The Accomplice

by The Accomplice (retail) (epub)

  “She said the other night at Glyndebourne that she came to marry your father.” Xenia had been listening, though Naomi and Marcus had almost forgotten her presence.

  “Oh, she did,” Marcus turned to face Xenia. “In fact, I remember now, she did not know that the money was here. It was my father who made enquiries for her and discovered it.”

  “There was money for her in England, family money?”

  “Of course, I was forgetting, it’s your family too. You must ask Jean about it.”

  “I don’t really see how she can do that, Naomi.”

  “Well, no, perhaps not. Now, I must finish this, Marcus. I’ll leave Jean to you.”

  Both Rosie and Xenia had heard and seen things to concern them that evening. Rosie was to take action while Xenia could only debate matters with herself. The revival of the project for her to go to Broad Woodham was unwelcome. It had been mentioned in letters in the early stages and never been developed in any concrete way. Xenia had allowed herself to forget the idea, especially since she had been concentrating her attention on Al, who needed to see her every day. Even though she could telephone him from Woodham, such a link would have none of the intensity of their afternoon meetings in Gayton Street. She was helpless, as she had so often been, her plans lying in the control of others. She could only wait to see what Yevgenia would decide. She was reasonably optimistic that she would be allowed to stay in London. She knew that Yevgenia disliked, even feared, her and so it seemed improbable that she would consent to have her at this late stage.

  However, as Naomi was ruminating on the sources of Yevgenia’s money a new idea had flared in Xenia’s mind. She had already seen parallels between her own life and Yevgenia’s and she now saw a new one. Yevgenia had found money in England, family money. Xenia had been as doubtful as Yevgenia as to whether a connexion really existed between her father and Yevgenia’s branch of the Chornorouky family. She had now decided that there was. It would be annoying if she was removed to Sussex for four weeks, but there were openings to be explored there and she would have to do what she could to maintain her link with Al until she returned to London.

  Part Eight

  YEVGENIA

  17

  When I was a child Kornu was a place of enchantment. Even when I was a young girl, though the magic had disappeared, it was still a beloved home. By the time I had reached twenty, however, it had become a prison. Aunt Zoya was elderly now and becoming very frail. Her poor health and dependence on me meant that when Xan left, I could not do so. For Aunt Zoya this was nothing strange for girls always stayed at home until they married. There was no question in her mind of my leaving, of earning a living as a nurse or a secretary, even of going to stay with distant cousins in Paris or New York in order to meet people. I had become aware of the world outside Kornu; not just Riga, which for me was a great metropolis, but even greater ones, Paris, London, Berlin, and I had no hope of reaching them. Not only did Aunt Zoya need me, but I had no education, knew no one, could do nothing useful. I remember there was a huge and ancient typewriter that weighed so much that it took a man to lift it, given to me by Lai from his father’s office. I taught myself to type, copying tracts from poems and novels in English and French. I must have been hoping for Aunt Zoya to die, for in no other way could I escape. Yet when the moment came for me to go, when Aunt Zoya herself begged me to leave, I refused. I did not want to, I was afraid of what lay beyond.

  In the summers Xan came home, and Lai too, and their stories of their lives in the real world would drive me mad with longing. Lai had started his studies in medicine. His father, like all fathers, wanted him to be a lawyer, but Lai had insisted and the older man found he could hardly refuse to permit his son to follow his own career. He went to the university in Riga and it was intended that he should go to Edinburgh later to complete his studies.

  Xan was in Paris, although what he was doing was unclear. He had gone there to study and had enrolled at the Sorbonne. He was not a good student. Choronoroukys never went to university. In early life they went into the army or travelled; later, they administered their lands and developed their estates if they were serious-minded; or drank Chateau Yquem and bought jewels for their mistresses if they were not. A whole way of life was closed to Xan and he could not find a new one. Worse, he could not decide if he was a serious-minded Chornorouky or a frivolous one. In some respects he wanted to be serious, like one of the great scholar-patrons of the eighteenth century, such as Prince

