winds of Catalonia, which will not blow out a candle but will put a man in his grave. And now, he realized, they were going to do what all the Okhrana agents and Chekists and Nazis and pimps and machine gunners and Spanish cooks had failed to do.
They were going to kill him.
But maybe not. On his rounds that night, in Le Chasseur Vert and the Jean Bart out in the Russian seventeenth arrondissement and Petrukhov’s place up in Pigalle, he felt the life force surge inside him. He laid some little glovemaker’s assistant among the mops and brooms in Petrukhov’s storeroom. Tossed his last francs out on the zinc bars as a rich slice of emigre Paris got drunk on his money and told him what a fine fellow he was. Sometime near dawn he was with the acmeist playwright Yushin, too plastered to walk any farther, propped on a wall and staring down into the Seine by the Alexandre III bridge.
“Don’t give up now,” Yushin said. “You’ve been through too much. We all have.”
Lezhev belched, and nodded vigorously. Yushin was right.
“Remember the Cossacks chased you?”
“Mm,” Lezhev said. Cossacks had never chased him, Yushin had him confused with some other emigre poet from St. Petersburg.
“How you ran!”
“Mm!”
“Still, they didn’t catch you.”
“No.”
“Well, there it is.”
“You’re right.”
“Don’t weaken, Boris Ivanovich. Don’t let these sanctimonious prigs stab your heart with their little quills.”
“Well said!”
“You think so?”
“Yes.”
“You’re kind to say that.”
“Not at all.” Lezhev saw that the compliment had put Yushin to sleep, still standing, propped against the stone wall.
But then, on the morning of 4 June, he had to report to the Prefecture of Police and slid, like a man who cannot get a grip on an icy hillside, down into a black depression. The Parisian police, responsible for immigration, had placed him on what they called a Regime des Sursis.
In March, the French had declared Lezhev an undesirable alien, subject to deportation back to Germany—his last country of legal residence, since he’d entered Belgium, Spain, and France illegally. Of course all sorts of judicial nightmares awaited him in Berlin; he could expect concentration camp, beating, and probably execution. The French perfectly understood his predicament. You may, they told him, appeal the order of deportation.
This he did, and was granted a stay—for twenty-four hours. Since the stay would lapse at 5:00 p.m. the following afternoon, he had to go to the Prefecture at 1:00 p.m. to stand on the lines. At 4:20, they stamped his papers—this enabled him to stay in France an additional twenty-four hours. And so forth, and so on. For four months.
The lines at the Prefecture—across from Notre-Dame cathedral on the Ile de la Cite—had a life of their own, and Lezhev grimly joined in. He’d been hit on the head in his life, missed plenty of meals, been tumbled about by fate. Standing in line every day held no terrors for him. He couldn’t earn any money, but Genya Beilis had a little and she helped him out; so did others. He’d written behind barbed wire, on a sandbag, under a bridge, now he’d write while standing on line.
This defiance held for March and April, but in May he began to slip. The
The line itself, snaking around the building, then heading up the quay, was a madhouse: Jews, Republican Spaniards, Gypsies, Hungarian artists, the lost and the dispossessed, criminals who hadn’t yet gotten around to committing crimes, the full riptide of unwanted humanity—spring of 1940. They whispered and argued and bartered and conspired, laughed and cried, stole and shared, extemporized life from one hour to the next.
But slowly, inevitably, the Regime de Sursis gnawed away until it ate a life, took one victim, then another. Zoltan in the river, Petra with cyanide, Sygelbohm under a train.
Boris Lezhev, papers stamped for one more day of existence, returned to his room late at night on the fourth of June. He’d stopped at a cafe, listened to a report on the radio of the British Expeditionary Force’s departure, in small boats, from the beaches of Dunkirk. But the population was to remain calm at all costs—Prime Minister Reynaud had demanded that President Roosevelt send “clouds of warplanes.” Victory was a certainty.
Lezhev was temporarily distracted from writing by a drunken altercation in the tiny street below his window. One old man wanted to defend Paris, the other favored the declaration of an open city—the treasures of the capital, its bridges, arcades, and museums, would be spared. Trading arguments, then insults, the old men worked themselves up into a fulminous rage. They slapped each other in the face— which made them both wildly indignant—they swore complicated oaths, threatened to kick each other, snarled and turned red, then strode off in opposite directions, threatening vengeance and shaking their fists.
When this was over, Lezhev sat on a broken chair in front of an upturned crate and wrote, on paper torn from a notebook, a long letter to Genya Beilis. He wanted her to be the custodian of his poetry. Over the years, he’d tinkered endlessly with his work, back and forth, this way and that. Now, tonight, he had to decide, so: here a birch was a poplar. The sea shattered, it didn’t melt. Tania did not smell of cows or spring earth—she simply walked along the path where the ivy had pulled down the stake fence.
“I don’t exactly thank you, Genya—my feelings for you are warmer than courtesy. I will say that I remember you. That I have spent considerable time and remembered you very carefully. It is a compliment, my love, the way you live in my imagination. The world should be that perfect.”
7 June 1940. Boulogne-Billancourt cemetery.
A few mourners for Lezhev: he’d made the enemies emigre poets make, some of the regulars had already fled south, and it was a warm, humid evening with the threat of a thunderstorm in the air. Those who did attend were those who, if they kept nothing else, kept faith with community: a dozen men with military posture, in dark suits, medals pinned to their breast pockets. There was a scattering of beards—Lezhev’s colleagues, gloomy men with too much character in their faces. And the old women, well practiced at standing before open graves, you could not be buried without them. The priest was, as always, Father Ilarion, forced once again to pray over some agnostic/atheist/anarchist—who really knew?—by the exigencies of expatriate life.
There wasn’t much in the way of flowers, but a generous spread awaited the funeral party in an upstairs room at the Balalaika— Efrimov’s restaurant in St. Petersburg had also been steps away from the cemetery—vodka, little sandwiches of sturgeon or cucumber, cookies decorated with half a candied cherry. Genya Beilis, lover, muse, nurse, editor, and practical goddess to the deceased, had, once again, been generous and openhanded. “God bless you,” an old woman said to her as they walked down the gravel path toward the restaurant.
Genya acknowledged the blessing with a smile, and the old woman limped ahead to catch up with a friend.
“Madame Beilis, my sympathies.”
He crunched along the path beside her, and her first view of him was blurred by the black veil she wore. His French wasn’t native, yet he did not speak to her in Russian.
