Shoot Me, I'm Already Dead

by Julia Navarro

  Pierre Beauvoir seemed upset with the testamentary provisions made by the woman who, at least nominally, had been his wife. Mikhail felt pleased at this last slight Irina had given her husband.

  All the money she had earned now belonged to Mikhail, and it was not a small amount. She had also left him her jewels, her paintings, some Bohemian cut glass and a set of silver cutlery.

  Mikhail cried as he read Irina’s letter.

  My dear Mikhail,

  I know that you could not understand or accept that I should marry Monsieur Beauvoir. You will think that I am selfish, that I only think about myself, and I cannot deny that you are right. I would have loved to have loved Samuel as much as I loved Marie; she thought that it would have been the best for all three of us. But I cannot ask forgiveness for what I do not feel, although Samuel will always be my most loyal friend. I appreciate his goodness, his generosity, and his talent, and I hope that one day you will come as well to appreciate him as he deserves.

  All I have is yours, because you are the son I should have liked to have had, and I have always thought of you as such. I do not know when or in what circumstances you will read this letter, but whenever it is, you should know that I have loved you always, with all my heart, and not a single day goes by that I don’t think of you.

  Always yours,

  IRINA

  Miriam and Samuel heard Mikhail’s sobs; Samuel wanted to go to him, but Miriam stopped him.

  “Let him get rid of his tears. He needs it. And read your letter, it looks like you’re afraid to,” she said as she left the room.

  Dear Samuel,

  When you read this letter I will no longer be here, but I do not want to go forever without thanking you for all you have done for me. I owe you so much! I was condemned to be unhappy, and you gave me my life back. I know that you loved me, and you cannot imagine how often I have blamed myself for not being able to love you more than as a friend or as a brother. You will have asked yourself on more than one occasion why I have the attitude toward men that I do. I never even told Marie, and now I regret that I did not, because she would have been able to advise me, and to help cure a wound that has never healed. Do you remember that I worked as a nanny in the house of that rich family, the Novikovs? Count Novikov raped me. Not on one occasion, but whenever he wanted to. I had an abortion. I have never been able to get past either of these things. I hope that now you will understand me. Ever since then I have closed my heart to men and to love. I felt dirty because of what had happened, I felt the need to punish myself, and then my soul dried up forever. Mikhail, you, my family—these are the people I have loved more than anyone else. Look after him, he loves you even if he doesn’t know how to show it.

  My dear Samuel, I hope that you will now be able to understand me, and forgive me.

  Yours,

  IRINA»

  He sat in silence with his eyes closed. He felt a pain in his chest and he tried to hold back his tears, but he lost the battle. Samuel and Mikhail spent that night alone. Neither of them felt strong enough to leave their rooms, nor did they want to see anyone else. Miriam had understood their needs without their having to say anything, so she asked the children not to make too much noise, and she made them their supper. Daniel helped her. At this moment she felt closer than ever to her oldest son. Neither of them belonged to a world in which the curtains were real lace and the photograph frames burnished silver. They spoke in low voices trying to comfort each other for their loss. Daniel said he wanted to return to Palestine, and Miriam said that they would go as soon as possible. Once the will had been read there would be nothing to keep them in Paris.

  However, Samuel did not think that way.

  “We cannot go yet, I need to decide what to do with this house; Marie looked after it, and then Irina, but now . . .”

  Miriam bit her lower lip. She wanted to go; Samuel had promised that they would go at once, but now they had been in Paris for two weeks. Daniel felt lost, as did she. They didn’t understand the language, and the city was so large . . . A beautiful city, but inhospitable. They had always thought that Jerusalem was the great capital, but alongside Paris it was nothing more than a large village.

  “Stay here, I’ll go with the children. You don’t need to worry about the journey. Daniel is a man now.”

  “I don’t want you to go, Miriam, I wouldn’t feel calm.”

  “I want to go to Palestine. I need to go to my mother’s grave. You have to understand.”

  “One more week, just one more, I promise . . .”

  He asked for one more week, and he took her to dinner at the house of Monsieur Chevalier, the pharmacist whose laboratory he had worked in during his last stay in Paris, after Marie’s death.

  “He taught me all I know about pharmacy, and he showed me that a chemist can be a good pharmacist as well. I couldn’t disappoint him by refusing his invitation. They want to know you, Miriam, you are my wife and you have to come with me.”

  Miriam was surprised that Samuel did not share in her grief. He seemed to be ignorant of the profound grief that she felt at the deaths of her mother and her uncles and aunts, as well as the illness her sister Judith was suffering from. Samuel had shut the door on Palestine and all that he had left there. She wanted to leave, but Samuel’s insistence that she stay made her think that maybe he did love her more than he said he did, even to himself.

  “I’ll ask Mikhail to take Daniel and you to do some shopping. The clothes we brought from Palestine do not suffice for Paris.”

  “I like my clothes, I know that they are modest compared with what the women wear here, but I am who I am and I don’t want to be anyone else.”

  “I love you for who you are, Miriam, which I why I ask you to be patient.”

  “The children are going crazy, locked up in the apartment all day, they need fresh air . . .”

