The Steppes of Paris

by Harris, Helen

  “Only because we’re not speaking French,” Great-Aunt Elena answered. “Excuse me, Edward. We were discussing yet again Vera’s infuriating idée fixe.”

  Edward heard Irina give an ominously gusty sigh so he just gave a non-committal, “Uh-huh?”

  “Maybe,” Elena continued provocatively, “maybe I should explain to Edward the basis of this idée fixe?”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t,” snapped Irina.

  Ignoring her niece, Elena turned to Edward. “I think you ought to know about this, Edward. It may help you to understand the world.

  “The meanings of certain words have changed this century. We have talked about travel. Also teaching. The meaning of the word ‘lost’ has changed too. For people of your age, and also Irina’s, ‘lost’ is no longer such a serious word as it used to be. You lose handkerchiefs, all right, wallets, luggage on aeroplane journeys. But, for you, ‘lost’ isn’t such a terrible thing any more. It contains the possibility of ‘found again’, doesn’t it? Your world today is equipped with a perpetual lost property office; the police return your wallet, the airlines retrieve your suitcase from the ends of the earth. Nothing is really gone for good any more. If your child-bearing abilities are lost, they provide you with someone else’s. If your heart loses its power to pump, they give you a new one. Everything can be replaced. If your marriage fails, you simply pick another partner. For us, things were very different.”

  He heard Irina sigh, “Ah-la-la,” and saw the toe of her boot impatiently scuff at the gravel.

  “For us,” Great-Aunt Elena continued, “‘lost’ meant precisely that; no possibility of ‘found again’. You lose your handkerchiefs and your wallets and your luggage. We lost each other. You cannot imagine today how total that loss was; how total and how permanent. All right, there were the stories of miracles; forty years later in Sao Paulo, in New York. But they were exactly that: miracles. For most people, there came a revolution, a war, another war, dispersal half way round the world, and the people you had left behind were lost forever. You couldn’t go back to look for them and even if you could have, you wouldn’t be able to find them, because they would have moved somewhere else too and changed their names, their occupations, their appearances. Well, losing playmates, servants, familiar faces from your childhood; that’s sad, but you can live perfectly well without them. In fact, maybe, I have sometimes thought, looking on the positive side, in some cases you were spared a deterioration by losing them in their youth; you never had to see them grow old and fat and ill-humoured. But losing a sister; that you never recover from.”

  “She wasn’t a sister,” Irina interrupted. “Tell the truth if you’re going to.”

  Elena scowled at Irina. “In spite of what Irina says,” she went on, “the person in question was a sister; not by birth, but in every other respect a sister, and I think it must be a sign of some emotional insufficiency in Irina that she can’t recognise that two people may perfectly well be sisters even though they were born of different mothers. This sister grew up with us from an early age, she shared our lessons with Miss Macpherson. She was as close to Vera as I was. In fact, because they were the same age and I was the baby, seven years younger, in many respects they were closer. Sophia Solomonovna was the daughter of our family doctor. Her mother had died when she was a baby and our mother always took a great interest in her upbringing. When her father, who was a very active political man, a social reformer, was sent to prison, Sophia Solomonovna came to live with us. His sentence was so severe and he was sent so far away that, as the years went by, Sophia Solomonovna became part of our family. At least we thought so. But when the Revolution came, and we had to leave, Sophia Solomonovna chose to stay. Naturally, she could hardly leave her father, even if he was hundreds of miles away in Siberia. And she imagined she saw a future for herself under the new order. Lots of the Jews did. So we lost her.

