me. Mentally I saw his sad face. Don’t think! Don’t think either about the fact that I am thirty-one years old and completely alone. Don’t think! My fatigue helped me to empty my mind. I fell asleep before it was completely dark.
I slept until the afternoon of the following day, when I was woken by a knocking at the door. Vladislav! He had come to ask me how I had spent my first night alone. Then we went to have dinner together. Afterward I went straight back to bed and once more I slept until the afternoon.
I remember the evening—after finding out her new address—I went to see her and invite her to dinner. At night, I took her back to her hotel. We walked past a Russian cabaret; the singing, the shouts, and the laughter could be heard a mile away. Nina hummed “Two Guitars,” a ballad they were playing on a balalaika inside, and said, “Young French people get drunk praising the Soviet Union and proletarian literature full of optimism and the builders of the great tomorrow, but it doesn’t occur to them, not in their wildest dreams, to ask why Stravinsky lives in Paris and not at home, or why Diaguilev died in Venice, heavily in debt instead of becoming the director of the Bolshoi ballet.”
“They don’t ask us anything,” I said, “because they don’t need to, they have everything clear in their minds: we are children of the revolution and we are not busy building Communism, so it is logical to assume that we are the reactionary children of dukes and princes. Do we live in misery? That’s good for us. We got what we deserve.”
“They adore Russian folklore almost as much as they do the Bolshevik revolution and the building of Communism,” laughed Nina.
A few gypsies were singing in the cabaret and the Cherkessians were dancing with Astrakhan hats on their heads.
“The French go wild over that type of hat. They say: ‘C’est typiquement russe!’ smiled Nina.
“The French and the Americans,” I said, “as well as the English, sing Russian ballads with drunken voices, weep, and embrace each other.”
“And above all, the glasses they’ve just emptied they smash against the floor,” said Nina, laughing so much she swayed as if she were drunk, “and like that, in the middle of the broken glass, the tears, and the drunken singing, they imagined they’ve turned into Mitya Karamazov, whose name vaguely rings a bell.”
Only on the fourth day did I get up at my usual time, between eight and nine, Nina goes on writing in the letter. I looked around me, realized where I was and why, and I was flooded by a great wave of happiness. Through the window I saw the streets of Paris and the chimneys of the roofs in front and I said to myself: “All of this belongs to me, and I don’t belong to anybody!”
This feeling of freedom made me go out onto the street. I walked through the parks observing the fruit trees that were about to blossom, in Champ-de-Mars I felt as if I were again in Russia, in an infinite field of corn. Under the bridges, the river murmured; in the Tuileries fountains, children sailed boats they had made themselves. Then I entered the Louvre as it was about to close, but I still had time enough to go through the Egyptian rooms that I hadn’t seen. I went back to the hotel and ran up the staircase to the sixth floor. In the attic room I already felt at home; I ran my fingers over the dresses hanging in the closet and I told myself once more: “All of this belongs to me and I don’t belong to anybody!” I took Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, got into bed, and read it through to the end. Then I fell fast asleep.
I spent the whole summer reading. It was muggy. In the morning when I got up, I chose a book and read until midday; then I continued with my reading in the Champ-de-Mars, on the terraces of cafes, where I ordered coffee and ice cream, poured the black liquid over the ice cream and read. In the attic room it was so hot that I couldn’t sleep there, so I read; not the books that Vladislav had recommended to me with paternal solicitude, but things I had chosen for myself—Virginia Woolf, Joyce, Gide, Kafka, Proust.
“Look, Igor, there are some friends of yours over in that corner!”
“Who?”
“Nabokov, with that woman