THE ONE WHO SAW EVERYTHING
I couldn’t sleep. I thought about Dashkevich. I thought about Umansky. About what I should ask. Out of what Ehrenburg had written about Konstantin Umansky, two things remained unclear. According to Ehrenburg, Umansky sacrificed his personal happiness for the sake of Nina’s peace of mind, and stayed with the family. But why, twenty years later, did Ehrenburg not name the object of Umansky’s affection? Who was she? Is it possible she was a married woman? And a party member to boot? Still, Ehrenburg could have said something, he could have written, for instance, that Umansky ‘fell insanely in love with an extraordinary green-eyed woman he met by chance at the summer terrace of the Vakhtangov Theater cafe where he used to meet his actor friends’… But there was nothi
