Julian Barnes: The Noise of Time

He knew, in his mind, what his ideal of love was. It was fully expressed in that Maupassant short story about the young garrison commander of a fortress town on the Mediterranean coast. Antibes, that was it. Anyway, the officer used to go walking in the woods outside the town, where he kept running into the wife of a local businessman, Monsieur Parisse. Naturally enough, he fell in love with her. The woman repeatedly declined his attentions until the day she let him know that her husband would be away on an overnight trip. An assignation was arranged, but at the last minute the wife received a telegram: her husband’s business had concluded early, and he would be home that evening. The garrison commander, mad with passion, feigned a military emergency and ordered the town’s gates to be closed until the next morning. The returning husband was driven away at bayonet point and obliged to spend the night in the waiting room of Antibes railway station. All so that the officer could enjoy his few hours of love.

True, he could not imagine himself in charge of a fortress, not even a tumbledown Ottoman gateway in a sleepy Black Sea spa town. But the principle applied. This was how you should love — without fear, without barriers, without thought for the morrow. And then, afterwards, without regret.

Fine words. Fine sentiments. Yet such behaviour was beyond him. He could imagine a young Lieutenant Tukhachevsky pulling it off, had he ever been a garrison commander. His own case of mad passion … well, it would make a different kind of story. He had been on tour with Gauk — a good enough conductor, but a bourgeois through and through. They were in Odessa. This was a couple of years before he and Nita married. At the time he was still trying to make Tanya jealous. Nita as well, probably. After a good dinner, he had come back to the bar of the London Hotel and picked up two girls. Or perhaps they had picked him up. At any rate, they had joined his table. They were both very pretty, and he was immediately attracted to the one called Rozaliya. They had talked of art and literature while he fondled her buttocks. He drove them home in a horse-drawn carriage and the friend looked away while he touched Rozaliya all over. He was in love, that much was clear to him. The two women had arranged to take a steamer to Batumi the next day, and he went to see them off. But the girls never got beyond the pier, where Rozaliya’s friend was arrested for being a professional prostitute.

This had come as a surprise to him. At the same time, he felt such a terrible love for Rozochka. He did things like banging his head against the wall, and tearing at his hair; just like a character in a bad novel. Gauk warned him severely against the two women, saying that they were both prostitutes and terrible bitches. But this only increased his excitement — it was all such fun. So much fun that he’d nearly got married to Rozochka. Except that when they got to the registry office in Odessa he realised he’d left his identity documents back at the hotel. And then, somehow — he couldn’t even recall why or how — it had all come to an end with him running away in pouring rain at three o’clock in the morning from a boat which had just docked at Sukhumi. What had all that been about?

But the point was, he didn’t regret any of it. No barriers, no thought for the morrow. And how come he had nearly married a professional prostitute? Because of the circumstances, he assumed, and some element of folie à deux . Also, because of a spirit of contradictoriness within him. ‘Mother, this is Rozaliya, my wife. Surely it doesn’t come as a surprise? Didn’t you read my diary, where I’d written down “Marriage to a prostitute”? It’s good for a woman to have a profession, don’t you think?’ Also, divorce was easily obtainable, so why not? He had felt such love for her, and a few days later he was nearly marrying her, and a few days after that running away from her in the rain. Meanwhile, old man Gauk sat in the restaurant of the London Hotel, trying to decide whether to have one cutlet or two. And who’s to say what would have been for the best? You only found out afterwards, when it was too late.

He was an introverted man who was attracted to extroverted women. Was that part of the trouble?

He lit another cigarette. Between art and love, between oppressors and oppressed, there were always cigarettes. He imagined Zakrevsky’s successor, behind his desk, holding out a pack of Belomory. He would decline, and offer one of his own Kazbeki. The interrogator would in return refuse, and each would lay his chosen brand on the desk, the dance concluded. Kazbeki were smoked by artists, and the packet’s very design suggested freedom: a galloping horse and rider against the background of Mount Kazbek. Stalin himself was said to have personally approved the artwork; though the Great Leader smoked his own brand, Herzegovina Flor. They were specially made for him, with the terrified precision you could imagine. Not that Stalin did anything as simple as put a Herzegovina Flor between his lips. No, he preferred to break off the cardboard tube and then crumble the tobacco into his pipe. Stalin’s desk, those in the know told those not in the know, was a terrible mess of discarded paper and cardboard and ash. He knew this — or rather, he had been told this more than once — because nothing about Stalin was deemed too trivial to pass on.

No one else would smoke a Herzegovina Flor in Stalin’s presence — unless offered one, when they might slyly attempt to keep it unsmoked and afterwards flourish it like a holy relic. Those who carried out Stalin’s orders tended to smoke Belomory. The NKVD smoked Belomory. Its packet design showed a map of Russia; marked in red was the White Sea Canal, after which the cigarettes were named. This Great Soviet Achievement of the early Thirties had been built with convict labour. Unusually, much propaganda was made of this fact. It was claimed that while constructing the canal the convicts were not just helping the nation advance but also ‘reforging themselves’. Well, there had been 100,000 labourers, so it was possible that some of them might have been morally improved; but a quarter of them were said to have died, and those clearly had not been reforged. They were just the chips that had flown while the wood was being chopped. And the NKVD would light up their Belomory and picture in the rising smoke new dreams of wielding the axe.

No doubt he had been smoking at the moment Nita came into his life. Nina Varzar, eldest of the three Varzar sisters, straight off the tennis court, exuding cheerfulness, laughter and sweat. Athletic, confident, popular, with such golden hair that it somehow seemed to turn her eyes golden. A qualified physicist, an excellent photographer who had her own darkroom. Not over-interested in domestic matters, it was true; but then neither was he. In a novel, all his life’s anxieties, his mixture of strength and weakness, his potential for hysteria — all would have been swirled away in a vortex of love leading to the blissful calm of marriage. But one of life’s many disappointments was that it was never a novel, not by Maupassant or anyone else. Well, perhaps a short satirical tale by Gogol.

And so he and Nina met, and they became lovers, but he was still trying to win Tanya back from her husband, and then Tanya fell pregnant, and then he and Nina fixed a day for their wedding, but at the last minute he couldn’t face it so failed to turn up and ran away and hid, but still they persevered and a few months later they married, and then Nina took a lover, and they decided their problems were such that they should separate and divorce, and then he took a lover, and they separated and put in the papers for a divorce, but by the time the divorce came through they realised they had made a mistake and so six weeks after the divorce they remarried, but still they had not resolved their troubles. And in the middle of it all he wrote to his lover Yelena, ‘I am very weak-willed and do not know if I will be able to achieve happiness.’