Russian Treasures

24. THE SAILORS’ UNIVERSITY

The Sailors’ University was set up in a former girls’ school on Ilinskaya Street. Anton Emilievich had also volunteered to give lectures there. Enthusiastic, disheveled, and perspiring from effort, he took turns reading his own stories and extracts from the Bolshevik political agenda to “our brothers the sailors,” who sat yawning and scratching their shaven heads.

This wasn’t the sort of audience to which Anton Emilievich was accustomed. The sailors had no use for his ironic comments or intriguing historical parallels. Propaganda had convinced them that they were the pride and strength of the revolution, and that everybody—including the generally despised lecturers—was obliged to bow down to them.

They interrupted Anton Emilievich or stood up during a lecture and announced, “I need to take a crap.” Sometimes Anton Emilievich felt like giving up altogether. These men had no respect for culture and education. They slept with their shoes on, blew their noses into their fingers, and the moment any problem arose there was an outcry: “Why are there no potatoes in our soup? You tell the kitchen staff from us that if they’re stealing our food, we’ll beat the living daylights out of them.”

What on earth could Anton Emilievich hope to do in this situation?

“Comrades,” he said in a shaky voice, “I’d like to tell you a story about a noble knight.”

The sea of brutish faces before him looked blank and indifferent. Some were chewing tobacco, and others were picking their noses.

Suddenly, there was a burst of laughter from the next classroom.

“What is it now?” Anton Emilievich exclaimed angrily. “It’s impossible to work in these conditions.”

He was annoyed to see that nobody was paying any attention to him. They were all listening to the sounds coming from Klim’s classroom on the other side of the wall.

At recess, the sailors met up together for a smoke. Anton Emilievich pushed his way through the crowd of laughing, cursing sailors.

“We were acting out the trial of a prostitute, Miss Roll-me-ova, who was accused of seducing a soldier. Our boatswain was gotten up as a woman in a shawl and kept pawing away at Vaska. Cracked us up, he did. And tomorrow, Comrade Rogov has told us we’re going to have a Funeral of the Superstitions. The lads have already knocked up a coffin.”

Klim clearly pulled out all the stops trying to keep the sailors entertained.

“No wonder they’re so fond of you,” Anton Emilievich told him. “It’s as they say—birds of a feather flock together.”

But to Anton Emilievich’s surprise and indignation, Klim’s popularity extended beyond the sailors. It was rumored that when he gave public lectures, the assembly hall was filled with hundreds of people, mostly young ladies and students.

Anton Emilievich went along, curious to see what his nephew had to say, although the subject seemed unremarkable—“The Nature of Power and Control Over the Masses.”

The assembly hall was packed, indeed. The audience shivered from cold. The feeble light of the electric lamps shone through the mist of breath that had gathered over the heads of the people.

“Several days ago, I was leafing through an old copy of the periodical Annals of the Fatherland,” Klim said as he went up on stage. “And I came across a phrase written in 1811 by Count de Maistre, ambassador to the Russian court from the King of Piedmont-Sardinia: ‘Every nation has the government it deserves.’ Would you agree with that?”

The listeners began to exchange glances. Some people became indignant, some shrugged, and some nodded, “We don’t deserve anything better.”

Klim sat down in the chair in the middle of the stage.

“As I see it, the ambassador was wrong,” he said. “There is a method that can be used by any government to hang onto power, which has nothing to do with the individual qualities of their citizens or the things they deserve. My father was a prosecutor, and when I was a child, he regularly took me to jail to see life as it really was, warts and all. Do you want to know what I discovered there? A jail is ruled not by the authorities or the wardens. It’s a system conceived and governed by the prisoners themselves, and the prison guards’ job is solely to keep it running.”

Klim was a natural-born actor. He dramatically described what had happened to the noblest souls who had been deprived of their freedom of speech, freedom of movement, and their freedom to survive and live honestly. They were forced to bow and scrape to the most powerful inmates to save themselves from a beating or to get an extra ladleful of soup. And the privileged criminals and their patrons from the prison administration made sure that this predetermined order of poverty, violence, and hierarchy never changed.

“If you want to live, become a part of the system,” Klim said in a quiet, menacing voice. “If you want to succeed, protect the system and remember that universal freedom is an abstract idea while the freedom to hand out food and thrash your subordinates is very real.”

Klim broadened his shoulders, and the character he was playing, the scoundrel who had risen through the ranks, disappeared before his audience’s eyes.

They were stunned. Everyone knew that what Klim had been talking about wasn’t the prison of his childhood but the events that were unfolding here in the country right now.

“This system feeds on human flesh,” Klim said, “it reproduces itself, and heals its wounds very quickly. If you remove one petty tyrant, somebody else will take his place in no time.”

“What if a system like that were to be put in place throughout a whole country?” someone asked.

There was an uproar in the audience.

“We should organize strikes.”

“The international community should treat a country like that as a pariah state.”

Klim shook his head. “The worse the economic conditions get, the stronger the system becomes because people become even more dependent on their rulers.”

“So, what should we do?” cried a girl in the front row.

“Those who are trapped inside the system have only two choices,” Klim said, “either serve their time in prison, hoping that one day it will turn into a resort, or… escape.”

The audience left the assembly hall in shocked silence. Klim had forced each and every one of them to confront their future face to face.

