by H
Natasha and I remained friends throughout secondary school and we sat the baccalauréat in the same year; she specialised in philosophy while I took maths. We were closer than ever. I was very fashion-conscious and always dressed up to the nines (you know me); she would walk about with one sleeve twisted, her collar sticking up and her hair all over the place, as though her body wouldn’t let her clothes have the last word. Yet there was something irresistible about her. She had all the boys falling at her feet and she didn’t even notice, because all she cared about was music. I should have been jealous, but it was impossible to hold anything against her for more than three seconds because her wit (which could be ferocious) and generosity were so infectious. She was one of those people born with a kind of light inside them, drawing us to them in awe and wonder.
Both of us passed the bac with good grades, and I had my first hangover after the little party Oleg and my father threw in our honour, both of them bursting with pride. That same year the Zabvines moved house, but as we had both enrolled at the Sorbonne – Natasha to study English and I history – we still saw a lot of each other. Books were expensive in those days, so we both did a bit of teaching to make ends meet. The one luxury we allowed ourselves was a daily copy of Le Monde; we would separate the pages and take turns reading them. Occasionally we would stop off at a bar on our way home from Sainte-Geneviève library, sipping our café crèmes and sharing our dreams for the future. I wanted to teach history, whereas Natasha had plans to become a psychoanalyst or a novelist. That was what marked us out from most girls of our age, and the main reason we got on so well: we were nonconformists. We had no desire to get married and end up like our friends’ sisters, with three children by the age of thirty and a life divided between shopping, washing-up and laundry. This didn’t always make us very popular with the boys.
Midway through our first or second term, I can’t remember precisely, Natasha began to change. She became moody, distant, suffering spells of gloom that were very unlike her. I kept asking what was wrong until she finally admitted that Jean Pamiat had introduced her to one of his army friends, a photographer, and she hadn’t stopped thinking about him since. She was losing sleep over it and could barely eat.
So, feeling very pleased with myself, I did what good friends do: I went to persuade Jean to set up a date between this young man, whose name was Pierre, and your mother. They fell, as the saying goes, head over heels in love, and were engaged within two months. I have rarely seen two people so strikingly well matched. They were like two faces of the same being – just seeing them walk down the road together brought a lump to your throat, and they turned heads wherever they went. The Zabvines, on the other hand, were rather less enchanted. Firstly, because Pierre was eight years older than your mother; and secondly, because he did not have what we would nowadays call a ‘stable income’, and was living off photographic commissions and odd jobs. It had been such a struggle for Oleg to lift his family out of relative poverty that he could not bear to hand his daughter over to an impoverished ‘artist’. But what Daria could not forgive Pierre was his agnosticism and irreverence towards all forms of religion, which he saw as an insult to human intelligence. She had caught him quoting one or two of Voltaire’s anti-religious jibes, which did not go down well at all.
And so, after almost a year, your grandparents made Natasha break off the engagement. Such a statement must sound ridiculous to a woman of your generation, but it wasn’t for ours, I can assure you. We were still minors until the age of twenty-one and getting married without permission was out of the question. On top of that, Natasha had no money, had not finished her studies, and the Zabvines had threatened to cut her off; Pierre, meanwhile, was already on the breadline. In my opinion, if the Zabvines had felt they had no choice in the matter, they might have backed down, but there you are. The real problem was that Natasha adored her parents and they her, and she chose to suffer rather than cause them pain. And so it was with the heaviest of hearts that she agreed to leave her fiancé. Poor thing, she cried so many tears that year; poor things, I should say, because it was a terrible time for Pierre too. I know he begged her to change her mind, and went to see Oleg too, but nothing could persuade your grandparents to go back on their decision.
