It was almost three o’clock in the morning, but Sergey Sergeyevich was still sitting in the armchair, gazing at the bright spot of lamplight in front of him, casting a regular, slightly diffuse circle onto the rug. “I don’t know,” he said aloud. “I can’t see anything…” He stood up, took a few paces and muttered crossly: “…anything consolatory.” Then he picked up a book, gripping it between his index finger and thumb, as though about to lance it into the air, but placed it neatly back on the side table. Next he gazed at the revolver for a long time, the black shimmer of its beautiful steel, shook his head and finally lay down to bed. A minute later, he was asleep.
Since early childhood, Seryozha had grown accustomed to the idea that the word “home” could encompass many different things at once. “Home” could mean London, a quiet street near Grove End Gardens in Hampstead, a bobby at the corner, the old church, the stone embankment of the Thames during his daily strolls; “home” could mean Paris, the proximity of the Bois de Boulogne, the Arc de Triomphe, the statue of Victor Hugo on a long-familiar square; “home” could also mean the crunch of sand beneath the wheels of Liza’s motor car, an alley beyond a pair of iron gates and a squat house set amid a tranquil garden, right on the shore of a still bay, which seemed at times deep blue, at others green, although mostly neither blue nor green, but rather that colour for which human language has no word. This landscape never changed—it forever remained the same, come winter or summer, autumn or spring—much as the people who lived in Sergey Sergeyevich’s villa never changed either: the gardener, always in that same large planter’s hat, snipping away in the distance with his enormous shears; the Russian caretaker Nil, a former soldier and an old giant of a man, with a slightly flattened head and an accordion of unseen proportions, which he would play at night. And whenever a member of Sergey Sergeyevich’s family arrived, from the suburbs of nearby Nice the cook would be summoned: a large, dark-eyed Italian who spoke in an astonishing idiom, a bizarre mix of the local dialect with French and Italian. And there was her son, too, a roguish, high-spirited youth, who would wash the car, repair the electricity and do odd jobs around the house, although he would always call himself the chef mécanicien,† and so everyone at home would jokingly refer to him as “Chef”—and so the name stuck. The suppliers, too, were the same year in and year out; they would always ring the one bell, which served absolutely no purpose but to quench the supplier’s love of its simple melody. The greengrocer would arrive in his tiny vehicle with its thin forlorn wheels on narrow tyres, although arising virtually from the wheels themselves was a great white plywood cone with painted on it a bunch of bananas in a garish yellow colour, a sliced blood-red pomegranate and, somewhat off to the side of the pomegranate and bananas, a pile of fruits that were of a greyish-green colour and by their shape suggested something between potatoes and pears—in any case, something that did not exist in nature—and above all this, in assured green lettering, was written “Fruits et primeurs de premiére qualité”,‡ with an acute accent in the penultimate word. Then there was the baker, with his thin white hands and dark face, who drove his own car, the distinguishing feature of which was that there was a five-year-old hole in the exhaust pipe, from which fumes would come spluttering out, and when the car ground to a halt and the engine fell silent, there would come a strange, faint ringing noise from all its metal components returning to their places; from afar it would always seem as if little pieces of crockery were flying off their shelves, or that this were the peculiar swansong of the baker’s car, which was falling to pieces, crying out as it did so; the most miraculous thing was that for all this, the vehicle remained intact. The milkman, who doubled as a bottle collector, was a young man and impossibly odd: he always went about without a cap, his black hair dishevelled; he had a leucoma in his right eye, was missing his front teeth, and always wore an oversized jacket, sagging trousers and enormous boots with upturned toes, usually with no laces. He lisped, and he would swing his weak arms, behind which billowed the broadest sleeves imaginable. His sole joy in life was bottles of different types and sizes: he knew everything there was to know about them. He was married to a beautiful, healthy woman who despised him, as did everyone else for that matter, and the chef mécanicien would say that he ought to duck when he passed below the telephone wires, so as not to get his horns tangled in them. “Tellement elles sont grandes, vous ne pouvez pas le croire!”§
The milkman had but one friend and advocate—the old caretaker with the accordion; they sometimes took a stroll together in the evenings, talking animatedly, and the little milkman would run alongside the old man, lisping, swinging his arms and hitching up his sagging trousers. He loved the accordion and, listening to it, would say: “On dirait de grandes bouteilles, qui font du bruit mélodique.”¶
As always, the butcher would come, a robust man who wore a very clean striped shirt, in a well-tuned automobile; from year to year the butcher grew fuller and rounder, and Chef predicted that he would die of an apoplectic stroke. But for the time being the butcher was still alive.
