Monsieur Ka

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  ‘But I only knew that many years later. That evening I had my own version of events, a husband’s idea of what might have happened before she returned with her wad of money, a husband’s insight into why she had insisted all along on knocking on those doors alone. It did not occur to me that she was trying to protect me, a count, from the humiliation of salesmanship, or the disgrace and pain of the violence she had suffered, just as it did not occur to me that night that she did not sell what should never be on sale. I thought her, that evening, so much worse than my mother, but I turned my back and feigned sleep.

  ‘I feigned sleep in order to avoid becoming anything even more terrible than the coward that I was. People did that too – things much worse than male cowardice. Men murdered their wives and killed themselves. The option did not seem untempting when the dawn call to prayer came and I was still awake, still feigning sleep. It seemed rational, the only right thing to do, but for Alexei, Albertine. A boy alone. I could not leave my son alone in this world, and although some men did that too, I could not murder my own child.

  ‘It was only years later that I knew the truth, when it was too late, when Tonya had almost stopped speaking, here in London, when she painted and painted yet never once wanted to sell a painting again. She hardly spoke to anyone except Princess Trubetskoy, but even then she mostly listened, rarely said a word. The Princess was happy to have a mute companion. The old woman was so full of stories that she never noticed another person’s silence. Much later, when it was too late, when Tonya had practically ceased to speak to me too, I realised that a part of me had known it all along.

  ‘Tonya was not going to say a thing to me and Alexei about the horrors she had been through because she did not want to make our lives harder than they already were. We know too much about men at war, but women’s wars, dear Albertine, women’s wars are what damn us all to hell. We don’t want to know how women suffer because we realise that we cannot fulfil our duty to protect them.

  ‘When Alexei was old enough, when he was making his own living, Tonya and I would sometimes lie in our bed, side by side, and if she thought that I was asleep, Tonya would talk to me again. She had always used a Russian vy, a vous form, to address me, as Russian women were wont to do in aristocratic marriages, as my mother had always addressed my father. Yet late at night, in those whisperings of hers, she always used tu – ty, Sergei – and she used the close, informal conjugations of the verbs.

  ‘“I hope you can hear me, Sergei, my love,” she would whisper. “You don’t have to respond, but I hope you can hear me. It is time to go. Our boy does not need us any more. We should only stay here for as long as is necessary to help our children and not remain to hinder them. It’s not just my feeling, it is the logic of Darwinism. And as for religion, I know self-murder is a sin, but God will forgive us, I am sure, as he has forgiven your mother. It is time to go.”

  ‘That is what she said, in those late-night soliloquies of hers. I pretended not to hear, and then, at daybreak, we resumed as before. When Alexei told us that he was to marry Diana, Tonya changed for a while, or pretended to have changed, for the sake of her son. At the church in Welbeck Street she almost appeared to be her old self. When Alexei and his bride walked around the nave with the golden crowns on their heads, her face was bright in a way it had only been when she was young and nursing our boy.

  ‘Alexei will be the perfect husband, she said. From this projected perfection I knew how thoroughly I had failed. You asked if Tonya was happy, dear Albertine. Yes, I think she was happy when that bomb fell on her, happy in the hour of her death.’

  I heard the front door open, caught the smell of fresh bread. Mrs Jenkins stepped into the house and stood at the door of the library, unbuttoning the single large collar button of her coat. She smiled the wide, jolly smile of a hunter-gatherer who has had a successful day.

  ‘It is like Soviet Russia, this England of ours, nowadays,’ Monsieur Carr said. You could not discern, from his tone, that he had just told me a dark, disturbing story. ‘Every household has to have one person in a queue somewhere, full-time.’

  ‘I trust you will stay for tea, Albertine. I’ve made some carrot cake,’ Mrs Jenkins said. ‘Mr Carr always complains about our English habit of making cakes with vegetables. What next, he asks, a beetroot génoise? But why not, I say. He always eats whatever cake I make. He always polishes it off. However much he complains.’

