Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (14 page)

Whirlwind’s plight came to the attention of the British consul in Sevastopol, who took pity on the destitute performer and paid for his passage to Odessa, a city with a well-established American consulate that would be able to look after its “ward,” as the American consul later described him. (As an Indian, Whirlwind was not considered a full citizen of the United States but was nevertheless entitled to protection and consular services while abroad.) With the consulate’s help, he scraped together enough money to have a new costume made. One imagines the American diplomat and the washed-up circus performer from America’s Great Plains sweating inside a stifling shop in Moldavanka, trying to explain to a Jewish tailor what an Indian costume was supposed to look like.
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This in turn allowed Whirlwind to secure employment with a small entertainment show in Odessa, presumably reprising his old warrior role on a much smaller stage.

The consul, Thomas P. Heenan, requested reimbursement for the $7.50 it cost to deal with the case. Heenan couldn’t shake the sense that he had been cheated. He had gone out of his way to help someone who wasn’t even a real American, he implied in his letters to his superiors, and Whirlwind would probably disappear into the city’s underworld, drunk again. But being taken advantage of, in one form or another, was an expected outcome in Odessa—especially among the mass of lower-middle-class workers and traders who would have been the main audience for Whirlwind’s Wild West entertainments.

F
ROM THE PERSPECTIVE
of the tsarist state, Russian society was divided into identifiable and highly regulated “estates,” or
sosloviya
in Russian. Membership could be fluid, at least across several generations, and in many cases one’s estate was never as predetermined or immutable as one’s sex or eye color. But it was still a fundamental part of a Russian subject’s social identity. In contrast to what Marxists would identify as “class,” an individual’s estate membership had little to do with his or her place in the hierarchy of economic production, much less with wealth or income. Like for the impoverished nobles in the works of Tolstoy or Chekhov, estate status was part of one’s birthright, the genetic code of Russian society as a whole, not a reflection of economic power. When the state came to sort and categorize its own citizens, the labels that presented themselves in the late nineteenth century were clear: nobles, clergy, military, civil servants, peasants, and a group known as the
meshchane
—by far the largest estate in Odessa.

The
meshchane
—a word that might be translated as the petty bourgeoisie—were the large group of semi-skilled workers, tradesmen, shopkeepers, and Russian subjects caught between the castes of large-scale landowners and their former serfs living in grinding poverty in the close-in suburbs. They eked out a living on the fringes of Odessa’s trading economy, vulnerable to the pendulum swings of commerce and the periodic blights afflicting agriculture. Unlike the wealthiest members of society, they had little recourse when times were hard, other than to join the day laborers hanging around the docks or hoping to pick up a job as a porter at one of the city’s bazaars. Unlike their peasant neighbors, they had few real connections to the countryside that might allow them to weather economic fluctuations in town. Already by the middle of the nineteenth century, Odessa was largely a city of these vulnerable
meshchane
. In 1858 the nobility comprised 3 percent of the city’s population, merchants nearly 5 percent, foreigners (that is, people who were not Russian subjects) just over 4 percent, peasants nearly 4 percent, and the military under 7 percent. The remainder—nearly 70 percent of the city’s total—were
meshchane
.
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With a transient foreign population and a constant stream of newcomers arriving by ship and overland carriage—far more than in the empire’s twin capitals, St. Petersburg and Moscow—Odessa was ripe for the kind of swindles, trickery, and palm-greasing that helped ease the economic burden of the petty bourgeoisie. When visitors complained of the hotelier who charged extra for bedding, the cobbler who charged twice to repair the same shoe, or the droshky driver who charged different rates for the same ride, it was the city’s huge estate of
meshchane
who were the makers of the city’s reputation. They could be found in virtually any profession. In 1892 over half the city’s 607 prostitutes reported that they were
meshchane
by estate.
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Odessa’s reputation was self-reinforcing. If it was the
meshchane
who were the foundation of the city’s culture of self-confident thievery, it was the same group that, by and large, loved to read, hear, and tell stories about their own exploits. Between the twilight of the nineteenth century and the dawn of the twentieth, a wealth of true-crime reportage filled the city’s panoply of Russian-language broadsheets and tabloids. It was a convenient fiction among upper-class Odessans that criminality was bred in the lower-class periphery, in places such as Moldavanka, and readers were treated to regular portrayals of life among the unhygienic and morally corrupt poor of these districts. But in reality the city’s thievish reputation depended on criminals’ talents for infiltrating and parroting the upwardly aspirant, if not upwardly mobile, petty bourgeoisie.

