Monsieur Ka

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  ‘The man in the cell next to me, a religious philosopher I had known, distantly, for many years, was allowed to keep his Bible when he was arrested. I am not sure why they allowed the Bible. The Bolsheviks may have been more tolerant in those early days; even Stalin had trained to become a priest, had been an intending ordinand, testing his vocation. Or they thought that it made no difference if the man was never going to leave the place. Well, it turns out, in his hurry he brought the wrong book with him. One of his sons, he guessed, must have taken the dust jacket and wrapped it around a volume just as thick, perhaps to read it furtively, in the church even. It was my mother’s story.

  ‘The man now offered to read Anna Karenina to me. He had no idea who I was. You won’t believe this, Albertine, but I had not read the damned volume before; at first because my father would not let me, then because I did not want to. I had heard stories about it, of course, the many stories about the way its author adapted the truth to suit the needs of his fiction. Real life is too untidy, too improbable. The old Count had added things that were patently untrue, that – even if they were true – he could not possibly have known about my mother. Contraception, for example. I am sure that Anna would not have known how to go about that. She would have thought women who used contraception dishonest before God. But that is the nature of fiction. And of people. If you write a memoir, everyone looks for lies; if you write fiction people search for the truth, assume that you have invented nothing.

  ‘Even Tolstoy became fed up with all the gossip, protested, played down the level of veracity, avoided us. That was all right. My father had not a single kind word to say about him. Father had been dead for almost a decade when Tolstoy was excommunicated from the Orthodox Church, but he would not have been in the least surprised.

  ‘And now, in the basement cell, it took my neighbour two months to read Anna to me by tapping the novel, letter by letter, on his prison wall. I could barely sleep during those two months. I would not say I forgot Tonya and Alexei, how could I, but I kept wanting to hear what happened next, or, rather, how it happened, for I knew all too well the doomed moment the story was racing to. Two months. Tap, tap, tap, tap. The novel was much more complex than anything I had imagined, much more nuanced. Tolstoy understood my mother better than she understood herself. The only person he did not quite manage to grasp was my aunt Dolly, Uncle Stiva’s long-suffering wife. Stiva treated Dolly abominably, but Tolstoy had no ear for the nature of her willing martyrdom. Dolly provoked the worst in the novelist, I think. He captured all the others. His writing was so great, it was, almost, worth all our misery.’

  He turned and looked up to the portrait of his parents on the wall above.

  ‘You know how Marx says – and I know a thing or two about Marx –’ he continued, ‘that writers of genius are capable of rising above their epoch and class. So Tolstoy transcended his gender to understand something about Anna that none of us who had claimed to love her had understood. She was an orphan who needed to be held. My father possessed her, but would not hold her. The failure of their bond was not necessarily sexual, although one does wonder why she had only me – until her affair, that is. Father might have been withholding his husbandly duties too, but the withholding of a human touch was more important.

  ‘In my cell, I dreamed of holding Tonya in my arms, all night, of holding Alexei. I woke up with his boyish smell in my nostrils. I could have killed a man to experience it just once more. Anna created two orphans in her desire to be held. An affair was an acceptable thing in St Petersburg and in the circles I was growing up in, for men and women alike. So long as you observed certain rules, obeyed certain hypocrisies. Anna’s sin was not that she had wanted an affair. I know this will sound sentimental, but it is no less true for it. Her sin was that she needed to be loved.

  ‘I had just one conversation with your husband, at our film party, and he admitted that he had never read Anna Karenina. “I never wanted to read it,” he said. “Though I did read War and Peace when I was at school, and I loved it. I just wasn’t that interested in Anna.”

  ‘“We obsess about adultery,” your Albert said, “as though it matters so much more than any other betrayal, more even than the betrayal of our deepest-held principles.” I liked that. Your husband was a good man, a noble man.’

  ‘He was,’ I said. ‘Of course he was. You forgot to tell me what happened in that prison after you heard the novel to the end. How did you escape?’

