‘Josette promised me she wouldn’t tell you that.’
‘Surprise! She broke her promise. I’d have thought you might have worked her out by now—you can see how high she’s flown. She said you’d been in Romania. Much shooting?’
‘It was chaos. It still is.’
‘I can believe it. Romanians have a penchant for drama—and for revenge. It’s nothing compared to what you’ll see when the Soviet Union breaks apart.’
‘Is that likely?’
‘It’s a certainty: give it a year or two. Then we’ll have old Russia back again—the dark, panting beast that prowls at Europe’s gate. Sit now—sit with me, there, across from me. Tell me everything. Sink into the sofa. Sink into dreams.’
‘But why are you here, beside the lake?’ I asked her: ‘It doesn’t seem like you. I thought you preferred the mountains. That’s where I’d go to look for you.’
‘If you’d been looking. But the mountains aren’t what they once were. Think of Vulpera.’
‘What about Vulpera?’
‘Were you so cocooned in your world of revolutions that you didn’t hear? There was a fire at the Waldhaus—almost a year ago, in springtime, at the end of May. Nothing’s left there but a shell. It was in all the Swiss and German newspapers—long reports, very detailed, but saying nothing. It was arson, of course: it always is with grand hotels. The blaze burned through the night—it made for striking images—sheets of flames consuming everything: fires in the great reception hall, roof beams splintering and cracking, balconies and towers tumbling down. A pleasingly symbolic event.’
‘In what way?’
‘Hundreds of ways. A cleansing of memories. The old order’s summer palace burning to the ground. Goodbye to nostalgia. Goodbye to that enchanted world of loss. New griefs for new times now.’
‘You must have been heartbroken when you heard.’
‘Not at all. Buildings are just backdrops for us—stage-sets, nothing more. I was pleased—even happy; happy that that the last traces of the days and weeks I lived through there have gone. No one can walk through those reception rooms that I remember so well anymore: they’ve passed into unreality. And I’ll never make the journey to those mountains and the valley and Tarasp castle again: I can only see them in my mind. You might like to go back, though: go back and see what’s left. It should be your ideal landscape—you were always fond of ruins.’
‘I was? I don’t remember that.’
‘I promise you it’s true. I know you better than you know yourself. Émigrés and exiles have a love of ruins. It’s natural, it’s almost diagnostic of them—ruins are their home.’
‘Is that what you think I am?’ I asked her.
‘Fencing with me? Still? It’s not necessary. Surely you can tell. You’re free from me now. Free to reinvent yourself. And I can see you’ve already made a start.’
She raised her eyes to mine, and looked straight into them, and smiled her most inward smile.
‘That’s an ambiguous look,’ I said.
‘How hard it is! You can’t imagine: it’s the hardest thing in life—letting your creations go.’
I was about to make an answer. I paused: I took in the room around us: the winding patterns in the carpet, the hanging tapestries, a gilt-framed mirror reflecting shadows, heavy curtains, half-faded, their hems of golden thread. It was a cage—an ornate cage: and at its centre, hands still clasped together, frail, determined—her.
‘Why are you staring at me that way,’ she said: ‘Assessing me—weighing me up—as if you’ve never had the chance before?’
‘Is that it?’ I said then: ‘Is that why you vanished from my life—why you stopped writing those long letters to me; stopped calling; left me in the hands of others?’
‘It had to be,’ she said, in a hard voice: ‘You had to make your way. It was time to cut you off. Of course I could dream up some soft pretence for you: a pleasant tale, and send you away with a happy feeling in your heart. I could tell you there were other reasons: many of them—I was producing films, it was California, the West Coast, demanding people and demanding times. I could tell you it was just life, the way of things—random life that takes people away from each other, events, chance, the ebb and flow. But I’d be lying. It was done on purpose. I’m sure you knew that already. It had to be that way.’
‘And you’ve come to rest here now? It’s nothing at all like the West Coast: there’s no resemblance.’
