The Big Green Tent (64 page)

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At about that time, traveling through Russia came into vogue. Backpacks, canoes, trains, risky hitchhiking, spending the night in tents or in abandoned villages—Ilya, of course, was the first in their group of friends to experience all this. He adored these trips and often went without any companions, returning home with rarities fit for a museum: books, icons, objects of peasant life. He made friends in far-flung parts of the Russian north, Central Asia, the Altai.

Mikha never joined Ilya in his travels; he would never have left his aunt for long while she was still alive. Early in the spring of 1967, two young couples—Mikha and Alyona and Edik and Zhenya—seized by a new passion for traveling, went to Crimea for the first time, to Koktebel. The genre of their journey was a pilgrimage—to the grave site of a poet Mikha revered.

It took them two days and nights to get to Feodosia. There was still snow on the ground in Moscow. In the morning, as they journeyed southward, they passed through warm rain, having already gone through floating remnants of snow, and through fogs and mists. After midday, entering another climatic zone, through the train window they observed roadside willows up to their knees in water, with swollen joints and straining branches. In Feodosia it rained on them again—gray and pearly iridescent. They got on a bus and, bumping and jostling all the way, continued on to Planernoe—where the poet Maximilian Voloshin had lived. The landscape—smoky, quivering, milky, and opaline—riveted their gaze. Columns of trucks were coming toward the bus from the other direction. They were excavating one and a half million tons of Koktebel sand, urgently needed for the purposes of the national economy. But what the travelers didn't realize was that before their very eyes the treasure of the ancient shoreline was being destroyed. The people who might have realized this were almost all gone by now.

When they got out of the bus, they heard the roar of the Black Sea for the first time, and began moving toward the captivating sound. The sea was raging for the second week in a row, in accordance with its seasonal mandate. It was even harder to accommodate the sea with one's vision than one's ears. Mikha and Zhenya were experiencing the sea for the first time. Alyona's parents had once taken her to the seaside by the Caucasus Mountains, and Edik knew the sea—albeit a different one altogether: the Baltic.

*   *   *

They turned to walk along the shore in the direction of Voloshin's house. They didn't ask anyone the way—the road simply beckoned them. They recognized the house immediately, by its eloquent appearance, its tower, its contrast with everything else that was built here after the Revolution, after the war. They sat on some rocks below the house. They pulled out a bottle of wine and the remains of their Moscow rations.

Mikha couldn't contain himself and began reciting poems. He had already burst out in a fit of lyrical passion on the train, but they had squelched it.

“As in a small seashell, the Great

Ocean roars its breath,

As its flesh shimmers and burns

with tides and silvery mist,

and its curves repeat

in the motion and scrolls of a wave—

Thus, in your coves,

O dark land of Cimmeria, my soul

is imprisoned and transfigured.”

The wind tore at their jackets and carried off their words. They huddled together, but Mikha couldn't stop. He didn't even notice when a flabby old woman with an ornate walking stick in her hand, wearing a huge, tattered raincoat and turbid glasses, glued together at the bridge, appeared in their midst, listening intently.

“Let's go into the house,” she said. The hospitable invitation contradicted the severity and gloom of her expression. She led them to a house they could not have imagined in their wildest dreams …

This was Voloshin's widow, Maria Stepanovna. She gave them a personal tour of her home. On the first floor, which at that time was called “Corpus 1,” vacationing miners working in the Donbas region were usually housed; they hadn't yet arrived on their local Communist Party tourist vouchers. The widow tried to fend off this invasion as best she could, but there was little she could do. She opened up two rooms for the young people on the lower floor.

“You can live here, until the strangers arrive.”

*   *   *

They spent several happy days under Maria Stepanovna's wing. Mikha and Edik undertook some urgent household tasks and repairs, of which there were many. Zhenya and Alyona washed floors, dusted the books on the tall shelves. They spent one whole day tidying up Voloshin's grave. Mikha and Edik restored the path leading to it, which had crumbled during the winter.