Seryozha found it astonishing that there had been no changes in the lives of these people; they never went anywhere, never read anything, and in all these years they had probably seen less than he had in a few months. He felt especial sympathy and pity for the little milkman and always had a chat with him whenever they met; however, the milkman was shy and would reply monosyllabically, smiling searchingly the whole time, his toothless mouth agape. But on the other hand, the old caretaker would chat happily, recounting the war with the Germans, weaving in tall tales that he himself truly believed: that he was impervious to bullets, that throughout the war he was never wounded and only once suffered a contusion—“though, really, a contusion doesn’t count!”—that in the Ukraine witches milk cows, that he had served in the artillery and had seen all there was to see: he had worked in field hospitals for two weeks and seen how doctors butchered people, and how one soldier, he claimed, had his skull amputated and, what was more, survived—he was a strong chap, like him. The old man would call Liza “mistress” and Sergey Sergeyevich “master”, and only to Seryozha would he speak with any familiarity, calling him by his given name, because he had known him since he was a babe in arms. He would speak Russian, but frequently lapsed into Ukrainian, and one day when Seryozha, who was nine years old at the time, brought him a large bar of chocolate, he thanked him, telling him he was a good boy, and added that the only thing left to do was to eat the sweet treat. “I don’t need no woman, I can’t dance no more,” he clarified with a sigh. However, this was particularly coquettish of him, for the old man was as strong as an ox, and his solid white teeth sparkled beneath his grey whiskers when he smiled. He spoke of the Mediterranean with disdain, averring that the country, while on the whole not bad, could never hold a candle to Poltava province, and the climate here was inconducive to good health—he based this on the fact that he had never once worn his sheepskin coat, brought all the way from Russia, and so it was just “shrivelling away”, as he put it. He would tell Seryozha about Poltava, about the Vorskla, which in summer glittered in the sunlight and in winter was so frozen over that you could ride sleighs over it, and about the dense, vibrant verdure of leafy trees; but then he would get carried away and talk of utterly fantastical things—how bears would almost daily wander into the farmstead, how he had killed a wolf with a stone, how he had a fabulous horse that would eat everything, and how one day he had fed it several pounds of salo. The people there, according to him, had been just like those found here, only they spoke a different language and were much more intelligent, and in his opinion the women were, on average, a little plumper than the ones here.
