The White Russian (10 page)

By that night, I knew a few more things.

The first was that Grandmother had left me her money. The lawyer (thin and faintly disapproving and dressed in hot black, regardless of the weather, like all lawyers everywhere) had shown me her will, written seventeen years before. Below an official declaration that she had no other family – I guessed, from this disavowal, that the will must have been her angry response to my mother and stepfather and her own sister’s decision to cut her out of our family finances – she’d written that I was to be her sole beneficiary.

‘
Mais, mademoiselle
,’ he’d added cautiously, nibbling at his pen and raising an eyebrow, ‘it is my impression that there isn’t much to leave. The apartment is rented – it’s paid for until the end of the year. She had an American official widow’s pension which dies with her. There are personal effects, of course: clothes, furs, jewels, which I don’t think are worth enough for you to worry about their incurring tax. But there is nothing else.’

Remembering Marie-Thérèse’s warning not to let the taxman know about the Fabergé trinkets, I’d kept quiet about the box. But I’d gestured around at the pictures – the ones in the salon were mostly curling-up pages of yellowed paper pinned to the wall, with jagged lines and cut-out bits
of violin curve stuck on to them, and asked, timidly, what about these? The lawyer had just smiled.

My second discovery was that both afternoon and evening were bad times to telephone Parisians, whether French, Russian or American. I hadn’t managed to strike up a chatty friendship with a single White Russian, trustworthy or otherwise. Every number I was put through to was answered by a haughty-sounding maid saying, ‘
Madame revient prochaînement
,’ or ‘
Monsieur dîne à l’extérieur
,’ and offering, with no great grace, to take a message. There hadn’t been many gracious expressions of condolence, either, when the message I’d dictated had been an invitation for Monsieur or Madame to attend a funeral the day after tomorrow.

One person I’d thought I might show the paper to, and ask what the mystery word meant, was the singer I’d met in New York – Plevitskaya, the so-called Russian Nightingale. Briefly, I’d been pleased at the idea of our paths crossing again. Here, among strangers, even someone I knew as little as Plevitskaya felt like a dear old friend. But, when I’d looked in the book, I hadn’t seen anything that looked like the singer’s long last name. (Or had I just remembered it wrong?)

Nor was there an entry I could recognize as being the orphanage woman’s number. I’d just have to wait to talk to the people who came to the funeral to find out more, I saw.

Grandmother’s Russian artist friends didn’t even have a telephone number. There was just an address: ‘Surrealists – chez Père Boucher, passage Dantzig, rue Dantzig, 15e. Or try Café Dantzig (NB beware drunk butchers)’.

So, when I’d given up on the telephone, I’d got Gaston
to take me there, through a district of slaughterhouses, foul smells and screaming cattle. Sighing deeply, he’d dropped me at a half-ruined octagonal building I’d felt a little scared to enter. The plot it was built on was full of other, smaller, more definitely ruined temporary buildings, like exhibition pavilions long gone to seed, with a garage at the end. It was very noisy. There were people banging at metal and wood on all sides. Most of the windows were broken. There were makeshift stovepipes sticking out of several squares with no glass. A man dressed as a cowboy was howling from a tiny balcony near the top, ‘
Moi génie! Moi génie!
’ But no one was listening.

Everywhere I looked I saw depressed-looking people in rags dragging themselves about or muttering together. No wonder they looked so miserable. It smelled of herring and filth, cabbage and turpentine. I could feel the rats. I was about to leave without daring to speak to a soul when I saw an old Frenchman wearing a military ribbon in his buttonhole, wandering with a donkey on a halter through a litter-strewn garden dotted with sculptures (or so I thought – though they were so odd that I also thought they might just be bits of buildings that had come down). When I explained my errand, his eyes filled with sympathetic tears and he took me straight into a not-so-bad apartment on the ground floor. As he murmured, ‘
Ah, la pauvre Constance
,’ a crowd of other lost souls followed us in, all of them emaciated and paint-damaged but suddenly bright-eyed too.

‘My bees,’ the old man explained vaguely, and the way they were buzzing around him was rather like bees; was this, then, the beehive – La Ruche – that the Dutchman
I’d talked to on the train, a lifetime ago – yesterday – had been heading for?

‘Are you making tea, Papi?’ one of the young people asked in guttural French; Russians, I thought, and my hunch was confirmed when he turned to me and explained, with a joyful flash of a smile, ‘Tea is the centre of all our nostalgias.’ Then, turning on the skeletal youth behind him, the speaker added, quickly: ‘Because if you are, I happen to know Kostya has a bottle of vodka in his pocket. So if you have bread and maybe a bit of sausage for a
zakuska
, too, we could all treat this lovely young lady.’

