Monsieur Ka

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  ‘The only face I see when I say my people is my husband’s. I do think of Paris sometimes. But I have no one there any more and I am growing to like London,’ I said, buying time, out of wishful thinking more than conviction. ‘I like the resilience and the modesty of the English. It is strange to think that I am married to an Englishman, odd, but not totally unexpected in this new Europe of ours.’

  ‘You don’t have to answer my question, but are you happy here?’ he asked.

  ‘I feel disoriented,’ I said. ‘What does my happiness matter? I feel I owe it to my husband. I mean I owe it to him to be happy. So many people have lost everything in the past eight years. So many have died.’

  ‘You survived,’ Monsieur Carr said. ‘I thought of that after I had this stroke. The value of survival. At first, I couldn’t walk and I could barely talk, but my languages came back, even the languages I will never need again. Things do get better. The only correct thing to say in the face of death is: not today.’

  I continued to think about our conversation on the train home. In its lingering fragments it revealed itself as much more important than I had thought as we sat in that bay window and the sun slowly dropped behind the roofs of Bedford Park. I went straight to Albie’s study when I returned to Earl’s Court. Taking off just my gloves, still in my overcoat, I took his typewriter out of its case and positioned it among the piles of memoranda and official letters: On His Majesty’s Service, over and over again.

  A heavy, upright machine – an Imperial 50 – it was the very model, in war paint rather than black, on which I used to type up hundreds of case histories on index cards at the hospital in Alexandria. Even in the midst of conflict, the British maintained a perfect bureaucracy. There were some advantages to it, I thought; it had brought me to my husband.

  I tightened the ribbon, shifting the carriage-return lever. There it was again, the familiar sound of the bell that had measured, with its steady beat, so many of my Alexandrian afternoons. I inserted a clean sheet of paper and started typing. Soon it was like sewing, a tick-tock, an immersion, but now with a kind of euphoria behind it. The writing felt like something that I alone could do.

  I noted everything Monsieur Carr told me, in English, as fast as I could, while I still remembered it. I would polish the words, worry about spelling later. At some stage we might continue to read Madame Bovary again, but this business seemed so much more pressing. I would write his memoir for him.

  Halfway through my typing there was a blackout. Power cuts were so regular that I ceased to register them as interruptions. I took a candle out of the top drawer of Albie’s desk. We had them at the ready, with boxes of matches, in every room. I continued as the air around me grew colder, until I typed that phrase ‘You survived.’ I shifted the lever and covered the two words with a line of crosses, writing myself out of the story.

  6

  The Wild Mane

  It was only when I went into the bedroom hours later that I knew Albie had returned. There was the curve of his hip under the eiderdown, the sound of slow breathing. He appeared to be asleep, but raised the cover to beckon me under when I approached. He let out a little yelp when he felt my hands, fingers as cold as blocks of ice. I tried to embrace him, but he caught my palms under his upper arms and squeezed them.

  ‘I did not mean to wake you up,’ I said. ‘I had no idea you were back.’

  ‘It’s not me,’ Albie said. ‘It’s a burglar. Didn’t you see his overcoat in the entrance hall?’

  He turned on his back and we rested as an occasional crescent of light illuminated the ceiling whenever a car passed in the street below. My hands grew warmer. I felt the slimness of his body, the parallel lines of his ribs. We tended to forget how thin we were under the many layers of clothing we wore all the time. His face was etched by exhaustion, his eyes sunken. He reached for the alarm clock on the bedside table and fiddled with it.

  ‘I won’t be needing this tomorrow,’ he said.

  ‘How was Berlin?’ I asked. ‘If it was Berlin.’

  ‘The flight was awful,’ Albie said. ‘I think I was the only person on board who wasn’t sick. And that includes the crew. So much turbulence, we thought we were going down over the North Sea, the whole shebang. The landing was, if anything, even worse. And it took longer to drive up from Croydon than to fly over from Europe. My car broke down halfway, and I sat inside it for an hour waiting for it to be fixed, on a slip road above the railway line, watching a unit clearing the line into Victoria, poor buggers. Soldiers, prisoners of war with them. I heard the orders passed on in German and Italian. Balham, Streatham, Tooting, don’t even ask where I was, Ber. I’m sick of snow, sick of this bloody war.’

