The White Russian

by Vanora Bennett

  Whenever this savage mood was upon me, I’d try to reason with myself. I’d tell myself that I’d never have learned all this if I hadn’t become a Paris taxi driver. I’d tell myself (feeling it to be a lie) that all experience was good. I’d tell myself that my experiences would, in some way, enrich the writing I was one day going to do, if ever I got any free time between driving, sleeping and the needs of my father and the poor sick creature whom, out of politeness, I called my mother. I’d say …

  Well, what does it matter what I told myself? It never worked, telling myself all that uplifting rubbish. So this evening, still intensely aware of that girl sitting on the back seat looking out of the window – aware of the lovely line of her neck and shoulder and of her casual disrespect, I tried something simpler. I emptied my mind and let the hypnotic movement of the streets all around calm me.

  One after another, round street lamps appeared then disappeared in the darkening air.

  The same streets, always the same streets rearing up around me: but sometimes, if I forced myself to take notice of them, the beauty of those luminous night lines, the conjunction with a black avenue here or a rustling park there, did have a soothing effect.

  Drawing away from the centre of town, I found this happening now. Remembering the wild eyes of other wealthy clients when I’d answered their unthinking rudeness with spirit, saying things like, ‘If you’re not happy, get out and take another cab,’ I did wonder how this girl would have responded if I’d challenged her. But, by then, as we headed off down a quiet suburban avenue, my anger had pretty much dissipated. And when I looked in the mirror and saw the pinched look on her face, I thought better of it.

  She was so obviously not happy.

  Anyway, I thought, finally able to enjoy the breeze moving the great lime trees that lined this avenue, had she really done anything so wrong? She hadn’t talked, true. But had I, so quick to take offence, actually even tried to talk with her either?

  I’d have been utterly corrupted by Paris if I too became unable to converse with people outside my station, I realized. The thought gave me courage and a little surge of warmth that was perhaps what hope, that feeling I hadn’t experienced for so long, might be like.

  I half turned, trying to catch her eye. ‘So what takes you to this outpost of Little Russia?’ I asked.

  My voice startled her. My question too. She looked straight at me. ‘You know there are Russians there?’

  Her French was good, I noticed, with hardly any accent. Her voice was low and pleasant.

  I was so delighted that she’d answered, and looked properly at me, that I rushed into an uncharacteristically long and detailed reply. I started telling her all the usual things people said about the estate we were heading for: that it was a big mansion with spacious grounds, and had once belonged to a Russian nobleman; that, after the Revolution in Russia, he’d turned it into a charity so that all the impecunious gentlefolk who’d escaped and ended up here in France had somewhere seemly to visit, walk in the grounds or go to classes or meetings in the former drawing rooms. There’d even been an orphanage, for a while, until all the Civil War orphans grew up. Now they were taking old folk in instead. ‘The old folk feel right at home,’ I said, and I felt my smile twist into something dangerously like a sneer, because it felt so hard to explain with anything like sympathy the joylessness of their exiled existence, ‘because there are samovars everywhere, and every franc can be mournfully sub-divided into kopeks …’

  I thought she might laugh at that. People sometimes had, when I’d said it before.

  I also thought she might ask, ‘Are you Russian?’ If she does, I was already thinking, realizing I was sitting up straighter than usual, I’ll tell her. There’ll be no stories about Belleville butchers today.

  But she didn’t laugh, or ask me any questions. She just looked at me without moving, so that, in the dusk, I couldn’t tell if she was even taking in what I was saying.

  At last she nodded. But all she said, in a small, blank voice, was, ‘Well, I don’t have any old relatives. Just business.’

  And then she turned her eyes down and started looking at her hands.

  There was nothing rude about it. She just didn’t want to talk. If anything, she looked vulnerable. There was even, I thought, a faint possibility that there’d been tears springing up in her eyes.

  Well, there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t force her to talk to me or, come to that, dry her tears. I was no one to her … just a taxi driver. Feeling, this time, sad more than angry, I turned back to face the road, and drove on.

  But of course I listened to what her private business was. I stood out in the drive, by the car, breathing in evening air and smoke as I waited to bring her back into Paris, while she sat in the ground-floor office just a few feet away and with the window wide open and the curtains not drawn, talking with that old charlatan Madame Sabline.

  I didn’t dare stare in. I thought she might feel my eyes on her. I kept my gaze fixed on the end of my cigarette glowing in the dark. But I eavesdropped shamelessly.

  One of nature’s great money-sniffers, Madame Sabline trumped all the girl’s questions about the American woman – who, it turned out, had been the girl’s grandmother, as well as Madame Sabline’s sister-in-law – with her own brutally self-interested questions about the will, the estate, who’d inherited what, what there’d been to leave. And then, when it turned out that the answer to these questions was ‘not much’, and there was no bequest to Madame Sabline or the home she ran, she broke the conversation off, quite abruptly, with the words, ‘Well, it’s nearly the dinner bell; time’s pressing; I’d better be getting on.’ I hadn’t heard her offer a word of condolence.

  ‘But … well, of course,’ I heard the girl reply, sounding crestfallen if polite. ‘Only there is one thing. Please can you look at this, and tell me what it says?’

  There was a rustle of paper. ‘ “Zhenya”,’ Madame Sabline pronounced indifferently after a moment. I heard her chair scrape.

  ‘My grandmother wrote that when she got ill, you see. So I’m wondering, is there a Zhenya you know of who knew my grandmother?’ the girl persisted. ‘Someone she might have been thinking of at the last?’

  Madame Sabline came over to the window. Without looking, I could see her silhouette. She could probably see mine too, standing by the taxi. I kept my eyes down. It was probably rude of me not to nod a greeting, but she was one of the Russians I didn’t like to associate with: the kind whose mind was full of the most banal lament imaginable for all the unimportant material things lost years ago when she left home behind: an inventory of missing silver spoons and chandeliers and bracelets. She started fiddling with the curtains. I’d been to enough evening classes in philosophy and writers’ get-togethers at that place myself, over the years, to know that its administrator wouldn’t actually draw those curtains shut in the presence of a guest – they were in shreds. Looking out and twitching at the great ruined folds of dark-red damask so that the rings jingled against the rail was just her way of showing impatience.

  ‘It wouldn’t have been her husband – your brother?’ I heard from farther back in the room.

  ‘No. God rest his soul, he was Pavel Pavlovich.’

  ‘And he didn’t have any children from his first marriage?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And my grandmother didn’t take an interest in any of your orphans called Yevgeny?’

  Madame Sabline shook her head, leaning out of the window, taking in a deep breath of night air and my cigarette smoke. ‘Not particularly, no,’ she said. ‘Anyway, the orphanage closed down years ago. We’re none of us getting any younger.’

  She perched herself on the window ledge, twisting back towards her guest. ‘Mademoiselle, it could be anyone, or everyone,’ she said with the brutality people sometimes call being cruel to be kind. ‘There’s no way you’ll ever know who was on her mind. It’s a common enough name. Every fifth Russian man is called Yevgeny. There are p
robably thousands of Yevgenys in Paris.’ Her harsh voice cracked into something approaching a laugh. ‘Why, even your taxi driver’s called Yevgeny.’

  16

  ‘I didn’t realize you were Russian,’ the girl said to me.

  It was fully dark now. I was concentrating on a roundabout. I couldn’t look behind but, feeling warm, I moved my shoulder in a kind of nodding shrug to show I was listening.

  ‘Madame Sabline in there says your father runs the White Russian military in Europe?’

  I nodded. I had such mixed feelings about Father’s work that I couldn’t feel proud, exactly. But I liked the respectful way she pronounced the words.

