. (In half an hour we'll be in Moscow.) The workman is a bulwark, and for some reason I fantasize that he knows everything; even more, that he is himself of the princely host (not without reason Pugachev!) and that precisely because he is the enemy he will save me (S.). Has already saved me. And that he sat down in this compartment deliberately—to protect and reassure —and that Lozovaya is beside the point, he could simply have appeared in the window —amid the steppes, in stride with the train. And that in the station in Moscow he'll turn to ashes.

*

Ten minutes until Moscow. It's already beginning to grow light. — Or is it just the sky? My eyes used to the darkness? I'm afraid of the road, of the hour in the cab, of the approaching house (of death — for if he's been killed, I'll die). I'm afraid to hear.

Moscow. Blackness. You can enter the city with a pass. I have one, not the right one at all, but it doesn't matter. (It's for the return trip to Theodosia: I'm the wife of an ensign.) I call a cabby: the workman has of course vanished. I ride. The cabby talks, I drift, the pavement bumps along. People with lanterns approach three times. "Pass!" I proffer my pass. They give it back without looking. The first bell. It's about 5:30. It's gotten lighter. (Or does it only seem so?) Empty streets —emptied of habitants. I don't recognize the route, I don't know it (we're taking a detour) — the feeling is that time is to the left, the way a thought sometimes is in the brain. We're headed somewhere through someplace, and for some reason there's a smell of hay. (Maybe, I think, this is Haymarket Square and that's why there's — hay?) There's a slight rumbling from the outposts: someone will not surrender.

Not a thought—about the children. If S. is no longer, then neither am I, and neither are they. Alya won't live without me, she won't want to, won't be able to. As I won't without S.

*

The Church of Boris and Gleb. Ours, the one in Povarskaya.* We turn into a side street, ours — Boris and Gleb Lane.5 The white house of the church secondary school —I always called it a "Voliere": a connecting gallery and children's voices. And on the left, the old-fashioned green house standing at attention (a town governor once lived there and policemen stood in front.) Yet another house. And ours.

The steps opposite two trees. I get out. I take my things out. Detaching themselves from the gates, two men in semi-military uniform approach. "We're the house security guard. What can we do for you?"

"I'm so and so and I live here."

"We don't have orders to let anyone in at night."

"Then please call the maid from apt. 3." (Thought: now, now, now they'll say it. They live here and they know everything.)

"We're not your servants."

"I'll pay."

They go. I wait. I'm not alive. I am the legs on which I stand, the hands with which I hold the suitcases (I didn't set them down, it turns out). And I can't hear my heart. If not for the cabby's call, I wouldn't have realized I'd been waiting a long time — a monstrously long time.

"Well then Miss, what'll it be, will you let me go or not? I still have to go to Pokrovskaya St."

"I'll pay you extra."

The quiet terror that he'll up and leave: my last bit of life is with him, the last bit of my life until. . . However, setting down my things, I open my purse: three, ten, twelve, seventeen rubles ... I need fifty. Where will I get them if... Footsteps. The sound of one door and then another. The entry door opens now. A woman in a scarf, a stranger.

Not giving her a chance to speak, I ask:

"Are you the new maid?"

"Yes."

"Has the master been killed?"

"He's alive."

"Wounded?"

There's another one on Arbat Square. (M.Ts.)

"No."

"But how? Where has he been all this time?"

"In Alexandrovsky with the Cadets. What a terrible fright we've had. Praise God, the Lord had mercy. Only they've got awfully thin. Right now they're on N-sky St. with friends. The little ones are there and the Master's sisters . . .All healthy, well and safe, just waiting for you."

"Would you have 33 rubles to pay the cabby?"

"Goodness gracious, of course—we'll just bring in your things." We bring in my tilings, let die cabby go, and Dunya offers to accompany me. I grab one of two loaves of Crimean bread to take with me. We go. Ravaged Povarskaya St. Cobblestones. Potholes. The sky grows a bit lighter. Bells.

We turn into a side street. A seven-story house. I ring. Two people in fur coats and hats. In the striking of a match — the gleam of a pince-nez. The match right in my face.

"What is it?"

"I've just arrived from the Crimea and I want to see my family."

"But this is unheard of— bursting into a house at 6 in the morning!"

"I want to see my family."

"You'll get there all in good time. Come back around 9 o'clock and then we'll see."

At this point the maid steps in.

"What's wrong with you gentlemen, they have little children, heaven knows how long it's been since they've seen each other. I've known them a long time, I'll vouch for her—she's a trustworthy soul, has her own house on Polyanka."

"Just the same, we can't let you in."

At this point, unable to restrain myself: "And who are you?"

"We're the house security guard."

"I'm so and so, the wife of my husband and the mother of my children. Let me in, I'll go in anyway."

And, half admitted, half pushing my way through —I fly up six flights — to the seventh.

*

(And so it has remained with me, my first vision of the bourgeoisie in the Revolution: ears hiding in fur hats, souls hiding in fur coats, heads hiding in necks, eyes hiding in glass. A blinding — in the light of a striking match — vision of mercenary hides.)

