1
Forerunners of Ostap Bender

In a piercing north wind, on a February day in 1920, the Whites fled from Odessa, firing a few parting shots at the town; the shells burst in the sky with a faint crump.

They left behind them a devastated city. The wind blew armfuls of half-burnt papers and greasy Denikin notes along the streets, piling them up against the drainpipes. The notes were worthless - they wouldn't have bought an olive. People simply threw them away. The shops shut down. Through the windows you could see swarms of ginger wharf-rats feverishly searching the dusty counters. The busy market squares had turned into deserts of cobblestone. Only the cats, unsteady with hunger, wandered about looking for scraps. But scraps in Odessa were a thing of the past.

Every last remnant of food had vanished. It was blood-chilling to think that all you could get in the whole enormous sea-port town was a little water tasting of rust. Miraculously, the pumps were still working and brought a trickle of it from the Dniester.

I had been living in Dr Landeman's disused sanatorium in Black Sea Street. Several journalists had moved in with me, among them Yasha Lifshitz, an extremely active reporter from Petrograd, who was interested in nothing but politics and his work. I spoke of him in the preceding volume of my autobiography 'In that Dawn'.

Shortly before the Soviet troops arrived, Yasha told me we ought to clear out, as the Bolsheviks were sure to nationalise the sanatorium and would turn us out anyway.

'We might get into serious trouble,' Yasha announced in a voice of doom. He didn't say what kind of trouble, and as we were all expecting trouble all the time I didn't bother to ask him.

Yasha and I found a porter's lodge in the same street and rented it from the enterprising landlord, an unfrocked priest called Prosvirnyak.

The lodge stood in a neglected garden surrounded by high walls of rough stone, at the back of a two-storeyed building facing the street. In those unquiet days it was as peaceful there as in a fortress. Prosvirnyak himself had named the lodge 'Fort Monte Cristo'.

The previous tenant had been a Russianised German, Schwittau, a professor of political economy at the University of Novorossisk. He had converted the house into a comfortable villa, surrounded it with beds of marguerites and moved his library into it, but he soon felt a foreboding of danger and, forsaking all, fled to Constantinople.

The Professor's library consisted almost entirely of German books on economics, so tidy that they might never have been opened. Partly for this reason and partly too because of their Gothic script, I imagined them to be ineffably boring.

The books gave out a sharp smell of lysol and cloves. Ever since, these smells have been for me a sign of paralysing boredom, especially the smell of cloves; seeds of some tropical plant, they look like black carpet-tacks.

On the other hand, standing on the Professor's shelves were all eighty-six volumes of Brockhaus and Efron's Encyclopaedic Dictionary, and this was treasure indeed.

Living among his possessions, I formed a mental picture of the Professor. He was smug, well-washed, pink, with a reddish beard and gold-rimmed glasses, and his eyes had the watery gleam you often see in those of ageing bachelors. I disliked this image of my predecessor, so I kept the windows wide open, hoping that his staid ghost would be blown away.

Before describing the events that followed, I should say something about Black Sea Street. I grew very fond of this small suburban street and believed it to be the most picturesque in the world.

Even the way to it from town was a tonic against adversity, as I often experienced. I might be walking home, utterly dejected by some failure, but as soon as I found myself in the deserted alleyways around Black Sea Street - Observatory Lane, Sturzo Lane, Battery Lane - and heard the rustling of the old acacia trees, saw the ivy dark on walls gilded by the winter sun, felt the breath of the sea on my face, I at once recovered my peace of mind and lightness of heart.

These alleys all ran between garden walls; the houses hid at the back of the gardens, behind locked wicket-gates. The alleys led to Black Sea Street, and Black Sea Street stretched along the edge of the cliffs overhanging the sea - though 'stretched' is perhaps the wrong word: it was so short that you could walk from one end to the other of it in a few minutes.

The street was open to the sea, which was beautiful in all weather. On the left, you looked down on Langeron and Quarantine Harbour, where an old pier, worn smooth by the storms, curved out to sea. On the right, the steep rust-red cliffs, overgrown with pigsweed and goosefoot, led to Arcadia and the Fountains, towards the misty beaches on which the tides would often wash up floating mines, torn from their moorings.

Black Sea Street was the naval outpost of Odessa. All the steamers passed it on their way to and from the port. The rustling of its gardens told us the varying strength of the wind; we learned to gauge it by this sound as sailors do by the Beaufort Scale.

There were other, slighter sounds as well, that served as weather signs. The drumming of ripe chestnuts on the pavements meant that the wind was freshening and had reached gale force four.

Black Sea Street was always empty. Its few inhabitants preferred to stay indoors. The day the coalman passed with his horse and cart, we could hardly believe our eyes - firstly because charcoal was worth its weight in gold, and also because the coalman fearlessly advertising his status as a private trader by actually shouting in his rich and sombre voice the welcome words:

'Charcoal! Lovely charcoal!'

In those comfortless days. Black Sea Street seemed, however deceptively, an island of salvation for those who had been washed up on it by the storms of life.

2
Plywood Maze

The old acacia trees in the boulevards flowered, and everything around them was strewn with yellowish blossoms.

In the thick of the acacias stood the Northern Hotel, to which Oprodkomgub moved in spring.

During the early revolutionary years, government departments showed an extraordinary restlessness. They were always on the move from one building to another, which they took over to the accompaniment of much noise, and immediately filled with flimsy plywood partitions and equally flimsy doors.

Set end to end, the partitions from any one department could easily have walled the city along the line of the Portofrank Circular Road.

Never quite reaching the ceiling, the partitions crossed at fanciful angles, cut stair-landings in half and formed dark, mysterious alleyways and dead-ends.

A vertical cross-section of the building from attic to basement would have revealed an astonishingly intricate human ant-hill inhabited by a unique species of human ant. They scribbled their way through mountains of paper by day and hid them for the night in the plywood cells with which the hill was honeycombed.

It was customary to plaster the partitions all over with orders, notices and wall-newspapers the size of bed-sheets.

A zinc tub for drinking water, with a tin mug attached by a chain, was set up in the plywood corridor; Aunt Motya or Aunt Raya, the messenger woman, sat beside it; from that moment, the department became fully operational.

It sometimes even seemed that no department could possibly exist without its plywood partitions and its women messengers and that only in their presence could it begin to flourish - its life seething, and its work exhaustively commented upon by its own Aunt Motya and those of neighbouring, friendly or hostile establishments. Each Aunt Motya was the jealous guardian of the prestige of her own department. Its Office Regulations were her Tables of the Law; they were subject to no criticism and had clearly been entrusted by the Lord of Hosts himself to the Commandant upon the heights of the administrative Sinai.

There were many interesting things to be seen in the plywood maze, to begin with the Cashier's office - a gloomy little cell with a crooked little window cut in the partition.

Written on it in blue pencil were the words: 'Comrades! write the amount in words and don't trouble the cashier to cut the money. Cut yourselves! (sic) - Ref. Order 1807.'

The mysterious and rather frightening words, 'Cut yourselves', had a simple explanation: the cashier was handed the money in large sheets which he had to waste time cutting up into separate notes. Tired of this, he took to paying the wages in uncut sheets.

The sheets varied in value according to the denomination of the notes. Thousand-rouble notes, for instance, were printed twenty to a sheet, so the sheet was worth twenty thousand, while ten-rouble notes were in sets of sixties, so the sheet was worth six hundred.

But sometimes the cashier couldn't pay in whole sheets. He had to cut the right amount with a pair of scissors.

This he put up with - it didn't take long anyway. It was only when some arrogant member of the staff refused to accept whole sheets and insisted on being paid in ready-cut notes that a row broke out.

On such occasions, the peppery old cashier slammed his little window and shouted:

'Think your hands will drop off if you cut the money? If you don't want to do it yourself, give it to the kids. Let them have a bit of fun.'

Slamming the window was a forbidden but powerful device of psychological warfare. I had experienced it myself and knew that, faced with a slammed cash-desk window, every employee panicked - especially those with many children, and alcoholics. Unaccountably, each felt sure that the window would never open again, that all the money had gone, that there was no money in the world and would never be again.

Even the most intractable claimant gave in and apologised. Then the cashier would open his window, give him a long, sad look over his spectacles and shake his head.

'Shame on you, young man. You're good-at making rows, but a little thing like cutting the money yourself and saving trouble for the finance department - that's beyond you. Write the amount here, after the red asterisk.'