  “I’ve spoken with the concierge . . . He’s given me the name of a niece of his who can help you with the house and look after the children. Her name is Agnès, and she is willing to start coming tomorrow. He says that she is a very handy young lady.”

  “The children don’t understand French . . .”

  “They’ll learn . . .”

  Mikhail did not understand why Samuel was not mourning for Irina, and he refused to go to the dinner.

  Miriam bought a discreet silk dress, but in spite of Samuel’s insistence that she have her hair dressed she decided to do it herself. She mourned her mother in silence, and it would have seemed a betrayal to go even for one minute to the hairdresser.

  Monsieur Chevalier had grown older. His wife’s death two years before had robbed him of his will to live. They had never had children and they were everything to each other. The loneliness was unbearable for him, and were it not for the responsibility he felt toward his employees, he would have closed the laboratory.

  The guests included David Peretz, the son of Benedict Peretz, the Jewish merchant friend of his grandfather who had helped him so much in the past, first in opening up his path to Palestine, and then in finding him his job with Monsieur Chevalier. Samuel apologized to David for not having attended his father’s funeral. He had received the news during the days after the Nabi Musa massacre.

  What he could not imagine was the surprise prepared for him by Monsieur Chevalier and David Peretz. He was introducing Miriam to a group of old friends when he heard a laugh that sounded familiar. He had to turn around.

  “Katia!” he exclaimed, without being able to believe what he was seeing.

  “Samuel! My God, it’s true, you’re here!”

  They hugged, in the face of Miriam’s confusion and the self-satisfied gazes of Monsieur Chevalier and David Peretz.

  They could not separate themselves or contain their tears. For Samuel, Katia Goldanski was the best of his past; he saw in her his old mentor Gustav Goldanski, his old friend Kons
tantin, and the life he had lost in Saint Petersburg.

  “You haven’t changed!” Samuel said in Russian as he looked dazedly at her.

  “What a liar you are! How could I not change? The years pass for me as they pass for us all,” she replied, without coquetry or artifice.

  But Samuel saw her as she had been, that elegant little countess, with her silky blonde hair and her clear, intense blue gaze, her porcelain skin, as beautiful as she had been when she was a child. He found her more beautiful than ever. Maturity suited her. Katia was a few years younger than he was, she must be nearly fifty.

  Miriam looked at them without knowing what to do. This woman seemed to be unreal, to have stepped out of a painting. She thought she knew who Katia was. Samuel had spoken to her about Konstantin and Katia, but he had never said that she was a beauty. For a moment she felt the urge to run away. Miriam did not look out of place in Jerusalem, but here, in this salon . . . She felt that the other women were looking at her out of the corners of their eyes and scrutinizing her clothes and her hair, poorly gathered in a chignon at the back of her head.

  “And you must be Miriam,” Katia said, catching sight of her and embracing her.

  “You’ll have to speak in English,” Samuel warned.

  They spent the rest of the evening getting themselves up to date with how their lives had been over the past few years, although they both had bits and pieces of news from the correspondence kept up by Konstantin and Samuel. They switched from English to French and from French to Russian without realizing it. Russian was their mother tongue, the language of their first babbled words, the first language in which they had laughed and cried.

  “My brother is in London, he would have liked to come, but he is closing a piece of business. He will be here in a few days. He told me to keep you here however I can, he doesn’t want you to go back to Palestine without seeing him. You don’t know his wife yet, her name’s Vera, they have a son, Gustav. Yes, baptized as Gustav in honor of my grandfather.”

  When the evening came to an end, Samuel took Katia back to where she was staying with some friends, insisting that they dine together the next day.

  He was so happy to have met Katia again that he didn’t notice how worried Miriam seemed or how upset Daniel was. The young man had spent the whole dinner in silence. He didn’t speak or understand French, so he felt out of place in that environment where they used a different knife and fork for each course, and where the women smelled so intensely of perfume that it drove one dizzy.

  “Mother, I want to go back to Palestine,” he begged his mother that evening.

  “Samuel needs us here, but when he has his business in order we will go. I’ve promised you that.”

  Samuel was nervous, and he asked Miriam to do all she could to make Katia feel at ease.

  “She has always been used to the best. I hope that the concierge’s niece is a good cook.”

  “The important thing is that you will all be together, the food is the least of it,” Miriam said.

  Mikhail barely remembered Katia, but he was happy to speak with someone who belonged to the past, the past they had taken away from him, the past that contained his father. Katia and Samuel talked about how they had played together as children.

  “In fact, Konstantin and he threw me out of the playroom, I was never important for them, they looked for me only when they needed to distract our German nurse because they had thought up some naughtiness or other,” Katia explained.

  “You said yesterday that you had moved to London, why is that?” Samuel asked.

  “Because it was not easy to live in Russia after the revolution. We had committed three unpardonable sins: We were rich, we were nobility, and we were half Jewish.”

  “The revolution was to do away with differences among men. Religion was to cease being important . . . ,” Samuel began, but Katia would not let him continue.

