He just wanted to see admiration in the eyes of his wife.
29
Nadya Plevitskaya looked anxiously at her husband.
He was mumbling to himself, as he did increasingly often these days. Any minute now, he’d start wagging his finger reprovingly at the dashboard of his car. She’d caught him at that several times in the past few days.
He’d always been quiet, but she’d liked it better before he’d started this odd, wordless, grunty swelling he did now, all the time – as if all the pent-up things he’d never quite said, but spent years thinking, were about to come pouring out. It made him look a bit mad, she thought.
Partly just to stop him, she touched his hand. He jumped, and then he turned and smiled at her. A great, big, absentminded smile, as if he had more important things in mind.
‘On Wednesday,’ she said, and she couldn’t stop the slight shake in her voice.
‘Do you remember it all?’ he asked. He sounded sharp, like a schoolteacher talking to a lazy pupil. ‘It’s very important.’
She gave him a devil-may-care grin, hoping to reassure him. ‘Ach, all that: of course I remember. I create your alibi, by acting. He’s right – it will be easy for a woman like me.’
‘Tell me again,’ he insisted. ‘Just in case.’
She knew every step, of course. But she humoured him and ticked them off anyway.
‘Early morning: pick up the nasty little Peugeot – less conspicuous than the Cadillac – in case something goes wrong and we need to make a getaway. Then drive to the corner café on rue du Colisée.
‘At nine o’clock, have breakfast together, for an hour, and talk noisily, in the most visible place we can find on the terrasse, greeting anyone we know and saying we are having a day off together.
‘Soon after ten o’clock, drive on to Monsieur Epstein’s boutique. We both say hello to him. You have a newspaper in your hand. You look a little impatient, and say you’re going to sit outside in the car and read the paper while I try on some new stage clothes. “Men!” I say, and roll my eyes. Monsieur Epstein laughs. We get going. No one sees that you aren’t really sitting outside reading the paper. You’ve driven away …’
She didn’t mention where her husband would have gone, or what he would be doing by then. She didn’t want to think about that part. She was happier concentrating on her role.
‘Meanwhile, I’m still at Monsieur Epstein’s, trying on every expensive dress in the shop. Sometimes I walk outside, and say I want to show one to you. I talk, loudly, out there, so they can hear me through the window. “Darling,” I say, “do you like me in gold?” or, “Chéri, do you think this one is too décolleté?” and then, “Oh, really? I’ll ask Monsieur Epstein what he thinks then.” Of course Monsieur Epstein thinks you’re still there. And I spend the rest of the morning there, going in and out, “talking” to you.
‘Then, not before one o’clock, I finally choose two dresses, for a combined value not exceeding three thousand francs, and sign for them myself and ask for them to be delivered to me at Ozoir. The cost will be reimbursed, on production of an appropriate receipt, by …’
She paused, suddenly imagining herself buying a gold Epstein dress on a Soviet expense account, then wearing it on stage while her admirers cheered.
‘Kolya … Kolyen’ka, I will actually get to wear those dresses, won’t I?’ she asked wheedlingly. ‘Afterwards?’
Skoblin nodded. As if that mattered, she could see him thinking. But then, he never had understood anything about performing.
‘And then you come and pick me up, at quarter past one, and we go together to the railway station to join the rest of the delegation seeing off General Kutyopov’s daughter to Brussels,’ she finished quickly. ‘As far as anyone knows, we’ve been together all day.’
He nodded. He looked reassured, for now, but she knew it wouldn’t last. He’d ask her to go through it all again several more times before bed.
‘That wasn’t what I was going to ask, actually,’ she said, pouting. The house was coming into view now – over the fence, a graceful tracery of birch twigs and small fluttering leaves. (He kept talking about leaving it and moving into a flat in town, once he was boss. He never asked whether she wanted to leave her little courtyard behind.)
He raised an eyebrow. ‘What, then?’
‘I wanted to know, what happens if it all goes wrong?’ she asked as the car slowed. ‘No one talks about that.’
He glided to a halt. Without emotion, he answered, ‘We go to the Soviet embassy. We ask for the crab salesman. They take us back to Moscow.’