  ‘I did not escape,’ he said. ‘I was freed. Let go. Just like that. They never explained their reasons, the Bolsheviks, never apologised. Tonya and Alexei had left for the countryside. They were never allowed to visit me and there was no other reason to stay in St Petersburg. It took two months to find them. They were living in a village on the Oblonsky estate, in a house which belonged to one of their former serfs. Tonya thought that she was seeing a ghost when I appeared. My hair had turned completely white in prison.’

  ‘That happens, I know. Overnight sometimes.’ I touched my temple where I now had a lock of white hair.

  ‘Much later, in Istanbul, one of the Russians I saw at Pera Palace, when I went there begging for work, one of Wrangel’s men, told me what he had heard. That I was released, together with several others, at the behest of Evgeniy Levin, my cousin Constantine’s son, who was high in Bolshevik ranks, Leon Trotsky’s right hand man. I had never set eyes on Evgeniy, but I could tell that I was a little suspect in the eyes of my Pera Palace acquaintance. Why would a Bolshevik vouchsafe for me?’

  ‘Blood ties,’ I said. ‘Surely even the Communists must have them?’

  Sergei Alexeievich lifted a card from his side table. It was a photograph from the film of Anna Karenina, Vivien Leigh in front of a painting depicting an urn brimming with flowers. The star looked like a flower herself, wearing a ruched dress in pale silk, with garlands of silk flowers around the skirt, a posy on her waist, even a hat made of posies, like a human doll, or a poodle. There was something so manipulatively coquettish about the dress, so disingenuously innocent, that the image seemed more suited to vaudeville than a great tragedy. But perhaps the true tragedies all have an element of vaudeville. I no longer knew.

  ‘I like the painting,’ I said. ‘Does the painting appear in the film? All those ruins in the deep background, beyond the flowers; they remind me of London.’

  ‘You make me laugh, Albertine,’ he said, although I wasn’t trying to elicit his laughter. ‘Do come, sit with me.’

  I went over and sat down next to him. My body took its time to move, its time to settle. He raised his right hand and placed it on my stomach, as if waiting for the flutter of the quail’s wing. Waiting for you, Anna, to give him a sign.

  He tapped with his fingers against the hardness of my skin.

  ‘A code?’ I asked.

  ‘An old Russian poem.’

  We sat like that and he tapped on, slowly, inaudibly, finger then palm, letter by letter, for a long time. It was the most soothing thing anyone had ever done to me.

  ‘Almost there, my dear. Almost over,’ he said, in Russian, and leaned in, closer, as if to await a reply. Your reply.

  When Albie’s parents had returned to East Anglia, I started tidying up the house. I had no idea what I wanted to do with it. It sometimes seemed that I had to stay put, just in case Albie returned. He needed to be able to find me, I thought, insane with grief. The mortgage was paid off after his death. It had not been a big loan; property in London was cheap in those days. I had no financial worries, but I had problems of every other kind. A combustible mixture of pain and anger and guilt did not go well with morning sickness. Eventually the sickness and the angerpain died down; there was just the guilt and the waiting.

  One summer’s day a letter came from Albie’s sister. The stamp depicted the crowned King-Emperor in profile, in an oval. ‘Postage one and a half annas, registration three annas’, it said. Things failed to make sense that summer. I saw Annas everywhere. I read everything two or three tim
es, found meaning where there was none, and failed to understand the simplest of things. I believed that my English was deteriorating.

  The British were leaving; India was being partitioned. Annabel was on her way to England. I didn’t think she knew that I was pregnant. The envelope was flimsy, the onion-skin airmail paper Annabel’s letter was written on almost transparent, but there was another, thicker letter tucked inside. Deutsche Post, this one was: its stamps had pictures of hands in chains releasing white doves into the air. ‘Dear Albertine’, Annabel’s letter said:

  Forgive my long silence. After I sent you a letter of condolence, a letter which no sister should ever have to write, I had what I suppose you could call a nervous breakdown. I could not get out of bed for days, and it was a bad time to stay in bed. During that time this arrived. A letter from the dead.

