The White Russian (26 page)

Jean

I looked at her for a moment. It was nearly midnight, and Evie was asleep. She seemed so young, arm thrown across the bed, hair rumpled, with innocence in the flush of her cheek; so beautiful. Then I got up and went to the salon and sat down on the nearest lumpy chaise longue. I’d never felt more alone.

Before my father and I had reached Paris, while we were still living our nomadic existence and I still had hope, I’d been used to everything changing: a constant flux of cities, countries and conditions. Back then, I remembered, I’d thought that there was a meaning of some sort in this endless shifting, and that, one day, I’d come to understand it. Back in those days, I think I may even have believed that I would, could, stop my journey myself when I found myself in a place lovely enough that I no longer wished to move on. But all that actually happened was that we ended up in France, and couldn’t keep travelling, and the infinite world in which I’d lived so many distant and miraculous lives dwindled to nothing more than endless driving round and round a cage of streets. That was when I realized I’d
always been helpless to change my fate, and always would be.

But it had never occurred to me that things could get worse, or that I could lose more.

Now I had. These last couple of strange echoing days walking through Father’s office, knowing he was gone yet always expecting to see him behind every door – how they hurt. Every moment I spent down there was fresh proof that, with him gone, I’d lost my past. I’d never understood, I realized now, how unmoored he and his comrades must always have felt with their past swept away. I hadn’t understood, either, how unmoored I’d feel if it happened to me. And now here I was, at last, immersing myself in the ROVS environment that I’d always kept myself so aloof from, listening to the endless, aimless discussion about how to, or whether to, elect a replacement for Father, or just to accept defeat and disband ROVS altogether. Disbanding it was what I’d always wanted, wasn’t it? Let the past go, I’d said, more times than I could remember. Stop hanging on to what’s lost. Accept reality.

But now it was I who didn’t want to let it go, or at least didn’t want to let Father go. It was I who kept saying to the ancient colonels and generals and the young secretaries, ‘But how sad he would be to hear …’ and ‘Surely you owe it to him to press on …’ as if, by rallying the faltering troops, I might somehow bring Father back to pat me on the head and look proud and pin a medal on my chest.

He’d gone, and would never look at me again. There were so many other things I might also have thought about. But it was the way he’d always looked at me that I clung
on to, inside my head. It was the one memory that was a comfort as well as a torment.

When I was just a kid in the forest, long ago, he’d found me crying once. I was in the camp boot room because I’d persuaded a bigger kid called Lyosha to let me help with the blacking. But Lyosha had been called off to do something else and I was on my own. I was a novice. My hands were all black and I’d smeared black on the wall. A nail in one of the boots had cut my hand. I was bleeding a bit from it. I suppose I was crying, without really knowing I was – scared kid’s tears – when the big man came in and saw me. My first shamed instinct was to run off but he picked me up, right there in that little room. He didn’t seem to notice that I was expecting a beating; he just looked very seriously at me out of his pale, wide-set eyes and then said, like a judgement, ‘The full man doesn’t understand the hungry man’ – a proverb; he liked folksy proverbs. ‘Let’s get you something to eat, eh, little man.’ I expect he got me some bread or soup next, though that’s not the part I remember. What stayed with me was just that serious, slow, light-eyed look; the feeling it gave me that, probably for the first time, someone was really seeing me and my troubles for what they were.

That look had given me hope, and changed everything. That’s what I’d lost. That’s what I realized, now he was gone. Though of course he hadn’t looked at me like that in a while. For the last few years, it had felt like me looking after him more than the other way round: handing him into the taxi and out; running errands. Maybe he’d been hurt that, in spite of all I owed him, I hadn’t wanted to follow in his footsteps. Maybe he’d just got old, and
weary, and preoccupied with his own business – with his military plotting, or his secret loves. Maybe there’d never even been quite as much promise in that look as I’d seen. He hadn’t shared
his
private concerns with me, after all. Never. And recently I hadn’t talked to him about … well, so many things; though what hurt most right now was that I’d never mentioned my friendship with Evie. He hadn’t known, and this suddenly seemed one of the saddest things of all.

I wasn’t going to think of where he might be now: of the boat, the box, the truck, the chloroform, the ropes. I wasn’t going to think he might already be dead. He’d given me the capacity to hope, and I was going to hold on to it.

Even so, I was beginning to behave as though he might not reappear. For instance, earlier yesterday I’d taken an hour to make arrangements to have Katerina Ivan’na cared for at Madame Sabline’s home, with her nurse – an insurance policy taken out by my father would, I’d discovered, cover the cost – so I could move to a room, alone.

