The Steppes of Paris

by Harris, Helen

  When they had eaten, Irina wanted to go out for a walk but it had started raining heavily. Despite her energetic efforts, Irina could not persuade her grandmother to go back to her room for her usual after-lunch nap. Instead the grandmother stayed sitting bolt upright in the living-room, not participating in Irina’s and Edward’s severely stilted conversation, but presumably monitoring it for indiscreet nuances.

  Edward took the coward’s option. “I have to push off now,” he said to Irina. “Please do excuse my staying such a short time.”

  Irina’s forlorn grin hid her obvious disappointment.

  “When are we going to see each other again?” she whispered at the front door.

  “Soon,” Edward promised her, but he escaped with one-hundred-per-cent relief into the dark-grey wintry afternoon.

  He had been greatly looking forward to getting back to his sanctuary in the rue Surcouf, but when he let himself in, it struck him that the flat was perceptibly changing its character. The more involved he became with Irina, and the more she told him about her catastrophic family, the less this place was his and the more it belonged to her Uncle Volodya. The three inter-connecting rooms, which he had appropriated with such pleasure in October, were being taken over again by somebody else. Their previous owner, slowly through Irina acquiring a face and a history and habits, was reinstating his claim. It struck Edward especially forcefully that Sunday afternoon; he was coming back to someone else’s home.

  Dyadya Volodya was Irina’s mother’s elder brother. There had been another brother too, Igor, but his whereabouts were unclear. Edward seemed to remember Irina mentioning he had gone to live in Brazil, but frankly the number of family members the Iskarovs seemed to have misplaced was such, he really couldn’t be certain. In the absence of Irina’s own errant father, Volodya had taken over the paternal role in her upbringing. As long as his marriage to the awful Aunty Ada had lasted, it sounded as though the relationship had never gone much beyond big birthday presents and trips to the Jardin des Plantes, sitting on her favourite uncle’s lap and extorting franc pieces from his pockets. Volodya had been a big, genial, meatily male presence in small Irina’s otherwise lopsidedly female life. But with the disappearance of his hindrant wife, it seemed Volodya, who must have been particularly keen for female company himself at that time, had begun to play a far greater part in Irina’s life. This change had coincided with Irina’s teenage years and must, Edward thought, be responsible for her predilection for older men à la Mr Blenkinsop. Until he himself had come on the scene, that was, and here he came up against the most awkward aspect of the whole situation. He was living in Volodya’s flat; but was he also stepping into Volodya’s shoes? He had wondered at the time whether Irina’s reluctance to come and spend the night with him in the rue Surcouf concealed anything more than material reasons. Did she feel uncomfortable about misbehaving with Edward in a flat which was so reminiscent of Volodya? Could she not face the thought of sleeping with Edward in Volodya’s bed? At this point in his suppositions, Edward stopped every time. He had no reason at all to imagine that Volodya had been anything more than Irina’s favourite uncle. So why did his mind keep coming back to the idea in this sick, obsessive way? He might as well admit why: he was concerned that it wasn’t him at all that Irina was having an affair with, but the inhabitant of Volodya’s flat.

  Edward made himself a cup of coffee and put on a cassette. Volodya’s presence was actually strongest, not as you might have expected in his bedroom, but in the living-room. Edward sat and listened to Bob Dylan and to the winter rain lashing down. He wondered whether the not unpleasant melancholy he felt might be characteristically Russian. As soon as it was permissibly late, he went to the kitchen to open a bottle of Nicolas plonk. There was a picture over the kitchen table which he had stared at vacantly often enough, but which he only now really took in. Who had chosen that picture? It was an oldish engraving, Edward didn’t know much about these things; maybe salvaged from Volodya’s antiques business which had never taken off. It was of a couple; a young woman in a long flouncy dress sitting in a swing. Her face, turned flirtatiously up towards a portly man standing watching over her, half-hidden by some shrubbery, bore an unmistakable resemblance to Irina. Edward wished he hadn’t noticed. She was doubtless going to swing over his breakfast every morning from now on. He took the bottle and his glass and went back into the living-room. He only hoped it wasn’t going to be the first of a string of similar discoveries; the walls and furniture of the flat shedding their surface appearance week after week to show him who was really who.

