The Steppes of Paris

by Harris, Helen

  He wondered whether Irina had been responsible for choosing those people too, and also, just quickly, about what naturally followed on from this question.

  “You are a perfect treasure, I can assure you,” Great-Aunt Elena went on, “compared to some of the tenants we’ve had.”

  “I heard about the American,” Edward volunteered.

  “American!” Great-Aunt Elena said dismissively. “But I bet she hasn’t told you about the Italian or the Hungarian or the Brazilian, has she?”

  “You had a Brazilian here?” Edward asked.

  “Yes, we did,” Great-Aunt Elena answered. “He worked for a bank with a most suspicious name, I remember: the Banco Espirito Santo e Commercial.” She repeated the name dubiously. “And I believe he was a fundamentally unprincipled man.”

  ‘This flat,’ thought Edward, ‘is becoming more and more of a liability all the time.’

  “The Italian was a decent person,” Great-Aunt Elena continued. “And then there’ve been a few others I never met, who were apparently perfectly all right. But the Hungarian!” She interrupted herself. “Tell your newspaper to keep you here for as long as they possibly can,” she said. “Really, you’re the most delightful tenant we’ve had since I don’t know when.”

  “I’m afraid it’s out of my hands,” Edward said.

  “And I know it’s not what you want anyway,” Great-Aunt Elena said hastily. “Well, that’s quite right; you should travel and see the world while you’re young.” She changed tack with the kind of French conversational manoeuvre which still always made Edward feel like clapping. “We must just make the most of you while we can. Will you come and have lunch with me next Sunday?”

  The feeling that this bizarre Russian family could one day get beyond a joke had been at the back of Edward’s mind all along, of course. He welcomed Irina’s relatives as an engaging diversion which could – who knew? – turn out to be professionally useful to him. But at that moment he sighted the day when they would cease to be the free gift which came with Irina, the joke in the cracker, the oddity in the gumball, and become the one thing he would flee from anywhere in the world: merely surrogate family ties and domesticity.

  He said, “Um, I’m not sure if I can make it.”

  “Sunday the thirty-first,” Great-Aunt Elena said encouragingly. “A week from today. Oh please, do come; it would give me such pleasure.”

  “I’ll just look in my diary, if you’ll excuse me,” Edward said, playing for time. He knew his diary gaped, utterly empty for weeks ahead, apart from the few single exclamation marks which were his jokey way of recording dates with Irina.

  The telephone receiver was still chirruping into empty space when he came back to it. Great-Aunt Elena didn’t seem to have realised he had walked away. She was holding forth with great vehemence about something or other into the blue.

  Mischievously, Edward picked up the receiver and listened for a moment without saying anything.

  “– worried at all because, really, she’s a wonderful girl, wonderful, it’s just her manner. People have, I am afraid, on occasion, misinterpreted her manner, but I know you won’t. You’re far too wise and intelligent to make such a primitive mistake. I was telling Vera only the other day: you have a wisdom beyond your years, I can sense it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Edward said. “But I had to leave the phone for a minute to get my diary. I think I missed the last thing that you said.”

  There was a confounded silence.

  “Which thing?” Great-Aunt Elena ventured.

  She sounded so uncharacteristically crestfallen, Edward answered hurriedly, “Oh, just that very last bit. Who was it you were talking about?”

  He heard her thwarted intake of breath, and then there was what seemed a deeper silence.

  At last she answered coyly, and enigmatically, so that Edward was left not knowing if his interpretation was anywhere near accurate, “I was telling you not to be afraid it would be a boring tête-à-tête with me. I’ve invited Irina too.”

  In the end, he said he could come. It seemed counterproductive not to and, besides, the alternative was just one more bleak Sunday spent watching some mediocre film at the cinema or with his feet up on Volodya’s footstool.

  Since he spent the night beforehand with Irina in the Cité Etienne Hubert, setting off for lunch with Great-Aunt Elena presented certain problems. For a start, it had been another highly energetic night and neither of them had the least inclination to get up and dressed, or to go out into the frozen greyness and put on a charade of distance. Irina had come back to bed after making Babushka her breakfast and woken him with such a frank request with her fingers that, instead of catching up on sleep, the remainder of the morning had gone the same way.