“It takes a lot of courage to say such things openly,” a man with a goatee said to Anton Emilievich. “But still, to me, it smacks of desperation or mad posturing.”

“He’s just a fool,” Anton Emilievich snapped. He was aware that his nephew’s lack of caution might end up costing him dearly.

Coming home, Anton Emilievich called for Klim and told him in no uncertain terms that—while he was welcome to go around asking for trouble—he should leave the house immediately if that was what he planned to do.

Then Anton Emilievich talked to Nina. “Do you want to be widowed a second time? Isn’t it enough that your brother has been shot?”

He was gratified to hear Nina scolding her husband. And then it was Osip’s turn to give Klim the tongue lashing he deserved. Anton Emilievich’s description of Klim’s lecture was laid on a bit thick, and Osip had yelled at Klim so terribly that Marisha gave a start and dropped the soup tureen.

Lubochka managed to calm Osip down.

“So, what did he say?” Anton Emilievich asked when she came to his room.

“Osip says that if anything like that happens again, he’ll shoot Klim himself as a traitor to the revolution.”

Anton Emilievich cracked his knuckles. He deeply regretted that in a fit of altruism his daughter had invited Klim and Nina to stay with them.

“How are we going to get rid of Klim?” Anton Emilievich asked Lubochka. “How long is he going to live here? He’s a foreign citizen, so he could easily leave the city with no questions asked. But he refuses to go because of his precious Nina. I don’t see what the fuss is about. It’s not as though there weren’t any dishwashers in Argentina. Still, if he does go back, he’ll get his head bashed in soon enough.”

Lubochka frowned. “What are you talking about?”

Anton Emilievich showed her an extract from the Bulletin of the Russian News Agency:

Lubochka snatched the paper from her father’s hands and headed for the door. “I need to show this to Klim.”

“Don’t!” Anton Emilievich cried. “If you do, he’ll stay here forever.”

Lubochka looked at him, her eyes narrowed. “That’s fine by me.”

In the past, I found it hard not to reproach Nina for not coming with me when it was still possible to leave Russia. I thought that if we’d gone then, we could have saved not only ourselves but also Zhora. But evidently, Nina’s instinct of self-preservation is keener than mine. If we’d been in Buenos Aires, we’d probably be dead by now. After all, everyone there knows I’m Russian.

Seven hundred killed. It’s impossible to grasp that the good old porteños are capable of such a crime.

I feel helpless. Nina and Sofia Karlovna think they’ll find a safe haven in France. Like hell they will. It’ll just be more of the same. We’re condemned everywhere to be outsiders—an unknown quantity and, therefore, guilty of all the troubles of the universe.

The world has gone mad, and we have nowhere to run. Except perhaps to the end of the earth, Patagonia, where you can go for months without seeing a single soul. All you see are the blue snow-capped mountains, crystal-clear lakes, and the grass rippling in the wind. We could set up an estancia and farm sheep—that would be the life, all right. But I’ll never get my wife to agree to it. Sofia Karlovna has already seduced her with her Parisian scheme. Nina isn’t daunted at the idea of France—she knows some French, and she’s been there before. As for me, to be honest, I no longer care.

After my public lecture, everyone in the house attacked me, accusing me of stupidity, selfishness, and short-sightedness. Nina reminded me how harshly I had condemned her for her participation in the underground resistance movement.

“But what you are doing,” she said, “is utterly suicidal. Do you have some kind of a death wish?”

In fact, I suppose I have a “life wish”—a craving for a normal life, and it’s very difficult to suppress it. If I have something to say, and I see other people ready to listen, it’s the most natural thing in the world for me to get it off my chest.

For the same reason I want to put my heart into my teaching.

“What are you trying to prove to your sailors?” Nina asked me. “They’re hopeless savages, and you can’t improve them.”

But I’m not interested in trying to improve anyone. I just show my students that there are many ways to live their lives. We’re all different, and we all have a right to exist so long as we don’t cause troubles for our neighbors.

People at war become deaf and dumb. To keep one’s mouth shut and stop even trying to explain yourself is to maintain a state of war. If all I see when I look at my sailors are violent degenerates, then I’m at war with them. But we can all get along together! They’re simply different from us, and we need to accept them as they are. Then everything will fall into place.

I’m not saying that everyone has to love one other. Say what you like, but I can’t stand Lubochka. I’m not fond of Uncle Anton either. Still, I’m talking about basic principles: if you don’t like a person, avoid them by all means, but don’t try to destroy them or remake them in your own image and likeness.

There’s no point in me scribbling these angry notes. Nina believes it’s another sign of my careless nature—to keep a diary that might cost me my life. Well—I did promise her that I would be careful. And in any case, it’s too late to lament our fate.

Nina came into the room and loosened the knot of her headscarf. “Have you been burning papers?” she asked.

Klim was sitting by the stove stirring at the coals with a poker. An empty leather binding lay on the floor beside him.

“What happened?” Nina said, alarmed.

“Nothing.” Klim sighed. “I just decided to get rid of a witness.”

Nina sat down next to him. She picked up the leather cord that Klim used to bind his notebook.

“Once Zhora wrote a poem,” she said.

Nina decorated the cord with several ornate knots and then tied it around Klim’s wrist.