Monsieur Ka

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  ‘I often walked after work, to clear my head, to fill my lungs with fresh air. Many cities are called the Venice of the North, but St Petersburg alone deserves the title. I particularly liked the Fontanka embankments and the reflections of palaces in water. The Yusupovs, the Sheremetevs, the Mikhailovskys, the Beloselsky-Belozerskys: their buildings were stunning, surpassing perhaps even those built by the Venetians. And their names represented my father’s Russia. Alexei Karenin knew them all, but this was no longer my world. I doubt if any of these old princes, if they happened to look out of their silk-lined coaches, would have guessed who I was.

  ‘One day, while I was crossing the Anichkov Bridge, I found myself walking behind a woman with a little boy. He was holding an ice cream, tilted so precariously that I became transfixed by the sight, expecting the scoops to drop any moment.

  ‘“Dear Kutik,” I heard the woman say, “be careful with that cone – hold it up or the strawberry ice will stain your suit.”

  ‘I used to have an almost identical little sailor suit. I remembered it well. In the sixties, such suits for boys were still a strange quirk of fashion brought over from England. My mother spoke English and liked the English ways, but I was embarrassed when adults enquired about my costume, when they complimented her on the fine serge collar or the hat, which I hated even more than the suit itself, when they pinched my cheek and called me the little Prince of Wales. I had no idea where this Wales was. I wanted to dress like all the other children.

  ‘“Kutik”: that is what Mother used to call me. The two syllables surfaced from some recess of my memory and pierced my soul. It was as though they lifted an invisible dam. Details flooded back, many of them evidence of Mother’s love. Time, unnoticed, had healed our rift. I no longer bore her a grudge. By the time you reach thirty, you realise that your parents are like you, fallible people, but not responsible for your failures.

  ‘With my sister gone, the house felt eerily empty. If it had been too big for two of us, it was ridiculously large for one. I kept no more than three or four servants, and I barely saw even them. I now spent my free time searching for Mother’s traces, room by room, desperate for the smallest object: a brush with a tangle of her hair, a needle with a length of thread she could have used while embroidering, a bottle of scent which had not completely evaporated. Father had done his best to remove all evidence of her existence.

  ‘Of course, there were still people who remembered her, on both the Oblonsky and the Hartung sides, but I did not wish to talk about Anna to anyone. I wanted my own memories back, physical traces of our shared days. There was one locked chest under my father’s bed. “Title Deeds”, read the label. When I broke the lock, I saw that it was a box full of yellowing documents confirming ownership of dwellings and pieces of land. There were other things in it too: this portrait you see above us, taken out of its frame and folded carelessly; a handkerchief with her initials embroidered on it; several pieces of jewellery, including a rose-gold necklace with a portrait in enamel of a boy aged no more than four or five. At first I assumed that it was my father, but then I opened the locket and saw a lock of curly hair, my name and birth date inscribed behind it. I stared at the child as though it was an alien. My physical similarity with my father had diminished with age, but as a toddler I was clearly his: the same eyes, the same earnest, humourless expression.

  ‘The resemblance troubled me. I now remembered how I had overheard Mother saying to Nanny that she found it difficult to look into my eyes because they were like his, that she felt I too was judging her. But I was too intimidated by my father then to see our physical similarity. I often strained to hear what she was saying to others about us when he wasn’t there, and just as often I misunderstood her words. Wasn’t it strange that her husband and her lover were both called Alexei, although the name was far from being that common in Russia? That she would leave one Alexei for another?

  ‘I found a book inside that chest, bound in red morocco, my mother’s book for children. She wrote it in Russian, although her written French was better, but the cover bore a French title. La Crinière sauvage: The Wild Mane. She wrote the story because she was desperate for something, anything, to do. It was like those carvings people make in prison, out of soap, or bones, out of bread when there is nothing else, depriving themselves of precious rations. I did not remember ever reading or even seeing her book before. The chest must have held the only copy, and God alone knows why my father had kept it.

