The White Russian

by Vanora Bennett

  How motherly she was feeling towards me became clearer still when she added, ‘And you ought to find out what that other word Madame wrote meant, too. Because – you never know – it might be something else; some other memento for you.’

  ‘It’s a person’s name,’ I said, with growing certainty. The idea was developing in my mind, too. ‘I’m almost sure it is, because of the place where she wrote “Evie protect make amends” with that word next to it. She must have wanted me to go and find someone, do something to help them and look after them; maybe someone she’d fallen out with. Perhaps she wanted me to share her pictures and jewels with them.’

  I’d gladly carry out that wish, I thought. In fact, I’d give them all the jewels. I didn’t even much like jewellery, especially not this ostentatious stuff. I’d far rather have those wild daubs of pictures as my memento of the woman who’d danced with me to Russian violin music, getting faster and faster, whirling me round till I laughed with joy … They’d be a better reminder of her.

  Marie-Thérèse and Gaston looked doubtful.

  ‘She had a Russian husband once,’ I said, wishing I knew more. ‘If those things are Russian, they must be old gifts that he gave her, and his letters, too, I suppose. And maybe some of his family is here – and that word is the name of some relative of his whom I should find. After all, in a family, there’s always someone to make amends to …’

  It sounded a promising line of inquiry.

  But Marie-Thérèse decisively shook her head. ‘Oh, no, mademoiselle,’ she said firmly. ‘That’s not it. Madame and that husband were only together for a year before Madame moved back to Paris. And she once told me that he’d been a shameless fortune-hunter, who’d only married her in the belief she was rich and would support him in style, and who started threatening to leave her as soon as her family cut off her allowance. She met him because she used to give money to the Russian orphanage that his sister – another vulture – ran out in the suburbs here. She said he’d spent all his own money long before he latched on to her. That was no surprise to me, of course; in my experience, Russians usually take more than they give. He had very nice manners, she said: he could charm birds down from trees. But it was a blessing in disguise that he died when he did.’

  Yes, I’d known about him, hadn’t I? Hughie had said something similar. But what struck me most about Marie-Thérèse’s last remark was the reference it contained to Grandmother’s family having cut off her allowance. I’d never heard anything about that from the family. This casual mention of it filled me with a searing pity for Grandmother, and anger against the rest of my family, who, I hotly told myself, had so spectacularly failed her – Mother in particular, but even affable, no-nonsense Hughie. He administered the family trusts, after all. He must have let Mother’s spite affect his judgement. He’d just cut her loose! If Marie-Thérèse was right, and it had happened while Grandmother had been briefly married to her Russian count, he must have done it after that time she’d stayed with us, when I was small. They must have been punishing her for that, when what had poor Grandmother actually done on that visit that was so terrible, except dance with me and organize a harmless procession in favour of women’s emancipation? Without her allowance, I knew, she’d have been left with nothing more to live on than her small widow’s pension from the diplomatic service. Was this why she’d stayed in Paris all these years, where life was so famously cheap, and not come home again? Was that why I’d never had a chance to get to know her?

  This was when my resolve formed. I was going to do what someone who’s needed does, I told myself. No one at home even knew Grandmother was dead (and even if they did, I thought hotly, would they care?), so it would be up to me to clear up the remnants of her life here, and while I did so I was also going to make it my business to find out what Grandmother had been trying to tell me. By the time I was done, I’d know everything that had been in her heart, and I’d take that knowledge home with me. They’d tried to write her out of their story, but I was going to be her historian. I was going to write her back in.

  ‘Well, at least I should go and visit that sister at the orphanage. Maybe, if it is a Russian name, she’ll be able to tell me more,’ I said carefully.

  Marie-Thérèse nodded unenthusiastically. ‘But be sure to ask all of them – all her Russians,’ she added cannily. ‘Not just that one woman. You’ll have to phone them all at some point, anyway, to say she’s died and tell them about the funeral. Remember, you can’t trust Russians. Every one of them will probably tell you that the word is their name. Make sure you double-check.’

