The White Russian (27 page)

Jean

It was evening when I woke up, the quiet golden hour when the air is honey. She was sitting at the desk reading, and had a plateful of rye-bread
buterbrody
with pickled herring waiting at her elbow.

My head was pounding, my tongue cleaving to the dry roof of my mouth.

This was why I never drank, and why I despised drinkers:
this
– the sick shame that came after that vain hunt for courage at the bottom of a bottle. I shook my head at the hangover cures on that plate that some knowing Russian must have assembled.

She smiled, and passed me a glass of milk. How beautiful she was. How calm she looked – happy almost – as though nothing could dent her tranquillity.

I couldn’t quite yet remember anything beyond how bad I felt, except how good it was that she was here. In a moment, I knew, some awful reality would explode over me. But I wanted to stay here for a little longer, in the fragile peace of her presence, before I let myself call it to mind. I wanted to be in her world, in that still calm.

‘We’ve all been talking about it out there,’ she said. ‘About Plevitskaya believing that she was your mother.’ She paused. ‘The secretaries,’ she went on, very softly, as if worried that her voice might crack open my head. ‘The colonels.’

The knowledge of what had happened to my father was beginning to return now, and the fear of who my mother might have been. I groaned, and put my hands to my clanging head. The memory of what I now had to do was coming back as well, and so was the darkness that went with it.

‘And the colours are wrong,’ she added. ‘Have you noticed?’

I could feel helpless tears start up. They were real tears, these, and it was the kindness in her voice that had made them prickle into life. I closed my eyes. In a minute I’d have to go, set off on my impossible journey, or I’d be completely unmanned.

But for now I just lay there and listened to the echo of her words in my head.

‘Your eyes are blue, and hers are dark. You don’t get blue-eyed children from dark-eyed parents. And the toy on your wrist, the little ball, was white, not red.’

The sickness was still swimming around my body. I didn’t remember telling her the toy on my wrist had been white, just light-coloured (though I probably hadn’t told her, either, that by the time the nuns saw it they said it stank too badly of shit to be saved; there was so much that would always be beyond words). And now everything was too confusing, and I didn’t remember. But something was lightening inside me.

‘But … I said, or maybe I didn’t say anything, because perhaps it had been white.

‘None of them believes a word of it,’ she said. ‘Every colonel and general in the office says they remember a village called “Zi” something or “Zna” something near every town in the war from Poland to Siberia. The village name means nothing. She just so wanted to find the son she loved, and the past she’d lost, that she let herself believe it was you.’

Evie looked towards the window. There was sadness in her eyes.

‘Poor Plevitskaya,’ she murmured, almost to herself. ‘She thought she was giving herself up for love. She thought she’d found her long-lost child, and she wanted to prove to you that, whatever she’d done, she wasn’t as bad as she knew you’d think her. And now they’ll execute her, or give her twenty years’ hard labour – but she gave herself up for nothing. You’re not her son. It was all a delusion; maybe looking for the past always is.’

‘I still have to …’ I started weakly, but the combination of my uncertain insides and the tears pouring down my cheeks stopped me. Anyway, I didn’t need to finish the sentence. She knew what I’d been going to say. She had the answer.

‘You won’t find your father if you try to go back to Russia.’ She still sounded faraway and a little sad. But she turned her gentle gaze back on me. ‘You’ll just meet the awful end he spent half his life trying to save you from, twenty years late,’ she said. ‘It would be the worst thing he could imagine, that you’d do that – give yourself up. It would make you like her. And it would make his life meaningless.’

I couldn’t sit up. But I did, gratefully, stretch out my hand to touch hers.

And, there in that room, at that time of complete failure, something changed. When the woman who meant everything to me looked into my eyes with that quiet depth of understanding, and saw me truly, she absolved me from my past and set me free.

I didn’t understand that at the time. All I knew was that she squeezed my hand back, and said, ‘He wanted you to live. So live. Stay with me.’

My father was never found. People said, afterwards, that they thought the Reds might have got him all the way to Moscow, like Kutyopov before him, to have secrets tortured out of him (if he knew any secrets). We never found out how he died.

Skoblin disappeared forever too. Rumour had it that he was smuggled out of France by the Soviets via the Spanish war, and was killed there.

The past was shutting down on all sides. ROVS was closed. The office apartment was sold. The proceeds went to fund Madame Sabline’s old people’s home.

