Goya's Glass (23 page)

The French live in the moment, whereas we prefer to philosophize about life. That is what I thought when I heard the noise, laughter, and music that were coming from the Bullier, the wooden dance hall. The painters were holding their annual charity ball there and I went out of curiosity. I recognized Derain and Braque among those who were dancing. But the Paris summer, with its pleasures and distractions, meant nothing to me. I left that gay place and decided to drop by Larionov’s place. He had invited me to a party and there, at least, I could have a couple of beers.

I entered a dark apartment, which a few candles barely managed to illuminate. The shadows made one think more of fall than of the brilliant light of summer, but I felt at home. In the dark corners and in the middle of the veil of cigarette smoke, I started to recognize all kinds of people I knew: painters, writers, philosophers—the splendor of our Russian exile culture in
all its misery. The guests drank and argued in groups and pairs. They weren’t having a good time; they weren’t happy, which also made me feel like I fit in. There was no beer, but someone offered me a glass of white wine that refreshed my fingers pleasantly. I moved from one group to another. The circle around Larionov talked about Russian passports that now were in fact Soviet ones. In time, when everything had settled down, a few people said they would go back to their country.

“Go back? But why?” Larionov asked with a grimace.

“I want to give my support to our new, young country,” said a bald student from the shadows.

“And how exactly are you going to do that?”

“Through art. I’m a painter.”

“You know what I think? You go and give your support to the land of the revolution, and when you’re behind bars some place in Siberia, I will weep for your misfortune from a cafe terrace in Montparnasse and will toast your health with champagne.”

I moved away. This type of conversation was very much in vogue among the Russians and bored me to death. I sat down in an empty chair, letting myself be swayed gently by the talk around me. Bunin was holding forth that the tsar was at fault for the atrocities that had taken place in Russia after the revolution, for he was too soft and had a weak character. Everybody pretended noisily that they were in agreement with this.

I preferred to dedicate myself to the white wine. I had a look around the shadows and, from the best lit spots, I caught sight of a hand holding a glass or some smiling lips or a worn out shoe . . .

My eyes came to rest on a very young girl who had the air of
something Chinese about her, like an oriental princess. Someone must have brought their daughter. She was sitting in a corner as if she wanted to melt into it. Next to her, a dark-haired woman was snoozing on the sofa. She woke up and addressed the girl. I recognized her as Natalia Goncharova and went over to say hello. She introduced me to her young friend, pronouncing her name for me slowly: Nina Nikolayevna Berberova. Then she started to complain, the way she usually did, that she had to work hard, that she often worked fourteen hours a day whereas Larionov, her husband, only painted when he felt like it.

“But he’s a great artist.”

The voice came from the corner, a voice with a contralto tone to it that I would never have suspected from such a young girl.

“Yes, indeed he is,” Goncharova sighed, and when she bowed her head, I noticed the thick net of white threads that embellished her black hair. “Sit down, Igor, if Nina doesn’t mind,” she told me. “I have to look after the other guests for a while.”

I sat in her place. But maybe because the young girl had such a fragile air about her, I sat on the sofa as far as I could from her, until I was rubbing up against the knees of some noisy young man. The girl kept giving furtive looks at a corner on the other side of the room, which was so dark I was unable to see if there was someone there or if the corner were empty. When she looked at me, Nina’s wide eyes had a touch of irony in them, but when they looked over at whatever was in the corner, they shone, dewy. The candlelight revealed a look of surrender. But, to whom?

“Which of Natalia Goncharova’s paintings do you like best,
Nina Nikolayevna?” I asked to break the silence that had risen between us.

“I never tire of looking at her pictures of Moscow in the snow. But the one I like the most is that blue cow that looks like a pet. It seems as sweet as a teddy bear. If I had money, that’s the painting I’d buy from her.”

I started to talk about the The Donkey’s Tail, the group of painters that Larionov had founded when he still lived in Moscow ten or twelve years earlier, but Nina, clearly uninterested, only answered me in monosyllables. So I tried more philosophical subjects: freedom, my freedom, the freedom of one who depends on no man and no woman, on no government or ideology. The more she listened to my words, the more restless the girl got, and I realized that her face expressed a rejection so strong I lost the courage to go on. We fell silent. She must have gone on thinking about something while I wondered what else I could say. The silence made me feel uncomfortable.

