The White Russian

by Vanora Bennett

  From her earlier observation of this little conspiracy of Russian café visitors – and every gathering of Russians was a conspiracy, she was sure of it – she knew that, any minute now, they would be joined by their more recent friend. This more definitely lower-class man might even – she recoiled almost physically at this thought – be a market trader, if his apron stinking of crab was anything to go by. Marie-Thérèse knew from past experience that this person, wildly unsuitable for a café in the serious, respectable rue du Colisée, wouldn’t be playing chess any more than his cronies did. They’d all just sit there all evening, ignoring the game and muttering away together.

  If only Madame wasn’t so taken up with Russians, she thought, and her regret was tinged with shame and anger that, as a result of her mistress’s poor social judgement, she too was, at one remove, also implicated in Russian goings-on. Not that the courteous, old-fashioned officers were bad neighbours, exactly, but those dirty artists who were always round here, staying up all night, eating Madame out of house and home, draining the wine cellar and stubbing their cigarettes out in the flower vases; not to mention the fact that a decent young Frenchman like her nephew Pierre couldn’t get work in the car factories at Billancourt these days, because he couldn’t understand what was being said around him if he didn’t speak Russian … ça alors!

  She shut the door on the scene with feeling, and followed the doctor up the stairs towards Madame’s bedroom.

  It didn’t take General Skoblin long to spot his wife through the clouds of murky steam that the trains were blowing back along the platform.

  Plevitskaya always stood out. Ignoring tonight’s heat, she was wearing a wide-brimmed dark felt hat festooned with ostrich feathers. Her lips were a crimson pout, and she had gold hoops in her ears. In that clinging burgundy dress, walking with a slight waddle caused by new shoes he could see were too high and small for comfort, she was sweating but magnificent.

  Watching her approach, amid the stares and turning heads of the other boat-train passengers, her husband quietly folded up his newspaper. In the half-hour he’d been waiting under the great glassed-in roof of the gare Saint-Lazare, no one in the crowds of porters and pigeons and passengers pushing one way or the other had spared him a second glance. But then he was an inconspicuous man in late middle age, with neat grey-black hair, a moustache and a suit of about the same colour as the dark metal stanchion he’d been standing by. He didn’t stand out. He was used to playing second fiddle.

  Even though he could see her eyes searching the crowd for him now, he didn’t do any of the flamboyant things people might expect the husband of such a woman to do: run forward, sweep her up in his arms, press passionate lips to hers, or even wave. He wasn’t given to melodrama. He just stood there, thinking, and sighing a bit at the mountains of luggage bobbing along behind her equally mountainous form. He didn’t like to think of the shopping she must have done in New York, whatever she’d promised him before leaving. At least she’d travelled second class this time, so hopefully there’d be fewer new debts. Thank God, in so many ways, for the second job, and his good news.

  ‘Darrrling!’ she erupted with her best throaty vibrato when she finally sighted him from ten feet away. She speeded up to a curvaceous totter, rushing to his arms. He stepped dutifully forward and embraced her back. He could smell at once that she’d been replenishing her supplies of Chanel No. 5, and at American prices too. As she and the porters and observers all clearly expected, he raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. She curved her big mouth up into a satisfied smile, then, before he’d had a chance to say a word, opened it again and started volubly talking. ‘My golden treasure! My little sun!’ Her lips caressed each endearment, showing off for the watchers she was pretending to ignore, giving them a performance as she always did. Her great stone-studded gold cross flapped energetically up and down between her breasts. Her black-rimmed eyes widened theatrically. The train – dreadfully crowded. The ship – a tossing, turning, heaving nightmare full of God knows who; the indignity. The unworthiness of the restaurants she’d been booked to sing in in New York. And the hotel waiters – all Chinamen in pigtails …

  Silently he nodded and smiled. He distributed francs among the porters (she didn’t even look – she was too busy talking). He shepherded them all along towards the waiting car. She’d shut up sooner or later. Then he’d get a chance to speak.

  Her monologues never needed answers. So at least there was a kind of peace to be found in them. He used it to recall that there’d been a time – so long ago he could barely remember – when the sight and sound of her hadn’t made him sigh.