  There were blotches all over the sheet of paper, right across Annabel’s neat handwriting. I could almost touch the fine salt on the rims of each smudged circle.

  I’m now back on my two feet, moving. What can I say? When we were children, I used to be jealous of my younger brother. He was the golden boy who had escaped to our beautiful England to have fun, leaving me with Ma and Pa, to their aridity, the suffocating months and years of home tutoring. But, he grew up to be a wonderful, handsome man. No one stayed angry with him very long. Forgive me for not sending you this letter before. The one I’m writing and the one I’m enclosing. It arrived several weeks after Albert’s death. I’m still not sure why he sent it to me. I think it would mean even more to you than it does to me, but I could not surrender it for such a long time. I’ve never met you but I remain,

  your loving sister-in-law,

  Annabel

  ‘Darling Bella’, Albie’s letter said:

  The winter’s finally over and I’m in Berlin again, in a residence near Lake Slaughter. Yes, Schlachtensee. The Germans have a predisposition for the morbid, but the lake’s anything but. There’s a path around it. It takes a good hour and a half to walk. The view changes with every step and it’s invariably magical. Otherwise, things here are dire. I can’t tell you much in a letter. There’s a coffee house on the shore where I escape the horrors to miss my Albertine in peace. She has been quiet lately. She has a secret she’s hiding from me. I think – I’m convinced – she’s pregnant. I’m not sure how to react when she finally chooses to divulge the news. I love her more than she’ll ever know, but I worry. This world’s not a good place for a child, not yet, and perhaps it’ll never be again. It was my duty – British duty, for we created the vastest empire this world has ever seen – to build a world fit for a child. We did not. To that extent we have – I have – failed. But I mustn’t be morbid, I’m not German (a feeble joke!). I’m rushing to catch the last post now, then the train (you’d love our little railway station, a fairy-tale thatched cottage, like something in Berkshire, with primitive wooden figures on the platform) to hear the Berlin Philharmonic in rehearsal. Beethoven. Can you imagine them, rehearsing Beethoven after all that’s happened recently? I’m a lucky man. I’ve my moments of panic about this child, but I’ll be a good father, and that’s all there is to it. I hope you’re well. I hope the second flush is coming on. God, how I miss India, how I’ve missed it all my life. You were so lucky, bellissima, so lucky to have had years and years of it while I suffered in the rain.

  Your loving brother,

  Albie

  ‘It seems selfish to me, what Albert did,’ Alex said one day while he was seeing me off from his father’s house to the train. ‘But I would say that. Leaving you the way he did, he took you away from me.’

  He was the only person I had told about Albie’s death. I knew I could trust him. I had to be able to talk to someone.

  ‘No more selfish than what we did,’ I said, reacting to the only part of his statement I managed to grasp.

  ‘But he did not know about that. His ignorance was your choice. When he made his, he knew that you would know, that you would suffer as a result of his impulse, if impulse it was.’

  ‘It looks as though I will never find out,’ I said. ‘He must have suffered.’

  We met from time to time, Alex and I, sometimes by accident, sometimes by design, pretending to need to talk about his father, yet we always ended up talking about that afternoon. Talking about it, that is, without ever referring to the most obvious event. Sooner or later, I guessed, he would ask for my permission to tell Diana, because he was too honourable to keep withholding the truth. I hoped that Diana would forgive him. In a strange, confusing way, I now loved this man and I did not know what to do with that love, any more than I knew while Albie was alive.

  It is possible to love two men at once. Most people cannot, or so they say. I very obviously could. I hoped I could be forgiven for it.

  I saw 1948 in alone – not quite alone – listening to the BBC Theatre Orchestra on the wireless, playing music for An Ideal Husband, the film version Korda had released that November. I was making a shirt with a ruffle collar, no darts at the waist, out of that fine silk fabric that could best be described as challenging. I was beginning to get out of my widow’s weeds. It was confusing for others, to be visibly in mourning while so heavily pregnant, so unbearably alone, going to the doctor alone, listening to your heartbeat. The colour of my clothing changed nothing, but it allowed some privacy for my pain. I no longer felt angry with anyone.

