Goya's Glass (24 page)

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.

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
:

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.

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
:

“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.

I took a pencil and added
:

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.