Now, as I sat on the chaise longue in the salon, I resolved to tell Evie to go home to America. I was, I realized, more trapped in France than ever before. And watching her struggle with my reality was one of the worst parts of this new awfulness. I was dragging her down to my level of poverty and despair, and had no right to expect her to live in the swinish way I always had and always would. She deserved better.

Evie

I was woken by knocking at the apartment door, a quiet but insistent tattoo. It was past midnight, I saw, turning on the
lamp and glancing at the clock. Who’d come calling at this hour but the police?

Jean wasn’t there. I got up, hunting for my shoes, and went out into the corridor. The lamp was on in the salon. I heard heavy breathing from the chaise longue. He’d fallen asleep there, with his legs and arms hanging uncomfortably off, I saw, looking with compassion at his face, careworn even in sleep. I didn’t want to wake him unless I had to. I was hoping that, even if it was the police, I could deal with them myself.

‘
Qui est là
?’ I called quietly, with my hand on the lock. But no one answered. The quick knocking just went on, until it became more of a scrabbling of nails. It was clear now that it wasn’t the police. I thought I could hear someone stifling sobs behind the door. I could feel the knot tighten in my stomach. I had to force myself to open up.

When I did, the door burst open on me. The person outside must have been leaning on it, because a large shape practically fell inside, half knocking me over.

Righting myself, I stared.

The last person I expected to see was Plevitskaya. She didn’t look the same. She was tear-stained, wild-haired and still in the dress I’d last seen her in days earlier. She looked ten years older. And she was crumpled and smelly enough to have been sleeping rough. But it was Plevitskaya all right, and she was staring right back at me. She still looked defiant, but she looked so pitiful too.

For an instant I let myself wonder if she’d come to lead us to the General. But nothing in her ravaged face gave grounds for hope.

‘I need to talk to Jean,’ she said in a strangulated voice.

There was so much to say to this woman, who, in the past few days, had become such a monster in my mind, that I couldn’t think what words to begin with. I started angrily shaking my head, but she just looked at me as though anything I might say would be superfluous, and marched on into the salon where the lamp glowed.

‘No!’ I called, thinking she was going to weep out some sort of terrible confession to him. I would have preferred her to tell
me
whatever it was, so I could do something to prepare him. ‘For God’s sake, leave him be!’

But I was too late. She’d hurled herself tremulously across the room and was on her knees beside him, shaking his arm. ‘
Shank
,’ she muttered, urgently, ‘
shank
…’

And then, once she’d got him to open his eyes, and he was looking at her in rumpled, sleep-dazed horror, she grabbed him into a fierce embrace. ‘
Moi sharik …
’ she cried, and then a whole lot more hysterical Russian with tears coursing down her face.

He sat up, trying to shake her off, but she went on clinging round his neck, sobbing. ‘What the hell?’ he half shouted, and I was surprised to hear that, even in his half-waking confusion, it was loud French that came out of his mouth, and not Russian. ‘What are you doing here?’

I remembered that
sharik
meant ‘little ball’, and it was what the nuns had called Jean, because he’d come to them so fat. But what was
she
doing here, howling that word at him?

This wasn’t at all what I’d thought I’d hear. I’d expected a torrent of incomprehensible words, sure enough, but also repentance, and shame, and a cowed demeanour. Not this ferocious embrace. Not this outpouring. Why, she hardly
knew Jean, did she? She hadn’t even known he wasn’t the General’s real son, the other day.

And then, suddenly, I thought I made out the word ‘Zyzyrovka’ in the torrent of words, and when she turned and pointed towards me, as if explaining something, a wild surmise filled me. Because hadn’t she said that same word to me, recently, in the dressmaker’s, when I’d started telling her about Jean being an orphan?

And hadn’t she lost a little boy herself?

For a horrible moment, Jean froze in her embrace, looking suddenly ill, and then he started to struggle in earnest. He caught her arms and, pinioning her by the wrists, pushed her off him and held her as far away as possible.

‘Zhenya!’ she howled imploringly, and her elbow banged against a pile of my belongings – books and papers – that Marie-Thérèse had got out of my box. It all went flying. ‘
Zhenya!
’

I glanced down. There was a scatter of papers on the floor. Grandmother’s letters, her diary, with its lock now broken open, the photo – but I couldn’t move.

‘Don’t call me that,’ he said in French. ‘I’m not your Zhenya. You’ve got it all wrong.’

Still weeping, she said in thickly accented French, ‘You had a little knitted ball on a string, round your wrist, a red one. So it wouldn’t get lost.’

I looked from her tousled dark head to his, and waited. It sounded so very like what Jean had told me about how he’d been found.

‘No,’ he said, after another long pause, and his eyes were full of rage. ‘I’m not your son. The father I love is the man you just helped kidnap. The man you and your husband
betrayed. The one whose blood will be on your hands if he’s gone for good.’

