Too Much Happiness (32 page)

Having somehow arrived on this train she reads these pages to Sophia who cannot bring herself to explain to her how things have changed and what has come about since those days in the tower room.

When she wakes Sophia thinks how all that was true—Aniuta’s obsession with medieval and particularly English history—and how one day that vanished, veils and all, as if none of it had ever been, and instead a serious and contemporary Aniuta was writing about a young girl who at her parents’ urging and for conventional reasons rejects a young scholar who dies. After his death she realizes that she loves him, so has no choice but to follow him in death.

She secretly submitted this story to a magazine edited by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and it was printed.

Her father was outraged.

“Now you sell your stories, how soon before you will sell yourself?”

In this turmoil Fyodor himself appeared on the scene, behaving badly at a party but mollifying Aniuta’s mother by a private call, and ending up by proposing marriage. Her father’s
being so decidedly against this did almost persuade Aniuta to accept, to elope. But she had after all a fondness for her own limelight, and perhaps a premonition of how that might have to be sacrificed, with Fyodor, so she refused him. He put her into his novel
The Idiot
as Aglia, and married a young stenographer.

Sophia dozes again, slips into another dream in which she and Aniuta are both young but not so young as when at Palibino, and they are together in Paris, and Aniuta’s lover Jaclard—not yet her husband—has supplanted Harold of Hastings and Fyodor the novelist as her hero, and Jaclard is a genuine hero, though bad mannered (he glories in his peasant background) and, from the first, unfaithful. He is fighting somewhere outside of Paris, and Aniuta is afraid he will be killed, because he is so brave. Now in Sophia’s dream Aniuta has gone looking for him, but the streets where she wanders weeping and calling his name are in Petersburg, not Paris, and Sophia is left behind in a huge Parisian hospital full of dead soldiers and bloodied citizens, and one of the dead is her own husband, Vladimir. She runs away from all these casualties, she is looking for Maksim, who is safe from the fighting in the Hotel Splendide. Maksim will get her out of this.

She wakes. It’s raining outside and dark, and she is not alone in the compartment. An untidy-looking young woman sits next to the door, holding a drawing portfolio. Sophia is afraid she might have cried out in her dream, but she probably didn’t, because the girl is sleeping undisturbed.

Suppose this girl had been awake and Sophia had said to her, “Forgive me, I was dreaming of 1871. I was there, in Paris, my sister was in love with a Communard. He was captured and he might have been shot or sent to New Caledonia but we were able to get him away. My husband did it. My husband Vladimir who was not a Communard at all but only wanted to look at the fossils in the Jardin des Plantes.”

The girl would have been bored. She might have been polite
but would still have conveyed the feeling that all this, in her opinion, might have happened before the banishment of Adam and Eve. She was probably not even French. French girls who could afford to travel second class did not usually travel alone. American?

It was strangely true that Vladimir had been able to spend some of those days in the Jardin des Plantes. And untrue that he had been killed. In the midst of the turmoil he was laying the foundations of his only real career, as a paleontologist. And true too that Aniuta took Sophia along to a hospital from which all the professional nurses had been fired. They were considered counterrevolutionary, and were to be replaced by the wives and comrades from the Commune. The common women cursed the replacements because they did not even know how to make bandages, and the wounded died, but most of them might have died anyway. There was disease as well as the wounds of battle to be dealt with. The common people were said to be eating dogs and rats.

Jaclard and his revolutionaries fought for ten weeks. After the defeat he was imprisoned at Versailles, in an underground cell. Several men had been shot because they were mistaken for him. Or so it was reported.

By that time Aniuta and Sophia’s father, the General, had arrived from Russia. Aniuta had been taken off to Heidelberg, where she collapsed in bed. Sophia went back to Berlin and her study of mathematics, but Vladimir remained, abandoning his tertiary mammifers to connive with the General to get Jaclard free. This was managed by bribery and daring. Jaclard was to be transferred under guard of one soldier to a jail in Paris, and taken along a certain street where there would be a crowd of people, because of an exhibition. Vladimir would snatch him away while the guard looked aside, as he was being paid to do. And still under Vladimir’s guidance Jaclard would be hustled through the crowd to a room where a civilian suit of
clothes was waiting, then taken to the railway station and supplied with Vladimir’s own passport, so that he could escape to Switzerland.