Plevitskaya hadn’t expected the idea of Moscow to surge into her mind with so much nostalgic force. The fresh smell of cucumbers and snow filled her nostrils, and her head swam with visions of little lopsided yellow-stucco houses piled up around churches with golden cupolas up and down the seven hills; of bright snow under a blue sky; of the faint cries of children skating on the Clean Ponds or squabbling happily over creamy round vatrushka cheesecakes or climbing on the Pushkin statue, and the jingle of harness, and the bells ringing …
‘God forbid,’ he continued, just as calmly.
He would say that, Plevitskaya thought, without rancour. He hadn’t been interested in anything but Paris for a long time.
But she wouldn’t be sorry to see Moscow again.
Sometimes, still, all these years later, she dreamed of Russia. Not of Moscow, as it happens, and not of any of the sleigh-bells-in-the-snow, storks-on-the-rooftops daydreams she filled her music with, either. This was a real dream – always in the same place, in the same forest, in that first war, the one against the Germans, in that somewhere on the south-western front that was tattooed into her brain, where the leaves were just beginning to drop from the trees overhead and there was a rumble of death somewhere up ahead. Milling back and forward from the front line were people going off or on duty, or to hospital, and trucks and carts grinding back and forth. Her husband – the long-ago husband of those days, whose face these days, after years of her later marriage to Skoblin, she barely recalled – was up there, in the fighting. He came back, once every couple of days, exhausted, stinking, sunken-eyed, to sleep. She’d cancelled her singing engagements – for she had singing engagements, even with a young child, in wartime – to be with that man. She wasn’t going anywhere unless it was with him. Why would she? They were a family. She didn’t think it was foolhardy staying near the front, whatever anyone said. She knew enough about life to know you clung to the happiness that came your way, and stayed near your man. There was food, for the moment. And she was sure that she and the child were safe here in the rear, anxious though everything might always be …
Until the moment the dream starts, that is. Until the day they’re not safe. Until the morning the greenish twilight of the woods explodes into strange, streaming, roaring, red-white hellfire, and everywhere she turns there are crackles and hisses and branches breaking off and fire. She can hear Yevdokia the housekeeper whimpering somewhere behind, with men shouting and jeering in foreign tongues. There’s only one thing on her own mind – getting herself and the little one away. So she’s running across the yard, panting – how is her breath so loud? – to snatch the child. The child’s in the outhouse. Or he was. But now there’s no outhouse any more, just a roiling midden where the log cabin used to be, and broken logs scattered everywhere, and, much later, a noise to break your head apart. And then she’s just running, running, running, in and out of trees and over roots, and there’s nothing else except that blood-rhythm, going on forever, and the tree-trunks: not her, not the child, just the thud of her feet on the pine-needly forest floor, heels, toes, heels, toes, and her breath. She doesn’t know where the child has gone. Even when they creep back, much later, there’s just a burning house, beyond saving. Yevdokia’s mauled body. The splinters of the outhouse. The thickset stink of the uncovered shit pit, buzzing with flies. But no little boy. No trace.
All these years later, she’d still
wake up whimpering from that dream, feeling for his little lost body, as bereft each subsequent time as she had been in that first naked moment as, in one awful dawn after another, she reunderstood her child’s absence.
It was brutal, this pain: always had been, always would be; although over time she’d managed to banish it, mostly, to the realm of sleep. It was an entirely different order of feeling from the soft, fuzzy, faint nostalgia she still sometimes also experienced, remembering the husband of those faraway days, who’d had soft blue eyes (or had they been grey?) and who’d been sent off to a different camp by his commanding officer with no time to grieve, then killed in the war soon afterwards. Once both son and husband had gone, her rage against the monstrous lack of feeling of the commanding officers, mixed up with her grief, had pushed her, in the war that came immediately after the one against the Germans, to go defiantly out singing for the rebellious Reds. The Reds all had their grudges against the power that had abused them, those righteously angry men, just as she did. Why not go out and cheer them along with her voice? She’d been so wild with fury and loss, back then, and had nothing to lose. She was alone. Sometimes she’d almost hoped an enemy bullet would carry her off.
