The White Russian

by Vanora Bennett

  The hubbub stopped. They all turned to stare.

  Holding up a note, he began to speak to them in a voice that carried through the apartment, deeper and stronger with every word.

  How I wished I understood. But, in a way, I could understand the really important part.

  It was only after a surprisingly short crowd discussion, which ended with everyone muttering agreement, and after one of the secretaries had picked up the phone and was asking to be put through to the police, that Jean looked over at me, and nodded. There was a ghost of a smile on his face.

  But the French police search was no more successful than the Russian hunt had been.

  The second half of the General’s letter was picked up before dawn, several miles away, in a quiet street not far from the market and slums of Les Halles. He must have dropped it. A baker’s apprentice walking to work in the dark unscrewed the ball of thick, expensive paper, hoping for a banknote inside. When he saw official-looking German writing, then realized that the crumpled-up letter was lying outside an empty building whose green street door had been left gaping open, he reported a burglary in the hope of a reward.

  Skoblin must have given the General a rendezvous at one end of Paris, then delivered him right across town to another address, and to his kidnappers, we worked out later.

  The General must have had enough presence of mind to leave the letter, in pieces, as a trail. In due course it became known that the building with the green door belonged to the Soviet embassy. And it was immediately clear that he hadn’t left it peacefully. Behind the green door the police found rags, rope and a used bottle of chloroform. An unknown van parked on the street for an hour at the end of the previous morning had blocked the traffic.

  There were no more clues.

  For a day or two, France’s ports and borders were closed.

  For a day or two, a public furore convulsed Paris.

  Word got about that the kidnappers, who had disappeared as completely as their victim, must be hiding in the Soviet embassy, where General Miller was probably also a prisoner. A crowd several thousand strong besieged the pretty mansion on the rue de Grenelle – not just White Russians, but reporters, police and ordinary Parisians like Gaston, too. They booed and roared and threw things when Monsieur Suritz, the ambassador, with his little Trotsky beard, came out to announce that the French police had no right to target Soviet territory, that he would not allow a search of his premises, and that anyway General Miller would not be found. But they could do no more than shout. The law was with the Soviets.

  Thousands of scandalized words were published in the next day’s papers about the kidnapping, the exotic murder habits of Russians, and the police investigation.

  I spent those days, scratchy-eyed with exhaustion, imagining a truck trundling towards the ports of the north French coast, carrying a box which occasionally emitted bangs and groans. I imagined men in the cab, sweating and smoking cigarettes. Maybe one would have Skoblin’s eyes, under a beret. I pictured the dread on their faces as the police flagged down their car – and then the smirks as they waved them on.

  It was almost a relief once the crowds thinned and the newspapers found something new to write about, because our sense of failure was so crushing. I don’t remember properly sleeping or eating in those few days. We sat in ROVS while people came and went. We dozed on armchairs. Occasionally I went upstairs for a change of clothes or a bath. Sometimes I slept for a few hours upstairs. Jean looked exhausted, with shadowed eyes. I don’t know if he slept at all. If he did, he must have fallen asleep at the desk or on the sofa, at ROVS. Sometimes the police were at ROVS. Sometimes we were at the police station. There was a lot of talk. Nothing much mattered.

  Jean was lost in a Russian world, barely speaking except in his native tongue. I could see that, by being there, and helping the ROVS people come to terms with what was happening to them – with what I could see was dignity – he was trying to be worthy of his father. As a true foreigner for the first time, someone who didn’t speak the language everyone around me was talking, I understood so little of what went on that I was of no practical use. But I knew he wanted me there. He touched me, blindly, from time to time; reached for my hand, hugged me close. I knew from that alone how lost he felt. I couldn’t leave him. Not for a moment.

