The People in the Photo

by H

  How about you? What have you been up to?

  Hélène x

  PS Nothing ventured, nothing gained: it was Sylvia, a true cordon bleu, who taught me to cook. Next time (if there is one), I’ll make you a chocolate parfait.

  Ashford, 29 September 2007

  Dear Hélène,

  You didn’t tell me it was your birthday! I wish you a fortieth year filled with happiness. Happiness, and answers too.

  By the way, if you promise me chocolate cake, not only might I come back, but what’s more I’ll book my train ticket right away!

  Well, I’d love to, but the fact is I’m flying to Helsinki tomorrow, and I didn’t want to leave without posting this letter.

  You must write and tell me all about your visit to Saint-Serge, whose name conjures up for me all the splendours of imperial Russia.

  Much love,

  Stéphane

  Paris, 12 October (email)

  Dear Stéphane,

  How are you? How’s your teaching going in Helsinki? I’m longing to hear your news.

  I have some of my own, as it happens. I went to Saint-Serge yesterday. It was an eventful day, to say the least!

  First of all, I must tell you about the place; it’s really quite amazing. It took me ages to find it, a little church tucked away in a grove of trees, at the top of a steep street. To get to it, you have to go up these strange wooden steps with latticed wooden panels either side. Every inch of the building is covered in paintings, embellished or decorated in some way. It makes you wonder how such an exotic, breathtaking structure ended up slap bang in the middle of Paris.

  I was able to go inside the church, although in theory it was closed; by the looks of it there had just been a meeting, and a few people were still lingering. So I saw the iconostasis and the icons in the strangely low-ceilinged hall which was bathed in a mellow, womb-like light. I took some pictures of the outside for you, so you can see how spectacular it is.

  One of the group, a lady in her fifties, noticed me standing there and came over to ask if I lived locally. I told her the reason for my visit and showed her the photo of the choir, which produced a curious Droste effect with the background of the picture reproduced life-size on the wall behind it. She examined the photo for a few seconds, turning it over. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘this picture was taken here, no doubt about it.’ But she didn’t recognise anyone in it – not surprising really, given her age. She must have read the disappointment on my face and suggested I go and see a woman by the name of Vera Vassilyeva, who had been very active in parish affairs and lived a bit further up, at the top of Rue de Crimée.

  I went straight there, armed with the name of the woman I had spoken to and a note she had written on the back of a leaflet. When I rang the bell, the door opened as far as the safety chain would allow. Madame Vassilyeva, who looked like a wizened little imp, said nothing, but simply beckoned me to lean down towards her – she must be about four foot seven – and stared at me while I reeled off my explanation. Then she invited me in.

  I would have put her down as being at least a hundred years old. Actually, she told me she’s only ninety-two. She spoke a rather formal, broken French that she seemed to have learned during the imperial period, while I muddled along in my pidgin Russian. Nevertheless, we just about managed to understand one another. After going to great pains to make tea in a samovar at least as old as her, Vera motioned to me to sit down on a worn blue velvet sofa, staring fixedly at me again, her eyes hooded by her drooping lids.

  Without thinking, I said in Russian, ‘I am Nataliya Zabvina’s daughter.’

  It struck me how odd it was to be saying those words for the first time in my life, in that language, in that place, as though I was in the process of becoming another person.

  Vera replied, ‘I know.’ Then, after a long silence broken only by her wheezing, ‘You look like your mother.’

  I felt my throat tighten. Sylvia aside, this was the first time since we started digging into all this that I’d spoken to someone who had known my mother. All at once Nataliya ceased to be a nebulous, shadowy figure and was once more flesh and blood, a voice, a presence. I showed Vera the photo and she tapped one of the faces with her gnarled finger: one of the three adults, the woman standing next to the priest. Her story was long and laboured, and she stopped several times to take a sip of tea, think, immerse herself in memories. But I was glad of these lulls in her account, as they gave me time to take in the shock of confronting the past.

  From what I understood of Vera’s story, and her memory seems to be intact, my mother’s parents arrived in France soon after the end of the war. To begin with they lived in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois before they found a small, basic apartment on Rue de la Mouzaïa. According to Vera, my mother was very beautiful, loved music and sang in the parish choir. She had a friend who was older than her, ‘Jan’ (who must be Jean Pamiat), and they were always getting up to mischief together, smoking under the church steps or hiding a litter of newborn kittens behind the iconostasis. My grandfather’s name was Oleg and my grandmother’s Daria.

  When they first arrived, Oleg took on all kinds of jobs – worker in a corset factory, gardener and then taxi driver. A year later, Daria took over, working as a cleaner while Oleg, at over forty, re-sat his medical exams, having lost some of his certificates in the exodus. And all the while he was battling to have the whole family granted French citizenship. Eventually they saved enough to rent a tiny flat with three rooms, one of which served as the consulting room. Business grew quickly and within a few years they were in a position to expand the practice. That’s when the family left the 19th arrondissement. Vera couldn’t remember exactly when they had moved, but she knew they had gone to live in the east of Paris.

