themselves through the flowers and hang around the fountain where goldfish swam? How is it that I was unable to foresee it, when at the end of the summer those shadows dared to enter the dining room to see how my parents ate? My lack of awareness then was unforgivable. But those immense fields of corn, vast and infinite, have kept me company all my life as a vision of happiness, more beautiful than the sea, more mysterious than the unreachable peaks of the high mountain land.
After half a year of living hand-to-mouth in Berlin, a city that did not welcome us and in which we always felt like strangers, we headed for Prague. We sensed that our exile could become permanent; we followed the news that came from Russia and tried to lengthen our period of uncertainty, before we would need to decide on a fixed place of residence.
Prague—thick, November fog. Low, heavy clouds. A tough, shadowy lid over everything that silenced life. Old honorable Russians with their ever-so-chaste wives. A gray, impenetrable city.
We stayed at the Beranek Hotel, that is to say the hotel of the lamb. There were lambs everywhere: embroidered on the cushions, printed on the menu and the bills of the restaurant, painted on the walls and doors. It was four o’clock; outside it was starting to get dark. Marina Tsvetaeva and her husband, Sergey Efron, had just entered the hotel. Marina had lived in Prague for quite some time. She had thick, red hair that fell onto her shoulders with fringe that covered her forehead down to her eyebrows.
I remember Marina Tsvetaeva; I ran into her once in Paris, at the home of some friends. We didn’t understand each other, as if we spoke different languages. She saw the poet as an occult being, as someone who lives on a desert island, in the catacombs, in an ivory tower. Nina thought this romantic vision of a creator was sterile, even dangerous. Marina was a proud woman who, in the Paris émigrés, always seemed out of place. From the 1920s onward, nothing that was written outside Russia ever managed to get inside the country, and she could not stand living apart from her readers. She couldn’t live in Russia either, as she demonstrated later with her suicide.
Now that I think of the way Marina wore her hair it strikes me that she did so in a way similar to Vladya. Their hair was a little weird, but attractive. What else does the letter say?
Her elegant brown dress was worn thin in many places. Marina never took off that indelible stamp of poverty. I had prepared tea on a little petrol burner, and I served thin slices of ham and cheese on a platter. We spoke of literature. In Prague, Vladislav and I had discovered Božena Němcová. We admired her life, her novels and stories, and with the help of friends we looked for those places in the Czech capital where the writer had once lived, where she had met with her friends, and the theaters that she had frequented. But more than anything our conversation turned to the experience of exile.
“I can’t get used to living outside Russia,” Marina complained.
“But have you tried to, Marina?” I remember Vladislav asking.
“It isn’t that I can’t. I don’t want to!” she exclaimed with the expression of an obstinate child.
“Marina always stresses that she can’t,” Sergey Efron said with a grimace, by way of explanation.
“You know what I think?” I reflected. “That you say this, Marina, as if it were a positive attribute. Like a demonstration of loyalty, of faithfulness!” I smiled at her, putting my palm into her hand.
“You are hard—you really are—but hardness becomes you,” she smiled at me.
I took my hand away.
“Your lack of adaptability, Marina, is a sign of your mental and existential failure,” I remarked, while keeping calm.
“You are still so young! And young people, of course, need theories, words,” Marina said, sipping her tea and watching me with unblinking eyes.
“This kind of failure,” I went on, “is typical of a person who does not know how to accept the times and the society that surround her.”
Marina fell silent; she was looking at my shoes now. Then she said with a sigh, “You are not under threat, my dear. You can go back to your home, to your town, and put flowers on the tombs of your loved ones.”
She was playing with her white cup and saucer, without looking at anyone. I sighed.
“But Vladislav