The Swan Thieves

by Elizabeth Kostova

  She turns to her companion. "Didn't you want to bring our book?" The last few nights they have been reading from a translation of Great Expectations.

  "Non, maman. But I have my embroidery to finish." The woman reaches out a hand cased in fine black lace to touch the girl's cheek where it curves down to a mouth that matches her own. "In time for Papa's birthday, after all?"

  "If it turns out well enough." The girl checks in her basket, as if her project is alive and needs constant care.

  "It will." For a moment the woman is flooded with a sense of rushing time, which has caused this flower, her beauty, to grow tall and articulate overnight. She can still feel her daughter's robust baby legs in her arms, pushing upright in her lap. The memory can

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  be summoned at a moment's notice, and she summons it often: mingled pleasure and regret. But she doesn't regret for a moment standing here, a woman alone in her heart, past forty, a woman with a doting husband waiting in Paris, a woman mature and sheathed in mourning. In the last year, they have lost the kind blind man who had the place of a father in her heart. Now there is a different cause for sadness as well.

  But she feels also the course of a life advancing as it should: a child's growth, a death that brings relief as well as loss, the dressmaker sewing something a little more fashionable than what she'd worn when her mother died years ago -- skirts have changed again since then. The child has all this ahead of her, with her basket of embroidery, her birthday dreams, her love of her papa before any other man. Béatrice has not dressed her daughter in unrelieved black; instead, the girl wears a white dress with gray collar and cuffs, a black sash around the pretty waist that is still thin but will soon be shapely. She takes the child's hand and kisses it through her veil, surprising them both.

  The train to Paris is seldom late; this morning it comes a little early, a distant rumble interrupting the kiss, and they both arrange themselves to wait. The child always imagines the train crashing into the village itself, smashing houses, piling up old stones and raising clouds of dust, overturning chicken coops and wrecking the market stalls--a world bouleversé like one of the prints in her book of nursery rhymes, old ladies holding their aprons up and running away on the wooden sabots that seem an extension of their big feet. A comic disaster, and then the dust settling and everything coming to rights in an instant as people like Maman climb quietly into the train. Maman does everything quietly, with dignity--she reads quietly to herself, she turns your head quietly a little more to the right when you sit for her to braid your hair, she touches your cheek quietly.

  Maman also has sudden moments that Aude recognizes in herself but has no way of knowing yet as the moments of youth

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  that never leave us--the surprising kiss of the hand, a laughing embrace of Papa's head and hat as he sits reading his paper on the garden bench. She looks beautiful even dressed in mourning, as they now are for Aude's grandfather and more recently for the death of Papa's uncle in faraway Algeria, where he went to live years ago. Or she will catch Maman standing at the back window watching the rain fall over the meadow, and see the rare sadness in her eyes. Their house in the village is at the edge of all the others, so that you can leave the garden directly for the fields; there is a line of darker woods beyond those fields where Aude may not go except with one of her parents.

  In the train, once the conductor has stowed their luggage, Aude settles herself in imitation of her mother. Her composure is brief; after a moment she jumps up again to look out the window at a pair of horses driven by her favorite coachman, Pierre le Triste, who comes daily with packages, deliveries for the small shops in the village center, sometimes for Maman herself. They know him well after all these years; Papa bought their village house the year she was born, the perfect, rounded date called 1880. Aude cannot remember a time when they didn't come to the village, just between Louveciennes and Marly-le-Roi, the train steaming through three times a week, the brief visits and long summers here with her mother and sometimes both her parents. Pierre has gotten down from his perch and seems to be conferring with the conductor outside about a package and a letter; his face is wreathed in smiles--the overflow of jollity that has earned him his affectionately ironic nickname. Through the window she can hear his voice but misses the words.

  "What is it, darling?" Her mother is taking off gloves and cloak, arranging her bag and Aude's basket, their small picnic.

