Tete-a-Tete (38 page)

Sartre agreed. The oppressed had to answer violence with violence, he wrote in his preface. It was the only way they would attain their liberation. Fanon's book, with Sartre's famous preface, would become a “little red book” for third-world revolutionaries.

In January 1962, a second plastic explosive destroyed the apartment on the Rue Bonaparte. Neither Sartre nor his mother was there, but the contents of the flat were wrecked, and many of Sartre's papers were lost. His mother was now permanently installed in a hotel. Sartre rented a tenth-floor studio five minutes away, in a modern building at 222 Boulevard Raspail. He had almost no furniture, and worked at a white Formica table, with books all over the floor. All he salvaged from his mother's apartment was the wooden chair that had belonged to his great-grandfather. “This chair is the only thing I care about,” he told his friend Liliane Siegel, “except my books, of course.” Siegel looked at the chair dubiously. “I like it to be uncomfortable,” Sartre said. “I don't like seats that corrupt.”
⁴⁹

The first time Siegel turned up there for her weekly appointment on Tuesday afternoons, she was horrified by Sartre's ugly new surroundings. Liliane Siegel was the latest beautiful, troubled Jewish woman Sartre was saving with his existential psychoanalysis. (“He was particularly good at getting people to talk,” she writes. “He detected the slightest pretence, the smallest lie, he interpreted silences, observed facial expressions, went through everything with a fine-tooth comb. He made no concessions, harked back to a phrase, demanded fuller information…. He wanted to know all or nothing.”
⁵⁰
) Liliane had come to depend heavily on their meetings. She had a practical bent, and could drive a car, and she liked to help Sartre whenever she could. She bought two wooden desks at a flea market—
one for Sartre, one for Beauvoir—and some bookshelves and lamps. Her son delivered and installed them.

In June 1962, just as Algeria was finally gaining its independence, Sartre and Beauvoir flew to Moscow. They were completely disillusioned with France and the thousands of deaths it had caused by clinging to colonialism. They were angry with the American government, which had implemented an economic embargo of Cuba. “It seems your dirty Kennedy is going to make serious troubles for Castro,” Beauvoir had written to Algren at the time of the Bay of Pigs crisis. “I hate this grinning boy and his grinning wife.”
⁵¹

Beauvoir and Sartre climbed up the steps of the plane, desperately hoping to see new signs of freedom in the Soviet Union.

June 1962–November 1966

After his vehement denunciation of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, Sartre must have been surprised to receive an invitation from the Soviet Writers Union. But under Nikita Khrushchev, the USSR was undergoing what it called a “thaw.”
¹
Khrushchev had condemned the abuses and purges of the Stalin regime. He was aware that Soviet culture could not remain forever in a deep freeze, and had embarked on a “de-Stalinization” policy, which involved an easing of censorship. The writer Ilya Ehrenburg (who was not in the party but was close to the communist nomenclature) was pushing Khrushchev to open up the cultural exchange between East and West. And as Ehrenburg would have pointed out, Jean-Paul Sartre—the most prominent intellectual in France, an active militant for world peace, a man of the left but not in the Communist Party—was the perfect man to court.

Sartre and Beauvoir flew to Moscow on June 1, 1962. Lena Zonina, a guide and interpreter from the Soviet Writers Union, was at the airport to meet them, and at their full disposal during their three-week sojourn. Zonina was a literary critic and translator, and unlike the other Russians they would meet, she knew their work well. She was hoping to translate some of it.
²

Sartre and Beauvoir had the impression that the Soviet Union was coming out of the Dark Ages. For the first time, Russians were hear
ing jazz, dancing to rock and roll, and reading translations of writers like Faulkner, Hemingway, Sartre, and Camus. Khrushchev had even permitted the journal
Novy Mir
to publish
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,
a novel by the unknown writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who had nearly died in a Siberian forced-labor camp. Never before had a book portraying life in the gulag been published in the Soviet Union.

This time, instead of the solemn banquets to which Sartre had been subjected in 1954, Sartre and Beauvoir were invited to people's homes, where they could talk fairly freely to other writers and intellectuals. Wherever they went, Lena Zonina was by their side. A highlight was their visit to Leningrad, a city they thought as enchanting as Rome. They walked with the crowd by the Neva River, and stood in front of the Winter Palace, thinking about the violent revolution that had taken place in that magnificent setting—scenes that were etched in their minds by photographs and old films. “The ‘White Nights of St Petersburg'; in Norway, in Finland, I had thought I knew what they were like,” Beauvoir would write, “but the magic of the night-time sun needs this ghost-haunted, petrified décor from the past to complete its spell.”
³

Despite the atmosphere of relative freedom, it was easy to remain insulated from everyday life in the Soviet Union. The Peking Hotel in Moscow, where Sartre and Beauvoir were staying, was a world of its own, a palace for foreigners. They disliked eating there, and preferred Zonina to take them to local restaurants, which meant standing in line with the Muscovites. Some evenings she took them to the Writers Club.

