How far, how bright, how unchanged by eternity, how disfigured by time! There were bread crumbs and even a bit of orange peel in the bed. The young cough was now muted, but I could distinctly hear creakings, controlled footfalls, the hum in an ear pressed to the door. I must have been eleven or twelve when the nephew of my grand-uncle visited the Moscow country house where I was spending that hot and hideous summer. He had brought his passionate bride with him—straight from the wedding feast. Next day at the siesta hour, in a frenzy of curiosity and fancy, I crept to a secret spot under the second-floor guest-room window where a gardener’s ladder stood rooted in a jungle of jasmin. It reached only to the top of the closed first-floor shutters, and though I found a foothold above them, on an ornamental projection, I could only just grip the sill of a half-open window from which confused sounds issued. I recognized the jangle of bedsprings and the rhythmic tinkle of a fruit knife on a plate near the bed, one post of which I could make out by stretching my neck to the utmost; but what fascinated me most were the manly moans coming from the invisible part of the bed. A superhuman effort afforded me the sight of a salmon-pink shirt over the back of a chair. He, the enraptured beast, doomed to die one day as so many are, was now repeating her name with ever increasing urgency, and by the time my foot slipped he was in full cry, thus drowning the noise of my sudden descent into a crackle of twigs and a snowstorm of petals.
10
Just before Ivor returned from his fishing trip, I moved to the Victoria, where she visited me daily. That was not enough; but in the autumn Ivor migrated to Los Angeles to join his half-brother in directing the Amenic film company (for which, thirty years later, long after Ivor’s death over Dover, I was to write the script of Pawn Takes Queen, my most popular at the time, but far from best, novel), and we returned to our beloved villa, in the really quite nice blue Icarus, Ivor’s thoughtful wedding present.
Sometime in October my benefactor, now in the last stage of majestic senility, came for his annual visit to Mentone, and, without warning, Iris and I dropped in to see him. His villa was incomparably grander than ours. He staggered to his feet to take between his wax-pale palms Iris’s hand and stare at her with blue bleary eyes for at least five seconds (a little eternity, socially) in a kind of ritual silence, after which he embraced me with a slow triple cross-kiss in the awful Russian tradition.
«Your bride,» he said, using, I knew, the word in the sense of fiancée (and speaking an English which Iris said later was exactly like mine in Ivor’s unforgettable version) «is as beautiful as your wife will be!»
I quickly told him—in Russian—that the maire of Cannice had married us a month ago in a brisk ceremony. Nikifor Nikodimovich gave Iris another stare and finally kissed her hand, which I was glad to see she raised in the proper fashion (coached, no doubt, by Ivor who used to take every opportunity to paw his sister).
«I misunderstood the rumors,» he said, «but all the same I am happy to make the acquaintance of such a charming young lady. And where, pray, in what church, will the vow be sanctified?»
«In the temple we shall build, Sir,» said Iris—a trifle insolently, I thought.
Count Starov «chewed his lips,» as old men are wont to do in Russian novels. Miss Vrode-Vorodin, the elderly cousin who kept house for him, made a timely entrance and led Iris to an adjacent alcove (illuminated by a resplendent portrait by Serov, 1896, of the notorious beauty, Mme. de Blagidze, in Caucasian costume) for a nice cup of tea. The Count wished to talk business with me and had only ten minutes «before his injection.»
What was my wife’s maiden name?
I told him. He thought it over and shook his head. What was her mother’s name?
I told him that, too. Same reaction. What about the financial aspect of the marriage?
I said she had a house, a parrot, a car, and a small income—I didn’t know exactly how much.
After another minute’s thought, he asked me if I would like a permanent job in the White Cross? It had nothing to do with Switzerland. It was an organization that helped Russian Christians all over the world. The job would involve travel, interesting connections, promotion to important posts.
I declined so emphatically that he dropped the silver pill box he was holding and a number of innocent gum drops were spilled all over the table at his elbow. He swept them onto the carpet with a gesture of peevish dismissal.
What then was I intending to do?
I said I’d go on with my literary dreams and nightmares. We would spend most of the year in Paris. Paris was becoming the center of émigré culture and destitution.
How much did I think I could earn?
Well, as N.N. knew, currencies were losing their identities in the whirlpool of inflation, but Boris Morozov, a distinguished author, whose fame had preceded his exile, had given me some illuminating «examples of existence» when I met him quite recently in Cannice where he had lectured on Baratynski at the local literaturnyy circle. In his case, four lines of verse would pay for a bifsteck pommes, while a couple of essays in the Novosti emigratsii assured a month’s rent for a cheap chambre garnie. There were also readings, in large auditoriums, at least twice a year, which might bring him each time the equivalent of, say, one hundred dollars.
My benefactor thought this over and said that as long as he lived I would receive a check for half that amount every first of the month, and that he would bequeath me a certain sum in his testament. He named the sum. Its paltriness took me aback. This was a foretaste of the disappointing advances publishers were to offer me after a long, promising, pencil-tapping pause.
We rented a two-room apartment in the 16th arrondissement, rue Desprиaux, 23. The hallway connecting the rooms led, on the front side, to a bathroom and kitchenette. Being a solitary sleeper by principle and inclination, I relinquished the double bed to Iris, and slept on the couch in the parlor. The concierge’s daughter came to clean up and cook. Her
culinary capacities were limited, so we often broke the monotony of vegetable soups and boiled meat by eating at a Russian restoranchik. We were to spend seven winters in that little flat.
Owing to the foresight of my dear guardian and benefactor (1850?—1927), an old-fashioned cosmopolitan with a lot of influence in the right quarters, I had become by the time of my marriage the subject of a snug foreign country and thus was spared the indignity of a nansenskiy pasport (a pauper’s permit, really), as well as the vulgar obsession with «documents,» which provoked such evil glee among the Bolshevist rulers, who perceived some similarity between red tape and Red rule and a certain affinity between the civil plight of a hobbled expatriate and the political immobilization of a Soviet slave. I could, therefore, take my wife to any vacational resort in the world without waiting several weeks for a visa, and then being refused, perhaps, a return visa to our accidental country of residence, in this case France, because of some flaw in our precious and despicable papers. Nowadays (1970), when my British passport has been superseded by a no less potent American one, I still treasure that 1922 photo of the mysterious young man I then was, with the mysteriously smiling eyes and the striped tie and the wavy hair. I remember spring trips to Malta and Andalusia, but every summer, around the first of July, we drove to Carnavaux and stayed there for a month or two. The parrot died in 1925, the footboy vanished in 1927. Ivor visited us twice in Paris, and I think she saw him also in London where she went at least once a year to spend a few days with «friends,» whom I did not know, but who sounded harmless—at least to a certain point.
I should have been happier. I had planned to be happier. My health continued patchy with ominous shapes showing through its flimsier edges. Faith in my work never wavered, but despite her touching intentions to participate in it, Iris remained on its outside, and the better it grew the more alien it became to her. She took desultory lessons in Russian, interrupting them regularly, for long periods, and finished by developing a dull habitual aversion to the language. I soon noticed that she had ceased trying to look attentive and bright when Russian, and Russian only, was spoken in her presence (after some primitive French had been kept up for the first minute or two of the party in polite concession to her disability).
This was,
