The Way I Found Her (42 page)

At first, she didn't say anything. I guess she was trying to figure out what on earth Elroy was. Then, gradually she would feel that he was a kind of doll with a face and limbs and everything and even start wondering whether he'd come from the Palais Royal toy-shop. I waited, with my face very near to the hole. Only after a long time went by did Valentina say: ‘What's his name?'

‘Elroy,' I said. ‘He's a Royal Marine.'

What I remember most about the days that followed were all the hours I spent listening to Valentina's voice telling me about the past. It was like her whole life was being gathered in and brought back from all the far corners of the cold earth where it had once been and distilled in the darkness of her cell and poured into my ear through the funnel in the wall. It was like I was learning in a short space of time more than I'd been taught in nearly fourteen years of existence.

‘You know, Lewis,' she kept saying, ‘I think this is boring for you, hearing about all these things which are past and gone. Why don't we talk about the future?'

I said I didn't want to talk about that. I knew there might be no future. Valentina must have known this, too, deep inside her somewhere, but she'd just decided not to admit it.

She told me the person in her family she most resembled was her grandmother, Zoya, Anton's mother. She said: ‘Zoya was fat and greedy, like me. Her idea of paradise would have been to own a patisserie shop. But paradise never came.'

Zoya lived in Leningrad, where Anton was born. She lived there all her life, including right through the siege of the city which began in 1941 and lasted nine hundred days. During all this time, there were no trains and no trams and no light.

Food was so scarce, people ate up all the dogs and cats and rats and all the sparrows and starlings of the city. They made soup from book bindings and glue. When someone died, as 900,000 people did die, bits of their bodies were often eaten in secret, in the lightless rooms. Buttocks were considered a delicacy. Zoya and her neighbours kept themselves alive for two weeks in the winter of 1942 by making a stew out of four crows. Into this stew they put morsels of a road-mender, who had died on the stairs.

I asked Valentina whether, if we were starving and I died, she'd slice off slivers of my bum and make a casserole with them, and she said: ‘Darling, I can say no, never, I would never, never, do that, I would rather die. But the truth is you do not
know
what you are capable of doing, until that moment – of starvation or self-protection or whatever it is – arrives. People say they know, but they do not. If you had told Zoya, when she was young, that one day she would eat pieces of a road-mender's body, she would have said that was impossible. But when the moment came, this is what she did.'

I said that if I was starving and Valentina was dead, I would definitely eat her. I asked her if breasts were a delicacy.

She said: ‘Well, I don't know. Perhaps not. Perhaps there is too much fat in them, what do you think?'

I said I thought they might taste of cream. Then I added: ‘The only thing I'd like to have to go with you, Valentina, would be a bit of sugar.'

She told me about the ship frozen in the Neva river at the time of Zoya's cannibalism. All through the siege, this ship kept going with a radio broadcast, run from the ship's generator. It called itself Radio Leningrad. It tried to bring people news about the war and news about where food was to be found and when the siege would end. Valentina said: ‘Zoya told my father that these broadcasts were the things that people most looked forward to every single day. A voice that talks to you, even if you can't see it, like we can't see each other now, can give you hope, even if there really and truly is no hope at all. And do you know what those broadcasters used to transmit between the programmes, Lewis? They found a metronome and put it by the mike and just let it tick, on and on. And Zoya said that when you switched on your radio and heard that metronome, you knew that the ship was still there in the river and that the city was still alive.'

I wanted to write this down, about the metronome, in case I ever forgot it. I thought, there must be hundreds of thousands of piano teachers all round the world, setting up their fucking metronomes, who don't know what a heroic function it once performed. If people knew the history of the world better than they do, they might have different attitudes towards all kinds of things, including cannibalism. But I couldn't write anything down because Alexis had stolen my Concorde notebook. I knew it was Alexis because he was the only one who understood a bit of English.

He first began to get agitated around this time. His agitation and the Siege of Leningrad were sort of linked in my mind, like Alexis was going mad and planning to kill us and cut us up to put in a stew.

Valentina told me he was getting restless because no response had come to his ransom demand. He'd demanded that Bianquis pay ten million francs, in cash, to be handed over at the refreshment kiosk in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont on a certain day. Now that certain day had passed and no one had come there. No money. Nothing. The request had just been totally ignored.

‘So,' I said, ‘what's Alexis going to do?'

‘Well,' said Valentina calmly, ‘he's threatening to kill me. But he knows he's not capable of killing me. That's why he shouts and screams. You see, he's never really got beyond adolescence. He dreams stupid dreams and deludes himself about what he can or cannot do. He's forgotten how well I know him.'

‘Will Bianquis pay the money in the end?'

‘Look, darling, ten million is a lot. Nobody parts with that kind of money if they don't have to. They will stall. They will hope Alexis will crack and let us go.'

‘Why don't you pay it?' I said. ‘Why don't you just tell Alexis how to get into your safe and let him take all your jewellery?'

‘You think I have ten million francs' worth of jewellery, Lewis?'

‘I guess . . .'

‘Well, I don't, darling. Nowhere near that. More like one million, if that.'

‘You could give him a bit of money as well, couldn't you?'

Valentina sighed. ‘I could,' she said, ‘but why should I? I've earned every penny of this money. I've worked for it for fifteen years. Why should I let Alexis just help himself?'

‘If you die, the money won't be any good to you.'

‘I'm not going to die! If I thought there was a risk of it, I might tell Alexis to take the money and let me go. But I've told you: there's not the least probability that that will happen.'

I said moodily: ‘I think Bianquis should just pay.'

‘It's a lot of money. But I think something's happening out there. It may be to do with you, I don't know. They've asked Alexis for more time, for another week, while they try to put the money together. But he doesn't like this delay. He's got dreams of what he will do when he's rich. The delay is making him frightened.'

