Look at the Harlequins! (7 page)

We rented a two-room apartment in the 16th
arrondissement
, rue Despréaux, 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 Nowadays (1970), when my British passport has been superseded by a no less potent American one, I still treasure that 1922 photo of the mysterious young man I then was, with the mysteriously smiling eyes and the striped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, at best, annoying; at worst, heartrending; it did not, however, affect my sanity as something else threatened to do.

Jealousy, a masked giant never encountered before in the frivolous affairs of my early youth, now stood with folded arms, confronting me at every corner. Certain little sexual quirks in my sweet, docile, tender Iris, inflections of lovemaking, felicities of fondling, the easy accuracy with which she adapted her flexible frame to every pattern of passion, seemed to presuppose a wealth of experience. Before starting to suspect the present, I felt compelled to get my fill of suspecting her past. During the examinations to which I subjected her on my worst nights, she dismissed her former romances as totally insignificant, without realizing that this reticence left more to my imagination than would the most luridly overstated truth.

The three lovers (a figure I wrested from her with the fierceness of Pushkin’s mad gambler and with even less luck) whom she had had in her teens remained nameless, and therefore spectral; devoid of any individual traits, and therefore identical. They performed their sketchy
pas
in the back of her lone act like the lowliest members of the
corps de ballet
, in a display of mawkish gymnastics rather than dance, and it was clear that none of them would ever become the male star of the troupe. She, the ballerina, on the other hand, was a dim diamond with all the facets of talent ready to blaze, but under the pressure of the nonsense around her had, for the moment, to limit her steps and gestures to an expression of cold coquetry, of flirtatious evasion—waiting as she was for the tremendous leap of the marble-thighed athlete in shining tights who was to erupt from the wings after a decent prelude. We thought I had been chosen for that part but we were mistaken.

Only by projecting thus on the screen of my mind those stylized images, could I allay the anguish of carnal jealousy centered on specters. Yet not seldom I chose to succumb to it. The french window of my studio in Villa Iris gave on the same red-tiled balcony as my wife’s bedroom did, and could be set half-open at such an angle as to provide two different views melting into one another. It caught obliquely, through the monastic archway leading from room to room, part of her bed and of her—her hair, a shoulder—which otherwise I could not see from the old-fashioned lectern at which I wrote; but the glass also held, at arm’s length as it were, the green reality of the garden with a peregrination of cypresses along its sidewall. So half in bed and half in the pale hot sky, she would recline, writing a letter that was crucified on my second-best chessboard. I knew that if I asked, the answer would be “Oh, to an old schoolmate,” or “To Ivor,” or “To old Miss Kupalov,” and I also knew that in one way or another the letter would reach the post office at the end of the plane-tree avenue without my seeing the name on the envelope. And still I let her write as she comfortably floated in the life belt of her pillow, above the cypresses and the garden wall, while all the time I gauged—grimly, recklessly—to what depths of dark pigment the tentacled ache would go.

Most of those Russian lessons consisted of her taking one of my poems or essays to this or that Russian lady, Miss Kupalov or Mrs. Lapukov (neither of whom had much English) and having it paraphrased orally for her in a kind of makeshift Volapük. On my pointing out to Iris that she was losing her time at this hit-and-miss task, she cast around for some other alchemic method which might enable her to read everything I wrote. I had begun by then (1925) my first novel (
Tamara
) and she coaxed me into letting her have a copy of the first chapter, which I had just typed out. This she carried to an agency that dealt in translations into French of utilitarian texts such as applications and supplications addressed by Russian refugees to various rats in the ratholes of various
commissariats
. The person who agreed to supply her with the “literal version,” which she paid for in
valuta
, kept the typescript for two months and warned her when delivering it that my “article” had presented almost insurmountable difficulties, “being written in an idiom and style utterly unfamiliar to the ordinary reader.” Thus an anonymous imbecile in a shabby, cluttered, clattering office became my first critic and my first translator.

I knew nothing of that venture, until I found her one
day bending her brown curls over sheets of foolscap almost perforated by the violence of the violet characters that covered it without any semblance of margin. I was, in those days, naively opposed to any kind of translation, partly because my attempts to turn two or three of my first compositions into my own English had resulted in a feeling of morbid revolt—and in maddening headaches. Iris, her cheek on her fist and her eyes rolling in languid doubt, looked up at me rather sheepishly, but with that gleam of humor that never left her in the most absurd or trying circumstances. I noticed a blunder in the first line, a boo-boo in the next, and without bothering to read any further, tore up the whole thing—which provoked no reaction, save a neutral sigh, on the part of my thwarted darling.

In compensation for being debarred from my writings, she decided to become a writer herself. Beginning with the middle Twenties and to the end of her short, squandered, uncharmed life, my Iris kept working on a detective novel in two, three, four successive versions, in which the plot, the people, the setting, everything kept changing in bewildering bursts of frantic deletions—everything except the names (none of which I remember).

