by H
I’ve replayed that scene over and over in my head hundreds of times since. I would give anything for it not to have happened but it did, and there’s nothing I can do about it. The following year, Natasha sent me a card from Saint-Malo, and another one to wish me a happy New Year. I felt so awkward about the way I had reacted, yet unable to get down off my high horse, and I didn’t know what to write back. So I didn’t. Then, a little over two years after we had last spoken, she called me at work one October evening, from a café. She told me something serious had happened and she was taking the train to see Jean in Geneva. She sounded awful; I think she was in tears. She asked me to look after you should anything happen and then she hung up, saying she would call me back.
A few days later, I received a letter from Michel Hivert with another letter addressed to Natasha inside. I don’t know how he had worked out that I knew where she was; perhaps he simply guessed. I duly forwarded it, and took the opportunity to ask how she was. But Natasha still didn’t call me back. So, after going to great pains to track down Jean’s telephone number (there was no internet back then, of course), I called from the post office to find out what was going on. International telephone calls were prohibitively expensive, so I had to be brief. Jean told me Natasha had left her husband and was not in the best shape, but he was looking after her. I could tell they were hiding something from me. They no longer trusted me and, in a way, it was my own fault.
On the evening of 18 November, Jean sent me a telegram telling me to come to a town called Pontarlier in the Jura, and to bring the Zabvines with me. Your mother had been involved in a car accident. We set off in the early hours of the next morning, but by the time we arrived, after a long day driving through rain and snow, it was too late. Tasha had sustained serious head injuries and a perforated lung, and she died without regaining consciousness. I always told you she was cremated, but that wasn’t true; she was buried initially at the cemetery in Pontarlier because the terrible weather had made the roads impassable. Then, four months later, her body was moved to the cemetery at Thiais just outside Paris, on the express wishes of the Zabvines. She was laid to rest in the Orthodox section; you can find her grave and say a prayer for her there, if you wish. Your grandparents are buried there too.
We were all there in Pontarlier. All except your father, who had been posted to a remote part of New Caledonia. He was informed too late to catch a flight in time, and arrived twenty-four hours after the funeral. He never forgave himself for that, among many other things.
The police report concluded it was an accident. The roads were icy, there was thick fog and Natasha was travelling in Jean’s car, which she can’t have been used to driving. I don’t know what she was doing there or where she was going, but I promise you it was an accident, a tragic accident. There’s no doubt about that.
I wanted to come and see you on my way back home so I took the train to Brest, but your father wouldn’t allow me in. He was devastated, and angry too. I think he had found out about the affair and thought I was in on the secret. I told myself he was in shock, that he just needed time, and I resolved to come back when things had calmed down.
But when I next tried to get in touch in early 1973, he had moved house without leaving a forwarding address. I did all I could to locate you, to no avail. Your grandparents hadn’t heard anything either and were at their wits’ end. They were tearing their hair out, absolutely desperate to see you. Despite serious misgivings, your grandfather ended up hiring a private detective, but two months later he had a heart attack and died; the detective took the money and ran. My own attempts at finding you remained fruitless; it was as if you had vanished into thin air. Then, three years later, I happened to overhear a conversation in a waiting room: a woman was talking about her son, a soldier who had suffered an eye injury operated on by ‘Dr Hivert’. It could only be your father. I asked the woman where he practised, rang his surgery at Val-de-Grâce hospital and he agreed to speak to me. A few days later, I was able to see you again.
You had grown so much! You were now seven years old and when you walked into the room, it brought tears to my eyes. You were Tasha in miniature. You had (and still have) exactly the same smile, the same unruly hair (and a skew-whiff velvet bow), the same expression. You inherited her beauty, you know. But what struck me most, there and then, was how sad you looked. You never smiled but only gazed around you with those big pale eyes, not saying a word. You didn’t recognise me, of course, and I didn’t even dare kiss you for fear of frightening you. Your father explained that you had not spoken at home or school for several months and he had had to ask his psychiatrist colleagues to step in to prevent you from being moved to a special school, since autism had been mentioned. It turned out you had only been back in Paris a few weeks: to begin with, Michel had left you with his parents, your paternal grandparents. He obtained a transfer to Marseille and came to fetch you to live with him, and then the pair of you went to Polynesia for a long-term posting. But while you were there, you picked up a quite serious flu-like virus called dengue fever, and it took you a long time to get over it. He sent you back to France to be looked after by one of his sisters, who lived near Le Mans, until he could get a posting back home. It was at that point you stopped talking.
I think you had been through too much upheaval and your silence was your way of saying you had had enough. Your father was raising you on his own in Paris, with a little help from his other sister, Madeleine, but his work was very demanding, and he was losing patience with your refusal to speak. If he agreed to let you spend time with me, it’s because he would have agreed to anything that might help you get better. He even told me he wouldn’t mind you seeing your grandmother again; what he didn’t know was that Daria had died of cancer the previous year.
