Monsieur Ka
Page 16
‘I knew you would find it amusing, Albertine. Even as I could not sleep last night, I thought of ways to make you smile. Gallanting is not right, I know. We are like wolves or swans, we Karenin men, we mate for life.’
The notion of Monsieur Carr and his son as wolves, or indeed swans, made me laugh even more. He could just as easily have said otters or white mink.
‘And ho ho, dearest lady, what’s so funny about swans?’ He had regained his childish mirth.
‘I know that Alexei liked Diana the moment he first saw her, staring at us in confusion from behind her grandmother’s back on the doorstep of their Kingston home,’ he said. ‘She was just out of school. He was young too, not quite twenty, though we tended to forget it. He had seen such hardship in his teenage years, and those experiences made him behave like a middle-aged man. By the time he returned from Cambridge, Diana was a young woman, a secretary at the brewery for which he now works. Alexei rushed to settle down, to lead a respectable, English life. Diana was his way into it.
‘It was the smallest of weddings. They were married in the old Russian Embassy chapel in Welbeck Street. There was Diana’s family, the three of us, Princess Trubetskoy with her three walking sticks, only a couple of years away from death. I don’t think we were ever as happy in London as we were on that day when we watched them, Diana and Alexei, under their wedding crowns. She was as beautiful as the Snow Queen, my daughter-in-law, so foreign and exotic was her beauty to our Russian eyes. The English are so insulated by the sea that they underestimate the mystique they arouse in the minds of others. That blonde hair and those green eyes seemed to belong to some Viking archipelago more than to the London smog.
‘After the ceremony we walked to the Langham Hotel. It was the most modest of all Karenin nuptials, the most discreet. They went to the Isle of Wight for their four-day honeymoon. That was modest too, so like Alexei. You seem so sombre and self-contained with your stiff upper lips, you young people, this new English generation. When I was young, men used to fight duels over matters of the heart. No more. What about your wedding, Albertine?’
‘If you call that wedding modest,’ I responded, ‘you should have seen ours. Albie and I said to each other that it was just to procure the documents, to satisfy officialdom, so that I could follow him to England. We pretended that the real thing would follow when we gathered our families, but I had no family to gather and he must have known even then that there would not be any other festivities, that it was just me and him, till death do us part, as they say. The voyage to England felt much more celebratory than the wedding.
‘In Alexandria, the boat was full of men and women learning to be young again. We took one last look at the Corniche, and shouted hooray. But there was sadness too. The family I was lodging with were preparing to leave. The Ashkenazic Europe had vanished, now the Sephardic Levant was about to disappear. That is what we spoke about during those last evenings while the suitcases stacked up in the corners of our rooms and walls revealed pale patches behind paintings that had been undisturbed for centuries. My landlady had cried every day for weeks. They were moving to Palestine, a short distance away, but Alexandria was the only home she had ever known.
‘The British were in a different mood. They were going home. And of all the British soldiers, Albie was the handsomest. In the ports where we stopped to replenish supplies – in Malta and in Gibraltar – people came down to the docks to greet the British with flowers, with cakes and oranges. Young women stared at my husband. I felt almost drunk with my own future. Of the many hours the British are wont to call their finest, this one certainly deserved the adjective.
‘In Gibraltar, Albert and I went ashore. We left the others and spent the night at the Rock Hotel. We had our breakfast on the balcony overlooking the Alameda Gardens: fresh orange juice, real coffee, toast with butter and marmalade. I had never experienced such luxury. Albie and I will travel the world together, we will have days and days like this, I thought. In the morning – the Sabbath morning, as it happened – he took me to the synagogue in Irish Town. The temple was empty.
‘“Here, Albertine, in front of your God, I promise to cherish and to obey,” he said and lowered himself on bended knee, then pinched me, just to offset the solemnity of his words.
