The White Russian (17 page)

Maybe I’d just imagined that catch in his voice. But there was nothing imaginary about the way he’d started staring fiercely at the road ahead. I could see the conversation was over. He didn’t even say ‘thank you’ when, after I’d settled him at his desk, I brought him coffee from the ROVS kitchen. He just got out a letter from his drawer and put it on the table and stared at it as though it were the most important thing in the world. Important enough, clearly, for him to work on a Sunday, but then he often worked weekends. The secretaries came in every day of the week to watch over him anyway, so it felt normal.

‘Well, goodbye,’ I said, feeling disappointed. He didn’t look up. Just waved a dismissive hand.

I could see that the letter he was gazing at so sternly was written in thick black Gothic script. German. That was unusual – so unusual that I wondered whether he wanted me to ask about it. But something in me recoiled from doing so. I knew they all dreamed, down here in this office, of getting military support from Germany for their cause. But then they didn’t have the half-mocking, half-fearful, always scornful commentary of my friend Sirin ringing in their ears as I did – Sirin, who’d left Berlin for Paris because of the rise of the little man with the little moustache, full of crass proletarian menace, because of Kristallnacht and the Night of the Long Knives, because of his Jewish wife. There were things about Father’s work in this office – compromises I sensed they’d all willingly
make, if they could only have a chance of getting home to Russia – that I preferred not to ask about, and, usually, he preferred not to tell.

Instead, not quite able to leave, I went to the fireplace and picked up the picture: Father young and happy, in a boat, with summer people all around. I stared at it, trying to read into that sepia smile a cultured youthful love for Turgenev and Tchaikovsky that maybe only defeat and exile had beaten out of him.

Sighing, I shook my head. I’d let myself believe I could achieve something, for once, by helping that girl read those letters, but the reality was that I was as helpless as ever.

Suddenly desperate to sleep, I let myself out.

That afternoon’s letter-reading session with Evie – muted in sleeveless light grey today after a day walking around the city – went just as badly.

She started by saying, sounding forlorn, that her housekeeper had told her Father used to come up for lunch with her grandmother about once a week. I read disappointment in her eyes that there’d been no hint of gossip of anything less innocent. For my part, I swallowed my separate disquiet that Father had never mentioned those lunches, innocent or not. (Why should they have been a secret? the worried voice in my head was saying. What other secrets might he have?)

Nodding without comment, I sat down at the small second pile of letters.

I read out a series of uninformative short notes, each one from a regimental barracks somewhere new in the provinces, and each saying something very brief about the
gift that must have come with it – a cigarette case, one time (‘I will imagine you in a cloud of scented Turkish tobacco smoke, smiling mysteriously’), a bracelet in another case (‘sapphire for your eyes’). Those were expensive-sounding gifts to my envious ears, and, I commented, probably the kind she’d have wanted to keep private from her husband.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Evie said, looking up at the mention of the gifts with a kind of dazed wonder that I didn’t understand but which made her dazzlingly pretty. ‘Maybe in those days no one thought anything of giving expensive gifts.’ Then she gave me a nervous look and bit her lip. Perhaps she thought I’d be angry at the idea of money not mattering.

‘So,’ I summed up, ‘we still don’t really know what was between them.’ Evie shook her head.

The next note was different – a scrawl. ‘My God,’ it said, ‘I’ve just heard the tragic news. I’m going to the station. I’ll be in town tomorrow. Wait for me.’

‘ “Wait for me …” ’ I repeated. Evie was still scribbling furiously. I was so close that I could see fine golden hairs on her tanned arms.

She said, eyes on her page, ‘Eighteen ninety-five. So that will be when my grandfather died; he was somewhere in the provinces himself, after the old Tsar died, and there was a Nihilist bomb.’

I could see she thought this was where everything would be revealed. She looked expectantly up, waiting for whatever was to come next.