  He imagined that it was Volodya Iskarov, instead of himself, sitting in the prime armchair, with his feet up on the battered footstool. It was of course Volodya Iskarov’s feet which had created the twin depressions in the cracked green leather where his own now rested. Edward looked warily around the rest of the room. As on the day, a fortnight ago, when he had found Irina’s food in the kitchen, he searched for clues which might reveal Volodya. He sensed somehow that many of the things in the flat were gifts from women. Although Volodya had ultimately been unlucky with women, he seemed to have always had plenty of them on tap. The clock perhaps, with its over-loud, fussy tick, that seemed to be more of a woman’s choice than a man’s. Or the profusion of cushions, which Edward had always had difficulty with; surely they had been scattered by the hand of an Iskarov female. It was, of course, impossible to tell what had been in the flat beforehand, when Volodya had lived there, and what had been added since by Irina for her tenants. But the durable, old-fashioned ring holders on the bathroom wall for a shaving-brush and a mug, they undoubtedly dated from Volodya, and in the bedroom the incontrovertible evidence was the bed. For there was no way Irina would have gone to the expense of buying a new bed for her tenants. The broad, dark, wooden bed had also housed Volodya.

  In the course of the evening, Edward had dinner, in the form of a number of successive forays to the fridge. He twiddled the television dial and drank considerably more than he had intended of his plonk.

  Fairly late that night, the telephone rang. Irina’s voice said, “Edouard, darling, I am miserable without you.”

  More churlishly than he meant to, Edward told her, “It’s the weather.”

  “Don’t be like that,” Irina said. “This is genuine; I miss you.”

  “I enjoyed being with you too,” Edward answered, he was aware, lamely.

  “What are you doing now?” Irina asked.

  He said, “Getting pissed.”

  Irina tutted. “Drinking alone?” Then she added triumphantly, “You see, you do miss me too, Edouard.”

  Her logic escaping him, he changed the subject. “What have you been doing with yourself today?”

  He was rewarded by a full-scale sigh. “Trying to drum some sense into Babushka. Making afternoon tea and then supper for Babushka. Putting Babushka to bed. I tell you, Edouard, it’s just as well her state is not infectious. I’d be raving mad by now.” And then, with no apparent connection, she asked him, “Are you doing anything on Wednesday evening?”

  Across his hesitation, she went on, “I’d like my friend Lyova to meet you. You remember, the one who came to be with Babushka that time, who works in a bookshop? I’m going to visit him in the shop on Wednesday after school and I thought you could come with me.”

  The ominous advances which this represented, seeing Irina at a time other than on Saturday night and presumably for a purpose other than on Saturday night, and being presented to one of her friends, were sufficient to make Edward hesitate even longer. The cons quite definitely outweighed the pros, so the only explanation he could think of for the fact that, after a moment or two, he accepted was Lyova’s Russian name. It was a day or two, in fact Wednesday, before the remainder of the explanation occurred to him; natural curiosity about this other man in Irina’s life, combined with the far-fetched idea that setting eyes on Lyova might somehow illuminate Volodya.

  Irina had given him the address, Number Eleven, rue
de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, and said they should meet directly at the bookshop, “rather than one or other of us having to wait at the Metro in this cold”. As things turned out, Edward was for once delayed in leaving the paper – an important telex was coming in from Yaoundé – and it was a good quarter of an hour after their arranged meeting time that he emerged from the nearest Metro station. It was one of his favourite names, Maubert-Mutualité, and he savoured it on the station signs before trying to identify the probable direction of the rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. It took him a while longer to find it – it wasn’t a neighbourhood he went to often – and so by the time he actually arrived at the bookshop and opened the door, setting off a quavering bell, Irina and her friend were long cosily installed drinking tea at a table at the back of the shop, looking a contentedly domesticated couple.

