IS LIFE GOING TO WAIT?
ONE
The French live in the moment, whereas we prefer to philosophize about life. That is what I thought when I heard the noise, laughter, and music that were coming from the Bullier, the wooden dance hall. The painters were holding their annual charity ball there and I went out of curiosity. I recognized Derain and Braque among those who were dancing. But the Paris summer, with its pleasures and distractions, meant nothing to me. I left that gay place and decided to drop by Larionov’s place. He had invited me to a party and there, at least, I could have a couple of beers.
I entered a dark apartment, which a few candles barely managed to illuminate. The shadows made one think more of fall than of the brilliant light of summer, but I felt at home. In the dark corners and in the middle of the veil of cigarette smoke, I started to recognize all kinds of people I knew: painters, writers, philosophers—the splendor of our Russian exile culture in all its misery. The guests drank and argued in groups and pairs. They weren’t having a good time; they weren’t happy, which also made me feel like I fit in. There was no beer, but someone offered me a glass of white wine that refreshed my fingers pleasantly. I moved from one group to another. The circle around Larionov talked about Russian passports that now were in fact Soviet ones. In time, when everything had settled down, a few people said they would go back to their country.
“Go back? But why?” Larionov asked with a grimace.
“I want to give my support to our new, young country,” said a bald student from the shadows.
“And how exactly are you going to do that?”
“Through art. I’m a painter.”
“You know what I think? You go and give your support to the land of the revolution, and when you’re behind bars some place in Siberia, I will weep for your misfortune from a cafe terrace in Montparnasse and will toast your health with champagne.”
I moved away. This type of conversation was very much in vogue among the Russians and bored me to death. I sat down in an empty chair, letting myself be swayed gently by the talk around me. Bunin was holding forth that the tsar was at fault for the atrocities that had taken place in Russia after the revolution, for he was too soft and had a weak character. Everybody pretended noisily that they were in agreement with this.
I preferred to dedicate myself to the white wine. I had a look around the shadows and, from the best lit spots, I caught sight of a hand holding a glass or some smiling lips or a worn out shoe . . .
My eyes came to rest on a very young girl who had the air of something Chinese about her, like an oriental princess. Someone must have brought their daughter. She was sitting in a corner as if she wanted to melt into it. Next to her, a dark-haired woman was snoozing on the sofa. She woke up and addressed the girl. I recognized her as Natalia Goncharova and went over to say hello. She introduced me to her young friend, pronouncing her name for me slowly: Nina Nikolayevna Berberova. Then she started to complain, the way she usually did, that she had to work hard, that she often worked fourteen hours a day whereas Larionov, her husband, only painted when he felt like it.
“But he’s a great artist.”
The voice came from the corner, a voice with a contralto tone to it that I would never have suspected from such a young girl.
“Yes, indeed he is,” Goncharova sighed, and when she bowed her head, I noticed the thick net of white threads that embellished her black hair. “Sit down, Igor, if Nina doesn’t mind,” she told me. “I have to look after the other guests for a while.”
I sat in her place. But maybe because the young girl had such a fragile air about her, I sat on the sofa as far as I could from her, until I was rubbing up against the knees of some noisy young man. The girl kept giving furtive looks at a corner on the other side of the room, which was so dark I was unable to see if there was someone there or if the corner were empty. When she looked at me, Nina’s wide eyes had a touch of irony in them, but when they looked over at whatever was in the corner, they shone, dewy. The candlelight revealed a look of surrender. But, to whom?
“Which of Natalia Goncharova’s paintings do you like best, Nina Nikolayevna?” I asked to break the silence that had risen between us.
“I never tire of looking at her pictures of Moscow in the snow. But the one I like the most is that blue cow that looks like a pet. It seems as sweet as a teddy bear. If I had money, that’s the painting I’d buy from her.”
