Master of Souls Read online

  SELECTED WORKS BY IRÈNE NÉMIROVSKY

  TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY SANDRA SMITH

  Suite Française

  David Golder

  Fire in the Blood

  Le Bal and Snow in Autumn

  The Courilof Affair

  All Our Worldly Goods

  The Dogs and the Wolves

  Jezebel

  The Wine of Solitude

  The Misunderstanding

  The Fires of Autumn

  The Prodigal Child

  MASTER

  OF

  SOULS

  •A NOVEL•

  IRÈNE NÉMIROVSKY

  TRANSLATED BY SANDRA SMITH

  Yes, we always pay for them, and sometimes the smallest indiscretions cost as much as the largest.

  IRÈNE NÉMIROVSKY,

  Fire in the Blood

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  A Note on Type

  1

  “I need money!”

  “I said no.”

  Dario tried to calm down, in vain. His voice became piercing when he was upset. He moved his arms about frantically. He looked like a typical man from the East, with the worried, starving expression of a wolf: his features were foreign, and his face seemed to have been hastily molded by a feverish hand.

  “You lend money to people,” he cried out in anger, “I know you do!”

  Everyone refused when he asked humbly. He had to try a different tone of voice. Patience. He knew how to make use of trickery, then threats. He would stop at nothing. He would beg or wrench the money out of the old usurer through sheer force. His wife and their child—who had just been born—had only him, Dario, in all the world to keep them fed.

  She shrugged her broad shoulders.

  “I do lend, yes, but with collateral. What do you have to offer me?”

  “Ah. That was better.” He had reason to hope.

  Sometimes, the person you are asking says no, but their eyes say yes. Ask again. Offer some favor, something you can secretly help with, a readiness to comply. Don’t beg; that’s useless. Bargain. But what could he give her? Nothing here belonged to him. This woman was his landlady; for four months, he’d been living on an empty floor in the little house she had transformed into lodgings for immigrants.

  “Who doesn’t need money?” she said. “Times are hard.”

  She fanned herself. She was wearing a pink hessian dress. Her enormous ruddy face was impenetrable. “Horrible creature,” he thought. She started to stand up. He rushed toward her.

  “No! Wait! Don’t go!”

  What else could he say to her? Beg? Pointless. Promise? Useless. Bargain? How? He’d forgotten how. Living in Europe, Dario Asfar, an insignificant little man from the ports and hovels of the Middle East, believed he had already internalized feelings of shame, of honor. But now he had to forget the fifteen years he’d spent in France, forget French culture, forget his title as a French doctor, which he had fought so hard to earn in the West, not as you might accept a gift from your mother, but the way you might steal a bit of bread from a woman you do not know. Pointless European affectations. They hadn’t given him anything to eat. His stomach was empty, his pockets empty, the soles of his shoes had holes in them, here, in Nice, in 1920, at the age of thirty-five, just like when he was young. He thought with bitterness that he did not know how to use these new weapons, dignity and pride, and that he would have to fall back on pleading and bartering, the tried and tested, age-old wisdom.

  “Other people travel in a pack, surrounded by others, being led,” he thought. “I’m all alone. I hunt alone, for my wife and little boy.”

  “How do you expect me to live?” he cried. “No one knows me in your city. I’ve been living in Nice for four months. I sacrificed everything to come here. In Paris, I could have made a fortune. All I had to do was wait.” (He was lying. He wanted to convince her at all costs.) “Here, I only take care of Russians. I only know starving immigrants. Not one Frenchman calls for me. No one trusts me. Maybe it’s my face, my accent, I don’t know,” he said, and as he spoke, he ran his fingers through his jet-black hair, over his thin, swarthy cheeks, over his eyes; he had long eyelashes, like a woman’s, that half-hid his harsh, feverish eyes. “You can’t force people to trust you, Marthe Alexandrovna. You’re Russian, you know how we’re marginalized. I have French qualifications as a doctor, I’m used to France, I became a French citizen, but I’m treated like a foreigner, and I feel like a foreigner. I have to wait. I’m telling you, you can’t force people to trust you, you have to be solicitous, win them over patiently. But while I’m waiting, I have to live. It’s in your own interest to help me, Marthe Alexandrovna. I’m your tenant. I already owe you money. You’ll throw me out. You’ll ruin me. But how will that profit you?”

  “We’re poor immigrants, too,” she said, sighing. “These are hard times, Doctor. What can I do to help you? Nothing.”

  “When my wife comes home on Monday, still weak, with a newborn baby, how am I going to feed them? God help them. What will become of them? Lend me four thousand francs, Marthe Alexandrovna, and ask for whatever you want in exchange.”

  “But what guarantees can you give me, you poor man? Do you have any collateral?”

  “No.”

  “Any jewelry?”

  “Nothing. I have nothing.”

  “People always leave me some jewelry as collateral, or some silver, or furs. You’re not a child, Doctor, you can understand that I can’t help people out for free. Please believe that I’m sorry. I wasn’t made for this profession, loaning money with guarantees. I’m the wife of General Mouravine, but what can you do when life grabs you here?” she said, bringing her hand low on her throat in a gesture that had been applauded when she was a young actress in the provinces, for the elderly general had married her only when he was in exile, after recognizing the son she’d had by him.