In the evenings they sat in Voloshin's freezing study, drank tea, and talked under the huge sculpture of Queen Taiakh, which was described in almost all the memoirs of his friends. Sometimes local inhabitants in their declining years would stop in—old ladies, some of them girlish, some of them like reptiles, as well as young writers from the House of the Arts. Once a famous young poet came over with a can of unbottled wine; another time his rival visited. They hated each other with a vengeance, but, in the tradition of the house, they refrained from quarreling when they both turned up at the same time.

They were both too Soviet and official for Mikha's and Edik's taste. But, as soon became clear, they were no better, nor worse, than those who congregated around Mayakovsky's statue.

At the end, when the young people were preparing to go home, Maria Stepanovna commanded them all to go to Staryi Krym. The way was not short—about ten miles—but unless they took this little detour, they could not be considered “kin.”

“You'll be able to rest up a bit there, my friend will feed you.”

Maria Stepanovna wondered whether she should send these young people to a rival widow. Assol, as she was called, had already done time in prison and returned to Staryi Krym, to fulfill her duties as the writer Grin's widow.
Perhaps Faina Lvovna would be better
, Maria Stepanovna thought, and gave them a note for a local lady whose husband, a dentist, fixed all the teeth of the elderly inhabitants.

They decided to go home by way of Simferopol, with a trip to Bakhchisaray. Maria Stepanovna explained that it was inadmissable not to go there—it was the very heart of old Crimea. The route was a bit convoluted: from Staryi Krym, bypassing Koktebel, to Bakhchisaray, where they would stay overnight, then go directly to Simferopol, to the railroad station.

Real spring had already begun in Staryi Krym. The leaves on the trees looked like delicate green lace. People sat in their gardens, prepared the beds for planting, or rushed about, setting out seedlings. The almond trees had blossomed.

The whole way, Mikha and Edik debated the nature of Soviet power, which, in Mikha's view, was weaker on the periphery of the empire than in the center, and more humane as well. Edik did not agree. He even claimed that in some places they were crueler and more stupid, citing Voloshin as an example: if he had lived closer to the center of power, they would have executed him by 1918.

Zhenya and Alyona walked behind their husbands, like Eastern wives, and talked about art. Alyona didn't approve of Voloshin's watercolors, which were all over the house. Zhenya argued hotly that one couldn't judge this artist by the immediate fruits of his activities—paintings or poems. His greatness was spiritual in nature, and when the specious verdict made way for a lasting, authentic one, the true scale of his greatness would become clear. Zhenya was a well-educated young woman. She read both French and English, and even knew a thing or two about anthroposophy. This irked Alyona somewhat.

In Staryi Krym, they had dinner at Faina Lvovna's. She received them with great solemnity, like visiting dignitaries from a friendly kingdom. She was wearing very long beads, and a dress with a dropped waist from the NEP period in the mid-1920s, as well as a flirtatious tendril pasted to her forehead. She fed her guests a modest but fashionable meal—bean soup and patties made from some indeterminate kind of grain, with kissel gravy.

They walked around the local cemetery, and strolled past the house of Alexander Grin. It was closed, but it felt like the residents had just stepped out and would be back any moment.

They arrived in Bakhchisaray in early evening—they were able to hitch a ride just in time. Again on the recommendation of Maria Stepanovna, they went to see a curator at the museum of local history. They immediately hit it off, and soon it seemed they had known each other their whole lives. Here, in the Crimea, there seemed to be a secret society of “former” people. They were privy to some arcane secret of the Crimea, but, however much they revealed of it, the secret remained intact. The curator turned out to be not Crimean at all, but from Leningrad; still, she seemed to be a keeper of secrets. She showed them wax figures of harem wives and eunuchs, bronze vases, a fountain that recalled Pushkin, “the tomb of khans, the final home of sovereigns…” The woman from the museum said that she would take them to Chuft-Kale the next morning, but that they couldn't stay overnight at her house, since her aunt had arrived that night from Petersburg for a visit.

In the evening they went to a hotel, in which they found the ordinary provincial squalor. They stowed their rucksacks in the storeroom, a small closet next to the reception desk. They agreed that the rooms would be waiting for them later in the evening, and they would register then. They went out to walk through the dark town, and to have a meal in some eating-house somewhere. They couldn't find any place to eat, but they did find a grocery store that was about to close in five minutes.

