David Golder, the Ball, Snow in Autumn, the Courilof Affair

by Irene Nemirovsky

  “It’s true.”

  She questioned me in a low, muffled voice. A savage, doleful flame lit up her green eyes. I said I’d heard the prince and the minister talking to each other.

  She listened to me in silence, but I could see what she was thinking in her eyes. She had come closer and was staring at me.

  “What?” she finally said.

  She stopped; she seemed unable to find words to express her horror.

  “What did they say?”

  She drew back nervously. By then, the fog had become so dense that Fanny’s face was half hidden in the mist. I could hear her voice quivering with passion and hatred. As for me, I was tired and annoyed. She pressed me to answer her questions. I angrily told her that in my opinion, they had said a few reasonable things but also talked a lot of nonsense. Yet I could see it was useless to explain to her how these two politicians, who were feared and hated—with their faults, their insensitivity, and their dreams—had seemed as imperfect and unhappy as anyone, including me. She would have read an obscure, secret meaning into my words that they didn’t contain.

  Meanwhile, the music had stopped; the crowd came out of the concert hall and slowly dispersed along the paths through the grounds. We went our separate ways.

  CHAPTER 16

  IT JUST so happened that the day the widow Aarontchik—the elderly Jewess recommended by Marguerite Eduardovna—came to visit, I was in Courilof’s room. He wasn’t feeling well; his wife asked me to firmly cut the interview short if I thought he was getting weak or tired. Four days had passed since the assassination. No business had been carried out since then. Courilof spent half of each day at the prince’s residence, beside the coffin that contained his mangled remains, with priests who recited prayers imploring peace for the dead man’s soul; the rest of the time, Courilof went to church.

  Finally, on the fifth day, the funeral took place.

  Several supposed accomplices of the female assassin had been arrested. Courilof wanted to be present when these “monsters, these wolves in sheep’s clothing,” as he called them, were all interrogated. Afterwards, two of them were hanged.

  Courilof came home exhausted; he said nothing, except when he was shouting at the servants or employees at the ministry. Only with me did he remain patient and courteous. He seemed to actually feel a kind of sympathy towards me.

  The audience granted to the widow Aarontchik had been delayed like all the others. Courilof received her in an enormous room I’d never been in before, full of portraits of the Emperor and mementos of Pobiedonostsef and Alexander III, all in glass frames and labelled like jars in a pharmacy. A dazzling light came in through the half-closed, enormous scarlet curtains; they looked stained with fresh blood. He made a savage picture that was striking to behold: his pale, motionless face above the white linen jacket of his uniform, decorations around its collar, others pinned at the side; his hand rested on the table with its heavy gold wedding band, adorned with a red stone that caught the light.

  A small, thin woman was shown in; she was shaking. She had white hair, a bony, angular face, a nose like a beak. She was dressed in mourning clothes that looked tarnished in the sunlight. She took three steps forward, then stopped, dumbstruck.

  The minister spoke to her in a deep, low, quiet voice, the one he sometimes used with inferiors who’d been recommended to him.

  “You are the widow Sarah Aarontchik,” he asked, “of the Jewish faith?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  Her hands were visibly shaking; she clasped them in front of her and stood motionless.

  “Come closer.”

  She didn’t seem to understand; she looked up at him, blinking, her eyes full of resignation and a kind of holy terror.

  His eyes were lowered, his head thrown back; he was absent-mindedly tapping an open letter on the table, waiting for her to speak.

  She remained silent.

  “Come now, Madame,” he called out. “You did ask for an audience, didn’t you? You wanted to speak to me. What did you want to say?”

  “Your Excellency,” she murmured, “I met your wife, Marguerite Eduardovna…”

  “Yes, yes,” he interrupted curtly. “That has nothing to do with the business that brings you here, I presume?”

  “No,” she stammered.

  “Well then, get to the point, Madame. My time is precious.”

  “The Jacques Aarontchik case, Your Excellency.”

  He gestured that he knew all about it.