  I turned off the roundabout, deep in the usual argument with myself that always began when I thought of Father. That dear old man, tap-tapping around with his cane and his belly, was almost cultured, and not without humour. But I’d never been able to grasp why a man with so little killer instinct would first have chosen to devote his youth to fighting, and then to have gone on and on with what he doggedly went on believing to be his calling despite the crushing defeat of the Civil War. They just weren’t cut out for the savagery of fighting in the twentieth century, he and all the other genteel ex-generals of ROVS. It was agonizing to watch someone so unsuited to strategic thinking still vainly trying to plot the overthrow of Communism, like listening to a person with absolutely no ear for music trying to be a violinist. His past career contained nothing but monstrously irreparable mistakes, which were as obvious as they could possibly have been, yet it made no difference. He went on trying. He was so proud to be running ROVS in that apartment full of maps stuck through with coloured pins, even though there was nothing real about any of it. Even the journal he edited, which so many of his former associates from that long-dead army wrote for or subscribed to – for there were still tens of thousands of army men like my father, all over Europe; he claimed a membership of a hundred thousand – even the journal made me sad.

  I was so absorbed in these painful thoughts that I was surprised when the girl spoke again.

  ‘And that your name is Yevgeny? Zhenya?’

  I did turn round now. I could hear the irritation come unbidden into my voice as I snapped, ‘No! It’s Jean.’ But why bite her head off? None of the things that angered me were her fault. I added, eyes back on the road, hastily trying to sound less sour, ‘Though I was called Zhenya, Yevgeny, once, a long time ago, in Russia … But I live in France now. I go by a French name. I’ve been here for twelve years – pretty much half my life – so I reckon I’m pretty much a Frenchman, even if I do have Russian blood and a nonsense stateless passport. There are too many Russians who reject reality: people who’d rather just pretend they’ve never left Russia and are living in some sort of imaginary Saint-Pétersbourg-sur-Seine. That bores me. I keep out of the way of Russians. I don’t like all their spite and squabbles, plots, counter-plots, the endless talk about lost splendours. All I want is to earn my crust; live my life in peace. What’s the point of living in the past?’

  I’d still sounded more bitter than I’d meant to, I thought miserably. That wasn’t a well-put, worldly, amused explanation. It was a rant. I’d spoiled the moment. There’d be no more talk now.

  But she did speak again, after a moment’s pause. She said, ‘And I’m Evie.’ Her voice was soft and, I thought, sympathetic. ‘Enchantée, Jean.’

  I snatched a glance at her in the mirror. I could see she was smiling, because the moon was out.

  For a while we drove in that moonlit quiet down the leafy suburban roads, heading for the porte d’Orléans.

  I kept my eyes on the faintly shiny, gently moving clouds of foliage all around, but my mind was full of the girl behind me. I wanted to hear Evie’s voice again. I wanted, more than anything I’d wanted for a long while, to ask her questions. But I couldn’t find a way to frame the questions I wanted to ask. Why had she come all the way across the world to visit a family member, yet knew so little about the grandmother who’d died that she’d been reduced to driving around Paris at night, asking strangers questions about names scribbled on bits of paper? She’d told Madame Sabline that there was no money to leave, so she couldn’t have been asking for the obvious reason – because of something in the American woman’s will.

  That old brute Madame Sabline had been rude, but she hadn’t been wrong. Unless this girl – Evie – already had some inkling who this Zhenya she was looking for was, she’d never find him now the old woman was dead.

  ‘No one lives in the past in America,’ I heard suddenly. She sounded tentative – almost, I thought, as if she’d also been trying to come up with the right way to carry on. I couldn’t help a quick private smile – she couldn’t see my face, after all, in the driver’s seat – as I realized that she wanted to talk to me. ‘Maybe you’ll think this is funny, but I actually came here because I wanted to find out more about the past …’

  And then she was off, telling me about the Paris grandmother no one in her family talked about, who’d once been married to a diplomat who’d died in Russia, long ago, and then been cut out of the family and forced to leave her child behind because she had artistic yearnings (which, I thought cynically to myself, was probably just a respectable family’s code name for too many of the wrong kind of love affairs) and, finally, when the girl went to college, had started sending her gifts. About deciding she’d come over to Europe as soon as college was over, and get to know this grandmother for herself. About buying a ticket and just setting off, alone – ‘I wanted an adventure!’ she said, rather shakily – and making it all the way here, only for the old woman to die before they’d had a chance to talk. About how, before the old Countess Sabline had died, she’d written the name Zhenya down in a last note on a bit of blotting paper, and how Evie now wanted to find this Zhenya, because she thought he was someone her grandmother wanted to look after.

  I nodded and nodded, finding solace in the possibility of relationship and the music of her voice.

  I could hear many things in her story: not just the obvious fact that she had enough money to cross the world on a whim, but also the cold wind that must blow through her family to have made her travel so far to seek love. I appreciated her good French and careful choice of words, too, which spoke of intelligence and a trained mind … And yet I also heard a contradictory note of naivety in what she was saying. She was talking about that piece of paper in her hand with what seemed to me too much of the wrong kind of hope, as though it were a clue in a detective story; as though it would actually take her to a living person, who’d give her vital information that would reveal the dead woman to her.

  That was something I could sympathize with, and not just because I felt so drawn to her. I understood that yearning of hers to find something that was, in reality, irretrievably lost. The piece of paper was all she had left of the dead woman.

  Gently, I said, ‘Shall I give you a piece of advice from Tolstoy?’ Then, before even bothering to look in the mirror at the puzzlement that would inevitably be on her foreign face, I added, ‘Who was a great Russian writer … He believed history was like a great clock moving unstoppably forward … and his advice to ordinary people, the helpless cogs in that clock’s machinery, was just to live in the present moment, as well as possible. He said: “If you want to be happy, be.” ’

  ‘Ah,’ I heard. She didn’t sound downcast. In fact, I heard a bright pleasure in her voice. ‘Yes, Tolstoy. But he also said, “Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait,” didn’t he; and, “The strongest of all warriors are these two, Time and Patience.” And I’ve got time, and patience … so I hope I’ll find out what I need to know.’

  Thank God there was a red light, because I took my eyes right off the road to turn around and stare. ‘You know Tolstoy?’ I said. She was looking – just a bit – mischievous, pleased with herself at having risen to that challenge and capped my quote, I thought.

  She smiled wider at my frank astonishment. ‘The quote’s from War a
nd Peace, I think,’ she added with satisfaction. Then, ‘Do you know the light’s green …?’ I turned round, smiling myself, and put my foot down. We glided on.

  ‘It’s not every young American girl who knows Tolstoy,’ I said over my shoulder.

  ‘I love Tolstoy,’ she responded. ‘My grandmother sent me Anna Karenina when I started college. I’ve read lots more since.’ A pause. ‘It’s not every taxi driver who’s read Tolstoy, either …’

  I almost laughed at that generalization, which, while it might be true of most Parisian drivers, certainly wasn’t of us Russians, many of whom had been professors once.

  But I wanted to avoid sounding bitter, so I told her about some of the writers I was occasionally invited to spend evenings with, so I could listen to them talking about literature or reading bits of whatever they were working on. They’d started to let me come, as an acolyte, because they knew I wanted to write, too, one day. Someone had seen promise, somewhere, in some dark comment I’d made a year or two before and introduced me; these writers’ evenings were the chink of light in my life. The writers were all grindingly poor by any normal measure, but at least they were in a position to give some of their mind to the work of the mind that they’d been intended for. As I described them now, I dwelled in particular on my Russian writer hero Sirin’s wry descriptions of the bizarre job his lover had taken to get them at least a taste of food – trimming poodles at a barber for rich pets – and of his own apartment, so tiny he had to write in the bathroom with an ironing board across the bidet for a desk. I even found myself trying to explain to the American girl his pun about our pennilessness in Paris: ‘pas riche’ in a city we knew, in Russian, by the same two syllables: ‘Pa-rizh’.

  I was gratified when I heard, behind me, her laughter in the dark.

  ‘So gallant, the Russians you talk about; how I admire that spirit …’ She sighed, then, ‘You’ll be a writer too,’ as if she were beginning to understand more. ‘Won’t you? One day? Maybe you write already?’