So I was able to spend some time with you, taking you to the zoo at Vincennes, ice-skating and to the cinema. You were a lovely child, good as gold; you looked around, taking everything in. But you never asked for anything; never said anything at all.
Even so, it didn’t take long to work out that there were some things you liked more than others: the overground sections of the métro (you would stare out of the window with both hands pressed against the glass); the stuffed animals at the natural history museum; hot chocolate; the piano, which I played with your little squirrel-like hands resting on top of mine. Sometimes when you were with me on a Sunday, you fell asleep in my arms sucking your thumb like a baby, and I would rock you to the Russian nursery rhymes your mother used to sing to you. You were so avid for affection, and I became more attached to you each day.
One evening on the métro, enthralled by the sight of the winter lights twinkling over the Seine, you grabbed hold of my sleeve and said ‘Sylvia’. It was the first word I had heard you utter since your return and I squeezed you so tightly you squirmed to be let go. You were so unused to the sound of your own voice that afterwards you became overexcited and couldn’t stop shouting ‘Syl-via, Syl-via’ as we walked through the underground tunnels while I mimed applause, beaming with delight. People turned and stared at us as if we were completely mad. Yet the first time you said ‘pa-pa’ to Michel again, he turned away to hide the emotion on his face. Your silence had been a living nightmare for him.
From then on, your father began to relax a little. He invited me round for dinner with you. Then he came with us to the zoo. And soon the three of us were doing lots of things together, especially going to concerts, because you loved music and could sit still for hours listening to Chopin. You gradually became more comfortable in your own skin. For your eighth birthday, with Michel’s consent, I bought you a kitten, the kitten who would grow to become our big fat Chacha. It was the first time I had seen you really laugh; you seemed so delighted with your present. When I asked what you wanted to call it, you immediately replied ‘Koshka’. Michel pursed his lips and told you a French name would be nicer. You never said it again in front of him, but I know you carried on calling your cat the name you had chosen.
You still didn’t say much to us, but I sometimes heard you in your bedroom holding forth to the animal in a made-up language I could make neither head nor tail of. You seemed to be progressing all the time. And within a few weeks, you were talking to us again.
Two years later, in 1978, Michel asked me to marry him. The idea of me marrying my best friend’s husband, and he his dead wife’s best friend, will no doubt seem peculiar to you. But your father and I had a great deal in common: in spite of his military background, he was a scholarly man, one of the old breed of medics interested in botany and poetry, and I worked in the book world. We both enjoyed music as well as peace and quiet. And above all, we both loved you. One night, when he had drunk too much whisky and the past must have been weighing more heavily on him than usual, Michel confessed that he had thrown your mother out a few weeks before the accident. At the time, he was religious, and madly in love with her, and he reacted very, very badly to the news of her affair. Not a world away from how I had behaved myself. You cannot imagine how guilty he felt. He never spoke of it again, but his nightmares gave him away: he would wake up gasping, covered in sweat, and go out walking the streets in the middle of the night. I sometimes didn’t see him again until breakfast, by which time I would be frantic, worrying he was never coming back.
I know you sometimes felt he was distant or irritable with you, and you’re right. But it wasn’t his fault; you reminded him so much of Natasha, it was hard for him even to cuddle you or look at you. What’s more, he was consumed with guilt, blaming himself (quite wrongly, in my opinion) for the accident that deprived you of your mother. Through no fault of yours, he felt your very presence as a silent rebuke against what he believed to be his own worst actions. Some days, it was too much for him to bear.
As for me, I had Natasha’s last words going round in my head and was haunted by the knowledge that I had pushed her away when she most needed me. She had asked me to take care of you, and you were now half-orphaned. On a more selfish note, my loneliness was becoming harder to bear, time was passing and my biological clock – as it’s called nowadays – was ticking. I wanted someone to come home to, a companion, and for you to be my little girl. So I agreed to marry your father on one condition: that I be allowed legally to adopt you. The papers were signed the following year. Michel also laid down two preconditions: we would never talk about your mother and I was never to address you in Russian. I kept my side of the bargain too. You must think us monstrous and calculating, and no doubt it was our sense of guilt that inspired the vain hope that blocking out the past might make the pain go away. But I promise you we both sincerely believed it was the best thing to do for your sake. And when, a decade or so later, I began to wonder if we’d got it wrong, it was too late to go back without accepting the prospect of you turning against us and pushing us away. We weren’t willing to take that risk.