‘That was our only religious ceremony, without witnesses, on the edge of Europe. I knew that I was happy then. We ascended through the Old Town to the top of the Rock and just stood there watching the two continents, the mountains of Morocco pale in the morning light. Europe and Africa seemed to be parting to let me through. It was perhaps the last time, on my journey from Alexandria to Southampton, that I thought I knew where I was going, that I did not feel lost.’
The Count stirred in his seat.
‘I know it won’t help, Albertine, but allow me to say it, for you are becoming like a daughter to me, more than Diana in a way. She and I never have these kinds of conversations. Those are the luxuries of the West, those kinds of sentiments. You feel lost because you have a home. You feel that a safe home is not enough. You remind me of my mother when you say things like that. She was Western too, I now know. Be careful what you wish for, dear girl.’
He leaned over and patted my hand.
When we had started these sessions, it would take ten minutes to walk from the Underground station to his front door because I worried about slipping on an unseen patch of ice. The dying winter bade us farewell with snowstorms in the first week of March, one last howl to remember it by. Now the rain fell softly and green buds appeared on the branches. At night, when everything was quiet, there was birdsong.
I returned home that evening to find Albie with a couple of colleagues. Army men, I could see it immediately from the way they sat, from the way they combed their moustaches. The smell of cigarette smoke hit me as I opened the front door, and, as I got closer, the smell of alcohol, but they were neither tipsy nor jolly. This was work, whatever their work was. Their faces were serious and the conversation carried on in a half whisper, falling dead as I approached. The taller man, in a dinner jacket, clearly on the way to somewhere more glamorous, stood up and kissed my hand. It was not something that British men did often. They were confused by the new notions of equality.
‘Mrs Whitelaw, so delighted to see you, finally,’ the tall man said. ‘I haven’t seen you since I was brought off that hospital ship in Alexandria. You wouldn’t remember, I am sure. You carried a pot with a palm tree into our hospital room, left it by the window, next to this young man’s bed.’
He nodded towards Albie.
‘“With fronds like these, who needs anemones?” Albert said when he saw you. It was one of those things we repeated for days. Seems silly now, but it made us laugh then. I don’t think you understood. It was the palm in the pot, but it was also the scarf you were wearing after work. No one in that hospital was quite as memorable as you. The French girl. We envied Albert his conquest.’
‘All those jokes about the failures of the French Resistance,’ Albie said. ‘I had to listen to no end of them.’
Albie’s colleague was tall and imposing, verging on stout, with a booming voice that he tried unsuccessfully to keep in check. On his left hand, he wore a signet ring with the crest carved deep into a green stone. His suntan seemed strange amid the London pallor. Everyone looked like that in Alexandria. In London, most people’s faces were chalky white, and women, when they went out, accentuated the whiteness with dark eyeliner and bright red lipstick. Their faces resembled Venetian masks.
I did not remember the man, but I assumed that three or four years can change a face, emphasise the difference between war and peace. I did remember the scarf. I had knitted it myself – a semi-successful experiment in stocking stitch – on a garden bench in Alexandria, in the deep shadow of a fig tree, improvising a pattern of fern and spruce, the dream of snowlines, northern Europe. It was a dark green thing with huge holes, useless against the cold, even more useless against the Mediterranean sun. Perhaps Monsieur Carr w
as right. I was more eccentric than I thought.
‘Ian Abercrombie,’ the man said bowing his head a little. ‘My friends, while I had them, called me Cutter.’
‘Peter Stanford,’ said the other man, and stood up to shake my hand.
‘Colonel Stanford and Brigadier Abercrombie,’ Albie explained. ‘They were here the other weekend, while you were with your Russians.’
‘I do hope that London is being kind to you,’ Abercrombie said. ‘The times are still difficult, but things are getting better.’
‘Very kind,’ I replied. ‘And I know.’
Albie offered to pour me a glass of the brandy they were drinking.
‘A present from Ian here, who is just back from the Cape. Klipdrift. Boer name, French taste, we were just saying. You’ll like it.’
‘Just a little sip, please, Albie.’
