They would manage as best they could, said Rose Liebig. The room was warm, the swaddling clothes and cradle were all ready, and they weren’t short of medical assistance: the hotel was full of refugees from central Europe, the majority of whom were medical students and midwives. Ada didn’t know anyone, or so she thought, but everyone knew about her condition, and she was more fussed over and spoiled that day than she’d been in all her life: they brought her apples, cushions for her and the baby, Viennese pastries, honey-covered nuts that were a Jewish speciality, little flasks of eau de cologne. No one came into the room, but from her bed, she could hear footsteps stop at the door, hesitate, and a secret hand would leave a package on the landing. Every now and again, she would lose consciousness and forget that Harry wasn’t with her; she would look around for him and call out his name, in vain. She imagined she was crying out and chasing him from room to room or through the streets. But the people who were looking after her heard only low groans, suppressed as if in shame, and words spoken in French that they couldn’t understand.
She came round during the night. All she could see was a lamp covered in a green silk shawl; the rest of the room was plunged into darkness. She felt as if this was not the first time she had suffered this way, that she had already been stretched out in a bed like this, had already brought a child into the world. This impression was so strange, so bewildering that she raised herself up in the bed and placed a trembling hand on the pillow beside her.
‘My child? . . . Where is my child?’
Someone moistened her lips and forehead with some cool water and for an instant, she recognised Rose Liebig. The two women looked at each other.
‘Rose . . . where is his father now?’ Ada asked suddenly, forcing herself to smile weakly. ‘I know that he’s thinking about me at this very moment.’
‘Of course,’ murmured Rose, with pity. ‘Of course.’
And she walked away, disappearing into the dark part of the room, leaving Ada alone with her ghosts; they rose up from every corner of the room: Aunt Raissa and Madame Mimi, Ben and Laurence. Only Harry was missing, and Ada felt as if her heart were being torn apart. Finally, the pain subsided, but the child still had not been born. Some of the older women walked quietly over to the bed. They wanted Ada to eat an orange; she sucked on a few sections of the fruit they had rolled in sugar and felt better, stronger. Everyone was talking all around her; they were listing the people who had died the previous evening during the uprising at the large factories in the southern suburbs.
‘What a terrible time for a child to be born . . .’ someone sighed. ‘And the woman all on her own.’
‘Nonsense!’ said Rose. ‘The most wealthy, the most cherished woman in the world feels all alone on the day when she brings her first child into the world, just as alone as a woman who is dying or the first woman ever to give birth.’
Was that really Rose Liebig who was talking? Or was Ada listening to a voice from within herself, wiser and older than herself, a voice that had so often consoled her in the past? She shifted in the big bed and the familiar, monotonous voices soothed her once more.
‘I’ve heard there are still some places left for immigrants in Canada. I heard it from the sister of the Persian consul who knows the secretary of the owner of . . .’
Ada closed her eyes. Where had she heard that before? It was in Paris, in another world, centuries before. Everything was becoming confused, slipping away, disappearing. Had she really even known Harry? Or was it a dream? She shuddered for a moment at the idea that she might wake up as a child in her bedroom in the Ukraine and realise that she had imagined all those years of happiness and pain.
‘And so,’ she thought, ‘I regret nothing. I have been happy. I may not have known it, but I have been unbelievably happy. I have been loved. I am still loved. I know that’s true, in spite of the distance between us, in spite of the separation. And I still have my eyes and my hands and my wonderful work.’
She didn’t think about the child. In the hours just before birth, the child is forgotten. Other people think about him, but not the suffering mother. Every so often, Ada wondered, ‘But why am I in so much pain? My God, will it never end?’
The worst moment came as night was ending, the moment when the pain seems unbearable and the fear of death is strong. Ada feared it more than anyone: what would happen to her child?
She suddenly thought of Nastasia, as she had been long ago, and called out for help from that other little Jewish woman who had fled from country to country carrying her precious burden inside her.
The child came into the world and began to cry.