  “Of course, it affected all of us profoundly. But if you break your leg, you don’t feel so acutely the chilblain on your foot. In the agony of the greater loss, the pain of the lesser one is masked. I know Vera never stopped thinking of Sophia Solomonovna, wondering what might have happened to her. She wrote to her for years, but of course the letters were never answered. At every calamity in her life, the loss of her husband, the premature death of her son Volodya, I know she thought of Sophia Solomonovna and imagined what life might be inflicting on her. Well, this became a very bad habit. Vera has always had trouble keeping her narrative tendency in check. In time, the life she imagined for Sophia Solomonovna came to seem quite real and convincing to her. Whereas, of course, the chances of Sophia Solomonovna even being alive any more must be minute. She has had so many chances to die: the purges, the Nazis, the war, not to mention natural, God-given sickness and old age. She could be dead a hundred times over. But Vera has got it into her head that she is still somehow miraculously living in St Petersburg, like your Dorian Gray, with not a white hair on her head, and she will keep packing her bags to set off to their reunion.”

  Edward left for Marseilles with unalleviated relief. The complication of Irina had been oppressing him all week. He wondered how he could have been stupid enough to make such an elementary mistake; on the verge of a career of single, unfettered travelling, unintentionally to form a tie. Certainly, the walk in the Pare Monceau had been a prelude to a particularly splendid night at the Cité Etienne Hubert. As if provoked by the onslaught of family misery to assert her independent pursuit of happiness regardless, Irina had been at her most unbridled. They must undoubtedly have alerted the grandmother, he thought, in the last few exquisite seconds before sleep; their performance had been tumultuous. But when he told Irina on Sunday morning that he was going back to the rue Surcouf to read up on the National Front, she had virtually thrown a tantrum.

  “We have so little time left together,” she had raged. “And you want to spend it reading.”

  “Yes,” Edward had answered stubbornly. “I do.”

  And he had gone back to the rue Surcouf through the chilly grey silence of a Sunday morning, leaving Irina glowering after him from her front door, a tableau of outraged offence.

  Again, he didn’t ring her all week and when she rang him (three times) he fobbed her off with patently fabricated excuses about pressure of work and preparations for Marseilles. Still, since he was leaving first thing on Sunday morning, he saw no harm in seeing her on Saturday night. But their evening was overshadowed by his departure and nothing went as well as before.

  He promised Irina a present before telling her that he would, in the end, be adding a few days’ holiday to his week. As deliberate policy, he didn’t specify on which day of the next week but one he would come back, pretending dishonestly that he hadn’t yet made up his mind. He couldn’t help detecting a trace element of guilt as Irina nevertheless swamped him in a long, thorough and highly effective goodbye embrace.

  He expected to enjoy Marseilles, of course, but he was unprepared for the euphoria which came over him when, having dumped his bag at the once grand old hotel off the Canebière which Henry had recommended, he set out to discover the city on his first evening. He felt liberated. For a start, it was a good ten degrees warmer than in Paris and at six o’clock in the evening still not yet dark. The streets, busy with the home-going evening rush hour, lay unexplored ahead of him. Best of all, he was on his own. He had worked out from his map up in his hotel room which was the direction to head in, towards the Vieux Port. But he had left the map behind; if there was one thing he couldn’t bear it was to be seen consulting a map in the street, a blatant advertisement of helplessness. As he started out, he relished the sensation of casting himself adrift into the evening, peopled, he realised within the first few blocks, by a largely Arab population. He had read about this, of course; he had done his research. But the visible evidence of finding himself walking among short men in skullcaps, sunburnt men with handlebar moustaches, and hearing every few yards incomprehensible Arabic instead of French still excited
him. There were little stalls like a souk in one of the streets he passed through and merchandise and haggling scenes and strong food smells, all of which vividly evoked North Africa, not that Edward had ever been there. He had obviously walked straight into one of the districts he had read about, where the influx of an immigrant population was being used to fuel the vicious backlash Henry wanted to write about. But instead of eyeing the scene professionally and memorising useful detail, he let himself aimlessly enjoy it and went on walking in his heady euphoria. He felt he had travelled much further than Marseilles; yes, that he was somewhere in North Africa or Arabia, and his real career had at last begun.

