Владимир Беляев - The Town By The Sea

"Well, you are a coon, aren't you! Just repeating other people's words like a parrot and not even troubling to find out what they mean! Are you really going to live your whole life in such a dull, lazy fashion? 'Black bottom,' in Russian, means 'chornoyedno,' the lower depths. Do you want to sink to the lower depths?"

Misha grinned flashing his silver teeth: "N-n-no, I don't!"

"I should think not either! Let those who think that dance fashionable do that, we'll find something a bit more cheerful. We've got to stride on towards the light, not sink to the lower depths!"

... When tickets for our youth show were distributed at the works, I took two extra tickets and sent them by post to Angelika Andrykhevich. Instead of writing my own address on the bottom of the envelope, I wrote: "From Lieutenant Glan." What gave me the idea, I don't know. I suppose I just did it out of devilment.

As I had expected, Angelika turned up at the show with Zuzya Trituzny. He sat in the third row, oozing with self-importance. Now and then he offered Angelika fruit drops out of a blue tin and whispered in her ear, grinning at his own jokes.

As I watched him paying his attentions to Angelika, I thought to myself: "Wait a bit, Zuzya, old chap! You can't imagine what a treat's in store for you!"

In spite of Zuzya's attempts to amuse her, Angelika was glum and gazed at the stage with a far-away look in her eyes. From time to time she pushed her hair back carelessly in a way that suggested she would be only too glad to be rid of her tiresome companion. She did not even smile, as many did, when Golovatsky began his introductory speech.

"People who don't realize that youth can get fun and pleasure out of doing something useful are downright stupid!" were Golovatsky's opening words. What the audience was to see he called "only our first attempt to show in its true light the depravity of the old life that still surrounds us, and to brand for ever the aping of things foreign."

"The decadent music of the dancing-saloon and night club," said Golovatsky, "gives rise to feelings of impotence and apathy, it lowers a man's working ability. And it is no accident that our enemies use it as a

weapon against us. But while branding what is rotten and alien to us," he went on, "we must learn from what is good, seek it out and cherish it, show everything that is genuinely of the people."

Golovatsky's words, which seemed to promise a very unusual spectacle, were listened to attentively by the large audience in the club hall. Besides the young people of the works, there were old workers and their wives among the audience. In the front row I saw Rudenko, the director, Flegontov, and Kazurkin, the secretary of the Town Party Committee.

I had heard Kazurkin speak once at a production meeting in the foundry, when he had called on us to combat spoilage and not to hold up the other shops. Turunda had told me that during the Civil War Kazurkin had been with Budyonny's cavalry in its campaign from the Azov steppes right across the Ukraine to Lvov. It was not for nothing that he wore on his white tunic the gleaming Order of the Red Banner, a very rare award in those days.

Kazurkin had helped us to prepare the show. After Golovatsky went to see him, everything was available— materials for the costumes, make-up men, balalaikas from the local watermen's club, Caucasian daggers that the militia had taken from captured Makhno bandits...

As soon as Golovatsky had finished speaking, I slipped over to the signal bell. From there I could watch not only what was happening on the stage, but also what took place in the hall. True, it was rather difficult for me to read the large notice bearing the title of the show which was revealed as the curtain went up:

CHARLESTONIADA or DOPE FOR DANDIES

The club decorators had reproduced the Rogale-Piontkovskaya dancing-saloon in detail. The tall papier mache columns placed along the sides of the stage were as greasy and finger-marked as they were in reality.

The title notice was raised out of sight and a pianist in a long dress-coat appeared on the stage—an exact replica of the pianist at Madame Rogale-Piontkovskaya's. In a squeaky affected voice he started praising the dances that the "mademoiselles" and "messieurs" could learn at the saloon for fifty kopeks an evening. Then he skipped over to the piano and the rattle of the Charleston filled the hall.

To the sound of the music, dancing couples began to appear from the wings.

First a titter of amusement skimmed across the hall like a puff of wind heralding a storm, then the titters swelled into loud laughter, and soon the audience was laughing fit to break every window in the club. The club artists had done a fine job! Working with the make-up men they had made the dancing couples into almost photographic images of the regulars at Madame's saloon.

Madeleine the plater jerked wildly on to the stage. She was wearing a sailor's suit with a broad collar and her fringe was so low that she seemed to have no forehead at all. Her friends were kicking their feet in such high heels that the audience could scarcely understand how they managed to move on them at all.

The girls' lips were vividly painted, not in "bows," however, as fashion demanded, but in huge ribbons! Nearly every dancer had a lurid blob under her nose, about the size of a hen's egg. And the coiffures the make-up men had given them! Fringes reaching to their plucked eyebrows, turbans of hair rising in spirals on top of their heads, birds' nests protruding from the back of their necks, spaniel curls in huge abundance.

One of the dancers, with bare legs, had pinned a green doll in her hair and cross-belted herself with two red fox furs tied at the back by their tails.

All the male dancers were Charlestoning in narrow, pipe-like trousers that seemed in danger of splitting at any moment.

The audience quickly guessed who was represented by a man with greying hair parted in the middle and plastered flat with hair-cream. He was dressed in cream flannels and a grey jacket, and his face had been darkened with a thick layer of powder mixed with black grease. The grey-haired dancer's face positively glistened. On his arm dangled a carved walking-stick.

Without a doubt this was Mavrodiadi the lawyer. Half-Greek, half-Turk—no one knew how he had come to be in Tavria—Mavrodiadi patrolled the noisy Avenue at a certain hour every day. Many were the pairs of shoes he must have worn out on its pavements. In winter he would sit in an office somewhere coining money by giving legal advice to private traders on how to avoid paying their heavy taxes, or wangling inheritances for maiden aunts, and when spring came round, as soon as the first holiday-makers appeared, he would creep out on to the Avenue again. There he would get acquainted with young girls new to the town, read their palms and tell their fortunes with cards, go down to the beach with them, and lie about by the water's edge until dusk in his red fez with a black tassel. In the evening, after taking a turn along the Avenue, he would march off to the saloon swinging his walking-stick, kiss Madame's hand and dance until midnight.

But the most dangerous thing of all was that this old rake enjoyed the company of young people.

We hoped that Mavrodiadi's clientele would be considerably reduced after this evening, for the best way of exposing rakes and swindlers is to ridicule them in public.

At that moment, yet another belated pair of dancers popped out of the wings. The audience roared—a girl with her hair done in a bird's nest on the back of her head had walked in accompanied by Zuzya Trituzny!

He had been fitted out with checked trousers, but they reached only to his knees, like football shorts. He was wearing orange football boots, so that nobody could have any doubts as to who he was meant to be. Everything had been copied—Zuzya's favourite hair style with rubicund neck bare almost to his pate; the bow-tie adorning a stiff collar. And all his mannerisms were there too—the affectedly polite inclination of his head, the sentimental, doe-eyed staring into the eyes of his partner. Abandoning the' Charleston from time to time, Pasha the carpenter, who was acting Trituzny, would pretend to be dribbling a football and bellow out all Zuzya's favourite foreign' words and football terms—"shoot!", "s'il vous ptaitl", "ach, charmant!", "aujour d'huil", "off-sidei".. .