A pity that Nina doesn’t describe the meeting with Mandelstam in more detail. To me he is the greatest Russian poet of the twentieth century. I would like to know what he was like when he was half asleep, though I suppose he was just like anyone else, with a grumpy face.
Vladislav put wood into the smoking stove heater and made me sit down on a chair next to the window. He brought his own chair as close as he could. The Nevsky Prospekt was empty; there were just mountains of snow that shone and dazzled. On Sadovaya Street a single lamppost was flickered, and even that one was about to go out. Daylight was approaching. The aura of January radiated polar light and hurled it at the river and canals. When the cold, pale sun flooded the boulevards, I headed home.
After that night, in which the heat of Vladislav’s hands and body passed into mine, I was not the same. Never until then had I said the words that I said that night to Vladislav; never until then had I heard sentences such as those he had whispered into my ear. And I have never heard them since. As if the icy black air of the Saint Petersburg night had converted them, as soon as they were born, into another piece of ice in the street to be shattered by the boots of those who would run to face so many struggles.
We moved forward in rhythmic shudders on the Petersburg-Berlin goods train.
“Nina, I didn’t want to tell you earlier so as not to influence your decision to come with me. I have found out—did you know?—that my name is on the list of intellectuals that the Commissariat for the Interior plans to have removed from the country. Berdyaev and Zaytsev are also on it. In fact, there are hundreds of names.”
I shrugged my shoulders a little and smiled as if to say: “We’re leaving anyhow. Now they can’t do anything to you.”
We were heading for exile. For a short while? For a long time?
I was not yet twenty-one; Vladislav was fifteen years older.
He handed me a piece of paper, but refused to let go of it. I read:
They order us to bow under the yoke,
or to live in the bitterness of exile;
but I, I carry in my suitcase
all of my Russia.
“Your Russia?” I asked, my eyes fixed on his suitcase.
Vladislav took out the eight volumes of Pushkin’s complete works. He placed them on the floor of the car, around us.
“Like that. And far away though we may be, we will always find ourselves in Russia.”
I shrugged again. There was a certain mockery mixed with my laughter. My eyes said, “Do you really need to deceive yourself in this manner?”
“We will always be together. We have to survive, Nina.”
I stretched out my hand.
“What’s on the other sheet?”
“It’s just a beginning. I don’t know how to finish it.”
My eyes passed from one line to the other.
Here there is a story. I have seen it
clearly, perfectly outlined
while I had your gentle palm
in my hand.
I took a pencil and added:
And so, from your burning palm
the blood began to pass to mine;
it gave me life and a clear look;
I was filled with tenderness.
I sat as comfortably as I could on the suitcase and watched the wooden walls of the freight car, as if there were a window through which I could contemplate a cheerful landscape. At that moment we left the Russian frontier behind.
A spacious summer villa with balconies and a wide terrace. A huge garden. An evening drenched in the color of an old silver moon. The paths of lime trees that lead out to the fields, beyond the garden. Fields of corn that stretch away to the horizon, the golden light of which is broken from time to time by patches of woodland or by streams. In the summer, this was my world: the house, the garden, the fields. While I let myself be lulled by the regular jolts of the train, I saw them before my eyes. Vladislav was next to me. This time the car had windows and we were both sitting on comfortable bench seats. We were poor, as poor as before, but now weren’t fleeing and we didn’t have to hide.
We were travelling from Berlin to Prague. My eyes rested on the fog that prevented me from seeing the landscape on the other side of the glass, and my mind was submerged in the images of that last summer at the family villa in the district of Tversk. How many years had passed? Seven? Maybe eight? Without knowing it, that summer I had said goodbye to the house for good. I walked past it, slowly, through the garden. I ran along the paths of lime trees, and revolution was in the air. In the evening the peasants came to walk in the owners’ garden. Who would have thought then that in a couple of years, flames would bring down those balconies of carved wood and that the bodies of caretakers would swing from the branches of the apple trees? How was it that I didn’t suspect all that would happen, when every evening I saw the shadows drag themselves through the flowers and hang around the fountain where goldfish swam? How is it that I was unable to foresee it, when at the end of the summer those shadows dared to enter the dining room to see how my parents ate? My lack of awareness then was unforgivable. But those immense fields of corn, vast and infinite, have kept me company all my life as a vision of happiness, more beautiful than the sea, more mysterious than the unreachable peaks of the high mountain land.
After half a year of living hand-to-mouth in Berlin, a city that did not welcome us and in which we always felt like strangers, we headed for Prague. We sensed that our exile could become permanent; we followed the news that came from Russia and tried to lengthen our period of uncertainty, before we would need to decide on a fixed place of residence.
Prague—thick, November fog. Low, heavy clouds. A tough, shadowy lid over everything that silenced life. Old honorable Russians with their ever-so-chaste wives. A gray, impenetrable city.
We stayed at the Beranek Hotel, that is to say the hotel of the lamb. There were lambs everywhere: embroidered on the cushions, printed on the menu and the bills of the restaurant, painted on the walls and doors. It was four o’clock; outside it was starting to get dark. Marina Tsvetaeva and her husband, Sergey Efron, had just entered the hotel. Marina had lived in Prague for quite some time. She had thick, red hair that fell onto her shoulders with fringe that covered her forehead down to her eyebrows.
I remember Marina Tsvetaeva; I ran into her once in Paris, at the home of some friends. We didn’t understand each other, as if we spoke different languages. She saw the poet as an occult being, as someone who lives on a desert island, in the catacombs, in an ivory tower. Nina thought this romantic vision of a creator was sterile, even dangerous. Marina was a proud woman who, in the Paris émigrés, always seemed out of place. From the 1920s onward, nothing that was written outside Russia ever managed to get inside the country, and she could not stand living apart from her readers. She couldn’t live in Russia either, as she demonstrated later with her suicide.
Now that I think of the way Marina wore her hair it strikes me that she did so in a way similar to Vladya. Their hair was a little weird, but attractive. What else does the letter say?
Her elegant brown dress was worn thin in many places. Marina never took off that indelible stamp of poverty. I had prepared tea on a little petrol burner, and I served thin slices of ham and cheese on a platter. We spoke of literature. In Prague, Vladislav and I had discovered Božena Němcová. We admired her life, her novels and stories, and with the help of friends we looked for those places in the Czech capital where the writer had once lived, where she had met with her friends, and the theaters that she had frequented. But more than anything our conversation turned to the experience of exile.
“I can’t get used to living outside Russia,” Marina complained.
“But have you tried to, Marina?” I remember Vladislav asking.
“It isn’t that I can’t. I don’t want to!” she exclaimed with the expression of an obstinate child.
“Marina always stresses that she can’t,” Sergey Efron said with a grimace, by way of explanation.
“You know what I think?” I reflected. “That you say this, Marina, as if it were a positive attribute. Like a demonstration of loyalty, of faithfulness!” I smiled at her, putting my palm into her hand.
“You are hard—you really are—but hardness becomes you,” she smiled at me.
I took my hand away.
“Your lack of adaptability, Marina, is a sign of your mental and existential failure,” I remarked, while keeping calm.
“You are still so young! And young people, of course, need theories, words,” Marina said, sipping her tea and watching me with unblinking eyes.
“This kind of failure,” I went on, “is typical of a person who does not know how to accept the times and the society that surround her.”
Marina fell silent; she was looking at my shoes now. Then she said with a sigh, “You are not under threat, my dear. You can go back to your home, to your town, and put flowers on the tombs of your loved ones.”
She was playing with her white cup and saucer, without looking at anyone. I sighed.
“But Vladislav can’t go back, and I can’t go back either. And I do not devote myself to the cult of the tombs of my ancestors or to any other kind of relic in order to bolster myself during difficult moments. I give no importance to family or blood relations, and I live without defenses and without weapons, as I haven’t got a skin as thick as that of a hippopotamus or the claws of a tiger.”
“You have your lover. Look how he has taken your hand. He only has eyes for you; he sleeps every night in your arms. It is easy to talk then. Whereas I . . . I have the feeling that I always have to fight against something and that wears me out.”
“Marina, isn’t it rather that it is difficult to bear up under the weight of your desire to always look different, to be a stranger everywhere?” asked Vladislav.
“Vladislav is right, Marina,” said Sergey Efron in a quiet voice, “although—”
“The poet always bears the special mark of discontent. Why is that so difficult for you to understand?”
“I understand perfectly well what you mean, Marina,” I interrupted her, more than anything because the hysterical tone of her exclamations was getting on my nerves. “I also feel that the forces that I am fighting against are impossible to define. We are faced with something difficult to describe, with enemies that have no concrete form.”
