I was young then. I wonder if the face of the young man I used to be still lives on in someone 's memory? Hélène, surely, has forgotten it. But perhaps one of those young women in pink who has grown old and has never seen me again, perhaps she might remember that thin young man, sunburned, with his little black moustache and sharp teeth. I told Colette about that moustache once, to make her laugh. No, I wasn't the typical young man of 1910: straight centre parting, hair slicked down like a wax head at the barber's. I was livelier, stronger, cheerful, more adventurous than even the young people of today. Marc Ohnet bears some resemblance to the man I was. Like him, I was never held back by being overly virtuous. I would have been capable of throwing a jealous husband into the river, capable of drinking, seducing my neighbour's wife, fighting, enduring utter fatigue, the harshest climates. I was young.
So that was our first meeting: a country sitting room with a grand piano, its lid open, so you could see the keys; a young woman dressed in salmon pink—Cécile Coudray—singing “More today than yesterday, but much less than tomorrow”; all the local friends and relations dozing off as they digested, with difficulty, their roast goose and jugged hare; and a woman in a red dress sitting next to me, so close that all I had to do was reach out my hand to touch her, just as in my dream, so close that I could smell her delicate fresh skin, so close and yet so far …
AS I MADE MY WAY BACK home that night long ago, I was determined to see Hélène again, with a plan to seduce her firmly in mind: she was twenty, beautiful and had an old husband; it seemed impossible that she could resist me for long. I imagined innocent meetings at first, then more secret, illicit encounters, then an affair lasting a few months until the moment of my departure. Now that so many years have passed, it is strange to think that our relationship was indeed like that: the way I crudely created it from my dreams and desires. What I could not foresee was the flame that would be locked inside me, whose cinders would continue to glow for years to come, to burn in my heart. How strange it is when something that we have desired so much actually happens. When I was a boy, playing at the beach, I remember a game I loved, which was an omen of my future life. I would dig a channel with high sides in the sand for the sea to fill. But when the water flooded the path I had created for it with such violence that it destroyed everything in its way: my castles made of pebbles, my dikes of sand. It swept away everything, destroying it all, then disappeared, leaving me with a heavy heart, yet not daring to ask for pity, since the sea had only responded to my call. It's the same with love. You call out for it, you plan its course. The wave crashes into your heart, but it's so different from how you imagined it, so bitter and icy.
I tried to see Hélène at her husband 's house. Needing an excuse, I remembered that she grew magnificent roses in her garden. They were crimson, full-bodied roses with long stems and sharp thorns as hard as steel. They gave off very little fragrance but had this familiar, sturdy look about them, something plump and bright, like the cheek of a beautiful country girl. I made up some story. I wanted to surprise my mother by ordering the same rose bushes for her in town. I used this as a pretext to go to Hélène 's house in order to ask her the exact name of the flowers.
She greeted me wearing no hat beneath the blazing sun, a pair of prunning shears in her hand. Since then, I have seen her stand exactly like that so many times. Even now she has the windswept beauty of a peach tree, delicate skin that has hardly ever been powdered but turns golden in the fresh air and sunshine.
She told me that her husband wasn't well. He had begun the long illness that would afflict him for two more years before leaving her a widow. His vanity made him close his bedroom door to keep his wife out when he was suffering from an attack: he had the kind of asthma old people get, painful and choking. Later on, when he could no longer get out of bed, he insisted she always sit with him. But at the time I'm talking about she was still free to tell me the name of those roses and show me into a large sitting room whose shutters were half-closed, where a bumble-bee buzzed about a bouquet of flowers. I remember that the house, even then, had its sweet smell of fresh wax, lavender and jam simmering in enormous pans.
