As with so many Russians émigrés of declining strength and lost professions, it was hard to say what exactly were Dr. Blagovo’s personal resources. He seemed to spend life’s overcast evening either reading his way through sets of thick magazines (1830 to 1900 or 1850 to 1910), which Annette brought him from Oksman’s Lending Library, or sitting at a table and filling by means of a regularly clicking tobacco injector the semitransparent ends of carton-tubed cigarettes of which he never consumed more than thirty per day to avoid intercadence at night. He had practically no conversation and could not retell correctly any of the countless historical anecdotes he found in the battered tomes of Russkaya Starina («Russian ancientry»)—which explains where Annette got her inability to remember the poems, the essays, the stories, the novels she had typed for me (my grumble is repetitious, I know, but the matter rankles—a word which comes from dracunculus, a «baby dragon»). He was also one of the last gentlemen I ever met who still wore a dickey and elastic-sided boots.
He asked me—and that remained his only memorable question—why I did not use in print the title which went with my thousand-year-old name. I replied that I was the kind of snob who assumes that bad readers are by nature aware of an author’s origins but who hopes that good readers will be more interested in his books than in his stemma. Dr. Blagovo was a stupid old bloke, and his detachable cuffs could have been cleaner; but today, in sorrowful retrospect, I treasure his memory: he was not only the father of my poor Annette, but also the grandfather of my adored and perhaps still more unfortunate daughter.
Dr. Blagovo (1867-1940) had married at the age of forty a provincial belle in the Volgan town of Kineshma, a few miles south from one of my most romanic country estates, famous for its wild ravines, now gravel pits or places of massacre, but then magnificent evocations of sunken gardens. She wore elaborate make-up and spoke in simpering accents, reducing nouns and adjectives to over-affectionate forms which even the Russian language, a recognized giant of diminutives, would only condone on the wet lips of an infant or tender nurse («Here,» said Mrs. Blagovo «is your chaishko s molochishkom [teeny tea with weeny milk]»). She struck me as an extraordinarily garrulous, affable, and banal lady, with a good taste in clothes (she worked in a salon de couture). A certain tenseness could be sensed in the atmosphere of the household. Annette was obviously a difficult daughter. In the brief course of my visit I could not help noticing that the voice of the parent addressing her developed little notes of obsequious panic (notki podobostrastnoy paniki). Annette would occasionally curb with an opaque, almost ophidian, look, her mother’s volubility. As I was leaving, the old girl paid me what she thought was a compliment: «You speak Russian with a Parisian grasseyement and your manners are those of an Englishman.» Annette, behind her, uttered a low warning growl.
That same evening I wrote to her father informing him that she and I had decided to marry; and on the following afternoon, when she arrived for work, I met her in morocco slippers and silk dressing gown. It was a holiday—the Festival of Flora—I said, indicating, with a not wholly normal smile, the carnations, camomiles, anemones, asphodels, and blue cockles in blond corn, which decorated my room in our honor. Her gaze swept over the flowers, champagne, and caviar canapиs; she snorted and turned to flee; I plucked her back into the room, locked the door and pocketed its key.
I do not mind recalling that our first tryst was a flop. It took me so long to persuade her that this was the day, and she made such a fuss about which ultimate inch of clothing could be removed and which parts of her body Venus, the Virgin, and the maire of our arrondissement allowed to be touched, that by the time I had her in a passably convenient position of surrender, I was an impotent wreck. We were lying naked, in a loose clinch. Presently her mouth opened against mine in her first free kiss. I regained my vigor. I hastened to possess her. She exclaimed I was disgustingly hurting her and with a vigorous wriggle expulsed the blooded and thrashing fish. When I tried to close her fingers around it in humble substitution, she snatched her hand away, calling me a dirty dиbauchи (gryaznyy razvratnik). I had to demonstrate myself the messy act while she looked on in amazement and sorrow.
