My father indulged me (Vitienka can do no wrong) and acted as if he were always about to reach out and pinch my cheek lovingly. He carried me on his back, bumping my rear gently against the bedroom wall in rhythm to a nursery song. My mother, on the other hand, seemed eager to treat me as a grown-up and impart lessons in self-discipline. Her distaste for self-indulgence was perhaps part of her own mother’s legacy. Anna Vassilievna, my grandmother, was a legendary figure in our family and among their friends. She was respected and feared for her imperiousness and polyglot wit. During our late-afternoon sofa sessions in Leipzig, where she and my grandfather lived in a wing of our apartment before we moved to Paris, she insisted that I lie perfectly still and repeat lines of Russian poetry by Lermontov and Pushkin that she slowly whispered to me, carefully separating the words so that I had no excuse for making mistakes.
Earlier still—I must have been five or six—when Nora was still alive and our parents were vacationing without us, my grandmother was put in charge of my sister and me. At such times, she felt free to implement her educational and hygienic theories. I still remember my father’s dismay when, upon returning with my mother from Venice and the photo-recorded feeding of pigeons on the piazza San Marco, they found my head closely cropped, maybe even shaved, because my grandmother held to the unshakable opinion that my hair would grow sturdier as a result. This capillary prophylaxis, radical and perverse in my parents’ view, did not prevent me from developing, at first, what is called a “high forehead,” then a receding hairline, and ultimately an undeniable baldness—like all the men on both sides of my family.
When my grandparents moved to an apartment of their own a few streets away, I would visit once a week and have lunch alone with Babushka. First she served his daily omelet to my grandfather, who, some thirty years older than she, was then in his nineties, quite frail, but endowed with an impressive appetite. After the daily omelet came the daily question—“How was it?”—followed by the daily answer, “It was good, but it was better yesterday.” It took me years to understand that this was more than a trivial and predictable answer to an equally predictable question. It was a statement about marriage and life in general.
Dyedushka, my grandfather, walked slowly but without a cane. When, as a child, I accompanied him to the park, I recall how he stopped now and then, turning around with his hands clasped behind his back, to appraise a feminine figure that had just passed us. He looked carefully and made no comments. He was rather taciturn, and I do not recall conversing with him in any language. I was told that he had all his teeth, and that he did not wear glasses. He used to sit for hours in his armchair, scrutinizing through his magnifying glass the financial page of the newspaper that listed the latest quotations of the stock exchange—the birja, as my grandmother explained—though he had lost everything he owned at the time of the Revolution: his sugar refinery, his properties, and his investments in the Russian railroad, which, as an engineer, he had helped develop. I heard it said that he was the first Jew admitted to the Polytechnic Institute under the tsars—some time in the mid-nineteenth century. He had amassed a not inconsiderable fortune, but that was now all in the past. A ruined émigré in Germany, he was supported entirely by his son-in-law, my father.
After my grandfather’s omelet came my turn to have lunch tête-à-tête with my grandmother, while my grandfather returned to his armchair and to the scrutiny of the newspaper. This was the time for a lesson in good manners. I would reach out for the food, if necessary by stretching my arm across the table. My grandmother would slap my wrist with her napkin, adding the inevitable “You must always ask.” One day I replied, perversely, “Yes, but what if I’m alone?” The answer came without hesitation: “Especially when you are alone.” I remained speechless. This surprising reply to my provocative question was not lost on me. I could not have explained its deeper meaning then and there. I have often wondered whether my grandmother was aware of it. As I think about her person and character, the answer must be yes. She was giving me a lesson in dignity and self-respect. It applied to any and all so-called private activities—washing, dressing, thinking. It is undoubtedly the same lesson that, many years later and against all logic, made me stubbornly polish my army boots in the muddy fields of Normandy after we landed in June of 1944.
“Especially when you are alone.” Babushka’s lesson, I know, also prepared me to appreciate that passage in Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz in which the Jew Steinlauf (who had earned an Iron Cross in the former Austro-Hungarian army) sums up survival wisdom, exhorting the newly arrived contingent of death camp inmates to wash their faces daily, if need be in dirty water, to polish their shoes regularly, and to walk erect—not in order to please the SS guards, but so as not to become beasts and “begin to die.”
Babushka thought that my parents thoroughly spoiled me. She was scandalized that they agreed to rescue me from my first summer camp, at the age of seven or eight, when I complained that the counselors made fun of me because I could not tie my shoelaces. I had pleaded to be allowed to come home, declaring that I was “unhappy.” Later, there was the record of her voice on the small, cheaply made plastic disk that she sent us in Paris (lost, alas, during the 1940 debacle) with a list of admonitions for my benefit. My parents and I played it over and over again with considerable amusement, until it developed a crack and the voice almost faded. The recorded message was in Russian, which my grandmother insisted I continue speaking daily. It concluded with the sentence “Chtobi tiebja ne tak kutaly” (Tell your parents that they should not pamper you so much). And it ended, to our lasting entertainment, with a firm German “So,” to indicate, we assumed, to the attendant in the Leipzig department store Kaufhaus Brühl, where the disk had been incised, that she had come to the end of her recording. The Germanic “So” became a family joke.
