Collected Prose

than a year before, and since S. had become important to him precisely in relation to his thoughts about his father, he felt that somehow the death of one automatically entailed the death of the other. In spite of what he tried to tell himself, he actually believed this. Beyond that he thought: if I go to see S., then I will learn he is dead; but if I stay away, it will mean he is alive. By remaining absent, therefore, A. felt that he would be helping to keep S. in the world. Day after day, he walked around Paris with an image of S. in his mind. A hundred times a day, he imagined himself entering the little room on the Place Pinel. And still, he could not bring himself to go there. It was then that he realized he was living in a state of extreme duress.
    *

    Further commentary on the nature of chance.
    From his last visit to S., at the end of those years in Paris (1974), a photograph has been preserved. A. and S. are standing outside, by the doorway of S.’s house. They each have an arm around the other’s shoulder, and there is an unmistakeable glow of friendship and comraderie on their faces. This picture is one of the few personal tokens A. has brought with him to his room on Varick Street.
    As he studies this picture now (Christmas Eve, 1979), he is reminded of another picture he used to see on the wall of S.’s room: S. as a young man, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, standing with a boy of twelve or thirteen. Same evocation of friendship, same smiles, same arms-around-the-shoulders pose. The boy, S. had told him, was the son of Marina Tsvetayeva. Marina Tsvetayeva, who stands in A.’s mind along with Mandelstam as the greatest of Russian poets. To look at this 1974 photograph for him is to imagine her impossible life, which ended when she hanged herself in 1941. For many of the years between the Civil War and her death she had lived in the Russian emigré circles in France, the same community in which S. had been raised, and he had known her and had been a friend of her son, Mur. Marina Tsvetayeva, who had written: “It may be that a better way / To conquer time and the world / Is to pass, and not to leave a trace—/ To pass, and not to leave a shadow / on the walls …”; who had written: “I didn’t want this, not / this (but listen, quietly, / to want is what bodies do / and now we are ghosts only) …”; who had written: “In this most Christian of worlds / All poets are Jews.”
    When A. and his wife returned to New York in 1974, they moved into an apartment on Riverside Drive. Among their neighbors in the building was an old Russian doctor, Gregory Altschuller, a man well into his eighties, who still did research work at one of the city hospitals and who, along with his wife, had a great interest in literature. Dr. Altschuller’s father had been Tolstoy’s personal physician, and propped up on a table in the Riverside Drive apartment was an enormous photograph of the bearded writer, duly inscribed, in an equally enormous hand, to his friend and doctor. In conversations with the younger Dr. Altschuller, A. learned something that struck him as nothing less than extraordinary. In a small village outside Prague, in the dead of winter in 1925, this man had delivered Marina Tsvetayeva’s son: the same son who had grown up into the boy in the photograph on S.’s wall. More than that: this was the only baby he ever delivered in his career as a doctor.
    “It was night,” Dr. Altschuller wrote recently, “the last day of January, 1925…. The snow was falling, a terrible storm which snowed-in everything. A Czech boy came running to me from the village where Tsvetayeva now lived with her family, though her husband was not with her at the time. Her daughter was also away with her father. Marina was alone.
    “The boy rushed into the room and said: ‘Pani Tsvetayeva wants you to come to her immediately because she’s already in labor! You have to hurry, it’s already on the way.’ What could I say? I quickly dressed and walked through the forest, snow up to my knees, in a raging storm. I opened the door and went in. In the pale light of a lonely electric bulb I saw piles of books in one corner of the room; they nearly reached the ceiling. Days of accumulated rubbish was shoveled into another corner of the room. And there was Marina, chain-smoking in bed, baby already on the way. Greeting me gaily: ‘You’re almost late!’ I looked around the room for something clean, for a piece of soap. Nothing,