Monsieur Ka

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  ‘I remember how Tonya held my hand on the train, her face blank, poised between growing fear and vanishing hope. Alexei was almost twenty. He had become a man in the worst times imaginable and he knew how to hide his feelings. You did not even know that he had any. His expression was even more inscrutable than Tonya’s. Yet I knew that his adolescence had been stolen, that he was both much older and much younger than his age.

  ‘At the end of our journey, the final local train full of clerks returning to their dormitory suburb was like a phantasmagoria of some kind. We felt like travellers from a different planet. This could not be, it wasn’t supposed to exist any more: ordinary life. There it was, finally, a world of ordinary people returning from their office work in a country with a king and a palace in the centre of its capital. We walked across the market square in Kingston, while people stared at us, at our unseasonal clothes. I understood why. We wore thick winter coats and fur, and the day was not particularly cold, just wet, with endless drizzle. I was sixty already, an old, white-haired man. What was I expecting to find in this city? How does one start again at that age? Were it not for Alexei and Tonya, I might have followed my mother long ago, in Istanbul, in Crimea, in St Petersburg even.

  ‘Were it not for Alexei, I should say more truthfully, for Tonya often held my hand late at night, when we lay on our bed staring upwards like those medieval effigies in English cathedrals, and, when she thought that I was asleep, that I could not hear, she would say: “Why don’t we just go, Seryozha, why don’t we just go, quietly, together?”’

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said. I was feeling tearful. I could not think of anything to say that did not sound trite. ‘What happened when you finally reached Hannah Wilson’s house?’

  ‘I have no idea whom and what we were expecting to see when we knocked at the door of her house in Grove Park Road. In retrospect, I hardly believe the journey we dared undertake, on such a flimsy premise, a hope that was less substantial than a drop of water. There was a sound of footsteps and a vague sense of an eye looking through the peephole for what seemed like an eternity and finally a scream coming from behind the black door with its brass dolphin knocker. I remember it now as though it were yesterday, the sound of that scream, that strange dolphin with an ungainly, stubby nose which I studied as we waited. You could not believe, Albertine, how odd everything seemed, the lion’s paws and the dolphins people had on their front doors instead of bells, the suburban streets, the front gardens so small as to make you wonder why they were there, just for that step which divided the house from the street, just for that single step which said this is mine, do not trespass, the single step which in Russia no longer meant anything.

  ‘And, coming from a Europe criss-crossed with the still-vivid scar lines of conflict, everything seemed so remote from any war, so blissful in its smallness, in its tidiness. We stood at the bottom of the steps in that little garden, scared, like trespassers, between two box trees trimmed into a strange spiral shape, under a hanging wall lamp, before a sign which read Orchard Villa although there was no sign of an orchard anywhere, waiting to hear that scream which would have been frightening but for its suggestion that we were recognised, that we were at the right address, that in some strange cosmic balance my mother’s charity was about to be returned to us. I don’t think that the world repays its charity in this way, but it did, just that once, to us.

  ‘It was Hannah – my mother’s ward, our Diana’s grandmother – who opened the door, sixty and white-haired and as old as I was, and with a different surname, although we continued to think of her as Wilson. She was agile and somehow much more youthful than I expected her to be, in that Englishwoman’s way. They grow into old age as though they have been just waiting to become old all their lives, Englishwomen do, as though they know all along that their seventies and eighties must be their best years.

  ‘She looked at our son for a long moment and then rushed towards him and screamed again, more quietly this time. “Alexei,” she screamed, before she looked at me and whispered “Dear Count” in Russian, “Dear Count,” and fell on her knees and started kissing my hands, both my hands. “Dear Count, dear Sergei Alexeievich, am I dreaming? Am I dreaming? I have thought of you every day, of you and your family, and of our Russia, of our Russia,” she said, “of its tragedy, every single day.” She was still on her knees in that small front garden between those box trees, and she hugged my calves, although she was, now, incomparably wealthier than us.

