A Question of Return
Page 7
Lezzard drew back, realizing he had wasted his time. With timid steps, the couple retreated into the smaller room.
“Is Audrey around?” Laukhin asked.
“She’s away.”
“Will she be in today?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where is she?”
Suddenly the man from Michigan appeared next to Lezzard, “Would you take a few post-dated cheques?” His wife had stopped near the folding doors.
There was another abrupt change in Lezzard’s demeanour. He got up and walked toward the wife, smiling and pushing her husband along. “Of course, of course. If you are thinking of buying the small Chemakoff ink and watercolour, make sure you set it away from strong colors. It’s a very delicate piece, très fragile, one of my favourites. I was thinking of keeping it for myself, but …”
Audrey walked in, struggling with a large travel bag and complaining about the heat. She looked drained. Lezzard introduced her to the Michigan couple, and the four of them filed into the smaller room.
Laukhin went back to Dorbao’s paintings. Groups of South-American natives, green-brown rivers, exotic plants and birds, monkeys. In one large painting, marked by a red dot as already sold, three natives with impassive faces sat in imposed, artificial attitudes, perhaps a metaphor of their fate since civilization reached them. One was a very old woman, with teats like wide ribbons. Bits of the conversation reached him from the smaller room.
He was looking at his watch when Audrey and Lezzard emerged with their new customers and walked them to the door. More chatter and smiles, and Laukhin did another round, before the couple left.
Audrey approached him and, touching his arm, whispered, “I didn’t notice you when I came in.”
“A drink, let’s have a drink for the sold Dorbao,” Lezzard said. “It calls for celebration. Can’t let an old man drink by himself. And the letters, we must celebrate the letters from Babel too.”
Audrey said, “Oh, you found them.” She tried to smile. “I should be pleased, I know, but I’ve spent three hours on the tarmac.” She didn’t say where, and Laukhin didn’t ask.
Lezzard walked to the small room and returned quickly with a large white envelope, which he handed to Laukhin. “Don’t look now,” he said.
They followed Lezzard out of the gallery and onto Yorkville Avenue. The heat had subsided a bit. They settled under the shade of a Cinzano umbrella, in a courtyard with a few round tables. He and Lezzard agreed on red wine, Ben ordered a beer, Audrey asked for soda with a slice of lime. She wore a white sleeveless blouse, and as she lifted an arm to arrange her hair, Laukhin noticed a patch of perspiration below the armhole. She looked tired, but lovely. He reflected that a certain amount of disorder in a woman’s attire and make-up revealed unexpected beauty. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.
Audrey and Lezzard talked about Dorbao-Uitlan for a while. From what Laukhin could understand, Dorbao was trying to get out of the agreement he had with the gallery. Lezzard ordered a second drink for himself and for the men. Raising his hands, he said he didn’t want to spoil a very good day talking about Dorbao. He persuaded Audrey to have a “serious” drink—white wine she decided—and asked for a plate of cheese. His face had become red and mischievous. “Are you in love with Audrey?” he asked Laukhin, enjoying himself tremendously.
“Jean, stop this nonsense,” Audrey protested.
“I’m bewitched,” Laukhin confessed.
“Lovely. Get married, have children, be happy. I was married once, briefly. Never been good at it myself. Even had a daughter. Have, I guess.”
“When did you find the letters from Babel, Jean?” Laukhin asked.
Lezzard shrugged, annoyed, “Oh, two or three days ago. The day I called you.”
“Were there many letters?”
“I didn’t get through even half of them. Most were from people unknown to me. Some names sounded familiar, but I couldn’t put a face to them. A couple of letters written during the war were in German. Imagine! God, she kept everything, and I have too, carried them around for too long. I should throw away the lot.”
“No, no,” Ben said, horrified, “you mustn’t throw away any of your mother’s letters, however insignificant they may seem. Give them to us. They might contain, almost certainly do contain, allusions and names that would be of great interest to researchers, invaluable to those interested in the Russian émigré community between the wars.”