  But Irina jumped up gratifyingly quickly when he came in and hurried forward to greet him. There were only two or three customers left in the shop, which was about to close, and none of them appeared to pay the slightest attention when in the middle of the shop Irina gave Edward a quick but audible kiss. They were all elderly characters, muffled so elaborately in woollen scarves and fur hats that perhaps they simply didn’t hear. They were reading with absorption, apparently from cover to cover.

  Irina led Edward, holding his hand, to meet Lyova. He admitted that his first emotion was hostility, for Lyova, rising lazily to his feet to shake hands, looked down on him with scarcely concealed entertained surprise. He was a big man, who extended one spade-like hand and muttered a gruff, “Enchanté” before disappearing into the back of the shop to bring Edward some tea.

  Irina squeezed Edward’s knee under the table but he shook her off; he did not want consoling. He did feel slightly less aggressive when Lyova came back with his glass of tea and sat down opposite him for, seated, the disparity in their heights at least was gone. But Lyova still possessed a number of irritating advantages. In the first place, he looked like a hero; his was the face you saw in newspaper pictures of dissidents, refuseniks, unbreakable men coming out of years in camps. He had a jutting jaw and a long Pinnochio nose, stern brown eyes which conveyed the impression they had daily witnessed scenes not entered in your English schoolboy’s catalogue of horrors. He also had, which would have been an affectation on almost anybody else, collar-length hair and what Edward thought of as a Russian peasant smock, a dark woollen affair, buttoned down one side and held in by a mammoth belt. The last straw was he smoked; a potent, foul-smelling Cyrillic brand.

  The only option open to Edward was to take the offensive. “What is this place?” he asked.

  It sounded like a poor joke when they answered simultaneously, “The YMCA.” The shop was a dimly lit barn. Hanging neon strips overhead shed insufficient light across the lino floor and the crammed shelves of plainly bound books. The air smelt of cheap paper and cheaply bound books. Even when there was no one smoking in the shop, you knew there would be a nostalgic whiff of foreign cigarette smoke. It was a place for futile governments in exile and revolutionary plots doomed to extinction.

  “Come off it,” Edward said.

  Lyova laughed. “Not your YMCA,” he said. He told Edward about the press which published the works of Russian dissident writers and, wryly, he pointed out the Russian emblems around the room: the heavily gilded orthodox calendars, the photographs of wooden huts in the snow.

  “You have entered the realm of retrospection,” he explained in thickly accented French. “You see these dear old people browsing? Never, incidentally, do they buy a book. They are like the statue turned to salt, forever looking backwards. They have been here in France, Edouard, for fifty or sixty years, but you should hear the way they speak French; they speak as if they arrived here yesterday. I, who did arrive yesterday, speak better than they do.”

  “You didn’t arrive yesterday,” Irina contradicted him.

  “Seven years?” objected Lyova. “Seven years is yesterday, especially in terms of fifty or sixty years’ residence. They make me weep, you know. They are so hopelessly nostalgic. They have no word for ‘tomorrow’ in their vocabulary; only ‘yesterday’.”

  “How long have you worked here?” Edward asked.

  Irina interjected, “Lyova’s an artist. He only works here sometimes.”

  Lyova grimaced. “An artist,” he repeated with affected horror at the pretentiousness of the term. “And you, I understand, are a journalist?” With which he bestowed on Edward a frankly disdainful smile.

  “That’s right,” Edward answered hotly. He wasn’t sure if Lyova’s disdain was directed at his profession or at the notion that someone so young and inexperienced could be a journalist. Either way, Edward’s indignation was roused.

  But Lyova wouldn’t gratify him with the wherewithal to have an argument. He just nodded, smiling infuriatingly, and contemplated a highly entertaining middle distance.

  Edward knew his rejoinder, “What’s funny about that?” sounded squeaky and childish. He regretted it as soon as it was out of his mouth, especially when Lyova answered ironically, “Nothing funny at all, I assure you. It is a noble calling.” He stood up a little abruptly. “Please excuse me. It is time for me to close this circus.”