  ‘Because I am a good boy,’ Monsieur Carr responded. ‘I am telling Albertine my life story and we had just reached Alexei and Diana’s wedding.’

  ‘Oh, what a day that was,’ Mrs Jenkins said. ‘Diana in white, with her green eyes – you should have seen her. The rite is just not the same in an Anglican church. Sorry, I am not sure I should be saying that. Yours was an Anglican wedding, I assume, Albertine. But it seems much nicer, probably, when you are new to it.’

  ‘Mine was a wartime, civil ceremony,’ I said. ‘A blue wedding, not a white one. I wore a cobalt blue suit and the Mediterranean obliged with the backdrop: a cloudless sky, the sea. But I wore pink in the evening, at the Cecil Hotel in Alexandria, my only evening gown.’

  ‘I am sure it was just as lovely a day. Weddings always are,’ Mrs Jenkins said.

  I did not feel I could take the folder out of my bag and present it to Monsieur Carr over carrot cake. I felt inexpressibly sorry for him, and even more so for Tonya. I looked at my watch, made up an excuse, said that I had to dash. Monsieur Carr stood up and walked me to the door.

  ‘I wish I had a daughter like you, Albertine,’ he said. ‘You are a good woman.’

  So I returned to Earl’s Court and re-entered the empty house, and put together some leftovers for supper. Why, I did not know, when it seemed likely – when I said what I had been planning to say to my husband since the moment I heard Monsieur Carr regret his cowardice – that we were not going to eat leftover meat or anything else together, Albie and I, not that night, not together, perhaps never again.

  The evenings were still cool. I laid the table then lit the fire in the sitting room and sat in its orange glow, waiting to hear Albie’s footsteps, thinking of the words I would use, matter-of-fact, unambiguous words. I owed my husband that. I have committed adultery, Albie.

  There was the sound of the car, stopping for some moments, then moving on, and I did not get up to look through the window. I sat where I was, in the armchair by the fire, facing the door through which Albie was going to step at any moment, waiting to hear the unlocking, the footsteps, the sound of a suitcase coming to rest on the tiles, the rustling of a raincoat being taken off.

  ‘Albie,’ I was about to say, ‘Albie, I am afraid something has happened.’

  I heard the key and the footsteps, but Albie was not alone. He was urging someone to come in, to close the door quickly, to leave the bags in the hall, to take their coat off, and then Peter Stanford pushed through the door.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Whitelaw, I’m so sorry. Are you all right sitting there? There was no light. We didn’t expect to see you here. Albert said you were at work.’ He straightened his jacket as if to start again.

  ‘I hope everything’s all right, Mrs Whitelaw,’ he said, just as Ian Abercrombie and Albie came in, a couple of big folders under Albie’s arms, a heavy, square bottle in Abercrombie’s. Albie switched the lights on.

  ‘Albertine, my dear, were you napping? Do forgive us,’ Albie said and kissed my hand demonstratively, somewhat tipsily I thought. ‘What’s new? How have you been?’

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Everything is quite all right. I went to the cinema on Monday night.’

  ‘Ah, cinema,’ said Abercrombie, not bothering to ask about the film.

  Albie had gone into the kitchen and returned with the plate of cold meat I had prepared. He held a radish, a small, perfectly red, perfectly round radish, like a nipple between his teeth.

  ‘We’re going to have to do some work here,’ Albie said, chewing the radish. ‘Don’t mind us, Ber.’

  �
�I will be upstairs,’ I said, ‘listening to the wireless. Do say if it disturbs you.’

  ‘Don’t you worry, Mrs Whitelaw,’ said Peter Stanford. Of the three men, he alone had a trace of anxiety in his eyes, a sense that the scene had been set for a different conversation.

  It was well after midnight when Albie joined me again. The bedroom was lit by the full moon. I watched him undress and hang his clothes in the wardrobe, item by item, then climb into bed.

