Goya's Glass (25 page)

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 N
ě
mcová. 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.