An Evening with Claire

Gaito Gazdanov, Bryan Karetnyk

• Publisher: Pushkin Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781782276067
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

The lyrical first novel of youth and love by acclaimed modernist master Gaito Gazdanov, author of The Spectre of Alexander Wolf

'The Gazdanov revival... is nothing short of a literary event' TLS

Two old friends meet nightly in Paris, after a separation of ten years. Trading conversational barbs and manoeuvring around submerged feelings, Claire and Koyla resume what fate interrupted. When their long-imagined romance at last becomes reality, Kolya is engulfed by memories of Russia, from a tragic and solitary childhood to the disorienting ordeal of civil war. As his haunting recollection takes shape, so too does a portrait of lost youth set against the trauma of a vanished homeland.

Written when Gazdanov was just twenty-six, An Evening with Claire is the celebrated Russian master's debut novel, and appears here in an elegant new translation by Bryan Karetnyk. Melancholic and lyrical, it is a powerful distillation of the quintessential émigré experience: caught between two worlds, belonging to neither.

15

An Evening With Claire

Claire was ill. For whole evenings I would sit up with her, and, each time I left, I would invariably miss the last Métro and end up going on foot from the rue Raynouard to the place Saint-Michel, in the vicinity of which I lived. I would pass by the stables of the École Militaire; from there I could hear the clanging of the chains to which the horses were tethered and smell that thick equine aroma so uncommon in Paris; then I would walk along the long and narrow rue de Babylone, and at the end of this street, in a photographer’s shop window, by the dim light of a distant street lamp, the face of some famous writer, composed entirely of slanting planes, would gaze out at me; those omniscient eyes behind horn-rimmed European spectacles would follow me for half a block—until I crossed the glittering black strip of boulevard Raspail. At length, I would arrive at my pension. Industrious old women dressed in rags would outstrip me, tottering on feeble legs. Over the Seine myriad lights 16would burn brightly, drowning in the darkness, and as I watched them from a bridge, it would suddenly seem to me as if I were standing above a harbour and the sea were covered in foreign ships emblazed with lanterns. Taking one last look at the Seine, I would go up to my room, lie down to sleep and sink instantaneously into the unfathomable gloom where trembling bodies stirred, not always quite managing to take on the form of images familiar to my eyes and thus vanishing without ever having materialized. And even in sleep’s embrace I lamented these disappearances, sympathized with their imaginary, unintelligible sorrow, and so I lived and slumbered in an ineffable state, which I shall never understand in waking. This fact ought to have grieved me, but in the morning I would forget what I had seen in my dreams, and my abiding memory of the foregoing day would be the recollection that I had again missed the Métro. In the evening I would set out again for Claire’s. Several months previously her husband had left for Ceylon, leaving us alone together; and only the maid, who brought in tea and biscuits on a wooden tray decorated with a finely drawn image of a gaunt Chinaman, a woman of around forty-five who wore a pince-nez (and hence didn’t at all look like a servant) and who was forever lost in thought—she would always forget the sugar tongs, or the sugar bowl, or else a saucer or a 17spoon—only she would interrupt our ménage, coming in to ask whether Madame needed anything. Claire, who for some reason was sure that the maid would be offended if she didn’t ask her for something, would say: yes, please bring the gramophone and some records from Monsieur’s study—although the gramophone was quite superfluous and, once the maid had gone, would remain in the very spot where she had left it, while Claire would immediately forget all about it. The maid would come and go around five times during the course of an evening; and when I once remarked to Claire that while her maid looked remarkably well preserved for her years, and though her legs still possessed a positively youthful indefatigability, all the same, I wasn’t too sure that she was quite all there—either she had a mania for locomotion or else her mental faculties had almost imperceptibly but unquestionably been attenuated in connection with the onset of old age; Claire looked at me pityingly and replied that I should do better to exert my singular Russian wit on others. Besides, as she saw it, I ought to have remembered that only the previous day I had shown up again in a shirt with mismatched cufflinks, and that I couldn’t, as I had done the day before that, simply throw my gloves down on her bed and take her by the shoulders, something that wouldn’t pass for a proper greeting anywhere on earth, 18and that if she wanted to enumerate all my violations of the elementary rules of propriety, then she would have to go on for… at this point she paused in thought and said: five years. She uttered these words with a look of severity; I began to feel sorry that such trifles could irk her so and wanted to ask her forgiveness, but she turned away; her back began to convulse, and she raised a handkerchief to her eyes—and when at last she turned to look at me, I saw that she was laughing. She told me that the maid was seeing out the latest in a series of romantic liaisons, and that a man who had promised to marry her now refused bluntly. That was why she was so lost in thought. “What’s there to think about?” I asked. “So he’s refused to marry her. Does one really need so much time to grasp such a simple thing?”

“You always put things much too plainly,” said Claire. “Women do. She’s thinking because it’s a pity for her. How is it that you can’t understand this?”

“Was it a particularly long affair?”

“No,” replied Claire, “two weeks in all.”

“Strange, she’s always seemed so lost in thought,” I observed. “Just last month she was every bit as unhappy and in reveries.”

