The return of the flame could have saved him. He had known that for a long time. The return of the constant pure flame of his passions - and his genius. Tantalizing flashes of memory and blurry glimpses of vague images of another life arrived suddenly and then vanished too quickly to even attempt to grasp them. Each time as the confusion cleared he saw before him only his failures. How could it happen, he now at the end asked himself, that my once fertile mind has become a jungle? How could I have been so blind and wild, so presumptuous and self-assured -- and so mistaken?

Again he looked out the narrow window onto the empty rear courtyard, sighed audibly, and aimlessly began a turn through the two tiny rooms of the dark apartment, colorless like his life and, in its crowded dimensions and eternal night, ironically reminiscent of his lodgings in his former life on the canals of Leningrad. With a grimace of disgust he glanced from the dark space that he called the hall into the bedroom so small that one passed from the narrow doorway directly onto the bed. As always disappointed, he turned back to the living room smothered under a ceiling he could touch. With bored eyes he surveyed the books piled on the floor and lined in the shelves helter-skelter, noting with disgust the coat of dust leaping uninterrupted from one volume to the other. The desk was sinking under stacks of Russian and French magazines and newspapers turning yellow, two broken-down typewriters, a dilapidated fax with a telephone on top, a heavy Soviet radio, filing folders, ledgers, telephone books, dictionaries, vases of dried flowers. On the dirty beige walls hung dozens of small oils and watercolors by painter friends, groups of framed photographs, and four good copies of Rublev icons in one corner. Two sprawling leather chairs crowded the desk and filled half the doorway so that his pacing space was reduced to nearly zero and he usually simply spun around in place. In profile in front of the bathroom mirror he sucked in his belly and with a pale, veinless hand smoothed down his thinning hair, so suddenly gray, and said aloud, “How did it all happen, Angel.” His question echoed in his brain but he knew there was no answer. Today it seemed that it was all a misunderstanding. “Ah, vremya,” he said aloud, “techet kak reka.” Time passes like a river. “Da, Da, techet kak reka.” Sometimes, walking the streets in recent years, he purposely uttered disconnected phrases in Russian, so that people would glance at him in commiseration.

Once, back in the good times, he’d wanted to forget who he had been. No longer. And anyway who was he to talk with during the endless days if not with himself? He had become a lonely man. Yesterday’s memories! You could almost survive on them. For back then, in the early years, everything was festive. His arrival at the Gare de l‘Est, now 25 years ago -- Nikolai Medvedev, the affirmed writer, still bewildered by his sudden release from the prison in Rostov, the stripping of his passport and his deportation abroad. Paris, Parizh, had met him like a hero that day. The speeches at the station -- leaders of the Russian emigration, Soviet experts, intelligence agents, human rights activists, and his old friend and forerunner in Paris, the famous writer, Maxim Zhelezniak. In the name of Paris, it seemed, in the huge Mercedes, Maxim had escorted him and Irina to their first residence in the West - a luxurious apartment near the Etoile. Life was luxurious, then. Brilliant and shiny like gold. Paris awarded him citizenship. France wanted him. From Germany and Italy, from Denmark and Holland came the publishers. The Russian writer’s books were the rage. Magazines and newspapers bought his stories. TV stations sought him out.

Nikolai Medvedev was an energetic man. A charming man whose smile was the contagious smile of one who has seldom been alone. Sparkling blue eyes of a seaman lent him an air of naivete. Eyes reflecting the northern seas and something of the eternity in them. His was the face of his ancestors of Baltic regions mixed with confused races of Scythians and Vikings and Magyars and Slavs and Mongols. Of average height, dark complexioned, with black hair and beard, already as a young man he’d acquired just the slightest of paunches revealing his fondness for a fast life of drink and play. His feet were too small for his body and his hands delicate as of one who has done little physical labor. Yet he concealed a silent, resilient strength that during his year of imprisonment lent him an air of heroic stoicism. His speech was rapid, intelligent, yet down-to-earth, so that he’d always been equally comfortable with intellectuals and simple people. Ah, zolotoy zapad! The Golden West! How long he’d waited for the final magic door to open into the new magical world.And when it opened to him he’d entered in grand style.

Like his memories of childhood, he could reconstruct every detail of those early times. It seemed like yesterday. Oh yes, he remembered also Maxim’s warnings that first day in the magazine offices, warnings repeated so many times in these over two decades. “Ostorozhno! Careful, Kolya! Don’t be deceived, Kolya! You’re a hero today. But they forget quickly.”

His answer had always been the same -- “This is a new life. A new world. Finally I’m independent. Now I can become the writer I always dreamed of being. I’m still young, and I’m a free man.” Today he saw himself as he was then, the 38-year old heroic writer on the threshold of victory. He saw himself that day as in all his great moments. The young conqueror stroked his well-trimmed beard in anticipation. His eyes darted about him and shone with excitement, and he continually rushed to the windows looking down onto the grand boulevards. He was impatient to get to the city. He felt like a hero of his time.

“Are you, Kolya?” Maxim habitually pronounced the diminutive of Nikolai with a certain irony -- as if to call him to order. He had sneered at Maxim’s measured words spoken that day with such thoughtful deliberation -- or was it sarcasm? -- “Kolya, are you really?” His beady gray eyes barely visible behind his thick -rimmed glasses, the older man seemed to be reading his friend’s destiny. “Desperation is behind me, Maxim,” he said. “Like yours, my life there was desperation. Even my departure from that savage society had a desperate quality. But the moment the train pulled out of the Moscow station, I said goodbye to desperation. That’s over. Now I intend to live. I admit it, I love the good world of privilege.” With chagrin he now recalled the strange pity he had felt for Maxim, that great writer, who like so many others had never really made it in the West. Maxim who had stopped living. But he, Nikolai Medvedev, would build a new world.

“But Kolya, be careful not to confuse your new life with the ease you had assured back there. Here nothing is guaranteed.” “No, never. But let me enjoy it -- for a while.” Nikolai was by nature one of those persons who have total confidence in their abilities. His manner back then had the quality of surprised delight, of one for whom life is made up of ever increasing wonders. Maxim was too old to understand his joy. He had burned himself out as a Soviet writer. No wonder he had nothing else to say. “Look Kolya, you have to understand one thing. Here continual success is the only criterion. You can’t live on your laurels here like we used to at home -- where once a writer you were a writer for a lifetime. And success means right-- right and good and happiness too. Success is the road to fulfillment here. Once it leaves you, everyone forgets you.”

Nikolai quickly adapted to the well-ordered world. Its doors stood wide open. Life was at his beck and call. It was, for him, that sense of grandeur and luxury surrounding him. Life was festive. Just as in Russia after a new publication, it was proper that he celebrate his new successes --high flyer, big spender, bon vivant, just as in Russia. The good life was embodied in his life style -- champagne, a luxurious apartment, a Mercedes, and women. In a way his new life was a continuation of the old. Yes, but it was different too. The West was too emotionally cool for his spirit, but who cared as long as royalties and fees poured in. Life was beautifully hectic. His Paris was eternally drunk. Life was good.

Today it seemed that before he even stopped to look at a calendar, the seventies ended and part of the eighties passed -- and he never wrote an original line.

Only on rare occasions, perhaps awakening with a start in the middle of the night or on a whimsical walk along the Seine, might he feel a sudden frisson of alarm and ask himself just what he thought he was doing with his life. Oh yes, they talked about it. They were still Russians. At a kitchen table ˆ la russe he and Maxim often talked all night about their new lives, about Russia and the West. As time passed, Nikolai began lamenting his inability to write anything original. He didn’t understand. Prolific in Russia, he now found nothing to write about. His cryptic language and the irony of his old stories about simple people engaged in everyday activities, so comical and so tragic in their Soviet context, baffled westerners. “Maxim, I’m standing still,” he admitted one day. “My publisher is asking me for stories about my experiences in the West. But what can I say about it? And who wants stories about Paris written in Russian?” Somehow those scenes in Maxim’s kitchen hung on like landmarks, milestones of his literary decline.

