TWO
I found a room in the Hôtel des Ministères, Nina wrote to me in the following letter:
On the boulevard la tour-Maubourg, between the Seine and the École Militaire. I had always found that neighborhood attractive. I went up the tall, narrow staircase to the sixth floor and opened the door with my number on it and entered a room at attic level; a folding screen hid the sink and the little gas cooker from sight. From my sixth floor room there was a view of Les Invalides, of the metal mesh of the Eiffel Tower, and of the long tree-lined avenues, which at that time of day were still silent.
In the afternoon, after my arrival, I put my books on the shelf, hung my dresses in the closet, took out my notebooks, ballpoint pens, and fountain pens, and laid them out on the table, which wobbled a bit. Then I washed myself. When darkness began to fall, I felt totally exhausted. I collapsed on the bed. I lay there without moving, without even turning on the light. I stared at the window which darkened gradually. My thoughts too were dark ones.
I was thirty-one years old; after eleven years of living together I had just left my partner. What must he be doing now? He probably had the cards on the table. For the first time that day, this image aroused a feeling of tenderness in me. Mentally I saw his sad face. Don’t think! Don’t think either about the fact that I am thirty-one years old and completely alone. Don’t think! My fatigue helped me to empty my mind. I fell asleep before it was completely dark.
I slept until the afternoon of the following day, when I was woken by a knocking at the door. Vladislav! He had come to ask me how I had spent my first night alone. Then we went to have dinner together. Afterward I went straight back to bed and once more I slept until the afternoon.
I remember the evening—after finding out her new address—I went to see her and invite her to dinner. At night, I took her back to her hotel. We walked past a Russian cabaret; the singing, the shouts, and the laughter could be heard a mile away. Nina hummed “Two Guitars,” a ballad they were playing on a balalaika inside, and said, “Young French people get drunk praising the Soviet Union and proletarian literature full of optimism and the builders of the great tomorrow, but it doesn’t occur to them, not in their wildest dreams, to ask why Stravinsky lives in Paris and not at home, or why Diaguilev died in Venice, heavily in debt instead of becoming the director of the Bolshoi ballet.”
“They don’t ask us anything,” I said, “because they don’t need to, they have everything clear in their minds: we are children of the revolution and we are not busy building Communism, so it is logical to assume that we are the reactionary children of dukes and princes. Do we live in misery? That’s good for us. We got what we deserve.”
“They adore Russian folklore almost as much as they do the Bolshevik revolution and the building of Communism,” laughed Nina.
A few gypsies were singing in the cabaret and the Cherkessians were dancing with Astrakhan hats on their heads.
“The French go wild over that type of hat. They say: ‘C’est typiquement russe!’ smiled Nina.
“The French and the Americans,” I said, “as well as the English, sing Russian ballads with drunken voices, weep, and embrace each other.”
“And above all, the glasses they’ve just emptied they smash against the floor,” said Nina, laughing so much she swayed as if she were drunk, “and like that, in the middle of the broken glass, the tears, and the drunken singing, they imagined they’ve turned into Mitya Karamazov, whose name vaguely rings a bell.”
Only on the fourth day did I get up at my usual time, between eight and nine, Nina goes on writing in the letter. I looked around me, realized where I was and why, and I was flooded by a great wave of happiness. Through the window I saw the streets of Paris and the chimneys of the roofs in front and I said to myself: “All of this belongs to me, and I don’t belong to anybody!”
This feeling of freedom made me go out onto the street. I walked through the parks observing the fruit trees that were about to blossom, in Champ-de-Mars I felt as if I were again in Russia, in an infinite field of corn. Under the bridges, the river murmured; in the Tuileries fountains, children sailed boats they had made themselves. Then I entered the Louvre as it was about to close, but I still had time enough to go through the Egyptian rooms that I hadn’t seen. I went back to the hotel and ran up the staircase to the sixth floor. In the attic room I already felt at home; I ran my fingers over the dresses hanging in the closet and I told myself once more: “All of this belongs to me and I don’t belong to anybody!” I took Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, got into bed, and read it through to the end. Then I fell fast asleep.
I spent the whole summer reading. It was muggy. In the morning when I got up, I chose a book and read until midday; then I continued with my reading in the Champ-de-Mars, on the terraces of cafes, where I ordered coffee and ice cream, poured the black liquid over the ice cream and read. In the attic room it was so hot that I couldn’t sleep there, so I read; not the books that Vladislav had recommended to me with paternal solicitude, but things I had chosen for myself—Virginia Woolf, Joyce, Gide, Kafka, Proust.
“Look, Igor, there are some friends of yours over in that corner!”
“Who?”
“Nabokov, with that woman who I’d like to paint the way Goya did his duchess. There is something of The Maja about her, haven’t you noticed?”
I pretended I wasn’t interested. Nikolasha liked to talk like that, probably because he knew that it irritated me.
In a corner of the Russian bistrot called l’Ours, Nina was sitting with Vladimir Nabokov. It hadn’t been such a long time since Nina had left Vladya. It didn’t surprise me that the couple had attracted the attention of my painter friend: Nabokov was blond and tanned, with a fine face, slim, athletic, dressed in a white shirt; Nina, vaguely Oriental looking, in a pearl-colored dress. There was something about the couple that was noble, aristocratic, that made them stand out in the crowd, at least for someone with a sharp eye.
They were eating Russian pancakes—the cook of L’Ours made exceptional blini—with smoked fish and imitation caviar, and they were washing it down with vodka. Later the waiter also brought them a bottle of red wine. As Nabokov knew the owner of the premises, without a doubt it was he who had invited Nina to have lunch with him. They were laughing a lot; they didn’t stop making toasts, and it was clear that they were getting drunk, and not only on the wine but also, especially, on each other. Nabokov’s frenchified rrrrrrr, so typical of the Saint Petersburg aristocracy, he repeated again and again.
“Where do you write, Nina Nikolayevna?”
“At home, on a little wobbly table, with a view of the chimneys of Paris, or at a cafe table. Like everybody, no?”
“No, not quite like everybody. I write exclusively in the lavatory, if I might dignify that little room in my hideaway in the outskirts of the city with such noble terms.”
“Why in the lavatory, Vladimir Vladimirovich?”
“Mainly because it is sunny there all morning. And also for the not insignificant reason that my apartment is unfurnished.”
“You live in an empty apartment?”
“Completely empty. When my wife or my son want to go the lavatory, I have to take a break. But they know this and are respectful. They drink very little.”
Nina laughed as if she never wanted to stop. They made a toast to that original form of writing desk.
“It is a table or a chair, as I please, but is never the two things together. I’ll give you a piece of advice, Nina, even though you don’t need any. Don’t forget that the lavatory is usually the quietest place in the apartment.”
The waiter comes up to refill their glasses. Nabokov pays and apologizes to Nina saying that he hadn’t noticed how time had flown in her company and that unfortunately he simply had to attend a meeting of the editorial board, which had started half an hour ago. Nina said that at least she could quietly finish enjoying the exquisite dishes that they hadn’t had time to finish while they conversed. He kissed her on the cheeks, one, two, three kisses, and was off.
Now my moment has come, I told myself. I said hello to Nina and she invited me to sit at her table. I signalled to my companion.
“Nina, let me introduce you to my friend Nikolay Vassil-yevich Makeyev, painter, student of Odilon Redon, and also a journalist and politician, the author of the book Russia, published in New York.”
“That is to say, a Renaissance man,” Nina smiled wryly. Nikolasha also smiled and looked at Nina without blinking. She noticed it and took hold of the bottle to offer us a glass of wine.
“Isn’t this friend of yours, Nabokov, a bit arrogant?” said Nikolay.
I had never seen my friend behave like this. Although he liked to épater le bourgeois, he never got close to being rude.
“Not at all. Why do you say that?” said Nina coldly.
“It is notorious that in a gathering of people he pretends not to know his closest friend; he deliberately calls a man who he knows perfectly well as Ivan Petrovich, Ivan Ivanovich. Be careful with him, Nina Nikolayevna: one day he will address you as Nina Alexandrovna, you’ll see! And in order to show his superiority he likes to mangle the titles of novels, with his hallmark sarcasm. For example, apparently without thinking and with all the pretense of innocence, he calls a book titled From the East Comes the Cold, From the East Comes the Fart.
“I don’t know what you’re getting at with all this,” Nina said, very distant. “Vladimir Vladimirovich has his eccentricities, as does everybody. In 1929, when The Luzchin Defence came out,” she went on, and although she was looking at me in particular, I sensed that her words were meant for Nikolay, that the painter interested her, that she liked to argue with him, “I read it twice in a row.”
