David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn & The Courilof Affair (2008) (27 page)

ONE
MONTH AFTER
Youri’s death, a cousin of the Karines came and spent a night with Tatiana Ivanovna. He was an old man, half dead from starvation and exhaustion, on his way from Odessa to Moscow to look for his wife, who had disappeared during the bombings in April. He brought her news of Nicolas Alexandro-vitch and his family, and gave her their address. They were in good health, but were living in poverty. “Could you find a man you trust,” he hesitated, “to bring them what they left here?”

The old woman left for Odessa, carrying the jewellery in the hem of her skirt. For three months, she travelled along the roads, as she had done when she was young, when she made the pilgrimage from Kiev, sometimes climbing on to trains full of starving people making the journey south. One September evening, she arrived at the Karines’ home. They would never forget the moment when she knocked at the door, when they first saw her, looking haggard and calm, her bundle of old clothes on her back, the diamonds beating against her weary legs. They would never forget her pale face, completely drained of blood, nor the sound of her voice when she told them that Youri was dead.

They were living in a dark room near the port; sacks of potatoes had been hung from the window-panes to absorb the exploding bullets. Helene Vassilievna lay on an old mattress on the floor; Loulou and Andre were playing cards by the light of a little stove, where three pieces of coal were nearly burnt out. It was already cold, and the wind whistled through the broken windows. Cyrille was sleeping in one corner of the room, and Nicolas Alexandrovitch began what was to later become the main activity of his life: pacing back and forth between their four walls, hands folded behind his back, thinking about a time that would never return.

“Why did they kill him?” asked Loulou. “Why, dear Lord, why?” Tears flowed down her face. She had changed, looked older.

“They were afraid he’d come back to claim his land. But they said he had always been a good Barine. They wanted to spare him the pain of a trial and execution, and that it was better to kill him that way …”

“The cowards,” Cyrille suddenly shouted. “The bastards! Shooting him in the back! Bloody serfs… We should have been harder on you when we were your masters!” He shook his fist at the old woman with a kind of hatred. “Do you hear me? Do you?”

“I hear you,” she replied, “but what’s the use regretting that he died one way as opposed to another? God has received him in his sacraments, I could see it in his peaceful face. May God grant all of us such a peaceful end. He saw nothing, he didn’t suffer.”

“Ah! You don’t understand.”

“It was better that way,” she repeated.

That was the last time she ever spoke Youri’s name out loud; she seemed to have sealed her ageing lips over him, forever. When anyone else talked about him, she never replied; she sat silent and cold, staring into space with a kind of icy despair.

The winter was extremely harsh. They didn’t have enough bread or clothes. Only the jewellery that Tatiana Ivanovna had smuggled back occasionally brought them some money. The city was burning; the snow fell softly, hiding the scorched beams of the ruined houses, dead bodies, and dismembered horses. At times, the city was different: provisions arrived, meat, fruit, caviar… God alone knew how… The cannon fire would stop, and life would begin again, intoxicating and precarious.

Intoxicating… Cyrille and Loulou were the ones who felt it, the only ones. Much later, they would remember certain nights—going for boat rides with other young people, the taste of kisses, the dawn breeze blowing on the stormy waves of the Black Sea—and this would never fade in their memories.

The long winter passed, another summer and another winter followed, when the famine was so bad that dead children were
buried in sacks, in mass graves. The Karines survived. In May, they managed to get passage on the last French boat leaving Odessa, first to Constantinople, then to Marseille.

They stepped out on the port in Marseille on 28 May 1920. In Constantinople, they had sold their remaining jewellery; their money was sewn into their belts, out of habit. They were dressed in rags, their faces were strange and frightening, miserable, harsh. The children, in spite of everything, seemed happy; they laughed with a kind of solemn gentleness which made the older members of the family sense their own weariness even more.

The clear May air was full of the scent of flowers and pepper; the crowd moved slowly, stopping to look in the shop windows, laughing and talking loudly. Lights and music echoed from the cafes, all of it as bizarre as in a dream.

