Every summer had one perfect day.
The green sea rose under the ship, held a moment, then fell away. Sometime later, the engines slowed, the iron walls shuddered, a tug tied on and nudged the Enköping against its pier. The rusty bolts squeaked as they were backed off, the hatch cover swung into the air, and a crane began to scoop the coal away. Later, under the dock lights, too bright against the pale evening sky of Sweden, a booming voice shouted recognition signals down into the echoing hold.
Was the third of June, 1940.
A springtime day in Paris and, last days being tricky this way, especially breezy and soft. No, Lezhev told himself, don’t be seduced. Le printemps, like every other spectacle of the French theater of life, was an illusion, a fraud. That was absurd, of course, and Lezhev knew it; spring was spring. But he chose to indulge himself in a little unjust spite, then smiled acidly at his intransigence. On this day above all he could say whatever he wanted—nobody contradicts a man writing a suicide note.
Stationed at the window of the smelly little garret room, he had watched spring come to the Parisian slums: to the tiny, dark street covered in horseshit and dire juices, to the fat women who stood with folded arms in doorways waiting to be insulted, and to the girls. Such girls. It would take the words of a Blok, a Bely, a Lezhev, to do them justice. “In Lights of a Lost Evening, the tenth volume from Boris Lezhev, this fierce apostle of Yesenin reveals a more tender, more lyric voice than usual. In the title work, for instance, Lezhev . . .”
Now, there you had girls. Lithe, momentary, a flash in the corner of your eye, then gone. Nothing good lasted in the world, Lezhev thought, that’s why you needed poets to grab it as it went flying by.
Well, now and then there was something good. For example, Genya Beilis. Genya. Yes, he thought, Genya. Lithe and momentary? Hah! You could never call her a girl. Girls had no such secret valleys and mysterious creases, girls did not contrive to occupy the nether mind quite as Genya did. He would miss her, up on his cloud or wherever he was going. Miss her terribly. She’d been his salvation—good thing in a bad life—the last few years of exile. Sometimes his lover, sometimes not, indomitable friend always, his brilliant bitch of a hundred breeds.
It was true, she was an extraordinary mixture. Her father, the publisher Max Beilis, was Russian, Jewish, and French. Her mother was Spanish, with some ancient Arab blood from Cordoba. Also an Irish grandmother on the maternal side. Lord, he thought, what wasn’t she? You could feel the racial rivers that flowed through her. She had strange skin; sallow, olive, smooth and taut. Hair thick, dark, with reddish tints in full sunlight, and long enough so that she twined and wound it in complicated ways. Strong eyebrows, supple waist, sexy hands, eyes sharp with intelligence, eyes that saw through people. —You were right to be a little afraid of Genya Beilis. The idea of some great, naked, flabby whale of a German hovering above her made Lezhev sick with rage, he would rise up and—
No, he wouldn’t. The German panzer divisions were racing south from Belgium, French troops surrendering or running away as they advanced, the police were on the verge of arresting him—the closer the Germans got, the worse for all the Lezhevs of Paris. So he wasn’t going to be anybody’s protector, not even his own.
Fact was, they had finally hounded him to the edge of the grave. The Bolsheviks had chased him out of St. Petersburg in 1922. He fled to Odessa. They ran him out of there in 1925. So he’d gone to Germany. Written for the émigré magazines, played some émigré politics. 1933, in came Hitler, out went Lezhev. So, off to sad Brussels; earnest, neutral Belgium. He hadn’t much left by then—every time he ran, things flew away: clothes, money, poems, friends. 1936, off to fight in Spain—the NKVD almost got him there, he had to walk over the Pyrenees at night, in snow up to his knees. He barely made it into LibertéEgalité-and-Fraternité, where they threw him in prison.
Amazing, Lezhev thought, the things he’d done. As a St. Petersburg teenager in 1917, he’d torn a czarist policeman’s club from his hands and cracked him on the nose. Stayed up all night, haunting the dark alleyways of the city and its women: talking to the whores, screwing the intellectuals. He saw a man executed with a leather cord as he sat in a kitchen chair at a busy intersection. He was a worker of the world. For a year or two, anyhow. Worked with a pen, which was mightier than the sword, he discovered, only when approximately the same size. He’d run from raging fires, crazed mobs, brawling Nazis, rumbling tanks, and the security police of at least six nations.
My valise, dark-eyes. Quick. It’s under your bed. There’s nothing in there, and nothing to pack, but I take it along.
So, at last, after all that, who got him? The ronds-de-cuir. French bureaucrats, laboring all day on wooden chairs, were prone to a shine on the seat of the pants. The antidote was a chair-sized round of leather—rond de cuir—carried daily to work, placed ever so precisely beneath the clerical behind. The makers of Parisian slang were not slow to see the possibilities in this. To Lezhev, the ronds-de-cuir seemed, at first, a doleful but inevitable feature of French life but, in time, he came to understand them in a different way. Fussy, niggling, insatiable, they had some kinship with the infamous 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 émigré 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 émigré poet from St. Petersburg.