When I read Tolstoi and Dostoievsky it is easier for me to read them in a translation.
I’m just as much a foreigner to my own people as I am to the English and French.
You who’ve got a home and a country, people who love you, people whose ways are your ways, whom you understand without knowing them—how can you tell what it is to belong nowhere?”
“But have you no relations at all?”
“Not one.
My father was a socialist, but he was a quiet, peaceable man absorbed in his studies, and he took no active part in politics.
He welcomed the revolution and thought it was the opening of a new era for Russia.
He accepted the Bolsheviks.
He only asked to be allowed to go on with his work at the university.
But they turned him out and one day he got news that he was going to be arrested.
We escaped through Finland, my father, my mother and me.
I was two.
We lived in England for twelve years.
How, I don’t know.
Sometimes my father got a little work to do, sometimes people helped us, but my father was homesick.
Except when he was a student in Berlin he’d never been out of Russia before; he couldn’t accustom himself to English life, and at last he felt he had to go back.
My mother implored him not to.
He couldn’t help himself, he had to go, the desire was too strong for him; he got into touch with people at the Russian embassy in London, he said he was prepared to do any work the Bolsheviks gave him; he had a good reputation in Russia, his books had been widely praised, and he was an authority on his subject.
They promised him everything and he sailed.
When the ship docked he was taken off by the agents of the Cheka.
We heard that he’d been taken to a cell on the fourth floor of the prison and thrown out of the window.
They said he’d committed suicide.”
She sighed a little and lit another cigarette.
She had been smoking incessantly since they finished supper.
“He was a mild gentle creature.
He never did anyone harm.
My mother told me that all the years they’d been married he’d never said a harsh word to her.
Because he’d made his peace with the Bolsheviks the people who’d helped us before wouldn’t help us any more.
My mother thought we’d be better off in Paris.
She had friends there.
They got her work addressing letters.
I was apprenticed to a dressmaker.
My mother died because there wasn’t enough to eat for both of us and she denied herself so that I shouldn’t go hungry.
I found a job with a dressmaker who gave me half the usual wages because I was Russian.
If those friends of my mother’s, Alexey and Evgenia, hadn’t given me a bed to sleep in I should have starved too.
Alexey played the violin in an orchestra at a Russian restaurant and Evgenia ran the ladies’ cloak-room.
They had three children and the six of us lived in two rooms.
Alexey was a lawyer by profession, he’d been one of my father’s pupils at the university.”
“But you have them still?”
“Yes, I have them still.
They’re very poor now.
You see, everyone’s sick of the Russians, they’re sick of Russian restaurants and Russian orchestras.
Alexey hasn’t had a job for four years.
He’s grown bitter and quarrelsome and he drinks.
One of the girls has been taken charge of by an aunt who lives at Nice, and another has gone into service, the son has become a gigolo and he does the night clubs at Montmartre; he’s often here, I don’t know why he isn’t here this evening, perhaps he’s clicked.
His father curses him and beats him when he’s drunk, but the hundred francs he brings home when he’s found a friend helps to keep things going.
I live there still.”
“Do you?” said Charley in surprise.
“I must live somewhere.
I don’t go to the Serail till night and when trade is slack I often get back by four or five.