The White Guard, Page 33

My companion and I exchanged glances.

  'You lived on the first floor, then?'

  'Yes. And his water was always dripping on to our heads. One day the ceiling almost caved in, so my father, a very decent, well-educated man - and he was the landlord, after all: they rented the apartment from us . . .' (we exchanged looks again) '. . . went upstairs and said: "Look here Misha, you must see to those faucets of yours, we're being flooded out downstairs . . ." And Misha was so rude to him in reply, so rude . . .'

  But we never heard exactly what it was that Misha had said, because at that moment the conversation was interrupted by the blond lady's daughter, combing her mass of golden hair as she came in from the passage.

  'Why all these details, mother?'

  Her mother looked rather embarrassed, although she said at once that she saw nothing wrong in all these details, they were simply an illustration of one side of Misha's character, and for the third time my friend and I glanced at each other.

  'So you lived on the first floor? And your back door was at basement level?'

  'Yes, that's why the water dripped through on to us.'

  It was obvious: the first floor, the landlord . . . Absolutely clear. We were talking to none other than the daughter of the owner of the Turbins' house, Vasily Ivanovich Lisovich, alias Vasilisa.

  The detailed, and in the case of Mikhail Bulgakov none too

  sympathetic analysis which our hostess gave us raised the question in our minds: had she read The White Guard? She had obviously seen the play based on it, The Days of the Turbins, when the Moscow Art Theater had taken it on tour to Kiev immediately before the war (her son saw it, at any rate: it had been impossible to get tickets, but as soon as he had said that he was the grandson of the man who had owned the house where the Bulgakovs had lived, they had given him a ticket at once). In short, we assumed that she knew the play, but the whole point was that Vasilisa, her father, is not in the play: he is not even mentioned. But he is in the novel. Vasilisa might have read it, but he was unlikely to have wanted his children to read it . . .

  'There's no getting away from it,' the lady of the house smiled sadly as she folded the net curtains, 'we and the Bulgakovs were rather like the Montagues and the Capulets ... So on the whole we didn't . . .'

  It further transpired that she had something of a grudge against Bulgakov not only as a tenant but as a writer as well. It so happened that in the late twenties or early thirties, when the government requisitioned all privately-held gold coinage, one of their neighbours who lived just across the street remembered that in some novel or other Misha had written about a certain house-owner who had hoarded some money; so, if this turned out to be true . . . There was no such hoard; but all the same, the story had led to some unpleasant consequences for her father. Why did Misha need to make his identity so plain?

  Both of us involuntarily looked out of the window: where was the tree, the acacia, from which the Petlyurovite bandit had spied on Vasilisa's efforts to conceal his belongings in a hiding place in the wall? But we were unable to find it, then or later. After all, forty years had passed. On the other hand, we did find the gap between the two houses, Nos. 13 and 11, where Nikolka had hidden the biscuit tin containing the pistols, officers' epaulettes and the portrait of the Tsarevich Alexei. And even the planks of the fence were broken, just as if the thieves had crawled through that very gap only today or yesterday.

  Today? Yesterday? The day before yesterday? Suddenly everything was confused, mixed-up, displaced . . .

  In this same room where we were now sitting, with its three windows on to the street, with the same view on to the hillside which had not changed at all since then (except for the disappearance of the acacia which had cast its shade over the sitting-room), in this same sitting room there had lived a tall blue-eyed man, ironic and caustic, who used to walk rapidly up and down, tossing back his hair, who had then gone away to Moscow and had never come back here again ... In this same sitting room, which in those days had pinkish wallpaper, with its cream-colored blinds, many years ago on a freezing December night three officers, one cadet, and a silly young man who had had been abandoned by his wife were playing whist, while a man lay in the next room delirious with typhus, and while at the same time, downstairs on the first floor, a gang of Petlyura's men were robbing the landlord, after which the wretched man had run upstairs and fainted, and they had thrown cold water over him . . .

  This same apartment, this same room had once smelled of pine branches at Christmas time, paraffin-wax candles had burned with a faint crackle, hortensias and langorous roses had stood in the pillar-shaped vase on the starched white tablecloth, the clock with the bronze shepherds had played its gavotte, while the black clock on the dining-room wall had echoed its chimes; the music of Faust lay open on the grand piano, the people drank wine and vodka, and sang an epithalamion to the god Hymen and another tune which reduced the landlord, with his Taras Bulba moustaches, and his wife, to terror: 'What the hell's going on? At three o'clock in the morning! This time I really am going to lodge a complaint!'

  And now all that is gone. The library, the falcon on the white sleeve of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, Louis XIV in his heavenly bower on the banks of a silken lake, the bronze lamp under its green shade - they are all gone; and the cold, carefully washed Dutch tiles stare sadly at the hissing blue flames and saucepans on the gas stove. And the people who lived on the first floor have moved upstairs and Vasilisa is presumably dead (in our embarrassment we somehow forgot to enquire about him), and Vasilisa's golden-haired grand-daughter lives in Nikolka's room (twenty-six square metres, as our hostess informed us).

  And what about Nikolka?

