“What sort of ideas?” asked Edward.
They had left the Metro station and were hurrying along a wide tree-lined boulevard. Beside him Irina, there was no other word for it, was scurrying. Every few yards, she glanced at her watch, tutted or clucked and scurried a little more. She answered his question with a dismissive “Tchuh!” and a flick of one hand. After a few moments, she added, “You couldn’t possibly understand. Specifically Russian delusions.”
Edward hesitated, his curiosity aroused. “Try me and see,” he suggested.
Irina gave a still louder “Tchuh!” “She tries to set out on a journey,” she said, almost resentfully. “Can you imagine? Eighty-seven years old, she can barely walk, and she takes it into her head she’s going to set out on a jaunt of a few thousand miles. She couldn’t get to the Metro on her own!”
“Where does she want to go?” Edward asked.
Irina gave him a malevolent sideways look. “St Petersburg,” she snapped. “Leningrad to you.”
She drilled on the bell of her great-aunt’s apartment house and after the heavy, dark-green front door had clicked open in response, she hurried ahead of Edward down the deep entrance hall. The cavernous lift at the end of it was out of order, “En Dérangement” in Edward’s favourite phrase. At the sight of the white card hanging askew from the lift door handle, Irina gave a little moan and plunged despairingly towards the staircase. By the time they reached the third floor, she was quite seriously out of breath. As they waited for the great-aunt to answer her bell, Edward felt suddenly acutely sorry for Irina, watching her struggle to control her panting and prepare her face into a serene expression of greeting. He had a half-formed intimation that getting older meant exactly this accumulation of worries, all the tedious constrictions and hindrances which had to be taken into account before you could do anything, and which culminated in his parents’ fretful immobility.
“You’ll be able to relax in church,” he comforted her.
A high-pitched torrent of greeting became audible behind the door and the great-aunt opened it in mid-sentence, stretching out both hands in delighted surprise as though their arrival were completely unexpected.
Edward was relieved to see she was a lot more vigorous than the grandmother. A certain spherical sturdiness was obviously a shared characteristic of all the women of the family. In Great-Aunt Elena, as Irina hastily introduced her, it took the form of a fair amount of corseted girth and a pair of pink-veined, only faintly wrinkled cheeks which Edward incongruously imagined being featured in a promotion by the Apple Marketing Authority. She gestured enthusiastically for them to come in. Irina interrupted her flow to point out that they were very short of time. Great-Aunt Elena paused and gave Irina a majestic look. “Indeed?” she declared. “And whose fault is that, may I ask?”
Indignantly, Irina started to explain. As soon as she mentioned the grandmother, Great-Aunt Elena erupted into another stream of exclamations. “She was always impossible,” she pronounced. “Always. Long before – even when she was a girl, she was always on the point of running away somewhere, you know.” She turned to Edward. “Vera has suitcases on the brain.”
“Don’t drag him into it, please,” Irina said tensely. “Where are your coat and hat? We really should be on our way.”
Grumbling good-naturedly, Great-Aunt Elena went off into a side room. Edward tried to catch Irina’s eye so he could give her a cheery conspiratorial wink, but she studiously avoided looking his way, seemingly embarrassed by this collective display of family oddity.
Edward was actually rather enjoying it. The small hall where they were waiting looked to him like a fly-blown model interior in a museum. Every inch of space was crowded with visibly venerable belongings and no anachronistic ephemera from 1980s Paris had slipped in to mar the yellowed authenticity. He felt he was standing in a hall in another city entirely.
After a moment, Great-Aunt Elena returned, wearing a highly feathered black hat and holding out an aged black astrakhan coat for one of them to help her put it on. Her voice had been just audible out of the other room, keeping up her running commentary on the evening’s events. Now she paused in front of them, cocking her plumed head and looking winsomely from one to the other, waiting for them to compete for the favour of helping her on with her coat. Irina bustled forward and helped her a little roughly into it. Great-Aunt Elena pirouetted in front of a smoky mirror to judge the finished effect. She turned to Edward. “Irina lacks a gentleman’s gallant touch,” she said coyly.
