The Little Man From Archangel (8 page)

Jonas had applied to all the authorities imaginable, Russian as well as French, without obtaining any news of his family.

Could he hope that his father, at eighty-two years old, and his mother at seventy-six, were still alive?

What had happened to Aunt Zina, in whose house people lost themselves, and his sisters, whose faces were unknown to him?

Did Doussia even know that she had a brother somewhere in the world?

All around him the walls were covered with old books. In his little room was a large stove which he kept roaring hot in winter as a luxury, and today he would have sworn that the smell of herrings still hung in the air in the kitchen.

The huge roof of the market was streaked with sunlight opposite his window and all around there were shops hardly larger than his own, except on the side of the Rue de Bourges where St. Cecilia's Church stood.

He could put a name to every face, recognize everyone's voice and, when people saw him in his doorway or when he went into Le Bouc's, they used to call out:

'Hullo, Monsieur Jonas!'

It was a world in which he had shut himself up, and Gina had walked in one fine day with a sway of her hips, bringing a warm smell of armpits with her into this world of his.

She had just walked out again, and he was overcome with a fit of giddiness.

IV

It was not that day that the complications were to begin, but he still had the feeling of a person who is incubating an illness.

In the afternoon, fortunately, the customers were fairly numerous in the shop and he received, among others, a visit from Monsieur Legendre, a retired railway guard, who used to read a book a day, sometimes two, changed them by the half-dozen and always sat down in a chair for a chat. He used to smoke a meerschaum pipe which made a spluttering noise each time he sucked at it, and as he had a habit of pressing down the burning tobacco, the entire top joint of his index finger was a golden brown colour.

He was not a widower nor a bachelor. His wife, small and thin, used to shop at the market, a black hat on her head, three times a week, and stop in front of all the stalls, disputing the price before buying a bunch of leeks.

Monsieur Legendre stayed for nearly an hour. The door was open. In the shadow of the covered market the cement, after being washed down, was drying slowly, leaving damp patches, and as it was Thursday, a crowd of children had taken possession of it and this time were playing at cowboys.

Two or three customers had interrupted the ex-railwayman's discourse and he waited, quite used to it, for the bookseller to finish serving them before carrying on the conversation at the exact point where he had left off.

'As I was saying . . .'

At seven o'clock, Jonas hesitated whether to lock up and go and have dinner at Pepito's as it seemed to him he ought to do, but finally he hadn't the heart. Instead he decided to walk across the Square and buy some eggs at Coutelle's, the dairy, where, as he expected, Madame Coutelle asked him:

'Isn't Gina there?'

It was without conviction, this time, that he replied:

'She's gone to Bourges.'

He made himself an omelette. It was good for him to keep himself occupied. His movements were meticulous. Just before pouring the whipped-up eggs into the pan he yielded once more to gluttony, as he had done at midday with the apple tart, and went into the yard to pick a few chives which were growing in a box.

Oughtn't he to have been indifferent to what he ate, seeing that Gina had gone? He arranged the butter, bread and coffee on the table, unfolded his napkin and ate his meal slowly, to all appearances thinking of nothing.

He had read in some book or other, probably war memoirs, that a certain time nearly always elapses before the most seriously wounded feel any pain, that sometimes they do not even realize at once that they have been hit.

In his case it was a little different. He felt no violent pain, nor despair. It was more that a void had been created inside him. He was no longer in a state of equilibrium. The kitchen, which had not changed, seemed to him not so much strange as lifeless, without any definite shape, as if he had been looking at it without his glasses.

He did not weep, did not sigh, that evening, any more than the day before. After eating a banana which had been bought by Gina, he did the washing up, swept out the kitchen, then went over to the doorway to watch the sun setting.

He did not stay where he was because the Chaignes, the grocers from next door, had brought their chairs out onto the pavement and were chatting in low voices with the butcher, who had come to keep them company.

