Death of my Father

I was in my last year at school in Kiev when the telegram came saying that my father was dying at the Gorodishche farm near Belaya Tserkov.

Next day I went to Belaya Tserkov and stopped at the house of my father's friend Feokistov, the head of the local post-office. He was a short-sighted old man with thick glasses and a long beard who wore an old jacket and the brass insignia of the postal service — crossed horns and lightnings—sewn to its lapels.

It was the end of March. Rain came down in a steady drizzle. Naked poplars loomed through the mist.

Feokistov told me that the night before the broken ice had swept down the fast-flowing Ros. The farm where my father was dying was on an island in the middle of this river, some twenty versts from Belaya Tserkov. A stone causeway ran across the river to the farm.

Now the flood-water was flowing over the causeway, so naturally no one would wish to drive me to the island — not even the most reckless driver in town.

Feokistov sat for a long time pondering as to which of the drivers in Belaya Tserkov was indeed the most reckless. In the half- dark drawing room his schoolgirl daughter Zina was diligently practising the piano. The music shook the leaves of a potted figtree. I stared at a pale, squeezed piece of lemon in a saucer and kept silent.

'Well, why not—let's call Bregman, the old rascal,' Feokistov decided at last. 'He'd take on the devil himself.'

My Grandfather

I stayed on in Gorodishche for several days after my father's funeral. It was only on the third day that the river fell and my mother was able to get across the causeway.

Her face had a dark, pinched look. She was no longer crying but she sat for hours by my father's grave.

There were no fresh flowers, so the grave was decorated with paper peonies. They were made by the girls in a neighbouring village, who were fond of wearing them braided with coloured silk ribbons in their hair.

Aunt Dosia did her best to comfort and to distract me. She dragged a trunk crammed with old family belongings out of the lumber room. Its lid opened with a loud crack.

Carp

Staying on in Gorodishche after my father's death, I was reminded of the many times in my childhood when, happy and carefree, we used to arrive from Kiev for the summer holidays.

The train pulled into Belaya Tserkov in the evening. My father hired one of the drivers who waited in front of the station, and he got us to Gorodishche in the middle of the night.

Half asleep I heard the monotonous jangling of the springs, then the noise of the water by the mill and the barking of dogs. The horses snorted and the wicket gate creaked. The damp darkness smelled of weeds.

Aunt Dosia carried me, drowsing, into the cottage with its many-coloured rugs on the floor. The cottage smelt of milk warm from the cow. Close to my face was the rich embroidery on Aunt Dosia's snow-white sleeves.

In the morning I woke up to see the hot sun striking on the white-washed walls. Red and yellow hollyhocks swayed outside the window. A nasturtium looked in with a furry bumble-bee inside it. I watched it anxiously as it buzzed crossly, backing its way out. Waves of light reflected from the river rippled endlessly across the ceiling. The river rushed noisily, close to the house.

'Here they come,' said my Uncle Ilko's voice. 'Naturally, the sun is up, so what else can you expect! Dosia, get the cakes and the cherry brandy.'

I jumped up and, barefooted, ran to the window. Slowly advancing along the causeway across the river came a procession of old men in broad-brimmed straw hats, their sticks tapping on the stones and their medals clanking on their smocks.

These were the venerable elders of the neighbouring village of Pilipchi, corning to greet us in accordance with tradition. Walking at their head was the pock-marked mayor Trofim with his copper badge of office round his neck.

The house filled with bustle. Aunt Dosia shook out a cloth over the table, sending a breeze through the room. Mama hurriedly sliced salami and piled dishes with cakes. My father pulled the corks out of bottles of home-made cherry liqueur, and Uncle liko set out the glasses.

Then Mama and Aunt Dosia rushed away to change while the men went out on the porch to welcome the elders who were approaching, as solemn and ineluctable as fate.

At last they arrived and, having silently embraced my father and my uncle, sat down on the low stone ledge, all sighing in unison—after which the mayor would clear his throat and pronounce the traditional phrase:

'I have the honour to congratulate you, Georgy Maximovich, upon your safe arrival in our quiet countryside.'

'Thank you,' said my father.

'Just so . . .' the old men all said together, sighing with relief. 'That's so, of course . . .'

'Yes,' said Trofim, glancing through the window at the bottles glinting on the table.

'That's the way it is,' added an old soldier with a bulbous nose, who had fought under Nicholas I.

'Naturally,' butted in a small and inquisitive old man called Nedolya. He was the father of twelve daughters whose names he was beginning to forget in his old age. He could get as far as five by counting them on his fingers — Hannah, Parasya, Gorpyna, Frosya, Olyosya — but after that he got muddled and had to begin again.

'Yes, indeed,' said the elders and fell silent.

At this point my grandfather Maxim Grigoryevich came out of the house and they all got up and bowed. My grandfather bowed in return. They resumed their seats, sighed, grunted and sat looking silently down at their feet. At last my uncle, deducing from some sign imperceptible to the rest of us that the meal was ready to serve, said:

'Well, thank you, kind folks, for your conversation. Please come inside and let us eat what God has sent us.'

Indoors, the elders were greeted by Mama who had put on an elegant summer dress. They kissed her hand and, following the custom, she kissed their brown wrinkled hands in return. Aunt Dosia, rosy-cheeked and prematurely grey, pretty in her shawl with crimson flowers on it, bowed from the waist.

After a glass or two of liqueur Nedolya, tortured with curiosity about everything we had brought with us from Kiev, began his questionnaire:

'What's this? What's it for? What is it called?'

This was a flat-iron heated by methylated spirit, my father would explain, and that was a freezer for making ice-cream, and that over there was a folding mirror. Nedolya nodded admiringly:

'Fancy! There's a thing for everything.'

'That's so, of course,' the elders agreed as they drank up.

In Gorodishche summer came into its own—a hot summer with terrifying storms and the rustling of trees, and cool draughts of water from the river, with fishing and blackberrying, and enchanting, leisured, unexpected days.

The island with my grandfather's house on it was of course the most mysterious place in the world.

There were two deep lakes at the back of the house. The water was dark, and the ancient willows on the banks made the landscape permanently gloomy.

Climbing up the hillside beyond them was a dense and tangled thicket of nut trees. The thicket opened out on to meadows with flowers in them as high as your waist, and so scented that on hot days they gave you a headache.

On the far side of the meadows you could see the smoke rising from the chimney of my grandfather's hut where it stood beside the beehives. And beyond it lay an unexplored region of rocks of red granite covered with creepers and wild strawberries.

The rocks had warm pools of rain-water in their hollows, where wagtails came to drink, and cheeky bumble bees flopped in and spun and buzzed, vainly calling for help.

The rocks ended in a sheer drop to the river. We were forbidden to go near it, but sometimes we would crawl to the edge and look down. At a vertiginous depth below us, the water hurtled, tense and transparent. And below its surface were narrow quivering outlines of fish, slowly advancing against the current.

Climbing up the slope on the other side was Countess Branitskaya's centuries' old forest. Its solid green was almost impenetrable to the sun. Only once in a while would a solitary shaft reveal the fabulous density of the undergrowth. Like shining dust-motes, birds would dart into the beam. They chased each other up and down it and dived into the foliage as into water.

But I liked the two lakes best of all.

Every morning when my father went fishing he took me along. We would go out very early, picking our steps across the heavy wet grass. Willow branches, catching the first sun, made patches of tranquil gold among the dark, as yet nocturnal trees. The carp splashed in the quiet enclosed waters of the lake, where the clumps of duckweed, water-lilies and millefoil hung as though suspended above the blackness of an abyss.