While Nicolas Alexandrovitch went to find some hotel rooms, the children and Tatiana Ivanovna stayed outside for a while. Loulou closed her eyes, lifted up her pale face to breathe in the fragrant evening air. Great round electric lights lit up the street with a bluish glow; clusters of delicate trees in bloom swayed their branches. Some sailors passed by, laughed as they looked at the pretty young girl, standing motionless. One of them gently threw her a sprig of mimosas. Loulou started laughing. “What a beautiful, charming place,” she said. “It’s like a dream, Nianiouchka, look…”

But the old woman had sat down on a bench and appeared to have dozed off, her head-scarf pulled tightly around her white hair and her hands crossed over her knees. Loulou saw that her eyes were wide open, staring straight in front of her. She touched her shoulder, called: “Nianiouchka, what’s the matter?”

Tatiana Ivanovna suddenly shivered, stood up. At the same time, Nicolas Alexandrovitch waved to them.

They went inside and slowly crossed the entrance hall, feeling that everyone was looking at them oddly as they walked past. They were no longer used to thick carpets; they stuck to their shoes, like glue. An orchestra was playing in the restaurant. They stopped, listened to this jazz music for the very first time, with a vague sort of fear and mad delight. It was another world.

They went into their rooms and stood at the windows for a
long time, watching the cars go by in the street below. “Let’s go out, let’s go out,” the children said over and over. “Let’s go to a cafe, or the theatre …”

They had baths, brushed off their clothes, rushed to the door. Nicolas Alexandrovitch and his wife followed them more slowly, more hesitantly, but consumed, as well, by a longing for fresh air and freedom.

When he reached the door, Nicolas Alexandrovitch turned around. Loulou had switched off the lights. They had forgotten Tatiana Ivanovna, who was sitting at the window. The light from a gas street-lamp in front of the little balcony lit up her bent head. She sat motionless, as ifwaiting for something. “Are you coming with us, Nianiouchka?” asked Nicolas Alexandrovitch.

She didn’t reply. “Aren’t you hungry?” She shook her head, then suddenly got up, nervously twisting the fringes of her shawl. “Should I unpack the children’s things? When will we be leaving?”

“But we’ve only just got here,” said Nicolas Alexandrovitch. “Why do you want to go?”

“I don’t know,” she murmured, a blank, weary look on her face. “Ijust thought…”

She sighed, spread out her arms, then said quietly: “It’s all right.”

“Do you want to come with us?”

“No, thank you, Helene Vassilievna,” she said with difficulty. “No, really…”

They could hear the children running down the corridor. The adults looked at each other in silence, sighing; then Helene Vassilievna made a weary gesture and went out, followed by Nicolas Alexandrovitch, who quietly closed the door.

THE
KARINES ARRIVED
in Paris at the beginning of summer and rented a small furnished apartment on the Rue de l’Arc de Triomphe. It was a time when Paris had been invaded by the first wave of Russian immigrants, all of whom piled into Passy and the area around the Arc de Triomphe, instinctively drawn to the nearby woods of the Bois de Boulogne. That summer the heat was unbearable.

The apartment was small, dark, stifling; it smelled of dust and old upholstery. The low ceilings seemed to weigh down on them; from the windows, you could see the courtyard, long and narrow, with its whitewashed walls shimmering cruelly beneath the July sun. Even in the morning, they had to close the windows and shutters. The Karines remained in these four dark rooms until evening, without going out, stunned by the noise in Paris, feeling slightly sick as they breathed in the smells from the kitchens and sinks that rose up from the courtyard. Back and forth they went, between their four walls, silently, like flies in autumn after the heat and light of summer had gone, barely able to fly, weary and angry, buzzing around the windows, trailing their broken wings behind them.

Tatiana Ivanovna sat all day long in a small laundry room, at the back of the apartment, mending clothes. The only servant, a young girl from Normandy with a fresh face and rosy cheeks, as lumbering as a work-horse, would sometimes open the door and shout, “Aren’t you bored?” She thought the foreigner would understand her better if she spoke slowly and loudly, like when you speak to deaf people; her voice reverberated, making the china lampshade rattle.

Tatiana Ivanovna would vaguely shake her head, and the servant would go back to stirring her cooking.

