I am leaving behind me people that I love, each of whom is a long story of friendship. I am leaving behind my beloved dead. My life.
No, I am not afraid.
Nina
We said goodbye at the railway station. Fourteen of us. Nina was going by train to Le Havre, where she was getting the boat.
“You will always be present among us,” said Boris Zaitsev.
“And not only because of your embroidery,” smiled Vera Zaitseva.
“Don’t catch cold; it’s a rough day,” said Nina as a goodbye to Bunin. Little did she know that in three years she wouldn’t have to worry about him because Bunin would be dead.
The train started to pull away. Nina stood by a lowered window, and tears rolled down her cheeks. I had never seen her cry. I went up to take hold of her wet hand as it pressed her handkerchief. I walked by her side following the rhythm of the train as it was pulling away.
“I feel like Prince Myshkin,” she said, smiling through her tears.
“And I, like Anna Karenina.”
“Like Myshkin and probably like Dostoyevsky himself, for suddenly I see everything with a great clarity, with absolute lucidity. Everything that I am leaving. And everything that has left me.”
The steam of the locomotive wrapped itself first around her, then around the whole car, then around the entire train.
THREE
She wrote to me in her first transatlantic letter:
. . . a gothic cathedral that floats in the sea, a slim ship with towering masts. A long time ago, I also saw Saint Petersburg like that, like a ship wrapped in ice. Now I saw New York the same way when after a sea voyage of one week, the city began to emerge out of the gray waves and the November drizzle. Slowly but surely, the cathedral got ever closer, forming a clearer and clearer outline in the lead-colored sky; and the closer it got, the more its temple shape changed, and it became a slim city on a narrow island, a capital consisting of towers with an infinity of lit windows. I felt that I had stopped moving and that the city was approaching me across the ocean. Whereas many cities are fixed in a single place, New York and Saint Petersburg float in the sea.
In the evening, sitting next to the window of a hotel on the corner of Ninety-Fourth Street and West End Avenue, I could not take my eyes off the unusual spectacle: around its eighteenth floor rose extremely tall skyscrapers, covered in lit windows. I was fascinated by the life in those windows, with their different lights, and again, as I had done in the taxi that morning, I asked myself where the center of the city was. In an unknown capital, is the center where we find ourselves, or, on the contrary, is it far from the place where we happen to be? The two sensations came together inside me on the morning, after the arrival of my boat, as the taxi was passing through the still-dark streets full of advertisements that hadn’t been switched off yet. The two suitcases of my exile lay on the floor of my hotel room, unpacked, but I had a copy of the New York Times open on the bed, at the page with the wanted ads, and I had already marked a few advertisements with red pencil. After the taxi fare and a week in advance at the hotel, I was left with exactly twenty-seven dollars.
When I arrived in America to look for Nina, I met her friend Alexandra Tolstaya, who spoke to me of her relationship with Nina. She told me about their meetings, the excursions they went on together. I already knew about them from the letters that Nina had sent me. In more than one she wrote of Alexandra, or Sasha, as friends called her, and of her other new friends. In one of them she writes:
Alexandra played with fire and asked me questions more often as a way of passing the time than out of interest.
“And how did you adjust, Nina?”
“I started taking the most diverse jobs,” I told her, amused, “always ones that didn’t require any knowledge of the language because I don’t speak a word of English. In a printing shop, in a factory. Once they fired me on the spot because I began to reflect on the meaning of technology and put the envelopes into the machine on their sides, so that the addresses were printed in the air and the envelopes remained blank.”
I was sitting with Alexandra and a male friend of hers on some tall dunes. The sea was roaring in front of us, and the waves were rising up with white hats, waves as tall as the ones I had only seen before in Saint Petersburg. They didn’t look very inviting as far as swimming was concerned. As for us, three figures tanned by the sun, agile flames of the fire leapt up and dyed our faces pink.
