The Steppes of Paris

by Harris, Helen

  “Irina has led perhaps an unusual life. I do not know if it was unusual from the beginning; if maybe the way we brought her up had some deficiencies we didn’t realise. Although I can’t see what they could have been; she always had a surfeit of everything. But, at any rate, since she has been grown-up and independent, managing her own life, I am afraid it has grown steadily more unusual. She has never found herself a serious and constant partner. Excuse me, this comment is not intended in any way as a reflection on you, Edward. What I mean is, Irina has somehow never settled on anybody who could last. She has had a series, oh dear, a long, long series, of highly unsatisfactory encounters. And, in this sorry series, Volodya’s apartment has played a most unfortunate part. We let her manage it because, after all, she is young and capable; a modern woman, a woman of the world. She could handle all the paperwork, the bureaucracy and the bank, much better than we could. We never dreamt of the way it would be exploited; how Irochka would use it, I am afraid quite scandalously, for her own purposes. Over the years, she has always chosen the tenants. We let her; we saw no harm in it. I think we were blinded to her intentions not only by our affection for her; I think she actively misled us. But eventually, of course, we realised what was going on. It was when the Italian moved in that we first had our suspicions, and then when he moved out rather suddenly and she replaced him with the Hungarian, the suspicions were reinforced. But, you see, we could scarcely believe it; our little Irochka up to such a thing! I am afraid it was the Brazilian banker who confirmed our darkest fears. Do I need to spell it out? Irina was using the apartment to house men whom she wanted to be close to. I’m sorry, but that is the case. We had a most unpleasant discussion. I said that from then on I would choose the tenants. I’m afraid the first person I chose was perhaps not entirely suitable, an American who turned out to be a follower of Hinduism. How was I to know? We never touched on religion in the interview. Anyway, we agreed the next tenant would be a woman, and Varvara Stepanovna found us a very appropriate Norwegian woman through her self-help group. And then, just at the last minute, all we were waiting for was her bank reference, Irina suddenly came up with you. At first, we were adamant: no, not again. But Irina insisted; it was via the lycée, she couldn’t refuse a favour to her colleague, Madame Hirshfeld. And she told us how young you were. Excuse me, we thought nothing could possibly go amiss. But it seems we were mistaken, yet again.

  “Edward, I must ask you, please, to stop seeing Irina. I know it will create difficulties for you. I know Irina can be a terribly tempestuous person. But, for her sake, please, be hard on her. She will ruin her life, I know, the way she is going. Please, tell her now, tell her no.”

  Edward sat stunned, with over his head the inky black exclamation marks of a cartoon strip.

  “Listen,” he said at last. “You don’t need to worry. I haven’t actually told Irina yet, but I’ve already heard about my next job. I’m leaving Paris in less than a month.”

  “Oich!”

  Some quite abstracted part of Edward’s brain reflected calmly how remarkable it was, the way these exclamations were inherited within the Iskarov family. How many times had he heard Irina make exactly that same winded little “Oich!” when he shocked her and by some uncouth act incurred her displeasure.

  Elena leant forward, her face a frozen conglomeration of absolutely round, shocked cheeks, eyes and mouth.

  “Less than a month?”

  “Yes,” Edward said. “I’m sorry about the notice for the flat. But you can understand how, in the circumstances –”

  Elena shook her head for a second or two helplessly. But then she seemed to brighten, realising that, however brutally, her aim had been achieved.

  “Tell me,” she asked him eagerly. “Where is it to be? Which ‘land beyond the sea’ are they sending you to?”

  “Brace yourself,” Edward told her. “Russia.”

  Elena gaped at him with what looked very like awe. Yes, it was a little as if he had announced he had been picked for a moon shot. Elena stared at him as if he had acquired a new and heroic stature.

  “You’re going to Russia?”

  “Yup.”

  Once again, her head wobbled from side to side in astonished admiration. Then came a new exclamation: “Molodyets!”

  This one was not a burst paper bag; it sounded to Edward more like the cluck of extreme glee a hen might make upon laying an egg.

  “Meaning?” he asked.

  “Clever you!” Great-Aunt Elena exclaimed. “And can we claim a little of the credit for having switched your thoughts in that direction? Was it your Russian experiences here in Paris which made you choose Russia in preference to South America?”

  “Oh,” Edward blurted tactlessly, “I didn’t choose it. It’s just happened. Though,” he added quickly, “of course I’m terribly pleased.”

  Elena sat back slightly, just a trifle disappointed.

  “Well,” she declared, “I’ve sensed it all along, but now my feelings are confirmed: you are the future.”

  Edward started to say, “Oh, come –”

  Elena dismissed his objections. “You represent the new unfettered era,” she informed him. “There is no reason why you should not go anywhere. For you, all countries are as one. There are no taboos, no closed doors any more. The world is a self-service restaurant.”

  There was more than one assumption in this speech which displeased Edward: the suggestion that he maybe didn’t distinguish deeply between one country and another, and the implicit comparison with the type of journalist he so despised, for whom a destination was only as appetising as its restaurants. But he thought he should be satisfied that Elena had taken this awkward news so positively, and not press the point.