“Why do you think I quit trying to write fiction and ended up editing this magazine?” the older writer said laconically, rubbing his tired watery eyes.

“The thing is, Maxim, I can’t write about the West and people here can’t even imagine what it was to live in the Soviet Union in the 60s and the 70s. How can I describe the kind of intimacy we shared then -- an intimacy absent here? Of course,” he said with a dry laugh, “we had our hardships in common. But that too was the other side of the moon. It’s a truism that people here will never understand Russia.” “That’s for the historians…. But Kolya, the point is we weren’t prepared for this. Soviet Russians are another race. Perhaps that’s our story -- but nobody wants it.”

“But at least we can remember. Like this. We remember the beauty of a bottle of vodka among friends around a kitchen table, right? Or the stir over a forbidden book or film. That kind of intimacy. We remember that life was also good back then -- and for some, prison was not that bad either.”

“Let’s don’t exaggerate!” said Maxim. “Remember I spent eight years in Gulag. But yes, it all comes back.” “But sometimes, in our hearts, those times don’t seem so bad now.” Something stirred in his guts at his own words. For an instant he felt tears in the depths of his northern eyes. “Yes … today it all comes back.”

“All the names come back too, to us -- Solzhenitzin, Sakharov, Almarik -- remember him? Bukovsky, Sinyavski, Daniel, Maksimov, Volpin, Brodsky. But the others, even the best of the millions of those who left, are forgotten. Ghosts now -- in Russia and abroad. We’re forgotten too.”

Just before the birth of his daughter Marina, they moved to the big apartment on Rue du Cherche Midi on the Left Bank. Ah, now that was the good life -- artistically unproductive, but wonderful. It was the air of excitement infecting their lives. Like the arrival from Russia of the religious painter, his old friend Vladimir Melnik, “Vlady,” one of the fathers of the dissident movement. Again the authorities and the cream of the emigration gathered in the Gare de l’Est. Arrivals from Russia were so triumphant! A confirmation of his own life. Life was a triumph. Vlady’s arrival was another landmark. A vicarious repetition of his own. There were those days on end with that mad mystic and his wife, Tanya, in the big apartment on Avenue George V, drinking red wine and reminiscing about the “good old days” in Moscow -- Vlady’s dreams of building the Orthodox Cathedral in Jerusalem while he painted his Christs In Flames In Russia, his Christ Don Quixote, his Conflagrations. Russian memories. Russian things. They never mentioned Vlady’s years in their psychiatric clinics -- prisons. Nor Nikolai’s jail. Nor Maxim’s gulag.

One memorable weekend Vlady recounted the destruction of his paintings. “The KGB doused them in acid,” he shouted. “They all disintegrated.”

Nikolai knew the story. Everybody knew it. People said he did it himself to attract attention in the West. But Nikolai knew he was not so calculating as that. He usually didn’t even know what he would say or do in the next instant.

“Why, Vlady, why? If they were letting you go, why?” Vlady had looked at him for a long time with his big hallucinated eyes, a silly grin on his red face. “Why, to stop my message that would revolutionize the West and regenerate Holy Russia. All the presidents of Europe and Russia were in the conspiracy against me. I thought you knew.”

“How do you know those things, Vlady?” His question was sincere. Sometimes Vlady seemed to know secrets. He’d often predicted that one day they would all unite in Europe. All the real artists of Russia. All the men of good will. Was he really a mystic or just plain mad? “The CIA man, Colonel Williams, told me. He said that some Americans wanted to disclose the old plot. They needed our help. We gave him the names of people in Russia who can help…. Many many names. All of my address books.”

The truth was, Nikolai learned later, CIA agents had literally kidnapped the Melniks and drained them of every scrap of information about everyone they’d ever known in Russia. “Now we regret that. It was a horrible mistake. They were recruiting spies,” Vlady said. And for a moment he didn’t look crazy at all.

“All a mistake coming here,” Tanya began screaming in that huge apartment on Avenue George V. “... better in prison than eating and drinking here … mistake to take their money -- for betrayal … shot full of drugs in a clinic in Moscow better than rotting here.” That was the last time Nikolai remembered her speaking at all before shortly afterwards she hung herself from the Renaissance chandelier in the dining room.

But that weekend they were drunk. Also the next evening at dinner downstairs in the apartment of the Melniks’ wealthy sponsor in France. And there was also Nicole, the French-born daughter of White Russians, who before the night was over was upstairs with him in Vlady’s bed. Nikolai sighed and stared out the dirty window. He had charmed them all back then. Men and women alike. That was his gift. Nicole fell to his charm -- and he knew to his Russian sexuality. When they met in the darkened hall, they walked straight into each other’s arms. Love at first sight. And later, for years after she had gone, he would suddenly see her image, in her red raincoat in the rain on a Paris street, and he would sigh dramatically, “oh Nicole, my Nicole.” He knew that was the period when he began losing control. The day he admitted to himself that he was bored with Irina and, he knew, she with him, he lost his bearings. They staggered along for another two years, leading separate lives, in separate worlds, before one day, to his complete surprise and relief, she announced, “Kolya, I’m leaving you.”

Ah, destiny, he thought. We Russians always have our destiny to rely on. Not even a month passed before she -- feminine destiny! - stepped in. As always in his life. He was walking down the stairs into the Metro station Franklin D. Roosevelt on the Champs Elysees and bumped into Nicole running upstairs. Two days later she moved in with him bringing into his life the breath of real Paris air. How he’d liked her calling him “Mon Ange” -- like in that other life when his mother and then Masha, his first great love in Leningrad, had called him “Angel.” Angelochek. He was her little angel. Oh Masha! Twenty years later he still saw her as she was then, petite, long blond hair. “You’re the essence of Russia,” he’d always told her. Sometimes he confused Masha with Nicole in an overlapping of time and place which he never tried to correct.

To Nicole he brought the Russia she had never seen. She brought him France. He began speaking French. He hoped he was becoming French. Now, he thought, he could begin to write.

With surprise he today admitted that unconsciously he’d blamed Irina for his long drought. How erroneous! In fact, the only real change in his life was Nicole in place of Irina and little Marina. Only briefly had his spirits soared when he started getting a book review now and then, or Figaro again asked for his comments on the cultural scene at home or on its disintegrating society. Then, out of the blue, his once popular short novel of fifteen years earlier, Near and Far, was published in France and in a few translations. Things were looking up. But the little echo the book aroused was negative. “Readers don’t understand what you want to say,” his editor told him. “You Westerners will never understand Russia,” he always responded to such critique. But despite the flop, the publisher risked once more and gave him advances on a promised collection of short stories and his first western novel -- neither of which he ever wrote. Still, as before, whatever came in, he burned in a frenzy. “Better a day like a wolf than a year like a lamb,” he used to say to Nicole. Money had a way of going in other directions. Soon the flow of royalties again became a trickle, newspapers again lost interest in his comments, the old Soviet Union was disintegrating, and he was a French citizen of Russian origin with no profession.

He stared into his now hollow eyes, recalling fondly their former celestial blue. Angel! He saw troubled eyes. Eyes haunted by deep preoccupation which never left even in the rare moments of joy. He knew he had a look of sorrow about him that alienated friends. The phone never rang. He was as if in quarantine. His worry and sorrow made him nervous, awkward even in physical movements. He had become so uncertain that today he could hardly walk a straight line. It was hard to tie his shoes. Just pulling a shirt over his head left him in confusion. He was always attempting contradictory actions with his now awkward hands. He told himself that he needed order. He who had always striven against the concept of order -- in the name of creativity. No time for order, he’d said. No patience with order.

“I must order my thinking, my life. I need harmony -- and a sense of permanence,” he advised himself. “I need reason.” Yet, his feelings, ah those deceptive feelings, remained so disordered. His emotions, aimless.

Life it seemed was flowing by in decades. In his recollections he arrived at the time when the great retreat was about to begin. It was in the early nineties - the final reversal. The rout. Nikolai Medvedev, narrator and novelist, with a shudder of shame and a sigh of relief, masking his growing humility and flaunting his wounded pride, a man cornered and trapped, accepted Maxim’s offer to join him as the deputy editor of the Russian-language magazine. “Editing articles is for clerks,” he had said as he sat down to his desk for the first time. It was as if at the moment when he was silently marking the completion of his half -century of time, he’d surrendered and stepped down. Willy -nilly he’d become an office worker.

“I feel like an exile.”

“I’ve never felt otherwise,” Maxim said drily. “I’ve become a character out of one of my own stories,” he said. “Remember the one about the factory worker who said that the moment he became a wage earner, he surrendered. But -- unfortunately, like most of them, he found happiness in his security.” “I remember. That was the one I always said was your most Soviet story.”

“My life instead is grim. Nicole is getting restless. Irina is making demands and Marina needs help. And I can hardly pay the rent.” Today in the wildness and savagery of time, it seemed, yes, he knew for certain, that in the moment he accepted the change to wage earner, he too surrendered.

He gave up the garage, he sold the Mercedes. And soon after Nicole also gave up and returned to her old life in the banlieu.

The next years were terrible ones for Nikolai Medvedev. He made no life-changing decisions.

Writing moved farther and farther away.

Without Nicole, his world was vacuous. Sometimes he thought he preferred starvation to the tra -tran of home-office, office-home. It was hardly worth the candle of his life. Then, when things couldn’t get worse, they closed the magazine -- the Americans shut off the subsidies and it died within a month. It took a year for Maxim to die. His only friend surrendered again and one day went to bed and just passed away -- his wife said, of a broken heart. Another Russian dead abroad.

“Angel” was left alone. Solitary. Where should he go? His women had vanished, his friends mysteriously disappeared. He was too old to play the charmer. And where? At the church service? In the Russian library? Russian emigrant society had anyway evaporated. He had no place to go.

“I’m the permanent exile,” he lamented as he walked the streets and sometimes thought of Russia. “A fallen angel!” Unexpectedly, Vera arrived into his life. Fresh from New Russia, thirty years younger than he, she’d married him to get French citizenship and to gain time to get her Doctorate. He knew that. That was clear. She dreamed of America - and having fun. Generously, he didn’t blame her. Not only could he not show her a good life, but so insidious was his disintegration that he could hardly make love. His greatest loss, he sometimes thought. First office worker, now a surrogate father and Eunuch.

Like each evening he listened for her footsteps on the dark staircase. He would like to open the door and turn on the hall light for her, but no, he couldn’t stand at the top of the stairs and wait … wait for an unfaithful wife. Wait for her arrival from the real world outside, while he paced the floors … and waited. Time had stopped. While the hand of the wall clock measured only seconds, the days and the weeks of his isolation flew by and turned into months. Things around him seemed bizarre and sinister and concealed. Thoughts too sharp for definition darted across his mind like specks cast on the Seine near Pont de l’Alma. He didn’t understand. And his sense of time had been erased. What could he do?

From time to time a preposterous new thought had begun cropping up: if he were ever to write again the books he believed he had in him, he had to go back home.

What? he screamed. Go back home? What home? It no longer exists. Yes, back home. No, better not to write at all. But if you really must write then you have to find again the kind of truth that you once wrote about, the truth that you can only find at home. Although he detested the crassness of New Russia, he, like Vlady Melnik, had never surrendered his conviction that something inherently superior -- a certain something intangible and unspoken -- differentiated his homeland.

“The true way!” he pronounced. “Russian values - love, beauty, warmth, truth and salvation.”

The truth was Vera had never brought him much joy. Vera in her freshness. Vera who had quickly taken Nicole’s place. Vera now seemed like an enemy. Nor did the city speak to him. And there was no work he could do. What did he have here in this still foreign land? Yet his real homeland, it seemed, had vanished. Where was he to go? What was he to do? Sometimes in recent winters he’d thought seriously of a leap from Pont Neuf.

“Oh, no, not that!” he shouted to the crowded room each time he thought of Vlady Melnik. Tanya long gone, persona non grata both in the emigration and in Russia, Vlady’s mind had turned off. He’d retired from the world.

Vlady had been on Nikolai’s mind for years when one summer day -- that was shortly before they closed the magazine and Maxim began to die -- someone called the editorial office with the information that Vladimir Melnik was living in the Odeon station of the metro. He found him there. An emaciated face with reddened cheekbones, gray hair, gray overcoat and gray boots, he was sitting immobile on a half blanket at the far end of the platform. He’s my age, Nikolai thought, standing over him and waiting for recognition. The man didn’t look up, didn’t move. “Priviet, Vlady,” he said in Russian. “How are you doing?” “Who are you?” a high fearful voice said. “Who are you?” “I’m Nikolai Medvedev. Kolya! Do you remember me? I’ve been looking for you for so long.” The man started, then covered his face and turned his body away. “Niet, niet, moi francais, moi francais,” the old man muttered under the blanket. “I want to help you if I can, Vlady!” He didn’t know how he could help. Surely a hospital would take him. The rich Russian sponsor of long ago. Maybe the Russian colony? But no, they all considered him a spy because while he could still think he’d tried to return home. He’d never pursued his French documents, he didn’t even speak French, and Soviet authorities considered him a worthless tramp. He was thrice over homeless. Suddenly, in a frenzy of movement, all the while hiding his face, Vlady crawled to his feet, pushed Nikolai backwards, collected his things in both arms, and ran down the platform shouting, “moi francais moi francais.”

He paused in his meandering and peered out the window when he noticed the couple from the rear apartment block emerge from the ground floor doorway into the courtyard. Both were impeccably dressed, he in a well-cut jacket and a silk foulard, she in a long afternoon dress and high-heeled shoes. They were out for their afternoon promenade. “Theirs is the serenity that only order can bring,” he said to himself and smacked his right fist into the palm of his left hand. “The calm that has always been absent in the chaos of my life.” He noticed that rather than take his arm firmly for the passage across the sunless courtyard the woman laid her hand lightly on the inside of the man’s elbow. “Of course, their serenity might be only facade. Who knows what torment lies under that bourgeois veneer? Maybe she is his troubled mistress, impatient for his divorce. Or he is her kept lover, bored and tired of this routine but afraid to leave her security.”

Violence and tragedy might be concealed behind that facade, he imagined. Yet, yet, there was the serenity. The cool serenity of Paris, the serenity of France.

In fear and trepidation he waited for Vera’s return. When and from where was unclear. “Someone has to earn a living,” she often said. “From the university,” she sometimes said. “I’m going ahead with my life.”

Everyday Vera was out until evening. His daughter Marina never came around anymore. He was alone in the back house. In his dark prison, in his memories, in the chaos of his never serene mind. He heard the downstairs door open. She was on the dark stairs. His heart stopped. Quickly he glanced at his image in the mirror. He ran his hands through his hair, smoothed down his scraggly beard. “Angelochek!” he said. Little angel. And he wanted to cry. The paucity of his designs today and the vacuity of his former high life style had destroyed him. As time had passed, he had become timid, then retreating, and now overwhelmed by his failure. At home, alone, over his consolatory vodka, he liked to say, “I’m a fallen angel.” Hastily he opened the door and sought the light switch in the dark. “Vera, eto ty?”

“Who else?” He heard her irony from down the stairwell, accompanied by her heavy breathing. God knows where she was running from. “Are you drunk … as usual?” she added as she emerged into the light cast from the open door. Fiery and fierce, that was Vera. Face to face with him at the top of the stairs, her blue eyes reflected in the light from inside, her look had something lawless in it, coarse, savage. It was etched in her beautiful face -- ambition, cruelty, and the certainty of success.

