the ambiguous and stupid position in which he left you and me deliberately, do not appear with him anywhere and do not receive him at our home. Do what you want with your reputation but bear in mind that I have mine.
Vladislav
What do I do now with this letter? If I give it back to Nina, she will know that I have read it. And if I don’t give it back to her, she will be sure that I have kept it.
I gazed at the branches of the chestnut trees through the little window; they were silhouetted, black, against the sky. It had stopped raining, the clouds had broken and given way to a blue sky that shone now, fresh, bright, almost springlike. A drunken clochard was walking through the park, the passersby avoided him with a disguised but nonetheless noticeable disgust, and he regaled them with a repertory of epithets that he made up on the spot. He is a poet of the day-to-day, I reflected.
Suddenly, Nina appeared in front of me, her hair done, smiling, a little distant, independent, as always. She handed me an envelope with my name on it. And as suddenly she went off, saying farewell with only a light movement of her fingers. A ghost.
Igor Mikhailovich,
You surely found a letter among the newspapers. I owe you an explanation. There are situations in which it is easier for me to write than to speak.
Little by little, almost imperceptibly, something in me began to fall apart; and now this has even affected my relationship with Vladislav. Our being together, which until recently was a joy and a consolation to both of us, has turned into a routine. Everything is going badly. In the morning I wander around the flat like a specter. I yawn and do nothing. Vladislav usually sleeps until midday. In the afternoon I am unable to read or write. Our evenings have always been somewhat melancholy, but now they are downright somber.
I am washed up; I feel that nobody needs me. Little setbacks that before I would have ignored as insignificant, now make me furious. They also irritate him, but he hides the fact. What can I do when he is in such a mood? I know the answer: to see him just once a week. In that way I would rediscover my identity and I could once again be the person who, a long time ago, he loved.
Life has taught me that even when there is nothing happening, nothing stays as it is. Everything changes, all the time. Between dawn and dusk humans change ceaselessly. These are enigmatic processes from which new transformations, variations, and mutations emerge.
I do not know if I am making myself clear.
N.B.
I thought that I should go and see them, to see it all with my own eyes, to talk with both of them. Maybe I could do something for them! I didn’t want to admit that what I really wanted above all else was to sit again in that little room that Nina had decorated so well with some old engravings of Saint Petersburg and a few yellow carnations in a milk bottle. Yes, just to sit in that little room, full of her voice, that somewhat somber voice, which was such a contrast to her fresh laughter.
I went there one day at dusk, after Vladislav had come back from the south of France. Nina was about to prepare dinner. Vladislav was sitting at the table with a pack of cards. We shook hands, he mumbled something incomprehensible. Nina had me sit down and served me a cup of tea. You could have cut the tension with a knife. To break the silence and give the impression that everything was all right, I said the first things that came into my head, silly things. Commonplaces are usually a good remedy for depression and provide a certain relief for bad moods.
“Do you know what Jean-Michel asked me the other day? If there was a samovar in every Russian’s home.”
Now, for the first time, Vladislav raised his eyes from his cards.
“Have the French any idea how much a toy like that can cost?”
The silence of this couple was re-established at once, and made me furious. So I ranted about the fact that the most prestigious western intellectuals filled the newspapers with articles that praised the “new Russia,” its ‘”interesting experiment” and its “highly personal experience.” When the pieces in question are signed by names such as H.G. Wells, G.B.