By the end of November, all three of us had received our visas. John Wiley’s lobbying on our behalf, the sponsoring letters from my mother’s father and Simon Liberman had borne fruit. And in the first weeks of December, my mother engaged in another act of derring-do: To retrieve valuables from Alex’s flat and our own that were essential to our journey to the United States, she decided to travel to Paris with a group of contrabandists—it was the only way one could then cross between the zones. We had fled the capital in such a hurry that she had left behind most of her jewelry and important papers; her strong sense of family duty also led her to worry about Aunt Sandra, Aunt Lila, and the Monestiers, and she wanted to say good-bye to them. And in view of the notorious anti-Semitism of the Vichy police, it would have been considerably riskier for Alex to undertake such a trip. (Looking back on it now, I realize that French citizens’ zany optimism concerning the military situation of June 1940 had led hundreds of thousands of Parisians to rush out of the capital in a manner quite as improvident as ours. Simone Weil and her family, for instance, filled with the same delusions and assured that “a new front” would at any minute be reconstituted north of Paris, realized on the afternoon of June 13, the day before the Germans took the city, that the very last southbound train out of Paris was about to depart; they rushed to the Gare de Lyon without even returning to their flat, leaving the city with no more than the clothes they were wearing that day.)
Mother’s trip to Paris demanded that she first take the train from Nice to Vichy. Once in Vichy, she would contact a group of clandestine truckers, who for a substantial sum—roughly the present-day equivalent of two thousand dollars—crossed the frontier at night. There was no sense attempting the crossing on foot, for even at the most densely forested parts of the frontier the Germans’ guard dogs could be let loose. The contrabandists picked up their passengers in a small village near Vichy and settled them in the backs of their vehicles among sacks of produce. (Potatoes and flour were the most widely used.) The interiors of the vehicles were lined with mattresses in case German border guards shot at them. The contrabandists drove the most obscure country roads, and it is probable that they used those checkpoints at which French border guards were in their pay. Once they’d reached the Paris suburbs, they let their passengers out and picked them up again five days later at another assigned location.
My mother admits to having been very scared by the ordeal. But the trip to Paris proceeded smoothly. Once she had reached the Paris suburbs, she took the subway to the Place d’Iéna, a block away from our apartment; she suffered dreadful claustrophobia on subways and had barely ever taken one in her life, but all bus service had been suspended because of the fuel shortage, and the only cars in circulation were the Germans’ Mercedes. My governess, who had stayed on in our apartment to safeguard it from being requisitioned by the Germans, greeted her with tears of joy. Mother could take only two suitcases back with her on the contrabandists’ return trip, and she started carefully assembling our belongings: the little valuable jewelry she had; whatever papers of my father’s were of any importance; whatever clothes of hers and mine she could fit into her luggage. Last but not least, she wrapped all of the Mayakovsky letters and poems she owned into a special folder and decided to place them in a bank vault for the duration of the war. Why did she not bring them to America? I’ve often been asked. For the same reasons that led her to beg her mother, from 1935 on, not to mention her romance with Mayakovsky: She sensed that a strong tide of anticommunism was about to sweep the West and that upon arriving in the United States she and I might be compromised if it became known that she had been the muse of the Soviet Union’s most celebrated poet.
The following morning, after taking the Mayakovsky documents to a bank, Mother proceeded up avenue Kléber toward the Etoile. Her destination was the Monestiers’ flat, which was right off the Champs-Elysées. As she headed down the avenue, she heard a man’s voice calling out her name. She wheeled around and saw a German officer getting out of a Mercedes. It was her old friend “Spatz” von Dincklage. “What are you doing here?” She asked him icily. “I’m doing my work,” he answered. “And what is the nature of your work now?” Mother snapped. “Same as it’s been for decades,” Spatz answered, “I’m in Army intelligence.” “Tu es un vrai salaud,” my mother burst out, “you’re a real bastard. You posed as a down-and-out journalist, you won all our sympathy, you seduced my best friend, and now you tell me you were spying on us all this time!” “A la guerre comme à la guerre,” Spatz answered and proceeded to invite Mother to dinner.