I asked permission to see her again. I saw her once, twice, ten times more. I waited for her at the edge of the village, or at the church door on Sundays; on the river bank, in the woods and at the Moulin-Neuf where Colette … She 's forgotten that. The mill hadn't yet been renovated back then. It was old and gloomy, despite being called the “New Mill.” Its crumbling walls, not far from Coudray and surrounded by the roar of the river, often witnessed our visits to the miller's wife. A few days after I first met Hélène, her stepmother had died when the horse pulling the trap she was driving veered into a ditch; being exceedingly mean, she had wished to make use of an animal she 'd bought cheap, but which was too young to be harnessed. Cécile 's face was horribly injured; the mother fractured her skull and died on the road. Cécile inherited the little estate at Coudray and a small income. She had always been unsociable and shy; the injuries that disfigured her removed any self-confidence she might have had. She refused to see anyone, believing that people were making fun of her. In the space of a few months she became the odd creature I knew towards the end of her life: thin and anxious looking, with a limp and a head that jerked endlessly from side to side, like an old bird. Hélène often visited her at Coudray and, since I knew this, I found excuses to go to Cécile 's house every day and see the good woman; then I would walk Hélène back to the edge of the woods.
One day, as I was watching the clock and trying to prolong my visit, Cécile said, “Hélène won't be coming today.”
I protested that I hadn't come for Hélène … She stood up and crossed the room. Her finger automatically traced the curved back of an armchair to check for dust (her mother had trained her in every aspect of housekeeping and she was always worried about it: she wandered nervously about the room, adjusting a curtain here, blowing on a tarnished mirror there, straightening a flower, anxiously jerking her head from side to side as if she expected to see her mother lurking in the shadows, spying on her). “Monsieur Sylvestre,” she said, emotion in her voice, “no one has ever come to this house to see only me … Until I was seventeen I never gave it a thought. Then young men began to visit. Some of them came because of the maid, others because of the gardener's daughter, who was blonde and pretty; then, when Hélène grew up, they came for her. It's still the same. It doesn't surprise me. But I don't want people mocking me. Just tell me that you want to see Hélène and I'll tell you myself the days and times I'm expecting her.” She spoke with a kind of restrained anger that was painful to hear.
“Do you love your sister?” I asked.
“She isn't my sister. She 's a stranger to me. But I've known her since she was a baby and I love her, yes, I do love her. She 's no happier than I am, actually,” she said, somewhat gratified. “Everyone has their problems.”
“Please don't think that she knows my intentions … I'd be devastated if you thought there was some kind of complicity …”
She shook her head. “Hélène is a faithful woman,” she said.
“Really? Her husband is so old: he couldn't possibly hope for her to be faithful. It would be monstrous of him, given the circumstances,” I said passionately. “She 's twenty and he 's more than sixty. Such a marriage can only be explained by desperation.”
“That 's exactly what it was. You see, Hélène was my father's daughter from his first marriage and my mother …”
“I understand, but do you really think that, under these circumstances, it's reasonable to expect fidelity?”
Her eyes flashed at me. “I didn't say it was to her husband that she would remain faithful.”
“What! To whom, then?”
“That you can ask her yourself.”
Once again she limped across the Coudray sitting room, bumping into furniture like a night owl trapped in a bedroom. Now that I think about it and recall the expression she had on her face then, Brigitt
e 's story is suddenly clear to me, lit up in a sinister, fiendish light, laying bare the very soul of that ageing woman. She was never able to forgive Hélène for having been loved more than her. She reminds me of one of my relatives, who once said something horrible. She had taken a poor countrywoman under her wing, giving her food, shoes, sweets, toys for her children. Then, one day, the woman told her she was going to get married again—she had lost her husband during the war—to a kind, handsome young man who was as poor as she was. Immediately the benefactress stopped her visits. Some time later they ran into each other and the woman gently scolded her (“Madame seems to have forgotten about me”), at which my relative curtly replied, “My dear Jeanne, I hadn't realised you were happy.”
Cécile Coudray, who saved Hélène 's honour and maybe even her life when she thought she was in dire straits, was never able to forgive her for being happy. It's only human.
“Tell me what you mean,” I begged her in anguish.
