Mademoiselle O

1

I HAVE often noticed that after I had bestowed on my characters some treasured item of my past it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it. Although it lingered on in my mind its personal warmth, its retrospective appeal, had gone and presently it became more closely identified with my novel than with the folds of my former self where it had seemed to be so safe from the intrusion of the artist. Houses have crumbled in my memory as soundlessly as they did in the silent films of yore, and the portrait of my old French governess whom I once lent to a youthful hero of mine is already hardly discernible, now that it is engulfed in the description of a childhood entirely unrelated to my own. The man in me revolts against the fictionist, and here is my desperate attempt to save what is left of poor Mademoiselle O.

A large woman, a very stout woman as round as her name, Mademoiselle rolled into our existence as I was about to be eight. There she is. I see her so plainly: her abundant dark hair which is covertly graying, the three wrinkles on her austere forehead, her beetling brows, the steely eyes behind a black-rimmed pince-nez, that vestigial mustache, that blotchy complexion which in moments of wrath assumes a purple flush in the region of the third and amplest chin, so regally spread over the frilled mountain of her blouse. And now she sits down, or rather she tackles the job of sitting down, the jelly of her jowl quaking, her prodigious posterior, with the three buttons on the side, lowering itself warily; then at the last she surrenders her bulk to God and to the wicker armchair, which, out of sheer fright, bursts into a salvo of crackling.

The winter she came was the only one of my childhood that I spent in the country. It was also a particularly severe one, incidentally producing as much snow as Mademoiselle O might have expected to find in the hyperborean gloom of remote Muscovy. When she alighted at the little station from which she still had to travel half a dozen miles by sleigh to our country house, I was not there to greet her, but I do so now, as I try to imagine what she saw and felt at that last stage of her fabulous journey. Her Russian vocabulary, I know, consisted of one short word — the same solitary word which seven years later she was to take back to Switzerland. This word, which in her case may be phonetically rendered as “giddy-ay,” meant “ Where? ” And that was a good deal; uttered by her like the raucous cry of some lost bird, it accumulated such interrogatory force that it sufficed for all her needs. “Giddy-ay? Giddy-ay?” she would wail, not only to find out her whereabouts but also to express an abyss of misery: the fact that she was a stranger, shipwrecked, penniless, ailing, and that she was searching for the blessed land where at last she would be understood.

I can see her as she stands in the middle of the platform, and vainly my ghostly envoy offers her an arm which she cannot see. The door of the waiting room opens with the shuddering whine peculiar to nights of intense frost; a cloud of hot air rushes out almost as profuse as the steam from the great funnel-shaped stack of the panting engine; and now our coachman is attending to Mademoiselle: a burly man in sheepskin with the leather outside, his huge gloves protruding from his scarlet sash into which he has tucked them. I hear the snow crunching under his felt boots while he busies himself with the luggage, the jingling harness, and then his own nose, which he blows by means of a dexterous flip of finger and thumb as he trudges back round the sleigh. Slowly, with grim misgivings, Mademoiselle climbs in, clutching at her helper in mortal fear lest the sleigh move off before her vast form is securely encased. Finally she settles down with a grunt and thrusts her fists into her skimpy plush muff. At the juicy smacking of their driver’s lips the horses strain their quarters, shift hoofs, strain again; and then Mademoiselle gives a backward jerk of the torso as the heavy sleigh is wrenched out of its world of steel, fur, flesh, to enter a frictionless medium where it skims along a ghostly road that it seems barely to touch.

For one moment, thanks to the sudden aura of a lone lantern at the turning, a grossly exaggerated shadow, also holding a muff, races beside the sleigh, climbs a billow of snow, and is gone, leaving Mademoiselle to be swallowed up by what she will later allude to with awe and gusto as “the Steppe.” There, in the endless gloom, the changeable twinkle of remote village lights seems to her to be the yellow eyes of wolves. She is cold, she is frozen stiff — frozen “to the center of her brain,”for she soars with the wildest hyperbole when not clinging to the safest old saw. Every now and then she looks back to make sure that, always at the same distance, like those companionable phantoms of ships in polar seas, the second sleigh bearing her trunk and hatbox is following. And now I notice that I have quite forgotten the moon; for surely there must be a moon, that full incredibly clear moon that goes so well with our lusty frosts — and with Mademoiselle’s name. So there it comes, steering out of a medley of small dappled clouds which it tinges with a vague iridescence; and as it sails higher it glazes the runner-tracks left on the road where every sparkling lump of snow is emphasized by a swollen shadow.

