didn’t go to see them even once. For a time I thought that my falling in love was a chimera, a fantasy that I had created for myself in order to make my life easier. That is why everyone likes to be in love, isn’t it? Sometimes I went to Paris, but my main concern was survival. When Nikolay came to see me, he brought me fruit from his garden, or bread that he had made himself. Generally speaking, there wasn’t any other kind of bread. One morning it snowed a little, but as the day drew on the snow melted in the rain. That evening, in the darkness next to my door, a bicycle stopped, some wellington boots could be heard, splish-splash, and there was Nina coming into the house.
“I have to tell you while it’s still fresh in my mind! Today I have had a meeting with beauty!”
This was the Nina I had known from before, the Nina who had charmed me so! I got some dry slippers for her and a pot of tea. I didn’t have so much as a crumb of bread. She began to tell me her story.
“This evening when I went to the farmhouse for milk, in the rain, walking along a path full of puddles, I made the acquaintance of Ramona. She’s the daughter of a woodcutter, a Spaniard who went into exile at the end of the civil war. The girl is eight years old and lives in indescribable misery. In the cold of winter, her dress, or rather the rags she wore, were hanging off her, and you could see her body through the holes. She splashed in the puddles in shoes so worn they were covered in holes, and so big that they were practically falling off her feet; they probably belonged to her mother. Her long, black hair was arranged in two pigtails and tied with two pieces of red wool. She was going to the farmhouse; like me, she was stumbling in the dark. While the farmer’s wife poured her some fresh milk, I was able to observe the little girl in the light. She looked like a figure from a Goya painting: fine, tanned fingers, huge eyes, full of curiosity, brown and shining. These tender eyes noticed me. She smiled with confidence, without knowing who I was.”
“And you?”
“I felt carried away with joy and compassion. You know, I had the feeling that something had awoken inside me.”
“Tenderness?”
Nina looked out of the dark window while she reflected. She was in another world.
“Igor Mikhailovich, what I am about to say now hasn’t got anything to do with what I came to tell you. No, in fact it does have something to do with it. Yes, it certainly does, now that I think about it. You know, with someone who loves me, with someone who adores me, I can be bad, terrible, treacherous.”
“Really? And why, Nina?”
“When I get the feeling that someone has put their hand on me tenderly, at that moment I feel like hitting that hand cruelly. It’s an attack of hatred. And at moments like that it’s a great effort for me to control myself.”
I didn’t know what to say. She had taken me unaware and I felt flustered.
“But going back to the girl. I told her, ‘Come with me, pretty one. I’ll give you a little ribbon for your pigtails.’ In fact I wanted to give her warm clothes. But she didn’t understand French. Her smile and the tin can, her ignorance of the language spoken by the people around her, the timidity that appeared for a moment in those tender and slightly frightened eyes—all this appeared before me to rid me of the rigidity that paralyzes me, to renew me, to clean away the death, blood, and the mold that lives off my soul.”
It was a long winter. The Germans arrested hundreds of Russian exiles and sent them to concentration camps. In town there was often no bread, and when there was some, we didn’t have money to buy any. The days, weeks, and months dragged on, cold and dark. I didn’t even notice that summer had arrived. The eighth of August—I remember the date well—was Nina’s birthday. How old must she have been? Maybe forty, already? I walked to their house early one morning, with a bunch of wildflowers in my hand. I had nothing else to give them. Together we went for a swim in the little river lined with willows.
A willow