THREE
She wrote to me in her first transatlantic letter:
. . . a gothic cathedral that floats in the sea, a slim ship with towering masts. A long time ago, I also saw Saint Petersburg like that, like a ship wrapped in ice. Now I saw New York the same way when after a sea voyage of one week, the city began to emerge out of the gray waves and the November drizzle. Slowly but surely, the cathedral got ever closer, forming a clearer and clearer outline in the lead-colored sky; and the closer it got, the more its temple shape changed, and it became a slim city on a narrow island, a capital consisting of towers with an infinity of lit windows. I felt that I had stopped moving and that the city was approaching me across the ocean. Whereas many cities are fixed in a single place, New York and Saint Petersburg float in the sea.
In the evening, sitting next to the window of a hotel on the corner of Ninety-Fourth Street and West End Avenue, I could not take my eyes off the unusual spectacle: around its eighteenth floor rose extremely tall skyscrapers, covered in lit windows. I was fascinated by the life in those windows, with their different lights, and again, as I had done in the taxi that morning, I asked myself where the center of the city was. In an unknown capital, is the center where we find ourselves, or, on the contrary, is it far from the place where we happen to be? The two sensations came together inside me on the morning, after the arrival of my boat, as the taxi was passing through the still-dark streets full of advertisements that hadn’t been switched off yet. The two suitcases of my exile lay on the floor of my hotel room, unpacked, but I had a copy of the New York Times open on the bed, at the page with the wanted ads, and I had already marked a few advertisements with red pencil. After the taxi fare and a week in advance at the hotel, I was left with exactly twenty-seven dollars.
When I arrived in America to look for Nina, I met her friend Alexandra Tolstaya, who spoke to me of her relationship with Nina. She told me about their meetings, the excursions they went on together. I already knew about them from the letters that Nina had sent me. In more than one she wrote of Alexandra, or Sasha, as friends called her, and of her other new friends. In one of them she writes:
Alexandra played with fire and asked me questions more often as a way of passing the time than out of interest.
“And how did you adjust, Nina?”
“I started taking the most diverse jobs,” I told her, amused, “always ones that didn’t require any knowledge of the language because I don’t speak a word of English. In a printing shop, in a factory. Once they fired me on the spot because I began to reflect on the meaning of technology and put the envelopes into the machine on their sides, so that the addresses were printed in the air and the envelopes remained blank.”
I was sitting with Alexandra and a male friend of hers on some tall dunes. The sea was roaring in front of us, and the waves were rising up with white hats, waves as tall as the ones I had only seen before in Saint Petersburg. They didn’t look very inviting as far as swimming was concerned. As for us, three figures tanned by the sun, agile flames of the fire leapt up and dyed our faces pink.
The man stretched himself out. I observed his long pianist’s fingers as they picked up a piece of sausage with a napkin, stuck it on a fork, and roasted it on the fire, while keeping his palms protected by the napkin. He noticed my look and quickly let the napkin fall onto the sand.
“And did you feel cheerful doing those dreadful jobs, Nina Nikolayevna?” he asked.
“What is this, a police interrogation? Now I feel cheerful and even on the brink of laughter as I watch you and your clumsy musician’s hands try to stick something as prosaic as a piece of sausage on the end of a fork,” I said, laughing with so much enthusiasm that no one could be cross with me for having mocked them.
Yes, Nina, how well I know your infectious laugh, how you let it out to cover up the terrible things you had just said! How many times I would like to have gotten cross with you, and I haven’t been able to because of the way you laugh!
Nina’s reply to the man—about whom all we know is that he is tanned by the sun—continues in her letter:
“Well I also thought to turn myself into a beggar. I took this very seriously. I even went to see the tramps and the homeless so as to negotiate a place with them and avoid putting myself where I wasn’t wanted.”
“Nina, as you are a beggar, do you want to ask for more alms, that is, another piece of sausage? With or without bread?”
Alexandra took it as a joke, but Nina had the idea fixed in her head that she would end her life among beggars. I understood her perfectly. She was far from being melodramatic or hysterical. Many of us were absolutely convinced of the same thing, this image of the end of our lives. We would end up as homeless people. It was a fact that we contemplated quite coolly.
“As you insist. Then together with the sausage I will also toast this crust. What do you think, Alexandra? May we ask our distinguished guest to play something for us on the guitar?”
“I would be delighted to play for you, Nina. But first I would like to know how you got to know each other, you and Alexandra.”
I leaned back on my elbows on the white sand.
“I can see that you have brought an enormous case full of questions with you for the weekend. I do whatever I can to make you shut up, but it’s just not possible. Alexandra will tell you, and I’ll add the details as she goes along, isn’t that right, Sasha?”
A handsome greyhound came running out of the sea. It stopped in front of us and shook to dry its coat. The fire was whispering, Alexandra shouted a few words, and the dog went over to the big house, with its tail between its legs.
“Nina came to see me in my office at the Immigrant Aid Organization. She didn’t come to see me as the daughter of Leo Tolstoy, but the fact is that when one is called Alexandra Lvovna Tolstaya, it is difficult for one to cover up one’s family connections. So I made her wait for over an hour and then I let her in.”
“With a not very friendly face, Sasha, if we want to round off the picture.”
“And I asked, ‘Nina Berberova? Are you the daughter or the niece?’ ‘Of whom?’ the visitor asked. ‘Of the writer, of course.’ ‘I am she.’ she answered with relief. I embraced her, and we went to have lunch together.”
“In a Chinese restaurant, we had roast duck with honey.”
“And on Friday I took her from Manhattan to the house, here.”
“Because you saw that I didn’t have a clue about fishing and, what was much worse, that I didn’t know how to play cards, sing a duet, and dance a waltz just as you all did in Iasnaia Poliana.”
“Just as we all had done before my father forbade us to, when he grew tired of mundane amusements.”
“I learned to play canasta . . .”
“Come on, Nina. You play like a garbage collector. You’d lose the last thing you own. That necklace with the charm. What is it?”
“A dove.”
The man played the cords of the guitar with the tips of his fingers in darkness. I stretched out and suddenly I lay down on the sand, watching the stars that were emerging from the clear sky, the crescent moon that shone ever more brightly. As it had so many years ago under the walnut tree at Longchêne, as it had done in Sorrento, Berlin, Prague . . . No, there was nothing else except fog, like in Saint Petersburg. Before my eyes there grew, like shining ripe strawberries, a hammer and sickle lit by spotlights, and more and more hammers and sickles that hung from all the buildings in the square full of snow. With a rapid movement I turned to one side, and supported my head with the palm of my hand so that I could see the man playing melodies by Boccherini on his guitar while the reflections of flames danced on his face, arms, and that part of his tanned chest revealed by his half-unbuttoned shirt.
Alexandra has never managed to understand Nina. But, can I say that I have really come to understand her? Is it possible to know and understand somebody deep down, no matter how much in love we might be? The more I knew Nina, the less I understood her. Each time I realized with greater clarity that I did not love Nina just as she was, but rather my image of her, or that fragment of her personality that was destined to fill an emptiness inside me.
May, 1951
According to the date, she wrote these letters to me prior to the long ones I have just read.
Dear Igor Mikhailovich,
The first person I have had dealings with in the United States is Alexandra Tolstaya. I had seen her many times in photographs of her with her father, the writer Leo Tolstoy. At that time Alexandra was twenty-eight years old and almost forty years have gone by since then. She is a strong, well-built, very elegant woman. Some time ago, Vladislav wrote some things about her in his article dedicated to the death of Leo Tolstoy. Do you know this article?
I have also met Vsevolod Pastukhov, pianist, teacher, and poet, and we have made friends. Through his music I relive the ambience of Saint Petersburg, which in fact I never had the time to get to know well enough.
May, 1952
Igor,
At the teas Maria Tselina offers here in New York, I have met a whole bunch of Russians. The ones who used to attend her salon in Paris had known each other for years, ever since they lived in Moscow. Here it is different. When she invites people, Tselina doesn’t keep to any given criteria. Vladislav used to tell me that the day would come when Russian exiles, the literati, would meet up as an association of people capable of distinguishing an iambus from a trochee. But the ones I meet at Tselina’s place don’t even know how to do that, so now I divide the Russians into two categories: those who try to take the maximum advantage possible of their experiences in the west, and those who have brought along a screen that they have placed between them and the western world. And what I do is avoid the latter.
Nina wrote to me much later, in one of those letters that seemed to be rough drafts written before she started her memoirs:
In front of the fireplace, Alexandra was brushing her greyhound. I sat in front of her in an armchair, and I told myself that leaning back in a comfortable chair with a book in one’s hand was absolute paradise. The warm, salty air and the smell of recently cut grass came in through the open windows. Weakened by the muggy heat, I placed my feet on a stool while my eyes wandered from the framed photographs that were hanging on the wall to the man who was mowing the lawn in the garden.
“Alexandra, you have your no-man’s-land, don’t you?”
“No-man’s-land? What do you mean by that?”
“Since I was little I have been convinced that each person has her no-man’s-land, a land that belongs to her and her alone.”
“Are you referring to acceptable and unacceptable life, the legal and the non-legal, that which is permitted and that which is not?”
“Not at all, Sasha. What I mean is that each person lives or ought to live without limits, in absolute freedom, in a private space, even though it might only be for an hour a day or an hour a week or one day a month. Deep down we live for this private life of our own.”
“No, I don’t experience anything like that, Nina. I know nothing of that.”
“You don’t have a territory where you are alone with your father?”
“My father died a long time ago.”
“So?”
“And you think that . . .”
“Think about it, Sasha.”
“And you have this no-man’s-land, as you call it?”
“I also have my dead person.”
“A dead person?”
“Yes, my dead person is alive for me; and the living, for me, are dead,” I explained looking at a spot somewhere through the window, someplace beyond the garden, the sea, the horizon.
Then I fixed my gaze at a spot in the garden. A tanned man was mowing the lawn, the muscles of his shoulders were tense under his vest. Rather than a famous musician, he looked more like a Russian peasant. I thought that I liked him like that more than when he was playing the guitar or the piano. Alexandra noticed my look.
“You have charmed our pianist. He never used to mow the lawn before you came along.”
“Pastukhov must be about the same age as me, yet somehow he manages to bring me back the echo of old Saint Petersburg, even though I personally never knew it, just a few of its notes at the beginning of the 1920s, when they were already fading away in the atmosphere of revolutionary Saint Petersburg.”
“And that’s all? Doesn’t he give you anything else, this man, except these notes?”
“Yes, something else. I feel at ease with him.”
“And that’s all?”
“I’ll help you brush the dog.”
I took the brush and comb from Alexandra’s hands and started to brush the coat on the firm stomach of the reclining animal.
“Nina, why do you wear a dove around your neck?”
“Why? Listen:
The doves flee frightened
from the feet of my loved one.
Do you like it?”
“Yes. Who wrote it?”
“Him . . . My no-man’s-land. My dead person. A long time ago. We were in Venice, the city of doves.”
I continued brushing the dog vigorously.
Pastukhov came into the salon, shining all over, with three glasses of vermouth in his hand.
July, 1952
Dear friend, do you remember that during the war we sometimes spoke of certain special moments that have the power of transforming people? We didn’t speak about it in those terms, but that’s what it was: remember how I told you about my meeting with a Spanish girl, a moment which renewed tenderness and compassion within me? Recently I have been thinking of this subject. In some way we all have our no-man’s-land. Within the territory of this other life, the invisible one which is ours only and in which we live in complete freedom, unusual things can happen. Two attuned souls can meet; a person who is reading a book or listening to music can reach an extraordinary degree of depth. Certain moments, lived in our no-man’s-land, either complement some aspect of our “real” life or they have a meaning that is all their own. This inner life can be a pleasure or a necessity.
Nina B.
September, 1952
Dear Igor Mikhailovich,
You ask me if I have got used to living in America. Yes, I’m fine here. I try to understand America. I keep on discovering more and more. I admire America, its youth, and its dynamism. But deep down, you know . . . It makes no difference to me whether I live in one place or another. I like to have new impressions; they help me to cope with the pain I carry inside me. But in the end, isn’t it everybody’s wish to snuff out their most intimate pain with a blanket of new, different, strong, crazy experiences? What we wouldn’t do to be relieved of ourselves!
Greetings from
your Nina
In an undated letter I received ten years or so after the earlier brief ones, she wrote:
In the program there was a concert dedicated to the memory of Dmitri Shostakovich. I was sitting next to Alexandra in the first row of the circle and was listening to the art of Vsevolod Pastukhov’s piano. All the other instruments are unnecessary, she told me; he alone is a whole orchestra that fills the concert hall. I observed the pianist submerged in the universe of the music where nothing of the outside world could reach. But perhaps something could: the pianist’s face took on from time to time an illuminated resplendent expression, like the one I had seen on him for the first time a few months ago in Alexandra’s house by the sea, he brought us some glasses full of golden vermouth with ice cubes that knocked against each other like bumper cars. I thought that musicians were happy beings: in music they have their no-man’s-land, which fills them completely and which acts as a refuge. Both Vsevolod Pastukhov and Dmitri Shostakovich did. Before them, Schubert, Mozart, Bach. Neither the Inquisition nor the totalitarian states would ever permit anyone his no-man’s-land, this other life. But with music it is possible to preserve one’s inner life even under a dictatorship. It is true that Shostakovich had serious problems with the totalitarian government, but nobody, not even Stalin, could take away the music that was echoing in his head.
Applause, a storm of applause. The audience gave a standing ovation.
In the wings there was a long line of people who wanted to shake hands with Vsevolod Pastukhov. Alexandra and I were the last in line. Pastukhov saw us and offered us the place next to him. He presented Alexandra to his friends and then me as “my friend.” I was stupefied; I felt my face grow severe, inaccessible. But no one was paying any attention to me, the evening belonged to Vsevolod Pastukhov. Alexandra excused herself, saying she still had work to do. We accompanied her out onto the street; she went off in her red sports car, which shrank until it melted into the flood of lights. Pastukhov called a taxi to Central Park.
On the way he told me of his first meeting with Shostakovich in the 1920s. He continued while we looked for a place on the terrace of a cafe in the middle of the park; he told stories while the waiter uncorked a bottle of champagne effortlessly, noiselessly. Then he played for a moment with his glass, expecting me to suggest a toast. After all, today he today had had the kind of success that comes only once in a lifetime, if it comes at all! But I sipped my champagne without saying a word, so that he clinked his glass against mine, in silence, before tasting the liquid full of tiny bubbles.
“Do you still work as a quadrilingual secretary for that old witch? And you handle her correspondence with Albert Schweitzer, Gary Cooper, and Kurt Furtwängler?”
“Mrs. Toom’s latest whim: she now wants me to grow roses instead of writing her letters.”
“And you’ve refused.”
“I certainly have. So she told me to grow tulips. And if I don’t want to, then I can leave.”
“So you left.”
“I left. The very next day she called me to tell me that the detective novel she had half-finished reading had gotten lost somewhere. And that I should help her find it because otherwise she would never find out who the murderer was. So before hanging up I told her the murderer was the gardener.”
The pianist laughed his head off, and his face shone as it had during the concert, as it had a few months ago. I stopped noticing what was around me, I only saw him.
The waiter filled our glasses to the brim.
“To Shostakovich. To your Shostakovich,” I said in a low voice.
We touched glasses, we looked each other in the eye, we drank a sip.
“And to you,” I added in a voice that could barely be heard.
He placed a palm over my fingers and held them tightly. He raised his eyes to me in a way . . . I don’t know how to put it. Like Tolstoy when he was looking at his daughter in the photo in Alexandra’s living room.
I wanted to move my hand, but my fingers were imprisoned. I started to notice what was around me. In front of us there was a little artificial lake, an owl had started to hoot, and in some place nearby a popular American band began to play. Without a doubt people were dancing. I could hear shouts of happiness. I felt like dancing with them even though I didn’t know that particular dance. But I didn’t say anything. I took a sip of champagne.
“One day in Alexandra’s house you recited some verses about doves, Nina. I heard it through the open window.”
“Yes. This:
The doves flee frightened
from the feet of my loved one.
“The loved one in question is you.”
“Yes.”
“The doves are the men who are afraid of you. On one hand, you are attractive and they desire you; on the other, you are mature, self-confident, and intelligent. And sarcastic. And worst of all, you are mysterious. And men panic when faced with mystery, because they don’t know what to do with it. That is why they flee, frightened.”
I laughed without stopping, drank champagne, choked, and coughed, and with my fingers over my open mouth, I said to him: “But it’s about some Venetian doves! On San Marco square!”
“Nina, let’s go together to Venice! And afterward we will not separate anymore!”
I took a sip thoughtfully. Here we are, then, I told myself. This had to happen one day; once more I am in a situation in which someone wants to take away the one thing that matters to me. The owl hooted again. A gust of cold wind blew that hinted at the coming of fall.
“I prefer the path to the destination, the sea to the harbor,” I answered slowly, in a low voice. “Is what we have already not enough for you, Vsevolod?”
“I live submerged in insecurity. We spend the weekends together, we go to the theater, to the concerts. But all that is insecure. And I need security.”
“Either you have security inside yourself or you don’t have it at all.”
“Maybe you will have to think about it, won’t you, Nina?”
He kissed the palm of my hand.
Instead of the artificial lake in Central Park, I saw before me the Venetian sky in April—dull clouds, a heavy downpour, and then an intense blue sky, the square of San Marco full of silky doves. I arrive, dressed in an ivory-colored raincoat, and . . . zaaaaaaasssss, dozens of doves beat the air with their wings, higher and higher, they have disappeared.
“I’m not an insurance agent whose job it is to make people feel secure,” I said, and got up.
He looked at me, petrified.
The music from a neighboring dance hall could now be heard more intensely. A strident shout of joy reached us. It was a dark night, without a moon, without stars.
Suddenly my violent gesture came to an end. I caressed his cheek with the tips of my fingers.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t want to . . .”
He sat, stunned, and watched as I moved away with my head down.
The letter ends here.
September, 1952
Dear friend,
Tonight I had the same dream I had many years ago in Paris. Isn’t that strange? We were sitting in a little art deco cafe built of wood in the Luxembourg garden. You probably don’t remember, so many years have gone by! We were walking together from the newspaper offices and down the rue de Vaugirard, I remember it perfectly well. Then we had coffee together in the Luxembourg garden and I told you about a dream, which I dreamt again tonight! The one in which I found myself in the train station at Saint Petersburg. I was waiting for the Paris train. It was a goods train that was bringing the coffins of the dead from exile back home. I ran along the platform, past the endless row of cars that were entering the station building little by little, and I discovered Vladya’s coffin in the last car. The shouts of the railway workers woke me up.
Nina
The day after the concert, very early in the morning, Nina phoned up Alexandra Tolstaya to invite her to go on a long trip together through Colorado and Arizona. “The sooner the better!” she insisted.
On Friday afternoon they set off on their trip in Alexandra’s red sports car. They discovered all kinds of scenery, the most varied types of people, Indians too. From time to time Nina talked of her no-man’s-land; she said that sometimes it took over so much that it didn’t let her live her primary life, the visible one, and that life isn’t going to wait. The Kansas prairie made her think of Russia.
I didn’t find out anything about this until much later, when I was in America. Alexandra Tolstaya told me about it. Since then I have only received one letter from Nina, the last one.
Igor, my friend,
You have known me almost my entire life. Sometimes I think that if I hadn’t abandoned Vladya, he might have lived longer, he might have lived until the war, we might even have lived through the bombing of Billancourt, we might . . . Forgive me for saying such words. On the day of the bombing we might have died together; you know that the house where we lived on the rue de Quatre Cheminées was completely destroyed. Sometimes I imagine (and I am ashamed to confess it) that we are together in the cellar during the bombardment, he is protecting me with his body, he lies on top of me, and at that moment a bomb falls on the house.
Igor, do you remember my outcry, “Is life going to wait?” that day in the cafe in Paris? I knew it. Life never waits!
Don’t reply; there is nothing more to be said.
Yours, Nina
In 1993, at the age of ninety-two, Nina Berberova died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She had worked as a professor of literature at Yale University from 1958 to 1963, and Princeton University from 1963 to 1971. Until nine years before her death, her work was almost unknown to anyone outside Russian émigré circles. In the spring of 1984 the French publisher Hubert Nyssen of Actes Sud found a manuscript in his mailbox with a letter from the translator: “The author of this novel is Russian, and I believe that her work has not had the recognition it deserves.” In a short period of time, Actes Sud released the complete works of the author in French, novels and stories, which since then have been translated into dozens of languages. Almost overnight, Berberova turned into a worldwide literary figure.
At the end of her life, after the change of regime, Nina traveled to Russia, where several books of hers have been published and where her readers adore her.
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Monika Zgustová was born in Prague and lives in Barcelona, Spain. She has published seven books, including novels, short stories, a play, and a biography. Her novel Silent Woman was a runner-up for the National Award for the Novel, given by the Spanish Ministry of Culture. Zgustová has also received the Giutat de Barcelona and the Mercè Rodoreda awards in Spain, and the Gratias Agist Prize given by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague. She has translated more than fifty books of Russian and Czech fiction and poetry, including the works of Milan Kundera and Vaclav Havel, into both Spanish and Catalan.