  He went to the front of the shop, clapping his hands and calling out in Russian to his elderly customers. Gradually, over several minutes, he chivvied them, protesting and apparently querying the accuracy of Lyova’s watch, out of the shop, turned the “Open” sign over to “Closed” and switched off some of the lights.

  While he was doing this, Irina again tried to take Edward’s hand, but he withdrew it bad-temperedly. What had been the point of bringing him here, just to be made fun of?

  “Are we going to have a drink together?” Lyova asked when he returned.

  “Why not?” Irina exclaimed brightly. “What time are you expected back?”

  Lyova ran a harassed hand through his hair. “Anna’s at one of her classes tonight,” he said gloomily. “The kids are with my sister-in-law. I should pick them up before eight, I guess.”

  This revelation came as a heaven-sent bounty to Edward. So Lyova, his taller, bigger, braver, better rival for Irina’s affections, Lyova who he was now quite convinced must remind Irina of Volodya, Lyova was married to someone else! Just briefly, he reproved himself for his immaturity in not having thought of this option. It did, of course, explain everything: the equivocal nature of the friendship and the way Lyova was sometimes on the scene and sometimes inexplicably not. Edward found it in himself to feel sorry for Lyova; no wonder he felt provoked to savage Edward. He must be eaten up with envy, poor bugger. For the fact was Lyova must at some stage have been Irina’s lover, but he wasn’t a free agent, shackled with a wife and puling kids to boot. He wasn’t a free agent but Edward gloriously was.

  “Sure,” Edward agreed magnanimously. “Let’s have a drink.”

  When Lyova had left reluctantly early, managing, Edward observed with disgust, to look vaguely dashing even in such unpromising circumstances, going off with the collar of his leather jacket turned up against the drizzle to collect his two little girls, Edward turned on Irina and asked, “What was all that in aid of?”

  “What d’you mean?” she asked. “And why have you been so unpleasant this evening? Didn’t you like Lyova?”

  Edward gave a sour laugh. “I’m sure he’s a fine, upstanding chap. What’s the score between you two?”

  “Edouard!” Irina exclaimed indignantly. “I’ve told you before, I will not have these sporting expressions. Lyova is my best friend.”

  Edward scoffed. “A likely story.”

  Unexpectedly, Irina did not erupt. She shook her head glumly.

  They sat in sulky silence for a while and then Irina explained, “I wanted Lyova to see what you were like. It’s hard not being able to talk about you to anybody.”

  “You must let me hear his verdict,” Edward answered nastily.

  Irina sighed. “It’s really not what you th
ink, Edouard. Lyova and I are allies, that’s all; I complain to him about my terrible family and he complains to me about his, that’s all.”

  “You’re not going to convince me that’s always been all there is to it,” Edward said.

  Irina drew herself up. “I’m talking about the present, Edouard,” she told him. “Not the past.”

  Lyova as old boyfriend, which was the category Edward consequently filed him under, was a lot less problematical than Lyova as an ongoing proposition. Edward relented a little while they ate a quick dinner – Irina had to be home early too – and he asked her in an offhand way, “So how often do you see each other, then? And what does his wife have to say about it?”

  Irina’s reply was not at all reassuring. She snapped, “Anna has no right to reproach anybody for anything, I can assure you.”

  Edward let the subject drop and called for the bill. He decided that, even if Irina offered, he would not go back with her that night to the Cité Etienne Hubert. It seemed an undesirable admission of dependency to start to spend nights with her during the working week. And he didn’t like the smug smile which his earlier display of jealousy had left on Irina’s face.

  Great-Aunt Elena telephoned him the following Sunday to invite him to lunch.

  “Oich!” she exclaimed, even before she had told him why it was she was ringing or gone through the elaborate Parisian hello-how-are-you formula. “It has such an effect on me, dialling Volodya’s number, you can’t imagine!”

  “I’m sorry it’s only me on the other end,” Edward said a bit lamely. Straight away, he wasn’t sure if the crack was in good taste.

  Great-Aunt Elena made the exclamatory noise he had previously compared to the partial bursting of a paper bag. “Ach, Edward,” she said. “I’d much rather you than some of the people we’ve had in there in the intervening years.”