Not only did she lack all literary talent, but she had not even the knack of imitating the small number of gifted authors among the prosperous but ephemeral purveyors of “crime fiction” which she consumed with the indiscriminate zest of a model prisoner. How, then, did my Iris know why this had to be altered, that rejected? What instinct of genius ordered her to destroy the whole heap of her drafts on the eve, practically on the eve, of her sudden death? All the odd girl could ever visualize, with startling lucidity, was the crimson cover of the final, ideal paperback on which the villain’s hairy fist would be shown pointing a pistol-shaped cigarette lighter at the reader—who was not supposed to guess until everybody in the book had died that it was, in fact, a pistol.

Let me pick out several fatidic points, cleverly disguised at the time, within the embroidery of our seven winters.

During a lull in a magnificent concert for which we had not been able to obtain adjacent seats, I noticed Iris eagerly welcoming a melancholy-looking woman with drab hair and thin lips; I certainly had met her, somewhere, quite recently, but the very insignificance of her appearance canceled the pursuit of a vague recollection, and I never asked Iris about it. She was to become my wife’s last teacher.

Every author believes, when his first book is published, that those that acclaim it are his personal friends or impersonal peers, while its revilers can only be envious rogues and nonentities. No doubt I might have had similar illusions about the way
Tamara
was reviewed in the Russian-language periodicals of Paris, Berlin, Prague, Riga, and other cities; but by that time I was already engrossed in my second novel,
Pawn Takes Queen
, and my first one had dwindled to a pinch of colored dust in my mind.

The editor of
Patria
, the
émigré
monthly in which
Pawn Takes Queen
had begun to be serialized, invited “Irida Osipovna” and me to a literary samovar. I mention it only because this was one of the few salons that my unsociability deigned to frequent. Iris helped with the sandwiches. I smoked my pipe and observed the feeding habits of two major novelists, three minor ones, one major poet, five minor ones of both sexes, one major critic (Demian Basilevski), and nine minor ones, including the inimitable “Prostakov-Skotinin,” a Russian comedy name (meaning “simpleton and brute”) applied to him by his archrival Hristofor Boyarski.

The major poet, Boris Morozov, an amiable grizzly bear of a man, was asked how his reading in Berlin had gone, and he said: “
Nichevo
” (a “so-so” tinged with a “well enough”) and then told a funny but not memorable story about the new President of the Union of
Emigré
Writers in Germany. The lady next to me informed me she had adored that treacherous conversation between the Pawn and the Queen about the husband and would they really defenestrate the poor chess player? I said they would but not in the next issue, and not for good: he would live forever in the games he had played and in the multiple exclamation marks of future annotators. I also heard—my hearing is almost on a par with my sight—snatches of general talk such as an explanatory, “She is an Englishwoman,” murmured from behind a hand five chairs away by one guest to another.

All that would have been much too trivial to record unless meant to serve as the commonplace background, at any such meeting of exiles, against which a certain reminder flickered now and then, between the shoptalk and the tattle—a line of Tyutchev or Blok, which was cited in passing, as well as an everlasting presence, with the familiarity of devotion and as the secret height of art, and which ornamented sad lives with a sudden cadenza coming from some celestial elsewhere, a glory, a sweetness, the patch of rainbow cast on the wall by a crystal paperweight we cannot locate. That was what my Iris was missing.

To return to the trivia: I recall regaling the company with one of the howlers I had noticed in the “translation” of
Tamara
. The sentence
vidnelos’ neskol’ko barok
(“several barges could be seen”) had become
la vue était assez baroque
. The eminent critic Basilevski, a stocky, fair-haired old fellow in a rumpled brown suit, shook with abdominal mirth—but then his expression changed to one of suspicion and displeasure. After tea he accosted me and insisted gruffly that I had made up that example of mistranslation. I remember answering that, if so, he, too, might well be an invention of mine.

As we strolled home, Iris complained she would never learn to cloud a glass of tea with a spoonful of cloying raspberry jam. I said I was ready to put up with her deliberate
insularity but implored her to cease announcing
à la ronde:
“Please, don’t mind me: I love the sound of Russian.”
That
was an insult, like telling an author his book was unreadable but beautifully printed.

“I am going to make reparations,” she gaily replied. “I’ve never been able to find a proper teacher, I always believed you were the only one—and you refused to teach me, because you were busy, because you were tired, because it bored you, because it was bad for your nerves. I’ve discovered at last someone who speaks both languages, yours and mine, as two natives in one, and can make all the edges fit. I am thinking of Nadia Starov. In fact it’s her own suggestion.”

Nadezhda Gordonovna Starov was the wife of a
leytenant
Starov (Christian name unimportant), who had served under General Wrangel and now had some office job in the White Cross. I had met him in London recently, as fellow pallbearer at the funeral of the old Count, whose bastard or “adopted nephew” (whatever that meant), he was said to be. He was a dark-eyed, dark-complexioned man, three or four years my senior; I thought him rather handsome in a brooding, gloomy way. A head wound received in the civil war had left him with a terrifying tic that caused his face to change suddenly, at variable intervals, as if a paper bag were being crumpled by an invisible hand. Nadezhda Starov, a quiet, plain woman with an indefinable Quakerish look about her, clocked those intervals for some reason, no doubt of a medical nature, the man himself being unconscious of his “fireworks” unless he happened to see them in a mirror. He had a macabre sense of humor, beautiful hands, and a velvety voice.