Monsieur Ka

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  7

  The Black Sea

  Whenever I returned home from Chiswick, I typed the new sections of Monsieur Carr’s memoir on separate sheets of paper. I noted his life’s events in the order in which he told them, giving each sheet a heading with the place and the period he described, as close as I could guess them. The following day, I reread the typescript and highlighted the details that remained unclear: the names of people and places, family relationships, social events and concepts. The gaps in chronology were still vast, but many episodes from Monsieur Carr’s life were coalescing into the chapters of a future volume.

  Albie admired this display of efficiency. My work reminded him of our early days. When I walked out of the study – his study – at the end of an evening, I often found him working on his own papers at the kitchen table because he had not wanted to interrupt my typing. The first question he would ask on seeing me tended to refer not to the there and then, the usual small change of household business, nor to Monsieur Carr, but to some long-unmentioned Egyptian recollection.

  ‘Do you remember that little kafenio by the hospital?’ he asked, for example, and it was clear that he had been revisiting Alexandria in his memory. ‘That Greek place serving the camel kebabs you loved so much? The owner who claimed to have been family friends with the Cavafys.’

  ‘Mutton, definitely, not camel,’ I said. ‘You were too fond of ouzo to tell the difference, Colonel Whitelaw. The owner noted that you called me Cartier whenever you bossed me around about the menu, trying to order something other than those kebabs, Bertie when any of your friends were with us, and darling at the end of the evening.’

  ‘You were like one of my men, Cartier,’ Albie said. ‘And I called most of them darling at the end of the evening.’

  His eyes lit up and he raised his hand to touch my lips as I was about to respond.

  ‘Behave yourself, Colonel Whitelaw,’ I said. ‘I hope you were not touching their lips like this.’

  ‘Only when we were too close to the German lines to speak out loud.’

  He laughed, like in the old days, but he was tired all the time, more tired than he ever was in Alexandria, and the effort he put into laughing was sometimes visible.

  ‘Is anything wrong, Albie?’ I asked when I noticed it.

  ‘What could possibly be wrong?’ he said. ‘Why do you ask?’

  I had no heart to tell him that he looked worn out.

  As the bundle of pages grew thicker, and I looked forward to the next instalment, my enthusiasm for the Karenin narrative must have become catching. Monsieur Carr seemed just as keen to resume his story. He had a small notebook, and would produce it out of his pocket and stare at his notes scribbled in Cyrillic. Now he too was preparing for our sessions.

  ‘We were talking about your marriage to Tonya,’ I prompted. ‘You proposed three times before she finally accepted.’

  ‘Oh, yes, and our honeymoon.’ He said this with such an infectious smile that I briefly worried he was going to reveal more than I really wanted to know.

  ‘Tonya and I spent our honeymoon at the Tavrida, the Oblonsky villa on the Black Sea,’ he said. ‘I was never particularly fond of Uncle Stiva when I was a boy. He seemed guilty of exactly the sort of behaviour that people accused his sister – my mother – of. He was selfishly focused on his own pleasure, and he got away with it because he was a man. No one could be angry with Stiva for long, it seemed. So gregarious, everyone would say, and I came to hate the word. I wanted to be the opposite of gregarious.

  ‘Yet after my mother died, Stiva changed. I would not say that he was any less dedicated to his own hedonistic pursuits, but he became more aware of the ways he made other people suffer, and he went to great lengths to be generous to everyone. It was as though he was bent on perpetual atonement despite the fact that he could not stop sinning. He showered me with gifts, secretly, when my father forbade every contact with the Oblonskys, and, after Father died, he treated me as though I was one of his own children. Everything he owned – although that was forever diminishing because of his inability to manage his affairs – was at my disposal, he kept repeating. I turned down most of his kindnesses, but I could not refuse the offer to take Tonya to the Black Sea, to spend a month at the villa.