To enlighten the staff on currency matters, the cashier pasted up on the partition near the cash-desk a set of all the Soviet notes in circulation and, next to it, a set of those which were no longer valid.

The two sets made up a unique collection, and the only reason it wasn't stolen was that he had stuck it on with carpenter's glue so that it was impossible to strip off. Even so, the day after it was put up, Karpenko found evidence of an attempt on it: someone had started cutting the plywood with a fretsaw.

Most of the notes in those days had nicknames. Thousand-rouble notes were 'bits', millions were 'lemons', while a milliard bore the resounding name of 'lemonard'. The smaller denominations also had found unexpected names, the most endearing being kept for the small change of paper thirties and fifties.

Some of those no longer current were quite fantastic. There were the hundred roubles printed on the backs of playing cards, issued by some god-forsaken town in the Ukraine. There were Odessa notes with views of the stock exchange, there were White-Guard 'bells' and 'caps', Ukrainian 'silver roubles', hundred-rouble 'omiettes' and 'steps', and a host of other 'currency' backed by the dubious assets of various towns, from Kryzhopol to Sosnitza and from Shpola to Glukhov.

The wall beside the cash desk was colourful. As soon as he was paid his money, nearly every employee went through the same drill: he pressed the sheets against the plywood, covered them with paper and rubbed hard to get rid of the sticky surplus of printer's ink.

By the end of pay day, every surface was tacky, and our hands, desks, papers and books were covered with serial numbers and signatures of the People's Commissar of Finance.

3
Barley Gruel

The hundreds and thousands of roubles we received as so-called wages all went for mid-day meals at the neighbouring public canteen. There, day in day out, we consumed a couple of spoonfuls of barley gruel flavoured with a green, vaseline-like substance. Torelli assured us it was rifle grease.

Apart from this, we fed on scorched bread and shell fish.

The bread had one remarkable property: the crust was quite separate from the loaf. They might have been two distinct geological strata. The space between them was filled with a cloudy, sour-tasting liquid, a kind of bitter bread-juice.

Some people liked it. They sucked the juice and said that it cured swellings of the joints.

The swellings were the result of malnutrition and cold. You couldn't touch them without feeling sharp and prolonged pain, and they burst open and bled every time you tried to wash your hands. In cold weather, they ached and when it was warm they itched unbearably.

I drank bread juice and can certify that it did nothing for my swollen joints, but it did give me acute pains in the stomach.

We boiled the shellfish with salt. They tasted strongly of fish glue.

We had to gather the shellfish ourselves at Langeron, prising them from the off-shore rocks with knives; of course we could do this only in calm, warm weather. So the shellfish were strictly summer fare.

We awaited summer impatiently. In summer I went fishing for goby-fish and sultanka. On the wide moles of the port, vegetable gardens, surrounded by fences made of rusty pipes and torn-up sheets of iron, were turning green. The leaves of the tomato plants gave off a wonderful smell, promising an early harvest of 'reddles' (as tomatoes were called in Odessa). The spectre of hunger faded for a while, but it was still there. It lay in wait for us, and we knew that at the slightest oversight on our part it would be back, and more menacing than before.

I felt I was the luckiest of men when I managed to get a few tablets of saccharine. It sweetened my beetroot tea, and as I drank it with a burnt crust of bread I felt new strength pouring into my veins.

All our money went on barley gruel and on water - a bucket cost 500 roubles. Not a penny was left, even for matches or firewood. Acacia wood the colour of sulphur was still on the market, but sold only in chips and by weight.

So we had to steal wood. I admit it without shame, if only because it was a dangerous business and the risk was sometimes deadly.

I need hardly say that we would much have preferred to feed our faithful bourzhouika on paper and newsprint. But old newspapers had to be stolen too.

Morally, there was little to choose between stealing papers and stealing logs, but in practice it made a great difference. Newsprint gave a fleeting hint of warmth and left the yard strewn with burnt paper and yellow ash, which brought upon us the admonitions of the unfrocked Prosvirnyak.

We stole wood mainly in Arcadia. It was the nearest residential suburb by the sea.

With the coming of summer, Arcadia made me think of the ruins of Roman villas - the Borghese, Aldobrandini or Conti. Dying ivy twined round the cracked pillars with their chipped plaster. The plaster was chipped off on purpose to make sure that the pillars were made of brick and could not be used as fuel.

Lizards sunned themselves in the glassless windows, where golden broom flowered, clinging to broken stone windowsills. Swallows nested in the pilasters. Dusty thistles grew and multiplied in the loggias, as in enormous stone bowls.

Ants made Appian Ways on the marble slabs. Like the Coliseum with its crumbling south wall, the concrete pool had a crumbling rim on the side facing the south and the sea, while the bottom was overgrown with dry grass and immortelles.

These ruins were only about two years old but they already had an air of antiquity, and it overlaid the colours of deserted Arcadia with the dusty bronze patina of Ellas or Pergamon.

This was in summer. But in winter, when we went out at night and in bad weather, the ruins loomed ominously black. The January north wind howled in them and peppered us with small-shot of dry snow. Then it was impossible to imagine that the summer sun would one day rise over the ruins, and the softest of breezes whisper in the leaves of the surviving century-old trees.

That winter Yasha and I stole timber only three times, but we were very successful. Twice we brought back a floorboard each, and once we even got away with a door-frame.

The wood lasted us all through the winter, but only because Yasha had discovered a remarkable method of instantly bringing the bour'^houika to white heat and the kettle to the boil. The secret was to stoke it with splinters as thin as straw. This produced a violent though short-lived flame, and used up hardly any fuel.

I well remember our nocturnal forays for wood. First we went on a daylight reconnaissance in search of a villa where not all the timber had already been stolen. During the walk, Yasha would as usual conduct a passionate argument about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays or the economic consequences of the Treaty of Versailles.

After the reconnaissance came the main expedition. We set out before dark, following the shore where in winter it was unlikely that anyone would see us. Under our coats we carried a small hunter's axe and a brace, both belonging to Prosvirnyak. In return for this we gave him kindling for his samovar. The fire- wood we shared only with Torelli. His invalid sister, bedridden and unable to move, needed constant warmth.

Near Arcadia, in a derelict cabin where in prehistoric times fruit-juice and soda water were sold, we waited for nightfall.

When it was dark, we made our way to the dacha we had selected. We went cautiously, stopping every few minutes to listen. At the slightest sound, we hid behind the nearest wall.

It was not policemen we were afraid of. There were none in Arcadia. Who would think of guarding ruins, gardens with bare branches whistling in the wind, or the bleak shore enveloped in the gloom of a stormy night? It was not the police we were avoiding but the petty thieves, the greedy pedlars who stole timber to sell it. The markets were swarming with them.

We bumped into them the very first night, and narrowly escaped being shot with a sawn-off rifle, while the abuse showered on us made our blood run cold.

Taking up the floorboards was the hardest part of the job. It was vital to make no sound, but the rusty nails invariably squeaked. We finished up with bleeding hands, torn nails and knees shaking with strain.

4
Blockade

Memory plays many unaccountable tricks on us. Our recollection of great events can be as hazy as that of a grey uneventful day.

I have tried to avoid this danger in my writing, but I am not sure of having been completely successful. The image we retain of a period can be subjective even though it seems to us objective and accurate. How otherwise account for the fact that, amidst all the resounding and amazing events of the time, our life in Odessa at the end of 1920 and in 1921 seems to me in retrospect a relatively peaceful interlude?

5
Concatenation of Circumstances

Volodya Golovchiner was fond of reflecting on the 'cunning and unpredictable concatenations of circumstances' which rule our fate. He quoted Chekhov's Ivanov to prove it: 'We, human beings, live like the flowers of the field. Along comes a goat and - snipl there's no flower.'

Torelli agreed, adding that, whatever might be true in the world at large, you could never be sure of anything in Odessa. Odessa was a law unto itself. Anything might happen, even a full-scale battle over a set of kitchen chairs, as had been the case during the Intervention in 1919.

The Interventionists had divided the city into four zones -French, Greek, Petlyura's and Denikin's, each fenced off by a row of bent-wood chairs. One day, when the French sentry had left his post on urgent business, Petlyura's men pinched some of them, thereby annexing a large slice of foreign territory. When he came back the indignant sentry 'started a commotion' and began to shoot.

However this may be, the following incident proved Volodya's point: the cause was indeed a complicated and unpredictable combination (or 'concatenation,' as he insisted) of circumstances.

