From Europe

Paris came sweeping over me like a hard wave of stone once we landed. I was fourteen years old and had never been abroad or travelled on my own. The city constricted me, compressing my consciousness like a vice. My heart was pounding. I looked out of the minibus window at the blue-grey roofs, the grey-brown façades, the red awnings and the black windows that reflected those same red awnings, grey-brown façades and blue-grey roofs. It was unreal and urgent, dreamlike and discomforting.

The minibus that had picked us up at Charles de Gaulle parked on a treeless street with identical stone buildings. A short, middle-aged Frenchman was waiting outside the door of a building that corresponded precisely to Oksana’s description. We were directed into an apartment on the first floor. He talked energetically for a minute, mostly to the teacher, then disappeared. I saw no trace of him after that. Despite half-hearted attempts to learn French from a phrase book over the summer, I didn’t understand a word. I saw no concierge, no plastic flowers. In the little room, which I was to share with the three boys, there were two metal bunk beds. In between them was a window and apart from that there was nothing at all. The girls had to sleep in a room with the teacher. In spite of my tense, compressed state, I fell asleep as soon as I closed my eyes.

We went to a few museums, visited a French school (closed for the summer holidays), looked at the tower. Every step was supervised by Alla Borisovna. She took us to the Bastille and the Arc de Triomphe, gave lectures on historic events and all manner of artistic and literary sights. Lenin lived here and Ehrenburg lived there and some important meeting was held here. Except for the first night we ate in the kitchen of the apartment, or rather the lounge, which was mostly taken up by a large boardroom table. In the corner, behind a counter, was a kitchen area where our teacher made soup and fried eggs. For lunch we got croissants or white bread and ham, which we ate on park benches.

The young man with the beginnings of a moustache had a briefcase he called ‘the diplomat’. He was of the opinion that the Commune had marked the culmination of Paris’s historic role, and that the task of the new generation was to study the city as an example of what the new Russia must never become: a dying museum to itself. He was in the first year at Moscow University, I heard from his conversations with the teacher, and viewed the rest of the group with a mix of disdain and indifference. In the evenings he sat with her in the kitchen and talked about all the different dimensions in Daniil Andreyev’s Rose of the World (‘It is true that there is no suprapeople over which a demiurge does not preside.’) or read pamphlets with Church Slavonic on their paper covers. On the second evening I saw that he was wearing a large Orthodox cross under his shirt.

Boris was one year younger, so maybe seventeen. He was impressed by the department stores, the cars, the Champs-Élysées and the ‘talent on display’. He asserted that if it hadn’t been for the watchful eye of the ‘regime’, that is to say the teacher, he could have engaged in sexual exploits every night without much difficulty. That’s what people do here, he informed us. Vsevolod, have you read Genri Meeler? No? What about Emmanuelle? The film. Seen it? You would probably find Quiet Days in Khlischi ‘eye-opening’. 

The only Emmanuelle I know, Vsevolod said guardedly from his place above me, is Kant.

According to Boris, the best place to pick up women was McDonald’s. I watched him jump over low metal fences and click his heels in the air, put on a funny voice to read signs and adverts in fake-French, pretend to tear down shelves and walk into products in supermarkets, tell funny stories. Sacruh bleurgh. Wherever you set foot he was in the way of everything, like a slow car on a one-way street. To begin with, the two girls, Marina and Oksana (not ‘my’ Oksana), kept an ironic distance from both him and the other male creatures. I heard them talking about perfume and Alexander Herzen. In the end, though, they let themselves be charmed by Boris’s persistent joking about, and as the last day drew closer the group was split into him and the girls on one side, me and Vsevolod, who lectured me on Andreyev and Tsiolkovsky, on the other, and then the last, taciturn boy all on his own. This kid was fat and sensitive and had dark hair. I can’t remember his name, only that he was from a mathematics school in Kuzminki and that his exclusion from the group, greater even than mine, gave me a sense of relief.

