Goya's Glass (33 page)

May, 1951

Dear Igor Mikhailovich,

The first person I have had dealings with in the United States is Alexandra Tolstaya. I had seen her many times in photographs of her with her father, the writer Leo Tolstoy. At that time Alexandra was twenty-eight years old and almost forty years have gone by since then. She is a strong, well-built, very elegant woman. Some time ago, Vladislav wrote some things about her in his article dedicated to the death of Leo Tolstoy. Do you know this article?

I have also met Vsevolod Pastukhov, pianist, teacher, and poet, and we have made friends. Through his music I relive the ambience of Saint Petersburg, which in fact I never had the time to get to know well enough.

May, 1952

Igor,

At the teas Maria Tselina offers here in New York, I have met a whole bunch of Russians. The ones who used to attend her salon in Paris had known each other for years, ever since they lived in Moscow. Here it is different. When she invites people, Tselina doesn’t keep to any given criteria. Vladislav used to tell me that the day would come when Russian exiles, the literati, would meet up as an association of people capable of distinguishing an iambus from a trochee. But the ones I meet at Tselina’s place don’t even know how to do that, so now I divide the Russians into two categories: those who try to take the maximum advantage possible of their experiences in the west, and those who have brought along a screen that they have placed between them and the western world. And what I do is avoid the latter.

In front of the fireplace, Alexandra was brushing her greyhound. I sat in front of her in an armchair, and I told myself that leaning back in a comfortable chair with a book in one’s hand was absolute paradise. The warm, salty air and the smell of recently cut grass came in through the open windows.
Weakened by the muggy heat, I placed my feet on a stool while my eyes wandered from the framed photographs that were hanging on the wall to the man who was mowing the lawn in the garden.

“Alexandra, you have your no-man’s-land, don’t you?”

“No-man’s-land? What do you mean by that?”

“Since I was little I have been convinced that each person has her no-man’s-land, a land that belongs to her and her alone.”

“Are you referring to acceptable and unacceptable life, the legal and the non-legal, that which is permitted and that which is not?”

“Not at all, Sasha. What I mean is that each person lives or ought to live without limits, in absolute freedom, in a private space, even though it might only be for an hour a day or an hour a week or one day a month. Deep down we live for this private life of our own.”

“No, I don’t experience anything like that, Nina. I know nothing of that.”

“You don’t have a territory where you are alone with your father?”

“My father died a long time ago.”

“So?”

“And you think that . . .”

“Think about it, Sasha.”

“And you have this no-man’s-land, as you call it?”

“I also have my dead person.”

“A dead person?”

“Yes, my dead person is alive for me; and the living, for me, are dead,” I explained looking at a spot somewhere through the window, someplace beyond the garden, the sea, the horizon.

Then I fixed my gaze at a spot in the garden. A tanned man was mowing the lawn, the muscles of his shoulders were tense under his vest. Rather than a famous musician, he looked more like a Russian peasant. I thought that I liked him like that more than when he was playing the guitar or the piano. Alexandra noticed my look.

“You have charmed our pianist. He never used to mow the lawn before you came along.”

“Pastukhov must be about the same age as me, yet somehow he manages to bring me back the echo of old Saint Petersburg, even though I personally never knew it, just a few of its notes at the beginning of the 1920s, when they were already fading away in the atmosphere of revolutionary Saint Petersburg.”

“And that’s all? Doesn’t he give you anything else, this man, except these notes?”

“Yes, something else. I feel at ease with him.”

“And that’s all?”

“I’ll help you brush the dog.”

I took the brush and comb from Alexandra’s hands and started to brush the coat on the firm stomach of the reclining animal.

“Nina, why do you wear a dove around your neck?”

“Why? Listen
:

Do you like it?”

“Yes. Who wrote it?”

“Him . . . My no-man’s-land. My dead person. A long time ago. We were in Venice, the city of doves.”

I continued brushing the dog vigorously.

Pastukhov came into the salon, shining all over, with three glasses of vermouth in his hand.

July, 1952

Dear friend, do you remember that during the war we sometimes spoke of certain special moments that have the power of transforming people? We didn’t speak about it in those terms, but that’s what it was: remember how I told you about my meeting with a Spanish girl, a moment which renewed tenderness and compassion within me? Recently I have been thinking of this subject. In some way we all have our no-man’s-land. Within the territory of this other life, the invisible one which is ours only and in which we live in complete freedom, unusual things can happen. Two attuned souls can meet; a person who is reading a book or listening to music can reach an extraordinary degree of depth. Certain moments, lived in our no-man’s-land, either complement some aspect of our “real” life or they have a meaning that is all their own. This inner life can be a pleasure or a necessity.

Nina B.

September, 1952

Dear Igor Mikhailovich,

You ask me if I have got used to living in America. Yes, I’m fine here. I try to understand America. I keep on discovering more and more. I admire America, its youth, and its dynamism. But deep down, you know . . . It makes no difference to me whether I live in one place or another. I like to have new impressions; they help me to cope with the pain I carry inside me. But in the end, isn’t it everybody’s wish to snuff out their most intimate pain with a blanket of new, different, strong, crazy experiences? What we wouldn’t do to be relieved of ourselves!