All this was accomplished.

Jaclard did not bother to mail back the passport until Aniuta joined him, and then she returned it. No money was ever repaid.

Sophia sent notes from her hotel in Paris to Marie Mendelson and Jules Poincaré. Marie’s maid responded that her mistress was in Poland. Sophia sent a further note to say that she might ask her friend’s assistance, come spring, in “selecting whatever costume would suit that event which the world might consider the most important in a woman’s life.” In brackets she added that she herself and the fashionable world were “still on fairly confused terms.”

Poincaré arrived at an exceptionally early hour of the morning, complaining at once about the behavior of the mathematician Weierstrass, Sophia’s old mentor, who had been one of the judges for the king of Sweden’s recent mathematical prize. Poincaré had indeed been awarded the prize, but Weierstrass had seen fit to announce that there were possible errors in his—Poincaré’s—work which he, Weierstrass, had not been given time to investigate. He had sent a letter submitting his annotated queries to the king of Sweden—as if such a personage would know what he was talking about. And he had made some statement about Poincaré being valued in future more for the negative than the positive aspects of his work.

Sophia soothed him, telling him she was on her way to see Weierstrass and would take the matter up with him. She pretended not to have heard anything about it, though she had actually written a teasing letter to her old teacher.

“I am sure the king has had much of his royal sleep disturbed
since your information arrived. Just think of how you have upset the royal mind hitherto so happily ignorant of mathematics. Take care you don’t make him repent of his generosity …”

“And after all,” she said to Jules, “after all you do have the prize and will have it forever.”

Jules agreed, adding that his own name would shine when Weierstrass would be forgotten.

Every one of us will be forgotten, Sophia thought but did not say, because of the tender sensibilities of men—particularly of a young man—on this point.

She said good-bye to him at noon and went to see Jaclard and Urey. They lived in a poor part of the city. She had to cross a courtyard where laundry was hung—the rain had stopped but the day was still dark—and mount a long, somewhat slippery outdoor staircase. Jaclard called out that the door was unbolted, and she entered to find him sitting on an overturned box, blacking a pair of boots. He did not stand up to greet her, and when she started to remove her cloak he said, “Better not. The stove isn’t lit till evening.” He motioned her to the only armchair, which was tattered and greasy. This was worse than she had expected. Urey was not here, had not waited to see her.

There were two things she had wanted to find out about Urey. Was he getting more like Aniuta and the Russian side of his family? And was he getting any taller? At fifteen, last year in Odessa, he had not looked more than twelve.

Soon she discovered that things had taken a turn that made such concerns less important.

“Urey?” she said.

“He’s out.”

“He’s at school?”

“He may be. I know little about him. And the more I do know the less I care.”

She thought to soothe him and take up the matter later. She
inquired about his—Jaclard’s—health, and he said his lungs were bad. He said he had never got over the winter of ’71, the starvation and the nights in the open. Sophia did not remember that the fighters had starved—it was their duty to eat, so that they could fight—but she said agreeably that she had just been thinking about those times, on the train. She had been thinking, she said, about Vladimir and the rescue that was like something out of a comic opera.

It was no comedy, he said, and no opera. But he grew animated, talking about it. He spoke of the men shot because they were taken for him, and of the desperate fighting between the twentieth and the thirtieth of May. When he was captured at last, the time of summary executions was over, but he still expected to die after their farcical trial. How he had managed to escape God only knew. Not that he believed in God, he added, as he did every time.

Every time. And every time he told the story, Vladimir’s part—and the General’s money’s part—grew smaller. No mention of the passport either. It was Jaclard’s own bravery, his own agility, that counted. But he did seem to be better disposed to his audience, as he talked.

His name was still remembered. His story still was told.

