Goya's Glass (30 page)

“A little more wine?”

“Certainly. The dinner was excellent, Nina.”

“Bring another bottle of wine, Nikolasha. We would like to drink a little more.”

She was thoughtful, melancholy. She hadn’t been herself for a year.

We sat on benches around the table, under a walnut tree. In that curious turquoise light of the pure June sky, we were silent more often than we spoke; that evening was conducive to silence and reflection. Even the acacias and the plane trees around us were motionless and didn’t make so much as the slightest whisper, like they were statues.

“The premonition of summer floats in the air,” said Olga with a dreamy look. In the shade her teeth flashed like white lightning.

“More like the premonition of a long war, not that I want to spoil your illusions, Olenka,” retorted Boris Zaitsev.

“Here in the country one can easily forget about war,” sighed Vera Zaitseva.

“Here in the country?” said Nina in a low voice, to herself, “In September of last year I stretched myself out on the lawn, there at the bottom of the garden. It was the first day of the war. The grass started to grow around my veins, while flower buds started to open between my toes; the ivy embraced me as if it wanted to throttle me. I don’t remember anything else.”

We fell silent again. Only at a distance could the song of a cricket in the neighboring meadow be heard, and from time to time, a frog jumping into the stream behind the house.

“Last year at this time the stars also shone this way, with a green hue,” said Olga.

“Last year at this time . . .” sighed Nina.

Nikolay looked at her attentively and poured more wine in our glasses, which looked pitch black in the shadow of the walnut tree.

“Last year at this time we finally bought ourselves a secondhand radio,” said Vera Zaitseva, “For a year now we’ve been listening to Mozart and Boccherini. At least we had something ideal, even though happiness was not ours for the asking. And now? Now for a month we have heard nothing except the horrible news about the German invasion.”

“I’ll write a story about you, Vera,” said Nina, “about you and Mozart, about happiness and how difficult it is to obtain.”

“A sheet of paper and a pencil for Ninon!” exclaimed Nikolay, but nobody was in the mood for his humor. Nobody laughed.

“I will write about having ideals as a substitute for having happiness. Like your Mozart, Vera,” said Nina in a quiet voice. “Last year at this time . . .”

Nikolay drank a little wine.

“Ninon is remembering that Vladya died exactly a year ago.”

Again, he drank from the glass that he hadn’t put down on the table between sips. He got up and went to the house. We didn’t say anything. He came back with a sheet of paper and a pencil, he placed these objects in front of Nina, who listlessly started to draw stars with twelve or fifteen points. When it was almost impossible to see anything, she added a crescent moon,
identical to the one that was at that moment emerging from behind the acacia.

“I try to cheer Ninon up,” Nikolay went back to the earlier subject, keeping a firm hold on his glass, “by telling her that they will meet up some day, there . . .” he pointed upward.

Nina interrupted him impatiently. “I’m not a believer. What’s more I don’t try to deceive myself with prayers the way you do. But above all, why do you expect me to desire to meet him again
in that other world?
Half the time we couldn’t put up with each other when we were alive.”

“Nina’s right,” said Vera in her favor. “After so many years people don’t even want to see each other down here. Time passes and people end up having nothing to say to each other. Maybe I wouldn’t even recognize my poor Aloysha, and that’d be a good thing.”

Vera sighed.

“The other day I saw him in a dream, Vera . . .” said Nina.

“My dead son?”

“No, I’m sorry. I saw Vladya. There were a lot of people in the room and nobody else saw him. He had long hair and he was thin, almost transparent, light as a ghost, but elegant and youthful. We found a way of being alone together. I sat next to him. I took his hand, fine and light as a feather. I told him, ‘If you can, tell me how you feel.’ He answered me with a peculiar gesture that I interpreted to mean ‘not too bad.’ Then he filled his mouth with smoke, bent his back, and said, ‘How can I put it? One doesn’t always feel comfortable . . .’”

“How strange,” said Olga, shaking her golden head and looking around at the others. “Do you make anything of it?”

“It’s strange, the whole thing is very strange. ‘My solitude begins when I am two steps away from you’ says the lover of the main character in a Giraudoux novel,” Nikolay said, blowing cigarette smoke out of his mouth.

“It could also be said that my solitude begins in your arms,” Nina said in a harsh tone of voice, staring at a spot beyond the fence.

“Ninon reckons,” Nikolay continued as if he hadn’t heard what Nina had said, “that in his poems Vladislav predicted what would happen and that this, according to her, is already starting to happen—”

“Olenka, where would you like to be now if you could choose?” Nina interrupted him, uneasily.

“Here, in the freshness of the night under this walnut tree, in 1941, a year from now, because then the war will be over.”

“And you, Vera?”

“Me? It’s rather banal, I’m ashamed to tell you, but I would like to be in the tsar’s court in Pushkin’s time. To be able to hear him reciting his poems. Pushkin, I mean, not the tsar.”

“Another ideal as a substitute for happiness?” Nina smiled sadly, “And you, Nikolasha?”

“I would like this to be the first day in this house. I would like to eat piroshki and wash them down with abundant quantities of champagne, and I would like to look forward to our first night on the dry grass.”

Nina was drawing her stars. Suddenly she looked up.

“I would like to be in America.”

“The truth is,” Nikolay went on as if he hadn’t heard her, “that Vladislav couldn’t have chosen a better moment for dying. He isn’t forced to see the Germans and human cowardice, as we are. And who knows what else we’re going to see.”

“And when I say that I would now like to be in America, that means that one day I will be there,” said Nina, while continuing to draw something on the sheet of paper.

“You are the exterminating angel, Nina. Would you really punish us with your departure?” said Boris Zaitsev.