“I have loved everything in life,” said Marina, quietly, slowly, as if only addressing me, “but each love has been a confrontation rather than a friendship, a farewell instead of a meeting, a breaking off rather than a union, death rather than life. That is how I am.”
“If you really need a homeland, Marina, look for it in what you write,” I answered her in a low voice.
“But in exile I have lost my readers! Only in Russia can they understand!” she exclaimed with desperation in her voice.
“And us, your friends?” said Vladislav while he stroked her hand.
Marina laughed in a crazy way, at something only she understood. Then she switched off the light. In the darkness she threw herself at me, caressed me, hugged me.
The lights were put on again. Someone knocked at the door. On the threshold Roman Jakobsen appeared. He had come to talk with Vladislav about metaphors and metonymies.
Prague is a majestic city, as inaccessible as its castle with its towers that point, black, toward the sky. We felt like strangers there. At the eating house for the Russians, people turn up with coupons; dozens and hundreds of Russians who go there to eat watered down borscht.
We went to Venice. Vladislav would relive his youth there.
“Zhenia.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Zhenia.”
“You mean Nina.”
“Here, you are Zhenia to me. Zhenia Muratova. Zhenia, my first love, my great love.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Don’t you like being both my past and my present?”
“The past never has the same value as the present. Not even my own past does. Only the present is important.”
“Zhenia, this time I won’t let you go. No, Zhenia, you are everything to me.”
A few days later, I found out that Zhenia had been the first wife of our mutual friend, Muratov.
“Nina, I’ve written a poem about you here, in Venice.” Vladislav said in a reconciliatory tone. When he decided that it was time we made up, he expected me to accept it all without a protest. But I remained silent. Vladislav went on: “A poem that speaks of your arrival at the Piazza of San Marco and of the doves that take flight at your presence.”
I said nothing. But I was excited by the poem. Vladislav took it badly that I hadn’t made up with him as soon as he offered me the possibility. In Venice he never stopped talking about Zhenia. The exile always lives like a sub-letter. In love, too, my fate was that of the exile—to live like a sub-letter.
We reached Rome, where we wanted to see some Russian friends, especially Muratov. Vladislav felt more defeated with each day that passed. He showed me the remains of ancient Rome and said, “These ruins will soon collapse completely, like me. What am I, if not a ruin? What are we if not that, you and I?”
“I would rather say that you and I will remain standing for a long time, like these ruins,” I said lightly.
Each morning, Vladislav got up fearing the disasters of the afternoon. Each evening, I looked forward eagerly to the joys of the day to follow.
“Which subject do you prefer most in Renaissance painting?” I asked during one of our visits to the Vatican museums.
“Saint Jerome,” answered Muratov.
“The Annunciation,” said Vladislav.
“The thoughtful ass of Bethlehem,” said Muratov. “And you, Nina?”
“Tobias with the fish and the angel who guides him.”
“Why, Nina?” he asked me, when we passed into another room.
“I feel that I recognize myself in both figures. I am Tobias, who carries the fish and moves forward slowly and with confidence, his shoelaces firmly tied and with a ribbon around his hair so that the wind won’t ruffle it. But I am also the angel, I walk with a challenging face like the prow of a ship that plows through the waves, confronting rough weather. The face of the angel radiates sureness, courage, and resolution. It is my face. I lead someone by the hand, I guide him. I am not afraid to lead. The clouds gather in the sky, but I pay no attention and move forward. The progress of these two characters represents my own path through life.
“Are you guiding someone, Nina?”
“Yes, I am guiding someone by the hand.”
The different stages of our exile. Sorrento, just after sunset, lights up for a moment like a flare. In the end it goes out, giving way to a salt-impregnated air that burns our lips, and to the smell of fish, both dead and alive.
In the dining room of Maxim Gorky’s house, a table was laid for twenty people. Baroness Budberg, friend and secretary of the writer, served the soup. Vladislav was listening to what Andrey Bely was saying to him, and then they both started laughing. Vladislav filled me with tenderness when he laughed. It was so difficult for him! But if I took his hand, he took it back. As if he wanted to prove that he was the strong one, that he despised my sentimentalism, that he didn’t need me. Poor Vladya!
