Monsieur Ka

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  Monsieur Carr held the metal in his palm. The chain dangled below.

  ‘A small thing,’ he said, ‘and it looks so harmless.’

  ‘It was lodged in Albie’s right shoulder. It was blisteringly hot when it hit.

  ‘“I am afraid I have a puncture,” Albie had told the matron when he arrived. Semi-conscious and in pain, he still spoke in understatements. They had irrigated the wound out in the field and sent him on to advanced care, because the shrapnel was too awkwardly embedded to handle on the spot. He has a diagonal scar on his shoulder blade, as though he had been trying unsuccessfully to grow wings, he jokes. They say it will fade away in time. It is barely visible already, but it gets angry sometimes, and then it shines bright red. I beg Albie not to scrub it when he has his bath. Perhaps that’s not it. I don’t know enough about wounds.’

  I looked at the portrait of Monsieur Carr’s mother and father, and it seemed, in the reflection the fire was throwing against the wall from the fireplace, that there were dancing shadows in the backdrop, that the painter had painted other people and then covered them in tar-black oil. Monsieur Carr looked like a creature from an era that pre-dated his parents. His white hair and his rough white jumper, which could have been knitted by one of the family serfs long ago, would not have been out of place in a medieval wall painting. The asymmetry gave his face a plaintive, Byzantine aspect.

  ‘A fisherman’s jumper,’ he said, following my eyes and touching the fabric of his garment. ‘From the Outer Hebrides. Have you heard of the archipelago? A present from Alexei, our Russian Allenby. He loves Scottish things. What a confusing world we live in, Albertine. One day, our grandchildren will look at our lives and think, our poor ancestors, so many trails, so many countries, so many wars.’

  ‘I told you my story; you promised yours,’ I said. ‘You were going to tell me what happened after your father died. After you returned to Russia.’

  He looked out of the window into the wintry garden and buttoned up his fisherman’s jumper at the shoulder, as though he was bracing himself against the cold.

  ‘My return to Russia was in 1892,’ he said. ‘It felt like a short visit at first, but I had preserved the sense that Russia was my home. No other place has ever felt like that. Not even England now, after twenty-three years. An entire decade passed in Germany and I never even thought of it as a place of permanent residence, let alone a home.

  ‘I assumed that Russia would always be there, that I would always be able to return. First, I wanted Russia to forget my mother. Until that happened, I would remain in Tübingen. People spoke of Anna – Tolstoy’s Anna – in Germany too, but they did not know that it was the story of my mother’s life; they did not know me, or ask themselves what I was doing in their country. I was just another Russian youth at the university which had educated Hegel and Hölderlin. Who would not study at Tübingen, given half the chance? In the ten years I spent there, my landlady never once asked why I chose Germany, so obvious was the answer.

  ‘The library was my refuge. I believed that nothing bad could happen to me behind a palisade of books. How naive I was, dear Albertine. I studied dead languages and deciphered manuscripts late into the night, and hiked, alone, in the hills or along the Neckar on Sundays. Latin, Greek, Church Slavonic, one could perhaps have expected me to want to study those, but not Assyrian, Egyptian, Sumerian. Yet I slowly mastered them. In 1892, ten years after I first set foot on German soil and crossed the threshold of Tübingen’s philology department, I defended my doctorate. My teachers wanted to keep me in Tübingen. I had no self-confidence, at least not enough of it to believe their praise.

  ‘“Count Karenin,” my tutor, Freiherr von Gutschmid, told me early on, “Germany will be kinder to you than Russia will be. It is a more civilised country.”

  ‘I loved Russia, I was proud of being Russian, and, although Gutschmid was thirty years older than me, I refused to believe that he knew what he was talking about. You cannot grasp Russia with your mind, the poet Tyutchev said. Gutschmid was pure mind.’

  ‘Could you tell that they felt superior to you, the Germans, simply because you were Russian?’ I asked. ‘Is that why you chose London in the end?’