Ada could hear the noise from the marketplace: joyful sounds rose up to her room. It was a beautiful day with almost no snow or wind. They pushed Ada’s bed over to the window, into the light, and tucked the baby in bed beside her. Everyone went away. Rose Liebig was sitting in a corner of the room, sewing. Just as you rest in the evening after walking all day long, just as your skin soaks up the coolness of the sheets, the softness of the bed after a day in the heat and dust, so Ada, eyes closed, felt a sense of physical, almost primal happiness sweep through her body, a feeling that was more wonderful than anything she had ever felt. Weakly, she moved her hand along the sheets and the feel of them filled her with sweet, peaceful joy. She watched the light against the windowpanes and smiled. She felt as if her body had been torn apart by pain and was not yet whole again, not yet able to resume her terrifying capacity to suffer when part of her body or soul was suffering. It had been liberated from its bondage: she was split into a thousand Adas, and each one of them was free, each one rejoiced with not a thought for the others, with not a thought, most importantly, for the real Ada and her past. Had she actually had a past? She had given up a part of her life for her newborn child, but he was giving her a wonderful gift; he shared his own riches with his mother: the gift of sleep, the gift of innocence, perhaps even the gift of forgetfulness.
The child was asleep in her arms; together they dozed off and woke up: the baby to cry, and Ada to smile as she looked at him. He had fine dark hair and a large forehead. He didn’t look like anyone in particular. She studied him intently but could find no features she recognised, yet, at the same time, he seemed very old and very wise, as all babies do when they are first born.
With deep astonishment and extraordinary joy, she could feel a faint, rapid rhythm beside her, the gentle beating of a heart that gave her two hearts. She thought of Harry then, when he lay in her arms. But Harry seemed far away; he had returned to his place in her dreams. He had been hers, and she had lost him. Her destiny was certainly harsh and incomprehensible, yet without quite knowing why, she sensed that she was at the brink of an explanation, of some truth that would suddenly shed light on the injustice of it all and resolve the dilemma. She had no doubt that her child knew something of this truth – and this is what made him look so old and wise; she knew the other part, she who had given up struggling, who asked for nothing, regretted nothing, she who felt so weary and carefree, both at the same time. Perhaps the two parts of this truth would merge to form a brilliant light? Fire destroys one tree after the other, until the entire forest is ablaze.
Like a child listing all the precious things he owns, she counted on her fingers: ‘Painting, the baby, courage: with those things, you can live. You can live a good life.’
Rose Liebig was a little frightened by her silence; she stood up and looked over at the bed.
‘Are you two all right?’ she asked.
‘We’re fine,’ said Ada.
She said it again and smiled: ‘we’ . . . For the first time in her life, she realised she could say this word and know for sure that it was true. And how sweet was its sound.
INTRODUCTION TO
THE FRENCH EDITION
Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev on 11 February 1903. She was raised by a French governess, and spoke only French with her mother, with whom she had a difficult relationship (reflected in several of her nove
ls). Her father was an important banker. When the October Revolution of 1917 broke out, a price was placed on his head, forcing him to go into hiding in Moscow with his family. It was at this time that Irène, for whom French had become as much her maternal language as Russian, discovered the short stories of de Maupassant, J.K. Huysmans’s À Rebours (Against the Grain) and Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray. The Némirovskys managed to flee to Finland; they then spent a year in Stockholm before settling in Paris in 1919, where her father managed to rebuild his fortune.
In 1929, after graduating in literature, Irène published her first novel, David Golder, which was greeted with unanimous critical acclaim. During the 1930s, she would publish nine novels and a collection of short stories: Le Bal (The Ball), Le Malentendu (The Misunderstanding), Les Mouches d’automne (published in English as Snow in Autumn), L’Affaire Courilof (The Courilof Affair), Films parlés (Spoken films), Le Pion sur l’échequier (The Pawn on the Chessboard), Le Vin de solitude (The Wine of Solitude), Jézabel (Jezebel), La Proie (The Prey) and Deux (Two). Les Chiens et les Loups (The Dogs and the Wolves) was published in 1940. While taking refuge in the Saône-et-Loire region during the war, she wrote three books that would be published posthumously: La Vie de Tchekhov (The Life of Chekhov), 1946, Les Biens de ce monde (All Our Worldly Goods), 1947 and Les Feux de l’automne (Autumn Fires), 1957. While in the process of writing an ambitious novel opening with the exodus from Paris in June 1940, she was arrested in July 1942, sent to a transit camp at Pithiviers, then deported to Auschwitz, where she died in August 1942.
After her death, the Albin Michel Publishing House and Robert Esménard took responsibility for educating her two daughters, who had spent the rest of the war in hiding with their governess. They had been entrusted with their mother’s last notebook, which contained the first two parts of the novel Suite Française, published in the autumn of 2004.
Irène Némirovsky, The Dogs and the Wolves
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