Andre had been sent to boarding-school near the coast, in
Brittany. A while later, Cyrille left. He had found his prison cellmate, the French actress he’d been locked up with in St. Petersburg in 1918. She had a rich lover now. She was a pretty young blonde, generous, with a full, beautiful figure, and madly in love with Cyrille. It simplified his life. But sometimes, when he came home at dawn, he would look out the window down at the courtyard, wishing he were stretched out on the pink paving stones, and finished, forever, with all the complications of love and money.

Later, that feeling passed. He bought nice clothes. He drank. At the end of June, he went to Deauville with his mistress.

In Paris, when the heat broke towards evening, the Karines would go out to the Bois de Boulogne, to the Pavillon Dauphine. The adults would sit there, sadly listening to the orchestra playing, remembering the little islands and gardens in Moscow; Loulou, and the other young boys and girls, would walk along the shaded paths, reciting poetry, playing at being in love.

Loulou was twenty. She was no longer as beautiful as before; she was thin with angular movements like a boy, and rough, dark skin burned by the wind during their long sea crossing. On her face was a strange look, weary and cruel. She had so loved her active, dangerous, exciting life. Now, her very favourite thing was walking through Paris at dusk, and the long, silent evenings in the bistros, those popular little bars, with their smell of chalk and alcohol, and the sound of people playing billiards in the back room. Towards midnight, they would go back to one of their apartments and start drinking again, caressing each other in the darkened rooms. Everyone else was asleep; their parents only vaguely heard the sound of the gramophone playing until dawn. They saw nothing, or wanted to see nothing.

One night, Tatiana Ivanovna came out of her room to get some washing that was drying in the bathroom; she had to mend a pair of tights for Loulou, and the night before, she’d left them on the radiator. She often worked at night. She didn’t need much sleep, and by four or five o’clock in the morning, she was up, silently wandering through the apartment; she never went into the sitting room.

On that night, she had heard footsteps and voices in the
entrance hall; the children had gone out ages ago, undoubtedly. She saw a faint light under the sitting-room door. “They forgot to switch off the lamp, again,” she thought. She opened the door, and only then heard the gramophone playing, muffled by a pile of cushions; the low, breathless music sounded as if it were being played under water. The room was almost dark. Just one lamp, covered by a piece of red cloth, cast a shadow on the settee where Loulou was stretched out, apparently asleep, her blouse unbuttoned; in her arms was a young boy, his pale, delicate head thrown back. The old woman moved closer. They were actually asleep, their faces pressed against each other, their lips still touching. The smell of alcohol and thick smoke filled the room; all over the floor there were glasses, empty bottles, overflowing ashtrays, and cushions with the deep impressions made by their bodies.

Loulou woke up, stared at Tatiana Ivanovna, smiled; her dilated eyes, darkened by wine and passion, looked mockingly indifferent and extremely tired. “What do you want?” she whispered.

Her long, loose hair reached down to the carpet; she tried to move her head, then groaned; the boy’s hand was caught in her tangled hair. She broke free suddenly, sat up.

“What is it?” she said again, impatiently.

Tatiana Ivanovna looked at the boy. She knew him well; she had seen him often at the Karines’ home when he was a child. He was called Prince Georges Andronikof; she remembered his long blond curls, his lace collars. “Get him out of here, right now, do you hear me?” she said suddenly, gritting her teeth, her old face trembling and ashen.

Loulou shrugged her shoulders. “All right, be quiet… He’s going.”

“Lulitchka,” the oldwoman murmured.

“Yes, yes, just be quiet, for God’s sake.”

She switched off the gramophone, lit a cigarette, put it out almost immediately. “Help me,” she ordered curtly.

Silently, they tidied up the room, picking up cigarette butts and empty glasses. Loulou opened the shutters, greedily breathing in the cool air that wafted up from the cellars. “Isn’t it hot?”

The old woman didn’t reply, looking away with a kind of furious modesty.

Loulou sat down on the window-ledge, gently swaying and humming. She looked sober, ill; beneath her face-powder, smudged from kissing, white patches of her pale cheeks showed through. She had rings under her wide empty eyes and she stared straight ahead.

“What’s the matter with you, Nianiouchka? We do the same thing every night,” she finally said, her voice calm, hoarse from the wine and smoke. “And in Odessa, my God? On the boat? You never noticed?”