  ‘I spent that evening reading The Wild Mane, and then another evening reading it again, trying to hear my mother’s voice from its lines. It was a story of a young man who owned a mare called Joujou, an animal he loved more than anything else in the world. The man came from a wealthy, aristocratic family. Their stables were legendary, filled with dozens of thoroughbreds. Yet he loved Joujou best and only she was brave enough to follow his every bidding. Eventually, he asked too much of her: he spurred her over an impossible jump and broke her back.

  ‘You’d expect the man to have the poor creature put down. Instead, he nursed her for days and weeks. Although he had many grooms at his disposal, he fed Joujou and watered her himself. He spoke to her and brushed her coat. Slowly, she regained her strength. One morning, he went to the stables and heard a neigh from the box where the mare usually rested. There she was, standing, ready for the next race.

  ‘Sentimental? Yes, of course. And how … This was a woman who needed to believe in the healing power of love.

  ‘My mother’s story was the stuff of miracles and redemption, all too obvious and technically impossible. Yet it was also very well written. Her Russian was simple and unaffected, her eye for detail impeccable, and the effect was moving and poetic. Forgive her son his presumption, but I don’t think I am biased. Had she been able to write and publish, she might have become as great as Anna Akhmatova.

  ‘I was determined to have her narrative preserved for the future and I knew no one better than my printer by the Tsarskoye Selo station. I took the manuscript to him. I wanted a hundred numbered copies, and I wanted them as beautiful as they deserved to be. Angevin was as taken by my mother’s writing as I was. We planned every detail together. He saw that this project was as important to me as – no, more important than – any medieval chronicle.

  ‘There were ink drawings in my mother’s copy, several simple vignettes drawn by her. Angevin suggested a properly illustrated volume. He mistook my hesitation for worry about the price of such an enterprise.

  ‘“My daughter, Aimée Antoinette – everyone calls her Tonya – would be delighted to produce some sketches,” Angevin said. “You don’t have to respond before you see them. Gustave Doré, Little Red Riding Hood – we have a copy here – that is the kind of thing I have in mind. And I hope you will hear me out. Tonya is very young, and has little publishing experience, but she is talented. I hesitate to say this, even as talented in the art of drawing as your mother was in her writing. And her contribution won’t add to the cost of this project.”’

  ‘And this young woman, this Aimée Antoinette Angevin, became your wife?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, happy that I had guessed so quickly, although it took so little effort. ‘Countess Hartung officially, known by everyone as Countess Karenin, now resting in a Chiswick cemetery as Tonya Carr.

  ‘My dear Albertine, I spent most of my youth thinking that I would never marry, but that if I did, I would not choose a Russian woman,’ he continued. ‘Finally I married one who was nominally French, but who was, in her religion and her love of Russia, almost more Russian than I was. Tonya was sixteen years younger than me, although she mothered me and looked after me like someone much older than her years: it was her nature. And she had only sixteen years in England. She was killed in 1940, at the very beginning of the Blitz, painting one of those baroque corners of London that reminded her of St Petersburg. I feel guilty about that, for I brought her to England, and I encouraged her to start depicting something other than flowers. But th
e bombs were falling everywhere, and she was adamant about preserving with her paintbrush the memory of that which the Germans were destroying around us. It could have been this house, and it could have been both of us, and that would have been much better. At least she did not live to see Alexei sent to the Holy Land, to worry whether he would come back.’

  ‘But you have not told me about your first meeting?’ I worried about the chronology of my still-secret project.

  ‘I leaped ahead again,’ he said. ‘Why is death so much easier to talk about than love? You are right to remind me. Our first meeting – if you could call it that – pre-dated even my early dealings with Angevin. When I first met Tonya, she was a girl of fifteen or sixteen and I had no idea who she was.

  ‘Whenever Russian winter bit hard, I swapped my walks along the canals with visits to museums and galleries. One day at the Hermitage, one particularly grey, snowy day, when there was hardly anyone else in its galleries, I noticed a girl in a blue pinafore painstakingly copying Raphael’s Madonna.

