Here they are. My cigarettes have gotten wet. One day, it must have been in the early 1930s, when I was wandering through the streets of Paris, from the rue de l’Ancienne Comédie to the boulevard Saint-Germain, I suddenly saw Zamyatin coming from the opposite direction. Once he had walked past me, I turned around and followed him out of sheer curiosity. He headed for the rue de l’Éperon, went into a Russian bookshop. I did the same just a moment later. He looked at a few books and then went into the second room. A young woman, engrossed in a book, stood next to one of the shelves that filled the room. The writer looked at her inquisitively several times, as if she reminded him of someone. To me, her slightly Asian traits also looked familiar—she was slender, attractive, with a plain dress and a long pearl necklace around her neck. Zamyatin went up to her and lowered the book she had in her hand.
“Don’t you recognize me?”
The girl was confused. He reminded her of their meeting.
“We met at the New Year’s Eve party in Saint Petersburg, at the House of the Arts, remember? In 1921. We had dinner together, with some other people. You were sitting next to Khodasevich.”
They left together. And I remembered a room full of cigarette smoke, the kind of mist that always surrounds Russian intellectuals, the light from a candle, and an Oriental princess. How she had changed! Her way of being, defiant and independent, stood out even in the way she walked, lightly but full of aplomb, even self-satisfaction, and in the way she held her head high and in her mildly ironic smile with which, as they walked, she turned to Zamyatin, who was gesticulating theatrically.
They sat down in the Cafe Danton. I like these Parisian cafes where people sit facing the street, like in a theater. This way people sitting together don’t have to look at each other if they don’t want to.
The girl with the pearl necklace talked for quite a while, but in such a low voice that I was barely able to make out anything at all. The writer lit his pipe and rested his chin on his hands, all set to listen. Zamyatin, who was living in Paris at the time, didn’t want to see anybody. He, who had been a member of the Bolshevik party in the time of the tsars, avoided the company of Russian exiles. He hoped that one day the Communist authorities would give him back his passport and he could go back to his country, in which he had lost confidence a long time ago, as he showed in his novel We. Then, he started to speak. He clearly wanted an optimistic tone to accompany his optimistic words, so he spoke loudly.
“Nina Nikolayevna,” he said in an affected, almost military manner, “one must wait patiently and keep calm, like certain animals that, instead of coming out and fighting, remain patiently in their lair.”
“But is life going to wait?” the woman interrupted him.
I will never forget it. It was an outcry.
“Life? What life are you talking about? In any event, life forgot about me a long time ago.”
“Life only forgets those who forget about it.”
“What kind of life can a writer have when he is condemned to silence? It’s been a long time now since I frightened off my old comrades, in the publishing houses, in theaters. Any publisher interested in my work is making itself a candidate for the firing squad.”
“But you’re talking about Russia. Things work differently over here.”
“I want to serve the great ideals of literature. And to do that I need readers in my own language, in my own country, a Russia in which it is possible to create literature without having to be the lackey of worthless people.”
“We exiled writers also form a part of Russia. And here everything depends on us.”
Zamyatin looked at his hands, which had fallen onto the table like dead weight.
“I am afraid that it will never again be possible to serve our literature. I am afraid that Russian literature has only one future left: its past.”
He frowned. That was to be expected. His previously ecstatic face became ever more solemn. Zamyatin was beginning to look more and more like a walking automaton. Or rather, a walking corpse.
For a long while they sat in silence. The silence of the writer was heavy, long, painful. He knew not only that the girl was right, but also that she was aware that he knew. Zamyatin hated the ones who had stayed over there. As for the ones who had come over here, he despised us, too.
“Among the exiles, Russia exists,” Nina Berberova said emphatically, as if to convince Zamyatin as well as herself. “It is a poor Russia, a pitiful one, pathetic and provincial, but it is, all the same! Maybe it’s true that my generation of exiles won’t do anything worthwhile and the previous generation will soon disappear. But over there in Russia, over there they are killing people! Over here we are alive. Life goes on! That’s the important thing.”
After a moment, she calmed herself and added, “That is why it is better to opt for a clear and precise alternative.”
The writer had stopped smoking for a while and his silence was increasingly painful. His companion felt sorry for him, wanted to erase the effect of her words. She said, as if to herself, “Life goes on and wears away the trivial events as well as the important ones. Famous names and whole epochs are turned to dust. As somebody once said to me, we are like the people of Pompeii, you, me, and all the exiled Russians—buried under ashes.”
The writer was silent. Both remained silent for a long while. Eventually they got up to go, without even having understood each other.
They said goodbye in front of the cafe and each began to walk in the opposite direction. Suddenly I felt as if I didn’t know where to go. So I followed the writer. I caught up with him at an intersection.
“Mister Zamyatin, I just wanted to say hello to you because I admire your work. Allow me to introduce myself—”
“I am not Zamyatin,” he said in a metallic voice. I certainly hadn’t expected that. “I am not Zamyatin; you’ve made a mistake,” he repeated and moved on.
I was stunned. The traffic lights shifted from yellow to red, from red to green. After a while, mentally I heard another voice, impatient: Is life going to wait?