Engulfed in the mysteries of this world of vegetation and water, I could happily have sat beside the lake from sunrise until sunset.

My father would silently cast his lines and light a cigarette. The smoke drifted across the lake and became entangled in the branches on the bank.

I filled the pail I had brought with water from the lake, threw in a few handfuls of grass and sat waiting. The scarlet floats were motionless. Then one of them would begin to tilt, making light cipples, and suddenly sank and swiftly drifted aside. My father reeled in and the line tautened, the rod bending into an arc, while a turmoil of splashing and gurgling broke out in the haze over the lake. The ripples rocked the water-lilies, water-beetles scurried off in all directions, and at last out of the enigmatic depth there came a quivering flash of gold. It was impossible to make out what it was until my father landed the heavy carp and it lay on its side on the trampled grass, panting and gently stirring its fins. Its scales had the wonderful smell of its underwater kingdom.

I put the carp into the pail. It turned about among the drifting tufts of grass, unexpectedly thrashing its tail and spattering me with spray. I licked my lips and longed to drink out of the pail, but my father would not allow it.

It seemed to me that the water in the pail with the carp and the grass in it had the same smell and taste as the rain-water we so avidly drank after a thunderstorm, in the conviction that as Nechipor had assured us, it would make us live to be a hundred and twenty.

Pleurisy

The storms began on midsummer day and went on all through July. They besieged the island with enormous many-coloured clouds which flashed and thundered, making the house quake and lightening Aunt Dosia into fits.

My memory of my first, childish love affair is connected with one of these thunderstorms. I was only nine at the time. On the Feast of St. John the Baptist the peasant girls from Pilipchi descended upon our island, like a flock of bright-feathered birds, and observed the custom of 'floating the wreaths'. The wreaths were made of wild flowers and had a wooden crosspiece in the middle with a candle attached to it. At twilight the candles were lit and the wreaths were sent drifting down the river.

The wreaths told the girls their fortunes: the one whose candle floated the farthest without going out would be luckiest. The most fortunate of all was the girl whose wreath drifted into the whirlpool and continued slowly to revolve in the eddy of the deep pool, which was invariably still so that the candle on it burned with a particular brightness, sputtering so much you could hear it from the bank.

The grown-ups were as fond of this custom as were the children — all except Nechipor who would grunt scornfully: 'Rubbish! What's the sense of it?'

One of the girls who always came to the 'floating' was Hannah, mv cousin; she was sixteen. She braided black and orange ribbons in her splendid reddish plaits, wore a necklace of unpolished corals, and had shining green eyes. When Hannah smiled she lowered her eyes and would only raise them again slowly, as if her eyelids were too heavy to lift. Her cheeks were always burning.

I used to hear Aunt Dosia and Mama speaking of her with pity, but I could never discover why as they always stopped talking as soon as I came up.

One midsummer's day I went with Hannah to watch the wreaths. On the way she asked me:

'What will you do when you grow up?'

'I'll be a sailor.'

'Oh, you mustn't!' she said. 'Sailors get drowned. You'll make some girl cry her eyes out for you.'

I wasn't listening. I was hanging on to her hot sunburned hand, telling her about my first visit to the sea.

Early that spring my father had had to go on a three-day business trip to Novorossisk and had taken me with him. The sea appeared to us in the distance like a dark blue wall. I could not imagine what it was until finally I saw the wide green bay and the lighthouse, and heard the sound of the breakers, and the sea invaded me like the memory of a confused but magnificent dream.

There were two black warships with yellow funnels anchored in the harbour: The Three Bishops and The Twelve apostles. My father and I went to visit them. I was fascinated by the oily warmth of the engine room, and by the sunburned officers in resplendent white uniforms with gold-hiked daggers. But it was my father who astonished me. Never had I seen him so gay and full of life as when he chatted and laughed with the officers. We even went into the cabin of one of the ship's engineers, and my father had a brandy with him, and they smoked pink Turkish cigarettes which had golden Arabic lettering on them.

Hannah listened to me, looking down at the ground. Feeling unaccountably sorry for her, I said that when I was a sailor I would take her to sea with me.

'As the ship's cook? Or to do the laundry?' she asked.

'No,' I said, fired by my schoolboy enthusiasm, 'you will come as my wife.'

Hannah stopped and looked sternly into my face.

'Will you swear it?' she whispered. 'Swear it by your mother's heart.'

'I swear it,' I said without a moment's hesitation. She smiled, her eyes became as green as sea-water, and she kissed me hard on the forehead. Her lips were feverishly hot. We walked the rest of the way in silence.

Hannah's candle was the first to go out. An enormous dark-grey cloud was rising over Countess Branitskaya's forest but we never noticed it—we were so busy watching the wreaths—until the wind struck and the reeds whistled and bent, and the lightning lashed in a blinding explosion of thunder.

The girls ran squealing into the shelter of the trees. Hannah ripped her shawl off her shoulders and tied it round me, then she seized me by the hand and we ran. But the downpour was catching up with us and I knew that we could never reach home in time.

The cloudburst overtook us not far from my grandfather's hut but we were drenched by the time we got to it. My grandfather was out.

We sat inside the hut, clinging to one another. Hannah chafed my hands. She smelled of damp chintz. 'Are you cold?' she kept asking me in a frightened voice. 'Oh, what shall I do if you should fall sick!'

I was indeed shivering with cold, and Hannah's expression alternated between love and despair.

At one moment she clutched at her throat and burst into a fit of coughing. I could see a vein throbbing under the smooth soft skin of her neck, and with a sudden longing that my mother were as young and as kind as Hannah, I flung my arms round her and buried my head in her shoulder.

'What is it?' she asked puzzled, stroking my head without ceasing to cough. 'Don't be frightened. It's all right. I'll look after you. The thunder won't hurt us.'

Then she gently pushed me away and pressed her sleeve to her mouth. It was embroidered with crimson oak leaves and I saw a blood stain spreading among them like another embroidered leaf.

'I release you from your oath,' Hannah whispered, looking up at me with a guilty smile. 'I was only joking.'

The thunder had rumbled over the edge of the earth, the downpour was over. The only sound was the quick patter of raindrops off the trees.

During the night my temperature went up and, two days later, young Doctor Napelbaum bicycled over from Belaya Tserkov and said I had pleurisy.

He went from us to Pilipchi to see Hannah and when he came back I heard him speaking next door to my mother.

'She's got galloping consumption' he said. 'She won't live through the winter.'

Bursting into tears I shouted for Mama, and as I threw my arms round her I noticed that she had the same touchingly throbbing vein in her neck as Hannah. I cried all the louder, while Mama stroked my head and said:

'What is it? Don't be frightened. It's all right. I'll look after you.'

I recovered but Hannah died that winter — in February. Next summer I went to visit her grave with Mama and placed a bunch of daisies on the grassy mound. Hannah used to wear such flowers in her braids. Unaccountably I felt embarrassed by the presence of Mama with her crimson sunshade, and at not having come alone.

Trip to Chenstokhov

Pink Oleanders

Pink oleanders in green tubs stood on the verandah of my grandmother's house in Cherkassy. I was fond of their greyish leaves and pale flowers. For some reason they made me think of the sea— a distant, southern sea washing a shore which blossomed with oleanders.