And so it had been maybe an hour before I’d got away – an hour during which several more people had crammed in to see me, many of whom had said warmly that Grandmother had been their dearest friend and patron, most of whom had asked me to their studios to see their work, and all of whom had said, very eagerly, that they’d be sure to come to the funeral. It had felt encouraging to be among people who’d known Grandmother and wanted to tell me how much they’d enjoyed her company and support, and who might at any moment let slip some inconsequential story that would perhaps let me feel closer to her. I yearned to hear her spoken of in a way that would illuminate her. So I’d sat very quietly, smiling at everyone and letting them pour more drink and talk, being patient when they broke into the language I couldn’t make head or tail of but now knew to be Russian. And it was only when I’d been getting up to go, with my head swimming from the vodka my new friends had been making me gulp down, neat, from a tin mug, followed by a tiny bite of herringy bread, followed by roars of applause, that I’d remembered my blotting paper.

‘Женя!’ they’d all sung out, on seeing the mystery scribble. ‘It says “Zhenya”!’ And I’d gazed back, soft with euphoria and hard liquor, loving them all, before I’d realized that this didn’t really solve anything for me, since I didn’t know what it meant. It was a name, of course, they said. The short pet name for Yevgeny – a Russian man’s name.

‘Well, are any of
you
called Yevgeny?’ I asked, hoping against hope that Grandmother would turn out to have one favourite among this lot. But the tousled heads shook, one by one. When they’d finished cheerily calling out all their first names, which went from Khaim to Konstantin but didn’t include anything like the one on my paper, I’d swallowed my disappointment, thanked them and left. Why did you even think it would be that easy? I’d told myself sternly. All the same, I blinked, very hard, all the way back to the car.

It had taken me the entire drive home to see things more optimistically.

It was only as I got into bed that I finally could. The third and most important thing I found out today, I told myself, as I switched off the lamp, is that I’m looking for a man called Yevgeny.

White Russians

On the ground floor below Constance’s apartment, a stout elderly man in a suit was sitting at his desk, bathed in strong morning sun, not looking at the one letter on its vast empty surface. He wasn’t looking out of the window, either, at the crowd of peculiar-looking people in the street, all watching a coffin being loaded into a hearse. Not really. Not any more than he was really looking at the two ponies strapped to the hearse, or at the tall, attractive, well-dressed young woman in black, a stranger to him – but, he thought, with a moment’s approval, a lady, at least, unlike all those other ragamuffins – as she got into the car parked behind. Even though he wanted to look. Even though there were tears in his light eyes.

What General Miller of the Russian General Military Union – discreetly identified on this apartment’s doorplate only by his international-sounding surname and its Russian initials, ROVS, transliterated into Roman letters – was doing, instead, as Constance’s odd cortège assembled on the street, was staying very still, and trying to keep those tears from rolling down his cheeks.

He was remembering how he’d brushed Constance off
at lunch three days ago, when she’d wanted him to come back to her apartment later on, and talk something over with her. Self-important fool that he was, he’d told her he was going to be too busy.

And now it was too late.

Constance had been the one taste of freedom in his life. He might not have liked all those terrible degenerate young men painting dreadful pictures whom she’d taken to cossetting. (He could half see several of them outside now.) But he’d admired her free spirit in choosing them, all the same. She wasn’t a person to let herself be tied down by other people’s expectations. She’d always done what she wanted. An extraordinary woman … To someone as defined as he was by the great struggle that had dominated his life for so long, that freedom of manoeuvre of hers had been something to appreciate. When he’d been with her, during those snatched moments together upstairs, he’d sometimes, briefly, also felt free. She’d had the knack of making it seem as though everything might, after all, be possible. She’d had hope. She’d had joy.

But now she was gone. How trapped he felt.

The door had just shut behind Jean, who’d taken one look at him while putting down a cup of breakfast-time coffee (still steaming, unnoticed, on the table by the sofa) and said, immediately, with concern in his voice, ‘Pap, you shouldn’t stay up all night working like this. Does you no good. The Soviets will wait another day to be conquered. You don’t look well. Come home with me now. Get some sleep, eh?’

Of course he hadn’t agreed. But that was nothing to do with the faint scepticism about his mission in life that he’d
heard in Jean’s remark either. Jean was a good boy, whose hard work in his unworthy calling as a driver kept them all financially afloat. Jean was entitled to his opinion. He had no right to argue with Jean.