I made my apologies. The three of them stood up as I walked away with my tumbler. A moment later I heard them resume their conversation.
‘Lucky man,’ Abercrombie said in his booming voice.
‘Oh, yes,’ Stanford said. Then the whispers continued.
On Albie’s writing desk – I did not have and had not wanted one of my own, although I now worried that I was usurping his space – the pile of paper that represented Monsieur Carr’s memoir was growing. Each time I returned from Chiswick, I added a few pages. I reread the story and added explanations of places and names as they became clearer to me – explanations for Gigi and his future English children, I thought. I was writing in English because the chances that they would speak French, or indeed Russian, these future generations, seemed increasingly remote. I hoped Monsieur Carr would not object to my choice of language. I did not aspire to Tolstoyan power, but I discovered that I could be faithful to his words, convey something of his voice.
Next to the side of the typewriter, there were Albie’s folders and envelopes. There were two new novels among his papers – one English, the other a translation from Russian: Brideshead Revisited and Days and Nights. I did not recognise their authors’ names. I looked at the blurbs inside the dust jackets: the former was a narrative of English decline, the latter an account of the Battle of Stalingrad. Albie was a keen reader, but not a reader of fiction, of made-up stories. The books were gifts, I assumed, for someone in Germany.
The sound of the conversation went up and down next door, like waves, then Albie knocked and announced our guests’ departure.
‘We apologise for stealing your husband, Mrs Whitelaw,’ Abercrombie said. ‘We appreciate that you have a right to him in the evening.’
‘No, not at all,’ I said, and wondered if that sounded right. Had I just said that I had no right to my husband’s company in the evening? Or that I did not care?
‘He’s indispensable, your husband,’ Stanford added. ‘I’m sure he’s too modest to make you realise that.’
He said this in perfect French and took everyone by surprise. ‘Most impressive, my dear man, most impressive. The accent too,’ Albie said and patted him on the shoulder.
‘Ah well, all those summers in the South of France with my mother and her lover,’ Stanford said, ‘while Father looked after the colonies.’
They treated everything, themselves included, as a joke. I liked that about Englishmen. Even when I couldn’t speak to Albie because of his urge to tease the humour out of every situation, I found it comforting. But once the front door was closed, Albie slumped into the armchair, refilled his glass of Klipdrift to the brim and crumpled, as though he had been keeping up appearances only for his comrades’ sake. He smiled but I could see that he was unhappy. Unhappy and tired beyond endurance.
‘Come here, Cartier. It’s an order,’ he said and patted his thigh. There was no warmth in his voice, only exhaustion. I did as I was told and hugged him. I realised that he had asked me to sit on his lap only to press his face against my back and hide from me whatever expression he wore.
‘I am so tired, Ber,’ he said. His voice was muffled by my clothing. ‘I am exhausted and Berlin is a tragedy, no point pretending otherwise. We’ll soon be surrounded inside the city and cut off. What do we do with Germany? You tell me.’
That night, he sighed in his sleep and said things in German and in the morning looked as though he hadn’t slept at all.
We had porridge for breakfast and he drank his tea in one gulp, then left for work early, too early. It was still dark outside.
‘There is no point in sitting here, Ber. I might as well get on with it,’ he said.
And I did too; got on with my day.
My Russian teacher’s basement in Queen’s Gate was a dark place, an Orthodox catacomb full of icons and flickering oil lamps. The air smelled of cats and mouldy books. The windows were protected by thick grilles outside, and by heavy net curtains inside, yellowing lace which sagged under its own weight. Two Siamese cats stalked behind sofas and armchairs like miniature pumas, staring at mouse holes. There were mousetraps here and there along the skirting boards, primed with bits of desiccated cheese. I noticed a smudge of blood and gut on the wall.
While I recited the Russian alphabet, Elizaveta Furst walked around, straightening her icons or adjusting the shawl that was pinned to her bosom by a large brooch. A firebird, she explained. Her arthritic fingers stood almost at right angles to her palms. They grew strange bone spurs, like ginger roots, above and below an array of rings.
