Goya's Glass

by Monika Zgustova

  What else does Nina say in her letter?

  Vladislav had returned to the south of France when I decided to leave him. I spent whole days waiting for him at home, but ultimately I started to get my things together: two packets of books, a shelf, several dresses, and a few folders full of papers. All the rest stayed in its place as if nothing had happened, from the teapot to the engravings of Saint Petersburg.

  When Vladislav arrived and listened to what I had to say to him, it didn’t occur to him to ask anything else other than, “Who are you leaving me for?”

  “For nobody.”

  After half an hour, once more: “I want to know who he is.”

  “On whose name do you want me to swear the truth? On Pushkin’s?” I smiled.

  I went to make a borshcht so that Vladislav would have a few meals after I left. He followed me into the kitchen.

  “You know how we’ll kill ourselves? With gas.”

  I saw him standing at the threshold of the kitchen, in striped pajamas, with his arms open, propped up against the doorframe. As if he’d been crucified.

  In the afternoon I left. He followed me with his eyes through the open window. On the table he had an enormous saucepan full of soup, which would soon stop steaming.

  TWO

  I found a room in the Hôtel des Ministères, Nina wrote to me in the following letter:

  On the boulevard la tour-Maubourg, between the Seine and the École Militaire. I had always found that neighborhood attractive. I went up the tall, narrow staircase to the sixth floor and opened the door with my number on it and entered a room at attic level; a folding screen hid the sink and the little gas cooker from sight. From my sixth floor room there was a view of Les Invalides, of the metal mesh of the Eiffel Tower, and of the long tree-lined avenues, which at that time of day were still silent.

  In the afternoon, after my arrival, I put my books on the shelf, hung my dresses in the closet, took out my notebooks, ballpoint pens, and fountain pens, and laid them out on the table, which wobbled a bit. Then I washed myself. When darkness began to fall, I felt totally exhausted. I collapsed on the bed. I lay there without moving, without even turning on the light. I stared at the window which darkened gradually. My thoughts too were dark ones.

  I was thirty-one years old; after eleven years of living together I had just left my partner. What must he be doing now? He probably had the cards on the table. For the first time that day, this image aroused a feeling of tenderness in me. Mentally I saw his sad face. Don’t think! Don’t think either about the fact that I am thirty-one years old and completely alone. Don’t think! My fatigue helped me to empty my mind. I fell asleep before it was completely dark.

  I slept until the afternoon of the following day, when I was woken by a knocking at the door. Vladislav! He had come to ask me how I had spent my first night alone. Then we went to have dinner together. Afterward I went straight back to bed and once more I slept until the afternoon.

  I remember the evening—after finding out her new address—I went to see her and invite her to dinner. At night, I took her back to her hotel. We walked past a Russian cabaret; the singing, the shouts, and the laughter could be heard a mile away. Nina hummed “Two Guitars,” a ballad they were playing on a balalaika inside, and said, “Young French people get drunk praising the Soviet Union and proletarian literature full of optimism and the builders of the great tomorrow, but it doesn’t occur to them, not in their wildest dreams, to ask why Stravinsky lives in Paris and not at home, or why Diaguilev died in Venice, heavily in debt instead of becoming the director of the Bolshoi ballet.”

  “They don’t ask us anything,” I said, “because they don’t need to, they have everything clear in their minds: we are children of the revolution and we are not busy building Communism, so it is logical to assume that we are the reactionary children of dukes and princes. Do we live in misery? That’s good for us. We got what we deserve.”

  “They adore Russian folklore almost as much as they do the Bolshevik revolution and the building of Communism,” laughed Nina.

  A few gypsies were singing in the cabaret and the Cherkessians were dancing with Astrakhan hats on their heads.

  “The French go wild over that type of hat. They say: ‘C’est typiquement russe!’ smiled Nina.

  “The French and the Americans,” I said, “as well as the English, sing Russian ballads with drunken voices, weep, and embrace each other.”

