To return to the trivia: I recall regaling the company with one of the howlers I had noticed in the «translation» of Tamara. The sentence vidnelos’ neskol’ko barok («several barges could be seen») had become la vue иtait assez baroque. The eminent critic Basilevski, a stocky, fair-haired old fellow in a rumpled brown suit, shook with abdominal mirth—but then his expression changed to one of suspicion and displeasure. After tea he accosted me and insisted gruffly that I had made up that example of mistranslation. I remember answering that, if so, he, too, might well be an invention of mine.
As we strolled home. Iris complained she would never learn to cloud a glass of tea with a spoonful of cloying raspberry jam. I said I was ready to put up with her deliberate insularity but implored her to cease announcing ю la ronde: «Please, don’t mind me: I love the sound of Russian.» That was an insult, like telling an author his book was unreadable but beautifully printed.
«I am going to make reparations,» she gaily replied. «I’ve never been able to find a proper teacher, I always believed you were the only one—and you refused to teach me, because you were busy, because you were tired, because it bored you, because it was bad for your nerves. I’ve discovered at last someone who speaks both languages, yours and mine, as two natives in
one, and can make all the edges fit. I am thinking of Nadia Starov. In fact it’s her own suggestion.»
Nadezhda Gordonovna Starov was the wife of a leytenant Starov (Christian name unimportant), who had served under General Wrangel and now had some office job in the White Cross. I had met him in London recently, as fellow pallbearer at the funeral of the old Count, whose bastard or «adopted nephew» (whatever that meant), he was said to be. He was a dark-eyed, dark-complexioned man, three or four years my senior; I thought him rather handsome in a brooding, gloomy way. A head wound received in the civil war had left him with a terrifying tic that caused his face to change suddenly, at variable intervals, as if a paper bag were being crumpled by an invisible hand. Nadezhda Starov, a quiet, plain woman with an indefinable Quakerish look about her, clocked those intervals for some reason, no doubt of a medical nature, the man himself being unconscious of his «fireworks» unless he happened to see them in a mirror. He had a macabre sense of humor, beautiful hands, and a velvety voice.
I realized now that it was Nadezhda Gordonovna whom Iris had been talking to in that concert hall. I cannot say exactly when the lessons began or how long that fad lasted; a month or two months at the most. They took place either in Mrs. Starov’s lodgings or in one of the Russian tearooms both ladies frequented. I kept a little list of telephone numbers so that Iris might be warned that I could always make sure of her whereabouts if, say, I felt on the brink of losing my mind or wanted her to buy on the way home a tin of my favorite Brown Prune tobacco. She did not know, on the other hand, that I would never have dared ring her up, lest her not being where she said she would be cause me even a few minutes of an agony that I could not face.
Sometime around Christmas, 1929, she casually told me that those lessons had been discontinued quite a while ago: Mrs. Starov had left for England, and it was rumored that she would not return to her husband. The lieutenant, it seemed, was quite a dasher
12
At a certain mysterious point toward the end of our last winter in Paris something in our relationship changed for the better. A wave of new warmth, new intimacy, new tenderness, swelled and swept away all the delusions of distance—tiffs, silences, suspicions, retreats into castles of amour-propre and the like—which had obstructed our love and of which I alone was guilty. A more amiable, merrier mate I could not have imagined. Endearments, love names (based in my case on Russian forms) reentered our customary exchanges. I broke the monastic rules of work on my novella in verse Polnolunie (Plenilune) by riding with her in the Bois or dutifully escorting her to fashion-show teases and exhibitions of avant-garde frauds. I surmounted my contempt for the «serious» cinema (depicting heartrending problems with a political twist), which she preferred to American buffoonery and the trick photography of Germanic horror films. I even gave a talk on my Cambridge days at a rather pathetic English Ladies Club, to which she belonged.
And to top the treat, I told her the plot of my next novel (Camera Lucida).
One afternoon, in March or early April, 1930, she peeped into my room and, being admitted, handed me the duplicate of a typewritten sheet, numbered 444. It was, she said, a tentative episode in her interminable tale, which would soon display more deletions than insertions. She was stuck, she said. Diana Vane, an incidental but on the whole nice girl, sojourning in Paris, happened to meet, at a riding school, a strange Frenchman, of Corsican, or perhaps Algerian, origin, passionate, brutal, unbalanced. He mistook Diana—and kept on mistaking her despite her amused remonstrations—for his former sweetheart, also an English girl, whom he had last seen ages ago. We had here, said the author, a sort of hallucination, an obsessive fancy, which Diana, a delightful flirt with a keen sense of humor, allowed Jules to entertain during some twenty riding lessons; but then his attentions grew more realistic, and she stopped seeing him. There had been nothing between them, and yet he simply could not be dissuaded from confusing her with the girl he once had possessed or thought he had, for that girl, too, might well have been only the afterimage of a still earlier romance or remembered delirium. It was a very bizarre situation.
Now this page was supposed to be a last ominous letter written by that Frenchman in a foreigner’s English to Diana. I was to read it as if it were a real letter and suggest, as an experienced writer, what might be the next development or disaster.
Beloved!
I am not capable to represent to myself that you really desire to tear up any connection with me. God sees, I love you more than life—more than two lives, your and my, together taken. Are you not ill? Or maybe you have found another? Another lover, yes? Another victim of your attraction? No, no, this thought is too horrible, too humiliating for us both.
My supplication is modest and just. Give only one more interview to me! One interview! I am prepared to meet with you it does not matter where—on the street, in some cafe, in the Forest of Boulogne—but I must see you, must speak with you and open to you many mysteries before I will die. Oh, this is no threat! I swear that if our interview will lead to a positive result, if, otherwise speaking, you will permit me to hope, only to hope, then, oh then, I will consent to wait a little. But you must reply to me without retardment, my cruel, stupid, adored little girl!
Your Jules
«There’s one thing,» I said, carefully folding the sheet and pocketing it for later study, «one thing the little girl should know. This is not a romantic Corsican writing a crime passionnel letter; it is a Russian blackmailer knowing just enough English to translate into it the stalest Russian locutions. What puzzles me is how did you, with your three or four words of Russian—kak pozhivaete and do svidaniya—how did you, the author, manage to think up those subtle turns, and imitate the mistakes in English that only a Russian would make? Impersonation, I know, runs in the family, but still—«
Iris replied (with that quaint non sequitur that I was to give to the heroine of my Ardis forty years later) that, yes, indeed, I was right, she must have had too many muddled lessons in Russian and she would certainly correct that extraordinary impression by simply giving the whole letter in French—from which, she had been told, incidentally, Russian had borrowed a lot of clichиs.
«But that’s beside the point,» she added. «You don’t understand—the point is what should happen next—I mean, logically? What should my poor girl do about that bore, that brute? She is uncomfortable, she is perplexed, she is frightened. Should this situation end in slapstick or tragedy?»
«In the wastepaper basket,» I whispered, interrupting my work to gather her small form onto my lap as I often did, the Lord be thanked, in that fatal spring of 1930.
«Give me back that scrap,» she begged gently, trying to thrust her hand into the pocket of my dressing gown, but I shook my head and embraced her closer.
My latent jealousy should have been fanned up to a furnace roar by the surmise that my wife had been transcribing an authentic letter—received, say, from one of the wretched, unwashed émigré poeticules, with smooth glossy hair and eloquent liquid eyes, whom she used to meet in the salons of exile. But after reexamining the thing, I decided that it just
