The rabbi, a solemn man whose Polish father had arrived in Britain on the Kindertransport, spoke of the pogroms, of Russian Jews escaping to Britain and America, then of the kindness of Britain towards its Jews, which had evolved with fewer recent blemishes than elsewhere in Europe, although even here, as one went backwards, the story darkened. He had seen Gorsky in the temple only once or twice, but Gorsky had invested a substantial sum in the bimah that he stood on as he read. This generous man, who was most likely not a believer, the rabbi said, was perhaps a tormented soul. It was a pity he did not allow anyone near him.
A lanky dark-haired woman, looking like a young Joan Baez, appeared and sang mournfully, a cappella, a Yiddish song which spoke of calves being led to slaughter. It made as much or as little sense as the rest of the ceremony. I stared at the empty seats. The dark neo-Byzantine space around us was architecturally close enough to the nave of an Orthodox church to make me feel at home and at ease, yet the absence of familiar images of saints and angels was somehow in keeping with the loneliness of the man whose life we were trying to celebrate.
Afterwards, we all stood for a while in a small circle around a mountain of smoked salmon, not knowing what to say to each other. Fynch and I took a couple of unopened bottles of champagne away – leaving dozens to the rabbi and the men and women of Gorsky’s forlorn rent-a-minyan – and emerged, blinking, into the late afternoon on Edgware Road. The owner of the Syrian shop next door stepped out and held up a tray of plump, glistening dates.
‘Orqod fi salaam,’ he said, bowing slightly. ‘May his soul rest in peace.’
He knew where we had just been and why. Further down the street, men sat in sheesha cafes in animated groups while women covered in black from head to toe shopped for sweetmeats and syrups in grocery stores that spilled onto the pavements in shiny waves of oranges, pomegranates and watermelons. The sounds and smells of the Middle East closed around us like the sea, as though the man who grew up on the snowy banks of the Neva, the man whose death we had just lamented, had never existed at all.
I was the one who, seven days later, disposed of his ashes. I upturned a Siberian malachite urn above the Thames on the spot where he died. I was not alone. Not long after the memorial service, a tiny woman, looking like a baby crow under a wide-brimmed black hat, had arrived at the Barracks with one of Gorsky’s bodyguards. It was practically my last day in the gatekeeper’s lodge. I watched her slow progress as she paused every now and then to wipe her eyes or blow her nose. Half an hour later, the same man who had accompanied her knocked on my door to say that Roman Gorsky’s mother, Elizaveta Alexandrovna Stern, who had just arrived in London, wondered if I would mind joining her for tea.
Her frail body was as lost in an ornate antique armchair as she was lost in her son’s vast palace and in this strange town which he had, for reasons she still failed to grasp, chosen as his home among all the cities in the world.
‘Fate,’ she kept repeating in a slow, deliberate Russian, translating her own sentences into a heavily accented and equally deliberate but faultless French. ‘He said he was following his fate. Paris, I would understand. Rome too. Or Berlin and Vienna. Even Zurich or Helsinki … but London … I am not sure I do. He spoke French and German. His English was very poor.’
I assured her that wasn’t the case. I spoke in an imperfect mix of the two languages she was using, for, although I understood them reasonably well, I was very far from conversant in either. I peppered my speech with words from my mother tongue, which was similar enough to Russian to help her grasp my meaning. She reminded me of my own mother. Her hands, speckled with the liver spots of old age, kept clasping and reclasping each other. They were just as bird-like as the rest of her. It took some effort to believe that she could have given birth to someone like Roman Gorsky. She was dark and her small eyes were inky and shiny, like currants. And she did not look wealthy. She wore a plain black dress decorated with a simple amber brooch the like of which you could get for a few roubles in any Russian market. On her feet, which barely skimmed the floor as she sat, she wore a pair of small-girl’s polished boots, totally unsuited to the summer weather.
It was heartbreaking that she did not make it for the funeral service, she said, but it was already becoming obvious to me that she had indirectly allowed it to happen. She did not want to mourn him with his so-called friends, or be photographed for the world to see. She could not understand so many things about the way her son had chosen to lead his life. When the news of his death reached her, she did not even possess a passport. She had never needed it, she said. Tragic, but also better perhaps: she did not believe in all that synagogue business. She was a Communist. That is why, although she loved Roman and although he was a loving son, she steadfastly refused his money. Her ageing comrades now went hungry and cold on their miserable pensions. How could she face them in some luxuriously equipped apartment? She urged Roman to give his wealth away to the needy. The only God she believed in, she explained, was the common good of the human race.
‘Roman too,’ she added. ‘He was a good, hard-working boy, a Communist himself. He lived modestly. And he did not believe in any of that religious stuff. Sorry if you are a believer, if what I say offends you. I know that there are few of us left and that many think faith is important if we are not to disappear completely, but it is not so.’
She clearly thought I was Jewish.
‘And Roman agreed with me. He was proud of being Russian. And I was proud of him. I was honoured to be his mother.