But, as if she had read my thoughts, the girl said, “I like silence and solitude. I prefer to be silent, you know? But I want to tell you that I don’t agree with what you have just said. Because freedom, once obtained, is not difficult to bear, don’t you agree? In any event, it shouldn’t be for an adult person capable of reflection.”

Once again, it seemed to me that her words didn’t match her youthful appearance, and even less with the teddy bear she’d mentioned just a moment earlier. I wanted to protest, but Nina went on:

“I’m one of those people for whom the place where they were
born has never been a symbol of safety or refuge. The awareness that I do not have this refuge, I find satisfying; I can even say that I like it. I have no homeland or political party, family or tribe. I don’t look for any, I don’t need any.”

Young people obliged to live without a defined set of values, often substitute theories for values. However, I didn’t want to initiate any controversy, not least because I wasn’t quite sure of my own position on this topic. So I limited myself to saying, “You live in Paris, you have a new homeland, new friends. Isn’t that a refuge?”

“We are just passing through Paris. The day after tomorrow, we go back to Berlin. But Berlin will not become home for me, I’m sure of that.”

I looked at her, perplexed. Nonetheless it felt good to be next to her. Maybe in her company I could even manage to enjoy being silent. I felt respect and a little fear in her presence. But above all I needed to think about everything that we had said. While I shifted about on the sofa, restless, Nina sent another look into the darkness. I followed her eyes: a man’s figure moved in the corner on the other side of the room, a head was shaken, and a mane of long hair spread over the back of the chair.

“M
onsieur, ce métro va à Billancourt?”

“Oui, monsieur.
But there’s nothing interesting in Billancourt. Just factories and immigrants. The Russians were there before the war, and recently a lot of North Africans have moved there. I would suggest that you . . . ”

“Vous êtes très gentil, monsieur, mais je connais Paris assez bien. Bonne journée!”

Why tell him that my destination was the Renault factory? In any case, he wouldn’t have believed me if I’d told him I was going there to work; engineers usually travel by taxi. It is difficult to make someone understand that, after so many years, what I want is to savor the Paris metro. It hasn’t changed. I find the same weird characters as always: little old ladies heavily made up, who look like clowns giving their last performance; drunken and ever-courteous clochards. The only difference now is that there are more, and louder, tourists.

So this is Billancourt. The working-class outskirts that didn’t belong to Paris in our time and where, ever since the time of the Commune, the streets have been named after the leaders of the workers’ movement. I recognize a cafe; it had been a Russian dance hall and is now decorated with marble and mirrors as in the belle époque. But, as far as I can see, it doesn’t have many customers. Today people prefer to get out of the city, which has become disagreeable and inhumane; back then it was the city itself that didn’t accept people. It was very expensive. That is why Tsvetaeva lived in Meudon, Berdyaev in Clamart, Shestov and Remizov in Boulogne.

Here we have the Place Nationale, there the rue Nationale. And here . . . Yes, here is the rue des Quatre-Cheminées, it was here that she lived! This is the street, and there is the Renault factory. I passed through that door every day. If I turn left, I’ll reach the Seine. It was on this bench that I used to sit and let my thoughts flow freely, following the pace of the river. I would
always end up thinking about her. To me, this bench is dedicated to her, as is this part of the Seine. In Billancourt, even the river is brown, like the firmament supported by four chimneys as if they were celestial pillars: those are her words and I imagined a kind of Greek Parthenon in which, instead of Ionic columns, the smoking chimneys of a factory rose up.

She was sitting in the first row of the audience: a twenty-year-old girl, with black hair and slightly Asian features, probably Armenian. She went to listen to poets often. That night her body was wrapped in a white lace dress. But an attentive observer—or even one who wasn’t—would have noticed that the young girl’s elegant dress was made from the cloth of a curtain. And the fact was that in 1921, Saint Petersburg had suffered revolution, hunger, and civil war. Most of the once-ostentatious cafes and restaurants along the boulevards were closed.

The poet who began the evening with his verses was Gumilyov,
Nina wrote to me many years later, in a letter in which she answered my questions about her literary beginnings in post-revolutionary Saint Petersburg. It was a long letter, like the ones I received later in our friendship; apparently she liked to take stock of her past.

And I can see her. It was the girl with that dress made out of a curtain, that is to say, Nina.