I opened the final letter. There was only a single sheet, though there must have been more, once. It was as blotched as any of Katerina Ivan’na’s wept-on military documents.
‘ “Please put all thoughts of my army career out of your head. It means nothing to me, compared with you, and the army will do very well without me,” ’ it began.’ “Your family will come to terms with the change, too, in time. A colleague in the regiment has promised me his house in Paris for a year. So I beg you to put all these futile considerations you’re torturing yourself with out of your head, and simply make up your mind to leave here with me, and settle there. Don’t punish yourself, or me. I implore you to at least …” ’

The page ended. The writer’s tormented stream of thought stopped. I stopped too. We might guess that they’d been lovers – the odd snatched meeting here and there, maybe, when the husband was away and ‘Zhe’ was in town. But we couldn’t know. And we could sort of piece together that, after her husband’s death, he’d wanted to take her overseas; maybe that he’d wanted to marry her; but that she’d resisted, either because she didn’t want to cut short his army career, or possibly, if they had been lovers, because she felt guilty.

But there was no more to read. No real connection between past and present, ‘Zhe’ and Father. Just fragments.

I could see the hope fade from Evie’s eyes. ‘Is that it?’ she asked.

Evie

I wanted to cry. The letters I’d put so much faith in had led nowhere. I hadn’t found out what I’d wanted, or become able to do what I’d promised Grandmother. I’d failed her.

Jean would get up and leave in a minute.

And, once he’d gone, there’d be no more reason for me to stay, either; not in this room, not in this city. If I couldn’t
find Grandmother’s Yevgeny, there’d be no reason not to give up, pack up, and go home.

Jean got up.

I couldn’t bear it. I shut my eyes, willing something to come into my head that would stop him leaving.

Jean

She just stepped into my arms.

For a moment, looking at her upturned face from so close, I was aware of eyelashes and her parted lips. I was too giddy with desire to be able to speak. I mustn’t, I heard a voice inside myself say. But my body wasn’t listening. And then, for much longer, there was nothing but breath and the feel of skin under linen and the thump of blood.

Jean

By the time I was able to think again, we were on a rumpled bed in a room full of rough canvases. For a moment, it was the pictures that caught my eye. There were plump naked women daubed across them in blue paint, running away from something. They looked like a call girl’s scared memories of a police raid on a
maison de passe.
I almost laughed.

And then I didn’t. Because here I was on a blue counterpane myself, with a naked woman’s cheek against mine, and her body stretched out under me.

Her eyes were shut, I saw in trepidation.

I thought she’d be horrified by what we’d just done. But when, eventually, she shifted her head, and then shifted sideways, so we were side by side, she didn’t leap out of the bed and run away, trailing draperies. She didn’t move more than a finger’s length. Her arms and legs stayed entwined with mine. She was breathless but smiling a heavy-lidded smile. ‘I never imagined it would be like that,’ she murmured. ‘Though I don’t know what I
did
think …’ She didn’t finish that thought, but I could feel her hands on my back.

‘Zhe …’ she whispered, a long while later, keeping her body’s length against mine, with her head turning slightly towards my ear, so I could feel warm breath on my neck. Then she kissed me below the ear and added, with a trembling hint of voice, ‘
My
Zhe …’

It took all that for me to really believe she
wasn’t
angry. Overcome with relief, and the beginning of confidence, I kissed her eyebrow, the nearest place, and held her tighter.

I didn’t want to think beyond this moment. It might not mean anything. It might be just a clinging in the darkness, after we’d failed to find the meaning we’d been looking for.

But, for now, she was here. And the miraculous unlikeliness of that made me feel suddenly reckless and dizzy with – at least temporary – happiness.

‘It’s “zhi”, not “zhe”,’ I whispered back, playfully.

She opened her eyes wider. ‘What?’

‘The name of the first letter of the French name “Jean” is “Zhi”, not “Zhe”,’ I said, stroking her hair.

She nodded, and burrowed closer, still clinging to me. I could feel that she didn’t want to end this embrace any more than I did; that she, like I, had no idea what might come next.

I lay still, savouring the feel of skin on skin, trying not to think. ‘ “If you want to be happy, be,” ’ I reminded myself. I shut my eyes. I opened them and looked unseeingly around the room and its strange pictures. But I couldn’t stop my mind racing.

If she went away now, what would I have left?

Wasn’t that what had happened to the ‘Zhe’ of the letters and the American woman?

What had he done afterwards?

I hadn’t ever thought about why Father would have stayed unmarried until, years later, he’d taken pity on Katerina Ivan’na. Might that be why?

And then my eye fixed on a picture on the mantel. I sat up.

Evie

‘What’s that?’ Jean shouted.

