Notes on the Cuff and Other Stories (2 page)

The novelist Yuri
Slyozkin
⁽⁴⁾
sat in a posh armchair. Everything in the room was
posh, so Yuri looked excruciatingly out of place there. His head shaven by
typhus was just like that boy's head described by Mark Twain
(
a
pepper-sprinkled egg ).
A moth-eaten army jacket
with a hole under the arm.
Grey puttees, one longer than the other, on
his legs.
A two-kopeck pipe in his mouth.
And fear
leap-
frogging
with anguish in his eyes.

"What's going to become of us?" I asked,
hardly recognising my own voice. After the second bout it was weak, reedy and
cracked.

"What's that?"

I turned round in bed and looked wretchedly out of the
window, where still naked branches were waving slowly. The exquisite sky
touched faintly by the fading sunset gave no reply, of course.
Slyozkin
was silent too, nodding his shorn head. In the
next room a dress rustled and a woman's voice whispered:

"The
Ingushes
will raid
the town tonight..."

Slyozkin
twitched in his chair and corrected her:

"The
Ossetians
,
not the
Ingushes
.
And tomorrow morning, not tonight."

The flasks behind the wall responded nervously.

"The
Ossetians
!
Oh, my God! That's terrible!"

"What difference does it make?"

"What difference? Ah, you don't know the local
customs.
When the
Ingushes
raid,
they raid.
But when the
Ossetians
raid, they
kill too."

"Will they kill everyone?"
Slyozkin
asked in a matter-of-fact voice, puffing on his
foul-smelling pipe.

"Goodness me!
What a strange person you are! Not everyone... Just
those who... Oh, dear, what's the matter with me! I forgot. We're disturbing
the patient."

A dress rustled. The lady of the house bent over me.

"I am not
dis-turb-ed
..."

"Nonsense,"
Slyozkin
retorted sharply.
"Nonsense!"

"What's nonsense?"

"All that about
Ossetians
and the rest of it.
Rubbish."
He puffed out a cloud of smoke.

My exhausted brain suddenly sang out:

Mamma! Mamma!
What we
gonna
do?

"And what precisely are we going to do?"

Slyozkin
grinned with his right cheek only, thought for a moment and had a burst
of inspiration.

"We'll open an ASS, an Arts Sub-Section!"

"What on earth is that?"

"What?"

"A sob-sexy on?"

"No, a sub-section!"

"Sub?"

"That's right."

"Why sub?"

"
Er
... well, you
see," he shifted around, "there's a Sec. of Ed. or Ed. Sec. Sec. Get
it? And this is a sub-section. Sub. Get it?"

"Sec. of Ed. Pin-head.
Barbousse
.
Screw loose."

The lady of the house let fly.

"Don't talk to him, for goodness sake! He'll get
delirious again..."

"Nonsense!" said Yuri sternly.
"Nonsense!
And all those
Mingrelians
and
Imere
...
What are they called?
Circassians
.
They're plain stupid!"

"Why?"

"They just rush about.
Shooting.
At the moon.
They won't rob anyone."

"But what'll happen?
To
us?"

"Nothing.
We'll open up..."

"The Arts?"

"That's right.
The whole lot.
Fine Arts.
Photo.
Lit.
and
Dram."

"I don't get it."

"Please don't talk,
Misha
dear! The doctor..."

"Tell you later! It'll be alright. I've been in
charge before. What do we care? We're a-political. We're Art!"

"And how shall we live?"

"We'll hide our money behind the carpet."

"What carpet?"

"In the town where I was in charge, we had a
carpet on the wall. And when we got paid, my wife and I used to hide it behind
the carpet. They were anxious times. But we ate.
Ate well.
Special rations."

"What about me?"

"You'll be ASS Lit.
head
.
Yes."

"What head?"

"Please,
Misha
. I beg
you!"

The night swims. Pitch black.
Can't
sleep.
The icon-lamp flickers anxiously.
Shots in the
distance.
My brain's on fire.

Everything's misty.

Mamma! Mamma!
What we
gonna
do?

Slyozkin's
building something.
Piling something up.
Fine Arts.
Photo.
Lit.
Dram.
Scram. Sam.
It's
photographic boxes. Why?
ASS Lit.
for
the writers.
Poor blighters.
Dram.
Ham.
Ingushes
gallop about on horseback, eyes flashing.
Pinching the boxes.
Dreadful racket.
Shooting at the moon.
Nurse injects my thigh with
camphor. A third bout!

"Help!
What'll happen? Let me go! I must get out..."