Early one morning in summer, when the blockade was at its height and Odessa's total isolation induced a certain recklessness in her mood, Torelli hammered on our door and shouted:

'Get up! There seems to be a new Intervention.'

I leapt out of bed. In Odessa you had to be prepared for anything. From the top of the cliffs overlooking Langeron and the port veiled in its delicate faint-blue mist, we saw what Torelli described as rosy-fingered Aurora (drifts of cloud over the sea, lit by a quiet dawn) and, on the clear waters of the harbour, two enormous, clumsy, ocean-going liners flying the French flag.

The French mine sweeper Lieutenant Borri, long and elegant as a fine cigar, lay beside them, a wisp of smoke over her funnel and the brasswork on her deck dazzling as the sun.

We rushed down to the port, but were not allowed in. It was cordoned off by units of sailors and Red Army men.

The two French transport ships were slowly moving towards their berths. We heard that the commander of the minesweeper was the well-known French writer Claude Farrere, author of Opium Dreams.

This was sufficiently interesting in itself. Still more interesting was the disembarkation which followed.

Calmly walking down the gangways of the troopship were not Zouaves, not coffee-coloured Senegalese, not even men of the Foreign Legion, but Russian soldiers, unarmed and in brand new khaki uniforms, indistinguishable from those of the old Tsarist army except for the addition of squeaky polished leggings of brown leather.

The men formed up on the quay and were marched off to barracks by Soviet commanders.

An hour later we knew all about it. 'All' was the fact that, during the War, Nicolas II had sent an infantry corps, known as the Russian Expeditionary Force, to France. It sailed from Vladi-vostock, landed in Marseilles and marched through Paris under the eyes of delighted Frenchwomen who showered the men with flowers.

President Poincare took the parade at the Arc de Triomphe, where they marched past to the rousing strains of 'Chubariki-chubchiki, trouble isn't grief.'

The French Command was not so keen to share the fruits of victory with Russian bears as to hurry them off to the front; all the same about five thousand of our men were killed in battles with the Germans on French soil.

Then came the revolution and the Russians refused to continue to fight. They were sent to the rear and interned in prisoner-of-war camps. There they remained for several years, although they kept demanding repatriation and even mutinied from time to time, causing considerable trouble to the French authorities.

In the end, the French decided to get rid of them, put them on troopships and, by agreement with our government, sent them under convoy to Odessa.

All Odessa flocked to the port to welcome the Russian soldiers. They were hugged, kissed and presented with flowers.

Then a mysterious incident occurred.

The disembarkation over, the ships left their moorings and were sailing past the Vorontsov lighthouse into the roadstead when, from our Black Sea Street, a volley thundered, and shells exploded across their bows.

The two transport ships stopped their engines while the minesweeper turned broadside-on to the port, and a dazzling violet light flashed on and off from its conning tower, signalling Odessa.

Meanwhile guns were being mounted on the Promenade. Sailors with Mausers at their belts worked in grim and concentrated silence.

All Odessa learned that, hidden in their holds, the troopships carried a large cargo of arms and even some light tanks.

The French had meant to kill two birds with one stone: rid themselves of the Russian revolutionaries, then call on the Crimea on their way to Constantinople and unload the arms for Vrangel.

The Odessa authorities had found this out from the men of the Expeditionary Force and asked Moscow by radio for instructions.

The order came to detain the ships and demand that the arms be landed in Odessa.

The French refused. It was said in Odessa that the whole dirty business had been thought up by General d'Anselrne; even the Whites, his allies, thought him stupid as a donkey and as mean as Plyushhkin.

Two days passed. All Odessa crowded on to the beaches, waiting to see what would happen. The French were adamant and kept up steam; their funnels never stopped puffing.

They were evidently looking for some dignified way out, but finally could think of nothing better than brute force.

A strong squadron of French warships was despatched from Constantinople. Its commander signalled grimly that he would shell the coast and raze Odessa to the ground unless the ships were released.

I still remember our bitter disappointment when, to save Odessa, Moscow advised the release of the ships. We were not strong enough at sea then to take on a whole French squadron.

The day the ships left, I went to Fountain where the cliffs looked out on to the open sea. A thick pall of smoke shrouded the horizon. The French squadron was approaching. It stopped a few miles away and waited for its troopships.

The troopships were sailing full steam ahead. Swooping after them and darting from ship to ship came the minesweeper 'Lieutenant Borri. The sight must have been too much for one of our shore batteries which fired a useless salvo in their wake.

I felt cruelly hurt for France and for the French, hurt for the whole of their great culture, for Diderot and Voltaire, Hugo and Stendhal, for Zola and Corot, for Pasteur and Delacroix, for all the great Frenchmen whom none of us distinguished from Russians. They were as close to us as Pushkin, Tolstoy and Chekhov. They would have felt bitterly ashamed of France's political confidence-tricksters and their representative. General d'Anselme. I could imagine how coldly and contemptuously Hugo or Stendhal would have had the General shot for cowardice and knavery.

6
Day of Peaceful Uprising

We had been without electricity for so long that we were beginning to forget it had ever existed. Bulbs were black with dirt, and if you turned a switch by mistake it squeaked with rust.

Only Volodya was delighted. With the air of making a discovery, he announced: 'Every epoch has its distinctive style. Ours is that of a new pastoral age. Think of it - no electricity. Nettles growing on the tramlines. Potatoes flowering in the squares. We wear Greek buskins on our feet and drink fresh water instead of vodka. What could be nicer? It's the dawn of the golden age.'

One day I wasn't feeling well and stayed in bed instead of going to Oprodkomgub. It was late in spring. The chestnuts were in flower and in the evening a mist-wrapped moon rose over the sea.

I lit the oil lamp and was quietly reading the tenth volume of Brockhaus and Efron's Encyclopaedia when something strange and disturbing happened - the filament in the bulb of the ceiling lamp turned yellow and began to glow, though without reaching anything like a state of full incandescence. The room filled with an unpleasant, pallid light that made it look like a morgue.

I watched, hypnotised, wondering why the light was so dim. Obviously the feeble current was dragging itself along rusty wires, struggling with ancient connections and dusty knots of insulating tape and getting stuck in the meters choked with cobwebs.

Just as I thought the light was growing brighter, it faded almost to vanishing point. All the same, there was enough of it to light up the oak book-cases and sombre rows of books.

It struck me that there was something sinister about the light suddenly coming on. It was an omen, a warning. I was not alone in this. Odessa secretly panicked. The light meant trouble. What kind of trouble?

Torelli gave me a hint. He knocked and came in, pale, wild eyed, a woman's brand-new coat with a monkey collar over his arm.

'Could I possibly ask you to hang it up in your cupboard?' he asked hurriedly. 'Just for a few days. It's my sister's.'

I was taken aback but I took the coat and hung it up. It was a light spring coat and smelt faintly of scent. Clearly, Torelli's sister Rachel, still a pretty girl with freckles on her face, had never once worn it since her illness.

'What's the matter?' I asked Torelli.

'It's a matter of logic.' He gave an artificial laugh and rubbed his hands. 'You know as well as I do that the power station has enough coal-dust for three nights. Yet they've started it up. That means that before the three nights are out, something is going to happen. Something that requires electric light.'

'But what could happen?'

'How do I know?' He shrugged. 'St Bartholomew's Night? Massacre of the Innocents? Rape of the Sabines? The last days of Pompeii? You can take your choice. Good night.'

He went, leaving me to rack my brains.

I couldn't think of anything, so I went back to bed. I tried to switch out the light - the switch squeaked but the light stayed on. I waggled the switch up and down. It squeaked loud and angrily but the light didn't even blink. I climbed up on a chair and tried to unscrew the bulb, but it had soldered itself to the socket.

I got into bed, leaving the windows open. The drowsy, rhythmic sound of the waves lulled me to sleep.

I awoke at dawn. Dew was gathering on the branches of the thuya outside my window. The garden was deserted and still. But in the near corner, where an old barrel of lime had always stood, there was a large, dark, shapeless object, rather like a hayrick.

I looked hard at it. Somehow it was frightening. Pulling myself together, I climbed through the window into the garden and went up to it. It was a heap of old but expensive coats. There was skunk with a beaver collar, a woman's astrakhan coat, two old-fashioned black spring coats and an astrakhan jacket.

Underneath the layers of fur I found a low stool, upholstered in damask, with curly gilt legs. I had seen one like it on the stage, under the feet of the old Countess in The Queen of Spades.