Afterwards, Natasha never quite regained the joie de vivre I knew and loved; it was as if part of her had been shut off and she had suddenly aged by several years. She fooled around less, instead making cruel sarcastic remarks which were completely out of character. For several years, she refused to set foot in a concert hall; she couldn’t bear to hear a single note without Pierre, with whom she had so enjoyed listening to music. In spite of everything, he had asked her to keep the engagement ring and she continued to wear it on a chain around her neck. Soon after she broke off their engagement, Pierre left Paris for Switzerland. When she found out, Tasha was despondent, because of course she still loved him. She just about managed to finish her degree, after I had badgered her to turn up for her exams. She scraped a pass, with much lower marks than she deserved, and then looked for work. It was around that time we began to drift apart.
She found a job through one of Oleg’s patients, a lawyer who needed an English-speaking secretary. She was still living with her parents, not far from Cours de Vincennes. We sometimes went to the pictures together on the few evenings I took off from revising for my teaching exams. Once or twice she brought someone with her, a nice boy called Vladimir or Vasily or something, but he wasn’t on the scene for very long. I don’t think she had got over her broken heart. We no longer saw Jean Pamiat, who had also left for Switzerland, but he wrote to us. I heard – from him, I suppose – that Pierre had got married two years after the engagement was broken off and had a little boy. I never told Natasha.
She had become quite secretive herself. Her lawyer boss had ended up asking her to marry him, but she turned him down, much to her parents’ displeasure. I had failed my teaching exams and while weighing up whether or not to enrol for a PhD in history, I took a job at the Bibliothèque Nationale to tide me over. I ended up staying there for the rest of my career, and I think I was happier than I would have been teaching a class of teenagers. At that point, I was only seeing Natasha every three or four months; I had started going out with one of the librarians at work, and we ended up getting married in 1963. Your mother and Jean were my witnesses.
Sadly, my husband, who was also called Jean, died two years later from a poorly treated collapsed lung. I was devastated, as you can imagine – it was all so sudden. Had it not been for Natasha, I think I might have done something stupid. She supported me, kept me company, even came to live in our apartment for a few months so she could make sure I was eating and help me through my grief. Things slowly got back to some kind of normality. The years went by and I carried on living the life of a young widow. Natasha in her mid-twenties was still ‘on the shelf’, as they say; being unmarried at that age was cause for concern in those days. After refusing the lawyer’s proposal, she changed jobs and was now employed by a publisher, compiling English grammar textbooks. She enjoyed her work. She had moved out of her parents’ home and was living in a little studio near the Jussieu campus. We used to rent a house in Brittany together for a week every year. One summer, she confided she was afraid of what the future held, and that her parents were driving her up the wall saying she was going to end up an old maid.
A few months after that, she told me she was engaged to a young doctor, Michel Hivert. She introduced me to him a week later. He was Breton, shy, very intelligent and rather mysterious, and he was just finishing his training at the École de Santé des Armées. I think he must have met the Zabvines through a work do while he was completing his internship at Val-de-Grâce military hospital. The old doctor had taken the young man under his wing as a kind of spiritual son. The fact he was a practising Catholic, if not Russian Orthodox, went down well with Daria, and I suspect it was the parents who arranged the engagement. In any case, it was clear to me that Natasha�
�s feelings for this young man were nothing compared to the passion she had felt for Pierre. Michel, on the other hand, was besotted with Natasha, who was both beautiful and cultured, and he treated her as if she were a goddess. Sometimes the three of us would go out to a café and he wouldn’t say a word all evening but simply stare longingly at her, leaving me feeling somewhat uncomfortable.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be telling you this, but if Michel was in love, for Nataliya it was more what might be termed a marriage of convenience, entered into for the sake of form. Again, you must remember that in those days such things happened all the time and, for a woman, being single was treated like an affliction. Sometimes, these orchestrated unions produced couples who held each other in mutual regard and managed to build a stable life together. I have always wondered what would have happened had May ’68 come a few months sooner, or Natasha been allowed to marry Pierre. But events took a different course, and it was Michel Hivert who led her down the aisle in February ’68. They went to great lengths to be granted an Orthodox ceremony. It was probably the happiest day of Daria’s life, watching her daughter get married at Saint-Serge. Jean Pamiat and I were witnesses (he wore a silk suit), Michel’s fellow students were there in full dress uniform and the choir sang beautifully. Afterwards there was a huge party where we all drank each other under the table – even Daria, who started singing ‘Kalinka’ at the top of her voice. You should have seen the faces of the Breton contingent! Your father destroyed his wedding photographs but I kept the one I took, and I’ve never forgotten the trace of melancholy on Natasha’s face. The icon of happiness was cracked from the beginning and the signs were there, right before our eyes. But we chose not to see them.