Seryozha knew all the inhabitants of the little village, on the outskirts of which Sergey Sergeyevich’s villa was situated: all the shopkeepers, restaurateurs, all the Italian gardeners, all the random people who had wound up here God knows how and had stayed on to make a living—like the irascible old Englishman who was unable to bear the
company of anyone and played tennis with himself, or the red-headed artist with freckles who went by the name of Yegorkin. For many years, Yegorkin had been painting the same pictures, depicting improbably garish peasant women riding a dashing troika through powdered snow; the one who was driving held a raised whip in her frozen hand, and what was most surprising of all was how lightly they were attired, with open necks and almost bare shoulders, so that when Sergey Sergeyevich saw one such painting for the first time, he asked the artist whether the sketch had been done during the thaw. Sergey Sergeyevich would always buy this artist’s works, and he would invariably give them to Sletov, who in turn would give them away to his international acquaintances; and so one might have supposed that these paintings now adorned the walls of various apartments in every corner of the globe: in the state of Virginia, in Canada and California, in Sydney and Calcutta, in Persia, Turkey and Afghanistan, and, naturally, in all the capitals of Europe. The painter, who, as with the majority of artists, was a simple man and in his time had graduated from a Russian school—which he would translate into French most arbitrarily as école supérieure, although it had been an ordinary three-year college in Tambov—had at one time decided to conceive a passion for surrealism, having seen in Nice, at the Palais de la Méditerranée, an exhibition of some contemporary artist’s work, and so to his usual troika racing through the snow he began to add, albeit around the edges, in the background, and even then sometimes from a far-off perspective, palm trees and a sea of the deepest blue, through which it was possible to discern some tailed monster with fins. However, Sergey Sergeyevich resolutely opposed this and had a long conversation with the artist, during which Sergey Sergeyevich persuaded Yegorkin to preserve at whatever the cost the distinct national character in his art and not to succumb to the influence of French painting, “whose contemporary trends seem, do they not,” said Sergey Sergeyevich, “contentious”. Sergey Sergeyevich particularly insisted that Yegorkin was, by calling, first and foremost a painter of animals, and not one of seascapes, with which Yegorkin, after some consideration, agreed. When Seryozha was young, Yegorkin would bring him cheap sweets (which the child would accept out of politeness) and bunches of mimosas, and would show him magic tricks, at which they both genuinely laughed. Seryozha always felt a little sorry for this shabbily dressed, very poor man, and Olga Alexandrovna shared that same sense of pity for him; only Liza never talked with him, and when she happened to glance at him, it was as though she were looking at an empty space. Sergey Sergeyevich said to her one day:
“Yegorkin, Lizochka, is a sphinx. Yes, a sphinx. Really, it’s utterly incomprehensible how a man can dedicate his entire life to such terrible tripe as his pictures. It’s easy to despise him, and so you oughtn’t. Don’t you think?”
The gates of the villa gave onto a rather narrow road that ran directly above the sea, which shimmered there three metres below. At the top of a path leading down, there was a large tree; below was a small bay paved with stone slabs, one side of which formed a little sea wall from which one could dive into the water. There was a dark-brown motorboat moored in the bay, beside which bobbed an ordinary pair-oar that Chef sometimes used to catch fish in particular spots known only to him, although their particularity existed only in his imagination, for there were no fish there at all, just as there were none in any of the waters nearby; or rather, they were so few that it was not worth mentioning.
It was the month of June, oppressive and sultry, when Liza and Seryozha arrived in the Midi. Chef was waiting for them at the railway station in Nice. It was around five o’clock in the evening; everything was glittering in the sunlight; there was a light breeze coming in from the sea. Seryozha’s body ached slightly from the prolonged muscular strain, and there was a light throbbing in his head. That vague and wicked feeling for Liza, having begun on that memorable evening when for the first time he noticed her bare shoulders in her ball gown, had taken possession of him once and for all, and he was unable to break free of it. It had tormented him throughout the entire journey: he had barely slept a wink during the night, sensing near him, in the shuddering blue darkness, Liza’s constant troubling presence. And so now, despite the heat, he felt cold and out of sorts.
“You know, Liza,” he said as they were leaving the station, “I hardly slept a wink last night. I’m probably coming down with something, aren’t I? I don’t feel well.”
She looked at him with her understanding and compassionate eyes, but what she said bore no relation to her gaze:
“Perhaps you really have caught cold.”
“I must have done, Liza.”
“It would be surprising,” she said in response to her own thoughts, which did not, however, concern Seryozha’s cold. “Once we’re home,” she said, “we’ll get you fixed.”
“In the sun?” asked Seryozha with a smile.
When they arrived, the Italian woman fed him bouillon, and after that he immediately fell asleep, lost in a soft silence, in the farthest reaches of which—he had grasped this as he was drifting off—that same quiet, though always troubling, presentiment awaited him.
* The charming savage!
† Head mechanic.
§ They’re so big, you wouldn’t believe!
‡ Top-quality fruit and vegetables.
