Chapter One The Emigrant from the Second-Class CarriagE Chapter Two

CHAPTER ONE THE EMIGRANT FROM THE SECOND-CLASS CARRIAGE

On this July morning a young man stepped onto the platform of the Lviv Railway Station dressed in a bespoke suit, blue with pale gray stripes.

His pants had become crumpled during the journey, bringing to naught the efforts of their owner to iron in some pleats, as dictated by city fashion. The cut did not look very contemporary. And in general, it appeared as if the fellow had not ordered the suit specially from a tailor, as was the custom, but had purchased a ready-made one, because it was cheaper. After this the tailor would have fitted and hemmed the clothes, taken his money, and would have even provided a discount. And both would have been left satisfied. The young man – because he had ended up with a cheap suit which at the same time looked quite decent. And the tailor – because he had finally gotten rid of goods which had been lying around, for which a former customer had not paid. That fellow had complained that he didn’t like it, that the stripes were wrong, while in reality he had lost all his money playing cards, and was sitting in cheap accommodation somewhere in Yamska Street8, waiting for his compassionate parents to respond and send him a little money. In his situation, he obviously was more concerned with finding a bite to eat than thinking about suits...

And that was in fact what had happened.

8 Yamska – a street in Kyiv which runs past Baykove Cemetery, which back then was on the outskirts of the city. During the period described here it was known as the ‘red light district’. Described in A. Kuprin’s novel Yama (The Pit).

Obviously, the young man, as he bargained with the Podil tailor, had no idea about the story behind the suit. He himself was not in the best of financial positions either, and this was not his only misfortune. The clothes in which he had been released from prison were blood-stained and dirty. The landlord, from whom the young man had rented an apartment in the Podil district of Kyiv, had unceremoniously taken his various odds and ends to cover outstanding rent. Adding at the same time the biting phrase ‘to my detriment’, but this was better than nothing at all. He didn’t want to ask his father for money. He managed to borrow some from an acquaintance, one of the few left who were not afraid to greet him and stop for a chat. He had promised to return the money as soon as he had found his feet in the new place. He had enough for a suit, a shirt, a tie, a round straw boater hat and a one-way ticket on the Kyiv-Lviv train.

The man’s name was Klymentiy Nazarovych Koshovy. He always introduced himself as Klym, and he also asked others to call him by this simple name. As he himself said, he didn’t like all those upper-class types, although his profession required him to rub shoulders with them in the state’s institutions9 .

He was a lawyer.

He had recently turned thirty.

And the police might already be looking for him no less than throughout the entire Kyiv Gubernia.

Although there seemed to be no obstacles to his traveling abroad, but who knows what could enter some official’s head. To declare someone as a state criminal and issue orders for their arrest was as easy as pie. True, on the scale of the police and gendarmerie of the vast Russian Empire, the persona of Koshovy seemed far too insignificant, for him to be sought after across the entire country. At least Klym himself wanted very much for this to be the case.

The Kyiv lawyer was traveling second class, having paid twelve rubles and fifty copecks for a ticket in a yellow carriage10. In his situation this was a

9 State institutions in the Russian Empire, which included not only the offices of bureaucrats, but also reception rooms, chanceries and so on. 10 Passenger trains in the Russian Empire had carriages of three classes, which differed in color. Blue corresponded to first class, yellow – second class, and green – third class. The mail car was brown.

crazy amount of money. He had even wanted to skimp, to travel third class for eight sixty. But at the last minute he had changed his mind. While he was hesitating, most of the seats were purchased by an Orthodox Jewish family. Klym was afraid they might create a commotion that would make his head buzz the following morning. But the opposite was the case. The children, two boys with long sidelocks aged several years apart, and a younger girl sat quietly, and when the train left Fastiv behind, the mother began to put them to bed. The men, the older and the younger one, judging by everything – the father-in-law and son-in-law, spoke softly in the passage.

Straining his ears out of curiosity, Koshovy sighed with disappointment: they were speaking in Yiddish, which he did not understand. He was itching to know why the family was traveling. It was quite possible that the older man had been settling business matters in Kyiv. However, Klym immediately rejected this assumption – in that case the men wouldn’t have encumbered themselves with a woman and three children. More than likely the family was moving to the West, because things in Kyiv were becoming progressively worse for them. The passengers had little luggage with them, which indirectly confirmed this: they had probably sold off their real estate, and the rest of their treasures had been shipped separately.

From time to time the Jews gave him suspicious looks. It was unlikely they saw him as a source of danger. They probably just didn’t feel too comfortable in his presence.

Deciding to leave them alone, at least for a while, Koshovy got to his feet and made his way to the restaurant carriage.