“I’m more of a Lady Macbeth,” said Nina.

“Why America?” I asked out of interest while I tried to get rid of the fly that had fallen into my glass of wine; at each sip it slipped between my lips and then reappeared.

“I’ll tell you a story,” answered Nina after a while.” A very old man, called Andreyev, a few days before his death in 1919, heard the enemy bombing raids in his home in Finland and at night he dreamed of America. I have the feeling that between his nights and my own there is no difference at all, as if no time had passed. And, apart from that . . .”

“Apart from that?”

She didn’t answer.

“Apart from that, what, Nina?” I asked again.

“I simply meant that I don’t like life to be too easy.”

Vera and Boris Zaitsev burst out laughing.

“You don’t have to worry about that, Nina. You haven’t been
granted an easy life, and I don’t think any of us have been threatened with one either!”

Nina didn’t laugh. She was thinking.

“Probably when I was little, I began to think in this way by reading Nietzsche, and it’s stayed with me since then. In a nutshell, I like the complexity that is part of human life.”

Olga sighed and shook her head so that her golden hair flew around her head like a halo.

“Nina, what blasphemy, how awful . . .”

As if to confirm her words, suddenly some artillery fire was heard. Then a detonation, an explosion, and silence. A long silence, different from that which had preceded it: heavy, a bad omen.

“Let’s go, it’s late already,” said Vera, and Olga was already putting on her hat. Her teeth, white as a sheet, were shining in the darkness, when she said, “What most agreeable company, it’s a pity we have to go home. Come and see me very soon, Ninochka. Bring her, Nikolasha.”

The car shuddered along the lane full of potholes.

I took hold of the tablecloth so as to shake it. A piece of paper fell from it, on which Nina had been drawing stars. I folded it and put it in my pocket. I also said goodbye and went to the guesthouse. I didn’t feel like getting on my bicycle and going home in the dark.

At night, by the light of a lantern, I read what was written on the sheet of paper that had fallen off the tablecloth. I already knew those words. But Nina had added more.

The bombing continued during the night. Sleep was impossible.

In the morning Marie-Louise came, who helped in the garden and around the house. First she started weeding the vegetable patch. While I prepared coffee for breakfast, I watched through the window as she took a basin full of weeds off to the woods on the other side of the fence. Suddenly I heard her cry for help. I was by her side in a moment. In some brush in the woods lay a boy who was about twenty years old, maybe younger, and he was looking at us with eyes full of fear. He looked like a wounded fawn; his large, brown eyes looked as if they were made of glass. His parachute had gotten stuck on one of the branches. We wanted to help him up, but he couldn’t stop moaning. He
didn’t understand French. I touched his legs and he shouted out in pain. Both his legs were broken. Marie-Louise brought him water, I held his head up; he drank and moaned. We washed his face that had been scratched by the branches, and wrapped him in a blanket. Later, they came looking for him to take him as a prisoner of war. He was German. When they carried him away like a wounded animal, I saw his eyes dilated in fear and full of tears. I saw those moist fawn’s eyes in front of me all day long, while we hid in the house and Nikolay wrapped Nina up in jackets and jerseys. She was shaking all over although the temperature was that of high summer. Nina wouldn’t have any of it; she kept repeating that she wanted to be left alone, that all she wanted was to leave for America.

The strawberries that grew in Nina’s garden were already ripe, but had blackened. A huge curtain of soot fell onto the garden and flakes of black snow covered the lawn, flowers, and fruit. The soot couldn’t be washed off and the strawberries became inedible. We spent whole hours together lying in the bomb shelter that we had dug at the bottom of the garden. The boom of the guns was deafening. The children didn’t stop trembling. Some people from the village came to share our shelter. There were only seventeen of us left; the others fled with the exodus out of Paris that occurred after the German occupation. The abandoned houses were looted.

Hitler was in Paris. The village of Longchêne began to fill with Germans who were no longer being made prisoner. They marched in triumph while the conquered looked on, who calmed themselves and dwelled on all kinds of favorable details: the Germans were clean, courteous, and paid in real money (they printed it back home in Frankfurt, day and night). The conquered told themselves that this hardship wasn’t the fault of these people. They were just carrying out orders.

One afternoon, sometime after I had gone to live in a neighboring village, I plunged myself into the summer mist to see Nina. Nikolay was in the kitchen making bread, Nina was out with a spade, working on the garden.

“Nina, you’re still not complaining about having too easy a life, are you?”

Nina was peeling a turnip; she cut it in half and offered the half to me.

“How do you expect me not to complain when I’m living with a man who is healthy and indestructible in body and soul?” she was laughing with her mouth full of turnip. “He is sensible, generous, sincere, and tender. Wouldn’t you complain? He knows how to do everything. After lunch he fixed the fuses; now he’s preparing cornbread; later he will draw a self-portrait; and in the evening he will sit at the piano and play Schumann’s
Carnaval
for us. Tell me, is it possible to live with a man like that? Come on, we’ll listen to the news of our heroes.”

“Now people are saying its better to be a living coward than a dead hero.”

“I’m a coward too.”

We went into the house. Nina put on the radio, and a quartet could be heard playing, probably Brahms. Nina went on, “Yes, I’m a coward. When the Russian revolution was going on, I told myself: ‘This is a problem for the tsar and the nobility, for the counterrevolutionaries and the bankers. I’m sixteen years old and have nothing to do with any of it.’ Now a new catastrophe has come along and what do I do? Just repeat the same old refrain: ‘This isn’t my business. This is a European thing. Who am I? A Russian exile, half Asian, that is to say, a nobody.’ But the other day I told myself, as I was looking at myself in the mirror: ‘It doesn’t speak well of you, this attitude of yours.’”