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Overview
Two old friends meet nightly in Paris, trading conversational barbs and manoeuvring around submerged feelings. Throughout the ten years of their separation, thoughts of Claire lingered persistently in Kolya's mind. As the imagined romance finally becomes real, Kolya is thrown into recollections of formative moments from his youth in Russia, from his solitary early years through military school and service in the White Army in the Civil War, all leading to this union with Claire.
The first novel by the celebrated Russian master Gaito Gazdanov, An Evening with Claire is a lyrical, finely crafted portrait of a lost innocence and a vanished era.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781782276050 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Steerforth Press |
| Publication date: | 10/19/2021 |
| Series: | Pushkin Collection |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 624,070 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.78(w) x 6.50(h) x 0.70(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Claire was ill. For whole evenings I would sit up with her, and, each time I
left, I would invariably miss the last Métro and end up going on foot from rue Raynouard to the place Saint-Michel, in the vicinity of which I lived. I
would pass by the stables of the École Militaire; from there I could hear the clanging of the chains to which the horses were tethered and smell that thick equine aroma so uncommon in Paris; then I would walk along the long and narrow rue de Babylone, and at the end of this street, in a photographer’s shop window, by the dim light of a distant street lamp, the face of some famous writer, composed entirely of slanting planes, would gaze out at me; those omniscient eyes behind horn-rimmed European spectacles would follow me for half a block—until I crossed the glittering black strip of boulevard Raspail. At length, I would arrive at my pension.
Industrious old women dressed in rags would outstrip me, tottering on feeble legs. Over the Seine myriad lights would burn brightly, drowning in the darkness, and as I watched them from a bridge, it would suddenly seem to me as if I were standing above a harbour and the sea were covered in foreign ships emblazed with lanterns. Taking one last look at the Seine, I
would go up to my room, lie down to sleep and sink instantaneously into the unfathomable gloom where trembling bodies stirred, not always quite managing to take on the form of images familiar to my eyes and thus vanishing without ever having materialized. And even in sleep’s embrace I
lamented these disappearances, sympathized with their imaginary,
unintelligible sorrow, and so I lived and slumbered in an ineffable state,
which I shall never understand in waking. This fact ought to have grieved me, but in the morning I would forget what I had seen in my dreams, and my abiding memory of the foregoing day would be the recollection that I
had again missed the Métro. In the evening I would set out again for
Claire’s. Several months previously her husband had left for Ceylon, leaving us alone together; and only the maid, who brought in tea and biscuits on a wooden tray decorated with a finely drawn image of a gaunt Chinaman, a woman of around forty-five who wore a pince-nez (and hence didn’t at all look like a servant) and who was forever lost in thought—she would always forget the sugar tongs, or the sugar bowl, or else a saucer or a spoon—only she would interrupt our ménage, coming in to ask whether madame needed anything. Claire, who for some reason was sure that the maid would be offended if she didn’t ask her for something, would say: yes,
please bring the gramophone and some records from monsieur’s study—
Claire that while her maid looked remarkably well preserved for her years,
and though her legs still possessed a positively youthful indefatigability, all the same, I wasn’t too sure that she was quite all there—either she had a mania for locomotion or else her mental faculties had just imperceptibly but unquestionably attenuated in connection with the onset of old age—
Claire looked at me pityingly and replied that I should do better to exert my singular Russian wit on others. Besides, as she saw it, I ought to have remembered that only the previous day I had shown up again in a shirt with mismatching cufflinks, and that I couldn’t, as I had done the day before that, simply throw my gloves down on her bed and take her by the shoulders, something that wouldn’t pass for a proper greeting anywhere on earth, and that if she wanted to enumerate all my violations of the elementary rules of propriety, then she would have to go on for… at this point she paused in thought and said: five years. She uttered these words with a look of severity; I began to feel sorry that such trifles could irk her so and wanted to ask her forgiveness, but she turned away, her back began to convulse, and she raised a handkerchief to her eyes—and when at last she turned to look at me, I saw that she was laughing. She told me that the maid was seeing out the latest in a series of romantic liaisons, and that a man who had promised to marry her now refused bluntly. That was why she was so lost in thought. “What’s there to think about?” I asked. “So he’s refused to marry her. Does one really need so much time to grasp such a simple thing?”
“You always put things much too plainly,” said Claire. “Women do.
She’s thinking because it’s a pity for her. How is it that you can’t understand this?”