  ‘A man came by, on his way back from work, I remember well, with a briefcase, in a pair of striped trousers, a black jacket, a waistcoat and a bowler hat, and he slowed down to take a good look. He looked so strange to us, but how much stranger must we have seemed to him, our little scene on the black and white tiles of Hannah Wilson’s minuscule front garden, a white-haired Englishwoman kneeling, kissing an old man’s hand, a young man looking at them, three battered suitcases lying between him and a woman standing back, dressed à la française, a woman in her forties, still striking, still young, but worn out by the hardships she had lived through, a woman who was the mother of my son. We were all crying now, and speaking that strange soft language I now know Russian is to the English, the way it sounds like falling snow.

  ‘“Please, please come in, dear Count, dear Countess.” Hannah was now kissing Tonya’s hand, still on her knees, and Tonya was crying too and begging her to stand up. The door of the house opened wide and inside, half hiding, was a young woman, no more than seventeen or eighteen, Hannah’s granddaughter, blonde like an angel, her green eyes so unreal and so beautiful. It was Diana, my daughter-in-law, appropriately named, although the Wilsons might not have known it, after Diana the huntress, the goddess of the moon.

  ‘During those first two months in London, everything was still uncertain and yet it felt to us like coming up for air. We went for a walk in the park soon after that first day, a long walk up the hill to Richmond Park, and suddenly, London seemed exactly like our Russia, except like the Russia that no longer was. There were dried grasses and bracken, and deer – herds of deer moving through the morning mist. We reached the top of the hill. There was a mound where the trees were trimmed to preserve a view, like a canyon cut through foliage. The Thames was curling behind us, winding its way into central London through the water meadows, and, before us, a hazy, shimmering view of St Paul’s Cathedral … It was some distance from us but it seemed to flicker ever closer as we stood, like a mirage, the ark of some new covenant.

  ‘“Like the Isaakiyevsky Sobor,” Alexei said. It is perhaps the loveliest of churches in St Petersburg. It pleased me that he still remembered it.

  ‘“Like it, but more majestic,” said Tonya, and then, as if she had had a premonition, she added, “I will die in this city. I do not want to travel any further.”

  ‘“But we will go back to Russia,” I said. “Give it a year, two at the most.”

  ‘“No, we won’t,” Tonya said. “And stop saying it, Sergei. It’s no use pretending. Alexei perhaps, he is young, but not you and I. We will never see Russia again. We will die here. I am happy to die here.”

  ‘“Alexei is young,” I said, “but you are young too, there is only one old person here.”

  ‘Secretly, however, I was relieved that she was content. I too was happy to die in London.’

  9

  Borzoi

  ‘They don’t feel guilty,’ Albie said of the Germans. It had been two years, almost, since Hitler died in his bunker, and there were still days when Albie spoke of the war as though it was not over. We had just walked from the Wigmore Hall to Baker Street and caught the Underground home after a Schubert recital. My head was full of music as we sat down to one last cup of tea before bed. I listened to Albie, but I resented his mood. It was unfair of me; he burdened me with his worries less and less.

  ‘Rather, they do,’ he continued, ‘but it is the wrong ones who feel the guilt. Those who have suffered themselves; the children who are not children any more. The fathers and
grandfathers don’t. They say, “We were defeated” the way you might say fair cop. They understand the need for punishment. The defeated have to take their punishment. But their regret, Ber, is about the defeat, not about the vision which took them to war. Many continue to say that the English work for the Americans and the Americans work for the Jews. They see their own towns in ruins, their own suffering, and they call it defeat, not just deserts. It is insidious, that vision. I see the ruins and I feel guilty. The rubble makes me feel that our victory wasn’t clean. As though there are clean victories, victories without rubble.

  ‘Or they go on about the Russians. We did not fight you, they say, we fought the Russians. Every German man I meet fought on the Eastern Front. As though there were millions in the East and only a handful in the West, just a few enlightened souls in SS uniforms, walking through Paris of a Sunday afternoon with a Baedeker guide. So civilised, the group promenade in tailored uniforms on the Champs-Élysées. It gets to you. You are not supposed to hate the millions of frostbitten kids who suffered on the Eastern Front, are you?