My grandmother had green fingers. There were always fuchsias flowering in her bedroom in winter. As for her garden, it was thick with burdock along the fences, but in summer it looked like one solid enormous bouquet. Its scent reached even into my grandfather's attic where it almost overcame the smell of tobacco, making my grandfather slam his windows angrily shut. He believed that flowers gave him asthma.

I used to think of flowers as people. Mignonette was an impoverished girl in a patched grey dress, whose fabulous origin was only betrayed by her wonderful scent. Tea-roses were young society beauties who had lost their rosy cheeks from drinking too much tea.

The border of pansies was like a fancy-dress ball. The pansies were gay, sly gypsies in black velvet masks—dancers in motley clothes, now blue, now purple, now yellow.

The daisies bored me. In their washed-out pink, they reminded me of the daughters of my grandmother's neighbour, a schoolmaster named Zimmer, two little girls with tow-coloured hair and invisible eyebrows, who held up their skirts and bobbed every time you met them.

The most fascinating flower of all was, of course, the purslane —a creeper blazing with pure colours. It had soft juicy needles instead of leaves, and if you pressed them the green juice spurted into your face.

The garden acted upon my imagination with extraordinary force. It must have been there that I first conceived my passion for travel. I used to imagine a far-away country which I felt certain that I would some day visit. It was an undulating plain filled with grasses and flowers as far as the eye could reach. The towns and villages were submerged in the vegetation, and the coaches of the express trains which crossed this region had thick layers of pollen clinging to their sides.

I told Mama and my brothers and sisters about it; but they none of them showed the slightest understanding. Instead, my eldest brother called me a dreamer, in fact, he turned it into a scornful nickname which was to stick to me.

The only person who perhaps understood me was my Aunt Nadya, the youngest of my grandmother's daughters.

She was twenty-three at this time, had a beautiful contralto voice and was being trained as a singer at the Moscow Conservatoire.

She used to come home at Easter and for the summer holidays. The moment she arrived the quiet spacious house was filled with noise and bustle. Aunt Nadya, slender and graceful, with her tousled fair hair and her fresh half-open lips, played with us children, shouting with laughter as she tore about and skidded on the polished floors.

Her grey eyes were flecked with gold and they laughed at everything—any joke or merry word, or just at Anton the cat who watched us enjoying ourselves with a fastidiously disapproving expression on his face.

Mildly critical. Mama used to say: 'Nadya takes nothing seriously.' Aunt Nadya's irresponsibility was proverbial in the family. She was always losing her gloves, her powder or her money, but she never allowed anything to upset her.

The piano stood open from the moment she arrived until after she returned to her cheerful, hospitable Moscow. Sheets of music littered the chairs, the candles smoked, the piano rumbled. Sometimes I woke up in the night to the sound of her pure deep voice singing the Barcarolle:

Sail, my gondola
Lit by the moon. .. .

While in the morning I was often wakened by Aunt Nadya bending over me, her soft hair tickling my face as she sang almost in a whisper:

Wake up! Get up!
The robins are chirping,
The roses are blooming
For You. . . .

When I opened my eyes, she kissed me and immediately disappeared. A moment later I would hear her waltzing in the hall with her brother Kolya, an army cadet, who sometimes came for Easter from Petersburg.

Then I would jump out of bed in anticipation of a happy, turbulent, unpredictable day.

When Aunt Nadya sang, even my grandfather opened his door to listen from the landing and afterwards asked my grandmother:

'Where on earth does she get her gypsy blood from?'

My grandmother always assured him that Nadya wasn't a gypsy but a Pole, and quoted examples from Polish history and literature to show that Polish women were often endowed with just such a cheerful, extravagant, devil-may-care nature.

'Exactly!' my grandfather said provocatively, banging his door. 'Exactly,' he repeated loudly after it was shut, as he sat down to roll a cigarette.

One year, Easter was late and the gardens in Cherkassy were already in bloom when we arrived by river-boat from Kiev. Aunt Nadya joined us a few days later.

I always looked forward to Easter but not to the days before it, when I was made to grind almonds and whisk white of egg with a spoon until my arms ached.

The house became unbearable; women scuttled about with their skirts tucked up, washing the ficus and rhododendron plants and scrubbing the floors, beating the carpets and the upholstery, polishing the handles on the doors and the windows. We were chased from room to room all day long.

After the cleaning came the ritual of the cooking. Grandmother made dough for the Easter cakes known in our family as 'satin ladies'. The yellow bubbling dough was put in a tub and wrapped in an eiderdown, and until it had risen, no one was allowed to run, shout or bang the doors. If a cab drove past the house my grandmother shuddered with alarm—the slightest commotion could make the dough 'settle', and then it was goodbye to the tall, round, airy cakes covered with icing and smelling of saffron!

In addition to the satin ladies. Grandmother baked a variety of biscuits with almonds and raisins, known as 'mazurkas'. Even my grandfather got restless when the baking tins came out of the oven and the house filled with their delicious smell. Opening his door, he would peer down into the drawing-room where the long marble topped table was already covered with a heavy damask cloth.

On the morning of Holy Saturday the house finally became a haven of cool cleanliness and quiet. After a breakfast of weak tea and dry biscuits, we ate nothing more until Lent ended on the following day after the Easter Mass. We rather enjoyed feeling a little hungry. There was a faint ringing in our ears as the long day drew to its close, and my grandmother's insistence on our keeping quiet put us in a thoughtful mood.

At midnight we went to church. I was dressed in a sailor suit with long trousers and brass buttons, and my hair was brushed painfully hard. Looking at myself in the mirror I saw a terribly excited, flushed little boy and felt very happy.

Aunt Euphrosine came out of her apartment. She alone had taken no part in the preparations for Easter. She was always ailing, hardly ever spoke to anyone, and only smiled gently at our chatter.

Now she appeared in a dark blue dress with a gold watch-chain round her neck and a handsome silk rosette pinned on her shoulder. Mama told me that the rosette was a distinction she had been awarded as a girl for her exemplary conduct at her boarding school.

Mama was in her grey party frock and my father in a black suit with a white waistcoat.

My grandmother would come out looking handsome and imposing, all in black silk, with an artificial heliotrope pinned to her corsage. Her smooth white hair showed through her lace veil, her skirt rustled and her movements were graceful—she always became younger on that night.

She would light the lamp before the ikon and draw on her black lace gloves, while my father held her mantle with its broad satin ribbon fastenings.

'I take it you are not coming to Mass?' she asked him with chilly courtesy.

'No, Vikentia Ivanovna,' my father replied smiling. 'I'll go and lie down for a bit. They'll wake me up before you are back from church.'

'Oh well,' said my grandmother, twitching her shoulders to adjust her cloak. 'My only hope is that God has ceased to pay any attention to your jokes.'

'That's what I fervently count on too,' said my father politely.

Grandmother went upstairs for a moment, to say goodbye to my grandfather. As she was coming down. Aunt Nadya rushed into the hall. She was invariably late.

Hurrying, in her white dress of light silk with a train and puffed sleeves, she did not so much walk in as alight like a thin, graceful, shimmering bird. She was breathing fast and a yellow rose fluttered on her breast.

It seemed as if all the light and joy of the world were shining in her eyes.

My grandmother stopped on the stairs and pressed her handkerchief to her eyes. The sight of her youngest daughter's beauty moved her to tears. Clearly, she worried about Aunt Nadya's future and wondered if she was tough and practical enough to stand up to the difficulties of life—perhaps it was this that made her cry.

That night, my father was awake when we returned from church. He had opened the windows of the drawing-room which looked out on the garden. It was very warm.

