The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

Chapter Twenty

everywhere, to the very edge of the marshes, were modest, small, sweet, Russian blueberries. One could also find mushrooms if one knew places in the seaside Finnish forest.

At the Lakhta station, as I recall, women vendors would come out to the trains with dozens of “White” mushrooms [boleti] in wooden baskets.

Lakhta is not far from Staraia Derevnia, on the outskirts of Petrograd, about several versts in all from it. It is separated from Staraia Derevnia by a vast and swampy marsh that is covered by stunted shrubbery, and is flooded by waters from the gulf pushed inland by the November west winds. The railroad from Staraia Derevnia to Lakhta skirts the marsh and runs along a road paved with cobblestones. Many dachas are located along the cobblestone road and the several streets that cross it, leading towards the seashore. In the old days these were rented to Petersburg city-dwellers. One of the cross streets, Gardnerovskaia, is connected with the history of my family.

John Gardner, master of the oakum business, came from England to Russian in the previous [19th] century. His profession was the caulking of the planks of newly built ships with oakum. Having founded his own business and conscientiously filling the orders of the Admiralty, old man Gardner became rich, as Russia became rich at the end of the previous century and the beginning of this one. At Lakhta, John Gardner built about ten dachas. He gave a red dacha to his son, Genrikh Ivanovich, the father of my cousins. Another, a big dacha with two annexes, he gave to his son Fedor Ivanovich, a sickly fellow for many years, who was looked after by a Russian woman, Nastas’ia Vasil’evna. After a time she became Mrs. Gardner, but the only English she ever learned was to call her pooch “doggie.” On the wall of her sitting room hung a portrait of Lord Kitchener, about whom she knew very little. However, she was very proud of this portrait.

Old man Gardner left nothing to his daughter Zhanetta Ivanovna. Zhanetta Ivanovna, a slender, tall, and stately lady, who must have been beautiful in youth, married well, settled in Moscow, and had no need of a dacha in Lakhta. She married Bruno Vasil’evich Farikh, a man of prominence in pre-revolu-tionary Moscow, who was in the insurance business. Their two sons had good careers in Soviet times. The elder somehow received a university education and became a well-known engineer, with a specialization in the machine-tool industry. The younger, Fabio Farikh, became a prominent Soviet arctic pilot. Later, he was shot as a man of foreign origins. The very same fate befell his brother, Bruno, as well.

By the beginning of the thirties, only one Gardner dacha remained—all the rest having been burned in 1917—the dacha belonging to Nastas’ia Vasil’evna Gardner. My fate was also connected with her home.

B. Brovtsyn, Dearly Beloved

195

Having been found to be a British national, she was expelled, poor thing, beyond the borders of the USSR shortly before the Soviet-German war. The English created a shelter in Estonia for such Russian-English persons, where Nastas’ia Vasil’evna, not knowing one word of English, except for the word “doggie,” suffered among other half-English people. Finally, having refused British citizenship, she managed to return to the USSR. She was not permitted to go to Lakhta, since her home had already been confiscated and divided into communal apartments. She was given a room in a communal apartment in Petrograd, and on the eve of the war she was sent to Siberia.

In the beginning of the ’30s, my family and I lived peacefully, but with great difficulty. Every summer my mother’s brother rented one of the two-room apartments in N.V. Gardner’s dacha. He lived there with his common-law wife, Elizaveta Ivanovna Shliakova, who was a resident of Petersburg. His lawful wife, having sent their daughter to her sister’s abroad, went herself to France in 1929 with a Soviet visa, naively hoping that my uncle, who received the rank of midshipman of the Imperial Fleet in 1916, would join the merchant marine and on the first foreign voyage jump ship. However, he never even thought of doing this. The fate and character of my uncle reminded me of Dr. Zhivago in Pasternak’s novel, although Elizaveta Ivanovna was a real Soviet worker, an accountant at Elektrotok [electric generation department], and not a romantic Lara, and my uncle was not a poet. However, he was indecisive and resigned to his fate, completely like Yurii Zhivago. When he was mobilized and sent to the Volga flotilla to fight against the whites, he resigned himself to this as well, instead of escaping south to join Denikin [commanding general of the White Army].