  He stopped to have a pre-dinner drink or two on a café terrace in the vicinity of the Vieux Port. In his mood of indulgent bonhomie, he had bought a couple of postcards to send to people and as he sat enjoying his first drink and the new view, he decided generously to send one of them to Irina. There she was, stuck up there in that icebound winter, and he was so free. She would still be stuck up there when he left for good and he felt sincerely sorry for her.

  “Dear Irina,” he wrote. “Arrived without any problem in Marseilles. The place has elements of 1001 Nights. But never fear; nothing to rival Parisian nights so far. Love Edward.”

  Then he felt annoyed because he realised that, having written that, he would need to send the card in an envelope and he didn’t have one with him. He put the card in one of his jacket pockets and decided he would only post it if he happened coincidentally to come across an envelope.

  Because he was on expenses, he had an especially good dinner and, afterwards, for all his bravado about not needing a map, no longer quite sure of his bearings, he took a taxi back to the hotel.

  He dreamt that night that he was in a shop on the Boulevard des Capucines, not far from the paper. It was a shop which he had always found rather depressing previously, a big dark emporium which went by the preposterous name of “Old England”. But, in his dream, he was thrilled to be in there because he was kitting himself out for the tropics. He was buying, ridiculously, a solar topee and a mosquito net, khaki shorts and bush shirts. He half-woke at this point in the dream, troubled by his overloaded digestion, but he made himself continue the dream when he got back to sleep. In this second part, he was already travelling and, dressed in his shorts and bush shirt, he was cutting a fine figure as he reported to the television news in front of a landscape of desert sands and palm trees.

  Despite his reluctance to confront the shortcomings of his life there once again, and despite the drop in temperature, Edward did feel certain positive anticipations on returning to Paris. He had a fat file of material and contacts to give to Henry; diligent, intelligent, impressive. And he did look forward to springing the happy surprise of his return on Irina; telling her all his various adventures and delighting her with her present.

  No one had been in his flat while he was away this time, distributing edible gifts all around the kitchen. There was a modest pile of mail untouched on the doormat, with a particularly outrageous card from Roland uppermost. Reading it standing in the hall, still with his coat on, Edward received an unwelcome surprise. Roland wrote, cryptically, that he had been trying to reach Eddy on the phone for days but not having any luck – what the fuck was he up to? – he was resorting to a card because he wanted to let Eddy know he was coming to stay on the second. Checking the date on his watch, Edward’s annoyance was reinforced; it was Thursday and Roland was coming to stay the day after tomorrow.

  His immediate reaction was to leave the rest of the mail, and his luggage, and to go and telephone Irina. If they only had two days ahead of them before Roland’s arrival, he may as well make the most of them.

  Irina answered the telephone in formal mode: “Allo oui?”

  Deepening his voice, Edward said, “C’est toi, chérie?”

  “Ah,” Irina said flatly, not entering into the spirit of the game at all. “Did you have a good time, Edouard?”

  “Great,” he answered. “Great. I just got back this minute, in fact. I wondered whether – you’re not free for dinner tonight, are you?”

  Her sigh was so slight, he wasn’t even sure he had heard it. He expected her to say no but instead she said, just as flatly, “Yes, I am.”

  “Is anything the matter?” Edward asked cautiously. The last thing he wanted to bring him down to earth was an evening of Iskarovian histrionics.

  In a sharpish tone of voice, which made him even more apprehensive, Irina replied, “No, Edouard, nothing’s the matter; everything is just marvellous.”

  He liked the sound of that even less, of course, but it was too late to withdraw now.

  “Let’s go to that Russian restaurant you were telling me about,” he suggested placatingly, “shall we?”

  In the shower, absorbing the disappointment of Irina’s low-key reception, one of Roland’s maxims on women came back to him. It stated: “Never get involved with a woman who’s got more problems than you have.” He wondered what Roland would make of Irina, if he allowed their paths to cross. (On balance, he thought he wouldn’t.) Roland would doubtless be savagely comic about the whole thing; inform Edward what the oddity of the relationship spelt out about him. On the other hand, had Roland ever been seen with anyone as rampantly a femme fatale as Irina? And, with his eternal bloody maxims, wasn’t Roland just the sort of person who would be impressed by their age difference?