I pulled it out and tried to lift it to have a closer look, but soon gave up - it seemed to be filled with lead.

I kicked it and heard something tinkle inside, under the elegant Louis XIV upholstery. The mystery deepened. I meant to solve it, but I first ran out to the nearest shop to buy bread. The shop stayed open only two hours -I was afraid of being late.

Coming back, I found that the pile in the corner of the garden had been camouflaged with straw and fallen leaves, so neatly that no one would have guessed there was anything there.

I dislike mysteries. Knowing that Prosvirnyak had the key of the door from the yard into the garden, I went to ask him what was going on.

Prosvirnyak was our political barometer. If he looked away when he met us, pretended not to hear, interrupted us by shouting at his cook, a former nun, 'Don't put too much oil in, Neonilla,' it meant that the regime in Odessa had suffered a setback, however slight.

But if he went out of his way to be amiable, laughing an affected, deep laugh and stroking his beard with both hands, we knew that the regime stood firm.

That day he was polite but livid.

'You of all people,' he said with quiet emphasis, 'as a civil servant with however limited a responsibility for the actions of your masters, should know that a Day of Peaceful Uprising has been proclaimed in Odessa. According to the authorities, the Day is to last three days.'

'I haven't heard,' I said. 'I haven't been to town yet. What is this Peaceful Uprising?'

He spread a grey sheet of paper in front of me. His hands were shaking. 'I tore this down with my own hands from the wall of my own house at eleven o'clock last night.'

I read the order signed by the Odessa Provincial Committee. It said that, as a means of expropriating the possessing classes, whose wealth was now the property of the people, a Day of Peaceful Uprising was proclaimed. All citizens without exception were to hand over their surplus food and belongings, and keep only the listed essentials.

I read the list. It said: 'To be left for the citizen's private use, one suit of outer clothing, one set of underwear, one pair of shoes (not boots), one headgear,' and so on down to 'one fork, knife, soup-spoon, mug, cooking utensils (only those essential), and one hundred grams of sugar.

'In the event of gold, valuables, foreign currency, or luxury or black-market goods being found, those who concealed them will be brought to trial for treason and counter-revolution.'

'Swine,' said Prosvirnyak, making me start. I had never before heard a coarse word from his honeyed lips.

'And now,' I said, 'will you kindly remove your stuff from under my windows and hide it elsewhere. As you may appreciate, I don't want to be shot because of your moth-eaten coats and your footstools stuffed with gold.'

'You are very much mistaken,' he said gently, pressing his hand to his breast. 'You have no reason to be angry. Two of the coats are mine, but the footstool belongs to General Rennenkampf's sister-in-law. I couldn't refuse, especially as she had seen me hiding my own stuff. Put yourself in my shoes. I'll take it all away as soon as it's dark.'

'Right,' I agreed. 'But mind, not later than tonight.'

Forgetting, apparently, that he was unfrocked, Prosvirnyak raised his arms to heaven and proclaimed in an affectedly inspired voice, as though from a pulpit (while his eyes flashed angrily):

'These are evil times indeed! Truly there are no bounds to human wickedness and the wiles of Satan.'

Dropping his arms, he went on in his ordinary voice:

'You I respect, but that Comrade Gavarsaki - the electrician, the tenant in Flat 5 - he worries me terribly. He's buying up explosives. One of these days, they'll pick him up and us as well and shoot the lot of us. I'll stake my life on it. Beware of him. Be careful he doesn't bury his infernal fireworks in the garden. The coats are nothing. At the worst, the "comrades" will take them. I'm prepared for anything.'

I went away convinced that he had not the slightest intention of removing his belongings, and indeed, when I came back with Yasha from the office, the pile had stretched from one end of the garden wall to the other. All the things were covered up with straw as carefully as the first lot which, by comparison, seemed to me quite small.

Dozing on a kitchen chair beside them was an imposing old gentleman with white side-whiskers. There was such a period air about him that you might have thought a story by Goncharov or Ostrovsky was being filmed in the garden.

'You haven't moved your things, of course,' I said to Prosvir-nyak. 'But be that between you and your conscience. Who is the character in the garden?'

'The watchman,' he said mysteriously. 'Between ourselves, people have brought their things from all over Black Sea Street -it's such a secluded place here. They're afraid of two things, naturally. On the one hand, the authorities may come and take everything, and on the other there are the bandits - you never know when they will strike. So we decided to keep watch in turn. Comrade Gavarsaki tried to get in with his fireworks, but I didn't let him.'

'What fireworks?'

'A liquid of some sort. In two-gallon carboys. He's a fool that Gavarsaki.'

'Hm . . . yes,' said Yasha, having learned what was going on in the house and garden. 'It's going to end in a God-awful mess, I can tell you here and now.'

Going to the office that morning, I had been struck by the unusual amount of traffic in town - especially the number of prams, push-carts and anything on wheels suitable for the transport of small objects; there were even bicycles loaded like mules and low wooden platforms on castors. The prams were mostly ramshackle and held together with string.

All this stream of baby carriages rolled towards the Greek market; so did the briskly rattling hand-carts pushed from behind. People were hurrying in the same direction, panting under the weight of parcels and suitcases, or dragging lamps and sewing machines, tailor's dummies and dentists' chairs.

This great migration was taking place in complete silence. Even the children in the prams uttered no sound. Not a squeak nor a howl - well wrapped up and sheltered by curtains and hoods, they were all fast asleep. And they must all have been future giants, judging by the way the prams sagged under their weight.

This went on all day. The staff of Oprodkomgub watched from the windows. The slightest hold-up in the traffic made the watchers uneasy. Leaning out, they called in worried voices:

'What's the matter? Won't they let you through? Try Perekop. They'll leave that to the last.'

'No, they're not stopping us,' the people in the street called back reluctantly. 'It's just a pram that's broken down. It's holding us all up.'

'What's in it?' The watchers asked with lively interest.

'Tins of halva! About two hundred pounds of it. A whole consignment.'

Torelli explained it all to me the moment I got to the office. The night before, the search parties had gone through the Greek market district, expropriating superfluous wealth. So now, people from other parts of the town - the Station district, for instance, where the expropriation was still to come - were moving their valuables to the Greek market for safety. If, by next day, the Station district had had its turn, prams and people would flow back, making room for those from French Boulevard.

Yasha and I couldn't sleep all night. The owners of the property hidden in the garden kept flitting about like bats, vanishing at the slightest sound as though the earth had swallowed them up.

We also stayed awake waiting for a search party to arrive at any moment - no one knew when it would be the turn of our street.

So we listened to all the strange sounds which came from outside and, to pass the time, tried to identify them.

The rustling in the main building was made up of the anxious whispers of the tenants in all the flats. Rising above it, could be heard the nagging, whining voice of Comrade Gavarsaki who had still not managed to dispose of his carboys of unidentified liquid explosive.

'It's all very well laughing,' said Yasha. 'If I were you I'd take that damned footstool out and get rid of it. Throw it over the wall into the next yard. Don't you realise you're risking your neck? How are you going to prove it's not yours?'

'All right,' I said. 'You go and do it. And you deal with that mob of owners. I don't care by now.'

Yasha snorted.

'Hi, you!' he suddenly shouted through the window at a thick shadow, which immediately disappeared in terror. 'You property owners out there! Ladies and gentlemen in waiting! Will you stop milling outside our window or not? Nobody can get a wink of sleep with all that row going on.'

An angry black tuft of hair stood up on his head. Outside, perfect silence 'reigned' as they say. I burst out laughing and hid my face in my pillow.

'What's the matter with you?' Yasha turned on me.

But just then Comrade Gavarsaki walked in through the door from the yard without knocking. He stopped on the threshold and looked at us reproachfully, arms folded on his chest.

'What do you want, young man?' Yasha asked in a tone implying 'Go to hell'.

But Gavarsaki didn't even look at him. I should explain that Gavarsaki's appearance was against him. The long face and muddy skin, the long dark nose, slightly askew, the yellow circles round the mournful eyes, the shuffling gait, the mumbling voice -all spoke of failure and querulous resignation to fate.

For a long time Gavarsaki stood in silence, open-mouthed, his eyes slowly searching the room.

'There's a space there,' he said at last. 'Behind that door. It would take one carboy. The trouble is I've got three.'

Yasha's eyes widened with fear:

'What is he talking about? What does he want?'