The energy went out of her. She stopped struggling. She drooped.

Over her head, Jean gave a wild, wolfish smile I’d never seen before. ‘Evie,’ he said, ‘call the police. Call them now.’

Jean

Evie ran for the police while the woman I hated went on wailing. I shut my eyes and ears and heart. Even holding her at arm’s length, I was still touching her, repelled by her damp skin and plump wrists under my hands. Her bones felt frail under my grip. I was aware of a murderous desire to squeeze tighter …

The police separated us in the end and took her away.

I wouldn’t look. I was determined not to give her a single memory to pick over in her cell.

But when the door had shut behind them, and Evie had come to me, I shifted myself so I could see out of the window on to the street before I opened my arms to accept the comfort she was offering.

I didn’t intend to, but when they led that woman out into the car outside, I couldn’t resist looking down over the top of Evie’s head at Plevitskaya’s, just for a moment.

She couldn’t be right, that woman. Even the thought of what she’d said made me feel unclean. It simply must be an insane fantasy that I could be her son, the flesh of her flesh.
And yet, as I looked down, my gorge rose at the realization that her hair was as dark as mine.

She couldn’t be right. But, then again, perhaps she could – because perhaps the lost past she’d entered into was a place where any dream could come true, and any nightmare too.

If only I remembered something about the mother who’d lost me: eyes, a voice, a song – anything. But there was nothing I could cling on to as a defence against the horrible, invasive doubt that woman had left me with. All I could remember was the fantasy mothers I’d imagined for myself, years ago – young, pretty, attentive mothers out of books, girls out of Tolstoy, girls like Kitty Shcherbatskaya, with pink cheeks and shyly sparkling eyes and an infinite capacity for kindness and little hands in muffs (mothers whom I’d then stopped imagining, because they were part of the absurdity of fantasizing about the lost past, and I didn’t approve of that).

Shutting my eyes again, I tried to remember
those
other hands and arms, the ones I’d so recently had in mine and wanted to crush. Were they, could they be, like mine? Recognizably related? But all I could recall was the way my own flesh had crept at the feel of hers.

But Plevitskaya hadn’t always been old, I told myself. She hadn’t always looked the way she did now. And I knew she’d only met Skoblin later, during the retreat, when she’d been arrested by the Whites and ended up marrying her jailor, so there was no point in calling
his
hated face to mind; it would be an earlier husband who’d fathered me. The dark way I looked, so different from the fair man I called Father – colours, yet also the line of toenail and fingernail
and shoulder, all those biological codes that meant nothing but everything – might as easily be an inheritance from that possible unknown father, as from her. If she was right. Which she couldn’t be.

Outside, the car door slammed. The engine started. Evie stirred and raised worried eyes to mine.

‘Was there really a Zyzyrovka …?’ Evie began. But when she saw my expression she quickly looked down. The car roared away. ‘Of course not,’ she went on in a whisper.

The horrifying thing was that I thought there might really have been a village with a name something like that, not all that far away from the nunnery. I vaguely remembered the signboard on the road, under the pines – a whitewashed board, rotting softly away, with the last letters missing in a fringe of splinters. I was almost sure there had been a ‘Z’ at the beginning of that board.

‘She’s wrong … or crazy,’ Evie whispered, her face hidden against my chest. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

But I didn’t know. In any case, I couldn’t do anything right then but sway on my feet, because, all at once, I’d been assailed by a mental picture of Father as he might be now. He was in torn and crumpled clothes, with grey stubble on his chin, backing away towards a damp wall from men I couldn’t see who meant him harm. He wasn’t the reassuring, all-knowing hero any more. He was a terrified wreck. And when I imagined him like that I, too, found myself melting into the kind of hot, childish panic that might once have turned into tears.

I wasn’t going to weep. He’d brought me up to be strong. If there was one thing I
could
cling to in all this, it was the
conviction that I had to be worthy. I was an officer’s son, or I’d been raised as one.

‘We’ll talk tomorrow,’ I said brusquely. I let go, ignoring the hurt look on Evie’s face. ‘I’m going down to the office now. I need to be alone. I need to think.’

I needed to be down in the messy darkness of the office because the poster of Plevitskaya was still in the lobby. She wasn’t young in it, or thin, but she was younger and thinner. I pulled it off the wall, and took it into Father’s office, which still smelled of him. ‘I’m sorry to bring her in here, Father,’ I muttered. ‘But I have to know.’

