David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn & The Courilof Affair (2008)

by Irene Nemirovsky

  “You may”

  M. took a puff of his cigarette, without inhaling, watched it burn in his fingers, and threw it down on the ground, slowly stubbing it out with his heel.

  “That all happened a long time ago,” he finally said, with a wry smile, “a very long time ago …”

  “Yes … I was the one responsible for the inquiry, after your arrest, after the terrorist attack.”

  “Oh, were you?” M. murmured indifferently.

  “I never managed to find out your real name. Not one of our secret agents knew who you were, either in Russia or abroad. Now that it doesn’t matter any more, tell me something—you were one of the leaders of that terrorist group in Switzerland, before 1905, weren’t you?”

  “I was never one of the leaders of a terrorist group, just a subordinate.”

  “So?”

  M. nodded, a weary little smile on his face.

  “That’s how it was, Monsieur.”

  “Really, and what about later on? In 1917 and after? I know I’m right, you were really …”

  He paused, looking for the appropriate word; then he smiled, revealing long, sharp teeth gleaming between pale lips. “You were really in the thick of it,” he said, tracing the shape of a big cauldron in the air. “I mean… at the top.”

  “Yes… at the top.”

  “The secret police? The Tcheka?”

  “Well, my friend, I did a bit of everything. During those difficult times, everyone lent a hand.”

  He tapped out a tune on the marble table with his delicate, curved fingers.

  “Won’t you tell me your name?” the man said, laughing. “I swear I’m also peacefully retired now, like you. I ask out of simple curiosity, professional inquisitiveness, if you will.”

  M. slowly raised the collar of his raincoat and pulled his scarf tighter with the same cautious gesture he always used.

  “I don’t believe you,” he said, laughing slightly and coughing at the same time. “People are always drawn back to their first love. And, besides, my name wouldn’t tell you anything more now. Everyone forgot it a long time ago.”

  “Are you married?”

  “No, I’ve kept some of the good old revolutionary traditions,” said M., smiling again; he had a little mechanical smile that made deep ridges at the corner of his mouth. He picked up a piece of bread and ate it slowly. “What about you?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. “What’s your name, Monsieur?”

  “Oh, my name? No mystery there … Baranof… Ivan Ivan-itch … I was assigned to His Excellency, to Courilof, for ten years.”

  “Oh, really?”

  For the first time, M.’s weary little smile faded; up until now, he’d been staring across at the harshly lit wax mannequins, the only items on display in the rain-drenched street, but he stopped staring, coughed slightly, looked straight at Baranof: “What about his family? Do you know what happened to them?”

  “His wife was shot during the Revolution. The children must still be alive. Poor Courilof. We used to call him the Killer Whale. Do you remember?”

  “Ferocious and voracious,” said M.

  He crumpled the remainder of his bread, started to get up, but it was still pouring; the rain bounced heavily off the pavement in bright sparks. He slowly sat down again.

  “Well, you got him,” said Baranof. “How many others did you personally bag, in total?”

  “Then? Or afterwards?”

  “In total,” Baranof repeated.

  M. shrugged his shoulders. “You know, you remind me of a young man who came to interview me once, in Russia, for an American magazine. He was very interested in the statistics, wanted to know how many men I’d killed since I’d come to power. When I hesitated, he innocently asked: ‘Is it possible? Is it possible that you can’t remember?’ He was a rosy-cheeked little Jew by the name of Blumenthal, from the Chicago Tribune.”

  He motioned to the doorman who was walking between the tables outside: “Get me that cab.”

  The cab stopped in front of the cafe.

  He stood up, extended his hand to Baranof.

  “It’s funny running into each other like this …”

  “Terribly funny.”

  M. laughed suddenly. “And… actually…”he said in Russian, “how many people did die? ‘In answer to our prayers’? With our help?”

  “Huh!” saidBaranof, shrugging his shoulders. “Well I, atleast, was acting under orders. I don’t give a damn.”