The man stretched himself out. I observed his long pianist’s fingers as they picked up a piece of sausage with a napkin, stuck it on a fork, and roasted it on the fire, while keeping his palms protected by the napkin. He noticed my look and quickly let the napkin fall onto the sand.
“And did you feel cheerful doing those dreadful jobs, Nina Nikolayevna?” he asked.
“What is this, a police interrogation? Now I feel cheerful and even on the brink of laughter as I watch you and your clumsy musician’s hands try to stick something as prosaic as a piece of sausage on the end of a fork,” I said, laughing with so much enthusiasm that no one could be cross with me for having mocked them.
Yes, Nina, how well I know your infectious laugh, how you let it out to cover up the terrible things you had just said! How many times I would like to have gotten cross with you, and I haven’t been able to because of the way you laugh!
Nina’s reply to the man—about whom all we know is that he is tanned by the sun—continues in her letter:
“Well I also thought to turn myself into a beggar. I took this very seriously. I even went to see the tramps and the homeless so as to negotiate a place with them and avoid putting myself where I wasn’t wanted.”
“Nina, as you are a beggar, do you want to ask for more alms, that is, another piece of sausage? With or without bread?”
Alexandra took it as a joke, but Nina had the idea fixed in her head that she would end her life among beggars. I understood her perfectly. She was far from being melodramatic or hysterical. Many of us were absolutely convinced of the same thing, this image of the end of our lives. We would end up as homeless people. It was a fact that we contemplated quite coolly.
“As you insist. Then together with the sausage I will also toast this crust. What do you think, Alexandra? May we ask our distinguished guest to play something for us on the guitar?”
“I would be delighted to play for you, Nina. But first I would like to know how you got to know each other, you and Alexandra.”
I leaned back on my elbows on the white sand.
“I can see that you have brought an enormous case full of questions with you for the weekend. I do whatever I can to make you shut up, but it’s just not possible. Alexandra will tell you, and I’ll add the details as she goes along, isn’t that right, Sasha?”
A handsome greyhound came running out of the sea. It stopped in front of us and shook to dry its coat. The fire was whispering, Alexandra shouted a few words, and the dog went over to the big house, with its tail between its legs.
“Nina came to see me in my office at the Immigrant Aid Organization. She didn’t come to see me as the daughter of Leo Tolstoy, but the fact is that when one is called Alexandra Lvovna Tolstaya, it is difficult for one to cover up one’s family connections. So I made her wait for over an hour and then I let her in.”
“With a not very friendly face, Sasha, if we want to round off the picture.”
“And I asked, ‘Nina Berberova? Are you the daughter or the niece?’ ‘Of whom?’ the visitor asked. ‘Of the writer, of course.’ ‘I am she.’ she answered with relief. I embraced her, and we went to have lunch together.”
“In a Chinese restaurant, we had roast duck with honey.”
“And on Friday I took her from Manhattan to the house, here.”
“Because you saw that I didn’t have a clue about fishing and, what was much worse, that I didn’t know how to play cards, sing a duet, and dance a waltz just as you all did in Iasnaia Poliana.”
“Just as we all had done before my father forbade us
to, when he grew tired of mundane amusements.”
“I learned to play canasta . . .”
“Come on, Nina. You play like a garbage collector. You’d lose the last thing you own. That necklace with the charm. What is it?”
“A dove.”
The man played the cords of the guitar with the tips of his fingers in darkness. I stretched out and suddenly I lay down on the sand, watching the stars that were emerging from the clear sky, the crescent moon that shone ever more brightly. As it had so many years ago under the walnut tree at Longchêne, as it had done in Sorrento, Berlin, Prague . . . No, there was nothing else except fog, like in Saint Petersburg. Before my eyes there grew, like shining ripe strawberries, a hammer and sickle lit by spotlights, and more and more hammers and sickles that hung from all the buildings in the square full of snow. With a rapid movement I turned to one side, and supported my head with the palm of my hand so that I could see the man playing melodies by Boccherini on his guitar while the reflections of flames danced on his face, arms, and that part of his tanned chest revealed by his half-unbuttoned shirt.
