Надежда Лохвицкая - Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me - The Best of Teffi

And so the night goes on. From the square outside Pontius Pilate’s house comes the hubbub of the crowd. And just then a voice, loud and forceful as fate itself, cries out, “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” And it seems as if the flames of the candles shiver, and an evil black breath spreads through the church: “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” And from age to age it has been passed down, that evil cry. What can we do, how can we make amends, how can we silence that cry, so that we no longer need hear it?

Liza feels her hands grow cold; she feels her whole body transfixed in a sort of ecstasy of sadness, with tears running down her cheeks. “What is it? Why am I crying? What’s the matter with me?”

“Perhaps I should tell Zuzu,” she thinks. “But how can I make Zuzu understand? Will Zuzu be able to understand how the whole church fell silent, how the flames of the candles shivered, and how that loud, terrible voice called out, ‘Crucify Him! Crucify Him!’? I won’t be able to tell her all that. If I don’t tell it well, Zuzu won’t understand anything. But if she does understand, if she feels what I feel, how wonderful, how glorious that would be. It would be something quite new. I think somehow we would start to live our whole lives differently. Dear Lord, help me be able to tell it!”

Easter Sunday was always jolly. A great many visitors would come to wish them a happy Easter. Liza had put on a spring dress made to a pattern of her own choosing. And she had chosen it because the caption beneath it in the fashion magazine read: “A dress for the young lady of thirteen”. Not for a little girl, or for a growing girl, but for a young lady.

Zuzu came round for breakfast. She was looking pleased, as if she were full of secrets. “Let’s go to your room. Quick. I have so much to tell you,” she whispered.

The news really was extraordinary: a cadet! A divine cadet! And not a young boy, he was sixteen already. He could sing “ Tell her that my fiery soul …” [7] A famous romance composed by Yelizaveta Kochubey (1821–97). Zuzu hadn’t heard him, but Vera Yaroslavtseva had told her he sang very well. And he was in love with Zuzu. He had seen her at the skating rink and on Palm Sunday at Vera Yaroslavtseva’s. He had seen Liza, too.

“Yes, he’s seen you. I don’t know where. But he said you were a magnificent woman.”

“Did he really?” Liza gasped. “Did he really say that? And what does he look like?”

“I don’t know for sure. When we went for a walk on Palm Sunday there were two cadets walking behind us, and I don’t know which of the two he was. But I think he was the darker one, because the other one was ever so fair and round, not the sort to have strong feelings.”

“And you think he’s in love with me , too?”

“Probably. Anyway, what of it? It’s even more fun if he’s in love with both of us!”

“Don’t you think that’s immoral? It feels a little strange to me.”

The bee-like Zuzu, all curls and honey, pursed her rosy lips mockingly.

“Well, I’m amazed at you, truly I am. The Queen of Sheba had all the peoples of the world in love with her—and here you are, afraid of just one cadet. That’s plain silly.”

“And it’s really true, what he said about me? That I’m…”

Liza was embarrassed to repeat those extraordinary words (“a mag-ni-fi-cent wo-man”).

“Of course it’s true,” said Zuzu, in a matter-of-fact way. “It’s what Vera Yaroslavtseva told me. Do you think she’d make up something like that just for fun? She’s probably bursting with envy.”

“But all the same, don’t you think it might be a sin?” Liza fretted. And then: “Wait, there’s something I wanted to tell you. And now I’ve forgotten. Something important.”

“Well, it’ll come back to you. We’re being called to breakfast.”

In the evening, when she was going to bed, Liza went up to the mirror, looked at her fair hair, at her sharp little face with its freckled nose, smiled and whispered, “A magnificent woman.”

The night was black.

Over to starboard, the sea flowed into the sky and it seemed that there, quite close, only a few metres from the ship, lay the end of the world. A black void, space, eternity.

Over to port, one or two little lights glimmered in the distance. They were alive, flickering, moving. Or were we just imagining this, since we all knew there was a town there? Living people, movement. Life.

After two terrible, boring weeks on board, with nobody sure where they were going and when they would arrive, or whether they would ever feel the earth beneath their feet again, or whether that earth would be kind to them or whether it would lead them to sorrow, torment and death; after that, how frustrating it was to see those living lights and not dare to sail towards them.

In the morning the captain promised to contact the shore, find out the situation there and then decide what to do.

Who was in the town? Who had control of it? Friend or foe? Whites or Reds? And if it was in enemy hands, where could we go? Farther east? But we wouldn’t get far on this little coaster. We’d be drowned. [8] This last section of the story evidently takes place during the Russian Civil War. After being evacuated from Odessa in April 1919, Teffi was on board a small ship bound for Novorossiisk, the Black Sea port from which she soon afterwards set off for Constantinople. For a more extensive treatment of this episode see Teffi, Memories, chapters 17–23, esp. 23.

Tired people wandered about on deck, looking towards the lights.

“I don’t want to look at those lights,” said Liza. “It makes me feel even more hopeless. I’d rather look at the black, terrible night. It feels closer to me. But isn’t the sea making a strange booming sound? What is it?”

A sailor passed by.

“Can you hear?” asked Liza. “Can you hear the sea booming?”

“Yes,” said the sailor, “it’s church bells from the shore. That’s a good sign. It means the Whites are there. Today is Holy Thursday. The Feast of the Twelve Gospels.”

The Twelve Gospels. A memory comes back, from long ago. Black, gold, candlelight. The pale blue smoke of incense. A little girl with blond braids clasps her hands around a wax candle that drips and flickers. She clasps her hands and weeps, “What can we do, how can we make amends, how can we silence that cry, so that we need no longer hear it: ‘Crucify Him! Crucify Him!’”

How strangely and clearly it all came back to her! So much time had passed, such a vast life, and then suddenly that moment—which, at the time, she had forgotten almost immediately—had suddenly come right up to her, in the form of church bells booming over the water, in the form of lights glowing on the shore like wax candles. It had caught up with her and now it was standing there beside her. It would never go away again. Never again? And Zuzu? Would Zuzu come running up again too, to buzz, to dance, to fly around her? The Zuzus of this world run fast, after all. They always catch up…

“And the second time the cock crew…”

Our friends the Zaitsevs live out of town. [1] This story is set in the 1920s, when Teffi was living in Paris.

“The air is so much better out in the suburbs,” they say.

That is, they can’t afford to live where the air is bad.

A small group of us went to visit them.

We set off without any mishap. That is, apart from minor details: we didn’t take enough cigarettes, one of us lost her gloves, another forgot her door key. And then, at the station, we bought one ticket less than we needed. Well, anyone can make a mistake. We counted wrong. Even though there were only four of us.