  Pavel Fyodorovich Chornorouky, the historian and dramatist. The Prince wrote an encyclopaedic History of the World, which Aunt Zoya made us read, and maintained a troupe of serf players who performed his pornographic plays, which Aunt Zoya banned. He married his most talented serf actress and killed himself when she died two years later. Such extravagant possibilities didn’t exist for Xan. He belonged to a group of left-wing artists and thinkers, fellow travellers some of them, others paid-up Party members. I am not sure whether he joined himself; sometimes he claimed to be a communist, sometimes he denied it. He undertook studies of working conditions in Latvia during his summer holidays and would sit in the kitchen asking Maris about her life, noting her answers in a little book. He wrote theoretical articles, published some journalism and managed to supplement the very little that Aunt Zoya was able to send him from Latvia. This was the serious Chornorouky; but the old aristocrat lurked there still, so that he passed his days in conversation and drinking, a faineance born of the belief with which we had been imbued, that we had no place in the new world.

  In the summer of ’39 he came back from Paris, as usual. He could not afford to stay there during the months when everything closed down and everyone went away. Lai, too, was on holiday, although he worked at his books during the mornings. In the heat of the afternoons we swam in the lake, as we always did, or lay beside the water in the shade with a picnic basket beside us. We were no longer the childhood trinity we had been, or as I imagined we had been, in the days before Lai and I had rebelled and Lai had been punished. The contrast between Lai and Xan ran through everything. It never broke out in open antagonism; it was simply and intrusively present in every opinion, discussion, decision. I came to prefer seeing them separately, rather than endure the tension of waiting for the flashpoint, the moment when the provocation of one by the other, usually, but not invariably, of Lai by Xan, would become unbearable.

  Xan still had the upper hand; the glamour of Paris showed up all the provincialism of Riga. He was interested in ideas, which he would express with the fluency and abstraction of the French speaker; Latvian medical students did not articulate many ideas, beyond a fierce Latvian nationalism, which Xan, an internationalist, scorned. Latvian culture, expressed in folksong, looked very unprobing beside French philosophy. I longed for what Lai did and admired to appear as significant and as interesting as what Xan stood for; but however much I wished to protect Lai, to allow him to win sometimes, I still thought that Xan’s life was more exciting and important. Perhaps I am making too much of the contrast between them at this stage. If they were so antagonistic, why did they spend so much time together? Or perhaps their differences were more obvious and more painful to me, who loved them both, than they were to each other.

  I have no memento of my life in Latvia. Even the two or three photographs which I carried in my purse when we ran away in 1944 were stolen from me in Berlin. So my memory is not influenced by visual reminders in the present. I don’t remember this period as a film, but as snapshots. I can see Xan and Lai sitting in the shade of the verandah at Kornu. Xan is lying back in his chair, his body as relaxed as a cat’s; he is smoking; his dark hair is rather long. Lai is leaning against the verandah rail, with one leg drawn up, his foot resting on the back of a chair. I can see Xan just after he has flung down his mallet in bad temper during a game of croquet; and Lai drawing himself out of the waters of the lake onto the jetty, wearing a black bathing costume with straps over the shoulders. Did I see these things? Did I once phot
ograph them and so fix them in my memory or have I made them up?

  In England they call the period between the outbreak of war in 1939 and the fall of France in 1940 the phoney war. For us it was a time of phoney peace. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, by which the Germans and Russians agreed on the partition of Poland, left us isolated while the Russians moved forward to retake areas of eastern Poland which they had not held since 1920. It was clear that one day soon the Soviets would turn their attention to us. Lai was fiercely anti-Russian, but he never considered leaving the country. Latvians are reeds, not oak trees; they cling to their soil and lie down under the storm. Xan might have left; he was already in exile in Latvia, so why should he not move on to safety in America, if he could get out through Norway or Sweden? He did not go, for complex and simple reasons. The complex one was that, although he knew it would be wiser to leave, given who he was, his curious admiration for the communists, the destroyers of his class and culture, and his feeling that he should not be better off than other Russians, prevented him from doing what was sensible. The simple reason was that he would not leave without Aunt Zoya and me and Aunt Zoya was too old and too ill to travel.

