Red Heaven

by Nicolas Rothwell

  For several years the two lived in discreet association. Mentions of La Rochefoucauld in the surviving letters of their circle are rare. His core was reticence and privacy; her special style was a brilliance of surface that masked her depths. She said that he had brought her intellect, and she had reformed his heart. In his correspondence he chose a single word to portray her character: it was true. Truth, discretion, intellect—pure ideals in a world of artifice and show. Events provided a stern test for La Rochefoucauld’s philosophy. On June the fourteenth, 1672, death’s solar flare blazed for all in their social circle to see. Madame de Sévigné was present at the Lafayette salon when word reached Paris of the French army’s crossing of the Rhine. There had been heavy losses, among them two of La Rochefoucauld’s sons. ‘That hail-storm’s blows struck him in my presence,’ wrote Sévigné to her daughter: ‘The tears flowed in his heart, but his strength and courage kept them from his eyes.’ His own death, when it came, was equally in character: a new version of the last of his maxims, austere, correct. The literary-minded Bishop Bossuet was summoned to provide extreme unction, though nothing in La Rochefoucauld’s works suggests the slightest interest in religion or belief in an afterlife. He refused to let Madame de Lafayette see him as he neared his end. With him gone, she fell into a despair that her nature only magnified. Her grief was very much like that of the Princess in her novel: it consumed her, it fed on itself, its unusual quality struck even Madame de Sévigné: ‘She has descended from the clouds, she never forgets for a moment what a loss she has suffered; she no longer knows what to do with herself, indeed she is no longer the same person, but completely changed, she thinks only of removing all thought from her mind. Time, which is so kind to others, only increases, as it will continue to increase, her sadness until the end.’

  Such was the life of the writer whose book Serghiana and I had read through in the mountains with so much attention and care.

  *

  Years went by before memories of those days of summer came back to me. I was far from the Swiss Alps by then: I had been sent to a New Hampshire boarding school. One weekend afternoon I was in the Founder’s Library, alone. The shelves were full of newly published titles, all untouched. There were serious-looking novels, and thick biographies, there were dictionaries, atlases and encyclopaedias: nothing familiar, though, nothing vivid or appealing at all. Eventually my eyes fell on an old paperback, lying off to one side: it was a Signet Classic, worn and scuffed. The cover illustration showed a young woman with flame-red hair, wearing a ruff-collared dress of mist-grey: her hands were crossed protectively before her, her face was turned to one side, her eyes were shut. Behind her, half in shadow, stood an unsmiling figure, more assassin than admiring suitor: there was a gold chain on his black doublet, he had a Jacobean beard and moustache, his expression was hard and cold. I looked more closely, and saw the author’s name in faded type on the cover: Madame de Lafayette. It was a translation of the Princesse de Clèves. I took it and started to leaf through it: the spine promptly broke in two. I glanced down at the pages opened for me in this unusual fashion, and began to read. ‘While they were out stag hunting, Nemours became lost in the forest.’ It was the scene in which Nemours finds his way, almost by accident, to the country house in Coulommiers, and overhears the Princess making her veiled confession to her husband. I read on for several pages, and my thoughts flew back to my first encounter with the book, and to Serghiana, who had loomed so large in my life in those years of childhood. She had receded from my world: she moved in different circles now; I saw her name from time to time in newspaper reports from overseas. How determined she had been that I should remember the Princesse de Clèves, and Madame de Lafayette, and pay attention to the lessons buried in the work! I smiled at the idea, and at the insistent way things we leave behind come back to us unbidden. Everything I read in those pages seemed suddenly familiar: the jousting tournament, the king’s death, the ensuing coronation ceremony, the sense of devastation and exhaustion at the story’s end.

  I was lounging in the cushioned window bay when the library door opened. One of the junior masters, a young man who taught me, and whose lessons I greatly looked forward to, swept in and flung himself down in an armchair. He saw me, and twisted round.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said: ‘Hi, guy.’

  ‘Hello, sir,’ I said, carefully.

  ‘Well, hello to you, too.’

  He came over, a friendly expression on his face.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he said. ‘I’m surprised to find anyone—the whole place is deserted. The long weekend. Don’t you have a home to go to? What are you reading, anyhow?’

  He reached down, and prised the paperback from me, and smiled, with a little nod, rather like a doctor noticing the first symptoms of an infectious disease.

  ‘French classic literature. Wow! But that’s right, you come from over there, don’t you, from France?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ I said: ‘More Central Europe.’

  ‘Well, it’s all the same cultural continuum, isn’t it? At least that’s what we tell everyone: cathedrals, good food, cobbled streets.’

  The food’s actually not that good where I come from, I was going to say, but I stopped, unsure where would be my point of origin from a strictly gastronomic perspective, and feeling that it would be disloyal to air this view. He thumbed through the book, which was in grave danger of shedding some of its pages, and brandished it before me.

