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(My Encounter with Andrei Bely)1
Dedicated to Vladislav Felitsianovich Khodasevich

I remember too that he exchanged greetings with the tiger in tiger talk: a kind of "ee-ooo," between a howl and a meow, accompanied by a twirl of the whole body from which his cloak gushed out like a waterfall. (He went around in the cape that is popularly called a fly-away, but which on him looked like a wing-shouldered opera cloak. Maybe it is because of that that I so vividly remember his arms, utterly free and poor, naked-seeming, without a sleeve on them, seeming by the deceptive cut of the cloak to be free, but in actual fact bound down. That was why he made so many little movements, which the cape behind him would repeat, intensifying each of his gestures like a shadow that balloons and blazons. The cape was a living background, a classical chorus. From the Kaufhaus des Westens77 or even his same old-fashioned Moscow cloak—I don't know which. A gray cloak.)

When we'd stood our way cage-by-cage through the whole zoo:

"I like animals very much. But don't you think that... they're too many of them here? Why should I look at them and not they at me? They turn their backs!"

We are sitting on a sort of log, an impossibility in Imperial Germany—just like Pressnen!—he and I and without the animals, and suddenly, as if through a broken dam, comes the story of the young Blok, his young wife, and of his own young self. A feverish story, a very complicated, plotless story of a heart, the reconstruction of which I am incapable of and which remained in my ears and veins as a kind of malaria-like resonance, with fragmented visions of some ryefield, some scythes, someone's silk sash... The early Blok appeared in his narrative as a young swain from Nekrasov's "Korobushka,"78 as a driver in the iconesque style of a Lukutin snuffbox, something all in colors without any white and— the scene changes—a Petersburg snowstorm, a blue cape... the entry into the drama of a young genius, a demon, the union of the three, the troubled union of two of them, the union of two others that wasn't realized, departures, arrivals, the distinct feeling that departures in this encounter were more numerous than arrivals, perhaps because the arrivals were short but the departures so very long, beginning from the very second of the arrival and always drawn out, put off until the instant of sudden flight... the knot is pulled tight, everything is in the loop, not to be untied, not to be cut through. And the last utterance that I distinctly remember: "I had a very bad meeting with her for the last time. Nothing was left in her of the woman that was. Emptiness."

And it was then I learned for the first time about Liubov Dmitrievna's79 son, her own son, not Blok's, and not Bely's-Mitka, about whom Blok was so troubled: "How are we going to bring up Mitka?" and whom he so sincerely lamented in the poem that ends with an apostrophe to God:

No, over that child, that blessed child

I will stand without you!

Lines that I never read detached from the lines of Pushkin's epitaph for Maria Raevskaia's80 firstborn, lines that ring in me with the same sound:

He looks at earthly exile with a smile

Blesses his mother and prays for his father.

I remember still one more thing: that the word "love" in this most complex love story was not spoken once—it was only understood, was safely bypassed each time, was replaced at the last second by something very close and distancing, so that several times in the course of the story I caught myself with the thought: "But what was all that?," with the thought—just that—for with feeling I knew: "That was what it was." I am convinced that it went the same way, was bypassed, replaced, not named by the protagonists in life too. It was that kind of epoch. They were souls like that. The best of souls. Symbolism is least of all a literary movement.

And—one more thing. If people nowadays don't say "I love," it's from fear, in the first place of binding themselves, in the second of giving: of lowering their own value. From the purest self-love. Those people—we—didn't say "I love" from a mystical fear that once we had named it we would kill the love, and also from the deep conviction that there is something higher than love, from the fear of making that higher thing lower, that by saying "I love" we might not get the whole meaning across.

That is why they loved us so little.

But then, in the zoo, I found out that the Blue Cloak, loved to anguish by all of Russia...

I called you, but you did not turn back,

I poured out tears but you did not heed,

You sadly wrapped yourself in a blue cloak,

You left home into the damp night...

was Liubov Dmitrievna's blue cloak. "Oh, he watched and cared for her his whole life as if for a sick person; her room was always ready, she could always come back... and rest... but that was broken, their lives went apart and never came together again."

The zoo ended with Alya's routine beer in a long wooden latticework structure that also resembled a cage. I'll never forget Bely, who got burned during that day to a kind of tea-kettle, samovar color, from which his clearly-Asiatic eyes shone even more blue, against the background of the clearing that splashed greenery and sunshine through the slats of the cage. Tossing back the silver of his hair over the copper of his forehead:

"It's nice, isn't it? How I like all this! The grass, the big animals off over there, you, so simple... And your daughter, quiet, sensible, not saying anything... (And now like a refrain:) It's pleasant."