It was late autumn before Plevitskaya’s trial opened.

In the dock she was full of artifice. Every inch the show-woman, she wore black. She pleaded tearfully that she knew nothing, and was just a simple woman duped by her disappearing husband. We were in the gallery. We could see people – other women mostly – nod and sigh sympathetically. And then the code books that had been found in the cat baskets at her home were brought into the courtroom, and the experts who knew what the strings of
numbers meant, and it turned out she’d been in it up to the hilt. But she didn’t turn a hair. She was no coward. You could see she was going to go down fighting. ‘Yes, my husband liked to write numbers in those books,’ she said, and her voice trembled helplessly. ‘But
I
–
I
am a woman. I have
never
understood numbers. I have
no idea
what he was writing.’ And the women leaning over the gallery sighed and tutted again.

I still hated Plevitskaya. Of course I did. There was no doubt she’d helped destroy my father. She wasn’t even repentant. But it wasn’t the same, now I knew she wasn’t my blood. I looked at her from the back row of the gallery (I didn’t want to be near, or have her see me), and felt distant from her, and all the strange, sad workings of the past that had drawn her and her fellow conspirators into their wickedness.

The start of the trial didn’t bring the emotional release I’d hoped for either. At the end of the first day I got up feeling oddly empty and unsatisfied. When Plevitskaya was led back to her cell, Evie turned to me and said, ‘It will go on for weeks more, you know.’

She looked as uncertain as I felt.

‘She’s nothing to us any more, is she?’ Evie said as we walked out into the evening, all wind and bluster and the last of the falling leaves, smelling of decay. ‘Let’s not torment ourselves going over the whole thing again. It won’t change anything. Let’s go away.’

I knew she missed home. She’d been writing long letters to her mother and stepfather and an aunt and to friends in New York while we waited for the trial.

‘We can’t,’ I said.

‘Why not?’ She linked her arm in mine and looked up at me.

We walked on.

It was true, in a sense, I realized. There was nothing holding me back any more. It had never occurred to me that freedom might come so easily – might sneak in through the back door without my even noticing. Even when she said, ‘Because I want to take you home with me to New York,’ I just went on shaking my head, half in negation, half simply in surprise.

‘But I can hardly speak English,’ I said.

‘You’ll learn,’ she replied. ‘I’ll teach you more words on the boat.’

‘I’m not going to live on your money,’ I said.

‘You can’t,’ she agreed. ‘I’ve got some, but not enough to support us both in style forever. We’ll have to do something. We can open a bookshop.’

‘I’d be like your orphan, in New York, without friends; I don’t want to be anyone else’s orphan,’ I said.

‘Ach, you won’t,’ she said. ‘You’re a great adapter, and anyway you won’t depend on me for long. Your writer buddies will all be leaving here too as soon as they get papers, won’t they? They’ll want someone who’s already settled over there. You’ll have plenty of old friends round you soon enough. And there’ll be new ones too. I think you’ll like mine.’

When I ran out of objections but still looked doubtful, she smiled. ‘There’s no past where I’m from, Jean,’ she said. ‘Just the future. Take a chance.’

And I nodded, because – setting my pride aside – of course I didn’t want to be an émigré any more. I never had.
I wanted to arrive somewhere for good and have a real life.

But then I caught my breath, because she was looking up at me in that determined way I’d come to love so dearly. ‘But we’d have to marry for you to get a visa, and you haven’t asked,’ she said, and her smile was a challenge.

‘But I don’t want you to think I want to marry you just for papers,’ I said anxiously.

She took no notice of that, except that her smile broadened.

Then she stopped walking. I could tell she was waiting.

We’d walked all the way to the rue du Colisée by then. We were outside number 29, that familiar building with the shuttered ground-floor windows where Father had once been. There was litter swirling in the wind, and a round white street lamp cast imitation moonlight on Evie’s upturned face. Her eyes shone brightly with its glow.

‘We choose our families, and I choose you,’ I said, finally knowing that what I was about to do was good, and right, and that Father would have approved. ‘Will you marry me?’

The American Boy

Jean

And so here I was in a new city, on a dark December afternoon, with eddies of snow swirling around me and a brutal wind that wouldn’t have been out of place in Siberia, looking at the black East River as we walked along a road with a number – E 58, E 59? – towards Evie’s family’s house.

