Mothers & Daughters: History Of Belyanka

HISTORY OF BELYANKA

Late Winter 1840

Vera quietly opened the door to peek inside. If Baba Lena raised her head from behind her desk littered with papers, lined with many plants and bouquets, and, smiling tenderly, looked at Vera from behind the mass of fresh flowers, she would walk in boldly and sit closer to her. If Baba Lena did not notice Vera’s arrival or, even worse, when she saw Vera and remained serious with concerned eyebrows; then Vera would quickly sit down anywhere, at a distance, and wait there, hiding, until Baba Lena called her. Sometimes Vera had to wait a long time for this, but she did not get discouraged or bored. There was always something to look at, and think about, in Baba Lena’s study.

The walls, floor, ceiling, everything was covered with wonders. During the day, those wonders occupied the child’s mind greatly, but at dusk, she would never have entered Baba Lena’s study alone. Lelya was different. She had a passionate love, and curiosity for, everything unknown and mysterious, and anything weird and fantastical. She also had an attraction to (and at the same time fear of) the dead. Coupled with her craving for independence (a craving that nothing and nobody could control) and freedom of action, Lelya, naturally, would sneak into Baba Lena’s “museum of natural history.” Here she would hold deep conversations with the seals and stuffed crocodiles. The pigeons cooed interesting fairy tales to her, while the other animals amused her with interesting stories from their autobiographies. For Lelya, all of nature seemed “animated with a mysterious life of its own.” She heard the voice of every object and form, organic or inorganic, animate or inanimate, like pebbles or pieces of decaying phosphorescent timber. This consciousness stemmed from some mysterious powers, visible and audible to herself alone it seemed (everyone else saw empty space.)[1]

There were many monsters in Baba Lena’s study, like the white flamingo. It had long legs and was as tall as a person, standing in a corner glass cabinet. It stretched out its arshin neck that ended with a huge hooked, black beak, and waved its wide white wings, bright red beneath as if smeared with blood. It was scary. Lelya told Vera a whole fairy tale about this stuffed thing. “The flamingo comes to life at night,” Lelya would say. “It flaps its wings, opens its beak and taps its jaws, and then goes hunting for food. You know what he eats, Verochka?” Little children! Yes! It pierces their heads with his nose, drinks their blood and having slurped his fill, wipes his beak with his wings. That’s why they are so red! It’s blood!” Of course, when Baba Lena learned about Lelya’s fictions, scolded her and reassured Vera. Vera knew that the stuffed animal could not walk, but was nevertheless afraid, and not just because of the flamingo. There were the yellow-eyed owls, crested eagles, and eagle owls, which looked at her from the walls. There were tigers with sharp teeth, bears, and the heads of innumerable animals, and skins spread upon the floor. But among these stuffed animals, Vera had one dearest friend—a white, smooth, satiny seal from the Caspian Sea. At dusk, when Baba Lena finished her daily activities, she loved to sit for half an hour, relaxing in her deep armchair at her desk. Vera would cheerfully drag her satiny friend by his outstretched tail to Baba Lena’s feet, and sit on him like on a sofa, leaning on his round head, and demanded stories. Baba Lena, laughing, affectionately stroked Vera’s hair. Owing, perhaps, to the stress of Helena Andreevna’s illness, Baba Lena’s own health was in decline, experiencing more frequent bouts of rheumatic suffering.[2]

“What fairy tale should I tell you today?” asked Baba Lena.

“Whatever you want!”

Baba Lena immediately pointed to something unknown to Vera. It looked like a curved log—a round, thick trunk of a petrified tree. “Do you know what this is?”

“A tree?”

“Yes, it certainly looks like a tree,” said Baba Lena, “but this is not a tree at all.”

Vera looked confused.

“This is the huge fang of an animal that lived in the world several thousand years ago,” Baba Lena explained. “This animal was called a mammoth. It looked like an elephant, only much larger than today’s elephants. And here is his tooth!”

Vera could not believe it. This tooth was a stone a quarter of an arshin wide, and seven inches long. I never believed it! Having examined the stone, Vera now saw that it had the shape of a tooth. “That was a giant!” Vera exclaimed. “I think everyone must have been afraid of such a monster! He probably ate people and did a lot of evil! That is why he had such fangs! He probably trampled on houses, too!”

“They probably could have if they wished, said Baba Lena. “But you see, dear, mammoths did not touch either people or animals unless they were angry. They, like their smaller brothers the elephants, only ate herbs, fruits, and things that grew. You are thinking, ‘If mammoths did not eat meat, then why did they kill?’ You see, in those distant times, long before the flood, there were other terrible, bloodthirsty animals, which no longer exist. They are much larger than today’s wild animals. More tigers, lions, crocodiles—”

“Giraffes?”

“Even more giraffes, hippos, and whales! There were so many of them that poor people, who did not have any weapons at that time fled from them. They roamed from the land to rivers and lakes. They built themselves rafts from logs on the water, and on the rafts, they put together huts instead of houses, and at night they removed the gangplanks that connected them to the shore. But even that did not help much! After all, huge monsters lived in the waters, like lizards, snakes, or winged crocodiles. (It would be another year before Sir Richard Owen coined the term “dinosaur.”)