  Edward showered in their antediluvian bathroom, convinced that even Babushka must guess from the raucous plumbing that Irina wouldn’t take two showers. He dried himself on the unprepossessingly pink bath towel Irina had given him and took advantage of the privacy to have a snoop through the compromising contents of the bathroom cabinets. Their rows of little mucky bottles containing medicines and cosmetics were thoroughly off-putting. He wished he could be certain that all the really stomach-turning ones belonged to Babushka – the tonic for dandruff, the horrid little khaki pills for flatulence – but, frankly, it was hard to tell whose cupboard was whose. This unnerved him. The faint stirrings of revulsion he had felt when he imagined Irina the age of Varvara Stepanovna revived. He closed the doors of the last cupboard hastily on a glimpse of something unidentifiable made of yellowed latex and told himself firmly it was, of course, his own fault for having gone snooping and, also, that last cupboard must be Babushka’s.

  Leaving the flat was a ridiculous rigmarole. Irina went in to occupy Babushka while Edward sneaked out and he waited for her on the landing while she made her goodbyes and followed. But she seemed to take so long coming, and the situation struck him as so unnecessarily undignified, that he was tempted to fling the front door open – he had left it ajar so as not to make any noise closing it – and to yell in, “Come on, Irina!”

  “I’m quite sure your grandmother’s tumbled to the fact there’s something fishy going on,” he grumbled as they travelled down in the lift. “I can’t see why you insist on carrying on with this cloak-and-dagger stuff.”

  “She has no idea,” Irina said haughtily. “And please make sure she doesn’t get one.”

  “I don’t know what makes you so sure,” Edward said unpleasantly. “I can think of a hundred and one ways she could have found out.”

  “I think,” Irina answered sarcastically, “I know her a little better than you do.”

  The lift came to the ground floor with an unnerving mechanical settling and an exhausted sigh.

  “Well,” Edward finished belligerently, “I still think the whole thing is ridiculous.”

  Irina glared at him. “I’m not sure what you think is the crucial consideration, Edouard.”

  They added bad temper to their other accumulated problems of lack of sleep and muzzy heads, and travelled across to Great-Aunt Elena’s in a bleary, tousled-feeling trance.

  Her greeting was uncomfortably to the point. “Mon Dieu!” she exclaimed. “What a pair of washed-out-looking faces! You both look in need of a good lunch.”

  She had laid this on with evident forethought. “This time, you shall have rosbif,” she said triumphantly to Edward.

  When they were seated in the living-room, with aperitif glasses at their elbows, she lifted hers and declared proudly, “Cheers!”

  Irina lay back in her armchair and closed her eyes, looking rather green, Edward thought. He couldn’t tell if she was sulking or if the previous night had caught up with her. He was relieved when she picked up her glass and answered aggressively, “Na zdorovye.”

  Great-Aunt Elena determinedly repeated, “Cheers!” and then, with a wicked giggle, “Bottoms up!”

  Edward laughed. “I bet you didn’t learn that one from Miss Macph
erson.”

  “Indeed not,” replied Great-Aunt Elena. “I learnt that expression from a young fellow who was a business associate of our family’s in Russia. His name was Blenkinsop.”

  “Oh yes,” Edward said. “Irina’s mentioned him to me before.”

  Great-Aunt Elena and Irina exchanged a suspicious and a respondingly hostile glance.

  “Of course,” Great-Aunt Elena said, “Irina only knew him in later life, when he was well past his prime.”

  “Miss Macpherson was far too much of a prude to teach them anything fun,” Irina retaliated. “She only taught them nursery rhymes and silly songs.”

  “They weren’t silly songs,” Great-Aunt Elena answered sharply. “They were charming.”

  Unexpectedly she warbled:

  “Bobby Shaftoe’s gone to sea-ea,

  Silver buckles on his knee-ee,

  He’ll come back and marry me-ee,

  Bonny Bobby Shaftoe!”

