"And anyway I"m leaving for good soon," Lik put in.
"Tell me, how"s the family? ... How"s Aunt Natasha?" Koldunov asked absently as they walked along a crowded little street that led down to the seafront. "I see, I see," he nodded at Lik"s reply. Suddenly a guilty, demented look pa.s.sed fleetingly across his evil face. "Listen, Lavrusha," he said, pushing him involuntarily and bringing his face close to Lik"s on the narrow sidewalk. "Meeting you is an omen for me. It is a sign that all is not lost yet, and I must admit that just the other day I was thinking that all was lost. Do you understand what I am saying?"
"Oh, everybody has such thoughts now and then," said Lik.
They reached the promenade. The sea was opaque and corrugated under the overcast sky, and, here and there near the parapet, the foam had splashed onto the pavement. There was no one about except for a solitary lady in slacks sitting on a bench with an open book in her lap.
"Here, give me five francs and I"ll buy you some cigarettes for the trip," Koldunov said rapidly. Taking the money, he added in a different, easy tone, "Look, that"s the little wife over there-keep her company for a minute, and I"ll be right back."
Lik went up to the blond lady and said with an actor"s automatism, "Your husband will be right back and forgot to introduce me. I"m a cousin of his."
At the same moment he was sprinkled by the cool dust of a breaker. The lady looked up at Lik with blue, English eyes, unhurriedly closed her red book, and left without a word.
"Just a joke," said Koldunov, as he reappeared, out of breath. "Voila. I"ll take a few for myself. Yes, I"m afraid my little woman has no time to sit on a bench and look at the sea. I implore you, promise me that we"ll meet again. Remember the omen! Tomorrow, after tomorrow, whenever you want. Promise me! Wait, I"ll give you my address."
He took Lik"s brand-new gilt-and-leather notebook, sat down, bent forward his sweaty, swollen-veined forehead, joined his knees, and not only wrote his address, reading it over with agonizing care, redotting an i and underlining a word, but also sketched a street map: so, so, then so. Evidently he had done this more than once, and more than once people had stood him up, using the forgotten address as an excuse; hence he wrote with great diligence and force-a force that was almost incantational.
The bus arrived. "So, I"ll expect you!" shouted Koldunov, helping Lik aboard. Then he turned, full of energy and hope, and walked resolutely off along the promenade as if he had some pressing, important business, though it was perfectly obvious that he was an idler, a drunkard, and a boor.
The following day, a Wednesday, Lik took a trip to the mountains, and then spent the greater part of Thursday lying in his room with a bad headache. The performance was that evening, the departure tomorrow. At about six in the afternoon he went out to pick up his watch at the jeweler"s and buy some nice white shoes-an innovation he had long wanted to sport in the second act. Separating the bead curtain, he emerged from the shop, s...o...b..x under arm, and ran straight into Koldunov.
Koldunov"s greeting lacked the former ardor, and had a slightly derisive note instead. "Oho! You won"t wriggle out of it this time," he said, taking Lik firmly by the elbow. "Come on, let"s go. You"ll see how I live and work."
"I have a performance tonight," Lik objected, "and I"m leaving tomorrow!"
"That"s just the point, my friend, that"s just the point. Seize the opportunity! Take advantage of it! There will never be another chance. The card is trumped! Come on. Get going."
Repeating disconnected words and imitating with all his unattractive being the senseless joy of a man who has reached the borderline, and perhaps even gone beyond it (a poor imitation, Lik thought vaguely), Koldunov walked briskly, prodding on his weak companion. The entire company of actors was sitting on the terrace of a corner cafe, and, noticing Lik, greeted him with a peripatetic smile that really did not belong to any one member of the group, but skittered across the lips of each like an independent spot of reflected sunlight.
Koldunov led Lik up a crooked little street, mottled here and there by jaundiced, crooked sunlight. Lik had never visited this squalid, old quarter. The tall, bare facades of the narrow houses seemed to lean over the pavement from either side, with their tops almost meeting; sometimes they coalesced completely, forming an arch. Repulsive infants were puttering about by the doorways; black, foul-smelling water ran down the sidewalk gutter. Suddenly changing direction, Koldunov shoved him into a shop and, flaunting the cheapest French slang (in the manner of many Russian paupers), bought two bottles of wine with Lik"s money. It was evident that he was long since in debt here, and now there was a desperate glee in his whole bearing and in his menacing exclamations of greeting, which brought no response whatever from either the shopkeeper or the shopkeeper"s mother-in-law, and this made Lik even more uncomfortable. They walked on, turning into an alley, and although it had seemed that the vile street they had just ascended represented the utmost limit of squalor, filth, and congestion, this pa.s.sage, with limp wash hanging overhead, managed to embody an even greater dejection. At the corner of a lopsided little square, Koldunov said that he would go in first, and, leaving Lik, headed for the black cavity of an open door. Simultaneously a fair-haired little boy came dashing out of it, but, seeing the advancing Koldunov, ran back, brushing against a pail which reacted with a harsh clink. "Wait, Vasyuk!" shouted Koldunov, and lumbered into his murky abode. As soon as he entered, a frenzied female voice issued from within, yelling something in what seemed a habitually overwrought tone, but then the scream ceased abruptly, and a minute later Koldunov peeped out and grimly beckoned to Lik.