  ‘Except for an old gardener and his wife, the house remained empty for months on end in those days. Stiva loved the Crimea in his younger years. It was far from the bankers of St Petersburg and the bureaucrats of Moscow, he used to say, yet the women were just as beautiful, and the wine cellars just as great as at home. Stiva was sixty-two when I married, and the closest relation we had from that older generation. He had declared himself too old for coastal escapades. Aunt Dolly, his wife, had always favoured the countryside, and my cousins preferred to spend their summers in Europe. The younger Oblonskys were so taken by anything Western that even a provincial Austrian resort on the Adriatic was superior to the glories of Yalta. When he offered us the keys, Stiva expressed his hospitality in such terms that it sounded as though Tonya and I were doing the Oblonskys a favour.

  ‘The Tavrida nestled on one of the finest slopes between Oreanda and Yalta, not far from the Tsar’s estate at Livadia. Stiva described the villa as a “small affair”, and so it was, if you compared it to the mansions which dotted the coast around it, but it was big enough to be fronted by a portico of six Corinthian columns, with a perfect white dome above them.

  ‘“It doesn’t seem right,” Tonya said when we arrived, pressing her cheek against the white Crimean marble, staring at the palaces which rose above the pine forests around us like mounds of white sugar cubes. The expanse of water sparkled for hundreds of miles ahead. If you looked south, there was no land between us and Turkey.

  ‘“It does not seem right for some people to possess all of this while the peasants starve. It is not right to own acres of forest, miles of coast, mountain peaks even … and then not even bother to visit. Had I not married you, I would not have dreamed that a place like this existed.”

  ‘“But the Oblonskys possess only debts, Tonya. They are not wealthy any more,” I protested.

  ‘“I know, Sergei. Don’t misunderstand me, please. The Oblonskys are kind people. Your aunt Dolly is a saint. But when the peasants also have debts, much smaller debts, they don’t get to hang on to their possessions.”

  ‘I loved her indignation, her sense of justice. I thought of it as feminine and compassionate. I did not assume her anger to be even an atomic particle of the swell that was coming together into the wave that would eventually sweep away our world. Unlike Tonya, I was born into privilege. I could see the inequalities of our Russia, but I assumed them to be natural, God knows why, and I hoped that, like nature, Russia would gradually evolve into something more enlightened and just. The way England keeps transforming itself.

  ‘Apart from that uncharacteristic outburst, we never talked politics, Tonya and I, not then, not later, when we were freezing in the single room of our palace that remained ours, listening to the gunfire outside. The Russians divide into those who never talk about politics and those who talk about nothing else. Tonya and I were of the former persuasion.

  ‘That entire month of our honeymoon was cloudless. We swam off the silver beaches, read Pushkin to each other under the pines, and in the evenings, rather than go out to dine in fashionable new hotels, we sat by the water and listened to the waves whistling through the grottos.

  ‘Tonya blushed when I called her my Nereid, but the silly, romantic name was apt, and not just because we were immersed in Pushkin. There was something unexpected about her that summer, something suddenly southern – the way she started combing rosemary oil into her hair, the way her tan steadily darkened under the sun and made her look as though she was part of the Crimean world, with a flash of a new knowledge in her eyes. I recognise that touch of the South in you. Something of Tonya’s young self. Your French side, perhaps, although both of you denied it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
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br />   ‘Tonya’s parents were French by distant ancestry, but she had never visited France. The only place she knew, before she married me, was St Petersburg. Her family had converted to Orthodox Christianity before she was born, but they were not devout. Your family history is the opposite of hers in some ways. You say that your people came from Poland, but Poland is nothing to you. You grew up in France. Your lips are the lips of a French speaker. Even your wrinkles, when you grow older, will be the wrinkles of a Frenchwoman: that repeated pout etches itself into the skin eventually.

  ‘Here’s what Tonya used to say: I am what I am. Je suis ce que je suis.’ He tried to gather his lopsided lips into an exaggerated French pout in order to demonstrate the sound, but he produced an involuntary whistle instead.