As they went down the stairs, Irina and her great-aunt broke into Russian. Going down ahead of them, Edward tried to judge if the double chirruping conveyed discord or harmony but it was almost impossible to tell. Out in the street, they reverted smartly to French. He and Irina each giving Great-Aunt Elena one arm, which seemed unnecessary but which visibly gave her pleasure, they set off back up the boulevard. Edward glanced surreptitiously at his watch; it was just after nine.
He couldn’t say he was taken with the actual music but as an all-round experience the concert was certainly gratifyingly weird. A good quarter of an hour late, they turned into the rue Daru, a plain, grey street of dormant Parisian apartment houses, and halfway along it they arrived at the black and gold gateway to a scene from a Russian village, astonishingly resurrected between the drab apartment houses. It was such an incongruous sight, the gold onion-domed church of folklore standing in a courtyard planted with silver birch trees, that Edward involuntarily stopped and goggled up at it. Above the church door, there was an arch filled with a gold mosaic depicting a blandly sweet-faced male saint holding an open book. Edward tried to make out what details he could of the rest of the church in the dark but he was chivvied forward by his two companions. They obviously weren’t the only latecomers, though, for there were other heavily coated figures ahead of them tramping up the flight of steps which led to the church door. In fact, the whole evening seemed to be running late because as they entered the church, a fat florid-faced man was only just announcing, in Russian and thickly accented French, the first item of the concert. The people who had come in ahead of them were engaged in a flurry of crossing themselves.
Since the music, an unaccompanied doleful chanting, didn’t do much for Edward, he found his attention easily distracted during the first half of the concert by his surroundings and by the audience. On his left, Irina, for all her earlier scoffing at “depressing religious music”, sat apparently rapt. Beyond her, Great-Aunt Elena alternately fidgeted and drowsed. The rest of the church was filled to capacity with an audience which appeared to be entirely in their seventies and eighties. Looking idly around, Edward could see an unparalleled concentration of silver hair swept into pin-studded buns, pink bald pates and ludicrously old-fashioned hats. There was also an impressive concentration of serious furs, reducing the number of short, stout figures which could be fitted into each row of unevenly assembled benches and chairs, and adding to the predominant reek of incense a background blend of mothballs.
“Well?” Irina turned to him when, eventually, one of the heartbreaking chants ended in a disconcerting silence and, without any applause, people laboured to their feet to go and greet acquaintances. “Are you enjoying it?”
Edward hesitated. “Well, the music’s not really my idea of fun,” he admitted. “But it is interesting. And actually I think this whole place is rather interesting; I am glad I came.”
Irina considered the audience with what looked like bleak affection. “You should study this society while you still can,” she said to him solemnly. “We’re coming up to the middle of the nineteen eighties. By the middle of the nineteen nineties, this will be gone forever.”
Undeterred by its imminent extinction, the aged community was battling towards a room off the vestibule where refreshments were being served.
Irina asked Edward, “Are you hungry? D’you want something?”
He shook his head. He had, slightly sordidly, eaten two Big Macs before taking the Metro to Cource
lles. Eating Big Macs in Paris constituted a symbolic act of gastronomic rejection in which he still rather stubbornly took pleasure.
“Well, shall we go outside and breathe?” Irina suggested, “This incense gives me such a headache.”
Great-Aunt Elena had disappeared into a multitude of nodding black hats. Dismissing her disappearance with an airy wave, Irina led the way outside. She looked distracted, Edward thought, as they stood a little aimlessly in the dark courtyard. She played with the bracelet on her wrist and glanced at her watch.
“How long does the interval last?” Edward asked. “What time will the concert finish?”
Irina threw him a look of amused disdain. “It’s that bad, is it?”
“Why were you looking at your watch?” Edward retaliated.
“I was just hoping my friend had turned up,” Irina explained. “To keep an eye on Babushka.” She sighed heavily. “I don’t want to have to spend my afternoon off tomorrow unpacking her suitcases.”