Lik crossed the threshold and immediately found himself in a low-ceilinged, dark room, whose bare walls, as if distorted by some awful pressure from above, formed incomprehensible curves and corners. The place was crammed with the dingy stage properties of indigence. The boy of a moment ago sat on the sagging connubial bed; a huge fair-haired woman with thick bare feet emerged from a corner and, without a smile on her bloated pale face (whose every feature, even the eyes, seemed smudged, by fatigue, or melancholy, or G.o.d knows what), wordlessly greeted Lik.
"Get acquainted, get acquainted," Koldunov muttered in derisive encouragement, and immediately set about uncorking the wine. His wife put some bread and a plate of tomatoes on the table. She was so silent that Lik began to doubt whether it had been this woman who had screamed a moment ago.
She sat down on a bench in the back of the room, busying herself with something, cleaning something ... with a knife over a spread newspaper, it seemed-Lik was afraid to look too closely-while the boy, his eyes glistening, moved over to the wall and, maneuvering cautiously, slipped out into the street. There was a mult.i.tude of flies in the room, and with maniacal persistence they haunted the table and settled on Lik"s forehead.
"All right, let"s have a drink," said Koldunov.
"I can"t-I"m not allowed to," Lik was about to object, but instead, obeying the oppressive influence he knew well from his nightmares, he took a swallow-and went into a fit of coughing.
"That"s better," said Koldunov with a sigh, wiping his trembling lips with the back of his hand. "You see," he continued, filling Lik"s gla.s.s and his own, "here"s the situation. This is going to be a business talk! Allow me to tell you in brief. At the beginning of summer, I worked for a month or so with some other Russians here, collecting beach garbage. But, as you well know, I am an outspoken man who likes the truth, and when a scoundrel turns up, I come right out and say, "You"re a scoundrel," and, if necessary, I punch him in the mouth. Well, one day ..."
And Koldunov began telling, circ.u.mstantially, with painstaking repet.i.tions, a dull, wretched episode, and one had the feeling that for a long time his life had consisted of such episodes; that humiliation and failure, heavy cycles of ign.o.ble idleness and ign.o.ble toil, culminating in the inevitable row, had long since become a profession with him. Lik, meanwhile, began to feel drunk after the first gla.s.s, but nevertheless went on sipping, with concealed revulsion. A kind of tickling fog permeated every part of his body, but he dared not stop, as if his refusal of wine would lead to a shameful punishment. Leaning on one elbow, Koldunov talked uninterruptedly, stroking the edge of the table with one hand and occasionally slapping it to stress some particularly somber word. His head, the color of yellowish clay (he was almost completely bald), the bags under his eyes, the enigmatically malignant expression of his mobile nostrils-all of this had completely lost any connection with the image of the strong, handsome schoolboy who used to torment Lik, but the coefficient of nightmare remained unchanged.
"There you are, friend.... This is no longer important," said Koldunov in a different, less narrative tone. "Actually, I had this little tale all ready for you last time, when it occurred to me that fate-I"m an old fatalist-had given a certain meaning to our meeting, that you had come as a savior, so to speak. But now it turns out that, in the first place, you-forgive me-are as stingy as a Jew and, in the second place ... Who knows, maybe you really are not in a position to make me a loan.... Have no fear, have no fear.... This topic is closed! Moreover, it would have only been a question of a small sum to get me back not on my feet-that would be a luxury-but merely on all fours. Because I"m sick of sprawling with my face in the muck. I"m not going to ask anything of you; it"s not my style to beg. All I want is your opinion, about something. It"s merely a philosophical question. Ladies need not listen. How do you explain all this? You see, if a definite explanation exists, then fine, I"m willing to put up with the muck, since that means there is something logical and justified in all this, perhaps something useful to me or to others, I don"t know. Here, explain this to me: I am a human being-you certainly cannot deny that, can you? All right. I am a human being, and the same blood runs in my veins as in yours. Believe it or not, I was my late mama"s only and beloved. As a boy, I played pranks; as a youth, I went to war, and the ball started rolling-G.o.d, how it rolled! What went wrong? No, you tell me-what went wrong? I just want to know what went wrong, then I"ll be satisfied. Why has life systematically baited me? Why have I been a.s.signed the part of some kind of miserable scoundrel who is spat on by everybody, gypped, bullied, thrown into jail? Here"s an example for you: When they were taking me away after a certain incident in Lyon-and I might add that I was absolutely in the right, and am now very sorry I did not finish him off-well, as the police were taking me away, ignoring my protests, you know what they did? They stuck a little hook right here in the live flesh of my neck-what kind of treatment is that, I ask you?-and off the cop led me to the police station, and I floated along like a sleepwalker, because every additional motion made me black out with pain. Well, can you explain why they don"t do this to other people and then, all of a sudden, do it to me? Why did my first wife run away with a Circa.s.sian? Why did seven people nearly beat me to death in Antwerp in "32, in a small room? And look at all this-what"s the reason for it?-these rags, these walls, that Katya over there? ... The story of my life interests me, and has so for a long while! This isn"t any Jack London or Dostoyevski story for you! I live in a corrupt country-all right. I am willing to put up with the French. All right! But we must find some explanation, gentlemen! I was talking with a guy once, and he asks me, "Why don"t you go back to Russia?" Why not, after all? The difference is very small! There they"d persecute me just the same, knock my teeth in, stick me in the cooler, and then invite me to be shot-and at least that would be honest. You see, I"m even willing to respect them-G.o.d knows, they are honest murderers-while here these crooks will think up such tortures for you, it"s almost enough to make you feel nostalgic for the good old Russian bullet. Hey, why aren"t you looking at me-you, you, you-or don"t you understand what I"m saying?"