‘You don’t like it? You don’t find it suitable?’
‘Isn’t it rather a bourgeois place for a red general’s daughter to end up?’
‘A stab! So let me parry. This isn’t just a riviera full of plutocrats.’
‘No? I can guess what you’re going to tell me—that it’s the lakeside of tranquillity, the misty shore where dreams begin.’
‘Along those lines—though not in quite such florid terms. Adjectives are a weakness: at least remember that!’
‘You use them,’ I said.
‘What an insult! I never use them: I despise people who use adjectives.’
‘I’ll take it on board,’ I said.
She gave me one of her measuring looks. ‘So casual—so at ease in your chosen life. I’m glad.’
‘You sound the opposite. You sound critical.’
‘I can be both at the same time.’
‘The important thing,’ I said, ‘is that you’re at ease here: you’ve found a place that suits you well. How did you find it? And why did you choose it?’
‘Don’t you know? Isn’t it plain to you? After all your years of schooling and study? After a childhood spent at my feet?’
I shrugged. ‘I give up. Tell me.’
‘The lakeside’s always been a sanctuary—a paradise of exiles. Musicians, artists, dancers, writers—they all flocked here. Everyone who mattered in the nineteenth century came to Vevey: Gogol, Byron, Shelley, Lamartine.’
‘Anyone more recently?’
‘Eminescu, Sienkiewicz, Adorno, Kafka.’
‘You’re making that up!’
‘Well, the last name, perhaps—but still—it’s a distinguished parade of ghosts, don’t you think? And that’s even without counting the old white Russian chloroforming his poor butterflies up at the palace in Montreux: not that I’d ever count a soft-voiced reactionary like him.’
‘And that’s why you came here: to join the list?’
‘No: I came to make a film: about someone else. Someone much more significant. No idea? Where’s your history? We were going to make a film of The Confessions—Rousseau.’
‘Of course,’ I said: ‘Because it would lend itself to cinema so wonderfully well.’
‘There’s no call for sarcasm: another bad habit you’ve picked up. I think I still had poor Corey back with me then. All the financing was in place. We set up here, in this hotel. But there was a problem with the actors: the way there always is: the project fell apart.’
‘You could still make it. He’s almost in fashion these days—the me generation, self above all else—that’s a tune people want to sing.’
‘It’ll never happen now. The time for dreams like that has gone.’
‘You were going to set it in his time?’
‘That would have been much too easy. The book’s like a screenplay for a costume drama. That’s what Rousseau did with his life: change scenes, sketch characters, try out attitudes. And the stage-sets are all still standing: you can walk down the promenade here and find the lodgings where he lived: there’s a little plaque to tell you he was there. What fame! But I had something different in mind: reveries: screen meditations, a series of them, meanders: in his style; true to him; set in the places where he found refuge. Do you know any of them?’
I shook my head.
‘No? The retreat at Ermenonville? The house near Chambéry? The island where he was so blissfully happy, on the Lac de Bienne?’
‘Afraid not,’ I said: ‘There hasn’t been much time for cultural excursions—you
can see life’s been taking me down different paths.’
‘You should change course. The years to come would be well spent if you made a pilgrimage in the footsteps of Jean-Jacques.’
‘You think so highly of him?’
‘He was a monster—but he freed himself from life’s chains. I’ve never come across a writer whose presence lingers quite so strongly in the places that he loved.’
‘Your tastes have changed since the days when we used to read the Princesse de Clèves to each other in the mountains.’
‘Not at all,’ she said, her voice triumphant: ‘You’re wrong: quite wrong! Jean-Jacques admired Madame de Lafayette greatly—he wanted his books to be like hers.’
‘I’m glad I’ve been able to give you a moment’s satisfaction,’ I said.
She looked back at me. Her expression broke. ‘My child, don’t you understand anything? I was happy then—I was happy, reading to you. When you were a boy—your eyes so wide. I was giving you the world. Those days were everything for me. I never wanted them to end.’