“Would they, now,” Lezzard said. “Un peu tard. Too bad they weren’t interested in that community then, when it could have helped a few. Ha. Well, here is a story for you, a story typical of the Russian émigré community between the wars. My mother’s story. Yes, let me tell you about her, an interesting woman she was.”
It was a rambling monologue peppered with French words, a disconcerting mixture of melancholy and anger. Laukhin had heard parts of it before. At the death of his father in 1925, Lezzard’s mother found herself penniless in Paris, with two young sons. They had emigrated a few years earlier from Soviet Russia. The family fortune, or whatever they’d salvaged of it in cash and jewelry, had been frittered away while they took refuge in Piatigorsk, a town in southern Russia. They had gone there hoping that the revolutionary storm would blow over and they could return to their former life in St. Petersburg. There had been a family estate, but Lezzard had been too young to remember it. When his father died, a resentful and discouraged man, Lezzard was nine years old and his brother twelve.
“Mother remarried briefly—we all became Lezzard then—but it didn’t work out. She became a modele. You know, posing naked for aspiring artists. That’s what she told us. She had an arresting face and a good figure. In time, my brother and I figured out that there was more going on than posing naked. But then, what else could she do to feed us?
“A bottle,” Lezzard said waving his empty glass. “Let’s get a bottle of wine.”
“Count me out,” Ben said quickly. “I’d like to be sober when I read the letters.”
“It would be a waste, Jean,” Audrey said. “Have another glass instead.”
“Oh, let’s go for it,” Laukhin said.
Lezzard signaled the waiter and ordered the bottle. “She died after the war, soon after she learned of my brother’s death,” he went on, “although, by that time, she had given up all hope of seeing him again. My brother had the stupid idea of fighting the Bolsheviks on the German side. Mother had a heart attack in the metro. Thirty joyless years would do it to anybody. She died instantly, underground, changing trains at the Châtelet. I was with her.”
Ben said, “Maybe I will have another beer.”
“When we got older, Mother used to joke that she had been an immigrant by profession. Not a prostitute. Prostitution was her second job. Like delivering pizzas after a day at the office. I do the same, following in her footsteps, a professional immigrant and prostitute.”
He swept the air with his hand. “All this is due to dear Mother. After her death, I found about a dozen unframed paintings in one of her suitcases. Among them, three Matisses and a Vlaminck. Well, that was a shock, n’est-ce pas? A real dilemma for a son. Did mother get the paintings for services rendered or did she steal them from customers sleeping off the effects of too much wine and amour? How many rendezvous was a Matisse worth in those difficult days? In which rich bourgeois homes in the Marais or in the huitième had these paintings once hung? Come on, young people, another sip to the memory of the dear lady. Whatever her choices in life, she had excellent taste and was a brave heart.”
Lezzard eyes were bloodshot. He stood up with some difficulty and went inside. They watched him, moving slowly and deliberately.
“How many times have you heard this story?” Laukhin asked Audrey.
She shrugged. “I don’t think he’s lying, if that’s what you are asking. He may be overdramatizing it a bit, but then most people do that with their own lives.”
“Why does he say he’s a prostitute?” Ben asked.
They were quiet until Lezzard returned. “Hard to find the pissoir in this place. Couldn’t remember where it was. I’ll finish the story, quickly, then put me in a cab.
“Even then,” he carried on, “those paintings were worth quite a lot of money. Especially for me, drifting from job to job, with hardly any prospects. I took everything I’d found and went to America, to New York. I told myself that’s where the money was. Besides, I felt it risky to try to sell Mother’s treasure in France. Who knew how she had acquired them? In the early years of the war, you know, I’d seen her with German officers. She stopped after a while, and that’s probably what saved her. That, and the anonymity of Paris. My fear was that if they were shown in France after the war, somebody could claim ownership of any one of the paintings, and I would not be able to explain their provenance.