  But we couldn’t talk, either. The only subject would have been the General, and his kidnappers, and the tragedy enveloping him, and this was too painful. I couldn’t even think of the two people who’d destroyed him – for Skoblin and his wife had both vanished, and must both be equally guilty – though I heard their names come up all the time in the puzzled, angry, defeated (and otherwise incomprehensible) conversations in Russian all around me. Between ourselves, Jean and I certainly couldn’t share out loud our private questions about where the General now was – if he was still alive at all: how long it took to reach Moscow by ship; whether he’d have survived until he met the interrogators waiting for him at journey’s end; and the awful, formless terror of what might happen next. And I’d never now be able to ask Jean why he’d always done so much for, and been so loyal to, a man I thought so flawed. All I could do was respect his anguish, and observe the silence.

  I knew too that home, for me, was now where Jean was. My search for Grandmother, which had started from some flickering memory of a past love of her, had maybe not led me to her Zhenya, as I’d hoped, but it had at least led me to find meaning in loving this man, here, now. Grandmother had shown me my Zhenya. I had to stay.

  Still, I treasured the few moments when the gloom briefly lifted. Marie-Thérèse redirected her food packages downstairs, for all comers.

  ‘You don’t mind, mademoiselle? They’re respectable, serious people, those ones,’ she said to me in an undertone, putting down a giant tureen of soup on one of the secretaries’ desks, talking as if she’d been trying to persuade me for some time that not all Russians were bad lots. ‘Army officers. Hard-working family men. Educated. Not dirty thieves like that other lot – the Soviets.’

  I nodded, almost relieved when she explained the other reason for her change of heart, sending a soft glance in the direction of Jean, who was talking to a policeman in a corner of the room.

  ‘He’s nearly as French as I am, that one, wherever his family came from,’ she said approvingly from the doorway. ‘A good lad. He doesn’t deserve this.’

  It was maybe the third or fourth evening, when all the light had leached out of the sky and there was hardly anyone left at ROVS, that our vigil ended. Jean woke me from my doze in a ROVS armchair. ‘Can we sleep?’ he said dully. ‘I need to sleep.’

  Arm in arm, we walked through the downstairs lobby, not stopping to look at the two policemen snoozing at either side of the door of the ROVS office. Slowly, we climbed the stairs.

  Jean inclined his head questioningly towards the salon. But when I thought of all the spindly, uncomfortable chairs behind that door, I walked past it, leading him instead to my room.

  To hell with what Marie-Thérèse might think. I didn’t think she’d mind, anyway.

  Nothing seemed to matter any more. I didn’t believe there’d be a happy ending, or even any ending. I’d spent all those days listening to words I didn’t understand, until I was stuck in the same dark fog as Jean had lived in for so long. Like him, I was by now just being swept helplessly along in the darkness.

  We both collapsed heavily on to the bed. I barely had time to drop my shoes to the floor before sleep overcame me. We’d lost the General. He wasn’t coming back.

  39

  Jean

  I looked at her for a moment. It was nearly midnight, and Evie was asleep. She seemed so young, arm thrown across the bed, hair rumpled, with innocence in the flush of her cheek; so beautiful. Then I got up and went to the salon and sat down on the nearest lumpy chaise longue. I’d never felt more alone.

  Before my father and I had reached Paris, while we were still living our nomadic existence and I still had hope, I’d been use
d to everything changing: a constant flux of cities, countries and conditions. Back then, I remembered, I’d thought that there was a meaning of some sort in this endless shifting, and that, one day, I’d come to understand it. Back in those days, I think I may even have believed that I would, could, stop my journey myself when I found myself in a place lovely enough that I no longer wished to move on. But all that actually happened was that we ended up in France, and couldn’t keep travelling, and the infinite world in which I’d lived so many distant and miraculous lives dwindled to nothing more than endless driving round and round a cage of streets. That was when I realized I’d always been helpless to change my fate, and always would be.

  But it had never occurred to me that things could get worse, or that I could lose more.