  Yes, Misha had two brothers. Nikolai and Vanya. Nikolai was the older of the two, the second son after Misha, quiet and serious, the most serious-minded of them all. He died in the January of this year in Paris where he was a professor. It is quite something for a Russian emigre to be a professor in Paris. He was very clever, and was regarded as the cleverest of them when they had lived here. And Vanya? Vanya was also in Paris, but he was not a professor . . . He had played in a balalaika band, or something of that sort. He was the youngest of them all and was probably still alive . . . two of the sisters were still living, both of them in Moscow. One was seriously ill, and they still occasionally corresponded with the other sister, Nadya. When she had been in Moscow she had been to see her. Not long ago her picture had been in a newspaper, taken against the background of Misha's library. His library was still intact. But Misha was dead . . .

  At this point our hostess stopped ironing and gave us a searching and mistrustful look:

  'He's become famous, you say?'

  'Yes, he has . . .'

  She shook her head.

  'Who would have thought it? You see, he was so unlucky ... It's true, Nadya did write to me not long ago that something of his was being published and lots of people were reading it . . . But it was all so long ago . . .'

  The children, a boy and a girl, burst in once more and were chased out again. The husband idly looked for something in the cupboard and sat down again, although he was really supposed to go out. The daughter who was still combing out her hair, tried to break into the conversation - why hadn't her mother told us anything about Lancia? But here, for all her garrulity, her mother suddenly balked - there was nothing interesting in that story. The daughter assured us that it was very interesting, at least to her it was. But her mother showed a strange obstinacy. All we learned was that Lancia had been the owner of the Hotel d'Europe on what was formerly Imperial Square (this piece of information was the second and final sentence spoken by the husband), that he had a country villa in Buch opposite the Bulgakovs' villa, and that he had a conservatory . . . That's all, she said, nothing interesting, as you can see. We realised that there was something interesting behind it, but for some private reason she did not want to tell us about what had obviously been some complication in the triangula
r relationship between the Bulgakovs, Lancia and Vasilisa, and we did not press her.

  On the whole my friend and I proved to be incompetent reporters. We forgot to take a camera with us, we had sat there, I in the armchair and he on the divan, as if we had been strapped down, we never went into the other rooms, and we failed to ask about the fate of Vasilisa . . . And yet perhaps that is as it should be. After all, we were not reporters, and what we did find out was interesting enough. And I can photograph the house any time I like - it will be there for a long time yet.

  That was all.

  We said goodbye and left, promising to come back again. But I doubt if we ought to.

  At present I am curious about one thing only: will the inhabitants of that little hillside house read about the events which took place in it almost fifty years ago?3

  As we climbed back up St Andrew's Hill, thrilled yet saddened, we tried to draw some kind of conclusions. Conclusions about what? Well, about everything. The past, the present, things that never were. At Yalta in the summer of 1966 we read Yermolinsky's memoirs of Bulgakov, which have just been published in the magazine Teatr: they are very sad, not to say tragic. We had just been exploring the haunts of Bulgakov's youth, we still had to visit

  3. Events ? What events ? The White Guard is fiction. But what fiction, when I can quite seriously and spontaneously write a sentence like the one printed above. And I have decided not to alter it, but just to add this footnote.

  the erstwhile First Gimnaziya4 (the building is now part of Kiev University), on whose main staircase Alexei died (on the Moscow Art Theater stage), we would go to the delicatessen store on Teatralnaya Street which was once Madame Anjou's shop, Le Chic Parisien, with its bell that rang every time the door was opened, then we planned to try for the nth time to find the house on Malo-Provalnaya Street. Just around the corner of 'the most fantastic street in the world' - a moss-grown wall, a gate, a brick path, another gate, still another, a garden of snow-covered lilac bushes, a lantern in front of an old-fashioned porch, the gentle light of a tallow candle in a candlestick, a portrait with gold epaulettes, Julia . . . Julia Alexandrovna Reiss . . . No sign of her. And the house was not there either. I had reconnoitred the whole of Malo-Podvalnaya Street. There had once been, at the far end of a courtyard, a wooden house that roughly corresponded to Bulgakov's description complete with verandah with colored glass panes, but it had long since vanished. In its place there was a new multi-storey stone building, looking hideously out of place in that crooked little street, while alongside it a six hundred feet high television mast thrust itself skywards . . .

  As we walked away up St Andrew's Hill we wondered why neither Bulgakov nor any of his brothers and sisters had ever felt drawn to come back here. His brothers, of course, could hardly have done so: Nikolka was dead, buried in some Parisian cemetery, whilst Vanya . . . Could it be that I had seen him, even met him? I was once in Paris, in a Russian restaurant not far from the Boulevard Saint-Michel. It was called 'Le vodka'. They had served real vodka there, which is not so common in normal French restaurants, some elderly people at the next table who had had a little to drink had sung old Russian songs, and on a little stage in the corner six balalaika players in blue silk Russian shirts had played three encores of 'Ochi chyorniye' ... I had talked to them; all except one were Russian. They didn't tell me their surnames,

  4. In pre-revolutionary Russia a state secondary school, originally modelled on the Prussian Gymnasium and roughly equivalent to an English grammar school.