My mother had an unswerving sense of duty toward her parents. Her perseverance and ingenuity enabled her, through relatives in the consular service, to get them out of Samara on the Volga, in the heart of Russia, where, after the Revolution, they had been virtual prisoners in a single room of their large house, occupied by coarse Soviet officials. And it was again her perseverance, after my grandfather died in Leipzig in 1937, that brought my grandmother to Paris, out of Nazi Germany. Just as she later managed—almost a miracle in 1942—to rescue my grandmother out of Occupied France and have her join us, via Spain and Portugal, in New York, where we ourselves had only recently found refuge.
Mama’s sense of filial duty was related, I guess, to her oft-repeated recommendation, rooted in who knows what emotional experience or intuition, never to take leave of a dear one on a cross note, never to postpone saying the kind word or doing the kind thing. The impressive dread of having to face a forever “too late” placed a supreme value on human relations but also made one vulnerable to the dictates of sentimentalism. It could lead to viewing life from a posthumous perspective.
Mama behaved toward her mother with a mixture of affection, irony, and reverence, even though Babushka was domineering and often peremptory and did not hesitate to state in a most categorical manner whom my parents should or should not frequent or what dress my mother should wear on a given occasion, not to mention her views on correct toilet training—just as, later on, she did not hesitate to express her firm opinions on what would or would not be a proper profession for me. Correctness in one form or another was a major concern. “Noblesse oblige” was a favorite expression of hers, suggesting that achievement and rank impose obligations. She considered her family more distinguished than the one her daughter comfortably married into, and she reminded me, so that I might view them as models, that among her relatives were respected professionals, several scholars, and even an orchestra conductor. She did so without ostentation, as though high attainments were something to be taken for granted.
It is chiefly to Babushka that I owe my ability to speak Russian, for she set aside time to instruct me. I did not always make language teaching easy for her. I can still see the massive oak tree, in the Rosenthal Park in Leipzig, next to which she stopped, somewhat out of breath, to make me repeat in Russian the supposedly useful adjectives “southeastern” and “northwestern,” and I quickly proceeded to exasperate her by concocting incongruous adverbial combinations like “northsoutherly” and “eastwesterly.” It is she who found the Russian tutor, a jobless émigré journalist and putative poet, whose airless attic room I visited twice a week at the age of six or seven, staring listlessly at the table ventilator and the decapitated flies that littered papers and notebooks, while he droned on about the intricacies of Russian declensions, conjugations, and inflections of irregular verbs.
I have often pondered that I do not have a “mother tongue,” if by that is meant that one’s first or true language is the language that was also native to one’s mother, and in which she spoke and sang to her infant. Mama’s native language was Russian, which I heard, or rather overheard, from early childhood but was not encouraged to speak until some years later. With my nanny Lotte, and then with Fräulein Marianne, who accompanied us to Paris, where she remained for a couple of years, I spoke German. And although my mother, who was fluent in several languages, spoke German to me on occasion, she made a point of addressing me in French as early as our stays in Nice and Montreux, but especially after we settled in Paris. French became my language. It was the language of my playmates, of school, of the street and the soccer field, of my discovery of books and ideas. Other languages—English and Italian—I learned later, and I established very special relations with them. But it is French that defined my way of perceiving the world.
Some time ago, I came across a passage in Marguerite Yourcenar’s Hadrian’s Memoirs in which the Spanish-born Roman emperor, who was learned in Greek and most at home in Hellenic culture, explains that the true place of birth, the real fatherland, is where one awakens to intelligent consciousness of others and of self. I reflected that this may point to the distance between the concrete, blood- and family-rooted mother tongue and the more abstract word “fatherland.” The French are fond of the word “patrie,” derived from the Latin “pater,” for “father.” But it is a metaphor that may have less to do with real paternity than with an ideological weaning process. The “enfants de la patrie” of the “Marseillaise” are no longer enfolded in the maternal bosom; they no longer have their roots in the soil of a given province. They will even be expected to lose their regional accent.
MAMA INHERITED HER mother’s aversion to self-humoring and indolence. One simply could not, must not, let oneself go. One Russian word, “raspushchinast’,” summed up the absence of self-control and discipline. It was the equivalent of moral anarchy. One had to be vigilant against it during all waking hours. After savoring her cup of hot chocolate and her morning croissant, Mama would have me come to her bedroom on days when there was no school. I was twelve or thirteen, and still in the lower forms, studying fastidiously, at times winning prizes—on one occasion even the coveted prix d’excellence. This diligence did not last.
