The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

“Why don’t you go and visit the owner of this house, then you’ll understand. If we’re going to talk about truth, draw your own conclusions: who should this house, and this garden, and this land—the grounds around the house alone are two desiatinas—who should this belong to? But the owner over there is odd. The landowner Shuiskii, an unbelievable wretch. I doubt he would even invite you in. You better think up some sort of business to see him.”

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Konstantin Paustovskii, Save Your Strength

131

“What kind of business?”

“Well, something like you wish to settle in there for the summer, to rent a dacha. And you’ve come to make arrangements.”

I approached the house along a path barely visible in the snow. The windows were shuttered with old rotten boards. The front porch was swept with snow.

I walked around the house, saw a narrow door upholstered in torn felt, and knocked loudly. No one responded nor opened the door. I strained my ears. The house was silent as a crypt. “Who am I kidding,” I thought. “Surely no one lives here.”

All of a sudden, the door flew open. On the threshold stood a little old man in a threadbare, black quilted robe belted with a towel. On his head was a little silk cap. His whole face was wrapped in a dirty gauze bandage. Tufts of cotton, brown with iodine, stuck out from beneath the bandage. The little old man looked at me angrily with eyes that were absolutely blue, like a child’s, and asked in a high-pitched voice:

“What may I do for you, my dear sir?”

I answered as the shoemaker had told me to.

“You’re not of the Bunin clan, are you?” the little old man asked suspiciously.

“No, of course not!”

“Follow me, then.”

He led me into what appeared to be the only inhabited room in the house. It was crammed full of tattered rags and junk. A little iron stove was burning in the middle of the room. Trains of smoke belched out of it with every gust of wind.

In the corner I saw a magnificent round stove inlaid with decorative tiles. Almost half the tiles were missing; in their place were small niches filled with medicinal vials buried in dust, little yellowed paper bags, and shriveled worm-eaten apples.

Above a trestle-bed covered with a worn sheepskin there hung a portrait in a heavy golden frame; it was a portrait of a woman in an airy blue dress, with powdered hair combed up and the same blue eyes as the little old man’s.

It seemed as if all of a sudden I was back in the early nineteenth century, visiting Gogol’s Pliushkin. Prior to that I had never imagined that there still remained houses and people of this sort in Russia.

“Are you a nobleman?” the little old man asked me.

Just to be safe, I answered that I was.

“What you do professionally is of no interest to me,” said the little old man. “These days such new occupations have come into being that it would trip up even a policeman. Kindly imagine, there is now even something called a

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Chapter Thirteen

“taxator” [an agricultural and forestry assessor]. It is all nonsense! The Romanovs’ nonsense! I will let you the house for the summer, but under one absolute condition: you will not keep any goats. A certain Bunin lived here three years ago. A suspicious gentleman! A real Judas! Got himself goats, and sure—they were plenty happy to gnaw away on my apple trees.

“The writer Bunin?” I asked.

“No, his brother, the excise official. The writer came to visit. A somewhat more decent character than his bureaucratic brother but also, let me tell you, I don’t understand what’s there to boast about. Such petty gentry folk!”

I decided to stand up for Bunin, but on the old man’s terms.

“Come now,” said I, “The Bunins are old nobility.”

“Old?” the little old man mocked me. He looked at me as if I were a hopeless dimwit and shook his head. “Old! Well, I am a bit older! My name is listed in the Velvet Books.1—If you have properly studied the history of the Russian state, then you would know how ancient my family is.”

Only then did I recall that the shoemaker had given me the name of this little old man—Shuiskii. Could it really be that in front of me was standing the last descendant of the Tsar Shuiskii? What the hell!

“I’ll charge you,” continued the little old man meanwhile, “fifty rubles for the whole summer. This is, of course, no trifling sum. But my expenses are not trifling either. My spouse and I separated last year. The old witch now lives in Efremov, and from time to time I have to cough up five or ten rubles for her. But it’s useless. She spends the money on her lovers. She’s just asking to be hanged from the nearest tree.”

“But how old is she?” I asked.

“The hussy is past seventy,” answered Shuiskii crossly. “As to your residence here, we will write a point-by-point contract. I won’t have it any other way.”

I agreed. I felt as if the most extraordinary performance was being acted out in front of me.