After the meal Uncle Semya went into his study and I sat with Aunt Genia and Wanda, reading a scientific article in
Perhaps I should feel bitterness towards Shura now, but I cannot. I believe that all he did was to introduce me to a world he dearly loved and knew I would love. I did love it, for those few months. I regret its ending. I did not value generosity then. Shura introduced me to Odessa in all her last, glorious, decadent days, before war, famine, revolution, the triumph of bourgeois virtues, came to turn her into just another port-city, built for traffic, with the people swept into grey concrete heaps on either side of ’motorways’, ‘fly-overs’ and ‘bypasses’. He introduced me to decadence and I saw it only as life and beauty and friendship. The hot sun of Odessa had ripened this fruit. Now, perhaps, it was rotting in the final summer of the old world.
Aunt Genia looked up from her novel. I seemed pale. I must take care of myself, for my mother’s sake. I must get brown in the sunshine of Arcadia while it lasted, not go with Shura to all his ‘dark holes of conspiring youth’.
I agreed that I was tired, but I could not think of sleep. My mind was analysing so much. ‘You will sleep,’ she said, ‘I’ll play you some music.’ She went to a large cabinet gramophone that was either German or English (it had the little dog on its metal label) and asked me if I had any preferences in music. I said that I had not. She had a good selection of the solid black discs with colourful labels we used to get in those days. She played me some operatic arias by Caruso (it was the first time I had heard Puccini or Verdi), some Mozart, two or three popular songs by a favourite singer of the day (I think it was Izya Kxemer) and a recent tango which, perhaps because the instrument wound down a little at the end, had a peculiar, significant quality which haunted me as I went up to bed and haunts me now, as I write. I fell almost immediately into a deep sleep.
IN THE DAYS WHICH followed, Shura was to introduce me to scores of new delights and against these I had absolutely no protection. My mother had warned me about revolutionists but not about the real attractions and dangers of Odessa: the gay, sardonic company of those slangy bohemians who did not give a damn for Karl Marx or the Tsar, who believed that their city was the world and that nowhere else on Earth was so beautiful. They were in many ways right. Very quickly I began to assume the tastes and manners of my friends. Odessans were regarded by the rest of Russia much as Californians are regarded by New Yorkers. The bright clothes we wore were natural to us, natural to the rosy light which made the city glow, and only appeared vulgar when removed from their locale. Even casual thievery in Odessa was not looked upon very seriously. It was almost as if property in that city were already communal, save that it was up to a person to hang on to as much of it as he could but not be resentful if he were outwitted and parted from it. Of course, not everyone shared this spirit. Such people were usually officials or immigrants of some sort, anyway: like the pompous burghers in their seaside cottages, or the holiday-makers who came to swim and lie in the sun. The women wished to flirt with sailors and our Odessa boys.