But there’d been no merciful oblivion. She’d been captured, not killed. And, in the White camp where she’d been held, she’d been astonished to find herself fêted as the exotic darling of the camp, adored by the very type of officer she’d blamed for her tragedy, because, as it turned out, for them, she and her voice and her fame added up to a symbol of the old glory days they were vainly fighting for. And slowly, agonizingly slowly, she’d finally wept for her loss in the arms of her White jailor, Skoblin, who’d become her last husband and life companion. Fate had ended up carrying them both, with their separate griefs for all that had gone, along with all the other survivors – each of them mourning one private lost thing or another that no one could either share or escape – away to this place of exile in Paris.
But time and happenstance hadn’t stopped her remembering her real home in Russia.
If she could only go back to Russia, she sometimes thought, she could follow the trails that had been impossible in wartime, scour the orphanages, trawl the schools, interrogate the priests; and somehow, miraculously, she might find herself running towards him, her child turned handsome young man, a man whom she’d recognize at once, with her arms out, rapturously smiling, racing into that embrace she held perpetually in mind.
Just being back in Russia – and Moscow, even if it hadn’t ever been quite home, was the jumping-off point of Russia, the place where power now was and where her friends in high places would be found – might be the start of making it all come true. Even now, all these years later, when she was fifty-three. Her husband beside her was consumed by his ambition; she understood this. She understood it not because she wanted her singing career back, though that would be nice, but because of her own secret but consuming ambition to do the impossible: turn back time, go home, and find her lost son.
30
Evie
I was late for Plevitskaya’s lunchtime performance. I stood near the front of the restaurant, still dazzled by the bright light from outside, watching sunspots fade from my eyes while, in the near-dark of inside, she finished her last number. According to the list at the entrance, it was called, ‘You’re Buried in Snow, Russia’. She was standing crushed into the one tiny table-free space at the back of the hall, in constant danger of bumping into the accompanist squashed beside her at an upright piano. As she drew the song out to its sentimental end, she drooped lower and lower, as if truly heartbroken.
There was the usual thin applause when the last note died away. The red-shaded table lamps went on again. An elderly couple – the woman in black with jet beads, the man in uniform – were revealed stolidly eating meatballs and buckwheat porridge close to the music. An older man still, with a red nose and tears slipping unnoticed down his cheeks, was nursing a drink not far from me. There wasn’t anyone else. They could have made her more space, I thought, clapping extra loudly. They could have cleared another table.
I waved. Her gloomy face lit up. I’d ordered two glasses of champagne before she’d even got to the table where I was sitting. Although she was smiling now as she approached, bosom heaving under her shawl, I saw that she had real tears in her eyes.
‘That was beautiful,’ I said, surprised by those tears, and moved, too. She sat down heavily. After finding her so erratic in English, I was trying French, and it seemed to be working. She ducked her own head, with dignity, and replied, in rather good French, maybe by way of apology for her glistening eyes:
‘Ach … how hard it feels, sometimes, to go on living with one’s ghosts.’ She sniffed, smiled and shook her head all at once. ‘That is the saddest song in my repertoire,’ she went on, and started reciting:
‘No paths left, no tracks through the plains,
Through the storm and endless snow;
No way back to the sacred homeplace,
To the dear voices I once knew …’
The champagne came. Unobtrusively, as she lifted her coupe to her mouth, she wiped the eye furthest from me. Then she drained it and furtively wiped her other eye. ‘It is not always so hard,’ she added more robustly, putting the empty glass down on the table.
‘I would have come last night—’ I began.
‘Ahhh … Last night was wonderful,’ she said, loudly and stagily, capping my voice with her surge of theatrical enthusiasm. ‘Many more people. Why didn’t you?’
‘Oh,’ I said uncertainly, remembering that, from the doorway, last night, which was as close as I’d got before Jean vanished and everything changed, there hadn’t seemed to be many more people inside this restaurant than there were today. ‘Something came up.’
Plevitskaya looked harder at me and spoke with a kindness so unexpected that it almost made me well up, too. ‘You look a bit pale. I hope you weren’t unwell?’
I shook my head. It had been so bewildering when Jean left. Even when I’d started looking around for him in earnest, I hadn’t been able to believe for several minutes that he really wasn’t there. There’d been other people in the street, and as he took my coat I’d been looking at them, and at the people going towards the church, and peeping into the dusty interiors of the little restaurants. I’d actually been feeling relieved, I could remember, that he hadn’t been angry.