Mama was in her dressing gown, her oval face and loose, dark hair set off against the white pillow. We would go over some fables of La Fontaine that had been assigned. Those were the French poet’s short, early fables, still close to their classical source, the Greek fabulist Aesop. I could not begin to guess how elegantly subversive these and especially some of the later fables were of the monarch’s authority, what sort of political critique of Louis XIV’s regime was embedded in these charming and ironic mini-dramas. All my mother and I derived from La Fontaine’s fables were picturesque, amusing story-lessons of animals behaving exactly like human beings, displaying common failings and vices: selfishness, greed, grandiose illusions, cowardice, cruelty, violence, pride, self-importance—like the parasitic fly that imagines its buzzing is what impels the horses to pull the heavy coach up the steep slope. Mama asked questions, then made her own comments about human foibles and people’s behavior in general—comments quite different from the formal and linguistic observations provided by our teacher, who was bent on explicating archaic expressions, points of versification, and rules of grammar.
Later, when I began to suffer from year-round spring fever, I began to skip school. Listless, I was dreaming of what lay beyond the classroom walls, beyond the confines of our apartment. I became refractory and inattentive to my teachers, reluctant to make even a minimal effort, especially in geometry and algebra. The result was predictable, as the report that so shocked my parents upon our return from Megève made clear. A year or two later, when I was sixteen, my entire summer vacation would be spoiled because I needed to prepare for the make-up exam in the fall if I wanted to avoid having to repeat the entire year, even in those subjects in which I had done adequately. That was the rule.
This crisis put my mother’s disciplinarian virtues to the test. In Deauville, where we were vacationing in 1939, she planned my daily schedule, set a timetable, and engaged a tutor in nearby Blonville who was to coach me specifically in mathematics. Only after I had sat at my desk and prepared for the lessons was I allowed to join friends at the beach and play volleyball. Three times a week I was to pedal a few miles to Blonville to meet my tutor, carrying with me the money to pay him. After a while, finding that I had better things to do, I no longer showed up. When my mother discovered that my tutor had not seen me for over a week, and that I had pocketed his fee (but what else, in fairness, was I to do with it?), she grabbed the nearest object in sight, which happened to be an umbrella, and proceeded to strike me. The umbrella, so useful in Normandy, was damaged in the process, I believe, and so were, for a while at least, my relations with my mother.
In Paris my piano lessons with maestro Lieberman, though they ended less dramatically, also proved to be a disappointment to my mother. I relied on my ear and my memory, did not read the music carefully, and practiced in a slovenly manner the Beethoven sonatina, the relatively easy Chopin waltz, the even easier “Happy Peasant” piece by Schumann. Yet I loved to hear them played for me by my piano teacher during the lesson, and I encouraged him, partly as a delaying tactic, to play for me yet another time the pieces I was supposed to have learned. Mama was outraged, but also amused, I believe, when she heard that I had succeeded in flattering the maestro with the aquiline profile and elongated fingers into playing the Chopin waltz once more for me because I claimed to admire so much the way he played, and to be so moved.
As time went on, my poor performance at the lycée, my wiles, my secretiveness, the friends I frequented (even when they were more responsible than I), my interest in girls, even my passion for tennis, all began seriously to worry my parents. Part of their worry was justified and had to do with the French school system, which was strictly competitive and intellectually elitist in spirit, eliminating the less-qualified along the way. In contrast to young Americans, who are given a second and third chance, and then still another one, French students had to choose their direction in their mid-teens (the choice was between letters or science), and then they had no way, really, of changing their minds. Competitive entrance examinations determined whether or not one was admitted to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, the École Poly-technique, or similar institutions. Only a certain percentage, established in advance on a national basis, could even expect to pass successfully the all-important baccalauréat (or bac, as it was commonly called), which marked the completion of the secondary education and was the gateway to a serious career. French democratic principles were rooted in the notion of free and compulsory public schooling, yet the entire educational system, pyramidal, centralized, and state controlled, was essentially geared to training cadres and forming a meritocracy—a distant legacy of the Napoleonic regime.
My parents’ worries proved well grounded. My mother—for it was she who carried on the serious discussions with me—kept reminding me that in the modern world, replete with instabilities, it was indispensable to have a remeslo, a Russian word that I understood to mean a trade, a craft, a professional occupation, a skill. But it was even better to enter one of the respected liberal professions in which one could become a luminary. It was not enough simply to inherit a father’s good name and wealth. My mother did not tire of bringing up the cases of émigré aristocrats who were now taxicab drivers in Paris because they had no real profession and could do nothing else. Did I want to be a chauffeur de taxi? Was that my aim in life?
