Nikolai Franzevich would occasionally invite friends over—three or four people—and would treat them to a very fine repast. His apartment was a rather spacious affair in one of Paris’s quieter districts, on the Right Bank of the Seine. On the walls were hung paintings, most often depicting sailing ships at sea and beaches with palm trees, while centre stage was taken by a wonderfully produced copy of a burning frigate by Turner. In one of the corners of the main room towered a twisted column of dark wood; on it, beneath a glass bell, was a clock, which, in place of a pendulum, had something like a flashing brass weathervane swinging back and forth. In Nikolai Franzevich’s study there were cabinets filled with books on miscellaneous subjects. One of them was dedicated to travel—Marco Polo, Livingstone, Stanley, Przhevalsky, and the works of several little-known authors who in the Middle Ages reached the wilds of far-flung countries, as well as books on zoology, biology and cultural history. In another cabinet there were French authors—Saint-Simon, Bossuet, La Rochefoucauld, Montaigne, Pascal, Descartes. His apartment contained some bronze statuettes, among them, for reasons unknown, one of a low-browed man with a general’s epaulettes.
The table at Nikolai Franzevich’s was waited on by a taciturn woman of middling years, with full lips and dark eyes set against a very pale face, with a distinctive expression of undisturbed sorrow. She forever wore a black dress, and her appearance was as if she had just returned from a funeral. When I once asked Nikolai Franzevich about her, he replied that she was Italian, that Italian women dearly love black and that she wore it because one of her cousins had recently died in Sicily—a cousin whom she had known as a child and had not seen in twenty years. I never once heard her raise her voice; she would reply almost inaudibly, moving her full red lips, which created an impression of contrast with those black dresses, the sorrowful, pale pace and all her funereal aspect.
Just as Nikolai Franzevich altered neither his customs nor his mode of dress, so too the years seemingly (again this “seemingly”) passed for him without trace. He remained exactly the same: thick grey hair, deep lines across his forehead, faded eyes. I could never imagine him young. “That’s quite understandable,” one of our mutual friends once told me, “for he never has been young. Simply one fine day, somewhere in pre-revolutionary Petersburg, a dapper middle-aged man took an apartment and installed himself in it, and this, properly, was the birth of Nikolai Franzevich, whom some celestial power had cast down to our earth perfectly formed, like a parachutist in full kit.”
In any case, I had known Nikolai Franzevich for many years and, whereas those people around him grew old and bald, ailed and died, he remained just the same as he had been when I first met him. Granted, he had no destructive passions that could have aided and abetted his premature decline—he did not drink, did not pass sleepless nights at the card table, seemingly did not know the devastating infatuations of the heart—but simply lived well, ate heartily, rose early, took baths, strolled in the Bois de Boulogne, talked with friends and spent the summer in Switzerland or on the Riviera; and in the month of October, when the autumn rains began in Paris, he would return to his apartment and once again that mute, silent woman in mourning garb would look after him, see to it that he had everything he required, right down, perhaps, to those comforts of an emotional nature, the propensity for which her expressive lips and dark eyes betrayed, concealing therein the potential for some other expression, which, incidentally, none of us ever witnessed in her.
Nikolai Franzevich was a fine conversationalist, one of the best I ever chanced to meet. I do not recall his ever arguing with someone, and when I remarked on this to him, he said:
“You see, my friend, I consider arguing a useless business. I converse, let’s say, with such-and-such a person. What interests me? What he thinks and how he thinks. My task is that of any interlocutor: to help him express his own thoughts and to familiarize myself with them. I should even say that the less they coincide with my own views, the more interesting it is for me. The intent that is completely alien to me is to try to convince my colleague of the necessity to think as I do. If you lead this to its logical conclusion, you will observe that the achievement of such an aim would lead to the man beginning to repeat your own words, and the conversation would lose any interest. For interest starts where there is difference between people and their opinions.”
Nikolai Franzevich did not often lack (despite the fact that he desired to convince no one of anything) for certain didactic motives. He read broadly, books of the most diverse nature, right down to fashionable novels. He would discourse on literature very willingly.