We sat down and had breakfast. The night was all around us and the stars shone straight into our eyes. The twittering of a sleepless bird came from the garden. We spoke little and sat listening to the pealing of the church bells, now swelling and now dying away in the darkness.

Aunt Nadya was pale and looked tired. I had noticed as we came in that my father, when he helped her off with her cloak, had handed her a telegram.

She had blushed and crushed it in her hand.

Immediately after breakfast we went off to bed. I awoke late to the clinking of cups in the drawing-room where the grown-ups were having coffee.

At dinner Aunt Nadya said that she had had a telegram from the nearby little town of Smela, from her friend Lisa Yagorskaya. Lisa had invited her over for the day to their house outside the town.

'I'd like to go tomorrow,' said Aunt Nadya looking at my grandmother. 'And I'd like to take Kostik.'

I blushed with joy.

'All right, darling,' said my grandmother. 'Mind you don't catch cold, either of you.'

'They'll send a carriage to meet us,' said Aunt Nadya. It was an hour by train from Cherkassy to Smela. Lisa, plump and cheerful, met us at the station in Smela and we set off in a carriage and pair through the clean, pretty little town. At the foot of the steep green hills the river Tasmin had flooded its banks and now flowed from one quiet lake to another, its slow current making a streak of silver through them. It was very hot. Dragonflies darted about over the water.

As we drove through a deserted park on the edge of the town, Lisa told us that Pushkin had been fond of walking in it. I could not believe that Pushkin had actually been in this place; that I was actually in a place where Pushkin had been. At that time Pushkin seemed to me a wholly legendary being. How could any part of his brilliant life have come anywhere near this Ukrainian backwater?

'Over there is Kamenka,' said Lisa. 'That was once the Rayevsky's estate. He used to stay with them a lot and that's where he wrote a wonderful poem.'

'Which poem?' asked Nadya.

Lisa recited it. I could not understand all of it, but the power and music of the poetry, the evening light on the park, the ancient lime-trees and the clouds drifting above them, all combined to put me in a magical mood, and the whole of this day has remained in my memory as a quiet celebration of spring.

We were driving up a wide avenue when Lisa told the coachman to stop, and we got out and walked to the house along a footpath lined with hedges of dog-rose.

Suddenly at a turning we saw coming towards us a man with a sunburned, bearded face and without a hat. He had a doublebarrelled gun over his shoulder, and a brace of duck dangled from his hand. His jacket was unbuttoned and his strong brown chest showed underneath. Aunt Nadya stopped dead and I noticed that she went very pale.

Scratching his hands on the thorns, the man broke off a big branch of dog-rose and presented it to Aunt Nadya. She cautiously grasped the spiky branch and gave him her hand, which he kissed.

'You smell of gunpowder,' she said. 'And your hands are bleeding. You must have the thorns taken out.'

'It's nothing,' he said smiling.

He had very even teeth. Now that I saw him close to, I realised that he was still a young man.

Chinese Elderwood

The small soft white balls rolled about inside the box. I dropped one into a bowl of water. It swelled, opened out, and turned into a black elephant with red eyes, or an orange dragon or a rose with green leaves.

These fabulous Chinese balls made of elderwood were a present from my godfather and uncle, losif Grigoryevich, or, more simply, Uncle Yusia; he had brought them from Peking.

'An adventurer, pure and simple,' my father used to say of him, but with a certain envy rather than with disapproval.

What he envied Uncle Yusia was that he had been all over Africa, Asia and Europe—not as a well-behaved tourist but as a conqueror, noisy, rowdy, insolently daring, and with an insatiable thirst for every sort of improbable deal in every corner of the world, from Shanghai to Addis Ababa and from Meshed to Kharbin.

Every one of the deals ended in a crash.

'I should go to the Klondike,' Uncle Yusia used to say. 'I'd show those Americans!'

What it was he intended to show the gold-seekers of the Klondike remained unknown. But it was perfectly clear that he would indeed have shown them something that would have made his name resound all the way from the Yukon to Alaska.

Perhaps he was born to be a famous explorer such as Nikolai Przevalski or Livingstone. But life in the Russia of those days— my father called them 'untimely'—had warped him. In him the noble passion for travel had taken the form of haphazard and purposeless globe-trotting. All the same, I am indebted to him, for his stories made the world a desperately interesting place and I have kept this feeling about it all mv life.

My grandmother Vikentia Ivanovna regarded Uncle Yusia as a form of 'divine retribution' and treated him as the black sheep of the family. When I was naughty she warned me: 'Mind you don't become a second Uncle Yusia.'

Poor Granny had no idea that his life seemed to me utterly splendid and that my one dream was to become a 'second Uncle Yusia'.

Whether in Cherkassy or Kiev, Uncle Yusia would always turn up suddenly and as suddenly vanish, to reappear in another twelve or eighteen months with his deafening ring at the door and fill the house with his raucous voice, his coughing, his swearing and his contagious laughter. And each time he would be followed by the cab driver dragging enormous suitcases filled with rare things.

Uncle Yusia was tall, bearded, he had a broken nose and fingers of steel—they could bend a silver rouble—and a glint of cunning in his deceptively quiet eyes.

With no fear of 'God or Satan or death', as my father used to say, he yet went all to pieces if a woman cried or a child was upset.

The first time I saw him was after the Boer War.

He had joined the Boer Army as a volunteer. This courageous and unselfish action had greatly raised his stock with the family.

We children were tremendously excited by the war. We were sorry for the Boers fighting for their independence, and we hated the English. We knew every detail of the battles being fought at the other end of the world — Ladysmith, Bloemfontein, Diamond Hill. Our heroes were the Boer generals De Witt, Joubert and Botha. We scorned the haughty Lord Kitchener and made jokes about English soldiers going into battle in red coats. We were intoxicated by a book called Peter Maritz, a Joung Boer from the Transvaal.

We were not alone in this. The whole civilised world was tensely watching the unequal struggle in the plains between the Vaal and the Orange River, and even the organ grinders in Kiev, who had so far always played 'Parting', now had a new song:

'Transvaal, Transvaal, my country burning in flames.' For playing this we gave them the five-kopeck pieces we had saved up for ice-cream.

For boys like myself the Boer War was the undoing of the exotic dreams of our childhood. Africa now turned out to be quite unlike the vision we had had of it from the stories in 'Around the World' or from Gorodetsky's house in Vankovsky Street.

The grey walls of this house, built to look like a castle, were decorated with sculptures of lions, crocodiles, giraffes, rhinos, antelope and other African animals. Carved elephant trunks hung down to the pavement and served as drainpipes. Water dripped from the jaws of rhinoceroses, and stone boa-constrictors reared their heads from dark recesses in the walls.

The owner of the house, an engineer, was a passionate hunter. He had shot big game in Africa and had decorated his house with animals in memory of his expeditions. The grown-ups thought him a bit crazy, but we loved his house and it had shaped our picture of Africa.

But now, small boys though we were, we realised that a great struggle for human rights was being waged on the huge black continent which we had imagined to be filled with wise elephants trumpeting in the steaming jungle and hippopotamuses quietly snorting in the slimy ooze of the great uncharted rivers for, until then, Africa had been for us only a land for explorers, for Stanleys and Livingstones.

We were sorry to lose our Africa, the one we had explored in our dreams—the one of lion hunts, dawns over the Sahara, rafts on the Niger, and whistling arrows and the furious chattering of monkeys in the gloom of impassable forests. There, danger had ambushed us at every step and in our imagination we had more than once died of fever or wounds behind the log walls of a fort, breathing the poisonous exhalations of the swamps, listening to the whine of a solitary bullet, our moribund eyes fixed on the last glimmer of the Southern Cross in the black velvety sky.