Very lovely, very lonesome. But what am I doing here in this stereoscopic dreamland? Somehow those two sleighs have slipped away; they have left me behind on the bluewhite road. No, even the vibration in my ears is not their receding bells, but my own blood singing. All is still, spellbound, enthralled by that great heavenly “O" shining above my Russian wilderness. The snow is real, and as I bend to it and scoop up a handful, thirty-five years crumble to glittering frost-dust between my tingling fingers.

2

An oil lamp is brought into the gloaming. Gently it soars and comes down; the hand of memory, now in a servant’s white cotton glove, places it in the center of a round table. The flame is nicely adjusted, and a rosy silkflounced lamp shade crowns the light.

A warm, bright room in a snow-muffled house, soon to be termed le chateau; built by my great-grandfather, who, being afraid of fires, had the staircase made of iron, so that when the house was burned to the ground during the Revolution, those fretted steps remained standing, still leading up. But this is neither here nor there: such a number of things fade away, while and because their owners grow, change, and forget them, that it would be unfair to lay all the blame on civic convulsions.

Some more about that room, please. The oval mirror. Hanging aslant on taut cords, its pure brow inclined, it strives to retain the falling furniture and a slope of sheeny floor that keep slipping from its embrace. The chandelier pendants. These emit a delicate tinkling whenever anything is moved in an upstairs room. Colored pencils. That tiny heap of emerald pencil dust on the oilcloth where a penknife has just done its recurrent duty. We are sitting at the table, my brother and I and Miss Jones, who now and then looks at her watch: roads must be dreadful with all that snow; and anyway, many professional hardships lie in wait for that vague French person who will replace her.

Those colored pencils — how I loved them. The green one by a whirl of the wrist could be made to produce so simply a ruffled tree or the smoke of a house where spinach was cooking. The blue by drawing a single horizontal line invited a distant sail. Somehow or other the brown was always broken, whereas the little purple chap, a special favorite of mine, had got worn down so short as to become scarcely manageable. The white one alone, that lanky albino among pencils, kept its length, or at least did so until I realized that, far from being a fraud, leaving no mark on the page, it was the ideal tool because I could imagine whatever I wished while I scrawled.

Alas, these pencils too have been distributed among the characters of my books to keep fictitious children busy; they are not quite my own now. Somewhere, in the apartment house of a chapter, in the hired room of a paragraph, I have also placed that tilted mirror, and the lamp, and the chandelier-drops. Few things are left, many have been squandered. Have I given away that old brown dachshund fast asleep on the sofa? No, I think he is still mine. His grizzled muzzle, with that wart at the puckered corner of the mouth, is tucked into the curve of his hock, and from time to time a deep sigh distends his ribs. He is so old and his sleep is so thickly padded with dreams (about chewable slippers and a few last smells) that he does not stir when faint bells jingle outside and a pneumatic door heaves and clangs in the vestibule. She has come after all; I had so hoped she would not.

In our childhood we know a lot about hands since they live and hover at the level of our stature; Mademoiselle’s were unpleasant because of the froggy gloss on their tight skin besprinkled with brownish liver spots. Before her time no stranger had ever stroked my face. Mademoiselle, as soon as she came, took me completely aback by patting my cheek in sign of spontaneous affection. Later on this gesture went through a natural evolution, producing varieties which she classified according to their degree of strength as flick, slap, smack, and finally what may be translated as “the Great Volley” and which, indeed, resembled the backhand smash of a tennis ace.

