Goya's Glass (32 page)
Authors: Monika Zgustova,Matthew Tree
Tags: #Literary, #Biographical, #General, #Fiction
“And what will you do there?”
“I will live. Above all, I’ll live far away from Europe. And how will I live? I will get up at six to see the sunrise. Then I shall do some exercises. For breakfast I shall eat a pear with dry bread, and I will drink tea. After that will come work: translations, stories, articles. Then before lunch, a long walk in the
open air. After dinner, some reading. I want to live far away from people!”
We shook our heads because we couldn’t imagine Nina, energetic, sociable Nina, living in that way.
“Why far away from people, Nina?” asked Bunin, the only one of us who took it at all seriously.
“Because every afternoon airplanes fly on missions above our heads to bomb the houses of innocent people. I can’t sleep. It’s like an obsession. I’m afraid that this situation will last forever.”
“But we’re alive and we’re drinking wine,” Olga raised her glass.
“I drink wine,
ergo sum
,” Bunin also raised his glass.
The rest of us also took part in the toast and when it was over, for a long while we savored the taste of wine on our tongues, as if that might even be taken away from us. Then we were done. Somehow we had forgotten that it was a birthday party.
When, after a few months, my brother contracted an illness that was difficult to cure, I moved to his house in Meudon so that he would have someone to look after him. From time to time I got a letter from Nina, but I don’t know if I received them all. The postal service wasn’t working very well.
November 15, 1941
Yesterday at eight in the morning I went to the cemetery, to Khodasevich’s tomb. They had removed the earth. Six gravediggers came with cords and took out the coffin. One
of them told me that in the place where the coffin had been the earth was arid and that probably the deceased had not decomposed but rather had gone dry, like a mummy. They transported the bier to a new, definitive resting place. Slowly, they placed the coffin at the bottom of the tomb. Then they covered it in earth. And I . . . I couldn’t take it anymore. I went to the Zaitsevs’ house, which is nearby.
December 3, 1942
The bombing of Billancourt by the Americans and the British started on the March 3 at ten in the evening. Around a thousand people lost their lives; two hundred houses were destroyed. The cemetery is closed. Many graves have been wrecked by the bombing; you can see bones and skulls everywhere. All this week there have been searches for people in the cellars and shelters destroyed by the bombs. From one of the basements a child’s voice shouted, “I’m here, Mother, here, come!”
March 20, 1942
On Sunday after the bombing of Billancourt, crowds of people came to see what had happened and, once there, took a stroll. The cries of those who had been buried alive could still be heard from the basements while the day-trippers laughed, played with their children, and ate toast with salt and oil.
March 8, 1942
In the bombing of Billancourt, Khodasevich’s grave was spared.
The black cross of his tomb now rises up among the tombs of those who died during the bombing.
March 17, 1942
Yesterday, at eight in the morning, the Gestapo arrested Olga and took her away. I don’t know if you know that on her mother’s side, Olga is Jewish.
October 10, 1944
Dear Igor Mikhailovich, I want to give you the following news personally: Nikolay and I have separated. The fault is mine.
Nina
July, 1948
Dear Igor Mikhailovich, we have sold the house at Longchêne. The buyer is Mony Dalmes, an actress with the Comédie-Française. She wants to “condemn that door” and “open this window over there.” Go ahead, lady, you go opening and condemning as you please. Do exactly as you wish!
December 1948
Meeting in the Pleyel room. Camus took the floor. He reminded me of Alexander Blok, both because of his physical appearance and his behavior, and because of the subject of his speech: in a sad voice he spoke about the freedom of the poet. Sartre intervened to say that by this stage in literature you can’t talk about love and jealousy without having adopted an attitude about Stalingrad and the Resistance. Breton then held forth on Trotsky.
July 1949
Dear Igor Mikhailovich, to your questions I must answer no. I am not distraught. I feel liberated. From what? From intellectual anarchy. From the opinions that were dictated to me by my moods. From a sense of guilt (I have gotten rid of it completely). From anguish. From the fear of the opinions of me that other people might have. From restlessness. From contradictory and indefinable emotional attacks.
In the moment that I achieved tranquility, I realized that I am still able to rebel and I have the feeling that things won’t stop here, under the roofs of Paris. I have glimpsed, vaguely, the events of the future. “Energy is eternal delight” (William Blake).