He looked as though he might be going to have a heart attack. My heart was pounding too. He’d dislodged me when he sat up so suddenly, so I got up and wrapped a blanket round myself and went and got the picture for him.

His eyes opened wider and wider when I handed it over. Then he smiled – a huge, relieved, still-astonished grin. I didn’t understand why. He hadn’t even read the Russian scribbles on the back.

‘Has this really been up here all the time?’ he asked, half laughing.

I nodded, bewildered. After all the intensity of everything that had happened between us in the past hour, that sudden laughter was incredibly endearing. Transforming, too. It turned him, instantly, from cinema detective to screen idol. But what was so funny about the picture?

Jean was pointing at the fair-haired young man in the boat. ‘It’s just – this is him,’ he said. ‘My father. Can’t you see? He keeps the same picture in his office downstairs. If only I’d looked …’

I sat down beside him again, trying to concentrate on the picture and not on the feel of his thigh against mine or the heat of his skin. I couldn’t quite believe it, even when
I gave the young man in the boat my full attention. What, that thin lad – the portly general downstairs?

‘And that’, I said, pointing at the ringleted girl in the same boat, aware that I was suddenly smiling as radiantly back at him as he was at me, ‘is
her
.’

We stayed like that, poised on the brink of discovery, for a long, swaying moment before I even thought to ask, ‘And what does the writing on the back mean?’

Jean turned it over, and peered at it for what seemed forever.

When he did, eventually, speak, I saw, to my astonishment, that there were tears in his eyes.

‘ “He could not be mistaken,” ’ Jean translated, very quietly. I could hear at once, from the reverent way he formed those words, that it was the beginning of a quotation. ‘ “There were no other eyes like those in the world. There was only one creature in the world who could concentrate for him all the brightness and meaning of life …” ’

And suddenly I knew, and tears filled my eyes too, because – of course! – it was the great love passage from Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina
, when the philosopher-hero, Levin, trying to devote himself to the simple life and be a good master to his peasants, unexpectedly catches sight of the woman whom he thought he’d lost, years before, and realizes that he has always loved her, that nothing else matters, and that he must go to her.

Taking Jean’s free hand in mine, I began speaking with him. ‘ “It was she,” ’ we both said, completing the quotation in unison. ‘ “It was Kitty.” ’

And then our own eyes met, and then our lips.

After a while, we parted, and Jean held the photo out
again. ‘He put a date; April three years ago,’ he whispered. ‘I know his writing. It’s much worse these days than in those letters from before. I suppose he must have made her this copy of the two of them, from back there, when they met again, here. And, look, he’s written one more line from
Anna Karenina
: “Only with her could he find the solution of the riddle of his life, which had weighed so agonizingly upon him of late.” ’

‘So it
is
him,’ I started to say, interrupting Jean who was also murmuring, pensively, ‘So they
did
find each other again, in the end.’ (And so had I! I was telling myself privately. Marie-Thérèse’s hunch had been right all along! I’d actually found Grandmother’s Zhenya! He was real! And now I could go and talk to him and tell him her last wish.)

We stared at each other for a moment, letting the triumph sink in.

‘They’d become so different from each other, by the time they got here and met again,’ Jean said, and I saw his smile fade as he tussled with his thought. ‘She with her wild avant-garde artists, while
he
… with his cause—’ His voice broke off, and, although his slight frown told me that he was thinking something about his father that made him unhappy, he didn’t hint what.

‘It didn’t matter, maybe,’ I said, wanting to take the shadow off his face, ‘because finding each other again here, when they were older, let them go back to being who they’d been when they’d first met, and start again. And they weren’t so different, back then, at the start; just young, and maybe both lonely? Maybe, back then, getting to know each other helped each of them feel less trapped by their
backgrounds? Maybe that’s what they loved? Because who can say where people will find love? Or feel free?’

Jean was looking so intently at me that I nearly lowered my own eyes. It took courage to keep my gaze meeting his.

‘How sad, though,’ I went on, trying to keep my voice steady, ‘that, even here, when they met again, they still weren’t really free. That this time he was married—’

‘What good luck,’ Jean said, abruptly, and his voice was strong, ‘that they somehow
did
manage to meet again, against the odds, and took what happiness they could.’ And then we were kissing again.