The White Russian

by Vanora Bennett

  I wriggled in my seat, and knew there was bashfulness in my laugh. ‘Maybe a little …’

  ‘It must be strange driving a taxi,’ she said hesitantly, ‘if you weren’t born to it …? I mean, as an educated man …’

  ‘Why?’ I said, keeping my voice neutral. ‘It’s just realistic. There’s no point standing on one’s dignity when there’s no Russian dignity left. My father would do anything – has been fighting for years – to go home to where he was born. That’s his calling. And it doesn’t matter whether, left to my own devices, I’d just forget the past. I have to respect his dream. But someone has to pay the rent, too. Someone has to exist in the real world of Paris in 1937. So I go out and drive.’

  ‘Maybe it’s not so strange,’ she said, pushing back her golden hair. ‘I know so little, that’s all. But maybe you’re a bit like a man I met in the train, who was off to Spain to fight for the rights of the poor – perhaps, for you, it’s all a matter of principle.’

  Principle?

  I opened my mouth, trying to stop her say something so catastrophically naive that it would lose her my respect forever, but before I could say anything she’d gone artlessly on, ‘Because … after all, how good it must be to live and work among simple, honest people.’

  I shook my head on a rising tide of silent fury directed both at the futility of my own existence and at her unforgiveable callowness. What made this rich young girl think being poor was good, or made you honest? Who did I know who was either simple or honest, however poor? The former foreign minister of a Balkan state, whom I met every now and then, still telling his worn diplomatic anecdotes from twenty years before? The other once influential people I sometimes had a cheap dinner with in a Russian restaurant, who were now labourers or drivers? Or might she mean the people I met in my other life: the Russian scroungers, the French vagrants, the prostitutes, the pimps?

  ‘Simple, honest people?’ I said, and my rage was all mixed up with unbearable disappointment that this girl and I would not, after all, have anything more to talk about. ‘I don’t know any of those. Though I do know plenty of stupid ones.’

  There was silence for the rest of the drive back to the rue du Colisée.

  She paid in silence. I gave her change in silence. She got out under the street lamp. Then she came back and leaned in through the cab, and again I smelled her faint fragrance and saw the smoothness of her skin. This time she looked straight into my eyes, and said, with disarming frankness, ‘I hope I didn’t say the wrong thing. I’m still just figuring things out.’

  I nodded, with my lips still clamped tight. Even if the humbleness of that last comment had surprised me, I wasn’t going to let my guard down again.

  She didn’t go away. She continued, ‘And I want to ask – could I employ you to help me for a few days?’ Her voice was all breathy with hope, but I wasn’t going to soften. I waited to hear her job offer. ‘So that I can track down the Zhenya my grandmother was thinking of?’ she stammered. I could tell in advance that she was about to say, tremulously, that, because she couldn’t speak Russian and didn’t understand enough about the Russian world in Paris to know where to look for this Zhenya, she’d like a fellow detective – or a Sherpa, paid, humiliatingly, by the day. I cut her off.

  ‘It’s a fool’s errand,’ I said. Why should I care if she knew I’d eavesdropped like a servant? Wasn’t it time at least one smug, frivolous, rich girl got a taste of reality? ‘Madame Sabline was right. There are thousands of Zhenyas in Paris. You’d be wasting your money.’

  I put my foot on the pedal. The engine raced. ‘And I’m fully employed,’ I added.

  ‘It wouldn’t take long,’ she stammered, sounding stung. She didn’t let go of the window. After another moment’s thought, she added, ‘Well, can I at least show you her letters? Her apartment’s full of letters in Russian. I can’t read them.’

  I shrugged. ‘There’s a bar I stop off at every night at about four in the morning, next to the station you’ll have arrived at,’ and I reeled off the address. It was a real place, and I really did park up nearby every night, and stop in it for an hour or so before going to pick up clients arriving on the early morning train. But I knew in advance that she’d never go near a cheap bar like that. It wasn’t in a part of town that her rich sort ever went to. It would be invisible to her.

