Notes on the Cuff and Other Stories (8 page)

"Dinner is served."

But I was afraid to go down. I felt stupid, realised
there was a big misunderstanding. It wasn't me who wrote
War and Peace.
Yet I was sitting there. Sofia
Andreyevna
herself came up the wooden staircase and said:

"Come along. It's a vegetarian dinner."

Suddenly I lost my temper.

"What?
Vegetarianism?
Get some meat at once! I want a steak.
And a glass of
vodka."

She burst into tears. Then a
dukhobor
with a bushy ginger beard rushed up and
said to me reproachfully:

"Vodka?
Tut
-tut-tut! What are you
thinking of, Lev
Ivanovich
?"

"Not
Ivanovich
! Nikolayevich!
Get out of my house! Scram!
Away with all those
dukhobors !
"

There was a great commotion.

I woke up a sick and broken man. It was dusk. An
accordion was playing in the next room.

I went to the mirror. What a face. Ginger beard, white
cheekbones, red eyelids. But that was nothing compared to the eyes.
Glittering again.
That was bad.

*

Advice: beware of that glitter.
as
soon as it appears, borrow some money (not returnable), from a bourgeois, buy
some food and have a meal. Only don't eat too much to begin with. Just clear
soup and a little white bread on the first day. Take it easy.

I didn't like my dream either. It was a horrid dream.

Drank tea again.
Remembered last week.
On Monday I ate some potatoes with
vegetable oil and quarter of a pound of bread. Drank two glasses of tea with
saccharine. On Tuesday I had nothing to eat and drank five glasses of tea. On
Wednesday I borrowed two pounds of bread from a plumber. Drank tea, but ran out
of saccharine.
Had a splendid lunch on Thursday.
Went
round to see some friends at

2 p. m.
The door was opened by a maid in a white apron.
Strange
sensation.
As if it were ten years ago. At

3 p. m. heard the maid begin to set the table. We sat
and talked (I had shaved that morning). They cursed the Bolsheviks and told me
they were exhausted. I could see they were waiting for me to go. But I sat
tight.

Eventually the lady of the house said:

"Would you care to stay for lunch perhaps?"

"Thank you. I should love to."

We had: soup with macaroni and white bread, meatballs
and cucumbers for the main course, then rice pudding with jam and tea also with
jam.

Must confess something horrid.
As I was leaving, I imagined the place being
searched. They would come and ransack everything. Find gold coins under the
longjohns
in the chest of drawers.
Flour
and ham in the larder.
Take the host away...

It was foul to think like that, but I did.

He
who sits hungry in an attic over a feuilleton, let him not follow the
example of the fastidious
Knut
Hamsun
.
Let him visit those who live in seven rooms and lunch with them. On Friday had
lunch at the canteen, soup and a potato cake, and today, Saturday, got paid and
ate myself sick.

There's
a
hint
of menace in the air. I've already developed a sixth sense. Something is giving
way beneath our ASS Lit.

The old man appeared today, pointed a finger at the
ceiling beyond which the young ladies lurk, and said:

"There's a plot against me..."

Hearing this I hurriedly counted how many saccharine
tablets I had left.
Enough for five or six days.

The old man came in noisily, beaming all over.

"I've foiled their plot," he said. No sooner
were the words out of his mouth, than a woman's head in a scarf popped round
the door and snapped:

"You there.
Sign this."

I signed it.

The paper said:

"As from such-and-such a date ASS Lit.
is
disbanded."

Like the captain on the sinking ship, I was the last
to leave. Our business —
Nekrasov
, the Resurrected
Alcoholic, Hunger miscellanies,
⁽²¹⁾
poetry, instructions to provincial ASS
Lits
,
I ordered to be filed and handed in. Then I turned out the light with my own
hands and left. And just as I did it began to snow. Then rain. Then something
in between the two lashed my face from all sides.