  ‘In Germany, however polite people were – however convincing the veneer of social niceties – there was always an apprehensiveness about Slavs, the looming threat from the East. My distant Teutonic ancestry did not signify,’ he said. ‘That vanished in England, where we became just another category of foreigners from faraway lands, but, in the dying years of the last century, no one could have guessed that I would end up in England. I am not sure if I was ever fully aware of the choice I was making as a student. For someone like me, with a scholarly bent, there was Russia and there was Germany. Austria-Hungary too, perhaps, but Vienna was not so different from Germany in its attitudes to Slavs.

  ‘Later on I wondered if I had made a mistake by not staying in Tübingen. I look at those German years, and I see my father looming over them, his money, his patronage, his purchase of the distance between us. When I was still a boy and he a recent widower, Father hired only the best tutors for me. He read textbooks in pedagogy to find out how to bring me up. His parenting was like that: mechanical, correct, devoid of anything instinctive. He wanted the best for his son, but I felt no warmth from him.

  ‘My late wife was interested in the workings of the human psyche. She read a lot of psychology, and she tut-tutted whenever my father was mentioned. High intelligence, she would say, but a failure of empathy, an inability to interpret emotion. She cited a paper by a Soviet woman psychiatrist someone gave her to read, and she urged me to look at it too.

  ‘“It describes your father and his kind,” she said. “There is more than a touch of him in you and even in our son.”

  ‘I laughed and threw the paper into the sitting-room fire. Perhaps there was a bit of my father in me after all. She was at the other extreme, my wife, so highly tuned into others that she forgot to think about herself.’

  ‘According to Tolstoy’s retelling of events,’ I said, ‘I seem to remember that most Russians took your father’s side at first.’

  ‘You are right, Albertine. We are all like Tonya now; we put our feelings first and are inclined to blame my father and not my mother for their shared tragedy. In my boyhood, it was the opposite. She was the goddess of destruction. He had never achieved his potential, and for that, too, my mother was to blame, everyone said.

  ‘After her death Father worked for a long while in the Ministry of Finance under a minister who was both younger and of lowlier birth than him. He remained superior only in humility. He took on the permanent mask of a man who had suffered an unjust blow, who had been tested beyond human strength. Not a cuckold but a martyr. And this did not change in the two decades he endured as a widower. Only when a terrible famine struck Russia in the early nineties did he seem to wake up, to realise that there were greater tragedies in the world than his own. He worked tirelessly, and seemed finally to have found a sense of purpose, a kind of peace. Twenty years, almost, after mother died, and months, practically, before he did. A sad, late display of what he might have been all along had he had more generosity of spirit. Who knows why we don’t have it, my dear child? We harm no one but ourselves by feeling slighted; we carry acid in our soul even when it eats nothing but the vessel it is stored in.’

  He stood up from his seat and looked out of the window. He held his right hand in his left behind his back, palm over hand, like an officer surveying troops in the field. In contrast to his determined pose, his body seemed frail and ancient. His jumper and trousers hung loosely off a skinny frame, his shoulders were stooped and he wobbled slightly as he stood there, as if harvesting the memory from the weather outside. Then he turned, faced me again, and sat next to me. We were now side by side, both facing his parents’ portrait.

  ‘But I have all that about Father second-hand, from other people,’ he said. ‘From our cousins, the Oblonskys, the Galitzines, the Levins.
Father came to visit me in Germany for the first and only time when I was twenty, on my birthday. Mother had been dead eleven years. He stayed at the Brenners in Baden-Baden and I travelled to meet him. He looked like a raven, all in black, his black beard covering much of his face, his bald head covered with a black hat. He walked slowly and noisily, click-clacking on the cobbles in his heavy, English-made shoes, and he seemed so old and so Russian that I was embarrassed to be seen with him. Not because of his Russianness, but because of his evident, alien difference, which called attention to itself when all I wanted was to be invisible. The Germans stared at him wherever we went, the waiters and the coachmen expected tips in gold coins, and everyone spoke slowly, waiting for me to interpret. No one dared address him directly. Father’s German was fluent enough, his French was perfect, and he had more than a smattering of English, but he avoided eye contact, he made no effort to speak.