'Or could I put them in your cupboard?' Gavarsaki asked calmly. 'They wouldn't harm your things. I use pure ether.'

'Ether?'

'Pure ether, I tell you. Ether sulphuricus. What did you think? I get three sacks of flour and a bottle of lamp-oil for every carboy. That's not to be sneezed at. Of course, if they find it they shoot you. But they'll never come to the lodge. Why should they? It's just an out-house. It's not like my room with the three carboys in the middle of it, like on a stage. It's got me worried, honestly comrades, it's a real headache.'

Yasha jumped out of bed, went up to Gavarsaki, and hissed with extraordinary venom:

'Get out! At once! Or I'll kick you through that door. Out!'

Gavarsaki scratched his head, blinked at me, asked, 'Is he always like that your friend? Sounds mental!' and reluctantly went out, closing the door carefully behind him.

Yasha locked it, blew out the wick-lamp and went back to bed, but he tossed for a long time in the dark, cursing the ill wind that had brought him to Black Sea Street.

I was dozing off when I smelt an unfamiliar, rather pungent smell. Suddenly I was floating, and my heart was gradually slowing down.

It stopped after a faint last flutter, without causing me any fear or pain, and a delightful freshness poured over me. I even laughed with pleasure.

Immediately, Yasha's voice roared as though from the centre of the earth:

'Get up! Quick! Ether!'

He jerked my arm. I tried to sit up but fell back. He seized me by the shoulders and dragged me, reeling, to the window.

'Get out into the garden,' he shouted, pushing me. 'Curse that Gavarsaki. Get out or we're finished! Hurry! Come on!'

I leaned with difficulty through the window. Someone from outside pulled me clear and picked me up. It was Torelli. Yasha climbed out after me. A strong, sharp smell filled the lodge.

'For God's sake,' Prosvirnyak shouted brokenly, 'don't smoke, don't strike a match. I beg of you! Or the building will go up. And don't go near the sewage pipe, you'll be killed.'

I came to. It was dawn. The garden was full of terrified lodgers, huddling against the walls. Torelli's sister lay on a blanket under the acacia tree.

'What has happened?' I asked. 'Has there been a search?'

'Nothing like that,' Torelli answered with forced heartiness. 'The Lord chose to work a miracle.'

At this, all the tenants began to laugh. The women rocked with laughter, covering their mouths with their shawls, the men shook silently, Torelli squealed and Prosvirnyak rumbled, stroking his beard. Even Yasha spluttered and choked.

I felt terrified.

'Stop!' I shouted. 'Tell me what's happened.'

It appeared that at two in the morning a search party had knocked up the house next door. Driven mad with terror, Gavarsaki rushed into the lavatory with his carboys, poured the ether down the drain, and immediately vanished without trace.

The fumes filled the building, poured along the pipes into the lodge and the next house, and seeped through flanges and manholes, out into the street and the other yards.

Everyone in our building and the next had got out safely. Torelli's sister was carried out just in time. Driven back by the fumes and the fear of being poisoned, the search party withdrew to the far end of the street and, after searching a few houses, went off at first light, swearing to find Gavarsaki even at the bottom of the sea, and knock his head off.

That day the belongings left in our garden went back to their owners, disappearing quickly and without fuss. Prosvirnyak swept the garden, a shower of rain laid the dust and washed away all trace of the nocturnal commotion; and once again the blue seaside silence enveloped the lodge, never again to leave it.

Yasha moved back to town. Volodya Golovchiner moved into the lodge in his place.

The flats still smelt of ether. Gavarsaki turned up at the end of a week, safe, but exhausted and batty.

And although he had saved them from a house search, the tenants turned on him to a man. Never a day passed without some new comic story being spread about him.

Gavarsaki scratched his head and looked in vain for a drop of sympathy. They had none to give him. Only Volodya had the patience to listen to him, and even he, after Gavarsaki had gone, shook his head and sighed:

'What can you do with a chap like that!'

7
The Austrian Beach

Quarantine Wharf was sheltered from the sea by a high wall of concrete blocks. At its far end, it widened into the pier.

Violent winter storms had broken a wide gap in the wall and formed a small sandy beach on the side facing the sea. The first to use it had been Austrian soldiers during the Intervention, so this warm, cosy, secluded beach was known as 'Austria'.

It was further away from town than the wide beach of Langeron Bay, so those who went were mostly people fond of solitude - and perhaps also of the kind of old-fashioned marine views you hardly ever see except in old illustrated magazines. For to get to it, you had to walk right across the port, past half-buried, round dismantled mines, yellow and red buoys, stone steps leading to the water, signal-masts, old barges, coils of rotten rope and finally, a mysterious little house with a white turret and rusted balcony, standing on the breakwater. It had no windows on the first floor which made it look rather like a fort or a blockhouse.

The roof was of orange tiles. The wind often sang round the flagpole, and through the half-drawn curtains of the ground-floor window you could see faded maps on the wall and a stack of books on the windowsill. The house was uninhabited. Needless to say, I would have been the happiest of men had I been allowed to live in it.

I would have adorned it with new maps and books, and let it be aired through and through by the sea breeze and warmed by the sunshine, pink against the all-pervading blue.

The Austrian beach was made for reading books that have to be read slowly, and set aside from time to time, while you dig about in the sand and by chance come across a fragment of rock crystal.

It was a wonderful place to doze. The wind from the sea tickled your eyelashes and the salt air stayed in your lungs and made you a little drunk.

Among the few people on the beach, I used to see Ilya Ilf (he was still known as Feinzilberg; the pen-name came later). I liked his quiet, sad face. He looked as though his head were full of half-dreams and half-stories and this was why he often fell asleep on the beach and had to be woken up at sunset.

Years later, I read some of the entries in his Notebooks and ever since I can't get rid of the idea that they all came to him just then, in 1921, on the Austrian beach. Here is one of them:

'I used to have soothing thoughts before I fell asleep.

For instance, the English fleet sailing for Jutland: I looked long at the empty port and this lulled me to sleep. Tens of thousands of men were at sea. But the port was disquietingly calm and empty.'

'I looked long at the empty port.' There was no more usual and sad occupation in those days in Odessa, than looking at the empty port, and observing it in minute detail. The details were very attractive. The steady light, the heat of the noonday sun, and the taut waves playing nearby gave them all the vividness and beauty of the south.

I have been very active over the years. My activity often altered the course of my life and made me see it from new and unexpected angles.

But it never involved fuss, or useless chatter, or indiscriminate contacts with people.

On the contrary, it satisfied my thirst for observation - for examining life closely, as through a magnifying glass - and my desire to give it (in my imagination) much more poetry than it has in fact.

I could never help lending it extra colour and light, and the result pleased me, it increased its charm.

Even if I had very much wanted to, I could not have destroyed in myself this function which, as I understood later, is one of the essentials of the work of a writer. Perhaps because of this, my writing was to be more than an occupation or a job, it was to be my state of life, my interior state. I often caught myself out in living as though inside a novel or a story.

This need to look at life through a magnifying glass came upon me very strongly in Odessa and was no doubt connected with my wanderings about the port, and the peaceful hours I spent on the Austrian beach.

Time has worn away the biting sharpness of the sorrows and misfortunes of those days. Memory turns to them unwillingly. It prefers to see the brighter side and dwells on our rare joys. With the passing of the years they have grown in volume and significance. Neither typhus and famine, nor the cold in our little room and our complete uncertainty of tomorrow could destroy our faith in the happy destiny of the country.

Our youth was unconquerable. It would have turned Dante's Inferno into an exciting show. Our bodies swelling with hunger, we could still feel and rejoice in the scent of the first spring flower outside the window of our lodge.

Together with many of my contemporaries, I experienced and I remember those years as years of great and unshakable hope.

That hope was present to us always and in everything.

It reached us like a glimmer of sunshine through the heavy clouds of an Odessa winter day. All at once, a stalk ofgoosefoot in the yard, frozen and grey with rime, lit up with warm sunshine from no one knew where, and in this light we already felt the radiant approach of spring.

One day, Volodya and I were sitting on the Austrian beach when a short man with a lisp and languid eyes came up to us, a sailor's faded, shapeless cap in his hand.

The cap was full of apricots which he offered us.

After we had eaten them all up between us, he introduced himself as Evgeny Ivanov, a former correspondent of the Russian Word.