  ‘She was concentrating so hard that she did not notice anyone around her, or anything beyond the canvas. The painting’s golden frame makes its scale deceptive. The image is tiny. I stood behind the girl for some minutes, watching her work. Her copy was perfect, and she made it without hesitation, in a series of steady lines. There were uncanny parallels between her and the woman in the painting. Her pinafore was precisely the colour of the Madonna’s robes. Her brown hair was parted in the middle, with the same severe, precise parting as the Madonna’s, but made into a thick plait pinned up above her nape, like a shiny crown which had slipped down the back of her head. I wondered if the girl knew the likeness, if these touches were deliberate, but she seemed too unaffected for such premeditated action. She wasn’t beautiful, but there was nobility in her smooth skin and in her gaze, a kind of grace in her movements. Her hands were beautiful. I couldn’t take my eyes off them.

  ‘I did not see the girl again, not until the morning when her father introduced her to me, yet I remembered her very well because I sometimes went back to stare at Raphael’s picture. I kept finding details in the canvas that I hadn’t noticed before – mysterious figures in the landscape, snow-capped mountains in the distance, a translucent ribbon on the Madonna’s chest. Each time I looked at the Madonna’s face, I saw the girl.

  ‘And before you draw any conclusions, dear Albertine, don’t jump to the obvious ones. No, I did not care for the virginal contrast with my own mother. What fascinated me was Tonya’s immersion in the task at hand, her single-minded concentration on her work. This tells you of my own innocence, my ignorance, but I had up to that point considered such dedication unfeminine, possibly even impossible in a woman. Women chatter with one another, I thought. Only a man could be so dedicated to his work. How foolish of me.

  ‘Then I saw Tonya’s sketches for my mother’s book. Her father was right: she was a formidable talent. His reference to Gustave Doré was not misplaced. The sketches were glorious to behold, and, just as importantly, there was depth in them, there was darkness and longing, enough to add to the thrill of reading my mother’s book if you were an adult, yet not so much darkness as to deter a nine-year-old boy. Tonya’s sketches did not take anything away from the story; on the contrary, they made you want to read and reread it until you understood the miracle at its heart.’

  ‘I would love to see those illustrations,’ I said. ‘Your wife’s work – there are so many examples of it in this house – seems to me so beautiful. She was clearly an astonishing talent. Yet her subject is always dead – nature morte, the French say.’

  ‘Still life, in English,’ he said. ‘Still, life: that is how I think of it now. It was not so much about death – she was different from me in that – as about stillness and silence, I believe. She became so anxious about change that she suffered sleepless nights over decisions as insignificant as buying a new toothbrush.

  ‘She had once possessed the rarest of skills in depicting horses and people in movement: the arching of a foot or lifting of a hoof, the tensing of the smallest muscle. She painted compulsively in later life, but you are right, Albertine, her subjects ceased to move. She had lost the gumption that had once been her defining trait. Her youthful self-confidence had all drained away. When she illustrated my mother’s book, Tonya was an inexperienced young woman; her youth made her art exceptional.

  ‘I was happy to commission the book with Tonya’s illustrations, happy to pay the asking price. Now that I knew the extent of her skill, and that the cost of her contribution was thrown in, the amount appeared modest in the extreme. Angevin called his daughter to meet the patron. He spoke to her in French while she was still only the sound of approaching footsteps.

  ‘“Do come to meet the Count, Tonya,” he said, and she emerged into the room. The recognition struck me like a bolt of lightning, and it made sense of the sketches.

  ‘“The Conestabile Madonna,” I almost shouted in Russian. “Of course.”