There was a good practical reason for refusing to go home. This respectable office was in an apartment that had been a legacy to ROVS from an elderly Russian émigré, who’d had the good fortune to pass away while he still had something left to leave. The apartment still had a faded dignity about it: high ceilings (though with flaking paint) and space to breathe and spread out maps. But the dingy little place in the sticks that he and Jean called home only had one bedroom, and that was for Katya, his wife, with the old nurse who lived with them in a cot at the side of the room. Where he slept, at night, was on the sofa in the other room. Jean slept on it during the day, after his nights out scouring Paris for fares. They were both big men. They couldn’t exactly share the sofa for a day’s sleep, could they?

And anyway, he wanted to be here, watching Constance’s funeral cortège set out.

What he’d really have liked, if he’d been another person with another life, would have been to go to the funeral himself. But he wasn’t allowed out by himself. He was too important to the White cause. His colleagues didn’t want any more leaders of what was left of the White Russian army – the man on whom they pinned all their hopes of a return, one day, to the lost motherland – to fall victim to any more Soviet plots. It might just have been a rumour that the strange, sudden TB that had taken off Vrangel’, his predecessor but one, had really been caused by a dose of Soviet poison. But there’d been no doubt when Kutyopov
had been clubbed and chloroformed and shoved inside a car seven years ago – right here on the street, in the middle of Paris, in the middle of the morning – by men dressed as French police. The hand of the Kremlin’s secret agents was clearly visible. No one knew exactly what had become of that White military leader, but the likelihood was that poor Kutyopov had been spirited off by ship to Russia and ended up in the Lubyanka. At any rate, he’d never been seen again. So, since General Miller had taken over the job, he’d been watched, day and night, not only by Jean – who ended every night’s driving work by picking him up from home in the taxi and bringing him here, then started every new night by coming back to pick him up – but also by all those young men in the outer office: the secretaries, always buzzing around, checking on him, bringing him things … like flies.

If he tried to slip out of the building now, they’d ask questions. They’d try to come too.

And he didn’t want that. Some things were best kept private.

He didn’t even dare get up and go and stare out of the window, memorizing the details of Constance’s last departure. He was too aware of Jean’s habits not to know that, after leaving him here in the mornings – or, on this particular morning, just dropping in to check he was all right – Jean always sat out there in the driver’s seat for a few more minutes, rolling a cigarette to smoke before heading home to sleep. (A filthy habit, General Miller sometimes remonstrated; but Jean was tired by the morning, yawning and red-eyed, and would answer without anger that he needed that cigarette to get his strength up to get to his
bed.) So General Miller had no intention of going near the window until he heard the chug of Jean’s motor heading away. He wouldn’t want to be seen gawping out at the many strange persons gathered out there – strays from all the old Russian empire’s subordinate nationalities – in their weird clothes, dirt and disarray.

He couldn’t stay still. He got up. But instead of going to the window he walked to the fireplace and picked up the small framed photo on it. It showed a thin young fair-haired man in military uniform, rowing a boat, with a dark-haired young woman in the mutton-chop-sleeve fashion of two generations ago smiling tremulously at him. He held it to his heart, remembering how young they’d both once been, and obscurely comforted by its still being here. Constance’s smile had always had that power over him.

Whatever he’d told her, after their last lunch, about being too busy, he’d half meant to change his mind and slip upstairs for that cocktail anyway. He really had. She was always in his thoughts. But then, by the end of the afternoon, his head had been too full of the marvellous news Skoblin had brought him – that letter from Wilhelm Canaris’s office, still lying there on the desk now, with its black, black Gothic lettering and its long German words. The letter held out the possibility of the alliance they’d been dreaming of for all these years: Germany’s military might thrown behind their increasingly futile struggle to unseat the Reds from Russia (futile because they were none of them getting any younger, and because so many of the young had, like Jean, given up hope of ever going home – but how different everything would look, if they could lean on Berlin) … He’d been so full of pride in his security
chief – Skoblin, the quiet man no one had trusted, whom he’d insisted on appointing; his faith in his subordinate now triumphantly vindicated – and in the future opening up for them all that he hadn’t been able to think of anything else. He hadn’t slipped upstairs, as he’d intended, not even for a moment. He’d just let Jean take him back to his own apartment instead.

If only he’d fobbed Jean off, said he had to work late, as he sometimes did, told him to come back hours later or not at all, that he’d sleep on the office sofa, anything. If only he’d forgotten about duty and the war against the Soviets for once. If only he’d said, as a normal man might have, to hell with the cause, I want to see my lover.