  ‘Yet she was no longer what she was.’ I pursued the meaning instead of the sound. There was always something childish, something evasive in his wordplay. ‘You said that Tonya had changed in the South. In the Crimea, I mean.’

  ‘And so she had,’ Monsieur Carr said. ‘Just as we were beginning to think of our return journey, Tonya started sketching flowers. I remember the first drawing well. She looked at a cluster of flowering lilies in the Nikitsky Gardens, and asked if we could pause for a moment. She took a sketch pad out of her canvas bag, and while I held her parasol, she drew the curves of orange flowers, the dark spots and the heavy golden stamens around which the petals gathered. Her drawing was beautiful – more striking than her work before – for there was now something feminine and erotic about her lines. I asked her if she knew. She continued to draw, without raising her eyes from her work, her hands mapping the curved lines on the white surface.

  ‘“I think I am pregnant, Sergei,” she said.

  ‘If I had been happy beyond measure during that entire month by the sea with her, I was now euphoric. The thought of seeing her child turned me into the most eager father you could imagine. That is how much in love I was.

  ‘When we returned to St Petersburg, my euphoria persisted. Even the old house seemed to be rid of its ghosts. It was still too big for the two of us, but there was now a line of rooms on the first floor, whitewashed and empty, waiting to be turned into nurseries. It was as though the space itself was pregnant, awaiting the first screams of a newborn child. The Russians are superstitious. Nothing can be prepared until the child is actually there. My mother’s salon, with its milky northern light, became Tonya’s studio. She painted, unconcerned about the purpose of her paintings, for the sake of colour and motion.

  ‘Then, just as her pregnancy moved into the fourth month, she lost the child. There was no warning. She bled for days, growing paler and unhappier. I worried that I would lose her. She had barely recovered when she became pregnant again, and lost another child, at the same stage and in the same way, this time in a wintry St Petersburg. I left for the library one morning and came back to find her bleeding and washing the rags in a freezing bathroom. She had dismissed the servants and suffered alone all day. She did not even summon a doctor. She did not want anyone to know, as though she was going through something shameful and humiliating, as though the servants would not have reached their own conclusions anyway. This time, as before, she blamed herself.

  ‘“There is nothing wrong with you, Sergei,” she repeated. Whatever I said, made her sob.

  ‘In the days which followed the second miscarriage, she began to despair. Parenthood meant so much more to her than to me. I would have been happy without a child. And through all the tribulations, she painted these amazing, engorged flowers, crowns opening out towards the viewer, still beautiful, still disturbing.

  ‘The third pregnancy did not happen until two years later. Tonya was so thin and so pale that I never believed it would end differently from the previous two. When it became visible, she refused to go out, fearing that people would pity her when she lost another child. Only when seven months had passed did we begin to hope.

  ‘There was a flicker, then finally a glow in her eyes, something of that flame I remembered from Yalta. She got up before me and went to my mother’s room to work. I can still see her, heavily pregnant, her shape outlined against the high windows and the naked branches outside. She was sketching and painting, dozens and dozens of flowers, pistils and anthers, sometimes from expensive bouquets I ordered from the glass-houses in Tsarskoye Selo, more commonly from images in her head. She exaggerated the filaments and the petals in a way which made the blooms look three-dimensional, reaching out of flat surfaces. Her work seemed more and more abstract and, in its way, more worrying for me. I did not know enough about art to see that Tonya was reaching for abstraction, decades ahead of her time.

  ‘Before her due date, she cut up and burned all of her paintings. I watched her swollen fingers stuck in the handles of the scissors, her pregnant belly moving with effort and urgency, and I did not know how to reconcile her jollity with such wanton destruction. She seemed to rejoice in the act – folding and cutting the thick paper and seeing its edges blacken and curl moments before the flames burst through her lines.

  ‘“These are the petals I was trying to draw,” she would say, looking into the fire, her voice sing-song and joyous. “The bright colours I could not achieve.”