  She urged me to go with Xan, but I could not leave her. Had I known what was to come, I would have gone, even though leaving an elderly woman unprotected seems a heartless thing to do. Had I known what even worse things I was to see and to do in the years that followed, I would have gone with Xan to Sweden, leaving her to die alone. But I did not know and could not imagine. I was as naive as it is possible to be if you have read all the classics of Russian, English, French and German literature. Of love and hatred, murder, torture and rape, I knew from a variety of sources. Yet I persisted in believing that none of the vileness of war would reach us at Kornu; we were so far from life. Not even the history of my family, the deaths of my parents, convinced me that we should run away. I think all these things, the violence of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Racine, Goethe, Scott, my parents’ murder, were all in an imaginary domain and I could not yet connect them with reality. So I insisted it was my duty to stay with Aunt Zoya and in my turn begged Xan to leave, and he, held back, not by lack of contact with reality, but by his perverse admiration for the impending violence, insisted on staying with me. I used to examine the reasons for his decision to stay, which had to be renewed each day in the face of the daily invitation to leave. Was it because of his open admiration for communist modernity, which he would welcome if it came to Latvia? Was it because of his care for his great-aunt who had brought him up and was the only mother he had ever had? Or was it because of me?

  I had adored and admired Xan when we were children. When he returned from Paris as a young man, I fell entirely in love with him. It was inevitable, of course. I knew no one and the compulsion of the young to love makes them susceptible to almost anyone remotely lovable in their immediate environment. I could have loved Lai, but he had always been the second, and he could not compete with a man who returned from Paris with all the brilliance of a great capital reflected upon him. When Xan arrived in June 1939, I was no more to him than his little cousin, almost a sister, but as the world closed in on us during the winter of that year he began to notice me.

  The trap for Xan was set with the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and sprung on 1st September with the invasion of Poland. These dates are a matter of history. I do not need to verify them, they are noted in every history book about the war. At the time there was nothing to mark the day. It would have been possible, if Xan had not been there, for Aunt Zoya and me not to know what had happened for some days. Xan, however, always listened to the news and that evening he came running out to where we were sitting in the shade of a great chestnut, looking out over the lake, to tell us that the Germans had invaded Poland.

  Aunt Zoya was filled with fear at the thought of the forward movement of the Red Army. Poles are figures of fun for Russians, the Irish of eastern Europe, but she remembered the miracle on the Vistula in 1920 when the Polish Army had defeated Tukhachevsky and beaten the Reds back into the Ukraine; the Poles were guarantors of our safety. Now they were gone, who was left to defend us? Xan was excited. He saw no personal advantage in what was happening; simply the idea of military movements, of fighting, the breaking up of Europe stimulated him. He welcomed what Aunt Zoya dreaded, the Soviets reclaiming Latvia as they had just reclaimed Poland. So, the combination of the difficulties of going anywhere else and the excitement of staying, kept him at Kornu through the autumn.

  I think now, I am sure, that if we had not been brought together by those circumstances, trapped by the icy Baltic winter at Kornu, with Aunt Zoya as our only companion, that he would never have thought of me. As it was, my passion was so powerful that, with no counter-attractions, he succumbed to it. If Aunt Zoya heard the murmur of our voices, our laughter beside the fire late in the evening, or even later, the creaking of the wooden floors as he moved between his room and mine, she gave no sign. But her wish that we should marry was made known, at first in hints, finally as open statements. As I wished for nothing more, I was in a delicate position: I had to feign carelessness, at least until the moment that Xan decided that, all things considered, he might as well marry me.

  And so in the spring of 1940, 12th May to be exact, Xan and I were married at Kornu. I wore a dress of my mother’s, dating from before the Revolution, of cream silk embroidered with butterflies, and some old lace that Aunt Zoya salvaged from somewhere. This magnificence was for the benefit of Aunt Zoya and the maids and a few elderly aristocratic Baltic neighbours. And Lai.

