II The Russian Neighbor
Chapter Five
1
Now, when I recall those months, I think that if I did manage to stay relatively sane it was thanks to Nina Andropova, my Russian neighbor. My conversations with her had a calming effect as though Nina moved at a different speed, not connected to the urgencies of the moment. Again and again, I would dwell on my meetings with Ida and that afternoon when I saw her for the last time, in the department hallway, when she walked away with the letters in her left hand and a canvas bag over her shoulder. Was it the left one? But if she was left-handed, why was it that, according to the police sketch, it was her right hand reaching down in the car, searching for something on the floor? “Oh, my dear,” Nina said to me, “you’ll never figure out what happened like that.”
My conversations with Nina seemed destined to force me out of the Dostoevskian gloom I was buried in. It was as if her life story, which she told to me in bursts, and her brilliant conversation made me recall old times, meetings in smoke-filled rooms where politics was discussed, passionate women who led the charge in working-class neighborhoods, planning revolutions that would purify the world; all of that splendor seemed to linger in her serene, musical voice.
During those days I would hear a sentence in the street and think they were talking about me (“She was dressed in blue”). I lived in a world where everything held a secret meaning and every gesture or detail occupied a place that was valid only to me. Nina would listen to me patiently and then change the subject, as though all she wanted was to help me heal my wounds and survive. She was generous, and she would bring up her Russian years again and again as if to say that we had indeed lived through glorious times and great tragedies, fiery speeches, and mass oppressions carried out by our revolutionary heroes; private matters couldn’t be used as a means of suffering because there was no room left in the heart. Her mother had gone to live in a miserable village in Siberia in order to be close to the labor camp where her father would die. “Us as well,” I said. We too had been swept away into history and horror, and I could understand what she was talking about. “Oh yes, everything is understandable except for the violence of revolution and the euphoria of victory,” she said, carefully placing a cigarette in the white holder as if it still made sense to protect her lungs that way. She was almost eighty years old, closer to death than I could really imagine, yet she moved energetically all the same, never losing her spark.
Nina had survived in France during the war and the German occupation by working as a nanny among the circle of writers for La Nouvelle Revue Française (she’d raised and educated Jean Paulhan’s children) at the same time that, under the tutelage of Nikolai Berdyaev, she was writing her thesis, “Tolstoy’s Early Years.” In 1950 she left Paris and came to the United States. I left because I couldn’t stand the atmosphere of the left in France after the Liberation, with Sartre, Aragon, and other provincial dictators defending the repression in Russia with the theory that the old Bolsheviks had objectively been in service of the enemy, regardless of their intentions, Nina told me. At the end of Saint Genet, Sartre had written that Nikolai Bukharin, the brilliant cosmopolitan intellectual and theorist from the Communist Party, hadn’t been a victim of Stalin but rather a traitor to the revolution, rightly punished after his confession. They tortured them and took them to be executed by firing squad and forced them to confess to absurd crimes. “It was hard to be on the left in those days, and it still is,” Nina said. “But I’m Russian, dear, and it’s impossible for me to be a reformist,” and she emphasized the last word with a Russian pronunciation. She still thought that the czar and his court were responsible for the catastrophes in Russia and that the revolution had been a fire, first destroying its heroes and then terrorizing the whole town. That early morning when she took the train to Finland, she realized that a whole world was left behind, alongside the image of her parents in the faint light of the empty platform. Ever since she left Russia, she’d lived with the ashen taste of exile on her lips.
She had arrived in New York with seventy-five dollars in her pocket, a copy of the first volume of her biography of Tolstoy, and the resolve to start over. Nina remembered the imposing figure of Alexandra Tolstoy, the daughter of the count, who ran a foundation that was dedicated to supporting Soviet exiles who came to America, even as she waited anxiously behind the fence on the dock in the port of New York while Immigrations guards held her up with insulting questions, and the wharf slowly emptied until finally she was able to go through, dragging the suitcase that held what little she had.
Nina had done every kind of job imaginable and had to suffer for two years before she got a position as a Russian teacher at a college in New Jersey. In 1960, she published the second part of her monumental biography (Tolstoy, The Novelist) and earned a professorship in literature at the university’s Department of Slavic Languages. It was there that she met her husband, Albert Ostrov, a Russian geographer who researched the cartography of lunar volcanoes at the legendary Institute of Experimental Studies. But her beloved Albert had died, and she was alone now, retired from teaching and buried in her interminable book on Tolstoy’s final years.
We were in
