Authors: Monika Zgustova,Matthew Tree
Tags: #Literary, #Biographical, #General, #Fiction
Goya's Glass (34 page)
The letter ends here.
September, 1952
Dear friend,
Tonight I had the same dream I had many years ago in Paris. Isn’t that strange? We were sitting in a little art deco cafe built of wood in the Luxembourg garden. You probably don’t remember, so many years have gone by! We were walking together from the newspaper offices and down the rue de Vaugirard, I remember it perfectly well. Then we had coffee together in the Luxembourg garden and I told you about a dream, which I dreamt again tonight! The one in which I found myself in the train station at Saint Petersburg. I was waiting for the Paris train. It was a goods train that was bringing
the coffins of the dead from exile back home. I ran along the platform, past the endless row of cars that were entering the station building little by little, and I discovered Vladya’s coffin in the last car. The shouts of the railway workers woke me up.
Nina
The day after the concert, very early in the morning, Nina phoned up Alexandra Tolstaya to invite her to go on a long trip together through Colorado and Arizona. “The sooner the better!” she insisted.
On Friday afternoon they set off on their trip in Alexandra’s red sports car. They discovered all kinds of scenery, the most varied types of people, Indians too. From time to time Nina talked of her no-man’s-land; she said that sometimes it took over so much that it didn’t let her live her primary life, the visible one, and that life isn’t going to wait. The Kansas prairie made her think of Russia.
I didn’t find out anything about this until much later, when I was in America. Alexandra Tolstaya told me about it. Since then I have only received one letter from Nina, the last one.
Igor, my friend,
You have known me almost my entire life. Sometimes I think that if I hadn’t abandoned Vladya, he might have lived longer, he might have lived until the war, we might even have lived through the bombing of Billancourt, we might . . . Forgive me for saying such words. On the day of the bombing we might have died together; you know that the house where we lived
on the rue de Quatre Cheminées was completely destroyed. Sometimes I imagine (and I am ashamed to confess it) that we are together in the cellar during the bombardment, he is protecting me with his body, he lies on top of me, and at that moment a bomb falls on the house.
Igor, do you remember my outcry, “Is life going to wait?” that day in the cafe in Paris? I knew it. Life never waits!
Don’t reply; there is nothing more to be said.
Yours, Nina
In 1993, at the age of ninety-two, Nina Berberova died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She had worked as a professor of literature at Yale University from 1958 to 1963, and Princeton University from 1963 to 1971. Until nine years before her death, her work was almost unknown to anyone outside Russian émigré circles. In the spring of 1984 the French publisher Hubert Nyssen of Actes Sud found a manuscript in his mailbox with a letter from the translator: “The author of this novel is Russian, and I believe that her work has not had the recognition it deserves.” In a short period of time, Actes Sud released the complete works of the author in French, novels and stories, which since then have been translated into dozens of languages. Almost overnight, Berberova turned into a worldwide literary figure.
At the end of her life, after the change of regime, Nina traveled to Russia, where several books of hers have been published and where her readers adore her.
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Monika Zgustová
was born in Prague and lives in Barcelona, Spain. She has published seven books, including novels, short stories, a play, and a biography. Her novel
Silent Woman
was a runner-up for the National Award for the Novel, given by the Spanish Ministry of Culture. Zgustová has also received the Giutat de Barcelona and the Mercè Rodoreda awards in Spain, and the Gratias Agist Prize given by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague. She has translated more than fifty books of Russian and Czech fiction and poetry, including the works of Milan Kundera and Vaclav Havel, into both Spanish and Catalan.
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