Alexandra has never managed to understand Nina. But, can I say that I have really come to understand her? Is it possible to know and understand somebody deep down, no matter how much in love we might be? The more I knew Nina, the less I understood her. Each time I realized with greater clarity that I did not love Nina just as she was, but rather my image of her, or that fragment of her personality that was destined to fill an emptiness inside me.
May, 1951
According to the date, she wrote these letters to me prior to the long ones I have just read.
Dear Igor Mikhailovich,
The first person I have had dealings with in the United States is Alexandra Tolstaya. I had seen her many times in photographs of her with her father, the writer Leo Tolstoy. At that time Alexandra was twenty-eight years old and almost forty years have gone by since then. She is a strong, well-built, very elegant woman. Some time ago, Vladislav wrote some things about her in his article dedicated to the death of Leo Tolstoy. Do you know this article?
I have also met Vsevolod Pastukhov, pianist, teacher, and poet, and we have made friends. Through his music I relive the ambience of Saint Petersburg, which in fact I never had the time to get to know well enough.
May, 1952
Igor,
At the teas Maria Tselina offers here in New York, I have met a whole bunch of Russians. The ones who used to attend her salon in Paris had known each other for years, ever since they lived in Moscow. Here it is different. When she invites people, Tselina doesn’t keep to any given criteria. Vladislav used to tell me that the day would come when Russian exiles, the literati, would meet up as an association of people capable of distinguishing an iambus from a trochee. But the ones I meet at Tselina’s place don’t even know how to do that, so now I divide the Russians into two categories: those who try to take the maximum advantage possible of their experiences in the west, and those who have brought along a screen that they have placed between them and the western world. And what I do is avoid the latter.
Nina wrote to me much later, in one of those letters that seemed to be rough drafts written before she started her memoirs:
In front of the fireplace, Alexandra was brushing her greyhound. I sat in front of her in an armchair, and I told myself that leaning back in a comfortable chair with a book in one’s hand was absolute paradise. The warm, salty air and the smell of recently cut grass came in through the open windows. Weakened by the muggy heat, I placed my feet on a stool while my eyes wandered from the framed photographs that were hanging on the wall to the man who was mowing the lawn in the garden.
“Alexandra, you have your no-man’s-land, don’t you?”
“No-man’s-land? What do you mean by that?”
“Since I was little I have been convinced that each person has her no-man’s-land, a land that belongs to her and her alone.”
“Are you referring to acceptable and unacceptable life, the legal and the non-legal, that which is permitted and that which is not?”
“Not at all, Sasha. What I mean is that each person lives or ought to live without limits, in absolute freedom, in a private space, even though it might only be for an hour a day or an hour a week or one day a month. Deep down we live for this private life of our own.”
“No, I don’t experience anything like that, Nina. I know nothing of that.”
“You don’t have a territory where you are alone with your father?”
“My father died a long time ago.”
“So?”
“And you think that . . .”
“Think about it, Sasha.”
“And you have this no-man’s-land, as you call it?”
“I also have my dead person.”
“A dead person?”
“Yes, my dead person is alive for me; and the living, for me, are dead,” I explained looking at a spot somewhere through the window, someplace beyond the garden, the sea, the horizon.
Then I fixed my gaze at a spot in the garden. A tanned man was mowing the lawn, the muscles of his shoulders were tense under his vest. Rather than a famous musician, he looked more like a Russian peasant. I thought that I liked him like that more than when he was playing the guitar or the piano. Alexandra noticed my look.
“You have charmed our pianist. He never used to mow the lawn before you came along.”
“Pastukhov must be about the same age as me, yet somehow he manages to bring me back the echo of old Saint Petersburg, even though I personally never knew it, just a few of its notes at the beginning of the 1920s, when they were already fading away in the atmosphere of revolutionary Saint Petersburg.”