Kolya leaned forward and seemed to sniff; she smelled of success. She had the passion he’d once had. And lost somewhere in time. “Drunk on what?” he asked sarcastically. “Here’s something to console you,” she said, pushing into his hands a plastic bag with three bottles of wine. He looked at the wines. “Good Bordeaux! But I don’t know even where we’ll be living next month. I can’t pay the rent.” “Even for this hole? Where we will be living?” she said. “Where you will be living! Anyway, I forgot to tell you, the landlord says we can stay. And he sent you the wine.”

“What, what?" he sputtered. “What do you mean, we can stay? We can’t possibly pay the new rent, triple what we’ve been paying.” “Oh, he’s agreed to accept the old amount -- for a while yet.” In critical silence they dined -- on pate, cheese, bread and the Bordeaux. After a few minutes Vera said she was tired, stood up and went to bed. He sipped his wine and listened as she made her preparations and climbed into the bedroom. And he knew she was sleeping with their landlord.

He lifted his eyes to the ceiling, stroked his beard, and sighed audibly. Such were the evenings. He drank his wine and spent some minutes recalling yesterday’s long wonderful nights -- perhaps drinks at the George V bar, dinners in Left Bank restaurants, early mornings in the bars and clubs, champagne and dancing and fascinating encounters, always surrounded by happy people.

As the bottle emptied, he began muttering about loneliness, solitude, banishment, prison, exile. “Angel”, he said, looking toward the bedroom and hoping she overheard, “you’re doomed to isolation…. But wait, Angel, after all, loneliness is not a rare thing. It’s the experience of every good man. Ah-ha!”

He tiptoed to the door and peered down at her. Already asleep, the light on, her handbag lying flat beside her, its contents spilling out on the bed. He peered at the papers. And there it was, right on top, the blue and white of an airline ticket. Automatically he picked it up and opened it. It leapt out at him - Air France, destination New York - and there was the date. What? What’s that, June 12! Why that’s my birthday. In two days. He knew when Angel’s birthday fell. In his hand with the ticket, inadvertently, was its envelope. He read the words scrawled across it -- “My going away present, Mon Amour.” No signature. But he knew.

His mind seemed to explode. Thoughts raced across his brain like sharp shards of light. Gone, finally, finally alone. Finished the daily nervous expectation and anxiety, erased the doubts. Now I can work in peace, now how can I bear the total solitude, now I too must decide, where can I go? let’s see, maybe Marina can lend me enough for a ticket. A ticket? But to where? to where? where else, Angel, to Russia. To Russia! I’ll begin packing so that she sees! I’ll take very little, tomorrow I’ll make a list, an inventory. Certainly the art must come with me. And the African masks. But the Mexican pottery? What about the books? Make a list of the most important and ship them. And my clothes? Ten suits are hanging in the closet like a testimony -- from the old days, good suits by fashion tailors. And the Smoking! Alas, all too small now. And when would I wear them anyway? And there are the Italian shoes, all Ferragamo! There’s that old steamer trunk, it must be at Irina’s, she’ll let me have it.

He paced the room. He opened drawers. He peered into the two closets. A small part of his life should be here. But is this all? These few things. But I had so much. The big apartment upstairs was full of our things. Of our life. Is this all? He spun around toward the kitchen, his right foot nearly tripping over the left, opened another bottle of the Bordeaux and pulled down from the overhead rack a clean glass -- how he loved that glass rack! - ducked his head under the wall cabinet and slid across the seat. He studied intently the descending red level of the Bordeaux. Who was that sitting opposite him? For a long moment he stared into the wall mirror and exhaled a sigh at the sick eyes looking back at him. An air of finality filled the room. Vera was ready to depart. Maxim was long dead, Nicole gone, old friends vanished, his writing dried up, his Paris dissipated.

He lifted his glass, and said, “Here’s to you, Angel. Bon voyage back home again.”