  ‘We walked, and took waters, and talked, yet remained distant from each other. He would have preferred me to study law or even philosophy. My studies meant little to him. He understood well enough that their endless continuation had as much to do with forgetting as it had with my thirst for knowledge. He was similar in that respect, more interested in the religious disputes among Russian Orthodox philosophers than in me, our wider family, or even Russian politics. There were women around him back home, I later heard, circling like birds of prey, mothering him, telling him what to do, hoping that he would remarry. Devoutly Orthodox as he was, he seemed to be toying with spiritualism. He talked about it as though it was some kind of exact science, a way of getting in touch with the hereafter. I now wonder if he was trying to contact my mother, God forbid. She deserved peace over there at least, poor soul.

  ‘We were equally unhappy, perhaps, father and son, wedded to each other as we were, till death did us part. One suicide was enough for the Karenins.’

  Monsieur Carr paused again and now stared at the pattern in the carpet. For a moment the silence around us was complete. We were in London, but we could have been almost anywhere on this earth. Paris was so densely populated that you always knew you were in it; there was always someone shouting in the street, the sounds of conversation or lovemaking seeping through party walls or open windows. In my London home, when Albert was not in it, there was often, as now in Monsieur Carr’s house, complete silence. It tempted you to speak aloud to yourself.

  The word suicide echoed. It was the first time he had used it. Suicide was against religion, and against the law, even in Britain now, against the Crown. In last century’s Russia, it would have been an even graver sin. I was still not sure how to ask about Anna’s death.

  ‘After he left Germany, Father wrote to me less and less,’ Monsieur Carr continued. ‘When news of his death reached me, I was twenty-eight and we had not seen each other in eight years. They wanted to bury him as fast as possible, as the Orthodox rite dictates. Yet they postponed the obsequies to give me – his only child and heir – the time to get back to St Petersburg. I would not have regretted missing the occasion, the days of condolences and obligatory feasting required of me to mark the first week, the forty days, the first full year after his death day. Orthodoxy may lift your soul closer to God than any other faith, but it can be atavistic in its attitude to the body. I was unprepared. I had not even known he was ill. The pancreas, apparently: too much bile, the doctors said. If anyone could die from too much bile, it was my father.’

  ‘And what does the Orthodox Church have to say of suicides?’ I asked, pursuing my own train of thought.

  ‘You are thinking of my mother,’ he said. ‘She had been distressed, and high on opium most likely. She took opium with increasing regularity, they said; it was an acceptable painkiller in those days. It was easiest for everyone concerned to conclude that Anna was of unsound mind at the moment she took her own life, even as they condemned her act. The Church preferred it that way. Yet there was little doubt as to the real, scandalous implication of her demise. I had left for Germany in order not to have to share its long aftermath with my father. Now that he was dead too, I was no longer sure where I wanted to be. His death had rendered us both free from slavery to hers.

  ‘On the way back to St Petersburg for his funeral I vowed that the train journey would be my final long voyage, whatever happened. How wrong I was, what distances lay ahead. I remember a procession of German towns and villages, the peasants on the platforms selling cups of water, pretzels stacked high on long sticks, paper cones of redcurrants and late cherries. The fruit was shrivelled, insanely sweet from the sun. The bread was decorated with zigzags of salt. It made you want to drink gallons, so you parted with your last coins for enamel cups handed through the train windows. We stood for hours in Berlin. When we crossed the Imperial Russian border and stopped in Warsaw I felt I was already at home, yet home was still hundreds of miles away. One forgets the vastness of Russia, how small it makes other countries feel.

  ‘It was only June, but the plains were so parched that the whole world seemed to be on the verge of some great, all-consuming fire. I felt a searing pain when I first noticed Cyrillic inscriptions on station platforms, a sense of years lost, of having missed a Russian youth, something I did not even think I had wanted. Russia was arid and dusty, halfway through what turned into five rainless months. Evenings melted away as we moved north, until at night there was just a continuous dusky, rosy light. I had not seen it in such a long time that I had forgotten what it was. White nights, I half whispered, as the memory returned. White nights, summer heat, and my father is no more, on ice somewhere in St Petersburg.