And then, when he’d suddenly pushed my coat back into my hands and rushed off, I’d gone on standing, dithering, looking around, thinking – hoping – that maybe he’d just run back to the taxi for something, or wanted to buy cigarettes or a newspaper. But I’d had a sense of all not being well, too. I’d felt my heart constrict with every examined head and body that turned out not to be his as the moments went by.
It had only been when I’d finally thought to look and see whether he was now walking back from the parked taxi, with the missing wallet or whatever it might be in his hand, and gone a bit of the way down the road towards the taxi myself, that I’d noticed it wasn’t there any more either. He must have driven off in it.
It had taken what seemed a long, quiet, strange time (in which the rest of the world had gone on just as usual, the late-afternoon sun shining, people walking along the kerb) before I finally believed he wasn’t coming back. Not in a minute. Not in ten. Not at all.
There were little jumbled scraps of thoughts in my head: that by now perhaps he was already home, wherever that was, or that he was picking up a book, whose letters were too alien to me to even guess at what was in it, or heading for a café where he’d meet the other writers he’d talked about …
But it didn’t matter where he was. He’d gone where I couldn’t follow.
Maybe I should have been angry, or cried. His disappearance was too strange for me to know what I felt, beyond a bit shaky and unreal.
Maybe I should have shrugged it off and gone to hear Plevitskaya and to talk to her, as I’d planned. But I couldn’t somehow face bra
zening that out on my own, either.
So I’d just walked home, feeling shamed, in a quiet, quiet way, as though I’d done something wrong. Faintly, I was remembering reading in the preface to some translation of Dostoyevsky that the Russian language, whose sensitivity to insult and injury had, the book said, resulted in a vast and subtle vocabulary for every possible shade of humiliation, even had a special single word for ‘a slap in the face’, a word Dostoyevsky was fond of using. Well, I felt as though I’d been given one of those one-word face-slaps, even though I didn’t know why.
He hadn’t been angry that I’d gone to see his father. He’d said so. It hadn’t seemed to matter. But as soon as I’d started telling him some of the detail of our conversation, he’d gone – and before I’d even had time to ask him whether we might have drawn the wrong conclusions.
Because we might, mightn’t we? I’d been thinking about that possibility all afternoon. Because, after all – whatever we’d learned from reading the letters, whatever we now knew about Grandmother and the General having loved each other, and however certain I might be that the General’s first name was indeed Yevgeny – there was some sense in what the General had told me. Why would Grandmother ever have thought that he would have wanted to share those pictures, if she knew he hated them? If what he’d said was true – that she’d never even called him ‘Zhenya’ but the much more bracing-sounding ‘Miller’ – was it possible that Marie-Thérèse and I had somehow got everything muddled up, and that there was some other explanation?
I wouldn’t be able to talk this over with Jean now – which didn’t matter, as I kept telling myself stoutly, not at all. I didn’t need Jean. I’d be able to work it out for myself – except maybe not right now, since I didn’t even know what should be in my own head when, for the whole of the immediate past, it had been so full of Jean. So I’d let myself back into Grandmother’s apartment and – full of lonely defiance at the unwanted memory of Jean’s milk-drinking – poured myself a brandy to watch the stars come prickling out by, and then another. But I hadn’t let myself go completely. Even if, in the middle of the night, when I’d woken up, I’d said to Grandmother’s photo, which I’d taken unsteadily to bed with me, ‘Well, you didn’t mind having no place back home, because you found a new home here among all the poor outcasts from Russia – but even they don’t seem to want me much,’ my self-pity hadn’t made me cry. Even if I’d got up this morning feeling fuzzy, disappointed and empty, I’d had my plan. I’d looked at the diary, whose key I hadn’t yet found, and been tempted for a moment just to break it open and read the rest of what Grandmother had left me. But then I’d remembered that I didn’t want to rush my time here. I’d told Marie-Thérèse to stay on, with Gaston, until the end of the year. And I thought, No, I’ll wait; it’s better to find the right key to the diary, and the right answer, in the right time …
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