All her mannerisms come back to me when I think of her hands. Her manner of peeling rather than sharpening a pencil, the point held towards her stupendous and sterile bosom swathed in green wool. The way she had of inserting her little finger into her ear and vibrating it very rapidly. The ritual observed every time she gave me a fresh copybook. Always panting a little, her mouth slightly open and emitting in quick succession a series of asthmatic purrs, she would open the copybook to make a margin in it; that is, she would trace a vertical line with her thumbnail, fold in the outer edge of the page, press, release, smooth it out with a final pat, after which the book would be briskly twisted around and placed before me ready for use. A new pen followed; she would moisten the glistening nib with susurrous lips before dipping it into the baptismal ink font. Then, delighting in every limb of every limpid letter (especially so because the preceding copybook had ended in utter sloppiness), with exquisite care I would inscribe the word Dictée while Mademoiselle hunted through her collection of spelling tests for a good hard passage.

3

Meanwhile the setting has changed. Hoarfrost and snow have been removed by a silent property man. The summer afternoon is alive with steep clouds breasting the blue. Eyed shadows move on the garden paths. Lessons are over and Mademoiselle is reading to us on the veranda where the plaited chairs smell of vanilla in the heat. The sun is everywhere — on the steps, on the mat, on the white window sills, where it repeats the hues of the stained glass. This is the time when Mademoiselle is at her very best.

What a number of volumes she read through to us on that veranda! Her slender voice sped on and on, never weakening, without the slightest hitch or hesitation, an admirable reading-machine wholly independent of her sick bronchial tubes. We got it all: the so-called “Pink Library” — inventive Jules Verne, bombastic Hugo, romantic Dumas the Elder. There she sat distilling her reading voice from the. still prison of her person. Apart from the lips, one of her chins, the smallest but real one, was the only mobile detail of her Buddha-like bulk. The black-rimmed pince-nez reflected eternity. Occasionally a fly would light on her stern forehead and the three wrinkles would instantly leap up together like three runners over three hurdles. But nothing whatever changed in the expression of her lace — that face which I so often tried to sketch, for its impassive and simple symmetry offered an almost voluptuous temptation to my furtive pencil.

Presently my attention would wander still further, and it was then perhaps that the rare purity of her rhythmic voice accomplished its true purpose. I looked at a creamy cloud and years later was able to visualize its exact shape. The gardener was pottering among the peonies. A wagtail took a few steps, remembered something, and then strutted on. Coming from nowhere, a comma butterfly settled on the threshold, basked in the sun with its fulvous wings spread, suddenly closed them just to show the tiny initial chalked on the under side, and as suddenly darted away. But the most constant source of enchantment was the rhomboids of colored glass inset harlequinwise in the crisscross panes of the side windows. The garden when viewed through these magic panes grew strangely still and aloof. If one looked through the blue glass the sand turned to cinders while inky-black trees swam in a tropical sky. The yellow one led to Cathay and tea-colored vistas. The red made the foliage drip ruby dark upon a pink-flushed footpath. The green soaked greenery in a greener green. And when after such richness one turned to a little square of normal savorless glass with its lone mosquito or lame daddy longlegs, it was like taking a draught of water when one is not thirsty, and one saw the first withered leaf lying on yonder bench and the blandly familiar birch trees. But of all the windows this is the pane through which parched nostalgia would long to peer now.

Mademoiselle never found out how potent had been the even flow of her voice. The claims she later put forward were quite different. “Ah, she sighed, “didn’t we love each other! Those good old days in the château! The dead wax doll we once buried under the oak! (No — a golliwog in red pants!) And that time you ran away and left me stumbling and howling in the depths of the forest! (The grove just beyond the old tennis court!) My, what a spanking you bad boys got! (Not I — I managed to escape and find Mother!) And the Princess, your aunt, whom you struck with your little fist because she had been rude to me! (I don’t remember.) And the way you whispered to me all your childish troubles! (Never!) And the cozy nook in my room where you loved to snuggle because you felt so warm and secure!”

