The White Guard (43 page)

   The children, a boy and a girl, burst in once more and were chased out again. The husband idly looked for something in the cupboard and sat down again, although he was really supposed to go out. The daughter who was still combing out her hair, tried to break into the conversation - why hadn't her mother told us anything about Lancia? But here, for all her garrulity, her mother suddenly balked - there was nothing interesting in that story. The daughter assured us that it was very interesting, at least to her it was. But her mother showed a strange obstinacy. All we learned was that Lancia had been the owner of the Hotel d'Europe on what was formerly Imperial Square (this piece of information was the second and final sentence spoken by the husband), that he had a country villa in Buch opposite the Bulgakovs' villa, and that he had a conservatory . . . That's all, she said, nothing interesting, as you can see. We realised that there
was
something interesting behind it, but for some private reason she did not want to tell us about what had obviously been some complication in the triangular relationship between the Bulgakovs, Lancia and Vasilisa, and we did not press her.

   On the whole my friend and I proved to be incompetent reporters. We forgot to take a camera with us, we had sat there, I in the armchair and he on the divan, as if we had been strapped down, we never went into the other rooms, and we failed to ask about the fate of Vasilisa . . . And yet perhaps that is as it should be. After all, we were not reporters, and what we did find out was interesting enough. And I can photograph the house any time I like - it will be there for a long time yet.

   That was all.

   We said goodbye and left, promising to come back again. But I doubt if we ought to.

   At present I am curious about one thing only: will the inhabitants of that little hillside house read about the events which took place in it almost fifty years ago?3

   As we climbed back up St Andrew's Hill, thrilled yet saddened, we tried to draw some kind of conclusions. Conclusions about what? Well, about everything. The past, the present, things that never were. At Yalta in the summer of 1966 we read Yermolinsky's memoirs of Bulgakov, which have just been published in the magazine
Teatr:
they are very sad, not to say tragic. We had just been exploring the haunts of Bulgakov's youth, we still had to visit

   3. Events ? What events ?
The White Guard
is fiction. But what fiction, when I can quite seriously and spontaneously write a sentence like the one printed above. And I have decided not to alter it, but just to add this footnote.

   the erstwhile First Gimnaziya4 (the building is now part of Kiev University), on whose main staircase Alexei died (on the Moscow Art Theater stage), we would go to the delicatessen store on Teatralnaya Street which was once Madame Anjou's shop, Le Chic Parisien, with its bell that rang every time the door was opened, then we planned to try for the nth time to find the house on Malo-Provalnaya Street. Just around the corner of 'the most fantastic street in the world' - a moss-grown wall, a gate, a brick path, another gate, still another, a garden of snow-covered lilac bushes, a lantern in front of an old-fashioned porch, the gentle light of a tallow candle in a candlestick, a portrait with gold epaulettes, Julia . . . Julia Alexandrovna Reiss . . . No sign of her. And the house was not there either. I had reconnoitred the whole of Malo-Podvalnaya Street. There had once been, at the far end of a courtyard, a wooden house that roughly corresponded to Bulgakov's description complete with verandah with colored glass panes, but it had long since vanished. In its place there was a new multi-storey stone building, looking hideously out of place in that crooked little street, while alongside it a six hundred feet high television mast thrust itself skywards . . .

   As we walked away up St Andrew's Hill we wondered why neither Bulgakov nor any of his brothers and sisters had ever felt drawn to come back here. His brothers, of course, could hardly have done so: Nikolka was dead, buried in some Parisian cemetery, whilst Vanya . . . Could it be that I had seen him, even met him? I was once in Paris, in a Russian restaurant not far from the Boulevard Saint-Michel. It was called 'Le vodka'. They had served real vodka there, which is not so common in normal French restaurants, some elderly people at the next table who had had a little to drink had sung old Russian songs, and on a little stage in the corner six balalaika players in blue silk Russian shirts had played three encores of 'Ochi chyorniye' ... I had talked to them; all except one were Russian. They didn't tell me their surnames,

   4. In pre-revolutionary Russia a state secondary school, originally modelled on the Prussian
Gymnasium
and roughly equivalent to an English grammar school.

   But all of them wanted to know how they could return to Russia. Perhaps one of them was Vanya Bulgakov, the man who for me and for all of us was - Nikolka Turbin? If he was playing 'Ochi chyorniye' on the balalaika now, might he not have played an army marching song to the guitar as a cadet in 1918?

