Do all of you out there understand? From here on, I’m expecting you to lend a bit more credence to what I’m telling you. Saint Petersburg was the right city for carrying out my plan. I’d rented a suite of rooms at the Astoria at a rate of $550 per night and I wanted to see the room F.M. had rented not far from there — I don’t know how much he paid.
ROMANZAS. K** directed her questions through the mouth of her guitar and the succession of arpeggios gave true answers whose authenticity struck deep into the soul. At times, when night was far advanced, she would begin some ROMANZA of southern Russia, legs crossed: the wheat fields and the soldier who marches away with his troop. And there before us was a part of the world, a light region of the globe that was a field of undulating wheat and the women at their harvest in their calico shawls, some perfectly nineteenth-century province. K** would sing for hours in her slender thread of a voice, beautiful country ROMANZAS, and I would rest my ear against her flowered housecoat to listen as the cascade of hs she had stored up in her chest flowed forth. That was how we passed the nights, without electric light, without central heating. Is it true that we were still just the same as we had been for many centuries? To sing a ROMANZA and read tomes of Karamzín’s History at night was better than switching on the RADIO. As we went to sleep, I would invariably say to her “Que sueñes con los angelitos!” (“May you dream of little angels!”) which sounded like this in Russian: “Pust tebe sniatsia angely!” That certainly merited a ROMANZA, and I lost no time composing one.
Russian self-contemplation knows no bounds. When K** launched into one of those beautiful ROMANZAS with verses by Esenin, Tsvetaeva, and even Pushkin himself for lyrics, her eyes would sometimes fill with tears and she would interrupt the song to wonder aloud, “Are there other peoples whose souls are as sensitive, as highly strung and apt to resonate at the slightest breath of wind, as the Russian people?”
I would try to explain. I would pick up the guitar and sing this very beautiful song (one of the many that accompanied me throughout those years).
RUDI. The night before our trip to Nice we took a room in one of the YALTA hotels. At seven, as LINDA was dressing for her important stroll along the CATWALK (YALTA’S little seafront promenade would serve the purpose), I dialed room service, still a novelty in the Grand Duchy’s hotels. I asked for a bouquet of carnations for LINDA and stepped onto the balcony to contemplate the peak of Ai-Petri emerging from the clouds. Then, down below, alongside the garden’s cypresses, I noticed a flower stand that hadn’t registered during our arrival and resolved to go downstairs for the carnations myself.
I. The florist was listening to one of those horrible Muscovite ballads about scoundrels, pearly tears, apricot cheeks, black plums for eyes. (Each day spent in this country included hefty doses of this sort of vaudeville tune or gypsy dirge — from the Balkans or some such locale. No one turned his nose up at this lowbrow music and since the Russians were all very intelligent they always had a dazzling theory at the ready that could trip up even the cleverest objection; out would come the lecture about the inhuman suffering, the millions reposing in the Gulag. The long periods of time the intelligentsia spent in the work camps had forced them to imitate certain practices, and thus with honeyed voices they sang Гражданин начальник (Citizen Chief), which is how Aleksandr Isayevich (Solzhenitsyn) had once addressed his superior: Grazhdanin nachalnik, will you allow me to make a suggestion? Already holding, hidden in his bosom, the bomb of the Archipelago.
Nervous about the many faces from the south I saw there and the possibility of thieves, I put my hand in my pocket and my eyes SCANNED fifty meters of street in both directions. An impulse transporting the information that a black form stood off to one side advanced devastatingly along my optic nerve as my fingers probed the soft leather of my wallet, but they were reached by the urgent countersign and remained there, grasping it tightly: someone very cunning was spying on me.
His face was straight off a “wanted” poster, complete with the perpetual struggle against a heavy growth of beard. I concluded that he was one of those picaresque characters from the south who are in the flower business and also dabble in thievery. He understood that I was waiting for him to leave before taking out my wallet and turned indignantly on his very high heels, crossing his arms like the bad guy in an operetta, mumbling insults. My eyes went off in search of some officer of the law to alert, but there was no one under the hotel canopy except the bored bellboy who — anything was possible in the Muscovy — might be in cahoots with the scoundrel from the south.
II. It was RUDI! How could I have taken so long to recognize him? The dark cloud I’d felt pursuing us since our arrival in Crimea took on form and density and acquired a face. I remembered the suggestion he himself had given me that night in the Astoria, his wet lips. “You should go south, to YALTA. Lots of casinos are opening there. The season has just begun.” He’d mentioned this hotel in YALTA to me as a trap. RUDI realized that I’d recognized him, that his appearance on stage (the incarnation of the Baron de Charlus) had been premature, and that now he could no longer postpone the execution of the plan his carelessness had precipitated. Then he turned to me openly, smiled at me, and sent a signal to the crystalline lens of his eyeballs, which afforded me a glimpse of the sparkling metallic armature inside, the fearsome machinery.