The White Guard - Mikhail Bulgakov [143]
Nothing has changed since those days: the house, the yard, the sheds, the verandah and the stairs under the verandah leading down to the back door of 'Vasilisa's' apartment - Vasily Ivanovich Lisovich. On the street side it is the first floor, whilst in the backyard it is the basement. Only the garden has disappeared - the backyard is now entirely taken up with sheds.
As I have said, my first visit was a short one. I was with my mother and a friend, we had come by car, and we had little time to spare. Having entered by the backyard, I timidly rang the bell on the left-hand one of the two doors giving on to the verandah and asked the fair-haired middle-aged lady who opened it whether some people called Turbin had once lived here. Or rather Bulgakov.
The lady stared at me in some astonishment and said, yes, they did live here once, very long ago, but why should I be interested in them? I said that Bulgakov was a famous Russian writer and that everything connected with him . . .
Her face showed even greater astonishment.
'What? Mishka Bulgakov - a famous writer? That incompetent venereologist - a famous Russian writer?'
With that I became dumb with embarrassment, and it was only later that I realised that the lady was not astonished at the incompetent venereologist becoming a writer (she knew that), but that he had become famous . . .
But this only came out during my second visit. This time only two of us went and we had all the time we needed.
When we rang, a young girl's voice rang outfrom the depths of the apartment:
'Mama, it's two men . . .'
Mama - the same middle-aged blond woman - appeared, and after a momentary pause of recognition and appraisal (for some reason she failed to recognise me at first), she said kindly:
'Please come in. Here, into the drawing-room. It was their drawing-room. And that was the dining-room. We have had to divide it with a partition, as you can see . . .'
Judging from the plaster mouldings on the ceiling, the former dining-room had once been very big and obviously comfortable;
now it served as both hall and kitchen. A handsome gas stove stood against the right-hand partition wall.
We went into the drawing-room, and the lady of the house excused herself for going on with her work - she was ironing net curtains, admittedly not very energetically, on a long ironing board - and invited us to sit down.
The drawing-room was obviously furnished in a most un-Turbinlike, or rather un-Bulgakovlike fashion. The three windows, giving on to the street and looking over to the hill on the far side where the grass was just beginning to sprout, were curtained to sill height, and there were flowers on the window ledge - a riot of mauve in little vases. All the rest - as it is everywhere in Kiev nowadays - was 'contemporary' furniture of the early 'fifties made at the Lvov factory together with some pieces of what is known locally as 'Bozhenko' furniture. (A hero of the civil war and companion-in-arms of the legendary partisan leader Shchors, Bozhenko, alas, is nowadays associated in the minds of most Kievans only with the mediocre furniture turned out by the factory that was named after him.) On the wall was some vaguely Japanese design on black lacquer (were they herons?), and by the doorway a gleaming piano in imitation walnut.
We sat down. The blond lady asked us what it was that we wanted to know, and we replied that we were interested in everything about this apartment which had been connected with