  Back in the Crimea … and for a moment General Skoblin could once again smell the thyme and sea in the glittering air of his youth – and call to mind, too, the hasty packings of tents, the listing of rifles and ammunition (fewer every time) and the terrifying creepings and rustlings of the night. The last thing he’d needed, on top of his part in the fading hopes of that campaign, was a consignment of Red prisoners sent down from Kursk to deal with. Until he’d seen her among them, and heard the indrawn breaths and whistles: the Nightingale! She’d gone to the Red lines, it turned out – joined the enemy. She’d been caught singing to keep the Bolsheviks’ spirits up. That’s how she’d got herself tangled up in that impossibly churned-up war world. But before that, and even before she’d been the Tsar’s favourite musician, given jewels and asked to perform at Tsarskoye Selo and the Winter Palace; before both her previous husbands, in some impossibly remote, lost dream-era when there still was no Revolution, and no war, he’d seen her sing at the Yar restaurant, back when she was still just a country girl who’d run away from a provincial convent choir and wore a red sarafan: a dark slip of a girl with a magical voice and a liquid-eyed way of looking at you …

  And suddenly there she was, his prisoner. He’d married her two years later, in a refugee camp in Turkey. By then no one remembered she’d briefly been the Red Nightingale. By then, the Civil War had been lost, and everyone just wanted to forget.

  And of course it had been a blessing, in some ways, their marriage. While most of the other White officers he’d fought and lost with had been completely down on their luck – stuck for years in those transit camps, some of them – she’d whisked him off on the new touring life she soon began, turning herself effortlessly back into the Tsar’s Nightingale and lucratively singing the sad songs of exile to any nostalgic émigré Whites who’d managed to make it as far as Germany, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria …

  They climbed into the Cadillac. (His little weakness, this; sometimes he explained it by saying he needed a grand car to drive his wife around in; sometimes, more churlishly, he told himself that surely he too was allowed a gesture of flamboyance every now and then?) Out of the corner of his eye, he watched his wife dump her handbag carelessly on the creaking pale-leather back seat. He was pleased when, apparently only now realizing it had landed on a newspaper whose front-page article was illustrated by a solemn picture of Yezhov, the new head of Soviet intelligence, she carefully moved the bag to the floor, giving him a furtive look.

  He nodded grimly. She liked to show off in public. All right. But he was the man. It was right that she should respect him and his work. Alone together, they both knew who the boss was.

  It was only when they were on the road out of Paris, and she’d stopped complaining about the indignity of second class, that Skoblin lit a cigarette and said, exhaling a cloud of smoke, ‘Tomorrow, to celebrate your return, we’re going to go back into town and buy’ – he paused for emphasis – ‘crab in the market.’

  He preferred talking in the car. There weren’t so many cats here as in their little house in Ozoir.

  ‘Oh!’ she said weakly, sounding as shocked as if she’d never expected to hear the phrase.

  ‘Yes,’ he continued, level-voiced. ‘The crab salesman is here.’

  He wasn’t displeased with the nervous way she shifted in her seat.

  9

&nb
sp; As the dusk thickened, and the train began passing through thicker clumps of villages, then mean outer-city districts of factories and poky housing with lights beginning to come on as workers came home for the night, I found myself getting so nervous that, in the clammy evening heat, my hands felt hot and damp and, I saw, were covered in newsprint smears.

  I put the paper down in my lap, thinking uneasily that I hadn’t had a reply to my letter; well, there hadn’t been time for a reply. I’d sailed the night after I’d bought the ticket, without telling Mother. I’d been trying, all the way over, not to think of the one-line note I’d left on my pillow at home, before heading off to spend the in-between time at Eliza’s. My note had said no more than that I was going to Paris for the summer. Every time I did remember it, I got a sick knot in my stomach. I hadn’t thought about it much on board ship either. It was only once I’d sent Grandmother a follow-up wire from Le Havre, before getting on this train, that the vagueness of my arrangements had really struck me. I couldn’t be sure anyone was expecting me. What if there was no one to meet me at the station? Would I just take a taxi and go to Grandmother’s address? What if she was away?

