by H
My colleagues are waiting for me to go and have dinner. That’ll be all for today, my love.
Tender kisses,
Stéphane
Paris, 12 March (email)
Dear Stéphane,
You’re right. Of course. And deep down, I want to know what’s in it too. But I’m putting it off like a coward until Friday night, when the working week is over and I’ve had a chance to psych myself up for whatever I find.
You haven’t said any more about the photos you had developed in London. What was on the film in the end?
Kisses, distant wanderer,
Hélène
Honolulu, 12 March (email)
Dear Hélène,
Nothing of great interest, just snowscapes. I’ll show them to you when I’m back.
Love,
Stéphane
10
The photo is a faded Polaroid. The damaged, dog-eared edges and scratched surface show that the square of strong paper must have been handled many times. On the white bottom border, in tiny, squashed, sloping female handwriting, an inscription: ‘Marsoulan, 1971’. The décor, with its arbour, ivy and the Etruscan mosaic on the lintel is familiar. The Zabvine family is gathered around a little girl sitting on her mother’s knee. She is wearing a dress that must have been red, but which has faded to old rose in the photo. Her chubby legs are open, showing the bulge of her nappy. One of her hands is outstretched, proffering an unidentifiable object (liquorice stick, toy?); the other, raised vertically, is gently clasped in that of her mother, who must have been trying to hold her still.
The child’s face is tilted slightly back to look at Nataliya, who is smiling at the camera. Despite the chromatic veil that has fallen over the image, the chestnut hair is noticeable, the mother’s dark, the child’s lighter, the shape of the face identical, the green eyes. Their skin tone is emphasised by Nataliya’s dress: with delicate pleats, in a blue that was originally turquoise, presumably, embroidered with different-coloured threads and golden beads, the hem ankle-length in defiance of the fashion of the day. Dressed thus, the young woman looks more Russian than ever. Her free hand is pressed against the little girl’s stomach, gently supporting her, thus replicating the timeless image of that hybrid, shifting organic entity, the mother and daughter.
Behind them stands Daria, the first link in the chain of three generations, her hands clasped, imposing, but intimidated by the mechanical eye of the camera. Her Orthodox cross stands out clearly against the unbleached fabric of her embroidered blouse. Meanwhile Dr Zabvine is in a white shirt, tie and jacket; he is still wearing his doctor’s coat over his clothes – a snatched moment of relaxation in the garden between appointments. His goatee and his spectacles make him look like a jovial Sigmund Freud. He is not touching Nataliya, out of a reticence that one senses is habitual in him, but he gazes at her and the child with tenderness, delighted to play the patriarch in his garden.
The only incongruity in this tableau, which despite everything has the hallmarks of a traditional family portrait, comes from the cat. Oleg has picked up the animal and slung it around his neck like a fur stole, its head and whiskers draped over one shoulder and its hind legs hanging down over the other, cupped in the doctor’s hand. The cat, that inoffensive, affectionate mass that is, however, a reminder that any equilibrium exists only in the possibility that it might be destroyed.
Paris, 14 March (email)
Dear Stéphane,
Delighted that all is going well. It was late in your part of the world, but I couldn’t resist hearing your voice. While I was looking through my window at the Paris sky, I could picture you over there in the warm rain you described.
I had a very different kind of phone call this evening, from Boris, the Russian lecturer, who told me he was about two-thirds of the way through the translation. From his tone of voice, I could tell something wasn’t right. He kept asking if I knew the people mentioned in the diary, if they were still alive today. Anyway, he wants to talk to me in person before handing over what he’s done; in fact he was very insistent about it. So he’s going to drop in next Wednesday.
Still haven’t worked up the courage to open the case. To take my mind off my cowardice, I decided to visit Rue de l’Observatoire to check everything was in order. The apartment has a sadness to it now, in a way it didn’t while Sylvia was in hospital, a different kind of emptiness. I can’t bear the thought of getting rid of all their things – dividing up some, selling the rest, and moving boxes and boxes of books.
I spent the whole evening there in the end, sitting on the floor of the library. Every so often, I detected Sylvia’s perfume on the pages of a book she had held between her hands. She was the one who introduced me to Vicki Baum, believe it or not, and I found the series of 1960s paperback editions she used to pass on to me after she had finished them, with their slightly crisp pages and unmistakable smell. I had no idea she owned a first edition of Apollinaire’s Alcools – it must be worth a fortune now.
An even more surprising find was a dog-eared copy of Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor with notes scrawled in the margins and métro tickets and a restaurant bill shoved inside. I find it hard to believe Sylvia would treat a book so badly and even harder to imagine my father reading that kind of novel.
Michel’s Bible was squeezed between two encyclopedias. Judging by the thick coating of dust on it, he can’t have opened it very often these past few years. A black and white postcard used as a bookmark had been left inside. The picture showed a cluster of buildings, one of them with a little steeple, at the foot of a mountain (‘Interlaken und die Jungfrau. 4,367m’). It was sent from Interlaken on 17 June 1970:
‘My dear Michel. Getting lots of rest and enjoying the magnificent scenery. Maman told me Lena visited the zoo. With love, Nathalie.’