August 21, 1950
I adore walking through the Trocadero at night. In the darkness, I sense the coming of winter. The parks and gardens, so noisy by day, are submerged in shadows and silence. Some lampposts make circles of light that illuminate part of the path or the wide branch of a plane tree. For an instant I forget who I am and what is happening to me. I also forget that of which I am always aware: the decadence of the Russian circle now, which started the day Paris was conquered by the Germans and continues in unstoppable fashion even now after the war. I usually come back from my walks fairly late at night. Before the day appears, Paris is phantasmagorical, a little like our legendary city on the Neva, especially when the wind bends the naked branches of the trees and gray, monotonous rain drips
down across my eyes and lips. My legs carry me in automatic fashion and I am aware of only one thing: that soon it will be a quarter of a century that I have been walking through Paris, and half a century that I have inhabited this earth. And I know that I want a change.
August 29, 1950
Dear Igor Mikhailovich,
I have received the following letter. Read it, please
:
Nina, what is up with you? I do nothing. I only read. I don’t even go for a swim. In my sad life there is nothing new.
Your friend forever, who embraces you tenderly,
Ivan Bunin
You see, I haven’t lied to you. We are on the way down, dying, all of us.
Yours, Nina
P.S. Perhaps it will interest you to know that on November 1, I will be getting a boat from Le Havre to New York. I am going, and I am never coming back.
October 1, 1950
Igor, I don’t want to put off the answer to your question. No, I am not afraid.
I am not afraid, although I feel that I am leaving behind
me not only Paris, but also Petersburg-Leningrad, Prague and Berlin, Venice and the French countryside, clear and misty at once, which I will love as long as I live. I see it when I close my eyes: giant trees watch over the roads, wide cornfields, meadows with brightly colored edges, pointed steeples of little forgotten churches, built a thousand years ago, long before Montaigne and Cervantes.
I am leaving behind me people that I love, each of whom is a long story of friendship. I am leaving behind my beloved dead. My life.
No, I am not afraid.
Nina
We said goodbye at the railway station. Fourteen of us. Nina was going by train to Le Havre, where she was getting the boat.
“You will always be present among us,” said Boris Zaitsev.
“And not only because of your embroidery,” smiled Vera Zaitseva.
“Don’t catch cold; it’s a rough day,” said Nina as a goodbye to Bunin. Little did she know that in three years she wouldn’t have to worry about him because Bunin would be dead.
The train started to pull away. Nina stood by a lowered window, and tears rolled down her cheeks. I had never seen her cry. I went up to take hold of her wet hand as it pressed her handkerchief. I walked by her side following the rhythm of the train as it was pulling away.
“I feel like Prince Myshkin,” she said, smiling through her tears.
“And I, like Anna Karenina.”
“Like Myshkin and probably like Dostoyevsky himself, for suddenly I see everything with a great clarity, with absolute lucidity. Everything that I am leaving. And everything that has left me.”
The steam of the locomotive wrapped itself first around her, then around the whole car, then around the entire train.
She wrote to me in her first transatlantic letter:
. . . a gothic cathedral that floats in the sea, a slim ship with towering masts. A long time ago, I also saw Saint Petersburg like that, like a ship wrapped in ice. Now I saw New York the same way when after a sea voyage of one week, the city began to emerge out of the gray waves and the November drizzle. Slowly but surely, the cathedral got ever closer, forming a clearer and clearer outline in the lead-colored sky; and the closer it got, the more its temple shape changed, and it became a slim city on a narrow island, a capital consisting of towers with an infinity of lit windows. I felt that I had stopped moving and that the city was approaching me across the ocean. Whereas many cities are fixed in a single place, New York and Saint Petersburg float in the sea.
In the evening, sitting next to the window of a hotel on the corner of Ninety-Fourth Street and West End Avenue, I could not take my eyes off the unusual spectacle: around its eighteenth floor rose extremely tall skyscrapers, covered in lit windows. I was fascinated by the life in those windows, with their different lights, and again, as I had done in the taxi that morning, I asked myself where the center of the city was. In an unknown capital, is the center where we find ourselves, or, on the contrary, is it far from the place where we happen to be? The two sensations came together inside me on the morning, after the arrival of my boat, as the taxi was passing through the still-dark streets full of advertisements that hadn’t been switched off yet. The two suitcases of my exile lay on the floor of my hotel room, unpacked, but I had a copy of the
New York Times
open on the bed, at the page with the wanted ads, and I had already marked a few advertisements with red pencil. After the taxi fare and a week in advance at the hotel, I was left with exactly twenty-seven dollars.
When I arrived in America to look for Nina, I met her friend Alexandra Tolstaya, who spoke to me of her relationship with Nina. She told me about their meetings, the excursions they went on together. I already knew about them from the letters that Nina had sent me. In more than one she wrote of Alexandra, or Sasha, as friends called her, and of her other new friends. In one of them she writes:
Alexandra played with fire and asked me questions more often as a way of passing the time than out of interest.
“And how did you adjust, Nina?”