  I was almost relieved when a very tall young man, weighed down by a big backpack and a guitar suspended across his front by a string, shimmied down the jerking length of the open carriage, only just avoiding all the bags and feet that might have tripped him up, to sit down next to me.

  ‘Best to be at the front of the train when you’re getting off,’ he said cheerfully by way of explanation, perching on the front of his seat (he couldn’t lean back, with that backpack) and flicking dark-blond curls off his handsome face. And then, looking properly at my face: ‘I remember you.’

  It was a relief, at that uneasy moment, to be recognized; and, besides, I remembered him too. We’d talked a bit on the boat. He was Dutch, I thought; and I half remembered that his mother had been an actress and his father maybe a theatre manager, but he’d come to America as soon as he’d left school; I thought he’d maybe been hanging around Hollywood for the past few years, like so many of the boys on the boat: doing little jobs, hoping for a break. But I definitely remembered that he’d recently been in Spain, taking pictures. He’d told me he’d been slightly wounded. He’d even rolled up his pants leg to show me the scar across his calf where the shrapnel had been picked out. He’d gone to New York to heal up and tout for work from American papers for his return to Spain. The Yanks paid better, he’d said cheerfully – only he’d said ‘de Yanks’. The Dutch had no cash. Nor did the French.

  He grinned at me. ‘You got somewhere to stay in Paris?’ he asked casually.

  His smile was so infectious that I grinned back, despite myself, and nodded. ‘I think so,’ I said cautiously, and then pointed at his guitar. ‘Do you play?’

  Well, of course he does, if he’s carrying around a guitar, I reproved myself. What kind of stupid question is that?

  But he only nodded and grinned wider and lovingly patted the body of his instrument. ‘Ja, I started learning last year in Andalucía from the gypsies. The last thing you’d expect in a war, ja? But, you know how it is, things just turn out the way they do. And I met some people, and they taught me a bit. And we got along so well, me and my gypsy friends, that they even ended up by giving me a gypsy name: Arai, which means something like “not of our blood, but one of us anyway”.’ He put his fingers gently on the strings: long, thin, elegant fingers, I noticed. The strings vibrated softly under his touch. ‘Did you ever hear flamenco music?’

  Perhaps it was just that by then I was so rattled by the prospect of finding myself alone on a strange continent, on my quite likely futile mission, but I half wanted him to start playing, right there in the carriage, while he talked about Spain and gypsies. But when I looked round, the train was already pulling in under a grimy glass awning. I could feel it ominously slowing.

  He looked around as if surprised, too, to have reached journey’s end so fast. Then he shrugged in that carefree way he had, leaped up and, picking up my bag, too, as if we’d decided to go travelling together, said, ‘Come on. Let’s beat the crowd.’

  I let myself be drawn along in his wake at the front of the crowd leaving the train, half running to keep up, laughing a little, as much out of surprised pleasure at this chance taste of friendship and freedom as from my nerves. Perhaps, after all, I’d got to a place where everyone was as spontaneous and happy as Eliza and Dorothy and their amusing brothers and chatty European fathers? Even if there was no one waiting for me at the station or at Grandmother’s home, how bad could it be? I’d just go and find myself a hotel and some new friends. Maybe this was the start of it all?

  Even when we got to the ticket barrier, and there was, after all, a fat, red-faced man in a peaked cap holding up a cardboard sign which I saw, with a thrill of recognition, said, ‘Mme la Comtesse Sabline’, I was (just a bit) sorry to say goodbye to the first new young friend I’d made.

  Arai the Flamenco Dutchman surrendered my bag to the chauffeur willingly enough. Then he nodded farewell at me, looking a little sad too.

  ‘Look me up,’ he said with another flashing smile, ‘if you want. I’ll be putting up at La Ruche for a bit. A blanket on the floor, I expect – no creature comforts – but it’s always fun.’ Before I’d even got out the words, ‘But what is La Ruche?’ he was already off at high speed, whistling. But he turned one more time and called back through the crowd that had by now caught up with us, and the pigeons flapping in the ironwork, ‘Oh, ask anyone! Everyone knows La Ruche!’ and waved before he vanished.

  And then I was alone with the chauffeur.

