Notes on the Cuff and Other Stories (3 page)

So now I'm not head of
ASS Lit.
Or Dram.
I'm a
stray dog in an attic.
Hunched up.
Shuddering when the
bell rings at
night
.........................................................

Oh, dusty days! Oh, stuffy nights!

*

And in the summer of 1920 A. D. there did appear a
vision from
Tiflis
.
A young man, all broken and disjointed, with an aged wrinkled face,
arrived and offered his services as a brawler poet.
He brought with him
a slim volume like a wine price-list. The book contained his poems.

Lily-of-the-valley is rhymed with don't shilly-shally.

It's enough to drive you bonkers!

The young man took an instant dislike to me. He
brawled in the newspaper (page 4, column 4).
About me.
And about
Pushkin
.
Not about
anything else. He hates
Pushkin
more than me. It's
alright for
Pushkin
! He's passed into the great
beyond...

But I'll be squashed like a worm.

What a bloody awful town
Tiflis
is! A second one's arrived.
In a bronze collar.
Yes, bronze. And he spoke in a live
magazine like that. I'm not joking! In a bronze collar, see
!............................................................

The novelist
Slyozkin
has
been sent packing, regardless of his nation-wide reputation and his pregnant
wife. That one's taken his place.
So much for Lit.
and
Dram.
And money behind the
carpet..............................................................

The moon's in a corona. Yuri and I sit on the balcony
and look at the canopy of stars. But it doesn't help. In a few hours' time the
stars will fade and a ball of fire will flame up overhead. And we'll squirm
again like beetles on pins...

A high unbroken squeal can be heard through the
balcony door. Somewhere at the back of beyond, by the foot of a mountain, in a
strange town, a son has been born to starving
Slyozkin
in an absurdly, bestially cramped room. They have put him on the window-sill in
a box with the words:

"M-me Marie.
Modes et Robes."

And he whimpers in the box.

Poor child!

Poor us, not the child.

The mountains have hemmed us in.
Table
Mountain
sleeps under the moon. Far, far away in the north lie the endless plains... In
the south ravines, precipices, swirling rivers. Somewhere in the west is the
sea. Above it shines the
Golden Horn
...

...Have you seen the flies on Tangle-foot?

When the crying stops, we go into the cage.

Tomatoes.
A little black bread.
And
araki .
What filthy vodka! Disgusting! Still it does the trick.

And when all around is fast asleep, the writer reads
me his new novel. There's no one else to hear it. The night swims. He finishes,
wraps up the manuscript carefully and puts it under the pillow. There is no
writing-desk.

We whisper until the pale dawn.

What names are on our dry tongues! What names! How
Pushkin's
verse can soften spiteful souls. Beware of spite,
writers of
Russia
!
..................................................................

Truth comes only through suffering. That's right, rest
assured! But no one pays you or gives you food parcels for knowing the truth.
Sad, but so.

Yevreinov
⁽⁹⁾
arrived.
In an
ordinary white collar.
From the Black Sea on his way
to
Petersburg
.

There used to be such a city in
the north.

Does it still exist? The writer laughs and assures us
that it does. But it takes a long time to get there. Three years in a goods
van. My tired eyes feasted for a whole evening on his white collar. And for a
whole evening I listened to tales of adventure.

Brother writers,
your vocation...
⁽¹⁰⁾

He hadn't got a penny. His luggage had been stolen...

...On another evening at
Slyozkin's
,
the last, Nikolai Nikolayevich sat at the piano in the smoke-filled
drawing-room provided by the landlady. He endured the torment of inspection
with iron stamina. Four poets, a poetess and a painter (workshop) devoured him
decorously with their eyes.

Yevreinov
is an ingenious fellow.

"And now ' Musical Grimaces'..."

Turning his face to the keys, he began to play.
At first...
At first he gave us a visiting elephant playing
the piano, then a lovesick piano-tuner, a dialogue between steel and gold and,
finally, a polka.

Within ten minutes the workshop was totally incapacitated.
It no longer sat decorously, but rolled about hysterically with much waving of
hands and groaning...

...The man with the lively eyes went away. No more
grimaces!

*

A sudden gust of wind blew through, and they were
swept away like leaves.
One from
Kerch
to
Vologda
, another from
Vologda
to
Kerch
.
A
rumpled
Osip
appears with a suitcase, complaining
angrily:

"We'll never get there, and that's that!" Of
course you won't get there, if you don't know where you're going!