'You may have heard of me.' He smiled, showing small sharp teeth. 'I am known as an adventurer, but that's only one of those Odessa lies. I have a proposition to put to you, two propositions, in fact. Seriously, no joke.'

He put his cap on the back of his head and slapped me on the shoulder.

'Firstly - a paper called The Seaman is coming out in Odessa in a fortnight. You see before you its technical editor. I want you to work for me. I know you by hearsay. We'll have a paper to outshine the novels of Dumas pere. Printed on special paper made of Saragossa seaweed. We'll hold all the seas in our fist just like that' - he clenched his little fist - 'and we'll squeeze stories out of them like orange juice, stories that will make collectors fifty years from now pay a hundred roubles for a back number of The Seaman.'

It was all lies of course. I looked at him. He was so carried away that he dribbled at the mouth like a baby.

'I'm not joking.' He laughed. 'I want you as assistant editor. Agreed?'

'Agreed,' I said without thinking.

Volodya refused a job on The Seaman on the grounds that he was section head at Oprodkomgub.

'Stick to your Oprodkomgub then,' Ivanov said haughtily, 'where you won't even get a tin of treacle so that you can give a ceremonial tea with maize rusks for the launching of our paper. You won't, you know. Well, my other proposition is simpler. Let's take our clothes off and go and gather shellfish on those rocks for supper. I've got the implement.'

He produced a jagged Austrian bayonet from inside his jacket.

Volodya didn't want to get his feet wet. He was an excellent swimmer but always bone lazy on the beach.

Ivanov and I undressed and waded out to the rocks.

'We can put the shellfish in my cap,' said Ivanov.

Gathering shellfish consisted in my lacerating my hands to prise them off the rocks with Ivanov's blunt bayonet while Ivanov collected them in his cap.

Our work was soon cut short. A woman's rough voice yelled from the beach:

'Zhenya! What d'you think you're doing? Come out at once!'

'Coming, Marina darling!' Ivanov called back ingratiatingly. *I was only just . . . .'

'How long am I going to wait for you, you tramp?' came the voice, and at this point I saw her. 'Come out, I tell you. Do you want to catch pneumonia? If you don't care about yourself, you might at least think of the kids.'

'My wife,' Ivanov told me unnecessarily. 'Marina. She would turn up. A real bully. But she's a wonderful woman.'

Marina was huge, swarthy, ox-eyed and had a black moustache. Shaking hands with Volodya and me, she said:

'Come to supper this evening. I've got a piece of pork, we'll have it roast, with hominy. You don't know my Zhenya. Randy as a tom-cat, can't let him out of my sight. A real wolf. You wouldn't think it, a little chap like that, dainty as a ballerina. I will say, though, he's a wonderful journalist, for that he's really gifted. Only he will get himself mixed up in all sorts of stunts.'

'Shut up,' said Zhenya, hopping on one foot and pulling on his canvas trousers. 'Keep your nose out of my business. And my trouser belt is bust.'

'Has he asked you to join The Seaman?' Marina went on, paying no attention. 'You two will make a wonderful job of it. Only mind his tongue doesn't run away with him. He's got an impossible character.'

That was how I joined The Seaman on the Austrian beach, and I still think I was very lucky, as my subsequent story will show.

8
Glycerine Soap

Several things happened in the two weeks before I began to work for The Seaman. The saddest was the death of Torelli's sister, Rachel.

She caught Spanish flu, then a new disease, had it very badly and developed complications.

Torelli stayed away from Oprodkomgub and looked after her like a nurse. Volodya and I often dropped in on her, although Torelli worried about our catching flu and kept trying to throw us out.

Volodya Golovchiner managed somehow to get hold of an old cake of glycerine soap and presented it to Rachel. Weak and feverish, she clasped her hands and blushed with pleasure so that her freckles stood out white.

We all examined the wonderful soap against the light. Golden and translucent, it still retained some of its subtle smell, though now rather stale.

One day Torelli had to go to town and needed someone to look after Rachel during his absence. He asked me to stay, but on condition I sat by the door.

By then I had left Oprodkomgub, so I was free.

Rachel lay with her eyes shut, smiling. She held the cake of soap in her hands, clutching it with her strong, violinist's fingers. She had studied under the famous Odessa violinist, Nahum Tokar.

Tokar was an excellent teacher, good at .'setting' his pupils' hands and 'giving them fingers', but a practical, down-to-earth man of no refinement.

'Is that the way to play this piece?' he would bellow at some wretched student. 'Where's the softness, the subtlety, the sweetness? Think of your mother, Rosalia Yosifovna, making her famous cherry jam. You're just going to eat it, and your mouth actually waters with anticipation. That's how you have to play it -with anticipation! Anticipate! Anticipate! Ant/cipate! Anticipate!' He beat time crossly with his foot.

Rachel seldom spoke of her music. Now she opened her eyes and said:

'Don't tell Abram, but I know I'm going to die soon. And he'll have me buried in that Jewish cemetery, next to Papa and Mama, and brother Arkasha. It's such a boring place! Now, for goodness sake don't start telling me I'm going to get well, and have cheeks like tomatoes, and perhaps marry a bonny lad in a cowboy shirt with a silver watch-chain. I've heard it all dozens of times from Abram. Better tell me where Majorca is.'

'Why do you want to know?'

'We had a lecture about Chopin, they said he lived there. I've never thought about it since, but today I've had a dream about it. There were hills, and very, very shallow streams running down into the valleys - the water was very clear and warm, and they were as wide as from here to the Quarantine Wharf. They flowed over green meadows, and there were all sorts of flowers growing in them, rising above the water and swaying with the current. I waded across the streams barefoot, and I liked feeling the soft grass under my feet.'

She turned her head and looked through the window. Small white clouds flew like canon-balls over the tops of the acacias, as though old bronze guns were firing them from invisible ships.

'There's a poet living here in Odessa,' I said, 'George Shengeli. I heard him read his poetry once, in Moscow, during the war. I remember only three lines: "There are islands distant as dreams -gentle as a quiet alto - Majorca, Minorca, Malta and Rhodes. . . ." I've forgotten the rest. Chopin did live in Majorca, with Georges Sand. In an abandoned monastery. He was very ill by then, dying, so the brilliant sunshine"got on his nerves. . . .' 'Go on.' But instead of waiting for me to continue, she said plaintively:

'Why did I have to be born into this family where everybody gets paralysed in the legs sooner or later? A legless, red-haired freak! That's not what I would have chosen! I'd like to sail in a rough sea, the wind grabbing at my knees! And to laugh, and sing! Does it disgust you when I talk like that? I'd sing you something now, only my chest feels so tight, as if it were strapped up.' She broke off, and turned the glycerine soap over in her hands. 'Will you do me a favour?' she asked. 'Before Abram comes home. Pour some water into that saucer, and put the soap in it. And there's a dry bunch of flowers standing on top of that chest-of-drawers - get me a hollow stalk out of it, and bring it all here.'

I did as she asked. She split the tip of the stalk, dipped it in the soapy water, and slowly blew a large soap bubble.

It broke off, flew halfway to the ceiling, and hung motionless in a dusty sunbeam, shining with pale, changing rainbow colours.

Rachel put her hand over her mouth, not to disturb the bubble with her breath. I, too, scarcely breathed.

'It's golden now,' said Rachel. 'A moment ago it was red like fire.'

She carefully blew another bubble, then a third, a fourth. I picked a straw for myself, and also blew bubbles, so that soon the air was shimmering with their lights and colours.

A few landed on the floor and burst, but most of them kept afloat, playing in the sun, and sometimes joining into many-coloured constellations.

Downstairs, the front door clanged on its spring. The house shook. All the bubbles burst. Fine spray showered the floor.

'Hide it all away,' Rachel said quickly. 'I'm tired, I want to sleep. Now I'll never, never see it.' 'See what?'

'Majorca. Go now. Thank you. I don't feel very well.' At the door, I bumped into Torelli. I told him his sister was asleep, and he turned back into the kitchen, to put the kettle on.

That evening he came to the lodge, sat down on the door-step, and burst into tears. Rachel had died, probably from heart failure.

Tears pouring down his face, he sat looking at us with round red-rimmed eyes and blowing his nose into a torn pillowcase.

I found an old bottle of valerian in Schwittau's book-case. Most of it had evaporated. I poured what was left into the tin I used as a glass, sat beside Torelli and gave it him.

He drank obediently, then let his head drop into his arms and shook with sobs. Gasping, pressing the pillowcase to his eyes, he kept apologising brokenly for giving me so much trouble, and for dripping tears on my torn and dusty brown velveteen trousers.

