and chronic stomach pains. Doctor Golovanov visited him for free and declared that all the problems had to do with his liver. Vladislav would have to go on a strict diet. But he wasn’t able to put up with any diet, and for that reason he didn’t improve. He suffered from boils. The doctor gave him injections, but they didn’t have any effect on him. His bed had to be changed every other day, and sometimes daily.
It was a rough day, with gusts of dry, biting wind, when I walked to the offices of the periodicals that owed Vladislav money for his articles. He had visited two editors but neither of them had given him anything. I offered new articles and poems by Vladislav, but they didn’t want them. I felt that they were starting to avoid me as well. When I came out of the last office, I took the metro and got off at Glacière Station; I ended up heading for rue Dareau. My cousin Assia wasn’t home, so I sat on a step and waited for her in the cold and darkness. After two hours she finally she appeared. I asked her if she could lend me some sheets. We sat down at her table to have a cup of tea.
At nightfall, I opened the door of the flat with my key and saw that Vladislav was dressed, leaning against the wall, and could barely keep himself upright.
“What are you doing dressed?”
“I was about to go to the police so they could look for you.”
Exhausted, I collapsed into a chair. I was dizzy. I rested my cheeks in the palms of my hands. Then I raised my eyes, in which, I imagine, shone flashes of sarcasm.
“’We French are convinced that all the inhabitants of the rest of Europe are nothing more than a poor bunch of idiots.’”
“Who said that?”
“Stendhal, and he was right.”
I made his bed. Vladislav got undressed and slid between the clean sheets. He took my hands and kissed them for a long time, and laughed out of happiness that he did not have to go and identify my corpse in the city morgue. I lay down beside him, observed his thick hair, and told myself that all this, his self-destructive moods and his sarcasm, all formed part of that long conversation of ours that had started one winter’s night in Saint Petersburg, in an empty square piled high with snow, dominated by the half-ruined statue of a Bolshevik.
The next day he left. At home he left me a note saying that he had gone to study historical material in the Versailles library; he didn’t say how long he would be gone; it turned out to be a week. During those days I didn’t work. There was no way I could concentrate on anything. I couldn’t sleep. I waited for him. But nothing came, not a message, not any news, not a greeting.
I thought that Vladislav had left me without a single word or maybe that he had died; I visited our mutual friends and asked them about him. No one would give me any answer, until Mark Vishniak told me that Vladislav had come to see him to tell him that he had decided to commit suicide. The Zaitsevs confirmed this.
At the end of a week he came back as if absolutely nothing had happened, accompanied by Olga Forch. I knew her from Saint Petersburg as a writer who was a friend and admirer of Vladislav. She had just arrived from the Soviet Union to make a brief visit to her daughter, who was exiled in Paris. Her visa had nearly expired. I was shocked to see her, older, with gray hair, but I was grateful for her presence because this way I could put off the questions and reproaches that were burning on my tongue. We had tea. Olga explained the policy that the Soviet Communist Party applied to writers; she chose her words with great care, constructed her sentences cautiously. She was noticeably nervous, and became more restless as time went on. Suddenly she exploded.
“The only thing that helps us live is hope!”
“Hope of what, Olga Dmitrievna?” I asked.
“Of some kind of a world revolution which will put an end to our suffering under the Communists. Who knows!”
“It won’t take place,” said Vladislav in a low voice, calmly.
Olga fell silent for a moment. Her serious face became even more somber, the corners of her mouth turned downward, her eyes misted over.