‘I was honoured to be his mother,’ she repeated when we stood by the Thames, just the two of us on the spot where his life came to its abrupt end, watched over at a distance by one of Roman’s bodyguards, and the enormous golden Buddha from the Battersea side. I opened the urn and upended it above the water. A plume of pale powder rose into the air and slowly descended into the murky water, pooling briefly then disappearing under the surface. The guard crossed himself with a quick hand movement. A horn sounded from a barge somewhere to the east. Elizaveta Stern stood next to me, now nursing the empty malachite jar with its golden Romanov eagles like the swaddled body of a baby. I did not dare ask whether she knew she had a granddaughter. I had to leave the revelation – if such it was – to Natalia and her conscience. Elizaveta’s husband was long dead and she had lost her only child. She sighed, deeply, but did not cry.
When the final strange twist to this story happened ten months later, at first it seemed like another case of random street violence. There was a robbery in Elgin Crescent in Notting Hill. A woman was forced to surrender an expensive watch at knifepoint, and a passer-by, an off-duty soldier, tackled the robber. The criminal, a Tunisian, was a small-time drug dealer who turned to mugging to support his own drug habit after his employer and supplier was jailed for drug-related offences. The man’s distinctive gait and an unusual card case in which he had stashed a few wraps of heroin provided incriminating evidence which helped solve an earlier, much more serious crime. He thought the case a worthless trinket – the pawnbroker had refused him a loan for thirty pounds against it. It was a Fabergé.
When he was challenged about the way it came to be in his possession, his confession was as quick as it was baffling. He had taken it from the pocket of Janice Allaoui’s English lover. He had killed them both, he claimed. Mahmoud Allaoui, his boss, had ordered her murder, but he did not have to order anything. He killed Mrs Allaoui because he had wanted to kill her anyway. Mrs Allaoui – Janice – had been his mistress. He loved Janice and Janice loved him. She was the love of his life. Life without her was torture. They planned an escape to the sun, a hotel on the Tunisian coast which they would run together one day. She kept promising to leave Mahmoud, but she kept lying. Then Mahmoud, suspecting nothing, revealed in his anger that Janice had another lover, an Englishman. The Tunisian confronted her. He threatened to kill her if she did not supply her lover’s address: he was going to lie in wait and beat up the bastard. She obeyed, and she promised to leave Allaoui
for him yet again, but he killed the whore anyway. If she could not be his alone, she was not going to be anyone’s. She did not deserve to live. Of course she let him into the flat; they had been meeting there regularly. She said that she was the cleaner but to him she was a paid whore.
Having killed Janice, he stalked The Laurels over several days. His rage and his fear about being found out only grew. He saw the Englishman with his wife several times. Late one night, he saw him kissing her on the doorstep, he followed him and he killed him. They have everything they want, those men, and then they want other people’s wives too, he said, as though he was the wronged party. No, he did not know anything about anyone called Roman Gorsky. He saw his victim’s face clearly. It was the same man whom he had watched going in and out of that house and whom he had seen that very evening on the doorstep, kissing his wife. He killed an Englishman, he was absolutely certain, not a Russian, and certainly not a Jew. No, definitely not a Jew.
On the day I finally moved out of the gatekeeper’s cottage, Summerscale was exonerated and the Barracks went up for sale for several hundred million pounds, an insignificant slice, it transpired, of the fortune Gorsky had left to Daisy Summerscale. There was a fortune after all.
It was also the day I met Natalia for the last time.
I had taken a short let in Mile End, a flat-share with an MA student at the LSE. The fact that I could barely afford to share an apartment with a Greek boy in his early twenties spoke volumes about my position. I had spent more than a decade in Britain living like mistletoe, attaching myself to the branches of powerful oaks. That decade was over and I had nothing to my name.
I hired a small van with a merry Romanian driver who came all the way from Edmonton to Chelsea and was ready to drive east. He parked off-street, by the ornate gate. He now leaned against his battered vehicle and whistled through a gap left behind one of his lower incisors, while studying the astonishing edifice through the ornate railings. I carried my boxes into the van. He wasn’t planning to do any heavy lifting for the pittance I was paying. When I mentioned that the palace was Russian-owned he nodded, as though he had suspected as much. That was the way the world had been ordered for his entire life.
He halted – mid tune – when Natalia emerged from her own massive gateway across the road, parting the traffic on her way over. She was carrying a small hamper. To make sure that I would have something for dinner wherever I was going, she said. She clearly knew more about my movements than I did about hers, for I had not realised she was back in London until that moment. I invited her upstairs, into the now empty room from which, over the past months, I had watched Gorsky’s palace being dismantled and rebuilt again just for her. We stood facing each other uncertainly, like two actors rehearsing the final act of a Chekhov play, when everything that was supposed to happen had already happened and the characters were departing one by one.
She looked as though she hadn’t slept in months. It occurred to me that we had never had what one could describe as a proper conversation. I fetched a book from one of my boxes, a cheap paperback. It was a Soviet art history book which used to belong to Gorsky long before I started compiling his library. I stole it from his shelves the day after his murder.
I already knew I needed no mementos. There was no way to forget him.