He found no peace here either.

For he had no desire or money to splurge on dinner. And he had no intention of simply sitting there, as it wasn’t the done thing. But his indecisiveness was misjudged by a group of his peers, who invited him to join their party.

It looked like they had been here a while. The whole car swayed from side to side because of the ruckus they had raised – or at least it seemed that way to Klym. Apart from them, there was an intelligent-looking gentleman with a small beard, wearing a pince-nez and an engineer’s everyday jacket, sitting at a table in the corner. Placing his cap on the table beside him and resting his elbows on the tablecloth, he was trying to convince a lady half

his age of something in a passionate whisper. Although she was dressed like a Kyiv townswoman, she seemed to be a person of a higher class. She did not speak with the engineer, mostly listening to him, occasionally throwing a few phrases in reply, which did not calm or please her interlocutor at all. Casting glances at the young men, he became more and more worked up, lowering his voice, and drawing his head into his shoulders.

Apart from these people, there was another patron sitting in the restaurant. A rather fat balding fellow, somewhat resembling a university lecturer, he was sipping tea, munching on some dried bagels and reading newspapers. One of these, which he had either read or was about to read, he placed under his left elbow, pressing it against the tabletop. Koshovy glanced at him and, spying part of the title, understood that it was Russkoe slovo11. Klym equally recognized the other newspaper in which the ‘lecturer’ was engrossed – Kievskie gubernskie vedomosti12. The loud threesome were obviously distracting him, for the fellow would throw them glances from time to time over the top of the newspaper, knitting his bushy eyebrows. Then he would wordlessly sip some tea, bite off a piece of bagel and become engrossed in his reading again. The local waiter was probably accustomed to this behavior – for as soon as the fellow finished a glass of tea, he was brought another, and the empty glass was removed.

At first Klym decided not to hang around. But then one of the young men called him over. He had decided that Klym could find nowhere to sit. With a welcoming gesture they invited him to join them, placed a glass before him and loudly, in unison, ordered another carafe of vodka. Koshovy downed the glass and helped it down with some fried bacon, even though he had eaten before leaving home. But he had decided that from now on and furthermore he would stop acting the timid invited guest: the train was taking him into an uncertain future, and who knew when he would have the opportunity to eat again.

His new friends made his acquaintance, introducing themselves, but Klym did not remember a single name. He knew that these young budding

11 ‘Russkoe slovo’ (Russian Word) – the cheapest daily newspaper in the Russian Empire, published from 1895 to 1918. 12 ‘Kievskie gubernskie vedomosti’ (Kyiv Provincial Gazette) – official Russian-language government newspaper, published from 1837 to 1917 in Kyiv. Published three times a week: on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.

merchants were definitely not in his league. Not because of disdain, on the contrary – most of his clients were mid-level landowners and industrialists. Literally, the purpose of their journey was different. Koshovy was a reluctant emigrant, in effect a fugitive from his home town, which he obviously did not mention to them, saying only that he was traveling ‘on business’. The young men were off to the spas. First to Truskavets13, for they had heard plenty about this new European resort, and the passions of their lives were already awaiting them there, having been dispatched earlier. From there they were heading to Baden-Baden for comparison. One of the lads turned out to be the son of some ‘liquor baron’ from outside Poltava, his friends from Kyiv had dragged him along with them. From time to time they called him a dumpling. Even though he may have been offended, the fellow strenuously pretended to like this.

When the threesome began to inquire, on what kind of business their new acquaintance was venturing to Lviv and whether he might be ready to turn his back on everything and come with them, so as to see a bit of the world and meet a nice gal, if he was lucky, Klym realized it was time to leave. He excused himself, had a drink for the road, said that he had a headache, and quickly made tracks. He didn’t care what the budding merchants thought about him, or whether they would think about him at all.

Apart from him, none of the others present left the restaurant car.

Early in the morning, when the train stopped at the border in Volochysk and the passengers began to show their passports, Koshovy tried his utmost to stay calm and confident. He even forced himself to smile to the border officer. The fellow looked at him, shrugged his shoulders, took the passport, leafed through it, and returned it. Suddenly, noticing something out of the corner of his eye, he turned sharply to look out the window, still holding the document in his hands. Looking outside, Klym saw that a senior border guard and two junior gendarmes in uniform had surrounded the engineer he had seen the night before. The fellow was without his cap, disheveled, waving his arms about, and was zealously trying to prove something to them.

13 The construction of a balneological resort in Truskavets, a town lying 100 km from Lviv, began in 1836. From 1895 the resort was actively expanded, modernized, and became popular and fashionable.