I stood by the cloudy mirror in the uncertain lamplight, looking at her face, then mine. Her hair was as dark as mine, but it was so greased down that you couldn’t tell whether it could ever be wild like mine. Her eyes were dark while mine were light, but was there something similar in the cast of them? She was much shorter than me. Hands, legs … I couldn’t know.

I looked all night, and I thought all night about Father, and his fearful eyes against that concrete wall. I thought of all I owed him. I thought about blood and family, duty and honour.

And as I thought I opened his bottle. I drank one draught. It went down like fire. Then I drank another, with nothing to eat between gulps that might have soaked up the alcohol. And then another.

I was still thinking about Father, and still looking at myself in the glass and then at the ripped-off poster of Plevitskaya when, at dawn, the police inspector came in. He was a thin man whom I’d heard talk to his subordinates
in rough Parisian
argot
, with a fag hanging out of his mouth, but who spoke to me in elaborate sentences full of complicated tenses and arcane bureaucratese.

The inspector nodded when he saw the poster. He wanted to tell me about what that woman had said during her preliminary interrogation. She’d informed him that Father was bound for Leningrad on board a Soviet freight ship. Madame Plevitskaya was being further interrogated, he said, and might be lying to mask some other reality, and the ship was out of contact, and might be innocent; but, at least, it was a clue.

I heard Evie’s footsteps, padding down the stairs and into the secretaries’ room where she waited. I was glad she wasn’t in the room with us to see me struggle to maintain composure. The inspector, grinding out his cigarette end, was so excited with his clue that he couldn’t stop grinning as he left. Tact was not his forte. What struck me was that Father was as good as dead if he was a prisoner being taken to Soviet Russia – that he might as well be cowering against a crumbling wall as the brutes in my dream approached, because that was how he’d end up, sooner or later.

‘I’m going to Russia to find him,’ I told Evie when, in her nightdress, she brought me tea on the bone-hard sofa. ‘I have no choice. I have to try to get him out.’

I made my voice hard. I didn’t want to sound weak. I couldn’t sound weak if I was going to Russia.

By now, dawn was breaking and the sun was turning the Parisian sky rosy pink. Even as I spoke, and looked out of the window at the horrible loveliness of a new day, I knew it was impossible for me to go to Russia. What would I do, after all, without documents? Steal a passport? Stow away
on another Soviet freighter? Drive my rented taxi to Poland and walk east? Go and ask the Soviet ambassador in Paris to give me a visa and help me find a hotel in Moscow?

That wasn’t the point. That wasn’t the point. There was only one point.

If Nadezhda Plevitskaya really was my mother – which meant my own flesh and blood being to blame for Father’s destruction – I had a debt of honour. Truculently, I told myself if Evie respected me she’d understand.

Evie took my hand in hers. She looked very sad. But she nodded. I should have been grateful, I knew, that she didn’t say a word.

‘I owe it to him,’ I said, knowing it was stupid to half wish she’d argue. ‘I must put things right.’

She tightened her grip. ‘Yes.’ She bowed her head. ‘I love you,’ she said simply. ‘I understand how terrible this is for you.’

For a moment, I felt sorry for both myself and this girl, as all the happiness I’d imagined coming to the two of us, in a shared future that would not now exist, flowed away. What had been between the two of us felt distant, now, as if I was only seeing our illusory might-have-been, this last time, from behind thick, thick glass. I was with Father already, in that cell; we were facing our tormentors together.

Perhaps Evie didn’t understand how little chance there was I’d come back? Didn’t she see that I was going, willingly, to an almost certain death? The thought of my heroism brought to my eyes tears that – even in that moment – I knew to be cheap and sentimental. Vodka tears.

My death would be the only way to avenge his, I told myself. My sacrifice for him would be the only way to show
the Nightingale how completely I denied whatever blood tie linked me to her, and how fully I chose instead the man who’d raised me, as the parent I would shed my own blood for. I had to die to expiate that woman’s sin.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said stiffly, wondering why my tongue felt so thick in my mouth. I was tired, mortally tired. I could barely get words out. My voice was slurring. My limbs were heavy. The room was going round. ‘Sorry … about
us.
But you must see … this comes first.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I do see.’ She looked at me – a serious, calm, careful look that showed me, even in my lurching drunkenness, that she really could see my worries. For a moment, as the stuffy room lurched like a ship’s cabin, I felt – just a little – comforted.

‘But first you must sleep,’ she said.

I shook my head. ‘Got to go now.’

‘Just lie on the sofa. We’ll talk again when it’s a bit lighter. I’ll get dressed. I’ll help you make a plan. I promise I will.’

I was swaying on my feet. She found the blanket in the cupboard.

I let her tuck it round me on the divan. She took away the bottle and the glass and closed the shutters.

I’d never sleep, I knew that. Never. But I shut my eyes.