"No, I understand everything," said Lik. "Only please excuse me. I don"t feel well, I must be going. I have to be at the theater soon."
"Oh, no. Wait just a minute. I understand a few things myself. You"re a strange fellow.... Come on, make me an offer of some kind.... Try! Maybe you"ll shower me with gold after all, eh? Listen, you know what? I"ll sell you a gun-it"ll be very useful to you on the stage: bang, and down goes the hero. It"s not even worth a hundred francs, but I need more than a hundred-I"ll let you have it for a thousand. Want it?"
"No, I don"t," said Lik listlessly. "And I really have no money. I"ve been through it all myself, the hunger and so forth.... No, I won"t have any more, I feel sick."
"You keep drinking, you son of a b.i.t.c.h, and you won"t feel sick. All right, forget it. I just did it to see what you"d say-I won"t be bought anyway. Only, please answer my question. Who was it decided I should suffer, and then condemned my child to the same lousy Russian fate? Just a minute, though-suppose I, too, want to sit down in my dressing gown and listen to the radio? What went wrong, eh? Take you, for instance-what makes you better than me? You go swaggering around, living in hotels, smooching with actresses.... What"s the reason for it? Come on, explain it to me."
Lik said, "I turned out to have-I happened to have ... Oh, I don"t know ... a modest dramatic talent, I suppose you could say."
"Talent?" shouted Koldunov. "I"ll show you talent! I"ll show you such talent that you"ll start cooking applesauce in your pants! You"re a dirty rat, chum. That"s your only talent. I must say that"s a good one!" (Koldunov started shaking in very primitive mimicry of side-splitting laughter.) "So, according to you, I"m the lowest, filthiest vermin and deserve my rotten end? Splendid, simply splendid. Everything is explained-eureka, eureka! The card is trumped, the nail is in, the beast is butchered!"
"Oleg Petrovich is upset-maybe you ought to be going now," Koldunov"s wife suddenly said from her corner, with a strong Estonian accent. There was not the least trace of emotion in her voice, causing her remark to sound wooden and senseless. Koldunov slowly turned in his chair, without altering the position of his hand, which lay as if lifeless on the table, and fixed his wife with an enraptured gaze.
"I am not detaining anyone," he spoke softly and cheerfully. "And I"ll be thankful not to be detained by others. Or told what to do. So long, mister," he added, not looking at Lik, who for some reason found it necessary to say: "I"ll write from Paris, without fail...."
"So he"s going to write, is he?" said Koldunov softly, apparently still addressing his wife. With some trouble Lik extricated himself from the chair and started in her direction, but swerved and b.u.mped into the bed.
"Go away, it"s all right," she said calmly, and then, with a polite smile, Lik stumbled out of the house.
His first sensation was one of relief. He had escaped from the orbit of that drunken, moralizing moron. Then came a mounting horror: he was sick to his stomach, and his arms and legs belonged to different people. How was he to perform that night? The worst of all, though, was that his whole body, which seemed to consist of ripples and dots, sensed the approach of a heart attack. It was as if an invisible stake were pointing at him and he might impale himself any moment. This was why he must follow a weaving course, even stopping and backing slightly now and then. Nevertheless, his mind remained rather lucid, he knew that only thirty-six minutes remained before the start of the performance, and he knew the way home.... It would be a better idea, though, to go down to the embankment, to sit by the sea until he felt better. This will pa.s.s, this will pa.s.s, if only I don"t die.... He also grasped the fact that the sun had just set, that the sky was already more luminous and more tender than the earth. What unnecessary, offensive nonsense. He walked, calculating every step, but sometimes he would err and pa.s.sersby would turn to look at him. Happily, he did not encounter many of them, since it was the hallowed dinner hour, and when he reached the seafront, he found it quite deserted; the lights burned on the pier, casting long reflections on the tinted water, and these bright dots and inverted exclamation marks seemed to be shining translucently in his own head. He sat down on a bench, hurting his coccyx as he did so, and shut his eyes. But then everything began to spin; his heart was reflected as a terrifying globe on the dark inner side of his eyelids. It continued to swell agonizingly, and, to put a stop to this, he opened his eyes and tried to hook his gaze on things-on the evening star, on that black buoy in the sea, on a darkened eucalyptus tree at the end of the promenade. I know all this, he thought, I understand all this, and, in the twilight, the eucalyptus strangely resembles a big Russian birch. Can this be the end? Such an idiotic end.... I feel worse and worse.... What"s happening to me? ... Oh, my G.o.d!