Mama had a competitive spirit. It came out even in her bridge playing. By all reports, she was an aggressive bidder, whatever that meant, and enjoyed taking chances. As a form of relaxation, she also played poker—in fact, any card game. At heart she was something of a gambler, welcoming any opportunity to confront the roulette wheel in various casinos. For her there was nothing frivolous about these activities. Watching her at the bridge table, at home or during tournaments, I was repeatedly struck by the fixity of her fine features, her air of serene concentration, the speed of her moves. No emotion could be read on her face, which at other times was so mobile and expressive—in conversation, when she desired my affection, or when she was angry with me.
Mama’s sense of discipline extended to matters of health and hygiene. I was to take care of my body as though it had been given me in trust. I had no right to neglect it, to abuse it. Any damage to it was my responsibility. If I bothered a pimple, stayed too long in the sun, there came the inevitable reproof and the warning that I would do myself some harm. How could I have avoided feeling a special kind of guilt, together with the fear of falling ill, of not being ready (for school, for a departure), or worse, of inflicting on myself some irreversible damage? The long-lasting effects of this delegated overprotectiveness escaped me at the time, but my fear of medical tests became indistinguishable from my fear of school exams. In either case, I knew that I could be poorly prepared. The outcome was my doing; I was responsible. Ultimately, I perceived sickness itself as a form of guilt.
When a friend of my mother’s told her that she found evidence that her son and I had been smoking in the toilet, my mother took me to Dr. Binkin, our family physician, under the pretext of a routine check-up. Since she herself had to consult him about her gallbladder, it would be convenient for us to go together. Dr. Binkin lived only a few streets away. He was stocky and had a childlike, slightly Mongolian face. He had practiced in St. Petersburg, and later in Berlin, where he had previously attended medical school, and he had acquired a reputation among émigré circles as a fine diagnostician. I was not to mention him to my schoolmates, for he did not have a license to practice in France. He nonetheless had a fully equipped office in his apartment, including an X-ray machine operated by his wife, who was dressed as a nurse, with her hair pulled straight back. The comings and goings of his patients could not possibly have escaped the notice of his concierge, and concierges notoriously informed the police about the activities of tenants, especially if they were foreigners, étrangers—a category of people deemed suspect by definition. I can only imagine the sizable bribes that over the years kept the concierge’s otherwise communicative tongue under control.
Dr. Binkin, after examining my mother in another room, came out carrying my chest X-rays and showed me the way to his study. “You smoke. No use denying it.” He looked straight at me through his thick lenses. He then proceeded to show me two sets of X-rays, which he held against a lit glass screen. He pointed with his pencil. “Here are those of a nonsmoker, all clean. And here are yours. Dark spots.” I was intimidated. But I began to suspect that the entire visit had been staged, that my mother had alerted him and asked him to talk to me, that the gallbladder was just a pretext, and either the X-rays were fake or there were no shadows at all. Mama’s good intentions and Dr. Binkin’s dubious method might have proven disturbing to a fourteen-year-old boy with less of a disposition to become a hypochondriac. We walked home in silence. I felt humiliated and impressed at the same time. But Mama’s stratagem and the Binkin method did work, at least for several years. I did not light another cigarette until the time of the German occupation, when the difficulty of procuring English-taste cigarettes and black-market prices made the pleasure of smoking irresistible.
The care of my skin was also under my mother’s close supervision. Every so often, to my keen displeasure, I was obliged to come along to Madame Miletski, her beautician on the Champs-Elysées. There, in a brightly lit room, vulnerably seated as in a dentist’s chair, I was subjected to the indignity of hot facial compresses, a cleansing lotion whose acetone smell sickened me, and then a special small metal instrument with a tiny hole in its head by means of which Madame Miletski proceeded insistently to extract whiteheads, blackheads, and other so-called impurities while I stared at the mole on her cheek. I really hated the whole process and even more the spotty redness of my face after it was all over. My mother’s visible satisfaction with the result as we walked out of the building only contributed to my embarrassment. I never said a word about these visits, even to my close friends Jacques Blum and Maurice Lécuyer.
There was another indignity, but this one, at least, took place at home. Mama insisted on shampooing my hair. This torment occurred regularly once a week, usually in the evening. (More frequent washings of the hair were considered unsalutary at that time.) There was no escape, no reprieve from the hated ritual; Mama would always remember. She must have derived some deep satisfaction from soaping and rinsing my hair, proclaiming that she was getting all the brilliantine out. Her pleasure was in no way shared by me. I loathed being manipulated, rubbed, flooded by the water that was always too hot at the beginning, feeling the sting of the soap in my eyes. I resented my mother’s stern commands not to squirm, to hold my head still over the washbasin while she hosed it energetically, and, finally, not to interfere with her rubbing my hair briskly with the rough towel until it was all dry and my scalp felt raw. To this day I dislike having my hair washed by hands other than my own. When hairdressers, especially in Europe, insist on administering a shampoo before cutting my hair, I try to resist, usually with little success. At times, I have left the shop without a haircut.