“And that’s all? Doesn’t he give you anything else, this man, except these notes?”
“Yes, something else. I feel at ease with him.”
“And that’s all?”
“I’ll help you brush the dog.”
I took the brush and comb from Alexandra’s hands and started to brush the coat on the firm stomach of the reclining animal.
“Nina, why do you wear a dove around your neck?”
“Why? Listen:
The doves flee frightened
from the feet of my loved one.
Do you like it?”
“Yes. Who wrote it?”
“Him . . . My no-man’s-land. My dead person. A long time ago. We were in Venice, the city of doves.”
I continued brushing the dog vigorously.
Pastukhov came into the salon, shining all over, with three glasses of vermouth in his hand.
July, 1952
Dear friend, do you remember that during the war we sometimes spoke of certain special moments that have the power of transforming people? We didn’t speak about it in those terms, but that’s what it was: remember how I told you about my meeting with a Spanish girl, a moment which renewed tenderness and compassion within me? Recently I have been thinking of this subject. In some way we all have our no-man’s-land. Within the territory of this other life, the invisible one which is ours only and in which we live in complete freedom, unusual things can happen. Two attuned souls can meet; a person who is reading a book or listening to music can reach an extraordinary degree of depth. Certain moments, lived in our no-man’s-land, either complement some aspect of our “real” life or they have a meaning that is all their own. This inner life can be a pleasure or a necessity.
Nina B.
September, 1952
Dear Igor Mikhailovich,
You ask me if I have got used to living in America. Yes, I’m fine here. I try to understand America. I keep on discovering more and more. I admire America, its youth, and its dynamism. But deep down, you know . . . It makes no difference to me whether I live in one place or another. I like to have new impressions; they help me to cope with the pain I carry inside me. But in the end, isn’t it everybody’s wish to snuff out their most intimate pain with a blanket of new, different, strong, crazy experiences? What
we wouldn’t do to be relieved of ourselves!
Greetings from
your Nina
In an undated letter I received ten years or so after the earlier brief ones, she wrote:
In the program there was a concert dedicated to the memory of Dmitri Shostakovich. I was sitting next to Alexandra in the first row of the circle and was listening to the art of Vsevolod Pastukhov’s piano. All the other instruments are unnecessary, she told me; he alone is a whole orchestra that fills the concert hall. I observed the pianist submerged in the universe of the music where nothing of the outside world could reach. But perhaps something could: the pianist’s face took on from time to time an illuminated resplendent expression, like the one I had seen on him for the first time a few months ago in Alexandra’s house by the sea, he brought us some glasses full of golden vermouth with ice cubes that knocked against each other like bumper cars. I thought that musicians were happy beings: in music they have their no-man’s-land, which fills them completely and which acts as a refuge. Both Vsevolod Pastukhov and Dmitri Shostakovich did. Before them, Schubert, Mozart, Bach. Neither the Inquisition nor the totalitarian states would ever permit anyone his no-man’s-land, this other life. But with music it is possible to preserve one’s inner life even under a dictatorship. It is true that Shostakovich had serious problems with the totalitarian government, but nobody, not even Stalin, could take away the music that was echoing in his head.
Applause, a storm of applause. The audience gave a standing ovation.
In the wings there was a long line of people who wanted to shake hands with Vsevolod Pastukhov. Alexandra and I were the last in line. Pastukhov saw us and offered us the place next to him. He presented Alexandra to his friends and then me as “my friend.” I was stupefied; I felt my face grow severe, inaccessible. But no one was paying any attention to me, the evening belonged to Vsevolod Pastukhov. Alexandra excused herself, saying she still had work to do. We accompanied her out onto the street; she went off in her red sports car, which shrank until it melted into the flood of lights. Pastukhov called a taxi to Central Park.
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