The White Russian

by Vanora Bennett

  He couldn’t stay still. He got up. But instead of going to the window he walked to the fireplace and picked up the small framed photo on it. It showed a thin young fair-haired man in military uniform, rowing a boat, with a dark-haired young woman in the mutton-chop-sleeve fashion of two generations ago smiling tremulously at him. He held it to his heart, remembering how young they’d both once been, and obscurely comforted by its still being here. Constance’s smile had always had that power over him.

  Whatever he’d told her, after their last lunch, about being too busy, he’d half meant to change his mind and slip upstairs for that cocktail anyway. He really had. She was always in his thoughts. But then, by the end of the afternoon, his head had been too full of the marvellous news Skoblin had brought him – that letter from Wilhelm Canaris’s office, still lying there on the desk now, with its black, black Gothic lettering and its long German words. The letter held out the possibility of the alliance they’d been dreaming of for all these years: Germany’s military might thrown behind their increasingly futile struggle to unseat the Reds from Russia (futile because they were none of them getting any younger, and because so many of the young had, like Jean, given up hope of ever going home – but how different everything would look, if they could lean on Berlin) … He’d been so full of pride in his security chief – Skoblin, the quiet man no one had trusted, whom he’d insisted on appointing; his faith in his subordinate now triumphantly vindicated – and in the future opening up for them all that he hadn’t been able to think of anything else. He hadn’t slipped upstairs, as he’d intended, not even for a moment. He’d just let Jean take him back to his own apartment instead.

  If only he’d fobbed Jean off, said he had to work late, as he sometimes did, told him to come back hours later or not at all, that he’d sleep on the office sofa, anything. If only he’d forgotten about duty and the war against the Soviets for once. If only he’d said, as a normal man might have, to hell with the cause, I want to see my lover.

  He tightened his hold on the picture, as if she were somehow still in it and reachable, touchable, addressing his excuses to her. The thing was that, at that moment, on that afternoon three days ago, he hadn’t been able to think of anything but the Germans, who, as the letter said, were already on their way to Paris for that long-awaited secret meeting. In his mind, he’d been sketching out what they might look like, where the meeting would be, and what he’d say to persuade them. He couldn’t have said anything about any of that to Constance, of course, and he wouldn’t have been able to explain his elation … and (incredible as this now seemed, in the darkness enveloping him this morning) he’d so wanted to celebrate. He couldn’t, not with anyone else, because only Skoblin knew, and Skoblin had had to go back to his own little hovel in the sticks, and his wife. So, tiptoeing around so as not to disturb Katya, who was asleep in her sickroom, he’d sat out on the balcony at home and got a little happily drunk, all on his own, gazing out through the night air at the stars and allowing himself to wonder if there might, after all, be any chance that one day before he died he’d again look up at this sky – but a bigger, more luminous, old-country version of it – from that beloved shabby spreading house from the past, with its fluttering curtains, its smell of Pears soap and Dusya’s apple cake, its little river beach, and its peace, surrounded by the pine forest where, in summer, he’d once raced between trees on a bicycle …

  And the next morning – could it really be only the day before yesterday? – with a muzzy head but still full of his private joy, he’d helped the nurse wheel the wordless Katya, dribbling and twitching in her invalid chair, out on to the balcony to enjoy the sunlight. He’d stood there beside the poor wreck of a woman his wife had become, not feeling sad for her for once because he was so lit up with his excitement. He’d waited for the sight of Jean’s taxi in the street below, not even listening to the traffic noise because he was lost in the peace and beauty of that other place, the estate, the blossom, the lime-tree promenade. He’d let little wisps of expectant half-thought run through his head – when would he arrange for Katya to move home, if…? And, Katya would have the care she needed, back home, if … And, more privately still, would Constance come with him to a place that would be so alien to her, if…? But all those were questions for later. He didn’t let his racing mind stop on any of them. As soon as he’d seen Jean he’d drunk his coffee in a gulp and rushed to work, eager as a child.

  ‘You’re in a good mood today,’ he remembered Jean saying wearily.

  ‘Developments,’ he’d replied, importantly, feeling the letter in his pocket with his hand. ‘Developments, dear boy.’

  Now the memory of that secret pride he’d been bursting with made him want to howl and smash his fist through something. How could he not have known – after all the reverses he’d suffered in his long life – that you should never take such hubristic pleasure in the advances of a single day? They could all be wiped out the next. They usually were.

  This time, his joy had been wiped out as soon as they’d reached this office building. He’d noticed people on the stairs – more to-ing and fro-ing than usual in the lobby. He hadn’t thought much of it. But perhaps he’d had a raised eyebrow, or an enquiring look on his face. At any rate, the secretary who’d answered their door had explained the fuss without even being asked, saying, with gloomy pleasure, ‘A death in the building, your excellency; the American lady upstairs.’

  The silence that followed seemed to go on forever. The universe, flipping over, the stars changing their course …

  Then he remembered that he’d said – snapped: ‘I don’t want to hear gossip. I have work to do. I don’t want to be disturbed today,’ and rushed into his room, leaving the secretary, and Jean, staring round-mouthed behind him.

  He’d been here ever since. He’d phoned Skoblin and said he wanted to be left alone for a day or two to work out how best to approach Canaris’s men. That had got rid of him. When Jean came to pick him up, in the evening, he’d sent the boy away too. Pressure of work, he’d said. Last night, too. Now the sofa was a frowsty mess of blankets. He hadn’t changed his shirt. His hair was sticking up.

  He knew they were all waiting outside, all his colleagues, expecting ideas and initiatives from him. But he hadn’t looked at the letter. Not once.

  He was a man like any other. He just wanted to be left alone to mourn; to cover the mirror up decently with a cloth as the old superstition demanded; and to go to Constance’s funeral and bury his love. And he couldn’t.

  Although, he suddenly thought with a wild little leap of the heart, if he were to try, just once, slipping out of the back door, the cook’s door, not just for a smoke in the courtyard, but to get to the alley at the back of it, and out past the dustbins … now, that might work … especially now, around midday, when the secretaries who worked here during the morning were all busy taking off their dignified suits and uniforms, putting on workmen’s overalls instead and heading off to the labouring jobs that they needed to keep them in bread and wine and rent money in this alien land they’d somehow fetched up in; while the others – the afternoon secretaries – were still straggling here, in ragged workers’ clothes, from their early shift in some unmentionable car-factory suburb, ready to resume their real dress, their real language, and their real, Russian way of life, only once they walked in through this front door …

  For a moment, he could almost imagine himself walking, free and unaccompanied, down the street, between the roaring of traffic, with the breeze ruffling his hair.

  It was what Constance would have done: paid no heed to the world, just followed her heart.

  But heart-following wasn’t his destiny. He shook his head (carefully, realizing as he did that he shouldn’t have toasted Constance’s passing in vodka in the middle of last night, without so much as a zakuska to help the alcohol down; it wasn’t good for his heart). No, no, he was a man with responsibilities. He’d better look at that letter, and start making plans. He started making his w
ay heavily towards the desk, hating the juxtaposition of mahogany slab, white paper rectangle and jacket neatly hung on the chair, dreading sitting at it again and closing down his heart.

  He was still walking across the room when he heard the taxi outside pull away.

  He stopped. He changed direction.

  What he’d imagined he would do now was to go to the window.

  But instead he went to the door, opened it – no one there – and slipped out in his shirtsleeves. They’d never know he’d gone, he told himself, opening the door at the back of the courtyard, as long as they could see his jacket on the back of his chair.

  13

  The bright crowd in ragged motley came clattering into the little church, looking about them and whispering in many different languages. Some of them I recognized from the artists’ refuge the day before yesterday; one of them, a large woman ostentatiously kissing people through a mass of attention-seeking black feathers, I was almost certain was the Russian singer I’d met in New York. Marie-Thérèse and Gaston, beside me in the front pew, near the coffin, were rigid with disapproval. But I didn’t mind. Even if no one except me had bothered to send flowers, there was no disrespect intended in their too-loud chatter. The door shut behind us.

  Then, just as the priest approached the altar to begin the service, the door opened again. A sombre-looking elderly man of a quite different sort, in shirtsleeves and correct, if worn, cavalry twill trousers, stuck his head in. He didn’t look the type to go out without a jacket. His hair had just been damped and combed over his big head, and he had a neat grey imperial beard and side-whiskers. He was composing himself, but he was still out of breath. He looked as though he must have been running.

  He blinked once or twice as his eyes got used to the interior twilight. For a long moment, he looked around. I saw his eyes fix on the waving black feathers above that woman’s splendid shelf of a bosom. I couldn’t help smiling to myself at the horror on his face as he took in the appearance of the crowd.

  Then he retreated. The door shut, very quietly, as the first word of prayer began.

  I forgot about the unknown worshipper for the next few hours. Marie-Thérèse had set out wine and canapés for the guests back at the apartment, and until the middle of the afternoon the artists were there, talking, mostly incomprehensibly in languages I couldn’t understand, and gesticulating, and drinking, and eating. Hardly anyone bothered to come and tell me the stories about Grandmother that I’d been so hoping to hear. They were too busy knocking back food and drink. I asked everyone I did speak to if, by any chance, their name was Yevgeny, but I just got headshakes in reply. Increasingly disappointed, I resolved that, once we’d got rid of them all, I would go and visit the sister of Grandmother’s dead husband – the one Marie-Thérèse had told me ran an orphanage in the suburbs somewhere. I’d got her name, Maria Sabline, from the art-colony man with the donkey. He couldn’t remember her address, but he told me it would be in the phone book. He’d laughed rather sadly at the thought of her, and added, not very distinctly, ‘It’sh been a long time shince it was an orphanage there. Children grow up; they all grow up …’ before grabbing at some cheese slices being passed around by Gaston and forgetting about me. It had occurred to me that the orphanage woman’s brother – Grandmother’s dead husband – might have been called Yevgeny.

  Only the singer – Plevitskaya was her name, I now knew for sure – came waddling over to offer condolences, but even she was soft with brandy before she remembered me. ‘It is good to see you again,’ she slurred, pushing back strands of black feathers that kept slipping down from her enormous hat. Her breath was pure Rémy Martin, but she clearly remembered meeting me before. ‘And here in Paris. But so sad, so sad, that we are at funeral of my dear old friend.’ She was clutching at my shoulders, hugging me to a too-warm, too-padded breast. Some of the artists came up and said something kind but discouraging to her, in Russian, but she shrugged them off in exclamatory English. ‘No! This is grand-daughter of my dear Constance! We are acquainted! Like grandmother, this beautiful young lady came to hear me sing in New York – then came to Paris to find Russians. Grandmother too – dear, dear Constance. Years ago, she hear me in New York – love Russian music so much – followed me to Paris. Same story. One Russian voice, and they are enchanted.’ Her eyes filled with tears.

  ‘Da ladno,’ one of the young men said tenderly, gently detaching her from me and taking her away to rest on the sofa. ‘I ask forgiveness!’ she said, looking at me in glistening alarm. ‘But I have another question!’ It came out as ‘kvesshon!’ I smiled uncertainly, but I didn’t go and join her on the sofa. She was too drunk, and too unmanageable. I could barely remember why I’d wanted to show her the paper with Grandmother’s writing on, the other day. There’d be someone easier to ask, I now felt sure. I didn’t really believe Grandmother had come to Paris as a result of hearing her sing, any more than I’d come because of that, but I felt sorry for her tears, all the same. The others didn’t. They just winked and grinned at me, as if sharing a joke, and moved on.

  Plevitskaya wasn’t the only one who seemed overwhelmed by the plentiful refreshments. The sofas were filling up fast with shouting, weeping people. ‘It’s unbelievable, what they’re getting through,’ I heard Marie-Thérèse mutter as she came rushing out of the kitchen with another tray of food. ‘Gaston says they’re drinking the cellar dry.’