Greetings from

your Nina

In the program there was a concert dedicated to the memory of Dmitri Shostakovich. I was sitting next to Alexandra in the first row of the circle and was listening to the art of Vsevolod Pastukhov’s piano. All the other instruments are unnecessary, she told me; he alone is a whole orchestra that fills the concert hall. I observed the pianist submerged in the universe of the music where nothing of the outside world could reach. But perhaps something could: the pianist’s face took on from time to time an illuminated resplendent expression, like the one I had seen on him for the first time a few months
ago in Alexandra’s house by the sea, he brought us some glasses full of golden vermouth with ice cubes that knocked against each other like bumper cars. I thought that musicians were happy beings: in music they have their no-man’s-land, which fills them completely and which acts as a refuge. Both Vsevolod Pastukhov and Dmitri Shostakovich did. Before them, Schubert, Mozart, Bach. Neither the Inquisition nor the totalitarian states would ever permit anyone his no-man’s-land, this other life. But with music it is possible to preserve one’s inner life even under a dictatorship. It is true that Shostakovich had serious problems with the totalitarian government, but nobody, not even Stalin, could take away the music that was echoing in his head.

Applause, a storm of applause. The audience gave a standing ovation.

In the wings there was a long line of people who wanted to shake hands with Vsevolod Pastukhov. Alexandra and I were the last in line. Pastukhov saw us and offered us the place next to him. He presented Alexandra to his friends and then me as “my friend.” I was stupefied; I felt my face grow severe, inaccessible. But no one was paying any attention to me, the evening belonged to Vsevolod Pastukhov. Alexandra excused herself, saying she still had work to do. We accompanied her out onto the street; she went off in her red sports car, which shrank until it melted into the flood of lights. Pastukhov called a taxi to Central Park.

On the way he told me of his first meeting with Shostakovich in the 1920s. He continued while we looked for
a place on the terrace of a cafe in the middle of the park; he told stories while the waiter uncorked a bottle of champagne effortlessly, noiselessly. Then he played for a moment with his glass, expecting me to suggest a toast. After all, today he today had had the kind of success that comes only once in a lifetime, if it comes at all! But I sipped my champagne without saying a word, so that he clinked his glass against mine, in silence, before tasting the liquid full of tiny bubbles.

“Do you still work as a quadrilingual secretary for that old witch? And you handle her correspondence with Albert Schweitzer, Gary Cooper, and Kurt Furtwängler?”

“Mrs. Toom’s latest whim: she now wants me to grow roses instead of writing her letters.”

“And you’ve refused.”

“I certainly have. So she told me to grow tulips. And if I don’t want to, then I can leave.”

“So you left.”

“I left. The very next day she called me to tell me that the detective novel she had half-finished reading had gotten lost somewhere. And that I should help her find it because otherwise she would never find out who the murderer was. So before hanging up I told her the murderer was the gardener.”

The pianist laughed his head off, and his face shone as it had during the concert, as it had a few months ago. I stopped noticing what was around me, I only saw him.

The waiter filled our glasses to the brim.

“To Shostakovich. To your Shostakovich,” I said in a low voice
.

We touched glasses, we looked each other in the eye, we drank a sip.

“And to you,” I added in a voice that could barely be heard.

He placed a palm over my fingers and held them tightly. He raised his eyes to me in a way . . . I don’t know how to put it. Like Tolstoy when he was looking at his daughter in the photo in Alexandra’s living room.

I wanted to move my hand, but my fingers were imprisoned. I started to notice what was around me. In front of us there was a little artificial lake, an owl had started to hoot, and in some place nearby a popular American band began to play. Without a doubt people were dancing. I could hear shouts of happiness. I felt like dancing with them even though I didn’t know that particular dance. But I didn’t say anything. I took a sip of champagne.

“One day in Alexandra’s house you recited some verses about doves, Nina. I heard it through the open window.”

“Yes. This
:

“The loved one in question is you.”

“Yes.”

“The doves are the men who are afraid of you. On one hand, you are attractive and they desire you; on the other, you are mature, self-confident, and intelligent. And sarcastic. And worst of all, you are mysterious. And men panic when faced
with mystery, because they don’t know what to do with it. That is why they flee, frightened.”

I laughed without stopping, drank champagne, choked, and coughed, and with my fingers over my open mouth, I said to him: “But it’s about some Venetian doves! On San Marco square!”

“Nina, let’s go together to Venice! And afterward we will not separate anymore!”

I took a sip thoughtfully. Here we are, then, I told myself. This had to happen one day; once more I am in a situation in which someone wants to take away the one thing that matters to me. The owl hooted again. A gust of cold wind blew that hinted at the coming of fall.

“I prefer the path to the destination, the sea to the harbor,” I answered slowly, in a low voice. “Is what we have already not enough for you, Vsevolod?”

“I live submerged in insecurity. We spend the weekends together, we go to the theater, to the concerts. But all that is insecure. And I need security.”

“Either you have security inside yourself or you don’t have it at all.”

“Maybe you will have to think about it, won’t you, Nina?”

He kissed the palm of my hand.

Instead of the artificial lake in Central Park, I saw before me the Venetian sky in April—dull clouds, a heavy downpour, and then an intense blue sky, the square of San Marco full of silky doves. I arrive, dressed in an ivory-colored raincoat,
and . . . zaaaaaaasssss, dozens of doves beat the air with their wings, higher and higher, they have disappeared.

“I’m not an insurance agent whose job it is to make people feel secure,” I said, and got up.

He looked at me, petrified.

The music from a neighboring dance hall could now be heard more intensely. A strident shout of joy reached us. It was a dark night, without a moon, without stars.

Suddenly my violent gesture came to an end. I caressed his cheek with the tips of my fingers.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t want to . . .”

He sat, stunned, and watched as I moved away with my head down.