Moscow
's terrible in periods of staff reductions and weather
like that. Yes sir, that was a reduction alright. People were being sacked in
other parts of that awful building too.

But not Madame
Kritskaya
,
Lidochka
or the sealskin hat.

1
.
Melnikov
P. I. (the pseudonym of Andrei
Pechersky
,
1818-1883), a Russian writer and the author of
In the Forests
and
In the
Hills,
novels about Old Believers.

2. "Peter in a green caftan..." A reference
to the Russian tsar Peter the Great who founded the Russian navy and used to
build ships with his own hands.

3. "Black, white, slender,
Vasnetsovian
..."
Victor
Vasnetsov
(1848-1926), a Russian artist who
painted legendary subjects and also decorated the Cathedral of St. Vladimir in
Kiev
.

4. "The novelist Yuri
Slyozkin
..."
The writer Yu.
L.
Slyozkin
(1885-1947), author of the novels
Table
Mountain

(The Girl from the Mountain), Abdication
and others, which portray the events of the pre-revolutionary period and
the years just after the Revolution.

5
. "I
face the future without fear..."
A quotation from Alexander
Pushkin's
poem
"Stanzas", which prompted certain circles of Russian society to talk
about the poet's abandonment of his ideals.
These accusations, which
were disproved by
Pushkin's
life and writings, were
repeated by primitive critics in the early Soviet period.

6. "...his Gentleman-of-the-
Bedchamberism
..."
In 1834
Pushkin
was appointed a
Gentleman-of-the-Bedchamber (the lowest court rank in Imperial Russia). The
poet was insulted and deeply angered by this unexpected "favour" from
the Tsar.

7. A quotation from
Pushkin's
poem "A Bacchanal Song".

8.
"Indifferent
alike to praise or blame..."
A quotation from "A monument I've
raised not built with hands..."

9.
Yevreinov
N. N.
(1879-1953), a director and playwright.

10.
"Brother
writers
, your vocation..."
A line from
Nekrasov's
poem "In the Hospital" which continues
as follows:
"holds the threat of
doom..."

11. "Yesterday
Riurik
Ivnev
appeared..."
The pseudonym of
Mikhail
Alexandrovich
Kovalyov
(1891-1981), a poet who belonged to the group of Imagists during the period in
question.

12. "The third was
Osip
Mandelstam."
Osip
Emilievich
Mandelstam (1891-1938), an
Acmeist
poet.

13. "The novelist
Pilnyak
..."
The pseudonym of Boris
Andreyevich
Vogau
(1894-1941), the author of the novels
The Naked Year, The Volga Flows into the
Caspian Sea
and
Okay,
as well as
several collections of short stories.

14. "
Serafimovich
arrived from up north." Alexander
Serafimovich
Serafimovich
(
Popov
) (1863-1949),
the author of the well-known novel
The
Iron Flood
about the Civil War.

15.
Nozdryov
— a satirical character from Nikolai
Gogol's
novel
Dead Souls.

16. A quotation from
Pushkin's
poem
The Poor Knight.

17. "Or perhaps it's
Bryusov
and
Bely
?"
Valery
Yakovlevich
Bryusov
(1873-1924),
poet, novelist and critic, the founder of Russian Symbolism.
Andrei
Bely
(the pseudonym of Boris Nikolayevich
Bugayev
) (1880-1934), poet and novelist, a leading
representative of Russian Symbolism.

18. "The meat pie in the
Truba
..."

19. "
Kanatchikov
dacha!"
A clinic for the mentally ill.

20. A quotation from
Gogol's
story
The Nose.

21. "...
Nekrasov
, the
Resurrected Alcoholic, the Hunger miscellanies..." A reference to a book
of verse by Nikolai
Nekrasov
(1821-1878), which was
about to be published, a play called
The
Resurrected Alcoholic
by an amateur playwright, and also various
collections by Russian and Soviet writers, the proceeds from which had been
donated to famine relief.