“Human life is impoverished: the vast majority of people cannot truly see what is going on around them, and so-called life experience consists more often than not in a few dozen banal observations. Yet a great many people (that is, so-called readers) tend to have a constant desire for something that they cannot find in their own lives, some other understanding, some other possibilities. They lack the imagination to envisage it without outside help. That, in point of fact, is literature and art’s raison d’être, though principally literature’s. But then, you see, some nations have professional mourners. Their role is to replace those who are unable to express their feelings appropriately, in this instance grief—because a loved one has died. So the mourner, who has never seen the deceased in person and has not the slightest notion of him, for an appropriate compensation weeps over him, as neither his sons nor his wives are able. There is a whole category of writers who perform almost the same function with regard to readers. Such, for example, among Russian writers was Nekrasov. This, however, constitutes only one branch of literature, though a rather significant one.”
As far as I recall, Nikolai Franzevich was not a member of a single professional body, though very frequently he would attend meals that were given to mark the anniversary of some activity of some personage. He never gave speeches, but he attentively followed everything that was said, even jotted down some things in his notebook and generally evinced uncommon interest. He was curious to know why Ivan Petrovich had become a barrister while Pyotr Ivanovich had become a doctor, what had determined their callings and when this had come about. He also read the newspapers attentively, took cuttings of them—some unusual incident, a piece about some crime, the memoirs of a famous personality. In his private dealings, Nikolai Franzevich was exceedingly courteous, would say nice things to everyone, speak of everyone with invariable benevolence, and from the sidelines it seemed as if he lived in an idyllic world composed of fine and pleasant people, his many acquaintances.
There was one thing he did not like—people paying him visits without prior warning. Those who did not know this and wanted to call on him without having agreed it in advance would never find him at home, although it often happened that on the day when he was “not at home”, and at the hour when somebody arrived at his apartment and no one answered the bell, Nikolai Franzevich was at precisely that time speaking to someone on the telephone and must have been there. At one time a rumour went about that Nikolai Franzevich was not what he seemed; somebody even said that he had dealings with the “intelligence services”. Yet this was so far-fetched that even those who repeated it did not themselves believe it. Moreover, there were people who had known Nikolai Franzevich back in Russia, although they were all significantly older than he and approaching that age when the fallibility of memory was as plain as it was forgivable. One of these characters, the former senator Trifonov, a most handsome grey-bearded old chap, with a face cut by deep lines in every conceivable direction—vertical, horizontal, semicircular—would tell how Nikolai Franzevich carried on in his youth an affair with some celebrated actress, who gave up the stage because of him and ended her life by suicide. Yet former senator Trifonov told this story only once, and when he was later asked to repeat it, he could no longer make the effort of memory necessary. He died soon thereafter, having fallen asleep never again to awake, one winter’s night in Paris, during the Thirties of this centur
y, denying us all the chance ever to know whether, besides in his enfeebled memory or frail imagination, there had truly existed somewhere this unknown and celebrated actress who ended her life by suicide because of Nikolai Franzevich.
Nikolai Franzevich, however, continued living in that same apartment, on that quiet street where there was so little traffic that in several spots green grass shot up through the macadam. Under the eaves of the buildings along this street pigeons were forever perching and flying off, there was always silence all around, and only every now and then, from one of the apartments, would the sound of a piano ring out. Yet at nine o’clock in the evening everything would die down, and the footfalls of the odd passer-by could be heard with exceptional clarity. This street in particular seemed to suit Nikolai Franzevich: here one could spend many years without knowing the Elysian Fields, the Grands Boulevards, Montmartre, just as people may live in Tambov, Vologda or Avignon, reading Plutarch or Bossuet before bed and contemplating the vanity of everything in existence, in a state of quiescent meditativeness—the preserve of the few who are happy in their own way.
