Monsieur Ka

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Vesna Goldsworthy

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Prologue: A Snapshot

  1 Monsieur Ka

  2 Air Street

  3 An Excursion to the Edge

  4 Absence

  5 Orphans

  6 The Wild Mane

  7 The Black Sea

  8 Forgiveness Sunday

  9 Borzoi

  10 When the English Speak of Russia

  11 The Russian Party

  12 The Meaning of Cowardice

  13 The Wronged Party

  14 The Descending Blue

  15 You, Anna

  Afterword

  Copyright

  About the Book

  The London winter of 1947. As cold as St Petersburg during the Revolution. The Karenins keep their vodka under the layers of snow in their suburban garden, in bottles entombed like their Russian past. But when a young Frenchwoman arrives to work as a companion to the aged ‘Monsieur Ka’ he begins to tell his story…

  Albertine is the wife of a British army officer who is often abroad on covert government business. Lonely, yet eager to work, she begins to write Monsieur Ka’s life story as a secret gift to him, and even learns his mother tongue. To her ear it is like ‘the sound of falling snow’. As she is drawn into Ka’s dramatic past, her own life is shaken to its foundations. For in this family of former princes, there are present temptations which could profoundly affect her future.

  About the Author

  Vesna Goldsworthy was born in Belgrade in 1961 and has lived in London since 1986. She writes in English, her third language. Her books include an internationally bestselling memoir, Chernobyl Strawberries, and a novel, Gorsky. A former BBC World Service journalist, she is currently professor of creative writing at the University of Exeter and at UEA.

  Also by Vesna Goldsworthy

  Gorsky

  The Angel of Salonika

  Chernobyl Strawberries

  Inventing Ruritania

  To Vera

  My God, if only someone could finish Anna Karenina for me! It’s unbearable.

  Tolstoy, Letters

  Prologue

  A Snapshot

  ‘Unconditional love: people say it is the essence of motherhood. I was barely old enough to recognise it when suddenly she was no more, like a comet extinguished. To have a famous mother is a curse. To lose your mother at nine is a tragedy. I have lived my life in the shadow of these two misfortunes. It took a lifetime to comprehend the extent of the devastation they caused. There is no mother more famous than mine. Except the Holy Virgin, perhaps. Soon you will understand it all much better. We are now related, you and I, dear Albertine.’

  The Count’s face was lit by the familiar, lopsided smile. He said all this in Russian. I was so pleased with myself for finally understanding the words that I realised only later, when I was writing them down, that I had missed his meaning. He was using the familiar, informal you for the first time. We are now related, you and I, he said. My Russian is, still, barely passable. By electing to write his story in English, I chose a camera unable to capture the most significant detail in the snapshot. What did he mean? What did he know?

  1

  Monsieur Ka

  Why do marriages end?

  A better question may be: why do they ever begin?

  ‘A triumph of hope over experience,’ Albie would have said. He spoke like that, holding emotions at arm’s length with the pincers and tweezers of clichés, like a bomb disposal expert. Years pass and I still don’t know which live wire was to blame for the blast that blew us asunder. I hold myself culpable. Responsibility is easier to live with than ignorance.

  Albie was not yet fully dressed. The long johns and the vest sagged around his knees and elbows and gathered under his armpits like old man’s skin. A pair of suspenders hugged his calf muscles, holding his long grey socks in place. There was something incongruous and clown-like about the red and green regimental stripes of the elastic band, at odds with everything around us. His army days now lingered in vestiges like those.

  ‘Ber,’ he said, managing to extend the syllable into a mournful tune.

  It was freezing, even indoors. The bathroom window was covered in fern frost. A faint glow beyond it suggested the arrival of a new morning – daybreak seems too strong, too definite a word. Albie pressed his forehead against the cistern, as though standing was an effort. A chain dangled to the right, its white pull with a black rubber ring indecent in its plain-ness, its no-nonsense utilitarianism. I was beginning to get used to this island, the pride it took in the functional, in making do. ‘Mustn’t grumble,’ people said all the time. ‘I’m fine,’ to mean they had had enough.