If he no longer had his valuable stamps at least he still had his collection of Russian ones, for this, which was purely of sentimental value, he had stuck into an album rather in the way that in other houses family portraits are pasted in.

Yet he did not feel himself to be particularly Russian, witness the fact that he only felt at home in the Vieux-Marché.

The shopkeepers had been friendly when the Milks had set themselves up there, and although to start with Milk's father did not speak one word of French, he had soon made great headway. It sometimes provoked his great laugh, devoid of bitterness, to be selling fish by the pound when, a few years earlier, he owned the most important fishing fleet in Archangel, and his boats went as far as Spitzbergen and Novaya Zembla. A little while before the war he had even equipped his ships as whalers, and it was perhaps a sort of sense of humour all his own that prompted him to call his son Jonas.

Natalie was slower to adapt herself to their new life and her husband used to tease her in Russian in front of the customers, who did not understand a word.

'Come on, Ignatievna Oudonova, dip your pretty little hands into that tub and serve this fat lady with half a dozen whiting.'

Jonas knew practically nothing about the Oudonovs, his mother's family, except that they were merchants who provisioned boats. While Constantin Milk, whose grandfather was a shipowner before him, had kept some of his rough plebeian habits, the Oudonovs liked good manners and mixed in high society.

When he was in a good mood, Milk did not call his wife Natalie, but Ignatievna Oudonova, or simply Oudonova, and she would pout as if it were a reproach

Her chief despair was that there were no synagogues in the town, for the Milks, like the Oudonovs, were Jews. There were other Jews in the district, especially among the second-hand shops and small stores in the Rue Haute, but because the Milks were red-haired, with fair skin and blue eyes, the local people did not seem to be aware of their race.

To the world at large they were Russians, and in a sense it was true.

At school, at first, when he had hardly been able to speak French and often used comical expressions, Jonas had been the butt of many gibes, but it had not lasted long.

'They are very nice,' he would say to his parents when they asked him how his schoolmates treated him.

It was perfectly true. Everybody was nice to them. After his father's departure, nobody went into the shop without asking Natalie:

'Still no news?'

Jonas was rather proud at heart that his mother had abandoned him to go and join her husband. It had upset him more to leave the Old Market to go to Condorcet, and above all to meet the Shepilovs again.

Serge Sergeevitch Shepilov was an intellectual, and it could be seen in the attitudes he struck, in his way of speaking, of looking at the person he was talking to with a certain air of condescension. After eleven years of living in France he still regarded himself as an exile and went to all the White Russian meetings, worked for their newspaper and their reviews.

When Jonas used to go and see them on holidays, in the bookshop in the Rue Jacob, at the back of which they lived in a minute studio, Shepilov liked to address him in Russian then, stopping short, would remark bitterly:

'Ah, but then you've forgotten the language of your country!'

Shepilov was still alive. So, too, was his wife, Nina Ignatievna. Both old now, they had eventually installed themselves in Nice where the odd article which Shepilov sold to a newspaper from time to time enabled them to vegetate. Around the samovar they spent their declining years in the cult of the past and the denigration of the present.

'If your father hasn't been shot or sent to Siberia, then it's because he's rallied to the party cause, in which case I prefer never to see him again.'

Jonas hated nobody, not even the Bolsheviks, whose rise had scattered his family. If he ever thought of Doussia, it was less as a real person than as a sort of fairy. In his imagination Doussia resembled nobody he knew; she had become the symbol of fragile, tender femininity which brought tears to his eyes every time he thought of it.

So as not to be left with nothing to do for the whole evening, he turned over the pages of Russian stamps, and in the little room where he had turned on the light, the history of his country unfolded itself before his eyes.

This collection, almost complete, had taken him a long time to build up, and it had required a great deal of patience, letters and exchanges with hundreds of philatelists, even though the entire album was worth less commercially than four or five of the stamps Gina had taken away.