* * * * *

Whether it was because it was summer, or because he was always excited, or because his fatal illness of the arteries had already settled in, I never saw him pale, always rosy, yellowish-vividly rose, copper color. From that rosiness both the blue of his eyes and the silver of his hair were intensified. And from that silver of his hair his gray suit too seemed silver, sparkling. Silver, copper, azure—those are the colors Bely remained in for me, the summer Bely, the Berlin Bely, the Bely of his summer of misfortune of nineteen twenty-two.

* * * * *

Entering for the first time my room in the Pragerpension, Bely saw on the table—or rather, he didn't see the table because-it was entirely covered by photographs of the Imperial Family:81 the Heir at all ages, the four Grand Duchesses, variously grouped, like flowers in court vases, of the mother, the father...

And he, bending over them:

"You... love all this?"

Taking the Grand Duchesses into his hands:

"How dear!... Dear, dear, dear!"

And, with a kind of despair:

"I love that world!"

* * * * *

I am standing with him on some elevated place, where—I don't recall, only very high up. And he, sweeping me up by the hand, as if opening a mazurka with me:

"You feel drawn towards throwing yourself over? Like this (a boyish smile)... to turn somersaults!"

I answer honestly that not only am I not drawn, but the mere thought dizzies me.

"Oh? How strange! And I, I can't tear my legs away from the void! This way (he bends in a right angle, spreading out his arms)... Or even better (a reverse bend, a gush of hair) this way..."

* * * * *

A few days after the zoo and Zossen, my husband arrived from Prague, now, after many years of battles, a student-philologist in Prague.

I remember Bely's special, intensified attentiveness to him, attention directed to each word, attention for each word, that special avidity of the poet for the world of action, avidity with even a glimmer of envy... (Let us not forget, that all the poets of the world have loved military men.)

"How fine your husband is," he said to me later, "how self-possessed, calm, irreproachable. That's how a soldier ought to be. How I would like to be an officer! (Quickly drawing back:) Even a rank-and-file soldier! The enemy, your own men, black, white— what tranquility. You see, that is what I was looking for with the Doctor; that is what I didn't find."

The soldier's self-possession was quickly put to the test, and in this way: Bely lost a manuscript. The manuscript of his Gold in Azure about which his publisher had said to me with honor: "Dear M.I., use your influence over B.N. Convince him ill.H before this it was also good. Why, compared with the original text he hasn't left stone on stone. We talked about reissuing it, but this is a new book, unrecognizable! Well, I have nothing against a new one, but then why set the type for the old one? Every sheet of his proofs is a whole new book! The book gets irrepressibly and unstoppably newer; the typesetters are simply giving up on it..."

And now that newness, that whole heap of innovations— a huge portfolio that refused any more insertions—Bely had Middenly lost.

"I've lost the manuscript!"—with that cry he came tearing into my room. "I've lost the manuscript! I've lost the Gold! I've lost—In Azure! I've lost it, dropped it, left it, abandoned it! In one of those cursed cafes to which I am condemned, may they lie- thrice cursed! I was on my way to you but then I decided— although I'm a lost man I'm a decent man—that just now you have oilier concerns besides me; I didn't want to darken the joy of your meeting—why, you're children in comparison with me! you're still in Paradise! and I'm burning in hell!—I didn't want to bring that gray Hell with that Doctor in it orchestrating the works— into your Paradise. I decided: I'll turn off here, I'll plunge in alone, in a word, I stopped in at a cafe: one, or another, or a third (with a venomous sneer!), first in that one, then in another, then in a third... And afterwards... how many? A blow on the legs: no manuscript! Walking had become just too easy, the left hand was going off too far on its own! in the right a cane but in the left—nothing!... And that nothing is my manuscript, the labor of three months, what three months! it's the fusion of then and now, I left twenty years of my life in a tavern... which one of seven?"

On the threshold—the bewildered apparition of Sergei YakovIevich.

"Boris Nikolaevich has lost a manuscript," I say hurriedly, explaining the cry.

"Forgive me, please!" says Bely, turning to him "At times I myself can hear how horribly I cry out. But—before you stands a lost man..."

"Boris Nikolaevich, dear friend, calm yourself, we'll find it, we'll search it out, we'll cover all the places where you were sit ting—you did, most likely, stop in somewhere? You most likely left it somewhere; you couldn't, really, have lost it on the street."

Bely, in a fallen voice:

"I'm afraid I could have."

"You couldn't. Why it's a thing that has weight. You've already looked for it somewhere?"