  As she said no more, he sighed, picked up a file, leafed through it for a moment and quickly read out loud: “I, the undersigned… denounce Pierre Mazourtchik, junior supervisor… Hmm!… Hmm!… Guilty of having corrupted my son …”

  He smiled faintly, took another statement from the table and read out loud: ” ‘I, the undersigned, Vladimirenko, teacher in the secondary school at… denounce one Jacques Aarontchik, of Jewish faith, aged sixteen, guilty of having incited revolution and subversive acts in his classmates.’ Do you accept these facts as true?”

  “Your Excellency, my unfortunate child was the victim of an agent provocateur. I thought I had done the right thing, I denounced his tutor, Mazourtchik, who was making him read these books and things… I’m just a widow, a poor woman. I didn’t know, I couldn’t know …”

  “No one is reproaching you for anything,” said Courilof; his icy, haughty tone stopped the woman dead. “What is it that you want?”

  “I didn’t know I was dealing with one of Your Excellency’s agents. He also denounced my son. I am just a poor widow.”

  I looked at her hands clasped in front of her; they were dirty, with furrows as deep as wounds. It made a horrible impression, and I saw that Courilof was also looking at them, shuddering, but somewhat fascinated. Her hands weren’t marked by some rare disease, but by doing the washing, the housework, by boiling water, by old age.

  The minister frowned, and I watched his heavy, impatient hands pushing the files about on the table.

  “Your son has been expelled,” he said at last. “I will look into the matter to see if there is reason to believe in his sincere repentance, and I will authorise him to continue his studies, if he proves himself worthy. Up until now, he was the best student at the school, as I can see from his reports, and given his young age … In any case, you have made this great journey, despite being elderly and all alone; if you will be responsible for your son, for his political opinions…” he said, his voice becoming more and more dry and nervous.

  She said nothing. He nodded, indicating that the audience was over.

  Then, for the first time, she looked at him.

  “Your Excellency, excuse me, but he’s dead now.”

  “Who’s dead?” asked Courilof.

  “He is… my little …Jacques…”

  “What? Your son?”

  “He killed himself, two months ago, Your Excellency, out of de … despair,” she mumbled.

  And suddenly, she began to cry. She cried in a humble, vile way, with a snorting sound that made you feel sick. Her tiny face, dark red, was suddenly covered in tears; her shrivelled, trembling mouth was wet, gaping, hanging open on one side from the violence of her sobbing.

  The more she cried, the more Courilof’s face grew heavier, paler.

  “When did he die?” he finally asked in his harsh, ringing voice, even though the woman had already told him; but he seemed confused. He spoke automatically, rapidly.

  “Two months ago,” she said again.

  “Well then, why have you come to see me?”

  “To ask for help. He was going to help me, he was about to finish school. He was already earning fifteen roubles a month. Now, I’m all alone. I still have three young children to raise, Your Excellency. Jacques killed himself because he was expelled from school over a mistake. I’ve brought a letter with me from the head teacher, saying it was clearly a mistake, that the papers and books taken from my son’s room had been planted there by Mazourtchik… by Your Excellency
’s agent, because we couldn’t pay him the hundred roubles he was demanding. I have all the facts here, the dates, the confession of the guilty party.”

  She offered the papers to the minister, who held them in two fingers as if they were rags, then threw them down on the table without even looking at them.

  “If I have understood correctly, you are accusing me of your son’s death.”

  “Your Excellency, I’m just asking for help. He was only sixteen. You are a father, Your Excellency.”

  She was shaking and panting so violently that she could barely get the words out of her mouth.

  “But why the hell have you come to me?” he suddenly shouted. “Because of your son? Is there anything I can do about your son? He’s dead, God has his soul! There you have it. Get out of here, you have no right coming here and bothering me with your sad story, do you understand?” he thundered. “Get out of here!”

  He was shouting, beside himself, his eyes filled with a kind of terror; he struck everything on the table so hard that the letters fell to the floor.

  The elderly Jewess turned very pale. She started to move, then suddenly, we heard her humble, persistent voice once again: “Just a little help, Your Excellency; you’re a father…”

  I looked at Courilof and saw him wave her away. “Go,” he said. “Leave your address at the ministry. I’ll send you some money.”

