in part because it had been recited by a girl who looked Japanese, charming and elegant even when wearing curtain fabric. Nina. Only she knew how to be attractive in the middle of the greatest misery, as she would demonstrate at other times. The letter continues:
“I found your piece about the bucket and the brush amusing,” said the young man who had recited before me, that Vladislav . . .
“I didn’t mention any brush; you weren’t listening properly. It was a broom!” I corrected him.
Instead of answering the man kissed my hand.
Who was this man with a long black mane and old-fashioned manners who still kissed women’s hands, and whom everybody admired? Was this Khodasevich? I decided there and then I would read something of his.
When the readings were over, the first reader, Nikolay Gumilyov, came up to me.
“Nina Nikolayevna, the committee has decided to accept you as a member of the Association of Artists and Writers,” he said and handed me my membership card. “Tomorrow I will meet you, right here,” he added.
The next day, both of us were sitting in a cake shop.
“It was I who discovered Akhmatova, and also Mandelstam, and I have made them what they are today. If you wish, I would do the same for you.”
He was not an attractive man. Each of his eyes peered in a different direction, but without a doubt one of them was sliding its way over my shoulders. We looked calm enough, but under the surface the animosity between us stretched out like a minefield.
“I am most grateful to you, Nikolay. I will follow your teachings religiously,” I answered with apparent cool. I didn’t feel free in the company of that man, but I kept saying to myself: he’s a great poet!
We headed for the Summer Garden, and then turned into Gagarin Street and went along the bank of the Neva to the Hermitage. In one of the bookshops, Gumilyov bought a few volumes of poetry. Bowing, he offered them to me. I was trembling with pleasure at the generosity, but I controlled myself.
“I’m sorry, but I cannot possibly accept your gift.”
“I have bought these books for you.”
“No, you mustn’t.”
“No? Well, if that’s the way it is . . .” and with a decisive movement of the hand the poet threw the books into the Neva. The waves closed over them.
When we stopped in front of my parents’ home, he recited a poem that he had written inspired by me, so he said. He placed his hand on my head and let the fingers slide down over my face, onto my shoulders. I took a step back.
“How boring you are!” he said in a loud voice. “Go home, I am going too.”
I saw a weak orange light in the window of my parents’ bedroom.
“Good night, have a good rest,” I said calmly, by way of goodbye.
“I won’t sleep, Nina. I’ll spend the night writing poems about you. I can’t sleep. I’m sad, deeply sad.”
Ah! The pathos of poets! I had always thought that they exaggerated, that it was a pose.
He left. It was the second of August.
Early on the morning of the third, they came for him. They arrested him, accusing him of being a monarchist sympathizer. It wasn’t true. A short time later, they executed him.
The wind off the Seine makes reading difficult. On this bench where I have come back years later to reread her letters again, it is always windy, with wet blasts that make me shiver. I don’t know if I can spend much more time here, with this cold coming in off the river and my memories . . . But still, it was in this letter that Nina wrote to me about the poets who had died after the revolution.
It was winter. The new year of 1922 was not far off. I left the university and stepped into a snow-covered street. After the revolution, Saint Petersburg had become a dark, abandoned city, illuminated only by snow. I was feeling desperate about the deaths of Gumilyov and Alexander Blok, who had died of hunger, and about the exile of Bely, Remizov, and Gorky, along with dozens of other artists. I did not know then that Yesenin, Mayakovsky, and Tsvetaeva would kill themselves. I told myself one era had ended and another was beginning. The silence and emptiness filled the square. Saint Petersburg looked like the city the visionary texts of Gogol, Dostoyevsky, or Blok had predicted: an abandoned, ice-covered ship that moves and