*

Yesterday
Riurik
Ivnev
⁽¹¹⁾
appeared.
On his way from
Tiflis
to
Moscow
.

"It's better in
Moscow
."

He travelled so much that one day he just lay down in
a ditch.

"I refuse to get up. Something must happen."

And so it did. A friend chanced to see him there, took
him home and gave him a meal.

Another poet went from
Moscow
to
Tiflis
.

It's better in
Tiflis
.

The third was
Osip
Mandelstam.
⁽¹²⁾
He arrived one
cloudy day, holding his head high like a prince. His laconic remarks devastated
us.

"Yes, but they don't pay..." Before I could
finish he had gone. I know not where...

The novelist
Pilnyak
⁽¹³⁾
went to
Rostov
in a flour train, wearing a
woman's cardigan.

"Is it better in
Rostov
?"

"No, I just want a rest!"

Eccentric — wears gold-rimmed spectacles.

*

Serafimovich
arrived from up north.
⁽¹⁴⁾

Tired eyes.
Hollow voice.
Gave a talk in
the workshop.

"Remember Tolstoy's kerchief on a stick. It keeps
catching,
then
fluttering again. As if it
were
alive... I once wrote an anti-drink label for a vodka
bottle.
Jotted down a phrase.
Crossed one word out and
put another over it. Thought a bit,
then
crossed that
one out too. And so on several times. But the phrase came out pat. Now they
write... They write in a funny way! You pick it up. Read it through. No!
Can't understand it.
You have another try — still no luck.
So you put it to one side..."

The local workshop sits by the wall
in
cor
pore.
Judging
from their eyes they don't understand it. That's their business!

Serafimovich's
left town...
Entr'acte.

The Sub-Section's decorator painted Anton
Pavlovich
Chekhov with a crooked nose and such a monstrous
pince-nez that from a distance he seemed to be wearing racing goggles.

We put him on a big easel.
A gingery-coloured
pavilion, a small table with a carafe and a lamp.

I read an introductory article "On Chekhovian
Humour". But perhaps because I hadn't eaten for three days or for some
other reason, my thoughts were rather sombre. The theatre was packed. Now and
then I lost the thread. I saw hundreds of blurred faces rising up to the dome.
And not a ghost of a smile on any of them.
Mind you, there
was some hearty applause. But I realised to my dismay that this was because I
had finished, and fled backstage in relief. That was two thousand in my pocket.
Now let someone else sweat it out. Going into the smoking-room, I heard a Red
Army
man complain
miserably: "To blazes with them
and their humour! We come to the
Caucasus
and
they won't leave us alone here either!"

He was quite right, that soldier from
Tula
. I hid away in
my favourite place, a dark corner behind the props room. A roar came from the
hall. Hurrah! They were laughing. Good for the actors! "Surgery"
saved the day and the story about the civil servant who sneezed.

Success! Success!
Sloyozkin
rushed into my rat corner and hissed, rubbing his hands:

"Write the second programme!"

It was decided to hold a
Pushkin
Evening after the Evening of Chekhovian Humour.

Yuri and I planned the programme lovingly.

"That blockhead can't draw,"
Slyozkin
fumed. "We'll ask Maria
Ivanovna
!"

I immediately feared the worst. In my opinion Maria
Ivanovna
draws about as well as I play the fiddle... I
concluded this when she first appeared in the Sub-Section saying she had
studied under the great N. himself. (She was immediately made Head of Fine
Arts.) But since I know nothing about painting, I kept quiet.

*

Exactly half an hour before the beginning I went into
the scenery room and stopped dead: there, staring at me from a gold
frame,
was
Nozdryov
.
⁽¹⁵⁾
He was perfect.
Crafty, goggling
eyes, even one side-board thinner than the other.
The illusion was so
complete, that I expected him to give a loud guffaw and say:

"Just got back from a fair, my
friend.
Congratulate me: gambled all my
money away!"

I don't know what my expression was like, but the
painter was mortally offended. She
blushed
a deep red
under the thick layer of powder and screwed up her eyes.

"You obviously ...
er
... don't like it, eh?"

"Oh, but I do! Ha-ha! It's very ... nice.
Very nice.
Only the side-whiskers..."

"What?
The side-whiskers?
You mean to say you've never seen
Pushkin
? Fancy
that! And you call yourself a writer! Tee-
hee
!
Perhaps you think he should be clean-shaven?"