  “Fair enough,” said M., his voice weary and indifferent. He carefully opened his large black umbrella and lit a cigarette on the brazier. The bright flame suddenly illuminated his face with its hollow cheeks that were the colour of earth, and his wide, suspicious dark eyes. As usual, he didn’t actually smoke his cigarette, just breathed in its aroma for a moment, half closed his eyes, then threw it away. He gestured good-bye and left.

  Leon M. died in March 1932, in the house in Nice where he had spent his final years.

  Amongst his books was found a small black leather briefcase; it contained several dozen typed pages clipped together. The first page had written on it, in pencil, the words THE COURILOF AFFAIR

  CHAPTER 1

  Nice, 1931

  IN 1903, THE Revolutionary Committee gave me the responsibility of liquidating Courilof. That was the term they used at the time. This affair was linked to the rest of my life only in a minor sort of way, but as I am about to write my autobiography, it stands out in my memory. It forms the beginnings of my life as a revolutionary, even though I changed sides afterwards.

  Fourteen years passed before I came to power, half of them spent in prison, half in exile. Then came the October Revolution (Sturm und Drang Period) and another exile.

  I have been alive for fifty years, years that have gone quickly by, and I don’t have much to complain about. But still the final years seem long… the end is dragging on.

  I was born in ‘81, on 12 March, in an isolated village in Siberia near the Lena River; my mother and father were both in exile for political reasons. Their names were well known in their day, but are now forgotten: Victoria Saltykof and the terrorist M. Maxime Davidovitch M.

  I barely knew my father: prison and exile do not lend themselves to a close-knit family. He was a tall man, with shining, narrow eyes, dark eyebrows, and large, bony hands with delicate wrists. He rarely spoke. He had a sad, scathing little laugh. When they came to arrest him the last time, I was still a child. He hugged me, looked at me with a kind of ironic surprise, moved his lips slightly in a tired way that could pass for a smile, went out of the room, came back to get the cigarettes he’d forgotten, and disappeared forever from my life. He died in prison, at about the age I am now, in a cell in the Pierre et Paul Fortress, where the waters from the Neva River had seeped in during the autumn floods.

  After his arrest, I went to live in Geneva with my mother. I remember her better; she died in the spring of 1891. She was a delicate, slight creature, with fair hair and a pince-nez—the intellectual type of the ‘80s. I also remember her in Siberia, when we were going back, after she was freed. I was six years old. My brother had just been born.

  She was holding him in her arms, but away from her chest, with extraordinary clumsiness, as if she were offering him to the stones along the road; she shivered as she listened to his hungry cries. Whenever she changed him, I could see her hands shaking and getting tangled up in the nappy and pins. She had beautiful, delicate, long hands. When she was sixteen, she’d killed the head of the Viatka police at point-blank range; he’d been torturing an old woman right in front of her, a political prisoner, forcing her to walk in the fierce heat of the Russian sun, even though she was ill. At the height of summer, the Russian sun batters you to death.

  She told me about it herself, as if she felt she had to hurry, but before I was old enough to really understand. I remember the strange feeling I had listening to her story. I remember her sounding resonant and shrill, different from the weary, patient tone of voice I was used
to: “I expected to be executed,” she said. “I considered my death to be the supreme protest against a world of tears and bloodshed.”

  She stopped for a moment. “Do you understand, Logna?” she said more quietly. Her face and gestures remained cool and calm; only her cheeks had gone slightly red. She didn’t wait for me to answer. My brother was crying. She got up, sighing, and picked him up. She held him for a moment, like a heavy package, then left us alone, and went back to coding her letters.

  In Geneva, she was in charge of one of the Swiss terrorist groups, the same one that took care of me and raised me after she died. We lived on an allowance from the Party and from money she earned giving English and Italian lessons; we wore our winter clothes in Mont-de-Piete in springtime; summer clothes in autumn … And so it went.

  She was very tall and thin. She looked worn out at thirty, like an old woman; her hunched shoulders crushed her delicate chest. She suffered from tuberculosis, and her right lung was totally non-functional; but she would always say: “How could I get medical care when the poor factory workers are coughing up blood?” (The revolutionaries of that generation always talked like that.) She didn’t even send us away to live somewhere else: weren’t the children of the workers infected by their own sick mothers?