Apart from the occasions on which the Slavophile Vsevolod deigned to speak to me, I spent the time within myself. An inner expansiveness extended everywhere I looked. The tourist sights didn’t interest me in the slightest, nor did the allegedly beautiful views along the river, which struck me as being even filthier than Moscow, or the beautiful boulevards, which seemed narrow, ugly and uniform. Was it this shitty town Voloshin and Ehrenburg had loved? Was this what Oksana longed for? It was as though the whole of Paris had been built by one single person: a single person multiplied into millions. The same person went to the same bakery and bought the same baguette, took a seat at the same corner café in the same rattan chair and ordered the same espresso. Via a convoluted system of mirrors, this single Parisian was multiplied into millions, talking to themselves, arguing with themselves, seducing themselves, eating themselves. Perhaps Oksana’s Parisian castle in the sky had laid the foundations within me for a feeling of metaphysical disappointment with this, the only real dream I had ever had. Nina writes a lot about this emotional experience in her black notebooks, this awareness that existence in itself is not much to boast about. It felt a little like when I was in the countryside: like everything around me was a meaningless yet transitory necessity, I told Sasja three decades later, as we sat at Wepler. I understood that the other teenagers, with the exception of the taciturn fatso, would spend the next six months expounding on their adventures, regaling everyone in bombastic terms, or, in the Slavophile’s case, in contemptuous ones, with all the things they’d seen and bought. For me, it was like the trip had drawn a curtain behind me, closed a door. One single night shut off everything behind me. In spite of an intense feeling of loss, loneliness and corresponding homesickness, I had difficulty, even on the second day, recollecting Oksana or my parents: how they looked, who they were. Today, almost thirty years later, twenty-five years later or whatever it is, I remember these two young men, Vladislav and Vasily, or perhaps his name was Boris, I don’t know, these two boys with whom I spent four days, better than classmates I’d seen every day for seven years up to that point. Now, when I think back to my dad, I suspect that what I’m picturing is a drawing on a record sleeve. I know now that there’s no such thing as memory. I don’t intend to let that word pass my lips anymore.

I didn’t understand what I was doing there in that group, what I was supposed to be interested in, why this was even desirable, where I came from, where I was expected to return to. At the same time I had a hollow feeling that I was missing out on something, a dull, subdued longing to do something drastic, to tear myself away from all this while I still had the chance.

Those four days curdled into one. On the last night I was lying on the bottom bunk, unable to sleep. Outside the window I saw the shapes of other dark windows on the building opposite. I felt a strong sense of indignation at the idea that this trip, which Oksana and I had talked of so often on our walks around Ivanovskaya Gorka, was over. In spite of everything, I didn’t want the trip to end before it had led to some real-life experience. At the same time I felt great sorrow at the thought that it simply was what it was. This was a contradiction that gave rise to a discomforting nausea. Each building proceeded from the last, and so on it went. The street turned into another street of exactly the same buildings and windows, just at a different angle. The windows of these buildings reflected other windows in identical buildings, everything at clear, mathematically poised, rectilinear angles. A thin odour of teenage sweat pervaded the box-like room.

In a single motion, without having considered what I was doing, I slipped, hunched, out of my bunk, grabbed my jacket from the foot of the bed and quietly pulled on my trousers. I put on my shoes and opened the door. Immediately before I opened it, it occurred to me that it might be locked.

It wasn’t, but there was electric light streaming out of the kitchen. I stood there a while and listened to the silence until I thought I heard the fridge. The floor creaked as I took the three or four slow steps along the short corridor and left the apartment.

There was a round ceiling light on in the pale stairwell. The chess-piece-castle door handles were affixed in the middle of the dark-blue doors. With a careful movement I made sure that the door was just touching the frame, without the latch going home. I went downstairs and pushed and pulled at the glass door of the main entrance before realising that there was a button to unlock it on the other side of the stone-paved foyer. The lock mechanism whirred open. Out on the street it was a chilly, soundless August night.

The Parisian night air hit my nostrils with its scent of water and roses.

With childish excitement I turned right. The street quickly turned into another, with closed corner cafés, shops with red blinds and windows and yellow-brown façades. It must have been around midnight. For the first time during that whole journey I felt Paris really existed and that I was in the city. I perceived a crystal-clear tension, the same luminous sense of absence you get when skipping school or going on an outing, deciding not to go to work that day or heading out of town without telling anyone – the same wintry sea breeze that meets me every time I open the balcony doors and look down across the street, the promenade, the shoreline: the freedom of no one knowing where you are that Nina so lacked in her abbreviated childhood. Behind me, they lay sleeping in their sweaty room. Somewhere far away, my family were sitting watching TV or sleeping. Even further off was Oksana; she looked on, wide-eyed, as I walked alone through celebrated, indifferent Paris, looking at the August plane trees and their prematurely yellowing leaves which fell, here and there, to the ground, seeing all the clean windowpanes and the green water fountains.

Identical streets with identical series of identical buildings stretched out before me in every direction. Here and there I stumbled upon loud groups of older teenagers, but mostly it was deserted: parked cars, dark windows, locked doors. I walked and walked.