  “That’s what my brother and you believed, but it was not so. Konstantin hasn’t wanted to worry you by writing in his letters about what we went through . . . We suffered a lot, Samuel, you can’t imagine how much, and my grandmother more than us. Her world suddenly collapsed, for all that Konstantin tried to protect us . . . One morning some members of the Saint Petersburg soviet came to our house. They had been sent by a man, a political commissar, Feliks Surov. They treated us like we were thieves, and gave no room for doubt: Private property had been abolished; this was no longer our house . . . They had reassigned it to twenty families. My grandmother tried to resist . . . Poor woman! Suddenly the house was opened to these people. You should have seen them, Samuel . . . I don’t blame them, no, I don’t blame them . . . but they hated us so! I remember a woman coming face to face with my grandmother and growling, ‘Well, so this is a mansion, this is how the nobles live, surrounded by silk and silver plate . . .’ and then suddenly shoving all the porcelain figures off my grandmother’s desk. They trod on some Fabergé eggs my grandfather had given her; they took the paintings off the walls because they said they needed fuel for the fires that winter . . . My grandmother trembled but maintained her dignity. Some of our servants interceded for us, saying that we had always treated them well, but that made Surov even angrier, and he was the leader of the group. He took pleasure in humiliating us, he called us enemies of the people and said that if it were up to him then we should pay with our lives for the suffering we had caused. Vera, Konstantin’s wife, started to shake. She was pregnant and worried that this man should be so angry. I asked my brother not to stand up to them. We were the losers, and had to deal with this new situation. I don’t want to lie to you, it was not easy, our life became a living hell. Ivan, do you remember Ivan, our stableman? He was a good man and loyal to my family, he gave us shelter in the shed he lived in next to the stables. He helped you leave with Mikhail and Irina, remember? Ivan knew Surov, because he had been his grandchildren’s teacher. The Okhrana had arrested him for revolutionary activities, and it was a miracle that he had survived. Ivan always defended us when Feliks Surov ridiculed us, but Surov turned on him and accused him of being a counterrevolutionary because he questioned Surov’s methods.”

  Katia’s eyes grew serious. Mikhail looked at her closely and found it difficult to hide his indignation.

  “Are you telling me that the people who made the revolution possible behaved like the worst kind of riffraff?” he asked.

  Katia thought for a while, trying to find the words to reply correctly while dissipating Mikhail’s anger.

  “I’m not going to defend our last tsar, he doesn’t deserve it. His predecessors didn’t try to find out what the people wanted or needed either, they preferred having serfs to having citizens. They could have been like their British or German cousins, but they were not, they were incapable of understanding that you cannot carry on committing injustices permanently. The people hated the imperial family, they hated the nobles, they hated the bourgeoisie, they hated everyone whom they saw as having everything while they were unable to feed their children.” Katia stared fixedly at Mikhail before continuing. “I know that your father Yuri was a revolutionary, that my brother and Samuel sympathized with socialism, because no one with a heart could fail to be moved at such injustice. I never shared my brother’s opinions about the revolutionaries, but I would have liked my country to change, I would have liked the tsar to have been able to implement reforms, I would have liked there to be a parliament where people could speak freely about the problems they faced . . . We would not have had to improvise, we had the British model to work with.”

  “You cannot convince me that the revolutionaries behaved like hangmen,” Mikhail insisted.

  “Russia has bled to death with the Civil War, the Red Army against the White Army . . . And yes, on too many occasions the revolutionaries behaved in a brutal fashion. They enforced their revolution at the same level of cruelty that the tsar had enforced his rule.” Katia said these wor
ds with no hesitation, even in the face of Mikhail’s furious gaze.

  “Are you so naïve as to think that the proud aristocrats, the caste that governed Russia, the tsar and his family, were simply going to bow to the people and agree that they had spent centuries exploiting them? Do you really think he would have shared his power? No, he wouldn’t have. We took what was ours. Men like my father gave their lives to give dignity back to Russia. What life is worth living if a man is a serf?” Mikhail had raised his voice.

  “My grandparents taught me to respect my fellow man. My grandfather would never have allowed Konstantin or me to grow up thinking that we were better than anyone else simply for having been born noble. My grandfather always treated his servants with respect and affection,” Katia replied in a peaceful voice.

  “Yes, you were condescending aristocrats, but why did you have to have everything while those around you had nothing? You should go to Palestine and see how the Jews are living there. It wouldn’t do you any harm to live on a kibbutz . . . No one owns anything on our farms, everything’s shared, and no decisions are taken without everyone being in agreement. The kitchen and the dining room are communal, the children are all educated by everyone. Do you know where this miracle of equality comes from? The Russian Jews, men who think the same as my father did. It is not easy to live on a kibbutz, only the best can do so, those who really think that all human beings are equal, that no one deserves to have more than anyone else.”

  “Yes, equality is a beautiful dream, but tell me, Mikhail, do the Russian socialists in Palestine make everyone else live like them? Do they put people who disagree with them into prison? Do they kill those who resist? Is it obligatory to be a communist? Our revolutionaries have imposed a reign of terror. They say that everything they do is in the name of the people, but they don’t ask the people what they want, how they want to live,” Katia said, unwilling to bend before Mikhail.