The Steppes of Paris

by Harris, Helen

  From then on, I felt considerably more confident. It was only a matter of time, it seemed, until Edouard was won over, and my days went by in a glow of happy anticipation.

  How harsh it is to recall that happiness from the perspective of my sorry present. Harsh, but it seems I cannot help it. I keep reliving that time again and again for weren’t even the bad bits a thousand times preferable to this state of affairs?

  Without telling me, he went home to England for Christmas. And I had been looking forward to our spending it cosily together in a deserted Paris! It reminded me again how very young he was; going home to his Mummy and Daddy for the holidays. Only when he came back, it seemed it hadn’t been like that at all.

  We met immediately, unable to stay away from each other, and united in our miserable Christmases behind us and our isolation in that stone-cold Paris January. I sensed then that we were on the verge of fulfilling my dearest desires. But because I didn’t want Edouard to get a mistaken impression of me, I deliberately delayed that last sweet course. I knew it would drive him wild, and that was all to the good. Only to my amazement, the dear naïve chap misunderstood my tactics. He thought that because I hadn’t invited him to somersault straight into my bed at the first available opportunity, I wasn’t interested in him after all! I was really rather dismayed by his interpretation. It took us only a short time, though, to recover from this upset and, within days, we were one.

  Oh, my little boy, you were beautiful in bed! You didn’t know you were beautiful and that was probably the greatest part of your charm. As you reared above me, perfect and pink in every detail, preparing to possess me, I assure you, you were Grecian in your perfection. And your enjoyment of me was so wholehearted, so wholesome; the glee of a child at play or once, forgive me, the image did come to me, a pig at truffles. For me, who had long become used to sexual complications, your simplicity was the height of pleasure. I was released by it from the obligation to feign, to simulate, to tailor my pleasure to the other’s design. With you, Edouard, I was more satisfied than with anyone ever.

  The memory arouses in me another irrepressible craving for sweet consolation. Although I know I will find Babushka in the kitchen, defending the fridge and the cake tins from my ravenous attacks, I must go there. Must. Now. Babushka doesn’t seem to understand what it is which is driving me to these bizarre feasts of mille-feuilles and crème caramel. It is biological, but she doesn’t seem to see that. Or if she does, she is pretending that by not seeing it, it will go away. Well, it won’t. It is all very well, she and Elena going on and on at me about how fat I am growing, how unbecoming it is, and how, unless I diet, I will never find a husband now. They won’t be able to keep up this prudish pretence for very much longer. I will burst. Yes, that’s it; I will burst!

  I do wonder sometimes how Edouard would feel if he found out. Probably panic-stricken, and even more panic-stricken now it is too late for anybody to insist on a common-sense remedy. Do not worry. In one respect, I am really quite happy, you see. All my life, I have hated common sense, and now, at last, I have the opportunity to do something which flagrantly contradicts it. I am turning what was a fantasy into real flesh and blood.

  Edouard and I were, according to the loathsome tenets of common sense, ill-suited. Yet we achieved greater complicity, greater joy than most pedestrian, sensibly assorted pairs. Could there have been a moment of greater joy than when Edouard, tossing his heels at the winter grey, suddenly walked on his hands in front of me in the Bois de Boulogne? Or when, one night, he crept up on the peep hole of the apartment opposite ours, from which an indiscreet light was shining, and waggled his fingers from his ears and stuck out his tongue? All winter long we were ecstatically happy with one another, so ecstatically happy that it is not surprising Babushka and Elena became suspicious. Our happiness must have been painted all over us. I suppose I knew I was paving the way to a terrible denouement. On the one hand, Babushka and Elena were bound to find out what was going on. Their fury at this repetition of scandal, coupled with the further deception, was bound to be dreadful. On the other hand, I knew Edouard would eventually go away and leave me. You could say, I suppose, I was knowingly risking everything for the known prospect of nothing. That is certainly what a dull, common-sense person would say. But, somehow, I overcame these trite considerations. Regardless of mere probabilities, I had the winter of my life.