  “And above all, the glasses they’ve just emptied they smash against the floor,” said Nina, laughing so much she swayed as if she were drunk, “and like that, in the middle of the broken glass, the tears, and the drunken singing, they imagined they’ve turned into Mitya Karamazov, whose name vaguely rings a bell.”

  Only on the fourth day did I get up at my usual time, between eight and nine, Nina goes on writing in the letter. I looked around me, realized where I was and why, and I was flooded by a great wave of happiness. Through the window I saw the streets of Paris and the chimneys of the roofs in front and I said to myself: “All of this belongs to me, and I don’t belong to anybody!”

  This feeling of freedom made me go out onto the street. I walked through the parks observing the fruit trees that were about to blossom, in Champ-de-Mars I felt as if I were again in Russia, in an infinite field of corn. Under the bridges, the river murmured; in the Tuileries fountains, children sailed boats they had made themselves. Then I entered the Louvre as it was about to close, but I still had time enough to go through the Egyptian rooms that I hadn’t seen. I went back to the hotel and ran up the staircase to the sixth floor. In the attic room I already felt at home; I ran my fingers over the dresses hanging in the closet and I told myself once more: “All of this belongs to me and I don’t belong to anybody!” I took Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, got into bed, and read it through to the end. Then I fell fast asleep.

  I spent the whole summer reading. It was muggy. In the morning when I got up, I chose a book and read until midday; then I continued with my reading in the Champ-de-Mars, on the terraces of cafes, where I ordered coffee and ice cream, poured the black liquid over the ice cream and read. In the attic room it was so hot that I couldn’t sleep there, so I read; not the books that Vladislav had recommended to me with paternal solicitude, but things I had chosen for myself—Virginia Woolf, Joyce, Gide, Kafka, Proust.

  “Look, Igor, there are some friends of yours over in that corner!”

  “Who?”

  “Nabokov, with that woman who I’d like to paint the way Goya did his duchess. There is something of The Maja about her, haven’t you noticed?”

  I pretended I wasn’t interested. Nikolasha liked to talk like that, probably because he knew that it irritated me.

  In a corner of the Russian bistrot called l’Ours, Nina was sitting with Vladimir Nabokov. It hadn’t been such a long time since Nina had left Vladya. It didn’t surprise me that the couple had attracted the attention of my painter friend: Nabokov was blond and tanned, with a fine face, slim, athletic, dressed in a white shirt; Nina, vaguely Oriental looking, in a pearl-colored dress. There was something about the couple that was noble, aristocratic, that made them stand out in the crowd, at least for someone with a sharp eye.

  They were eating Russian pancakes—the cook of L’Ours made exceptional blini—with smoked fish and imitation caviar, and they were washing it down with vodka. Later the waiter also brought them a bottle of red wine. As Nabokov knew the owner of the premises, without a doubt it was he who had invited Nina to have lunch with him. They were laughing a lot; they didn’t stop making toasts, and it was clear that they were getting drunk, and not only on the wine but also, especially, on each other. Nabokov’s frenchified rrrrrrr, so typical of the Saint Petersburg aristocracy, he repeated again and again.

  “Where do you write, Nina Nikolayevna?”

  “At home, on a little wobbly table, with a view of the chimneys of Paris, or at a cafe table. Like everybody, no?”

  “No, not quite like everybody.
I write exclusively in the lavatory, if I might dignify that little room in my hideaway in the outskirts of the city with such noble terms.”

  “Why in the lavatory, Vladimir Vladimirovich?”

  “Mainly because it is sunny there all morning. And also for the not insignificant reason that my apartment is unfurnished.”

  “You live in an empty apartment?”

  “Completely empty. When my wife or my son want to go the lavatory, I have to take a break. But they know this and are respectful. They drink very little.”

  Nina laughed as if she never wanted to stop. They made a toast to that original form of writing desk.

  “It is a table or a chair, as I please, but is never the two things together. I’ll give you a piece of advice, Nina, even though you don’t need any. Don’t forget that the lavatory is usually the quietest place in the apartment.”