  Albert and Albertine – an Englishman and a Frenchwoman, if I could still call myself French. One might have concluded from our names that we had been meant for each other, but there was no deeper meaning behind the coincidence and Albertine had nothing to do with Proust. I was a few days older than the first volume of À la recherche. My father had wanted a son to call after my grandfather: the name helped overcome the disappointment of my gender. Albie’s father loved Queen Victoria. His mother did not approve of Albert as a name. Too common, she thought. She had wanted to call him Tristan; mine nearly plumped for Violetta. Patriarchal authority gave us both a lucky escape.

  He laughed when I called him Albie – fit for a Cockney comedian, he said – but the nickname stuck. He used to call me Bertie in Alexandria. Ber sounded like an English shiver. It seemed apt, on mornings like this.

  My nightdress offered little protection against the cold. The mirror above the washbasin threw a misty reflection of its blue stripes back at me. The pattern was unflattering, although I had purchased the fabric and made the garment myself. It was ill-chosen, or perhaps chosen all too well. I thought I knew what I was doing as soon as I touched the flannel at the Army & Navy Stores in Victoria, but I had miscalculated the effect. I had assumed the stripes would suit a tomboyish garment, a witty, wifely echo of Albie’s longing for propriety. I took no notice of the fact that it could make me look like a detainee, yet that is what it had faded to, and so soon.

  The sewing machine had been a wedding present from Albie’s parents; a Singer, like my maiden name, or one version of it. On the day the gift was delivered, there was the clip-clop of horses’ hooves outside. The livery of the coachman was as green as the cart and the big box from Harrods that it brought; the horses as black as the blackest night, with fetlocks from a gothic romance. I was green, too, new to the land where people sent expensive gifts by way of apology for not seeing you. We pretended that was normal, in England. Albie was used to communicating by parcel. The machine reminds me of those horses every time I open the lid. Friesians, Albie told me, a sight to behold. Graceful, dependable; foreign like me.

  ‘Ber,’ Albie said, ‘you’ll get used to London. You’ll come to love it. I promise. Give it a couple of years.’

  A couple more years, he should have said. It was eighteen months since our boat had docked in Southampton. It had been high summer then; 1945, the war just over. The train that took us to London cut through the Hampshire fields, parting waves of wheat as full of sunshine as the beaches we had left behind. London: the word still pealed like the chimes of wedding bells.

  Before we left Alexandria for good, Albie and I had had a weekend by the water, west of the city, where the desert met the sea in luminous expanses. The Egyptian sand seeped from our hair and our clothes for weeks. I kept finding grains on pillowcases and felt them on the carpets under my feet well into that first autumn. Tiny, hard, grey specks; impossible
to believe that, in their billions, they added up to something golden.

  Albie joked that we had brought the dunes with us to our home in Earl’s Court. It took a long time to learn how to pronounce these two words well enough to make myself understood when I wanted to buy Underground tickets. The waves closed behind me and the city took me in. Its size was overwhelming. I did not venture to its edges again until the end of the second winter.

  Albie combed some oil into his hair, then tidied his moustache with the same comb. He would soon put on a suit and tie, button up his waistcoat so that it looked as stiff as a cuirass, lace up his black shoes and finally throw his overcoat over his shoulders, never once glancing in the mirror. He knew his drill. Wrapped up and poker-straight, he was the very picture of an officer in mufti – handsome, handsomer even than that dusty, lithe creature in desert boots and shorts he had been when I first met him – yet everything about him had stiffened, become different, unreachable.

  The young man who had teasingly boasted of defeating Rommel now went to work in an office, eagerly and as early as he could, often skipping breakfast. Duty calls, he’d say in a sing-song voice, his face warming into a smile, as though duty was a mistress, easier to please than a wife.