  “Of course,” he said, “I do intend to tell Irina. But I want to leave it as late as I can, you understand, so as not to upset her any sooner than necessary.”

  Great-Aunt Elena seemed to look doubtful.

  “Please,” Edward insisted. “You won’t tell her, will you? I really think it’s important, in the circumstances, that the news comes from me.”

  Elena still looked unhappy. “When will you tell her?”

  “Oh, very soon,” Edward assured her. “As soon as I’ve got an actual date for going.”

  “How will you go there?” Elena asked. “Will you go back to London first or will you travel directly?”

  “I thought,” said Edward, “it might be rather fun to go by train, across Poland; a good introduction. But, of course, it depends how urgently I’m needed there.”

  Great-Aunt Elena gazed at him. “You know why I’ve always liked the Boulevard de Courcelles? It reminds me of the palaces in St Petersburg on the banks of the Neva.”

  “I’ll go and look at them,” Edward said earnestly. “And I’ll think of you. And you know what; I’ll send you a postcard of them.”

  He returned to the rue Surcouf on an ebb tide of bilberry liqueur and fell almost immediately into a sound, satisfied sleep. The noise which woke him had the inexplicable and relentless quality of a nightmare and, for several seconds, he couldn’t work out if he were dreaming it or if it were really happening. Someone was battering on his front door. Thinking first of fire or some medical emergency, he scrambled out of bed and as he fumbled his way into the nearest pyjamas, he managed to focus on his bedside alarm clock and saw it was two o’clock in the morning. The pounding on the door didn’t let up during the few moments it took him to get to it.

  He called, “J’arrive, j’arrive. Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?”

  Irina’s voice howled back, “Let me in, Edouard.”

  He did, for a moment, hesitate to open the door but he cringed, in what he acknowledged irritably was a very English way, at how his neighbours were liable to react if the noise continued.

  Irina plunged in at him.

  “Is it true?” she demanded.

  “For Christ’s sake!” he protested. “What d’you think you’re doing? Is what true?”

 
“You’re leaving,” Irina panted. “They’re sending you to Moscow in a fortnight’s time.”

  She looked so ghastly, Edward experienced an instant of sheer revulsion: staring-eyed, livid-faced, and every incipient wrinkle of her thirty-six-year-old face starkly accentuated by her panic.

  “Is this why you’ve come round now?” he asked her angrily. “Do you realise it’s bloody two o’clock in the morning? You must have woken up every single person in the building, banging on the door like that.”

  Irina grabbed him by the arm and tugged at him fiercely.

  “Tell me!” she shrieked.

  He saw in her panic-stricken eyes black depths of desperation he had never seen before and he became gradually scared.

  “Look, come in and sit down,” he said roughly. “We need to talk this over together quietly. There’s no point getting in such a state.”

  As he tried to reach around Irina to close the front door discreetly behind her, she whirled round on him, pinning him against the door, which at least slipped securely shut beneath their combined weight.

  Grimacing into his face from point-blank range, Irina breathed, “If you don’t tell me this instant –”

  “OK,” Edward said furiously. “It’s true. I’m being sent to Moscow and I’ll be leaving in three or four weeks’ time. Now, if you don’t let go of me and calm down and stop behaving like a lunatic, I promise you, you’ll regret it.”

  But he was already speaking to a deflated balloon; Irina released him in the process of clutching her own face and doubling up as if in unbearable pain. Gasping, she held her face and her stomach, as if with terrible difficulty holding herself together.

  Edward didn’t move an inch to help her, for his predominant emotion was outrage.

  Irina reared up, proving that her seizure was either short-lived or, more likely, a sham.

  “You’ll regret it!” she screamed. “Not me; you’ll regret it, Edouard Wenwright! You thought you could cheat me, didn’t you; deceive me and cheat me, and I wouldn’t find out? What was supposed to happen, tell me; was I supposed to wake up one fine morning and discover you were gone? Or would you have left me a little goodbye note maybe? ‘Cheerio, it’s been nice knowing you.’ Was that what was supposed to happen? Well, I tear up your little goodbye note and I spit on it. I spit on you, Edouard. You’ve disappointed me more than I ever thought was possible. You know, I was stupid enough to think you were a decent man, my first-ever properly decent man. I thought you believed in all those fine English values: being a good sport and fair play. But you’re really a specimen of something else English, aren’t you? It’s true what they say about perfide Albion, If it needed to be proved, you’ve just proved it.” Two or three times, in a quavering voice, she shrilled, “Perfide Albion! Perfide Albion!”

  Edward was just considering some act of violent assertion to lower the noise level when Irina paused to summon breath for a final onslaught.

  “You thought you’d steal away like a thief in the night, didn’t you?” she shrilled. “Take what you wanted and then sneak away, filer à l’anglaise. But you’re going to find out life’s not as easy as you thought. I’m going to teach you a lesson, Edouard Wenwright, which you’ll never forget.”

  “I was going to tell you,” Edward said. “You weren’t meant to hear this way from Great-Aunt Elena. I asked her specially not to tell you.”

  The tempest redoubled in volume.

