Hugh, tilting his head slightly, satisfied himself that he had
been right: it was indeed the paperback edition of Figures in a Golden
Window.
"One of ours," said Hugh with an indicative nod.
She [Armande] considered the
book in her lap as if seeking in it some explanation of his remark. Her skirt
was very short.
"I mean," he said, "I work for that particular publisher. For
the American publisher of the hard-cover edition. Do you like it?"
She answered in fluent but artificial English that she
detested surrealistic novels of the poetic sort. She demanded hard realistic
stuff reflecting our age. She liked books about Violence and Oriental Wisdom.
Did it get better farther on?
"Well, there's a rather dramatic scene in a Riviera villa,
when the little girl, the narrator's daughter - "
"June."
"Yes. June sets her new dollhouse on fire and the whole villa
burns down; but there's not much violence, I'm afraid; it is all rather
symbolic, in the grand manner, and, well, curiously tender at the same time, as
the blurb says, or at least said, in our first edition. That cover is by the
famous Paul Plam."
She would finish it, of course, no matter how boring, because
every task in life should be brought to an end like completing that road above
Witt, where they had a house, a chalet de luxe, but had to trudge up to the
Drakonita cableway until that new road had been finished. The Burning
Window or whatever it was called had been given her only the day before, on
her twenty-third birthday, by the author's stepdaughter whom he probably -
"Julia."
Yes. Julia and she had both taught in the winter at a school
for foreign young ladies in the Tessin. Julia's stepfather had just divorced her
mother whom he had treated in an abominable fashion. What had they taught? Oh,
posture, rhythmics - things like that. (9)
Would you permit me to call on you, say
Wednesday, the fourth? Because I shall be by then at the Ascot Hotel in your
Witt, where I am told there is some excellent skiing even in summer. The main
object of my stay here, on the other hand, is to find out when the old rascal's
current book will be finished. It is queer to recall how keenly only the day
before yesterday I had looked forward to seeing the great man at last in the
flesh. (10)
Now we have to bring into focus the main street
of Witt as it was on Thursday, the day after her telephone call. It teems with
transparent people and processes, into which and through which we might sink
with an angel's or author's delight, but we have to single out for this report
only one Person. (13)
Armande informed Percy that Julia had come
all the way from Geneva to consult her about the translation of a number of
phrases with which she, Julia, who was going tomorrow to Moscow, desired to
"impress" her Russian friends.
Percy, here, worked for her stepfather.
"My former stepfather, thank Heavens," said Julia.
"By the way, Percy, if that's your nom de voyage, perhaps you may help.
As she explained, I want to dazzle some people in Moscow, who promised me the
company of a famous young Russian poet. Armande has supplied me with a number of
darling words, but we got stuck at - " (taking a slip of paper from her bag) -
"I want to know how to say:
'What a cute little church, what a big snowdrift.' You see we
do it first into French and she thinks 'snowdrift' is rafale de neige,
but I'm sure it can't be rafale in French and rafalovich in
Russian, or whatever they call a snowstorm."
"The word you want," said our Person, "is congère,
feminine gender, I learned it from my mother."
"Then it's sugrob in Russian," said Armande and added
dryly: "Only there won't be much snow there in August." (ibid.)
August 4 was Wednesday in 1965. It seems that
Hugh Person makes Armande's acquaintance on Monday, August 2.
August 1, 1965, was Armande's twenty-third
birthday. So she was born on August 1, 1942. Armande's father, Charles
Chamar, died in summer, 1964:
No, her father's family came from Belgium, he was an architect
who got killed last summer while supervising the demolition of a famous hotel in
a defunct spa; and her mother was born in Russia, in a very noble milieu, but of
course completely ruined by the revolution. (9)
Actually, Anastasia Petrovna Potapov (Armande's
mother) is a grand-daughter of a
country veterinary. She was born in Ryazan
before 1917 and dies in February,
1966:
In the second week of February, about one
month before death separated them, the Persons flew over to Europe for a few
days: Armande, to visit her mother dying in a Belgian hospital (the dutiful
daughter came too late), and Hugh, at his firm's request, to look up Mr. R. and
another American writer, also residing in Switzerland.
(18)
This was his fourth visit to Switzerland. The first one had been
eighteen years before when he had stayed for a few days at Trux with his
father. Ten years later, at thirty-two, he had revisited that old lakeside town
and had successfully courted a sentimental thrill, half wonder and half remorse,
by going to see their hotel. (4)
HP was born in 1933 (the year in which Hitler came to
power in Germany). For the first time HP visits Switzerland in 1955
with his father who dies during this visit. (HP's mother died a year
before. HP's parents outlived Stalin who died on March 5, 1953.) On the day
of his father's death HP moves to much finer lodgings in Geneva, has
homard à
l'américaine for dinner, and goes to find his first whore in a lane right
behind his hotel:
She [the
prostitute] took him to one of the better beds in a hideous old
roominghouse - to the precise "number," in fact, where ninety-one, ninety-two,
nearly ninety-three years ago a Russian novelist had sojourned on his way to
Italy. The bed - a different one, with brass knobs - was made, unmade, covered
with a frock coat, made again; upon it stood a half-open green-checkered grip,
and the frock coat was thrown over the shoulders of the night-shirted,
bare-necked, dark-tousled traveler whom we catch in the act of deciding what to
take out of the valise (which he will send by mail coach ahead) and transfer to
the knapsack (which he will carry himself across the mountains to the Italian
frontier). He expects his friend Kandidatov, the painter, to join him here any
moment for the outing, one of those lighthearted hikes that romantics would
undertake even during a drizzly spell in August; it rained even more in those
uncomfortable times; his boots are still wet from a ten-mile ramble to the
nearest casino. They stand outside the door in the attitude of expulsion, and he
has wrapped his feet in several layers of German-language newspaper, a language
which incidentally he finds easier to read than French. The main problem now is
whether to confide to his knapsack or mail in his grip his manuscripts: rough
drafts of letters, an unfinished short story in a Russian copybook bound in
black cloth, parts of a philosophical essay in a blue cahier acquired in Geneva,
and the loose sheets of a rudimentary novel under the provisional title of
Faust in Moscow. As he sits at that deal table, the very same upon
which our Person's whore has plunked her voluminous handbag, there shows through
that bag, as it were, the first page of the Faust affair with energetic erasures
and untidy insertions in purple, black, reptile-green ink. The sight of his
handwriting fascinates him; the chaos on the page is to him order, the blots are
pictures, the marginal jottings are wings. Instead of sorting his papers, he
uncorks his portable ink and moves nearer to the table, pen in hand. But at that
minute there comes a joyful banging on the door. The door flies open and closes
again. (6)
1955 - 93 = 1862. In 1862 Turgenev's Otsy i deti
("Fathers and Sons") appeared. Turgenev is the author of Faust (a Story in
Nine Letters) (1856). In Turgenev's correspondence there is a strange
gap in August, 1856. On July 21/August 2, 1856, Turgenev left St.
Petersburg on a steamer sailing to Stettin, completed his Faust
abroad and on August 18/30 sent the manuscript to the editors of
The Contemporary.
HP strangles Armande in his sleep in March,
1966.