Efron's activities made Tsvetaeva's own position in emigre society untenable. It was assumed that she herself was a Bolshevik, not least because of her continued links with 'Soviet writers' such as Pasternak and Bely, who like her had their roots in the pre-revolutionary avant-garde. She found herself ever more alone in a community that increasingly shunned any contact with the Soviet world. 'I feel that I have no place here', she wrote to the Czech writer Anna Teskova. The French were 'sociable but superficial' and 'interested only in themselves', while 'from the Russians I am separated by my poetry, which nobody understands; by my personal views, which some take for Bolshevism, others for monarchism or anarchism; and then again - by all of me'.109 Berberova described Tsvetaeva as an 'outcast' in Paris: 'she had no readers' and there was 'no reaction to what she wrote'.110
Just say: enough of torment - take A garden - lonesome like myself. (But do not stand near by, Yourself!) A garden, lonesome, like Myself.112
'Everything is forcing me towards Russia', she wrote to Anna Teskova in 1931. 'Here I am unnecessary. There I am impossible.'113 Tsvetaeva became increasingly frustrated with the editors of the emigre periodicals - professors and politicians like Miliukov who failed to understand her prose and hacked it into pieces to conform to the neat, clean style of their journals. Her frustration drove her to form an over-rosy view of literary life in the Soviet Union. She talked herself into believing that she was 'needed' there, that she would be able to be published
once again, and that she could find a new circle of writer friends who would 'look on me as one of their own'.114 "With every passing year she felt the 'milky call' of her native tongue, which she knew was so essential, not just to her art but to her very identity. This physical longing for Russia was far stronger and more immediate than any intellectual rationalization for her continued exile: that Russia was contained inside herself and, like a suitcase filled with Pushkin's works, could be taken anywhere. 'The poet', she concluded, 'cannot survive in emigration: there is no ground on which to stand - no medium or language. There are - no roots.'115 Like the rowanberry tree, her art needed to be rooted in the soil.
In 1937 Efron was exposed as a Soviet agent and implicated in the assassination of a Soviet spy who had refused to return to the Soviet Union. Pursued by the French police, Efron fled to the Soviet Union, where Alya had already settled earlier that year. Now Tsvetaeva could not remain in France. Shunned by everyone, her life there became impossible. Berberova saw her for the last time in the autumn of 1938. It was the funeral of Prince Sergei Volkonsky - at the moment when his coffin was carried out of the church on the Rue Francois Gerard. 'She stood at the entrance, her eyes full of tears, aged, almost grey, hands crossed on her bosom… She stood as if infected with plague: no one approached her. Like everyone else I walked by her.'116 On 12 June 1939, Tsvetaeva and her son left by boat from Le Havre for the Soviet Union. The evening before her departure she wrote to Teskova: 'Goodbye! What comes now is no longer difficult, what comes now is fate.'117
Pasternak had warned Tsvetaeva: 'Don't come back to Russia - it's cold, there is a constant draught.' It was an echo of her own prophetic fear
That the Russian draught should blow away my soul!118
But she was like her husband: she did not hear what she did not want to hear.
Many of the exiles who returned to Stalin's Russia did so in the knowledge, or with the intuition, that they were going back to a life of slavery. It was a mark of their desperate situation in the West, of their longing
for a social context in which they could work, that they were prepared to close their eyes to the harsh realities of the 'new life' in the Soviet Union. Homesickness overcame their basic instinct of survival.