Mademoiselle’s room, both in the country and in town, was a weird place to me — something like a dim hothouse sheltering a thick-leaved plant imbued with a heavy, queerly acrid odor — and although next to ours, it did not seem to belong to our pleasant, well-aired home. In that sickening mist, reeking among other effluvia with the brown smell of oxidized apple peels, the lamp burned low, and strange objects glimmered upon the writing desk: a lacquered box with licorice sticks, black segments of which she would hack off with her penknife and put to melt under her tongue; a picture postcard of a lake and a castle with prismatic spangles sublimating its windows; a bumpy ball of tightly rolled and compressed bits of silver paper that came from all those chocolates she used to consume at night; photographs of the nephew who had died, of his mother who had signed hers “Mater dolorosa,” of a certain Monsieur de Marante who had been forced by his family to marry a rich widow.

Lording it over the rest was one in a noble frame incrusted with garnets; it showed in three-quarter view a slim young brunette clad in a close-fitting checked dress, with a liquid glint in her eye and a great roll of hair burdening her pale graceful neck. “A braid as thick as my arm and reaching down to my ankles! was Mademoiselle’s melodramatic comment. For this had been she — but in vain did my eyes probe and dig into her familiar form to try to extract the exquisite creature it had engulfed. Such discoveries as I did make merely increased the difficulties of my task; and the grownups who during the day beheld only a densely clothed Mademoiselle O never saw what we children saw when, roused from her sleep by one of us shrieking himself out of a bad dream, disheveled, candle in hand, a gleam of gilt lace on the blood-red dressing gown that could not quite wrap her quaking mass, the nightmare Jézabel of Racine’s absurd play stamped barefooted into our bedroom.

All my life I have been a poor go-tosleeper. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me. I loathe Somnus, that black-masked headsman binding me to the block; and if in the course of years I have got so used to my nightly ordeal as almost to swagger while the familiar axe is coming out of its great velvet-lined case, initially I had no such comfort or defense, nothing — save a door left ajar into Mademoiselle’s room. That meek line of light was something I could cling to, since in absolute darkness my head would swim, just as the soul dissolves in the blackness of sleep.

Saturday night used to be a pleasurable prospect because that was the night Mademoiselle indulged in the luxury of a weekly bath, thus granting a longer lease to my tenuous gleam. But then a subtler torture set in. The bathroom was at the end of a Z-shaped corridor some twenty heartheats distant from my bed, and between apprehending Mademoiselle’s return and envying my brother’s stolid snore, I could never really put my additional time to profit by deftly getting to sleep while a chink in the dark still bespoke a speck of myself in Nirvana. At length they would come, those inexorable steps, plodding along the passage and causing some little glass object, which had been secretly sharing my vigil, to tinkle in dismay on its shelf.

Now she has entered her room. A brisk interchange of light-values tells me that the candle on her bed table takes over the job of the lamp on her desk. My line of light is still there, but grown old and wan, and flickers whenever Mademoiselle makes her bed creak by moving. For I still hear her. Now it is a silvery rustle spelling “Suchard”; now the trk-trk-trk of a fruit knife cutting the pages of La Revue des deux mondes; I hear her panting slightly. And all the time I am in acute distress, desperately trying to coax sleep, opening my eyes every few seconds to check the faded gleam, and imagining paradise as a place where a sleepless neighbor reads an endless book by the light of an eternal candle.

The inevitable happens: the pince-nez case shuts with a click, the review shuffles onto the marble of the bed table, and gustily Mademoiselle’s pursed lips blow; the first attempt fails, a groggy flame squirms and ducks; then comes a second lunge, and light collapses. In that pitchy blackness I lose my bearings, my bed seems to be slowly drifting, panic makes me sit up and stare; finally my dark-adapted eyes sift out, among entoptic floaters, certain more precious blurrings that roam in aimless amnesia until, half-remembering, they settle down as the dim folds of window curtains.