An ex libris bookplate inside the front cover had the initials RBG pencilled in, and, in the corner, an old-style Leningrad telephone number. A few of the inside pages still carried his scribbled annotations: asterisked names of artists with ‘Natasha mentioned’, or ‘as explained by Tasha’ or ‘liked by Talya’. He had many pet names for her, as Russians do, but I don’t remember him ever addressing her by any of them.
There was something poignant about the earnestness with which he had clearly studied the book. I imagined, from the year of its publication, that she must have told him stories of her art degree in their early encounters, and that he had followed the references up. His entire life seemed guided by the desire to capture and harness everything she was fond of, to recreate the world in the image of her dreams so that she would desire no one but him.
She briefly pored over the book, touching the yellowing oblong of the ex libris bookplate, then leafed through pages of black-and-white photographs, some of them of artists in rooms very much like those she must have grown up in, in the city that was once called Stalingrad. She was as beautiful as ever, but she was no longer an alien princess. In fact, she reminded me of several of the girls I had known at school in Belgrade. It seemed strange that I hadn’t noticed the likeness before.
‘These pictures take me back,’ she said, as if she had guessed my thoughts. ‘There were months when we existed on potato soup alone. Not just my family, the whole town. The entire country. But I wasn’t unhappy there, just thirsty to see the world and sometimes frustrated by general poverty. I understood very early on how important it was to have plenty of money, because money made things possible and shielded you from so much. I am sure you understand that.’
I did not understand. I had never thought money shielded you from anything.
‘When Roman arrived in Volgograd for my father’s funeral,’ Natalia said just before I proffered that parting gift, ‘he refused even to acknowledge my presence, let alone speak to me. I had just arrived from London on a long connecting flight. There was a sudden snowstorm, then four hours’ delay in Moscow while they cleared the runway and de-iced the plane. I felt shell-shocked and disoriented. I had been married to Tom for a while at that stage. I was always fond of Tom and I was not unhappy with him, but I had wanted to escape Russia so much and for such a long time that I did not know what to do with myself in London when homesickness struck. I had no friends in England then, not even someone like Gery to keep me company. The English just watched me, like a giraffe in a zoo. When Tom was away, as he was a lot at that stage, I paced up and down the Mayfair apartment we were living in and I cried all the time. Then my father died and I was convinced that I had killed him, that my marriage was the cause of his heart attack. He hated Tom. He hated Britain. He had other ideas for me.
‘There were all these old men at his funeral, old Communists in bad suits, with gold teeth under their moustaches and endless rows of medals, frail and doddery, but glad to be among old comrades and still with the self-confidence born of having exercised power in the prime of their lives. They were burying Dad but they might as well have been burying an entire era, everything they had ever stood for, everything their reputations depended on. They looked at me as though I was the enemy.
‘No one spoke to me, not even my mother. I understood Roman: we had parted in very unhappy circumstances. I couldn’t understand the others. I kept sending money to them all. I wondered if I should have stayed away.
‘Then a comrade of my father’s who had been Brezhnev’s secretary delivered the funeral oration. He spoke at length about my father’s life and achievements. All I could think of, all I could see, from the moment he opened his mouth, was the coffin which ferried the body of Sergey, my eldest brother, from Afghanistan. It is one of my earliest memories; the touch of zinc still seemed cold from its journey in the underbelly of a plane, under the red flag. I was too young to mourn my brother, too young even to remember him properly. They called them black tulips, those planes. When I was a child, I did not know this. I looked at the atlas to see where Seryozha had fought. I thought his soul had floated on black petals, across the Caspian Sea, across the Urals, all the way back to us. A heavily framed photograph, showing his young face gazing out forever above the striped paratroopers’ telnyashka he was so proud to wear, became for us an atheist icon. In my school, which had been his school too, there was another picture, of my father receiving a medal on his son’s behalf from this same man. Now my father was dead too, yet here he was, this comrade, this friend of his, ancient and stooped but still brimming with the will to live.
‘Comrade Volkov was one of those men who made the Soviet Union great, he said. The workers of t
he world had never been as oppressed as they are now, at the beginning of this new millennium, and imperialists think that they have triumphed. But, don’t deceive yourselves, he said, and looked at me: the ideal of Communism is not dead. The oppressed proletariat will rise again and the new revolution will be even more glorious than the last one. Then there will be no rich and poor, for there will be no property and no money anywhere on this planet. Its riches will belong to everyone equally. From everyone according to their abilities, to everyone according to their needs, Comrade Marx wrote. That is how Comrade Volkov lived, a Marxist-Leninist in thought and deed to the end of his days. His abilities were immeasurable, his needs were modest to the very end, he said. He finished his speech and stood to attention before the coffin. There was a large wreath of white winter roses on it, with a five-pointed star, in red carnations, in its centre.
‘Then they played an army march Dad loved, “The Farewell of Slavianka”, and I could no longer fight back tears. My heart was overflowing with pity for them and for their world, yet they looked at me as though they had somehow defeated me. Then Roman suddenly came over to me and put his arm around my shoulder.
‘“Nu, nu, Natasha,” he whispered, “Nu, nu, my little one. You must never cry, my love. When you cry, the world stops making sense.”’
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