  She made the gesture of tightening an invisible necklace around her thick white neck.

  “We’re all suffocating from poverty, Doctor, my dear Doctor. If you only knew what my life was like,” she said, using the tactic people who are being begged always use: turning any pity they’re capable of onto themselves, to better refuse lending someone money. “I work like a slave. I have to take care of the general, my son, and my daughter-in-law. Everyone comes to beg me for help, and I can’t ask anyone to help me.”

  She took out a pink cotton handkerchief that had been tucked into her belt and dabbed the corners of her eyes. Tears streamed down her face; it was heavy and reddish, worn with age, but it still retained the vestiges of her faded beauty in the curved line of her small, fine nose and shapely eyebrows.

  “My heart is not made of stone, Doctor.”

  “She’ll cry but still send me away,” Dario thought in despair.


  Each of Dario’s thoughts brought up a flood of memories. Whenever he thought, “We’ll be sent away. We’ll leave. We’ll have nowhere to rest our heads. We won’t know where to go,” the images awakened in him did not come from his mind alone, but were carved into his flesh, flesh that had known the cold, and were burned into his eyes, which had stung from exhaustion at the end of a long night of homelessness. More than once he hadn’t known where he would sleep; he had wandered the streets, been thrown out of hotels. But all of that, which had seemed normal in his childhood, in adolescence, in his first penniless student years, today seemed like the kind of degradation that made death seem preferable. Yes, Europe had made him soft, that much was certain.

  He looked around at the room, the furniture. Three small rooms above a family-run boardinghouse, red floor tiles barely covered by some thin rugs; in the living room, two armchairs upholstered in yellow fabric, faded by the sun, and in their bedroom, their beautiful, large French bed, where they slept so well; he loved it all so much.

  He thought of the child they would sit in his little carriage on the narrow balcony; the sea breeze would reach him there, just above the roofs of the Rue de France; in the morning, he would hear voices shouting “Sardini, belli sardini” from the nearby market below; he would breathe in the bracing air; later on, he would play in the sunshine.

  Dario had to stay, had to get some money from this woman. He looked back and forth between the walls, the furniture, and the face of the general’s wife, feeling anguish, anger, and hope. He closed his lips tightly and thought he looked calm, but his anxious, eloquent, despairing eyes betrayed him.

  “Marthe Alexandrovna, you won’t ruin me, will you? Four thousand francs, you could find four thousand francs for me. You could wait until the next three months, when the rent is due. You wouldn’t make me leave. You could give me a year. What couldn’t I accomplish in a year? With four thousand francs, I could dress properly. But right now, how could I even get into a big hotel? Who would let me in? I reek of poverty . . . Hotel employees in luxury hotels in Nice, in Cannes, in Cimiez promised to have me called if they need a doctor. But look at my shoes, wet, because there are holes in them; look at my jacket,” he said, pointing to the fabric, which shone in the sunlight. “I’m telling you, it’s in your own interest, Marthe Alexandrovna. You are a woman. Can’t you recognize a hardy person with a strong will and courage? Four thousand francs, Marthe Alexandrovna, three thousand! In the name of God!”

  She shook her head.

  “No.”

  She said it again, more quietly: “No.” But he was listening less to her words than to the sound of her voice: words meant nothing, it was the tone of voice. Had she murmured “No” impatiently? Had she shouted it in anger? If her refusal was truly absolute, hopeless, she would shout it in a rage and harshly send him away. But her “No,” spoken more softly, her tears, and yet the harsh look in her sinister eyes, which grew even harder still, insistent, and sharp, all those things meant that it had come down to bargaining, and bargaining was not to be feared. As long as it was a matter of wheeling and dealing, of arguing endlessly, of buying or selling, there was still hope.

  “Marthe Alexandrovna,” he said, “is there nothing I can do for you? You know that I am discreet and loyal. Think about it. You seem worried, Marthe Alexandrovna, you can trust me.”

  “Doctor,” she began. Then she fell silent.

  They could hear the sounds of the family boardinghouse through the thin walls; it was there that immigrants lived, quarreled, cried and laughed, hated and loved one another, spent the last of their money. They heard voices, the rapid, hurrying footsteps of young women, the weary, aimless footsteps of old men between those four sad walls. So much scheming, so many love affairs. So much tragedy. The general’s wife knew everything, that much was certain. She needed him. He would not shy away from doing anything in the world. He felt the internal panic that invades the soul like a crashing wave. Above all, stay alive. Forget scruples and cowardly fears. Above all, keep breathing, keep eating, keep his wife and the child he loved so much alive.

  She let out a heavy sigh.

  “Come closer, Doctor . . . Doctor, you know my son’s wife, Elinor, the American he married? Doctor, I’m telling you this as a mother in despair . . . They’re just children. They’ve made a terrible mistake.”

  She toyed with the handkerchief she was holding, then wiped her forehead and lips. The sun, just as it was disappearing, sparkled for a moment above the rooftops and into the room. It was one of the first days of a stormy spring. She was very hot, panting a little, and seemed more human, full of anger and fear.

  “My son is just a boy, Doctor. As for her, I think she has a lot of experience. But there we are. They didn’t say anything to me until now. But, Doctor, we can’t allow there to be another mouth to feed. I’m dying under the weight of everyone who is hanging on to me and expecting me to feed them. Another child? Doctor, it isn’t possible.”

  2

  In the Sainte-Marie Hospital, Dario’s wife, Clara, her child next to her, was lying in a clean, narrow room with the window slightly open and a warm cover over her legs.

  When the nursing sister asked her, “Are you all right?” Clara turned to look at her with gratitude in her eyes; she smiled when she saw the nun’s white wimple.

  “How could I not be well?” she replied with shy pride. “Don’t I have everything I need?”

  It was evening. The doors were being closed. She hadn’t seen Dario since the day before, but she still hoped he would come; the sisters knew he was a doctor and let him come outside the official visiting hours.

  She was sorry that Dario hadn’t agreed to let her be in the ward with the others. She had never had any female friends. She had never been in a close relationship with another woman. She was very shy, fearful. In these foreign cities, she found everything surprising. She had learned French, with difficulty. Now she could speak the language of the country, with a bad accent, though, but she had gotten used to living on the sidelines. When Dario was with her, she didn’t need anyone else; here, the child should have been enough for her, but she sometimes felt a desire to have the presence of another woman nearby. She could hear them laughing in the ward . . . and it would be nice to compare her child with the others. No child could be as beautiful as hers, Daniel, her son, or feed so quickly or eagerly, or have such a well-formed body, such agile little legs, such perfect hands. But Dario wanted a private room for her, comfort, peace, luxury. Dear Dario, how he spoiled her. Did he really think he was fooling her? Didn’t she guess how difficult his life was? Couldn’t she recognize the weariness in his halting movements, in his voice, in the rapid gestures of his trembling hands?

  But the birth of the child had filled her heart with peace. She did not know why, but she no longer worried. She was too grateful to God to hold any anxiety within her. Sometimes she gently leaned over the bed and drew the cradle closer to her—closer, and closer still, holding it tightly. She couldn’t see the child, but she could hear him breathing. Then she would gently turn her painful body over to one side. She would let go of the cradle and cross her arms over her chest, where the milk, flowing up in waves at this time of day, throbbed rapidly, like your pulse when you have a fever. She was so slim that her sides, her chest, her thin knees barely raised the sheet. Her face was both too young and too old for her age; she was well over thirty. Her small, curved forehead, with no wrinkles, her full eyelids, her smile and magnificent, even white teeth—the only really beautiful thing about her—were the features of a pretty young woman, almost of an adolescent, but some wisps of her curly, unruly hair were going gray; her brown eyes were sad: they had shed tears, kept vigil, contemplated death on faces she loved, waited in hope, looked on with courage; her mouth, when still, was weary, naïve, and full of pain.

  When the last visitors had gone, the little carts carrying the light meals started moving from one door to the other. The women who were nursing their children were getting
ready for the evening feed. The children woke up and cried. The sister went into Clara’s room, helped her sit up in bed, and put her son in her arms. She was a heavy woman with a tough, cheerful pink face.

  For a moment, both of them looked at the baby in silence as he turned his head from side to side, whimpering a little and trying to find the breast, but he soon calmed down, and they could hear the faint rhythm of a happy, satisfied child who drank his milk and fell asleep. They started talking quietly:

  “Didn’t your husband come to see you today?” the sister asked.

  She had the melodic accent of Nice.

  “No,” Clara replied, rather sadly.

  She knew that he hadn’t forgotten her. Maybe he didn’t have enough money for the tram? The clinic was rather far from the town center.

  “He’s a good husband,” said the sister, reaching out for the sleeping child.

  She wanted to take him and put him on the scale, but his eyes immediately opened, and he started waving his arms around. Clara held him close.

  “No, leave him. He’s still hungry.”

  “A good husband and a good father,” said the sister. “‘Do they have everything necessary? Do they need anything at all?’—that’s what he asks me every day. Oh, he loves you both . . . That’s enough now,” she said, standing up and taking the child from Clara’s arms.

  Clara let him go, but not until she had made an instinctive movement to hold him close, which made the sister laugh.

  “You feed him too much. You’ll make this baby sick.”

  “Oh, no, madame,” said Clara—she could never get into the habit of calling the nun who looked after her “Sister.” “I’m just happy to nurse him as much as he wants, for my first child died because I didn’t have enough milk to feed him, or money to buy any.”

  The sister shrugged her shoulders slightly, with an expression of cordiality, compassion, and scorn that meant “You’re not the only one, now, you poor thing. I’ve seen plenty of poverty,” and with that gesture and the look she felt from under the sister’s wimple, Clara knew that her bitterness, and a certain sense of shame, inseparable from unhappiness, was deserting her. She had never, ever talked about her first child to anyone.