  However, I remember that she never kissed us. Besides, we were morose, cold children, at least I was. Only now and again, when she was very tired, would she stretch out her hand and stroke our hair, just once, slowly, as she sighed.

  Her face was long and pale, with yellowish teeth and weary eyes that blinked behind her spectacles. She had delicate, clumsy hands that always dropped things in the house, that couldn’t sew or cook, but wrote constantly, coding messages, forging passports… I thought I had forgotten her features, what she looked like (so many years have passed by since then), but here they are, resurfacing once again in my memory.

  Two or three nights a month, she would cross Lake Leman from Switzerland into France, carrying bundles of pamphlets and explosives. She would take me with her, perhaps to harden me to the dangerous life that was to be mine in years to come, in a kind of “revolutionary dynastic tradition,” perhaps to inspire trust in the customs officers, because I was so young, perhaps because my two brothers were dead and she didn’t want to leave me alone in the hotel, the same way that middle-class mothers might take their children with them to the cinema. I would fall asleep on the deck. It was usually winter; the lake was deserted, covered in a thick fog; the nights were freezing cold. Once in France, my mother would leave me for a few hours with some farmers, the Bauds, who lived in a house beside the lake. They had six or seven children; I remember a group of little ruddy-cheeked kids, very healthy but very stupid. There I drank piping hot coffee. I ate warm bread with chestnuts. The Bauds’ house— with its fires, the delicious aroma of coffee, the screaming children—was, to me, paradise on earth. They had a terrace, a sort of large wooden balcony that looked out over the lake, and, in winter, it was covered in snow and creaking ice.

  I had two younger brothers; both had died. They’d also lived alone in a hotel for a while, like me. One of them died when he was two, the other at three. I can particularly recall the night when the second one died; he was a good-looking boy, big and blond.

  My mother was standing up, at the foot of the bed, an old bed made of dark wood. She held a lit candle in her hand and was watching the dying child. I was sitting on the floor beside her, and I could see her exhausted face, lit from below by the candle’s flame. The child had one or two little convulsions, looked up with a weary, astonished expression, and died. My mother didn’t move; her hand covering the flame was the only thing that was obviously trembling. Finally, she noticed me and wanted to say something (undoubtedly something like “Logna, death is part of nature”), but she just clenched her lips sadly and said nothing. She placed the dead child on his pillow, took my hand and brought me to a neighbour’s house. The silence, the darkness, and his pale face, his white nightshirt and long, fine blond hair— all this I remember as if it were a bewildering dream. Soon afterwards, she also died.

  I was only ten years old then. I had inherited her predisposition to tuberculosis. The Revolutionary Committee lodged me at the home of Dr. Schwann. A naturalised Swiss citizen of Russian origin, he was one of the leaders of the Party. He owned a private clinic that had twenty beds in Monts, near Sierre, and it was there that I lived. Monts is a bleak village between Montana and Sierre, buried between dark fir trees and gloomy mountains, or perhaps that’s just how it seemed to me.

  For years on end, I lived glued to a chaise-longue, on a balcony, seeing nothing of the world except the tops of the fir trees and, on the other side of the lake, a glass cage similar to ours that reflected the rays of the setting sun.

  Later on, I was able to go out, down into the village, meeting the other patients along the only usable road. They were wrapped up in shawls, and we all climbed back together, breathing with difficulty, stopping after every few steps, counting the fir trees along the road, one by one, staring with hatred at the circle of mountains that shut out the sky. I can still see them, after all these years, just as I can smell the sanatorium—that odour of disinfectant and new linoleum—just as I can hear, in my dreams, the sound of the fohn, the dry autumn wind, in the forest.

  With Dr. Schwann, I studied foreign languages and medicine, which I particularly enjoyed. As soon as my health was better, I was given various assignments by the Revolutionary Committee in Switzerland and France.