“Good grief,” said Claire, “that was another affair of hers.” 19

“It’s really quite simple,” I said. “Forgive me, but I wasn’t aware that your maid’s pince-nez masked the tragedy of some female Don Juan who actually wants to tie the knot, as opposed to the Don Juan of literary renown who took a rather dim view of marriage…” But Claire interrupted me, reciting with great pathos a line that she had spotted on a billboard, the reading of which had reduced her to tears of laughter:

Heureux acquéreurs de la vraie Salamandre

Jamais abandonnés par le constructeur.1

The conversation then returned to Don Juan before passing somehow on to ascetics and Archpriest Avvakum; however, upon reaching the temptation of Saint Anthony I paused, recollecting that Claire didn’t much care for such talk; she preferred other subjects—the theatre, music—but most of all she loved humorous anecdotes, of which she knew a great many. She would recount these exceedingly witty and thoroughly obscene yarns, after which the conversation would take a rather queer turn, and even the most innocent of phrases would seem to conceal double-entendres—and Claire’s eyes would begin to sparkle; but when she stopped laughing, her eyes would grow dark and criminal, and her delicate brows would knit together. I would move in closer, 20and she would whisper angrily: mais vous êtes fou2—and so I would retreat. She would smile, and her smile would blithely say: mon Dieu, qu’il est simple!3 Then, picking up our interrupted conversation, I would start to inveigh against things towards which I normally felt absolute indifference; I would try to sound as cruel and insulting as possible, as though craving revenge for the defeat I had just endured. Claire would agree mockingly with all my arguments, and my defeat would be all the more obvious because she conceded so readily. “Oui, mon petit, c’est très intéressant, ce que vous dites là,”4 she would say without taking the trouble to conceal her hilarity, which, incidentally, pertained not at all to my words, but to that very defeat, and by emphasizing that disparaging “là” she made clear that she didn’t attach the slightest significance to anything I had to say. Making a supreme effort, recognizing that it was now too late, I would again resist the temptation to draw nearer to Claire and would force myself to think of other things. Her voice came to me half-muffled; she was laughing and telling me all manner of nonsense that I heard out with rapt attention, until I realized that Claire was simply having some sport. It amused her that in such moments I was incapable of understanding anything. I would come to make amends the following day; I would promise myself not to sidle up to her and to choose such topics that would eliminate any 21danger of repeating the previous evening’s humiliating moments. I would speak of all the sorrows I had known, and Claire would grow quiet and serious and, in her turn, recount the death of her mother. “Asseyez-vous ici,”5 she said, indicating the bed—and I sat down right beside her while she rested her head in my lap, saying: “Oui, mon petit, c’est triste, nous sommes bien malheureux quand même.”6 I listened to her, fearing to move lest my slightest movement offend her grief. She stroked the quilt first one way, then the other; and it was as if her sorrow were being spent in these caresses, which were unconscious to begin with but then drew her attention and ended in her noticing the hangnail on her little finger and reaching out for the nail scissors lying on the bedside table. Once again she smiled a lingering smile, as if she had caught and traced within herself some long train of memories that ended on an unexpected, though by no means unhappy, thought; and Claire regarded me with momentarily darkening eyes. Gingerly I transferred her head over to the pillow and said: I’m sorry, Claire, I’ve left my cigarettes in the pocket of my trench coat—and went out into the hallway as her quiet laughter followed me from the other room. When I returned, she remarked:

“J’étais étonnée tout à l’heure. Je croyais que vous portiez vos cigarettes toujours sur vous, dans la poche de votre pantalon, comme vous le faisiez jusqu’à présent. Vous avez changé d’habitude?”7 22

And she looked me in the eyes, laughing and pitying me, and I knew then that she understood perfectly well why I had stood up and left the room. What was more, I had the carelessness then to extract my cigarette case from my back trouser pocket. “Dites-moi,” said Claire, as though imploring me to tell her the truth, “quelle est la différence entre un trench-coat et un pantalon?”8

“Claire, that’s very cruel,” I replied.

“Je ne vous reconnais pas, mon petit. Mettez toujours en marche le phono, ça va vous distraire.”9

That evening, as I left Claire’s, I heard the maid’s voice coming from the kitchen—trembling and faint. She was wistfully singing a jolly little ditty, and it took me by surprise:

C’est une chemise rose

Avec une petite femme dedans,

Fraîche comme la fleur éclose,

Simple comme la fleur des champs.10

She instilled so much melancholy into these words, so much languid sorrow, that they began to sound different, unusual, and the line “fraîche comme la fleur éclose” instantly recalled to me the maid’s aged face, her pince-nez, her love affair and her eternal pensiveness. I mentioned all 23this to Claire; she took an active interest in the maid’s misery—for nothing of the sort could ever happen to her, and this sympathy demanded none of her own emotions or anxiety—and she was terribly fond of the little ditty:

C’est une chemise rose

Avec une petite femme dedans.

