The Story of a Life by Konstantin Paustovsky

Author:Konstantin Paustovsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2023-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

1 Popular Moscow restaurant in the early 1900s known for its Gypsy choir.

2 Oft-quoted line from Griboedov’s Woe from Wit.

53

The Ocean Liner Portugal

The summer of 1915 was hot and dry. From the windows of the train we watched brown curtains of dust sweep over the fields of Poland. The army was retreating. The dust of defeat, with its bitter smell of charred ruins, covered everything – the soldiers’ faces, the grain in the fields, the guns, the train. Our red goods wagons had turned grey. Now we never stopped anywhere for longer than three or four hours. The train was in constant motion. The wounded kept coming. Once we stopped to pick up some wounded men along the right bank of the Vistula in Praga, a suburb of Warsaw. Fighting was taking place in a section of the city near the Mokotów Gates. Small fires reflected off the waters of the Vistula. Smoke and darkness had settled over the houses. Gunshots crackled on the far side of the river. It sounded as if someone were tearing heavy cloth in short, violent bursts.

The wind was blowing from the east. It filled Praga with the fresh air of the night. But the train held onto the hot stuffy air of the day, especially in my operating carriage, whose windows were sealed up tight; the smell of dressing and bandages had no escape. At the time we were carrying casualties from Poland to Gomel. As soon as the train reached Polesia, the air became fresh again. The damp forests and quiet rivers of Belorussia seemed to us a cool paradise. The wounded men came to life and lifted their heads to gaze at the rustling groves of aspen or the evening sky as it faded to green.

By the middle of summer, the train had become so worn out that it was ordered to the railway workshops in Odessa for urgent repairs. We went through Kiev, the city of my childhood. I saw it once again from a siding at dawn. The sun was already gilding the tops of the poplars and burned in the windows of the tall houses built from the yellow Kiev brick. I recalled the city’s morning streets, freshly sprinkled and still full of shadows, its housewives carrying home warm rolls and bottles of cold milk in their bags. But for some reason nothing tugged at me to return to the coolness of these streets – Kiev had receded into the irredeemable past. The past was gone for good reason. I convinced myself of this later on the two or three occasions when I tried to relive it. ‘Nothing in life ever returns,’ Father loved to say, ‘except our mistakes.’ And the fact that nothing in life ever does repeat itself is one of the things that makes our existence so endlessly fascinating.

After Kiev the soft, sun-drenched hills of Ukraine rolled by our windows. Somehow the smell of marigolds, growing in yellow clumps around every crossing keeper’s hut, managed to find its way into the train.

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