Rasputin and Other Ironies Page 2

  Everything was out in the open. My lines of retreat had been cut off. This was rock bottom. Since nothing could be more terrifying, I could now give serious thought to my situation.

  Why exactly had I decided the play was so very bad? If it was bad, they wouldn’t have accepted it. That they had accepted it could only be thanks to the good luck of the fool whose name I had taken. If I had signed the play “Kant” or “Spinoza”, they would surely have rejected it.

  I needed to pull myself together and go to the rehearsal. Otherwise they might try to track me down through the police.

  Along I went. The play was being directed by Yevtikhy Karpov, someone suspicious of any kind of innovation, a man of the old school.

  “Box set, three doors, and your lines from memory—rattle them off facing the audience.”

  He greeted me with condescension. “So you’re the author, are you? All right. Find yourself a seat and keep quiet.”

  Need I say that I did indeed keep quiet? Up on stage a rehearsal was underway. The young actress Grinyova (whom I sometimes still see here in Paris—she has changed so little that when I look at her my heart flutters as it did back then…) was in the lead role. She was holding a crumpled handkerchief that she kept pressing to her mouth—the latest mannerism among young actresses.

  “Stop muttering under your breath!” shouted Karpov. “Face the audience! You don’t know your lines! You don’t know your lines!”

  “Yes I do!” said Grinyova, offended.

  “Oh do you? All right then. Prompter—not another word from you! Let her stew in her own juice—like a sprat in a pan!”

  Karpov was a bad psychologist. No one would remember their lines after intimidation like that.

  Oh this is dreadful, I thought, really dreadful! Why had I even written this dreadful play? Why had I sent it to the theatre? The actors were suffering—being forced to learn all this claptrap of mine by heart. And now the play was going to fail and the papers would write, “It is a shame that a serious theatre should be wasting its time on such nonsense when people are going hungry.” And then, when I went to my grandmother’s for Sunday breakfast, she would give me a stern look and say, “We’ve been hearing things about you. I very much hope they’re untrue.”

  Nevertheless I carried on going to the rehearsals. I was amazed by the friendly way the actors greeted me—I had expected them to hate and despise me. Karpov laughed loudly and said, “The poor author’s wasting away. She’s getting thinner and thinner.”

  The “poor author” held her tongue and tried not to weep. And then came the point of no return. The day of the performance. To go or not to go? I decided to go but to find myself a place somewhere at the very back where no one would see me. After all, Karpov was capable of anything. If the play flopped, he might stick his head out from the wings and shout, “Leave this theatre and don’t come back, you fool!”

  My little play followed a long and extremely tedious four-act work by some novice. The audience was bored—yawning and whistling its disapproval. Then, after the last jeering whistle and after the interval, up went the curtain and my characters began to prattle away.

  “Utterly dreadful!” I was thinking. “What a disgrace!”

  But the audience laughed once, laughed again, then began to enjoy themselves. I promptly forgot I was the author and laughed along with everyone else as old Yevgenia Yablochkina played a woman general marching around the stage in uniform and tooting martial fanfares with no instrument but her lips. All in all, the actors were very good. They did my play proud.

  “Author!” the audience began calling out. “Author!”

  What was I to do?

  Up went the curtain. The cast took a bow and made a show of searching for the author.

  I leapt from my seat and began to make my way down the aisle towards the wings. Then the curtain came back down, so I returned to my seat. But once again the audience called for the author, and once again the curtain went up, the cast took a bow and someone on stage shouted, “But where’s the author?” Once again I made for the wings, but once again the curtain came back down. And so it went on. I carried on dashing backwards and forwards until someone with a shock of wild hair (I learnt later that this was Alexander Kugel) grabbed me by the arm and bellowed, “For the love of God—she’s right here!”

  But at this point the curtain, after going up for the sixth time, came down once and for all. The audience began to disperse.

  The following day I had my first ever conversation with a journalist, who had come to my apartment to interview me.

  “What are you working on right now?”

  “I’m making some shoes for my niece’s doll…”

  “Oh really? And what does your pseudonym mean?”

  “It’s… the name of a foo… I mean it’s a surname.”

  “Someone said it’s from Kipling.”

  Saved! I was saved! There is indeed such a name in Kipling. And not only that, but in Trilby there’s a little ditty that goes:

  Taffy was a Wale-man,

  Taffy was a thief…1

  It all came back to me straightaway. Yes, of course, it was from Kipling!

  Beneath the photograph of me that appeared in the newspapers was the word “Taffy”.2

  That was it. There was no going back.

  And so it remains.

  1931

  Translated by Anne Marie Jackson

  Notes

  1 Taffy is the name of a young British art student in Trilby, a novel by George du Maurier; it is also the name of a young girl in one of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. And “Taffy was a Welshman” is the first line of a well-known English nursery rhyme. Teffi gives these two lines in English, misquoting and misspelling as here. She is, presumably, reproducing how she used to say these lines as a child. In this apparently autobiographical article Teffi is, as always, being playful. In reality, she first used the pseudonym “Teffi” as early as 1901, six years before the first performances of The Woman Question (Elena Trubilova, in Na ostrove moikh vospominanii (Tikhvin, 2016), p. 12).