The first stamp, which was also the first issued in Russia, dating from 1857, depicted an eagle in relief, and although Jonas possessed the ten and twenty kopeks, he had never managed to get hold of the thirty kopeks.

For years, the same symbol had been used with minor variations until the tercentenary in 1905, which the school friend from Condorcet had shown him.

Then with the 1914 war there came the charity stamps with the portrait of Murometz and the Cossack of the Don. He particularly liked, for its style and engraving, a St. George and the Dragon which, however, was only catalogued at forty francs.

He thought to himself as he fondled them:

'When this stamp was issued my father was twenty years old ... He was twenty-five. . . . He was meeting my mother. . . . That one dates from Alyosha's birth. . .

In 1917 it was the Phrygian cap of the Democratic Republic, with the two crossed sabres, then the stamps of Kerensky, on which a powerful hand was breaking a chain.

1921, 1922 saw the advent of illustrations with harder, coarser lines, and from 1923 onwards the commemorations started once again, no longer of the Romanovs, but of the fourth anniversary of the October Revolution, the fifth anniversary of the Soviet Republic.

Some more charity stamps at the time of the famine, then, with the U.S.S.R. pictures of workers, ploughmen, soldiers, the portrait of Lenin, in red and black for the first time in 1924.

He did not soften or feel touched with nostalgia. It was more curiosity which had impelled him to assemble this collection of a far-off world and place them side by side-…

A Samoyed village, or a group of Tajiks beside a cornfield plunged him into the same dreamland as a child with a book of holy pictures.

The idea of going back there had never occurred to him, and it was not due to fear of the fate which might await him, nor, as with Shepilov, hatred for the Party, From the moment he had come of age, on the contrary, two years before the war, he had renounced his
Nansen
passport and become a naturalized Frenchman.

France itself was too big for him. After school he had worked for several months in a bookshop in the Boulevard Saint-Michel and the Shepilovs had been unable to believe their ears when he had told them that he preferred to return to the Berry.

He had gone back alone, had taken a furnished room with old Mademoiselle Buttereau, who had died during the war, and had gone to work as a clerk in Duret's bookshop, in the Rue de Bourges.

It was still in existence. Old Duret had retired, almost gaga, but the two sons continued the business. It was the chief newsagent-bookshop in town and one of its windows was devoted to devotional objects.

He had not yet taken to eating at Pepito's at that time, because it was too expensive. When the bookseller's shop where he now lived, had become vacant, he had moved in there as if the Rue de Bourges only a stone's throw away, had been too far.

He was back once again in the heart of the Old Market of his childhood and everyone had recognized him.

Gina's departure had suddenly destroyed this equilibrium, acquired by perseverance, with the same brutality as the Revolution, earlier on, had scattered his own family.

He did not peruse the album to the end. He made himself a cup of coffee, went and removed the handle from the door, turned the key in the lock, shot the bolt, and a little while later went up to his room.

It was, as always when there was no market, a quiet night, without any noise except for the occasional distant motor horn, and the even more distant rumble of a goods train.

Alone in his bed, without the spectacles which made him look like a man, he huddled up like a frightened child and finally went to sleep, with a sad twist to his lips, one hand in the place where Gina ought to have been.

When the sun woke him, coming into his room, the air was still as calm as ever and the bells of St. Cecilia's were sounding out the first Mass. All of a sudden he felt the void of his loneliness again, and he almost dressed without washing as sometimes happened before Gina's day. But he was intent at all costs on following the same routine as every other day, so that he even hesitated when he was being served his
croissants
at the baker's opposite.

'Only three,' he filially murmured regretfully.

'Isn't Gina there?'

These people didn't know yet. True, they were almost new to the Square, where they had bought the business only five years before.

'No. She's not there.'

He was surprised not to be pressed, that the news was received with indifference.

It was half-past seven. He hadn't closed the door to go across the Square. He never did. When he came back he had a shock, for a man rose before him and as he was walking with his eyes cast down, plunged in thought, he had not recognized him immediately.