On the way he told me of his first meeting with Shostakovich in the 1920s. He continued while we looked for a place on the terrace of a cafe in the middle of the park; he told stories while the waiter uncorked a bottle of champagne effortlessly, noiselessly. Then he played for a moment with his glass, expecting me to suggest a toast. After all, today he today had had the kind of success that comes only once in a lifetime, if it comes at all! But I sipped my champagne without saying a word, so that he clinked his glass against mine, in silence, before tasting the liquid full of tiny bubbles.
“Do you still work as a quadrilingual secretary for that old witch? And you handle her correspondence with Albert Schweitzer, Gary Cooper, and Kurt Furtwängler?”
“Mrs. Toom’s latest whim: she now wants me to grow roses instead of writing her letters.”
“And you’ve refused.”
“I certainly have. So she told me to grow tulips. And if I don’t want to, then I can leave.”
“So you left.”
“I left. The very next day she called me to tell me that the detective novel she had half-finished reading had gotten lost somewhere. And that I should help her find it because otherwise she would never find out who the murderer was. So before hanging up I told her the murderer was the gardener.”
The pianist laughed his head off, and his face shone as it had during the concert, as it had a few months ago. I stopped noticing what was around me, I only saw him.
The waiter filled our glasses to the brim.
“To Shostakovich. To your Shostakovich,” I said in a low voice.
We touched glasses, we looked each other in the eye, we drank a sip.
“And to you,” I added in a voice that could barely be heard.
He placed a palm over my fingers and held them tightly. He raised his eyes to me in a way . . . I don’t know how to put it. Like Tolstoy when he was looking at his daughter in the photo in Alexandra’s living room.
I wanted to move my hand, but my fingers were imprisoned. I started to notice what was around me. In front of us there was a little artificial lake, an owl had started to hoot, and in some place nearby a popular American band began to play. Without a doubt people were dancing. I could hear shouts of happiness. I felt like dancing with them even though I didn’t know that particular dance. But I didn’t say anything. I took a sip of champagne.
“One day in Alexandra’s house you recited some verses about doves, Nina. I heard it through the open window.”
“Yes. This:
The doves flee frightened
from the feet of my loved one.
“The loved one in question is you.”
“Yes.”
“The doves are the men who are afraid of you. On one hand, you are attractive and they desire you; on the other, you are mature, self-confident, and intelligent. And sarcastic. And worst of all, you are mysterious. And men panic when faced with mystery, because they don’t know what to do with it. That is why they flee, frightened.”
I laughed without stopping, drank champagne, choked, and coughed, and with my fingers over my open mouth, I said to him: “But it’s about some Venetian doves! On San Marco square!”
“Nina, let’s go together to Venice! And afterward we will not separate anymore!”
I took a sip thoughtfully. Here we are, then, I told myself. This had to happen one day; once more I am in a situation in which someone wants to take away the one thing that matters to me. The owl hooted again. A gust of cold wind blew that hinted at the coming of fall.
“I prefer the path to the destination, the sea to the harbor,” I answered slowly, in a low voice. “Is what we have already not enough for you, Vsevolod?”
“I live submerged in insecurity. We spend the weekends together, we go to the theater, to the concerts. But all that is insecure. And I need security.”
“Either you have security inside yourself or you don’t have it at all.”
“Maybe you will have to think about it, won’t you, Nina?”
He kissed the palm of my hand.
Instead of the artificial lake in Central Park, I saw before me the Venetian sky in April—dull clouds, a heavy downpour, and then an intense blue sky, the square of San Marco full of silky doves. I arrive, dressed in an ivory-colored raincoat, and . . . zaaaaaaasssss, dozens of doves beat the air with their wings, higher and higher, they have disappeared.
“I’m not an insurance agent whose job it is to make people feel secure,” I said, and got up.
He looked at me, petrified.
The music from a neighboring dance hall could now be heard more intensely. A strident shout of joy reached us. It was a dark night, without a moon, without stars.
Suddenly my violent gesture came to an end. I caressed his cheek with the tips of my fingers.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t want to . . .”
He sat, stunned, and watched as I moved away with my head down.
The letter ends here.
September, 1952
Dear friend,
Tonight I had the same dream I had many years ago in Paris. Isn’t that strange? We were sitting in a little art deco cafe built of wood in the Luxembourg garden. You probably don’t remember, so many years have gone by! We were walking together from the newspaper offices and down the rue de Vaugirard, I remember it perfectly well. Then we had coffee together in the Luxembourg garden and I told you about a dream, which I dreamt again tonight! The one in which I found myself in the train station at Saint Petersburg. I was waiting for the Paris train. It was a goods train that was bringing the coffins of the dead from exile back home. I ran along the platform, past the endless row of cars that were entering the station building little by little, and I discovered Vladya’s coffin in the last car. The shouts of the railway workers woke me up.
Nina
The day after the concert, very early in the morning, Nina phoned up Alexandra Tolstaya to invite her to go on a long trip together through Colorado and Arizona. “The sooner the better!” she insisted.
On Friday afternoon they set off on their trip in Alexandra’s red sports car. They discovered all kinds of scenery, the most varied types of people, Indians too. From time to time Nina talked of her no-man’s-land; she said that sometimes it took over so much that it didn’t let her live her primary life, the visible one, and that life isn’t going to wait. The Kansas prairie made her think of Russia.
I didn’t find out anything about this until much later, when I was in America. Alexandra Tolstaya told me about it. Since then I have only received one letter from Nina, the last one.
Igor, my friend,
You have known me almost my entire life. Sometimes I think that if I hadn’t abandoned Vladya, he might have lived longer, he might have lived until the war, we might even have lived through the bombing of Billancourt, we might . . . Forgive me for saying such words. On the day of the bombing we might have died together; you know that the house where we lived on the rue de Quatre Cheminées was completely destroyed. Sometimes I imagine (and I am ashamed to confess it) that we are together in the cellar during the bombardment, he is protecting me with his body, he lies on top of me, and at that moment a bomb falls on the house.
Igor, do you remember my outcry, “Is life going to wait?” that day in the cafe in Paris? I knew it. Life never waits!
Don’t reply; there is nothing more to be said.
Yours, Nina
In 1993, at the age of ninety-two, Nina Berberova died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She had worked as a professor of literature at Yale University from 1958 to 1963, and Princeton University from 1963 to 1971. Until nine years before her death, her work was almost unknown to anyone outside Russian émigré circles. In the spring of 1984 the French publisher Hubert Nyssen of Actes Sud found a manuscript in his mailbox with a letter from the translator: “The author of this novel is Russian, and I believe that her work has not had the recognition it deserves.” In a short period of time, Actes Sud released the complete works of the author i
n French, novels and stories, which since then have been translated into dozens of languages. Almost overnight, Berberova turned into a worldwide literary figure.
At the end of her life, after the change of regime, Nina traveled to Russia, where several books of hers have been published and where her readers adore her.
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Monika Zgustová was born in Prague and lives in Barcelona, Spain. She has published seven books, including novels, short stories, a play, and a biography. Her novel Silent Woman was a runner-up for the National Award for the Novel, given by the Spanish Ministry of Culture. Zgustová has also received the Giutat de Barcelona and the Mercè Rodoreda awards in Spain, and the Gratias Agist Prize given by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague. She has translated more than fifty books of Russian and Czech fiction and poetry, including the works of Milan Kundera and Vaclav Havel, into both Spanish and Catalan.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
GOYA’S GLASS
THE GARNET NECKLACE
IS LIFE GOING TO WAIT?
About The Feminist Press
About the Author
More from The Feminist Press
Goya's Glass Page 26