“Twice?” Nikolay said, surprised.
“Yes. I found it to be a demanding work by an author who is meaningful, complex, mature. I suddenly realized that from the fire and ashes of revolution and exile, a great Russian writer had been born.”
“You say that with so much pomp.”
“Of course. Because at that moment I felt certain that our existence, that is to say that of Russian writers in exile, would have meaning. At that moment I felt that my entire generation had been vindicated.”
“Nina Nikolayevna, I am familiar with the articles and the stories that you publish in Poslednie novosti. How can someone like you talk of generations and vindications? Haven’t you yourself said on more than one occasion—and if I may say so with a self-assuredness that irritates readers—that not only every writer, but that every individual in the end is alone? Does Nabokov care at all about his generation? Nabokov has earned his place in literature and no doubt he will keep it for a long time, but does this mean that the others, you among them, will survive only in his shadow?”
“One thing at a time. I am convinced that each person is a world, a universe, a hell in his or her own right. I don’t believe at all that Nabokov could drag a mediocre person along with him, into his immortality. But Nabokov represents the answer to the doubts of all the humiliated and wronged people, all those who have been unjustly ignored, those who have been pushed into the background in exile.”
“Perhaps you include yourself among those humiliated?”
“I include myself among those who love life too much to have the right to be inscribed in people’s memory. I prefer life to literary fame, the mad inebriation of an action to the results, the path toward the destination to the destination in itself.”
“Bravo, Nina! To the mad inebriation of an action by Nina Berberova, who with this speech has just entered the kingdom of immortality! Allow me to give you a kiss: mwah-mwah!”
Nina wrote to me, How did love come? From the outside. A smile lit up the serious face that a moment before still seemed strange to me, and then the eyes began to speak to me. I discovered a charm in him unknown to me before: the parting of his hair, the warmth of his hands, the smell of his body and breath, his voice. I have always been sensitive to voices and the expressiveness of faces. Then, thanks to the power of love, when I had penetrated his inner life, when I had made it mine and it became for me a source of happiness. Then I realized that I had lost Nina. And that life does not wait.
At our meetings for coffee, Nina would tell me how she came to know Nikolay, and of the outings and excursions on which they went together. They visited the L’Orangerie and the Jeu de Paume, for the exhibitions they admired by Matisse, Dérain, and Bonnard. On bicycle outings they rediscovered Corot in the trees next to a lake, Courbet in a river flowing between two rocks, Pissarro in the winding country lanes lined with plane trees and poplars. Sisley was everywhere: in the kiosks and the little bridges, in all the lanes and cornfields. Nina was transformed. She was less sarcastic and became more spontaneous. And I could barely recognize Nikolasha. He discovered within himself a kind of goodness that he must have kept well hidden. He was painting more than ever. Nina and he chose the paintings that he would exhibit in the Salon d’Automne.
One morning he went to look for her at the hotel with a bottle of champagne in one hand and a sack of piroshki in the other.
“Let’s go to the notary! There’s a house . . . ”
From the notary’s they went on bicycle, through the countryside, to Yvelines. The bag with the bottle of champagne swung on the handlebar. They reached the village of Longchêne; there, in front of a half-ruined grain barn, Nikolay jumped off the bicycle.
“This is our home!”
And he was already leading her in. Here we will make a little kitchen, here we will have the bathroom, this will be the living room. You can choose wherever you want to have your study. In the attic, among the beams, they found a date: 1861.
He uncorked the bottle of champagne, opened the sack that contained the piroshki made of meat and cabbage. While they had dinner they made plans about the fruit trees they would plant in the garden. Nina wanted to have beehives and a vegetable patch.
A neighbor brought them a few armfuls of dry grass that had been recently cut and they made their bed with that. Through the window they looked at the stars. It was May, the cool of the night entered the building, and the hay gave off a strong smell, but the perfume of lilacs in the garden was so delicious that it didn’t even occur to them to close the window. They pressed tightly against each other, buried in the hay.
“And time came to a standstill,” she told me then.
It was spring. And Vladislav more than once, she told me, asked her friends about her, looked for her, wrote to her.
