During the whole of autumn I didn’t go to see them even once. For a time I thought that my falling in love was a chimera, a fantasy that I had created for myself in order to make my life easier. That is why everyone likes to be in love, isn’t it? Sometimes I went to Paris, but my main concern was survival. When Nikolay came to see me, he brought me fruit from his garden, or bread that he had made himself. Generally speaking, there wasn’t any other kind of bread. One morning it snowed a little, but as the day drew on the snow melted in the rain. That evening, in the darkness next to my door, a bicycle stopped, some wellington boots could be heard, splish-splash, and there was Nina coming into the house.
“I have to tell you while it’s still fresh in my mind! Today I have had a meeting with beauty!”
This was the Nina I had known from before, the Nina who had charmed me so! I got some dry slippers for her and a pot of tea. I didn’t have so much as a crumb of bread. She began to tell me her story.
“This evening when I went to the farmhouse for milk, in the rain, walking along a path full of puddles, I made the acquaintance of Ramona. She’s the daughter of a woodcutter, a Spaniard who went into exile at the end of the civil war. The girl is eight years old and lives in indescribable misery. In the cold of winter, her dress, or rather the rags she wore, were hanging off her, and you could see her body through the holes. She splashed in the puddles in shoes so worn they were covered in holes, and so big that they were practically falling off her feet; they probably belonged to her mother. Her long, black hair was arranged in two pigtails and tied with two pieces of red wool. She was going to the farmhouse; like me, she was stumbling in the dark. While the farmer’s wife poured her some fresh milk, I was able to observe the little girl in the light. She looked like a figure from a Goya painting: fine, tanned fingers, huge eyes, full of curiosity, brown and shining. These tender eyes noticed me. She smiled with confidence, without knowing who I was.”
“And you?”
“I felt carried away with joy and compassion. You know, I had the feeling that something had awoken inside me.”
“Tenderness?”
Nina looked out of the dark window while she reflected. She was in another world.
“Igor Mikhailovich, what I am about to say now hasn’t got anything to do with what I came to tell you. No, in fact it does have something to do with it. Yes, it certainly does, now that I think about it. You know, with someone who loves me, with someone who adores me, I can be bad, terrible, treacherous.”
“Really? And why, Nina?”
“When I get the feeling that someone has put their hand on me tenderly, at that moment I feel like hitting that hand cruelly. It’s an attack of hatred. And at moments like that it’s a great effort for me to control myself.”
I didn’t know what to say. She had taken me unaware and I felt flustered.
“But going back to the girl. I told her, ‘Come with me, pretty one. I’ll give you a little ribbon for your pigtails.’ In fact I wanted to give her warm clothes. But she didn’t understand French. Her smile and the tin can, her ignorance of the language spoken by the people around her, the timidity that appeared for a moment in those tender and slightly frightened eyes—all this appeared before me to rid me of the rigidity that paralyzes me, to renew me, to clean away the death, blood, and the mold that lives off my soul.”
It was a long winter. The Germans arrested hundreds of Russian exiles and sent them to concentration camps. In town there was often no bread, and when there was some, we didn’t have money to buy any. The days, weeks, and months dragged on, cold and dark. I didn’t even notice that summer had arrived. The eighth of August—I remember the date well—was Nina’s birthday. How old must she have been? Maybe forty, already? I walked to their house early one morning, with a bunch of wildflowers in my hand. I had nothing else to give them. Together we went for a swim in the little river lined with willows.
A willow all of silver, on the bank
caresses the resplendent September waters,
Nina recited.
From the past my shadow rises up
silently and comes to meet me,
Nikolay continued reciting the poem, and then started to sing it to the melody of “Ochi chornye.”
No matter how many lyres they hang from this branch
there is space–it seems–for mine too
and Nina took over once more, finishing the stanza to the melody of Beethoven’s “Für Elise.”
And this sweet, sunny rain,
comes brim full of good news, of comfort.
“What’s that you’re singing?” asked Marie-Louise, who had come to swim with us.
“It’s Anna Akhmatova, who we have just recognized to be the Queen of Poetry.”
“After Pushkin,” Nikolay corrected her.
“All right, after Pushkin. She writes about a weeping willow.” Nina took off her white dress with its pattern of little red and blue flowers. “The poem starts like this:
All the souls of the people I love
are among the stars: what luck, I no longer have,
then, anyone else to lose and cry for!