Zonina, they were relieved to discover, was no Stalinist. She had been. Her real name was “Lenina,” reflecting her parents' commitment to the revolution. It embarrassed her. She preferred “Lena.”
⁴
Until the end of the Second World War, her family deeply admired Stalin. And then came more Jewish purges. In 1949, her father, Alexander Zonin, a writer, was arrested as a “rootless cosmopolitan” (code for Jewish intellectual) and sent to a camp in Kazakhstan. As the daughter of an “enemy of the people,” Zonina was not allowed to continue her university studies.

Because she wrote French well, Ilya Ehrenburg employed her as his secretary. It took courage, for which she would always be grateful to him. Ehrenburg's own position was highly precarious. Like her, he was Jewish, and having lived for almost twenty years in Paris, he had a strong rapport with Western intellectuals. He was fortunate to have survived this long, and he knew it.

When her father was released from the camp in 1955, Zonina went back to the University of Moscow to pursue postgraduate studies in French. That had led to her present job—in the International Commission, the most prestigious section of the Writers Union.

At thirty-eight—twice married and divorced—Zonina lived with her mother and her two-year-old daughter, Masha, in a dilapidated apartment building in the center of Moscow. While Lena was at work, her mother looked after little Masha. The women shared the shopping, which involved endless waiting in line, then climbing up five flights of rickety stairs with shopping bags.

Zonina struggled constantly with fatigue. Shortly after Masha's birth, she had developed severe diabetes. She had to follow a draconian diet and give herself three injections a day. Allergic to the pig insulin produced in the Soviet Union, she relied on friends in the French embassy to bring her insulin from the West. And even though she carried bread in her handbag in case of a hypoglycemic attack, one day, in a Moscow restaurant, Sartre and Beauvoir saw her keel over in front of their eyes.

“There was nothing lukewarm about Lena,” Beauvoir would write in her memoirs. “She had a passionate feeling for truth and justice. But she never indulged in dogmatism or priggishness; she was gay, ironical, and sometimes very funny…. There was a bond between us that is hard to define—an understanding, an instant communication…. It was a great pleasure, walking about with her or sitting in her flat, talking and drinking vodka.”
⁵

For her part, Lena admired Sartre's and Beauvoir's writing, their political commitment, and their independence as a couple. She had been more than a little intimidated as she waited for them at the airport, but in no time she felt at ease in their company and found herself joking and laughing with them, and telling them about her life.

 

Two weeks after returning to Paris, Sartre flew to Moscow again, this time on his own. From July 10 to 16, 1962, he took part in the World Peace Congress in Moscow. Lena Zonina was once again his official interpreter. Because the sessions started early in the mornings, she, too, was accommodated in the hotel.

As soon as he got back to Paris, Sartre wrote her the first of many passionate letters. He had never remembered the number of a hotel room before, he wrote, but he would not forget number 606 until he was senile. For six nights, her room had been their mutual home. He loved her. He missed her presence. He missed her somber voice, her breasts, her soft skin. He missed her thick black hair, her naked shoulders, her smile.
⁶

How tender and brave her smile had been at the airport, he wrote. He had climbed into the plane feeling as if he had had a tooth yanked out. Settling back in his seat, exhausted with pain, he had wiped away tears. The plane took twenty minutes to climb through the clouds. Then everything was blue—a hard, metallic blue—and he lit his first cigarette. Throughout the three-and-a-half-hour trip, he could not sleep. Lena would not let him sleep. He would start to doze, then a vivid memory would jerk him awake.

“Ma femme,” he called her. In Moscow, he had felt as if they were married. They had turned up at people's houses together and they had left together. In the conference sessions, he was conscious of her beautiful heavy body next to his. Had she noticed that their hips or thighs were nearly always touching? He loved it when she asked him to light her cigarette and their fingers touched.

She had been so busy, running everywhere, organizing things. Did she remember answering the phone that morning, her toothbrush still in her mouth? He had felt so happy, free, and calm with her in Moscow.

She had looked after him, protected him. It made him feel almost feminine. In order for him to be understood, she had to be at his side. His French words had made love with her Russian words in the air. Back in Paris, he could not get used to speaking to people without an intermediary.

Theirs was a forbidden love, he told her, like Romeo and Juliet. Separated by three thousand kilometers and an iron curtain, their access to each other depended on cold-war politics. They would not see each other for six months, and it was going to be hard. Would Zonina decide that six months was too long? She had told him that she had always been the one to end her relationships with men. It made him anxious.

