The Steppes of Paris

by Harris, Helen

  Edward very much wanted to ask Great-Aunt Elena about her past. The amount of history she had lived through was bound to yield some stirring stories. But he hesitated. Would it mean good stories or would it mean trauma, stirred up trouble and a row?

  Finally, when Irina and Varvara Stepanovna had gone into another room where Irina was going to try on a dress Varvara Stepanovna had promised to alter for her, he raised the subject delicately. Great-Aunt Elena was threatening to embark on another interrogation, this time about where in the world the paper might one day send him, and that provided him with an easy transition.

  “You must have seen a fair bit of the world in your time?” he asked her.

  Great-Aunt Elena shook her head wistfully. “I haven’t seen the places I wanted,” she answered. “Only the ones I didn’t: Berlin, Geneva, New York, Nice. I haven’t seen the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China or the Taj Mahal.” She brightened somewhat. “Maybe I still will, though; they organise the most splendid trips for pensioners nowadays, you know. Although, I must say, I don’t like the idea of going somewhere with a whole group of senile old dears in a bus. I’d rather travel independently.” She gave another vigorous head shake. “It gets me so angry when Vera tries to set off with her suitcases to places that don’t even exist any more, when the world is so full of the most marvellous sights we’ve neither of us seen. If she would only concentrate more on those places, she’d have a much better grip on reality. I keep giving her books about China and about Egypt, but I don’t think she even opens them.”

  “What d’you mean?” Edward asked. “Places that don’t exist any more?”

  Great-Aunt Elena gave him a fond but faintly condescending smile.

  “Russia,” she said.

  “But Russia still exists,” he argued.

  She shook her head. “Unfortunately not.”

  For a moment, Edward felt himself floundering. “You’d better explain that one,” he said.

  Great-Aunt Elena was terse. “The Russia we knew no longer exists. It has been replaced by a country called the USSR; that is a completely different place.” But it was clear she didn’t want to dwell on this sorry state of affairs. “Tell me, Edward, where would you most wish to be sent next?”

  He had to insist. “Where in Russia did you live?”

  Her round face began implausibly to lengthen. “St Petersburg.”

  He wanted to say, “Tell me what it was like”, but he sensed he was pushing in a perilous direction. Instead, he asked, “How old were you when you left?”

  “Twenty-three,” Great-Aunt Elena answered.

  This was followed by a reflective pause, in the course of which a devastating thought came to Edward. Great-Aunt Elena had been three years younger than he was when she left Russia; to all intents and purposes, she had been his age. At that moment, her intended future had been sliced off. Her life had been in many respects halted. For here she was, eighty-something years old, still harking back to the time and the place before the amputation, and her whole being, everything about her, was still determined by that vanished world. He wondered whether anything comparable could conceivably happen to him, here and now, which would slice off his intended future the way hers had been sliced off, and result in his spending the rest of his life stopped short, in many respects, at the developmental stage he had reached now. It was such an appalling thought, he had to keep quiet to assimilate it.

  Great-Aunt Elena had apparently taken off in another direction during the pause.

  “I had a son,” she said.

  Edward flinched. The use of the past tense in this sentence moved him more than anything else he had encountered in his embryonic journalist’s career. “I had a son.” He didn’t think he had ever heard the sentence spoken in the past tense before.

  “I carried him out of Russia in my arms. He was only a baby, younger even than Irina’s mother. I hoped he was small enough to be spared; he wouldn’t remember anything, he would grow up in France or in Switzerland, wherever we ended up, and he would become a thorough citizen of that country, free of all our severances and dislocations. Maybe he would have; he was a stable boy. Although, look at Irina, one generation further on and still just as dislocated and confused. His name was Kiril. In France, it became Cyrille. And he was exceedingly French in a great many ways. We used to make fun of him. He was fussy about his clothes in a particularly French way; everything had to be just so. And he was especially fussy about his food, mon Dieu, a real gourmet. We used to joke whether he would open his own restaurant or go into haute couture. As it turned out, he decided to study law. Well, he was a serious person at heart. I remember how he used to set off to the rue d’Assas each morning, with his armful of books and his fresh cravat, and Borya and I would watch him go and marvel at this impeccable Frenchman we had created. Then the second war came and Kiril was such an impeccable Frenchman, he escaped to London to join De Gaulle. He was more of a Frenchman than many of his compatriots, I can tell you that. He was killed outside Amiens.”