¶ It sounds like great big bottles making a musical noise.
WHEN SERYOZHA AWOKE in the early morning, all trace of his troubled state over these last few days had vanished. He listened. Downstairs, Nil was talking with the Italian woman in his strange French with its Ukrainian accent—in which all the verbs had but one form for every occasion, an indistinct conjugation—about how it was a shame that there were so few fish in the sea and that the big ones were taken to Nice from the ocean.
“What use is a sea if there are no fish in it?” Nil was saying. “Maybe you just don’t know how to catch them. Vous pas savoir attraper gros poisson, vous savoir attraper petit poisson?”*
“On saurait bien l’avoir,” replied the Italian woman, “s’il y en avait là-dedans.”†
Seryozha washed, dressed and, through old force of habit, slid down the banister of the interior flight of stairs leading down from the first floor, where his room was situated, and went into the yard.
“Bonjour, Monsieur Serge,” said the Italian woman. “Dieu, que vous êtes devenu grand maintenant!”‡
“What are you doing up so early?” asked Nil, placing his enormous arm around Seryozha’s shoulders. “Where are you off to?”
It pleased Seryozha greatly that Nil and the Italian woman were kindly towards him and so obviously loved him. He shook the woman’s hand, asked after her recent health and enquired whether Chef was around. The woman said that she had been well and that Chef was washing the motor in the garage. Seryozha headed there: the garage was nearby, and he could hear the sound of a jet of water crashing into the automobile—there was a curious change in pitch when the jet landed under the wings of the vehicle.
“Hello, Chef,” said Seryozha. “I’d like to go out on the water today. Is your boat working?”
“My boat?” said Chef in astonishment. “Of course it’s working. How could it not be, when I’ve been looking after it?”
This boat had been made to order for Sergey Sergeyevich, and, as with everything he ordered or bought, perhaps with the exception of Yegorkin’s paintings, it was of very fine quality. Chef abandoned the half-washed automobile, changed his clothes with the speed of an illusionist, and a minute later they were already sitting together in the boat, which was sailing across the smooth water of the bay, shooting up two white semi-transparent walls of spray. Then, having doubled the cape, they headed out into the open sea, where there were already a few reasonably sized, bouncy waves. The morning was clear throughout, and in the luminous fading blue one could make out the retreating outline of the opposite shore.
They were both silent. Seryozha sat reclining, now closing, now opening his eyes. Then Chef said in his easy manner:
“Et bien, comment ça va à Paris?”§
Seryozha could not help laughing. In Chef’s imagination, while Paris was indeed a great city, it was also a homogeneous concept, and so it was sufficient merely to live in Paris in order to determine unequivocally how things were there in general. In reply to Seryozha’s explanations, Chef nodded and then began to talk of events in his own life, telling him that he had a fiancée with a dowry, but that his mother would not allow him to marry, since he was too young. He spoke of a certain Jeannot, who, according to him, was absolutely unbeatable at any game, be it boules, billiards or even cards, and said that he, Chef, suspected him of cheating. Then he began to talk about the lonely Englishman, whom he had watched as the latter sat in his garden, talking with someone, and then grew angry and started shouting, although there was no one in the garden other than him; Chef had been unable to understand anything because the man had been speaking in English, but he was convinced that the old man had gone mad from drink, although no one had ever seen him drunk.
“That doesn’t prove anything,” said Chef. “Perhaps he had been drinking earlier, and only then, after he went mad, did he stop.”
When Seryozha returned, Liza was already taking her coffee. He asked her how she had slept. “Wonderfully,” came the reply, but Seryozha detected a very slight but indisputable distance in her voice. It had slipped out unintentionally; Liza herself noticed it only several minutes later. However, while she understood the reason for it, Seryozha did not. Still, half an hour later they both set out for a swim and only retuned home once their shoulders began to ache from the effects of the quick southern sun. After luncheon, Liza retired to her room to read, while Seryozha went to Cannes with Chef to watch the motorboat race, and they returned only towards dinner.
The Flight Page 8