  The waiter comes up to refill their glasses. Nabokov pays and apologizes to Nina saying that he hadn’t noticed how time had flown in her company and that unfortunately he simply had to attend a meeting of the editorial board, which had started half an hour ago. Nina said that at least she could quietly finish enjoying the exquisite dishes that they hadn’t had time to finish while they conversed. He kissed her on the cheeks, one, two, three kisses, and was off.

  Now my moment has come, I told myself. I said hello to Nina and she invited me to sit at her table. I signalled to my companion.

  “Nina, let me introduce you to my friend Nikolay Vassil-yevich Makeyev, painter, student of Odilon Redon, and also a journalist and politician, the author of the book Russia, published in New York.”

  “That is to say, a Renaissance man,” Nina smiled wryly. Nikolasha also smiled and looked at Nina without blinking. She noticed it and took hold of the bottle to offer us a glass of wine.

  “Isn’t this friend of yours, Nabokov, a bit arrogant?” said Nikolay.

  I had never seen my friend behave like this. Although he liked to épater le bourgeois, he never got close to being rude.

  “Not at all. Why do you say that?” said Nina coldly.

  “It is notorious that in a gathering of people he pretends not to know his closest friend; he deliberately calls a man who he knows perfectly well as Ivan Petrovich, Ivan Ivanovich. Be careful with him, Nina Nikolayevna: one day he will address you as Nina Alexandrovna, you’ll see! And in order to show his superiority he likes to mangle the titles of novels, with his hallmark sarcasm. For example, apparently without thinking and with all the pretense of innocence, he calls a book titled From the East Comes the Cold, From the East Comes the Fart.

  “I don’t know what you’re getting at with all this,” Nina said, very distant. “Vladimir Vladimirovich has his eccentricities, as does everybody. In 1929, when The Luzchin Defence came out,” she went on, and although she was looking at me in particular, I sensed that her words were meant for Nikolay, that the painter interested her, that she liked to argue with him, “I read it twice in a row.”

  “Twice?” Nikolay said, surprised.

  “Yes. I found it to be a demanding work by an author who is meaningful, complex, mature. I suddenly realized that from the fire and ashes of revolution and exile, a great Russian writer had been born.”

  “You say that with so much pomp.”

  “Of course. Because at that moment I felt certain that our existence, that is to say that of Russian writers in exile, would have meaning. At that moment I felt that my entire generation had been vindicated.”

  “Nina Nikolayevna, I am familiar with the articles and the stories that you publish in Poslednie novosti. How can someone like you talk of generations and vindications? Haven’t you yourself said on more than one occasion—and if I may say so with a self-assuredness that irritates readers—that not only every writer, but that every individual in the end is alone? Does Nabokov care at all about his generation? Nabokov has earned his place in literature and no doubt he will keep it for a long time, but does this mean that the others, you among them, will survive only in his shadow?”

  “One thing at a time. I am convinced that each person is a world, a universe, a hell in his or her own right. I don’t believe at all that Nabokov could drag a mediocre person along with him, into his immortality. But Nabokov represents the answer to the doubts of all the humiliated and wronged people, all those who have been unjustly ignored, those who have been pushed into the background in exile.”

  “Perhaps you include yourself among those humiliated?”

  “I include myself among those who love life too much to have the right to be inscribed in people’s memory. I prefer life to literary fame, the mad inebriation of an action to the results, the path toward the destination to the destination in itself.”

  “Bravo, Nina! To the mad inebriation of an action by Nina Berberova, who with this speech has just entered the kingdom of immortality! Allow me to give you a kiss: mwah-mwah!”

  Nina wrote to me, How did love come? From the outside. A smile lit up the serious face that a moment before still seemed strange to me, and then the eyes began to speak to me. I discovered a charm in him unknown to me before: the parting of his hair, the warmth of his hands, the smell of his body and breath, his voice. I have always been sensitive to voices and the expressiveness of faces. Then, thanks to the power of love, when I had penetrated his inner life, when I had made it mine and it became for me a source of happiness. Then I realized that I had lost Nina. And that life does not wait.