  I smiled and spread my hands in resignation, signalling: Oh, let them gorge themselves. They don’t look as though they eat enough, usually. It was my guess Grandmother would have wanted a cheerful send-off.

  But after a while – once I’d seen Plevitskaya consult her watch, then totter out in a not completely straight line – I slipped away too and left the rest of them to it and went back to the churchyard. I thought I’d sit by Grandmother’s grave and clear my head, and Gaston could see off the stragglers and clear up.

  To my surprise, there was someone else at the graveyard already, under the old yew tree spreading shade next to that morning’s mound of upturned earth, with its flowers. He was sitting with dignity on a stump, straight-backed, not seeming to notice how uncomfortable it must be. And he was gazing into the distance, cradling something square in his arms. His eyes were reddened and his face looked rough, as if he hadn’t slept. But his expression was calm. It was the same elderly man I’d seen in church: the one in crumpled shirtsleeves, with the beard and whiskers. There was something familiar about him, I thought now. Perhaps I’d seen him around here somewhere before or perhaps it was just I could now see that his silvered hair, no longer neatly combed down but blowing all over the place in the breeze, was, rather like mine, prone to rising up irrepressibly in two places at the temples. His, unrestrained by the grips that held mine, had started to look a little comical as it fluttered in the wind. Between the two wiry kinks that had escaped their moorings and were pushing out and up, the softer hair from the middle part of his forehead had blown forward to hang limply over his eyes, which must be why, every now and then, he was unconsciously shaking his head, like a horse flicking its mane about to rid itself of flies. Looking at him made me smile, even as it reminded me, sympathetically, of my own struggles with my disobedient hair.

  I stopped at the gate. I couldn’t know if it were Grandmother’s grave that had drawn him there, or if he were just sitting there by chance. He hadn’t stayed in church for her funeral, after all, but I didn’t like to disturb him, all the same. I could sense the depth of sadness in him.

  There was so much sadness in this city, I was just beginning to see; so many people hugging secret sorrows to their hearts. There was so much I didn’t yet understand.

  I was already walking away by the time I realized there’d been something else about that scene. I’d been expecting to see just my bunch of flowers on the grave. But someone had brought more since I’d left the churchyard. There’d been a whole scatter of loose red and white carnations, just now, blowing over Grandmother’s grave.

 
; 14

  The feathers kept getting in Plevitskaya’s eyes as she walked. In spite of the havoc being wrought on her feet by these excruciating New York high heels, she’d chosen to walk all the way to the 17th arrondissement, rather than hail a cab, because she could tell she’d somehow got a bit tiddly at the wake and wanted to sober up before she met her husband and the others for the early dinner they’d planned. This meeting might change both their lives. She couldn’t let him down.

  Irritably, she brushed the tickly black fringe out of her face. If only the sun weren’t so hot, and her dress so tight. She wasn’t the type to drink, she told herself; it was just the once, because she was sad, and that was understandable enough …

  As soon as she’d peeped round the door of Constance’s office, at the start of the wake, she’d seen that the equipment for her voice recording, which had been lying everywhere just the other day, beeping and gleaming, had all gone. Vanished. She’d meant to ask the girl what had happened to it, but sadness had overwhelmed her, and the girl had been too busy to concentrate. It was clear that the recording would never be made now. She’d pinned so much faith on it. She’d so hoped that being on phonograph, especially this superior type, which would show her at her best advantage, was going to revive her career. She’d been dreaming about it non-stop ever since her husband had come home, looking pleased, and said he’d put the question of paying for it to Constance so subtly that she’d almost ended up thinking it was all her own idea. Her husband, despite his pursed lips and moodiness, did, often, still think of wonderful ways of pleasing her. It wasn’t his fault this one hadn’t worked. But it was a reverse, a considerable reverse. No wonder she’d poured out the cognac with a more generous hand than usual today. The frustration was enough to make a saint weep.