I was nervous about meeting them. I’d spent the time since I’d got here being gawped at like a zoo animal. There was a clumsy kindness in all her friends’ eyes. A whole crowd of bright-eyed innocents had been coming by at all hours to stare at me since we had arrived, two or three days before, in the big but crowded bare-boards apartment above a bakery, somewhere far away in a less intimidatingly rich part of town, where we were staying. (Two girls lived there, Eliza and Dorothy. There was no furniture to speak of, only boxes for tables and a few broken-down chairs and mattresses on the floors. The room they’d put us in was speckled with paint; Evie’s grandmother’s paintings, when they arrived, were going to fit right in.)

For tonight, Evie had taken me shopping for a Brooks
Brothers suit. The shirt had a stiff collar that rubbed. She’d insisted it was proper to wear the astonishingly colourful argyle socks I couldn’t feel sure about. If anything, the dressing up had made me feel even more like an exotic pet animal. I was aware that the family I was about to meet would find my broken English as comical as Evie’s friends clearly did, and might think me a fortune-hunter too. But I was keeping my reservations in check, because, after hearing so much about these people, I was curious.

It was Evie who looked most nervous, swinging that big bag she insisted on carrying herself, biting her lip.

Evie

We were sitting in the familiar bower of orchids and gardenias, on the yellow silk cushions, watching Mother pour out pale tea into near-transparent cups. I’d almost forgotten how big this room was, and how immaculate Florence always kept everything. It didn’t feel half as fussy and suffocating as I’d remembered. It just felt a pleasure to be back, breathing in air scented by those colourless but exotic flowers.

There was a more robust and cheerful smell in the air today, too, of roasting pumpkin and poultry, reminding me how, after whisking in here with the tray and the petits fours, a shiny-faced Florence had stared approvingly at Jean, grinned at me, and rushed back to the kitchen to go on masterminding the Thanksgiving cooking. Hughie would be along to join us in an hour; the cousins would start appearing later for dinner.

Meanwhile, here we were, the three of us. So far Mother was coping well with meeting my Russian husband. Perhaps
it was just that she knew we’d had to marry for him to get into the country, but to my relief there’d been none of the pursed lips, averted eyes and chill I’d rather feared – not even when I said that his job, for now, would be translating for an émigré association, but that we were looking for a premises in the Village to set up a small bookshop with a Russian section.

‘Welcome, welcome,’ Mother kept saying, smiling and smiling and fussing over the cup with her sugar tongs and slivers of lemon before passing it to Jean. His English was still uncertain, so he wasn’t saying much in reply. But he looked back at her, suddenly, with a tenderness I hadn’t expected, and, to be honest, didn’t really like either.

She glanced up at Jean from under her long eyelashes. She took the second cup of tea for herself. The third stood steaming but forgotten on the tray. It would have been absurd for me to spoil the moment by asking for it to be passed to me.

Of course I should just have been pleased that Jean and she were getting on so well. But, for a moment, all I did feel was a familiar helpless disappointment. For a moment, I felt too tall, and awkward, and not half pretty enough, again – as much the overgrown child no one quite knew what to do with as I’d ever been.

But only for a moment. Because once Jean had finished smiling back at her, he turned to me, and gave me a crinkly-eyed half-smile and a faint, but very encouraging, nod, and passed me his cup.

He didn’t withdraw his hand, either, once I’d taken the tea. He put it lightly on my elbow. And he moved his chair, so he was just a bit closer, and facing just a little more towards
me. Relief flooded through me. It felt as transforming as if he’d shouted, ‘I see!’ and ‘I’m here!’ and ‘Don’t forget you’ll always have me!’

Mother looked briefly puzzled. Then she laughed gaily and said, to him, in her sweetest voice, ‘Oh my! Do please forgive my absentmindedness, I forgot all about the tea; I’m so hopeless these days …’ and passed Jean the neglected third cup.

She still had eyes only for him. But, with his hand on my arm, it suddenly didn’t matter.