  The silk, with its red petals like bloodstains, had been languishing in the back of the wardrobe since spring. Albie had seen it the day I bought it. I remember undressing for him. He wrapped the silk around my breasts as we pretended to care about ruffles and cuffs, and he tugged my carefully layered curls and plaits, until the complicated weave unfurled down my back. There were those moments when he knew exactly what to do and say; knew the vocabulary of tenderness so well that you had to assume that at other times he held back. We walked to our bed – me backwards, he facing me, like a couple in a dance – and as he fell over me he reached for the drawer in the bedside chest.

  ‘No, Albie, please not. Let’s carry on as we are.’

  His face darkened for the briefest of moments, or perhaps I imagined this, but we carried on, exactly as we were. By the following morning I had forgotten the shadow, the split-second refusal to contemplate a child, like a cloud that passes over the sun.

  That second body, gaunt and gentle, I almost forget it now because I saw it only once, some hundred hours earlier – the distance between a Monday and a Friday – and in the advancing darkness, perhaps while at the same moment Albert sat in some dull meeting in Bristol. I am not sure if I imagined this, but Alex’s Russian was as tender as the falling snow, and he held me, for a long while, afterwards. To take a lover to your marital bed: is there a worse trespass?

  I thought of it all as I stitched, of those five days.

  It may have been foolish of me to set out to Korda’s party alone the evening before the night I went into labour, but I had to see the film, had to be there.

  The cameras turned to me because I was alone and because I must have been a strange sight. Sergei Alexeievich waited at the top of the stairs, holding his grandson’s hand. Gigi beamed with a sense of importance. He was one of the stars at the premiere.

  ‘Oh, my dear Mrs Whitelaw,’ Duvivier laughed as I walked the length of the red carpet, my first red carpet ever, ‘I almost failed to recognise you. We have been productive since our last meeting, but not nearly as productive as you, I see. I realise why you failed to call.’

  ‘Oh my,’ Elizabeth Montagu echoed when she saw my bulk. ‘You were meant to be my assistant, you know, an assistant’s assistant.’ She laughed too, a lovely, throaty chime.

  ‘I’d love to work with you in the future. For you. If there is still a vacancy after this,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I’m sure there will be. Very much so. I’ve just fired a girl. Just so you know that I’m not a shrinking violet. We are the future, we film people; everyone says so. We can
afford to be ruthless. We’ll be filming in Vienna, if I’m right, by the time you’re up and running again.’

  She looked at my figure.

  ‘I’m all for working mothers; that’s the future too,’ she added. ‘But wouldn’t the father mind?’

  ‘No, the father wouldn’t mind,’ I said. It was not a moment for explanations.

  Then Leigh and Olivier arrived. They had become Sir Laurence and Lady Olivier since I had seen them in person for the first time. People surged around them, whispering about Vivien’s dress, about her pearl choker, the dark velvet ribbon in her hair. She kissed Elizabeth on both cheeks, then held my hand in hers, fishnet-gloved and cold, and seemed to take in our likeness for the first time.

  ‘When is the baby due?’ she asked. She was beautiful, much more beautiful than me, but she wasn’t Anna.

  ‘Any moment now,’ I said. Just then, I could not guess how right that was.

  She turned to wave at the gathering crowds. A camera flashed and there I was, my forehead and eyes caught above her right arm in a thousand newspaper clippings.

  I see a man’s face almost obscured by her waving hand, and I recognise Alex’s forehead and I now know that neither of us would see Anna Karenina that evening. Because in the end, when I felt the first contractions and had to leave the cinema, he was the first to notice, and he was the only one to follow.

  I searched for Sergei Alexeievich across the vast space of red plush and gilt. He nodded and gave me a little wave as I got up. That was the last time I saw him. By the time you and I came out of hospital, he had suffered a second, fatal stroke.

  I saw Alex whispering something in Diana’s ear. He followed me out, summoned a taxi.