Solomin wallowed in the soft bliss, in the plush carpet of silence. It was not so long ago that he began taking advantage of this salubrious atmosphere of comfort, and each time he immersed himself, he dissolved like a saccharine tablet in a cup of strong, prewar Russian tea.
From this vantage, his chesterfield drowning in carpets under the milky moon of a crystal lampshade, his long years of roaming seemed to him like a bad German film seen in a third-rate, smoky cinema. The stories in those films were simple, full of clichés that stung like cheap tobacco, the kind of films screened by the dozen in suburban movie houses to jerk the tears from the eyes of softhearted seamstresses.
The son of a staff officer. Some property near Moscow inherited from his mother. Childhood (normally shown in the prologue): expensive toys, governors and governesses. Boyhood: gymnasium, books, stamps. Summers in the countryside – duck hunting. The first amorous thrills. Mainly farm girls managed by an experienced steward. And everything was just so.
University. “Moscow by night.” Filling gaps in his erotic education. And then suddenly, at what we might call the sizzling climax – mobilization.
Military college. The front lines. Injuries. The hospital out back. Nurses. The oblivion of lusty frenzies under the modest habit of the good prioress. Back to the front. Second line. The tedium of plundered villages. Alcohol and card games. And in moments of starvation for ecstasy – Jewish girls. Hollow rumors from the rear. Revolution. Committees and “comrades.” Leave of absence. Moscow. The allure of the uniform and the raptures it produced. Then more upheavals – October.
Roving from apartment to apartment. Hideouts. A soldier’s gray greatcoat, his hands covered in soot: no manicure, and blisters a must. Papa’s shot. His estate turned into a soviet seat. Every inch of land parceled out. The manor of his carefree childhood now a school full of grubby village brats.
Flight. Falsified documents. The Crimea. General Wrangel. On the offensive. To avenge a “disgraced Russia.” Towns recaptured. Counterespionage. Settling scores with the Bolsheviks. Firing squads. Communists and Komsomol members. And in-between – Jews. Jewesses: a rifle to the temple and everyone gets a turn. Pasty, stinking blood.
Hurried evacuation, a humiliating retreat. Cities and people. Constantinople. Sofia. Prague. The abolition of relief payments. Hunger. In Paris, word was, they’re recruiting white officers for Zhang Zuolin’s army… Paris. Drivel, no chance! No way to make a living. Making the rounds of the émigré committees. Relief withheld. Hauling suitcases at the North Train Station. Sweeping floors in Renault factories. Cutbacks. Hitting the pavement again. Nights under a bridge. One-time relief payment. A driver’s exam. And to top off many years of roaming – the immortal, canonical taxi.
Surviving off a driver’s salary was feasible. The humiliation was much worse. Paris was swarming with acquaintances, both his father’s and his own. Not everyone had come empty-handed. Some of them, of course, had known how to smuggle in a little something. Paris is never short on money. They set up companies, worked a business. Many already had their own cars. Others broke up their days and nights with cab rides. Shameful, humiliating predicaments. Having driven acquaintances, he would turn his face as he reached out his hand for a tip. He kept a notebook filled with addresses of all the pubs and brothels.
It wasn’t just male acquaintances, often female ones, too. In the evening, drunk outside the Florida, accompanied by well-plucked Frenchmen – taxi to a hotel. Others didn’t even manage to hold out till the hotel – they got right down to it in the cab. The seats were soft, there were all the amenities. The polished mirror over the steering wheel was a full-blown Le Chabanais every evening: all the positions. The cab reeked of semen from a mile off. In Moscow the ladies were like school girls in pigtails who couldn’t bear to hear foul language in good company, had their high-ranking papas in the state administration, fiancés to boot, everything just so. But here – they climbed into his cab and spread their legs on command: Parisian women! All of Étoile was one giant whorehouse. Show them a hundred francs and they’d suck you to death. He wasn’t condemning anyone. Maybe they really couldn’t make a living any other way? Everyone earned money as best they could… Until he had that single most humiliating encounter.
He’d had a fiancée in Moscow. Tanya, the daughter of one General Akhmatov. Eyes of azure. Otherworldly. She was all Balmont and Severyanin. Played the piano like an artist. They got engaged before the revolution. When he left for the front lines, she kissed him full on the mouth, and two warm teardrops rolled down his cheeks, forever to be stored in the small vial of his heart.
They were among the first to flee Russia. It was rumored they were in Paris. The prudent general had placed his money in a foreign bank account. Apparently he’d doubled his money playing the stock market in Paris.
Arriving in Paris that summer, Solomin tracked down their address. He was told: Gone off to Nice, no knowing when he’d return.
Then, upon dropping off a client at a brothel, he spotted something: it was her, coming out of the gate. He could scarcely believe his eyes. She got into the taxi and absent-mindedly tossed out an address.
As he drove he drafted a plan in his head. He wouldn’t say a thing, he’d merely remove his cap when she paid, so she’d recognize him. In front of her house, however, he caved in. Pulling over, he turned to the back seat and, taking off his cap, clearly enunciated:
“Earn a lot this way, do you, Tatyana Nikolayevna?”
She gave a start and then burst into tears. A fountain of words: Papa was stingy, he counted every penny. It wasn’t easy going around in darned stockings. They’d been through so much…
“Where, if I may ask? In Nice?”
She furrowed her brow. Slammed the door. She didn’t have to justify herself to some cab driver. (That’s exactly how she put it: “Some cab driver” – Solomin remembered the exact words). She tossed him ten francs and vanished through a doorway.
He wanted to run in after her, throw the ten francs back in her face, give her a piece of his mind. He saw a butler in a starched white shirt standing at the door. He suddenly felt embarrassed by his driver’s uniform, embarrassed by the whole laughable situation. He drove off. He vowed to return the money by mail.
That evening he drank heartily at a Russian cabbie’s pub with a nasally “Volga” coming out of the gramophone, longing to sink to the depths of his bitter humiliation, his wretchedness (“stomped in the mud”).
But he couldn’t forget that slap in the face. Of the thousand and one insults he’d received, he always remembered that one. He hung it around his neck like a small, greasy scapular, and from time to time he’d pull it out to fuel his venom, to keep from forgetting. And in the long evenings, his mind constructed a complex, fantastical plan of revenge.
In the evenings he spent his whole day’s earnings on a third-rate girl from Avenue de Wagram. It had to be a Russian girl, and after performing the duty he would press twenty francs into her hand and beat her face, hurling the most vile abuses. Soon no girl from Avenue de Wagram would go with him, not for any amount of money.
Months went by, then years. His return to Russia, gun in hand, at the head of an imaginary White Army, a return he dreamed of every evening, cultivating this dream inside himself like an antidote to his daily debasements, became more and more problematic. In fact, he had stopped believing in it. Only the émigré gazettes were still stubbornly making promises. He understood that the editors had to make a living somehow, too. He stopped reading the papers.