  "It's Pierre." The conductor sees her and waves, and Pierre waves back and comes up beside the train, motioning with his big arms for her to lower the window and take a package and letter. Her mother stands to receive them and gives the package to Aude,

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  nodding to let her know she may open it at once. It is from Papa in Paris, a delayed but welcome gift; they will see him tonight, but he has sent Aude a little ivory shawl with daisies in the corners. She folds it contentedly and drapes it across her lap. Maman has taken a jet pin from her hair and is opening her letter, which is also from Papa, although another envelope falls out of it, one with unfamiliar stamps and a shaky handwriting Aude has never seen before. Maman snatches it up and opens it with trembling care; she seems to have forgotten the new shawl. She unfolds the single page, reads it and folds it again, unfolds it and reads it, puts it slowly back in the envelope and lays it on the black silk of her lap. She leans back, puts her veil down; but Aude sees her close her eyes, sees her mouth turn upside down and quiver the way one's mouth does when one resolves not to cry. Aude drops her eyes and strokes the shawl and its daisies; what could make Maman feel this way? Should she try to comfort her, say something?

  Maman is very still, and Aude looks out the window for answers, but there is only Pierre in his boots and big jacket, unloading a case of wine, which a boy trundles away in a handcart. The conductor waves good-bye to Pierre, and the train whistle screams once, twice. Nothing is wrong in the village, which has come to life everywhere.

  "Maman?" she tries in a small voice.

  The dark eyes behind the veil open, glittering with tears, as Aude has feared. "Yes, my love?"

  "Is something--is it bad news?"

  Maman looks at her for a long time, and then she says, her voice a little unsteady, "No, not news. Just a letter from an old friend that took a long time to reach me."

  "Is it from Uncle Olivier?"

  Maman catches her breath, then lets it out.

  "Why, it is, yes. How did you guess that, my darling?"

  "Oh, because he died, I suppose, and that's very sad."

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  "Yes, very sad." Maman folds her hands over the envelope. "And did he write you about Algeria and the desert?"

  "Yes," she says. "But it came too late?"

  "Nothing is ever really too late," Maman says, but her words trip over a sob. This is alarming; Aude wishes the journey were over and Papa there with them. She has never seen Maman cry before. Maman smiles more than almost anyone she knows, except for Pierre le Triste. She smiles especially when she looks at Aude.

  "Did you and Papa love him very much?"

  "Yes, very much. And so did your grandfather."

  "I wish I remembered him."

  "I wish you did, too." Maman seems to have collected herself now; she pats the seat beside her, and Aude moves gratefully close, bringing her new shawl along.

  "Would I have loved Uncle Olivier, too?"

  "Oh yes," says Maman. "And he would have loved you. You are like him, I think."

  Aude loves to be like people. "In what way?"

  "Oh, full of life and curiosity, good with your hands." Maman is silent for a second; she looks at Aude in that way Aude welcomes and cringes under, the straight, straight gaze, bottomless dark. Then she speaks. "You have his eyes, my love."

  "I do?"

  "He was a painter."

  "Like you. As good as you were?"

  "Oh, much better," she says, stroking the letter. "He had more experience of life to put in his paintings, which is very im
portant, although I didn't know that at the time."

  "Will you save his letter?" Aude knows better than to ask to see it, although she would enjoy reading about the desert.

  "Perhaps. With other letters. All the letters I have been able to keep. Some of them will be yours when you are an old lady."

  "How will I get them then?"

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  Maman puts her veil up and smiles, pats Aude's cheek with her gloveless fingers. "I will give them to you myself. Or I will be sure to tell you where to find them."

  "Do you like my shawl from Papa?" Aude spreads it over her white muslin skirts and Maman's heavy black silk.

  "Very much," Maman says. She smoothes the shawl so that it covers her letter and its big strange stamps. "And the daisies are almost as pretty as the ones you stitch. But not quite, because yours always look alive."