*

From below, the voice of the maid: God bless! I knock. They open. "Seriozha's sleeping? Where's his room?" And, a second later, from the threshold "Seriozha! It's me! I just arrived. The people downstairs are vile. But the Cadets won all the same! Are you here or not?" It's dark in the room. Having reassured myself:

"I traveled three days. I brought you some bread. I'm sorry it's stale. The sailors are vile! I met Pugachev. Seriozhenka, you're alive and . . ."

*

The evening of the same day we leave for the Crimea: S., his friend G-tsev, and I.

*

A LITTLE PIECE OF THE CRIMEA

Arrival in Koktebel in a mad snow storm. The gray-haired sea. The enormous, almost physically burning joy of Max V. at the sight of Seriozha alive.6 Enormous loaves of white bread.

*

The apparition of Max V on the steps of the tower, with a volume by Taine on his knees, frying onions. And while the onions are frying, reading aloud to S. and me, the destinies of Russia tomorrow and beyond.

"And now, Seriozha, there will be such and such . . . Remember."

And softly, carefully, almost rejoicing, he shows us picture after picture. Like a kind magician revealing his secrets to children, he relates the course of the entire Russian Revolution five years in advance: the terror, the Civil War, the executions, the military outposts, the Vendee, the atrocities, the loss of godliness, the unloosed spirits of the elements, blood, blood, blood . . .

*

With G-tsev to get bread.

A cafe in the Otuzy. Bolshevik appeals on the walls. Long-bearded Tatars at the tables. How slowly they drink, how sparingly they speak, how imposingly they move. Time has stopped for them. The iyth century — the 2Oth century. Even the cups are the same, dark blue, with cabalistic signs, no handles. Bolshevism? Marxism?

Scream your lungs out, posters! What do we have to do with your machines, your Lenins, Trotskys, your new-born proletariats, your decaying bourgeoisie . . . We have Ramadan, Mullahs, grapes, a dim memory of a great queen . . . This is die boiling sediment at the bottom of these gilded cups. We — are outside, we — are above, we — are a long time ago. It's for you — to be, we — have passed. We — are once and forever. We—are not.

*

Moonlit twilight. A mosque. The herds of goats return. A girl in a raspberry skirt down to the floor. Tobacco pouches. An old woman, gnawed like a bone.

The sculpturesqueness of ancient races.

*

In the train compartment (the return trip to Moscow, Nov. 25.) "Breshko-Breshkovskaya's a bastard too!7 She said 'y°u have to

fight!'"

*

"To destroy more of the poor classes and live blissfully again themselves!"

"Poor Mother Moscow, clothing the entire front! We can't complain about Moscow! The papers cause all the trouble. The Bolsheviks are right when they say they don't want to spill blood, they're keeping an eye on things."

*

In the compartment air — so thick you could cut it with a knife — three words resound: bourgeois, Junkers, bloodsuckers.

*

"So their business will be better!"

*

"Our revolution's young, but in France theirs is old, stale."

*

"A peasant, a prince, what's the difference — their hides are all the same!" (I, thinking to myself: but some are only out to save their own hide — that's the whole point).

*

"The officer, comrades, is the number one bastard. In my opinion, he's of the very lowest education."

*

Across from me, on the bench, sleeps a downcast, emaciated, prudent Vikzhel.8

"God, comrades, was the first revolutionary!"

*

"You're from Moscow, right? We don't have any of those types in the south."

(An ensign from Kerch)

*

An argument about tobacco.

"A lady, and she smokes! Everybody's equal, sure enough, only it don't do for a lady to smoke. Her voice gets rough from the tobacco, and her mouth smells like a man's. A lady should suck on candies, spray herself with perfumes so she'll have a sweet fragrance. Or else a young gent'll pay his compliments, and there you are breathing the same man's smell —ugh!

"If there's anything the masculine sex can't stand to abide, it's a man's smell. What do you say Miss?"

I: "Of course you're right, a bad habit!"

Another soldier: "But I think, er, that is, comrades: the female sex ain't got nothing to do with it. I mean, the smoke goes in your throat— and everybody's throat's the same. Tobacco — bread, what's the difference? So what if young gentlemen won't love them, maybe it's better — lots of brothers run around wagging their tails. LOO-ove! Dogs —not love! And whoever falls in love — it's with the soul, and he'll take her no matter what the smell, he'll even roll the cigarettes himself. I'm right, ain't I? What do you think Miss?"

I: "Right. My husband always rolls my cigarettes. And he doesn't smoke himself."

(I'm lying.)

My defender —to someone else: "So she ain't a Miss after all. Hey brother, you blundered! And your husband, he'd be a student or something?"

I, remembering caution: "No, well, just my husband . . ."

The other one, explaining the situation: "That means they live off their capital."

My defender: "You'll be going to him then?"

I: "No, I'm going for the children, he stayed in the Crimea."

"What — you have your own dacha in the Crimea?"