‘But they did. Abruptly.’
‘How cold you sound. I taught you well. You learned from the Princess, didn’t you?’
‘Learned what?’
‘You know what the lesson was: to be circumspect in everything. To keep your feelings locked up in the fortress of your heart.’
‘And that’s why it was the first book we read together, after all those little mediaeval tales you dragged me through?’
‘I was trying to show you something else as well by choosing it. Something even more important.’
She gave me a stare of challenge.
‘Show me what, exactly? Should I guess?’
‘That there are magic books for us to turn to—a handful of them: books to heal the wounds of life.’
‘As they did for you?’
She looked uncertain. She paused, and clasped her hands together more tightly. ‘Do you regret those days, when we used to sit together so peacefully all afternoon long? Do you think that time was poorly spent? From the tone in your voice it almost sounds that way.’
I was about to make some answer when a concierge from the hotel appeared at the entrance to the salon.
‘Madame Semyonova-Terek,’ he began: ‘Something for you and your guest?’
‘Leave us,’ she said: ‘We’re talking.’
‘Terek?’ I repeated: ‘You’ve added a name?’
‘It was my father’s nom de guerre. Appropriate, don’t you think? Made up—or borrowed, if you like. It’s the name of the river that runs through the mountains of his homeland: pale blue and cold and pure.’
‘Like all your favourite rivers.’
‘The names we choose aren’t immutable. I use them to remember. To bring things back. It’s a trick that works, much better than madeleines.’
‘Madame?’ It was another concierge, looking even more flustered. ‘Forgive me, please.’
‘What?’
‘The banker from Zürich.’
‘Tell him to wait.’
‘He’s already been waiting for some while. You gave him a time for his appointment with you. Such people generally don’t like being made to wait.’
‘This one will wait, I assure you,’ said Serghiana. ‘It’s his role in life to wait.’ She gave a quick, dark laugh and waved the concierge away. ‘Go on,’ she said to me: ‘More talk.’
‘I was in Zürich last month,’ I said: ‘After Prague—before Romania. I hadn’t been there since I was a boy.’
‘Really,’ said Serghiana, in an abstracted voice.
‘I saw Ady there. Can you believe it, after so long?’
She turned to face me. ‘My child,’ she said: ‘Either your imagination’s running away with you—which isn’t that unlikely, in fact, is it—or you’ve lost your sense of time. Not a good thing in your chosen profession, I’d think, on balance.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Didn’t you hear? Palafay’s dead. She took her own life: in Vienna—in that mansion; not long after her husband died. She was true to herself—deceptive to the end: stealing across life’s last frontier without papers like the refugee she was. At least she remembered to have those two outlandish dogs of hers put down the day before. I thought that was an elegant touch.’
‘I had no idea,’ I said.
‘You must have been mistaken, then, in thinking that you saw her,’ said Serghiana, firmly.
I took in this news.
‘Why so quiet? Do you feel the loss? Do you miss her, now you know she’s left us? Would you miss me the same way?’
‘Please,’ I said: ‘Don’t even think such things.’
‘How trite and conventional you sound! How tamed and soft. Why shouldn’t I think them? Don’t you see how it is here for me? Look around you: all this pointless splendour. Jasmine and tiger lilies in every vase; blue rugs from Isfahan; Fortuny damask on the walls. Everything pleasing: everything in perfect taste. Through the windows the sun on the peaks each morning, dazzling the eye; the women with their lapdogs, strolling on the promenade; the lake steamers from Lausanne and Montreux calling at the jetty, always exactly on time. It’s like Svidrigailov’s eternity in Crime and Punishment.’
‘Remind me.’
‘All there will be forever is a little room. A tiny room, like a cabin in a bath-house, with black dust and grime on the walls and spiders skulking in the corners—that’s all, forever. Changelessness. I never guessed it could be so hard to bear. I thank my stars I’ve got the exit visa in my passport.’
Those words spoken sharply: almost spat out.
