Stained Glass (17 page)

Erika competed and won without much difficulty, and without causing resentment. Though serious by nature, she could participate in gaiety and do so convincingly. Her friends now accepted matter-of-factly her prolix virtuosity and had long since ceased to think anything about it. She was like the boy or girl at graduation whose name recurs and recurs and who has to walk up to the headmaster fifteen times before he is done collecting the silver: Best Athlete, Best Student Leader, Best Scholar—Best Prig, often as not. But Erika got on well with her friends, all of whom assumed that she would either go on to become a professor of almost anything, or else that a very gallant and very rich man, desiring a beautiful girl of exotic manner and prodigious attainments, would take her off and make her duchess of something where she would preside over salons for a couple of generations of Princes of Wales. At home the night before leaving, in the comfortable house in Providence exploding with books and order, she actually managed to catch her mother's and father's attention at dinner by saying, “Are you glad we won the war, Father?”

Chadinoff, dressed in his velvet smoking jacket, finished chewing what he had in his mouth.

“I am glad we won. I am sorry
they
won. I am sorry that they now occupy Eastern Europe. I predict they will still occupy East Europe one, maybe two years from now.”

Erika remembered the night her father so greatly embarrassed her during her last year at Ethel Walker, before two friends spending the weekend in Providence. It was the critical weekend when at first Stalingrad was reported captured by the Germans, then the Russians were reported holding out. As the radio reports came in the girls cheered on all the news of Russian advances, and hissed all the news of German advances. It soon became uncomfortably clear that their host, Professor Dimitri Chadinoff, was unmistakably cheering the other side. Alice, who was well known for her ingenuous candor, looked up during the late morning and said, “Professor Chadinoff, are you pro-Nazi?”

“No, Alice,” said Chadinoff. “Permit me, are you pro-Communist?”

“Why, no,” said Alice.

“Very, well, then?” Chadinoff's eyebrows lifted, and he was evidently prepared to change the subject.

“But we are at war with the Nazis.”

“Who is ‘We'?” Chadinoff replied.

“Well, Americans …” Then she gasped. She hadn't thought about it before. She turned to Erika, hoping for help. But Erika's father was in charge.

“We carry Nansen passports, Alice. They are a kind of diplomatic Man-Without-a-Country passports. We are grateful to the United States for its hospitality and express our gratitude by paying exactly the same taxes we would be paying if we had been born and raised in Topeka, Kansas. We have not taken any oath to support America's foreign policy and, my dear Alice, if truth were told, no one's reputation for intelligence could survive the taking of such an oath.”

Alice was a fair student of biology, a little backward in languages, including English, so she thought at least she could charm the famous linguist by trotting up a phrase from her Ethel Walker School French: “Well, Professor,
chacun à son goût.
”

“
Chacun à sa bêtise
,” Professor Chadinoff retorted and returned to his reading.

That afternoon, when her guests were dressing for the Brown-Yale football game, Erika pleaded illness, sending her date off alone to the game. She then turned to her father as she had never done before and, fire in her eyes and a great ball of resentment in her stomach, she blurted out: “I think what you did to Alice was disgusting! Doesn't it matter to you that one million—
one million
—Russians have died in the last two months defending Stalingrad? They can't be as mad as you are at Communism for having taken away
their
landed estates!” She flung the door shut, went up to her room, locked the door, and wept. She wept fitfully through the afternoon and her intelligence alerted her, after a while that her discomposure was deeply rooted. She did not know exactly what was the cause or causes of it, and now, three years later, she still did not know. Characteristically, neither her father nor her mother had ever again alluded to the incident.

This time she said, “Father, do you believe in God?” “No. But I believe in some of the things attributed to God.”

“Like what?”

“Like the Ten Commandments. Most of the Ten Commandments. One or two are arguable, explained by Jewish cultural idiosyncrasies.”

“What do you believe in?”

“I believe in the life of the mind, and in human fancy, and in the everlasting struggle against vulgarity.”

“What do you mean, you believe in
the struggle against vulgarity?
Does that mean you believe that that struggle is going to happen, or does that mean that you believe that that struggle is worth winning?”

“It is obviously worth winning. But it will never be won. That is why I qualify it by calling it an everlasting struggle.”

