all of silver, on the bank
caresses the resplendent September waters,
Nina recited.
From the past my shadow rises up
silently and comes to meet me,
Nikolay continued reciting the poem, and then started to sing it to the melody of “Ochi chornye.”
No matter how many lyres they hang from this branch
there is space–it seems–for mine too
and Nina took over once more, finishing the stanza to the melody of Beethoven’s “Für Elise.”
And this sweet, sunny rain,
comes brim full of good news, of comfort.
“What’s that you’re singing?” asked Marie-Louise, who had come to swim with us.
“It’s Anna Akhmatova, who we have just recognized to be the Queen of Poetry.”
“After Pushkin,” Nikolay corrected her.
“All right, after Pushkin. She writes about a weeping willow.” Nina took off her white dress with its pattern of little red and blue flowers. “The poem starts like this:
All the souls of the people I love
are among the stars: what luck, I no longer have,
then, anyone else to lose and cry for!
The air here is conducive to repeating songs.
And straight away she began to translate the poem into French.
“You really have no one left to lose? Not even your parents? You must have remembered the poem for some reason,” asked Marie-Louise, who was up to her knees in the water.
“I know nothing about my parents; it has been a long while since correspondence between us was banned. But it is true that I no longer have anyone to lose and cry for. No one who means anything to me,” she answered, testing the temperature of the water with her toe.
She entered the water very cautiously, and then splashed Nikolay who cried out and fell straight into the river. But he got up immediately, even in the middle of the river the water only reached up to his knees. He and Marie-Louise tried to swim in that puddle of water, playing at being dogs and frogs, while Nina and I laughed.
Once dressed, we heard the moan of airplanes getting closer; they were fighters. When they saw us, they immediately started to come down in such a way that I thought they would crash nose first into the ground. They fired their machineguns at the willows next to the river. We threw ourselves into the under-growth, Nina, in her white flower dress, threw herself into the river. Even after the fighters had gone away, we stayed on the ground motionless, and Nina stayed in the water. We went home, dirty, exhausted, exasperated.
Nina laid the table in the garden while waiting for the guests. With considerable difficulty, she managed to procure half a pound of sausage. She cut it into very thin slices and placed one on a slice of bread. The table was laden with three bottles of wine and my bunch of wildflowers in a glass jar. The guests turned up at eight. Nina welcomed each one of them with a cup of tea. The sugar and the milk were on the dining room table. While she served the last cups, the guests started to go into the garden.
Bunin was the first. He observed the table, done up as if for a party, then examined the plates with the bread and slices of sausage. When he had finished, he unhurriedly began eating the slices of sausage, one after the other. He devoured the twelve slices, that is to say, all of them. We sat down to dinner. In front of us were a few plates with dry pieces of bread. Our Nobel prizewinner Bunin was drinking wine, laughing his head off, and talking about a surrealist table.
“Surrealist scenes are what the Germans give us every day; what we want is food on the table,” grumbled Nikolay, in a bad mood.
“In this way the dinner is more original,” Bunin insisted.
Twilight was falling; we sat under the walnut tree as we had done a year ago. The light wasn’t turquoise like last year; it was rather the color of a pigeon’s wing. The air was misty. A night butterfly came into the dining room and vanished from sight.
“We can’t complain about having only to see a few surrealistic scenes; I saw one not long ago,” said Nina. “The Germans called up the Russians in order to register them: the German police wants to find out who is White and who is Red. Then they send the Reds to concentration camps. I went to the Kommandantur in Rambouillet. Russians that I saw there, in torn clothes, some of them looking like skeletons, their hands covered in calluses.