Mikha went to get their rucksacks out of the storeroom, and began digging around for their passports. He found them, and put them on the desk in front of the receptionist. She began inspecting them diligently, looking in the last pages for their officially registered addresses, and the stamp proving they were legally married.

Just at this time, a family entered the hotel. It was a husband and wife, who were getting on in years, and a daughter who looked about fourteen. They were Tatars from Central Asia. This was evident from the Uzbek
tubeteika
on the man's head, from the woman's striped dress, from their high cheekbones, from the silver bracelets studded with red carnelian on the fragile wrists of the girl, and from the anxiety written on their faces. The man pulled two passports out of the inner pocket of his suit coat and placed them in front of the receptionist.

The jacket was not new; the back of it was faded. Nearly the entire front, however, from his shoulders to his waist, was covered with military decorations and orders.

The sullen receptionist put the passports of the Moscow travelers aside, and opened their passports. She shook her head.

“There's no room.”

“What do you mean, there's no room? You're lying! There are vacancies!” Mikha objected. “We have booked two rooms. Please give this family one of ours.”

“We don't have any for you, either,” the woman said, pushing the pile of passports toward Mikha.

“What? We made an agreement!”

“Our first priority is to serve business travelers, and only then to accommodate ‘savages.' There's no room here.”

“We traveled more than a thousand miles to look at the graves of our ancestors. Here are our return tickets. In two days we are flying back to Tashkent,” the man said, still holding out some hope.

“Don't you understand Russian? I said there's no room here!”

“I understand Russian. Perhaps in the private sector it would be possible to stay for only one night?”

“Stay wherever you want. It's not my concern! But just remember—you'll be answerable for violating the passport rules.”

Mikha was boiling with anger. His response to injustice was instantaneous and passionate, even corporeal. It felt like a hammer pounding in his temples. His hands spontaneously curled up into fists.

“Bastards! What bastards!” he whispered to Edik. “Do you realize what's happening? This is a Tatar family that was deported…” Just a few days before, their friend Maria Stepanovna had told them about the events of May 1944. This information was still fresh in his mind, and the injustice of it still rankled. “While this man was fighting at the front, they evicted his family from their home and deported them!”

“Take it easy,” Edik whispered to him. “We'll think of something.”

The much-decorated Tatar wrapped up the passports in a silk handkerchief, and put them carefully back into his inner pocket.

“Let's get out of here. They'll call the police any minute now!” Edik bent down nearly in half to whisper to the Tatar.

He nodded, and they all made their way to the door, onto the street, where it was already pitch-dark. The darkness seemed peaceful and safe, in contrast to the loathsomeness of the reception area, albeit illuminated by electricity.

Natasha Khlopenko, the receptionist, was already dialing the number to contact the police. This was her duty—to inform them about Tatars arriving in Bakhchisaray. But the officer on duty didn't answer the phone, and she threw down the receiver in relief: her mother was a Karaite Jew, and her father a recently arrived Ukrainian. It wasn't that she felt any special sympathy toward the deported Tatars, but more that she didn't want to be an accessory to this long-standing war of nationalities and peoples, which involved her to a degree. To a very small degree.

Seven people left the hotel, and the Tatar man silently headed up their exodus.

“Let's go. I know a place where we can find shelter for the night. You're not afraid of cemeteries, are you?”

“No, let's go,” Edik said.

Although it was completely dark, the Tatar walked confidently westward, and up a hill.

They walked about a mile and a half, and came to an ancient Tatar cemetery.

The ruins of a small mausoleum seemed cozy, rather than threatening. And perhaps the Tatar's trust in this place was so great that it communicated itself to the young people. They sat on a slope—or reclined, as it were. The slope was as comfortable as a floating pillow. Edik pulled out a bottle of Crimean port from his rucksack. The domestic Zhenya took out the feta cheese they had bought in the store, some salted tomatoes, and bread, which they had planned to eat in their room at the hotel.