Goya's Glass (26 page)

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:

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.

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!”