About ten minutes pa.s.sed, no more. His watch ticked on, trying tactfully not to look at him. The thought of death coincided precisely with the thought that in half an hour he would walk out onto the bright stage and say the first words of his part, "Je vous prie d"excuser, Madame, cette invasion nocturne." And these words, clearly and elegantly engraved in his memory, seemed far more real than the lapping and splashing of the weary waves, or the sound of two gay female voices coming from behind the stone wall of a nearby villa, or the recent talk of Koldunov, or even the pounding of his own heart. His feeling of sickness suddenly reached such a panicky pitch that he got up and walked along the parapet, dazedly stroking it and peering at the colored inks of the evening sea. "In any case," Lik said aloud, "I have to cool off.... Instant cure.... Either I"ll die or it"ll help." He slid down the sloping edge of the sidewalk, where the parapet stopped, and crunched across the pebbly beach. There was n.o.body on the sh.o.r.e except for a shabbily dressed man, who happened to be lying supine near a boulder, his feet spread wide apart. Something about the outline of his legs and shoulders for some reason reminded Lik of Koldunov. Swaying a little and already stooping, Lik walked self-consciously to the edge of the water, and was about to scoop some up in his hands and douse his head; but the water was alive, moving, and threatening to soak his feet. Perhaps I have enough coordination left to take off my shoes and socks, he thought, and in the same instant remembered the carton box containing his new shoes. He had forgotten it at Koldunov"s!
And as soon as he remembered it, this image proved so stimulating that immediately everything was simplified, and this saved Lik, in the same way as a situation is sometimes saved by its rational formulation. He must get those shoes at once, there was just time enough to get them, and as soon as this was accomplished, he would step onstage in them. (All perfectly clear and logical.) Forgetting the pressure in his chest, the foggy feeling, the nausea, Lik climbed back up to the promenade, and in a sonorously recorded voice hailed the empty taxi that was just leaving the curb by the villa across the way. Its brakes responded with a lacerating moan. He gave the chauffeur the address from his notebook, telling him to go as fast as possible, even though the entire trip-there and from there to the theater-would not take more than five minutes.
The taxi approached Koldunov"s place from the direction of the square. A crowd had gathered, and it was only by dint of persistent threats with its horn that the driver managed to squeeze through. Koldunov"s wife was sitting on a chair by the public fountain. Her forehead and left cheek glistened with blood, her hair was matted, and she sat quite straight and motionless, surrounded by the curious, while, next to her, also motionless, stood her boy, in a bloodstained shirt, covering his face with his fist, a kind of tableau. A policeman, mistaking Lik for a doctor, escorted him into the room. The dead man lay on the floor amid broken crockery, his face blasted by a gunshot in the mouth, his widespread feet in new, white- "Those are mine," said Lik in French.
MADEMOISELLE O.
1.
I HAVE often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it. Although it lingered on in my mind, its personal warmth, its retrospective appeal had gone and, presently, it became more closely identified with my novel than with my former self, where it had seemed to be so safe from the intrusion of the artist. Houses have crumbled in my memory as soundlessly as they did in the mute films of yore; and the portrait of my old French governess, whom I once lent to a boy in one of my books, is fading fast, now that it is engulfed in the description of a childhood entirely unrelated to my own. The man in me revolts against the fictionist and here is my desperate attempt to save what is left of poor Mademoiselle.
A large woman, a very stout woman, Mademoiselle rolled into our existence in 1905 when I was six and my brother five. There she is. I see so plainly her abundant dark hair, brushed up high and covertly graying; the three wrinkles on her austere forehead; her beetling brows; the steely eyes behind the black-rimmed pince-nez; that vestigial mustache; that blotchy complexion, which in moments of wrath develops an additional flush in the region of the third, and amplest, chin so regally spread over the frilled mountain of her blouse. And now she sits down, or rather she tackles the job of sitting down, the jelly of her jowl quaking, her prodigious posterior, with the three b.u.t.tons on the side, lowering itself warily; then, at the last second, she surrenders her bulk to the wicker armchair, which out of sheer fright bursts into a salvo of crackling.
The winter she came was the only one of my childhood that I spent in the country. It was a year of strikes, riots, and police-inspired ma.s.sacres; and I suppose my father wished to tuck his family away from the city, in our quiet country place, where his popularity with the peasants might mitigate, as he correctly surmised, the risk of agrarian troubles. It was also a particularly severe winter, producing as much snow as Mademoiselle might have expected to find in the Hyperborean gloom of remote Muscovy. When she alighted at the little station, from which she still had to travel half a dozen miles by sleigh to our country home, I was not there to greet her; but I do so now as I try to imagine what she saw and felt at that last stage of her fabulous and ill-timed journey. Her Russian vocabulary consisted, I know, of one short word, the same solitary word that years later she was to take back to Switzerland, where she had been born of French parents. This word, which in her p.r.o.nunciation may be phonetically rendered as "giddy-eh" (actually it is gde, with e as in "yet"), meant "Where?" And that was a good deal. Uttered by her like the raucous cry of some lost bird, it acc.u.mulated such interrogatory force that it sufficed for all her needs. "Giddy-eh? Giddy-eh?" she would wail, not only to find out her whereabouts but also to express an abyss of misery: the fact that she was a stranger, shipwrecked, penniless, ailing, in search of the blessed land where at last she would be understood.
I can visualize her, by proxy, as she stands in the middle of the station platform, where she has just alighted, and vainly my ghostly envoy offers her an arm that she cannot see. The door of the waiting room opens with a shuddering whine peculiar to nights of intense frost; a cloud of hot air rushes out, almost as profuse as the steam from the great stack of the panting engine; and now our coachman Zakhar takes over-a burly man in sheepskin with the leather outside, his huge gloves protruding from his scarlet sash into which he has stuffed them. I hear the snow crunching under his felt boots while he busies himself with the luggage, the jingling harness, and then his own nose, which he eases by means of a dexterous flip of finger and thumb as he trudges back round the sleigh. Slowly, with grim misgivings, Mademoiselle climbs in, clutching at her helper in mortal fear lest the sleigh move off before her vast form is securely encased. Finally, she settles down with a grunt and thrusts her fists into her skimpy plush m.u.f.f. At the juicy smack of their driver"s lips the horses strain their quarters, shift hooves, strain again; and then Mademoiselle gives a backward jerk of her torso as the heavy sleigh is wrenched out of its world of steel, fur, flesh, to enter a frictionless medium where it skims along a spectral road that it seems barely to touch.
For one moment, thanks to the sudden radiance of a lone lamp where the station square ends, a grossly exaggerated shadow, also holding a m.u.f.f, races beside the sleigh, climbs a billow of snow, and is gone, leaving Mademoiselle to be swallowed up by what she will later allude to, with awe and gusto, as "la steppe." There, in the limitless gloom, the changeable twinkle of remote village lights seems to her to be the yellow eyes of wolves. She is cold, she is frozen stiff, frozen "to the center of her brain," for she soars with the wildest hyperbole when not clinging to the safest old saw. Every now and then, she looks back to make sure that a second sleigh, bearing her trunk and hatbox, is following-always at the same distance, like those companionable phantoms of ships in polar waters which explorers have described. And let me not leave out the moon-for surely there must be a moon, the full, incredibly clear disc that goes so well with Russian l.u.s.ty frosts. So there it comes, steering out of a flock of small dappled clouds, which it tinges with a vague iridescence; and, as it sails higher, it glazes the runner tracks left on the road, where every sparkling lump of snow is emphasized by a swollen shadow.
Very lovely, very lonesome. But what am I doing there in that stereoscopic dreamland? Somehow those two sleighs have slipped away; they have left my imaginary double behind on the blue-white road. No, even the vibration in my ears is not their receding bells, but my own blood singing. All is still, spellbound, enthralled by that great heavenly O shining above the Russian wilderness of my past. The snow is real, though, and as I bend to it and scoop up a handful, forty-five years crumble to glittering frost-dust between my fingers.
2.
A kerosene lamp is steered into the gloaming. Gently it floats and comes down; the hand of memory, now in a footman"s white cotton glove, places it in the center of a round table. The flame is nicely adjusted, and a rosy, silk-flounced lamp shade crowns the light. Revealed: a warm, bright room in a snow-m.u.f.fled house-soon to be termed "le chateau"-built by my great-grandfather, who, being afraid of fires, had the staircase made of iron, so that when the house did get burnt to the ground, sometime after the Soviet Revolution, those fretted steps remained standing there, all alone but still leading up.
Some more about that room, please. The oval mirror. Hanging on taut cords, its pure brow inclined, it strives to retain the falling furniture and a slope of bright floor that keep slipping from its embrace. The chandelier pendants. These emit a delicate tinkling whenever anything is moved in an upstairs room. Colored pencils. That tiny heap of emerald pencil dust on the oilcloth where a penknife had just done its recurrent duty. We are sitting at the table, my brother and I and Miss Robinson, who now and then looks at her watch: roads must be dreadful with all that snow; and anyway many professional hardships lie in wait for the vague French person who will replace her.
Now the colored pencils in more detail. The green one, by a mere whirl of the wrist, could be made to produce a ruffled tree, or the chimney smoke of a house where spinach was cooking. The blue one drew a simple line across the page-and the horizon of all seas was there. A nondescript blunt one kept getting into one"s way. The brown one was always broken, and so was the red, but sometimes, just after it had snapped, one could still make it serve by holding it so that the loose tip was propped, none too securely, by a jutting splinter. The little purple fellow, a special favorite of mine, had got worn down so short as to become scarcely manageable. The white one alone, that lanky albino among pencils, kept its original length, or at least did so until I discovered that, far from being a fraud leaving no mark on the page, it was the ideal tool since I could imagine whatever I wished while I scrawled.
Alas, these pencils, too, have been distributed among the characters in my books to keep fict.i.tious children busy; they are not quite my own now. Somewhere, in the apartment house of a chapter, in the hired room of a paragraph, I have also placed that tilted mirror, and the lamp, and the chandelier-drops. Few things are left; many have been squandered. Have I given away Box (son and husband of Loulou, the housekeeper"s pet), that old brown dachshund fast asleep on the sofa? No, I think he is still mine. His grizzled muzzle, with the wart at the puckered corner of the mouth, is tucked into the curve of his hock, and from time to time a deep sigh distends his ribs. He is so old and his sleep is so thickly padded with dreams (about chewable slippers and a few last smells) that he does not stir when faint bells jingle outside. Then a pneumatic door heaves and clangs in the vestibule. She has come after all: I had so hoped she would not.
3.
Another dog, the sweet-tempered sire of a ferocious family, a Great Dane not allowed in the house, played a pleasant part in an adventure that took place on one of the following days, if not the very day after. It so happened that my brother and I were left completely in charge of the newcomer. As I reconstruct it now, my mother had probably gone for a few hours to St. Petersburg (a distance of some fifty miles) where my father was deeply involved in the grave political events of that winter. She was pregnant and very nervous. Miss Robinson, instead of staying to break in Mademoiselle, had gone too-or perhaps my little sister, aged three, had inherited her. In order to prove that this was no way of treating us, I immediately formed the project of repeating the exciting performance of a year before, when we escaped from poor Miss Hunt in gay, populous Wiesbaden, a paradise of multicolored dead leaves. This time the countryside all around was a wilderness of snow, and it is hard to imagine what exactly could have been the goal of the journey I planned. We had just returned from our first afternoon walk with Mademoiselle and were throbbing with frustration and hatred. To keep up with an unfamiliar tongue (all we knew in the way of French were a few household words), and on top of it to be crossed in all our fond habits, was more than we could bear. The bonne promenade she had promised us had turned out to be a tedious stroll around the house where the snow had been cleared and the icy ground sprinkled with sand. She had had us wear things we never used to wear, even on the frostiest day-horrible gaiters and hoods that hampered our every movement. She had restrained us when we were tempted to explore the creamy, smooth swellings of snow that had been flower beds in summer. She had not allowed us to walk under the organ-pipe-like system of huge icicles that hung from the eaves and gloriously burned in the low sun. As soon as we came back from that walk, we left Mademoiselle puffing on the steps of the vestibule and dashed indoors, giving her the impression that we were about to conceal ourselves in some remote room. Actually, we trotted on till we reached the other side of the house, and then, through a veranda, emerged into the garden again. The above-mentioned Great Dane was in the act of fussily adjusting himself to a nearby snowdrift, but while deciding which hind leg to lift he noticed us and at once joined us at a joyful gallop.
The three of us followed a fairly easy trail and, after plodding through deeper snow, reached the road that led to the village. Meanwhile the sun had set. Dusk came with uncanny suddenness. My brother declared he was cold and tired, but I urged him on and finally made him ride the dog (the only member of the party to be still enjoying himself). We had gone more than two miles and the moon was fantastically shiny, and my brother, in perfect silence, had begun to fall every now and then from his mount, when a servant with a lantern overtook us and led us home. "Giddy-eh, giddy-eh?" Mademoiselle was frantically shouting from the porch. I brushed past her without a word. My brother burst into tears, and gave himself up. The Great Dane, whose name was Turka, returned to his interrupted affairs in connection with serviceable and informative snowdrifts around the house.
4.
In our childhood we know a lot about hands since they live and hover at the level of our stature; Mademoiselle"s were unpleasant because of the froggy gloss on their tight skin besprinkled with brown ecchymotic spots. Before her time no stranger had ever stroked my face. Mademoiselle, as soon as she came, had taken me completely aback by patting my cheek in sign of spontaneous affection. All her mannerisms come back to me when I think of her hands. Her trick of peeling rather than sharpening a pencil, the point held toward her stupendous and sterile bosom swathed in green wool. The way she had of inserting her little finger into her ear and vibrating it very rapidly. The ritual observed every time she gave me a fresh copybook. Always panting a little, her mouth slightly open and emitting in quick succession a series of asthmatic puffs, she would open the copybook to make a margin in it; that is, she would sharply imprint a vertical line with her thumbnail, fold in the edge of the page, press, release, smooth it out with the heel of her hand, after which the book would be briskly twisted around and placed before me ready for use. A new pen followed; she would moisten the glistening nib with susurrous lips before dipping it into the baptismal ink font. Then, delighting in every limb of every limpid letter (especially so because the preceding copybook had ended in utter sloppiness), with exquisite care I would inscribe the word Dictee while Mademoiselle hunted through her collection of spelling tests for a good, hard pa.s.sage.
5.
Meanwhile the setting has changed. h.o.a.rfrost and snow have been removed by a silent property man. The summer afternoon is alive with steep clouds breasting the blue. Eyed shadows move on the garden paths. Presently, lessons are over and Mademoiselle is reading to us on the veranda where the mats and plaited chairs develop a spicy, biscuity smell in the heat. On the white windowsills, on the long window seats covered with faded calico, the sun breaks into geometrical gems after pa.s.sing through rhomboids and squares of stained gla.s.s. This is the time when Mademoiselle is at her very best.
What a number of volumes she read through to us on that veranda! Her slender voice sped on and on, never weakening, without the slightest hitch or hesitation, an admirable reading machine wholly independent of her sick bronchial tubes. We got it all: Les Malheurs de Sophie, Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-Vingts Jours, La Pet.i.te Chose, Les Miserables, Le Comte de Monte Cristo, many others. There she sat, distilling her reading voice from the still prison of her person. Apart from the lips, one of her chins, the smallest but true one, was the only mobile detail of her Buddha-like bulk. The black-rimmed pince-nez reflected eternity. Occasionally a fly would settle on her stern forehead and its three wrinkles would instantly leap up all together like three runners over three hurdles. But nothing whatever changed in the expression of her face-the face I so often tried to depict in my sketchbook, for its impa.s.sive and simple symmetry offered a far greater temptation to my stealthy pencil than the bowl of flowers or the decoy duck on the table before me, which I was supposedly drawing.