  ‘But Berlin?’ I persisted, not bothering to correct him. Not saying that it was twenty-one months since the war had ended. I counted them always, counted the months.

  ‘Ah, Berlin, Ber, my dear’ Albert said. ‘Like London but worse. Rubble everywhere. Everyone hungry, although the black market is thriving there too, better than here: German efficiency. And everywhere these pathetic allotments. I saw women using ice picks to dig a few potatoes out of the frozen soil of the Tiergarten. And so many people whisper that it was better under Hitler. Even to me, an Englishman, in a jazz club, after a few drinks. Can you imagine what they say to each other when we are not listening?’

  ‘What about you?’ I said. ‘I don’t care about the Germans. How was your work?’

  ‘So much of it is just tedious administrative stuff, endless meetings full of jargon and acronyms, details you think are of little consequence, and then suddenly the Russians or the bloody French take offence and all hell breaks loose. Barricades go up, permits are revoked or someone threatens to let one damn obersturmführer or another slip away to Spain or Argentina. And you realise that the boring stuff is important, that you are walking a bloody tightrope – one wrong word, not even your word, a wrong nuance chosen by the interpreter, and the entire thing collapses. Bang. The whole of Germany is like that. The Russians don’t trust us; they want to run it. The French don’t want any Germany at all. They’d rather see it in pieces, as it was before Bismarck. Five wars in eighty years, they say. A country which starts five wars in eighty years forfeits the right to exist. The Americans have more patience with the Krauts than any of us, but it’s easy for them, fat buggers. Why am I telling you all this? What were you typing in that room? A secret memorandum to Stalin? On my typewriter?’

  ‘I was writing up Monsieur Carr’s story. I have this plan, silly perhaps, to write his memoir for him. For his descendants, I mean. In the first person. Does that make sense? In French, we call an invisible writer, such as I would like to be in this case, a nègre littéraire.’

  ‘A ghostwriter,’ Albie suggested. ‘I believe that is what they call them now, in America.’

  ‘I prefer the English version to the French. A ghost, yes.’

  I started sketching the details of Monsieur Carr’s life. Albie listened for a while but then his breathing slowed down and he was asleep again. The circles under his eyes were darker than the darkness in the room. His skin was dry and pale, all the Egyptian light washed out of it, but so was mine, so was everyone’s. So many Londoners who had had exotic wars were now pallid and looked more strained than they had in wartime. We survived, Monsieur Carr had said. Was it so important to survive? I had doubted this, before.

  Outside, London was eerily quiet, nursing its own ruins, its own scars. In the morning, when the city started moving again, there would be men like Albie on every street, in every train. If their sleeves or trouser legs were empty, you could begin to guess the wounds they carried.

  I did not tell Monsieur Carr about my plan when we next met. Not yet, I thought. If he knew what I was planning, he could become self-conscious, censor himself, tell his story differently. I asked what had happened when Annie left and he found himself living alone in his father’s house.

  ‘Let me tell you about London first,’ he said. ‘I have been
mulling over that night at the Electric Cinema since we parted. I have forgotten the film – it could have been any old comedy – but I cannot forget the Pathé News that came before the main feature: the national anthem, that parade from Moscow, then a report about a terrorist attack in Jerusalem. Alexei had just returned from Palestine. There were bombings there all the time, though the worst – the King David Hotel – had not happened at that stage. You could see that Palestine had changed Alexei. He and I talked about exile when we came out of the cinema; the meaning of a homeland.

  ‘“I am the only English person here,” Gigi said suddenly as we were walking along the High Road. He had, until that moment, been kicking a bottle top along the way.

  ‘That made me sad, Albertine, and I could not quite understand why. The child was half English and only a quarter Russian, and I was to blame for the fact that he had an English surname, yet I wanted my grandson to feel all Russian. Is that not perverse?

  ‘Alexei could see that I was about to say something, and he jumped in.

  ‘“So you are, Gigi. You are the only one without even a trace of an accent. But you are also a citizen of the world. When you grow up, one’s nationality will not be nearly as important as it seems now.”

