Teffi (II) — Memories From Moscow to the Black Sea

THEN CAME the northeasterly.

Back in Odessa I had heard many stories about it.

A colleague from the Russian Word had returned from Novorossiisk all bandaged up and covered in plasters. He’d been caught by a northeasterly. He’d been quietly walking along—and then the wind had knocked him off his feet and rolled him along the street until he managed to catch hold of a lamppost.

I’d also heard of steamers being ripped from their moorings and blown out to sea. Only one had been left in the bay—a cunning American who had got up full steam and headed into the wind. By making straight toward the shore, he had managed to stay in one place.

While I didn’t exactly believe all these stories, I was, nevertheless, eager to see what this northeasterly was really like.

People said it could only count in threes. It blew for three days, or six days, or nine days, and so on.

And then my wish was granted.

Our Shilka began shrieking, screeching and groaning. Not one of her bolts, chains, or cables was silent. The rigging whistled; every bit of metal clanged.

I set off into town with the secret hope that I too would be knocked off my feet and rolled along the street, like my colleague from the Russian Word.

I got as far as the market without incident and was buying a few little bits and pieces when, suddenly, splinters were flying, a dark cloud of dust was soaring into the air, and the awning above the stalls gave a great clap. Something crashed to the ground—and then something pink and frothy closed me off from the rest of the world.

I desperately tried to shake myself free. The world opened up again and the pink thing—my own skirt, which had billowed up over my head—wrapped itself around my legs.

Embarrassed, I looked around. Everyone was screwing up their eyes, rubbing them, shielding their faces with their bent arms. My first introduction to the northeasterly appeared to have passed unnoticed. There was just one woman some way away, a bagel seller, who was still watching me, and shaking with laughter.

The northeasterly continued to rage for twelve days. Every kind of howl in the world—anguished, spiteful, sorrowing, savage—could be heard from the ship’s rigging. Sailors were swept off decks and traders blown away from the market; the streets were emptied of people. Not a boat was left in the roadstead, not a cart on the shore.

Yellow columns of dust roamed about the town as they pleased, [Note: To this day, there is a large cement factory in Novorossiisk, one of the oldest such factories in Russia, founded in 1882.] rolling stones down the road, whirling debris of every kind through the air.

One day the waves brought us the bloated corpse of a cow.

Evidently it was not uncommon for the wind to hurl cattle into the sea.

The cadets tried to push the cow away with long boat hooks, but it kept coming back. It floated about for a long time, a monstrous, swollen balloon, now moving away a little, now bobbing up right beside us.

Those of us still left on the Shilka wandered about dejectedly.

To your left, if you went up on deck, you saw a silent city, all dust and debris, exhausted by anxiety, fear, and typhus. And to your right lay the boundless sea, the waves hurriedly and mindlessly buffeting one another, mounting one another and then dropping back down, crushed by other, newer waves that spat at them in foaming fury.

Agitated gulls were swooping about, bitterly flinging what sounded like last words—hopeless, fragmentary last words—at one another.

Gray sky.

It was all very dismal.

At night, the thudding and crashing overhead made it impossible to sleep. If you left your airless cabin and went up on deck, the wind would spin you round, seize hold of you, slam the door behind you, then drag you away into the darkness, where it whistled and howled as it harried a frightened crowd of waves, driving them off, driving them away. . .

Away from these shores of despair. But where? Where to?

Soon we too might be driven away by the raging elements, but where would we go? Where in the wide world?

And so you would return to your cabin.

And lie on your hard wooden bunk and listen to the midshipman strumming his out-of-tune guitar, and to the violent coughing of the old Chinese cook—the man who had once "got so angry his heart broke." [Note: This is inconsistent with Akyn's earlier account on page 171: "He had once got so very angry...that he had 'torn his throat.'" Teffi may have intended the reader to understand that she herself heard different stories about this cook—or, more likely, this is simply a mistake on her part.]

Explanation: