The stamp on the next letter that Nina sent to me is also American, which means that she wrote it several decades after our meeting at the cabaret.
“Waiter, bring me another beer!”
It was muggy. Dust and smoke came into the room through the open window. With difficulty, I managed to get Vladislav out of bed, and we both left the flat. We wandered through the streets without any particular destination. The city was just waking up from its summer lethargy, and in the coolness of the twilight hour, it was reaching a frenetic pace. We stopped at a Montparnasse bistro for a coffee, and then we headed for the other end of Paris, for Montmartre, where we lost ourselves amid the smelly streets. We entered a house of ill repute, then a dance hall. In a little theater located in a cellar, a music hall show was being performed; the cardboard sets were more pathetic than ridiculous. We watched a sideshow hermaphrodite, and then went over to the bar, where we were served drinks by fat naked women. Euphoric, Vladislav was planning the poems he would write about this other side of Paris.
But the following day Vladislav didn’t get out of bed, not even to have his morning tea. He said, “Why me? Why is it I who must suffer among all the people in the world? Why has this had to happen to me?” He blamed me for things. He kept telling me that I wasn’t as interesting or attractive as I had been at the beginning of our relationship. It fit perfectly into his logic that because Vladislav had lost interest in me, he had fallen into a depression. What was more, this situation paralleled his feelings about being in exile, the loss of Russia. The contrast between the misery in which the Russians lived in Paris and the opulence and arrogance of the Parisians kept me so busy that I wasn’t even trying to experience, for myself, the wealth of culture that was all around me. I felt buried under the poverty I was suffering, and the difficulties with the French language, which in Paris turned out to be completely different from what I had learned in school.
I couldn’t stand the sighs that came from his bed, day after day, without a word of explanation.
One day Vladislav received a letter.
“What do they say?” I asked him.
“I’m on the list of the one-hundred banned writers in Russia. My books can’t be sold there.”
I sat down on his side of the bed.
“Well, so what? Your life, our life, is here now.”
Vladislav covered his head with a pillow. I did what I could to uncover him, and we struggled with that for a while. Then Vladislav relented. With the face of a child who is at once capricious and hurt, and with a voice altered by anguish, he said, “Here I am not able to write. There I am banned from doing everything: writing, publishing, and living.
“You will learn to write here.”
I had no doubts. Like Tobias, I spoke with confidence, without realizing that he was dragging me into his hell.
“I can’t live without writing.”
“Then write! I’m always telling you.”
“I tell you I’m not one of those people who can write anywhere. The flower of writing does not bloom everywhere. Now I know that in order to write I need Russia. And I can’t go back.”
“We have brought our Russia here.”
No. He didn’t make any effort. Like an obstinate child, he covered his face with a pillow again. I took it away from him once more.
“Hey, Vladya . . .”
“I’ve walked into a dead end. I can’t go forward and I can’t go back.”
“There is always a way, it’s just a matter of finding it.”
“All right, all right . . . I know what it is.”
“And?”
“Put an end to the whole thing with a pistol.”
I took his hand.
“Don’t talk like that, you’re not Anna Karenina. Come on, we’ll go out and walk for a while. You’ll think about other things.”
“I don’t want to think about other things. I don’t want anything.”
“Nothing? You don’t even want me?”
“You, yes. You will die with me. First I will kill you, and then myself.”
Ah, what a letter! What times those were. I must take a break. Almost all the signs on this street were written in Russian then. And the air smelled the same as in Russia: garbage and dust; the perfume of lilac was added in springtime.
After our meeting in her neighborhood, which was also mine, I saw Nina in the offices of the Russian newspapers and magazines from time to time. She went there to remind the editors that they owed her money. One day I found her there and I noticed immediately that she didn’t look too well. Instead of the usual coffee that day she asked for a glass of wine, which helped her open up a little more than usual in conversation. Hearing one detail after detail of her situation, I got a good idea of her life with Vladislav.
“I’ve managed to get tickets to the Russian ballet for tomorrow,” I told her. “Would you like to come with me, Nina Nikolayevna?”
“But he won’t want to come . . .”
“Come on your own.”
“I can’t do that to him. What’s more, I’m afraid that . . . “
“Perhaps Vladislav doesn’t feel so well?”
“He suffers from something I call Russianitis. He can’t stop saying that without Russia he is unable to write.”
“So he doesn’t write.”
“But without writing he can’t live, which is to say, he can’t live without Russia.”
“But he’s got Polish and Jewish blood, not one drop of Russian.”
“Blood is surely not the most important factor. The important thing is where one has been brought up. We Russians are not like the English, who think nothing of travelling thousands and thousands of miles away from home, as if it were nothing. We Russians lose our balance after a thousand miles, and then we can never get it back.”
“Are you one of those who cannot live without writing, Nina?”
“Me?” For the first time that day she laughed openly, and I also beamed, as if mirroring her. “I write with great pleasure, but I would not exchange one single minute of life for the written word, my balance for the manuscript of a novel, or a tempest raging inside me for a poem. I love life too much.”
The next day, before the performance, I went to see them. The first thing I caught sight of was a man’s head, with black hair, caught in the sheets of the bed. Nina was resplendent in an evening dress, and was getting ready to leave for the theater.
“Are you not coming with us, Vladya? We’ve got tickets for the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, and you can’t tell me you’re going to miss that.”
His defeated head didn’t move.
At the theater, I stopped to observe Nina among the mirrors in the foyer: a dark blue, sleeveless dress, which flowed from the Chinese collar down to her knees without marking the waist; large black eyes full of curiosity; slim arms, thin along her body. I had never seen her naked arms before and their fragility moved me more than all her desperation and misery.
I took her by the elbow to lead her to the seats. It was a performance of Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring.
I see they have artichokes. I’ll order two or three. What do artichokes remind me of? Where was it? Yes, in Paris, one day Nina and I were having a coffee at La Rotonde as usual. She was thinking with her cup up close to her lips, and I watched her eyes as they wandered in circles. As if she had read my thoughts, she said, “What is love for you?”
I went red as a beet. But she wasn’t expecting an answer. Without noticing anything, she went on, “Love is sharing an artichoke leaf. Knowing how to do it, wanting to do it, and being able to do it. There are very few people who are prepared to do this.”
I murmured something. I wasn’t ready to talk about this subject; I hadn’t thought enough about it. “Waiter, bring me two or three baked artichokes. Yes, warmed up. Thank you.”
Nina shared an artichoke leaf with Vladislav.
Then she told me how one day the first wife of Georges Annenkov—who danced in the evenings at La Chauve-Souris—went to see them and left a piece of cloth that needed embroidering on Nina’s knees.
“It has to be ready by tomorrow.”
And she left.
Nina started to embroider. “If I manage it,” she said to herself, “I can earn up to seventy centimes an hour.” She spent the entire night embroidering; in the morning only a few stitches had yet to be done. That night, unusually, Vladislav slept like a log. In the morning he woke up and said, “The poor little thing is doing needlework! She’s spent the whole night working by candlelight until her eyesight has gone poor. Oh, that’s been described by Dickens and Chernyshevski. Who does that interest today?”
“Thank you. The artichokes smell wonderful. And a glass of red wine, please.”
I will finish reading her letter.
At first I didn’t know where I was.
“Wake up, Nina, we’ll have some tea together,” said Vladislav.
“What time is it?”
“Half-past two. Do you mind me having woken you?”
“On the contrary, Vladya. Aren’t you going to put on your pajamas? I had them close to my breast while I slept to keep them warm for you.”
“No, I’m not going to bed yet. I’m writing something that is half finished. Nina . . .
“What is it?”
“Yesterday evening I lied to you when I said I’d spent the day at home. I spent the afternoon going around to the offices of newspapers and magazines.”
“And?”
“I went to the Dni and they gave me eighty centimes for that long essay on Russian poetry in exile. ‘You must understand that we can’t pay you more than we do Lolo. People eat him up. Do you think the readers can’t live without an article on Russian poetry in exile, brilliant though it might be?’ An Sovremennye listy the secretary told me there was no one to receive me, but she warned me that in the next issue, instead of my poem they were going to print Mrs Teffi’s story because it was unbelievably funny. I also dropped into the offices of Poslednie novosti. I spoke with the editor, and you know what he told me, that Milyukov of yours? Guess.”
“That you should write a novel for him that he would publish in installments.”
“All I need is for you to laugh at me too. He made it clear that he can do perfectly well without my contributions.”
“Vladya . . .”
“Wait, the story isn’t over yet. Afterward I had an appointment with Olga.”
“Don’t speak to me about it. I’ve already told you, it’s not my business, so I don’t want to know anything about it.”
“Don’t shout! I mention it for another reason. She showed me the magazine Na postu, which someone must have smuggled out of Russia. One of the major figures of Soviet literary criticism, whose name I forget, talks about me in this issue.”
“And what has this major figure written?”
“He says, ‘Vladislav Khodasevich, a typical decadent bourgeois, describes seeing his mirror image in the window of a train car:
I penetrate alien lives
and suddenly I recognize with repulsion,
beheaded and without life,
my head in the night.
“And so? The verses are good. Do you want a little more tea?”
“You know what the poem’s about, don’t you?”
“As I understand it, in the glass you saw something like the features of contemporary Russian literature. Texts that have a body, but from which the head is separated. A literature without readers.”
“More or less. Give me a little more tea to calm me down. Well, the major figure ends his article with this sentence: ‘It is high time that all these Khodasevichs and other crybabies who profess mysticism and decadence were liquidated.’”
“Vladya, listen. Do you not have an opinion of your own? There is no one as closely linked to the cultural renaissance in Russia in the first quarter of the century as you.”
“As I?”
“Yes, you. You can talk about the deaths of Tolstoy and Chekhov as events that have taken place in your lifetime. You were a friend of Blok, of Skriabin.”
“But they’ve destroyed me.”
“Not you. They’re trying to destroy something bigger. You are only one of the pillars of this grand building that will soon be reduced to rubble. And, despite everything, it will be necessary for you to live. And to write.”
“Thank you for your words, Nina, but I don’t believe you.”
“They are not just words. Come to bed.”
“Nina, I want to put an end to the whole thing. Will you come with me?”
I didn’t leave him alone. I was afraid that he would open the gas tap or throw himself out of the window. I didn’t have money for studies. I didn’t think about the Sorbonne, but about practical things: learning to use a typewriter, doing the most ordinary secretarial jobs. Vladislav was so downcast that he almost never got out of bed, saying that everything loaded him down. Vladya didn’t eat any fruit or vegetables, or fish or cheese; he only liked meat and macaroni. There was no money to buy meat, so he preferred not to eat. He sank even further. And me? I felt desperate but the more worries I had, the more I looked forward to the start of each day. I was obsessed with life, with the earthly and the day-to-day. What else could I do?
Vladislav had a chronic cough and chronic stomach pains. Doctor Golovanov visited him for free and declared that all the problems had to do with his liver. Vladislav would have to go on a strict diet. But he wasn’t able to put up with any diet, and for that reason he didn’t improve. He suffered from boils. The doctor gave him injections, but they didn’t have any effect on him. His bed had to be changed every other day, and sometimes daily.
It was a rough day, with gusts of dry, biting wind, when I walked to the offices of the periodicals that owed Vladislav money for his articles. He had visited two editors but neither of them had given him anything. I offered new articles and poems by Vladislav, but they didn’t want them. I felt that they were starting to avoid me as well. When I came out of the last office, I took the metro and got off at Glacière Station; I ended up heading for rue Dareau. My cousin Assia wasn’t home, so I sat on a step and waited for her in the cold and darkness. After two hours she finally she appeared. I asked her if she could lend me some sheets. We sat down at her table to have a cup of tea.
At nightfall, I opened the door of the flat with my key and saw that Vladislav was dressed, leaning against the wall, and could barely keep himself upright.
“What are you doing dressed?”
“I was about to go to the police so they could look for you.”
Exhausted, I collapsed into a chair. I was dizzy. I rested my cheeks in the palms of my hands. Then I raised my eyes, in which, I imagine, shone flashes of sarcasm.
“’We French are convinced that all the inhabitants of the rest of Europe are nothing more than a poor bunch of idiots.’”
“Who said that?”
“Stendhal, and he was right.”
I made his bed. Vladislav got undressed and slid between the clean sheets. He took my hands and kissed them for a long time, and laughed out of happiness that he did not have to go and identify my corpse in the city morgue. I lay down beside him, observed his thick hair, and told myself that all this, his self-destructive moods and his sarcasm, all formed part of that long conversation of ours that had started one winter’s night in Saint Petersburg, in an empty square piled high with snow, dominated by the half-ruined statue of a Bolshevik.
The next day he left. At home he left me a note saying that he had gone to study historical material in the Versailles library; he didn’t say how long he would be gone; it turned out to be a week. During those days I didn’t work. There was no way I could concentrate on anything. I couldn’t sleep. I waited for him. But nothing came, not a message, not any news, not a greeting.
I thought that Vladislav had left me without a single word or maybe that he had died; I visited our mutual friends and asked them about him. No one would give me any answer, until Mark Vishniak told me that Vladislav had come to see him to tell him that he had decided to commit suicide. The Zaitsevs confirmed this.
At the end of a week he came back as if absolutely nothing had happened, accompanied by Olga Forch. I knew her from Saint Petersburg as a writer who was a friend and admirer of Vladislav. She had just arrived from the Soviet Union to make a brief visit to her daughter, who was exiled in Paris. Her visa had nearly expired. I was shocked to see her, older, with gray hair, but I was grateful for her presence because this way I could put off the questions and reproaches that were burning on my tongue. We had tea. Olga explained the policy that the Soviet Communist Party applied to writers; she chose her words with great care, constructed her sentences cautiously. She was noticeably nervous, and became more restless as time went on. Suddenly she exploded.
“The only thing that helps us live is hope!”
“Hope of what, Olga Dmitrievna?” I asked.
“Of some kind of a world revolution which will put an end to our suffering under the Communists. Who knows!”
“It won’t take place,” said Vladislav in a low voice, calmly.
Olga fell silent for a moment. Her serious face became even more somber, the corners of her mouth turned downward, her eyes misted over.
“If that is the case, then we’re lost.”
“Who is lost?”
“All of us, those of us who are in Russia.”
She promised that she would come back the next day, but she didn’t appear either on that day or the day after. After four days had gone by, and Vladya and I had made up, we went to see her, thinking she might be ill. It was a pleasant summer twilight; the sun was flooding the windows of the place where Olga was staying, at her daughter’s home. We went in. Olga was lying on the bed, her hair a complete mess, her cheeks red. She said that the day after she had been with us she went to the Soviet embassy, where they told her that it was strictly prohibited for her to see Vladislav Khodasevich, the enemy of the Soviet people. From time to time she could see Berdyaev and Remizov, but not Khodasevich under any circumstances.
“Go,” she said, “you can’t stay here.”
We were left standing in the middle of the room as if someone had thrown a bucket of cold water over us.
“Go,” Olga whispered, making an effort, “and forgive me, Vladya.”
A sob shook her enormous body. We stayed for a moment behind the closed door and saw the sun playing on the dust. At the moment we both realized that our exile would be a long one, that perhaps it would last all our lives. A little later I received a letter from my parents asking me not to write to them if I didn’t want to cause them great difficulties.
“I had a dream tonight. Afterward I was unable to sleep,” Nina answered me when I asked her why she was so restless. We were walking along the rue de Vaugirard toward the Luxembourg Garden. It was raining a little. We sat down in one of those wooden art deco cafes. I ordered two coffees, then lit Nina’s cigarette and my own. It began to rain heavily. Contrary to her usual habit, Nina’s hair was a little untidy that day.
“In my dream I found myself in the train station at Saint Petersburg, or rather Leningrad,” she continued. “I was waiting for the Paris train. It was a goods train that was bringing the coffins of the dead from exile back home. I ran along the platform past the endless rows of cars that were gradually entering the station building. On the first car, inscribed in chalk, were the names of Rachmaninov, Liliukov, Chaliapin. On the second, Zamyatin, Lunacharski, Diaguilev. I asked in which car they were bringing Khodasevich. With a wave, they indicated a point a long way away, toward the end. Then the car passed with the names of Remizov and Shestov. I ran on. I discovered Vadislav’s coffin in the last car. The door to the car opened with a loud noise and ten railway workers came running, each of them was pushing a trolley. ‘Unload! Unload!’ I heard behind me. At that moment I woke up.”
I offered her another cigarette; she took it from the packet with her long fingers. I held up a lit match for her.
“What does this dream mean, Igor?”
The waiter, wearing an apron that was long and as white as milk, brought us two little cups of coffee.
“What does it mean?” Nina insisted.
“I don’t know. I have to think about it. I don’t believe in premonitions.”
“When I thought that I’d lost him, I desired so, so much to have him back with me again.”
Nina had to go back to the office of the newspaper where she sometimes worked as assistant editor. I stayed in the cafe to read the latest issues of Poslednie novosti, which Nina had taken out of her briefcase and placed on my table before she left. I read one issue and was about to pick up the next one when I realized that the folded newspaper contained inside it a sheet of paper. A letter. Creased, clearly read many times. You shouldn’t do it, you mustn’t do it, I told myself, but my eyes were already passing from one line to the next.
Nina,
I will be staying a few weeks more here in the south of France.
I have found out something about you, or rather about you and Milyoti. I ask you in earnest not to have any more dealings with him. I don’t mean that you should have it out with him. But I beg of you, most insistently, that after all that has been said of him, after the ambiguous and stupid position in which he left you and me deliberately, do not appear with him anywhere and do not receive him at our home. Do what you want with your reputation but bear in mind that I have mine.
Vladislav
What do I do now with this letter? If I give it back to Nina, she will know that I have read it. And if I don’t give it back to her, she will be sure that I have kept it.
I gazed at the branches of the chestnut trees through the little window; they were silhouetted, black, against the sky. It had stopped raining, the clouds had broken and given way to a blue sky that shone now, fresh, bright, almost springlike. A drunken clochard was walking through the park, the passersby avoided him with a disguised but nonetheless noticeable disgust, and he regaled them with a repertory of epithets that he made up on the spot. He is a poet of the day-to-day, I reflected.
Suddenly, Nina appeared in front of me, her hair done, smiling, a little distant, independent, as always. She handed me an envelope with my name on it. And as suddenly she went off, saying farewell with only a light movement of her fingers. A ghost.
Igor Mikhailovich,
You surely found a letter among the newspapers. I owe you an explanation. There are situations in which it is easier for me to write than to speak.
Little by little, almost imperceptibly, something in me began to fall apart; and now this has even affected my relationship with Vladislav. Our being together, which until recently was a joy and a consolation to both of us, has turned into a routine. Everything is going badly. In the morning I wander around the flat like a specter. I yawn and do nothing. Vladislav usually sleeps until midday. In the afternoon I am unable to read or write. Our evenings have always been somewhat melancholy, but now they are downright somber.
I am washed up; I feel that nobody needs me. Little setbacks that before I would have ignored as insignificant, now make me furious. They also irritate him, but he hides the fact. What can I do when he is in such a mood? I know the answer: to see him just once a week. In that way I would rediscover my identity and I could once again be the person who, a long time ago, he loved.
Life has taught me that even when there is nothing happening, nothing stays as it is. Everything changes, all the time. Between dawn and dusk humans change ceaselessly. These are enigmatic processes from which new transformations, variations, and mutations emerge.