  ‘Ber, dear, I saw as I came in that you were bursting to talk to me. I’m sorry. I’ve had a long day, meetings, then an interminable drive back, and I’ll have a very early start tomorrow. Whatever it is, unless it’s burning, can it wait?’

  He was setting the alarm.

  ‘No, nothing’s burning, Albie, just you sleep.’

  He pulled over the eiderdown and hooked one of his feet around my ankle, as if to say I am here, worry not. I heard the eastward rumbling of the last Underground train.

  ‘I love you, Albertine. That’s all that matters. Please don’t worry about it, whatever it is, I’ll sort it out.’

  And with that, he was away.

  13

  The Wronged Party

  Elizaveta Maximilianovna had placed a selection of excerpts from Chekhov on her dining table. They consisted of sheets of paper in a wide fan around a spread of tarot cards she kept turning, even during our Russian lessons, as though she needed the tarot to interpret my stammering responses. She murmured and whispered, clapping her chubby hands with their gnarled fingers when she liked the way the cards fell, screwing her lips into a small pouting circle when she did not.

  She had written the passages out in Cyrillic block capitals, wide spaced, to allow me to note the translations down before we discussed them. Chekhov was not ideal for a beginner, but I did what I was asked to do in longhand, in English, with painstaking slowness, consulting a battered Russian– French dictionary. While my trilingual translation went on, Elizaveta glanced from time to time at an array of icons. From inside their golden halos, the long faces of saints with dark eyes that followed you around the room were the very opposite of her own soft, round face, of her blue eyes which hardly ever looked straight into yours, yet saw everything. She never kept the time. The one hour I paid for sometimes extended to three or four, with endless cups of tea and visits to her freezing lavatory, where outlandish hairnets hung from the hooks inside the door like equipment for some surreal butterfly hunt.

  Her two cats sat on her lap, purring, one next to the other across her knees, leaving a trail of hairs on her skirt every time they moved. The room was filled with the sound of footsteps. The basement window looked – through the grilles – onto the pavement of a busy road, showing only about twenty inches of space. There was a procession of trousered and stockinged legs, of headless children and pram wheels, and just occasionally a whole dog, a dachshund or a spaniel, looking in, straight at the two of us. Only the passing dogs roused the cats to full alert, ready to jump off their mistress’s knees.

  ‘Lev Nikolayevich was a genius,’ she said, her French so heavily accented that it always took a minute to realise she was not speaking Russian. ‘Anton Pavlovich, however, was more like the son of God. He died so young, he saw everything and his mercy was boundless, whereas Lev Nikolayevich was …’

  That second mention of Tolstoy’s name and patronymic was the point at which I realised she was speaking French. Had her outlandish comparison between Tolstoy and Chekhov been delivered in Russian, I would have assumed that I was misunderstanding her completely. She enjoyed seeing me startled by the eccentricity of her claims. She liked my Frenchness, and forgave my Jewishness.

  ‘Like Proust, you see, some of the best Frenchmen – and women – were Jewish,’ she once said to me, having assumed that I needed reassurance, although I cared about my status in France no more than she would have cared about hers in Soviet Russia. Having said it, she did not wait for my reaction but reached instead for a silver casket on the shelf behind her and opened it to show me a glass container of soil from Lorraine, several teaspoonfuls, proof perhaps that France meant more to her than it did to me. She was a Francophile, and she despised the English only marginally less than she despised the Germans, in spite of her German-sounding name.

  ‘You think I am exaggerating, I see, Albertina Abramovna,’ she continued, pursuing her wild parallels still further. ‘Lev Nikolayevich was difficult and vengeful, and too prolific in every way. Thirteen children, like thirteen Apostles.’ Here she paused and crossed herself, but I chose not to question the number. ‘Whereas Anton Pavlovich had only his readers. Have you read “The Lady with the Little Dog”? Have you done your homework?’

  ‘Yes I have,’ I said.