  Because I had been so self-absorbed, or Xan-absorbed, during the phoney peace, I had paid very little attention to the political events of the time, which held everyone in Europe in the tension of an indrawn breath of terror. For me, my marriage allowed a release, in a gasp of joy, and with that new breath, events began to move with a speed that was horrifying to us in our fastness at Kornu, listening to the news in several languages on our crackling steam wireless.

  The first event in the unfreezing of our war was the death of Aunt Zoya. We found her sitting in her chair in her bedroom one morning, still in her nightdress. The oil lamp burned in front of the icon in the corner of the room and the early light seeped through the cracks in the shutters. She was already rigid and had probably sat down to die after saying her prayers the previous evening. Her ancient face was crumpled like tissue paper, her skin darkened by her years of work, running the house and garden at Kornu. She looked like what she had become, an old and toil-worn peasant woman, rather than what she held herself to be, above all a Chornorouky princess.

  Immediately afterwards France fell and Xan’s thoughts were even more with his friends in Paris. He was married and with me at Kornu, but he wished he were not. Then the Russians tightened their noose on Latvia, demanding to take over the country. In mid-June just a month after our wedding, the government was reconstructed under Soviet auspices. New elections with only one list of Soviet-approved candidates were held in July and the new Parliament voted at once to join the Soviet Union. The Red Army which had been lined up on our borders, marched in, and behind them came the NKVD. Prominent Latvians were arrested and deported, never to be seen again. Banks and shops were nationalized. The remains of my father’s estate were confiscated. Lai’s father was arrested as a prominent intellectual and a capitalist in these early months of occupation.

  In terror, I persuaded Xan to go into hiding. At first we had exercised a rather cursory form of secrecy. If any outsider was seen approaching the house, Xan hid in a barn or an outhouse and the maids were instructed to say that he had left. The savage snatching of Lai’s father in the middle of the night by the NKVD, the arrest of his mother ten days later, recounted to us by Lai, frightened me so badly that in September I resolved that Xan must really disappear. We told nobody where he was, feeling that such knowledge would constitute a danger to them and a source of continual worry to us. The maids were told that he had gone to Riga and would not be comin
g back. I told Lai, who often came out from the city, hiring a bike at the station and riding twelve miles to Kornu on a Saturday afternoon, the same thing. He looked me in the eye, waiting to hear the truth; but I said nothing.

  During the autumn of 1940 and the winter that followed, Xan lived in the cellar, in the dark, behind a door which was hidden by piles of wood. As a prisoner he was very comfortable. He had books, writing materials, a wireless. I went every night to see him, to supply him with food, to talk to him, to make love to him. But he hated his imprisonment and, I think, hated me for insisting on its necessity. Living such a life decided him to leave. To be captured and killed was better than to live as a voluntary prisoner. We spent hours in passionate, whispered argument, as we debated the alternatives of escape, hiding, or coming out into the open. In the spring, with the warmer weather, things improved in one sense, because I moved him out of the cellar, where he had been warmed by the house stove, and into a woodcutters’ shack in the woods. Here he lived above ground, for the forests were vast and little frequented; during the day he was there alone, reading and writing. If he ever saw or heard signs of hunters or soldiers or even partisans, as he did once or twice, he retreated into his lair where we had constructed a hiding place for him beneath piles of brushwood. At night he often walked the seven miles or so to Kornu. At a pre-arranged signal I would let him in and later, before dawn, he would return to his bothy in the woods with a knapsack of food and books on his back. In the daylight of the forest his morale improved. He was convinced he would not be there for long because he hoped, through communist friends in France, to be able to make his peace with the regime in Latvia. He agreed now that he was in the open air that the decision to hide had been correct. Communists, he said, with some admiration, shoot first and ask questions later and there were no satisfactory answers we could give, even afterwards. Xan was a Chornorouky, a Russian in exile, an aristocrat, a landowner, even worse, an intellectual. There would have been no mercy for him on any of these counts. No protestations of sympathy for the communist cause, no waving of CP membership from Paris would have arrested the finger on the trigger of the tough Ukrainian who visited us with his troop of soldiers late one afternoon in January 1941.