Hawaii, 17 March (email)
Dearest Hélène,
Here I am on my balcony at the other end of the earth, and I’m looking at the photo of your parents’ wedding, which I’ve got up on screen. You look so very much like your mother. I stopped midway through reading the letter with a lump in my throat. I can imagine how distraught Pierre and Natasha must have been to be separated, and I want to take a moment to find a place where my thoughts can be with you, see your face again, your hands as you pour water to make tea or grope for your glasses, the way you converse with your cat or run your hands through my hair. All the delicious and intense things I feel when I’m with you, beside you, close to you. Because we are alive.
And like you, I am looking back giddily over this year of seeking, which came and shattered the routine of my quiet – probably too quiet – life. When I first wrote to you, I thought, rather presumptuously, that my reply was simply a noble gesture to calm the anxiety and answer the questions of an unknown correspondent. By the time we had exchanged three letters, things had changed dramatically. The unease you described in your struggle with this silent past was, word for word, my own.
Our quest has given me the opportunity to understand the things that can break the life of a man, my father; to make sense of that extinction of his person that we witnessed, powerless to help. From one season to the next, and, above all, looking through the albums, I was discovering Pierre, the energy he invested in capturing on film the heartrending light of empty spaces. I guessed that these images were for him the representations of private aspirations, and that even aside from seeking refuge from his unhappy marriage, he was someone who craved solitude. I understand now how the separation of 1960 was certainly one of the sources of that pain, which he never expressed other than through photographs.
You ask who will remember us. I’d gladly tell you that first of all, it’s up to us to reinvent a present that will be ours, one that the dead cannot take away from us. We are driven forward, it’s true. But side by side this time.
Stéphane
11
The snowflakes have settled, carpeting the ground and enveloping everything – the earth, trees and paths – in a soft blanket of pure white. No footsteps have disturbed the virgin surface, and, if they did, they would produce that muffled, crunching sound of snow being trampled. The outlines of the yews, pines and larches are lost under swollen tunics that weigh heavily on their sturdy branches. It is one of those wan January mornings when the freezing air bites your fingers and face and seeps up your legs. One of those mornings when winter like a silversmith has rimed the tiniest protuberance, stone, railings and bars, and snow has blanketed the chaos of the world with its fragile molecular cathedrals.
Apart from a few frozen birds, the animals have abandoned the place, which is too wild to be a clearing or a field, too open to shelter creatures or homes.
There are curious, slightly fuzzy, vertical shapes dotted around and it takes a moment to realise what they are. The photographer, who failed to produce a clear image, lighted on a large snowy mass measuring one and a half metres by three. The layer of snow conceals a rectangular tomb, softening its irregular contours and sharp edges. The uniformity of the whitish blanket is broken in only two places. On one side, a prominent stem pokes up, the ghost of a bunch of flowers invisible under the snow: the drop of blood of a frozen rose. At the other end is the recognisable shape of the three-beamed Orthodox cross, the lowest beam slanting, departing from the usual perpendicular geometry of cemeteries.
Sylvia’s Letter (2)
Not long after the wedding, having graduated, your father received his first posting. He and Natasha moved to Brest, where his garrison was stationed. She wrote to me from time to time and sent the occasional postcard. She seemed bored whenever Michel was away, as he was most of the time. He had forbidden her to work, out of principle, and besides she had fallen pregnant straight away. He had, however, bought her a piano on hire purchase to give her something to occupy her time. She told me she would spend whole days sight-reading and playing Chopin waltzes.