  ‘So you know it then. It is a fraction of Anna Karenina’s length, but it achieves so much more. What complexity of feeling, don’t you agree? Can you find the quote from the story on the table, Albertina Abramovna? Could you read it to me? Russian first, then your own, French translation.’

  And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.

  I read this in stammering, halting Russian, then in my own French translation, as quickly as I could, not giving her the time to think about its quality. I did not want Elizaveta Maximilianovna to focus on my word choices and turn this into a French lesson, as she often tried to do, to prove that her French was superior to mine.

  I waited for her question. She sighed and sighed for a good couple of minutes. Her stomach expanded into a large round balloon, then shrank, again and again. The cats made no concession to the movement of her body.

  ‘Even Chekhov’s most devoted admirers,’ she finally said, still in French, ‘hated that ending. They expected Anton Pavlovich to tell them what happens, to spell out the adulterers’ fate. They wanted them punished or redeemed. They demanded to know what that most difficult part was. Lev Nikolayevich gave them that. Death on the railway line. Bang. Nothing so simple with Anton Pavlovich.’

  One of the cats jumped off Elizaveta Maximilianovna’s lap, the other burrowed a sleepy head deeper under the balloon. A cloud of hairs flew into the air.

  ‘What do you think, Albertina Abramovna?’

  ‘I think they – both of them, Tolstoy and Chekhov – load the dice a bit. The husbands are boring in both cases, undeserving of love. It makes the equation simple.’

  ‘But if it were otherwise, why would the wife stray? Any husband who is deceived must ipso facto deserve to be deceived. Don’t you agree?’

  ‘No, I don’t. Not at all. I am sorry,’ I said, uttering my words with more vehemence than I had intended to. Elizaveta Maximilianovna laughed.

  ‘Oh, I see. But we can disagree. This is a Russian lesson, not an ethics class, my dear Albertina Abramovna.’ She was delighted by my outburst. ‘Au contraire, I think there’s nothing wrong with adultery. It is so very bourgeois of Lev Nikolayevich to get into that judging business.

  ‘My father and mother, for example …’ She reverted to Russian and the now familiar history of being a daughter of an aristocratic general. Her story, with its ever-increasing accumulation of details, was the pivot around which my Russian vocabulary grew.

  She sipped sour-cherry vodka and refilled her glass liberally and often, although it was just ten in the morning, and she went on about dances and revolutions in a dizzying way. There were more revolutions in Elizaveta Maximilianovna’s tales than in Monsieur Carr’s, many more than in any Russian history book. She kept patting her chignon. She looked, in spite of her much emphasised aristocratic background, like a large Russian matryoshka.

  I struggled to understand her, anyone would, I thought, yet my Russian progressed nonetheless. Barely two months of classes, and there was already much more Russian than French in her sentences – to the extent that I some
times feared there would soon be no French left at all, that I would be cast adrift in that soft language which sounded like feathers falling from the sky, like being lost inside a paperweight snowstorm. Yet, by some strange miracle, I managed to understand more and more.

  After the language class, I lunched at home and went to Monsieur Carr’s. He was nursing a heavy cold and an eye infection. He was wearing a pair of sunglasses behind which tears trickled in a steady stream. He refused to shake my hand and kiss me on arrival.

  ‘I don’t want you to catch this,’ he said. ‘I have come to depend on your visits.’

  ‘I am stronger than you may think,’ I said. ‘I haven’t had a cold in years. And I have a surprise for you.’

  I took the folder out of my bag, the manuscript I had intended to give him the previous time. He held it up close against his face and examined the cover.

  ‘“Karenin’s Winter”,’ he read. ‘My life. Albertine, have you written this?’

  ‘Yes, I have,’ I said. I could not tell his reaction from his tone and so I started explaining my reasoning behind the volume. ‘I thought it would be something to give to Gigi, and any other grandchildren you may have one day.’

  Given Diana’s age, the likelihood of another grandchild was relatively small, but I blushed when I said this. I realised that I had betrayed not only my husband, but this woman and her child, and possibly this old man too.