The criminal class included an intricate array of specialized professions. Some were defined by the area of the city in which they worked: the rough and tumble port district; the central Boulevard district atop the cliffs; the southern dacha-filled suburbs of Maly, Sredny, and Bolshoi Fontan; or the sparse industrial reaches of the north and northwest. Others were known for the days on which they worked, such as the weekenders who targeted the crowds that filled Deribasovskaya on Saturdays and Sundays. Still others were infamous for their creative disguises. One Ekaterina Ratsinskaya passed herself off as a cook for a wealthy family—only to show up at one of the local bazaars with 300 rubles’ worth of jewelry she had spirited away from her employer by expertly picking the lock on a chest of drawers.
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A person dressed up in gentlemanly attire might hit the most popular theaters and restaurants—the main theater on Langéron Street known simply as the Opera, the New Theater, or cafés near Alexandrovsky Park—as part of a well-turned-out gang of thieves who put their marks at ease before expertly slipping their hands into the pocket of the unwary.
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A kind passerby who flicked the dust off a neighbor’s frock coat could also lift his wallet. A respectable lady browsing in a luxury-goods store could turn out to be a resourceful shoplifter casing the joint.
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Other criminals were more creative. One P. Zhukov, “a coffee lover,” as a local newspaper called him, took employment with the trendy Fanconi café only to make off with thirty pounds of freshly roasted beans, for which he was sentenced to three months’ jail time.
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In the central districts of the city, there were stories of nighttime assignations and ingenious cons. Women threw vitriol in the faces of their cheating husbands. Men claimed to be wealthy in order to ingratiate themselves with the best families, only to abscond with their silver. Attractive young prostitutes, pretending to be bored but respectable housewives, sought the intimacy of leading businessmen—and then used the affair to blackmail their unsuspecting johns. A well-dressed gentleman might express a deep interest in a woman whose marital prospects seemed dim. He would return week after week, eventually popping the question and settling down for a life of bliss—until he ran off with whatever money she brought into the marriage.
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In the city’s newspapers, tales of criminal mischief competed with more pedestrian accounts of neighborly disputes and everyday disturbances. A September 1894 issue of
Odessky listok
(Odessa Folio), one of the city’s more sober Russian-language dailies, carried the story of a small-time criminal syndicate run by the male-female team of Nikolai Yerginov and Aksina Oleinikova, probably Russians or Ukrainians by ethnicity. Their racket was selling stolen chickens to a middleman, Blum Goldberg, presumably Jewish, who claimed to be oblivious to the birds’ origin. In court, Yerginov and Oleinikova put forward a classic crook’s defense: that it was all a terrible misunderstanding, and that the chickens had been part of the estate of Yerginov’s late, lamented father. The judge didn’t buy the explanation, however, and Yerginov—a repeat offender, as it turned out—was given a year and a half in jail, while his female accomplice and Goldberg were set free.
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Another issue carried news of eighteen-year-old Olga Popik, the daughter of an Odessa
meshchanin
who had fallen in love with a wandering sailor, Mikhail Filipenko. When Popik became pregnant with Filipenko’s child, the sailor made a quick getaway, marrying another woman shortly before Popik’s baby was due. At the end of her term and distressed by news of the sailor’s marriage, Popik stole away to a ravine running down to the sea and there gave birth to a baby girl. Passersby discovered the child’s body some time later. Popik was put on trial for murder. The young woman, frightened and alone, had smashed the child’s head with a rock.
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The popular Fanconi café on Catherine Street, ca. 1913, from a contemporary postcard.
Courtesy of Nic Iljine.

Stories such as these, repeated in their hundreds in the local press and in café-table conversations, reinforced Odessa’s image as a haven for larceny and sensational crime. But they also contributed to the persistent view among outsiders that the city’s real sin was its blatant arrivisme—the shallow, crass, impatient, and fly-by-night tendencies that passed for strivers’ virtues. Like the ambitious middle class everywhere, Odessa’s
meshchane
became practiced in spinning merits out of fate: celebrating pragmatism; reveling in melancholy; making their own distinctive patois out of the Italian, Greek, Yiddish, and Russian that tumbled out of doorways and courtyards; and trying, in an often unpolished and comical way, to turn fleeting trickster talents into something more permanent and profitable. “Experienced, shrewd, a trickster, a manipulator, a maneuverer, a man of ingenuity, a screamer, an exaggerator, a speculator” was how Vladimir Jabotinsky described the archetypical Odessan, labels that he intended as compliments.
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Even disease was something the city’s social classes learned to embrace.

S
INCE
R
ICHELIEU’S DAY
, Odessa struggled to fend off and manage infectious illnesses. Five separate outbreaks of plague devastated the city between the 1790s and the 1830s.
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Even as the threat of plague declined—in part because of improved enforcement of quarantine restrictions, in part because of the waning of the disease in the Ottoman ports across the Black Sea—other diseases such as typhus, cholera, and smallpox appeared with fatal regularity. Yet despite the frequent recurrence of serious disease, Odessans usually displayed a certain reticence to trade freedom for safety. “Your aim, young lady, is to inoculate smallpox, and with God’s help, you are inoculating it,” says a Jewish almshouse elder to a needle-wielding doctor in a story by Isaac Babel. “Our aim is to live out our life, not torture it!”
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In several senses, locals usually found disease to be a useful, if not always desirable, companion, especially when the Russian state was involved.

The effort by captains and passengers to evade quarantine restrictions was a fact of life on the Black Sea, as certain as the circular migration of fish around the coast or the coming of violent storms in the winter. Already in the 1790s, Russian officials were complaining that ship captains routinely spent forty to sixty days making the easy journey from Constantinople to the north coast, a trip that should have taken no more than eight days under sail. The sluggish pace meant that goods rarely got to their destination with any rapidity, but it also ensured that those goods would be exempt from inspection or confiscation since they had been at sea long enough for any plague symptoms in passengers and crew to become manifest.
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That was a boon for asymptomatic passengers, but infected goods could still make their way easily into port, which in many cases guaranteed the spread of disease beyond the docklands.

When the city government began to improve the quarantine system during Vorontsov’s time as governor-general, the goal was to create a model of modern efficiency, a real barrier against the leap-frogging of sickness around the Black Sea ports and into the Russian heartland. The experience of going through the quarantine usually left a rather different impression, however.

The process started in the harbor. Ship captains were ordered to fly red flags if signs of plague had been noted on board or yellow flags for those effecting quarantine and thus off limits to new passengers. When a new ship arrived, a public health officer would row out from the quay and, bobbing along shipside, take charge of any mail the captain or passengers might have for delivery. To prevent any direct contact with potentially infected newcomers, the official would extend a long pair of iron tongs, using them to pick up the mail from the deck before securing it in an iron box and rowing away. The letters would then be fumigated at the quarantine facility, usually with sulfur dioxide to eliminate any disease-carrying insects, and delivered to their recipients the next morning.
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