  Looking defeated, she did, at last, step back from my window. Taking out her keys, she went up to the door of number 29. Her shoulders were drooping. I was already feeling angry with myself for having been too angry, but some Dostoyevskian impulse to cut off my own nose to spite my face was still pushing me to go further: offer her one last taunt I knew I would regret at leisure later. While she was still struggling with the front-door lock, I called out softly, ‘Look.’

  I saw hope in her eyes as she turned.

  I pointed at the brass plate on the door, next to the bottom bell. ‘Do you see what that says?’ I asked. I knew without looking that it said Miller/ROVS.

  ‘It’s my father’s office. It means General Miller of ROVS – the White Russian military headquarters. I come every evening and take him home, you see. I don’t like him wandering around Paris unprotected. Because, futile though his work might be – all their work – it’s risky all the same. The Bolsheviks do watch them, just in case; and, every now and then, they’ve managed to pick off a ROVS boss …’

  In the monochrome light of the street lamp, her face was a black-and-white picture of bewilderment.

  ‘And do you know why I’m telling you all this?’ I added, realizing, now it was too late to stop, how bitter and spiteful I must sound, and what a fool I was making of myself. She shook her head.

  ‘Because’, I finished, not savouring this hollow triumph half as much as I’d expected, ‘his first name is Yevgeny, too. My point is, if you multiplied the two of us that you’ve found in a few minutes in this street alone by all the other streets in Paris, and all the other Yevgenys, it might give you some idea of just how idiotic it would be to go round trying to find the one Yevgeny your grandmother thought might need her help.’

  And then, unable to bear my shame, I revved up again and drove off to park.

  It was a night for hearing things through open windows.

  Once I’d parked the taxi, down the road, and was walking back up to number 29 to pick up Father – I wasn’t going to brook any argument from him this time – I caught a snatch of him in conversation with his number two, General Skoblin, behind the closed shutter which was all that separated them from the pavement.

  It was something to think about to take away the taste of my own bad behaviour with that girl. (I was both relieved, and sorry at the same time, to find she’d disappeared inside already.) Again, I found myself listening.

  Skoblin was more talkative than usual. ‘There’ll be two of them, old man, arriving any day now,’ he was saying encouragingly. ‘And once we’ve got the agreement sorted out, there’ll be money, intelligence, everything. It will make all the difference. Think how helpful that sort of back-up would have been that time in Poland …’

  ‘Or with the man in Switzerland,’ Father replied, sounding much more like himself.

  ‘They know they need us with a war coming,’ I heard Skoblin add, and when Father laughed, and agreed, ‘Our moment has come,’ I could hear real pleasure in his voice.

  I rang the front-door bell. ‘That’ll be my son,’ I heard Father say behind the shutter. He sounded relieved. I realized with a soft pang of tenderness that he must have been looking forward to my arrival. ‘It’s late. We’ll talk tomorrow, dear colleague.’

  17

  Evie

  When I’d let myself in last night, there’d been no trace of the wake. The apartment was spotlessly clean and dauntingly quiet. After taking a bite of the cold meat Marie-Thérèse had left in the kitchen, I flung myself straight to bed, barely pausing long enough to pull off my clothes. I’d wanted nothing more than to let sleep blot out all the events – and discourag
ements – of my long day. Especially that last conversation.

  Even now, after a heavy sleep, with coffee and a croissant beside me, Marie-Thérèse audible in the kitchen, clattering pans and the sun pouring through the long windows, I didn’t really feel better.

  It was futile to try and make sense of Grandmother’s note, I could see. I’d never find her Zhenya.

  The taxi driver had been right.

  The other people I’d come across here who understood Russian, and whom I’d thought might help, weren’t quite the noble souls I’d expected from Tolstoy. Some were turning out to be full of flattery and charm, but too clearly on the make to trust (the artists and Plevitskaya). Some had been plain rude (that woman last night, Madame Sabline). The officers downstairs seemed far too busy with their mysterious military planning.