I started to talk about the The Donkey’s Tail, the group of painters that Larionov had founded when he still lived in Moscow ten or twelve years earlier, but Nina, clearly uninterested, only answered me in monosyllables. So I tried more philosophical subjects: freedom, my freedom, the freedom of one who depends on no man and no woman, on no government or ideology. The more she listened to my words, the more restless the girl got, and I realized that her face expressed a rejection so strong I lost the courage to go on. We fell silent. She must have gone on thinking about something while I wondered what else I could say. The silence made me feel uncomfortable.
But, as if she had read my thoughts, the girl said, “I like silence and solitude. I prefer to be silent, you know? But I want to tell you that I don’t agree with what you have just said. Because freedom, once obtained, is not difficult to bear, don’t you agree? In any event, it shouldn’t be for an adult person capable of reflection.”
Once again, it seemed to me that her words didn’t match her youthful appearance, and even less with the teddy bear she’d mentioned just a moment earlier. I wanted to protest, but Nina went on:
“I’m one of those people for whom the place where they were born has never been a symbol of safety or refuge. The awareness that I do not have this refuge, I find satisfying; I can even say that I like it. I have no homeland or political party, family or tribe. I don’t look for any, I don’t need any.”
Young people obliged to live without a defined set of values, often substitute theories for values. However, I didn’t want to initiate any controversy, not least because I wasn’t quite sure of my own position on this topic. So I limited myself to saying, “You live in Paris, you have a new homeland, new friends. Isn’t that a refuge?”
“We are just passing through Paris. The day after tomorrow, we go back to Berlin. But Berlin will not become home for me, I’m sure of that.”
I looked at her, perplexed. Nonetheless it felt good to be next to her. Maybe in her company I could even manage to enjoy being silent. I felt respect and a little fear in her presence. But above all I needed to think about everything that we had said. While I shifted about on the sofa, restless, Nina sent another look into the darkness. I followed her eyes: a man’s figure moved in the corner on the other side of the room, a head was shaken, and a mane of long hair spread over the back of the chair.
“Monsieur, ce métro va à Billancourt?”
“Oui, monsieur. But there’s nothing interesting in Billancourt. Just factories and immigrants. The Russians were there before the war, and recently a lot of North Africans have moved there. I would suggest that you . . . ”
“Vous êtes très gentil, monsieur, mais je connais Paris assez bien. Bonne journée!”
Why tell him that my destination was the Renault factory? In any case, he wouldn’t have believed me if I’d told him I was going there to work; engineers usually travel by taxi. It is difficult to make someone understand that, after so many years, what I want is to savor the Paris metro. It hasn’t changed. I find the same weird characters as always: little old ladies heavily made up, who look like clowns giving their last performance; drunken and ever-courteous clochards. The only difference now is that there are more, and louder, tourists.
So this is Billancourt. The working-class outskirts that didn’t belong to Paris in our time and where, ever since the time of the Commune, the streets have been named after the leaders of the workers’ movement. I recognize a cafe; it had been a Russian dance hall and is now decorated with marble and mirrors as in the belle époque. But, as far as I can see, it doesn’t have many customers. Today people prefer to get out of the city, which has become disagreeable and inhumane; back then it was the city itself that didn’t accept people. It was very expensive. That is why Tsvetaeva lived in Meudon, Berdyaev in Clamart, Shestov and Remizov in Boulogne.
Here we have the Place Nationale, there the rue Nationale. And here . . . Yes, here is the rue des Quatre-Cheminées, it was here that she lived! This is the street, and there is the Renault factory. I passed through that door every day. If I turn left, I’ll reach the Seine. It was on this bench that I used to sit and let my thoughts flow freely, following the pace of the river. I would always end up thinking about her. To me, this bench is dedicated to her, as is this part of the Seine. In Billancourt, even the river is brown, like the firmament supported by four chimneys as if they were celestial pillars: those are her words and I imagined a kind of Greek Parthenon in which, instead of Ionic columns, the smoking chimneys of a factory rose up.
She was sitting in the first row of the audience: a twenty-year-old girl, with black hair and slightly Asian features, probably Armenian. She went to listen to poets often. That night her body was wrapped in a white lace dress. But an attentive observer—or even one who wasn’t—would have noticed that the young girl’s elegant dress was made from the cloth of a curtain. And the fact was that in 1921, Saint Petersburg had suffered revolution, hunger, and civil war. Most of the once-ostentatious cafes and restaurants along the boulevards were closed.