You know what happened next: our life together, the three of us. It wasn’t all bad, I don’t think. Yes, your father still had the odd temper, and he never came to terms with Natasha’s death. But he had ‘started over’, as the expression goes, and firmly closed the lid on the past. He had distanced himself from his parents, who for all their devoutness never took the slightest interest in you. He, on the other hand, had turned his back on religion entirely. Yet he continued to visit Thiais every 19 November to lay flowers on Natasha’s grave, and I would go with him. I took you there once without telling him, one spring afternoon when you were eight. I couldn’t tell you why. I just wanted you to be near one another, at least once. The last time I made the trip with Michel, when his health was beginning to fail, we passed an old man, tall but frail, walking back along the path through the cemetery on the arm of a younger man the spitting image of him at the same age. It was Pierre Crüsten. He didn’t recognise me. It had been thirty years, after all.
Time passed happily enough for us, in spite of your low periods and recurring nightmares about accidents. You were our daughter, the most adorable child, and you always remained so, even when you were fifteen and dyed your hair green, your bedroom reeked of cigarettes smoked in secret and you called us ‘a pair of old right-wing reactionaries’ (your words exactly!) for not letting you go to the cinema on school nights. And in the end you grew into the beautiful person you are today.
In 1973, I had received a card from Jean Pamiat, who had left his job at the newspaper to set up a small commercial photography studio in Lausanne. Things seemed to be going well for him, and we saw each other three or four times over the next few years, whenever he was in Paris. But the weight of Natasha’s memory hung heavy between us and we stopped meeting once I was back in touch with you and Michel. I suppose this tacit split was a way of severing the one remaining link with the past, and thereby protecting you from it.
If only it were that easy. For your fifteenth birthday, you had your heart set on a camera. At first we tried to tell ourselves it was a passing craze, but once we saw how much time you were spending developing pictures up in the attic room, it was clear you really had a passion for it. Then you announced you were going to write your master’s dissertation on family photo albums in literature, and it seemed to me we were seeing the first cracks appearing in our wall of silence. And when you took up Russian seven years ago, Michel and I understood that all the outward calm had been deceptive; you had never stopped questioning where you came from, trying to find the part of you that was missing. You had an incredible instinct for unearthing your history, in spite of the fact we had erased all the material clues that might have shown you the way. Repeatedly failing your driving test, as if afraid of replicating your mother’s fate, was the most obvious example. I also sensed the sadness we had striven to ward off rearing its ugly head once more. Many years later you told me that the idea of having children terrified you and that you had just left Hervé, who was desperate to have them, for that very reason. That was when the scope and depth of our mistake really sank in. I was on the verge of telling you everything when your father fell ill. I had no choice but to give him my undivided attention.
I have no idea whether all that I have written will help you to see things more clearly. But I have every faith in you. Like Natasha, you are drawn to the light, and we have done nothing but surround you in shadows. It may be late in the day, but I am urging you now to brush those shadows aside, to find the strength never to let them descend on you again. I don’t know what you will think of us now that you know the truth. You might hate us for all the lies we told, and if so, I would understand. But I’m old enough to know that hatred is a poison that harms the person who feels it the most; something Michel learned through bitter experience. Even if you cannot bring yourself to forgive us just yet, please keep a place in your heart for the three of us – your mother, your father and me. And more than anything, try to remember that everything we have done, even the things we did wrong – especially those – we did out of love for you, solnyshko.
Be happy, my darling Hélène.
I love you with all my heart.
Sylvia Hivert
Hawaii, 17 March (email)
Dear Hélène,
It was immediately clear to me from your letter that the woman who brought you up was an exceptional person. Mistakes, clumsiness, I grant you. But what love in those silences, in those ridiculous efforts whose hopelessness she herself realised. The simple fact that she had the courage to write you that letter is a mark of extraordinary affection.
I too owe her a great deal, indirectly. How would I have known, otherwise? Reading about my father’s past, the past I was unaware of, was deeply upsetting but also reassuring, in a way. I have always been convinced, even though I found it hard to explain, that he had two different personalities. This account touches on his other side, the one that Philippe and I glimpsed only briefly: that of a free man, an adventurer, passionate about his art, a man in love, the man in the portrait of 1971. There’s something cruel in the thought that we, his family, represented the flipside of that life, but
what can we do other than accept it now?
After Natasha’s death, he must have grieved for her and, worse, grieved without being able to talk about it, which is appalling. Now I understand why he avoided us as he did, why he found it so hard to bear the presence of others. He must have wanted to shut himself away with his sorrow, ultimately the only thing that remained of her.
It was your mother he went to see in Thiais cemetery, I’m certain of it. And I bumped into your parents, that day, even though I don’t remember them. When Pierre and I were already on our way back to Geneva, you must have been waiting somewhere for them. Our destinies, yours and mine, could have so easily continued unaware of each other, dearest Hélène. I find that retrospective thought almost unbearable.
I am with you, more than ever.
Stéphane
Paris, 18 March (email)