Speak, Memory

Then came a Pole. He was a handsome medical student, with liquid brown eyes and sleek hair, who looked rather like the French actor Max Linder, a popular movie comedian. Max lasted from 1908 to 1910 and won my admiration on a winter day in St. Petersburg when a sudden commotion interrupted our usual morning walk. Whip-brandishing Cossacks with fierce, imbecile faces were urging their prancing and snorting ponies against an excited crowd. Lots of caps and at least three galoshes lay black on the snow. For a moment it seemed as if one of the Cossacks was heading our way, and I saw Max half-draw from an inside pocket a small automatic with which I forthwith fell in love—but unfortunately the turmoil receded. Once or twice he took us to see his brother, an emaciated Roman Catholic priest of great distinction whose pale hands absentmindedly hovered over our little Greek Catholic heads, while Max and he discussed political or family matters in a stream of sibilant Polish. I visualize my father on a summer day in the country vying with Max in marksmanship—riddling with pistol bullets a rusty NO HUNTING sign in our woods. He was, this pleasant Max, a vigorous chap, and therefore I used to be taken aback when he complained of migraine and languidly refused to join me in kicking a football around or going for a dip in the river. I know now that he was having an affair that summer with a married woman whose property lay a dozen miles away. At odd moments during the day, he would sneak off to the kennels in order to feed and cajole our chained watchdogs. They were set loose at 11 P.M. to rove around the house, and he had to confront them in the dead of night when he slipped out and made for the shrubbery where a bicycle with all accessories—thumb bell, pump, tool case of brown leather, and even trouser clips—had been secretly prepared for him by an ally, my father’s Polish valet. Holey dirt roads and humpy forest trails would take impatient Max to the remote trysting place, which was a hunting lodge—in the grand tradition of elegant adultery. The chill mists of dawn and four Great Danes with short memories would see him cycling back, and at 8 A.M. a new day would begin. I wonder if it was not with a certain relief that, in the autumn of that year (1909), Max left the scene of his nightly exploits to accompany us on our second trip to Biarritz. Piously, penitently, he took a couple of days off to visit Lourdes in the company of the pretty and fast Irish girl who was the governess of Colette, my favorite playmate on the plage. Max abandoned us the next year, for a job in the X-ray department of a St. Petersburg hospital, and later on, between the two World Wars, became, I understand, something of a medical celebrity in Poland.