She would never suffer because of him, he assured her. He would rather gouge out his eyes than cause her pain. He hoped he could rely on her, and that the only danger to their love would be external. They had to be able to give each other all their trust and confidence.

 

Because of the Soviet censors, Sartre and Zonina did not send letters through the mail. They had to wait until a trusted confidant traveled between Paris and Moscow—most often Ilya Ehrenburg or a friend from the French embassy in Moscow. It sometimes took weeks. Sartre, who liked to write to Zonina every day, ended up sending letters that were forty or more pages long. He would put the letter inside a packet containing articles or a manuscript, ostensibly sent by Beauvoir, who wrote on the envelope.

Sartre had shown himself susceptible to Slavic charm over the years. But Lena Zonina was very different. Unlike the Kosakiewicz sisters or Nathalie Sorokine, she was no “White Russian.” Her family had not fled the 1917 revolution. And she was Jewish. To Sartre, she represented so many things: Slavic exoticism, the communist revolution, anti-Semitic persecution. The hardship of her life made him feel guilty, he told her. He thought of her tramping up five flights of stairs, and felt bad every time he stepped into his elevator.

Zonina protested that Sartre was in love with a fantasy. She did not want to symbolize Mother Russia. She wanted to be his lover, not his
Soviet
lover.

She was no fantasy, Sartre assured her. She was his refuge. He needed her in order to be happy. He needed her in order to feel himself. There were only two people in his life he truly cared about: the Beaver and his little Lenochka.

 

Was Lena Zonina a KGB agent, paid to get close to Sartre and inform on him? The suggestion has been floated around from time to time.
⁷
Sartre himself was aware of the rumor and laughed at it.
⁸
But what
did
it mean that Sartre, who was always so careful to preserve his political independence, had fallen in love with an official representative of the Soviet government?

The Writers Union was a large organization with some six thousand members, established by the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Its senior officers were Communist Party members, some of whom were in the KGB. The interpreters who worked in the International Commission enjoyed certain privileges, like travel, though when they traveled to the West, they were obliged to leave close family members behind, in case they entertained any ideas about defecting. Whenever they spoke to foreigners, they were required to submit detailed reports.

Jean-Paul Sartre was no nuclear scientist; he had no trade secrets that interested the Russians. His value was as a propaganda tool. “The importance of his visit cannot be exaggerated,” Zonina noted in her first report. “His influence on the avant-garde intelligentsia in the West is immense at the moment.”
⁹

Lena Zonina's position would have been impossible if she had fallen in love with a Western intellectual who was overtly critical of the USSR. But she hadn't. During the years in which they were lovers, 1962–1966, Sartre fell into line with Soviet propaganda almost completely. On his visits to the USSR, he made it clear to everyone he met that he was there because he wanted to appreciate the
positive
things. Like them, he was committed to world peace, he said.
¹⁰
And he was eager to foster cultural ties between East and West. In his preface to Lena Zonina's Russian translation of
Words,
he even wrote that for Frenchmen of his generation, “The great event in our lives was your revolution.”
¹¹

Lena Zonina was considerably more critical of the Soviet government than Sartre was. She had remained loyal to Ilya Ehrenburg, who signed protest petitions, kept his distance from the apparatchiks at the Writers Union, and dared to express positive views about two
men who were much reviled in party circles—Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn. In the circle Zonina mixed in, everyone was critical of the government—at least in the privacy of their own homes.

Indeed, most Soviet intellectuals were liberal thinkers, and they were disappointed that Sartre, despite his position of influence, said nothing to challenge the Soviet government. “They found him rather naïve, a bit dishonest, even,” says Gilbert Dagron, who was the cultural attaché at the French embassy in Moscow at the time, and a close friend of Lena Zonina. “He saw things, but did not say them.” Sartre was always afraid that the conservative press would use any criticism he made of the Soviet Union as propaganda for the American side. Dagron talked to Sartre for an hour in Sartre's room at the Peking Hotel. Sartre commented that certain things were “scandalous,” and Dagron urged him to write about them. “I can't,” Sartre said. “The
Figaro
would praise me.”
¹²

Did the KGB know about Zonina's love affair with Sartre? It is inconceivable that it did not. Foreign guests were under constant surveillance. As Beauvoir points out in her memoirs, there were always supervisors in the corridors of their Intourist hotels.

Were the authorities worried by the affair? It brought Sartre to the USSR far more often than he would otherwise have come, which made the USSR look good. If the aim of the Soviet authorities was to impress Sartre with the freedom of the Soviet Union and the warmth of Soviet hospitality, they could not have done better. And with Sartre came Simone de Beauvoir. Her memoirs were best sellers in the West, and at a Moscow press conference in June 1962 she promised to convey her positive impressions of the USSR in the next volume.
¹³