“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 Régime des Sursis. Sursis meant reprieves, but régime was a little harder to define. The authorities would have said system, but the word was used for a diet, implying control, and some discomfort. Lezhev would describe it as “a very refined cruelty.”
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 Île de la Cité—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 ronds-de-cuir, on the other side of their wire-grille partitions, did not become friendly over time—that astonished, then horrified, finally sickened Lezhev. What sort of human, he wondered, behaved this way? What sort of reptilian heart remained so cold to somebody in trouble? The sort that, evidently, lived in the hollow chest of the little man with the little man’s mustache. That lived within the mountainous bosom of the woman with the lacquer hairdo and scarlet lips, or behind the three-point handkerchief of Coquelet the Rooster, with his cockscomb of wild hair and the triumphant crow of the dunghill. “Tomorrow, then, Monsieur Lezhev. Bright and early, eh?” Stamp— kachuck—sign, blot, admire, hand over, and smile.
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 Régime 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 café, 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 émigré 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.
Doz’vidanya, Boris Ivanovich.
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.
“A friend of Monsieur Lezhev?” she asked.
“Unfortunately, no.”
Polite, she thought. Through the veil, she could see a strong, pale forehead. He was in his late thirties, hair expensively cut, faintly military bearing. Aristocrat, she thought. But not from here.
“An associate of Monsieur Pavel,” he said.
Oh.
She was, just for a moment, very angry. Boris was gone, she would never hear his voice again. For all his drinking and brawling he’d been a tender soul, accidentally caught up in flags and blood and honor and history, now dead of it. And here by her side was a man whose work lay in such things. I am sick of countries, she wanted to say to him. But she did not say it. They walked together on the gravel path as the first thunder of the storm grumbled in the distance.