  ‘The Americans employ them. A spot of manufacturing, that’s all, a bit of scientific expertise. Of no consequence, everyone says, nothing political. They have the know-how, those Germans. We have to forgive or we’ll never get the workers we need, the place won’t function. One has to be pragmatic. Send them food and clothing. A loan or two. You can’t punish an entire nation. I am confused, Ber. I sit in wood-panelled rooms and I feel I no longer know right from wrong. I see small men with spectacles on both sides of the bar, bookkeepers in uniform. I wonder if I am one of them. How do I know that what I serve is not evil? That it won’t come to look evil even if it does not seem so now?’

  I walked up to Albie and massaged his temples, slowly, barely pressing in. I was struck, for the umpteenth time, by the unreality of his blond hair as it passed through my fingers, smelling of almond oil. The strangeness of the gesture – the sense of power women have when a man surrenders like that.

  ‘You don’t wear spectacles, Albie. You no longer wear a uniform. Though I can see it on you even when you’ve got no clothes on. I read an article in Le Monde about Stanislavsky, who was, they say, a famous theatre director in Russia. It was written by a Frenchman who went to see him at work in Moscow in the 1930s. Stanislavsky described how he prepared for some grand Shakespearean role, Othello perhaps, by wearing a turban all day, onstage and off, to adjust the posture, to acquire the comportment of someone in a heavy turban, so that even when he took it off, he stood and walked as though there was that heavy, bejewelled burden on his head. Perhaps I am dreaming this, dreaming this article, only to say that I see your uniform even when you are naked in our bed, Albie, and I don’t understand why it has to be so. I see your muscles tense for the fight even when I hold your head in my hands. I feel that tension too, as though someone is about to knock on my door with dreadful news. We can’t live like this, Albie. We have to relax somehow or we will be lost, and I am no help, am I?’

  The shadows of branches played on the ceiling, throwing dappled light into the room. I massaged his temples and I felt him frowning. It was easier to talk to him when I was not looking into his eyes. When we faced each other he slapped the surface of the table the way old men slap their knees. He got up and walked away.

  ‘Cheer up, old girl,’ he said, ‘cheer up.’

  Easier to talk to him when we both looked straight ahead, in the dappled light of the room.

  Whenever we made love, Albie kept his eyes closed. I kept mine open. If he opened his, I closed mine. It was as though we couldn’t go on doing it, making love, if we both acknowledged what we were doing. Our marriage stood beneath a dam of unacknowledged matter. A levee of sandbags against the flood; we seemed unsure what we feared, what more could have burst in. I wondered what other lovers did.

  I had only had one lover before I met Albie: an engineer from Perpignan. Fresh-faced, dark-haired, moustachioed, he was as young and as inexperienced as I was. We stared at each other as though neither of us could quite believe the situation we had found ourselves in. Without guilt. As though we were having breakfast together; we were eating because we were hungry, because it was time for breakfast. Our lovemaking was more beautiful in retrospect than while it was going on. The engineer proposed. A young woman, living with her aunt, I might have looked like someone who might be longing to become an engineer’s wife. I escaped to Bucharest to avoid hurting him.

  In Alexandria, I lied to Albie. I told him I had had three lovers before him. For some strange reason I thought he wouldn’t want me if I owned up to just that one, that he would stay away from the responsibility for someone who did not take lovers lightly. I invented three men. Or, rather, two. The engineer from Perpignan was still there, but there were two imaginary Parisians on either side of him, like bookends. The first was much older and a professor. He took my virginity. The third was a publisher and a Communist who must have vanished into the maquis the moment the Germans marched into Paris. The third was the love of my life, before I realised that Albie was.