  “Ah, ça suffit,” snapped Irina. She stood up rather abruptly. “I’m going to the bathroom if you’re going to start singing those maudlin melodies.”

  As she stamped past Edward, he was taken aback to see her chin was trembling, as if she were on the verge of tears.

  “I don’t know what gets into Irina sometimes,” Great-Aunt Elena commented. “She can be so moody and sharp. I think it must be the shortcomings of her life which distress her.”

  She misread Edward’s non-committal look, with which he tried to wipe any traces of responsibility or guilt from his face, as incomprehension.

  “She leads in many respects an unsatisfactory life, of course,” Great-Aunt Elena explained. “But, I keep telling her, she only makes it worse for herself, the way she behaves. People get the wrong idea about her. She’s a dear girl, a –”

  “Don’t,” Irina called out, reappearing unexpectedly quickly in the doorway. “Don’t poison his mind against me. I forbid you to.” Her voice was disturbingly strained and shrill.

  Great-Aunt Elena snorted. “Precisely the opposite of what I was doing,” she declared. “Precisely the opposite.”

  She stood up and bustled indignantly towards the door. “I shall serve you lunch, although you, Irina, don’t deserve it.”

  For a few moments, Edward and Irina stayed, not communicating with each other at all. Irina had slumped back deep into her armchair, her eyes shut and a profoundly miserable expression on her face.

  “Hey, cheer up,” Edward whispered to her. “It’s not that bad, surely.”

  Irina’s eyes opened and he saw they actually were glinting with tears.

  “It is,” she retorted. “And worse.”

  The cock-a-leekie soup and the rosbif seemed to restore the spirits of Irina and her great-aunt. They had rather the opposite effect on Edward. The heavy, bland food settled in his stomach like a leaden depression. He hadn’t come to Paris, he reflected, to experience this ersatz England. There was something profoundly dismal about watching these last survivors of a dead empire dotingly mimicking another empire in its death throes. Was it, in fact, some sort of unrecognised affinity which had brought him here, to eat rice pudding and to listen to “Bobby Shaftoe”? Did he have some fatal English fondness, which he had not till now noticed, for what was old and crumbling and passé? Rather than enjoying a private laugh at their expense, was the joke actually on him?

  Great-Aunt Elena’s little chipolata of a forefinger poked out and plucked him on the chin.

  “Why so glum, Edward?”

  He said hastily, “I’m not glum, am I? I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to be. Probably I was just concentrating on this lovely lunch.”

  He saw Irina raise one finely shaped eyebrow.

  “Mais enfin,” Great-Aunt Elena exclaimed, “what’s got into the two of you today? You didn’t at all have the look of someone quietly enjoying his lunch, you know, Edward. You looked as if you were plunged in gloom. What’s the matter?”

  “I can’t speak for Irina,” Edward said. “But I’m really not feeling down at all. Maybe eating this sort of food reminded me of England, that’s all.”

  “And that made you feel sad?” Great-Aunt Elena asked. “Why? Surely you aren’t homesick?”

  Irina gave a harsh laugh. “Homesick? Edouard? Haven’t you realised he’s longing to get as far away as possible from England, from Europe, from all of us? He wants to go to the jungle and find himself a girlfriend who wears flowers behind her ear.”

  “And quite right and proper at his age too,” Great-Aunt Elena reproved her. She turned to Edward. “Visit the jungle while you can,” she instructed him. “At my age it’s too late.” As an after-thought, she added, “Send me postcards.”

  “Postcards?” Irina scoffed. “From the jungle? You amaze me with your never-ending wanderlust, you know, Elena. One would have thought that after all the migrations you’ve been through in your time, you’d finally be quite glad to stay put in one place. You’re really no better than Babushka with her perpetual suitcases.”

  Great-Aunt Elena drew a very deep and, Edward felt, menacing breath.

  “Well, I think it’s tremendous,” he chipped in.

