he placed these objects in front of Nina, who listlessly started to draw stars with twelve or fifteen points. When it was almost impossible to see anything, she added a crescent moon, identical to the one that was at that moment emerging from behind the acacia.
“I try to cheer Ninon up,” Nikolay went back to the earlier subject, keeping a firm hold on his glass, “by telling her that they will meet up some day, there . . .” he pointed upward.
Nina interrupted him impatiently. “I’m not a believer. What’s more I don’t try to deceive myself with prayers the way you do. But above all, why do you expect me to desire to meet him again in that other world? Half the time we couldn’t put up with each other when we were alive.”
“Nina’s right,” said Vera in her favor. “After so many years people don’t even want to see each other down here. Time passes and people end up having nothing to say to each other. Maybe I wouldn’t even recognize my poor Aloysha, and that’d be a good thing.”
Vera sighed.
“The other day I saw him in a dream, Vera . . .” said Nina.
“My dead son?”
“No, I’m sorry. I saw Vladya. There were a lot of people in the room and nobody else saw him. He had long hair and he was thin, almost transparent, light as a ghost, but elegant and youthful. We found a way of being alone together. I sat next to him. I took his hand, fine and light as a feather. I told him, ‘If you can, tell me how you feel.’ He answered me with a peculiar gesture that I interpreted to mean ‘not too bad.’ Then he filled his mouth with smoke, bent his back, and said, ‘How can I put it? One doesn’t always feel comfortable . . .’”
“How strange,” said Olga, shaking her golden head and looking around at the others. “Do you make anything of it?”
“It’s strange, the whole thing is very strange. ‘My solitude begins when I am two steps away from you’ says the lover of the main character in a Giraudoux novel,” Nikolay said, blowing cigarette smoke out of his mouth.
“It could also be said that my solitude begins in your arms,” Nina said in a harsh tone of voice, staring at a spot beyond the fence.
“Ninon reckons,” Nikolay continued as if he hadn’t heard what Nina had said, “that in his poems Vladislav predicted what would happen and that this, according to her, is already starting to happen—”
“Olenka, where would you like to be now if you could choose?” Nina interrupted him, uneasily.
“Here, in the freshness of the night under this walnut tree, in 1941, a year from now, because then the war will be over.”
“And you, Vera?”
“Me? It’s rather banal, I’m ashamed to tell you, but I would like to be in the tsar’s court in Pushkin’s time. To be able to hear him reciting his poems. Pushkin, I mean, not the tsar.”
“Another ideal as a substitute for happiness?” Nina smiled sadly, “And you, Nikolasha?”
“I would like this to be the first day in this house. I would like to eat piroshki and wash them down with abundant quantities of champagne, and I would like to look forward to our first night on the dry grass.”
Nina was drawing her stars. Suddenly she looked up.
“I would like to be in America.”
“The truth is,” Nikolay went on as if he hadn’t heard her, “that Vladislav couldn’t have chosen a better moment for dying. He isn’t forced to see the Germans and human cowardice, as we are. And who knows what else we’re going to see.”
“And when I say that I would now like to be in America, that means that one day I will be there,” said Nina, while continuing to draw something on the sheet of paper.
“You are the exterminating angel, Nina. Would you really punish us with your departure?” said Boris Zaitsev.
“I’m more of a Lady Macbeth,” said Nina.
“Why America?” I asked out of interest while I tried to get rid of the fly that had fallen into my glass of wine; at each sip it slipped between my lips and then reappeared.
“I’ll tell you a story,” answered Nina after a while.” A very old man, called Andreyev, a few days before his death in 1919, heard the enemy bombing raids in his home in Finland and at night he dreamed of America. I have the feeling that between his nights and