Vera listened to Baba Lena’s stories, mouth open and my ears attentive, to such a point, that at times she imagined that the stuffed animals in her office were beginning to move and look at her with glassy eyes (which made Vera shudder in fear.) Baba Lena once caught her anxious glance.

“What’s wrong with you? What are you afraid of?”

“Nothing!” Vera answered, flushing.

“You seem to be a coward—afraid that a stuffed bear will bite you,” laughed Baba Lena. Noticing that such stories frightened her, Baba Lena began to tell Vera more stories about modern animals, and more about birds, butterflies, and beetles (of which she had a lot) both in drawings and real ones, only not alive, but behind glass. She skillfully, and beautifully knew how to arrange the animals in her collection on branches and flowers—just as they appeared in the wild—sitting, flying, and swimming in the wild. The butterflies and moths fluttered around the flowers. (Her water was made from shards of glass, broken mirrors, and painted paper.) Birds of prey (eagles, hawks, falcons, and owls) were all perched on one wall, and above them, right under the ceiling, a huge lamb eagle spread its wings.

“Why is it called a lamb eagle?”

“Because he often carries little lambs into his nests,” said Baba Lena. “In Switzerland, where there are many such eagles in the mountains, even people are afraid of them because they steal little children from the fields; it pushes shepherdesses off cliffs into abysses and pecks them there, carrying pieces of their bodies into the rocks, into his nest, for the eaglets for lunch.”

This eagle was also Vera’s enemy, now. It supplanted the terrible, red-winged flamingo, as her taxidermized tormentor. It looked at her from above, with its yellow eyes.

But what lovely tiny hummingbirds were in Baba Lena’s study! One was the size of a large bee, and just as golden. This tiny fly bird (as Baba Lena called it) was Vera’s favorite. It sat, with many of its brilliant friends, under a glass cover, on a rose bush (which was also made by Baba Lena.) The other hummingbirds were wonderfully beautiful! Their breasts shined like precious stones, like emeralds and other gemstones, green, crimson, and golden! But Vera’s little hummingbird was the cutest of all for its tininess.

There were also the equally tiny sunbirds, which, flew in abundance like their sparrows in a hot country far beyond the seas, Baba Lena explained. This place, which Baba Lena called India, had many interesting things. The people there had dark skin, the color of coffee and copper, and because of the heat, they walked around almost naked, just as the antediluvian ancestors did. They always wore a lot of bracelets with bells and trinkets on their arms and legs. This was a place of snakes—a lot of snakes—and some were very poisonous. They were afraid of ringing, and therefore the inhabitants wore rattles on their feet, so the snakes crawled away when they heard them, and would not bite their bare feet.

“Elephants served people there like horses, and monkeys ran free like our dogs,” Baba Lena would say, “and parrots—white, red, green—fly like our black crows and jackdaws.”

The most wonderful decorations of India were the plants. Magnificent flowers and huge trees— palm trees, which spread their planted leaves like giant fans, some of which were covered with bright flowers the size of a plate.

“Imagine huge trees covered with red, pink, white, and purple sunflowers!” Baba Lena said.[3]

Next to Vera’s friend, the seal lay a stuffed walrus. It was also smooth as satin, but his fur was black. Vera did not like him. He had an evil muzzle and two strong downward-curved white fangs.

Baba Lena, joking with Vera, called the seal and the walrus cousins, Belyanka and Chernysh.

“I also had Serko!” joked Baba Lena. “A gray seal from the Baltic Sea. Yes, the poor man was eaten by moths, and only his skin remained. I had to throw him away! What a pity! He was beautiful, with black streaks and spots on his smooth gray back. He was Belyanka’s brother, although he didn’t know her during his lifetime. He swam in the northern seas and came to me from St. Petersburg. Belyanka, well she was an Astrakhan girl—born and lived in the southern Caspian Sea. Mr. Chernysh is their cousin— similar, but not quite!

Baba Lena. ^[3]

And Baba Lena showed Vera the distinctive features of walruses and seals. Walruses and seals can live both in water and on land, Baba Lena explained. They do not die in the air without water, like fish, but it is very difficult for them to move on the ground (because their legs are awkwardly designed for walking.)

“In the Caspian Sea, I often saw how seals swim, and above their head, shining like a white ball, another little head sticks out, and both of them moved their black eyes in a funny way, and move their long mustaches!” said Baba Lena. “Walruses are stronger and braver than seals because they are larger and well-armed. Do you see how strong and sharp their fangs are! They often attack large fish—and poor Belyanki have nothing to defend themselves with, nor attack others. They eat small fish, slugs, and most of all algae and sea grass. Walruses live in the coldest northern seas—at the poles, where whole mountains of eternal ice float. They live there together with polar bears. A walrus will never get used to a person, and seals very easily become tame. Yes, I often fed this very stuffed Belyanka from my own hands.”

“Weren’t you sorry to kill her later, poor thing? Oh, Baba Lena how wicked of you!”