  Great-Aunt Elena, far and away the shortest person at the lunch table, managed to look down on Irina with a regal glare. “I am astonished that you, Irina, of all people, should dream of comparing opposites. What do you suppose our travelling had in common with Edward’s? How can you make such a frivolous comparison between forced, joyless displacements and gadding about?” She turned graciously to Edward. “I do not wish to make light of what you do, Edward, but it is a game, isn’t it?” She rounded on Irina. “If you cannot perceive the difference between Edward, who propels himself around the world, notebook in hand, and we, who were propelled, then, milaya moya, really I do not know what the last thirty years have been in aid of.”

  “Oh, I’m sick and tired of this litany,” Irina burst out. She dropped her knife and fork in disgust. “Tell me, how many times have I had to sit through the recital of the sufferings of the Iskarov family from A to Z? Since I was a child, year in, year out; never let little Irina forget how much we all suffered so that she could have her donkey rides in the Jardin du Luxembourg and get the bean on the Fête des Rois. Well, little Irina had enough! She didn’t see why she should carry the burden of all that inherited suffering into the next generation: inherited complexes, inherited disorientation, inherited weather! Little Irina decided a long time ago she was going to have a good time. So there’s no point going into it all over again, for Edouard’s benefit, thank you very much. Let’s just let the matter drop.”

  There was a short, very sultry silence. Edward wished himself anywhere but in the midst of this family confrontation.

  “I’m quite sure the distinction is clear to you, Edward,” Great-Aunt Elena continued provocatively. “For your generation, travel is just a ride on a fairground carousel or a Ferris wheel; you know, barring a disaster, you’ll come safely back to the place you set out from and you can sit back and enjoy the sensations of the voyage. You don’t need to worry that the station you started out from won’t be there any more when you get back.”

  “You can tell her when you’ve had enough, you know,” Irina interrupted rudely.

  “I think it’s extremely interesting,” Edward answered defiantly.

  For a moment, he and Irina faced one another, all their extensive differences exposed.

  “For us, of course, it was another matter entirely,” Great-Aunt Elena went on. “Only a very few people were fortunate enough in those days to sample exotic travel: the jungle or the Himalayas. For most people, travel was something that was forced on you quite against your will. It came, frankly, in the category of natural disasters; like an earthquake or a hurricane. It uprooted you, blew you in a turmoil halfway across the world and then dropped you down quite arbitrarily somewhere you hadn’t chosen at all, and you had to make a go of it as best you could. Travel meant essentially loss, not the acquisition of colourful experiences an
d mementoes. It meant the loss of people, of places, of ridiculous irreplaceable things like smells and sounds and colours. And the loss was absolute, irrevocable; those things weren’t just mislaid or temporarily out of reach, you understand. They were gone for good.” She hurried herself a little, as if she realised that Irina’s forbearance would only last so long. “Considering what a catastrophe it was, it is remarkable how quietly, how unnoticeably it began. The day of a disaster, and I suppose the day of your death, dawns just like any other, you know. Yes, the day on which your life is totally changed or utterly ruined begins with a perfectly unremarkable banality. Afterwards, looking back at that day, at the events which preceded the catastrophe, it is their very banality, their failure to foreshadow what followed, which astonishes you. You remember, not waking up and knowing that today the chain of events would start which will end in you and your family fleeing your native land, taking with you only what you can carry. No, you remember waking up and feeling pleased because you have a new blouse to wear. You remember very clearly the colour and the feel of that new blouse because it was the last new garment you had for a long, long time. You remember lying in bed in the early morning and listening to the familiar noise outside of the ice floes splitting and creaking as they float down the river. You have lain in bed in the morning and listened to that same strange noise every spring. It is just one of the familiar seasonal phenomena of your youth. But you will remember this ordinary, annual phenomenon with such clarity, such intensity, because you will never hear it again.”

  “Bravo!” Irina said tartly. “Now, if the show is over, perhaps we can go on to the cheese?”

  “Why are you being so vile to her?” Edward whispered when Great-Aunt Elena had left the room, maintaining a dignified silence.

  Irina heaved a giant sigh. “Please, Edouard, don’t take sides in a battle you don’t understand.”

  “Oh, come off it,” said Edward. “I don’t need to understand anything to see you’re giving her a hard time. I think you’re being unbelievably mean.”