I sat there turning the little rectangle over in my hands – a piece of card my mother’s hand had touched – tracing the beautifully neat handwriting with my fingertips. So here we are again, back where we began. What was she doing there, with her husband’s full knowledge?
Tender kisses,
Hélène
Hawaii, 15 March (email)
Dearest Hélène,
I’m thinking of the way children play hunt-the-thimble: ‘you’re cold, warm, boiling’. For us adults it’s more like: ‘cold, warm, you’re getting burnt’. Fear is not necessarily cowardice, Hélène.
We have fantasised so much about our parents, young, beautiful, imagining a love affair that was very romantic when all is said and done … It is tempting to stop there and to hold on to the idyllic image of a couple under an arbour. Except that, if we run away from the past once again, I fear that sooner or later we’ll be presented with the bill of unanswered questions, plus interest.
If you prefer, we can wait until I’m back. But perhaps your curiosity will get the better of you, and that will enable me to satisfy my own. I’m burning too, but to know, I think.
All my love,
Stéphane
Paris, 16 March (email)
Dear Stéphane,
I did it, I opened the case. Inside, I found a letter, from Sylvia, folded around another sealed envelope, along with two albums bound in blue morocco.
There they were, the photos of my mother I had never been allowed to see, painstakingly ordered, arranged and captioned in what must have been Sylvia’s personal collection. She and Nataliya as little girls with plaits, and then as teenagers in the Saint-Serge days. A picture taken on a café terrace in which my mother is reading Nabokov (now everything’s coming together) with a cigarette in her hand. One of your father with his arm around her neck as they queue for the cinema. The two of them on the beach, my mother’s willowy frame vaguely resembling Catherine Pozzi, the poet (have you read her?). A photo from her wedding to Michel, too, taken at the top of the steps of Saint-Serge. He was a handsome man in his youth, my father, with his uniform and cap, and he was beaming with happiness that day; his young wife a little less so. And then a Po
laroid picture of me, my mother and my grandparents. In a split second I could see myself back there, with the fat cat almost as big as me, the smell of lavender and ether when my grandfather kissed me and my mother’s blue dress, goluboye: my memory of the word comes from there.
I didn’t feel like delving any further. I was starting to wheeze again, a sign I should stop. Boris is coming this week and I still need to read Sylvia’s long letter. I fell into bed without any dinner and slept for six hours straight, which hasn’t happened in weeks. I only got up to write to you.
Loving thoughts,
Hélène
Hawaii, 16 March (email)
Dearest Hélène,
Part of me is sorry not to be with you at this time which I imagine is very unsettling; another feels it is probably better that this reunion should take place in private and solitude. How hard it must be to have to relearn that whole lexicon of childhood which was stolen from you. Mine was incomplete, but at least I know the people and the stages, and besides, I’ve always had the photos too.
I can’t wait to be back. When I need some time to myself, I go to the park and memorise its fifty-five native species. I now know every heady or fetid fragrance by heart. No matter how far away we are, we still cling to our routines, the classes, seminars and lunches. And the nights go by, in the loneliness of my air-conditioned room, filled with nostalgia, emotion too, when I think what time it is in Paris.
You are particularly in my thoughts this evening.
Love,
Stéphane
Paris, 17 March (email)
Dear Stéphane,
I had a nightmare earlier. I was driving a car, even though I knew I didn’t have a licence, and you were in the passenger seat. Before long, the road began to melt beneath us. You were making light of it, but I knew for certain we were going to die there, smothered in tar. I woke up covered in sweat.
So I got up, went into the kitchen, lit a cigarillo and opened Sylvia’s letter.
I cried so much, the tears are still flowing now. I don’t know how to say this … We were right, at least broadly so, but we had missed many of the links of cause and effect. Now at least we can say there was a logic to what happened between our parents, if nothing more.
The worst of this is seeing just how wrong Sylvia and Michel got it, in their desperation to protect me at all costs. In that regard, the letter is like a switch in a dark room: everything, absolutely everything makes sense in light of its contents. I ask myself how they could have been so stupid. And yet I can’t even bring myself to be angry with them.
I’ll scan these pages for you now rather than await your return, since the letter concerns you as much as me and I expect you’re eager to know what it says. I didn’t like to open the other letter though. I don’t know how it ended up there, but it’s not addressed to me and I won’t read it.
After I’d finished reading, I replayed every step of our journey in my mind, looking down from the window at the rear lights of the cars dancing silently in the Paris night. It’s dawning on me that having immersed ourselves in the past, chasing after the shadows and mysteries of other people’s lives, time is suddenly pushing us onwards, together, relentlessly. And it will snuff us out too, when our turn comes. Stéphane, dorogoy, who will remember us when we’re gone?
But for now, the question I ask above all others is what you’re going to think of them.
Hélène
Paris, 16 June 2004
My dear Hélène,
By the time you read these words I will have departed this world. First and foremost I want you to know how much your father and I loved you, and I hope you never doubt it. You have been our ray of sunshine, bringing us joy and, later, such pride. Life dealt me a cruel hand in not giving me children, but it made amends by allowing me to be a mother to you. When I look at you now and the person you have become – so generous and sweet-natured – I tell myself yes, we made a lot of mistakes, but at least we succeeded in surrounding you with the love you so deserved. You know I don’t believe in the hereafter, yet a little part of me hopes that wherever I end up, I will be with your father again and together we can continue to watch over you.
