The White Russian (21 page)

Evie

I was late for Plevitskaya’s lunchtime performance. I stood near the front of the restaurant, still dazzled by the bright light from outside, watching sunspots fade from my eyes while, in the near-dark of inside, she finished her last number. According to the list at the entrance, it was called, ‘You’re Buried in Snow, Russia’. She was standing crushed into the one tiny table-free space at the back of the hall, in constant danger of bumping into the accompanist squashed beside her at an upright piano. As she drew the song out to its sentimental end, she drooped lower and lower, as if truly heartbroken.

There was the usual thin applause when the last note died away. The red-shaded table lamps went on again. An elderly couple – the woman in black with jet beads, the man in uniform – were revealed stolidly eating meatballs and buckwheat porridge close to the music. An older man still, with a red nose and tears slipping unnoticed down his cheeks, was nursing a drink not far from me. There wasn’t anyone else. They could have made her more space, I thought, clapping extra
loudly. They could have cleared another table.

I waved. Her gloomy face lit up. I’d ordered two glasses of champagne before she’d even got to the table where I was sitting. Although she was smiling now as she approached, bosom heaving under her shawl, I saw that she had real tears in her eyes.

‘That was beautiful,’ I said, surprised by those tears, and moved, too. She sat down heavily. After finding her so erratic in English, I was trying French, and it seemed to be working. She ducked her own head, with dignity, and replied, in rather good French, maybe by way of apology for her glistening eyes:

‘Ach … how hard it feels, sometimes, to go on living with one’s ghosts.’ She sniffed, smiled and shook her head all at once. ‘That is the saddest song in my repertoire,’ she went on, and started reciting:

The champagne came. Unobtrusively, as she lifted her coupe to her mouth, she wiped the eye furthest from me. Then she drained it and furtively wiped her other eye. ‘It is not always so hard,’ she added more robustly, putting the empty glass down on the table.

‘I would have come last night—’ I began.

‘Ahhh … Last night was
wonderful
,’ she said, loudly and stagily, capping my voice with her surge of theatrical enthusiasm. ‘
Many
more people. Why didn’t you?’

‘Oh,’ I said uncertainly, remembering that, from the doorway, last night, which was as close as I’d got before Jean vanished and everything changed, there hadn’t seemed to be many more people inside this restaurant than there were today. ‘Something came up.’

Plevitskaya looked harder at me and spoke with a kindness so unexpected that it almost made me well up, too. ‘You look a bit pale. I hope you weren’t unwell?’

I shook my head. It had been so bewildering when Jean left. Even when I’d started looking around for him in earnest, I hadn’t been able to believe for several minutes that he really wasn’t there. There’d been other people in the street, and as he took my coat I’d been looking at them, and at the people going towards the church, and peeping into the dusty interiors of the little restaurants. I’d actually been feeling relieved, I could remember, that he hadn’t been angry.

And then, when he’d suddenly pushed my coat back into my hands and rushed off, I’d gone on standing, dithering, looking around, thinking – hoping – that maybe he’d just run back to the taxi for something, or wanted to buy cigarettes or a newspaper. But I’d had a sense of all not being well, too. I’d felt my heart constrict with every examined head and body that turned out not to be his as the moments went by.

It had only been when I’d finally thought to look and see whether he was now walking back from the parked taxi, with the missing wallet or whatever it might be in his hand, and gone a bit of the way down the road towards the taxi myself, that I’d noticed it wasn’t there any more either. He must have driven off in it.

It had taken what seemed a long, quiet, strange time (in
which the rest of the world had gone on just as usual, the late-afternoon sun shining, people walking along the kerb) before I finally believed he wasn’t coming back. Not in a minute. Not in ten. Not at all.

There were little jumbled scraps of thoughts in my head: that by now perhaps he was already home, wherever that was, or that he was picking up a book, whose letters were too alien to me to even guess at what was in it, or heading for a café where he’d meet the other writers he’d talked about …

But it didn’t matter where he was. He’d gone where I couldn’t follow.

Maybe I should have been angry, or cried. His disappearance was too strange for me to know what I felt, beyond a bit shaky and unreal.

Maybe I should have shrugged it off and gone to hear Plevitskaya and to talk to her, as I’d planned. But I couldn’t somehow face brazening that out on my own, either.