  I told these lies because I thought that Albie was going to leave Alexandria without me sooner or later, and I did not want him to feel guilty. I must have understood something of his unbearable decency even in those earliest days. But I invented these men so thoroughly that I almost fooled myself into believing they had existed. There were times in Alexandria when Albie was on leave, when he kept wanting to know everything about my past life, when he kept asking questions. I relayed the professor’s imaginary obituary from La Croix. A small lie led to a bigger one until I forbade him to ask about my past lovers. We never spoke about any of these men again. The lovers were buried from that boat to Southampton, given a sea burial. I sometimes wonder why Albie’s largesse in accepting an experienced Parisienne was less scary, less of a burden than taking on a fearful near virgin in her thirties. My shame at not coming clean from the word go: buried too. Innocent lies, perhaps, but how do you undo them years later, how do you come clean? How do you say: I lied to you, Albie? I invented those two lovers because I was too old when you met me to have had just the boy from Perpignan. Because I did not think you would last, I did not think these stories would commit me to a version of myself. A less virginal version of myself. The war had robbed me of something too. So many people were raped and butchered, how could I even consider an absence of love a loss?

  I massaged Albie’s temples and felt him frowning. He was too young to carry the guilt of Germany on his naked uniformed shoulders, on his thin-boy’s epaulettes. I looked at his feet in lambskin slippers and that felt wrong too. I knew his feet in polished leather and I knew them in blood-spattered desert boots. Blood from an exploding anti-tank grenade. Albie’s blood. O positive: a universal donor. I knew that from my index card before I knew how right it was.

  He held my hands and pressed my fingers into his temples and he knew that these fingers which were touching him had touched three lovers – one so old that he had died, one a man in the prime of his middle age, a political man, one practically a boy from Perpignan. That last, the only real one, was an inexperienced provincial boy who nonetheless knew enough to grab a linen towel, to come cleanly he said, to come out clean.

  ‘We never come out clean, never come clean out of such things,’ I told Albie. ‘The Germans know it. They must know that they are unclean. Does it matter what they say?’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about, Ber?’ Albie said, pressing my fingers deeper into the sides of his face.

  ‘About that which you know when you are alone, when there is no need to step into a version of yourself that is like a concrete bunker surrounded by sandbags. They, those bookkeepers in uniform you are talking about, they know it when it’s two a.m. and the dead millions come out and march past them, they know that it wasn’t just the Eastern Front that counts, but the home business too.’

  ‘You are wrong there,’ Albie said. ‘The guards wake them up at six. The guards wake them up
to prepare for the courts. They sleep like lambs. The guards get less sleep than these men do. You are wrong, Ber. They do not torture themselves. They think we will torture them enough. But to torture them would diminish our victory.’

  I watch his feet in lambskin slippers, his thick woollen socks, and I feel like kissing those feet, because seeing those feet is like seeing Albie naked.

  For Monsieur Carr the Second World War barely existed. The only war that counted had happened thirty years ago. I mentioned the last one, but he said: ‘We will come to that.’ He waved his hand in the air as though he was chasing away an inconsequential thought.

  ‘I signed on, dear Albertine. Early in 1925, I signed on. There was an employment bureau just to the north of the National Gallery, a short way off Trafalgar Square, where they registered unemployed aliens like me, for work in the hotel industry. So many of us had the languages and the manners to go with the doorman’s uniform. Like Nutcracker soldiers; I had the face for one too. Times were hard, but when weren’t they in this wretched century? The bureaucrat who took my details just shook his head in sorrow rather than disbelief. He had seen dozens like me already, that day alone. A count, you said? Polish? Lithuanian? No, Russian. What a pity, he said. Languages? French, German, Russian obviously, all at mother-tongue level. Other? Church Slavonic, Latin, Greek, Aramaic. He looked up, smiled a thin, reproachful smile. I had been a curator of ancient manuscripts, once, in St Petersburg, I explained. You won’t need those languages, Count, don’t count on them. He paused to give me the time to register the pun. There are no vacancies in manuscripts that come through my offices. He lifted his notes again and read – Count Karenin – then looked at me in such a way that I decided to change that too, as soon as possible. You won’t need that title of yours either, Count Karenin. He did not say that but I could hear it. We will be in touch, he said. My name, at least, I could change. At sixty-one, I could see, there were few jobs anyone would rush to offer me.