Once again, Edward felt sorry for Irina, and slightly conscience-stricken. He was deeply glad that he had no one he needed to take into account. He asked, “Couldn’t you telephone?”
Irina shook her head, “They’re still pre-1917 here. I don’t think they have a public telephone. It doesn’t matter; I’ll try afterwards from Elena’s.”
On their way back in, Irina was stopped at least half a dozen times to say hello to people. From their gestures, stroking her on the cheek, patting her on the head, Edward concluded that most of these old characters must have known Irina since she was a child and still viewed her as one. When they reached their row, where Great-Aunt Elena was once more ensconced, talking animatedly to a new neighbour in ear muffs, Irina breathed a heavy sigh of relief. “Sometimes I think I should go and live in Australia,” she confided in a fierce whisper, “just to get away from them all.”
The second half of the concert frankly dragged. Although the stencilled programme notes explained that these chants were of a completely different origin, Edward couldn’t detect much difference. His attention freewheeled. He remembered Irina’s remark, “By the middle of the nineteen nineties, this will be gone forever,” and he wondered what it must feel like to be a historical curiosity. He wondered whether these sturdy old people in their furs even realised that they were a historical curiosity; meeting here only with their own kind, keeping up the language and customs of another country in another age, did the perceptions of the present day matter to them at all? He had entered a time warp. Subject only to the biological inevitability of ageing, the community was otherwise immune to change. He felt distinctly odd sitting in their midst, now he came to think about it; probably the only person who wasn’t in the least Russian in the whole church. What exactly was he doing there? Beside him, Irina was far away inside her enjoyment of the music; she belonged here. It wasn’t only her round face and the inherited ease with which she wore a fur coat. It was also a question of her nature. For all her flashy surface fashion, her coloured hair, the big brilliant green earrings she was sporting tonight, somewhere at her core it was still before the First World War. What worried Edward was that he hadn’t noticed where the time warp first began; it had begun at the front door of the Iskarovs’ flat.
Seeing Irina like this, in context, he felt much kindlier disposed towards her than at any time. Not only had she acquired here a convincing carat mark of Russianness, even some of her quirks made more sense; for example, her abrasiveness, which he now saw as the ferocious struggle of a fly to free itself from the gluey golden amber in which it was trapped.
What had the old people made of him when they came up to say hello? He sincerely hoped they were all too old and proper to have put two and two together and made five. It was true none of them had seemed to show much curiosity about his presence as Irina’s guest. But then, of course, he hadn’t understood a word they said.
He felt cheered to be on thoroughly foreign soil for the first time since he came to Paris. The happy exhilaration of discovery enveloped him as he looked around at the dark icons watching over the silver heads. As a guide to her unlikely kingdom, Irina could certainly create a diversion.
It wasn’t long before this transient optimism receded, washed away, doubtless, by the depressing music. It was pathetic to be reduced to feeling cheered because he had in a smelly church discovered a fossilised version of a country. He thought how totally ironic and back-to-front and sad it was that instead of travelling forwards into some dynamic and vibrant future, as he was meant to when he moved abroad, all Paris had been able to offer him was a journey sixty years backwards.
He greeted the end of the final chant with relief.
Irina scooped up her bag and gloves and said briskly, “Right, let’s be on our way,” as though to make up for the fact that she had visibly been moved by the music.
The goodbyes took a further ten or fifteen minutes and then they headed out onto the Boulevard de Courcelles again, pushing back towards Great-Aunt Elena’s apartment house into what had become a bitterly cold wind. Neither Irina nor Great-Aunt Elena seemed especially troubled by the wind and Edward couldn’t help admiring the way they kept up their conversation the length of the boulevard, shrieking their questions and answers at one another in the teeth of the wind. One of their exchanges caught Edward’s attention. Although it was in Russian, he could understand it was about food because the food words were all in French; quenelles de saumon, escalopes de dindon, pudding au riz. His apprehensions were confirmed when Irina leant across her great-aunt and called to him, “Are you hungry, Edouard? We’re going to eat at Elena’s.”