  I knew little about Albie’s work. Whitehall: that was what he said when people asked where he worked. It sounded like Whitelaw, his – our – family name. We had walked along Whitehall, with its un-French, haphazard jumble of commanding grey blocks, several times that first summer, and he had pointed to the building which housed his office. It was closer to Trafalgar Square than to the Houses of Parliament; it had a shiny black door, with an even shinier brass plate next to it bearing the name of an English county. Sussex House, Cheshire House, Lancashire House: it could have been any of these. I trusted Albie. I still do. Wives did not ask in those days.

  ‘Don’t worry your pretty head, Ber. I’ll keep bringing home the bacon.’ That was his answer, and a hug, when I bothered to pose a question. It was such a funny phrase. I never doubted the essence of his promise. I felt lucky that he thought me pretty, that he had chosen me for a wife.

  He was still on His Majesty’s service, though no longer in uniform, and he no longer talked about his work. In our earlier days, he had often seemed unable to resist a boast. Chases along the wadi, madcap plots to snip apart Rommel’s string of African successes: his yarns of military adventure were so riotous that I never believed any of them. He made the war sound like an English school sports day. Victory had turned out to be a more serious business. He even found it difficult to say whether he was hoping to be home for dinner. Every now and then he would pack a suitcase, leave it waiting in the hall and, in the morning, when an official car arrived to collect him, he would say, ‘See you on Thursday or Friday’ the way other husbands might have said, ‘I’ll be a bit late tonight, darling.’

  I could guess where he had been on his return if a box of sweets appeared on the dining-room table – marrons glacés, calissons or bergamotes, leckerli, lebkuchen, the upturned boats of gianduotti or the sweet pillows of amaretti morbidi. Albie’s gifts from Europe. He did not exactly hide his tracks, but that part of his life which related to the unfinished business of wartime victories was no longer mine, no longer a laughing matter.

  In bed at night, he fell asleep within minutes. I counted hours, sheep, personal losses, depending on the mood I was in. Albie thought that happiness was a matter of pulling your socks up, making them stay there, by hook or by crook. I was beginning to think that perhaps I should become like him: bury the past, forget that which you can’t bring back. Choose to be cheerful, stay cheerful, and happiness will follow. He himself seemed stuck at the second part of the proposition.

  ‘You don’t have to work, Ber, you know that. But if it would make you happy to go out into the world, meet people, please, Ber, I won’t say no. I know it’s difficult to stay at home when you have been used to working. Voluntary work, for example? A lot of ladies these days …’

  My stockings hung on the radiator like something vaguely prosthetic. I reached for them and stepped out of the bathroom. I could hear the hum of a motor outside. Albie started these conversations only when there was a way to end them quickly. Down in the square, the car was waiting to take him to Whitehall, a shiny black frog under the falling snow.

  When he went to work, the day stretched emptily ahead. I had long ceased to pretend that the pieces of translation which Albie’s people sent my way could keep me occupied. The brief communiqués that I conveyed into my most elegant French extolled the Allied war record and expressed optimism about the future. They were neither riveting nor revealing. I had no illusions about their importance. I was too un-English to be grateful for small mercies. Yet even these commissions were drying up. Treaties were being signed; war-crimes trials were being completed one by one.

  I wasn’t looking forward to the life of galleries and tearooms in which so many women frittered their afternoons over oils or china cups. When they thought no one was watching, I glimpsed the memory of war in their faces, the disorientation of a return to inconsequential civilities.

  I would not have thought it possible to feel as homesick as I did when Albie was not around to distract me, although I knew I was homesick for places that no longer existed. The war took away Paris and Bucharest, and replaced them with a knowledge of their capacity for betrayal. I had arrived in Alexandria in 1941 and, while the world was at war, I felt at peace there for four years. I had a job. I polished my English as though I sensed my life would come to depend on it. I knew that Egypt was a temporary shelter, that the enforced largesse of the Arabs was not going to last. Now only London remained, yet I did not know how to love London. Albie was my way into the metropolis, but Albie had a country – a whole continent – to rebuild, a new world to defend. I had no such clarity of purpose. In the heart of a frozen city, on an island surrounded by icy grey waters, my insides felt frozen to the bone.