  At our meetings for coffee, Nina would tell me how she came to know Nikolay, and of the outings and excursions on which they went together. They visited the L’Orangerie and the Jeu de Paume, for the exhibitions they admired by Matisse, Dérain, and Bonnard. On bicycle outings they rediscovered Corot in the trees next to a lake, Courbet in a river flowing between two rocks, Pissarro in the winding country lanes lined with plane trees and poplars. Sisley was everywhere: in the kiosks and the little bridges, in all the lanes and cornfields. Nina was transformed. She was less sarcastic and became more spontaneous. And I could barely recognize Nikolasha. He discovered within himself a kind of goodness that he must have kept well hidden. He was painting more than ever. Nina and he chose the paintings that he would exhibit in the Salon d’Automne.

  One morning he went to look for her at the hotel with a bottle of champagne in one hand and a sack of piroshki in the other.

  “Let’s go to the notary! There’s a house . . . ”

  From the notary’s they went on bicycle, through the countryside, to Yvelines. The bag with the bottle of champagne swung on the handlebar. They reached the village of Longchêne; there, in front of a half-ruined grain barn, Nikolay jumped off the bicycle.

  “This is our home!”

  And he was already leading her in. Here we will make a little kitchen, here we will have the bathroom, this will be the living room. You can choose wherever you want to have your study. In the attic, among the beams, they found a date: 1861.

  He uncorked the bottle of champagne, opened the sack that contained the piroshki made of meat and cabbage. While they had dinner they made plans about the fruit trees they would plant in the garden. Nina wanted to have beehives and a vegetable patch.

  A neighbor brought them a few armfuls of dry grass that had been recently cut and they made their bed with that. Through the window they looked at the stars. It was May, the cool of the night entered the building, and the hay gave off a strong smell, but the perfume of lilacs in the garden was so delicious that it didn’t even occur to them to close the window. They pressed tightly against each other, buried in the hay.

  “And time came to a standstill,” she told me then.

  It was spring. And Vladislav more than once, she told me, asked her friends about her, looked for her, wrote to her.

  My love,

  Nothing, nothing can change the great feeling that you inspire in me. It will always be the same. You know perfectly well how I reacted when someone wanted to do you harm or put some distance between us. It w
ill be this way forever: whoever wants to be on a good footing with me, must be on one with you too. Take care of yourself. Now I am going to sleep, it is almost four in the morning. I kiss your hand.

  Your Vladya

  It was spring. Vladislav went to see her at the offices of Poslednie novosti. They had lunch together; in the afternoon they walked along the Seine, and when it rained, they played billiards in a brasserie. Often they sipped wine and had some cheese at the George V Cafe, close by the offices of Vozrojdenie, where Vladislav was now making weekly contributions with his book reviews. Then they took long walks through the side streets of Montmartre, and Nina accompanied him to the rue des Quatre-Cheminées, to the apartment that was now his alone. They prepared tea and drank it slowly, until well into the night. Nina wrote to me later, I kissed his beloved face, his hands. He also kissed me, so moved that he couldn’t even speak. When, by sheer magic, I managed to make him laugh, I felt it to be a great success.

  Time came to a standstill. That is what she told me and that is what happened. Several times a week, Nina cycled from Longchêne to Paris. On the way back she took the main road—I cycled with her many times—and then an unpaved lane, and from a long way off she peered into the distance trying to see the green patch that was the roof of the grain barn that she and Nikolay had turned into a home. She liked to receive guests. Many couples went to see her: Kerensky and his wife, the Zaitsevs, the Bunins, Goncharova and her husband, Larionov. I most enjoyed her dinner parties when we gathered with just a small circle of close friends. In the summer we had dinner in the garden under the trees. Nikolay was a good host, the home radiated well-being. They had decorated it with Nikolay’s paintings and a few engravings by his master Odilon Redon. The guests walked through the garden and the meadows that separated them from the neighbors. For Nina, time came to a standstill.

  It was in the winter when she received news that Vladislav had become seriously ill. She wrote to me: