This was 1933. I watched Mussolini’s histrionics and Black Shirts parades, amused, disdainful, and as unconcerned as I would be later on by Hitler’s oratory.
I did not take politics seriously. Perhaps because my father, a teacher, had been officially reprimanded for “mixing in politics” in his hilarious articles about potholes on village streets and nettles growing around graveyard walls. Besides, when I was in my twenties it was very unbecoming for a young woman to be concerned about politics, a man’s game.
The author in the garden of the “secluded marvel within walking distance of the Sorbonne”
Eventually, bored with my silly jobs, I returned to Paris, and to my former lodgings, two rooms in an eighteenth-century house, a secluded marvel within walking distance from the Sorbonne, its private garden and chapel surrounded by convents and their private gardens and chapels.
I was back at the university, making believe that time had stood still. It had not. One afternoon, a mob of right-wing students tried to keep us from attending the class of a Jewish professor. Tear gas, for the first time, filled the Sorbonne’s halls.
If our genius in sabots had still been around, would we have so easily dismissed the ugly incident as something in bad taste? He would have known what it all meant. But by then, he was in Egypt deciphering ancient riddles carved on the palace walls of long-dead dictators.
At the time, I was teaching full time and taking as many classes as I could in semantics, Latin, and Greek, trying to make up for so many lost study hours. No time for worrying.
The political scene offered a disquieting spectacle, but it all seemed far away, somehow not quite real. Ministers playing musical chairs against the lurid backdrop of assorted scandals that sometimes involved the lawmakers themselves, rowdy antiparliamentary leagues in uniforms of different hues bloodying the streets. Staid citizens—the patriots by tradition—boasting that they were sending their money to Switzerland and gravely weighing the benefits of the dictatorships next door.
I remember listening to them in their salons. I also remember that I called them “old fogies” and laughed at them.
The generation whose childhood had been spent under a cloud of fear refused to accept that the sky could, so soon, darken again.
In March 1935, the German dictator declared that Germany was going to rebuild its army, despite the military restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles. Anxiety seeped into our chests. France and England, at the time, were still much more powerful than Germany. What were they going to do?
They offered impotent protests. Nothing else. Our anxiety dissipated like a morning fog.
Then the horse chestnuts burst into bloom; the dizzy Parisian spring took center stage. I was on my way to a party one evening with a group of art students when one of them—I had known him in my father’s classroom—whispered that this was not the kind of party I should go to. Anyway, our group was becoming too boisterous for my taste. We were passing a Russian bar. I went in and slipped behind the black marble counter. The bartender only smiled. (These were the blessed days when bartenders, policemen, concierges, and the like still knew how to smile.)
After some time I ventured to peek over the counter and stared into a handsome, tormented face, young yet lined, blue eyes smiling but veiled with melancholy.
“I am sad tonight,” he said. “Come, drink vodka with me.”
I did.
He spoke with a foreign accent, was whimsical, charming. I don’t remember what he said.
Like most French, I was fascinated and awed by the Russians, their literature, their history, their fate. I met them daily, the taxi drivers, bartenders, musicians, waiters, and waitresses who had, in another life, been generals, grand dukes, grand duchesses, princes, and princesses. Proud, romantic, sometimes arrogant, they were the White Russians, who could laugh and cry and sing all at once.
I also knew the other Russians, the Red Russians. A friend—a model—had taken me to the studio of Lavroff, the sculptor. A man as quiet and powerful as a tree, a fervent communist, he had an unlikely obsession with Pavlova, the famous ballet dancer and idol of the White Russians. There were only sculptures of Pavlova in Lavroff’s studio, in bronze, marble, and plaster.
Thin, shabby students came, drank tea and talked, and talked, and preached in bad French about the new faith that was conquering the world. Did they ignore the sculptures for the sake of a talk, a cup of tea, or a bowl of borscht?
Shortly after Pavlova died in 1931, the White Russians sponsored a gala in her memory in the Paris opera house. For one night out of a dream, Russian generals wore their uniforms and their medals, princesses and grand duchesses their grand couturiers’ dresses, their tiaras and their diamonds. I watched from the upper galleries in the company of Lavroff’s model and some communist students. The sculptor’s bronze Pavlova stood in a place of honor in the lobby. Was Lavroff among the Red or among the White Russians that night? I never knew. What I knew was that the Russians were too enigmatic for me.
So was the handsome Russian I had met in the spring of 1935.
I avoided the Russian bar vicinity, the artists’ quarter. Twice, from far away, I saw him. Twice, I fled.
Then it was spring again. Something strange happened to my landlady: overnight, almost, she conceived an uncontrollable hatred for her beautiful, quiet house. Her hapless husband decided to sell it and advised me to look for new lodgings.
In the spring of 1936, Hitler tore up another page of the Treaty of Versailles and marched into the Rhineland, the buffer zone that could have protected France and Belgium against a surprise attack. What were “we”—France and England and our allies—going to do? The fear of war cowed members of the government and of the military as much as ordinary citizens. “We” did nothing. “We” made the shadow of war fade away for another day. And once again, our world breathed with relief. Or perhaps only I did.
I was engaged in a task impossible at this time of the year: finding an inexpensive place to live in the Latin Quarter. It was taboo, I don’t know why, for Sorbonne students to live on the Rive Droite, across the Seine. In order to stay on the Rive Gauche, I had to venture farther south toward the artists’ quarter.
At the end of a frustrating day, I came upon a tall, rather plain building of little interest except for a sign in the downstairs office window: “Room for Rent.” I went in, was shown a small, pleasant room with a balcony. I rented it.
The walls in the whole building were painted stark white, the tiled floors kept bare. It looked like a hospital. But it offered a vast gymnasium on the first floor where the known athletes of the day trained, I was told, a swimming pool, a sauna, and terraces on the seventh floor for sunbathing.
Abel, age twelve
There was also an artists’ studio, where, I discovered the very day I moved in, the handsome Russian lived. By chance we met in the hall in the afternoon. “Bonjour,” we said, both smiling, both ignoring that we had not seen each other in a year. We walked out of the building. He held the door for me.
“We could have supper together tonight, could not we?” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
We walked to the Dôme for the traditional aperitif before dinner.
Abel was not a Russian, he was a German. Not a very good one, he joked; his father had been born in a part of the former Austria-Hungary called Slovakia. He did not like Germany, he surely did not want to live there, he said.