And more stories followed, also familiar. He rose and fetched a strongbox from under the bed. Here was the precious paper, the paper that had ordered him out of Russia, when he was in Petersburg with Aniuta some time after the days of the Commune. He must read it all.

“Gracious sir, Konstantin Petrovich, I hasten to bring to your attention that the Frenchman Jaclard, a member of the former Commune, when living in Paris was in constant contact with representatives of the Polish Revolutionary Proletariat Party, the Jew Karl Mendelson, and thanks to the Russian connection through his wife was involved in the transfer of Mendelson’s letters to Warsaw. He is a friend of many outstanding
French radicals. From Petersburg Jaclard sent most false and harmful news into Paris about Russian political affairs and after the first of March and the attempt against the czar this information passed all bounds of patience. That is why at my insistence the minister decided to send him beyond the borders of our empire.”

Delight had come back to him as he read, and Sophia remembered how he used to tease and caper, and how she, and even Vladimir, felt somehow honored to be noticed by him, even if it was only as an audience.

“Ah, too bad,” he said. “Too bad the information is not complete. He never mentions that I was chosen by the Marxists of the International in Lyon to represent them in Paris.”

At this moment Urey came in. His father went on talking.

“That was secret, of course. Officially they put me on the Lyon Committee for Public Safety.” He was walking back and forth now, in joyful rampaging earnest. “It was in Lyon that we heard that Napoleon le Neveu had been captured. Painted like a whore.”

Urey nodded to his aunt, removed his jacket—evidently he did not feel the cold—and sat down on the box to take up his father’s task with the boots.

Yes. He did look like Aniuta. But it was the Aniuta of later days to whom he bore a resemblance. The tired sullen droop to the eyelids, the skeptical—in him scornful—curl to the full lips. There was not a sign of the golden-haired girl with her hunger for danger, for righteous glory, her bursts of wild invective. Of that creature Urey would have no memory, only of a sick woman, shapeless, asthmatic, cancerous, declaring herself eager for death.

Jaclard had loved her at first, perhaps, as much as he could love anybody. He noted her love for him. In his naïve or perhaps simply braggartly letter to her father, explaining his decision to marry her, he had written that it seemed unfair to desert a woman who had so much attachment to himself. He had never given up other women, not even at the beginning of the
liaison when Aniuta was delirious with her discovery of him. And certainly not throughout the marriage. Sophia supposed that he might still be attractive to women, though his beard was untidy and gray and when he talked he sometimes got so excited that his words came in a splutter. A hero worn out by his struggle, one who had sacrificed his youth—that was how he might present himself, not without effect. And it was true, in a way. He was physically brave, he had ideals, he was born a peasant and knew what it was to be despised.

And she too, just now, had been despising him.

The room was shabby, but when you looked at it closely you saw that it had been cleaned as well as possible. A few cooking pots hung from nails on the wall. The cold stove had been polished, and so had the bottoms of those pots. It occurred to her that there might be a woman with him, even now.

He was talking about Clemenceau, saying they were on good terms. He was ready now to brag about a friendship with a man she would have expected him to accuse of being in the pay of the British Foreign Office (though she herself believed this false).

She deflected him by praising the apartment’s tidiness.

He looked around, surprised at the change of subject, then slowly smiled, and with a new vindictiveness.

“There is a person I am married to, she takes care of my welfare. A French lady, I am glad to say, she is not so garrulous and lazy as the Russians. She is educated, she was a governess but was dismissed for her political sympathies. I am afraid I cannot introduce you to her. She is poor but decent and she still values her reputation.”

“Ah,” said Sophia, rising. “I meant to tell you that I too am marrying again. A Russian gentleman.”

“I had heard that you went about with Maksim Maksimovich. I did not hear anything about a marriage.”

Sophia was trembling from sitting so long in the cold. She spoke to Urey, as cheerfully as she could.

“Will you walk with your old aunt to the station? I have not had a chance to talk to you.”

“I hope I have not offended you,” said Jaclard quite poisonously. “I always believe in speaking the truth.”