  He speculated on the possible encounter as he dressed, seeking out the tie Irina had given him for good measure. There was no doubt Irina would want to meet one of his friends from England. There was no doubt either that, should Roland decide to act the buffoon and make any of his tasteless quips about him and Irina, Irina could certainly look after herself.

  She greeted him, dressed in black and an assortment of angular modern jewellery which looked jarring in the Iskarovs’ antiquated front hall. His spirits rose; even if Irina were in a bad mood, she had gone to the trouble of dressing up for him.

  “You look fantastic,” he whispered. The grandmother was undoubtedly within earshot. He gave her a quick minor hug and one of the angles of her jewellery prodded him in the solar plexus.

  “So what d’you feel like doing?” he asked her. “Shall we go to the Datcha?”

  Irina shrugged ungraciously. “If you want.” Then, as if determined to run counter to the grain of Edward’s good mood, she added, “First come and say hello to Babushka. She needs cheering up.”

  “Oh Christ,” Edward whispered. “Do I have to? I’m really tired, Irina; I’ve been on the train all day.”

  She chilled him with a look.

  “OK,” he muttered to her back in the doorway to the grandmother’s room, “Just hello.”

  As if she hadn’t budged during the fortnight since he had last seen her, Babushka sat immobile in the same armchair. When Irina showed Edward in, she responded with the merest trace of a tremor. Edward resisted a mad impulse to open the innings with a jokey reference to St Petersburg and after Irina had announced, “Edouard’s just back from Marseilles,” he added rather moronically, “Yes, I’ve been sampling bouillabaisse.”

  “Bouillabaisse!” Irina repeated loudly. “It’s been a long time since you ate that, n’est-ce pas, Babushka?”

  This time, there was no missing the impression which Edward had often thought he caught before but now unmistakably registered; Babushka impaled Irina on a long beady look. The look darted to Edward and Babushka drilled with the same silent accusation into him. Then she gave a tiny, almost inaudible, perfectly genteel sniff.

  Irina bundled Edward out of the room so speedily, he wondered if it had been worth dragging him in there in the first place. The encounter was, he thought wryly, rather like paying a skimpily ritual visit to a shrine. It had not done anything for Irina’s mood either; she collected her coat and her bag and came out after him to the lift without a word.

  He tried to fondle her in the lift; there was a well-established precedent. But, wearing an insultingly
martyred expression, Irina merely let him and didn’t respond at all.

  Edward cursed inwardly; he would have been better off in the rue Surcouf with a bottle of wine.

  “Irina,” he said irately, “I don’t see what’s the point of us spending the evening together if you’re going to be like this the whole time.”

  The lift reached the ground floor. In a retaliatory gesture that was frankly childish, Irina’s forefinger jabbed out and pushed the button for the fifth floor. With a long-suffering exhalation, the lift rose again.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Edward.

  Irina stared stonily ahead of her. The first and second floors moved laboriously past them.

  “Is this it, then?” Edward asked furiously, between the third and the fourth.

  Even as he said it, he was painfully aware of how ridiculous the pair of them were, riding up and down in this cantankerous journey by lift.

  The lift bumped home. Irina had the presence of mind to prop the lift door ajar with one hand to stop someone else summoning it from another floor, but she didn’t get out.

  With as much dignity as someone in that position could expect to muster, she said to Edward, “If you wanted to go out with someone all sunshine and high spirits, tra-la-la, then you shouldn’t have chosen me.” Whereupon, letting the lift door fall to, she flung herself around Edward’s neck and burst into noisy tears.

  Edward prodded the door ajar again with his foot but then, fearing that either Babushka or the lady who lived behind the fish eye opposite might overhear Irina’s sobs, he let it close and reached awkwardly around Irina to push the button for the seventh, top floor.

  The lift rose again, wearily.