  But all of them wanted to know how they could return to Russia. Perhaps one of them was Vanya Bulgakov, the man who for me and for all of us was - Nikolka Turbin? If he was playing 'Ochi chyorniye' on the balalaika now, might he not have played an army marching song to the guitar as a cadet in 1918?

  How I long for a sequel to The White Guard! A childish curiosity makes me want desperately to know what happened afterwards, what fate befell the Turbins and their friends after 1918. Exile? For Nikolka the answer is clearly yes. As for Myshlaevsky - I don't know. And what about Shervinsky and Elena? And Alexei? Did he write The Days of the Turbins and The White Guard? And die in 1940, so long before the triumphal recognition of his writing which came twenty-five years later?

  How I regret now not having known Bulgakov. How keenly I long to know the how, the where and the why in the genesis of his novel.

  In 1923 his mother died of typhus. The White Guard was begun in 1923. And it opens with the funeral of the Turbins' mother: 'For the reigning head of the family, their adored mother, was no longer with them.'

  I am just re-reading The Master and Margarita, and I now understand very clearly the real-life origin of the flood caused by Margarita in Latunsky's apartment.

  And Maxudov in The Theatrical Novel is not writing Black Snow but The White Guard:'... It's evening, the lamp is burning; it has a fringed shade. Music lies open on the grand piano. Someone is playing Faust. Suddenly Faust stops and a guitar starts playing. Who is playing it? Here he comes, with the guitar in his hands . . .'5

  Nikolka . . . Nikolka again . . . Greetings, Nikolka, old friend of my youth . . .

  There I've said it: The friend of my youth, it appears, was no more and no less than a White officer-cadet. But I cannot reject

  5. M. Bulgakov Black Snow. A Theatrical Novel. (Hodder and Stough-ton; London 1965), p. 63.

  him or deny him, nor his elder brother. Norhis sister, nor his brother's friends ...

  For I fell in love with those people and I love them to this day. I love them for their honesty, their nobility and their bravery, and ultimately for the tragedy of their position. I love them, just as the hundreds of thousands of people loved them who saw the play at the Moscow Art Theater.6 And among them was Stalin. According to the M.A.T. records he saw The Days of the Turbins no less than fifteen times! And he could hardly be called the keenest of theatergoers . . .

  The Turbins' apartment was destroyed by fire at Minsk in 1941. And although it rose from the ashes again thirteen years later, this time not in one but in three versions (the play was revived in Moscow, in Tbilisi and in Novosibirsk), for me there was only one genuine one, the set (hateful word for something so real!) designed by the artist Ulyanov. It is gone forever. Just as the actors in the original cast, Khmelyov, Dobronravov, Kudryavtsev, are gone for ever, the ones who first made us fall in love with the real-life (or maybe they were fictional, well perhaps half- or quarter-fictional -God, I've made the same mistake again!) heroes of Bulgakov's play.

  We have known them so long - forty years in fact (incidentally we are now as far away in time - even three years longer - from the last M.A.T. production of the play as was that performance from the events it describes). Why has our friendship with them not only not waned over so many years (for they have acquired new friends too) but actually grown stronger? Why did I love them even more when I saw the revived production?

  At first I could not give a precise answer to that question. Now I can.

  I loved the Turbins even more just because it was they who first introduced me to Bulgakov.

  Forty years ago, there's no point in concealing it, I was much less interested in Bulgakov (as a writer, and still less as a person)

  6. Not less than a million, in my estimation. In the fifteen years from 1926 to 1941 the play ran for 987 performances, with an audience of at least i.ooo people each time.

  than in his heroes. But now, when we have come to know so many more of his heroes, even including some who are devils and witches, I turn back in my mind to 1928, I am again sitting on the steps of the dress circle in the Moscow Art Theater and I give thanks to Alexei, to Elena and Nikolka, even to the Hetman Skoropadsky for having been the first to say to me: 'Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov, playwright . . .'

  I have never seen his play Moliere, but I have read his Life of Monsieur de Moliere. Bulgakov had no patrons, he had no Prince Conti, no Duke of Orleans, just as Moliere had no Art
istic Directors to contend with, but both of them were equally aware what a steep path the true artist had to climb.

  Bulgakov achieved fame (with all its problems) both early in his career and late. But here I must stop; for that is a subject for a separate piece of research, for which I am not equipped.

  My subject has been topography. I am proud (and surprised that no one did it before me) of having discovered 'The house of the Turbins', and when you come to Kiev I invite you to walk down the steep slope of St Andrew's Hill to No. 13, to glance into the backyard (be sure to notice the steps on the left, under the verandah, for it was just there that a shiver ran down poor Vasilisa's belly when he caught sight of Yavdokha, the beautiful milkmaid), and then to go uphill, cross the 'mediaeval' courtyard of Richard the Lionheart's Castle and to go up on to the hilltop, sit down on the edge of it, light a cigarette if you like, and admire the City which, even though he never came back to it, Bulgakov loved so much.