“It wasn’t me who killed her,” said Baba Lena. “It was a Kalmyk a hunter. Do you know of the Kalmyks? Have you seen them in my pictures? These are the people who live in the south of Russia, mostly at the mouths of the Volga, in the Astrakhan and Saratov Provinces. They are stocky and small people, with broad shoulders and skin the color of copper. Kalmyks do not live in cities or in houses but roam in caravans living in their kibitki—felt tents that are easy to fold and transport from one place to another.[4] When we lived in Astrakhan, the doctors told your mother to drink kumis, a drink that Kalmyks make from mare’s milk. To do this, one summer we moved to a dacha, not far from their ulus —the Kalmyk nomads camps, where they live in with their wagons, are called uluses. The sea was not far from us, and every day we went swimming and walked along the shore—we fed the fish and threw crumbs of bread, minced meat, and all sorts of leftovers into the water. A little further from our bathhouse, between the stones, there was a deserted bay with a lot of fish in it. Belyanka also got into the habit of swimming with them, and quickly got used to me, and completely stopped being afraid of people. I think that she faithfully raised her children in this creek.”

“Have you seen them?” Vera interrupted.

“No,” said Baba Lena. “Maybe I would have if the poor thing had not been killed so soon. Our Kalmyks found out that I willingly buy various animal skins. Seals are killed for their fat. They get fat easily, and their fat is sold for lubrication. And their fat burns perfectly. Kalmyks use it to light their tents. But this one was not killed for the fire—they brought it straight to me. Belyanka faithfully swam closer, seeing a man, thinking that they had come to feed him, and the Kalmyk shot at her, not knowing that she was tame.”

“How did you know that it was Belyanka?”

“Well, because she no longer swam to me. It used to be that as soon as I approached the bay, Belyanka was right there! But then, no matter how much I threw the fish into the water, no matter how much I walked along the shore, my Belyanka never appeared! I truly felt sorry for her!”

“I would have beaten that nasty Kalmyk!” cried Vera.

“There was nothing to beat the Kalmyk for Verochka, he was not guilty of anything.”

Having learned the story of Belyanka, Vera loved her even more. Sometimes, when leaning on her, waiting for Baba Lena to stop studying and call her, Vera would stroke the satin fur of her round head, look into her black glass eyes, and think

“Poor Belyanochka! You swam free in the wide, deep, blue, sea! You stuck out you very round, stupid head from the transparent, foamy waves. Sometimes you crawled clumsily onto the deserted shore to warm your fat, shiny body in the sun; and then flop back into the depths of the sea, catching unwary fish for dinner. You never meant harm! I have never even seen you on person, as Baba Lena knew you. She began to feed you, and you fell in love with her to your death! You thought that all people were kind like her, but it didn’t turn out that way. An evil Kalmyk came, shot, and killed you on the spot! You, poor thing, just waiting for some bread, and then a hunter came from somewhere and treated you to a bullet! And so, people took you, took off your skin, with little white fur; they rendered the fat from your meat and burned it in lamps, and lubricated the wheels with it. They stuffed your skin with dust and tow, made a stuffed animal of you and laid it under people’s feet, in the room, on the floor. Did you think, poor seal, living in the freedom of the sea, that someday a little girl would sit on you as a pillow or in some kind of chair? She would sit, think her thoughts and listen to stories! Stories about you! About how they shot you and stuffed you—and you will lie quietly.”[5]

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SOURCES:

[1] Sinnett, Alfred Percy. Incidents In The Life Of Madame Blavatsky. G. Redway. London, England. (1886): 27, 34-35.

[2] Fadeev writes: “Count Kiselev (as well as Count Perovsky) had a method of constantly sending auditors to audit the province in all parts and in all directions. There was little significant benefit from this, but a lot of trouble and distraction from the real business. So I was visited this year for a similar audit by Bradke, the Director of the Third Department of State Property Bradke […] I, in part, accompanied him on his journey through the Saratov province. Of the two officials accompanying him, there was also Julius Fyodorovich Witte […] In general, during this year of 1840, I had a lot of work and troubles, which had a rather noticeable effect on my health, which was beginning to deteriorate. The following year of 1841 began unpleasantly for me, with the increasing illness of my poor eldest daughter, frequent relapses of my wife’s rheumatic ailments, and my own rather frequent attacks of illness. Meanwhile, official duties and bustle increased: in addition to the multitude of written matters in the chamber, it was necessary to travel incessantly around the province.” [Fadeyev, Andrei Mikhailovich. Vospominaniia: 1790-1867. Vysochaishe Utverzhd. Yuzhno-Russkago. Odessa, Ukraine. [Russian Empire.] (1897): Part I: 156.]

[3] Zhelihovskaya, Vera Petrovna. My Childhood. A. F. Devrien. St. Petersburg, Russia. (1893): 62.

[4] Maksimov, Konstantin Nikolaevich. Kalmykia In Russia’s Past And Present National Policies And Administrative System. Central European University Press. Budapest, Hungary. (2008): 114.

[5] Zhelihovskaya, Vera Petrovna. How I Was Little. A. F. Devrien. St. Petersburg, Russia. (1898): 133-147.