The air here is conducive to repeating songs.
And straight away she began to translate the poem into French.
“You really have no one left to lose? Not even your parents? You must have remembered the poem for some reason,” asked Marie-Louise, who was up to her knees in the water.
“I know nothing about my parents; it has been a long while since correspondence between us was banned. But it is true that I no longer have anyone to lose and cry for. No one who means anything to me,” she answered, testing the temperature of the water with her toe.
She entered the water very cautiously, and then splashed Nikolay who cried out and fell straight into the river. But he got up immediately, even in the middle of the river the water only reached up to his knees. He and Marie-Louise tried to swim in that puddle of water, playing at being dogs and frogs, while Nina and I laughed.
Once dressed, we heard the moan of airplanes getting closer; they were fighters. When they saw us, they immediately started to come down in such a way that I thought they would crash nose first into the ground. They fired their machineguns at the willows next to the river. We threw ourselves into the under-growth, Nina, in her white flower dress, threw herself into the river. Even after the fighters had gone away, we stayed on the ground motionless, and Nina stayed in the water. We went home, dirty, exhausted, exasperated.
Nina laid the table in the garden while waiting for the guests. With considerable difficulty, she managed to procure half a pound of sausage. She cut it into very thin slices and placed one on a slice of bread. The table was laden with three bottles of wine and my bunch of wildflowers in a glass jar. The guests turned up at eight. Nina welcomed each one of them with a cup of tea. The sugar and the milk were on the dining room table. While she served the last cups, the guests started to go into the garden.
Bunin was the first. He observed the table, done up as if for a party, then examined the plates with the bread and slices of sausage. When he had finished, he unhurriedly began eating the slices of sausage, one after the other. He devoured the twelve slices, that is to say, all of them. We sat down to dinner. In front of us were a few plates with dry pieces of bread. Our Nobel prizewinner Bunin was drinking wine, laughing his head off, and talking about a surrealist table.
“Surrealist scenes are what the Germans give us every day; what we want is food on the table,” grumbled Nikolay, in a bad mood.
“In this way the dinner is more original,” Bunin insisted.
Twilight was falling; we sat under the walnut tree as we had done a year ago. The light wasn’t turquoise like last year; it was rather the color of a pigeon’s wing. The air was misty. A night butterfly came into the dining room and vanished from sight.
“We can’t complain about having only to see a few surrealistic scenes; I saw one not long ago,” said Nina. “The Germans called up the Russians in order to register them: the German police wants to find out who is White and who is Red. Then they send the Reds to concentration camps. I went to the Kommandantur in Rambouillet. Russians that I saw there, in torn clothes, some of them looking like skeletons, their hands covered in calluses. They were frightened. A German official was interrogating them. He didn’t understand how the Nansen stateless person’s passport that we all carry is proof that we are not pro-Soviet. I spoke to him in German, too fast, anxiously, making mistakes, trying to persuade him that his persecution made no sense. I had the following words on the tip of my tongue: ‘Look carefully at these men and women! Can’t you see you won’t get anything out of them? Can’t you see that they’ve been suffering for twenty years, that they’ve been doing the hardest jobs, the jobs that no Frenchman wants to do?’ That’s what I wanted to tell him, and that is what I repeat to him every night while I sleep. Every night now, I’m in the Kommandatur saying, ‘They’re wrecks, because they’ve been living abroad like this for twenty, twenty-five years. Before, they were like you, yes they were, they were young and strong. Their children are timid and gormless like they are; their wives are exhausted from so much work and worry. They pay taxes, they go to church, they carry a stateless person’s passport and sad faces. Have pity on them. They are Russian exiles.’ And every day I wake up in tears.”
The leaves of the walnut tree murmured above our heads; they brought to mind the waves of the sea. The black butterfly flew out of the dining room window and beat its wings against the oil lamp that we’d put on the table.
“We sat here a year ago, under this walnut tree,” said Olga, quietly.
“Its branches have grown in the meantime,” observed Vera Zaitseva.
“It was the evening of the German occupation of Paris and the entry of Italy into the war.” said Boris Zaitsev. “Today it looks as if even greater horrors are in store for us. Dozens of planes fly above us every day on their way to Britain. London is in flames.”