  The lovingly preserved past of her living-room revealed itself as a memorial. Edward stared down at the carpet ahead of his feet, unable to come up with any worthwhile response. After a moment, he risked a sideways look at Great-Aunt Elena and saw her face had retreated behind a veil as it had on the night of the concert. For perhaps the first time, Edward had encountered an appropriate use for the adjective “tragic”.

  In that most unfrivolous of moments, Irina and Varvara Stepanovna bounced back in, Irina parading the dress which Varvara was altering for her. She gave a model’s pirouette for their benefit, only pausing for fractionally longer in front of Edward than in front of her great-aunt.

  “Aren’t I magnificent?” she pealed.

  Varvara watched, her podgy hands clasped and her lunar face tipped to one side. The dress was a red and black sheath, which enclosed Irina like a capsule. Just a few pounds more, Edward thought, and Irina would not be able to squeeze into it. But, for now, it moulded her contours alluringly with its red and black pattern. There was unmissable longing in Varvara Stepanovna’s eyes, and Edward found himself thinking briefly, between admiring Irina, how insensitive of her it was to set the poor fat lady to work on sewing a dress like that for her. It was a dress to go out and shine in, to seduce people and to be lingeringly unzipped. None of these things would ever happen, had maybe ever happened, to Varvara Stepanovna, and lurid vicarious imaginings of them were painted all over her face.

  There was a busy discussion of seams and hems and linings among the women, during which Edward walked over to the nearest bookcase and browsed along its length. He found that the books themselves were, as in Irina’s own flat, largely out of bounds since they were almost all in Russian. But along the top of the bookcase, he found rich pickings: family photographs in old silver frames, including one, in pride of place, of a young man posing on some academic steps, whom he took to be Kiril, and slightly shockingly among the dead faces, one unmistakably of Irina as a little girl. She had been an unequivocally stocky child, seated slightly pompously on a donkey in the Jardin du Luxembourg.

  It was, he thought, typical of Irina that she should succumb to jealousy of a bookcase. She dropped the discussion of her dress and bustled over to him.

  “Are you getting bored?” she asked. “Are we neglecting you? I think you and I should leave soon.”

  There were protests in the background from Elena and Varvara Stepanovna.

  “You’ve been here for barely an hour and a half!”

  “Why are you so keen to hurry away? Are we not entertaining enough?”

  “We’re going to see a film,” Irina told them. “The séance starts at six fifteen.”

  “Ah, what film?” asked Varvara, a glazed expression, which Edward only subsequently realised must be artistic appreciation, descending over her face.

  Irina told her a name.

  Like the little increasing speech bubbles in a strip cartoon, Edward saw himself thinking, ‘Well, huh, thank
you for letting me know; that’s the first I’ve heard of it.’

  When they were outside on the Boulevard de Courcelles again, Irina hugged him extravagantly.

  “Thank you, Edouard. You were wonderful.”

  “Meaning?” he asked, wrestling her jokingly away.

  “You behaved so well towards my impossible family. I know it can’t be anybody’s idea of a good way to spend Saturday afternoon, sitting discussing English domestic traditions with an eighty-one-year-old fusspot, but you behaved so beautifully to her. I was watching; I was touched.”

  Edward was about to tell her that he found her family perfectly amazing; that he was more than happy to spend the odd Saturday afternoon soaking up their eccentricity. But he didn’t; he realised in time that Irina would take it wrong. She would object to her near and dear ones serving, as she put it, as curious postage stamps for his stamp album and, more to the point, she might query what it was that had attracted him to her in the first place.

  The film she had mentioned was showing up and down the Champs-Elysées. It had Alain Delon and a strong love interest.