So I’d just walked home, feeling shamed, in a quiet, quiet way, as though I’d done something wrong. Faintly, I was remembering reading in the preface to some translation of Dostoyevsky that the Russian language, whose sensitivity to insult and injury had, the book said, resulted in a vast and subtle vocabulary for every possible shade of humiliation, even had a special single word for ‘a slap in the face’, a word Dostoyevsky was fond of using. Well, I felt as though I’d been given one of those one-word face-slaps, even though I didn’t know why.

He hadn’t been angry that I’d gone to see his father. He’d said so. It hadn’t seemed to matter. But as soon as I’d started telling him some of the detail of our conversation,
he’d gone – and before I’d even had time to ask him whether we might have drawn the wrong conclusions.

Because we might, mightn’t we? I’d been thinking about that possibility all afternoon. Because, after all – whatever we’d learned from reading the letters, whatever we now knew about Grandmother and the General having loved each other, and however certain I might be that the General’s first name was indeed Yevgeny – there was some sense in what the General had told me. Why would Grandmother ever have thought that he would have wanted to share those pictures, if she knew he hated them? If what he’d said was true – that she’d never even called him ‘Zhenya’ but the much more bracing-sounding ‘Miller’ – was it possible that Marie-Thérèse and I had somehow got everything muddled up, and that there was some other explanation?

I wouldn’t be able to talk this over with Jean now – which didn’t matter, as I kept telling myself stoutly, not at all. I didn’t need Jean. I’d be able to work it out for myself – except maybe not right now, since I didn’t even know what should be in my own head when, for the whole of the immediate past, it had been so full of Jean. So I’d let myself back into Grandmother’s apartment and – full of lonely defiance at the unwanted memory of Jean’s milk-drinking – poured myself a brandy to watch the stars come prickling out by, and then another. But I hadn’t let myself go completely. Even if, in the middle of the night, when I’d woken up, I’d said to Grandmother’s photo, which I’d taken unsteadily to bed with me, ‘Well,
you
didn’t mind having no place back home, because you found a new home here among all the poor outcasts from Russia – but even
they
don’t seem to want me much,’ my self-pity hadn’t
made me cry. Even if I’d got up this morning feeling fuzzy, disappointed and empty, I’d had my plan. I’d looked at the diary, whose key I hadn’t yet found, and been tempted for a moment just to break it open and read the rest of what Grandmother had left me. But then I’d remembered that I didn’t want to rush my time here. I’d told Marie-Thérèse to stay on, with Gaston, until the end of the year. And I thought, No, I’ll wait; it’s better to find the right key to the diary, and the right answer, in the right time …

So I’d bathed and dressed and come back to talk to Plevitskaya, as I’d planned.

‘No,’ I said, more firmly now, feeling proud that I was able to put aside the darkness of the night but be grateful for her concern all the same. ‘I’m not unwell.’

The last thing I expected was that, a moment later, tears would have overwhelmed me, or that I’d be mumbling about Jean through chaotic sobs, or that she would be murmuring soothing little bird-noises, or hugging me, and wiping my face with a corner of her shawl, and murmuring, ‘
T’en fais pas, ma petite; t’en fais pas. Tout se guérit dans la vie, même les coeurs brisés.
’ (‘Don’t fret, little one. Don’t fret. Everything heals, even broken hearts.’) I’d never thought, not for a moment, that I could be so weak, or she so kind.

After a while, when my tears had subsided a bit, and we’d found a napkin to replace the damp corner of the Nightingale’s shawl, and she’d run through the things people say about heartbreakers – ‘The boy must be a fool to want to break
your
heart’ and ‘Not that I know General Miller’s family, but everyone knows that boy has always been a loner; maybe he’s just not the type for love, or not ready’ – she added, very
gently and sweetly, ‘And it’s more than just a broken heart with you, I know, because you are in grief, too …’

There was a near-sob in her voice at that. ‘That is no surprise. Your grandmother was a wonderful woman; her death so unexpected. Even
I
find it hard to believe, I, who have seen so much suffering, when dear Constance was so full of life just a week ago. I am sorry she’s gone.’ She squeezed my hands in hers.

Our glasses were empty. She picked hers up and waved at the waiter. I sniffed acquiescence.