  ‘The funeral went on for hours, the liturgy, the speeches, finally, for some unknown reason, even a military band, its sound tinny and desolate in the heat. There was a honeyed smell of lime trees high above the grave, the buzz of bees. On the ground, just the tang of melting candles. Everything felt sticky and thirsty at the cemetery that day. St Petersburg: there is no better place in the world in which to be dead. But the living sweltered. The wreaths were shrivelling before our eyes, white turning yellow, red turning rust, as though an invisible fire was consuming us all. It was impossible to mourn my father while all eyes were on me. Instead, I planned a letter to Gutschmid wrapping up my affairs in Tübingen. I knew already I was not going back to Germany, although I had left everything and everyone there expecting a temporary absence.

  ‘My father’s coffin was open.

  ‘“Accept, O Lord, the soul of your slave Alexei,” chanted the priestly choir, voices plumbing the depths that only the Russian basses seem capable of. I looked at my father’s waxen face, his grey beard, his stern features. I bent down to kiss his hand when instructed. His skin was warm, not from life but from the heat.

  ‘Annie, my dear little sister, bent down to kiss my father’s hand too, and sobbed although he was nothing to her, although he had been responsible for her own father’s death. The Vronskys had not wanted to know her. My father took her in, in the first flush of his martyrdom, but then left her to the nuns. She came to look like a nun too. She was twenty one and should have been married for three or four years already, according to the Russian custom. Marriage seemed unlikely now.

  ‘Then the casket was closed and he was no more.

  ‘“We have only a little time to please the living. But all eternity to love the dead,” Annie whispered, throwing a handful of dust onto the roses which shrouded the descending coffin, then wiping her gloves against her long black skirt. I had not wanted to please him while he was living and I certainly did not intend to love him dead, not for an eternity, not for a minute. Pity, yes, always, for the three of them, as for the two of us. I squeezed Annie’s hand. She and I now had only each other, and her life, whatever happened, was marked out to be more difficult than mine, for, cruelly, my half-sister was a bastard and I was not.’

  ‘And afterwards?’ I asked. ‘You stayed on in Russia because of Annie?’

  ‘Not just because of her. A kind of inertia, perhaps: I could not
move on. But I did feel a sense of duty for Annie, and guilt that I had never thought of her in Germany. We stayed on the Oblonskys’ country estate that summer and moved back to my father’s house when the rains finally came. I took a modest job at the Imperial Public Library. I looked after the manuscripts in the collections established by Count Korff, while Annie looked after the household. Some years later, already in her late twenties and an old spinster, she married a country doctor called Zaytsev, a friend of an acquaintance of mine. Dr Hare – not an aristocratic name.

  ‘It was matchmaking, pure and simple, but Annie was happy to go. Her Hare took her to Suzdal of all places. I think she had three sons and a daughter, but we lost touch. The little Hares, descendants of Anna and Vronsky, that other Alexei. Isn’t it strange, dear Albertine, to think that they may still be somewhere in the old country, that they may be suffering or making others suffer? When you read about Russia nowadays, there seems to be no other option.’

  He paused. I wondered if he was going to say something about present-day Russia. In the letters pages of The Times and Le Monde people argued endlessly about Communism, about Stalin. Some said he was a dictator, worse than Hitler. There were also many Communists in Britain who saw the Soviet Union as a model society, the only way ahead. Not as many as there were in France.

  ‘I find it impossible to hate them, these Soviets, these new Russians,’ Monsieur Carr said. ‘I saw footage of the Victory Parade in Moscow in June 1945. Alexei took Gigi and me to the Electric on the High Road to see a film and before it, in the newsreels, there was the Kremlin, Red Square, the soldiers, mere boys with their wide, familiar Russian faces, marching. My mind whispered that they were Bolsheviks, but my heart saw the faces of my people, after all these years, only my people. Even the marches were familiar: the cymbals were striking the Russian beat. Red stars on their hats, yes, but my people. Do you feel this about the French, Albertine?’