   How I long for a sequel to
The White Guard!
A childish curiosity makes me want desperately to know what happened afterwards, what fate befell the Turbins and their friends after 1918. Exile? For Nikolka the answer is clearly yes. As for Myshlaevsky - I don't know. And what about Shervinsky and Elena? And Alexei? Did he write
The Days of the Turbins
and
The White Guard?
And die in 1940, so long before the triumphal recognition of his writing which came twenty-five years later?

   How I regret now not having known Bulgakov. How keenly I long to know the how, the where and the why in the genesis of his novel.

   In 1923 his mother died of typhus.
The White Guard
was begun in 1923. And it opens with the funeral of the Turbins' mother: 'For the reigning head of the family, their adored mother, was no longer with them.'

   I am just re-reading
The Master and Margarita,
and I now understand very clearly the real-life origin of the flood caused by Margarita in Latunsky's apartment.

   And Maxudov in
The Theatrical Novel
is not writing
Black Snow
but
The White Guard:
'... It's evening, the lamp is burning; it has a fringed shade. Music lies open on the grand piano. Someone is playing
Faust.
Suddenly
Faust
stops and a guitar starts playing. Who is playing it? Here he comes, with the guitar in his hands . . .'5

   Nikolka . . . Nikolka again . . . Greetings, Nikolka, old friend of my youth . . .

   There I've said it: The friend of my youth, it appears, was no more and no less than a White officer-cadet. But I cannot reject

   5. M. Bulgakov
Black Snow. A Theatrical Novel.
(Hodder and Stough-ton; London 1965), p. 63.

   him or deny him, nor his elder brother. Norhis sister, nor his brother's friends ...

   For I fell in love with those people and I love them to this day. I love them for their honesty, their nobility and their bravery, and ultimately for the tragedy of their position. I love them, just as the hundreds of thousands of people loved them who saw the play at the Moscow Art Theater.6 And among them was Stalin. According to the M.A.T. records he saw
The Days of the Turbins
no less than
fifteen
times! And he could hardly be called the keenest of theatergoers . . .

   The Turbins' apartment was destroyed by fire at Minsk in 1941. And although it rose from the ashes again thirteen years later, this time not in one but in three versions (the play was revived in Moscow, in Tbilisi and in Novosibirsk), for me there was only one genuine one, the set (hateful word for something so real!) designed by the artist Ulyanov. It is gone forever. Just as the actors in the original cast, Khmelyov, Dobronravov, Kudryavtsev, are gone for ever, the ones who first made us fall in love with the real-life (or maybe they were fictional, well perhaps half- or quarter-fictional -God, I've made the same mistake again!) heroes of Bulgakov's play.

   We have known them so long - forty years in fact (incidentally we are now as far away in time - even three years longer - from the last M.A.T. production of the play as was that performance from the events it describes). Why has our friendship with them not only not waned over so many years (for they have acquired new friends too) but actually grown stronger? Why did I love them even more when I saw the revived production?

   At first I could not give a precise answer to that question. Now I can.

   I loved the Turbins even more just because it was they who first introduced me to Bulgakov.

   Forty years ago, there's no point in concealing it, I was much less interested in Bulgakov (as a writer, and still less as a person)

   6. Not less than a million, in my estimation. In the fifteen years from 1926 to 1941 the play ran for 987 performances, with an audience of at least i.ooo people each time.

   than in his heroes. But now, when we have come to know so many more of his heroes, even including some who are devils and witches, I turn back in my mind to 1928, I am again sitting on the steps of the dress circle in the Moscow Art Theater and I give thanks to Alexei, to Elena and Nikolka, even to the Hetman Skoropadsky for having been the first to say to me: 'Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov, playwright . . .'

   I have never seen his play
Moliere,
but I have read his
Life of Monsieur de Moliere.
Bulgakov had no patrons, he had no Prince Conti, no Duke of Orleans, just as Moliere had no Artistic Directors to contend with, but both of them were equally aware what a steep path the true artist had to climb.

   Bulgakov achieved fame (with all its problems) both early in his career and late. But here I must stop; for that is a subject for a separate piece of research, for which I am not equipped.

   My subject has been topography. I am proud (and surprised that no one did it before me) of having discovered 'The house of the Turbins', and when you come to Kiev I invite you to walk down the steep slope of St Andrew's Hill to No. 13, to glance into the backyard (be sure to notice the steps on the left, under the verandah, for it was just there that a shiver ran down poor Vasilisa's belly when he caught sight of Yavdokha, the beautiful milkmaid), and then to go uphill, cross the 'mediaeval' courtyard of Richard the Lionheart's Castle and to go up on to the hilltop, sit down on the edge of it, light a cigarette if you like, and admire the City which, even though he never came back to it, Bulgakov loved so much.