The White Guard (42 page)

   Nothing has changed since those days: the house, the yard, the sheds, the verandah and the stairs under the verandah leading down to the back door of 'Vasilisa's' apartment - Vasily Ivanovich Lisovich. On the street side it is the first floor, whilst in the backyard it is the basement. Only the garden has disappeared - the backyard is now entirely taken up with sheds.

   As I have said, my first visit was a short one. I was with my mother and a friend, we had come by car, and we had little time to spare. Having entered by the backyard, I timidly rang the bell on the left-hand one of the two doors giving on to the verandah and asked the fair-haired middle-aged lady who opened it whether some people called Turbin had once lived here. Or rather Bulgakov.

   The lady stared at me in some astonishment and said, yes, they did live here once, very long ago, but why should I be interested in them? I said that Bulgakov was a famous Russian writer and that everything connected with him . . .

   Her face showed even greater astonishment.

   'What? Mishka Bulgakov - a famous writer? That incompetent venereologist - a famous Russian writer?'

   With that I became dumb with embarrassment, and it was only later that I realised that the lady was not astonished at the incompetent venereologist becoming a writer (she knew that), but that he had become famous . . .

   But this only came out during my second visit. This time only two of us went and we had all the time we needed.

   When we rang, a young girl's voice rang outfrom the depths of the apartment:

   'Mama, it's two men . . .'

   Mama - the same middle-aged blond woman - appeared, and after a momentary pause of recognition and appraisal (for some reason she failed to recognise me at first), she said kindly:

   'Please come in. Here, into the drawing-room. It was their drawing-room. And that was the dining-room. We have had to divide it with a partition, as you can see . . .'

   Judging from the plaster mouldings on the ceiling, the former dining-room had once been very big and obviously comfortable;

   now it served as both hall and kitchen. A handsome gas stove stood against the right-hand partition wall.

   We went into the drawing-room, and the lady of the house excused herself for going on with her work - she was ironing net curtains, admittedly not very energetically, on a long ironing board - and invited us to sit down.

   The drawing-room was obviously furnished in a most un-Turbinlike, or rather un-Bulgakovlike fashion. The three windows, giving on to the street and looking over to the hill on the far side where the grass was just beginning to sprout, were curtained to sill height, and there were flowers on the window ledge - a riot of mauve in little vases. All the rest - as it is everywhere in Kiev nowadays - was 'contemporary' furniture of the early 'fifties made at the Lvov factory together with some pieces of what is known locally as 'Bozhenko' furniture. (A hero of the civil war and companion-in-arms of the legendary partisan leader Shchors, Bozhenko, alas, is nowadays associated in the minds of most Kievans only with the mediocre furniture turned out by the factory that was named after him.) On the wall was some vaguely Japanese design on black lacquer (were they herons?), and by the doorway a gleaming piano in imitation walnut.

   We sat down. The blond lady asked us what it was that we wanted to know, and we replied that we were interested in everything about this apartment which had been connected with the life of Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov.

   From the account that followed, interrupted first by the appearance of the silent husband looking for something in a cupboard, then by the incursion of two grandsons who were immediately chased out again ('Run along, this is nothing to do with you'), we learned that the Bulgakov family was a large one: the father - a professor of theology who had apparently died some time before the revolution; the mother-very houseproud and orderly; and seven children - three brothers, of whom Mikhail was the eldest, and four sisters. They had lived in this apartment for more than twenty years and had left in 1920. After that none of them had ever come back, including Mikhail. The family was patriarchal, run on

   firm lines. Then with the death of their father everything had changed. The mother, as far as we could gather, had moved elsewhere: 'Up at the top of the street, opposite St Andrew's church, there lived a doctor, a very decent man, he died not long ago as a very old man in Alma-Ata', and after that untidiness and confusion had reigned in the house.

   'They were very noisy and cheerful. And the place was always full of people. Singing, drinking, always talking at once and trying to shout each other down . . . The gayest of all was Misha's second sister. The older sister was quieter and more serious, she was married to an officer. His surname was something like Kraube - he was German by origin.' (Ah, we thought: Talberg . . .) 'They were expelled after the revolution and neither of them are alive now. But the second sister - Varya - was a delightful creature: she sang well, played the guitar . . . and whenever the noise got unbearable she would climb up on a chair and write "Quiet!" on the stove.'

   'On this stove?' We turned round at once and looked at the corner, involuntarily recalling the erstwhile scribbles and inscriptions on it, especially the last one written by Nikolka:

   'I hereby forbid the scribbling of nonsense on this stove. Any comrade found guilty of doing so will be shot and deprived of civil rights.

   signed: Abraham Goldblatt,

   Ladies, Gentlemen's and Women's Tailor. Commissar, Podol District Committee. 30th January 1918.'

   'No,' said the lady, 'on the stove in the dining-room. I'll show you on your way out.'

   For the rest of the time she told us about Misha himself. Somehow the story began with his teeth. He had very strong teeth. ('Yes, yes,' added the husband who had sat down on a chair in the corner, 'he had very strong teeth.') Misha was tall, fair, with bright blue eyes. He was always tossing back his hair. Like this - with his head. And he walked very fast. No, they had not been friends, he had been considerably older, at least twelve years older than her.

   She had been friends with the youngest sister, Lyolya. But she remembered Misha very well. And his character - sarcastic, ironic, caustic. Not an easy person to get on with, on the whole. One day he had even insulted her father, for no reason at all.

   'Misha's consulting-room was in there.' The blonde lady pointed to the wall in front of her. 'That's where he saw his syphilitic patients. You know, of course, that after he qualified he went on to specialise in venereology. Yes, and for some reason the faucets in his consulting-room were always running. And his basin was always overflowing. And seeping through the floor, so that the water dripped on to our heads . . .'

   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 . . .'