  2 Not all English vowel sounds have exact Russian equivalents. The standard Russian transliteration of “Taffy” is “Тэффи” (Teffi).

  My First Visit to an Editorial Office

  My first steps as an author were terrifying. I had never, in any case, intended to become a writer, even though everyone in our family had written poetry from childhood on. For some reason this activity seemed horribly shameful, and should any of us find a brother or sister with a pencil, a notebook and an inspired expression, we would immediately shout out, “You’re writing! You’re writing!”

  The guilty party would begin to make excuses and the accusers would hop around, jeering, “You’re writing! You’re writing!”

  The only one of us above suspicion was our eldest brother, a creature suffused with sombre irony.1 But one day, when he was back at the lycée after the summer holidays, we found scraps of paper in his room covered in poetic exclamations, and one line repeated over and over again:

  “Oh Mirra, Mirra, palest moon!”

  Alas! He, too, was writing poetry.

  This discovery made quite an impression on us. And who knows, it may even have influenced my older sister Masha’s choice of pen name. When she became famous, she adopted the name “Mirra Lokhvitskaya”.

  My own dream was to become an artist. I had even, on the advice of a businesslike friend from kindergarten, written this wish down on a piece of paper, chewed it a little, and thrown it out of the window of a train. My kindergarten friend assured me that this was a “foolproof” method.

  When my older sister began to publish her own poetry after leaving college, I sometimes went with her to the editorial office on the way back from school. My nanny2 would come too, carrying my satchel of school books.

  And while my sister was sitting in the editor’s office (I don’t remember now what journal it was, but I remember that the editors were Pyotr Gnedich and Vsevolod Sol
ovyov),3 Nanny and I would wait in the outer room.

  I would sit a little way away from Nanny, so that nobody would guess that she was accompanying me. I would assume an inspired expression, and imagine how everybody—the delivery boy and the copy-typist and all the would-be contributors—would take me for a writer.

  The only thing was, the chairs in the reception were inconveniently high, and my feet didn’t touch the ground. However, the inspired expression on my face more than made up for this handicap—and for my short dress and school pinafore.

  By the age of thirteen, I already had some literary works under my belt. I had written some verses on the arrival of the Tsaritsa4 and on the anniversary of the founding of our school. These latter—hastily composed in the form of a high-flown ode—contained a stanza for which I was later made to suffer a great deal:

  And may for future generations

  The light of truth shine, like a sun,

  In this great shrine of education,

  For many, many years to come.

  My sister tormented me for a whole year over that “great shrine of education”. If I pretended I had a headache and wasn’t going into school, she would immediately start up a chant: “Nadya, Nadya, why aren’t you going to the great shrine of education? How can you bear the light of truth to shine without you?”

  And then, when I was sixteen or seventeen, I wrote a comical poem called “The Song of Margarita”, and, without showing it to anyone, of course, I decided to take it along to the journal Oskolki.

  The editor of Oskolki was Leikin. At that time he was already very old and in poor health. And he did, in fact, die soon afterwards.

  I went to the editorial office. It was terrifying. Particularly when I was on the staircase, about to ring the bell. The door was small and dirty. There was a smell of cabbage pie, something I can’t abide. I rang the bell—and thought, “Quick! Run away!”

  But then I heard a scrabbling sound from behind the door. Somebody was taking the chain off the hook. The door opened a crack, and an eye peeped through. Then another eye. Then the door opened the rest of the way.

  “Who do you want?”

  It was a very thin, elderly lady with an Orenburg shawl worn crosswise over her chest.

  “I’ve co-come to-to see Leikin.”

  “Sir isn’t here yet,” said the lady. “Come in. Sit down and wait. He will be here presently.”

  She ushered me into a tiny room and went away. From there I could see another room, also rather small, with a writing desk and, above it, a stuffed bird.

  Above the desk, a stuffed bird

  gawps at the editor without a word.

  I waited a long time. Occasionally the lady would come back and, stroking the front of her shawl with her bony hands, would whisper, “Just a little longer. He won’t be long now.”

  Then I heard the doorbell. A stamping of feet, a coughing and a wheezing. I could make out the words:

  “Who?”

  “What?”

  “Eh?”

  “Why?”

  “For me?”

  “Damn!”

  Then the wheezing stopped, and once again the thin lady came in and said in a nervous whisper, “Sir still needs to warm up.” Then she went out again. I sat and thought how awful it was to lead a literary life.

  Once again, the thin lady came in, and, clearly feeling sorry for me and hoping to cheer me up, she whispered, “Sir still hasn’t quite warmed up.”

  Such a kind woman! I wanted to put my arms around her neck, so that we could weep in each other’s arms. She went out again. Oh heavens! I so wanted to leave! But I didn’t dare leave now. Here she was again, “All over now. He’s done.”

  At first I didn’t realize what she meant. For a moment I thought Leikin had died. I got to my feet, horrified.

  “Don’t fret yourself,” said the lady. “Sir will see you now.”

  I frowned, then stepped forward. After all, he wasn’t going to kill me. In an armchair, in front of the stuffed bird, sat a thickset, crook-shouldered, apparently cross-eyed man with a black beard. He seemed very gloomy.