  “We don’t have to go and see it,” Irina said as they approached the cinema. But, once they were there, of course, it seemed too much trouble to seek out an alternative.

  Edward had his first opportunity to fondle Irina in the dark of a cinema, to hold hands and entangle across the upholstered arms of the seats. But, to his dismay, Irina strongly objected to this, and at his first encroaching hand in the dark – slipping matter-of-factly round her thigh – she gave a little shocked gasp of disapproval.

  “Mais enfin, Edouard, what are you doing?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” he whispered flippantly.

  Irina snorted. “But not here,” she scolded him. “Not in the cinema.”

  She sat very straight and stiff after that and stared fixedly at the cinema screen without acknowledging his presence for about twenty minutes. He sat beside her, feeling resentful, but at the same time, that being the unfair way with these things, a steadily increasing amount of desire.

  They came out of the cinema into a Paris evening tuning up. The queues for the next programme of the film were already penned behind their metal barriers the length of the pavement: smoking, chattering, flirting, putting on a self-conscious parade of Parisian attitudes. Edward and Irina strolled down towards the Rond Point des Champs-Elysées, discussing the little there had been to discuss in their film. On a traffic island, Irina impulsively seized him and treated him to an extensive kiss.

  “Why here?” Edward asked her afterwards, faintly irritated. “But not in the cinema?”

  Irina twined her arm through his as they continued strolling. “In the cinema, it’s dark and distasteful,” she explained. “And the contrast with the couple embracing on the screen is too dismal.”

  They had agreed to eat in the Marais. They went down into the Metro at Franklin D. Roosevelt and rattled their eight stops in near silence.

  Despite the proliferation of new restaurants in the Marais, the streets were quiet as they made their way to the one Irina had chosen. Edward had not made any serious suggestions when they were discussing it. He didn’t feel confident, even after four months’ residence, to submit his judgement to Irina’s Parisian scrutiny. So she had opted, after lengthy deliberations, for somewhere called the Soucoupe Musicale, just recently opened and apparently well recommended.

  As they spotted the lifesize waiter’s silhouette holding the menu outside it, Edward suddenly worried that Henry and Mai might be eating there; a well-recommended new restaurant right in their neighbourhood. He wondered, in a panic, how ever he could explain away the fact that he was out having dinner with Mademoiselle Iskarov, his landlady, on a Saturday night. It seemed fairly clear that he couldn’t. While Irina read the menu in the silhouette’s graciously outheld hand, he considered the problem; even though Irina had sworn him to secrecy vis-à-vis her elderly relatives, he could hardly ask the same of her as regards his colleagues. The sensibilities of working journalists were not those of well-bred eighty-year-old refugees, and the implication that he was embarrassed about her was unavoidable.

  “It looks fine,” Irina concluded. “They even have blinis.”

  Henry and Mai weren’t in the restaurant and they enjoyed a thoroughly relaxed dinner. As they were drawing out the last remains of their desserts, Edward summoned his courage and asked Irina, “Would you mind coming back with me to the rue Surcouf tonight?”

  Irina looked startled. “Why, Edouard?”

  He hesitated, drawing out a trail of chocolate cream into a long question mark across his plate. “Well, we wouldn’t need to worry about your grandmother hearing us. And, remember, I’ve got a double bed.”

  Irina looked distantly disgusted. “Babushka’s deaf,” she replied. “And besides I liked the two of us so close together in my single bed. We were like Hansel and Gretel.”

  One of Edward’s cartoon bubbles shot up, filled with expletives.

  “But, Irina,” he said beseechingly, “can’t you see it’s more comfortable for both of us if we have a bit more room?”

  Irina pouted. “It seems disappointingly soon for you to be concerned about things like that, Edouard. Anyway, I have to be there when Babushka gets up. I have to make her breakfast. D’you want me rushing back across Paris at crack of dawn?”

  “Well, I had to,” Edward answered roughly.

  Irina looked at him as if he were, he thought, a lesser form of insect life. “I know you are very young, Edouard,” she said with leaden dignity, “but please don’t be quite so uncouth. Just because I ask you to do something, it doesn’t mean you may automatically expect the same thing of me.”

