I

I first heard about him during conversations from which I found myself suddenly excluded, just at the moment when he was mentioned. It was always and only ever Akhmatova who mentioned him, always lightly, jokingly, cheerfully, with a hint of irony, always as if in the flow of the conversation, as if incidentally, as if she wanted to illustrate the conversation with one of his remarks, statements, actions, in short, with him. ‘Nina,’ she turned towards her friend, ‘this reminds me of how Sir …’ Or: ‘Lida, you said your father received a letter from Oxford – how is our Sir doing there? …’ Or: ‘Lyubochka, I have to tell you something, I’ve been sent a greeting from Salomea, direct from London – Sir is on characteristic form …’ And her friends, sharing in her secret, smiled understandingly, as if they wanted to confirm that Sir really was on characteristic form, and above all, that this wasn't a joke or a fairy tale, that somewhere there was a real Sir, of a certain age, with certain manners, living at a certain address. Sometimes they referred to him as Lord.

Despite the obvious reality of his existence – even after she had begun to talk to me about him openly, and after I had found out all the details of the story that is now familiar to anyone who has read the most rudimentary biography of either one of them – while Akhmatova was alive, he remained to me a fictional character, partly out of Walter Scott, partly out of Evelyn Waugh. Even partly out of Shakespeare, such a special ‘Sir’ , as if one side of him belonged to the circle, or, more widely speaking, to the entourage of Henry IV in Part 1, and even more so in Part 2, but at the same time also to the society of The Merchant of Venice, since Sir was, in addition to everything else, a Jew. This perception of him was not in the slightest the product of a lively imagination, or literary inclinations, or a romantic nature, if these were ever part of my personality. It was evoked by the fact that Akhmatova had placed this man once and for all in a reality that lay beyond the one we were seeing, one that Akhmatova saw better than anyone else.