Presently my attention would wander still farther, and it was then, perhaps, that the rare purity of her rhythmic voice accomplished its true purpose. I looked at a cloud and years later was able to visualize its exact shape. The gardener was pottering among the peonies. A wagtail took a few steps, stopped as if it had remembered something-and then walked on, enacting its name. Coming from nowhere, a comma b.u.t.terfly settled on the threshold, basked in the sun with its angular fulvous wings spread, suddenly closed them just to show the tiny initial chalked on their underside, and as suddenly darted away. But the most constant source of enchantment during those readings came from the harlequin pattern of colored panes inset in a whitewashed framework on either side of the veranda. The garden when viewed through these magic gla.s.ses grew strangely still and aloof. If one looked through blue gla.s.s, the sand turned to cinders while inky trees swam in a tropical sky. The yellow created an amber world infused with an extra strong brew of sunshine. The red made the foliage drip ruby dark upon a coral-tinted footpath. The green soaked greenery in a greener green. And when, after such richness, one turned to a small square of normal, savorless gla.s.s, with its lone mosquito or lame daddy longlegs, it was like taking a draft of water when one is not thirsty, and one saw a matter-of-fact white bench under familiar trees. But of all the windows this is the pane through which in later years parched nostalgia longed to peer.
Mademoiselle never found out how potent had been the even flow of her voice. The subsequent claims she put forward were quite different. "Ah," she sighed, "comme on s"aimait!" ("didn"t we love each other!") "Those good old days in the chateau! The dead wax doll we once buried under the oak!" (No-a wool-stuffed golliwogg.) "And that time you and Serge ran away and left me stumbling and howling in the depths of the forest!" (Exaggerated.) "Ah, la fessee que je vous ai flanquee!" ("My, what a spanking I gave you!") (She did try to slap me once but the attempt was never repeated.) "Votre tante, la Princesse, whom you struck with your little fist because she had been rude to me!" (Do not remember.) "And the way you whispered to me your childish troubles!" (Never!) "And the cozy nook in my room where you loved to snuggle because you felt so warm and secure!"
Mademoiselle"s room, both in the country and in town, was a weird place to me-a kind of hothouse sheltering a thick-leaved plant imbued with a heavy, queerly acrid odor. Although next to ours, when we were small, it did not seem to belong to our pleasant, well-aired home. In that sickening mist, reeking, among other effluvia, of the brown smell of oxidized apple peel, the lamp burned low, and strange objects glimmered upon the writing desk: a lacquered box with licorice sticks, black segments of which she would hack off with her penknife and put to melt under her tongue; a picture postcard of a lake and a castle with mother-of-pearl spangles for windows; a b.u.mpy ball of tightly rolled bits of silver paper that came from all those chocolates she used to consume at night; photographs of the nephew who had died, of his mother who had signed her picture Mater Dolorosa, and of a certain Monsieur de Marante who had been forced by his family to marry a rich widow.
Lording it over the rest was one in a n.o.ble frame incrusted with garnets; it showed, in three-quarter view, a slim young brunette clad in a close-fitting dress, with brave eyes and abundant hair. "A braid as thick as my arm and reaching down to my ankles!" was Mademoiselle"s melodramatic comment. For this had been she-but in vain did my eyes probe her familiar form to try and extract the graceful creature it had engulfed. Such discoveries as my awed brother and I did make merely increased the difficulties of that task; and the grown-ups who during the day beheld a densely clothed Mademoiselle never saw what we children saw when, roused from her sleep by one of us shrieking himself out of a bad dream, disheveled, candle in hand, a gleam of gilt lace on the blood-red dressing gown that could not quite wrap her quaking ma.s.s, the ghastly Jezabel of Racine"s absurd play stomped barefooted into our bedroom.
All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me. I loathe Somnus, that black-masked headsman binding me to the block; and if in the course of years I have got so used to my nightly ordeal as almost to swagger while the familiar axe is coming out of its great velvet-lined case, initially I had no such comfort or defense: I had nothing-save a door left slightly ajar into Mademoiselle"s room. Its vertical line of meek light was something I could cling to, since in absolute darkness my head would swim, just as the soul dissolves in the blackness of sleep.
Sat.u.r.day night used to be a pleasurable prospect because that was the night Mademoiselle indulged in the luxury of a weekly bath, thus granting a longer lease to my tenuous gleam. But then a subtler torture set in. The nursery bathroom in our St. Petersburg house was at the end of a Z-shaped corridor some twenty heartbeats" distance from my bed, and between dreading Mademoiselle"s return from the bathroom to her lighted bedroom and envying my brother"s stolid snore, I could never really put my additional time to profit by deftly getting to sleep while a c.h.i.n.k in the dark still bespoke a speck of myself in nothingness. At length they would come, those inexorable steps, plodding along the pa.s.sage and causing some little gla.s.s object, which had been secretly sharing my vigil, to tinkle in dismay on its shelf.