How often had I died regretting the shortness of my life and my failure to cross the mysterious continent from Algiers to the Cape of Good Hope and from the Congo to Zanzibar!

We could not, of course, completely efface this Africa from our memories—it was much too alive. Hence my wordless, ecstatic amazement at the appearance in our prosaic Kiev house of my Uncle Yusia, bearded, burned bv the African sun, wearing a broadbrimmed Boer hat and an open-necked shirt and with a cartridge clip in his belt.

I dogged his footsteps and gazed into his eyes—eyes which had seen the Orange River, Zulu kraals, British cavalrymen and storms on the Pacific.

All this happened when Kruger, the unwieldy old President of the Transvaal, came to Russia to ask for help. Uncle Yusia arrived with him. He only stopped in Kiev for a day and went on to join the President in Petersburg.

Uncle Yusia was convinced that Russia would come to the assistance of the Boers. But from Petersburg he wrote to my father:

'Overriding considerations of State have forced the Government to an ugly decision: we have refused help to the Boers. So it's all over and I am going back to the Far East.'

My maternal grandfather had not been wealthy. He had not been able to afford an education for his many children—five daughters and three sons—except by sending the boys to the Kiev Cadet Corps where the teaching was free.

There my Uncle Yusia went with his two brothers, and all was well with him for four years but in his fifth year he was transferred from Kiev to the 'penal' corps at Volsk on the Volga. A cadet could only be sentenced to Volsk for a 'grave crime'. So evidently such a crime had been committed by my uncle.

The kitchen of the Kiev Cadet Corps was in the basement. A lot of buns had been baked before a holiday and left to cool on the kitchen table. Uncle Yusia got hold of a pole, fixed a long nail to it, used it to fish out several dozen buns through the open window, and laid on a feast for his class.

He only spent two years in Volsk. In his third year he was expelled from the Corps and reduced to the ranks for striking an officer: the officer had stopped him in the street and shouted at him for some trifling fault in his turn-out.

Uncle Yusia was given a soldier's greatcoat and a rifle and sent off on foot to join an artillery regiment stationed in Kutno near Warsaw.

He crossed the country from east to west in winter, reporting to the local garrison commanders on the way, begging his food in the villages and spending the nights where he could.

He left Volsk as a hot-headed boy, he arrived in Kutno an embittered soldier,

In Kutno he was eventually commissioned as an ensign, but his military career was dogged by the worst possible luck. He was transferred from the artillery to the infantry and his regiment was sent to Moscow to do guard duty during the coronation of Nicholas II. His particular unit was on duty on the quay of the Moskva outside the Kremlin.

Early on the morning of the coronation he saw his men rushing down to the river bank where a violent scuffle had broken out. Clutching his sword, he hurried after them.

A terrifying creature with a copper head was rolling about in the mud, entangled in tubing. The soldiers had knocked it down and piled on top of it, and it was clumsily kicking out at them with its enormous leaden boots. One of the soldiers squeezed a ribbed rubber tube near the copper head, and the monster, giving a hoarse rattle, ceased to resist. My uncle realised that the monster was a diver and shouted at the soldiers, but by the time they had unscrewed the helmet the diver was dead.

Neither my uncle nor his men had been warned that divers from Kronstadt were that morning searching the bed of the river for terrorists' bombs.

After this incident Uncle Yusia was discharged from the army. He went to Central Asia, and for a time worked as organiser of camel caravans travelling between Uralsk, Khiva and Bokhara. There were as yet no railways linking Central Asia to Russia: the track ended at Uralsk, where all the goods had to be re-loaded on to camels and sent on by caravan.

In the course of his trips Uncle Yusia made friends with the two brothers Grum-Grzhimailo, who were exploring Central Asia, and went hunting tigers with them. He sent a tiger skin to my grandmother, but the tiger had such a ferocious expression that she immediately wrapped it up in mothballs and hid it in the cellar.

Uncle Yusia was fond of instructing us on how to kill jackals by sneezing at them. When spending the night in the desert, he used to lie down with his head on the knapsack which contained his food and pretend to go to sleep. The jackals crept up with their tails between their legs. When the boldest got its teeth into the knapsack and started cautiously pulling it out, my uncle gave an ear-shattering sneeze, and immediately, so he said, the timid jackal dropped dead of heart failure, without giving so much as a squeal.

We believed him because we heard him sneeze every morning in preparation for the new day: the windows rattled and the cat, panic-stricken, hurtled about the room looking for shelter.

We found Uncle Yusia's stories more fascinating than the adventures of Baron Munchhausen. The Baron had to be conjured up by our imagination, whereas Uncle Yusia was there beside us, wrapped in a cloud of tobacco smoke and shaking the sofa by his huge laughter.

After he left Central Asia his life entered an obscure period. He roamed about Europe, gambled—so they said—in Monte Carlo, found himself in Abyssinia and came back with an enormous gold medal, for some reason conferred upon him by the Negus Menelik. The medal was like one of the large round badges of office worn by janitors.

Uncle Yusia continued to be restless until he discovered the attraction of the mysterious Far East. Manchuria and the region of Ussuria — seemed to exist expressly for such people as my uncle, for there they could live an expansive, rumbustious life, to the full extent of their will and resourcefulness, unthwarted by any 'asinine laws'.

This was the Russian Alaska—uninhabited, rich and dangerous. No better place on earth for Uncle Yusia could have been invented. The Amur, the virgin forest, gold, the Pacific, the Chinese, Korea and beyond—Kamchatka, Japan, Polynesia ... A vast, unknown world thundered like surf against the shores of the Far East, disturbing the imagination of such men.

Uncle Yusia and his young wife, a religious ascetic—no one else, according to Mama, could possibly have stood him—went off to the Far East.

There he took part in the defence of Kharbin against the Boxers, in fights against the hungusi bandits, and in building the Chinese Eastern Railway, only interrupting his activities to go to the Transvaal.

After the Boer War he returned to Asia, not to Manchuria but to Port Arthur, where he worked as an agent for the Navy. He wrote to us that he had fallen in love with ships and felt sorry he had not become a sailor when he was young.

At about this time he lost his wife and found himself with two small daughters on his hands. A touchingly affectionate though clumsy father, he brought them up with the help of a devoted old Chinese servant whom he called Sam Drink Tea and to whom he -was perhaps as attached as to his daughters. He was in general very fond of the Chinese and said they were a wonderful, kind, wise people whose only defect was their fear of rain.

As a former officer he was called up at the outbreak of the Japanese war. He packed his daughters off to Kharbin with Drink Tea.

After the war he came to visit us in Kiev, and this was the last time I saw him.

By then he was grey and staid, but the wild gay sparkle still occasionally nickered in his eyes.

He told us all about Peking, the gardens of the Chinese Emperors, Shanghai and the Yellow River. His stories left me with a curious vision of China fixed in an everlastingly clear, warm evening light. This may have been because Uncle Yusia no longer made things up, no longer rolled his eyes or roared with laughter, but spoke in a tired voice, continually flicking ash off his cigarette.

This visit took place in 1905. Uncle Yusia had little understanding of politics. He thought of himself as an old soldier, which he in fact was, honourable and loyal to his oath. When my father began one of his harsh, dangerous speeches, Uncle Yusia would fall silent and go out into the garden where he would sit smoking in solitude. He considered my father 'more leftist than the left'.