She would imbue these words with the most diverse inflections—now questioning, now confident, now triumphant or mocking. Whenever I heard this motif on the street or in a café I would begin to feel out of sorts. Once I went to see Claire and started to curse the song, saying that it was much too French, that it was trite and that no self-respecting composer would be taken in by the allure of its cheap showiness; this encapsulated the main difference between the French mindset and serious things, I said: this art, so unlike real art, is as a fake pearl is to the genuine article. “It lacks the most important thing,” I said, having exhausted all my arguments and losing my temper. Claire nodded in the affirmative, before taking my hand and saying:

“Il n’y manque qu’une chose.”11

“And what exactly is that?”

She laughed and sang: 24

C’est une chemise rose

Avec une petite femme dedans.

When Claire was convalescing and, having spent a few days out of bed, sitting in an easy chair or on the chaise longue, began to feel quite well again, she asked if I would accompany her to the cinema. After the cinema we sat for an hour or so in an all-night café. Claire was awfully short-tempered with me, and interrupted me often: if I made a joke, she would hold back her laughter and say, smiling despite herself: “Non, ce n’est pas bien dit, ça”12—and, since she was in what appeared to be a foul mood, she projected her own dissatisfaction and irritability onto the world around her. She would ask me in astonishment: “Mais qu’est-ce que vous avez ce soir? Vous n’êtes pas comme toujours”13—although I was behaving no differently than usual. I saw her home; it was raining. When I kissed her hand at the door, taking my leave, on a sudden she said irritably: “Mais entrez donc, vous allez boire une tasse de thé”14—and she said this in such an angry tone, as though meaning to drive me away: well, what are you waiting for, can’t you see that I’m sick and tired of you? I went in. We took our tea in silence. I felt awkward, and so I went over to her, saying:

“Claire, there’s no need to be angry with me. I’ve waited to be with you for ten years. I’m not asking 25anything of you.” I felt like adding that such a long wait entitled me to the least modicum of kindness; but Claire’s eyes had turned from grey to almost black; with horror I saw—for I had waited too long and ceased hoping for this moment—that Claire was right beside me and that her breast was pressing against my buttoned-up double-breasted jacket; she took me in her arms, her face drawing nearer; the chilling fragrance of the ice cream she had eaten in the café suddenly struck me incongruously; and she said: “Comment ne compreniez vous pas?…”15—and a shiver ran through her body. Her misty eyes, endowed with the capacity for so many metamorphoses—cruel one moment, but shameless or laughing the next—these murky eyes of hers I saw before me for a long time. When she had fallen asleep, I turned over to face the wall and was visited by a former sorrow; this sorrow hung in the atmosphere, and its transparent waves rolled over Claire’s white body, over her legs and breasts; it escaped her mouth in an invisible breath. I lay there beside her, unable to sleep; drawing my gaze from her blanched face, I noticed that the midnight blue of the wallpaper in Claire’s room seemed suddenly brighter and strangely altered. The dark-blue that I saw in my mind’s eye had always reminded me of a mystery that had been solved—the solution to which had been obscure and sudden and seemed to halt before having 26revealed itself completely: it was as if the force of some spirit had stopped in its tracks unexpectedly and died, and in its place there had arisen a dark-blue backdrop. Now it had metamorphosed into something brighter; as if the force were not yet finished and the dark-blue colour, having brightened, had found within itself an unexpected, matt-despondent hue, which curiously chimed with my feelings and undoubtedly had some connection with Claire. Pale-blue spectres with lopped-off hands sat in the room’s two easy chairs; they were coolly hostile towards one another, like people whom the same fate has befallen, sharing the same punishment but for different misde-meanours. The wallpaper’s lilac border meandered in an undulating line, like the hypothetical path of a fish swimming in uncharted waters; and through the fluttering curtain by the open window a distant current of air was forever trying to reach me but could not; it was of that same pale-blue hue, and carried with it a long gallery of memories, which fell as regularly as raindrops, and just as irrepressibly. But Claire turned over, awake now, and mumbled: “Vous ne dormez pas? Dormez toujours, mon petit, vous serez fatigué le matin”16—and again her eyes dimmed. She lacked, however, the strength to overcome her torpid slumber and, scarcely having uttered this phrase, fell back asleep; her brows remained raised, and as she dreamt she 27looked surprised by what was happening to her. There was something exceedingly characteristic in this surprise: in surrendering to the power of sleep, or of sorrow, or of some other emotion, however strong it might be, she never ceased to be herself; and even the mightiest of shocks seemed incapable of altering anything in this so exquisite a body, of destroying this final, invincible charm that had compelled me to spend ten years of my life searching for Claire, never forgetting her, no matter where I found myself. “But in any love there is sorrow,” I recalled. “Sorrow for the end and the approaching death of love, if it has been a happy one, and, if the love has been in vain, sorrow for the inviability and loss of what was never ours.” And just as now I lamented the riches that I didn’t have, so had I once grieved for Claire when she belonged to another; and so now, as I lay on her bed in her apartment in Paris, amid the pale-blue clouds of her room, which until this evening I would have deemed impossible, imaginary, the clouds which surrounded Claire’s alabaster body, covered as it was in three places with such shameful and agonizingly alluring hair—so too, now, I grieved for the fact that I could no longer dream of Claire as I had always dreamt of her, and that much time would pass before I could construct for myself another image of her, o...