“Do you believe in God, my dear?” Maria Fyodorovna, Gorky’s second wife, asked me.
“Each of us believes in his own god, don’t you think, Maria Fyodorovna?” I answered with some reticence.
“And what do you think is best, my little pigeon: to live in Russia without freedom, or to live in freedom without Russia?” Maria Fyodorovna didn’t want to give up.
I didn’t think twice.
“In freedom without Russia.”
“It isn’t so obvious, my dear. To live so far away, so many miles from home . . .”
I began to observe Semyon Yushkevich, the writer who dealt with Jewish themes. His eyes gazed around him in melancholy fashion while he murmured, “Nothing serves any purpose; death is at our heels. Death, who cannot be put off or rejected, and it is high time we started to think about our souls.”
I picked up the spoon to start eating the soup, little by little. The song of a cricket came from the garden and I couldn’t understand how it could be singing already, at the beginning of April. Then the company of so many strangers began to tire me and I felt a desire to walk in the garden, all alone, just Vladislav and me, even though that meant doing without dinner. But recently Vladislav had been so distant. In the garden it was almost dark already, and a cold, wet breeze blew in through the open window. I wanted to ask Andrey Bely, who was sitting in front of me, to close it, but he had his eyes fixed on his dish because they had forgotten to give him a spoon.
The conversation was growing stale.
I saw the host wrapped in a silence heavy with annoyance. He stared at a spot on the wall above the heads of the guests and drummed his fingers on the table to let everyone know that he was in a very bad mood.
“The chicken hasn’t come out well; it’s too dry,” Maria Fyodorovna informed the eaters.
At last! As if obeying an order everyone started up animated conversation: all present tried to cover up the hostess’s inconvenient remark, to make out that they hadn’t heard anything, to laugh, to make noise.
For the third time that evening, Bely explained to Vladislav how he had fallen in love with Liubov, Alexandr Blok’s wife. When he was about to do so for the fourth time (“I forgot certain details”), Vladya jumped up and excused himself by saying that he had to leave for a moment. Gorky was hurling tirades against Dostoyevsky and then at Gogol, as if all the Russian writers of the last century were his personal enemies. No one dared contradict his opinions; only I, who had not considered the situation properly, mentioned the name of Tolstoy. At that moment I didn’t have Vladislav by my side to tap me on the shoulder by way of warning. In a few brief words, Gorky recognized his talent, but quickly moved the subject, moving it into the territory of hatred by dwelling on Tolstoy’s personal weaknesses.
The next morning, taking advantage of a walk with Gorky while Vladislav still slept, we discussed the subject once more.
“Do you, Berberini, also reproach me for my book of memories of Lenin?” the writer asked me while looking at the orange-tinted sea.
“I understand your intentions. You want to go back to Russia and you are paving the way.”
“I will confess something to you. While I was writing the book I couldn’t stop crying.”
I smiled. I don’t like grandiloquent sentiment. I wanted to say, “You were crying like an old peasant woman,” but I didn’t dare.
Gorky continued.
“Twenty-five years ago Lenin explained to me his concept of the world, of life, the only coherent concept I have ever known. Without his vision I am lost.”
“You will go back to Russia, won’t you, Alexei Maximovich?”
“Here, in Italy, I am writing more than ever. This week I will read to you The Artamonova, a novel that I have just completed. In Russia they are trampling on the principles of human dignity and of freedom. But . . . “
“But?”
“But without Lenin’s conception of the world, life has no meaning for me.”
“So you will go back. Be careful, Alexei Maximovich. I am worried for you.”
We sat on a cafe terrace. In the square, the children of Sorrento started to sing, not Neapolitan shanties, but the latest American hits. Then they passed a hat for the tourists to put money in.
The day came when we ran out of money. With difficulty we gathered enough to buy two train tickets to Paris. We left Rome on a sunny April afternoon, and ended up standing, the following morning, in the Gare de Lyon in Paris. It was raining; gusts of wind cut through to our bones and the city was covered in fog. Everything there was gray: the sky, the streets, the people. Instead of the castle of Sant’Angelo standing out against the blue of the sky, we saw a clock tower pointed up toward a sky the color of dirty lead. We felt strange in that unwelcoming atmosphere. We felt that we had arrived in hell, from which the path of return is a difficult one, if there is a path of return at all.