In the autumn of 1905 there was a mutiny in an engineers' battalion stationed in Kiev. An artillery battery joined the uprising. The rebels fought their way through the city, beating off the Cossacks who harassed them, and took up a position on the far side of the Demyevsky Gate.

From there the rebel battery opened fire on the Governor's Palace and on the barracks of the Cossacks. But so inaccurate was their aim that every shell went wide.

All that day Uncle Yusia was on tenterhooks, chain-smoking and swearing under his breath.

Finally he left the house. That evening the battery opened up again, breaking up the attacking Cossacks and laying down a fast, accurate barrage on the fort, the barracks and the palace. The authorities were thrown into confusion, and although the engineers had clearly lost the day, they were able, under cover of the barrage, to escape and scatter in the swamps and forests to the west of Kiev.

Uncle Yusia did not come home either that night or the next. He never came back at all. It was not until six months later that we heard from his daughter in Kharbin, who wrote that Uncle Yusia had settled down for good in Japan and begged us to forgive him for his abrupt disappearance.

Much later still we learned that Uncle Yusia, an old artilleryman, had found it unendurable to hear of the wretched marksmanship of the mutineers and on leaving the house had joined them and taken over the command of the battery.

He had naturally had to flee, and had gone to Japan where he died soon afterwards in Kobe, of cardiac asthma and incurable homesickness.

In the weeks before his death this huge, violent man would cry at the slightest reminder of Russia. In his last, seemingly half-jesting letter, he asked us to send him the most precious thing he could think of—a dried leaf from a Kiev chestnut tree.

Svyatoslavsky Street

Our trips to Cherkassy and Gorodishche were the holidays of my childhood. The 'weekdays' were those passed in Kiev where we spent the long winters in our gloomy, uncosy flat in Svyatoslavsky Street.

The street, lined with monotonous blocks of flats built of the yellow local brick which was also used for the pavements, ended in an enormous waste-lot furrowed with ravines. There were several such lots in the city. We called them 'wastelands'.

All day long 'dirt-carts' loaded with soil and gravel filed past our house on their way to the wasteland. They tipped their loads into the furrows to level the ground in preparation for building.

The soil was always spilling from the carts, and the street was always muddy—this was one of my reasons for disliking it.

We were strictly forbidden to play on the wasteland. But occasionally we boys made up a gang and went all the same. We took a police whistle with us, just in case ... It seemed to us as reliable a weapon as a revolver.

At first we used only to stand on the edge of a ravine, looking apprehensively down at the glint of broken glass and the dogs who rummaged among the rusty tins in the litter without taking any notice of us.

Then we became bold enough to go down through the pall of dirty yellow smoke which hung over the gully. The smoke came from the hovels and dug-outs at the bottom. The hovels were put together out of anything that had come to hand—bits of plywood, old tin, broken packing cases, chair seats, mattresses with their springs sticking out of them. Dirty sacking was hung up in place of doors.

Ragged, dishevelled women sat round the fires in the ravine. They snapped at us or begged money for vodka. Only one of them, a shaggy grey-haired old woman with a leonine face, smiled at us, showing her one remaining tooth.

She was an Italian beggarwoman, well known in Kiev, who went from yard to yard playing the accordion. For a little extra she would play the 'Marseillaise'. On such occasions a boy was posted as look-out at the gate to watch for the policeman who patrolled the street.

Not only did she play the 'Marseillaise' on her accordion—she bawled it in her furious raucous voice. Sung by her, it sounded like an angry call to arms, a malediction from those who dwelled in the wasteland.

There were other familiar faces we used to come across. There, for instance, was Yashka with his white vodka-bleary eyes, who begged on the steps of the Vladimir Cathedral, everlastingly whining his one and only tag: 'Kind sirs, take pity on my crippled-dippled condition.' Seen on his home ground, he was very different from the snivelling misery who sat in the church porch. Tossing his vodka down his throat, he would cheerfully pound his chest and sing bawdy songs.

Then there was the bald old man who sold toothbrushes in Fundukleyev Street near the Francois Cafe, next to the hurdy-gurdy man with his parrot.

The hovels had clay ovens beside them, belching smoke through the broken samovar pipes stuck into their tops.

The organ grinder was never at home in the daytime but his daughter was there, a barefooted girl with an earthy complexion and fine smouldering eyes, who used to sit on the ground outside, peeling potatoes, her leg bound up in a rag.

She was double-jointed and had been a 'tumbler', going from door to door with her father—a wisp of a child in blue tights who performed her acrobatic tricks on a small square of carpet she put down on the ground. But since the accident which had damaged her leg, she could no longer 'work.'

Sometimes I would find her reading, always out of the same book. Judging from the illustrations, I guessed it to be Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers.

'What are you hanging about for?' she used to shout at us. 'Have you never seen how people live?'

But after a while she got used to us and stopped shouting. One day the undersized organ grinder, her father, ran into us in the ravine and told her:

'Let them be. Let them see what our half of the world has to put up with. They may find it useful later on when they are students.'

At first we always went in a gang, but later, as I got to know the people in the wasteland, I went alone.

For a long time I kept this a secret from Mama, but in the end the organ grinder's daughter gave me away. I had lent her Uncle Tom's Cabin and didn't come to fetch it because I was ill. She got worried about me and brought the book to the flat. Mama opened the door to her, and so it all came out. Mama's icy silence and tight lips told me all I needed to know.

That evening I heard my parents talking about me in the diningroom next door. Mama was upset and cross, but my father said there was nothing terrible about it, I wasn't easy to spoil, and he would rather I made friends with these unfortunate people than with the sons of Kiev merchants and officials. Mama objected that at my age I ought to be protected from distressing impressions.

'What you don't realise,' said my father, 'is that these people respond to being treated decently with a devotion you would never find in our circle. I don't see why his impressions should be distressing.'

'Perhaps you are right,' said Mama after a silence.

When I got well she brought me The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain and said:

'There . . . Take it to the organ gander's daughter ... I don't know what her name is.'

'Lisa,' I said shyly.

'Well, take it to Lisa. As a present.'

From then on, no one made any more fuss about my visits to the wasteland. I no longer had to filch the sugar for my new friends from the sideboard, nor the pignuts for Mitya their half-blind parrot. I asked Mama for whatever I wanted and she never refused me.

One day in the early autumn I saw the organ grinder standing in our yard without his parrot. The organ was wheezing out a polka: 'Come along, my darling angel, come along and dance with me.' The organ grinder was listlessly turning the handle and scanning the windows and balconies, waiting for the coppers in their twists of paper to start falling to the ground.

I ran out to him and he told me without ceasing to turn the handle:

'Mitya's sick. Sits like a hedgehog. Eats nothing—not even

I your nuts. Must be a goner.'

He took off his dusty black hat and wiped his face with it. 'It's a hard life!' he said. 'An organ grinder by himself, without Mitya, can't even earn his vodka, let alone his bread. Who will help me with the "lucky dip" now?'

For five kopecks, the parrot would pick out a blue, red or green slip with a prediction printed on it. For some reason, the slips were called 'luck'. They were kept, rolled up into spills, in an empty cartridge box. Before pulling one out, Mitya would stamp up and down on his perch, screeching unhappily.

The language of the prophecies was obscure. 'You were born under the sign of Mercury and your stone is the emerald, which signifies diffidence and the arrangement of worldly affairs to your liking in the years which are grey with age. Be on your guard against blondes of either sex, and avoid going out in the streets on the Feast of St. John the Baptist.'