  Now I had. These last couple of strange echoing days walking through Father’s office, knowing he was gone yet always expecting to see him behind every door – how they hurt. Every moment I spent down there was fresh proof that, with him gone, I’d lost my past. I’d never understood, I realized now, how unmoored he and his comrades must always have felt with their past swept away. I hadn’t understood, either, how unmoored I’d feel if it happened to me. And now here I was, at last, immersing myself in the ROVS environment that I’d always kept myself so aloof from, listening to the endless, aimless discussion about how to, or whether to, elect a replacement for Father, or just to accept defeat and disband ROVS altogether. Disbanding it was what I’d always wanted, wasn’t it? Let the past go, I’d said, more times than I could remember. Stop hanging on to what’s lost. Accept reality.

  But now it was I who didn’t want to let it go, or at least didn’t want to let Father go. It was I who kept saying to the ancient colonels and generals and the young secretaries, ‘But how sad he would be to hear …’ and ‘Surely you owe it to him to press on …’ as if, by rallying the faltering troops, I might somehow bring Father back to pat me on the head and look proud and pin a medal on my chest.

  He’d gone, and would never look at me again. There were so many other things I might also have thought about. But it was the way he’d always looked at me that I clung on to, inside my head. It was the one memory that was a comfort as well as a torment.

  When I was just a kid in the forest, long ago, he’d found me crying once. I was in the camp boot room because I’d persuaded a bigger kid called Lyosha to let me help with the blacking. But Lyosha had been called off to do something else and I was on my own. I was a novice. My hands were all black and I’d smeared black on the wall. A nail in one of the boots had cut my hand. I was bleeding a bit from it. I suppose I was crying, without really knowing I was – scared kid’s tears – when the big man came in and saw me. My first shamed instinct was to run off but he picked me up, right there in that little room. He didn’t seem to notice that I was expecting a beating; he just looked very seriously at me out of his pale, wide-set eyes and then said, like a judgement, ‘The full man doesn’t understand the hungry man’ – a proverb; he liked folksy proverbs. ‘Let’s get you something to eat, eh, little man.’ I expect he got me some bread or soup next, though that’s not the part I remember. What stayed with me was just that serious, slow, light-eyed look; the feeling it gave me that, probably for the first time, someone was really seeing me and my troubles for what they were.

  That look had given me hope, and changed everything. That’s what I’d lost. That’s what I realized, now he was gone. Though of course he hadn’t looked at me like that in a while. For the last few years, it had felt like me looking after him more than the other way round: handing him into the taxi and out; running errands. Maybe he’d been hurt that, in spite of all I owed him, I hadn’t wanted to follow in his footsteps. Maybe he’d just got old, and weary, and preoccupied with his own business – with his military plotting, or his secret loves. Maybe there’d never even been quite as much promise in that look as I’d seen. He hadn’t shared his private concerns with me, after all. Never. And recently I hadn’t talked to him about … well, so many things; though what hurt most right now was that I’d never mentioned my friendship with Evie. He hadn’t known, and this suddenly seemed one of the saddest things of all.

  I wasn’t going to think of where he might be now: of the boat, the box, the truck, the chloroform, the ropes. I wasn’t going to think he might already be dead. He’d given me the capacity to hope, and I was going to hold on to it.

  Even so, I was beginning to behave as though he might not reappear. For instance, earlier yesterday I’d taken an hour to make arrangements to have Katerina Ivan’na cared for at Madame Sabline’s home, with her nurse – an insurance policy taken out by my father would, I’d discovered, cover the cost – so I could move to a room, alone.

  Now, as I sat on the chaise longue in the salon, I resolved to tell Evie to go home to America. I was, I realized, more trapped in France than ever before. And watching her struggle with my reality was one of the worst parts of this new awfulness. I was dragging her down to my level of poverty and despair, and had no right to expect her to live in the swinish way I always had and always would. She deserved better.

  Evie

  I was woken by knocking at the apartment door, a quiet but insistent tattoo. It was past midnight, I saw, turning on the lamp and glancing at the clock. Who’d come calling at this hour but the police?