  “Of course!” Irina screeched. “And I know why! I may have been stupid, but not that stupid.”

  “Actually,” Edward started vaguely. But he almost no longer cared. What appeal was there in retaining the goodwill of someone so hideously transformed?

  “When I have done what I intend to do,” Irina announced, “I hope you can still have a nice life as you travel around the world. I wish you bon voyage.”

  She strutted towards him and although he could easily have restrained her at the front door, tried to talk some sense into her, he stood aside and held the door open with ironic courtesy. He was too outraged to make even the least conciliatory effort.

  Irina stalked out. In the very last second before he closed the door completely after her, Edward saw her stop and begin to turn. He finished closing the door immediately, for the last thing he wanted was Irina coming back.

  The rest of the night was of course a write-off. For hours, he turned furiously, fuming, thinking of cleverer, more conclusive responses than the ones he had given, and from time to time ruthlessly squashing a recurring uncoiling of anxiety over what dramatic act it was Irina was planning to perform. In the end he grew calm enough to sleep. He concluded, with a callousness which frankly surprised him, that Irina had at least solved the problem of how to say goodbye to her.

  Reading up on his next country, plus the acquisition of the many indispensable objects which Arnold warned him over the telephone would be unobtainable in Moscow, enjoyably filled the rest of Edward’s time in Paris. He liked the sound of Arnold’s voice on the phone; albeit in the fruitiest of English public-school accents, it seemed to convey the same jovial, robustly cynical outlook as Henry’s.

  Of course, he did worry about Irina, resentfully. But his worry tended to focus on the most likely form of her threatened revenge rather than on her plight. He realised he was, in fact, waiting for it, and every day of what should have been this splendidly happy countdown period was being subtly spoilt by the oppressive awareness that every day which elapsed free of drama only meant it was more likely the following day. He supposed there were two forms the reprisal could take; it would either be directed against him (sneaking into the flat while he was out and sabotaging his belongings, for example; lying in wait and somewhere publicly leaping at him; or possibly contacting the paper and causing him some monumental embarrassment) or else it would be directed against herself (suicide). Each drama-free day which passed in silence made this second dreadful option seem the most likely.

  He dealt directly with Great-Aunt Elena over the business of relinquishing the flat and he realised he was ringing her more often than was strictly necessary to sort out the inventory, the documents and the bills because he assumed she would tell him if anything awful happened to Irina. He wondered whether Elena and Babushka were adequate guardians under whose protection to leave Irina and he couldn’t help feeling that, with their track record, they were not. For his own peace of mind, as much as anything else, he wished there were someone sensible he could tip off, who would keep an eye on Irina in the coming weeks and guarantee that his start in Moscow was not marred by the arrival of some ghastly black-edged envelope. It was at this point that he remembered Lyova and, much as he thought he disliked the man, a week before his departure decided to go and see him. It took him a while to identify the Russian bookshop in the telephone directory as Les Editeurs Réunis and he thought with reflex irritation how typical of Irina it was never to have called the shop by its proper name. The first time he rang, Lyova wasn’t there and a woman with a near-incomprehensible accent told Edward she didn’t know when he would be back. With some relief, Edward left it till the following day. He wondered whether it was really such a bright idea to contact Lyova after all. It was true Great-Aunt Elena had referred to him during that last dramatic truth session as one of Irina’s few trustworthy male friends, a “noble soul” she had described him. But Great-Aunt Elena’s judgement had hardly been brilliant, by her own admission. How was Edward to know that Great-Aunt Elena’s version of their friendship bore any relation at all to reality? She had portrayed Lyova as a much persecuted individual whose own suffering had enabled him to understand other people’s, and who magnanimously allowed poor, childless Irina to mind his little ones. This interpretation alone seemed to Edward to cast doubt over her whole reading. But there was no one else he could turn to and he knew that, even if something ghastly were to happen, he would sleep more peacefully if he had warned Lyova before he left.

  The next day, it was Lyova who answered the telephone. He sounded
only slightly surprised to hear from Edward, his predominant tone as usual being faintly aloof amusement. But what caused Edward most indignation in the circumstances was that, to start off with, Lyova didn’t seem at all sure who he was. They arranged to meet at seven when the bookshop shut and Edward, just so as to keep his end up and not appear straight away as the helpless supplicant, suggested on the phone that they went for a drink at a different, he implied more congenial, café than the one the three of them had gone to before.

  He and Lyova shook hands, probably with more sincerity than either of them felt, and set off in the direction of Edward’s preferred bar. It was only when Lyova, to break what was already a wary, awkward silence, asked, “How is Irina?” that it occurred to Edward that perhaps Lyova didn’t know what had happened. This was a possibility which had not crossed his mind. He had assumed Irina would have gone running straight to Lyova and sobbed what a pig, or possibly perfidious wretch Edward was and how, from now on, she would have nothing whatsoever to do with Englishmen, who, whatever people said about them, weren’t actually gentlemen at all. He had expected this conversation to be mainly self-justification, defending what Irina would already have portrayed as despicable behaviour. But if Lyova really knew nothing, he gained an immediate advantage.