She had written out her resignation and was about to take it to Rizin, when she was called to the telephone. It was Limonov.
He asked her whether she was free the next evening: someone had arrived from Tashkent; he told very amusing stories about how things were there and had brought Limonov greetings from Aleksey Tolstoy. Once again Yevgenia felt the breath of another life.
Although she hadn't intended to, Yevgenia told Limonov about her attempts to obtain a residence permit.
He listened to her without interrupting and then said: 'What a story. It's really quite amusing. A father has a street named after him in Kuibyshev and his daughter is expelled, refused a residence permit. Very curious.'
He thought for a moment.
'Don't hand in your notice today, Yevgenia Nikolaevna. Tonight I'm going to a conference arranged by the secretary of the obkom. I'll talk to him about you.'
Yevgenia thanked him, thinking he would forget about her as soon as he put down the telephone. Still, she didn't hand in her notice and merely asked Rizin whether he would be able to get her a ticket, through the Military District HQ, for the steamer to Kazan.
'That's no problem,' said Rizin, spreading his hands helplessly. 'The police are impossible. But what can one do? Kuibyshev comes under special regulations – they have their instructions.'
Then he asked: 'Are you free this evening?'
'No,' answered Yevgenia angrily.
On the way home she thought that very soon she would see Viktor, Nadya and her mother and sister. Yes, life in Kazan would be easier than in Kuibyshev. She wondered why she had got so upset, shrinking with fear as she walked into the police station. They had rejected her application and to hell with it! And if Novikov wrote, she could ask her neighbours to forward the letter to Kazan.
The following morning she was called to the telephone as soon as she arrived at work. An obliging voice asked her to call at the passport bureau in order to collect her residence permit.
25
Yevgenia got to know one of the other tenants, Shargorodsky.
If Shargorodsky turned round abruptly, it looked as though his big, grey, alabaster head would come off his fine neck and fall to the ground with a crash. Yevgenia noticed that the pale skin on the old man's face was faintly tinged with blue. The combination of his blue skin and the light blue of his cool eyes intrigued her; the old man came from the highest ranks of the nobility and Yevgenia was amused at the thought that he would have to be drawn in blue.
Vladimir Andreyevich Shargorodsky's life had been still more difficult before the war. Now at least he had some kind of work. The Soviet Information Bureau had asked him to supply them with notes on Dmitry Donskoy, Suvorov and Ushakov, [16] on the traditions of the Russian officer class, on various nineteenth-century poets…
He informed Yevgenia that on his mother's side he was related to a very ancient princely house, one even older than the Romanovs. As a young man he had served in the provincial zemstvo [17] and had preached Voltaire and Chaadayev to the sons of landlords, to young priests and village schoolteachers.
He told Yevgenia about a remark made to him forty-four years before by the provincial marshal of the nobility: 'You, a descendant of one of the oldest families of Russia, have set out to prove to the peasants that you are descended from a monkey. The peasants will just ask: "What about the Grand Dukes? The Tsarevich? The Tsaritsa? What about the Tsar himself…?"'
Shargorodsky continued his subversive teaching and was finally exiled to Tashkent. A year later he was pardoned; he emigrated to Switzerland. There he met many of the revolutionary activists; Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, SRs and anarchists all knew the eccentric prince. He attended various gatherings and debates, was friendly with some of the revolutionaries but agreed with none of them. At that time he was a friend of the black-bearded Lipets, a student who was a member of the Jewish Bund.
Shortly before the First World War he returned to Russia and settled down on his estate, now and again publishing articles on historical and literary themes in the Nizhnii Novgorod Listok. He didn't concern himself with the actual management of the estate, leaving that entirely to his mother.
In the end he was the only landlord whose estate was left untouched by the peasants. The Committee of Poor Peasants even allocated him a cartload of firewood and forty cabbages. He sat in the one room of the house that was still heated and had its windows intact, reading and writing poetry. He read one of his poems to Yevgenia. It was entitled ' Russia ':
Insane carefreeness Wherever one looks. The plain. Infinity. The cawing of rooks.
Riots. Fires. Secrecy. Obtuse indifference. A unique eccentricity. A terrible indifference.
He pronounced each word carefully, pausing for each punctuation mark and raising his long eyebrows – somehow without making his large forehead appear any smaller.
In 1926 Shargorodsky took it into his head to give lectures on the history of Russian literature; he attacked Demyan Byedniy [18] and praised Fet; [19] he took part in the then fashionable discussions about the beauty and truth of life; he declared himself an opponent of every State, declared Marxism a narrow creed, and spoke of the tragic fate of the Russian soul. In the end he talked and argued himself into another journey at government expense to Tashkent. There he stayed, marvelling at the power of geographical arguments in a theoretical discussion, until in late 1933 he received permission to move to Samara to live with his elder sister, Elena Andreevna. She died shortly before the war.
Shargorodsky never invited anyone into his room. Once, however, Yevgenia glanced into the Prince's chambers: piles of books and old newspapers towered up in the corners; ancient armchairs were heaped on top of each other almost to the ceiling; portraits in gilt frames covered the floor. A rumpled quilt whose stuffing was falling out lay on a sofa covered in red velvet.
Shargorodsky was a very gentle man, and quite helpless in any practical matter. He was the sort of man about whom people say, 'He's got the soul of a child,' or 'He's as kind as an angel.' And yet he could walk straight past a hungry child or a ragged old woman begging for crusts, feeling quite indifferent, still muttering his favourite lines of poetry.
As she listened to Shargorodsky, Yevgenia often thought of her ex-husband. There really was very little in common between this old admirer of Fet and Vladimir Solovyov, and Krymov the Comintern official.
She found it surprising that Krymov, who was just as much a Russian as old Shargorodsky, could be so indifferent to the charm of the Russian landscape and Russian folk-tale, to the poetry of Fet and Tyutchev. And everything in Russian life that Krymov had held dear since his youth, the names without which he could not even conceive of Russia, were a matter of indifference to Shargorodsky – or even aroused his antagonism.
To Shargorodsky Fet was a god. Above all he was a Russian god. Glinka's Doubts and the folk-tales about Finist the Bright Falcon were equally divine. Whereas Dante, much though he admired him, quite lacked the divine quality of Russian music and Russian poetry.