Marienbad was, indeed, full of Russians only last year. Army types, their hair close-cropped, accompanied by ladies; lawyers’ families with children so numerous he shuddered at the thought of the amount of energy and money required to bring them all up; authors dressed in a true liberal fashion, in French-style jackets; girls not wearing bustles, holding books in their hands, sweet, dreamy Russian girls. When it came to Russian girls he was knowledgeable, having read a lot about them in his time, in books by the severe Tolstoy, the gentle Turgenev, the terrible Dostoyevsky. The year he met Felice he also discovered that famous Russian revolutionary with a German-sounding name. Herzen, that’s right. Missing a beat momentarily, his heart resumed its normal rhythm. Oh yes, it was Herzen he happened to strike up a conversation about, with a young Russian lady, here in Marienbad, last summer, on a bench by the white, fretted gallery, white hats and umbrellas all around them. He was here alone, his wife having gone to Berlin to deal with some family affairs. The already familiar marital routine broken, he came back, quite unexpectedly, to what he used to enjoy so much, all that wandering around and staring at things. There was a time when he cultivated that stupid habit, telling himself that a writer, above all else, must be an observer. Now that his writing was reduced to business papers, he took to it again out of sheer boredom. After his medicinal water and breakfast, he would walk to the gallery, sit on a bench, open a newspaper, and, while skimming through the usual exchange of cantankerous notes between Petersburg and Paris, Vienna and Berlin, Belgrade and Istanbul, he would glance at passing saunterers, taking in their awkward stances and comic gestures, and listen hard to their multi-tongued conversations, trying to grasp their meanings. So he sat there for days, watching the Turks complain to the Russians, the Russians demand explanations of the Austrians, the Austrians ask the French for support, and the latter shake their republican fist at Emperor Nicholas and his cousin Willy, while agreeable bourgeois strolled around, emboldened by the half-century-long continental armistice, reassured just enough to start spending their leisure time and substantial amounts of money on cures for gallstones and gastritis. Once he noticed a girl on the bench opposite; for some reason her features reminded him of his wife, so he rose to leave. As he was getting up, he caught her intent stare. He walked up to the Kurhaus and back again, hoping to find her gone. But she was still sitting on the same bench, spying on passersby over the red cover of her open book. He strolled past, noting her clothes, the same as Felice’s in that memorable photograph, a white blouse and a dark skirt. He also noticed that the only resemblance between her and his wife was in the large nose; the rest—her lips, the shape of her eyes, the hue of her skin—being different. She kept watching him, which made him angry. He decided to say something biting to her, in German, hoping that the Russian wouldn’t understand and he would be able to retreat safely, his revenge exacted and no harm done. How did he know immediately that she was Russian? It was because of the book—he recognized Cyrillic letters on the cover. There was a time when he used to think about Russia often, to the point of dizziness; he would dream of the sentiments he found in Dostoyevsky and Herzen, even imagine himself living in some Russian backwater, in a hut by railway tracks going nowhere. After that unfortunate Serb killed the Archduke, a war with Russia seemed unavoidable, and he had been terribly worried, tormented by his desire to join the army in order to put an end to the hell his life had become, to finish it all in one swoop. He started reading French memoirs about Napoleon’s Moscow campaign, savoring the idea of the most powerful army in the world being swallowed by huge, snow-covered Russian plains. Perhaps that was why he wanted to go into the army, to march upon Moscow and vanish forever on the outskirts of Asia. He could no longer remember the exact reason. However, Rasputin persuaded the Czar not to declare war, and the Serbs, very bitter at Russia, accepted Austria’s ultimatum and so changed patrons yet again. He remembered his distress, shortly afterward, at the news of Austrian sleuths looking for conspirators in Belgrade. Back then, in the summer of 1914, everything seemed lost to him: he had been sentenced by Felice, a conviction she herself was to quash later, as it turned out, and his plan to take Napoleon’s route to Russia failed. Nailed to himself, he began to write a novel but never got past the first sentence. “Someone must have slandered him, for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.” He had memorized this phrase, the only one he could now remember from his writings, having given all the papers, notes, and diaries to Max after the wedding, telling him to burn everything. The treacherous Max asked, acting innocent, why he didn’t destroy them himself. What could he say? He said nothing. A few days later, Max telephoned to inform him that he had fed his scribblings to a bonfire at his friend’s allotment in Nusle. The choice of the place was ideaclass="underline" he used to work on that allotment himself, trying to harden his soul-tortured body. He never saw Max again.
He managed to make out the lettering on the girl’s book, having learnt the Russian alphabet eight years ago. The cover had the name “Herzen” on it. Approaching the girl, he faltered: “I could hardly stay here with your spying on me. So there.” With that, he turned around and, already starting to walk away, heard a reply, in immaculate German, “You started spying on me first!” He stopped, turning back. She was looking at him, cheerful and composed. “I thought you were too busy with your Herzen to notice.” It was time for her to be surprised then, but she gave nothing away, retorting, “And I thought you were too occupied with your paper.” “Not at all—I was just contemplating what that misanthropic Socialist might have said were he to witness a parliament emerging in Russia, with the government led by that liberal Mr. Nabokoff.” “Do you think he would have been pleased?” “Unlikely.” “I think you’re right.” They laughed. They introduced themselves. She was proud of her Greek name, Lydia; she was proud and independent all around; she studied at Marburg, where her teachers were serious philosophers; she appreciated Marx; she was translating into Russian a French novelist who had, she told him, undertaken an epic work to eclipse Balzac. Although her parents, who still lived in a seaside town in Russia, supported her financially, she saw her dependent status as a burden and wanted to stay on in Germany, to teach. He felt a pang of envy—cupidity, even—in the presence of her young vitality, her posture never bent by a six-hour workday in an office, her carefree attitude to geography, her seriousness. Despite being seventeen years younger than him, she was more knowledgeable and talked with more confidence. She even saw her Jewish origins differently; when he recalled seeing a famous Chasidic Rebbe from Beltsov here in Marienbad six years ago, she listened to his story and remained indifferent, apparently having little idea of who that was, and when he asked her if she was going to Palestine she replied with an ironic smile that she preferred to be a subject of a Russian emperor than a Turkish sultan. And so the conversation went on, he telling her about Werfel and Meyrink, the “Falcons” and Kaiser Karl; she telling him about Rasputin and Plekhanov, Gumilev and Kuzmin. Ah yes, of course, it’s all coming back to him now, he read that novella once, in his previous life, it was by a Russian author, what was his name again, about Alexander the Great. Of course it was, there were crocodiles in it, whose urine was capable of burning a hole in a piece of wood. He caught himself too late, one doesn’t talk about such things with young ladies. “What, about crocodiles?” “No, no, I didn’t mean those, I’m sorry.” They chatted about everything and anything, even politics—she was well-versed in international affairs, suggesting at one point that when it came to the Aegean problem, Russia would always stay on the side of its ally, Turkey. “Then you and I will be in opposite camps,” he offered sadly. “It may be for the best,” she replied, somewhat awkwardly.