  Vera and my grandparents had continued to spend the summer holidays together until the distance came between them. Nataliya had returned to Saint-Serge several times to say hello to her old friends there. The last time she came, she was, Vera told me, zamuzhem – married – and carrying a babe in arms. ‘Eto byla ty, eto byla ty’ (it was you), the old woman said again and again, shaking her head and patting my arm. I looked into her eyes, faded and milky as they always are in the very elderly, the same eyes that thirty-nine years earlier had gazed on me in my mother’s arms and had kept a mental photograph of that moment somewhere in the recesses of her mind, a photograph I would never see.

  Vera knew that Nataliya had died: the priest at Saint-Serge had told her before the death notice went out. It was also the priest who told her a year or two afterwards that Dr Zabvine had passed away. ‘Ot chego ona umerla?’ (What did she die of?) – ‘Ya ne znayu’ (I don’t know).

  Just then, the old woman heaved herself out of her shabby armchair and, using a walking stick, made her way into another room. I could hear her opening doors and moving things around, muttering words in Russian I couldn’t understand. I sat for more than a quarter of an hour in the autumnal gloom of the living room, the window casting an ever fainter rectangle of light. I asked myself what it is that forms the truth of a person, what happens when you grow up without memories, who were those people who had known me and of whom I knew nothing, whether some part of them – a word, an image, a smell – had stayed with me. I am Nataliya Zabvina’s daughter. Ya doch Natalii Zabviny. The words in both languages kept going round and round inside my head, and repeating them to myself filled me with both fear and joy.

  Eventually Vera Vassilyeva came back carrying a battered shoebox under her arm. She gestured to me to turn on the lamp, then she slumped into the armchair, out of breath, closing her eyes for a few seconds. Then she slowly lifted the lid and rummaged inside the box for several long minutes, her arthritic fingers leafing through old letters, notices and photos. Every now and then she would pick one out, saying ‘Posmotri!’ (look). There were images of the area in the 1940s, more photos of Saint-Serge, one featuring Jean Pamiat, a snapshot of a baby (me) held firmly by someone whose face wasn’t visible, and a portrait
of my grandparents. The seated woman at the lunch under the arbour was indeed my grandmother.

  Then she paused and slowly took out a photo which she held towards me. ‘Davay, posmotri!’ I looked: it was my mother, pregnant.

  With me, needless to say.

  My past, which had always seemed so hazy and shapeless, suddenly had a face, pictured in such sharp focus that my heart skipped a beat. That’s when I knew that the person who walked out the door of Vera Vassilyeva’s apartment that day would no longer be quite the same Hélène Hivert who had walked in earlier.

  It was dark when I left. I went for a brandy in the first bar I came across and the strength of the alcohol gradually brought me back to reality. I felt nauseous as I made my way home, sensing the onset of a migraine. When I got back to the flat, I felt as though I was returning from a voyage to the ends of the earth. Luckily Bourbaki was there: he has no interest whatsoever in my genealogical soul-searching, demanding only to be fed at set times.

  Vera let me keep the picture of my mother. I look at this image which forces itself upon me, claiming my attention, and it makes my entire life seem fake, built on lies. The more I hear about Nataliya, the deeper the impression I form of her as a joyful, happy, well-loved person. What can have happened, what crime can she have committed to find herself so entirely wiped from family memory?

  I’m going to write to the Paris medical council to find out where my grandfather Dr Zabvine practised, in the hopes of discovering others who might have known my mother. I’m sorry these new pieces in the puzzle don’t tell us anything about your father, but I’m convinced they’re part of a trail that will lead us to him.

  If you have a few minutes, I’d love to hear your news.

  Hélène

  xxx

  Rovaniemi, 14 October (email)

  Dearest Hélène,

  Forgive me for not writing sooner, the days are flying by (or rather the nights, I should say), and my trip has turned out to be rather demanding.

  I was enthralled by the description of your visit to Saint-Serge. I think I understand how churned up you must be feeling and to some extent I share your emotion, at least partially. The more I’ve thought about these events, the fonder I’ve become of these two people about whom you and I knew so little. And like you I am on the hunt for the slightest scrap of information. Your encounter with this Madame Vassilyeva was a real stroke of luck: a place, a date, photos, new clues. And there is so much more for us to find out!

  One thing intrigues me: where did you learn to speak Russian?

  Here, everything is going very well. The students are delightful, keen, and my colleagues are very kind, although Finnish hospitality is somewhat reserved. The university has lent me an apartment not far from the campus, in the middle of the countryside, or almost, and I’m enjoying not having to be involved in the admin side of things. That said, I’ll be glad to be home and eat real marmalade, and pick up my post.

  Send my love to Bourbaki. And kisses to you.

  Stéphane

  Paris, 16 October 2007 (email)

  Dear Stéphane of the Arctic,

  Bourbaki says thank you and sends his love back. In fact, I had to lift him off the keyboard to write this.

  Glad to hear all’s going well. I envy you being up there in the remote northern reaches. Is there snow already?