I do not know if I am making myself clear.
N.B.
I thought that I should go and see them, to see it all with my own eyes, to talk with both of them. Maybe I could do something for them! I didn’t want to admit that what I really wanted above all else was to sit again in that little room that Nina had decorated so well with some old engravings of Saint Petersburg and a few yellow carnations in a milk bottle. Yes, just to sit in that little room, full of her voice, that somewhat somber voice, which was such a contrast to her fresh laughter.
I went there one day at dusk, after Vladislav had come back from the south of France. Nina was about to prepare dinner. Vladislav was sitting at the table with a pack of cards. We shook hands, he mumbled something incomprehensible. Nina had me sit down and served me a cup of tea. You could have cut the tension with a knife. To break the silence and give the impression that everything was all right, I said the first things that came into my head, silly things. Commonplaces are usually a good remedy for depression and provide a certain relief for bad moods.
“Do you know what Jean-Michel asked me the other day? If there was a samovar in every Russian’s home.”
Now, for the first time, Vladislav raised his eyes from his cards.
“Have the French any idea how much a toy like that can cost?”
The silence of this couple was re-established at once, and made me furious. So I ranted about the fact that the most prestigious western intellectuals filled the newspapers with articles that praised the “new Russia,” its ‘”interesting experiment” and its “highly personal experience.” When the pieces in question are signed by names such as H.G. Wells, G.B. Shaw, Romain Rolland, Thomas Mann, and Stefan Zweig, what can we do? Write, of course, write about the persecution of intellectuals in the Soviet Union, about the repression and the censorship, the arrests and the trials and the labor camps, of course, but who will publish us? And if it is published, who will believe it?
“There is nothing else to do but to sit in a corner and keep quiet, like good children. Sois belle et tais-toi,” Vladislav said, and he took another card from the pack.
Tying her apron on, Nina said, “The other day I couldn’t help laughing like a lunatic. Any French intellectual worth the name inevitably quotes Jean Cocteau’s phrase: ‘Dictators foment protests in artistic circles; without the spirit of protest, art would die.’ Would this phrase be just as viable if under such a dictatorship, Cocteau was shot through the head?” she laughed.
Vladislav was irritated by her laughter, which bubbled forth like a mountain spring. He rested his head in the palms of his hands and concentrated on his cards, as if taking refuge far from us in a world that was only for him. Nina also got nervous then and went off to finish preparing dinner. I felt restlessness fill the entire room. I noticed that the bed wasn’t made, that cobwebs hung off the ceiling, and that there wasn’t a trace of a flower. Dust covered the engravings that hung on the wall, and in the middle of the room there was one worn-out boot of Vladislav’s; I couldn’t find the other one. We devoured macaroni in silence so as to get it over with as quickly as possible. Even when he was eating Vladislav didn’t stop testing our patience. I only felt a sense of relief once I was out in the street again.
What else does Nina say in her letter?
Vladislav had returned to the south of France when I decided to leave him. I spent whole days waiting for him at home, but ultimately I started to get my things together: two packets of books, a shelf, several dresses, and a few folders full of papers. All the rest stayed in its place as if nothing had happened, from the teapot to the engravings of Saint Petersburg.
When Vladislav arrived and listened to what I had to say to him, it didn’t occur to him to ask anything else other than, “Who are you leaving me for?”
“For nobody.”
After half an hour, once more: “I want to know who he is.”
“On whose name do you want me to swear the truth? On Pushkin’s?” I smiled.
I went to make a borshcht so that Vladislav would have a few meals after I left. He followed me into the kitchen.
“You know how we’ll kill ourselves? With gas.”
I saw him standing at the threshold of the kitchen, in striped pajamas, with his arms open, propped up against the doorframe. As if he’d been crucified.
In the afternoon I left. He followed me with his eyes through the open window. On the table he had an enormous saucepan full of soup, which would soon stop steaming.