  ‘Pretty antique, isn’t it?’

  ‘In several senses of the word,’ I said.

  ‘I’d never have read something like this myself, of course, at least not for pleasure, maybe for some godforsaken college paper or exam—and certainly not now.’

  ‘What would you read?’ I asked, dropping the honorific, and he glanced at me for a second, and ignored this little liberty.

  ‘How old are you, anyway?’

  I told him, and countered: ‘And how old are you?’

  ‘I’m twenty-eight,’ he said: ‘More than twice you! But you’re old enough to read responsibly—constructively—to build yourself by reading, aren’t you? Although I have to say every time I reread something I read before when I was much younger I realise very quickly that I just didn’t understand it at all.’

  ‘That’s what you find? Every time?’

  ‘Absolutely—yes!’

  This with great emphasis, as though the business of ageing and the passage of time had brought him a series of shocking revelations. He shook his head.

  ‘Youthful ignorance,’ he went on: ‘Youthful presumption—they’re worth outgrowing.’

  ‘And do you think that goes on happening all through your life, so even when you’re eighty-eight years old you’ll keep realising how wrong you were before?’

  He laughed. ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘So what would you recommend? You know, to point me in the right direction.’

  ‘That’s a big question to lay on me! You moved over here not so long ago, didn’t you? And you’re going to stay here now? All the way through to college?’

  ‘I guess.’

  He frowned, and assumed the look of someone consulting a vast storehouse of knowledge.

  ‘Perhaps some Pynchon. I’d be careful to start off with The Crying of Lot 49, though. Or Brautigan, or Barth. Steinbeck, too, for someone your age, and a bit of Faulkner to liven things up.’

  He handed me the paperback.

  ‘You should probably stay away from books like this, though. Why entrench old ideas? We’re not living in the seventeenth century, are we?’

  He shook his finger at me, in genial fashion: ‘Don’t let me catch you again.’

  ‘Of course not, sir,’ I said, and allowed this rebuke to sink in.

  He left; I nursed the paperback, and tried to fit its damaged halves together. Over the next few afternoons, in a quiet corner of the school grounds, away from everyone, I made my way through the book again, increasingly caught up by its story. The re
moteness of its setting and its refusal to grant its characters the faintest hint of happiness resonated with me: Nemours stupefied by his despair, the Prince destroyed by his growing knowledge of his plight, the Princess herself, drowning in love, deprived of warmth—these were fates that seemed in tune with what I knew of life. Other novels and stories were full of dramas and adventures, sudden reversals of fortune, last-minute deluges of fulfilment. The slow journey of Madame de Lafayette’s characters to their appointed ends seemed dignified and beautiful to me.

  This time the book remained with me after my reading, I had a fixed impression of it, I dwelt on its story—its scenes, its exchanges, its understated narrative, its silences. Gradually, by a process that was only half-conscious, it became transformed, it turned into a secret treasure, a closed world I could explore in safe passage, something no one else shared or knew. I kept it in the background of my thoughts; I even had a way of assessing events and people in its light: the various schools and colleges I passed through were much like the courts of intrigue Madame de Lafayette had described; the students and instructors there were like her characters as well. I became fond for a while of this game of comparisons—and so, long after I had first been led through its pages, the book at last left its trace inside me, and in this oblique fashion Serghiana’s wish from years before came true.

  *

  All that had vanished, though, and many other new books and enthusiasms had replaced the Princesse de Clèves and been replaced in their turn by the time I took my first steps into adulthood, and began a life of foreign corresponding, country to country, new faces, new languages—and the constant sluicing of images and printed columns through my mind soon made every tale and story I had known seem equivalent. Memoirs, histories, tragic dramas, romances, science-fiction novels—they all shared the same structures and principles, they had their well-signalled plots, their heroes, their predictable, inevitable denouements. More and more the threads of different books and films and works of art were weaving into each other inside me, contending with each other, annulling each other, submerging every detail in a sea of associations—and almost the only respite I found from this tide of words and images came when I was sent on reporting trips into the Soviet Union or the satellite dictatorships of Eastern Europe, where the flow of new information stopped dead. All would be still there, of a sudden, and the mind set free: the silence of an empty night-time street or a sparsely furnished room became something very like a blessing. Even after the end of the Eastern empire and the demise of the Soviet Union, these destinations remained for several years havens of relative tranquillity, with the result that Moscow, once the most forbidding of capitals, became one of my favourite ports of call. And so it was that, midway through 1996, a year of upheavals in Russian politics, I arrived at Sheremetyevo airport, ready for the presidential election campaign, and with elaborate plans already drawn up for the weeks ahead. I would base myself in the city, but leave time free for other projects, among them one that had beguiled me ever since I first read the brief memoir of the revolutionary leader Bukharin’s widow, Anna Larina. In its pages she sets out her happy recollections of childhood, when she lived with her father in an apartment near Bukharin’s in the Metropol Hotel. Larina mentions Bukharin’s fondness for animals: he loved hedgehogs, and gave several of these delicate and graceful creatures to Stalin as gifts of friendship; he turned a disused ornamental fountain outside his front door at the Metropol into a private menagerie—it housed in turn a marmoset, an eagle, a bear cub and a hawk with a broken wing. Eventually Bukharin was obliged to move to the Kremlin, where he kept a pet fox in his quarters. Soon after his arrival there he became an overt target of Stalin’s hostility. He was charged with attempting to overthrow the Soviet state, tried, and executed. Larina vanished for two decades into the Gulag, where, deprived of books and pen and paper, she became adept at memorising verses and stories. The fox remained at large in the Kremlin grounds for several years, running here and there and searching vainly for visitors with whom to play hide-and-seek. I found this saga of Bukharin’s animals particularly touching, a tale to tell. I had reserved a quiet room at the Metropol for the length of the presidential campaign. I settled in.

