Peaceful discussion of these alarming topics made our journey both entertaining and informative, but we hadn’t even been going three hours when the train stopped and everyone was ordered to disembark.
We get off the train, drag our luggage out, stand on the platform for about two hours, and then get onto a different train. This train is third class only and packed full. Some malicious-looking peasant women with pale eyes are sitting opposite us. They clearly don’t like the look of us.
“Here they be on our train,” says a woman with a pockmarked face and a wart. “Here they be on our train, but where and why they’re going, they haven’t a clue.”
“Like dogs off a chain,” agrees the other one. She has a grimy headscarf and is using the corners of it, rather gracefully, to wipe her duck-like nose.
What irritates them most of all is a Pekinese dog—a tiny, silken ball lying on the lap of the older of our two actresses.
“A dog on a train! Look at her—a hat on her head and here she be on a train with a dog!”
“Should’ve left it at home. Nowhere for folks to sit and here she be with this hound of hers!”
“But she’s not in your way,” says the actress, her voice quivering as she defends her hound. “Anyway, it’s not as though you’d be sitting here on my lap!”
“No, we’d not be travelin’ around with dogs,” the women continue relentlessly.
“I can’t leave her at home on her own. She’s delicate. She needs more care than a little child.”
“Huh?”
“What d’ye mean by that then?” shouts the pockmarked one, leaping to her feet in fury. “Here, listen to this! This one here with the hat says our children’s worse than dogs! We’re not standing for this, are we?”
“Huh? Us? We be dogs and she ain’t?”
Then this discussion—and there’s no knowing where it might have led—is interrupted by a wild shriek. The shriek comes from the space at the end of the train car. Everyone jumps up and rushes to investigate. The pockmarked woman goes as well, and, when she returns, she tells us in the most amiable of tones that a thief had been caught and that they’d been about to “drop ’im under the car”—only the thief had beaten them to it. He’d jumped off the moving train.
“Charming characters!” says Averchenko. “Try to ignore them. Think about something cheerful.”
I do as he says. Tonight, the lights will be switched on at the theater, people will gather and sit in their seats and will listen to:
Oh why do I have to remember this? This idiotic refrain—spinning round and round in my poor head!
The women carry on chatting happily about how jolly it would have been to throw the thief under the wheels and about how he must be lying on the ground now with a smashed head.
“Lynch every one of ’em! Yes, him and every one of his sort. Poke out their eyes, rip out their tongues, cut off their ears, and then tie a stone round their necks and—into the water with ’em!”
“Back in our village we’d drag ’em under the ice on a rope, from ice-’ole to ice-’ole…”
“Oftentimes they was burned on a fire.”
Thank God they were diverted by the thief. Otherwise who knows what they’d have done to us?
“How awful!” I say to Averchenko.
“Sh!”
“I don’t mean them,” I continue. “I have torments of my own, I can’t get Silva out of my head.”
I shall think instead about how we might have been roasted, maybe that will do the trick. First I think about the pockmarked woman sitting opposite me. She’d be hard at it! She’s thorough. She’d be blowing on the kindling. And Gooskin? He’d be shouting, “Please excuse me, but we have a legally binding contract! You are preventing her from fulfilling her part of our agreement, and you are bankrupting me as an impresario! First she must pay me a forfeit!”
The “stupid cupid” gradually withdraws. It fades and dies away.
The train pulls into a station. Women with bundles start bustling about. The thump of soldiers’ boots. Bags, sacks, and baskets obscure the light of day. And then, on the other side of the glass, I see Gooskin. His face is twisted in terror. For the past few hours he’s been in a different car. What on earth has happened to him?
He looks ghastly. White all over, gasping for air.
“Get out quick! We must take a different route. This route’s out of the question. I’ll explain later.”
Well then, so be it. We get off the train. I’m rather slow, the last one out. When I finally jump down onto the platform, a ragged beggar boy comes up to me and says very clearly, “Stupid Cupid can’t be canned. Fifty kopeks, please!”
“Wha-at?”
“Fifty kopeks! Stupid Cupid.”
It’s all over. I’ve gone mad. I’m hearing things. My weak nerves must have been incapable of withstanding the combination of Silva and the people’s wrath.
I look around for our group; I need moral support. Averchenko is studying his gloves with extraordinary attentiveness and doesn’t respond to my mute appeal. I slip the boy fifty kopeks. I still don’t understand, but I have my suspicions.
“Admit it!” I say to Averchenko.
He gives an embarrassed laugh.
“While you were still in the train car,” he says, “I asked the boy if he wanted to earn a little money. I said a passenger in a little red hat was about to get off the train. ‘You go up to her,’ I told him, ‘and say, “Stupid Cupid can’t be canned!” She gives fifty kopeks to everyone who says that to her.’ Well, he seems like a bright boy!”
Gooskin, who’s been busying himself with our luggage, walks over. He is drenched in sweat.
“Wonderful!” he says in a ghastly whisper. “That bandit has gone and got himself shot!”
“What bandit?”
“That commissar of yours! What don’t you understand? Well? He’s been executed for robbery and bribe-taking. We can’t cross the border here. We’ll be fleeced—and then slaughtered to boot. We must cross somewhere else.”
All right then, a different border crossing it is. About two hours later we get onto another train and set off in another direction.
We arrived at the border station in the evening. It was cold. We wanted to go to bed. But we were anxious: What did this place have in store for us? When would they let us through and how would we continue our journey?
Gooskin and Averchenko’s impresario went off into the station building to assess the situation and conduct negotiations, giving us strict instructions to stay where we were. The omens did not bode well.
The platform was empty. Occasionally a dark figure would appear—maybe a guard, maybe a peasant woman in a soldier’s great-coat. This figure would cast a suspicious look in our direction, then disappear again. We waited for a long time. Finally, Gooskin emerged—escorted by no fewer than four men.
One of the four came rushing up to us. I shall never forget him: a thin, dark little man with a crooked nose, wearing a student’s cap and a huge, magnificent beaver coat that trailed behind him like a royal mantle in some throne-room portrait. The coat was brand new, evidently only just ripped off somebody’s back.