  Suddenly he threw his head back against the chair and started to laugh. “Go!”

  She left. He continued laughing; a sad, nervous laugh that echoed strangely.

  “Vile old woman, old fool,” he kept saying, trembling with anger and disgust. “So then, we’re going to pay her for her son … Do such creatures deserve any pity?”

  I didn’t reply and he closed his eyes, as he often did, weary all ofa sudden.

  I tried to imagine his thoughts. But when he opened his eyes, his face was impenetrable once more. I remember thinking about the elderly Jewess; her absurd gesture had revealed such depths of despair, ignorance, and poverty. And on that day, I don’t know why, but for the first time the idea of murdering this pompous fool filled me with horror.

  CHAPTER 17

  A FEW DAYS passed, and the story of the elderly Jewess began to bear bitter fruit. I don’t know if it was because Courilof’s sadness over the death of the prince was magnified by his anxiety over his own fate. I don’t think so: he was too wrapped up in himself to realise how very useful the elderly man had been to him, how the prestige of Nelrode’s name was enough to put an end to certain conspiracies against him. Nevertheless, around that time, on several occasions he would say: “He was faithful to his friends. He was a loyal man, you could count on his word. That is very rare in life, young man… You’ll see.”

  If he still had any illusions, however, the arrival of the first anonymous letters quickly made them vanish.

  Up until then, Dahl’s fears of displeasing the prince had kept him from campaigning against the minister, whose post he desired for himself. With the prince gone, the game began.

  Dahl rushed to tell everyone at court that the Minister of Education had been threatened by an elderly Jewess from Lodz with scandalous revelations about “the beautiful Margot’s past.”

  “She used to live in Lodz, when she was a second-rate actress in a touring company,” Dahl said. “This woman, a former midwife, had secretly given her an abortion, and after learning of Margot’s excellent marriage, she had come to St. Petersburg to blackmail the minister.” As proof, he pointed to the sum of money that Courilof had, in fact, sent to the old Jewess. Suddenly all the old stories about Marguerite Eduardovna resurfaced; they had been discreetly whispered around the city at the time of her marriage, and now they were openly discussed. Without a doubt, some of them were true, based entirely on fact; no one could deny her youthful indiscretions or her affair with Nelrode. Public opinion deemed it scandalous.

  “An ugly, filthy business,” said Dahl in disgust.

  They were saying that she still had lovers, protected by Courilof, as he himself had been protected by his predecessor: “It’s her good nature. She happily uses her great influence over her husband to protect her former lovers and numerous admirers in the two most prestigious regiments in the army, the Horse-guards and the Preobrazhensky Guards.”

  That, however, was partly true. But they also accused her of being the mistress of Hippolyte, Courilof’s nephew, whom she couldn’t stand; and, finally, of procuring young girls for her elderly husband, because she was “a loving wife.” That was just as absurd as the rumour Fanny spread about “the infamous orgies in the house at the Iles.”

  I was truly astonished that anyone who actually knew the minister could believe such idle gossip. Poor Courilof—pious, conscientious, cowardly, and prudent—was entirely incapable of carrying out such deeds. Nevertheless, he wasn’t a man of “flawless morals,” as Froelich would have put it. Courilof’s private life was as uneventful as any ordinary Swiss citizen’s, but it probably hadn’t always been that way. He was hot-blooded and extremely passionate. These days he no longer indulged himself, and hadn’t for many years—undoubtedly due to religious scruples and because he had to be prudent. But he found it particularly odious to see his enemies guessing the secret weaknesses he forced himself to overcome. I was never able to understand one element of his character: a mixture of sincere puritanism and deceitfulness. As for the rest—well, I found him quite transparent.

  After a while, the press got hold of the widow Aarontchik’s story. The extreme right accused Courilof of “liberalism,” of “giving in to revolutionary ideas,” because he had given money to the mother of a suspicious Jew. On the other hand, revolutionary newspapers edited abroad reported that this woman’s son had been murdered by policemen, agents provocateurs paid by Courilof, in order to destroy papers that might compromise the careers of certain highly placed members of the teaching profession.

