Chapter 34: The Journey

THE LOST PASSPORT—KÖNIGSBERG—THE HAND-MADE NOSE—WE ARRIVE!—AND DEPART

In Lautzagen the Prussian gendarmes invited me into their office. The old sergeant took the passports, put on his spectacles, and with extreme distinctness began reading aloud all that was unnecessary:

_Auf Befehl s.k. M. Nikolai des Ersten ... allen und jeden, denen daran gelegen_, etc. etc.... _Unterzeichner Peroffski, Minister des Innern, Kammerherr, Senator und Ritter des Ordens St. Wladimir ... Inhaber eines goldenen Degens mit der Inschrift für Tapferkeit...._

This sergeant who was so fond of reading reminded me of another one. Between Terracino and Naples a Neapolitan carbineer came to the diligence four times, asking every time for our visas. I showed him the Neapolitan visa: this and the half _carlino_ were not enough for him; he carried off the passports to the office, and returned twenty minutes later insisting that my companion and I should go before the brigadier. The latter, a drunken old officer, asked me rather rudely, ‘What is your surname and where do you come from?’ ‘Why, that is all in the passport.’ ‘I can’t read it.’ We conjectured that reading was not the brigadier’s strong point. ‘By what law,’ asked my companion, ‘are we bound to read aloud our passports? We are bound to have them and to show them, but not to dictate them; I might dictate anything.’ ‘_Accidenti_,’ muttered the old man, ‘_va ben, va ben!_’ and he gave back our passports without writing anything.

The learned gendarme at Lautzagen was of a different type; after reading three times in the three passports all the decorations of General Perovsky, including his buckle for an unblemished record, he asked me: ‘But who are you, _Euer Hochwohlgeboren_?’ I stared, not understanding what he wanted of me. ‘_Fräulein Maria E._, _Fräulein Maria K._, _Frau H._—they are all women, there is not one man’s passport here.’ I looked: there really were only the passes of my mother and two of our friends who were travelling with us; a cold shudder ran down my back.

‘They would not have let me through at Taurogen without a passport.’

‘_Bereits so_, but you can’t go on further.’

‘What am I to do?’

‘Perhaps you have forgotten it at the office. I’ll tell them to harness a sledge for you; you can go yourself, and your family can keep warm here meanwhile. _Heh! Kerl! Lass er mal den Braunen anspannen._’

I cannot remember that stupid incident without laughing, just because I was so utterly disconcerted by it. The loss of that passport of which I had been dreaming for years, which I had been trying to obtain for two years, the minute after crossing the frontier, overwhelmed me. I was certain I had put it in my pocket, so I must have dropped it—where could I look for it? It would be covered by snow.... I should have to ask for a new one, to write to Riga, perhaps to go myself: and then they would send in a report, would notice that I was going to the mineral waters in January. In short, I felt as though I were in Petersburg again; visions of Kokoshkin and Sartynsky, Dubbelt and Nicholas, passed through my mind. Good-bye to my journey, good-bye to Paris, to freedom of the press, to concerts and theatres ... once more I should see the clerks in the ministry, police—and every other sort of—officers, town constables with on their back the two bright buttons with which they look behind them ... and first of all I should see again the little wrinkled soldier in a heavy casque with Number 4 mysteriously inscribed on it, the frozen Cossack horse.... I might even see the nurse again at ‘Tavroga,’ as she had called it.

Meanwhile they put a big, melancholy, angular horse into a little sledge. I got in beside a driver in a military overcoat and high boots, he gave the traditional lash with the traditional whip—when suddenly the learned sergeant ran out into the porch, in his shirt-sleeves, and shouted: ‘_Halt! Halt! Da ist der vermaledeite Pass_,’ and he held it unfolded in his hands.

I was overtaken by hysterical laughter.

‘What are you doing with me? Where did you find it?’

‘Look,’ he said, ‘your Russian sergeant folded them one inside the other: who could tell it was there? I never thought of unfolding them.’

And yet he had three times over read: _Es ergehet deshalb an alle hohen Mächte und an alle und jede, welchen Standes und welcher Würde sie auch sein mögen...._

I reached Königsberg tired out by the journey, by anxiety, by many things. After a good sleep in an abyss of feathers, I went out next day to look at the town. It was a warm winter’s day: the hotel-keeper suggested that we should take a sledge. There were bells on the horses and ostrich feathers on their heads ... and we were gay; a load was lifted from our hearts, the unpleasant sensation of fear, the gnawing feeling of suspicion, had vanished. Caricatures of Nicholas were exposed in the window of a bookshop; I rushed in at once to buy a stock of them. In the evening I went to a small, dirty, and inferior theatre, and came back from it excited, not by the actors but by the audience, which consisted mostly of workmen and young people; in the intervals between the acts every one talked freely and loudly, all put on their hats (a very important thing, as important as the right to wear a beard, etc.). This ease and freedom, this element of greater serenity and liveliness impresses the Russian abroad. The Petersburg government is still so coarse and crude, so absolutely nothing but despotism, that it positively likes to inspire fear; it wants everything to tremble before it—in fact, it desires not only power but the theatrical display of it. To the Petersburg Tsars the ideal of public order is the discipline of the waiting-room and the barracks.

