we are like the people of Pompeii, you, me, and all the exiled Russians—buried under ashes.”
The writer was silent. Both remained silent for a long while. Eventually they got up to go, without even having understood each other.
They said goodbye in front of the cafe and each began to walk in the opposite direction. Suddenly I felt as if I didn’t know where to go. So I followed the writer. I caught up with him at an intersection.
“Mister Zamyatin, I just wanted to say hello to you because I admire your work. Allow me to introduce myself—”
“I am not Zamyatin,” he said in a metallic voice. I certainly hadn’t expected that. “I am not Zamyatin; you’ve made a mistake,” he repeated and moved on.
I was stunned. The traffic lights shifted from yellow to red, from red to green. After a while, mentally I heard another voice, impatient: Is life going to wait?
Yes, here is rue des Quatre-Cheminées, a street destroyed by bombs during the Second World War. The house where Nina and Vladislav lived doesn’t exist any more.
Quatre cheminées. Four chimneys indeed, but in my life there was only one woman. That cry, “Is life going to wait?” changed me forever. It tied me to her. That was it. My path was laid out before me: it was hers. Pursuit of that woman took me across Paris, into the French countryside during the war, and then on to America. It could be said that I had fallen in love, although now I think it was a matter of obsession, full of self-deception, one of those passions that help one stay alive, to live in a dream. This obsession kept me chasing after her and even had me investigating into her private life. Someone in love is worse than a spy.
During the roaring twenties, which for us exiles were rather on the miserable side, there was a Russian cabaret here instead of this cafe where I am now. We called our cafes “cabarets.” It belonged to Boris Stepanovich—I don’t remember his last name. Maybe Amfiteatrov? No, he was called Kozlobabin. We went there after finishing work in the Renault factory—Petrusha, Kostia, and I—to have a beer—Russian beer, as Monsieur Kozlobabin used to proclaim. Originally Petrusha was a cellist, Kostia a student of philosophy. I was an engineer, but I wanted to be a writer. In Billancourt we were all simply workers, some of the ten thousand Russian workers to whom Monsieur Renault hired in the 1920s so that we could manufacture his cars. In the evenings, Dunia, that stocky platinum blonde, used to sing in the cabaret:
Billancourt, new homeland,
a lair for young lives.
Every night, in a little corner,
Russia cries its eyes out.
Unforgettable. Another pudgy platinum blonde presided behind the bar—the wife of Boris Stepanovich, Madame Kozlobabina. She laughed with the regulars and made sure that nobody slipped away without paying. When a Frenchman came in by accident, no matter what he ordered, Madame Kozlobabina served him that cat’s piss she claimed was vodka, and even added, with all the cheek in the world, “C’est typiquement russe!”
One day, as if she were an apparition, Nina Berberova turned up there. She was wearing an elegant suit jacket—at least that’s how it struck me on that day; at that time I didn’t suspect the degree of misery she was in—and had her short, black hair combed back. She sat at one of the tables and ordered a coffee. She pretended to be engrossed in her cigarette but I noticed that her big brown eyes were running over the faces, over the walls decorated with Russian balalaikas; she was scrutinizing people’s gestures and digesting snippets of conversation. She was probably looking for material for the stories and chronicles that she published at that time in the Poslednie novosti newspaper.
Petrusha, Kostia, and I sat by the bar, still with our work overalls on. I wanted the ground to swallow me up when that elegant woman approached to say hello to Petrusha, who was one of her friends. She didn’t recognize me after our first meeting in the darkness of the Bullier. Petrusha introduced me as a writer who was starting out and Nina winked at me, as if to someone who is taking part in the same conspiracy.
That day I found out that she too lived in Billancourt. I walked her to her street, rue des Quatre-Cheminées.
The stamp on the next letter that Nina sent to me is also American, which means that she wrote it