How utterly foreign to the troubles of the night were those exciting St. Petersburg mornings when the fierce and tender, damp and dazzling arctic spring bundled away broken ice down the sea-bright Neva! It made the roofs shine. It painted the slush in the streets a rich purplish-blue shade which I have never seen anywhere since. Mademoiselle, her coat of imitation seal majestically swelling on her bosom, sat on the back seat of the landau with my brother next to her and me facing them, joined to them by the valley of the velvety rug; and as I looked up I could see, strung on ropes from house to house high above the street, great semitransparent banners billowing, their three wide bands pale red, pale blue, and merely pale — deprived by the sun and the flying shadows of any too blunt connection with a national holiday, but undoubtedly celebrating now, in the city of memory, that spring day, that drive, the swish of the mud, and the ruffled exotic bird on Mademoiselle’s hat.

4

The unusual aspect of her limbless and boneless name may have had something to do with the morbid touchiness that was perhaps her main characteristic. Being absolutely Russian-proof, she fortunately remained unaware of what native servants did to that name; but whenever she was being introduced to a guest and it rolled out, sounding somewhat like a terminal interjection in a doggerel rhyme, her look was a mixture of defiance and anxiety. Her obesity was another reason for her always being on the defensive, as if she were living among cannibals who licked their chops behind her back.

And as though nature had not wished to spare her anything that makes one supersensitive, she was hard of hearing. Sometimes at table we boys would suddenly become aware of two big tears crawling down Mademoiselle’s ample checks. “Don’t mind me,” she would say in a small voice, and she kept on eating till the unwiped tears blinded her; then with a heartbroken hiccough she would rise and blunder out of the dining room. Little by little the truth would come out. The general talk had turned, say, on the subject of the warship my uncle commanded, and she had perceived in this a sly dig at her Switzerland that had no navy. Or else it was because she fancied that whenever French was spoken the game consisted in deliberately preventing her from directing and bejeweling the conversation. Poor lady, she was always in such a nervous hurry to seize control of intelligible table talk before it bolted back into Russian that no wonder she bungled her cue.

“And your Parliament, sir, how is it getting along?” she would suddenly burst out brightly from her end of the table, challenging my father, who, after a harassing day, was not exactly eager to discuss troubles of the State with a somehow unreal person who neither knew nor cared anything about them. Thinking that someone had referred to music, “But Silence, too, may be beautiful,” she would bubble. “Why, one evening in a desolate valley of the Alps I actually heard Silence.” Sallies like these, especially when growing deafness led her to answer a question none had put, resulted in a painful hush instead of touching off the rockets of a sprightly causerie.

And, really, her French was so lovely! Ought one to have minded the shallowness of her culture, the bitterness of her temper, the banality of her mind, when that pearly language of hers purled and scintillated, as innocent of sense as the alliterative sins of Racine’s pious verse? My father’s library, not her limited lore, taught me to appreciate authentic poetry; nevertheless something of her tongue’s limpidity and luster has had a singularly bracing effect upon me, like those sparkling salts which are used to purify the blood. That is why it makes me so sad to imagine now the anguish Mademoiselle O must have felt at seeing how lost, how little valued was the nightingale voice which came from her elephantine body. She stayed with us long, much too long, obstinately hoping for some miracle that would transform her into a kind of Madame de Rambouillet holding a gold-and-satin salon of poets, princes, and politicians under her brilliant spell.

She would have gone on hoping had it not been for Leonidas Orlov. He was a Russian tutor, with mild blue eyes and strong political opinions, who had been engaged to coach us in winter and play tennis and ride with us during the summer holidays. He taught mathematics entrancingly, lost his stirrups, and lobbed every ball into the lilac bushes. While venerating my father, he could not quite stomach certain aspects of our household, such as footmen and French, which last he considered an aristocratic convention of no use in a liberal statesman’s home. On the other hand Mademoiselle decided that if Orlov answered her point-blank questions only with short grunts (which he tried to Germanize for want of a better tongue), it was not because he could not understand French, but because he wished to insult her in front of everybody.

I can see and hear Mademoiselle requesting him in dulcet tones, but with an ominous tightening of the lips, to pass her the bread; and likewise I can hear and see Orlov unflinchingly going on with his soup; finally with a slashing “Pardon, Monsieur,” Mademoiselle would swoop right across his plate, snatch up the breadbasket, and recoil again with a “Thank you, sir" so charged with irony that Orlov’s downy ears would turn the color of geranium. “The brute! The cad! The Nihilist!” she sobbed later in her room — which was no longer next to ours though still on the same floor.