I, calmly: "Yes, and a house in Moscow." (I made up the dacha.)

— Silence —

My defender: "You sure are brave, little Missus. Come, you don't really want to admit to such things now do you? These days a body's so afraid, he's happy to bury his house, his money, even himself in the ground with his own two hands!"

I: "Why bury oneself? There'll come a time when others will bury us. And anyway, this isn't the first time it's happened: self-buriers. They used to bury themselves alive in the ground —to save their souls. And now it's to save their bodies."

They all laugh, and I laugh too.

My defender: "And how come your husband ain't with the simple people?"

I: "No, he's with all the people."

"I don't quite get you."

I: "As Christ commanded: neither poor, he said, nor rich: but all men and Christ in every one."

My defender, joyfully: "That's it, thou art not guilty of thy princeli-ness, and thou art not guilty of thy poverty . . ." (a bit suspiciously) "And you Ma'am . . . you wouldn't be a Bolshevik?"

Someone else: "What kind of Bolshevik when they have their own house?"

The first one: "It don't mean nothing, lots of them are in the educated class — gentry too, merchants. More and more it's the gentry that go over to the Bolsheviks . . ." (Glancing, unsure.) "And she has short hair."

I: "That's the fashion nowadays."*

A sailor unexpectedly breaks, rather, bursts into the discussion.

"Comrades, you ain't thinking this thing out straight, you ain't got no consciousness. It's these booklearned ones, this gentry, these damned Junkers that have filled Moscow with blood. Bloodsuckers! Bastards!" (To me): "And you, comrade, some advice: less talk about Christs and dachas in the Crimea. Those times are over."

My defender, scared. "Oh —she's just young. What kind of a dacha could they have — a little shack on three legs, like I've got in the country . . ." (Appeasingly): "Look how cheap her boots are . . ."

*

About this sailor. Constant obscenities. The others (he's a Bolshevik!) are silent.

Finally, I ask him, sweetly, "Why do you swear so? Do you really enjoy it?"

*The fashion came later. For Russia it came along with typhus, i.e., in '19 or '20; for the West I don't know from or with what, in '23 or '24. (M.Ts.)

The sailor: "I'm not swearing, comrade —it's just a saying of mine."

The soldiers roar with laughter.

I, pensively: "A bad saying."

*

This very same sailor, by the open window in Oriol, in the tenderest voice: "What a lovely breeze!"

*

Alya (4 years old)

"Marina, you know Pushkin didn't say it right! He said:

Guns fire from the wharf

Calling the ships to join them

But it should be:

Guns fire from the house."

(After the uprising)

Alya's prayer during and since the uprising:

"Save us Lord and grant us grace: Marina, Seriozha, Irina, Liuba, Asya, Andriusha, the officers and not-officers, the Russians and not-Russians, the French and not-French, the wounded and not-wounded, the healthy and not-healthy—all friends and strangers."

Moscow, October-November 1917

"Oktiabr' v vagone" was first published in the Prague journal Volia Rossii 11-12 (1927). This translation first appeared in Partisan Review 54, no. 4 (Fall 1987): 517-26.

1: S. is talking about Vladivostok. In many of the diaries Tsvetaeva refers to her husband, Sergei Yakovlevich Efron (1893-1941), by the initial S.

2: I read Yuzhny Krai. The newspaper, Southern Land.

3: The Kremlin, Tverskaya Street, the Arbat, the Metropol Hotel, Voznesensky Square. All places in Moscow where battles took place during the October Revolution.

4: Something of an affectionate Pugachev. Emelian Ivanovich Pugachev (ca. 1740-75), a Don Cossack who led Russian peasant uprisings of 1773-74 and was captured and executed by order of Catherine the Great. Pugachev became a legendary folk hero and was extolled by many Russian writers. In 1937 Tsvetaeva wrote an essay called "Pushkin and Pugachev."

5: Boris and Gleb Lane. Now Ulitsa Pisemskogo, no. 6. Tsvetaeva and her family moved into the house in the fall of 1916, and she lived there until she emigrated in 1922. The building is now occupied by the Tsvetaeva Museum. *

6: The enormous, almost physically burning joy of Max V. The Russian poet and artist Maximilian Voloshin (1877-1932). Tsvetaeva met Voloshin in late 1910. They immediately became fast friends, and it was at Voloshin's house in Koktebel that she met her future husband, Sergei Efron, in May 1911. Tsvetaeva wrote an essay on Voloshin after his death in 1932. "Zhivoe o zhivom" ("The Living about the Living").

7: Breshko-Breshkovskaya's a bastard too! Ekaterina Breshkovskaya (1844-1934), one of the founders of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, known as the "grandmother of the Russian Revolution."

8: Across from me, on the bench, sleeps a downcast, emaciated, prudent Vikzhel. Presumably a railroad employee. Vikzhel was the acronym of the All-Russian Administrative Committee of The Railroad Workers Union, founded in August 1917. It did not support the October Revolution and was disbanded for counterrevolutionary activities in January 1918.