The poet who began the evening with his verses was Gumilyov, Nina wrote to me many years later, in a letter in which she answered my questions about her literary beginnings in post-revolutionary Saint Petersburg. It was a long letter, like the ones I received later in our friendship; apparently she liked to take stock of her past.
After Gumilyov, Georgi Ivanov read, and the last to read was a young man with long hair and a velvet jacket. He was known as Vladislav Felitsianovich Khodasevich; everyone present addressed him with respect. He read poems such as “Lida,” “Bacchus,” and some others. With sensitivity, without the histrionic pathos that characterized the performance of the first poet.
Then came the turn of the candidates for membership of the Association of Artists and Writers,
Nina went on.
There was only one applicant.
And I can see her. It was the girl with that dress made out of a curtain, that is to say, Nina.
I positioned myself in front of the audience, sitting on the ground on an oriental carpet. And I recited my verses:
Decorated amphorae and water jugs
I will rinse under a flow of warm water.
And my still wet hair
I will twist above the smoking stove.
Like a playful little girl,
With my pigtail well plaited,
I will take a heavy bucket
and I will sweep everything
with a monstrous broom.
They applauded. In the audience, a woman who was thirty-something years old stood up, beautiful and sure of herself. It was Anna Akhmatova. Before leaving, she wrote something in a book and without saying a word handed me the volume with its dedication, “For Nina Berberova”: it was her collection Anno Domini.
The poem about the broom surely captivated the venerated poet, in part because it had been recited by a girl who looked Japanese, charming and elegant even when wearing curtain fabric. Nina. Only she knew how to be attractive in the middle of the greatest misery, as she would demonstrate at other times. The letter continues:
“I found your piece about the bucket and the brush amusing,” said the young man who had recited before me, that Vladislav . . .
“I didn’t mention any brush; you weren’t listening properly. It was a broom!” I corrected him.
Instead of answering the man kissed my hand.
Who was this man with a long black mane and old-fashioned manners who still kissed women’s hands, and whom everybody admired? Was this Khodasevich? I decided there and then I would read something of his.
When the readings were over, the first reader, Nikolay Gumilyov, came up to me.
“Nina Nikolayevna, the committee has decided to accept you as a member of the Association of Artists and Writers,” he said and handed me my membership card. “Tomorrow I will meet you, right here,” he added.
The next day, both of us were sitting in a cake shop.
“It was I who discovered Akhmatova, and also Mandelstam, and I have made them what they are today. If you wish, I would do the same for you.”
He was not an attractive man. Each of his eyes peered in a different direction, but without a doubt one of them was sliding its way over my shoulders. We looked calm enough, but under the surface the animosity between us stretched out like a minefield.
“I am most grateful to you, Nikolay. I will follow your teachings religiously,” I answered with apparent cool. I didn’t feel free in the company of that man, but I kept saying to myself: he’s a great poet!
We headed for the Summer Garden, and then turned into Gagarin Street and went along the bank of the Neva to the Hermitage. In one of the bookshops, Gumilyov bought a few volumes of poetry. Bowing, he offered them to me. I was trembling with pleasure at the generosity, but I controlled myself.
“I’m sorry, but I cannot possibly accept your gift.”
“I have bought these books for you.”
“No, you mustn’t.”
“No? Well, if that’s the way it is . . .” and with a decisive movement of the hand the poet threw the books into the Neva. The waves closed over them.
When we stopped in front of my parents’ home, he recited a poem that he had written inspired by me, so he said. He placed his hand on my head and let the fingers slide down over my face, onto my shoulders. I took a step back.
“How boring you are!” he said in a loud voice. “Go home, I am going too.”
I saw a weak orange light in the window of my parents’ bedroom.
“Good night, have a good rest,” I said calmly, by way of goodbye.