  The only person I’d met who, every instinct had told me, would be trustworthy, had been the driver last night, Jean. There’d been something in the sadness of his eyes that I’d felt at one with as soon as we’d started talking.

  While he’d been talking so articulately about exile, I’d felt I almost understood his predicament. I’d been wondering, too, whether Grandmother had been attracted to people living with the sense of loss he was describing because of the private sadness I knew she must also have felt at being cast out from her past world? I’d even been thinking that maybe I’d one day be able to ask him what he thought of that idea, and that maybe it was something he’d understand. And then, suddenly, all the warmth of the conversation had switched off, just like that.

  Of course, it was only because it had been late, and there’d been so many other disappointments in the day, that I’d felt tears springing as he’d driven off. But still, that sudden coldness had hurt.

  Hughie would probably have been able to explain it away and make me laugh, I thought, and for a moment, as I recalled his voice, saying of a Russian that he ‘couldn’t stop telling us all the usual stories: about how grand he’d been before the Revolution, and how tragic his life had become since’, I felt just a little nostalgic for home. Yes, Hughie would have said something amusing about the Slav soul that would have taken the sting out of last night.

  But, as it was, I was on my own. And when I called to mind the hostility I’d last seen in the driver’s surprisingly beautiful pale-blue eyes, the closed look on his chiselled face and the harshness that seemed to have come into his voice in those last few minutes, I couldn’t help, even in this morning’s sunlight, but feel downcast.

  I looked around the room I’d woken up in, and suddenly I didn’t know what I was doing here, camping in this stranger’s life, halfway across the world from everything I’d ever known.

  Pull yourself together, I told myself, trying to be robust, but it made no difference to the cold, lost feeling inside.

  I tried to reason with myself. I had somewhere to live, money to live on, and I was in the City of Lights. Even if I accepted that none of the things I’d imagined doing here were going to happen – that Grandmother was gone and with her the flickering idea I’d had that, through getting to know her, I would learn something important about myself – it would be insane to walk out on Paris without even trying to have an adventure. Imagine what Eliza and Winthrop and Bill would say. Surely I could just substitute another kind of adventure for the one I’d wanted? Surely I could find the other Americans here, for a few days or weeks at least? I could go to Shakespeare and Company, the bookshop, where all the young writers went hoping to be recognized. I could join some of the young men writing modern books in very short sentences. Or I could go and pay homage to the weirder young Frenchmen writing surreal poetry. Hadn’t I been thinking I might try my own hand at writing, just a few days ago on the train on the way here? And even if I couldn’t do any of this, surely, surely I could just go dancing in nightclubs and have affairs? There were plenty of girls here doing that.

  I sighed. I didn’t have the remotest interest in doing any of those things. The kind of meaning I’d wanted to find on this journey had been so different. But, if I didn’t want to do those things, and the thing I did want to do was, as Jean had so brutally said, impossible, well, then …

  When I got out of bed, I thought gloomily, it might make sense to pack. Then I should tell Marie-Thérèse I’d go home soon … And then I should go to the shipping office and get myself a ticket.

  All that I could imagine. It was the part that came next that I couldn’t bear even to contemplate: sliding back through the front door into my old life.

  Wrapping a robe around my nightdress, I went into Grandmother’s room. It was empty of her presence now to the extent that the bed had been stripped, the drapes and windows and shutters opened, and the sickroom accoutrements taken away from the bedside tables. But it still had a clutter of her belongings on the surface of the other furniture: the scent I’d borrowed yesterday, a few bracelets. Marie-Thérèse, I saw, had put some crates neatly in a corner. Grandmother’s clothes would need clearing.

  I didn’t want to think about that. I turned my eyes away from the boxes to the scatter of small things above the fireplace that suggested she might reappear at any moment. Next to a small string of amber beads (Heavens, were they the huge ones I remembered her wearing, long ago?) was, I saw, a cracked, faded photograph propped against the glass. It showed two young people in a rowing boat, on a river, with more people on the shore to one side in the background. It was summer. A corner of a picnic table was visible. There must have been someone on the river bank – one of the picnickers – with a camera and a tripod.

