The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

We went and arranged all the picnic paraphernalia by the lakeside. I got the urge to climb Lapin’s Mountain. It was very steep. The paths on it were only those of animals turning unexpectedly either left or right, crossed by other paths just like them. People said that there were roe deer and elk and wild oxen there, but I never saw any. There were bears and wolves and an occasional lynx. The animals did not alarm me. The apparition of Lapin scared me more, but they said he never appeared in the daytime. I scaled to the top. The view from there was gorgeous. Below was the bright-blue lake and distant inundated meadows to the right. On the other side of the mountain lay the half-moon Garusovo Lake, as if of red copper. A bright green serpentine valley opened to the south with a river snaking through it. Bluish pine forests stood in tiers on both its sides. It struck me that Lapin chose this mountain for a good reason.

I sat and looked for a while and then decided to descend. The way down was more difficult than the climb. I started to zigzag down the paths. Suddenly I came out into a flat meadow. Although I missed it at first, I suddenly

72

Chapter Six

noticed a moss-grown log ruin that might have been a peasant cabin. There were only four or five courses of logs standing. “Strange,” I thought, “it probably was a forester’s hut.” I walked around it and was dumbfounded. Behind it was a low, overgrown stone cross. My God, it was Lapin’s grave.

I took off downhill, stumbled, rolled, stumbled, and rolled again. Finally I made it to the forest by the lake and, all out of breath, found the others. “What’s wrong with you?” someone asked.

“Nothing, just running hard,” I answered. For some reason I did not want to tell anyone about my discovery. Later I told only Nikolai Ermolaevich [a family friend] and he believed me: “Yes, I have heard of a cross and a log cabin, but I never could find it.”

Nikolai Ermolaevich’s wife was visiting him at the time. She also was from a family of lumbermen of Viatka Province but was then in medical school in Moscow. She was a slim, beautiful woman of twenty-five with auburn, almost red hair, and was very fun-loving. We kids simply adored her. After our snack of rusks [a browned, sweetened biscuit] we all ran along the shore to a sandy beach where we plopped down to rest. It was incredibly hot. “How about going for a swim,” she said. We all undressed and dashed into the cold water. None of us were embarrassed by the fact that we were all nude. At Khmelita everyone swam in the nude, men and women together. I did notice however, without any furtive thoughts, what a beautiful figure she had. We swam for a while, then stretched out on the sand where we quickly dried out in the heat. We then dressed and went back for tea.

“Where were you?” asked one of the governesses.

“Swimming,” answered Nikolai Ermolaevich’s wife.

“Swimming! Nude!” shrieked all the governesses.

“Of course.”

The group was gripped by horror. They all began to fuss and fume. A scandal was obviously brewing. I could not understand their agitation. At first I thought that we should not have gone swimming after a snack, but then realized that all these outlanders and city folk had never swum nude and were shocked. I was not an innocent kid and knew the difference between the bodies of men and women, but none of us ever thought of nude swimming as shocking or improper. Then I recalled the horror of the governesses when they once heard that I was present at calving-time. “Do you think that a stork brings calves?” I said to myself and decided that they were all ignoramuses.

The news of the murder of Franz-Ferdinand and his duchess came while we were still at Glubokoe. I remember what a doleful effect it had on everyone, as any murder would. Murders were so rare in those “uncivilized” times that every killing was the subject of conversation for weeks. Father said that

Nikolai Volkov-Muromtsev, Memoirs

73

they were “clearly killed by anarchists or some other lowlife, but that the Aus-trians, as usual, will exaggerate this and blame the Serbian government. And the Serbs, like jerks, will get all hyper and there’ll be a crisis. It’s up to the diplomats to quiet this thing down. Don’t know why we guaranteed the independence of our ‘little brothers’ who may draw us into a war through their local intrigues.”

Nevertheless, no one thought at the time that this would lead to war. Almost everyone assumed that it was an incident of only local significance.

Chapter Seven

Vladimir Zenzinov, Coming of Age