The Accomplice

  As I have said, Xan, too, was an orphan and we had a ghoulish rivalry about the nature of our parents’ deaths, the more violent the better. Here I scored over him for both my parents had died horribly, while his mother had merely expired of some kind of puerperal fever a few weeks after his birth. However, Xan, a fiercely competitive male supremacist, insisted that his father’s death, actively fighting the Reds in the Civil War, counted for more than my parents’ passive victim-status as murderees. I would retaliate with my own unremembered experience as witness of events. His father might have died fighting, but Xan had seen nothing of it himself. Superiority on this was close but unclear. We were both, however, leagues ahead of our childhood companion, Nikolai, whose parents were both still alive. He may often have wished his rich and devoted father and mother dead of a thousand bizarre tortures in order to compete with Xan and me. In this he simply foresaw their ends.

  The turmoil of the former Russian empire gradually subsided during the early twenties. The Russians had retreated from the western provinces; the occupying German forces, defeated on the western front, returned to their own country, leaving the Slavs and Balts of the intermediate lands to establish their own states. None of this was a matter of rejoicing for my families. In Latvia the great estates of the German and Russian nobility were confiscated and handed over to the peasantry. The old landowners were allowed to retain a house and a farm of a few acres. The ruins of my father’s house were taken over by the state and I was assigned a smaller house and some land which had previously been let. I never lived there, for my home was with Aunt Zoya and Xan at Kornu. The Chornorouky lands in Latvia had never been extensive; their riches had come from huge estates in the Ukraine which were now lost for good. Aunt Zoya settled in Latvia because it was close to Russia; she could lead as Russian a life as was possible, but she was not under Bolshevik rule. So we lived an existence salvaged from the past and from the confiscation of the Chornorouky estates, and a very odd household we must have made.

  The core of it was Aunt Zoya. Her two brothers, our grandfathers, the Princes Yegor and Yuri Alexandrovich, also stayed with us from time to time. My grandfather, Prince Yuri, spent the winter months in Baden-Baden or Berlin, only coming to Kornu for the summer. He chose German cities because he had had some money in Berlin which had been frozen there at the start of the war in 1914. This, at the time, according to Aunt Zoya, had been regarded as typical of the combination of bad luck and bad judgement that characterized my grandfather, because the sums had been so considerable as to be noticed even in my mother’s fabulously wealthy family. But by 1918 Prince Yuri was seen as one of the lucky ones. His money in Germany was nothing in comparison with what the Chornoroukys had lost: the palaces in St Petersburg and Moscow, the summer houses near Pskov, the villas in the Crimea, the endless tracts of the black earth lands of the Ukraine. Nevertheless the money in Germany would permit my grandfather to live still as a man of means. However, Prince Yuri was as unlucky in this as in everything else. All his remaining wealth was wiped out by the terrible inflation of the early 1920s; he watched in astonishment as his money disappeared in value like our lake at Kornu in the December frosts, until the whole expanse of water was transformed into a snow-covered field, as if it had never existed. In 1924, when I was seven years old, my grandfather, ruined for a second time, returned to live with us in Latvia. He was a gently complaining presence in the background of our lives. Aunt Zoya organized the household to give him great respect and to allow him an almost entirely nocturnal regime, spending his waking hours of the night reading by the fire in winter and in the summer sitting on the verandah in the white light that is never completely extinguished at that time of year. Occasionally some real money must have materialized from somewhere, for Prince Yuri would leave once or twice a year to visit friends and fellow exiles in England or France, returning with tales of Yousoupoff luxury in Paris and Vyazemsky penury in London.

  Xan’s grandfather, Prince Yegor Alexandrovich, to whom Kornu belonged, did not live with us in Latvia, but made his home in London. He came home to us in the summer of 1925 or ’26 to die. I remember the two old men sitting on the verandah, dressed in immaculate suits of white duck or cream linen with waistcoats and bow ties, playing chess with a crude wooden set with which Xan and I learned the game. They talked and talked, drinking glasses of tea and eating redcurrant jam with spoons. They would go over the events of the last decade, what he, or she, or they should have done to fend off the catastrophe that had overwhelmed them all. If only at that moment the Tsar had appointed X, or sacked Y; if a certain policy had been abandoned earlier, or another adopted sooner. If only the Tsaritsa had not been so religious, nor the Tsarevich so ill. If only, if only… The alternative worlds proliferated indefinitely in their talk of what might have been.