We found a small flat on the outskirts of the city, in Billancourt. Vladislav spent his days stretched out on the bed, staring at the ceiling. I sat at the table and looked out through the only window at the wall of the house in front of ours and at a scrap of Parisian sky, almost black. We didn’t have enough money even to eat, and no hope of a steady job. When someone came to see us, I ran to the bakery on the corner to buy a couple of cakes. Out of decency the visitors didn’t touch the food.
And here this long letter comes to an end: a few questions about my health and my work, and then a greeting and signature. Where did I put the matches?
Here they are. My cigarettes have gotten wet. One day, it must have been in the early 1930s, when I was wandering through the streets of Paris, from the rue de l’Ancienne Comédie to the boulevard Saint-Germain, I suddenly saw Zamyatin coming from the opposite direction. Once he had walked past me, I turned around and followed him out of sheer curiosity. He headed for the rue de l’Éperon, went into a Russian bookshop. I did the same just a moment later. He looked at a few books and then went into the second room. A young woman, engrossed in a book, stood next to one of the shelves that filled the room. The writer looked at her inquisitively several times, as if she reminded him of someone. To me, her slightly Asian traits also looked familiar—she was slender, attractive, with a plain dress and a long pearl necklace around her neck. Zamyatin went up to her and lowered the book she had in her hand.
“Don’t you recognize me?”
The girl was confused. He reminded her of their meeting.
“We met at the New Year’s Eve party in Saint Petersburg, at the House of the Arts, remember? In 1921. We had dinner together, with some other people. You were sitting next to Khodasevich.”
They left together. And I remembered a room full of cigarette smoke, the kind of mist that always surrounds Russian intellectuals, the light from a candle, and an Oriental princess. How she had changed! Her way of being, defiant and independent, stood out even in the way she walked, lightly but full of aplomb, even self-satisfaction, and in the way she held her head high and in her mildly ironic smile with which, as they walked, she turned to Zamyatin, who was gesticulating theatrically.
They sat down in the Cafe Danton. I like these Parisian cafes where people sit facing the street, like in a theater. This way people sitting together don’t have to look at each other if they don’t want to.
The girl with the pearl necklace talked for quite a while, but in such a low voice that I was barely able to make out anything at all. The writer lit his pipe and rested his chin on his hands, all set to listen. Zamyatin, who was living in Paris at the time, didn’t want to see anybody. He, who had been a member of the Bolshevik party in the time of the tsars, avoided the company of Russian exiles. He hoped that one day the Communist authorities would give him back his passport and he could go back to his country, in which he had lost confidence a long time ago, as he showed in his novel We. Then, he started to speak. He clearly wanted an optimistic tone to accompany his optimistic words, so he spoke loudly.
“Nina Nikolayevna,” he said in an affected, almost military manner, “one must wait patiently and keep calm, like certain animals that, instead of coming out and fighting, remain patiently in their lair.”
“But is life going to wait?” the woman interrupted him.
I will never forget it. It was an outcry.
“Life? What life are you talking about? In any event, life forgot about me a long time ago.”
“Life only forgets those who forget about it.”
“What kind of life can a writer have when he is condemned to silence? It’s been a long time now since I frightened off my old comrades, in the publishing houses, in theaters. Any publisher interested in my work is making itself a candidate for the firing squad.”
“But you’re talking about Russia. Things work differently over here.”
“I want to serve the great ideals of literature. And to do that I need readers in my own language, in my own country, a Russia in which it is possible to create literature without having to be the lackey of worthless people.”
“We exiled writers also form a part of Russia. And here everything depends on us.”
Zamyatin looked at his hands, which had fallen onto the table like dead weight.
“I am afraid that it will never again be possible to serve our literature. I am afraid that Russian literature has only one future left: its past.”
He frowned. That was to be expected. His previously ecstatic face became ever more solemn. Zamyatin was beginning to look more and more like a walking automaton. Or rather, a walking corpse.
For a long while they sat in silence. The silence of the writer was heavy, long, painful. He knew not only that the girl was right, but also that she was aware that he knew. Zamyatin hated the ones who had stayed over there. As for the ones who had come over here, he despised us, too.