‘Please tell me more about her,’ I asked, trying, with only partial success, to dry my eyes. ‘I so want to know.’

She remembered Grandmother all right. She said they’d sat up all night talking, in New York when they’d first met – an instant rapport. ‘Kind, glamorous, beautiful, Constance,’ she reminisced with lyrical enthusiasm, applying herself to the second glass. ‘She was wearing a silver fox wrap, and I recognised it
at once
as one of Ours … a Russian fur. And so naturally we started to talk in Russian – she spoke wonderful Russian, you know – and before we knew it we found we shared the most important possible common interest, she and I …’ She sighed again.

‘Because she loved your husband’s boss, you mean? General Miller?’ I asked.

She gave me an odd look – startled, I thought, for a moment, as her wide-open eyes met mine. But amused disdain quickly took over. ‘
Vryad li
,’ she said firmly, bringing down her eyelids and wrinkling her nose. ‘Surely not. What, that big dough-ball of a general and my elegant Constance, with her beautiful soul? Constance, who loved
art
? No, no. Unimaginable.’

She sounded so utterly certain – and looked so appalled, too, by the idea of the General as Grandmother’s lover – that despite myself I nearly laughed. Instead I did a little half-shrug, half-bow, to signify my apologies for interrupting, and she swept on.

‘No, no,’ she breathed tragically, ‘it was nothing as banal as
that.
No. What bound me and Constance together, from the first, was
this
…’ She leaned closer, over the table, and her breasts, squashed against the tabletop, billowed out alarmingly. ‘We had both lost a beloved child,’ she whispered. ‘The strongest bond of all …’

A tear cut a shining line through her make-up. Her shoulders were shaking. It didn’t look like the hammy overacting I remembered. My fingers squeezed hers.

‘I’d never had anyone I could talk with about my little boy,’ she muttered. Small individual circles of wet were landing on the table. Helplessly I squeezed harder. ‘I met my present husband later, you see. It wasn’t his child, and it was wartime, and there was so much grief, and nothing got better afterwards. And we Russians, well, these days, we each have our separate crosses to bear, and we suffer in silence. There was no one who wanted to hear my sorrow. But
she
understood, because she’d lost her daughter, too. She knew how grief felt …’

She looked up. Her wide lips were trembling and their lipstick was smeared. But she’d forgotten her appearance.

‘She used to say, “Oh, Nadya, I know the pain you feel, the helplessness.” She was so sympathetic to me. It wasn’t quite the same for her, of course, because there was no death in her story, while my little boy almost certainly died, lost and alone, with no one to bury him. Still, her daughter was
lost to her, as surely as my son to me, and the daughter had shut her out of the next generation, too. There are many kinds of exile …’

She fixed those woeful eyes on me. I could see she’d forgotten, in her tale about herself and her friend, that she was also talking about my family and me. But I didn’t mind. Around the edges of her story, I was privately seeing the faint outline of another story: Grandmother holding Plevitskaya’s hands and thinking about me.

‘But we found a shared home in our suffering, at least. And she understood, oh, no one better, how much I went on dreaming of going back to Russia somehow, to find my child, alive or dead …’ Plevitskaya’s face became more animated at this prospect, but then she sighed. ‘But of course I couldn’t – can’t – because here we are in France, and there’s no way back, never will be. I know that. But how I appreciated Constance’s kindness, all the same. A good, good friend …’

How magnetic Plevitskaya was. By now I’d forgotten to ask what Grandmother had said about me because I was realizing how very small my concerns were – my heartbreak for a man I hadn’t known a month ago; my nostalgia for a woman I’d only known as a child – next to Plevitskaya’s all-enveloping tragedy. Her pain, I could see now, was on a different scale.

‘What was he called?’ I asked softly, holding tight on to her hand. ‘Your little boy?’

She looked straight at me. My eyes were used to the red-lit darkness by now. I could see her lips moving, as if in prayer.

‘Zhenya.’

I felt myself go very still.

A brief flicker of hope stirred in me. Could that possibly mean … Could it possibly be
your
child Grandmother wanted me to look after and make amends to? I asked her from somewhere deep inside my head. But I didn’t say anything, and, a moment later, when Plevitskaya began talking again, I was glad I’d waited.