  ‘Hearing himself described as a citizen of the world, the boy beamed with visible pride and looked at me for approval. I nodded. I liked this cosmopolitan ideal, yet I still wanted him to feel Russian first. I felt very old, and defeated in some odd, intangible way. Can you begin to understand this, Albertine?’

  ‘I am not sure I can,’ I said. ‘I agree with your son. Albie talks about Europe, but I find even that claustrophobic. Citizen of the world seems so much better. The only way to raise a child.’

  ‘Perhaps I am too old to change. I was sixty when we arrived in England in 1924,’ Monsieur Carr said. ‘Too late to begin a new life, too early to die, I thought already on our strange ferry crossing from Ostend. My wife was forty-four, Alexei had just turned twenty. He was tall, my son, lanky like a stick insect, and with the brittle, evanescent smile of someone who had known suffering too young. I worried that I could soon become a burden to him.

  ‘Our little family, the three of us, sat on the ferry to Dover – the Ville de Liège, the boat was called – at a metal table screwed to the floor, a circle of battered suitcases around us on the deck, like the collapsing ruins of a pagan temple. We shared a single egg sandwich and a cup of beef tea, the cheapest meal available in the ship canteen. It tasted like infirmary food. Perhaps it was; the vessel had been a hospital ship. My wife took a single bite and chewed it for long minutes, staring ahead as though she had the task of spotting land.

  ‘Everything around us was grey: the sea, the sleet, the screeching gulls, the sky above. It was January, but nothing that a Russian would recognise as winter, not like this one now. An English January, kind to the body, cruel to the soul. I did not know English winters then. Even those famous white cliffs of Dover, when they finally emerged in the drizzly mist, were grey and forbidding, so that you wondered what kind of world lay up there, enveloped in layers of fog, as though we were arriving at the opening lines of some version of Jack and the Beanstalk created especially for the survivors of the Soviet Revolution.

  ‘We had little money and a lot of worthless papers, and we persisted in thinking – seven years after the first shots were fired from the Aurora at the Winter Palace – that we were going back to Russia soon, within a year or two at the most. Our fellow passengers looked at us, sometimes enquired about the strange language we were speaking and, when we said it was Russian, nodded without surprise. We were not even the only Russians among some hundred-odd passengers on board. As we sailed towards England, a small, bird-like man, a Russian Jew from Riga, came up to inform us that Lenin had died, that Lenin’s body was, as he spoke, on the train from Gorki to Moscow.

  ‘“Believe me, cher Prince,” the man said to me in the canteen while I waited for our meagre ration, “in two or three years it will all be over, this experiment. The Soviet state will vanish, will seem like a bad dream, and your people will be back in power, back in the red fort.”

  ‘He must have heard us speaking French and Russian to each other, yet I am not sure why he had decided that I was a prince, or who he thought my “people” were. I don’t think he could have deduced anything from the look of our small, exhausted trio. Our clothes were worn and we were permanently hungry, not because we had no money but because we did not dare spend what little we had. And although we were not spending it, money seemed to be melting away. The only treasure we possessed was an address in Kingston, that of Hannah Wilson, my mother’s ward, my daughter-in-law’s grandmother. Mrs Jenkins told you about her.’

  ‘So you stayed in touch?’ I asked. ‘It must have been – what? – half a century since she left Russia … and she was a small girl when she left.’

  ‘For a long time after my mother died and Hannah was sent to England by my father, she used to write to us once or twice a year: a Christmas card, a short letter in Russian just so as not to forget the language and the alphabet. She married and changed her family name; she had children of her own, but she still signed herself Hannah Wilson, anxious that we might have forgotten her. The last card we carried with us in 1924 was old, fifteen years old at least. The chances that Hannah would still be living at the same address were infinitesimal we thought, but it was as good a place to start in this new exile as any. We had other addresses in London, but no more reason to believe in their usefulness. No one here owed us anything, except Hannah Wilson, perhaps.

  ‘But I rush ahead again, dear girl. You asked how I coped alone after my sister Annie married. That is a much lovelier story. I met Tonya. I met my wife.’

  ‘How old were you then?’ I asked. We would return to England, I knew.