  Jean wasn’t there. I got up, hunting for my shoes, and went out into the corridor. The lamp was on in the salon. I heard heavy breathing from the chaise longue. He’d fallen asleep there, with his legs and arms hanging uncomfortably off, I saw, looking with compassion at his face, careworn even in sleep. I didn’t want to wake him unless I had to. I was hoping that, even if it was the police, I could deal with them myself.

  ‘Qui est là?’ I called quietly, with my hand on the lock. But no one answered. The quick knocking just went on, until it became more of a scrabbling of nails. It was clear now that it wasn’t the police. I thought I could hear someone stifling sobs behind the door. I could feel the knot tighten in my stomach. I had to force myself to open up.

  When I did, the door burst open on me. The person outside must have been leaning on it, because a large shape practically fell inside, half knocking me over.

  Righting myself, I stared.

  The last person I expected to see was Plevitskaya. She didn’t look the same. She was tear-stained, wild-haired and still in the dress I’d last seen her in days earlier. She looked ten years older. And she was crumpled and smelly enough to have been sleeping rough. But it was Plevitskaya all right, and she was staring right back at me. She still looked defiant, but she looked so pitiful too.

  For an instant I let myself wonder if she’d come to lead us to the General. But nothing in her ravaged face gave grounds for hope.

  ‘I need to talk to Jean,’ she said in a strangulated voice.

  There was so much to say to this woman, who, in the past few days, had become such a monster in my mind, that I couldn’t think what words to begin with. I started angrily shaking my head, but she just looked at me as though anything I might say would be superfluous, and marched on into the salon where the lamp glowed.

  ‘No!’ I called, thinking she was going to weep out some sort of terrible confession to him. I would have preferred her to tell me whatever it was, so I could do something to prepare him. ‘For God’s sake, leave him be!’

  But I was too late. She’d hurled herself tremulously across the room and was on her knees beside him, shaking his arm. ‘Shank,’ she muttered, urgently, ‘shank …’

  And then, once she’d got him to open his eyes, and he was looking at her in rumpled, sleep-dazed horror, she grabbed him into a fierce embrace. ‘Moi sharik …’ she cried, and then a whole lot more hysterical Russian with tears coursing down her face.

  He sat up, trying to shake her off, but she went on clinging round his neck, sobbing. ‘What the hell?’ he half shouted, and I was surprised to hear that, even in his half-waking confusion, it was loud French that came
out of his mouth, and not Russian. ‘What are you doing here?’

  I remembered that sharik meant ‘little ball’, and it was what the nuns had called Jean, because he’d come to them so fat. But what was she doing here, howling that word at him?

  This wasn’t at all what I’d thought I’d hear. I’d expected a torrent of incomprehensible words, sure enough, but also repentance, and shame, and a cowed demeanour. Not this ferocious embrace. Not this outpouring. Why, she hardly knew Jean, did she? She hadn’t even known he wasn’t the General’s real son, the other day.

  And then, suddenly, I thought I made out the word ‘Zyzyrovka’ in the torrent of words, and when she turned and pointed towards me, as if explaining something, a wild surmise filled me. Because hadn’t she said that same word to me, recently, in the dressmaker’s, when I’d started telling her about Jean being an orphan?

  And hadn’t she lost a little boy herself?

  For a horrible moment, Jean froze in her embrace, looking suddenly ill, and then he started to struggle in earnest. He caught her arms and, pinioning her by the wrists, pushed her off him and held her as far away as possible.

  ‘Zhenya!’ she howled imploringly, and her elbow banged against a pile of my belongings – books and papers – that Marie-Thérèse had got out of my box. It all went flying. ‘Zhenya!’

  I glanced down. There was a scatter of papers on the floor. Grandmother’s letters, her diary, with its lock now broken open, the photo – but I couldn’t move.

  ‘Don’t call me that,’ he said in French. ‘I’m not your Zhenya. You’ve got it all wrong.’

  Still weeping, she said in thickly accented French, ‘You had a little knitted ball on a string, round your wrist, a red one. So it wouldn’t get lost.’

  I looked from her tousled dark head to his, and waited. It sounded so very like what Jean had told me about how he’d been found.