“There you are. That’s why I left, in 1947, after Mother’s death. With the paintings I brought over I became half owner of a gallery. It had a good run. For many years, my partner and I had a very successful business. I was young, energetic. I even got married, a disaster that ended shortly thereafter in a nasty divorce. American women should be kept in caves and brought out at intervals for reproductive services. I have no idea where my former wife is, even if she’s still alive. I have a daughter in Denver, or nearby. She sends me Christmas cards, but she doesn’t tell me her whereabouts—probably afraid I’d visit her. I would, you know, if she’d only half-invite me. I seem to have many grandchildren, because the list of names signing the card is always increasing. Either that or she’s living in an ever-growing commune …”
Lezzard closed his eyes and nodded off. They watched him for a while, asleep in his chair, his head tossed back, mouth half open, a defiant and pained man.
Audrey got up. “I’m sorry, but I’m very tired. Do you mind? He’s a docile drunk.”
“I know,” Laukhin said.
“Make sure he gets into a cab all right.”
Laukhin followed her for a few steps. “It’s going to be over thirty degrees this weekend,” he said. “Why don’t we run off together to Corby Falls. Ben is from Corby Falls. He shares a cabin there with a friend of his, on the south shore of Clara’s Lake, only a mile or two from the town. I’ll get the key from him. It’s a bit rustic—there’s no electricity—but if you call it a dacha it acquires a romantic glow. I’ve been there once. There’s nothing near it except a pasture at the back and a few cows that won’t be interested in us. In the morning the water is fresh and undisturbed. We could jump in as the birds begin their morning chorus. In the evening, we’d eat canned dinners and drink wine by the light of the smelly oil lamp, and we’d go to bed early and tipsy.”
“Did you say, smelly oil lamp?”
“Basic, yes, but deliberate simplicity. Minimalist—we Russians started it. Total communion with nature. It’s where we are at our best.”
She smiled. “I’ll think it over.”
“Think it over?”
“Give me some time, Art.”
Time. That was what he didn’t have, closing in on fifty. She should have said, “Have patience, Art.” Trees have patience.
He went back to the table. After a while, they woke Lezzard, who had a hard time finding his credit card and cash for the cab. As they walked to Avenue Road to hail a taxi, they had to hold him steady.
* * *
Ben and he looked at Babel’s letters the next day in Laukhin’s office. He cleared half of his desk, and Ben carefully laid the three letters on the freed surface. The ink had faded, and the paper, tearing at the folds, had yellowed. Ben kept realigning the letters, and Laukhin believed he saw the beginning of tears in his eyes. The earliest letter, dated October 1928, was short and disappointing.
Mashenka,
I came by yesterday, but you were out. I left the money with your older son who didn’t recognize me and was reluctant at first to take the envelope.
I’m going back home in a week’s time. I’d like to see you again before I leave. I’ll be free for a couple of hours this coming Wednesday, at two o’clock in the afternoon. The usual place? I’ll wait for you. Please come.
The signature was illegible, but they could make out an ‘I. Babel.’
The second letter, from 1932, was more promising, although of indirect literary interest. It was long, full of anguish about what the future held in store for him, and contained details about friends and acquaintances. There was an entire page about his daughter, whom he had never seen before. Seeing his three-year old daughter, he wrote, had filled him with unimaginable joy, but “it’s a tortured joy, a joy unable to find rest or a future.” It must have been a slow and dark time for Babel to write a letter that long.
The third letter had Ben’s heart pounding—that’s what he told Laukhin afterward—by the time they finished reading it.
Dear Masha,
I am rushing to respond to you. Please tell your friend that I’m very keen to meet Marina Ivanovna while I’m here in Paris—anytime, anywhere. I’m motivated not just by the desire to meet a true, untainted poet—few are left—but also because it would help me with XX.