  ‘I am ashamed of my cooperation in her act. It is a strange thing, women’s art. Our social position prevented Tonya from selling her pieces, but what do you do with the work in the end? There were folders and portfolios of it, so many that there was a kind of relief in its destruction. I am ashamed to admit that I felt it.

  ‘I felt a similar sort of relief, mixed with other emotions, to be sure, but as distinct as a solo voice rising above a choir, at the surge of maternal love so obviously unlocked by my son’s birth. There he was, a tiny wrinkled creature just released from the darkness of the womb, his head still caked with bits of Tonya’s congealed blood, his cry as thin as that of a kitten, lying in my wife’s arms, trying to latch on as she held his head against her breast with more tenderness than I could imagine possible. They seemed equally vulnerable. I knew that I would give my life for theirs in that moment, but I also thought: enfin. The French word was so startling when it came to me, so similar to the sound I expected to make, that I said it out loud.

  ‘“Finally.”

  ‘My wife misunderstood. She assumed, mistakenly but reasonably, that I meant finally a son and heir, finally a child. She took it to be an unspoken rebuke to her for the long wait. I did not fully know my own sense in that first moment, but what I thought was this. Finally, Tonya’s life will have a purpose. She will feel it has a purpose, and I won’t have to worry about turning our world into something that seems worth fighting for. Finally. Because I could not do this. Because no one could. I am not sure why I worried about her despair more than I worried about mine. It might well be that some part of me took that lesson from my mother’s death. That this world is a much harder place for women than it is for men.

  ‘Russia was in turmoil, but the two of us were so deeply wrapped up in our own small family that we did not notice, or were unwilling to notice the signs. There was unrest, whispers of pogroms, endless arguments in the zemstvos; there were strikes, general strikes, mutinies and assassinations. Our son was learning to walk to the beat of marching crowds, learning to speak against the sound of street protests. Many of these processions unfolded below our windows, but their noise felt as distant as Manchuria.

  ‘The best way to live in Russia is to close your eyes and keep them closed. Even when the city had no electricity and no newspapers, and even when we witnessed, on St Stephen’s Day, thousands of people moving towards the Winter Palace, we pretended not to see. When the sailors mutinied on the Potemkin, my son was teething. The country teetered on the brink of a military dictatorship. The Tsar gave in. Things improved for a while.

  ‘There would be havoc again. There would be chaos. We did not think that there would be another revolution, a much bigger revolution. The Russians were too deferential, we thought, despite all evide
nce to the contrary. I had witnessed the explosion of the anarchist bomb which killed the Tsar’s grandfather, old Tsar Alexander, when I was seventeen. I was two and in the Summer Gardens with a nanny when they first tried to kill him. I believe that some of my earliest memories, now memories of memories, are linked to that attempted assassination: noises, panic, the crunching footfall on the gravel, an amorphous fear that if I fell I would be lost in the crowd, abandoned, unclaimed. Yet, even after all of that, I still managed to believe that Russia was improving, that it would soon be a great economic power the like of which the world had not seen. We ignore what we want to ignore, we forget what we want to forget.

  ‘Our son’s first word, after mama and papa, was svet: light. It took a while to understand that he really meant light, because so often there was none. He was our svet, our clever boy. He had an artistic sensibility, like his mother, but he was much better with numbers, and numbers interested him more. Although we made him study music and art, Alexei was never going to be an artist; that much was clear very early on.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, Father, thank you kindly,’ Alex Carr said as he stepped into the room.

  ‘If you spy on us, Alexei, you deserve to hear whatever you hear. You mustn’t make a habit of it. In fact, Albertine and I were just discussing Russian history. You are only an infinitesimal part of it, dearest boy.’

  ‘Oh, I see. You two are now thick as thieves,’ said Alex Carr.

  ‘I promise you, Mr Carr, your father was telling me about the revolution in 1905.’

  I lifted the notepad and pointed at a few lines scribbled as my aide-memoire, as though they proved something. Monsieur Carr took his tiny notebook out of his pocket and searched for something on its pages: 1905 perhaps.