  I was a member of the Party by my very birth …

  CHAPTER 2

  I BEGAN WRITING these notes thinking I would eventually write my autobiography. There’s so much time to fill. You have to do something at the end of your life, one way or another. But already, here I am, stopping. “A revolutionary education is difficult to explain in a way that is both sincere and instructive,” I recall that brave Hertz once said. And my code name, “Leon M.,” has its place in the iconography of the October Revolution, which no doubt should be left intact. The son of parents living in exile, brought up exclusively on revolutionary speeches, tracts, and models; and in spite of it all, I lacked strength and passion.

  When I lived in Geneva, I would listen with envy as my friends talked about their youth. I recall a young man of thirty who had taken part in fourteen terrorist attacks—ofwhich four had been successful; four of these murders had been carried out in vicious cold blood, in the middle of the street. He was a pale red-head with small, delicate, sweaty hands. One December evening after a meeting of the Committee, when we were coming back along the peaceful, frozen streets of Geneva, he told me how he had run away from home at the age of sixteen and wandered the streets of Moscow for eighteen days.

  “What you never did,” he said, smiling, “was to make your mother die of grief… or read illegal tracts by the light of a fire, like I did, when I was fifteen, at night, stretched out on the riverbank, in May…”

  He spoke in a bizarre, rasping voice, in little rapid, breathless phrases, and sometimes, he would stop and say with a sigh: “The good old days…”

  So true …

  Later on, I also experienced exile, prison, the bunkers of the Pierre et Paul jail, the tiny cells, putrid-smelling in the summer heat, where twenty or thirty of us were locked up together; the vast, dark, freezing-cold prisons in the countryside and the fortress where those condemned to death were held and where it was possible, by pressing your ear to certain places in the wall, to hear the echo of revolutionary songs coming from the women’s section.

  But even now, I no longer appreciate the romantic side of the Revolution as much as I should.

  An autobiography? Vanity. It would be better for me to remember certain things only for myself, as I did in the past. When I was in the state prisons they allowed us to write in notebooks, but then they destroyed them as soon as they were full of stories and memories.

  Would I even have had the time to finish an autobiography? So much has happened,
so many years gone by… I feel death approaching with a sense of weariness, of indifference, that is unmistakable: the debates, the changes within the Party, everything I used to feel so passionate about—I’m tired of all of it. Even my body is tired. More and more often, I want to turn over to face the wall, close my eyes, and fall into the deepest, sweetest sleep, forever.

  CHAPTER 3

  AND SO I belonged to the Party through my birth, my childhood, through the conviction that a social revolution is inevitable, necessary, and fair, as fair as anything to do with human affairs could ever be. My love of power attracted me to it as much as my desire for a certain kind of human affection that I lacked, and it was the only place that I found it.

  I like people, the masses. Here, near Nice, I live in Lourie’s house. It is a cube made of white stone, in the middle of a garden where no tree grows higher than a broomstick; the house is between two roads, one leading to Monaco and the other to the sea; you breathe in a fine dust here that is full of petrol and is finishing off my poor old lungs. I live alone; in the morning, an old woman comes in to clean the four empty rooms that make up my house; she prepares my food and leaves. But the sounds of life continue to surround me, and that is what I love, that is what pleases me, people, cars, trams going by, quarrels, shouting, laughter… fleeting silhouettes, the faces of strangers, conversations … Below, behind the bare little garden, where six delicate, sinuous bushes have been planted that will grow into peach trees, almond trees, goodness knows what, there is a kind of little Italian bistro, with a player piano, and benches beneath an arbour. Working men—Italian, French—go there to drink.

  At night, when they begin to walk up the twisting road that runs along the sea, I come out of the house; I sit down on the small low wall that separates the garden from the bistro; I listen to them. I watch them.

  I can see the small square lit up by paper lanterns, the pale light reflected on their faces. They go home late. The rest of the night passes more quickly that way, thank goodness, for I cough and fall asleep only when it’s morning. Why do I sit here looking at the flowers and the sea? I hate nature. I have only ever been happy in cities, those ugly, dirty cities with houses full of people, and on the streets in summer, when it’s hot, where I walk by strange faces and weary bodies. These are the hours I wish to kill, when solitude and silence surge up, when the last of the cars are returning from Monte Carlo along the coast road. Since I became ill, I am overwhelmed by memories. Before, I used to work. But my work is finished now.