I used to go to Nimotchka — I was a student too, and at the Sorbonne — and, on Sunday mornings when she came back from church, she loved to have friends visiting her. That day, the lunch service was later, so you had an hour more. Nimka was gay, and when she came back, I read to her some text from the Ramayana or the Mahabharata, the story of Nala and Damayanti, and the exile of the royal couple always moved her. She made a link between the Smolny courtyard and the palace of Damayanti, and she had only to invent the Swan. I was the Swan then — I was the Swan now. Nimka knew the Indian saying that the swan knows how to separate milk from water — the good from the bad, and as I knew her to be good, she recognized me a swan. The swan sailed in and out and India became the land where all that is wrong everywhere goes right there. In India, the Smolny courtyard exists — it could not but exist — look at the number of Maharajas, the Maharajas of Kapurthala and His Highness the Aga Khan, all Indians and you saw their pictures in the newspapers. They assured you of your very existence— you had a right to exist in righteousness, for they existed and their decorous faces lit up the pages of the newspapers. Nimka, whom I had once taken to the Théâtre des Champs Elysées to see Uday Shankar dance, actually met the Yuvaraja of Mysore. I introduced her to him, and she gave such a curtsey and a smile— it made her certain her assuredness was right. The mother was all grateful for my kindness. And in a few months a new picture went up on their wall. It was the picture of Mahatma Gandhi, for Tolstoy was a friend of Mahatma Gandhi (I read her the full text of Tolstoy’s letter to Mohandas Gandhi — the one in Romain Rolland’s Life of Gandhi, editions Stock) and so Tolstoy was right and India was right, and since she was right and India was right, and since she could not put up a picture of me on the wall, she put up Mahatma Gandhi’s. It gave great beauty to Tolstoy’s face — the one looked the disciple, and the other the master. Since I was a son of India, I was, as it were, a sort of grandson, and she was, so to say, of the same status as I. That made everything possible, the conversation, the gentle looks, and a dinner now and again — one had an afternoon off every fortnight, in those days — which made affinity permissible. I could also take her out to Chinese restaurants, and she loved to be the Princess. She had her mother’s mink coat, of course, and a pearl necklace they had saved against all odds — it was to be her marriage gift. Nimka, I think, loved me, but somehow that necklace came in the way. She could not imagine me and the necklace altogether — that necklace was made of pain, it stood there as a reminder of man’s inner strength against outer odds — it meant struggle and passion and poverty — the bow of Rama is easier to break than to twist the screw of that Russian necklace, the hand that could twist it needed a more masculine grasp, a more painful nobility, a graver happiness. The Indian is too simple in his depth — if there’s no concierge and the cat, there’s no goodness. Success is sin. Gandhi is poverty. The Maharaja is proof of truth. Truth is unnaked. Love is unsaid. So, Nimotchka fell in love with Michel.
Now, Michel was a friend of mine. He was nineteen, and had a fine mask of dignity. He had gone through the Ecole Normale, and was at the Rue d’Ulm. I knew him for he’d taken Sanskrit for his Aggregation and I often met him at the Institut de la Civilisation Indienne at the Sorbonne. He was pale, with a nervous twitch of the nose, and his hands ever trying to adjust his eye-glasses, as though however much he wanted to see clearly, he just could not see clearly. He said to me, ‘When my teachers say green, I just do not know what green is — when they say red, I just do not know what red is — I know them as names of colours. All my life I just wanted to see — see it, the object, the object as reality, and my friend, what can I do? I just cannot look at it. I am a failure. I am damned. My father died in the war, and left my mother a widow of twenty-one. I am the hope of the family — hope indeed, he who cannot distinguish between red and green. Colour, yes, a name. A name is everything. Abelard, that old sensualist, was right. We are all nominalists. The object exists because of its name. Remove the name, and the object is space. Remove the space, and the object is the Reality. Poetry must be made of reality. Vocables are voluntary creations. We just invent language as we invent breath. Breath,’ he said, opening his waistcoat, as though he wanted more air, and he stopped. Nimka, who served us, would wait with her plate till the speech was over. She loved his dignified voice and his love for scribbling all over the tablecloth. He wrote vocables. He invented vocables.
And one day when I’d gone out on Easter holidays and returned, I saw Nimka and Michel arm in arm. They smiled to me very sweetly. Michel was a poet. The poet is sacred. Tolstoy was not a poet. He was a writer. But then he was a poet all right. Michel wrote beautiful things. He said beautiful things. How he laughed, when Nimka laughed. I was their saint and protector. Since Michel lived in Rue d’Ulm and she couldn’t take him to Rue Saint Jacques, they met in my room, in Rue du Sommerard. Michel read to her his poems. She never wore the pearl necklace for him. She became grave. I knew she never allowed him to touch her. Thus she respected me. Only once, said Michel, she allowed him to kiss her, and that was in a church (the Rumanian one, behind Rue du Sommerard). She thought it improper — it had to do with the flesh — and she had to hide it from her mother. She decided then to marry, marry anyone. She could not marry me — I was too far, too distant and different. She could not marry Michel — he had kissed her. Michel was so desperate. Nimka married, almost a month after that, Count Vergilian Kormaloff, who ran the vegetarian restaurant, off the Pantheon. She bore him a child very soon, and though there was so much warmth in her heart, her face was infinitely sad. Sorrow seemed to sit on her brow, for the noble count, apart from being twenty years her elder and a widower, was interested in betting on horses. He lost everything he ever had on horses. Then he started borrowing from his clients. One day his restaurant too had to be sold. He left Nimotchka during the days of the Czechoslovak crisis, and ran to Monte Carlo to make money. Boris, his little son, never saw him again.
When Hitler occupied France, I wondered what would have happened to Nimka and her mother. When the Hitler police saw the picture of Tolstoy and Gandhi, they never worried her, wrote Nimka. During the war, she said, she became, for Boris’ sake, a mannequin. She knew nothing wrong could happen to her. Success she despised most of all. She liked to live as her mother had taught her to live. The mother had died during the Occupation. She believed that one day truth would reign in the world. She hoped Mahatma Gandhi might still save the world. She liked Hitler, for he liked India. . At seventeen Boris studied at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. Boris knew all was good. So when the Russians invited the Russians from all over the world to return, he was so proud (anyway he did not like to do military service in France) and he went, hoping to come back and take his mother. Boris never returned, of course. Mahatma Gandhi was shot, and Nimka knew that was the price of righteousness.