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  C HAPTER 101 Marlow

  Robinson greeted me cordially on my return to his sitting room. He did not try to stand up, but he was neatly turned out in gray flannel slacks, a black turtleneck, and a navy jacket, as if we were going out to lunch rather than planning to sit immobilized in his salon. I could hear the rattle of pans in the kitchen, to which Yvonne had retreated, and I smelled onions, butter frying. To my delight, he asked me at once to promise I would stay for lunch. I reported on the Musée de Maintenon. He made me try to recite the name of each canvas he'd given the museum. "Not bad company for our Béatrice," he said, smiling. "No--Monet, Renoir, Vuillard, Pissarro..."

  "She will be appreciated more in the new century." It was hard to believe in a new century at all, here in this apartment where the same books and paintings had sat for perhaps fifty years and even the plants seemed to have been alive as long as Mary. "Paris celebrated pretty well, didn't she? The millennium?"

  He smiled. "Aude remembered New Year's Eve of nineteen hundred, you know. She was almost twenty." And he himself had not yet been born. He had missed the century of Aude's childhood.

  "Could I ask you one more thing, if that wouldn't be inappropriate? It might help me in my treatment of Robert, assuming you can find it in you to be so generous."

  He shrugged without objecting--a gentleman's reluctant pardon.

  "I wonder what you believe yourself about the reasons Béatrice de Clerval stopped painting. Robert Oliver is very intelligent, and

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  he must have thought deeply about this. But do you have your own theories?"

  "I do not deal in theories, Doctor. I lived with Aude de Clerval. She confided everything to me." He straightened a little. "She was a great woman, like her mother, and this question troubled her. As a psychiatrist, you can see that she must have felt to blame for the end of her mother's career. Not every woman gives up everything for her child, but Aude knew her mother had, and it weighed on her all her life. As I told you, she tried to paint and draw herself, but she had no gift for it. And she never wrote anything personal about her mother or about her own life -- she was a strict journalist, very professional, very brave. During the war, she covered Paris for la Resistance -- another story. But she sometimes talked to me about her mother."

  I waited in a silence as deep as any I'd known with Robert. At last the old man spoke again.

  "It is a mystery, your coming here, and Robert before you. I am not accustomed to talking with strangers. But I will tell you something I have told no one else, certainly not Robert Oliver. When Aude was dying, she gave me this package of letters you have so kindly returned to me. With them was a note from her mother to Aude. She asked me to read the note and then to burn it, which I did. And she gave the rest of the letters into my keeping. Aude had never shown me these things before. I felt hurt, you understand, that she had not, because I had thought that we shared everything. The note to Aude from her mother said two things. One was that she loved her, Aude, more than anything in the world because she had been the child of her greatest love. And, second, that she was leaving evidence of that love with her servant, Esmé."

  "Yes--I remember the name from her letters."

  "You read the letters?"

  I was startled. Then I realized he had been serious when he said he sometimes forgot things. "Yes--as I said, I felt I should read them for the sake of my patient."

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  "Ah. Well, it doesn't matter now." He patted sharp fingers on the arm of his chair; I thought I could see a worn spot under them.

  "You said Béatrice left something with Esmé?"

  "I suppose she did, but Esmé died, you know, soon after Béatrice. She had a sudden illness, and perhaps she simply did not manage to give to Aude whatever it was, from her mother. Aude always said that Esmé died of a broken heart."

  "Béatrice must have been a kind mistress."

  "If she was at all like her daughter, then she was a wonderful presence." His face was growing sad.

  "And Aude never knew what this proof of love was?"

  "No, we never knew. Aude wanted so much to know. I searched for information on Esmé, and discovered from a municipal record that her full name was Esmé Renard, and that she was born in, I think, 1859. But I could not find anything else. Aude's parents bought a house in the village from which Esmé came, but it was sold when Yves died. I do not even remember the name of it."

  "Then she was born eight years after Béatrice," I pointed out.