You were born prematurely at seven and a half months after a difficult labour, and we were worried you might not survive. You had to stay in hospital for four months while Natasha slowly recovered from a pulmonary embolism, but in the end you both pulled through. Your grandmother rushed over to see you as soon as you were born and prayed for you from dawn until dusk, took care of you and showered you with love. It really was touch and go for a while. She had got it into her head to call you Hélène Seryozha Hivert – the masculine diminutive of Sergey, which she wanted to try to pass off as a girl’s name! But neither the council nor the Catholic priest would register it, and I don’t think Michel put up much of a fight.
Your mother asked me to be your godmother, and I was honoured to accept: you’ll find the christening notice among the other papers.
Judging by Tasha’s letters, things seemed to pick up around then. She sounded happy: she adored you, her Lena, her Lenochka, her little princess. When you were about nine months old, she began bringing you to Paris when Michel was away; he could no longer put off resuming his assignments overseas. To your grandparents, you were something approaching the eighth wonder of the world … Oleg and Daria had decided to teach you Russian, which your mother already spoke to you when her husband wasn’t around. Your grandmother even tried to take you to vespers at Saint-Serge once, but apparently you made so much noise she never did it again!
I often dropped in to Rue Marsoulan, so I saw quite a bit of you. You were absolutely adorable, babbling away and trying to attract the attention of the cat, a fat tomcat who was shut away every night for fear he might lie on top of you and suffocate you. For your first birthday, I bought you a wooden toy with animals painted on it, and I remember telling you their names in Russian. I think kot was your first word when you started talking.
I came to see you in Brest, too – your parents invited me one Christmas. The flat was gloomy and the town, which had been completely rebuilt after the war, was also quite depressing. Michel and Nataliya – whom he called ‘Nathalie’ – were getting on well, but even so it always seemed to me there was something about them as a couple that didn’t quite work. Natasha, who was usually so talkative, would just sit there with a fix
ed, distracted smile plastered across her face whenever her husband was in the room. This pleasant yet vaguely distant demeanour served as a kind of defence mechanism, but it was clear that something was wrong beneath the veneer. I don’t think there was much love lost between her and her in-laws, Breton traditionalists who still hadn’t resigned themselves to Michel having married ‘the Russian girl’. In Brest, your mother was getting better and better at the piano, and she had a few friends, mostly officers’ wives. But they never became close: her glorious untidiness, her chain-smoking (always Craven As), lack of interest in baby talk and increasingly staunch feminism made her stand out. Too much.
She still wasn’t working. The only remnant of her past life – music aside – was her passion for reading, which remained as fervent as ever. More than once I witnessed her ignoring your cries until she had finished her chapter. She told me she even read while she was breastfeeding you! One night while I was staying with you, I found her fast asleep on the sofa with a book, even though Michel had returned from his posting. She was still there the next morning. I don’t think it was a one-off.
It was September 1970, I remember well, when I received a letter from Natasha asking to see me as soon as possible. She came to Paris, leaving you behind, and I met her in a café near the Odéon. She told me she had seen Pierre, her fiancé of 1960, again; she had bumped into him by chance while on holiday in Switzerland, and was having an affair with him. Then, Hélène, I did something I’m still ashamed of to this day: I lectured her. In no uncertain terms. I told her she had lost her mind, that she must break it off at once, think of her family, think of you. I called her a bad daughter, an unfit mother and who knows what other foolish things besides. You see, I had lost my husband; Jean and I hadn’t had the chance to have children, and I was lonely, pretty unhappy and probably rather bitter. In the end I was so angry I called her sumasshedshaya – crazy, reckless. I don’t think she expected me to react the way I did. She blanched, gathered up her things, paid for her coffee and left. That was the last time I saw her alive.