  By that night, I knew a few more things.

  The first was that Grandmother had left me her money. The lawyer (thin and faintly disapproving and dressed in hot black, regardless of the weather, like all lawyers everywhere) had shown me her will, written seventeen years before. Below an official declaration that she had no other family – I guessed, from this disavowal, that the will must have been her angry response to my mother and stepfather and her own sister’s decision to cut her out of our family finances – she’d written that I was to be her sole beneficiary.

  ‘Mais, mademoiselle,’ he’d added cautiously, nibbling at his pen and raising an eyebrow, ‘it is my impression that there isn’t much to leave. The apartment is rented – it’s paid for until the end of the year. She had an American official widow’s pension which dies with her. There are personal effects, of course: clothes, furs, jewels, which I don’t think are worth enough for you to worry about their incurring tax. But there is nothing else.’

  Remembering Marie-Thérèse’s warning not to let the taxman know about the Fabergé trinkets, I’d kept quiet about the box. But I’d gestured around at the pictures – the ones in the salon were mostly curling-up pages of yellowed paper pinned to the wall, with jagged lines and cut-out bits of violin curve stuck on to them, and asked, timidly, what about these? The lawyer had just smiled.

  My second discovery was that both afternoon and evening were bad times to telephone Parisians, whether French, Russian or American. I hadn’t managed to strike up a chatty friendship with a single White Russian, trustworthy or otherwise. Every number I was put through to was answered by a haughty-sounding maid saying, ‘Madame revient prochaînement,’ or ‘Monsieur dîne à l’extérieur,’ and offering, with no great grace, to take a message. There hadn’t been many gracious expressions of condolence, either, when the message I’d dictated had been an invitation for Monsieur or Madame to attend a funeral the day after tomorrow.

  One person I’d thought I might show the paper to, and ask what the mystery word meant, was the singer I’d met in New York – Plevitskaya, the so-called Russian Nightingale. Briefly, I’d been pleased at the idea of our paths crossing again. Here, among strangers, even someone I knew as little as Plevitskaya felt like a dear old friend. But, when I’d looked in the book, I hadn’t seen anything that looked like the singer’s long last name. (Or had I just remembered it wrong?)

  Nor was there an entry I could recognize as being the orphanage woman’s number. I’d just have to wait to talk to the people who came to the funeral to find out more, I saw.

  Grandmother’s Russian artist friends didn’t even have a telephone number. There was just an address: ‘Surrealists – chez Père Boucher, passage Dantzig, rue Dantzig, 15e. Or try Café Dantzig (NB beware drunk butchers)’.

  So, when I’d given up on the telephone, I’d got Gaston to take me there, through a district of slaughterhouses, foul smells and screaming cattle. Sighing deeply, he’d dropped me at a half-ruined octagonal building I’d felt a little scared to enter. The plot it was built on was full of other, smaller, more definitely ruined temporary buildings, like exhibition pavilions long gone to seed, with a garage at the end. It was very noisy. There were people banging at metal and wood on all sides. Most of the windows were broken. There were makeshift stovepipes sticking out of several squares with no glass. A man dressed as a cowboy was howling from a tiny balcony near the top, �
��Moi génie! Moi génie!’ But no one was listening.

  Everywhere I looked I saw depressed-looking people in rags dragging themselves about or muttering together. No wonder they looked so miserable. It smelled of herring and filth, cabbage and turpentine. I could feel the rats. I was about to leave without daring to speak to a soul when I saw an old Frenchman wearing a military ribbon in his buttonhole, wandering with a donkey on a halter through a litter-strewn garden dotted with sculptures (or so I thought – though they were so odd that I also thought they might just be bits of buildings that had come down). When I explained my errand, his eyes filled with sympathetic tears and he took me straight into a not-so-bad apartment on the ground floor. As he murmured, ‘Ah, la pauvre Constance,’ a crowd of other lost souls followed us in, all of them emaciated and paint-damaged but suddenly bright-eyed too.

