Goya's Glass (28 page)
Authors: Monika Zgustova,Matthew Tree
Tags: #Literary, #Biographical, #General, #Fiction
“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.
I found a room in the Hôtel des Ministères, Nina wrote to me in the following letter:
On the boulevard la tour-Maubourg, between the Seine and the
École Militaire
. I had always found that neighborhood
attractive. I went up the tall, narrow staircase to the sixth floor and opened the door with my number on it and entered a room at attic level; a folding screen hid the sink and the little gas cooker from sight. From my sixth floor room there was a view of Les Invalides, of the metal mesh of the Eiffel Tower, and of the long tree-lined avenues, which at that time of day were still silent.
In the afternoon, after my arrival, I put my books on the shelf, hung my dresses in the closet, took out my notebooks, ballpoint pens, and fountain pens, and laid them out on the table, which wobbled a bit. Then I washed myself. When darkness began to fall, I felt totally exhausted. I collapsed on the bed. I lay there without moving, without even turning on the light. I stared at the window which darkened gradually. My thoughts too were dark ones.
I was thirty-one years old; after eleven years of living together I had just left my partner. What must he be doing now? He probably had the cards on the table. For the first time that day, this image aroused a feeling of tenderness in me. Mentally I saw his sad face. Don’t think! Don’t think either about the fact that I am thirty-one years old and completely alone. Don’t think! My fatigue helped me to empty my mind. I fell asleep before it was completely dark.
I slept until the afternoon of the following day, when I was woken by a knocking at the door. Vladislav! He had come to ask me how I had spent my first night alone. Then we went to have dinner together. Afterward I went straight back to bed and once more I slept until the afternoon.
I remember the evening—after finding out her new address—I went to see her and invite her to dinner. At night, I took her back to her hotel. We walked past a Russian cabaret; the singing, the shouts, and the laughter could be heard a mile away. Nina hummed “Two Guitars,” a ballad they were playing on a balalaika inside, and said, “Young French people get drunk praising the Soviet Union and proletarian literature full of optimism and the builders of the great tomorrow, but it doesn’t occur to them, not in their wildest dreams, to ask why Stravinsky lives in Paris and not at home, or why Diaguilev died in Venice, heavily in debt instead of becoming the director of the Bolshoi ballet.”
“They don’t ask us anything,” I said, “because they don’t need to, they have everything clear in their minds: we are children of the revolution and we are not busy building Communism, so it is logical to assume that we are the reactionary children of dukes and princes. Do we live in misery? That’s good for us. We got what we deserve.”
“They adore Russian folklore almost as much as they do the Bolshevik revolution and the building of Communism,” laughed Nina.
A few gypsies were singing in the cabaret and the Cherkessians were dancing with Astrakhan hats on their heads.
“The French go wild over that type of hat. They say: ‘
C’est typiquement russe!
’ smiled Nina.
“The French and the Americans,” I said, “as well as the English, sing Russian ballads with drunken voices, weep, and embrace each other.”
“And above all, the glasses they’ve just emptied they smash
against the floor,” said Nina, laughing so much she swayed as if she were drunk, “and like that, in the middle of the broken glass, the tears, and the drunken singing, they imagined they’ve turned into Mitya Karamazov, whose name vaguely rings a bell.”
Only on the fourth day did I get up at my usual time, between eight and nine,
Nina goes on writing in the letter.
I looked around me, realized where I was and why, and I was flooded by a great wave of happiness. Through the window I saw the streets of Paris and the chimneys of the roofs in front and I said to myself: “All of this belongs to me, and I don’t belong to anybody!”
This feeling of freedom made me go out onto the street. I walked through the parks observing the fruit trees that were about to blossom, in Champ-de-Mars I felt as if I were again in Russia, in an infinite field of corn. Under the bridges, the river murmured; in the Tuileries fountains, children sailed boats they had made themselves. Then I entered the Louvre as it was about to close, but I still had time enough to go through the Egyptian rooms that I hadn’t seen. I went back to the hotel and ran up the staircase to the sixth floor. In the attic room I already felt at home; I ran my fingers over the dresses hanging in the closet and I told myself once more: “All of this belongs to me and I don’t belong to anybody!” I took Kafka’s
The Metamorphosis
, got into bed, and read it through to the end. Then I fell fast asleep.
I spent the whole summer reading. It was muggy. In the morning when I got up, I chose a book and read until midday;
then I continued with my reading in the Champ-de-Mars, on the terraces of cafes, where I ordered coffee and ice cream, poured the black liquid over the ice cream and read. In the attic room it was so hot that I couldn’t sleep there, so I read; not the books that Vladislav had recommended to me with paternal solicitude, but things I had chosen for myself—Virginia Woolf, Joyce, Gide, Kafka, Proust.
“Look, Igor, there are some friends of yours over in that corner!”
“Who?”
“Nabokov, with that woman who I’d like to paint the way Goya did his duchess. There is something of The Maja about her, haven’t you noticed?”
I pretended I wasn’t interested. Nikolasha liked to talk like that, probably because he knew that it irritated me.
In a corner of the Russian bistrot called l’Ours, Nina was sitting with Vladimir Nabokov. It hadn’t been such a long time since Nina had left Vladya. It didn’t surprise me that the couple had attracted the attention of my painter friend: Nabokov was blond and tanned, with a fine face, slim, athletic, dressed in a white shirt; Nina, vaguely Oriental looking, in a pearl-colored dress. There was something about the couple that was noble, aristocratic, that made them stand out in the crowd, at least for someone with a sharp eye.