When she wasn’t speaking Russian, she talked in a mixture of English and French, with a Russian accent so thick that you couldn’t tell where English ended and French began. She was, she boasted, a baroness, an alumna of the Smolny Institute.
She let out little yelps whenever I answered the question or did the exercise correctly, short squeals that sounded like yelps of a puppy in pain, and which made the cats jump out of their hiding places. This happened regularly enough: I worked hard.
‘Dear Albertina Abramovna …’ She had asked me for my father’s name and insisted on using my first name and my patronymic, Russian style, just as she insisted that I must call her (we are very informal here, she had explained) Elizaveta Maximilianovna, a patronymic I found impossible to pronounce at the beginning of my halting Russian sentences.
‘Dear Albertina Abramovna, you are the best student I have, and I have seven at the moment. All handsome young Englishmen, all clever, but not nearly as clever as you. I should introduce you. Perhaps you would like to practise together?’
She had a mischievous smile on her face.
‘But I am married, Elizaveta Maximilianovna.’ It came out as Maxilovna.
‘How very bourgeoise of you, Albertina Abramovna, to need to point that out,’ Elizaveta Maximilianovna said. ‘Both the aristocrats and the Bolsheviks have stood up against prudish adherence to the patriarchal order.’ Or at least that’s what I think she said.
‘But you are right, perhaps, to turn my offer down so politely. You already have an English husband. Why ask for more of the same? You should take a Russian lover. An old-style Russian gentleman, not these Soviet muzhiki who have milled about London since this last war, and can’t tell one end of a spoon from the other. I see them sometimes, in Kensington Gardens, going to their wretched embassy. Have you ever met a Russian man?’
‘No,’ I lied. ‘No. Never. Only in books.’
‘To deny three times, like Peter, in one breath,’ Elizaveta Maximilianovna wheezed with laughter. ‘And so fast … you are a dark horse, Albertina Abramovna.’
That same day, early afternoon, I was sitting at the kitchen table, with a slice of toast, a cup of chicory coffee and my Russian primer before me, when the telephone rang. The black Bakelite was cold against my ear.
‘Oh, my dear Mrs Whitelaw, I am so glad I found you at home,’ Mrs Jenkins said. ‘You are supposed to come to us this evening, but I am afraid Sergei Alexeievich is in hospital. He had a fall. They will keep him in for a couple of days.’
‘What happened? How is he? Where is he? Can I visit him?’
I insisted. She relented. The visiting hours were between five and seven.
I left a note for Albie and set out for Acton. After endless winter stoppages, the journey seemed easy. The buses were moving again. Snowdrifts were reduced to dirty scraps here and there. There were floods beyond London, people said, as if to say there was no end to misery, but in West London, for the moment, the weather offered a promise of something better.
The upper deck of the bus was full of people speaking in languages which I now recognised as Slavonic. I picked up words here and there, sometimes whole sentences. No one threw me a second glance as I leafed through my Russian notebook trying to memorise a few lines with which to surprise Monsieur Carr. Even my features fitted. In this corner of a London filling with survivors, I looked less foreign than most.
He was asleep when I arrived, tucked in like a child under a grey blanket, his left arm bandaged but not in a sling, luckily unbroken. That side of his face which was always sad now carried a large bruise on the cheek and forehead, a dark, beetroot colour. His eyes were bloodshot when he opened them.
‘Oh, my dear Albertine, I wish you hadn’t bothered,’ he gurgled hoarsely. ‘I must be a spectacle.’
The asymmetry of his face was emphasised by his injuries.
I took his outstretched right hand and said, in Russian: ‘You look fine.’
I wanted to say you look much better than I had feared, but my vocabulary did not stretch that far yet. My accent was too hard, too unyielding.
‘You make me laugh, Albertine, and that hurts. I am impressed. Have you been studying Russian in secret all along? And where, if I may ask?’ he responded in French, realising that I had already reached my linguistic limits in his native tongue.