Mama’s weekly designs on my scalp lasted until the first year of the war—I was by then sixteen—when we had settled in Deauville for the winter. I vividly recall that the cleansing and flushing ceremony had just taken place a few minutes before an air-raid alarm sent us all, wobbling grandmother included, scurrying with our gas masks to the nearby beach, from where, sitting on the sand, we watched in the far distance across the bay the pyrotechnic spectacle of the huge oil tanks near the port of Le Havre being blown up by German bombers on a mild May evening in 1940. That act of war put an end, I believe, to my mother’s shampooing tyranny.
In the days before the war, while we were still ensconced in Paris, my mother did not neglect what she considered my intellectual hygiene. On many a Sunday, she announced that I was not to go roller-skating with my friends in the little park of La Muette, that instead she and I were going to the Louvre. On those occasions, we never seem to have gotten beyond the Egyptian rooms, either because we tired on our way to other collections, or perhaps because of a secret devotion of my mother’s to Isis and Osiris, or simply because of her fondness for Verdi’s opera Aida. These supervised ambulations through endless rooms filled with outsized and repetitive statuary made me quite dizzy and probably account for an aversion to Egyptian artifacts that lasted until many years later, when Bettina finally persuaded me to travel to Luxor, Karnak, and Abu Simbel. Mama, who insisted on giving me advance instruction before we reached the Louvre, talked to me—also repetitively—about Memphis, Thebes (which for a long time I failed to distinguish from the Thebes in Greece), the proximity of the Canaeens, the pyramids, the cataracts, and the ubiquitous River Nile.
As we entered the Louvre on those dreaded Sundays, Mama led me, I don’t recall in what order, past mummies, representations of riverboats destined to carry the dead to their burial place, stone slabs covered with hieroglyphs. Mama maintained that all spoke of an advanced culture (although I tended to associate advanced culture with radio sets, elevators, and sleek locomotives), that even some commoners and some women were able to decipher those strange-looking engraved characters. The latter accomplishment somehow seemed particularly admirable to her, because in modern, enlightened France she was chafing under various restrictions, she explained; she could not, for instance, without my father’s authorization, open a bank account of her own.
Mama’s great moment came after we had proceeded past endless quantities of spatulas, alabaster vases, miniature bronze cats, and even a monkey playing a lyre. We entered a vast room crowded with huge figures of sphinxes with human faces and lions’ bodies, the ibis-headed god That, goddesses with the heads of various animals, and statues of other gods that went by the fierce names of Hathor, Amon, and Horus. We never saw anything else in the Louvre, finding ourselves quite exhausted by this assemblage of hieratic shapes. Only years later did I overcome the memory of the tedium and of aching feet, when on a leisurely and sensuous trip up the Nile, Bettina and I followed the traces of the journey that had carried Flaubert toward Assuan, past Esna and Edfu, at a time in his life when, in his slow-moving riverboat, he was beginning to dream of Emma Bovary’s insatiable yearnings amid her drab life in Normandy. It amused me to think that Flaubert visited Egypt in part to escape from his mother.
THOUGH I RESENTED it when Mama breached my privacy and attempted to structure my activities, I took pride in her appearance and in the admiration of her friends. She never embarrassed me, unlike my father, who, in spite of his repeated admonitions to watch out for bones and not talk while we ate fish or rabbit, would regularly choke on his food, especially in public places. His sneezes and coughs were also attention-getters. What irked me perhaps most in my father was his excessive caution, his lack of impulsiveness, his seeming incapacity to indulge in even a momentary act of impetuousness. “Be reasonable,” was his refrain. No madness whatsoever. Mama delicately repressed her sneezes, as though she carried an implosive silencer in her air passages. But she was given to improvised, delightfully unpredictable actions. She often surprised me, particularly in my father’s absence, as when, having just exited from the movie theater on the Grands Boulevards after my father’s departure for London, she asked me, impromptu, whether I would like to see another movie right then and there. The expression on my face made any answer superfluous. We immediately entered another movie theater, again in the middle of a film. I still remember that it featured Louis Jouvet and the comedian Larquey. But what remains memorable is not their performance, nor the plot—which I have totally forgotten—but the sense of freedom and fun my mother communicated to me.
Her bridge-playing memory never failed to astonish me as I overheard morning telephone conversations from which I gathered that she had total recall of all the hands dealt the previous evening. My mother’s ability to concentrate, remember, and plan enabled me to appreciate feats of “blind” chess playing, or the perhaps even greater feat of the blind scholar Pierre Villey, who edited all of Montaigne’s essays, which so thrilled me when I discovered them in graduate school.