“I won’t sleep, Nina. I’ll spend the night writing poems about you. I can’t sleep. I’m sad, deeply sad.”
Ah! The pathos of poets! I had always thought that they exaggerated, that it was a pose.
He left. It was the second of August.
Early on the morning of the third, they came for him. They arrested him, accusing him of being a monarchist sympathizer. It wasn’t true. A short time later, they executed him.
The wind off the Seine makes reading difficult. On this bench where I have come back years later to reread her letters again, it is always windy, with wet blasts that make me shiver. I don’t know if I can spend much more time here, with this cold coming in off the river and my memories . . . But still, it was in this letter that Nina wrote to me about the poets who had died after the revolution.
It was winter. The new year of 1922 was not far off. I left the university and stepped into a snow-covered street. After the revolution, Saint Petersburg had become a dark, abandoned city, illuminated only by snow. I was feeling desperate about the deaths of Gumilyov and Alexander Blok, who had died of hunger, and about the exile of Bely, Remizov, and Gorky, along with dozens of other artists. I did not know then that Yesenin, Mayakovsky, and Tsvetaeva would kill themselves. I told myself one era had ended and another was beginning. The silence and emptiness filled the square. Saint Petersburg looked like the city the visionary texts of Gogol, Dostoyevsky, or Blok had predicted: an abandoned, ice-covered ship that moves and can barely make its way through a tempest of snow. I started to run in my oversized boots. I slipped. I got up again after my fall, and stumbled and fell once more. On the corner of the boulevard Konnogvardeiski they had erected a statue of Volodarski, the Bolshevik. During the bombing of Saint Petersburg the sculpture had cracked. It was then covered with a canvas sheet which snapped in the wind. It seemed as if the statue was shifting restlessly, crying out, threatening someone. I crossed the square and walked along the boulevard up to Morskaya Street. Not a light was visible, not a sound could be heard, just the howls of the wind and the snow, more and more snow that connected the sky to the earth. And the ghosts that had started to dance in the fantastic winter night.
Suddenly, a shadow appeared from around the corner.
“Careful, the ground is slippery!”
It was Vladislav Khodasevich.
I’m cold. It would be better if I went into the cafe on the corner and had a cigarette while finishing reading this letter. I remember how I too had wanted to surprise Nina like that, when we were together in Paris. I waited for her at the door of the Poslednie novosti newspaper offices where she worked as a staff writer. But she wasn’t startled the way she was that night in Saint Petersburg. As if my waiting for her at the door of her workplace was the most normal thing in the world, she said when she saw me: “Let’s go for a coffee.”
That New Year’s Eve, in the enormous Baroque palace that was home to the Saint Petersburg House of the Arts there was wine and food, joy and warmth, and even music and dance, that is to say, everything that the city had been missing for the last three years, given the shortages during the civil war. I sat between Rozhdestvensky, my friend who had invited me to dinner, and Vladislav Khodasevich, who knew that I would be coming along to the party.
“White or red wine, Nina?” Rozhdestvensky asked me.
“First white, then red, and then lots of other colors!”
A sculpture by Rodin presided over the blue room. There was a light on and a few candles to illuminate the table. The pianist played the waltz from Eugene Onegin, and then a ballad by Glinka and then . . . No. I lost count of the pieces he played afterward. I conversed with Rozhdestvensky but was attentive, above all, to the man on my right. From time to time I asked something of Zamyatin or his wife; I answered Kornei Chukovsky’s questions. But altogether everything was a dance of lights, colors, and sounds; warmth came from my right hand side. Vladislav was drinking red wine; Rozhdestvensky, white wine; during a toast he broke the glass.
“Take mine, we’ll both drink out of it,” I suggested.
“In that case I beg of you that you also drink out of mine, otherwise it would be unfair,” said my neighbor on the right.
“I have two glasses; I’ve come out the winner!”
I clinked the two glasses together and drank out of them both at once.
“Nina . . .”
Irina, who had come in Fedin’s company, bent down to me behind Rozhdestvensky’s back. She whispered something in my ear. I giggled, red as a tomato.
