THE EXIGENCIES OF EARNING WHAT SHE MUST to keep hold of the very room of which she despaired—the single room in which she slept and bathed and cooked and ate, in which she sat at a table under a bare lightbulb, laboriously translating texts from Russian to French and from French to Russian—had, since the Revolution, inspired Suzanne Petrovna to supplement her inadequate income with tutoring and piecework that came not from publishers but from refugees. By 1926, her steadiest employment had for years been the translation of letters whose object was to secure jobs or information, the whereabouts of lost relatives and strayed fiancées. She wrote complaints to magistrates and protestations of innocence to officials of the court, explaining injustices too complex to render in elementary, refugee French.
The cost of a simple grammatical mistake or a misspelling could be a man’s credibility, a woman’s honor—at least this was what Suzanne told herself, now that her texts had become human lives and she parsed not only documents but hearts. For her efforts she was paid modestly, sometimes offered food instead of money, but she grew used to—dependent upon—the emotional sustenance such employment offered. If it was not her honor that was threatened, if it was not she who had lost the woman she had planned to marry, the son she had nursed and bathed, at least it was she who chose the words to bring them back. Chose between devastated and bereft, between implore and insist, hope and pray.
An organized person, she liked to lay out her papers and pens and dictionaries the same way each time. She placed the text to be translated before her, reference materials to the left, scratch paper for rough drafts to the right, pens within reach in their tray.
She was filling the bladder of her new black fountain pen—a gift from a grateful client—when she heard the tread of feet on the stairs. A large person, she concluded, because the fifth stair creaked as it did when the neighbor to her left ascended, a man of substantial height and girth. Whoever it was moved slowly down the corridor, paused regularly as if looking for names or numbers on the doors. Most tenants of the building, which had no concierge, were too transient to bother to identify their rooms for callers—either that or too likely to be hiding from creditors. Only Suzanne had written her name on a card, with the words Translation of Correspondence and Documents, and pinned it to her door. The sound of feet stopped, as if the visitor was considering this information, and she stood, eager at the thought of unanticipated work. She tidied her hair in the mirror over the sink and looked to see that her dress was properly fastened, for sometimes, while bent over her papers, she opened the button at her neck.
“Oui,” she answered the knock, her hand on the latch but not yet opening the door. The voice from the other side was deep, and spoke French with a heavy Russian accent, inspiring the unlikely image of someone spitting out lumps of undercooked dough. Suzanne didn’t recognize it.
“I want … I have a piece of business to discuss.”
As most of Suzanne’s work came to her by word of mouth, she asked for the referral: “Who was it that sent you to me?”
“No one,” said the voice, and made no attempt to explain itself further. Suzanne found something familiar in its unapologetic terseness; what, she couldn’t think. She drew in her breath, unlatched the door, nodded at the man before her.
He had what she considered a typically Russian face, melancholic and stubborn, eyes that believed in fate and a mouth that mocked it. His clothes were worn and grimy; his hands hung empty from too-short sleeves. He wasn’t carrying the usual frayed envelope or rumpled sheaf of papers, but perhaps these were folded inside his coat. Suzanne stood back to let the stranger enter. He nodded, smiled, not with good humor but a sardonic stretch of his lips. He sat in her chair and dropped his hands in his lap, fingers laced.
Only after Suzanne had really searched his face feature by feature did she remember it. What she recognized was the peculiarly dark-pigmented skin under his eyes: brown, purple, blue, gray—it partook of all but was none of these, a strange color echoed in his dark but somehow bloodless lips. The rest of him was very changed; he was stooped, his hair thin. Deep vertical lines creased his cheeks, as if he’d lost too much weight too quickly. Defensively, Suzanne folded her arms; she didn’t close her door but left it open to the public corridor.
“Go away?” she said, intending the imperative, but her voice lilted with nerves, and the words formed a question.
He shook his head, and his easy arrogance rekindled such a store of old resentments that she was forced to steady her voice.
“You must, though.”