  In answer to your question, I learned a smattering of Russian at INALCO, the Oriental studies institute in Paris, where I took lessons for five years. I would describe my level as pretty elementary; I could never get my head around the verbs. But let’s just say I know enough to tell the difference between a hamburger and caviar on a restaurant menu.

  I have always felt drawn to the language, and I’m beginning to understand why. While I was learning Russian, certain words would strike me as strangely familiar, particularly strings of words like the names of the numbers, colours and days of the week. Weird associations too: the adjective goluboy always reminds me of a certain fabric, with beads and gold thread. The first time I heard the word kotyonok, a jumble of images came back to me: a bedcover, a fur throw. The same topsy-turvy sensation I once felt breathing in the perfume worn by the woman at the next table in a café in Aix-en-Provence, a scent I was sure I had inhaled as a small child. In other words, Proust’s ‘madeleine effect’.

  One of my teachers once asked me if I had spoken Russian in the past or heard it spoken around me, and raised an eyebrow when I assured him I hadn’t. It was one of those passing comments you put to the back of your mind without a second thought – until the day you realise what it meant.

  If my mother was Russian, as her name suggests, she must of course have taught me these words when I was little, though I’ve since forgotten them.

  She must have held me in her arms, sung to me, taught me to count, odin, dva, tri, chetyre, and I’ve forgotten all about it.

  When are you coming home?

  Love,

  Hélène

  Rovaniemi, 20 October 2007 (postcard)

  Dear Hélène,

  Fond wishes from Scandinavia. You who love the north, and the cold, you’d be like a duck in (frozen) water here.

  All my love,

  Stéphane

  Paris, 23 October (email)

  Dear Stéphane,

  I don’t know where this message will find you, but I wanted to let you know that Sylvia died last night. I’ll write as soon as I can.

  Hélène

  Rovaniemi, 23 October (email)

  Dearest Hélène,

  I am so sorry. Words are useless in these situations, but I can imagine your grief, and I share your sorrow. Is there anything I can do for you at this distance? If nothing else, let me reassure you that you are constantly in my thoughts, even though we are far apart.

  A big hug,

  Stéphane

  Paris, 26 October (email)

  Dear Stéphane,

  Thank you for phoning and please don’t worry about calling so late. You did the right thing. It was so comforting to hear your voice. I had known for a while that Sylvia was going to die and in a way she had already left us, but it still came as a terrible shock. As I said, those final moments were … difficult.

  After all, she was my mother, even if she didn’t give birth to me.

  I’ll be in touch soon.

  Love,

  Hélène

  7

  The sky is overcast but the sun is strong enough to shine through regardless. The dense cloud diffracts a series of slanting rays, visible to the naked eye, whose slow passage ends on contact with the water. Reflection upon reflection of late-afternoon light glazes the ebbing tide with a slick of liquid silver as it moves in ever lazier swirls, leaving flotsam, seaweed and shells stranded on the wet shore. The receding water does not prevent the sea from displaying its calm opulence, broken up by the crests of little waves streaking its surface with parallel lines. The beach is deserted. Only a couple and their dog disturb this elegy to emptiness. Or almost only: on looking closely, the tiny form of a child can be seen sitting on the beach playing with the sand (Where are its parents?). You can almost feel the bracing wind, the chill of the water, the density of the sand at last exposed to the air after a day in the relentless clutch of the waves.

  In the top left-hand corner of the photo is the seafront with its imposing, harmonious facades, the fluid geometry of water pitted against the solid force of stone. A break in the ranks: a lone building rises up, with a gap on either side. The camera angle has foreshortened its impressive length, but nevertheless it dominates the landscape, its many chimneys giving it the appearance of a small chateau. Its two wings jut triumphantly towards the sea; they enclose a large glass conservatory, the beauty of the antique wrought ironwork defying the unperturbed majesty of the beach. It could be a casino, a railway station, a hotel: any one of those feats of early-twentieth-century seaside architecture, the setting for a novel bringing together a cast of cosmopolitan characters from Mitteleuropa. But for n
ow, the sunlight bouncing off the water, the mercury-coloured beach, the tree-stump breakwaters, the solitude of idle stone are timeless, forming a moment suspended between land and sea where the muted light of an afternoon redolent of salt water and marine birds is gently fading.

  Paris, 16 November 2007

  Dear Stéphane,

  I hope you’ll forgive the long silence. Things have been pretty hectic following Sylvia’s death and I still haven’t finished dealing with all the formalities. At least it has kept me busy. I went back to work last week, which has also helped take my mind off things. As I said last time we spoke on the phone, no matter how much you’re expecting it, it still comes as a shock. In the words of that song by Barbara, I feel like a (nearly) forty-year-old orphan.

  Thankfully, at the very end, Sylvia was no longer aware of what was happening to her. She was cremated according to her wishes in a non-religious ceremony, and her ashes have been laid to rest beside my father’s. Her brother came to the cremation, along with her surviving friends and a good turnout of former colleagues. It was a beautiful day; the sun shone on her final journey.

  I’ve given up on our search for the time being; I don’t feel up to it. I can only grieve for one person at a time. For now, all I want is to reflect on the woman who has just left us and who was no ghost, even if she did hide a great deal from me.