Now she has entered her room. A brisk interchange of light values tells me that the candle on her bed table takes over the job of the lamp on her desk. My line of light is still there, but it has grown old and wan, and flickers whenever Mademoiselle makes her bed creak by moving. For I still hear her. Now it is a silvery rustle spelling "Suchard"; now the trk-trk-trk of a fruit knife cutting the pages of La Revue des Deux Mondes. I hear her panting slightly. And all the time I am in acute distress, desperately trying to coax sleep, opening my eyes every few seconds to check the faded gleam, and imagining paradise as a place where a sleepless neighbor reads an endless book by the light of an eternal candle.
The inevitable happens: the pince-nez case shuts with a snap, the review shuffles onto the marble of the bed table, and gustily Mademoiselle"s pursed lips blow; the first attempt fails, a groggy flame squirms and ducks; then comes a second lunge, and light collapses. In that pitchy blackness I lose my bearings, my bed seems to be slowly drifting, panic makes me sit up and stare; finally my dark-adapted eyes sift out, among entoptic floaters, certain more precious blurrings that roam in aimless amnesia until, half-remembering, they settle down as the dim folds of window curtains behind which streetlights are remotely alive.
How utterly foreign to the troubles of the night were those exciting St. Petersburg mornings when the fierce and tender, damp and dazzling arctic spring bundled away broken ice down the sea-bright Neva! It made the roofs shine. It painted the slush in the streets a rich purplish-blue shade which I have never seen anywhere since. Mademoiselle, her coat of imitation seal majestically swelling on her bosom, sat in the back seat of the landau with my brother next to her and me facing them-joined to them by the valley of the lap rug; and as I looked up I could see, strung on ropes from housefront to housefront high above the street, great, tensely smooth, semitransparent banners billowing, their three wide bands-pale red, pale blue, and merely pale-deprived by the sun and the flying cloud shadows of any too blunt connection with a national holiday, but undoubtedly celebrating now, in the city of memory, the essence of that spring day, the swish of the mud, the ruffled exotic bird with one bloodshot eye on Mademoiselle"s hat.
6.
She spent seven years with us, lessons getting rarer and rarer and her temper worse and worse. Still, she seemed like a rock of grim permanence when compared to the ebb and flow of English governesses and Russian tutors pa.s.sing through our large household. She was on bad terms with all of them. Seldom less than a dozen people sat down for meals and when, on birthdays, this number rose to thirty or more, the question of place at table became a particularly burning one for Mademoiselle. Uncles and aunts and cousins would arrive on such days from neighboring estates, and the village doctor would come in his dogcart, and the village schoolmaster would be heard blowing his nose in the cool hall, where he pa.s.sed from mirror to mirror with a greenish, damp, creaking bouquet of lilies of the valley or a sky-colored, brittle one of cornflowers in his fist.
If Mademoiselle found herself seated too far at the end of the table, and especially if she lost precedence to a certain poor relative who was almost as fat as she ("Je suis une sylphide a cote d"elle," Mademoiselle would say with a shrug of contempt), then her sense of injury caused her lips to twitch in a would-be ironical smile-and when a naive neighbor would smile back, she would rapidly shake her head, as if coming out of some very deep meditation, with the remark: "Excusez-moi, je souriais a mes tristes pensees."
And as though nature had not wished to spare her anything that makes one supersensitive, she was hard of hearing. Sometimes at table we boys would suddenly become aware of two big tears crawling down Mademoiselle"s ample cheeks. "Don"t mind me," she would say in a small voice, and she kept on eating till the unwiped tears blinded her; then, with a heartbroken hiccup she would rise and blunder out of the dining room. Little by little the truth would come out. The general talk had turned, say, on the subject of the warship my uncle commanded, and she had perceived in this a sly dig at her Switzerland that had no navy. Or else it was because she fancied that whenever French was spoken, the game consisted in deliberately preventing her from directing and bejeweling the conversation. Poor lady, she was always in such a nervous hurry to seize control of intelligible table talk before it bolted back into Russian that no wonder she bungled her cue.
"And your Parliament, Sir, how is it getting along?" she would suddenly burst out brightly from her end of the table, challenging my father, who, after a hara.s.sing day, was not exactly eager to discuss troubles of the State with a singularly unreal person who neither knew nor cared anything about them. Thinking that someone had referred to music, "But Silence, too, may be beautiful," she would bubble. "Why, one evening, in a desolate valley of the Alps, I actually heard Silence." Sallies like these, especially when growing deafness led her to answer questions none had put, resulted in a painful hush, instead of touching off the rockets of a sprightly causerie.
And, really, her French was so lovely! Ought one to have minded the shallowness of her culture, the bitterness of her temper, the ba.n.a.lity of her mind, when that pearly language of hers purled and scintillated, as innocent of sense as the alliterative sins of Racine"s pious verse? My father"s library, not her limited lore, taught me to appreciate authentic poetry; nevertheless, something of her tongue"s limpidity and l.u.s.ter has had a singularly bracing effect upon me, like those sparkling salts that are used to purify the blood. This is why it makes me so sad to imagine now the anguish Mademoiselle must have felt at seeing how lost, how little valued was the nightingale voice which came from her elephantine body. She stayed with us long, much too long, obstinately hoping for some miracle that would transform her into a kind of Madame de Rambouillet holding a gilt-and-satin salon of poets, princes, and statesmen under her brilliant spell.