“The Communists believe more than you do.”

“That is certainly correct. So do African witch doctors.”

Her mother was following the argument, but was now distracted by something, and she could not remember what it was. She had mistakenly begun the meal by serving the chocolate soufflé because she had found that, by misreckoning, it was done when they sat down, and obviously would not wait, whereas the lamb would.

“As a matter of fact,” broke in Anna Chadinoff, her points of reference not immediately clear either to her husband or to her daughter, “lamb will wait very nearly indefinitely.”

“What did you say, Anna?”

“I said that lamb would wait very nearly indefinitely.”

“Do you mean, like the everlasting struggle?”

“What do you mean by that, dear?”

Chadinoff, knowing when the door was finally closed on any possibility of nexus, pronounced the chocolate soufflé quite excellent, and wondered whether they would now be served kippered herring.

No, Anna said. No, there would be lamb. And Chadinoff then understood. Erika understood. God, if he existed, now understood. Erika thought that, really, her parents were quite splendid, but how wonderful it would be to be gone from them for a while: for a long while, she thought that night.

Erika arrived in Paris in the awful, depressed postwar season three years after the war. She was loaded down with letters from her father and mother commending her to the attentions of their numerous friends in the expatriate world. She began dutifully with the first names on the list: Mr. and Mrs. Valerian Sverdlov. Mme. Sverdlov was a niece of Tolstoy; her husband had commanded a czarist cavalry regiment; both had known Erika's parents since childhood and both greeted her warmly once communication was effected.

This proved difficult because although Erika rang the telephone number her father had given her and, after a few days during which there was never an answer, checked it against the telephone book to find it correct,
still
there was no answer. So she sent a letter and got back a prompt invitation to come to tea, which the following day she did. Mr. Sverdlov, quite bald, with a mustache, bad teeth, pink cheeks and twinkling eyes, was always laughing, and he rejoiced at seeing his beloved Chadinoff's daughter, rejoiced at being able to speak in Russian to her, and several times emptied his glass of vodka to celebrate the general celebration. His wife, though more reserved, was also warm. She worked as a tutor in Russian and found now in the postwar world a considerably increased demand for her services. Beginning the following week, Valerian would return to his job as driver of an American Express tourist bus. Erika was faintly surprised to learn this, but then reminded herself that, until a few years ago, her father worked as a concierge and her mother as a dishwasher.

When she alluded to the difficulty in getting through to the Sverdlovs on the telephone, he laughed and laughed and said several times that the French were the
silliest
people in the whole world. You see—he adopted a conspiratorial voice—I was a
collaborator!
Yes! I worked for the Germans! One day I traveled with the German Army as far as St. Petersburg. Not
into
St. Petersburg, but as
far
as St. Petersburg—and there—he stood theatrically, and waved his arm forward, “there from the hilltop I could see—my house. My father's house. My grandfather's house. Where your father played with me when we were boys.”

But, he said, that was as far as they had got. Russian resistance proved effective and the retreat began. He returned to Paris and resumed his clerical work as translator of Russian war documents and radio communications—it was understood he would work only against the Soviets.

“Now,” he said with delight to Erika, who struggled to conceal her chagrin at her father's friend's collaborationist activity but little by little was caught up by his ebullience—“now,” he said, “the French know that I was a collaborator. And
they
know that
I
know that
they
know that I was a collaborator. But!”—he stood again and howled with glee, his mustache high over his white, crooked teeth, his wispy hair tousled, cheeks pink with mirth and stimulation—“they cannot prove it. And the reason they cannot prove it is that before the Germans left, I said to Colonel Strassbourg: ‘My dear Colonel, you can have very little use for my file in Berlin, so be a good chicken and let me have it.' And he did, and I burned it, right there”—he pointed to the shabby little fireplace with the four pieces of coal warming, or trying to warm, the whole apartment