Sometimes the sentence was shorter and more sinister: 'Tomorrow at dusk' or 'If you want to stay alive, don't look back.'

A day later Mitya died; I put him in a cardboard shoe box and buried him in the wasteland. The organ grinder got drunk and disappeared.

I told Mama about the death of the parrot. My lips were trembling but I managed not to cry.

'Get your coat on,' Mama said sternly. 'We're going to Burmistrov's.'

Burmistrov was an old man who kept a dark, stuffy little shop on the Bessarabka. He was hard of hearing, his beard was green with age and he looked like a gnome, but he sold the most wonderful things—fishing rods, bright-coloured floats, fish tanks, goldfish, birds, ants' eggs and even transfers.

Mama bought an old green parrot with a lead ring on its leg. I carried it in a cage we borrowed from Burmistrov. It contrived to bite my finger to the bone; I had it bandaged at a chemist's but I was so excited that I felt almost no pain.

I longed to take the parrot to the wasteland at once but Mama said:

'I'm coming with you. I must see this place for myself.'

She went home to change. I was ashamed at the idea of her dressing up to call on ragged paupers but I said nothing.

In a few minutes she came out in an old dress darned at the elbows and with a shawl over her head. For once she was without her elegant kid gloves and her shoes had trodden down heels. I looked at her gratefully and we set off.

Mama climbed valiantly down into the ravine, walked through the crowd of dishevelled women struck dumb with amazement, and didn't even once raise her skirt to avoid the mounds of rubbish and cinders.

When she saw us coming with the parrot. Lisa's grey face turned a deep red and, to my astonishment, she curtsied to Mama. Her father was still out with his friends, drowning his sorrows in the pubs on the Demyanovka.

Lisa took the parrot, blushing more and more and saying again and again:

'Oh, why did you? You shouldn't have done it!'

'Can he be taught to pull out the lucky slips, do you think?' Mama asked.

'Of course! It won't take a couple of days,' Lisa said happily. 'But you shouldn't have done it! Good Lord! The money you must have spent!'

When my father was told, he grinned:

'That was very philanthropic of you, my dear—the result of your sentimental upbringing.'

'Good Lord!' my mother exploded. 'Do you always have to contradict yourself? You really are extraordinary! You'd have done exactly the same in my place.'

'No, I'd have done more.'

'Oh, would you?' Mama's voice was threatening. 'All right! We'll see!'

I didn't realise that he was deliberately provoking her.

Next day Mama sent Lisa a black dress which had belonged to my sister, and a pair of brown shoes of her own. But my father was not to be outdone. He waited until the organ grinder turned up with his new parrot.

He was wearing a red scarf round his neck and his nose shone with vodka and joy. The hurdy-gurdy played everything it knew:

'Yearning for the Fatherland', 'The Waves of the Danube', 'Bitter Parting' and 'Oh, the box is full to bursting'—a march, a waltz, a polka and a song. The parrot picked out lucky slips, and the coppers came showering from the windows.

Finally he slung his organ on his back and set off, bent double as ilways, but up the stairs to our door instead of down the street.

His hat in his hand and almost brushing the floor, he thanked Mama and kissed her hand. My father invited him inside. The argan grinder leaned his organ against the wall and, picking his steps, followed my father to his study.

My father gave him a brandy, said he realised how hard and unrewarding must be his lot, and offered him a job as watchman on the South-West Railway. He would have his own little house and a garden.

'I'm sorry, Georgy Maximovich, and I hope you won't judge me too harshly,' the organ grinder said, blushing. 'But I'd be bored to death. It seems it's my lot to be an organ grinder.'

He went off. Mama said nothing but she couldn't hide her satisfaction.

A few days later, without warning, the police evicted all the squatters from the wasteland. The organ grinder and Lisa disappeared—they must have moved to another town.

But before this happened I had time to pay them one more visit. The organ grinder had invited me to 'an evening' at his house.

A plate of baked tomatoes and brown bread, a bottle of cherry brandy and some grubby, thick striped sticks of rock had been set out on an upturned packing case.

Lisa had on a new dress and her hair was in tight braids. She watched me jealously to make sure I was 'eating as much as at home'. The parrot slept, a leathery shutter let down over each eye. The organ heaved an occasional musical sigh without anyone touching it. The organ grinder explained that this was because air was trapped in a pipe inside it.

This was in September. Twilight was coming on. No one who hasn't seen a Kiev autumn can have any conception of the gentle beauty of these hours.

The first star lights up in the sky. The luxuriant autumnal gardens are still, waiting for the night and for the shooting stars which they will catch in their dense foliage as in a hammock and lower to the ground so softly that no one will wake up or know.

Lisa took me to our door, thrust a sticky pink sweet into my hand and fled down the stairs, while I stood trying to make up my mind to ring the bell and face the scolding I would get for being so late.

Winter Scene

My father gave me a pair of 'Halifax' skates for Christmas. Nowadays children would laugh if they could see them, but at that time there were no better skates in the world than those that came from Halifax.

'Where is the city of Halifax?' I asked everyone. Where was this city covered with snow where all the little boys went about on skates? Where was this wintry country populated by retired sailors and happy schoolboys? No one could tell me.

My eldest brother Borya said Halifax was not a city at all—it was the name of the inventor of these particular skates. My father said he thought Halifax was a town—yes, it was a little town off the north coast of America, on the island of Newfoundland which was not only famous for its skates but also for its dogs.

The skates lay on my table. I looked at them and thought about Halifax. I saw it so clearly in my mind that I could have drawn a detailed plan of its streets and squares.

I could sit over my Malinin and Burenin arithmetic book—I was working for my entrance examination to the High School—and think about Halifax for hours on end.

This addiction was a great worry to Mama. She was greatly concerned about it, and said that penury and death in a ditch lay in store for moony little boys like myself.

The gloomy prediction, 'You'll die in a ditch', was very widely used in those days; for some reason death in a ditch was regarded as particularly shameful.

I heard it often, but still more often Mama told me that T had a 'dislocated mind', that I was 'different from other people' and that she was afraid I would never be a success at anything. My father -was furious whenever he heard this, and would say:

'I don't care what kind of a failure he is—let him be a tramp or a pauper so long as he doesn't grow up into one of those damned Kiev philistines.'

In the end I myself became a little shy and wary of my imagination. It seemed that I was wasting my time over trifles while everyone around me was busy with serious things: my brothers and my sister went to school and worked hard at their lessons, my father was on the managerial staff of the South-West Railway, and Mama did her sewing and ran the house. I alone lived in my own world, taking no part in their interests and with nothing to show for mine.

'I wish you'd go out and skate instead of sitting at home mooning,' said Mama. 'You really are a funny boy. Just look at yourself.'

I went skating. The winter days were short and dusk often found me still at the rink. A brass band struck up. Little coloured lights were lit. Schoolgirls in fur coats skated in circles, swinging from side to side, their hands tucked away in their muffs. Schoolboys skated backwards or 'pistol-fashion', one leg bent at the knee and the other stretched straight out. This was regarded as the height of style and I greatly envied them.

I came home flushed and tired. But my heart was troubled, for even after skating I still felt the same dangerous inclination to 'moon', 'daydream' and 'make things up'.

At the skating rink I often met my sister Galya's friend Katya Vesnitskaya who was in the senior form at the Fundukleyev High School for girls. Katya too had Halifax skates, but hers were black and burnished.