Yes, here is rue des Quatre-Cheminées, a street destroyed by bombs during the Second World War. The house where Nina and Vladislav lived doesn’t exist any more.
Quatre cheminées. Four chimneys indeed, but in my life there was only one woman. That cry, “Is life going to wait?” changed me forever. It tied me to her. That was it. My path was laid out before me: it was hers. Pursuit of that woman took me across Paris, into the French countryside during the war, and then on to America. It could be said that I had fallen in love, although now I think it was a matter of obsession, full of self-deception, one of those passions that help one stay alive, to live in a dream. This obsession kept me chasing after her and even had me investigating into her private life. Someone in love is worse than a spy.
During the roaring twenties, which for us exiles were rather on the miserable side, there was a Russian cabaret here instead of this cafe where I am now. We called our cafes “cabarets.” It belonged to Boris Stepanovich—I don’t remember his last name. Maybe Amfiteatrov? No, he was called Kozlobabin. We went there after finishing work in the Renault factory—Petrusha, Kostia, and I—to have a beer—Russian beer, as Monsieur Kozlobabin used to proclaim. Originally Petrusha was a cellist, Kostia a student of philosophy. I was an engineer, but I wanted to be a writer. In Billancourt we were all simply workers, some of the ten thousand Russian workers to whom Monsieur Renault hired in the 1920s so that we could manufacture his cars. In the evenings, Dunia, that stocky platinum blonde, used to sing in the cabaret:
Billancourt, new homeland,
a lair for young lives.
Every night, in a little corner,
Russia cries its eyes out.
Unforgettable. Another pudgy platinum blonde presided behind the bar—the wife of Boris Stepanovich, Madame Kozlobabina. She laughed with the regulars and made sure that nobody slipped away without paying. When a Frenchman came in by accident, no matter what he ordered, Madame Kozlo
babina served him that cat’s piss she claimed was vodka, and even added, with all the cheek in the world, “C’est typiquement russe!”
One day, as if she were an apparition, Nina Berberova turned up there. She was wearing an elegant suit jacket—at least that’s how it struck me on that day; at that time I didn’t suspect the degree of misery she was in—and had her short, black hair combed back. She sat at one of the tables and ordered a coffee. She pretended to be engrossed in her cigarette but I noticed that her big brown eyes were running over the faces, over the walls decorated with Russian balalaikas; she was scrutinizing people’s gestures and digesting snippets of conversation. She was probably looking for material for the stories and chronicles that she published at that time in the Poslednie novosti newspaper.
Petrusha, Kostia, and I sat by the bar, still with our work overalls on. I wanted the ground to swallow me up when that elegant woman approached to say hello to Petrusha, who was one of her friends. She didn’t recognize me after our first meeting in the darkness of the Bullier. Petrusha introduced me as a writer who was starting out and Nina winked at me, as if to someone who is taking part in the same conspiracy.
That day I found out that she too lived in Billancourt. I walked her to her street, rue des Quatre-Cheminées.
The stamp on the next letter that Nina sent to me is also American, which means that she wrote it several decades after our meeting at the cabaret.
“Waiter, bring me another beer!”
It was muggy. Dust and smoke came into the room through the open window. With difficulty, I managed to get Vladislav out of bed, and we both left the flat. We wandered through the streets without any particular destination. The city was just waking up from its summer lethargy, and in the coolness of the twilight hour, it was reaching a frenetic pace. We stopped at a Montparnasse bistro for a coffee, and then we headed for the other end of Paris, for Montmartre, where we lost ourselves amid the smelly streets. We entered a house of ill repute, then a dance hall. In a little theater located in a cellar, a music hall show was being performed; the cardboard sets were more pathetic than ridiculous. We watched a sideshow hermaphrodite, and then went over to the bar, where we were served drinks by fat naked women. Euphoric, Vladislav was planning the poems he would write about this other side of Paris.
But the following day Vladislav didn’t get out of bed, not even to have his morning tea. He said, “Why me? Why is it I who must suffer among all the people in the world? Why has this had to happen to me?” He blamed me for things. He kept telling me that I wasn’t as interesting or attractive as I had been at the beginning of our relationship. It fit perfectly into his logic that because Vladislav had lost interest in me, he had fallen into a depression. What was more, this situation paralleled his feelings about being in exile, the loss of Russia. The contrast between the misery in which the Russians lived in Paris and the opulence and arrogance of the Parisians kept me so busy that I wasn’t even trying to experience, for myself, the wealth of culture that was all around me. I felt buried under the poverty I was suffering, and the difficulties with the French language, which in Paris turned out to be completely different from what I had learned in school.
I couldn’t stand the sighs that came from his bed, day after day, without a word of explanation.
One day Vladislav received a letter.
“What do they say?” I asked him.
“I’m on the list of the one-hundred banned writers in Russia. My books can’t be sold there.”
I sat down on his side of the bed.
“Well, so what? Your life, our life, is here now.”
Vladislav covered his head with a pillow. I did what I could to uncover him, and we struggled with that for a while. Then Vladislav relented. With the face of a child who is at once capricious and hurt, and with a voice altered by anguish, he said, “Here I am not able to write. There I am banned from doing everything: writing, publishing, and living.