I said that when I was frightened I quite often played chess, sometimes just in my mind or sometimes with a real opponent or with a computer. And Valentina seized on this and said: ‘Chess is a good idea, darling. It might calm Alexis down. Alexis was like you when I lived with him – only in that one respect, of course: he could reduce his anxiety by playing chess. And he often won. I don't know why, when his mind is so wild, but he did.'

We drifted off the subject of Alexis and on to the subject of Stalin, whom Valentina called ‘another madman with a chess player's cunning mind'. She told me that Anton and Olga (Mrs Gavrilovich) had met in the queue to pay their last respects to Stalin's dead body. She said so many people were in that queue that seventeen of them were crushed to death during the days the coffin was open for public viewing.

I asked why, when Stalin had done such terrible things, Russians wanted to come and look at him. Valentina said: ‘You can understand why, can't you? They needed to get proof. Proof that it was over. Proof that he was lying in the velvet coffin and that they were still alive.'

‘How did Stalin die?' I asked.

‘Well, you know, he had a terrible death. Very, very slow, like death was torturing him. He had a cerebral haemorrhage, but it didn't kill him straight away. It made him suffocate, agonisingly slowly, in his own blood. They say his features turned dark and his lips black. It took him four days to die. But of course when Maman and Papa saw him, the morticians had drained some of the blood and made him appear normal again, and, anyway, I think Maman and Papa hardly noticed how he looked. Papa used to say: “I made this pilgrimage from Leningrad to Moscow and I thought it was to say adieu to Stalin. But it wasn't. It was a pilgrimage to find your mother.” Imagine. You're in a queue of a million people and you look round and you see your future wife standing right behind you.'

‘Was Olga beautiful then?'

‘Yes. She had beautiful eyes, especially. And hair very thick and dark. She worked in Moscow at that time, in a shoe factory. She always says the first thing she noticed about Anton was what a poor condition his shoes were in. She wondered if he'd walked all the way from Leningrad!'

I remembered the shoe coming down on my book then, on the steps in the theatre foyer, and how the mark left on Paul Berger's copy of
Le Grand Meaulnes
had bothered me. I said to Valentina: ‘How did Alexis know about the Meaulnes business?'

I could hear Valentina move on the other side of the wall. Lying there, with your face near the talking funnel, could make your body get stiff and quite often we broke off and went for walks. Mostly, we walked round Switzerland. We became sort of fond of these Swiss walks, with their cow bells and their wood-choppers and their sunsets over the mountains. But sometimes we went to other places and walked there. One of these places was London.

‘The difficulty I have with Alexis,' said Valentina, after she'd settled herself down in a new position, ‘is remembering to treat him like a stranger. I was married to him for more than a year. I used to wash his hair. I'd listen to his poems in the middle of the night. And so I find, still, after all this time has gone by, that I tell him things without meaning to. I should have told him nothing about you, but it never, never, occurred to me that he would try to harm you. I just said that I had become . . . very fond of you, like you could be my own son, or something, the son Alexis wanted and I never had, and that I had given you a musical box and was helping you with your translation of
Le Grand Meaulnes
. I don't know why I told him these things, but I just did, and now I'm so sorry, Lewis, I'm so sorry . . .'

‘Don't cry, Valentina,' I said. ‘Tell me about the
café-charbon
. Who came there? What was it like working in the café?'

I heard Valentina blow her nose. I asked her if she was blowing it on a torn-up bit of
France Dimanche
and she said she was. Then she said: ‘When I was a child, I used to love the
café-charbon
. We had an old cart then, with a pony. Imagine a pony on the streets of Paris! Nowadays, it would be killed by a BMW in about one week. But not then. And Anton would let me sit on the pony, sometimes, when he made his deliveries. And when you're a child, the only life you know is the one you've got, and so that's the life you love. It's the same for us all. Children try their best to love what they're given. But then later, when you can see beyond that life, you realise what poverty is, what drudgery is, what boredom is. I would look at my mother and father and think, how can they stand it? For all these years and years, this life of the
café-charbon
! How can they not see how pitiful it is? And I vowed, Lewis, I vowed to myself that I would find some other life. I didn't know what, but I vowed nevertheless.'

‘And you did.'

‘Yes. Thank goodness, I did. But maybe, you see, if I hadn't met Alexis—'

We had to stop this conversation there because we heard the monkeys coming back. I hoped they were bringing us a meal, even if it was a stew made from crows.

Food was on our minds quite a lot of the time. The only thing about the
café-charbon
Valentina seemed sad to have lost was the griddle pan on which she and Olga used to make
croquemonsieurs
. And on one of our walks round London, when I asked Valentina where she'd been she said she'd had tea at Brown's Hotel and dinner at the Caprice. When she told me where these places were, I pointed out to her that this wasn't a proper walk, but all she said was: ‘I
walked
from Brown's to the Caprice, darling. This meant going down Albemarle Street, crossing Piccadilly and into Arlington Street. It was raining, but I didn't take a taxi.'

I didn't know London as well as she did. I just knew the bits of it I'd been taken to see, like the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace, so mainly I just walked between these two places and back again, through St James's Park.

I didn't go down into the Tube and risk coming face to face with any untalented buskers. And, anyway, I couldn't remember which Tube lines ran where, except that the Northern line went up to Hampstead and Hugh had once taken me there when I was about ten and we'd flown our bird kite on a wooded hill. I kept this place in reserve, for when I'd run out of other walks. I knew it might be difficult to imagine myself there alone, without Hugh and the kite.

I remembered that the Houses of Parliament were by the river, so when I'd gone round them and into Westminster Abbey and looked at a few tombs and out again, I started walking along the Embankment, going east, where there were loads of new buildings alongside the water and the dome of St Paul's in the distance.