Full of a sense of expansiveness I put block after block behind me, or rather, within me, in a foreign, incomprehensible city, inhaling its monumental indifference. I was not worried about how I would return without waking the others. I could just as well turn up in the morning, just as the minibus was about to set off for the airport. Neither had I considered where I was headed. I wanted to see, and seeing is something you do by yourself. I walked along the illuminated streets. The tightly packed city encircled me, like an egg encircles its yolk. I felt free, safe, full of strength and self-confidence. Or perhaps not; rather: free and empty, light and weightless, as translucent as air. I squinted at the street lights, peered down at the tarmac. I stared right into the lights of the city: the neon signs, the street lights, apartment windows, car headlights, the wavy reflections on the wet tarmac. Street succeeded street at ever-new angles, like in a Cubist painting. At some point the buildings grew smaller, more crooked, whiter; the streets narrowed and shrank. I kept moving forwards, block after block. My tempestuous interior absorbed the emptiness without – the mathematical emptiness of life, the literal homelessness of my surroundings. The two were on the verge of balancing each other, of blooming into that grey rose, into the painful pleasure of feeling all alone.

I awoke with piercing anxiety at the clattering of a heap of metal poles against the tarmac in front of a lorry’s flatbed. Grey dawn light bored into my eyes. I was sitting with my back against a marble plinth in the middle of a square that had been empty an hour or so ago but that was now in the process of coming to life. A large clock in the tower of a corner building said it was half eight: the departure time for our flight back to Moscow.

My first terrified impulse was to run back to the apartment. I jumped up, but stayed rooted to the spot. I knew neither the address nor in which direction I should run; I had no idea how I had got to the square. Whenever I have tried, at various moments in my life, to reconstruct this night, I have calculated that I must have walked about for at least two hours before finally sitting down to rest awhile and falling asleep, or dozing off. I now know that you can cross Paris in its entirety in two hours, but that it’s equally possible to wander around the same arrondissement without getting anywhere. I now believe we had been staying on the edge of the fifteenth, and that I must have walked northwards, first inwards, then out. I must have passed through the seventh, without seeing the tower, crossed the river, walked on through the eighth and finally arrived at the large square where I fell asleep.

My back ached and the whole of my upper body felt stiff.

I stretched, crossed a few streets and arrived at a dirty, deserted boulevard where I sat down on a bench. For the first few minutes, or maybe even the first half hour, I simply sat there without doing anything.

Behind me was a yellow van covered in graffiti. Opposite me, on the other side of the street, was a supermarket. There were several mopeds parked between the bench and the street. I saw a green water fountain behind me, walked over to it and drank the cold water. After that I returned to the bench.

I watched a man who had come out onto a balcony on the building opposite, where the sun had not yet reached. He was standing there smoking, looking out over the trees. A pigeon was sitting on a traffic light. In one of the windows there was a French flag. Two men were urinating simultaneously against a tree.

My passport was still in Alla Borisovna’s bundle, but I had the pocket money my father had given me in my purse belt. While the others, Boris especially, had amassed a range of consumables from the convenience stores, I had stared at their walls of products in incomprehension. The toy department passed me by – I was too old for it – while the adult goods, like perfume and clips you could put in your hair, utensils to assist with food preparation, china, or fabrics in the form of towels or bed sheets seemed altogether abstract. Why would you need all these towels, was one not enough? Why did there have to be ten different sizes of the same spoon? Why did they have wax candles in fifty different colours?

Apart from the purse belt I had nothing. My rucksack, packed ready for the journey home, was still there by the bunk bed in the square room.

A little way off, a man was standing in the middle of the street reading an opened-out newspaper.

I was still sitting on the bench. A while later, perhaps an hour or two, a few people, mostly older women, gathered outside the entrance to the supermarket. I sat and waited a while longer. A man approached the automatic doors from inside the shop and pressed a button at eye level. The metal shutters travelled slowly upwards with a muted squeaking sound. Then the doors slid open.

A rubbish lorry drove past with two binmen on the back.

There was music playing in the supermarket. A shop assistant was just putting the freshly baked bread out in baskets and placing pastries into cardboard trays. I bought a hot baguette and a packet of ready-sliced jambon de Paris from the chiller cabinet. I got back several notes and a heap of coins.

I walked out onto the now-busy boulevard, turned onto one of the streets running off it and sat on a bench in Place de Dublin under the delicate canopy of the ginkgo trees, then ate the soft, warm bread and ham hungrily. A pigeon landed on the edge of the pump and tried to drink from the little stream of water.