He fell silent, then mumbled in conciliatory tones: “I should have put that a bit differently…”
The Chekhov story, “Vanka,” that had entranced Léa was one of Shutov’s favorites. But to talk about it over this dinner, which was a replica of their evenings in the old days… No! Léa had been using young Vanka as a backdrop for her masquerade of affection. “Perhaps this is how she wants to take her leave of me. An amicable divorce in an elegiac setting, to avoid a brutal breach. In fact, she set me a trap and I walked straight into it. Poor old writer! What a hopeless expert in the human psyche! An ill-shod shoemaker, indeed…”
“Look, Ivan, you’ve got it all wrong. That story’s not about a petty nobleman at all. It’s about a little peasant boy sent away to be an apprentice in the city and his master maltreats him. All he’s got is his grandfather. He writes to him. Not knowing the address, he writes on the envelope: ‘To my grandfather, Konstantin Makarych. The country.’ He posts the letter and waits for the reply. That scene bowled me over! What shocks me is your lack of sensitivity. You’re Russian but that story is totally lost on you…”
“I’m not Russian, Léa. I’m Soviet. So you see I’m filthy, stupid, and vicious. Very different from all those Michel Strogoffs and Prince Myshkins the French are crazy about. Sorry…”
She stared at him with a stubborn, hostile air, her tone of voice refusing to acknowledge Shutov’s rueful smile.
“That’s just it. Your generation of Russians were so programmed by the totalitarian regime that it’s no longer possible to communicate with you. Even on a mundane level, I mean. You’ve never learned the slightest tolerance. Everything’s all black or all white. In the end it gets tiring. I knock myself out trying to make you see…”
Léa went on with her speech for the prosecution and he sensed that at any minute now the verdict would be delivered: she would tell him she was leaving. She would not even need to argue her case, he had just made himself a sitting target… The attic without her? “Just a little more pain might make my life unbearable…”
He ran through all the routes for retreat in his mind: apologize, laugh, feign contrition, admit to being genetically modified by communism… Meanwhile she was saying: “As long as you cling to your past in Soviet slavery…” (In a brief moment of distraction Shutov glanced at Léa’s arms: “She’ll never know how beautiful her arm can be”). “… And if you don’t feel free you crush other people. You don’t respect anyone’s inner feelings. I find Vanka writing to his grandfather really upsetting. But you couldn’t give a damn. Well, look, I think we need to have a serious talk because, quite honestly…”
He choked from the pressure of words held back and, to begin with, his voice was a whisper, broken, expressionless: “Of course, Léa. We’ll have a talk whenever you like. But before that I want to tell you a little story. Quite Chekhovian, by the way. I have it from a friend. He was an orphan. As a child he used to be sent with his comrades to gather vegetables on collective farms. On one occasion it was a type of rutabaga they had to dig up from more or less frozen soil. They were scrabbling about in the mud and suddenly my pal unearthed a skull, then a soldier’s helmet. Their supervisor told him to go and take them to the farm management. He set off and spent a long time floundering across plowed fields, then he stopped and… How can I put it? He realized that he was all alone on this earth. The low northern sky, icy fields as far as the eye could see, and himself with that skull and the helmet in a bag. It’s quite upsetting, you know, for a child to confront such complete, almost cosmic, loneliness: himself, the sky, the mud under his feet, and no one from whom he can expect a word of tenderness. No one in the whole universe! No grandfather to send a letter to… So, you see, I’m quits with Chekhov and his Vanka. As you’ll have guessed, that little lad amid the fields was me.”
As it happened, his story would achieve nothing. It might even have furnished one more motive for their breakup: a refusal to share the past of someone you no longer love.
A wounded man can do no other: Shutov had learned this in the army. When hit, a body struggles against the first wave of pain, flails about, fights, then, overcome, goes rigid. During the final months of their relationship he had behaved like a wounded man embarking on his dance with death, resisting it, clutching it to his heart. Then one day in a crowded café he had gone rigid. “In Russian shut means ‘clown,’” Léa was saying. “A buffoon.” A sad clown, he had added, conscious that the word defined all too well what he had become.
A gray spring came, without savor: the emptiness of the streets at night, the blue of days that started for him at three o’clock in the afternoon, and this attic, the only place where his life still had any kind of meaning. Thanks to those cardboard boxes Léa was going to take away.
And if anywhere else existed it was that park of thirty years ago in Leningrad, two shadowy figures walking slowly along, beneath the autumn leaves, their breathing matched to the rhythm of a poem.
Drink helped him to believe that this country beneath the golden foliage still existed. This certainty became so intense that one day Shutov accomplished something that had earlier seemed inconceivable: he found an agency that obtained visas for Russia and now, once a fortnight, he packed a suitcase, booked a ticket. And did not go.
In the end he admired the dexterity with which Léa had transformed their relationship into a vague camaraderie. After two months’ absence she began to show signs of life but now in the guise of an old friend, well disposed, devoid of passion. Asexual. It was in this guise that she telephoned him toward the middle of May. Her voice created a distance such that Shutov thought he must be speaking to a woman he had met during another period of his life. At the end of the conversation the old Léa gave herself away but advisedly: “Do you remember the coffee table I bought that’s at your place? And my corner bookshelf? I’m going to come over with a friend who’s got a car. But I wanted to let you know in advance… In fact, I’ve told him we were just good friends and I’d left those bits of furniture at your place for the time being. He doesn’t need to come up if you’d prefer him not to…”
Shutov protested vehemently, afraid of seeming like a jealous old fogy. And in this way he was able to see Léa’s friend (the figure of a tall adolescent, a fine, harmonious face). He greeted him and retreated to the kitchen, heard them talking about their apartment. They were discussing where they would put the pieces of furniture they were collecting. Involuntarily Shutov pictured himself in those rooms smelling of fresh paint, in their world… He was touched by the fervor they invested in their move. The young man carried the little set of shelves the way one carries a baby. And Shutov felt terribly old and disillusioned.
All that was left in his attic now was a few cardboard boxes, a bag of Léa’s clothes, and two piles of books. Occasionally Shutov would open a volume, leaf through it: people falling in and out of love, pain and pleasure, wisdom slowly gained and, at the end of the day, useless. Little psychological dissertations the French call “novels.”
He could have written one of these slight works himself. Picturing Léa sometimes as a female Rastignac, sometimes as a fallen woman rescued by a wanderer with a heart of gold. What else could he invent? A little girl gone astray in the jungle of the capital, a cynical young woman on the make, a sleeping Madonna bathed in moonlight… A provincial woman corrupted by Paris, a Galatea awakened by her Pygmalion. All plausible but false.
There was more truth in that brief glimpse he had: wriggling through his skylight up to the waist, Shutov watched Léa and her friend crossing the courtyard, carrying the coffee table, and could see the rear of a car parked in the street. An evening in May, this young couple departing toward a luminous sequence of roads and journeys, toward the unpredictable abundance of tiny joys that is life. He felt a lump in his throat (how many times had he mocked authors who used that expression) and could have given all he possessed for this newfound love to be a happy one! The young people set the table down on the sidewalk, the boy opened the trunk. And that was when Léa looked up and her gaze, hesitant at first, focused on the attic and the skylight… Shutov hid rapidly and remained bent double for a moment, panting as if he had been running, ashamed of having gained entry into a life where he no longer existed.