“So, you’re interested in the Emigration?”
“Very.”
“And yet, you’re still young . . .”
Young? I had never thought of myself as young. A large mirror in a gold frame hung on the wall, close to me. I looked at my face. Young?
“Oh . . . not so young as all that . . .”
There was a moment’s silence. The two of us, stretched out on either side of the room, looked like opium smokers.
“I’ve just returned from a funeral,” he said. “It’s a pity you didn’t meet the old lady who died . . . She could have told you many things . . . She was one of the real personalities of the Emigration . . .”
“Really?”
“A very brave woman. At the beginning, she opened a small tea-room, in Rue du Mont-Thabor, and she helped everybody . . . It was very hard . . .”
He sat up on the edge of the bed, his back bowed, arms crossed.
“I was fifteen at the time . . . When I think, there are not many left . . .”
“There’s . . . Georges Sacher . . .,” I said at random.
“Not for much longer. Do you know him?”
Was it the old gentleman of plaster? Or the fat bald-head with the Mongolian features?
“Look,” he said, “I can’t go over all these things again . . . It makes me too sad . . . But I can show you some photographs . . . The names and dates are there on the back . . . You’ll manage on your own . . .”
“It’s very kind of you to take so much trouble.”
He smiled at me.
“I’ve got lots of photos . . . I wrote the names and dates on the back, because one forgets everything . . .”
He stood up and, stooping, went into the next room.
I heard him open a drawer. He returned, a large red box in his hand, sat down on the floor and leaned his back against the edge of the bed.
“Come and sit down beside me. It will be easier to look at the photographs.”
I did so. A confectioner’s name was printed in gothic lettering on the lid of the box. He opened it. It was full of photos.
“In here you have the principal figures of the Emigration,” he said.
He handed me the photographs one by one, telling me the names and dates he read on the back: it was a litany, to which the Russian names lent a particular resonance, now explosive like cymbals clashing, now plaintive or almost mute. Trubetskoy. Orbelyani. Sheremetev. Galitsyn. Eristov. Obolensky. Bagration. Chavchavadze . . . Now and then, he took a photo back and consulted the name and date again. Some occasion. The Grand Duke Boris’s table at a gala ball at the Château-Basque, long after the Revolution. And this garland of faces on a photograph taken at a “black and white” dinner party, in 1914 . . . A class photograph of the Alexander Lycée in Petersburg.
“My older brother . . .”
He handed me the photos more and more quickly, no longer even looking at them. Evidently, he was anxious to have done with it. Suddenly I halted at one of them, printed on heavier paper than the others, and with no explanation on the back.
“What is it?” he asked me. “Something puzzling you?”
In the foreground, an old man, stiff and smiling, seated in an armchair. Behind him, a blonde young woman with very limpid eyes. All around, small groups of people, most of whom had their backs to the camera. And toward the left, his right arm cut off by the edge of the picture, his hand on the shoulder of the blonde young woman, an extremely tall man, in a broken check lounge suit, about thirty years old, with dark hair and a thin moustache. I was convinced it was me.
I drew closer to him. Our backs leaned against the edge of the bed, our legs were stretched out on the floor, our shoulders touched.
“Tell me, who are those people?” I asked him.
He took the photograph and looked at it wearily.
“That one was Giorgiadze . . .”
He pointed to the old man, seated in the armchair.
“He was at the Georgian Consulate in Paris, up to the time . . .”
He did not finish his sentence, as though its conclusion must be obvious to me.
“That one was his grand-daughter . . . Her name was Gay . . . Gay Orlov. She emigrated to America with her parents . . .”
“Did you know her?”
“Not very well. No. She stayed on in America a long time.”
“And what about him?” I asked in a toneless voice, pointing to myself in the photo.
“Him?”
He knitted his brows.
“I don’t know who he is.”
“Really?”
“No.”
I sighed deeply.
“Don’t you think he looks like me?”
He looked at me.
“Looks like you? No. Why?”
“Nothing.”
He handed me another photograph.
It was a picture of a little girl in a white dress, with long fair hair, at a seaside resort, since one could see beach-huts and a section of beach and sea. “Mara Orlov – Yalta” was written in purple ink, on the back.
“There, you see . . . the same girl . . . Gay Orlov . . . Her name was Mara . . . She didn’t yet have an American first name . . .”
And he pointed to the blonde young woman in the other photo which I was still holding.
“My mother kept all these things . . .”
He rose abruptly.
“Do you mind if we stop now? My head is spinning . . .”
He passed a hand over his brow.
“I’ll go and change . . . If you like, we can have dinner together . . .”
I remained alone, sitting on the floor, the photos scattered about me. I stacked them in the large red box and kept only two, which I put on the bed: the photo in which I appeared, next to Gay Orlov and the old man, Giorgiadze, and the one of Gay Orlov as a child at Yalta. I rose and went to the window.
It was night. The window looked out on to another open space with buildings round it. At the far end, the Seine, and to the left, the Pont de Puteaux. And the Île, stretching out. Lines of cars were crossing the bridge. I gazed at the façades of the buildings, all the windows lit up, just like the window at which I was standing. And in this labyrinthine maze of buildings, staircases and elevators, among these hundreds of cubbyholes, I had found a man who perhaps . . .
I had pressed my brow against the window. Below, each building entrance was lit by a yellow light which would burn all night.
“The restaurant is quite close,” he said.
I took the two photos I had left on the bed.
“Mr. de Dzhagorev,” I said, “would you be so kind as to lend me these two photos?”
“You can keep them.”
He pointed to the red box.
“You can keep all the photos.”
“But . . . I . . .”
“Take