  It was when the autumn came round again, when signs in the streets started to repeat all the accompaniments of the year before – the return of oysters to the stalls of the rue Saint Dominique and then the chrysanthemums of mourning – that the effort of maintaining my false composure became too much for me. The clockwork which had kept me functioning like a well-behaved, varnished wooden toy ran down. In the silence when its ticking stopped, I noticed a new mechanism starting up.

  I remember the first time we made love in Volodya’s apartment. It was after a Sunday lunch at Elena’s. We were both burdened with familial gloom and the sepulchral silence of Paris’s wealthy neighbourhoods on a winter Sunday afternoon. It was Edouard who suggested it, with his habitual boyish mischief, his knack of leap-frogging out of oppressive solemnity. I went warily, fearing the resurrection of evil memories. But, in the event, we entered a new kingdom there in which we were emancipated and my ghosts became guardians of the kingdom, watching protectively over our bed. I felt so loved then, so profoundly at peace that afterwards I said not a word so as not to break the spell.

  I remember having breakfast with Edouard and the two little girls at Lyova’s and pretending privately that we were a family. Although he was in a fearful mood, incensed by this ersatz family, I still relished every moment of it. In a way, his bad temper made the game seem even more real; my husband would be grumpy as he hurried off to his day’s business and his children frolicked around him and delayed his departure.

  Lyova warned me that what I was up to was silly. I think he did not have a high opinion of Edouard. But I dismissed his warning as obvious jealousy.

  I cannot pinpoint the day when my happiness began to draw to a close. It is important for me not to dwell on distressing topics in my condition. (All topics are distressing.) In March, when Edouard let a whole week go by without contacting me, it did fill me with a fatal foreboding, but I did my best to believe his explanation about added responsibilities at work. I tried to overlook the proliferating omens of disaster.

  Only when he went away, he said to Marseilles, did I start to sink. For then I had a foretaste of what my life would be like when he was gone for good. I did not imagine this development, of course; I imagined myself sinking alone into a choking black bog of despair and demanding elderly relatives from which no one would ever again appear to extricate me.

  To make my predicament worse, it was around that time too that Babushka’s and Great-Aunt Elena’s suspicions sharpened. They started to spy on me and I was forced to resort to all sorts of clandestine stratagems like in one of their own wartime stories.

  When Edouard came back, I could not conceal my depression from him, even though I knew it was wrong, even though I risked alienating him. To hang onto him for as long as possible, I knew I should be a source of light-hearted entertainment, not troubles. But such are not my gifts.

  Naturally, Edouard wanted to know what the matter was. My depression got in his way like a large black bat blundering lost in the wrong context. And I, fool that I was, I told him. But would things, in fact, have turned out any differently if I hadn’t? I sometimes suspect that the two alternative happy endings I had imagined were neither of them really plausible. In one of them, Edouard took me away with him on his travels and, in the other, which I admit was less likely, he renounced his desire to travel and opted to stay on in Paris instead with me, like Monsieur and Madame Hirshfeld. Although that ending was the less plausible, it had the advantage that I would still be able to look after Babushka and Great-Aunt Elena.

  In the short term, though, my rash confession didn’t seem to have any
very serious consequences. Of course, the monster rat, misery, was gnawing away at my “palais sucré du bonheur” from underneath. But only I could hear its teeth. Edouard was oblivious to them.

  I envy him his selfishness. I envy him the dedication with which he went in pursuit of his own happiness. And I think that, on balance, I wish him a good life. I like to think of him in Moscow, in a rabbit fur hat with ear muffs to protect him from frost-bite, ice-skating, or on a fine summer weekend going out to the woods with his beery Soviet chums to pick mushrooms.

  Only occasionally, I have a treacherous dream in which he has fallen into the clutches of the KGB and they are interrogating him in the Lubyanka prison. And I have another dream, too, just very rarely, in which he is dead.

  My first symptom was the most obvious one, but I ignored it. I attributed it, if I thought about it at all, to my state of upset since Edouard’s departure. For I have been very low for a long time now, and it seemed only natural that my physical functions should be depressed too. It actually took more than one repetition for me to realise, in amazement, what the cause of it must be.