The doctor who signed the death certificate said that, were it not for the flu, Rachel could have lived a long time. Torelli told us how she had given a loud cry and suddenly stopped breathing.

The day of the funeral we all went to the house. In the room where Rachel's body lay, Gavarsaki stood in the corner, twisting his greasy cap in his hands. His eyes showed nothing except a pathetic effort to understand what was going on.

Prosvirnyak came in, looked disapprovingly at Rachel's feet in their wooden clogs and spoke in a low voice to the verger from the synagogue. The verger nodded obsequiously and shouted something to the old crones who were busy round the coffin. The shabby black coffin, 'hired' for the occasion, had obviously served a hundred times before to transport the dead from town to cemetery in the ramshackle hearse.

The crones fetched a torn brown shawl from somewhere, covered Rachel's feet, and the unfrocked priest went off with the air of having done his duty.

'Cheek!' Yasha muttered after him. 'Making himself at home, and giving orders.' But Prosvirnyak pretended not to hear.

I had never been to a Jewish funeral before. I was struck by the hurry of the proceedings. The hearse arrived, drawn by a scraggy horse in dusty funeral trappings. The garrulous old driver came into the room, rapped the lid of the coffin with his whip-handle and said:

'Well, lads, who's the youngest? Grab it I Hoist it! All together! That's the way. Be careful at the bends. Whoever built that staircase, may he cough in hell, ought to be nailed up in that coffin instead of the young lady. Call it a staircase, it's a pain in the neck, so help me.'

Then we trudged along the cobbled streets, following the hearse. It jolted and swerved violently from side to side, as though trying to throw the coffin, like a restive horse its unwelcome rider.

The graveyard lay in the steppe, on the edge of the town. The steppe was burnt brown, although it was still early summer. Warm dust whirled in the wind against the high wall of the cemetery.

The wheel of the hearse caught on the gate-post. The driver had to back a little, but the horse refused to budge, so he beat it on the muzzle with his whip-handle.

Torelli shouted at him. The driver spat and said:

'Better cry over your sister instead of that skinny brute, if you are so soft-hearted.'

Torelli's eyes filled with tears. He stamped his little pointed shoes the colour of burnt orange peel, and screamed, all on one piercing note:

'Bastard! Swine! Moldavian thief!'

He was pitiful in his grief and anger.

The driver shrugged scornfully, lifted the back of the hearse, freed the wheel, then, without a backward glance, climbed into his seat, whipped up the horse and jogged away at a brisk trot, down the long graveyard avenue towards the grave. There was not a tree anywhere - all had been cut down for firewood - only the uniform yellow tombstones on either side of the unswept road.

The grave was a long way off. We ran after the hearse, together with a stumbling crowd of graveyard beggars.

The coffin was lowered into the ground. For some reason there was a lot of broken glass at the bottom of the pit.

Torelli gave alms to the beggars, a thousand roubles each (roubles had gone up in value). They accepted reluctantly, showing their dissatisfaction. One old woman with suppurating eyes flung the money into Rachel's grave and screamed:

'What d'you expect me to buy with your money? The hole in the breadround? Buy it yourself, millionaire !'

We went away crushed. Torelli cried, off and on, all the way home. The verger hobbled beside him, saying:

'I don't know what the world is coming to. Monsieur Blumkis! I'd sooner lie in the grave myself than bury people like that, I swear by my mother's life.'

For several days after the funeral I went nowhere, only climbed through the window of the lodge into the garden every morning. Prosvirnyak kept the garden locked, so there was never anyone there. Only Prosvirnyak himself occasionally turned up, but went off as soon as he saw me, even his back looking indignant.

After Rachel's funeral, Volodya and I ceased to take any notice of him. No one else paid him any attention either, even as a landlord.

He resented this deeply and bitterly. It was about this time that he began to seethe with lust for vengeance, and his secret hope of an upheaval and the overthrow of the regime, turned into an obsession which unbalanced his mind. The less hope of change there was in fact, the more haggard he looked, wizened and wild-eyed.

He no longer said hullo to us when we met, but only muttered something about 'Jew-loving intellectuals' and 'retribution for the innocent blood of Christ'. He looked crazier and crazier. Even his cook, Neonilla, who never had a word to say for herself, refused to stay on alone with him and moved into our tiny box-room. She wept every day and told us how he had threatened to kill her for 'going over to the Jews and heretics'.

She also told us that Prosvirnyak, a widower, had become unfrocked after the February Revolution in order to marry a rich Greek (priests are not allowed to remarry). But on the eve of the wedding the bride lost her nerve, and took herself and her money off to Greece.

One night I was woken up by a faint scraping of metal on metal. It seemed to come from the kitchen, which opened into the box-room where the maid slept.

I tiptoed to the glass door of the kitchen. In the garden, outside the box-room window, Prosvirnyak was squatting on his heels and working on the latch with a chisel.

He was too absorbed even to see me, his face wore a sly grin and he was muttering to himself.

Terrified, I cried out. He jumped up and fled, bounding across the garden into the yard and from there into the house, his old cassock flapping behind him like a pair of black wings.

I called Volodya. We went into the garden and looked at the window Prosvirnyak had been trying to open. Beneath it lay a five-pound weight and a German razor with a bone handle.

Volodya went for the police. Two hours later an ambulance arrived from the asylum. Two hefty male nurses tied Prosvirn-yak's hands and took him away. He went quietly, moaning and whimpering to himself.

The maid left to stay with relations in Tiraspol. She was terrified of Prosvirnyak escaping and coming back to murder her.

Torelli moved soon afterwards. He was unhappy living in the flat where Rachel had died. A little later Gavarsaki was arrested for some unknown reason - probably the business with the ether. And one night the Professor of Ecclesiastical Law, a friend of Prosvirnyak's, who had occupied two of the flats, fled from Odessa together with his family.

By the end of summer, the building was empty. Boatswain Mironov moved in, a taciturn, red-haired native of Kherson, who was on The Seaman's staff. For a bet, he could wrench the iron stakes out of the garden fence with one hand. After that everything was ship-shape in the house and garden.

I had only a few days left before I would start my job on The Seaman.

I read up all I could find in the Encyclopaedia about Majorca, Chopin, and Georges Sand, tried to recall everything I had ever read about them, and decided that nothing embellishes the events of our life like the passing of time.

Chopin and Georges Sand in Majorca lived a cheerless, difficult and unsettled life. Georges Sand had fallen out of love with the sick musician. Chopin was lonely, tormented by bis cough, the pain in his side, and by the wind and rain at night. He knew he was dying, and would never compose the wonderful music of which his genius was capable.

His life was being cut short by his illness. Perhaps it need not have been. He searched his memory for the day of the irreparable mistake. If only it were given to man to know his mistakes in time, before they are past help! But this is given to no one. We all leave this life without achieving a tenth of what is in us to achieve.

In the ancient monastery, its walls green with damp, an iron crucifix in every cell, he murmured against God. Why did men implore Him to forgive their sins? How petty were their individual sins, compared with the great collective sin of bloodshed, lies and hatred He had permitted to be their lot!

Yet this was the God he praised in majestic music, in the pealing of the organ and the voices of the choir, sweet as heavenly strings.

The monastery corridors smelt of mould and decay. The forest moaned beyond the barred windows. And all at once the glamour of the romantic atmosphere he and Georges Sand had sought, paled before the image of the simplest, even the poorest - poor but warm - Lithuanian room with an unpretentious piano, plain but comfortable bed - and peace.

He was tired of being a genius. He had no more use for it. He bore the title, or the nickname, as a burden, pleasing only to his friends.

But as the time passed, it carefully dropped all that was petty and bitter from the life of Chopin and Georges Sand on the island, and turned that life into a poem of sacrificial love.

The poem touched many hearts, including the heart of a red-haired Jewess in Odessa, who had never in her life seen anything more beautiful than glycerine soap bubbles.

Wherever I went I took with me The Romantics, a novel I had started writing long ago, in Taganrog. I wrote at such long intervals that it was a wonder to me that I hadn't lost the manuscript.

Now, in Odessa, I was working on the last chapters. As usual when I was busy writing, I became a savage. I avoided people, went off on my own, got up at two in the morning and worked by the light of the wick-lamp, afraid of Volodya waking up and asking me a lot of questions.