My love,
Nothing, nothing can change the great feeling that you inspire in me. It will always be the same. You know perfectly well how I reacted when someone wanted to do you harm or put some distance between us. It will be this way forever: whoever wants to be on a good footing with me, must be on one with you too. Take care of yourself. Now I am going to sleep, it is almost four in the morning. I kiss your hand.
Your Vladya
It was spring. Vladislav went to see her at the offices of Poslednie novosti. They had lunch together; in the afternoon they walked along the Seine, and when it rained, they played billiards in a brasserie. Often they sipped wine and had some cheese at the George V Cafe, close by the offices of Vozrojdenie, where Vladislav was now making weekly contributions with his book reviews. Then they took long walks through the side streets of Montmartre, and Nina accompanied him to the rue des Quatre-Cheminées, to the apartment that was now his alone. They prepared tea and drank it slowly, until well into the night. Nina wrote to me later, I kissed his beloved face, his hands. He also kissed me, so moved that he couldn’t even speak. When, by sheer magic, I managed to make him laugh, I felt it to be a great success.
Time came to a standstill. That is what she told me and that is what happened. Several times a week, Nina cycled from Longchêne to Paris. On the way back she took the main road—I cycled with her many times—and then an unpaved lane, and from a long way off she peered into the distance trying to see the green patch that was the roof of the grain barn that she and Nikolay had turned into a home. She liked to receive guests. Many couples went to see her: Kerensky and his wife, the Zaitsevs, the Bunins, Goncharova and her husband, Larionov. I most enjoyed her dinner parties when we gathered with just a small circle of close friends. In the summer we had dinner in the garden under the trees. Nikolay was a good host, the home radiated well-being. They had decorated it with Nikolay’s paintings and a few engravings by his master Odilon Redon. The guests walked through the garden and the meadows that separated them from the neighbors. For Nina, time came to a standstill.
It was in the winter when she received news that Vladislav had become seriously ill. She wrote to me:
February 25, 1939
Diagnosis: obstruction of the biliary tubes. The treatment is barbarous, cruel. Vladya said: “If I could always be with you, I’m sure I would be cured.” He feels better.
May 3, 1939
The latest diagnosis: cancer. For the whole month of April he suffered cruelly and has lost twenty pounds. His hair has grown back (during the treatment it had completely fallen out), but has turned gray. He shaves rarely and has a white beard. He doesn’t put in his dentures. The pain in his abdomen makes him suffer day and night. Sometimes they give him morphine injection, but he becomes delirious: he meets Bely, the Bolsheviks are after him, he worries about me. In one of his dreams he saw a car accident in which I lost my life (that fact is, I’m learning to drive). For hours he couldn’t calm himself. The next day, when I went to see him, he started to sob and see visions again.
At the end of May and the beginning of June, Vladislav was in the hospital, in the worst conditions that can be imagined. None of us had enough money to pay for a private clinic for him.
June 15, 1939
On June 8 he came back home, exhausted by the tests they had carried out on him, and by life in the hospital. On the twelfth they had to take him back to the clinic again for a long operation. On the thirteenth he didn’t recover consciousness. On the fourteenth, at half past seven in the morning, I arrived at the clinic. He had died at six that morning, without having regained consciousness. Before he died, he kept raising right arm.”
In death, Vladya reached out to somebody with a hand that “held a trembling flower.” Alive he had written in one of his poems.
Nina was under the influence of death. She didn’t go out, she didn’t want to see anybody. Visits did nothing to cheer her up; the look on her face made that clear enough to her visitors. A few months after the death of Vladislav, she published this cry, which shot through the world of the Russian exiles like a bolt of lightning:
Miserable, stupid, stinking, deplorable, disgraceful, worn-out, hungry Russian emigration of which I form a part! Last year, Khodasevich died, thin as bone, unshaven on a sunken mattress and in torn sheets, without money to pay for medicine or a doctor. This year I go to see Nabokov and I find him in bed, ill, and in a pitiable state. (I brought a chicken for Nabokov. Vera started cooking it at once).
“A little more wine?”
“Certainly. The dinner was excellent, Nina.”
“Bring another bottle of wine, Nikolasha. We would like to drink a little more.”
She was thoughtful, melancholy. She hadn’t been herself for a year.
We sat on benches around the table, under a walnut tree. In that curious turquoise light of the pure June sky, we were silent more often than we spoke; that evening was conducive to silence and reflection. Even the acacias and the plane trees around us were motionless and didn’t make so much as the slightest whisper, like they were statues.