“Which is worse? “ asked Olga, in her childlike voice that irritated so many people. “This or the suicide of Marina Tsvetaeva after her return to Russia, and the arrest of Isaak Babel, they say, that has taken place in the USSR?”
Nina answered without thinking twice, as if she’d known the answer all her life: “For me, knowing that Babel is in prison is harder to bear than the news of the sinking of ships filled with passengers.”
“And if we’d been travelling in that ship?” Olga’s voice was like that of a schoolgirl.
“Even if we’d been travelling in it. I’m sorry, Olenka.”
“But if Nikolay had been on it, you wouldn’t say the same, would you?”
“There are no exceptions, Olga.”
Nina sat up straight at the head of the table. She was wearing her white dress with a pattern of little flowers, which she had had time to wash and hang out to dry in the sun. She was a beautiful marble sculpture, I told myself. The exterminating angel: “It’s an attack of hatred. It is difficult for me to control myself.” Her words went through my head.
Bunin whistled.
“A year ago, Boris,” said Vera Zaitseva to her husband, as if she had remembered something, “at a dinner here under the walnut tree, we said all sorts of rubbish! I said I wanted to live in the time of Pushkin. And you, Nina, wanted to go off to America. You don’t remember that now, do you, Ninochka?”
“I will go off to America, most definitely. I don’t say things just for the sake of it.”
“And what will you do there?”
“I will live. Above all, I’ll live far away from Europe. And how will I live? I will get up at six to see the sunrise. Then I shall do some exercises. For breakfast I shall eat a pear with dry bread, and I will drink tea. After that will come work: translations, stories, articles. Then before lunch, a long walk in the open air. After dinner, some reading. I want to live far away from people!”
We shook our heads because we couldn’t imagine Nina, energetic, sociable Nina, living in that way.
“Why far away from people, Nina?” asked Bunin, the only one of us who took it at all seriously.
“Because every afternoon airplanes fly on missions above our heads to bomb the houses of innocent people. I can’t sleep. It’s like an obsession. I’m afraid that this situation will last forever.”
“But we’re alive and we’re drinking wine,” Olga raised her glass.
“I drink wine, ergo sum,” Bunin also raised his glass.
The rest of us also took part in the toast and when it was over, for a long while we savored the taste of wine on our tongues, as if that might even be taken away from us. Then we were done. Somehow we had forgotten that it was a birthday party.
When, after a few months, my brother contracted an illness that was difficult to cure, I moved to his house in Meudon so that he would have someone to look after him. From time to time I got a letter from Nina, but I don’t know if I received them all. The postal service wasn’t working very well.
November 15, 1941
Yesterday at eight in the morning I went to the cemetery, to Khodasevich’s tomb. They had removed the earth. Six gravediggers came with cords and took out the coffin. One of them told me that in the place where the coffin had been the earth was arid and that probably the deceased had not decomposed but rather had gone dry, like a mummy. They transported the bier to a new, definitive resting place. Slowly, they placed the coffin at the bottom of the tomb. Then they covered it in earth. And I . . . I couldn’t take it anymore. I went to the Zaitsevs’ house, which is nearby.
December 3, 1942
The bombing of Billancourt by the Americans and the British started on the March 3 at ten in the evening. Around a thousand people lost their lives; two hundred houses were destroyed. The cemetery is closed. Many graves have been wrecked by the bombing; you can see bones and skulls everywhere. All this week there have been searches for people in the cellars and shelters destroyed by the bombs. From one of the basements a child’s voice shouted, “I’m here, Mother, here, come!”
March 20, 1942
On Sunday after the bombing of Billancourt, crowds of people came to see what had happened and, once there, took a stroll. The cries of those who had been buried alive could still be heard from the basements while the day-trippers laughed, played with their children, and ate toast with salt and oil.
March 8, 1942
In the bombing of Billancourt, Khodasevich’s grave was spared. The black cross of his tomb now rises up among the tombs of those who died during the bombing.
March 17, 1942
Yesterday, at eight in the morning, the Gestapo arrested Olga and took her away. I don’t know if you know that on her mother’s side, Olga is Jewish.
October 10, 1944
Dear Igor Mikhailovich, I want to give you the following news personally: Nikolay and I have separated. The fault is mine.