  At that time, just before he died, Prince Yegor wrote the note about his English will, which he gave to Aunt Zoya, who told Xan about it in the summer of 1940, just before she died. Xan mentioned it to me, casually, by chance, one afternoon, lying in the undergrowth in the forest when I visited him in hiding in the woodcutters’ hut. And so the last remnants of the Chornorouky fortune reached me in England after the war. With what Prince Yegor left me I bought Asshe House. I chose it carefully; it was old and beautiful, but not grand, the house of a bourgeois in a small provincial town, not the home of an aristocrat.

  As a child, I knew we were poor. I didn’t look too closely into the question of wealth; I simply knew that there were very many things to be had for money and money was what we lacked, although the farm provided us with all that the household of some twenty persons needed. Aunt Zoya worked ceaselessly to bottle, to pickle, to preserve, to smoke, to salt our own produce so that there was always a satisfying array on the shelves behind the locked doors of the storerooms. But there was very little in the way of cash. Nikolai, in contrast, was rich. During the summer holidays he lived in a large modern house near the village; his father rented my property at Jamala and many other farms, taking all the milk and butter, eggs and wheat to sell in Riga where he owned houses, which he let to the people who flooded in from the countryside. Nikolai had pocket money and could afford books and coloured pencils and little pads of paper made in England from the stationers on Marijas iela in Riga, things that Xan and I craved for but could never hope to purchase.

  Xan and I were brought up by the old who had known the Golden Age, who had witnessed the Fall and who had been ejected from Paradise. The assumptions on which our lives were based were that the good days, the great days, were over. Everything Gets Worse. This was the fundamental law of life, a scientific principle, which had been empirically tested. We heard only obliquely about the magnificence of the past, for the old men did not speak to us about their palaces and their wealth. Aunt Zoya told her tales, which were like fairy stories, with the same indirect relationship with reality. They taught us about our family and our past, about human relations, love and betrayal, but they said nothing about the future, about how we were to live, Xan and I, when we grew up. We knew there was a world beyond Latvia, a world where power and fortune lay. The message from Aunt Zoya and the Princes was that it was not for us. We were dodos, young dodos, unfitted for the new world that had been born out of the war; indeed, they implied that our being unfitted for the modern world was a sign of moral worth, for it was a world of random violence, inhuman cruelty and arbitrary intolerance, without order, faith, reason or feeling.

  For Xan this induced a fascination with the Bolsheviks which he had to hide from Aunt Zoya.

  “There has to be a reason for their victory,” he would say. “It’s not a question of if the Tsar had done this or that or if some tiny thing had been different. Russia was a dodo; the whole empire was doomed. It couldn’t go on. The communists could see what was happening. They have the future with them.” He like to read about communist achievements in Russia, the building of factories, the creation of the Metro, the Stakhanovite overfulfilment of the production targets. Ph
otographs in months-old magazines which we sometimes saw, showed rhythmic views of factory chimneys, pumping machinery, railway lines. Xan admired all that. I could not share his admiration, though I loved him above everyone, for I was afraid. I accepted the old people’s belief that there was no hope for us in the new world. We had to avoid attracting attention in order to be allowed to live at all.

  I have to say that, although I knew we had been ejected from Paradise, wrongfully too, I thought we had not ended up in too dreadful a place. Of course, I had never known the true golden age; yet Kornu in the twenties seemed like heaven to me. The house, originally a hunting lodge in the forest, was large and rambling, yet, because it was low, of wooden construction, it appeared simple and unpretentious. Standing on a little hill, it faced south and a long verandah ran the whole of its length, looking out over the lake below to the forest beyond. Through the trees could be seen the tip of the onion-domed church built by the Orthodox Chornoroukys. Its gilding was now blackened and damp mottled the paintings on the iconostasis within. Yet it still retained a gaudy exoticism in comparison with the sober white churches of the Protestant Latvians.