It seemed beyond doubt that Nikolai Franzevich ranked among them and that everything predisposed him precisely to this. However, what nobody ever knew was the means by which Nikolai Franzevich subsisted. He was employed nowhere and did not work. He did not possess any fortune and, when he had turned up in Paris all those years ago, he had, according to the accounts of those who knew him well then, no money and initially found himself in dire straits, enduring privations with that sense of dignity that never deserted him. On the other hand, he could not have amassed a fortune in Paris, since he had no hand in any business ventures. No inheritance had come his way either—he did not even appear to have any relatives abroad. That he did not engage in illegal dealings and that he was never threatened with prosecution, there could be no doubt.
I once encountered him, late at night, at a dinner organized by the Union of Foreign Journalists in Paris, where I happened to be quite by chance, enticed by the entreaties of one of my acquaintances, a writer for some of the Austrian and Swiss papers, who spent the larger part of his time in innumerable bars and restaurants, so that it was unclear when he could have actually worked. The dinner was not at all bad, though regrettably accompanied by so many speeches given in various languages, the contents of which were always more or less the same: “We live in terrible times, and the responsibility we bear before our readers demands of us… Public opinion cannot remain indifferent… While the threat of tyranny hangs over Europe… We cannot allow…”
A great quantity of wine had been consumed beforehand, after the wine followed cognac, and my acquaintance, with whom I had arrived, managed within a very short period of time to drink the same quantity of wine and cognac that his colleagues drank over the course of the entire evening; he became rowdy and applauded the speakers, and in his befogged imagination there arose a whole set of fantastic visions, blurred and unsteady, such as his colleagues, who soon lost the clarity of their outlines, and a teetering row of black dinner jackets above a white table cloth bespattered with pale-red dots of spilt wine. And over this undulating and moving vision, with a peculiar and drunken cogency, rang out words of responsibility and of the impossibility of allowing—although in actuality there was no responsibility, nor any possibility or impossibility of allowing or not allowing anything; yet for a certain while it seemed not only to my acquaintance, but to his colleagues as well, that the fate of the world hung on what they would write or not write in their articles. It was clear that this strange aberration had been prompted variously by several causes, for which it would be difficult to find any definite explanation: the vintage of the wine and the cognac, which governed subtle changes in its effect, the degree of temporary atrophy in their analytical faculties; however, for those who remained sober, all this seemed a flagrant rejection of elementary and self-evident logic. Luckily, there were few such sober people there, and all that they could have said would have seemed unconvincing to those who spoke of duty and responsibility.
I left this dinner at the same time as Nikolai Franzevich, who, as always, had drunk with gusto, although not to excess. It was a winter’s night with that distinctive cold Parisian fog, through which the murky, luminescent blurs of the street lamps spectrally emerged.
He said that he enjoyed taking occasional walks around the deserted nocturnal city. I replied that I shared this partiality of his, and we walked together in the direction of the Seine. Amid the winter fog, which now grew denser in places, now thinned, the incomparable vistas of Paris’s streets were unveiled and concealed. In this neurotic light, in this mix of fog and murky blue light from the street lamps, Nikolai Franzevich, in his black overcoat, white silk scarf and bowler hat, seemed to me that night even less convincing than usual. He was of average height, a rather thickset man, and was, on first appearance, just like thousands upon thousands of his peers. And yet I was never able to shake off the impression that a part of him remained unrealized and almost phantom-like. I asked after his health, although over the many years of our acquaintance I could not recall his ever having been ill. He replied that at his age there were always minor ailments, although they had not yet grown to catastrophic proportions… As with all healthy people, this subject clearly bored him. Then he said that what in fact interested him more than anything was how a man lived or what he did.
“Please understand,” he said. “I’m convinced that everyone, or nearly everyone, is interested not in how he lives, but in how he wants or ought to live. Many people, as you know, see themselves not as others see them. The vast majority know or suspect they know a few truths. Firstly, that they are not as other people think; secondly, that they live not as they ought to live, by force of a whole host of accidents, because unfavourable circumstances compel them to lead just such an existence. Thirdly, that they deserve a better lot than that which has fallen to them. Finally, and perhaps most importantly: the majority of people feel constrained by those conditions that determine their existence. Their soul, their intellect demand something else, as though each of them needs to live several lives, and not just one.”