He tightened his hold on the picture, as if she were somehow still in it and reachable, touchable, addressing his excuses to her. The thing was that, at that moment, on that afternoon three days ago, he hadn’t been able to think of anything but the Germans, who, as the letter said, were already on their way to Paris for that long-awaited secret meeting. In his mind, he’d been sketching out what they might look like, where the meeting would be, and what he’d say to persuade them. He couldn’t have said anything about any of that to Constance, of course, and he wouldn’t have been able to explain his elation … and (incredible as this now seemed, in the darkness enveloping him this morning) he’d so wanted to celebrate. He couldn’t, not with anyone else, because only Skoblin knew, and Skoblin had had to go back to his own little hovel in the sticks, and his wife. So, tiptoeing around so as not to disturb Katya, who was asleep in her sickroom, he’d sat out on the balcony at home and got a little happily drunk, all on his own, gazing
out through the night air at the stars and allowing himself to wonder if there might, after all, be any chance that one day before he died he’d again look up at this sky – but a bigger, more luminous, old-country version of it – from that beloved shabby spreading house from the past, with its fluttering curtains, its smell of Pears soap and Dusya’s apple cake, its little river beach, and its peace, surrounded by the pine forest where, in summer, he’d once raced between trees on a bicycle …

And the next morning – could it really be only the day before yesterday? – with a muzzy head but still full of his private joy, he’d helped the nurse wheel the wordless Katya, dribbling and twitching in her invalid chair, out on to the balcony to enjoy the sunlight. He’d stood there beside the poor wreck of a woman his wife had become, not feeling sad for her for once because he was so lit up with his excitement. He’d waited for the sight of Jean’s taxi in the street below, not even listening to the traffic noise because he was lost in the peace and beauty of that other place, the estate, the blossom, the lime-tree promenade. He’d let little wisps of expectant half-thought run through his head – when would he arrange for Katya to move home,
if
…? And, Katya would have the care she needed, back home,
if
… And, more privately still, would Constance come with him to a place that would be so alien to her,
if
…? But all those were questions for later. He didn’t let his racing mind stop on any of them. As soon as he’d seen Jean he’d drunk his coffee in a gulp and rushed to work, eager as a child.

‘You’re in a good mood today,’ he remembered Jean saying wearily.

‘Developments,’ he’d replied, importantly, feeling the letter in his pocket with his hand. ‘Developments, dear boy.’

Now the memory of that secret pride he’d been bursting with made him want to howl and smash his fist through something. How could he not have known – after all the reverses he’d suffered in his long life – that you should never take such hubristic pleasure in the advances of a single day? They could all be wiped out the next. They usually were.

This time, his joy had been wiped out as soon as they’d reached this office building. He’d noticed people on the stairs – more to-ing and fro-ing than usual in the lobby. He hadn’t thought much of it. But perhaps he’d had a raised eyebrow, or an enquiring look on his face. At any rate, the secretary who’d answered their door had explained the fuss without even being asked, saying, with gloomy pleasure, ‘A death in the building, your excellency; the American lady upstairs.’

The silence that followed seemed to go on forever. The universe, flipping over, the stars changing their course …

Then he remembered that he’d said – snapped: ‘I don’t want to hear gossip. I have work to do. I don’t want to be disturbed today,’ and rushed into his room, leaving the secretary, and Jean, staring round-mouthed behind him.

He’d been here ever since. He’d phoned Skoblin and said he wanted to be left alone for a day or two to work out how best to approach Canaris’s men. That had got rid of
him.
When Jean came to pick him up, in the evening, he’d sent the boy away too. Pressure of work, he’d said. Last night, too. Now the sofa was a frowsty mess of blankets. He hadn’t changed his shirt. His hair was sticking up.

He knew they were all waiting outside, all his colleagues,
expecting ideas and initiatives from him. But he hadn’t looked at the letter. Not once.

He was a man like any other. He just wanted to be left alone to mourn; to cover the mirror up decently with a cloth as the old superstition demanded; and to go to Constance’s funeral and bury his love. And he couldn’t.

Although, he suddenly thought with a wild little leap of the heart, if he were to try, just once, slipping out of the back door, the cook’s door, not just for a smoke in the courtyard, but to get to the alley at the back of it, and out past the dustbins … now, that might work … especially now, around midday, when the secretaries who worked here during the morning were all busy taking off their dignified suits and uniforms, putting on workmen’s overalls instead and heading off to the labouring jobs that they needed to keep them in bread and wine and rent money in this alien land they’d somehow fetched up in; while the others – the afternoon secretaries – were still straggling here, in ragged workers’ clothes, from their early shift in some unmentionable car-factory suburb, ready to resume their real dress, their real language, and their real, Russian way of life, only once they walked in through this front door …

For a moment, he could almost imagine himself walking, free and unaccompanied, down the street, between the roaring of traffic, with the breeze ruffling his hair.

It was what Constance would have done: paid no heed to the world, just followed her heart.