We did better next day, and finished the flattish champagne; I never could quite tame her, though. I remember most promising nights in Italian lakeside hotels when everything was suddenly botched by her misplaced primness. But on the other hand I am happy now that I was never so vile and inept as to ignore the exquisite contrast between her irritating prudery and those rare moments of sweet passion when her features acquired an expression of childish concentration, of solemn delight, and her little moans just reached the threshold of my undeserving consciousness.
9
By the end of the summer, and of the next chapter of The Dare, it became clear that Dr. Blagovo and his wife were looking forward to a regular Greek-Orthodox wedding—a taper-lit gold-and-gauze ceremony, with high priest and low priest and a double choir. I do not know if Annette was astonished when I said I intended to cut out the mummery and prosaically register our union before a municipal officer in Paris, London, Calais, or on one of the Channel Islands; but she certainly did not mind astonishing her parents. Dr. Blagovo requested an interview in a stiffly worded letter («Prince! Anna has informed us that you would prefer—«); we settled for a telephone conversation: two minutes of Dr. Blagovo (including pauses caused by his deciphering a hand that must have been the despair of apothecaries) and five of his wife, who after rambling about irrelevant matters entreated me to reconsider my decision. I refused, and was set upon by a go-between, good old Stepanov, who rather unexpectedly, given his liberal views, urged me in a telephone call from somewhere in England (where the Borgs now lived) to keep up a beautiful Christian tradition. I changed the subject and begged him to arrange a beautiful literary soirиe for me upon his return to Paris.
In the meantime some of the gayer gods came with gifts. Three windfalls scatter-thudded around me in a simultaneous act of celebration: The Red Topper was bought for publication in English with a two-hundred-guinea advance; James Lodge of New York offered for Camera Lucida an even handsomer sum (one’s sense of beauty was easily satisfied in those days); and a contract for the cinema rights to a short story was being prepared by Ivor Black’s half-brother in Los Angeles. I had now to find adequate surroundings for completing The Dare in greater comfort than that in which I wrote its first part; and immediately after that, or concurrently with its last chapter, I would have to examine, and, no doubt, revise heavily, the English translation now being made of my Krasnyy Tsilindr by an unknown lady in London (who rather inauspiciously had started to suggest, before a roar of rage stopped her, that «certain passages, not quite proper or too richly or obscurely phrased, would have to be toned down, or omitted altogether, for the benefit of the sober-minded English reader»). I also expected to have to face a business trip to the United States.
For some odd psychological reason, Annette’s parents, who kept track of those developments, were now urging her to go through no matter what form of marriage, civil or pagan (grazhdanskiy ili basurmanskiy), without delay. Once that little tricolor farce over, Annette and I paid our tribute to Russian tradition by traveling from hotel to hotel during two months, going as far as Venice and Ravenna, where I thought of Byron and translated Musset. Back in Paris, we rented a three-room apartment on the charming rue Guevara (named after an Andalusian playwright of long ago) a two-minute walk from the Bois. We usually lunched at the nearby Le Peut Diable Boiteux, a modest but excellent restaurant, and had cold cuts for dinner in our kitchenette. I had somehow expected Annette to be a versatile cook, and she did improve later, in rugged America. On rue Guevara her best achievement remained the Soft-Boiled Egg: I do not know how she did it, but she managed to prevent the fatal crack that produced an ectoplasmic swell in the dancing water when I took over.
She loved long walks in the park among the sedate beeches and the prospective-looking babes; she loved cafиs, fashion shows, tennis matches, circular bike races at the Vиlodrome, and especially the cinema.
I soon realized that a little recreation put her in a lovemaking mood—and I was frightfully amorous and strong in our four last years in Paris, and quite unable to stand capricious denials. I drew the line, however, at an overdose of athletic sports—a metronomic tennis ball twanging to and fro or the ghastly hairy legs of hunchbacks on wheels.
The second part of the Thirties in Paris happened to be marked by a marvelous surge of the exiled arts, and it would be pretentious and foolish of me not to admit that whatever some of the more dishonest critics wrote about me, I stood at the peak of