I leaned forward and kissed her cheek. I suddenly wanted to show her that I’d stopped being the kind of thoughtless young girl who’d just take off overseas on a whim, leaving a provokingly uninformative note on my pillow (though Mother had been surprisingly forgiving about that when I’d first called, as soon as we’d docked, and rather nervously apologized. ‘We did worry, darling; but we hoped – well, we were sure – that you’d know you could tell us if you needed help,’ was all she’d said, in a careful voice, as if she’d taken the trouble beforehand to think out an answer that would absolve me of blame and then committed it to memory. I was grateful at this proof that she’d been trying to understand how we could get on now I was an adult; I wanted to try too). It felt a shock when, from close up, her eyes met mine. ‘It’s lovely to be back, Mother,’ I said. ‘I missed you.’ I thought I saw all kinds of emotions flit across her face – relief, surprise, maybe, and maybe a note of shyness, too. Or perhaps that was just what I was feeling.

There was so much we’d never be able to say to each other, she and I. I could see that too. Even if she hadn’t found my bookishness and travel whims odd and threateningly
unconventional, she was too much of a man’s woman ever to feel entirely comfortable with another female in the room. But we’d get by.

I got out the box from the bag I’d put at my feet. It was a capacious old one of Grandmother’s, and the sight of it reminded me of all the other things of Grandmother’s I’d left behind in Paris. I’d given her car and fur coat to Gaston and Marie-Thérèse, and – in private – also got Marie-Thérèse to choose one of the Fabergé trinkets as a keepsake. (I’d been rather relieved when, looking overwhelmed and close to tears, the one the housekeeper had picked out had been the reddish jewelled dog I liked least.)

My heart started beating faster.

After the police had taken Plevitskaya away, I’d picked up the broken remains of Grandmother’s now-opened diary. By then, my quest to know her hadn’t seemed that important, compared with everything else happening around us. But I still wanted to know what was in it. Of course, there was nothing much except inconsequential nonsense – recent lists of scrappy pros and cons that we couldn’t understand, often headed, ‘Tell M?’ (‘She must have been very indecisive,’ Jean said drily later, when I showed him.) But there was one more old letter that we hadn’t read, one which must have been tucked inside. Grandmother had clearly never sent it. It was from her, soon after her husband had been killed, addressed to the lover she’d left. She must have written it while on her way home, halfway across the world, from Russia. I could see why she hadn’t sent it, of course. It was too full of pain – a tearful mess of bleak, hopeless phrases from ‘I can’t live without you’ to ‘I’m expecting a baby’.

Now I caught Jean noticing the little furrowing of Mother’s brow above her wide-set pale eyes – an expression that, I could see, reminded him of his father – and nodding slightly.

I’d never be able to tell Mother about Jean’s thoughtful voice, saying, ‘Of course, Zhenya is also a girl’s name … Yevgeniya. As you’d say in English, Eugenie.’ Or my small reply: ‘Or Jeannie, for short. My mother’s name.’

For a moment, after that conversation on a gusty afternoon on deck, I’d forgotten Jean altogether. No wonder Grandmother had been unable to settle at home on her return from Russia, I thought, or love her newborn daughter. It must have felt too painful to bear, to look every day at a small face so like the adult one she couldn’t be with, and to know she’d never be able to tell her secret to the familiar people around her back home. No wonder she’d left the European clinic where they’d sent her to convalesce, and gone off to hide until it was too late, and she’d been locked out forever. But Aunt Mildred hadn’t been altogether wrong to keep her away, either, because her sister’s flightiness and pain must have been very visibly damaging the child she’d left behind. Look at how Mother had grown up, so anxious to lead the conventional life, still playing the cosseted, manipulative, little-girl darling of an older husband. Poor Mother, too – because who wouldn’t do anything to be loved, after being abandoned like that? And then I’d come back down to earth, and put all those thoughts aside, and smiled up at my new husband, who was smiling rather quizzically back at me.

He was right. I’d never be quite sure enough that I’d understood the past right. There was no way of checking.
I couldn’t know for sure which Zhenya Grandmother had had in mind when she scribbled the name on a piece of blotting paper. I could only be grateful that, in Paris, I’d found my future with Jean.

At least I could, now, see more clearly why Grandmother had loved that poem about the unknown woman. I’d warmed to the yearning of those lines, because I’d thought she might have been thinking about me. But it was just as likely, wasn’t it, that, all along, she’d been thinking of the child she’d run away from and lost?

So tonight I’d brought along the box of gifts sent to Grandmother, long ago, by her lover. I couldn’t say who Zhenya was. But I wanted Mother to hear that her mother had been thinking of her at the last. I wanted Mother to have her mother’s jewels.