The White Guard - Mikhail Bulgakov [147]
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