  The Emperor allowed it to continue. He hated Courilof, as much as such a weak man could experience any strong feelings. He’d heard details of certain unfortunate things his minister had said; he guessed that Courilof wished to one day see Grand Duke Michael, the Emperor’s brother, on the throne. (Prince Alexis, heir to the throne, hadn’t been born yet, but the Emperor and Empress had an unshakable belief that they would one day have a son.)

  Finally, owing to Courilof’s regular tactlessness, he had a falling out with his colleague from the Home Office as well; its director could not forgive Courilof for having criticised one of his men. Morning, noon, and night, masses of letters and newspapers from varying political affiliations landed on Courilof’s desk; all of them hostile to him.

  Marguerite Eduardovna did her best to remove them, but by some strange fate, despite all the precautions she took, every one landed in her husband’s hands. He never read them in front of us and, sometimes, openly threw them away. But he couldn’t prevent his gaze from immediately moving towards the title of the item underlined in blue pencil. He would gesture for one of the servants and say, “Burn this filth.”

  And as they collected up the scattered papers, he stared at the pages with burning curiosity. His large, pale eyes almost popping out of his head, he looked like an animal strangled by two strong hands, being choked to death. Finally, when the servant left, carrying away the stack of letters, Courilof would turn towards us and say: “Dinner’s ready! Come along!”

  The children spoke quietly, but he remained silent, looking at each of us absent-mindedly, without actually seeing us; sometimes, he couldn’t control the way his lips trembled slightly. He then spoke quickly, enunciating each word in a hateful, scornful manner, his voice growing more and more scathing and shrill. At other times, he fell into a deep dream, sighed, gently reached out to his son who sat at his side, and stroked his hair.

  On those days, he was more patient and in a better mood than usual. He resigned himself to putting up with the boiling hot compresses that Langenberg had ordered me to place on his liver. It was as if he
were offering his physical pain up to God and asking in return that he quash his enemies.

  CHAPTER 18

  I WENT INTO his room every morning to treat him, as soon as he was awake. He was stretched out on a chaise-longue in front of the open window, wearing a scarlet silk dressing-gown that made his cheeks look pale and puffy. For some time now, his wild beard had been going grey. The yellowish colour of his skin, the deep purple bags under his eyes, and the two delicate bruises that appeared at the sides of his nose were evidence of the progress of his disease. He had lost weight, he was melting away; his heavy, yellowish flesh hung on him like a piece of oversized clothing. This was obvious only when he was naked; once he was dressed, his uniform, with its decorations across his chest, became a kind of imaginary breast-plate.

  It was obvious that Langenberg’s hot compresses had about as much effect on his cancer as they would on a corpse.

  Every morning, his son came to see him. He would hold the boy, stroke him, gently place his large hand on the boy’s forehead, push his hair back, lightly pull his long ears. He treated him with deep and unique tenderness; he seemed afraid of hurting him, of touching him too roughly. But then he would say, “Just look at how strong he is, don’t you think, Monsieur Legrand? Off you go, my boy …”

  With his daughter, the public Courilof re-emerged: cold, impassive, giving orders without raising his voice. In spite of myself, I felt an aversion to Irene Valerianovna. But I liked the married couple, the Killer Whale and his old tart; they moved me, I don’t know why.

  Now, as I write, I walk back and forth, remembering; it remains impossible for me to explain, even to myself, how I could intimately understand these two people. Could it be because I lived in an abstract world all my life, in a “glass cage”? For the first time, I saw human beings: unhappy people with ambitions, faults, foolishness. But I haven’t got time to think about those things! I just want to concentrate on what happened back then, that moment buried in my memory … Anything is better than sitting and doing nothing, waiting to die. Look at the work done by the Party: what Karl Marx brought to the workers, the translations of Lenin’s writings, the Communist Doctrine, all doled out in instalments to the local Bolshevik middle classes! I did what I could. But I’m ill, I’m tired of it all. These old memories are less tiring. They numb me, preventing my memory from lingering on futile recollections ofwar and conquest, on everything that will never again return—at least, not for me.