But the old bird just flapped her dark wings at me. She was still dressed in mourning for her mother; her black crêpe veil fluttered around her. I left Coudray, more passionately in love than I had ever been. And the restraint towards Hélène which had held me back disappeared; I began to woo her in earnest … Oh, back then it was done so sweetly, so properly. Nothing like the brutal way young people say they love each other these days. I imagine Marc Ohnet would have found it amusing. But in the end it all comes down to the same thing, the same desire … the same roaring, all-consuming tidal wave of love.
Hélène listened to me with deep, sorrowful solemnity. “Cécile was telling you the truth. I do love someone.”
Then she told me about how she 'd met François, how he 'd fallen in love with her when she was still nearly a child, how he 'd gone away, about her own unhappiness in her family and, finally, how she 'd married an older man and how François had come back. They hadn't wanted to betray her elderly husband. They had parted.
“So now you're waiting for your husband to die?” I asked.
She went slightly pale, then nodded. “He 's forty years older than me,” she said quietly. “It would be ridiculous to pretend I love him. But I'm not hoping he 'll die. I'm doing my best to look after him. To him, I'm …” She hesitated. “I'm a friend, a young woman, a nurse, all of that. But not a wife. Not his wife. But I want to be faithful to him in spite of all that, and not just physically, but in my soul. That's why François and I decided to part. He accepted a job abroad. We don't even write to each other. I'm doing my duty here. If my husband dies, François will wait a few months before coming back. We won't rush anything. We don't want to cause a scandal. He 'll come back and we 'll get married. If my husband lives for many years to come, well, that's my hard luck. My youth will be gone and all my hopes for happiness, but at least I won't have a vile act on my conscience. As for you …”
“As for me,” I said, “the best thing for me to do is leave at once.”
She said what all women say at such times: that I shouldn't hold it against her, that she hadn't been flirting; it was just that she felt so lonely, all friendship was precious to her and we could be friends … But I could think of only one thing: she loved another man and I was in pain. My love affair was over.
THAT WAS IN 1912. I went back to Africa for two years, then returned to France a few months before the war. My mother had died, but my cousin Montrifaut was still alive. I went to visit him. He was very ill and near the end, or so we all hoped. It was only the injections that were keeping him going. He was unbearably demanding, with bouts of anger that bordered on madness.
“He 's unhappy and he takes it out on everyone else,” people said.
They all praised Hélène for the way she behaved.
“She won't have to go on suffering much longer,” whispered all the ladies in the region, and they sighed with both pity and envy, imagining how much Hélène would inherit.
But I found out something that no one else knew: old Montrifaut was leaving only a small part of his fortune to his young wife; the rest was going to his brother's family. Hélène knew all about these arrangements, but she was (and still is) the sort of woman whose altruism is indisputable, a part of who she is. Hélène wouldn't be Hélène if she could act out of personal interest and François is the same. So Hélène knew that her devotion would reap no reward and it was that very fact that forced her to push this devotion to the extreme. She had a great need to respect herself.
“Actually,” she told me, “he 's been good for me, in spite of everything.”
The sick man suffered exhausting fits of asthma, but when I saw him he complained most about his terrible insomnia. He was sitting up in bed (his bedroom has since become the sitting room), wearing a scarf around his head, the way invalids used to. He was terrifying and strange, the shadow of his large, pinched nose looming above him on the wall. A small lamp was lit beside his bed. His voice was no more than a whisper. “Yes,” he said, “just imagine … I haven't slept in two months. It's horrible. It makes my life twice as long.”
“What are you complaining about?” I cried. “Ten lives wouldn't be enough for me !”
And it was true. I felt so strong, back then, as if my body was built to last a hundred years.
I looked at Hélène as I said it.