“Your mother. Is she dead?”
Suzanne nodded.
“When?”
“Years ago. Fifteen years. During the summer. The twenty-seventh of August.”
“No one told me.”
“No.”
He nodded, glanced over the small, sparse room, noted the papers on the table, the two washed glasses on the shelf by the sink. “You have room for me for a night or two,” he said. She shook her head, and he smiled, again without pleasure. He switched from French to Russian. “It wasn’t a request.”
Suzanne continued to speak in French. “This is my home. I ask that you leave it.” Now he looked around, very slowly, allowing his eyes to rest on each object, conveying to Suzanne how shabby were her surroundings: the cracked enamel of the sink, the obviously mended chair, the flat and faded coverlet on the couch that served her as a bed. The Bokhara rug and mahogany armoire, the malachite lamps and the silver cup—all she had managed to retrieve from her dead brother’s apartments had long ago been sold. Beneath the window frame, the wallpaper had been scratched until it peeled off the plaster below: the work of her sometimes cat, jumping up onto the high sill to quit the apartment.
“You turn me away? What life you have”—he paused as if to underscore that life’s meanness—“I gave you.”
“I will call a gendarme. I will—” Suzanne broke off, realizing from his impassive expression that her father knew how unlikely it was that any plea for help might be answered in such a neighborhood. At three in the afternoon no police were on patrol; any man sober enough to stand was at work. Down the hall was a consumptive laundress, upstairs the mother of two young children. There were no others.
“I need a place until the end of the week. Then I leave for—”
“Where?”
“Lyons. A job.”
“Leave now, then. You can’t stay here.” Suzanne’s voice surprised her with its sureness. She could see that her father, despite his quick arguments, was taken aback as well. Still, he challenged her.
“Why, when I have a daughter with a roof?” he asked. He was tipping the chair back as he spoke, an old habit, she’d forgotten. She watched as he balanced on the two back legs, steadying himself with one hand on the table.
Without thinking—it wasn’t something she planned, not even for an instant, it was more reflexive than that—Suzanne reached her foot forward and gave the edge of the seat a hard push, enough to tip it over backward. She covered her eyes as her father grabbed at the table’s edge, and kept them covered for a few seconds after she heard his head hit the tiled floor. She was frozen, just as when she was a child and he’d beaten her, or the night he’d stood on her brother’s fingers. She was waiting for the blow and comforting herself with the thought that he’d grown too old, too weak, to actually kill her with his bare hands; and she, too, she was no longer a child, she was a woman now, fully grown and long past the time when he could have easily accomplished it, the end of her.
Suzanne was waiting, but she was waiting for nothing; there was no sound after the thump of his head, like the noise of a melon that had rolled off the tabletop. She opened her eyes, squatted by his chest to see that he was breathing. How odd that she’d never before looked at him so closely, her father. As it turned out, he wasn’t ugly. She was surprised by the graceful curve of cheekbone under his closed eye, the straight narrow nose, nothing like the lumpy potato nose of the peasant she had come to think him. He was dirty, but the skin above his lip was freshly shaven, his chin and cheeks as well, as if he’d conceded this small measure of hygiene in preparation for coming to her room. Seeing this, she remembered the feel of his cleanly shaven face. Hadn’t there been, long ago, lost in childhood, a holiday afternoon when he’d walked into the sea with her riding on his shoulders? She had put her hands on his face, just shaved, to steady herself.
Now what, Suzanne thought, still squatting. She was surprised to have done something she would have judged herself incapable of doing, surprised also that she felt neither guilt nor satisfaction in her violence. She was strangely unburdened of emotion. Early memories, even, had no power to move her. Did this indicate a disordered moral faculty, she wondered, an unbalanced mind?