“I’m not telling you,” I answered Irina, “but I’ll write a poem about it. It’ll be a futurist poem because I’m totally drunk.”
After a moment I read aloud:
Joyful and drunken, with our hearts in our hands
we stagger as we sing,
drinking into the small hours
three out of two glasses.
“Is it true that they are sharing you?”
my timid friend asks.
I blink and look sideways at both of them,
am confused by what I see.
I live on the bank.
What more can I desire!
Applause. I let myself fall back into the chair.
Vladislav Khodasevich leaned over to me from the right, asking in a quiet voice: “What are you referring to when you say you live ‘on the bank’?”
Rozhdestvensky leaned over to me from the left, wanting to know what we were talking about.
“’On the bank?’” I answered, “That’s where you find yourself when the boat leaves without you.”
Vladislav waited until the moment when Rozhdestvensky got involved in a conversation with Fedin to whisper to me:
“I am not one of those who stays on the bank.”
A bell tolls. Midnight! Nineteen twenty-two has started right now.
“Happy New Year! Happy New Year! For you! For Russia! For your novel! For us!”
Exclamations, toasts, the clinking of glasses, laughter.
“For the ship, Nina,” said Vladislav, touching his glass to mine. Without smiling, serious, very serious, he looked me straight in the eyes.
I stepped away from him. I felt that this man had power over me. But even though I went over to the farthest end of the room, I realized that the only thing, the only person I perceived was him.
It was well into the small hours or the morning when the door opened suddenly. Dozens of buoyant people burst into the room. In the middle of the swarm I recognized Anna Akhmatova. They had even brought an orchestra with them! They occupied the largest room in the palace, the room of mirrors, and the orchestra set to playing dance music. Vladislav made me sit down on the sofa in front of the great mirror and settled down next to me. Across the room, couples moved to the rhythm of the tango and the fox-trot; the women had perfumed themselves with dried thyme and oregano; from time to time someone spoke a few words in French or English. What inspired us was the desire to show ourselves that after three years of fear and hunger, we were still alive and able to enjoy life.
Vladislav took my hand.
“Fortunately, in this country the imagination of the heart still exists.”
Ah, Russian sentimentalism! But at that moment, the phrase stole my heart. I sat with my head resting on the back of the sofa, my feet stretched out in front of me, and my eyes closed as I let myself be carried away by the rhythm of the music and his sweet voice speaking to me. Next to me a low lamp with a shade of pink silk cast its light only on me and the man who was leaning toward me; it singled us out from the rest of the people in the room. Couples happy as could be were moving around as if they couldn’t see us, as if they knew that they were in our way, that in some way they were too much of a crowd.
We walked, one next to the other. It was the sixth of January, the eve of the Russian Christmas. Vladislav walked with a light step. He was slim, tall. His overcoat, hat, and gloves—everything he wore was borrowed, but he knew how to keep a natural elegance about him despite everything. The snow whipped his face, but he moved forward with his head held high and a mocking grimace on his lips, as if he were forever protesting against something.
Yes, that gesture of Vladya’s . . . Rather than protest, I would say it was derision. It was as if he was laughing at everybody, and many people couldn’t stand him for that reason. But those of us who knew him knew that the grimace was the mask of a timid man.
A tune more suitable for dancing than for celebrating Christmas filled the snowy air of Saint Petersburg. Any excuse was good for an improvised party. We crossed the square in front of the Mikhailovsky Theater; the snow was crisp and shiny. Against the light of the enormous spotlights in the square, wide bands of steam, like cigarette smoke, emerged from our lips. Invisible workers were hanging a hammer and sickle on the façade of the theater; gigantic symbols already crowned the neighboring buildings. The spotlights illuminated those hammers and sickles, which were so easy to spot, red and futuristic. From time to time as we walked their light came to rest on our happy faces. We crossed Politseisky Bridge, buried under the snow, and we were already in front of the House of Arts where Vladislav lived. In the corridor we said hello to a roommate who was half asleep, Ossip Mandelstam.