“The premonition of summer floats in the air,” said Olga with a dreamy look. In the shade her teeth flashed like white lightning.
“More like the premonition of a long war, not that I want to spoil your illusions, Olenka,” retorted Boris Zaitsev.
“Here in the country one can easily forget about war,” sighed Vera Zaitseva.
“Here in the country?” said Nina in a low voice, to herself, “In September of last year I stretched myself out on the lawn, there at the bottom of the garden. It was the first day of the war. The grass started to grow around my veins, while flower buds started to open between my toes; the ivy embraced me as if it wanted to throttle me. I don’t remember anything else.”
We fell silent again. Only at a distance could the song of a cricket in the neighboring meadow be heard, and from time to time, a frog jumping into the stream behind the house.
“Last year at this time the stars also shone this way, with a green hue,” said Olga.
“Last year at this time . . .” sighed Nina.
Nikolay looked at her attentively and poured more wine in our glasses, which looked pitch black in the shadow of the walnut tree.
“Last year at this time we finally bought ourselves a secondhand radio,” said Vera Zaitseva, “For a year now we’ve been listening to Mozart and Boccherini. At least we had something ideal, even though happiness was not ours for the asking. And now? Now for a month we have heard nothing except the horrible news about the German invasion.”
“I’ll write a story about you, Vera,” said Nina, “about you and Mozart, about happiness and how difficult it is to obtain.”
“A sheet of paper and a pencil for Ninon!” exclaimed Nikolay, but nobody was in the mood for his humor. Nobody laughed.
“I will write about having ideals as a substitute for having happiness. Like your Mozart, Vera,” said Nina in a quiet voice. “Last year at this time . . .”
Nikolay drank a little wine.
“Ninon is remembering that Vladya died exactly a year ago.”
Again, he drank from the glass that he hadn’t put down on the table between sips. He got up and went to the house. We didn’t say anything. He came back with a sheet of paper and a pencil, he placed these objects in front of Nina, who listlessly started to draw stars with twelve or fifteen points. When it was almost impossible to see anything, she added a crescent moon, identical to the one that was at that moment emerging from behind the acacia.
“I try to cheer Ninon up,” Nikolay went back to the earlier subject, keeping a firm hold on his glass, “by telling her that they will meet up some day, there . . .” he pointed upward.
Nina interrupted him impatiently. “I’m not a believer. What’s more I don’t try to deceive myself with prayers the way you do. But above all, why do you expect me to desire to meet him again in that other world? Half the time we couldn’t put up with each other when we were alive.”
“Nina’s right,” said Vera in her favor. “After so many years people don’t even want to see each other down here. Time passes and people end up having nothing to say to each other. Maybe I wouldn’t even recognize my poor Aloysha, and that’d be a good thing.”
Vera sighed.
“The other day I saw him in a dream, Vera . . .” said Nina.
“My dead son?”
“No, I’m sorry. I saw Vladya. There were a lot of people in the room and nobody else saw him. He had long hair and he was thin, almost transparent, light as a ghost, but elegant and youthful. We found a way of being alone together. I sat next to him. I took his hand, fine and light as a feather. I told him, ‘If you can, tell me how you feel.’ He answered me with a peculiar gesture that I interpreted to mean ‘not too bad.’ Then he filled his mouth with smoke, bent his back, and said, ‘How can I put it? One doesn’t always feel comfortable . . .’”
“How strange,” said Olga, shaking her golden head and looking around at the others. “Do you make anything of it?”
“It’s strange, the whole thing is very strange. ‘My solitude begins when I am two steps away from you’ says the lover of the main character in a Giraudoux novel,” Nikolay said, blowing cigarette smoke out of his mouth.
“It could also be said that my solitude begins in your arms,” Nina said in a harsh tone of voice, staring at a spot beyond the fence.
“Ninon reckons,” Nikolay continued as if he hadn’t heard what Nina had said, “that in his poems Vladislav predicted what would happen and that this, according to her, is already starting to happen—”
“Olenka, where would you like to be now if you could choose?” Nina interrupted him, uneasily.
“Here, in the freshness of the night under this walnut tree, in 1941, a year from now, because then the war will be over.”
“And you, Vera?”