There was another odd thing I noticed about myself when I was working - if I was writing about something sad, I looked for sad situations and impressions, as though they could help me.

Early one morning I went to the Jewish cemetery, but soon came back, deafened by women's cries, hysterics, lamentations, frightened by the sight of sere old fingers clutching at coffins with such force that it took several men to pull them away, shaken by the silent weeping of widows, tearing their hair and trying to leap into their husbands' open graves. I came back troubled and confused by the sight of human grief naked and unadorned.

One evening, just as I was finishing the last chapter, a thin, fidgety young man came to see me and said he was the future publisher of The Seaman, Isaac Livshitz.

'Not with an/but with a v,' he added. 'Livshitz, not to be confused with Yasha Lifshitz.'

'Don't you like him?'

'It's not that,' said Livshitz (I was never, from that evening, to call him anything but Izya, as did everyone else). 'But he won't last long in our time.'

'Why not?'

'He hasn't got much sense of humour.'

Izya gave me a note from Ivanov, asking me to come to The Seaman's office next day - it was time to settle down to the job.

He had brought with him a tall, incredibly thin man who wore puttees, had the profile of a minstrel, and a lock of beautiful chestnut hair hanging over his brow. The man held out a large, warm, friendly hand, and clicked his heels. After that, he went to the book-case, took down the first volume of the Professor's Encyclopaedia, turned the pages and removed all the tissue paper which protected the coloured illustrations and maps.

'Eddie!' Izya said severely, but the man with the profile didn't give him a glance. He took down the second volume and extracted the tissue paper from that. 'Now we'll smoke,' he said, pleased.

'Eddie! You mustn't! It isn't nice!'

The tall man silently tore a strip of tissue paper, pressed it with a kind of special skill between his fingers, put it to his mouth - and the lodge filled with the clear, high but ringing and undeniably touching sound of the song of some small bird.

'Is that nicer?' asked the man.

It was uncanny. I could hear the beads of sound forming in the warm throat of the bird.

'I'm so sorry,' lzya pulled himself together. 'I forgot to introduce you. Our Odessa poet and bird watcher, Edward Bagritsky.'

I would like to give the reader some idea of the remarkable man who was The Seaman's editor, Ivanov, and of the atmosphere in his office.

Actually, the editor appointed by the Sailors' Union was Party-member Pokhodkin, former captain of an ocean-going liner. But Ivanov's drive, imagination and resourcefulness proved too much for him and the aged captain virtually gave up his job and retired to his villa in Arcadia.

Ivanov, who, as I have already said, went about in a squashed naval cap, patched cavalry greatcoat and clogs on his bare feet, looked like a tramp. But no one had greater charm than this innocent-eyed boy. He looked twenty although he was getting on for forty.

He was an excellent storyteller. His sense of humour never left him, however desperate the situation, and he was always courteous.

Even in those days he was not afraid to kiss a woman's hand. It was said that he had very nearly got himself shot for this in Ribnitza, a town famous for its pretty Moldavian girls.

He really had been a reporter on the Russian Word. This part of his complicated story was confirmed by the former manager of the paper, a God-fearing old man, named Blagov, who had fled from Moscow to Odessa. He also said that Ivanov had been the racing correspondent and had betted heavily on the tote.

Ivanov took on Blagov as senior proof-reader. Blagov turned out to be terribly fussy. The smallest misprint brought him down like a ton of bricks on whoever was responsible. Even Ivanov was afraid of him, not to speak of the compositors who trembled in his presence and looked like boys taking their school-leaving exam.

Ivanov was the kind of journalist who can find copy even in a ditch or a board meeting of the Society for the Insurance of Shorthorn Cattle.

Not only did he find 'copy' (the word at that time meant any interesting news) but he anticipated it. He knew where to look for it, he could tell from signs, known only to himself, what was going to happen and where.

In the same way he deduced from minute tokens, which no one else noticed, what people were likely to do. He knew what trifles can determine people's acts and motives. He was not afraid of rummaging among this litter and would often come up with 'a pearl, or a blood-stained dagger' or even 'an intrepid human heart', as our slicker Sukhodolsky put it.

An exuberant old man, Sukhodolsky would shout at us as he made up the paper:

'Do you know what our Zhenya could have been? A Balzac! A Balzac, I tell you. Or a Lombrozo!'

Ivanov had his own way of selecting his staff. He judged them by three qualities. They had either to be young and gifted (these had priority), or experienced and 'proven', or else barefaced liars and adventurers. Perhaps this was because he was himself a classical though harmless schemer, the very one who found the goose that laid the golden eggs.

He was always in the thick of new projects. Some he carried out in The Seaman - either successfully or landing himself in a major or minor row. But most of them had a life-span of a few hours. Ivanov gave them up with surprising lightness.

The first one he put through seemed to us interesting and in any case novel.

Above the heading, where every other paper carried the motto 'Workers of all lands, unite!', we were to print our own, a genuinely naval one - 'Workers of all seas, unite!'

A picture of the Vorontsov lighthouse duly appeared over the heading. It shed four beams, and the slogan was printed on them in four languages - English, Russian, French and German.

But the issue was the first and last of its kind. Ivanov was summoned by the Provincial Committee. He came back paler and more handsome than ever, and ordered the stereo to be destroyed at once and a new one made, still with the Vorontsov lighthouse and the four beams, but with the correct slogan.

When the blockade was lifted and foreign ships began to arrive, part of the edition was printed specially for foreign sailors in their own languages.

It was Ivanov who introduced this innovation which made The Seaman popular among foreign crews.

After that, we were besieged by translators. There was even an Abyssinian who turned up one day - brown, friendly and hungry. But as Abyssinia had no fleet, we had to decline his services.

He went away in tears. But Ivanov had a warm and generous heart. He brought him back, questioned him, and found out that Bartholomew (this was the Abyssinian's name) had been sent to Russia before the revolution to study at the university of Kazan and was now reduced to working as a barber. This gave Ivanov an idea: he appointed him official barber to The Seaman's office which, literally, within a week of the first issue, had turned into a noisy club for writers and sailors. Plenty of people came in and out so the gentle Abyssinian was soon assured of a wide clientele.

The senior translator of The Seaman specialised in English and was a former shipping agent called Moser, fat, beaming, friendly and polite. He was a great expert on shipping, the intricacies of naval treaties and laws, and the cargo fleets and naval traditions of the world.

Wearing out the last of his English suits, he looked among us, skinny ragamuffins, like a veritable Lord of the Admiralty.

Our translator from the French was his wife. Tall and thin as an Englishwoman, a bit prim and very much the woman of the world, she struck us in those days as something of a museum piece.

She was an unusually conscientious translator. Every misprint made her ill, though in a lady-like manner. She lay moaning all day long on the dilapidated sofa in her room, sniffing the last remnant of her smelling salts and pressing to her temples a lace handkerchief moistened at the tap of the communal kitchen, where a certain 'Madame' Zofer held sway.

For hours on end, this imposing matron would shout her views in a deafening voice. Every sentence began with her favourite expression 'In days gone by. .. .'

'In days gone by I would not have dreamt of touching this hominy. I had the very best white bread every day. . . .'

A moment later her voice rang out again, but on a very different theme:

'In days gone by we gave birth to normal children, not like yours, my dear. God only knows what they are - kittens or something.'

At first Mrs Moser was embarrassed by Madame Zofer's loud and coarse pronouncements. But conventions are quickly shed, and very soon she was calmly telling me, as she sniffed her smelling salts, 'Wish she'd stop her barrel organ, that old tart!' and, by the end of a month on The Seaman, 'Madame' Moser was fluent in sailors' slang.

We printed anything in any way related to the sea and to sailing. After a while our hunt for suitable material became fiercely competitive.

At one time Mrs Moser looked like winning. She translated some marvellous poems by Tristan Corbiere, a half-forgotten French sailor and poet. We printed a whole cycle with a biographical note by Jules Lafargue. It said that Corbiere was a sailor from his boyhood up, always went about in clogs and a checked cloak, published his one book of poetry in Paris in 1873, and died soon afterwards while still a young man.

Lafargue wrote in his elegant French that Corbiere's poetry was 'full of daring, strength, vivacity, tautness, and sad and stinging irony'.

But very soon boatswain Moronov, our Black Sea Street neighbour, snatched the laurels from Mrs Moser's feeble grasp. On an old English cargo boat, named with inexplicable tenderness, 'Heart of Ellen' (it was a grimy ste