From somewhere in the Orkneys, Nadezhda Gordonovna and a clerical friend arrived in Paris only after her husband’s burial. Moved by a false sense of duty, she attempted to see me so as to tell me «everything.» I evaded all contact with her, but she managed to locate Ivor in London before he left for the States. I never asked him, and the dear funny fellow never revealed to me what that «everything» was; I refuse to believe that it could have amounted to much—and I knew enough, anyway. By nature I am not vindictive; yet I like to dwell in fancy on the image of that little green train, running on, round and round, forever.
PART TWO
1
A curious form of self-preservation moves us to get rid, instantly, irrevocably, of all that belonged to the loved one we lost. Otherwise, the things she touched every day and kept in their proper context by the act of handling them start to become bloated with an awful mad life of their own. Her dresses now wear their own selves, her books leaf through their own pages. We suffocate in the tightening circle of those monsters that are misplaced and misshapen because she is not there to tend them. And even the bravest among us cannot meet the gaze of her mirror.
How to get rid of them is another problem. I could not drown them like kittens; in fact, I could not drown a kitten, let alone her brush or bag. Nor could I watch a stranger collect them, take them away, come back for more. Therefore, I simply abandoned the flat, telling the maid to dispose in any manner she chose of all those unwanted things. Unwanted! At the moment of parting they appeared quite normal and harmless; I would even say they looked taken aback.
At first I tried putting up in a third-rate hotel in the center of Paris. I would fight terror and solitude by working all day. I completed one novel, began another, wrote forty poems (all robbers and brothers under their motley skin), a dozen short stories, seven essays, three devastating reviews, one parody. The business of not losing my mind during the night was taken care of by swallowing an especially potent pill or buying a bedmate.
I remember a dangerous dawn in May (1931? or 1932?); all the birds (mostly sparrows) were singing as in Heine’s month of May, with demonic monotonous force—that’s why I know it must have been a wonderful May morning. I lay with my face to the wall and in a muddled ominous way considered the question should «we» not drive earlier than usual to Villa Iris. An obstacle, however, kept preventing me from undertaking that journey: the car and the house had been sold, so Iris had told me herself at the Protestant cemetery, because the masters of her faith and fate interdicted cremation. I turned in bed from the wall to the window, and Iris was lying with her dark head to me on the window side of the bed. I kicked off the bedclothes. She was naked, save for her black-stockinged legs (which was strange but at the same time recalled something from a parallel world, for my mind stood astride on two circus horses). In an erotic footnote, I reminded myself for the ten thousandth time to mention somewhere that there is nothing more seductive than a girl’s back with the profiled rise of the haunch accentuated by her lying sidelong, one leg slightly bent. «J’ai froid,» said the girl as I touched her shoulder.
The Russian term for any kind of betrayal, faithlessness, breach of trust, is the snaky, watered-silk word izmena which is based on the idea of change, shift, transformation. This derivation had never occurred to me in my constant thoughts about Iris, but now it struck me as the revelation of a bewitchment, of a nymph’s turning into a whore—and this called for an immediate and vociferous protest. One neighbor thumped the wall, another rattled the door. The frightened girl, snatching up her handbag and my raincoat, bolted out of the room, and a bearded individual entered instead, farcically clad in a nightshirt and wearing rubbers on his bare feet. The crescendo of my cries, cries of rage and distress, ended in a hysterical fit. I think some attempt was made to whisk me off to a hospital. In any case, I had to find another home sans tarder, a phrase I cannot hear without a spasm of anguish by mental association with her lover’s letter.
A small patch of countryside kept floating before my eyes like some photic illusion. I let my index finger stray at random over a map of northern France; the point of its nail stopped at the town of Petiver or Pиtit Ver, a small worm or verse, which sounded idyllic. An autobus took me to a road station not very far from Orlиans, I believe. All I remember of my abode is its oddly slanting floor which corresponded to a slant in the ceiling of the cafe under my room. I also remember a pastel-green park to the east of the town, and an old castle. The summer I spent there is a mere smudge of color on the dull glass of my mind; but I did write a few poems—at least one of which, about a company of acrobats staging a show on the church square, has been reprinted a number of times in the course of forty years.
When I returned to Paris I found that my kind friend Stepan Ivanovich Stepanov, a prominent journalist of independent means (he was one of those very few lucky Russians who had happened to transfer themselves and their money abroad before the Bolshevik coup), had not only organized my second or third public reading (vecher, «evening,» was the Russian term consecrated to that kind of performance) but wanted me to stay in one of the ten rooms of his spacious old-fashioned house (Avenue Koch? Roche? It abuts, or abutted, on the statue of a general whose name escapes me but surely lurks somewhere among my old notes).
Its residents were at the moment old Mr. and Mrs. Stepanov, their married daughter Baroness Borg, her eleven-year-old child (the Baron, a businessman, had been sent by his firm to England), and Grigoriy Reich (1899-1942?), a gentle, melancholy, lean, young poet, of no talent whatever, who under the pen name of Lunin contributed a weekly elegy to the Novosti and acted as Stepanov’s secretary.
I could not avoid coming down in the evenings to join the frequent gatherings of literary and political personages in the ornate salon or in the dining room with its huge oblong table and the oil portrait en pied of the Stepanovs’ young son who had died in 1920 while trying to save a drowning schoolmate. Nearsighted, gruffly jovial Alexander Kerenski would usually be there, brusquely raising his eyeglass to stare at a stranger or greeting an old friend with a ready quip in that rasping voice of his, most of its strength lost years ago in the roar of the Revolution. Ivan Shipogradov, eminent novelist and recent Nobel Prize winner, would also be present, radiating talent and charm, and—after a few jiggers of vodka—delighting his intimates with the kind of Russian bawdy tale that depends for its artistry on the rustic gusto and fond respect with which it treats our most private organs. A far less engaging figure was I. A. Shipogradov’s old rival, a fragile little man in a sloppy suit, Vasiliy Sokolovski (oddly nicknamed «Jeremy» by I.A.), who since the dawn of the century had been devoting volume after volume to the mystical and social history of a Ukrainian clan that had started as a humble family of three in the sixteenth century but by volume six (1920) had become a whole village, replete with folklore and myth. It was good to see old Morozov’s rough-hewn clever face with its shock of dingy hair and bright frosty eyes; and for a special reason I closely observed podgy dour Basilevski—not because he had just had or was about to have a row with his young mistress, a feline beauty