“Me? It’s rather banal, I’m ashamed to tell you, but I would like to be in the tsar’s court in Pushkin’s time. To be able to hear him reciting his poems. Pushkin, I mean, not the tsar.”
“Another ideal as a substitute for happiness?” Nina smiled sadly, “And you, Nikolasha?”
“I would like this to be the first day in this house. I would like to eat piroshki and wash them down with abundant quantities of champagne, and I would like to look forward to our first night on the dry grass.”
Nina was drawing her stars. Suddenly she looked up.
“I would like to be in America.”
“The truth is,” Nikolay went on as if he hadn’t heard her, “that Vladislav couldn’t have chosen a better moment for dying. He isn’t forced to see the Germans and human cowardice, as we are. And who knows what else we’re going to see.”
“And when I say that I would now like to be in America, that means that one day I will be there,” said Nina, while continuing to draw something on the sheet of paper.
“You are the exterminating angel, Nina. Would you really punish us with your departure?” said Boris Zaitsev.
“I’m more of a Lady Macbeth,” said Nina.
“Why America?” I asked out of interest while I tried to get rid of the fly that had fallen into my glass of wine; at each sip it slipped between my lips and then reappeared.
“I’ll tell you a story,” answered Nina after a while.” A very old man, called Andreyev, a few days before his death in 1919, heard the enemy bombing raids in his home in Finland and at night he dreamed of America. I have the feeling that between his nights and my own there is no difference at all, as if no time had passed. And, apart from that . . .”
“Apart from that?”
She didn’t answer.
“Apart from that, what, Nina?” I asked again.
“I simply meant that I don’t like life to be too easy.”
Vera and Boris Zaitsev burst out laughing.
“You don’t have to worry about that, Nina. You haven’t been granted an easy life, and I don’t think any of us have been threatened with one either!”
Nina didn’t laugh. She was thinking.
“Probably when I was little, I began to think in this way by reading Nietzsche, and it’s stayed with me since then. In a nutshell, I like the complexity that is part of human life.”
Olga sighed and shook her head so that her golden hair flew around her head like a halo.
“Nina, what blasphemy, how awful . . .”
As if to confirm her words, suddenly some artillery fire was heard. Then a detonation, an explosion, and silence. A long silence, different from that which had preceded it: heavy, a bad omen.
“Let’s go, it’s late already,” said Vera, and Olga was already putting on her hat. Her teeth, white as a sheet, were shining in the darkness, when she said, “What most agreeable company, it’s a pity we have to go home. Come and see me very soon, Ninochka. Bring her, Nikolasha.”
The car shuddered along the lane full of potholes.
I took hold of the tablecloth so as to shake it. A piece of paper fell from it, on which Nina had been drawing stars. I folded it and put it in my pocket. I also said goodbye and went to the guesthouse. I didn’t feel like getting on my bicycle and going home in the dark.
At night, by the light of a lantern, I read what was written on the sheet of paper that had fallen off the tablecloth. I already knew those words. But Nina had added more.
Miserable, stupid, stinking, deplorable, disgraceful, cowardly, worn-out, hungry Russian emigration of which I form a part! Last year Khodasevich died, thin as bone, unshaven on a sunken mattress and in torn sheets, without money to pay for medicine or a doctor. He lived in Billancourt. Billancourt is a drunken worker, the fifteenth district, a vale of tears, of trivialities, and dreams of glory; the sixteenth is a starched collar around the wrinkled skin of a mundane crook, with a fur coat, venereal disease, debt, gossip, and cards. And there’s Meudon and all the suburbs full of orthodox churches, where they barely tolerate us and where soon we will fill entire cemeteries.
The bombing continued during the night. Sleep was impossible.
In the morning Marie-Louise came, who helped in the garden and around the house. First she started weeding the vegetable patch. While I prepared coffee for breakfast, I watched through the window as she took a basin full of weeds off to the woods on the other side of the fence. Suddenly I heard her cry for help. I was by her side in a moment. In some brush in the woods lay a boy who was about twenty years old, maybe younger, and he was looking at us with eyes full of fear. He looked like a wounded fawn; his large, brown eyes looked as if they were made of glass. His parachute had gotten stuck on one of the branches. We wanted to help him up, but he couldn’t stop moaning. He didn’t understand French. I touched his legs and he shouted out in pain. Both his legs were broken. Marie-Louise brought him water, I held his head up; he drank and moaned. We washed his face that had been scratched by the branches, and wrapped him in a blanket. Later, they came looking for him to take him as a prisoner of war. He was German. When they carried him away like a wounded animal, I saw his eyes dilated in fear and full of tears. I saw those moist fawn’s eyes in front of me all day long, while we hid in the house and Nikolay wrapped Nina up in jackets and jerseys. She was shaking all over although the temperature was that of high summer. Nina wouldn’t have any of it; she kept repeating that she wanted to be left alone, that all she wanted was to leave for America.
The strawberries that grew in Nina’s garden were already ripe, but had blackened. A huge curtain of soot fell onto the garden and flakes of black snow covered the lawn, flowers, and fruit. The soot couldn’t be washed off and the strawberries became inedible. We spent whole hours together lying in the bomb shelter that we had dug at the bottom of the garden. The boom of the guns was deafening. The children didn’t stop trembling. Some people from the village came to share our shelter. There were only seventeen of us left; the others fled with the exodus out of Paris that occurred after the German occupation. The abandoned houses were looted.
Hitler was in Paris. The village of Longchêne began to fill with Germans who were no longer being made prisoner. They marched in triumph while the conquered looked on, who calmed themselves and dwelled on all kinds of favorable details: the Germans were clean, courteous, and paid in real money (they printed it back home in Frankfurt, day and night). The conquered told themselves that this hardship wasn’t the fault of these people. They were just carrying out orders.
One afternoon, sometime after I had gone to live in a neighboring village, I plunged myself into the summer mist to see Nina. Nikolay was in the kitchen making bread, Nina was out with a spade, working on the garden.
“Nina, you’re still not complaining about having too easy a life, are you?”
Nina was peeling a turnip; she cut it in half and offered the half to me.
“How do you expect me not to complain when I’m living with a man who is healthy and indestructible in body and soul?” she was laughing with her mouth full of turnip. “He is sensible, generous, sincere, and tender. Wouldn’t you complain? He knows how to do everything. After lunch he fixed the fuses; now he’s preparing cornbread; later he will draw a self-portrait; and in the evening he will sit at the piano and play Schumann’s Carnaval for us. Tell me, is it possible to live with a man like that? Come on, we’ll listen to the news of our heroes.”
“Now people are saying its better to be a living coward than a dead hero.”
“I’m a coward too.”
We went into the house. Nina put on the radio, and a quartet could be heard playing, probably Brahms. Nina went on, “Yes, I’m a coward. When the Russian revolution was going on, I told myself: ‘This is a problem for the tsar and the nobility, for the counterrevolutionaries and the bankers. I’m sixteen years old and have nothing to do with any of it.’ Now a new catastrophe has come along and what do I do? Just repeat the same old refrain: ‘This isn’t my business. This is a European thing. Who am I? A Russian exile, half Asian, that is to say, a nobody.’ But the other day I told myself, as I was looking at myself in the mirror: ‘It doesn’t speak well of you, this attitude of yours.’”
“It’s difficult for us exiles to grow roots and that’s why we end up feeling that all problems are alien to us.”
“We all write, paint, compose music, and philosophize with a single hope: that we will go back to Russia after we’re dead, in the form of our work.”
“And you say that, Nina? You, the little westerner? For whom life is everything, be it here or there?”
“I want to be in some place where I can feel myself part of what is going on. But I know now that France is not for me.”
I smiled. I wanted to ask her about her intention of going to America, but at that moment Nikolay came in.
“Nina has promised me that you would play Schumann’s Carnival for us, Nikolasha.”
Nikolay washed his hands and sat down at the piano.
Seated next to Nina, I liked listening to the way the chords summoned each other up. Outside the fog grew ever thicker and apart from us; nothing else existed. Everything had become unimportant, distant. The only thing that really existed was the foggy summer evening, the music, and us. After the last chord, I clapped.
“Did you like it, Nina?”
“A moment ago I said to Igor Mikhailovich,” she addressed herself to me, “that Nikolay is a person who knows how to do everything, didn’t I?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what you said.”
“And by that I meant that a person who knows everything, deep down knows nothing at all.”
She ran upstairs to her study.
Nikolay shrugged his shoulders, attempted a smile, and followed her.
I took my bicycle home. The fog had become so thick that not a single star could be seen.