As a fledgling bridge player, I certainly did not impress my mother, who had recently won the French championship. She watched me once or twice, then decreed that I was un idiot des cartes. It is true that I preferred to converse, often forgetting what the trump suit was. Mama and her tournament partners played in complete silence. It was not, however, for the spectacle of her playing that I looked forward to the days when bridge tables were set up in two large, adjoining rooms. The real reason was that Mama would order delectable canapés and petits fours of various colors from Coquelin, the pastry shop on the rue de Passy. I swallowed them whole, several at a time, then took some more to the writing desk in my room, disposing of them at greater leisure as I turned the pages of the latest detective novel with the characteristic yellow cover featuring the emblem of a black mask.
Social events at home were not limited to bridge parties. Every so often my parents received friends for buffet suppers, for which five or six smaller tables were set up for dining, before they were converted for other purposes—gin rummy and poker. But before the games and the gambling began, lanky Zinaïda Sameievna, the wife of a deaf fur merchant, would get up with a shy look, one shoulder thrown back, curtsying in an ungainly fashion, and read in her shrill voice a poem, in Russian or French, written by her especially for the occasion, and then complain in even shriller tones about the intolerable smell of ashes in the ashtrays. And there was humming and singing of Russian folk tunes. On those festive evenings, the typical Russian hors d’oeuvres, zakuski, were served with ice-cold vodka, and there was much loud conversation and laughter. I had for some time been pillaging the contents of the vodka bottles, and while I was relishing various herrings, lovely cold pink salmon, and kulibyaka, I kept worrying that someone would notice how much weaker the vodka had gotten as a result of my having added some water to make up for the amounts consumed with the help of a friend or two. But no one ever seemed to notice, which made me somewhat skeptical of their connoisseurship as they smacked their lips and grunted with satisfaction. I loved those events, for which my mother always produced a cool, smooth, aromatically seasoned, crunchy fish salad, the recipe for which went back to old places that I would never know, but that I came to associate with the plays of Chekhov.
Occasionally—but this only for family or a few close friends—my mother would treat us to fluffy, golden-hued blini that she herself prepared (the recipe called for beer), and for which red caviar, smoked salmon, and inordinate amounts of smetana, or sour cream, were obtained from the Russian delicatessen on the nearby rue Nicolo. I have never again had blini like that, certainly not in St. Petersburg, where we were recently served, under that name, what looked and tasted more like crêpes, unrecognizably folded and sweetish in taste. In the Paris of the 1920s and 1930s, Russian specialties were still available and had retained their pre-Revolutionary flavor—and this not only in the fancy restaurants like Moskva and Korniloff that were sometimes mentioned at home.
Parts of my parents’ social life, when I was asked to join, seemed unremittingly dull to me. On certain Sundays in the spring, but also in early fall, starting when I was twelve or thirteen years old, I was expected to drive out with them to the surrounding countryside—to Bougival by the Seine, to the forest of Fontainebleau, to Montfort l’Amaury, or the valley of Chevreuse—to meet friends of theirs in a garden café or restaurant for interminable lunches followed by hours of just sitting around drowsily until the waiters began setting tables for the evening meal. I was often the only young person. I tried to distract myself by walking to the nearby pond or by reading a few pages of a book I had brought with me (a precaution I still take on all outings). But I, too, had grown drowsy, and it felt as though the slow, lazy hours would never come to an end.
Those drawn-out, sun-speckled afternoons, in sight of a curtain-row of poplars reflected in the river, or under some opulent chestnut tree, afternoons heavy with dreamy boredom now seem graced by a special glow. The well-known song “Les enfants s’ennuient le dimanche” (Children are bored on Sundays) sums up the particular sadness that came over me on those dominical excursions, which accounts in part for my continuing aversion to Sundays. Yet the wariness that invaded me is now associated with certain canvases of which I came to be fond. It does not matter that the sequence is out of order, that I had probably not yet seen a Renoir or a Sisley painting, nor heard of Impressionism at that time. What counts is the reality of the shuttle, between past and present, between images and sensations derived from the artists’ vision and those provided by what is called “daily life.” With the years I have become increasingly unable (and unwilling) to separate the two.
The Russian émigrés enjoyed, or tried to enjoy, the best of French life. They were aware, when the Hitlerian hysteria began to be heard from across the German border, that the French were reluctant to fight another war, that they preferred the douceur de vivre, the pleasures of the table and the daily amenities of life, even when the plumbing was deficient. The Russians in exile had their own newspapers (Poslednie Novosty, or “Latest News,” was the most commonly quoted), their literary and intellectual circles. Many of them had known French since childhood, and some of them, including my father, held degrees from French universities. Their children, the younger ones born in France, felt totally assimilated in French school life, held French citizenship, were expected to do their service militaire, and engaged in French professional life—as was the case of my cousin Tovy Millner, who became an outstanding young lung surgeon, by all accounts destined to have a brilliant career.