  One morning I went down very early to the hotel’s breakfast salon. It was a vast gallery, marble columned, with a wide, curved roof of decorated glass and high lunettes in frescoed Jugendstil. The tables were all set, as if for a banquet. Towering beside each one was an ornamental urn filled with an arrangement of lush flowers, peonies, tiger lilies, cattleya orchid blossoms, bright, strong-scented, their fronds hanging low. Jets of water played in the fountain at the centre of the gallery; soft violin music came from above. The space was empty, except for a lone waiter, a young man, sitting slouched beside the buffet table, reading. He looked up, saw me, rose to his feet and stuffed the book in his jacket pocket, an anxious expression on his face. After a few moments he came over to me, weaving his way between the tables and the banks of flowers. He glanced around, and made a little bow of greeting.

  ‘Gospodin,’ he said: ‘Sir—can I perhaps interest you in one of the many delicacies on our breakfast menu?’

  ‘What did you have in mind?’ I said.

  He clasped his hands behind his back and began reciting: ‘Compote of tropical fruits, cloudberry muffins, caviar—Oscietra, from the best merchants—or a special omelette fines herbes, made from Siberian duck eggs.’

  ‘Wow, Siberian duck eggs!’ I said: ‘It’s too early in the morning for that!’

  ‘I can personally recommend them,’ he countered.

  I looked at him more attentively. He was tall, and thin, with lanky hair. There was a faint tinge of defiance about him.

  ‘How come?’ I asked.

  ‘I grew up in Khabarovsk. It’s on the Amur River, close to the Chinese border, in the Far East.’

  ‘I know where it is,’ I said: ‘I’ve been there.’

  He raised his eyebrows on hearing this piece of information.

  ‘You’re a long way from home,’ I said.

  ‘It wasn’t home. It’s just the place where I spent my childhood.’

  ‘And why were your family living there? Were they nomenklatura? Or internal exiles?’

  ‘A little of both, perhaps,’ he said: ‘Those weren’t really exclusive categories, you know, in the old Soviet Union.’

  ‘And what are you doing here, now, in Moscow—besides being a waiter?’

  ‘I’m a student, of course.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Literature. French literature. I mean to go to Paris to complete my studies.’

  ‘I don’t mean to be discouraging,’ I said, ‘but I’m not sure that Paris is really the same kind of city today as it was in the days of Turgenev.’

  ‘I’m not interested in Russian books and Russian writers,’ he said: ‘Only French. Only literature of the highest civilisational value. That’s why I immerse myself in works like this.’

  He pulled from his jacket the leather-bound book he had been reading and waved it in front of me.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s the Pléiade of Madame de Lafayette, the author of the Princesse de Clèves, most perfect of all novels!’

  I nodded, and fell silent. I felt the great gears of pattern and coincidence grinding within me. How arcane and full of depth life seemed to me as I listened, and let his words sink in.

  ‘Are you familiar with it?’ asked the waiter, in an insistent voice.

  ‘In a sense,’ I said, a touch reluctantly.

  He smiled in triumph. ‘You see! How little you know! It’s a perfect illustration for me. Life has set a trap for us. Life, and politics.’

  ‘For us?’

  ‘People my age here had hopes. We thought we would have fine, free, western lives. Lives like yours. But we can already see the fate that’s been prepared for us.’

  I looked up at him. ‘What fate is that?’

  ‘More joke than fate, in fact. Isn’t
it clear enough to you? We love the West, we steep ourselves in your traditions, they seem like life and light for us, and they mean nothing anymore in your world—but it’s you who will shape our future.’