  To Edward, who had grown up in times of notional equality, this statement was at first staggering. He was on the verge of answering back when he realised abruptly there was no point. Irina operated by different rules. If the truth were told, he found her pompous little airs and graces to a certain extent appealing. After partners who drably put up with almost any indignity, there was something rather, if shamefully, entertaining about a woman who expected and performed a pantomime.

  So they went back to the Cité Etienne Hubert. This time, they began to embrace in the lift and arrived at the fifth floor ready to proceed directly to Irina’s single bed. It was therefore especially frustrating that Irina should hiss, “Shush!” as she opened the front door, listen for a minute before whispering to Edward, “Babushka’s on the prowl” and tell him to wait outside on the landing until the coast was clear. He waited, fuming, for almost fifteen minutes. The peep hole in the door of the apartment opposite watched him with fishy humour. At last, Irina let him in, her finger to her lips, and led him in silence to her bedroom.

  The delay had, as it turned out, only heightened their impatience. There was none of the previous Saturday’s slow motion undressing. They toppled, grappling with one another’s clothing, onto the pastel bedcover and what eventually followed was one of the all time greats of Edward’s sexual career. Beneath him, he registered Irina coming twice in close succession and he himself forgot all thoughts of the prowling grandmother and bellowed his exultation like a ship’s funnel.

  In the quiet which came afterwards, he still lay on top of Irina, relishing the feel of her small, warm mountain range, simmering like a recently erupted volcano. His pleasure was barely touched by the slippers which this time did pass down the corridor, and by the thought that he had never intended to like Irina this much.

  The second time he spent the night with Irina, and the third, she did not throw him out in the early morning. Instead, she told him to stay secretly in bed while she made Babushka her breakfast and settled her for the day in her room. Then she would come back to him. He expected to sleep thankfully, lying across the warm space Irina had vacated. But it felt so extremely odd to be lying in bed in someone’s apartment, without their even knowing you were there, that for quite some time he didn’t go back to sleep. He listened for s
ounds of Irina and her grandmother moving about the apartment, but he couldn’t hear a thing. He wondered, slightly jealously, how Irina was able to sally out in her dressing-gown, as though nothing had happened, and sit quite calmly chatting to her grandmother, without giving away any sign of the action-packed night which had passed between them. Out there, it must be as though he didn’t exist. He lay feeling swallowed up by the large flat, a small object digested in one of the plural stomachs of a cow. Apart from Irina, no one in the world knew he was there. He drew the sheets over his head; he had disappeared. As he breathed in the remains of Irina’s perfume with short shallow breaths, it seemed to him the silence of the apartment had deepened. Had Irina taken her grandmother out for a Sunday morning stroll? She hadn’t come back in here to get dressed. But maybe she kept clothes somewhere else in the flat too? He folded the sheets down and strained to listen. In his own personal cul-de-sac, within the greater cul-de-sac, the silence was absolute.

  He had fallen sound asleep when Irina came back to bed. She pushed him gently over towards the wall and slid in again beside him. They lay for a while, drowsy, undecided between the relative merits of sleep and each other. But gradually Irina’s touch woke him and they rolled into an action replay, although this time it was unlike the volcanic activity of the night before. It was low key, slow and affectionate. Afterwards, they slept for the rest of the morning, curled in cramped but happily sweaty proximity.

  At lunchtime, Irina said he should shower and dress while she diverted her grandmother’s attention, and then “arrive” for lunch by tiptoeing out through the front hall and ringing the door bell. It was an uncomfortable meal. The grandmother spoke hardly at all, only to Irina and only in Russian. But her eyes flickered back and forth between them, suspecting, Edward was certain, all there was to suspect. In spite of this, he and Irina kept up a pretence of formality, passing one another dishes and saying pointedly, “S’il vous plaît” and “Merci.” It didn’t do anything to improve Edward’s appetite for what was a disappointing meal of meat rissoles and red cabbage.