“I was vaguely tempted to accept,” she admitted later, “for the simple reason that he might have offered me important information.” But her patriotism and her anger quickly prevailed. “He had posed as a victim of Hitler’s racism, he had worn rags, he had ridden in a beat-up thirdhand car,” she would fulminate when telling the story decades later. “He had seduced Hélène Dessoffy into an affair because she had a house near France’s biggest naval base, Toulon, and we’d all fallen for the bastard’s line!” Moreover, there was Mother’s sense of protocol. “What would it have looked like if I’d gone out to dinner with him?” she would add. “The widow of a Resistance hero riding in a German Mercedes with a top-ranking Nazi officer, I couldn’t allow my concierge to see that!”
Shortly after she saw him, Spatz went on to have a notorious affair with Coco Chanel—an affair from which Chanel’s career, after the liberation of Paris, barely recovered. The entire episode gave my mother a tragic sense of the extent to which Nazi espionage had infiltrated French society. It also instilled in her a dread of the entire institution of espionage: Decades later, by extension, it led her to paranoid suspicions that most Soviet visitors in the United States were KGB agents.
That first day in Paris, Mother went to Alex’s studio at Villa Montmorency and rolled up as many of his canvases as she could fit into her suitcase. She went on to have dinner at Simone and André Monestier’s; they already knew that my father was missing in action but had not received any further details. After sharing the facts with her favorite relatives, she fell into Simone’s arms and burst into tears: “It was my fault, it was all my fault,” she sobbed, “I ruined his career in the diplomatic corps, after that, he became prone to foolhardy actions, he was bent on a course of self-destruction.” When my aunt Simone told me that story, many decades later, she added: “I tried to console her by reassuring her that she’d played no role whatever in your father’s death, but of course your mother was in some part right.”
Simone wisely waited until the 1970s, the decade before her own death, to tell me this. It led me to the following, sorrowful considerations, which I could not possibly have handled in earlier years: To what degree had Tatiana and Alex been conscious of the fact that their legendary happiness was grounded in my father’s death? Or, to be superstitious, to what degree had they even caused his death by wishing it to happen? Considering their emotions decades later, I was forced to realize that Alex, being an intensely jealous man, must have hated my father for having shared a life with Mother; that he must have detested him all the more because my father belonged to a caste and embodied a system of values that Alex could never have aspired to—that of the ancient chivalric aristocracy of France, fiercely proud and prejudiced but given to extraordinary feats of valor at times of crisis. I had to accept the fact that Alex must have felt a kind of dreadful jubilation upon hearing the news of my father’s death and that I would have to deal with the guilt of having loved two men who loathed each other.
Perhaps more important, I had to confront the complex emotions that my mother must have experienced upon my father’s death—a perplexing blend of sorrow and liberation, further complicated by the guilt that sense of liberation brought. In her last decades, many of Tatiana’s friends, commenting on the moments of great melancholy that alternated with her habitually vibrant manner, would ask me what deep sorrows in her life might have caused those more somber moods. Only recently hav
e I realized that my mother was one of those women whose fates had been shaped by men’s deaths: in her case, Mayakovsky’s and my father’s.
During the days Mother undertook her hazardous trip to Paris, I was sent to a boarding school in Cannes. I couldn’t quite understand, at the time, why I couldn’t have peacefully stayed with Alex at Sainte Maxime. But again, Mother’s sense of propriety—and perhaps also my late father’s injunctions about not exposing me to “the Ste Maxime crowd”—prevailed. The phrase “one does not leave one’s child with one’s lover” must have run through her mind. The dormitory was freezing. The meals were composed almost exclusively of sweet potatoes and small field potatoes. I direly missed Alex’s carefully gleaned black-market items. He phoned me every two days to keep up my spirits and his, for by this time there was no phone communication between the Vichy and Occupied Zones, and he later told me he had worried terribly about Mother. The only other highlight of my brief boarding-school experience was that it increased my knowledge of the facts of life. The rumor I’d heard the previous year in Gujan-Mestras, I was told by a fourteen-year-old in my dorm, was absolutely true. The man did stick his thing into the woman’s little hole to produce babies, and—far worse—he often stuck it in there just to have fun, which struck us as particularly repellent.