If Orlov happened to come tripping downstairs while, with an asthmatic pause after every ten steps or so, she was working her way up (for the little hydraulic elevator would constantly, and rather insultingly too, refuse to function), Mademoiselle maintained that he had viciously bumped into her, pushed her, knocked her down, and we already could see him trampling her prostrate body. More and more frequently she would leave the table, and the chocolate ice or gâteau d’Artois that she would have missed was diplomatically sent up in her wake. From her remote room she would write a sixteen-page letter to my mother, who, hurrying upstairs, would find her dramatically packing her trunk. And then one day she was allowed to go on packing.

5

Because of the war she had some trouble in reaching Switzerland. “The Germans,” she wrote with her usual emphasis, “stripped me to the skin, searching me for some secret message which, hélas! they did not find.” Nor have I — at least up to this point of her life story. But some ten years later, in the middle twenties long after our correspondence had fizzled out, by some fluke move of life in exile I chanced to pass through Lausanne — so I thought I might as well look up Mademoiselle O if she was still alive.

She was. Stouter than ever, but quite gray and almost totally deaf, she welcomed me with a tumultuous outburst of affection. Instead of the Château de Chillon picture there was now one of a gaudy troika. She spoke as warmly of her life in Russia as if it were her own lost homeland. Indeed I found in the neighborhood quite a colony of such old Swiss governesses ousted by our Revolution. Clustering together in a constant seething of competitive reminiscences, they formed a small island in the midst of a country which had grown alien to them. One is always at home in one’s past, no matter what its color, which partly explains those pathetic ladies’ posthumous love for another land that they never really had known and where most of them had been continuously unhappy.

As no dialogue was possible because of Mademoiselle’s deafness, I decided to bring her next day the appliance which I gathered she could not afford. No sooner had she adjusted the clumsy thing than she turned to me with a dazzled look of moist wonder and bliss in her eyes. She swore she could hear every word, every murmur of mine. She could not, for I had not spoken. Was it silence she heard, that Silence she had talked about in the past? No, she had been lying to herself then; now she was lying to me.

Before leaving for Basle and Berlin, I found myself somehow or other walking along the lake in the clammy and misty night. At one spot a lone arc light dimly diluted the darkness. In its nimbus the mist seemed transformed into a visible drizzle. “Il pleut toujours en Suisse” was one of those casual comments which formerly had made Mademoiselle weep. Below, a wide ripple, almost a wave, and something vaguely white happened to attract my eye. As I came quite close to the lapping water I saw what it was — an aged swan, a large and uncouth creature, making ridiculous efforts to hoist himself into a moored boat. He could not do it. The heavy, impotent flapping of his wings, that scaly, slippery sound against the rocking and plashing boat, the gluey glistening of the dark swell where it caught the light — all seemed for a moment laden with that strange significance which sometimes in our dreams is attached to a finger pressed to mute lips and then pointing to something we have not time to discern before waking with a shudder. But although I soon forgot that dismal night it was, oddly enough, that night, that compound image — shudder and swan and swell — which first came to my mind when a couple of years later I learned that Mademoiselle had died.

She had spent all her life in feeling miserable; this misery was her native element; its fluctuations, its varying depths, alone gave her the impression of moving and living. What bothers me is that a sense of misery, and nothing else, is not enough to make a permanent soul. My enormous and morose Mademoiselle O is all right on earth but impossible in eternity. Have I really salvaged her from fiction?

Just before the rhythm I hear falters and fades, I catch myself wondering whether, during the years I knew her, I had not kept utterly missing something in her that was far more she than her name or her chins or her ways or even her French — something perhaps akin to that last glimpse of her, to the radiant deceit she used in order to have me depart pleased with my own kindness, or to that swan whose agony was so much more real than a drooping dancer’s white arms; something in short which I could appreciate only after the things and beings that I had most loved in the security of my childhood had been turned to ashes or shot through the heart.