"Be quiet,
Misha
dear.
Be quiet!"

After the morphine the
Ingushes
disappear. The velvety night sways. The icon-lamp casts its divine light and
sings in a crystal voice:

Ma-
amma
! Ma-
amma
!

Sun. Clouds of dust behind carriage wheels.
People walking in and out of an echoing building.
A room on the fourth floor.
Two cupboards
with broken doors, some rickety tables.
Three young ladies with violet
lips bang away loudly at typewriters, stopping now and then to have a smoke.

In the very centre a writer snatched from death's jaws
fashions a sub-section out of the chaos.
Fine.
Dram.
Actors' bluish faces keep pestering him.
Asking for money.

After the typhus a rocking
swell
.
Dizziness and nausea.
But I'm in charge.
ASS Lit.
head
.
Getting
to know the ropes.

"ASS head.
Sec. of Ed. Lit.
Coll."

A man walks between the tables.
In a
grey army jacket and monstrous riding-breeches.
He plunges into groups
that fall apart. Like a torpedo boat ploughing the waves. Everyone quails under
his glance.
Except the young ladies.
They're not
afraid of anything.

He comes up.
Eyes boring into me, he
plucks out my heart, places
it in his palm and scrutinises it carefully.
But it is as clear as crystal.

He puts it back and smiles graciously.

"ASS Lit.
head
?"

"That's it."

He goes on his way.
Seems a good
chap.
Only what's he doing here? Doesn't look like Dram. And certainly
not like
Lit
.

A poetess arrives.
Black beret.
Skirt buttoned down the side and stockings falling down. She's brought a poem.

Dee,
dee
, deep down,

In my heart

Beats a dynamo-machine.

Dee,
dee
, deep down.

Not a bad poem. We'll have it ... you know ... what do
they call it ... recited at a concert.

The poetess looks pleased. Not a bad young
lassy
. But why doesn't she hitch up her stockings?

Everything was fine. Everything was dandy.

And then I got the push all because of
Pushkin
, Alexander
Sergeyevich
,
God rest his soul!

It was like this.

A workshop of local poets nested in the office, under
the spiral staircase. A young man in blue student trousers with a
dynamo-machine in his heart, a doddery old man who started writing poems at the
age of fifty-nine, and a few others.

In sidled a dare-devil with an aquiline nose and a big
revolver in his belt. He was the first to thrust his ink-intoxicated pen into
the hearts of those who had escaped the knife and turned up for old time's sake
at the track—the former Summer Theatre. To the incessant booming of the muddy
Terek
, he cursed lilac and thundered:

You've had enough songs about moonlight and

sweet
things.

Now I'll sing you one about emergency meetings.

It was most impressive!

Then another one read a paper on
Gogol
and Dostoyevsky wiping them both off the face of the earth. He spoke
disapprovingly of
Pushkin
, but in passing.
Promising to devote a special report to him.
One night in June he tore
Pushkin
off a
strip.
For his white trousers, his "
I
face the future without
fear..."
⁽⁵⁾
,
his Gentleman-of-the-
Bedchamberism
,
⁽⁶⁾
his elementary rebel, and in general for his
"pseudo-
revolutionism
and hypocrisy",
obscene poetry and gadding around after women...

Bathed in sweat I sat in the front
row of the stuffy hall and heard the speaker rip
Pushkin's
white trousers to shreds. When, after refreshing his dry gullet with a glass of
water, he finally suggested throwing
Pushkin
into the
stove, I smiled. I must confess. It was an enigmatic smile, blast it! A smile's
not a bird in a bush, is it?

"Then you defend him."

"I don't want to!"

"You haven't any civic courage."

"Is that so? Alright, I'll
defend him."

And so I did, damn it! I spent three days and three
nights preparing.
Sitting at an open window by a lamp with a
red shade.
On my lap lay a book written by the man with eyes of fire.

False wisdom pales at the first tiny glimmer

Of true wisdom's ne'er-fading light...
⁽⁷⁾

It was He who said:

Indifferent
alike to praise or blame...
⁽⁸⁾

No, not indifferent! No. I'll show them! I'll show
them alright. I shook my fist at the inky night.

And show them I did! There was commotion in the
workshop. The speaker was out for the count. In the eyes of the audience I read
a silent, jubilant:

"Finish him
off!".....................................................................

*

………………………………………………………………

But afterwards!
Afterwards...

I was a "wolf in sheep's clothing".
A "
toff
".
A
"bourgeois
yes-man"....................................................................