“So what do these silly Frenchmen do? They take away my telephone! They do not tell me: ‘Mr. Sverdlov, you are a traitor, and we cannot send you to jail, and we cannot send you to the firing squad, so we are going to take away your telephone.' No. They just disconnect it. Everything else is the same. And when I ask about it they just shrug their shoulders and say I must wait!” He laughed at this trivialization of treason, although of course he too, Erika knew, would have used the same arguments her father used about the Nansen passport, so she did not catechize him. She enjoyed him most unabashedly, and he offered to take her the next Monday to Chartres; and, on the bus, where he wore a chauffeur's cap without any apparent self-consciousness, he buoyantly situated her in the seat directly across from him and they chatted as he drove. When, like her parents, he had run out of money, he applied to American Express for a job as a bus driver, stressing his knowledge of French (perfect), German (excellent), English (shaky), and then he qualified his application by saying he would be interested in only a single route: to Chartres. His employer was puzzled until Sverdlov explained that the cathedral at Chartres was the most beautiful sight in the world, more beautiful even than any sight in Russia, and if he was destined to drive a bus every day he might as well drive it to the most beautiful sight in the world.

“Why not?” he exclaimed, his whole face and shoulders rising in interrogation. When after a month the dispatcher told him that that day he would have to drive the bus to the cathedral at Rheims, Sverdlov said that under no circumstances would he go to Rheims—the cathedral there, for all its reputation and pretensions, being simply inadequate. American Express tried suggesting that he was, in fact, under no obligation to join the tourists in the cathedral, but Sverdlov was so affronted by the implied mechanization of his role, American Express quickly retreated, undisposed to discipline the driver who was the favorite of the tourists. By now, even after the war's long interruption, his title to Chartres was secure and no one would question it, he said happily. Later, in a whisper, he told Erika that after seeing the cathedral, he would take her to a little Russian delicatessen where they would have some vodka and some cheese and sausage while the other tourists had their regular lunch.

Erika's reaction, on seeing the cathedral, gratified Sverdlov: she found it was everything Henry Adams said it was, in the book she was assigned to read by one of her art professors at Smith; and other things that Henry Adams had failed to say it was. She asked Sverdlov, whom now she was told to call Valerian Babeyevich, whether he had read Adams' book on Mont St. Michel and Chartres, and he replied that he had not, that he did not want to read about the cathedral, only look at it.

Erika mused that her father, who would much prefer reading about a cathedral to seeing it, would scarcely approve of Valerian's attitude: and in the course of the afternoon she discovered that Valerian really knew nothing about her father's career except, vaguely, that he had become a success of sorts in America.

“When he writes me letters”—Valerian laughed, as he tipped his fifth jigger glass of vodka a down his throat—“he writes about obscure poets or writers he has discovered, and always he forgets to tell me about Anna and his darling and beautiful daughter.”

He looked at his watch and said that they must go back to the bus now, the tourists would be assembling as instructed. He insisted to Erika on paying the bill, which proved painless when the old Russian shopkeeper in turn insisted on refusing payment from his old friend, who had brought that day such an “elegant”—he bowed to Erika “and beautiful daughter of an old friend.”

From the American Express bus terminal it was a short walk to the apartment Erika rented at Rue Montalembert: a bedroom, study/living room/dining room, kitchen, and bath—for thirty-five U.S. dollars per month, on the Left Bank almost but not quite overlooking the river. From there she could walk to the Sorbonne, and did now regularly, even though the weather had turned cold, attending classes in philosophy and the history of art. The classrooms were cold and dirty, the students poorly dressed, and on the faces of many of the boys there was a premature gauntness of expression. Erika noticed a sharp divergence in the attitude of the students. Half, perhaps more than half, diligently took notes on what the instructor said, particularly in the class taught by Jean-Paul Sartre, who when he spoke did so with a precisionist nonchalance, a quiet and perfect engine of volubility whose words, transcribed, could have formed completed chapters of books, indeed regularly did so. But other students, though they might make a note occasionally, were studiedly skeptical, as if to communicate to the instructor that no presumptive respect was owed either to him or to the words he spoke. During the exchanges these students, when they said anything at all, tended to challenge this or that generality of the teacher, or ask whether, by this inflection, he had meant to say such and such. M. Argoud, who had written a history of art, answered questions, however provocative, neither with indignation nor with servility. If the question was barbed he would ignore those parts of it that were provocative, giving unadorned answers to whatever was left. “Would you not say, M. Argoud, that you slip into confusion when you suggest there are similarities between the theoretical defenses of abstractionism and of primitivism?”