  We were discovered. I am not quite clear any more what the ultimate piece of incriminating evidence was, which led Babushka and Great-Aunt Elena to confront me. All I know is that they chose the worst possible day; a day which was intended to be one of carefree spring spirits, walking hand-in-hand with Edouard along the quais, and they combined to spoil it. I refused to stoop so low as to deny it. I took the irrefutable line that all their accusations were quite accurate, only there was simply absolutely nothing wrong in it. Their facts were right but their conclusions were hopelessly, farcically wrong. As was their suggested remedy, the diabetic widower, whom I furiously rejected.

  The day would have been spoilt anyway. For, on the Quai d’Orléans, whom should we meet but the Hirshfelds, and my beloved Edouard rejected me. These were his words, surely still legible in scar tissue on my heart: “Do you know my landlady, Mai’s colleague, Mademoiselle Iskarov?”

  Each word was branded there, I am convinced, for ever. In such spring sunshine, in such friendly circumstances, my edifice of sugar, undermined from within by the rat, crashed in ruins. Somehow I managed to maintain outward appearances. Already nothing but a cheerful automaton, I joked and laughed with the Hirshfelds. But inside, Edouard, didn’t you realise, you had destroyed me? And when the Hirshfelds had walked on, a happy pair, a married pair, walking in step on their American rubber shoes, I lost the last of my fragile self-control and screamed at Edouard and from then on we didn’t see each other nearly as often any more.

  Secrecy, I see with hindsight, was the malign underside of our relationship. Everything that was pernicious and evil flourished there and we ignored it. By keeping our great happiness a secret, each for our own more or less respectable reasons, we allowed the poisonous mushrooms of neglected dark places to multiply. We should have declaimed our happiness from the rooftops, climbed up together to that slate-grey realm of mansards and stone members rearing against the winter sky, and yelled our happiness down on all their heads.

  Far from feeling agitated, once the first shock was past, I welcomed it. It was like an unbelievable reward which compensated me for all the rejection, the deprivation, the loss. There is a satisfying justice, when you think of it, about the outcome of our magic winter being something which can in no circumstances remain a secret.

  He left in June. But, frankly, it may as well have been midwinter for all the pleasure I could take in the season. Ever since our disagreement beside the Seine I had been waiting for his departure, dreading it, because it seemed to me the disagreement would inevitably have brought it closer. If there were any chance at all of his hastening the decision, he would surely do so now. I had already begun to lose my concentration at the lycée; easily done at the best of times, but then beginning to assume disturbing proportions. Disturbing enough for one of my pupils, the especially smug and odious Clotilde Ponomarev, to complain to her parents and her parents to complain in turn to the headmistress. I was able to prevaricate satisfactorily, but I was aware that this complaint now lay in wait in my dossier, ready to re-emerge when the time came. It was one more small element of the disaster that was about to overwhelm me.

  What I cannot forgive Edouard, what I shall never forgive him, is that on those last two or three occasions we did spend a night together, he should have deceived me; that he should have lain with me, knowing he would soon be gone, and not said a word. It is that which made my fury erupt in the end. For he was lying, because silence can also be a lie, and if he was lying in word, or rather in lack of word, then how do I know he was not lying in deed as well?

  One thing is certain; I was never meant to find out. He was intending to sneak away from Paris while my attention was elsewhere and, at best, I would have received a scribbled postcard. So I am, oddly enough, grateful to Elena for her cruelty in telling me. Whatever her misguided motives may have been, she at least spared me the greater cruelty of waking one morning to find my Edouard was gone.

  There is a German woman living in Volodya’s apartment now. Volodya would be horrified; he couldn’t stand Germans. It is another coup by Varvara Stepanovna, who met the woman in a beauty salon where the German pulls out hair. A beauty salon; Varvara Stepanovna! Allow me to laugh. Although it is true that as I am subsiding into this necessarily sluggish period, Varvara seems to be growing ever more active. As Elena never tires of reminding me, Varvara has now lost seven kilos.

  If Volodya hadn’t died, my life would, of course, never have gone askew. He would have continued to protect me and care for me, the way he always did, and I would never have needed to seek out lesser men.