  ‘My bees,’ the old man explained vaguely, and the way they were buzzing around him was rather like bees; was this, then, the beehive – La Ruche – that the Dutchman I’d talked to on the train, a lifetime ago – yesterday – had been heading for?

  ‘Are you making tea, Papi?’ one of the young people asked in guttural French; Russians, I thought, and my hunch was confirmed when he turned to me and explained, with a joyful flash of a smile, ‘Tea is the centre of all our nostalgias.’ Then, turning on the skeletal youth behind him, the speaker added, quickly: ‘Because if you are, I happen to know Kostya has a bottle of vodka in his pocket. So if you have bread and maybe a bit of sausage for a zakuska, too, we could all treat this lovely young lady.’

  And so it had been maybe an hour before I’d got away – an hour during which several more people had crammed in to see me, many of whom had said warmly that Grandmother had been their dearest friend and patron, most of whom had asked me to their studios to see their work, and all of whom had said, very eagerly, that they’d be sure to come to the funeral. It had felt encouraging to be among people who’d known Grandmother and wanted to tell me how much they’d enjoyed her company and support, and who might at any moment let slip some inconsequential story that would perhaps let me feel closer to her. I yearned to hear her spoken of in a way that would illuminate her. So I’d sat very quietly, smiling at everyone and letting them pour more drink and talk, being patient when they broke into the language I couldn’t make head or tail of but now knew to be Russian. And it was only when I’d been getting up to go, with my head swimming from the vodka my new friends had been making me gulp down, neat, from a tin mug, followed by a tiny bite of herringy bread, followed by roars of applause, that I’d remembered my blotting paper.

  ‘Женя!’ they’d all sung out, on seeing the mystery scribble. ‘It says “Zhenya”!’ And I’d gazed back, soft with euphoria and hard liquor, loving them all, before I’d realized that this didn’t really solve anything for me, since I didn’t know what it meant. It was a name, of course, they said. The short pet name for Yevgeny – a Russian man’s name.

  ‘Well, are any of you called Yevgeny?’ I asked, hoping against hope that Grandmother would turn out to have one favourite among this lot. But the tousled heads shook, one by one. When they’d finished cheerily calling out all their first names, which went from Khaim to Konstantin but didn’t include anything like the one on my paper, I’d swallowed my disappointment, thanked them and left. Why did you even think it would be that easy? I’d told myself sternly. All the same, I blinked, very hard, all the way back to the car.

  It had taken me the entire drive home to see things more optimistically.

  It was only as I got into bed that I finally could. The third and most important thing I found out today, I told myself, as I switched off the lamp, is that I’m looking for a man called Yevgeny.

  PART THREE

  White Russians

  12

  On the ground floor below Constance’s apartment, a stout elderly man in a suit was sitting at his desk, bathed in strong morning sun, not looking at the one letter on its vast empty surface. He wasn’t looking out of the window, either, at the crowd of peculiar-looking people in the street, all watching a coffin being loaded into a hearse. Not really. Not any more than he was really looking at the two ponies strapped to the hearse, or at the tall, attractive, well-dressed young woman in black, a stranger to him – but, he thought, with a moment’s approval, a lady, at least, unlike all those other ragamuffins – as she got into the car parked behind. Even though he wanted to look. Even though there were tears in his light eyes.

  What General Miller of the Russian General Military Union – discreetly identified on this apartment’s doorplate only by his international-sounding surname and its Russian initials, ROVS, transliterated into Roman letters – was doing, instead, as Constance’s odd cortège assembled on the street, was staying very still, and trying to keep those tears from rolling down his cheeks.

  He was remembering how he’d brushed Constance off at lunch three days ago, when she’d wanted him to come back to her apartment later on, and talk something over with her. Self-important fool that he was, he’d told her he was going to be too busy.

  And now it was too late.

  Constance had been the one taste of freedom in his life. He might not have liked all those terrible degenerate young men painting dreadful pictures whom she’d taken to cossetting. (He could half see several of them outside now.) But he’d admired her free spirit in choosing them, all the same. She wasn’t a person to let herself be tied down by other people’s expectations. She’d always done what she wanted. An extraordinary woman … To someone as defined as he was by the great struggle that had dominated his life for so long, that freedom of manoeuvre of hers had been something to appreciate. When he’d been with her, during those snatched moments together upstairs, he’d sometimes, briefly, also felt free. She’d had the knack of making it seem as though everything might, after all, be possible. She’d had hope. She’d had joy.

  But now she was gone. How trapped he felt.

  The door had just shut behind Jean, who’d taken one look at him while putting down a cup of breakfast-time coffee (still steaming, unnoticed, on the table by the sofa) and said, immediately, with concern in his voice, ‘Pap, you shouldn’t stay up all night working like this. Does you no good. The Soviets will wait another day to be conquered. You don’t look well. Come home with me now. Get some sleep, eh?’

  Of course he hadn’t agreed. But that was nothing to do with the faint scepticism about his mission in life that he’d heard in Jean’s remark either. Jean was a good boy, whose hard work in his unworthy calling as a driver kept them all financially afloat. Jean was entitled to his opinion. He had no right to argue with Jean.

  There was a good practical reason for refusing to go home. This respectable office was in an apartment that had been a legacy to ROVS from an elderly Russian émigré, who’d had the good fortune to pass away while he still had something left to leave. The apartment still had a faded dignity about it: high ceilings (though with flaking paint) and space to breathe and spread out maps. But the dingy little place in the sticks that he and Jean called home only had one bedroom, and that was for Katya, his wife, with the old nurse who lived with them in a cot at the side of the room. Where he slept, at night, was on the sofa in the other room. Jean slept on it during the day, after his nights out scouring Paris for fares. They were both big men. They couldn’t exactly share the sofa for a day’s sleep, could they?

  And anyway, he wanted to be here, watching Constance’s funeral cortège set out.

  What he’d really have liked, if he’d been another person with another life, would have been to go to the funeral himself. But he wasn’t allowed out by himself. He was too important to the White cause. His colleagues didn’t want any more leaders of what was left of the White Russian army – the man on whom they pinned all their hopes of a return, one day, to the lost motherland – to fall victim to any more Soviet plots. It might just have been a rumour that the strange, sudden TB that had taken off Vrangel’, his predecessor but one, ha
d really been caused by a dose of Soviet poison. But there’d been no doubt when Kutyopov had been clubbed and chloroformed and shoved inside a car seven years ago – right here on the street, in the middle of Paris, in the middle of the morning – by men dressed as French police. The hand of the Kremlin’s secret agents was clearly visible. No one knew exactly what had become of that White military leader, but the likelihood was that poor Kutyopov had been spirited off by ship to Russia and ended up in the Lubyanka. At any rate, he’d never been seen again. So, since General Miller had taken over the job, he’d been watched, day and night, not only by Jean – who ended every night’s driving work by picking him up from home in the taxi and bringing him here, then started every new night by coming back to pick him up – but also by all those young men in the outer office: the secretaries, always buzzing around, checking on him, bringing him things … like flies.

  If he tried to slip out of the building now, they’d ask questions. They’d try to come too.

  And he didn’t want that. Some things were best kept private.

  He didn’t even dare get up and go and stare out of the window, memorizing the details of Constance’s last departure. He was too aware of Jean’s habits not to know that, after leaving him here in the mornings – or, on this particular morning, just dropping in to check he was all right – Jean always sat out there in the driver’s seat for a few more minutes, rolling a cigarette to smoke before heading home to sleep. (A filthy habit, General Miller sometimes remonstrated; but Jean was tired by the morning, yawning and red-eyed, and would answer without anger that he needed that cigarette to get his strength up to get to his bed.) So General Miller had no intention of going near the window until he heard the chug of Jean’s motor heading away. He wouldn’t want to be seen gawping out at the many strange persons gathered out there – strays from all the old Russian empire’s subordinate nationalities – in their weird clothes, dirt and disarray.