  My ideal landscape has always been that flat northern plain with its low horizons and huge overarching sky, and at one’s back the forests of birch and larch. Xan and I rode, walked, cycled for miles around Kornu. We bathed in the lake in the heavy afternoons of summer, swimming, weightless, in a blue globe of sky and water. We punted among the bulrushes at dawn in the spring, watching the birds through a heavy pair of German field glasses, passed back and forth between us. We built snow houses in winter, carefully forming bricks to create large structures that would endure from Christmas to March, a period when the temperature never rose above freezing, even during the still, clear days of February when the sun shone fiercely and we would take off our jackets and tie them round our waists, radiating the heat of energy as we swooped along the forest paths on our skis, leaving behind us the criss-cross tracks of truly fast skiers. Such a different childhood from Hampstead children’s, like Ivo and Rosie. They never had the freedom that Xan and I had at Kornu because their parents feared for them. Aunt Zoya never worried about the dangers we might meet: the terrors of the forests, the secret shootings, the murder of children, the hunting of men lay in the future.

  The world outside was hostile to our species, so we were lucky to have a little reserve where we could live in peace. I rarely left Kornu. My greatest adventure was to go to Riga to see Xan when he went away to school, to collect him for the holidays, or more sadly, to deliver him for the start of term. I did not attend school, ever. I was taught at home by Aunt Zoya and then by students, very often young graduates, who came to stay with us for shorter or longer periods and who, in return for their board and a very small salary, spent three hours every morning with me in the school room, teaching me anything they cared to impart. I learned languages from Aunt Zoya: I spoke Latvian and Russian and English every day; German and French were rotated by the week. On Monday Aunt Zoya would declare, “Une semaine francaise," and all conversation at meals would be in that language. A novel would be read, bits of it aloud by the fire or on the verandah, and had to be finished before next Monday’s announcement of, “Deutsch, bitte.” This ramshackle way of learning was not good enough for Xan who was sent to school when he was ten, boarding in the home of Nikolai and his parents and only returning to us at Kornu for Christmas, Easter and the endlessly long summer months with the great celebration of the festival of St John’s Day, Xan’s birthday.

  Nikolai made the third person of our trinity, the necessary balance and counterweight. The relationship between the three of us has, throughout my life, made me think, in spite of everything that happened, that the triangle not the pair is the fundamental grouping. Since I had no parents, the trinity of Alexander, Nikolai and me, Xan, Lai and Genya, was the basic unit of the world, the family, for me. And, like more ordinary families, it was full of tension as well as a source of security. Perhaps the tension held it together.

  Nikolai was the son of a Latvian doctor. His great-grandfather had been a peasant, not much more than a serf, on the Chornorouky estate, a fact of which Nikolai’s father made no secret, of which he was proud. His son had become rich through the farming of sugar beet, buying land, building sugar mills, exporting the sugar to western Europe out of the port of Riga. He had diversified into timber and other products and had established himself in fine style in Riga, in a grand new house. Nikolai’s father was educated, first at St Petersburg University and then in Paris. The grandfather was a peasant; the father was a businessman; the son was to be a scholar and administrator. However, he chose medicine, not law, as his subject and when he set up his plate in Riga, he became a fashionable doctor whose large clinic had two doors: at one entered the comfortable Latvian bourgeoisie, who paid for those entering the other door, the peasants and working people of the town. Nikolai’s parents were Latvian nationalists, hostile both to the Baltic nobility, such as my father’s family, and to the Russians like the Chornoroukys. They were the winners in the break up of the empire, where Alexander and I were the losers.