He began, “I didn’t realise –” but Irina shouted cheerily, “I can’t hear a word you’re saying.”
He tried again. “I didn’t realise we were going to eat. I’m afraid I had something to eat beforehand.”
Irina pouted. “You disappoint me yet again.”
Great-Aunt Elena interrupted. “What? What did he say?”
“He’s not hungry,” Irina shouted at her. “We’ll have to do something about that.”
Great-Aunt Elena turned to Edward, full of acute concern. “Not hungry? What’s the matter? Are you ill?”
Edward grinned sheepishly. “No, no, I’m fine. It’s just I had something beforehand.”
Great-Aunt Elena dismissed such a feeble pretext. “So what? You’ll have something afterwards as well. At your age, one can.”
With a dismal sensation of defeat, Edward realised he was not going to get out of this unexpected extension to the evening. What was more, he didn’t like the way, for the second time now, these tough Russian women had got the better of him with quantities of food and drink. He, who was renowned among his friends as a bottomless pit; by their Slav standards, he acknowledged he was a non-starter.
Perhaps feeling slightly sorry for him, Irina added, “Great-Aunt Elena’s gone to a lot of trouble. You mustn’t disappoint her.”
Before Edward could answer, Great-Aunt Elena squeezed his hand tightly. “He won’t. Will you, golubchik?”
It must have been half past eleven when they sat down to table. By one o’clock in the morning, Edward’s resentment had turned to admiration; Great-Aunt Elena was, by her own admission, eighty – “Eighty-one,” Irina mouthed behind her back – but she wasn’t flagging at all.
As soon as they entered the flat, Irina had gone to telephone home. Her friend had arrived, had talked the grandmother out of setting off for the Finland Station and was happy to stay there, watching the television, until Irina came home. Edward did wonder, briefly, what the nature of this friend (after all male) was, who was willing to do Irina such enormous favours and wait uncomplainingly until all hours for her to come home. He even wondered whether all his anxiety about Irina’s pursuit hadn’t been misplaced. Maybe that was just her manner; maybe she behaved that way, ravenously, to all men? He observed her with pity.
Her face, in the better light of Elena’s apartment, showed how tired she was; there were dar
k rings under her eyes and her complexion had a sallow tinge. When she returned from the telephone, having taken off her coat, her brilliant green earrings turned out to be accessories to a brilliant green top and skirt, whose lurid colour gave her, Edward found, a livid look. She plumped herself into an armchair and sighed, “Oich!”
“Hard day at the lycée?” Edward asked.
Irina shuddered. “Don’t mention the name. The very idea of it makes me depressed.”
“Ach, Irina, you exaggerate,” Great-Aunt Elena commented. She was busy at the side of the room putting out a daunting number of dishes onto an already densely set small table. “You have less than one week of term left and then all that Christmas holiday.”
“You don’t understand,” Irina retorted. It was obvious it was a disagreement they had had many times before.
Great-Aunt Elena appealed to Edward. “Tell me what you think. Don’t you think she’s lucky? She’s got a post in one of the best, the very best lycées in Paris. Her pupils are mostly nice girls, no trouble-makers. And yet she goes on as if it were a prison.”
“It is a prison,” Irina said through gritted teeth. “When are we going to eat? I’m starving.”
Great-Aunt Elena flung up her hands and then clapped them dismissively. The Russian exclamation which accompanied this sounded like someone incompletely bursting a paper bag. Then she bustled with busy dignity from the room.
Irina shut her eyes. Edward, observing her, remembered one of his friend Roland’s observations on women. Roland, who fancied himself as something of a connoisseur, had once said that a woman’s age showed most first thing in the morning. “Say you’ve had a fair bit to drink,” he had said. “And you end up in bed with someone of your own age or younger, you’ll both look about equally terrible in the morning. But say you’ve picked up some eager older woman who might have looked perfectly acceptable under the party lighting the night before. Well, you’ll probably wake up next to some absolutely awful old bag.”
The Steppes of Paris Page 10