“You will learn to write here.”
I had no doubts. Like Tobias, I spoke with confidence, without realizing that he was dragging me into his hell.
“I can’t live without writing.”
“Then write! I’m always telling you.”
“I tell you I’m not one of those people who can write anywhere. The flower of writing does not bloom everywhere. Now I know that in order to write I need Russia. And I can’t go back.”
“We have brought our Russia here.”
No. He didn’t make any effort. Like an obstinate child, he covered his face with a pillow again. I took it away from him once more.
“Hey, Vladya . . .”
“I’ve walked into a dead end. I can’t go forward and I can’t go back.”
“There is always a way, it’s just a matter of finding it.”
“All right, all right . . . I know what it is.”
“And?”
“Put an end to the whole thing with a pistol.”
I took his hand.
“Don’t talk like that, you’re not Anna Karenina. Come on, we’ll go out and walk for a while. You’ll think about other things.”
“I don’t want to think about other things. I don’t want anything.”
“Nothing? You don’t even want me?”
“You, yes. You will die with me. First I will kill you, and then myself.”
Ah, what a letter! What times those were. I must take a break. Almost all the signs on this street were written in Russian then. And the air smelled the same as in Russia: garbage and dust; the perfume of lilac was added in springtime.
After our meeting in her neighborhood, which was also mine, I saw Nina in the offices of the Russian newspapers and magazines from time to time. She went there to remind the editors that they owed her money. One day I found her there and I noticed immediately that she didn’t look too well. Instead of the usual coffee that day she asked for a glass of wine, which helped her open up a little more than usual in conversation. Hearing one detail after detail of her situation, I got a good idea of her life with Vladislav.
“I’ve managed to get tickets to the Russian ballet for tomorrow,” I told her. “Would you like to come with me, Nina Nikolayevna?”
“But he won’t want to come . . .”
“Come on your own.”
“I can’t do that to him. What’s more, I’m afraid that . . . “
“Perhaps Vladislav doesn’t feel so well?”
“He suffers from something I call Russianitis. He can’t stop saying that without Russia he is unable to write.”
“So he doesn’t write.”
“But without writing he can’t live, which is to say, he can’t live without Russia.”
“But he’s got Polish and Jewish blood, not one drop of Russian.”
“Blood is surely not the most important factor. The important thing is where one has been brought up. We Russians are not like the English, who think nothing of travelling thousands and thousands of miles away from home, as if it were nothing. We Russians lose our balance after a thousand miles, and then we can never get it back.”
“Are you one of those who cannot live without writing, Nina?”
“Me?” For the first time that day she laughed openly, and I also beamed, as if mirroring her. “I write with great pleasure, but I would not exchange one single minute of life for the written word, my balance for the manuscript of a novel, or a tempest raging inside me for a poem. I love life too much.”
The next day, before the performance, I went to see them. The first thing I caught sight of was a man’s head, with black hair, caught in the sheets of the bed. Nina was resplendent in an evening dress, and was getting ready to leave for the theater.
“Are you not coming with us, Vladya? We’ve got tickets for the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, and you can’t tell me you’re going to miss that.”
His defeated head didn’t move.
At the theater, I stopped to observe Nina among the mirrors in the foyer: a dark blue, sleeveless dress, wh
ich flowed from the Chinese collar down to her knees without marking the waist; large black eyes full of curiosity; slim arms, thin along her body. I had never seen her naked arms before and their fragility moved me more than all her desperation and misery.
I took her by the elbow to lead her to the seats. It was a performance of Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring.
I see they have artichokes. I’ll order two or three. What do artichokes remind me of? Where was it? Yes, in Paris, one day Nina and I were having a coffee at La Rotonde as usual. She was thinking with her cup up close to her lips, and I watched her eyes as they wandered in circles. As if she had read my thoughts, she said, “What is love for you?”
I went red as a beet. But she wasn’t expecting an answer. Without noticing anything, she went on, “Love is sharing an artichoke leaf. Knowing how to do it, wanting to do it, and being able to do it. There are very few people who are prepared to do this.”
I murmured something. I wasn’t ready to talk about this subject; I hadn’t thought enough about it. “Waiter, bring me two or three baked artichokes. Yes, warmed up. Thank you.”
Nina shared an artichoke leaf with Vladislav.
Then she told me how one day the first wife of Georges Annenkov—who danced in the evenings at La Chauve-Souris—went to see them and left a piece of cloth that needed embroidering on Nina’s knees.
“It has to be ready by tomorrow.”
And she left.
Nina started to embroider. “If I manage it,” she said to herself, “I can earn up to seventy centimes an hour.” She spent the entire night embroidering; in the morning only a few stitches had yet to be done. That night, unusually, Vladislav slept like a log. In the morning he woke up and said, “The poor little thing is doing needlework! She’s spent the whole night working by candlelight until her eyesight has gone poor. Oh, that’s been described by Dickens and Chernyshevski. Who does that interest today?”
“Thank you. The artichokes smell wonderful. And a glass of red wine, please.”
I will finish reading her letter.
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