“Among the exiles, Russia exists,” Nina Berberova said emphatically, as if to convince Zamyatin as well as herself. “It is a poor Russia, a pitiful one, pathetic and provincial, but it is, all the same! Maybe it’s true that my generation of exiles won’t do anything worthwhile and the previous generation will soon disappear. But over there in Russia, over there they are killing people! Over here we are alive. Life goes on! That’s the important thing.”
After a moment, she calmed herself and added, “That is why it is better to opt for a clear and precise alternative.”
The writer had stopped smoking for a while and his silence was increasingly painful. His companion felt sorry for him, wanted to erase the effect of her words. She said, as if to herself, “Life goes on and wears away the trivial events as well as the important ones. Famous names and whole epochs are turned to dust. As somebody once said to me, we are like the people of Pompeii, you, me, and all the exiled Russians—buried under ashes.”
The writer was silent. Both remained silent for a long while. Eventually they got up to go, without even having understood each other.
They said goodbye in front of the cafe and each began to walk in the opposite direction. Suddenly I felt as if I didn’t know where to go. So I followed the writer. I caught up with him at an intersection.
“Mister Zamyatin, I just wanted to say hello to you because I admire your work. Allow me to introduce myself—”
“I am not Zamyatin,” he said in a metallic voice. I certainly hadn’t expected that. “I am not Zamyatin; you’ve made a mistake,” he repeated and moved on.
I was stunned. The traffic lights shifted from yellow to red, from red to green. After a while, mentally I heard another voice, impatient: Is life going to wait?
Yes, here is rue des Quatre-Cheminées, a street destroyed by bombs during the Second World War. The house where Nina and Vladislav lived doesn’t exist any more.
Quatre cheminées. Four chimneys indeed, but in my life there was only one woman. That cry, “Is life going to wait?” changed me forever. It tied me to her. That was it. My path was laid out before me: it was hers. Pursuit of that woman took me across Paris, into the French countryside during the war, and then on to America. It could be said that I had fallen in love, although now I think it was a matter of obsession, full of self-deception, one of those passions that help one stay alive, to live in a dream. This obsession kept me chasing after her and even had me investigating into her private life. Someone in love is worse than a spy.
During the roaring twenties, which for us exiles were rather on the miserable side, there was a Russian cabaret here instead of this cafe where I am now. We called our cafes “cabarets.” It belonged to Boris Stepanovich—I don’t remember his last name. Maybe Amfiteatrov? No, he was called Kozlobabin. We went there after finishing work in the Renault factory—Petrusha, Kostia, and I—to have a beer—Russian beer, as Monsieur Kozlobabin used to proclaim. Originally Petrusha was a cellist, Kostia a student of philosophy. I was an engineer, but I wanted to be a writer. In Billancourt we were all simply workers, some of the ten thousand Russian workers to whom Monsieur Renault hired in the 1920s so that we could manufacture his cars. In the evenings, Dunia, that stocky platinum blonde, used to sing in the cabaret:
Billancourt, new homeland,
a lair for young lives.
Every night, in a little corner,
Russia cries its eyes out.
Unforgettable. Another pudgy platinum blonde presided behind the bar—the wife of Boris Stepanovich, Madame Kozlobabina. She laughed with the regulars and made sure that nobody slipped away without paying. When a Frenchman came in by accident, no matter what he ordered, Madame Kozlobabina served him that cat’s piss she claimed was vodka, and even added, with all the cheek in the world, “C’est typiquement russe!”
One day, as if she were an apparition, Nina Berberova turned up there. She was wearing an elegant suit jacket—at least that’s how it struck me on that day; at that time I didn’t suspect the degree of misery she was in—and had her short, black hair combed back. She sat at one of the tables and ordered a coffee. She pretended to be engrossed in her cigarette but I noticed that her big brown eyes were running over the faces, over the walls decorated with Russian balalaikas; she was scrutinizing people’s gestures and digesting snippets of conversation. She was probably looking for material for the stories and chronicles that she published at that time in the Poslednie novosti newspaper.
Petrusha, Kostia, and I sat by the bar, still with our work overalls on. I wanted the ground to swallow me up when that elegant woman approached to say hello to Petrusha, who was one of her friends. She didn’t recognize me after our first meeting in the darkness of the Bullier. Petrusha introduced me as a writer who was starting out and Nina winked at me, as if to someone who is taking part in the same conspiracy.
That day I found out that she too lived in Billancourt. I walked her to her street, rue des Quatre-Cheminées.