  He shifted in his seat and shaded his eyes as if to see me more clearly. "You know so much about Béatrice," he said, with wonder in his voice. "Do you love her, too, like Robert Oliver?"

  "I have a good memory for numbers." I was beginning to think I should leave the old man before he tired again.

  "In any case, I found nothing. Just before Aude died, she said her mother had been the loveliest person in the world, except" -- he cleared a catch in his throat--"except for me. So perhaps she did not need to know more."

  "Surely it was enough," I said, to comfort him.

  "Would you like to see her portrait? Béatrice?"

  "Yes, of course. I've seen the Olivier Vignot piece in the Metropolitan Museum."

  "A good portrait. But I have a photograph, which is very rare-- Aude said her mother did not like to be photographed. Aude would never let anyone publish it. I keep it in my album." He pushed

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  himself up very slowly, before I could protest, and took a cane from the side of the chair. I offered my arm; he accepted, grudgingly, and we went across the room to a bookcase, where he pointed his cane. I took out the heavy leather album he'd indicated--worn bald in spots, but still embossed with a gilt rectangle on the cover. I opened it on a nearby table. Inside were family photos from several eras, and I wished I could ask to see them all: small children staring straight ahead in frilly dresses, nineteenth-century brides like white peacocks, gentlemanly brothers or friends in top hats and frock coats, hands on one another's shoulders. I wondered if Yves might be among them, perhaps that dark-bearded, bulky-shouldered man with the smile, or Aude, a little girl in a wide-skirted dress and buttoned boots. Even if they were there, or if any one of them was Olivier Vignot himself, Henri Robinson was skipping past them on his mission, and I didn't dare interrupt his fragile mind or hands. At last he stopped. "This is Béatrice," he said.

  I would have known her anywhere; still, it was eerie to see her face from life. She was standing alone, one hand on a studio pedestal and the other holding back her skirt--the stiffest of poses, and yet her figure was full of energy. I knew the intensely dark eyes, the shape of her jaw, the slender neck, the abundance of curly hair swept up from her ears. She wore a long dark dress with a sort of shawl flaring around her shoulders. The sleeves of the dress were large at the top and narrowed to the wrists; her waist was small and tight, and her skirts trimmed at the bottom with a wide border of some lighter color, a cleverly geometric pattern. The lady of fashion, I thought: an artist in dress if not in practice.

  The picture was professionally dated, 1895, and bore the name and street address of a Paris phot
ographer's studio. Something veiled was pulling at me, a reminder, a figure from elsewhere, a melancholy I couldn't shake. For a long moment I thought that my memory was not much better than Henri Robinson's--far worse, in fact. Then I turned to him. "Monsieur, do you have a book of the works of--" What was it? Where was it? "I'm looking for a

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  painting--I mean, a book of paintings by Sisley, if you happen to have one."

  "Sisley?" He frowned as if I'd asked for a drink he didn't keep on hand. "I suppose I have something. It would be in that section." He jammed his cane in the air again, steadying himself on my arm. "Those are Impressionists, beginning with the original six."

  I went to his shelves and began to look, slowly, and found nothing. There was a book on Impressionist landscapes, and this had Sisley in the index, but not what I was searching for. At last I found a volume of winter scenes.

  "That is new." Henri Robinson was looking at it with surprising sharpness. "Robert Oliver gave it to me when he came the second time."

  I held the volume--an expensive present. "Did you show him Béatrice's photograph?"

  He thought for a moment. "I don't think so. I would remember that. Besides, if I had, he might have stolen that, too."

  I had to admit it was a possibility. The Sisley painting was there, to my relief, as I remembered it from the National Gallery: a woman walking away down a high-walled village lane, snow under her feet, the bleakly dark branches of trees, a winter sunset. It was a stunning work, even in reproduction. The woman's dress swinging around her as she walked, the sense of urgency in her figure, the short dark cloak, the unusual blue border around the bottom of her skirt. I held the book up to Henri Robinson. "Does this look familiar to you?"