... When we were setting off for Berlin I got into the carriage, and a gentleman muffled up in wraps took the seat beside me; it was evening, I could not see him distinctly. Learning that I was a Russian, he began to question me about the strictness of the police and about passports; I, of course, told him all I knew. Then we passed to Prussia; he spoke highly of the disinterestedness of the Prussian officials, the excellence of the administration, praised the king, and finally made a violent attack on the Poles of Posen on the ground that they were not good Germans. This surprised me; I argued with him, I told him bluntly that I did not share his views, and then said no more.

Meanwhile it was getting light; only then I noticed that my neighbour, the conservative, spoke through his nose, not because he had a cold in it, but because he had not one at all, or at least had not the most conspicuous part. He probably noticed that this discovery did not afford me any special satisfaction, and so thought fit to tell me, by way of apology, the story of how he had lost his nose and how it had been restored. The first part was somewhat confused, but the second was very circumstantial: Diffenbach himself had carved him a new nose out of his hand; his hand had been bound to his face for six weeks; _Majestät_ had come to the hospital to look at it, and was graciously pleased to wonder and approve.

‘A dit: c’est vraiment étonnant,
Le roi de Prusse en le voyant.’

Apparently Diffenbach had been preoccupied with something else and had carved him a very ugly nose. But I soon discovered that his hand-made nose was the least of his defects.

Getting from Königsberg to Berlin was the most difficult part of our journey. The belief has somehow gained ground among us that the Prussian posting service is well organised: that is all nonsense. Travelling by post-chaise is only pleasant in France, Switzerland, and England. In England the post-chaises are so well built, the horses so elegant, and the drivers so skilful that one may travel for pleasure. The carriage moves at full speed over the very longest stages, whether the road runs uphill or downhill. Now, thanks to the railway, this question is becoming one of historical interest, but in those days we learned by experience what German posting chaises and horses could be. They were worse than anything in the world except perhaps the German post-drivers.

The way from Königsberg to Berlin is very long; we took seven places in the diligence and set off. At the first station the conductor told us to take our luggage and get into another diligence, sagaciously warning us that he would not be responsible for our things being safe. I observed that I had inquired at Königsberg and was told that we should keep the same seats: the conductor spoke about snow, and said that we had to get into a diligence provided with runners; there was nothing to be said to that. We had to transfer ourselves with our goods and our children in the middle of the night in the wet snow. At the next station there was the same business again, and the conductor did not even trouble himself to explain the change of carriages. We did half the journey in this way; then he informed us quite simply that we ‘should be given only five seats.’

‘Five? Here are my tickets.’

‘There are no more seats.’

I began to argue; a window in the posting station was thrown open with a bang and a grey-headed man with moustaches asked rudely what the wrangling was about. The conductor said that I demanded seven seats, and that he had only five; I added that I had tickets and a receipt for the fares for seven seats. Paying no attention to me, he said to the conductor in an insolent, husky, Russo-German military voice: ‘Well, if this gentleman does not want the five seats, throw his things out; let him wait till there are seven seats free.’ Whereupon the worthy stationmaster, whom the conductor addressed as _Herr Major_, and whose name was Schwerin, shut the window with a slam. On considering the matter, we, as Russians, decided to go on. Benvenuto Cellini in like circumstances would, as an Italian, have brought out his pistol and shot the stationmaster.

Our friend who had been repaired by Diffenbach was at the time in the restaurant; when he clambered on to his seat and we set off, I told him what had happened. He was in a very genial mood, having had a drop too much; he showed the greatest sympathy with us, and asked me to give him a note on the subject when we got to Berlin. ‘Are you an official in the posting service?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he answered, still more through his nose; ‘but that doesn’t matter ... you ... see ... I am in what is called here the central police service.’

This revelation was even more distasteful to me than the hand-made nose.

The first person to whom I expressed my liberal opinions in Europe was a spy—but he was not the last.

Berlin, Cologne, Belgium—all passed rapidly before our eyes; we looked at everything half absent-mindedly, in passing; we were in haste to arrive, and at last we did arrive.

... I opened the heavy, old-fashioned window in the Hôtel du Rhin; before me stood a column:

‘... with a cast-iron doll,
With scowling face and hat on head,
And arms crossed tightly on his breast.’

And so I was really in Paris, not in a dream but in reality: this was the Vendôme column and the Rue de la Paix.

In Paris—the word meant scarcely less to me than the word ‘Moscow’! Of that minute I had been dreaming from childhood. If I might only see the Hôtel de Ville, the Café Foy in the Palais Royal, where Camille Desmoulins picked a green leaf and, fixing it on his hat for a cockade, shouted ‘_A la Bastille!_’

I could not stay indoors; I dressed and went out to stroll about the streets ... to look up Bakunin, Sazonov: here was Rue St. Honoré, the Champs-Élysées—all those names which had been familiar for long years ... and here was Bakunin himself....

I met him at a street corner; he was walking with three friends and, just as in Moscow, discoursing to them, continually stopping and waving his cigarette. On this occasion the discourse remained unfinished; I interrupted it and took him with me to find Sazonov and surprise him with my presence.

I was beside myself with happiness!

And at that happiness I will stop here.

I am not going to describe Paris once more. My first acquaintance with European life, the glorious tour in Italy just awakened from sleep, the revolution at the foot of Vesuvius, the revolution before St. Peter’s, and finally the news—like a flash of lightning—of the 24th of February—all that I have described in my _Letters from France and Italy_. I could not with the same vividness reproduce now impressions half effaced by time and overlaid by others. They make an essential part of my _Records_—what is a letter but a record of a brief period?