I was told to look up to Tovy as a model, especially every time my school report came in, casting a gloomy spell. I did not mind, because I admired Tovy’s intestinal jokes (some of them, I later discovered, came directly from Rabelais), his taste for garlicky snails and mustard-flavored sautéed kidneys, and in general his rare appetite for living. He died quite suddenly in his late thirties from a stroke it would seem, coming out of his apartment building on rue Monsieur-le-Prince, the very building in which the religious philosopher Pascal had lived and which, long after the writer’s death, was classified as a monument historique.
DEATH HAD BEEN an early reality, yet I never came to live on familiar terms with it. I resented its intrusion into my childhood, its way of denying what ought to be reliable and repeatable. Perhaps what I resented above all was my mother’s inconsolable grief after Nora died. That grief itself became a steady presence. Mama never got over it, not even after twice moving to other countries and putting more than four thousand miles between her new existence and Nora’s tomb. I have a picture of that tomb carrying the dates 1925–1930. It was taken shortly before the Nazis desecrated the cemetery. Unlike the tombless death of anonymous millions who soon after went up in smoke, Nora’s is at least recorded on that faded and creased print of a vanished tomb.
I resented my mother’s suffering, to which I seemed to have no access. I have since discovered that, alas, the suffering of others excludes oneself. Despite the reassuring etymology of the words “compassion” and “sympathy,” both of which declare shared suffering, can we really ever feel someone else’s pain, even a simple toothache? Perhaps we can, through the intercession of images and metaphors, in art. My mother’s occasionally pensive and sorrowful face remained impenetrable. Her large, dark eyes then signaled that inward glance—not for long, but I could tell. In repose, her otherwise smooth face was lined by a bitter crease or two around the mouth. She suffered from spasms of the esophagus that must have had a nervous origin. I sensed, without having to reason it out, what fears impelled her to overprotect me. The slightest indisposition, the passing complaint of a numbness or tingle in my fingers upon awakening sent her and my father into a panic. Instantly, I was taken to our doctor for a check-up and consultation. And it was again impressed on me that my body was precious, and that I was to be its responsible guardian. I chafed under this responsibility, which I translated into a permanent guilt.
Mama displayed several faces. There was the cheerful, outgoing being, much sought after, surrounded by friends. She valued warmth and affection and the presence of joyful company. She knew many ways of giving pleasure. Her quick wit and unassuming elegance of bearing were pleasing—even though my father’s family, critical of anyone who did not resemble them, found her a little “too proud.” But then they could not imagine anyone worthy different from themselves, anyone who did not share their views or did not live according to the norms of their clan. (Simon Millner, who married into their family, and who spent much of his time in luxury hotels, where he insisted on being addressed as “Dr. Millner,” was according to them just a bluffer with a distinguished-looking mustache. When it turned out that he had famous friends and was president of a learned society devoted to the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Spinoza, that only confirmed their negative view.) My father, up to a point, took after them. He tended to be skeptical, even misanthropic. After my mother died, he shied away from old friends, living an increasingly lonely existence.
Mama’s other face seemed to disclaim her zest for company and good cheer. It spoke of the gravity of life, which she was perhaps afraid to love too much. Aware of the deceptiveness of beauty, the fleetingness and evanescence of all things, she appears to me in retrospect not unlike Mrs. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, who brandished a metaphorical sword at her antagonist, life.
My sense of remorse, as I think of my mother, is altogether different from the guilt I felt toward my father. It is more like a betrayal, for I failed to respond adequately to her affection. The caressing hand on my head (perhaps there lingered the memory of too many shampoos) caused me to bristle. I withdrew. Mama called me a cachottier, a secretive fellow. I would conceal my activities, even the books I was reading. I was reluctant to tell her about my fallings in and out of love, even more reluctant to have her meet any of the girls I was going out with. Years later, I sometimes failed to inform her of public lectures I was to give for fear that she might show up.
My guilt is reflected in a recent dream that I recorded upon awakening. I am called to the phone in a clubhouse cabin. A voice tells me that Mama died in the hospital. I am disconsolate, but resigned. Her son, I understand from her brothers (my uncles), gave her grief, but she had learned to accept it. I felt great pangs for not having called her from abroad for a long, long time. I had, in fact, forgotten about her. The truth, as I woke up from my dream, was only partially comforting. I realized that Mama had been dead since 1959—more than forty years.
