Unreal… That says it all! Asking a flesh-and-blood woman to be a dream. Imagine living with a madman who thinks you capable of walking on a moonbeam! He had idealized her from the first moment. Yes, from the first words they had exchanged on a Sunday evening, one as dreary as any wet February night in the chilly station hall at the Gare de l’Est…
They were telephoning from adjacent booths, two telephones separated by a sheet of glass, in fact. She (he would later learn) was ringing a vague acquaintance who had promised to put her up. He was trying to catch a publisher at home (on his return from his luxury villa in Normandy, purchased, Shutov reflected ironically, with the proceeds from publishing pulp fiction). Suddenly the girl turned around, a phone card in her hand, and he heard a whispered exclamation that was both frantic and amused. Cheerful astonishment, on the brink of tears. “Oh shit! The credit’s run out…” Adding in a louder voice, “Now I’m in a real mess!” Shutov had not caught her eye; at first she did not realize he was offering her his card. (The publisher’s wife had just put him in his place. “I’ve told you already. Call him tomorrow at the off-” Proudly, he hung up on her.) Léa thanked him, dialed the number again. Her girlfriend could not put her up, because… She hung up as well, but slowly and indecisively, slipped the card into her wallet, murmured good night, and wandered over to the arrivals and departures board. Shutov hesitated between versions in different languages. In Russian, word for word, it would be: “And my card, young woman?” In French: “Mademoiselle, may I have my card back?” No. Perhaps: “Hey, you! Aren’t you going to…” Not that either. Well, in any event, he was too old for the retrieval of a phone card to cause more than a moment of embarrassment…
He strolled away thinking about an opening for a story in the style of André Maurois: a woman walks off with the phone card a man has just lent her… What next? Every time she walks past that telephone booth she thinks of him?… No, too Proustian. Better: a foreigner (he, Shutov) runs after the woman to get his card back, calling out in his appalling accent, the woman thinks she’s being attacked and sprays him with tear gas (alternatively: lays him out with a stun gun)…
He had already got a good way up the Boulevard Magenta when a breathless voice called out to him, then a hand touched his elbow. “I’m so sorry. I went off with your card…”
He fell in love with every aspect of Léa. Everything about her that caught his eye had the completeness of a sentence that needs no rewriting. Her old leather jacket with its threadbare lining, a tight-fitting jacket that had ended up being molded to the curves of Léa’s body. Even when it hung on the back of the door at the dovecote this garment retained the imprint of her contours. And then Léa’s notebooks, the slightly childish diligence of her writings, “very French,” Shutov told himself, perceiving in them the obsessive search for the elegant phrase. And yet the mere sight of these notebooks now seemed vital. As did the frozen gesture that, for him, was a poem in itself: an arm flung far out across the covers by Léa in her sleep. That slender arm, a hand with fingers that trembled from time to time, in response to the secrets of some dream. A beauty independent of her body, of the attic awash with moonlight, of the outside world.
Yes, that had been his mistake, his desire to love Léa as one loves a poem. It was to her that he read Chekhov’s story one evening: two irresolute lovers, their meeting twenty years later. I love you, Nadenka…
“An exile’s only country is his country’s literature.” Who said that? Shutov cannot place the name in his confused thoughts. Some anonymous expatriate, no doubt, waking in the night and trying to recall the last line of a rhyme learned in childhood.
For a long time he had lived in the company of the faithful ghosts that are the creatures brought into being by writers. Shadowy figures, certainly, but in his Parisian exile he got on well with them. On a fine summer’s day in Moscow Tolstoy saw the figure of a woman through an open window, a bare shoulder, an arm with very white skin. All of Anna Karenina was born, if we are to believe him, from that woman’s arm.
Shutov told the tale to Léa. What else could he offer her other than that country of his, rediscovered in books? During that very cold winter, two years before, at the start of their love affair, they would read Tolstoy almost every day. The attic was heated by a little cast iron stove connected to the chimney hatch, the scent of tea mingled with that of the fire and the glow from the flames flickered across the pages of the book.
“You see, people are always saying: ‘Oh, Tolstoy. A ver-r-r-y R-r-russian novel. A mighty river, an impetuous, capricious torrent!’ Not true! A mighty river, agreed, but under control, thanks to the lock gates of well-proportioned chapters. Indeed, a rather French structure, you might say.”
Shutov now attempts a mocking sneer but drunkenness has turned his face into a mask too weary for such contortions. Besides, that image of the lock gates is not bad. And the memory of those evenings reading in front of the fire is still so tender, so raw.
He would also quote Chekhov: “In a short story cut the beginning and the end. That’s where most of the lies are told.” Léa listened with daunting eagerness. “Playboys take women out for drives in convertibles,” Shutov thought with a smile. “Destitute writers treat them to the Russian classics.” On a boat just about to leave a Crimea put to the torch by the Revolution, the young Nabokov was playing chess. The game was moving in an unusual and enthralling direction and when he finally tore himself away from the checkerboard, the land of his birth had already vanished from sight! An empty expanse of sea, the cry of a gull, no regrets. For the time being…
“I got carried away like an idiot when I told her about that missed leave-taking…,” Shutov remembers. The aesthete, Nabokov, cared more about an elegant metaphor than the land of his fathers. And Lolita was his punishment. A nauseating book, one that flatters the worst instincts of the Western bourgeoisie…
This verdict, he recalls, provoked one of those sparring matches in which Léa used to come to the defense of writers assailed by Shutov.
“But hold on, listen to this sentence,” she exclaimed that evening. “Nabokov writes: ‘His diction was as blurred as a moist lump of sugar.’ It’s absolutely brilliant! You can feel it in your mouth. You can picture the man talking like that. You must admit it’s very powerful!”
“Herculean! As I sit here, I can just picture our pretty Vladimir sucking his sugar lump. But it’s not ‘brilliant,’ Léa. It’s clever, there’s a difference. And furthermore your Nabo couldn’t care less whose accent this is. If it were a prisoner being tortured it wouldn’t make any difference. He writes like a butterfly collector: he catches a beautiful insect, kills it with formalin, impales it on a pin. And he does the same thing with words…”
Shutov went on reviling Nabokov but Léa’s eyes glazed over; she seemed to be observing a scene enacted beyond the walls of the dovecote, far from their conversation. “She can see a man playing chess on the deck of a ship and his native shore sinking below the horizon.” Shutov fell silent, listened to the hiss of the rain on the roof.
The next day, somewhat embarrassed, Léa had informed him that she must “pay a duty visit” to her mother. They set off together. This trip would mean more to Shutov than the year he had spent in New York, more than all his wanderings across Europe, more, even, than his time in Afghanistan on military service.