  He was called Gaston. I knew that because, with my bag in one hand, walking towards the automobile he’d parked outside the station, he used his free hand to thump at his own chest and said, speaking loudly and enunciating very carefully, as if I wouldn’t understand a word and was deaf into the bargain: ‘Gaston.’

  ‘Evelyn,’ I replied, with my best social smile and brightest tone, ‘Evie. Enchantée!’ He just grunted. I could see he’d got it in his head I wouldn’t understand French, because he ignored all my subsequent polite attempts to chat: about the weather, about the crowds, about the pigeons … After a few minutes of scratchy struggling, I stopped trying to converse with him and just concentrated on getting inside the motor car.

  Because, really, who cared about a surly driver? I was here! And, as I settled myself in the back seat, my mind was already leaping ahead – out of sheer relief, probably, at knowing I did, after all, have a journey’s end after that unsettling last hour of worrying in the train. And, now I was here, I’d befriend Grandmother. Of course I would. And maybe there’d be an afterwards, too, once I’d filled that gap in my family’s past and answered the questions in my head, once I’d found a family member who wouldn’t automatically disapprove of all the things my friends wanted to do with their lives. And, if she’d liked that Russian singer (funnily enough, I’d actually seen her again, on the ship, though only from far away; she’d been sitting on a deck chair behind the railing separating me from the second-class deck of the boat, looking windswept and glum and dumpy under a shawl, staring out to sea; I’d even waved, but she hadn’t seen me) … well, maybe I’d discover that Grandmother would enjoy the idea of wandering musicians as much as I’d liked that brief brush with the handsome young Dutchman. And (since she obviously liked romance and adventure and travel too – two husbands! And all those artists’ colonies all over the world!) she might even think it a good idea for me to go off to Spain, to see what it was all about. And even if she was against that idea, for better reasons than any I’d have heard from Aunt Mildred or Mother, well, no harm done. Because maybe I could just stay on in Paris for longer, and learn to paint or write my own novel …

  ‘… mademoiselle,’ Gaston was saying, turning round and taking one hand alarmingly off the wheel. I realized he’d been trying to get my attention for several moments.

  I nodded and put an intently listeni
ng look on my face. I could see he’d need encouraging out of his idée fixe that all young Americans in Paris were complete, uncomprehending idiots. I leaned forward.

  But it didn’t matter what look I put on my face, or how I arranged my body. He just looked a mixture of agonized and patient and impatient all at once, and went on in the kind of pidgin French he must think easier for me to understand: ‘Madame – malade. Madame – malade, comprenez?’

  After a moment’s panicky thought, I said weakly, ‘Oh là là,’ as if I really were the half-wit he took me for, then instantly cursed myself for feebleness. He only shook his head and sighed eloquently (proof!); then – and this, at least, was a relief – he turned his eyes back to the road and accelerated off, making the automobile growl. By the time I got my wits together enough to add, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’elle a, la pauvre?’ (‘Poor thing, what’s the matter?’) he was concentrating on his driving, and the car was probably making too much noise for him to have heard. At any rate, he didn’t reply.

  I think what I imagined was a touch of flu, or just a headache. My euphoria at having reached Paris was so intense that it never crossed my mind that there might be anything really wrong. Why would it? I’d never seen any illness but Mother’s turns.

  Perhaps I should stop for flowers? I thought vaguely, while also letting my eyes drink in the great squares as they rose up before us, and the bridges, the boulevards, the trees, the statues, but as I didn’t have the faintest idea of how you’d buy flowers here and wasn’t about to tangle further with Gaston to try and find out, and it was pretty much night-time anyway, I didn’t take the idea that seriously. Anyway, I already had a gift. I’d brought Grandmother the new novel everyone was talking about back home about two landless men looking for work in California – a grand little novel, despite its melodrama, the New York Times had called it, and it had struck me, midway through, that those two characters, George and Lennie, wandering the dry heat of the West with their bundles on sticks, were a bit like me and my own quixotic, uncertain journey here. It would be enough for her to read that in bed as she recovered, I decided. So I let my mind form vague pictures of myself taking her cups of smoky China tea in a vast Empire bed, and the gratitude of her smile as she looked up from the book. And I stared around me.