29 In Memory of Amalia Fondaminsky (Obituary Essay, 1937)*

In October 1932 I came to Paris for a month. I had known Ilya Fondaminsky for several years already, but it was the first time I met Amalia Fondaminsky. There are rare people who enter our lives so simply and freely, with such a smile, as though a place has been prepared for them for a long time now, and from then on it is impossible to imagine that only yesterday we had been strangers. The whole past seems to rise at once to the level of the moment of meeting, and then, receding again, takes with it, for its own use, the shadow of the living image, mixes it with shades of our life that has really been and passed, so that it turns out that for the sake of that one person (who by their very nature was a priori dear to us) a kind of false time is created, which retrospectively explains the feeling of natural closeness, the solid tenderness, the experienced warmth, which overcomes us at such meetings. That was the atmosphere of my meeting with Amalia Fondaminsky. The night before we met, I remember my first visit to Rue Chernoviz; I didn’t catch Amalia there, and while I conversed with Ilya, I admired her Siamese cat. He was dark beige, with paler shades at the joints, with chocolate-colored paws and the same color tail (relatively short and fattish, which in combination with the coloring of his short-haired fur made his backside rather kangarooish). He looked on at God knows what with his clear eyes, filled to the brim with sapphire water; and this strange azure, his muteness, and the mysterious cautiousness of his movements made him look like a sacred temple creature. It was most likely about him that Amalia Osipovna and I first spoke. Her face shone with a welcome; an intelligent smile played across her lips, her eyes were alert and youthful, her graceful voice tender and quiet. There was something infinitely touching about her dark dress, her short height, and her very light tread. Like all newcomers to an unfamiliar city, I greedily made use of other people’s telephones, and so now, too, I asked permission to phone out. When I sat back down at the tea table, Amalia Osipovna, silently and without archness, passed me a letter which I could not have supposed to be in her possession. It was my letter to Stepun,1 who had once asked me to look over the English translation of his Pereslegin,2 a translation which had seemed inexact to me, and to which I had responded hypercritically, driven by an overscrupulous fear of missing anything. Since one of the two translators had been Amalia Osipovna, Fyodor Avgustovich had passed on to her my letter, with its unflattering report, having told her, apparently, that I was unaware of who had made the translation. This turn in the conversation immediately ushered it out into an expanse of jovial frankness, and it became clear that Amalia Osipovna was a fine appreciator of what could be called the art of the gaffe. We discussed the ones I had already had time to commit in Russian Paris, through absentmindedness, through a lack of everyday sense, or just like that, for no reason. Meanwhile, a saucer with milk, like a full moon, was lowered down to the cat, who began to lap, observing a dactylic rhythm. And the cat, and the whole décor of the apartment, all its objects—from Amalia Osipovna’s writing set to the large mat by the door, under which Russian Parisians trustingly hide their keys—all carried the elusive but indubitable stamp of kindness and cordiality that marks things in the homes of people radiant, and generous in their radiance. Amalia Osipovna’s heartfelt kindness, transparent to its depths, was combined with a feeling of tenderness toward the world, a love for what Baratynsky called “fanciful nicknames,”3 the urge to name everything in the world anew, in a special, personal way, as though she believed, perhaps rightly, that by improving the name you can improve its bearer.

I began to visit the Fondaminskys almost every day, and by the end of my stay in Paris I had moved in with them entirely. Amalia Osipovna, with a touching and at the same time unquestioning attentiveness toward me, had decided that I was “worn out,” that I needed to “rest” before the public reading which she and her friends took part in organizing, something I had done nothing to deserve. And how I remember the charming, quiet room, with its overhanging bookshelves, where every detail was thought through with care, from the bottle of mineral water, to the hair lotion, to the scented talcum powder. And the ardor with which she sold tickets; and how distinctly I remember the following picture: Amalia Osipovna in the quiet, warm sitting room, is typing up for me several pages from Despair, while the cat sits warming himself on the fireplace. And with what a keen sense of shame, of remorse, I can’t define it, do I recall how much I smoked in the apartment, not knowing that the smoky air was bad for her, while she of course said nothing to me. I fear that in general I was a difficult lodger, yet she graciously forgave me everything. Once, for instance, having come back very late when everyone in the house was already sleeping, I wanted to switch off the light in the hallway, but there were several switches and I didn’t know which was the right one. I tried one, then another, and the lamps in the adjoining rooms started waking up. I was alarmed that I was going to light up the whole house this way, and, having left the light on in the hallway, went off to bed. But then my conscience troubled me. I got up, went back to the hallway, and began to test the switches carefully, and it was worrying that one of them seemed to have no visible effect. It later turned out that on my first attempt I had turned on, and then successfully turned off, the light in Amalia Osipovna’s bedroom, and when I returned to the hallway, I lit her bedroom up once more and then left it that way; and she later woke up and turned it off herself, reacting with perfect humor to this nightmarish illumination.

Soon afterward I left Paris, and my final memory was of the small, dark figure of Amalia Osipovna on the platform; she had come to see me off. I would never see her again. And so now I want to keep hold of all this with feeble human hands for a few moments longer—all this which is so wondrous and so unsteady, ready at any moment to tumble silently into the dark and soft chasm of oblivion (but something essential will stay in one’s soul forever, no matter how much life tries to conceal the traces, no matter how unreliable the brightness of these details, still memorable today, turns out to be).