  Nikolai was brought up to speak Russian and German as well as Latvian; with us he insisted on speaking his own language which remained always the one we spoke naturally among ourselves. It began when we were very little. Then we spoke Latvian to him in the same way that we spoke Latvian to the servants, because he spoke nothing else. Later on, it became one of the ways in which he maintained his torsion on the strings that bound us together. Although he knew our languages, he made us speak his. Lai needed to exert his power where he could because it was acknowledged between the three of us that Xan was our leader. His dominance was, in the first place, physical. He was tall and slim, dark-haired and grey-eyed, a handsome boy. He ran faster than we did; he climbed higher in the trees, swam farther; he was fearless, where I was timid and Lai reasonable, in the face of risk. He maintained his leadership through personality as well as strength. He had a charm that could win round the most obdurate of adults and it was exercised ruthlessly over Lai and me. Xan’s displeasure was a real threat. On the whole, however, Lai and I were devoted subordinates, each of us recognizing our place in the natural order of things. Lai’s characteristics, overshadowed by Xan’s, were those of persistence and endurance. They were borne out by his appearance. He was stocky with a round skull which seemed bald when he was small because his hair was so silvery fair. Later it thickened into a pile of straight fine gold which grew into a long fringe during the summer months and from under which peered light blue, frowning eyes.

  I’m talking a lot about who we were and what we looked like. What did all that matter to three children growing up on an isolated smallholding in one of the remotest corners of Europe? A great deal. We did not articulate any of these things, but everything I have tried to express was known to us, our relative social, racial and financial positions, our individual appearance and character and each element was a factor in the play, the tension, between us. If Xan was the leader, Lai was the best friend, Sir Lancelot, the loyal lieutenant; I, of course, was the one, younger, female, they could both feel superior to. I heard their complaints and praise of the other. I sustained them both. My loyalty was one of the spoils that had to be shared, justly, though not evenly. Nikolai did not claim equality with Xan, yet he knew his worth and demanded his due. The trouble came when what Lai thought was his right was more than Xan was prepared to give.

  When I saw Rosie and Xenia in battle on Sunday I suddenly recalled Xan and Lai, as I have not remembered them for years and years. I remembered the act of independence that precipitated everything.

  Nikolai and I made a secret expedition without Xan, creeping out of the house in the siesta hour when we were supposed to be resting on our beds. It was done wilfully, that is we knew that Xan would resent it, although we did not know how deeply. It was not much as a rebellion. We walked through the forest that stretched for kilometres behind the house. The strong s
ummer sunshine was filtered through the green cover of birch and pine into a pure greenish light. We had no particular purpose and wandered along the woodcutters’ rides, sometimes wading into the thin undergrowth to investigate something that attracted our attention. Crouched under the bracken, we enjoyed the sensation of being hidden from Aunt Zoya, the maids and from Xan, too. Finally we crept back to the house for tea, carrying with us a handkerchief of myrtles and wild strawberries to placate Xan’s displeasure. We were never to do it again because Xan’s revenge was so terrible. And from his point of view it was right, for we might well have made a habit of it, if he had not punished us so dreadfully. We found that a companionship of equals is peaceful and happy; there was none of the fierce competition, the striving for supremacy, that characterized our games with Xaa When we returned, Xan said nothing and we thought at first we had escaped without reproach, that what we had done was not so bad after all.

  In the summer we used to bathe in the lake below the house. It had been created originally as an ornamental lake by the damming of the river and was part of the pare anglais laid out by some unhappy Chornorouky princess, abandoned at Kornu at the end of the eighteenth century. By the early thirties everything was neglected. Reeds grew all round the edge of the lake and the little temple which had served as a landing stage for the voyage to Cythera was marooned among the bulrushes. There was a sinuous, wooden jetty projecting into the water used as a diving board and bathing raft. We were sitting there after our swim the following evening when Xan began to taunt Lai. His mockery played on all Lai’s characteristics that we, with unanimous and arbitrary certainty, rated lower than their counterparts in Xan: his being Latvian, non-noble, shorter, slower of speech and thought. Even as I sat listening, shamed and horrified, I admired the cleverness of Xan’s punishment. I realized at once that he had chosen deliberately to avenge himself on Lai in this way. The two boys could have fought one another in the woods, when I was not there, but that would have been no good. The whole point was to humiliate the victim in front of a witness who, by seeing and saying nothing, becomes the accomplice: shamed like the victim, implicated like the bully.