  ‘She looked at me, puzzled. She was a bit older than when I had last saw her, but instantly recognisable. Her plait now fell over her shoulder and down the front of the same blue pinafore, which was stained with dark paint. I assumed, as she wiped her right hand against it, that she was about to shake mine, about to apologise for her untidiness. Instead, she curtsied, twice. There were smudges of paint, like fingerprints, on her forehead and on her blushing cheeks, as though she had tried to smooth her hair before she met me.

  ‘“Dr Hartung,” I corrected her father in Russian, then smiled at her. I was still officially Hartung.

  ‘“I prefer Doctor,” I explained. I now blush at my pomposity, but I was driven by the silly idea that as a doctor I would be closer to her than as a count, as though I could ever be her equal.

  ‘She was silent, clearly too shy to speak. I could not have helped.

  ‘“And no need for a curtsy. Your drawings are beautiful. My mother would have been thrilled.”’

  ‘“Your mother was a great writer,” Tonya finally said. “Her story made me cry each time I read it, and I read it many times while deciding which scenes to draw.”’

  ‘“No more talented as a writer than you are as a painter …”

  ‘She blushed and offered a simple thank-you in return.

  ‘“I am proud of Tonya’s talent,” Angevin said. “However, I wish she were more ladylike. Long hair, short mind, we Russians say, but that is not true of my daughter. Tonya’s mind is a boy’s mind. My daughter is too clever for a girl. And she behaves like a boy.”

  ‘The thought that he was speaking to Tonya’s future husband would never have crossed old Angevin’s mind. My title might have been tarnished long ago, and my working life might not have been suggestive of immense wealth, but I was a count and Tonya was a printer’s daughter. In the eyes of St Petersburg, our marriage, when it happened, was the final nail in my father’s coffin, one last, devastating consequence of my mother’s act. We had slipped from dining with princes to marrying printers within a generation, the evil tongues wagged. The next generation would be marrying coachmen and market traders, they said. They were not far wrong, dear Albertine, even if it mattered so little in the end.

  ‘And Tonya refused me, twice. She was an only child. Her mother had died in childbirth, and she believed that her duty was to look after her father and help him run his business. The father seemed not so much happy at the thought of her dedication as resigned to it. Angevin had no more power to resist Tonya’s will than I ever had subsequently.

  ‘As was the custom in the last century, even in its last decade, I approached the father to ask for his permission to marry the daughter. He was stunned but he gave it without hesitation, and yet he immediately added:

  ‘“My dear Count, you know as well as I do that my consent is only a small step. You must now ask Tonya and I fear that you will be rejected even before you complete your question. Do not take it personally. Do not let it ruin our friendship and our business toget
her.”

  ‘He knew his daughter well. When I summoned the courage, she stopped me in mid-sentence, exactly as her father had predicted.

  ‘“Dear sir,” she said, “it is impossible. Impossible. Please allow me to ask you not to repeat your proposal and to beg you not to let my response influence your relationship with my father. I am not free to marry – not you, not anyone.”

  ‘But I did repeat the offer – how could I not? – a year later, and then again three years on. Her father was dead, she was twenty-two and I had the new century on my side. Still, I expected her to say no. Instead, she accepted.’

  He paused. I quickly rearranged the decades in my mind – the 1890s in St Petersburg, the 1920s in London. We were circling around the Great War, the Revolution, but that story would follow too, I was sure.

  ‘What happened with Anna’s book?’ I asked.

  ‘My mother’s book could have sold thousands of copies, had I wanted to sell them. The hundred we printed went out to family and friends. Only one made it over to Britain with us. I sometimes think that it must be, again, the only copy of The Wild Mane left. I read it to my grandson. We take it out of tissue paper and open it on the dining-room table. My hands have been shaky since the stroke and I now hardly dare turn its pages.

  ‘We wait for Alexei, my grandson Gigi and I, and sometimes, of a Sunday evening, my son reads his grandmother’s story to us. My son looks like Alexei Karenin, all three of us do. Alexei fights his impulsive Oblonsky streak, his grandmother’s inheritance, but I feel it when he reads, like something pulsating beyond his knowledge of himself.’