She walked down the hall as far as the stairwell, to be sure it was empty. She could get him that far, anyway. But when she pulled at his boots, intending to drag him out the door by the feet, they came off easily—so big they must have been borrowed, or stolen—and she fell backwards onto her tailbone. He was wearing no socks, and his feet were as white as a corpse’s beneath the grime, so she took hold of him by his trousered ankles and dragged him into the hall, his head bumping over the saddle. He was heavier than he looked; by the time she rolled him around the corner and into the stairwell, she was panting.
Suzanne’s father fell only a few steps and then came to a stop, but his head struck each tread, so hard that she cringed. Perhaps this would grant her a few more minutes of his unconsciousness, safeguard a chance for her to think. She set the boots neatly on the landing, returned to her room, and locked the door. It would be best to leave, she thought, to pack a bag and go—she didn’t know where, but once she was outside she would think more clearly. Outside she could breathe again. She had a few francs; she’d go out the back way. But then from down the hall she heard a moaning, a French and Russian cursing, a tripping and stumbling, followed by one and then another stamp, the kind required to put on buckleless boots, even overly large ones. Suzanne looked at her door once more, to check that the bolt was secured; then she backed up until she was on the other side of her room. Under the bed, she could see two red reflections: the cat’s eyes, round with surprise. She hadn’t even known the animal was in the room.
Suzanne listened to her father pound on the door, counting the times, only four, and this, too, was unexpected—she thought he’d throw his shoulder against it until the lock gave. He didn’t yell, he didn’t call her any names, he didn’t say anything at all. He walked away, and she listened to the sound of his boots descending the stairs. Sitting on the floor with her eyes closed, she heard the cat jump onto the sill, back legs scrabbling for purchase, the thud as he landed on roof tiles.
For eight days, Suzanne stayed in. She didn’t open the door to any inquiries, and thereby she lost two pieces of translation from potential clients who didn’t know her well enough to push valuable papers under a locked door, let alone money. She sat at the window and drank tea with sugar, then tea without sugar, and when the wet, reused leaves wouldn’t produce even a hint of color or flavor she drank hot water. She ate a tin of smoked herring—actually smiling that this had turned out to be the occasion for which she’d saved it—a stale half loaf, and two packets of biscuits, meted out three per meal. Then, after two days of eating nothing and feeling queasy, then faint, she went out, her auburn hair pinned under her hat, a dark scarf pulled up to her nose.
He said he was leaving in a week, he said he was leaving in a week, she recited as she stepped tentatively around corners, peering out from under her low felt brim. I waited eight days, and he said he was leaving in a week.
After a month, Suzanne forced herself to put away the scarf and hat, but her bravery was an act, and at night she lay in bed listening for a vengeful tread on the stairs. When she slept, her dreams were nightmares, and often she woke standing at her door, checking the lock to see, was it secure? Weeks passed, one after another; she didn’t relax but grew only more and more nervous. She lost the ability to work efficiently and, worn down by poverty and apprehension, fell ill, recovered poorly. Even a short walk brought back her fever; she coughed until her eyes watered; she was obliged to seek a cure in the southern sun—in Nice, where, hoping to elude consumption, she lost what money remained to her and sat for hours on a bench overlooking the sea, calculating not only her poverty (for that math was simple enough: first she had very little, and then she had even less), but how, in the course of her life, one reversal had mysteriously precipitated the next, until there she was, discovering as if for the first time that the shoes she wore were not serviceable but ugly, her life was not one of simplicity but of privation.
As Suzanne followed the gendarme along the Promenade des Anglais—the mistral now whipping over the beach and threatening to tear the awning right off the tobacconist’s stall—she crossed her arms over her chest to keep her coat closed. Into what new mess was she allowing her father to push her?
On the other hand, could anything be worse than spending a night outdoors, listening to the relentless washing and worrying of the tide? The Oriental woman in the litter: she had materialized like some mandarin fairy queen, held aloft by those two silent, braided acolytes, the severity of their dress emphasizing the opulence of hers. Suzanne hurried after the gendarme, coughing, panting. Perhaps there were witches and genies and … She shook her head. No, what there were, were fevers, and when fevers didn’t improve, deliriums.