  ‘Thirty-four, almost. It was in 1898, my fifth year at the library. I was probably the first person in my family, in God knows how many generations, to look for a job rather than be offered a paid sinecure on a silver salver, certainly the first not to see that as a personal tragedy. Long before the Revolution, I was an aspirant bourgeois. It’s neither the proletariat nor the aristocracy, but the professional middle classes that will inherit the earth. I saw that in Germany.’

  ‘It is so poignant, funny almost, to think of Anna Karenina’s son as a librarian,’ I said. ‘Although it sounds like a modest way to describe what you did, the kinds of books and manuscripts you were handling.’

  ‘I prefer librarian to curator or palaeographer, although both of those might be more appropriate,’ he said. ‘The library treasures were such that they made the Tübingen collections look provincial and meagre by comparison, as if to contradict von Gutschmid. The manuscript holdings alone ran to thousands of pages in every language and alphabet imaginable – enough work to keep generations of palaeographers busy. I spent my days deciphering, copying and dating, happy to think of this work as my destiny.

  ‘Not far from the Tsarskoye Selo railway station, there was a printing press run by a Frenchman by the name of Angevin. His family had come to Russia during the reign of Catherine the Great. Work took me to him several times a month, sometimes for several hours at a time. The library had commissioned a print edition of an early Russian chronicle. The line setting was laborious. You had to possess a steady hand to insert a metal sort in the right place, a sharp eye to spot an error, and you had to be a pedant to enjoy all this. I certainly was. The work suited and soothed me. I took hours poring over each forme, over each page.

  ‘Angevin was convinced I had printing in my blood. One of the earliest printing presses in St Petersburg was Hartung’s, like our original family name. This was a coincidence, but a meaningful one. I would have been happy as a printer, away from political turbulence and from the storms men and women create for each other. There might also have been something of my father in me, the thirst for the safety of dead things, for the mastery you can achieve only over that which doesn’t change, doesn�
��t move. You find it in people who collect stamps, coins or butterflies, or who paint lead models of soldiers. Indeed, they are usually men, such people, bright, intelligent, decent men, not at their ease in the world of women.’

  ‘I understand that,’ I said. ‘The wish for safety, I mean. Like my hospital index cards. You must have been so lonely, nonetheless.’

  I did not want to ask a direct question about women, about love, but my meaning was clear. Whatever damage his mother had inflicted, she could not have extinguished all desire.

  ‘It might not surprise you, and forgive the openness of an old man,’ he said, ‘to hear that I was still a virgin at thirty-three.’

  He had understood me well. The admission was shocking. From the speed with which he rushed to explain it, I could see that he knew.

  ‘I did not find women unattractive,’ he said. ‘I did not grow up to hate them because of my mother’s transgression. I did not wish to punish any woman for my mother’s sins, nor was I one of those men who seek to have their prejudices confirmed in brothels.

  ‘I fell ill soon after I saw mother that last time, on my ninth birthday. I developed a raging, delusional fever which lasted for days. In that time, I seem to have repressed my memory of her – my first-hand memory, I mean – only to replace it subsequently with other people’s accounts, with false histories. She died, I was told, in a tragic accident. No one ever mentioned suicide. I was not allowed to attend her funeral and I never knew the location of her grave. I don’t know it to this day. Although I missed her, I can’t say that I mourned her. At first there were moments when I thought that she was still alive, that her death was another lie told by my father. By the time I was fourteen, I could no longer recall the sound of her voice or the image of her living face.

  ‘Others would have forgotten her too, I am sure, but for Count Tolstoy and his novel. “Was there a real Anna?” people asked, as though they had every right to know. “Was it your mother?” It was impossible to offer an answer that would satisfy. If I said “Yes, it was my mother,” they laughed it off as a presumption, a denial of Tolstoy’s genius. If I said “No, Tolstoy’s Anna is someone quite different,” they kept finding more and more parallels between my mother and Anna Karenina, until they had proved that there was no significant difference between reality and fiction. You should not be surprised that I preferred to spend every hour in the library, away from the chattering of the intelligentsia. You would have thought there were more important things to keep them preoccupied.