They were frightened. A German official was interrogating them. He didn’t understand how the Nansen stateless person’s passport that we all carry is proof that we are not pro-Soviet. I spoke to him in German, too fast, anxiously, making mistakes, trying to persuade him that his persecution made no sense. I had the following words on the tip of my tongue: ‘Look carefully at these men and women! Can’t you see you won’t get anything out of them? Can’t you see that they’ve been suffering for twenty years, that they’ve been doing the hardest jobs, the jobs that no Frenchman wants to do?’ That’s what I wanted to tell him, and that is what I repeat to him every night while I sleep. Every night now, I’m in the Kommandatur saying, ‘They’re wrecks, because they’ve been living abroad like this for twenty, twenty-five years. Before, they were like you, yes they were, they were young and strong. Their children are timid and gormless like they are; their wives are exhausted from so much work and worry. They pay taxes, they go to church, they carry a stateless person’s passport and sad faces. Have pity on them. They are Russian exiles.’ And every day I wake up in tears.”
The leaves of the walnut tree murmured above our heads; they brought to mind the waves of the sea. The black butterfly flew out of the dining room window and beat its wings against the oil lamp that we’d put on the table.
“We sat here a year ago, under this walnut tree,” said Olga, quietly.
“Its branches have grown in the meantime,” observed Vera Zaitseva.
“It was the evening of the German occupation of Paris and the entry of Italy into the war.” said Boris Zaitsev. “Today it looks as if even greater horrors are in store for us. Dozens of planes fly above us every day on their way to Britain. London is in flames.”
“Which is worse? “ asked Olga, in her childlike voice that irritated so many people. “This or the suicide of Marina Tsvetaeva after her return to Russia, and the arrest of Isaak Babel, they say, that has taken place in the USSR?”
Nina answered without thinking twice, as if she’d known the answer all her life: “For me, knowing that Babel is in prison is harder to bear than the news of the sinking of ships filled with passengers.”
“And if we’d been travelling in that ship?” Olga’s voice was like that of a schoolgirl.
“Even if we’d been travelling in it. I’m sorry, Olenka.”
“But if Nikolay had been on it, you wouldn’t say the same, would you?”
“There are no exceptions, Olga.”
Nina sat up straight at the head of the table. She was wearing her white dress with a pattern of little flowers, which she had had time to wash and hang out to dry in the sun. She was a beautiful marble sculpture, I told myself. The exterminating angel: “It’s an attack of hatred. It is difficult for me to control myself.” Her words went through my head.
Bunin whistled.
“A year ago, Boris,” said Vera Zaitseva to her husband, as if she had remembered something, “at a dinner here under the walnut tree, we said all sorts of rubbish! I said I wanted to live in the time of Pushkin. And you, Nina, wanted to go off to America. You don’t remember that now, do you, Ninochka?”
“I will go off to America, most definitely. I don’t say things just for the sake of it.”
“And what will you do there?”
“I will live. Above all, I’ll live far away from Europe. And how will I live? I will get up at six to see the sunrise. Then I shall do some exercises. For breakfast I shall eat a pear with dry bread, and I will drink tea. After that will come work: translations, stories, articles. Then before lunch, a long walk in the open air. After dinner, some reading. I want to live far away from people!”
We shook our heads because we couldn’t imagine Nina, energetic, sociable Nina, living in that way.
“Why far away from people, Nina?” asked Bunin, the only one of us who took it at all seriously.
“Because every afternoon airplanes fly on missions above our heads to bomb the houses of innocent people. I can’t sleep. It’s like an obsession. I’m afraid that this situation will last forever.”
“But we’re alive and we’re drinking wine,” Olga raised her glass.
“I drink wine, ergo sum,” Bunin also raised his glass.
The rest of us also took