  I couldn’t help but be fascinated. I took it over to the window.

  My sense of being utterly alone lifted a little when I recognized, in the young black-haired woman with the mutton-chop sleeves sitting in the boat, the same younger version of Grandmother I’d already seen pictured in that photograph in Mother’s room. The girl was in profile this time, and her looped-up hair was messier and wispier than in that other studio shot, as if she’d got the breeze in it. She looked happier, too, as if she’d spent the whole day smiling. I smiled too, to see that familiar face; for a moment, it felt almost as though I were greeting an old friend.

  Then I turned to the young man opposite her, with oars in his hand. I was expecting to see the same thin, dark, related-looking person who’d been in Mother’s picture – my grandfather, Eddie. But, however long I looked, I couldn’t make this image resolve itself into that remembered one.

  This young man was tall and thin, too, but much fairer, with thick nearly blond hair under a peaked military cap and a tunic buttoned up to the neck. The uniform was unfamiliar. It didn’t look like anything from the American military that I’d ever seen. The young man’s face remained equally, stubbornly unfamiliar, however much I stared. Still, I liked the look of him; he had the same carefree air as Grandmother. Who was he? Perhaps a boatman, or her driver – a servant? (Though that uniform looked very smart for a servant.) I turned the picture over. There was a Russian scribble on the back. Nothing more.

  My misery returned. I’d never know. I should leave all this alone, I told myself, not quite understanding the darkness that settled on me as I put the picture back. But it was pointless wondering, and wishing I understood and could piece together the bits of Grandmother’s past. It was gone: dust to dust, ashes to ashes. I was only torturing myself by trying.

  And then, through the window, I saw a taxi draw up at the kerb outside, and the same driver – the Russian Jean – get out, with swift, beautiful economy of movement. He held open the door. He was smiling tenderly at his client. He drew out the same elderly gentleman I’d seen on my first evening here, the one with the splendid military uniform.

  As I stared – well, it didn’t matter if I stared now, did it? They couldn’t see me up here – the memory of that first evening filled my mind. It must have been Jean who’d given me that furious scowl, but been so affectionate to his customer, out in the street. And the portly man with whiskers must be his father
, General Miller.

  Then something else struck me. I hadn’t recognized the father yesterday without that eye-catching jacket, festooned with gold frogging, and with his hair damped and combed into submission. But now I was looking at him again, it was obvious. It had been General Miller who’d come, in shirtsleeves, into the church at the beginning of Grandmother’s funeral, and whom I’d seen, later on, sitting by her grave. It had almost certainly been General Miller who’d left that romantic scatter of carnations, too.

  General Miller, whose office was only a few feet from Grandmother’s apartment; General Miller, whose name, Jean had told me last night, was Yevgeny …

  The world shifted a little, as pieces of the puzzle seemed to lock into shape.

  All at once, I thought I could see, in this slightly unlikely assemblage of corpulence and elaborate facial hair and bulk and Ruritanian frogging, the man who not only brought out the gentle side of the moody son I’d so warmed to last night, but whom my chic grandmother must have known, and maybe loved, and wanted me to make amends to.

  Suddenly I was full of hope again. I couldn’t stop myself. I was already running downstairs.

  ‘You’re General Miller, aren’t you?’ I said quickly, emerging through the front door into the sunshine. He looked uncertain, but I took his hands in mine and rushed on, ‘I recognize you from yesterday, because didn’t I see you at my grandmother’s funeral? Thank you, if so. Thank you for coming.’ He bowed his head.

  ‘And thank you for the flowers, too, because it was you who left those, wasn’t it? The carnations …’ I said, but I was already faltering over the last words of my burst of bravery, because I didn’t understand his reaction. He wasn’t hugging me, or bursting into tears, or starting to tell me how he’d loved Grandmother, or any of the novelish things I’d been half hoping for from a Russian gentleman – reactions that would have shown Jean, who was standing so close but whom I couldn’t bring myself to look at, that I wasn’t just on a fool’s errand.