  Every morning, after Albie left, I’d put on my coat and galoshes and walk to South Kensington to buy Le Monde, fresh off the ferry and a day late. To take some exercise, I cut through rows of mews and back streets at great speed, trying to look like someone who had to get somewhere in a hurry. It was a new habit, this new paper: Le Monde. I read it the way one reads fiction, as though France was a figment of my imagination, a country that no longer existed. I skimmed through the headlines over toast and coffee until it was close to noon, the day half gone, the thought consoling in itself.

  ‘You’re wishing your life away, Ber,’ Albie had said when I told him how the best part of the day was always around 3 p.m. – when the light was almost spent. It was too late to start anything, close enough to his return from work to make me relish a bit of solitude – if he was in the country that is, and not, as so often, in Germany, France or Switzerland. When I had promised to have and to hold, there was no mention of a thousand temporary partings.

  Europe, he called it.

  ‘I’m off to Europe tomorrow, Ber. I won’t be back until Thursday.’

  ‘Isn’t it perverse, Albie,’ I had asked, ‘isn’t it perverse to wake up and look forward to three in the afternoon?’

  ‘You’re wishing your life away,’ he had responded, spreading margarine on his toast, scraping it so thinly that the membranes of each cell crackled under the pressure of the knife.

  ‘I am not. You are,’ I said. I failed to grasp the meaning of the strange little phrase. I took away to mean elsewhere.

  On one of those morning walks, I had spotted an advertisement in the window of the newsagent, offering light secretarial work to a lady fluent in French, two afternoons a week, or more. It had been typed out on a blue-lined index card. Someone had stuck a paper flag in the bottom right corner, a French flag, next to the telephone number, baiting the card to attract the Francophones left in the rock pools of South Kensington by the receding tide of the war.

  It was the tricolour that had caught my eye. It made the card look like the ad
vertisements people displayed on notice-boards in Alexandrian consulates and hospitals, hoping for news of family and friends. Now, when Albie mentioned work, I remembered the advertisement. Chiswick 9940 – I was not aware that I had memorised the number until I dialled it.

  ‘My father is Russian,’ a male voice explained, diffident, perhaps distinguished too, ‘and secretarial work is not quite right. An occasional letter, maybe. Tidying the family archives, such as they are. A bit of reading. The sound of French. Company.

  ‘We visit him often,’ he continued, ‘almost daily. But Father is bored. He was once a great walker; he now trips and falls so often. He used to read; now he complains that no light is bright enough. Company, yes, mainly company.’

  The man gave his business address for the interview. It was less awkward that way, he explained, less disturbing for his father, in case I did not accept the job.

  ‘I am sure it will be a formality, Mrs Whitelaw.’ He sounded apologetic that he had to make me travel all the way to Chiswick. Apparently, I was the first – the only – person to respond. The temperature had been hovering around zero for weeks; a bad time to advertise anything, he added. He emitted a strangled little laugh. Ha ha: it did not sound so much like laughter as like someone reading the two short words from an unrehearsed script. I warmed to his shyness, his lack of self-confidence.

  Fahrenheit, I thought when I put the receiver down. In Celsius, zero would be progress.

  The following day I found myself in a vast office on the first floor of a Georgian terrace with bricks the colour of congealed blood and rows of black-framed windows reflecting the snow. The street sloped towards the Thames like a slide. There were the beginnings of an island at the bottom – an eyot, Albie later explained. Black stumps of reeds pierced layers of snow on its crest, and ducks paddled across patches of ice on the river’s edge. The air was full of yeast, malt and smoke; the warm, pleasant smell of a medieval kitchen, as unexpected after a short ride from Earl’s Court as the horse-drawn carts loaded with casks which emerged from a warehouse alongside the office and clattered away on icy cobbles, on a twin-track path cut through the snow. I had taken the Underground train, and – after half a dozen stops – emerged into a world teetering on the brink of the Industrial Revolution.