  “To what do I owe the honour of this visit?” he asked, not looking at me. “What do you want?”

  “Poetry,” I mumbled.

  “What poetry?”

  “‘The Song of Margarita’.”

  “Eh? I don’t think we’ve ever had that here. Can you give me a clearer idea of what you mean?”

  “I wrote it. Here it is.”

  He held out his hand, still not looking at me. I thrust my sheet of paper into it.

  “Well?” he said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Well—goodbye. You’ll be able to read the answer in our ‘post bag’.”5

  A month later, I read in the Oskolki “post bag”: “‘The Song of Margarita’ has nothing to recommend it.”

  This was my first step as a writer. Later, by way of a secret triumph over that angry (albeit by then deceased) editor, I managed to get it printed no fewer than four times, in a number of publications.

  Though, I think, had I been an editor myself, I wouldn’t have printed it even once.

  1929

  Translated by Rose France

  Notes

  1 It is unclear whether Teffi had one or two elder brothers. There is documentary evidence only for one elder brother, Nikolai Lokhvitsky (1867–1933), who attended military school and by the end of the First Word War had attained the rank of lieutenant general. Here, however, we have an elder brother attending a lycée rather than a military school and there are two other stories (“Love” and “The Scarecrow”) in which Nikolai is presented as the second of two brothers (Haber, chapter 1). The biographical truth is, at present, impossible to establish with certainty. On the one hand, Teffi presents her stories simply as stories, not as biographical memoirs; on the other hand, it is odd that she so often mentions having two brothers.

  2 Typically a peasant woman employed first as a wet-nurse to a baby and then kept on as a household servant. Often she was more deeply involved with a child’s life than its mother.

  3 The illustrated journal Sever (The North), founded in 1887.

  4 Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya studied in the Liteiny Girls’ School in Mokhovaya Street, St Petersburg. The school celebrated its twentieth jubilee in 1884. The Tsaritsa would have been Maria Fyodorovna, wife of Alexander III.

  5 Journals of the time often had a “post bag”, a section where authors of manuscripts submitted for approval were publicly offered advice and criticism.

  PART II

  Staging Posts

  Liza

  The three of us were sitting together: I, my sister Lena, and Liza, the priest’s daughter,1 who used to come to our house to have lessons, and compete with us to be seen as the most diligent and obedient pupil.

  Today there were no lessons and we were not allowed to play. Today was a solemn, anxious day—Holy Saturday.2

  We had to sit quietly, not bother or pester anybody, not fight, and not fidget or kneel on our chairs. Everything was difficult, complicated and extremely disagreeable. The shadow of pain and mortification hung over the entire day.

  Everyone was busy, irritable, in a hurry. Our governess with the red blotches on her cheeks was running up a blouse for herself on the sewing machine. Huh! As if it made any difference to her pockmarked nose. Nanny had gone into the big girls’ room to iron pinafores. My elder sisters were sitting in the dining room, decorating eggs. They greeted me in their usual way: “The very last person we want in here! Won’t you take her away, Nanny?”

  I tried to stand my ground but promptly knocked over a cup of paint with my elbow, and, with the assistance of Nanny, who came bustling in, was returned to the nursery. And in the midst of this debacle I found out that our parents wouldn’t be taking us to church that evening for the Easter Vigil.

  I was so furious I didn’t even cry. I just said sardonically, “We get dragged along for confession all right. They take the best—and l
eave the worst for us.”

  Despite my brilliant rejoinder, the enemy prevailed; we had to retreat to the nursery.

  Just then, as ill luck would have it, Lena and I were in the midst of a heated theological debate—on the subject of robbers and prayers. The priest had told us that before beginning any task, we should always say a prayer. I was immediately struck by a difficult problem: when a robber is about to kill someone, shouldn’t he say a prayer first? After all, killing is his task. But Lena argued that a robber didn’t need to say a prayer first, since he’d be forgiven for all his sins in one go.

  There was no one we could ask, and we weren’t allowed to fight. What could we do?

  At last, Liza arrived.

  Liza had a thin, taut face. Her big, pale, bulging eyes always bore a look of startled inspiration. She saw everything two or three times larger than life, and told lies as if she lied for a living.

  She was a year older than me. She had already been twice to confession. Lena and I looked on her with respect.

  We knew every detail about Liza’s home life, all of which was quite fascinating.

  Liza had an uncle, a seminary student, Pyotr Yakovlevich, who had once drunk the milk of four cows. He had arrived to find no one at home and all the milk from that evening’s milking standing in the porch, and he had drunk the lot.

  Also, Liza’s family had four golden grand pianos at home, but they were hidden in the hayloft, so that nobody could see them.

  Also, nobody ever ate dinner at Liza’s house. Instead, there was a big cupboard in the hall that was always full of roast chickens. If anyone was hungry, all he had to do was to poke his head into the cupboard, eat a chicken and go on his way.

  Also, Liza had fourteen velvet dresses, but she only wore them at night so that nobody would see them. In the daytime she hid them in the kitchen under the big pot they used for making pastry.