It has taken all this time to begin to guess what worries attended bringing up a boy in the prewar years. It was difficult enough to deal with the mischief and vexations of the rebellious âge ingrat, the awkward adolescent years; to suspect that one’s son will forever be taken up with frivolities, has no real ambition (perhaps no real gifts), that he is missing out on all the opportunities that call for work and a sense of direction. Then came worse, after the invasion of France: the threat of labor camps, the even greater threat of deportation. And later, once we had reached our haven over which loomed, as an emblem of hope and fortitude, the optimistic smile of a president with a cigarette holder, my mother had to accept my departure for the army and for what she knew was a “just war.” After the invasion of Normandy, her worst fears turned into reality: the horror of a newsreel of prisoners taken in the Ardennes, among whom I sit dejected, with my tilted helmet half covering one eye. The newsreel was shown over and over again in New York. The helmet hiding part of the face may explain the confusion. Yet my cousin Sascha and others who were consulted (including an ex-FBI expert who compared the newsreel print with available photographs of me) all concurred: it was me. When I was later shown the picture, I myself was fooled. How can I ever grasp my parents’ distress at seeing that newsreel? I make a vain effort, retrospectively, to experience it with them, day by day, week by week, until they finally receive a letter from me. I was safe—somewhere, for we were not allowed to tell where. The prisoner in the newsreel had been someone else.
After settling in New York in 1941, Vera Salomonovna still had a restricted number of close friends, those who had also succeeded in escaping from France and who had settled, for the most part, on the Upper West Side, between Riverside Drive and Central Park West. Life had resumed, on a modest scale. But Mama’s gambling instincts, this time on the stock market, bore disastrous results. And an ill-starred investment in a resort hotel, in partnership with an unsavory character who looked and behaved as though he had stepped straight out of a novel by Dostoevsky and who took perverse delight in insulting the hotel guests, ended in failure. The hotel had to be sold, at a great loss. To help out my father, who was ailing and had never really adjusted to American business mores, Mama for a while took a job as a saleswoman in a fashionable department store on Fifth Avenue. The long hours on her feet, selling ties and gloves, did not improve her varicose veins. This was not the first time she had shown courage in adversity, and in the circle of her friends, used to political and economic vicissitudes, she suffered no loss of social standing.
One day I realized to my surprise that she was well over sixty. I also learned that the gallbladder problems had not been just a pretext for having Dr. Binkin lecture me about my teenage smoking. Her esophageal spasms required regular visits to Philadelphia for uncomfortable dilating sessions. Then her ulcers began to bleed. She was hospitalized, administered coagulants, and developed phlebitis. A blood clot began its occult work. She died from a pulmonary embolism, in the hospital, at night, alone, not heard by the nurse she may have called in vain.
In Paris, my parents had a recording of a melodramatic Russian ballad sung by one Viktor Henkin. I remember the name because the ballad made such an impression on me. It is about a fellow in love with an evil woman who demands that he kill his mother and feed her heart to the swine. I learned the song and still recall most of the words. What moved me so was that the mother’s heart, as the son was carrying it to the pigsty and stumbled, spoke out softly, asking with great concern whether he had hurt himself: Moy malchik moy (Oh, son of mine). The song was insufferably sentimental, but it struck a chord.
There was also a parable, or tale, that perturbed me. It probably carried some political undertones, but what agitated me, upon hearing it, was its almost unbearable pathos. A tyrant informs a mother that her son has been condemned to death, but that he could be pardoned if she succeeds in mowing a large field all by herself before sunset. The feat seems beyond the capabilities of even a vigorous young peasant. Yet the mother in the tale accomplishes the impossible—only to collapse and die when she reaches the end of the field. I shed tears every time I heard the story of a mother’s sacrifice beyond the limits of human endurance.
When I reached the funeral parlor on Amsterdam Avenue, I was taken straight to the room where Mama lay, her face exposed. (By a frivolous coincidence, I had just acquired a black fedora, which I thought particularly smart and planned to display at the upcoming professional meeting in Chicago.) There Mama lay, in marblelike immobility in her casket, and I thought of the tombs and sarcophagi we had seen on our Sunday visits to the Louvre. I broke down, sobbing wildly. I did not know I had it in me. Where did those sobs that shook me come from? I cannot even remember speaking to my father, who sat all crumpled in a corner armchair, being consoled. All I remember distinctly are the words spoken by my meek Aunt Helena, whose mouth was more twisted than ever, as she hugged me. (“Eto syudba”—that’s fate.) It was with her that I had stayed years earlier during the final days of my sister’s illness, and she had endlessly, patiently, played with the little boy I was then a silly card game called War and Peace to keep me occupied. And as I stood in the funeral parlor on Amsterdam Avenue, I remembered sobbing together with Mama in her bed as she told me about Nora’s death. And then I also remembered her advice never to leave unspoken the tender words one wanted to say to a dear one. And I knew how right she was. Only now it was indeed too late.