‘What on earth do you mean?’ I said: ‘What are you talking about?’
‘You do a good impression of understanding nothing. You want me to show you X-rays?’
She saw my face. She stopped.
‘Please,’ she said then: ‘Don’t be agitated. Compose yourself: for me. Just look at me, and tell me. Can you see the signs of it in my face? Is it there? How do I seem to you?’
‘You always seemed majestic.’
At this, she smiled faintly, and even gave a little laugh. ‘A telling choice of the past tense. Your mouth is for speaking truth, not lying. Your eyes are for seeing truth, not illusion. Use them. Avoid pretence. Can’t you say what you see in front of you? Silence? You can’t say anything? Then I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you what I see in the mirror. There’s no light left in me—my skin is pale like ash, my breathing’s like a whisper, my heart barely stirs. And see these—my hands?’
She held them up, and flinched again. ‘How twisted they are. How bent out of true. They revolt me.’
I got up from my seat to go across to her.
‘Stay where you are! No scenes. I don’t want you coming over here and kneeling at my feet.’ She glared.
‘What do you want?’ I asked then.
Her manner changed. Her face became gentler. ‘You remember how I tried to teach you everything I knew, don’t you?’
‘I do,’ I said.
‘I tried to show you all the secrets of the world when you were with me. All the wonders I’d seen rushing past me in the journey I took through life.’
‘A wild life,’ I said.
‘It was a fiasco. In exile from exile. At home in homelessness. That’s why you were so perfect for me. As I always told you: you belonged nowhere—you had no home.’
‘Weren’t you that for me?’ I asked.
She paid those words no attention. She looked upwards and frowned. ‘My child—you must know this is our last meeting.’
‘Then I’ll carry you in my thoughts,’ I said.
‘That’s your affair. Make your own way now. All my life I lived with scorn for others: scorn for their weakness. Now I’m weak in my turn. Before the nothing—before the grandest, most romantic path of them all. Tell yourself I’ll watch over you—always. Now leave me be. Go on your way through life. Live for me, see for me, breathe for me. Send in the banker. Go.’
; VII
Envoi: Bodensee
YEARS WENT BY before I saw the alpine peaks again. I travelled; I lived in different countries. I saw conflicts, I moved between them, I described them, I steeped myself in them until I was settled in this system of impermanence: it suited me; I scarcely felt the beat of passing time. Then, one autumn, after long negotiations, an East–West summit was announced: to be held in Davos, in the shadow of the Schatzalp. The usual piece of theatre. I was sent to it. I attended. I watched. Motorcades, leaders and their teams of diplomats; banquets, speeches, words of prudence, a communique, success. Such concord, so precisely scripted: I was glad when at last the time came to escape. I went back to the press hotel, and looked round for my photographer to say goodbye to him. We had worked together before, often, in the Middle East, in South-East Asia: we used to know each other well. I found him on the terrace promenade, his expression serious.
‘I was just thinking about you,’ he said.
‘Time for me to take off, Bruno,’ I told him.
‘Really? You don’t sound very sure. You don’t look very sure. In fact you look as though you’re in two minds. Lost. Nothing new, of course.’
‘Your laser judgement,’ I said: ‘And your intuition. Still in place.’
‘What would I be without them? Just a man with a camera. To make a picture you have to know what lies behind it. The image is the easy part.’
‘I remember.’
‘So?’ he asked me: ‘What’s the shadow—what’s the trouble? You can tell me. Aren’t we still friends? Aren’t we like brothers? Feeling uneasy—is that it? Being back here, with your paradise of childhood so close by?’
‘Did I ever talk about that time with you?’
‘You used to speak of little else.’
‘Don’t exaggerate,’ I said.
‘I’m not. You don’t see yourself that clearly: word people never seem to. You think you have a perfect front: a disguise against the world. You think it works so well that no one knows you; but all it does is stop you from knowing anyone. That’s why you’re better when you’re part of a team; you need someone else around, someone to look out for you.’
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