The Midshipman

The spring began when the Dnieper overflowed its banks. You had only to climb the Vladimir Hill on the edge of the town for a great expanse of bluish sea to open out before you.

But this was not the only flood in Kiev—the city was inundated with sun, freshness and warm, scented winds.

The sticky cone-shaped poplars on Bibikov Boulevard burgeoned, filling the surrounding streets with a smell of incense. The chestnuts put out their first, creased, transparent leaves covered with a reddish down. By the time their yellow and pink candles were in flower, spring was at its height, and the damp smell of new grass and the whispering of newly unfolded leaves poured over the garden walls into the streets.

There were caterpillars on the pavements even in the Kreshchatik. The wind swept fallen petals into drifts. Butterflies and maybugs flew in at the windows of the trams. Nightingales sang at night. The fluff off the poplars eddied on the flagstones like the surf of the Black Sea, and dandelions blossomed in the gutters.

Striped awnings were lowered over the wide-open windows of pastry shops and cafes. Vases of lilac sprinkled with water stood on the tables of the restaurants, and young girls searched its clusters for five-petalled blooms, their faces shadowed to a creamy ochre by their summer hats.

In spring I vanished for whole days into one or other of the Kiev parks. There I played and did my homework and read, coming home only to eat and sleep.

I knew every corner of the huge Botanical Gardens with its gullies, its lake and the dense shadow of its ancient avenues of lime-trees.

But my favourite park was the Marinsky Park in Lipki, near the Palace. It overlooked the Dnieper, it had fountains playing on its lawns, and its walls of white and purple lilac, three times a man's height, swayed and hummed with their multitude of bees.

The parks stretched in a wide belt along the tops of the red cliffs overhanging the Dnieper. The famous view from the Merchants' Park over the Podol was the pride of Kiev. A symphony orchestra played in the Park throughout the summer, and there was nothing to distract you from listening to the music except the hooting of the steamers.

The farthest of the parks along the bank was Vladimir Hill. It had a statue of Prince Vladimir holding up a large bronze cross in his hand. Electric bulbs had been attached to it and at night the nery cross blazed in the sky above the Kiev heights.

So beautiful was the city in spring that I could never understand Mama's passion for driving out on conventional Sunday excursions to the near-by places of interest. I was bored by the summer cottages of Pushcha Voditsa, indifferent to the stunted Boyarka woods haunted by the poet Nadson, and disgusted by Darnitsa because of the trampled grass littered with cigarette butts at the foot of its pine-trees.

One day I was sitting with my sister Galya in Marinsky Park, reading Stevenson's Treasure Island. Galya was also reading; her summer hat lay beside her on the bench, its green ribbon stirring in the wind.

Earlier it had rained but now the rain had nearly stopped and only a few drops pattered off the lilacs.

Galya was a short-sighted and extremely trusting girl whose equanimity it was almost impossible to upset.

A child with bows in her hair and a skipping rope had stopped in front of us and was distracting me by her skipping. I shook the lilac tree. A small shower descended noisily on to the child and Galya. The little girl stuck out her tongue at me and ran away;

Galya only brushed the drops off her page and continued to read.

It was at this moment that I saw the man who for years to come was to poison my mind with dreams of an unattainable destiny.

A tall midshipman with a calm, sunburned face came striding lightly down the path. A straight black cutlass hung from his shiny belt. Black ribbons with bronze anchors on them fluttered in the breeze. His uniform was all black, the vivid gold of the insignia alone relieving its austerity.

In our land-locked Kiev where we hardly ever saw a sailor, he was a visitor from the remote and legendary world of sailing ships, from the Frigate Pallada, from the world of all the oceans, all the ports, all the winds, all the fascination of the life of those who toil at sea. His antique black-hiked cutlass had come to Marinsky Park straight out of Robert Louis Stevenson.

The midshipman walked past, the sand crunching under his feet. I stood up and followed him. Galya was too short-sighted to notice my disappearance.

The man was the embodiment of all my ocean-going dreams. I had often imagined the sea, stormy or misty or calm in the gold evening, and myself on a distant voyage, with the whole world swiftly shifting and changing before my eyes like the patterns in a kaleidoscope. Good gracious, if someone had only thought of making me a birthday present of so much as a bit of rust off an anchor! I would have treasured it like a jewel.

The midshipman looked round. Inscribed on the narrow ribbon of his cap was the mysterious word 'Azimuth'. I learned later that this was the name of a training ship of the Baltic fleet.

I followed him down street after street. He saluted infantry officers with a careless grace which made me ashamed of our landlubbing soldiery.

After looking back several times he finally stopped at a corner of a street and beckoned me over.

'Tell me, boy,' he said with an amused smile, 'why have I got you in tow?'

I blushed and couldn't get out a word.

'I know, he wants to be a sailor,' he guessed, for some reason referring to me in the third person.

Tm short-sighted,' I said despondently.

He put his lean hand on my shoulder.

'Let's go to the Kreshchatik.'

We walked side by side. Not daring to look up I could only see the dazzling gloss on his stout, polished boots.

When we got to the Kreshchatik, he took me to the Samadeni Cafe and ordered two pistachio ices and two glasses of water. The waiter put them down on a small three-legged table with a marble top. The marble was very cold and had figures scribbled all over it: the stock exchange brokers used to gather in the cafe and work out their profits and losses on the tables.

We ate our ices in silence. The midshipman drew from his wallet the photograph of a magnificent corvette fully rigged and with a large funnel. Handing it to me, he said:

'Take this to remember me by. It's my ship. I sailed in her to Liverpool.'

Then he firmly shook my hand and walked out. I stayed on until the sweating businessmen in boaters who sat at the next table began to stare. Then I stumbled out and ran all the way to Marinsky Park. There was no one on the bench. Galya had gone. I realised that the midshipman had felt sorry for me and learned for the first time that pity leaves a bitter aftertaste.

For years after this I was tormented by the longing to be a sailor. I yearned for the sea. I had only had that one glimpse of it, when I spent a few days with my father in Novorossisk, and that had only whetted my appetite.

I used to sit for hours over an atlas, tracing the outlines of seaboards, looking up obscure little ports, capes, islands and estuaries.

I invented a highly complicated game. I made up a long list of ships with glamorous names such as Sirius, North Star, Chingkhan, Walter Scott; I added to it day after day, and I became the owner of the largest fleet in the world.

Needless to say, I sat in my own shipping office, the air thick with tobacco smoke, the walls bright with posters and sailing schedules, the wide windows facing the quayside. The yellow masts of steamships reached to the windows, poplars whispered cosily outside the walls, and smoke from the funnels blew in freely, mixing with the smell of new sacking and old brine.

I worked out the most astonishing routes for my ships. There was not a corner of the world they left unvisited. They even called at the island of Tristan da Cunha.

I switched them from route to route. I followed their sailings and knew unerringly where each of them would be on a given day— the A.dmiral Istomin was today loading bananas in Singapore while the flying Dutchman was unloading grain in the Faroes.

There were many things I needed to know in order to conduct an undertaking on so vast a scale, and I pored over guides and nautical almanacks and whatever else had the remotest connection with the sea.

That was when I first heard Mama mention meningitis.

The only hope it doesn't end by giving you meningitis,' she said one day.

But I had heard that meningitis was a disease which struck children who learned to read before they were old enough, so I only laughed at Mama's fears.

What it actually ended in was my parents' decision that we should all spend our summer holiday by the sea.

I realise today that Mama was hoping to cure me of my infatuation. She believed that, after dreaming of it so passi