Warm weather had come to stay, and everywhere, in travel agencies, in foyers, in waiting rooms, in general stores, in trolleybuses, in elevators, on escalators, in every damned corridor, everywhere, and especially where women worked, or had worked, invisible onion soup was cooking on invisible stoves. I was to remain only a couple of days in Leningrad and had not the time to get used to those infinitely sad emanations.
From travelers I knew that our ancestral mansion no longer existed, that the very lane where it had stood between two streets in the Fontanka area had been lost, like some connective tissue in the process of organic degeneration. What then succeeded in transfixing my memory? That sunset, with a triumph of bronze clouds and flamingo-pink meltings in the far-end archway of the Winter Canalet, might have been first seen in Venice. What else? The shadow of railings on granite? To be quite honest, only the dogs, the pigeons, the horses, and the very old, very meek cloakroom attendants seemed familiar to me. They, and perhaps the faгade of a house on Gertsen Street. I may have gone there to some children’s fйte ages ago. The floral design running above the row of its upper windows caused an eerie shiver to pass through the root of wings that we all grow at such moments of dream-like recollection.
Dora was to meet me Friday morning on the Square of the Arts in front of the Russian Museum near the statue of Pushkin erected some ten years before by a committee of weathermen. An Intourist folder had yielded a tinted photograph of the spot. The meteorological associations of the monument predominated over its cultural ones. Frock-coated Pushkin, the right-side lap of his garment permanently agitated by the Nevan breeze rather than by the violence of lyrical afflatus, stands looking upward and to the left while his right hand is stretched out the other way, sidewise, to test the rain (a very natural attitude at the time lilacs bloom in the Leningrad parks).
It had dwindled, when I arrived, to a warm drizzle, a mere murmur in the lindens above the long garden benches. Dora was supposed to be sitting on Pushkin’s left, id est my right. The bench was empty and looked dampish. Three or four children, of the morose, drab, oddly old-fashioned aspect that Soviet kids have, could be seen on the other side of the pedestal, but otherwise I was loitering all alone, holding the Humanitи in my hand instead of the Worker which I was supposed to signal with discreetly but had not been able to obtain that day. I was in the act of spreading the newspaper on the bench when a lady with the predicted limp came along a garden path toward me. She wore the, also expected, pastel-pink coat, had a clubfoot, and walked with the aid of a sturdy cane. She also carried a diaphanous little umbrella which had not figured in the list of attributes. I dissolved in tears at once (though I was farced with pills). Her gentle beautiful eyes were also wet.
Had I got A.B.’s telegram? Sent two days ago to my Paris address? Hotel Moritz?
«That’s garbled,» I said, «and besides I left earlier. Doesn’t matter. Is she much worse?»
«No, no, on the contrary. I knew you would come all the same, but something has happened. Karl turned up on Tuesday while I was in the office and took her away. He also took my new suitcase. He has no sense of ownership. He will be shot some day like a common thief. The first time he got into trouble was when he kept declaring that Lincoln and Lenin were brothers. And last time—«
Nice voluble lady, Dora. What was Bel’s illness exactly?
«Splenic anemia. And last time, he told his best student in the language school that the only thing people should do was to love one another and pardon their enemies.»
«An original mind. Where do you suppose—«
«Yes, but the best student was an informer, and Karlusha spent a year in a tundrovyy House of Rest. I don’t know where he took her now. I even don’t know whom to ask.»
«But there must be some way. She must be brought back, taken out of this hole, this hell.»
«That’s impossible. She adores, she worships Karlusha. C’est la vie, as the Germans say. It’s a pity A.B. is in Riga till the end of the month. You saw very little of him. Yes, it’s a pity, he’s a freak and a dear (chudak i dushka) with four nephews in Israel, which sounds, he says, as the dramatic persons in a pseudoclassical play.' One of them was my husband. Life gets sometimes very complicated, and the more complicated the happier it should be, one would think, but in realitycomplicated’ always means for some reason grust’ i toska (sorrow and heartache).»
«But look here, can’t I do something? Can’t I sort of hang around and make inquiries, and perhaps seek advice from the Embassy—«
«She is not English any more and was never American. It’s hopeless, I tell you. We were very close, she and I, in my very complicated life, but, imagine, Karl did not allow her to leave at least one little word for me—and for you, of course. She had informed him, unfortunately, that you were coming, and this he could not bear in spite of all the sympathy he works up for all unsympathetic people. You know, I saw your face last year—or was it two years ago?—two years, rather—in a Dutch or Danish magazine, and I would have recognized you at once, anywhere.»
«With the beard?»
«Oh, it does not change you one droplet. It’s like wigs or green spectacles in old comedies. As a girl I dreamt of becoming a female clown, Madam Byron,' orTrek Trek.’ But tell me, Vadim Vadimovich—I mean Gospodin Long—haven’t they found you out? Don’t they intend to make much of you? After all, you’re the secret pride of Russia. Must you go now?»
I detached myself from the bench—with some scraps of L’Humanitи attempting to follow me—and said, yes, I had better be going before the pride outstripped the prudence. I kissed her hand whereupon she remarked that she had seen it done only in a movie called War and Peace. I also begged her, under the dripping lilacs, to accept a wad of bank notes to be used for any purpose she wished including the price of that suitcase for her trip to Sochi. «And he also took my whole set of safety pins,» she murmured with her all-beautifying smile.
3
I cannot be sure it was not again my fellow traveler, the black-hatted man, whom I saw hurrying away as I parted with Dora and our National Poet, leaving the latter to worry forever about all that wasted water (compare the Tsarskoselski Statue of a rock-dwelling maiden who mourns her broken but still brimming jar in one of his own poems); but I know I saw Monsieur Pouf at least twice in the restaurant of the Astoria, as well as in the corridor of the sleeping car on the night train that I took in order to catch the earliest Moscow-Paris plane. On that plane he was prevented from sitting next to me by the presence of an elderly American lady, with pink and violet wrinkles and rufous hair: we kept alternately chatting, dozing and drinking Bloody Marshas, her joke—not appreciated by our sky-blue hostess. It was delightful to observe the amazement expressed by old Miss Havemeyer (her rather incredible name) when I told her that I had spurned the Intourist’s offer of a sightseeing tour of Leningrad; that I had not peeped into Lenin’s room in the Smolny; had not visited one cathedral; had not eaten something called «tabaka chicken»; and that I had left that beautiful, beautiful city without seeing a single ballet or variety show. «I happen to be,» I explained, «a triple agent and you know how it is—» «Oh!» she exclaimed, with a pulling-away movement of the torso as if to consider me from a nobler angle.