Nina
July, 1948
Dear Igor Mikhailovich, we have sold the house at Longchêne. The buyer is Mony Dalmes, an actress with the Comédie-Française. She wants to “condemn that door” and “open this window over there.” Go ahead, lady, you go opening and condemning as you please. Do exactly as you wish!
December 1948
Meeting in the Pleyel room. Camus took the floor. He reminded me of Alexander Blok, both because of his physical appearance and his behavior, and because of the subject of his speech: in a sad voice he spoke about the freedom of the poet. Sartre intervened to say that by this stage in literature you can’t talk about love and jealousy without having adopted an attitude about Stalingrad and the Resistance. Breton then held forth on Trotsky.
July 1949
Dear Igor Mikhailovich, to your questions I must answer no. I am not distraught. I feel liberated. From what? From intellectual anarchy. From the opinions that were dictated to me by my moods. From a sense of guilt (I have gotten rid of it completely). From anguish. From the fear of the opinions of me that other people might have. From restlessness. From contradictory and indefinable emotional attacks.
In the moment that I achieved tranquility, I realized that I am still able to rebel and I have the feeling that things won’t stop here, under the roofs of Paris. I have glimpsed, vaguely, the events of the future. “Energy is eternal delight” (William Blake).
August 21, 1950
I adore walking through the Trocadero at night. In the darkness, I sense the coming of winter. The parks and gardens, so noisy by day, are submerged in shadows and silence. Some lampposts make circles of light that illuminate part of the path or the wide branch of a plane tree. For an instant I forget who I am and what is happening to me. I also forget that of which I am always aware: the decadence of the Russian circle now, which started the day Paris was conquered by the Germans and continues in unstoppable fashion even now after the war. I usually come back from my walks fairly late at night. Before the day appears, Paris is phantasmagorical, a little like our legendary city on the Neva, especially when the wind bends the naked branches of the trees and gray, monotonous rain drips down across my eyes and lips. My legs carry me in automatic fashion and I am aware of only one thing: that soon it will be a quarter of a century that I have been walking through Paris, and half a century that I have inhabited this earth. And I know that I want a change.
August 29, 1950
Dear Igor Mikhailovich,
I have received the following letter. Read it, please:
Nina, what is up with you? I do nothing. I only read. I don’t even go for a swim. In my sad life there is nothing new.
Your friend forever, who embraces you tenderly,
Ivan Bunin
You see, I haven’t lied to you. We are on the way down, dying, all of us.
Yours, Nina
P.S. Perhaps it will interest you to know that on November 1, I will be getting a boat from Le Havre to New York. I am going, and I am never coming back.
October 1, 1950
Igor, I don’t want to put off the answer to your question. No, I am not afraid.
I am not afraid, although I feel that I am leaving behind me not only Paris, but also Petersburg-Leningrad, Prague and Berlin, Venice and the French countryside, clear and misty at once, which I will love as long as I live. I see it when I close my eyes: giant trees watch over the roads, wide cornfields, meadows with brightly colored edges, pointed steeples of little forgotten churches, built a thousand years ago, long before Montaigne and Cervantes.
I am leaving behind me people that I love, each of whom is a long story of friendship. I am leaving behind my beloved dead. My life.
No, I am not afraid.
Nina
We said goodbye at the railway station. Fourteen of us. Nina was going by train to Le Havre, where she was getting the boat.
“You will always be present among us,” said Boris Zaitsev.
“And not only because of your embroidery,” smiled Vera Zaitseva.
“Don’t catch cold; it’s a rough day,” said Nina as a goodbye to Bunin. Little did she know that in three years she wouldn’t have to worry about him because Bunin would be dead.
The train started to pull away. Nina stood by a lowered window, and tears rolled down her cheeks. I had never seen her cry. I went up to take hold of her wet hand as it pressed her handkerchief. I walked by her side following the rhythm of the train as it was pulling away.
“I feel like Prince Myshkin,” she said, smiling through her tears.
“And I, like Anna Karenina.”
“Like Myshkin and probably like Dostoyevsky himself, for suddenly I see everything with a great clarity, with absolute lucidity. Everything that I am leaving. And everything that has left me.”
The steam of the locomotive wrapped itself first around her, then around the whole car, then around the entire train.