4. Déambulations: Second Nina Interlude

Giving in to the sweet exhaustion from my walk, I hop onto the subway, take Nina’s autobiography out of my purse and carefully place it onto my lap. Out of print and mostly out of stock, I finally found it at the Strand, the last copy. I glance at the back:

“Nina was revealed as one of the most resonant voices among the generation of writers dispersed by the Revolution. In The Italics are Mine, Berberova recounts her passage from a privileged St Petersburg upbringing to a hand-to-mouth existence in Berlin, Paris and America”.

I open the first page and I dive in, barely noticing the subway stations gliding by.

“I carry the fact that these two origins - Russian (northern) and Armenian (southern) fuse in me, like a precious gift of destiny.”

(...)

“All dualism is painful for me, all splitting or bisecting contrary to my nature (...)My whole life has been the reconciliation within myself of dichotomy. Now all these diverse and often contrasting traits fuse in me. Long ago, I stopped thinking of myself as being composed of two halves. I feel physically that a seam, not a cut passes through me, that I myself am a seam, that with this seam, while I am alive, something has united in me, something has been soldered (...) that I am not living in vain but there is a sense that I am as I am, an example of synthesis in a world of antitheses.”

One stop left, pencil out, two lines drawn in the margin.