"No, I came running directly here."

"Then let's go."

And we started out. And it started up! In the first place he couldn't say exactly which cafes he had stopped in and which not. First it would come out that he had stopped in them all, then, not in any. We get closer—that's it, we go in—that's not it. And without making inquiries, only making a survey, without saying a word—off and away. "Die Herrschaften wunschen? (You would like something?)" Bely, aggressively: "Nichts! Nichts! (Nothing! Nothing!)" A light shrug of the waiter's shoulders and we're out on the street again. But on the way out: "And what if that's it? There's a second room too; I didn't take a look in there." Serezha, magnanimously: "Shall we go in again?" But the second room too is unrecognizable.

In another cafe—the reverse: he's convinced that he was there, and it's that table, and the window is right, and the cashier has the same brooch, everything matches, only there's no manuscript. "Aber der Herr war ja gar nicht bei uns. (But the gentleman never came inhere)," restrainedly-irritably says the ober.82 "A half hour ago? At that table? I would remember." (Which I don't doubt, for Bely is red, with a fly-away hat, fly-away hair, a flyaway cane—really unforgettable.) "Ich habe bier meine Handscrift vergessen! Manuscript, verstehen Sie? Hier auf diesem Stuhl! Eine schwarze Pappe: Mappe!* [*Portfolio, in German, is Mappe, and Pappe is nonsense.—M.Ts.] (I forgot my manuscript in here! Manuscript, you understand? Here on this chair! A black portfolio!)" cries Bely, flushing more and more red, thumping with his cane. "Ich bin Schriftsteller, russischer Schriftsteller! Meine Handschrift ist alles fur mich! (I am a writer, a Russian writer, my manuscript means everything to me!)"

"Boris Nikolaevich, let's take a look in the one next door," Serezha counsels calmly, drawing him gently but firmly over the threshold. "Right next door there's another one. You could easily get mixed up."

"This one? I was sitting in this one? (Poisonously:) No-o, I wasn't in this one! It's quite obviously-unattractive, I wouldn't have gone into one like that. (Planting his cane into the asphalt.) And I won't go in now." Serezha, relieved: "Well, then I'll go. And you and Marina stay here."

We stay. He comes out with empty hands. Bely, triumphantly: "There, you see? Now would I have gone into a place like ihat? Why in that sort of cafe you leave not just a manuscript— you leave your legs and arms behind. Do you really not see that they have cocaine?"

The next one on the route we simply bypass. Unheeding of our exhortations, he doesn't even turn his head and visibly hastens his pace. "But why is it you don't want even to take a look?"-"You didn't notice that there's a dark-haired man sitting there? I'm not saying that it's that man, but in any case it's one of them. Dyed. Because black hair like that doesn't exist. There's only Mack coloring like that. They're all dyed. It's their brand."

And stopping in the middle of the sidewalk, with a terrible smile: "But isn't this the machinations of the Doctor? Didn't he give an order from where he is for the manuscript to disappear: fall off the chair and fall through the floor? So that I would never again write poetry, because now, of course, I won't write another line. You don't know the man. He is the devil."
And raising his cane, he beats time with it on whatever is handy: on the wooden walkway, the straight Berlin tree trunks, the fencing, and suddenly—with the whole impetus of rage—on a huge yellow great Dane, behind which, in the whole stature of his self-satisfaction, looms up a lieutenant.

77. German. A store in Berlin the name of which can be loosely translated: "The Merchandise Mart of the West."

78. Tsvetaeva refers here to "The Peddlers" ("Korobeiniki"), a long narrative poem with folk rhythms and diction by the poet Nikolai Alexeevich Nekrasov (1821-1878). The opening stanza consists of the words of a young peddler who is referred to in the second stanza as molodets, meaning roughly, "swain."

79. Liubov Dmitrievna, nee Mendeleeva, was Alexander Blok's wife.

80. A lapse of memory. The lines Tsvetaeva quotes are dedicated to Prince N. S. Volkonsky. The poem, "Epitaph for an Infant" ("Epitafiia mladentsu"), 1828, was written on the death of the two-year-old son of the Decembrist S. G. Volkonsky.

81. The family of Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia. In one of her letters to Vera Nikolaevna Bunina, Tsvetaeva mentions that she had once undertaken a piece of writing on the Imperial Family which was never finished because, as she put it, "the historian in me drove out the poet." (See Letter to V. N. Bunina, August 28, 1933, /V. P., p. 434.)

82. German. Short for Oberkellner, that is, "head waiter," or "Maitre d'hotel."