  But, oh, my little Edouard, I did love you! I don’t think I will ever stop regretting you, you know. I wake in the morning, in this room where we lay and laughed together. I wake missing you. I hear your breathless voice saying, “Wow!” And when I do go out, not often now, for obvious reasons, I keep imagining that I see your curly head in front of me in the street, so strong is my yearning for you.

  My breasts have swollen to unbelievable dimensions. And sometimes I feel sick. That is further proof, if proof were needed, that this is not, as Babushka and Elena would unkindly imply, all in my head. It is not in one’s head, mes chères, that one conceives a baby. It is not true that I am becoming like Varvara Stepanovna, cramming myself with cakes in place of affection. That is not the reason why I am swelling, swelling shamelessly now for all to see. Believe it or not, I am carrying Edouard Wainwright’s child.

  Babushka’s Verdict

  Naturally, it is not natural. Naturally, it is not natural for a woman of Irina’s age to be without a child. I knew as soon as she told me guiltily the age of the boy she had installed in Volodya’s apartment what the outcome would be. I have seen her before developing a preternaturally excessive fondness for someone or something young and small. It happened already a long time ago with the dog of that hog Vlasin. I knew Irina couldn’t conceivably be interested in Vlasin, choosy as she is. Yet he was round here all the time during her silly infatuation with the Papillon. With her ancestry, she should have preferred bigger, prouder dogs: Afghan hounds, Borzois. If only Vlasin had suspected; it would have served him thoroughly right, the beast. But being such a conceited fellow, of course, it never crossed his mind that it wasn’t him Irina was flirting with at all; it was that fluffy white piece of canine nonsense, with its aberrant ears aflap with multilingual neurosis.

  I watched Irina and the boy and I was filled with the murkiest of misgivings.

  “Nonsense!” Elena scolded me. “You’re just unsettling yourself again with your stories. Stop making things up, Vera, and everything will be all right.”

  And again later: “He’s a perfectly charming young man, I do assure you, Verochka; far too young and proper for anything of that order.”

  Only I saw clearly. I saw clearly right from the start, for I had seen Irina’s mother before her, also a frenzied collector
of men. I saw the look in Irina’s eyes, or rather the way her eyes would not look at mine when she presented the boy to me for the first time. I knew then what grave dangers lay in wait for us and, with co-operation, we might have surmounted them. Only Elena, and everybody else, insisted I was imagining them.

  “It is your ghost all over again,” Elena reproached me, a childish reference from a sister to an incident which took place on our dacha one summer several lives ago. Sophia Solomonovna and I had terrified Elena by inventing a ghost, which flapped down the passages in an old sheet, to liven those interminable northern midsummer evenings.

  I resorted to ruses. On the evenings when I suspected Irina was going to meet the boy, I tried to detain her at home by diversionary tactics. I would pack a suitcase, pretending a sudden plan to set off for St Petersburg. And, in fact, the time did seem right to go. This tactic, which called for a monumental exertion – all that lifting and carrying – may not have prevented their folly but I am quite certain it delayed it.

  Never let it be said I didn’t do my best. Let those who encouraged the folly with invitations to lunch and recitals of William Wordsworth bear their share of the blame. I tried. At every possible opportunity, I snubbed them. Once, late at night, I waylaid the boy in the corridor of our apartment and treated him to a passable impersonation of a domovoy, a house spirit, there to protect the inhabitants but to scowl malevolently at scoundrels.

  Once it seemed to be, alas, too late for prevention, I concentrated on obstruction. I patrolled our apartment late at night; albeit in slippers, I carried an imaginary gun. So, at least, I can be confident that the ultimate outrage never occurred; Irina never brought the boy back here to lie as shameless bedfellows under the Iskarov roof. For I would not have tolerated that. I would have put a stop to it immediately.

  Not that she didn’t bring him back here in the depths of night perilously often. I used to hear them coming in together, talking and laughing, more often her voice than his, let it be said. I would hear them going into the living-room, her laughter through the living-room door. There were long, alarmingly long silences during which I realised I had lost track of them in the apartment, maybe dropped off even, who knows, it was so indecently late. But, last thing, almost without fail, Irina would tiptoe to my door, where she had doubtless seen the nightlight burning, and whisper, “He’s gone. Good night, Babushka.”