It has been two weeks since the doctor told me I am suffering from Alzheimer’s, but I had seen it coming a long way off; there were too many holes in my memory, too many muddles. I’ve read up on it and I know what’s going to happen: I will begin to forget, first the recent past, then more distant memories. There may come a day when I am no longer able to recognise you. Naturally I hope my lungs will have carried me off before then, but I have to consider all the practical consequences now.
There is one thing I want to do before I go and while my memory is still intact – at least, those memories that concern you. Something I should have done long ago, but I lacked the courage. And I don’t know how to broach the subject with you now; I can’t bear the thought of throwing you off balance or making you unhappy. But neither can I stomach the prospect of taking this secret with me to the grave, leaving you to inherit nothing but unanswered questions.
My solicitor will hand this letter to you after my death. It’s a convenient solution – too convenient, perhaps, but at least it means you can choose when to read it and put it aside if you don’t feel ready yet. I want to tell you about your mother, Hélène – your mother, Nataliya Zabvina, who died soon after you turned four and about whom we have hidden the full truth from you. You will find two albums inside this box filled with photos of her and me, along with the last letter sent by someone very dear to her. She never got the chance to read it. It’s for you to decide what to do with it.
I’m ashamed to think of all the times you came to me with your sweet little face, asking questions which I systematically avoided answering. But you must understand, your father didn’t want us to talk about your mother and I was afraid of opening up old wounds which had taken years to heal. I say ‘you must understand’, but in fact you’re perfectly entitled not to understand, to hate me even. What we did, holding back the truth for so long, was wrong, deeply wrong, and I’m all too aware of it.
Your mother, Nataliya (whom we called Natasha) and I were childhood friends. Her parents had come over from Russia at the end of the war; her father was enlisted in the Germans’ forced labour programme and feared reprisals should he return. Before the war in St Petersburg – or Leningrad as it was then called – he had been a brilliant and highly regarded young doctor and had even published a short paper on paediatric ophthalmology. Afterwards, he was merely a wretched exile like so many others in Europe who had lost everything. But he thanked God he had escaped with his life.
In 1947 he managed to get his wife, Daria, and their daughter out of Austria (where they had fled at the end of the war) via Germany to join him in Paris. The first thing he did was get a job in a factory to feed himself and his family. Due to medical council red tape, he had to re-sit some of his exams at the university in Paris, and it wasn’t until late in 1953 that he was finally given approval to practise again. He opened a small surgery on Rue de la Mouzaïa where he was mainly a general practitioner, and transferred to the 12th arrondissement as soon as he was able. Before long he had built up a patient base there, this time practising his specialism. The move had symbolic significance for him: a fresh start in a slightly smarter neighbourhood where he was no longer the humble factory worker returning to medicine, but the venerable Dr Zabvine, ophthalmologist. He mostly treated children; his young patients adored him for his humour and Russian accent, and their mothers were won over by his old-fashioned manners. It’s true he was a very funny man, always playing pranks on his wife such as swapping the flour for icing sugar or pretending to listen to the chicken’s heartbeat before carving it. Religion was almost the only thing he never joked about.
Natasha, then, arrived at the same time as her mother, not quite two years after the war had ended. She was six years old at the time, and didn’t speak a word of French. I met her a few years later, in the pe
nultimate year of primary school, when we sat together in class. Since my parents, who had emigrated before the war, had taught me Russian at home, we soon began conversing in the language and quickly became inseparable. You wouldn’t believe how often we were scolded! Writing lines of ‘I must not chatter in Russian during mathematics lessons’ was our daily punishment. Not only that, but Natasha was even worse than Oleg; if ever there was a chance to be silly, she leapt at it. Once or twice we were called names like Russki, or told to go back where we came from, but overall my memories of that time are happy ones, the whole gang of us hurtling crazily down Rue de la Mouzaïa on our old bicycles.
Your mother loved music and had a very pretty voice. Her father scrimped and saved to pay for lessons with a Russian émigré pianist even worse off than he was. Your grandmother who, like many refugees, had become very devout in exile, enrolled Natasha in the parish choir of Saint-Serge in the 19th arrondissement. It was there that your mother met the boy who went on to become her closest friend. His name is, or was – I don’t know if he’s still alive – Jean Pamiat. He came from a family of White Russians who had emigrated in 1917. Jean was an incredible character, always dressed like an aristocrat despite not having a sou to his name. He had just come back from military service – he was older than us – and was working around the Buttes-Chaumont as a photographer’s apprentice. He would have us all in stitches with his impressions of the rector of Saint-Serge; he only came to church for the music. It was a funny time, you know. Some of the kids really didn’t have much; they would wear their fathers’ old suit jackets and shoes with holes in them, and had no concept of what a holiday meant. But at the same time, when I think back to my childhood, my memory is of a lost paradise.