Hélène sighed and that involuntary sigh said so many things. She was pale and thin, and less beautiful than two years before. You could see that she needed exercise and fresh air, that she 'd been confined to the sickroom. When she first saw me she remained calm and smiled as she always did, but when she shook my hand, when she spoke the banal words of welcome, her voice betrayed her: it broke suddenly, leaving a gap in the vague, kind words she spoke; it was as if the timbre of her voice had changed, as if her blood had unexpectedly rushed to her heart. And when I answered her I could hear my own voice breaking the same way. We stood beside the sick man's bed and looked at each other, I with barely disguised triumph, she with a sort of despair. And that sigh! It meant she understood me, that she envied my freedom, that she too, in another time and place, would have liked ten lives and to live each one to the full, but instead she watched days and years pass, all lost to love.
When she walked me to the door I asked if she 'd heard from François.
She glanced anxiously towards the dying man's bed. “He never writes to me,” she said.
“He keeps to the same arrangement?”
“Yes. François won't change.”
I wonder now how right she was. How was François spending those hot spring days, in that little village in Bohemia? Surely there was some pretty country girl, some young servant in the background? After all, the three of us were young. It wasn't just about the pleasures of the flesh. No, it wasn't that simple. The flesh is easy to satisfy. It's the heart that is insatiable, the heart that needs to love, to despair, to burn with any kind of fire … That was what we wanted. To burn, to be consumed, to devour our days just as fire devours the forest.
It was the most beautiful spring evening of 1914. The door stood open behind us and we could see the shadow of a large, pinched nose on the wall. We were standing in the white corridor where, in years since, Hélène has stood before me so many times, her children hanging on to her skirt, saying in her polite, calm voice, “Oh, it's you, my dear Silvio, come in. There 's an extra egg and a veal cutlet. Would you like to stay for lunch?”
“My dear Silvio …” That's not what she called me then. She simply said “Silvio” (the word itself was a caress), “will you be staying home for long?”
I didn't answer but pointed instead to the shadow of the dying man and asked, “Is it very hard?”
She shuddered. “Quite hard, yes, but I don't want people feeling sorry for me.”
“But he 'll die soon,” I stressed cruelly. “François will come back.”
“Yes,” she said, “he 'll come back. But it would have been better if he 'd never gone away.”
“Are you still in love with him?”
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We were talking without knowing what we were saying. Our lips were moving, but they were lying. Only our eyes spoke, understood each other. But when I took her in my arms, our lips finally told the truth.
I will never forget that moment, never. It was then that I saw our shadows, merging as one, on the whitewashed wall. There were lamps all along the corridor, keeping watch. All along that big, bare corridor shadows danced, swayed and disappeared.
“Hélène,” the dying man called out, “Hélène.”
We didn't move. She seemed to be drinking me in, breathing in my heart. As for me, by the time I finally let her go I knew I had already begun to love her less.
PREFACE TO THE FRENCH EDITION
In 1918 the fifteen-year-old Irène Némirovsky was living in Mustamäki, the Finnish village that had become a haven to the wealthy elite of St. Petersburg since revolution broke out in Russia. To relieve the boredom, Irène wrote poems.
Little goat grazing in the mountains,
Galya is so happy to be alive.
The grey wolf will devour the little goat
But Galya will devour an entire army …
Nearly twenty years later, in 1937, Irène Némirovsky rediscovered these lines when she came across the slim black notebook that contained her early attempts at literature. They were a verse rewriting of Alphonse Daudet 's short story “La Chèvre de M. Seguin,” in which the goat, Blanchette, is eaten by a wolf; in Némirovsky's version, the goat gets its revenge. “If ever you read this, my daughters, how silly you will think I was!” Némirovsky wrote. “Even I think I was silly at that happy age. But it is important to respect the past. So I won't destroy a thing.”
Némirovsky remained true to her word. She tore up none of the work that belonged to her adolescence—a time when she was not entirely Russian, nor French either, nor conscious of her Jewishness. She had already mined her childhood memories and writings for material in 1934, shortly after her father's death, sketching out three novels and several stories alongside diary entries in a notebook Némirovsky called the “Monster” because of its ever-increasing size. The novels were Le Vin de solitude, Jézebel and Deux, the work of a writer at the height of her powers.