“But does it not seem to you, Nikolai Franzevich,” I said, “that if that really were so, it would be some gross aberration, such as the one that you and I have just attended? In this particular instance, there was talk, was there not, of responsibility, which allegedly rests with those people who today delivered these pathetic tirades on the subject, about which they have, if not an entirely fantastical notion, then a most exaggerated one, to put it mildly?”
“Any notion surpassing very narrow, commonplace boundaries may be an aberration. Even those ideas of a primitive nature—from the viewpoint of a philosophically minded person—such as progress or democracy—truly, are these not aberrations? Yet millions of people have perished because of them. Ultimately it is of no consequence whether it is an aberration or not. It is a sensation, a feeling, a need. And if this were not so, if people did not need to change their lives, there would be none of what we term cultural history.”
On this winter’s night, the streets of Paris were deserted. From the fog that stretched out before us, the figures of two policemen appeared and disappeared as they made their round, and Nikolai Franzevich said that this for some reason reminded him of The Night Watch, although the appearance of these policemen scarcely had anything in common with Rembrandt’s famous painting. Next to float out of the fog was the figure of a poor tramp, muffled up in torn overcoat and audibly shuffling his feet in worn-out boots without laces. When this shuffling, like short, dry sobs, had faded away, Nikolai Franzevich said:
“There’s yet another victim of aberration for you: that man, who might have been a farmhand somewhere in Auvergne or Normandy, a bricklayer, a dustman, a labourer or a miner, and whose life was also too constrained for him.”
Then Nikolai Franzevich said that sometimes—very rarely, mind, on such winter’s nights as these—Paris would suddenly begin
to remind him of Petersburg.
“Please note that these cities are absolutely dissimilar to one another. But that is immaterial. Here one experiences a feeling that’s difficult to define, and it causes an arbitrary impression of similarity that doesn’t exist in reality. And that is when you realize that time, years, distance—all these notions are exceedingly relative and deceitful. Time marches on by itself; we live until some mechanical force restores the calendar’s truth. But really, time does not exist. We have memories, imagination, we can delve into the past, fear the future, but we term it thus—past, present, future—I think, only because we do not make for ourselves the trouble of contemplating this and understanding that all this is mere sensation.”
We were walking along the embankment of the Seine. In the nocturnal fog, the river was invisible, and it began to seem to me more and more that it was the ghost of a man walking beside me—a man who, perhaps, had never really existed, and never more clearly than on that night did Nikolai Franzevich seem so far from the reality in which he and I lived and beyond which I did not know him.
On the deserted Elysian Fields, he and I parted; he got into a taxi and headed homeward. I imagined him returning to his apartment, turning on the light in the room in which, silently and interminably, Turner’s blazing frigate burned, then lying down in bed and plunging into the oblivion from which he would again emerge the following morning.
Some time later, when I, along with others, was invited again to supper at Nikolai Franzevich’s, he appeared before us as we had always known him—unvaryingly hospitable, exceptionally gracious and a marvellous host. The maid, with her tragic aspect and full red lips upon that pale face, served oysters, Nikolai Franzevich poured white wine, time passed unnoticed, while behind the windows’ strained curtains there was a cold winter’s evening. Meanwhile, at the table, Petersburg again emerged, about which Nikolai Franzevich spoke willingly and at length: a musical drama, the names of celebrated actors and actresses, Blok’s poetry, Hofmann’s concerts, the Neva, those inevitable quotations from The Bronze Horseman. All this contained a comforting illusoriness, the triumph of memory and imagination—and that evening it seemed to me that Nikolai Franzevich could with the very same ease be transported to another country and another era. For the first time we appreciated him as an extraordinary raconteur—until now he had seemed only a conversationalist. By the time we left, it was already late at night.
The Beggar and Other Stories Page 13