A week or so after my mother had returned from Paris, she came with Alex to pick me up. Why has she waited an entire week? I asked myself, sensing for the first time, with some unease, that Alex and Mother might treasure those moments they spent without me. I’d seldom been happier than upon my release. The gloom of winter had settled on the coast, but at Va-et-Vient all was lightness and cheer. All our visas are in order! We have tickets on a boat out of Lisbon! We’re ready to leave!! The rumor had spread that it was far safer to cross the Spanish frontier by train than by car, for border police on trains were less prone to persecuting Jews than their colleagues on the routes nationales. So even though Alex had hoarded gas coupons to get us to Spain, we decided to take one train to the Spanish frontier and then another to Madrid, whence we would leave for Lisbon. It was on the train from Nice to the Spanish frontier that I witnessed, for the first time, a bitter argument between Alex and Mother.
Mother and I are sitting on one side of the compartment, reading, and Alex is on the banquette facing us. At a stop in the vicinity of Toulouse, a man with a long beard, dressed in a long black coat, with a small round hat on the back of his head, comes into our compartment and sits down next to Alex. Alex, looking uneasy, gets up and moves over to our side of the compartment. The man in black, who had smiled politely as he’d come in, suddenly looks solemn. My mother is giving Alex angry sideways glances and saying to him in Russian, “Pozor! Kakoe hamstvo!” (“Shame on you! What boorishness!”) She smiles ingratiatingly at the stranger, who gratefully smiles back. He rides with us for only an hour or so and exits our compartment with a small bow and a last grateful smile for my mother. She looks out of the window until the stranger is out of earshot, and then she lets Alex have it. “I’ve always known you were anti-Semitic!” she half shouts at him, “and you suffer from the worst kind of anti-Semitism, Jewish anti-Semitism! How rude, how boorish can you be?” Alex looks apologetic, tries to butt into her tirade, “Mais Boubousiki….. Je m’excuse Boubousiki,” but she continues the invective. “A nice-looking rabbi sits down next to you, and what do you do? Insult him by moving away from him! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? There’s nothing worse than Jewish anti-Semitism, especially at this time of history!” Alex, stumbling for words, could not manage to soften the tongue-lashing of the blond virago whose delicate social sensibility he had offended. Her refrain “Nothing worse than Jewish anti-Semitism” would last all the way to the Spanish frontier. “Bon, finis,” she eventually said. “But don’t you ever act that boorishly again!”
My one winter coat had been abandoned in Paris the previous summer. So throughout the trip, I had been wearing a fur coat belonging to Alex’s mother, who had left for the United States in August and had asked us to bring her coat to New York. It was stolen on the way from Hendaye to Madrid, while we stepped off the train for a minute to stretch our limbs. And as soon as we got to Madrid, where Mother immediately pleaded a migraine, Alex and I went out to look for a winter garment for me. He was determined to find me a coat similar to the one his father had bought him in London in 1921 upon arriving from Russia, when he was my age. After hours of searching, he finally found the model he desired: It was a double-breasted camel’s-hair reefer a few sizes too large, hanging fairly to mid-calf because, as he put it, “you’re growing very fast, and we won’t have much money on the other side.” He topped it off with a perfectly matched camel’s-hair hat. My mother’s face radiated with delight when I came into our room in my new outfit.