“I started taking the most diverse jobs,” I told her, amused, “always ones that didn’t require any knowledge of the language because I don’t speak a word of English. In a printing shop, in a factory. Once they fired me on the spot because I began to reflect on the meaning of technology and put the envelopes into the machine on their sides, so that the addresses were printed in the air and the envelopes remained blank.”
I was sitting with Alexandra and a male friend of hers on some tall dunes. The sea was roaring in front of us, and the waves were rising up with white hats, waves as tall as the ones I had only seen before in Saint Petersburg. They didn’t look very inviting as far as swimming was concerned. As for us, three figures tanned by the sun, agile flames of the fire leapt up and dyed our faces pink.
The man stretched himself out. I observed his long pianist’s fingers as they picked up a piece of sausage with a napkin, stuck it on a fork, and roasted it on the fire, while keeping his palms protected by the napkin. He noticed my look and quickly let the napkin fall onto the sand.
“And did you feel cheerful doing those dreadful jobs, Nina Nikolayevna?” he asked.
“What is this, a police interrogation? Now I feel cheerful and even on the brink of laughter as I watch you and your clumsy musician’s hands try to stick something as prosaic as a
piece of sausage on the end of a fork,” I said, laughing with so much enthusiasm that no one could be cross with me for having mocked them.
Yes, Nina, how well I know your infectious laugh, how you let it out to cover up the terrible things you had just said! How many times I would like to have gotten cross with you, and I haven’t been able to because of the way you laugh!
Nina’s reply to the man—about whom all we know is that he is tanned by the sun—continues in her letter:
“Well I also thought to turn myself into a beggar. I took this very seriously. I even went to see the tramps and the homeless so as to negotiate a place with them and avoid putting myself where I wasn’t wanted.”
“Nina, as you are a beggar, do you want to ask for more alms, that is, another piece of sausage? With or without bread?”
Alexandra took it as a joke, but Nina had the idea fixed in her head that she would end her life among beggars. I understood her perfectly. She was far from being melodramatic or hysterical. Many of us were absolutely convinced of the same thing, this image of the end of our lives. We would end up as homeless people. It was a fact that we contemplated quite coolly.
“As you insist. Then together with the sausage I will also toast this crust. What do you think, Alexandra? May we ask our distinguished guest to play something for us on the guitar?”
“I would be delighted to play for you, Nina. But first I would like to know how you got to know each other, you and Alexandra.”
I leaned back on my elbows on the white sand
.
“I can see that you have brought an enormous case full of questions with you for the weekend. I do whatever I can to make you shut up, but it’s just not possible. Alexandra will tell you, and I’ll add the details as she goes along, isn’t that right, Sasha?”
A handsome greyhound came running out of the sea. It stopped in front of us and shook to dry its coat. The fire was whispering, Alexandra shouted a few words, and the dog went over to the big house, with its tail between its legs.
“Nina came to see me in my office at the Immigrant Aid Organization. She didn’t come to see me as the daughter of Leo Tolstoy, but the fact is that when one is called Alexandra Lvovna Tolstaya, it is difficult for one to cover up one’s family connections. So I made her wait for over an hour and then I let her in.”
“With a not very friendly face, Sasha, if we want to round off the picture.”
“And I asked, ‘Nina Berberova? Are you the daughter or the niece?’ ‘Of whom?’ the visitor asked. ‘Of the writer, of course.’ ‘I am she.’ she answered with relief. I embraced her, and we went to have lunch together.”
“In a Chinese restaurant, we had roast duck with honey.”
“And on Friday I took her from Manhattan to the house, here.”
“Because you saw that I didn’t have a clue about fishing and, what was much worse, that I didn’t know how to play cards, sing a duet, and dance a waltz just as you all did in Iasnaia Poliana.”
“Just as we all had done before my father forbade us to, when he grew tired of mundane amusements.”
“I learned to play canasta . . .”
“Come on, Nina. You play like a garbage collector. You’d lose the last thing you own. That necklace with the charm. What is it?”
“A dove.”
The man played the cords of the guitar with the tips of his fingers in darkness. I stretched out and suddenly I lay down on the sand, watching the stars that were emerging from the clear sky, the crescent moon that shone ever more brightly. As it had so many years ago under the walnut tree at Longchêne, as it had done in Sorrento, Berlin, Prague . . . No, there was nothing else except fog, like in Saint Petersburg. Before my eyes there grew, like shining ripe strawberries, a hammer and sickle lit by spotlights, and more and more hammers and sickles that hung from all the buildings in the square full of snow. With a rapid movement I turned to one side, and supported my head with the palm of my hand so that I could see the man playing melodies by Boccherini on his guitar while the reflections of flames danced on his face, arms, and that part of his tanned chest revealed by his half-unbuttoned shirt.