I worry that XX is becoming too long. I must constantly be on guard against this Russian sickness. But it’s so much easier to let your pen just go, floating over the paper like a sailboat blown by recollections. The first part—about the boy’s childhood in Odessa, in a Jewish family at the turn of the century, a family in which tradition and the pull of change clash under ominous signs and revolutionary hysteria—keeps getting longer and longer, and I keep cutting, and then writing more, and cutting again.
Familiar? I could write about this forever. I seem to have written about this forever. At first, I tried to stay away from obvious autobiographical details, so I changed many things from my own childhood. In time, I relented somewhat. I don’t have a vivid imagination so I’m better off sticking to what I know. Although my hero also starts in Odessa, I changed facts here and there. What I can’t change, what I don’t want to change, is what I take most delight in writing about: the smells, shouts, and cruelty; the nuttiness, the vanishing of a way of life and a certain innocence. So, without question, this is an autobiographical book in the sense that it draws heavily on my life (who said that we have only one book in us?) except, of course, in the last part.
I’m quite happy with the middle part too. Love, literary ambitions, revolution, civil war, Moscow, marriage and family, first literary success, fame.
And then (can you hear me sighing?) the hero’s many doubts, inability to write, family problems, distress, unexplained anguish, thoughts of emigrating. It’s here where I have the greatest difficulties, and where meeting and talking with Marina Ivanovna would help. My hero’s final choice is different, of course, but even with him taking the “correct path” I’m beginning to think I don’t have much of a chance of ever seeing my novel on bookshelves. Well, we’ll see.
It would be best if the meeting were not advertised. The fewer people who know about it the better. I’m free tomorrow the whole day. Sunday would do too, although with more difficulty, and not in the evening. As for next week, Monday and Wednesday are fine, but I prefer Monday so that we do not leave it to the very last moment. I’m leaving on Thursday.
They read the letter several times, passing it back and forth between them. Laukhin warned Ben that all that glittered was not gold.
Ben disagreed. “It’s gold, Artyom Pavlovich, pure gold, twenty-four karat. The Marina Ivanovna in the letter has to be Tsvetayeva. And, yes, I am almost afraid to believe it, but … Babel was talking here about a longer narrative work that was taking him many years, a novel, this XX. That’s what he did during those barren years. XX is the reason for Babel’s mysterious silence.”
They spent more than an hour speculating abo
ut Babel’s novel. They wondered whether XX was a tentative title alluding to the century the hero’s life overlaps or just a placeholder; whether XX was definitely lost or still in some archive of the secret police. Likely it was lost, but there was no way of knowing. Laukhin said that he had heard rumours of a novel by Babel, autobiographical in spirit. “I remember my father talking with Pasternak about it.”
“There’s nothing in the journal about it, is there?” Ben asked.
“No.”
“Odd, isn’t it?”
Laukhin shook his head. “My father was unduly influenced by his great hero, and Pasternak disliked Babel. Couldn’t stand him.”
He told Ben the story of the long awkward train trip the two writers had taken together. They travelled to Paris in 1935, to the Congress of Writers in Defence of Culture—only communists could dream up such insipid names—just the two of them. They had not been part of the initial Soviet delegation, but, at Malraux’s insistence, they were added by the Soviet authorities and sent together on the same train bound for the West. During their trip Babel was dismissive, mocking, sometimes even rude to Boris Leonidovich. Pasternak had not been in good health, and he was known to be a hypochondriac, a complainer, a man used to having one or several women around him, looking after his smallest needs. Pasternak’s constant whine about his health and his complicated family life probably drove Babel crazy, and he might have been testy with him. From that trip onward, Pasternak’s talk about Babel was always tinged by dislike.
“I never heard Pasternak say one good word about Babel,” Laukhin said. “Never. And he dismissed all rumours of a Babel novel by saying it would not have amounted to anything. He saw Babel as a jeweller, a craftsman of miniatures, a man who never had what it took to write a great novel. Babel was a small time conjurer, a magician with two or three good tricks.”