We had decided not to engage in any holiday celebrations until we were on the boat, and we spent an uneventful Christmas Eve in Madrid. My most terrifying recollection of our exodus is that of boarding the train that would take us from Madrid to Lisbon. Rumors abounded that the Spanish government might at any moment expel all refugees from the country and force them to return to France, and at the Madrid train station panic prevailed. The teeming crowds—thousands of exiles from all parts of Europe—gave the space a biblical, end-of-the-world aura. Highly ambivalent about the legion of foreign refugees it was being forced to accommodate, the Spanish government had not adjusted train schedules to meet the fugitives’ needs. We found hordes of exiles camping on the floor of the waiting rooms, their possessions stuffed into tied-up blankets or carpets as well as suitcases; they were expecting to take the same train to Lisbon as we. Alex had bought our tickets from the concierge at the Madrid Ritz, tipping heavily, of course, to secure the purchase. But such was the pandemonium, so dense the crowds, that tickets had become meaningless. Railroad officials were nowhere to be seen. Refugees not speaking a word of Spanish, waving tickets or other credentials in a futile pantomime, tried to persuade stony-faced, indifferent policemen to give them access to the platforms. Hundreds of small children had lost their parents in the crush and walked about the station weeping, an equal number of adults paced the platforms, crying out their children’s names.
Moreover, no signs for the next train to Lisbon were in sight, and the police had no idea of the trains’ schedules. “The hotel, let’s return to the hotel,” my mother began to moan as we fought our way through the dense crowd. “Let’s turn back, I’m suffocating,” she repeated, suffering, as usual, from the panic caused by claustrophobia. “We must get on that train,” Alex replied firmly. “But the train doesn’t seem to exist,” Mother moaned. “They’ve probably canceled it!” “It exists, it exists,” Alex said grimly. Suddenly, a voice announced on the loudspeaker, in Spanish: “All aboard! Madrid-Lisbon express on track twenty-four, leaving in seven minutes.” We picked up our bags and ran to get in line amid the swarming crowd. But nothing so orderly was possible. Instead, we were caught in a shouting mass of humanity that was rushing toward the platforms, crying out lost relatives’ names in a half dozen languages. “Sauve qui peut,” Alex muttered, and we followed him as he tried to shove his way through the crowd. Making little headway, he turned to me and whispered, “Pretend you’re sick.” He continued shoving, holding his suitcases over his shoulders, now shouting “Enfant malade, enfant malade!”
I played this suddenly assigned role to the hilt, limping like Quasimodo and coughing pitifully, the way I imagined Camille must have coughed in her death scene, deliberately stumbling several times over the hem of my long coat. The gambit worked. Enough persons were moved by my plight to make room for us, and we finally reached the platform, which was as densely seething with crowds as the waiting rooms. But my mother’s panic grew more intense upon her first glimpse of our train. It was already packed beyond capacity by those who had arrived hours early to secure seats; some travelers, crammed twenty to a compartment, held their worldly possessions on the windows’ rim or even sat on the edges of windows, their
legs dangling out of the train; and hundreds of additional refugees were attempting to climb into the cars. “I’m not getting in there,” Mother cried out to Alex, “I refuse.” “You’re getting in,” Alex shouted firmly, “this may be the last train in months!” “No no no,” my mother shouted back, beginning to weep. We were now standing a foot away from the train, and the locomotive had begun to make threatening hissing sounds. “Boubous, get in,” Alex shouted again. “No no no no,” my mother sobbed. He turned to me. “Frosinka, you get in first!” Suitcases in hand, I managed to climb the first two steps, wrangling my way past some Polish refugees by muttering some dimly remembered phrases in their language; once firmly established on the train, I held my hand out to my mother. “Maman, come with me!” I shouted as the train began to pull very slowly out of the station. Alex walked beside the train, pushing my sobbing mother from behind, and managed to lift her to the first step. I tugged her up the rest of way. Alex got onto the stairs himself, hauling the rest of the baggage. As he joined us, the engine gave a hoot and started to pick up speed, leaving hundreds of shouting, weeping refugees stranded on the platform. We had made it out of Madrid.
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