The Accomplice

by The Accomplice (retail) (epub)

  Yevgenia was, too, often in pain which could make her fractious, even though she concealed it. It was lucky, Xenia thought, that she had had long practice of coping with an alcoholic father, as she waited, without betraying impatience, for the old woman to stalk from one room to the next on her two sticks. She never allowed herself to succumb to, an impulse to retort on Yevgenia’s brusqueness, which often amounted to rudeness. She noticed that the old woman did not like to look at her; she knew this signified her dislike. She concentrated at first on making herself both as useful and as unobtrusive as possible. In rendering herself almost invisible, she was able to observe the rooms and routines of the house. Although Yevgenia still had sharp hearing, Xenia, once she had installed her in her chair in the drawing room, could move around on bare feet at the far end of the house. She gradually reconnoitred Yevgenia’s bedroom and bathroom. Late at night she explored in the dark by touch the kitchen cupboards, the interior of the fridge, the study and the drawing room.

  In the first week of her move to Broad Woodham she was impelled, during her afternoon explorations of the town, to take a blue and white sponge bag from Boots, which she left in a neighbouring department store; a paperback of Man Ray’s photographs which she left on a bench in the park by the church, after caressingly turning the pages and admiring the images. A number of items ended up in dustbins, as it was impossible to add to the sparse contents of an old lady’s shelves in the same way as to the crammed cupboards of the Hampstead house. She longed to rid herself of the obsessive search for the ideal object and at four o’clock when she returned from her walk she vomited furiously in her bathroom. Each day, while she was out, she telephoned Al and only the evidence of the phone picked up at the second ring kept her from despair. The mountain path became steeper and narrower.

  One evening in Xenia’s second week in Woodham, Zita had called in on her way home from work to see how Yevgenia was and, as she was leaving, said with mock severity, in Russian, “No, shto, what are you doing to Xenia? She is losing weight; she looks like a scarecrow.”

  Yevgenia, who until then had only spoken in English to Xenia, replied in Russian, “Is she thinner? Let me see you, child.”

  Zita took her by the shoulders and turned her to face Yevgenia. “Look how thin she is. It is most unRussian.” She pulled at the loose top of Xenia’s jeans. “Even my mother would think it has gone too far. Did I tell you she called from St Petersburg last night? She has decided to extend her visa and go to Moscow. She wants to visit the block of flats where she lived as a child and to trace her mother’s older sister. I can’t imagine what is happening to her. She said she now realized that I had the perfect Russian figure.”

  Xenia pulled away from Zita’s hands. “But why would she say that? You’re beautiful,” she said. She spoke with evident sincerity.

  “Oh dear, oh dear,” Zita said. “I’ve made you cry. Are you homesick, thinking of Moscow?”

  Xenia sniffed and flicked at the corners of her eyes with her finger tips. “Of course not,” she said.

  “Yevgenia,” Zita’s voice resumed its imitation of her mother’s scolding tone, “you must take more care of Xenia. Feed her up. You’d better come to me this evening, so I can nourish you both.”

  Xenia escaped from them before Zita left, agreeing to accompany Yevgenia to dine next door that evening. After dinner, she complained of tiredness and returned home, leaving Yevgenia with Zita. She was about to go to her own room, when, passing the open door to the drawing room, she glanced in at the empty chair with its little table beside it, arrayed with Yevgenia’s books and papers. Xenia had never yet had the opportunity of freely examining the room without its owner somewhere nearby. She walked in slowly, sniffing the air like an animal. It smelled faintly of old lady, a talcum-powdery odour of roses. She sat down in the high-cushioned wing-chair and began to pick up the objects from the table, turning them over in her hands to look at them from every side. She ruffled the leaves of a pad of lists, opened a biography of Churchill and glanced at the postcard which functioned as a book mark. It was from Ivo, from Madrid, showing Eve placidly holding the apple that she had just plucked, while a concupiscent Adam stood behind her, caressing her right nipple. An extraordinary card to send your grandmother, Xenia thought. She put Yevgenia’s reading glasses on her own nose and looked out at the lights beyond the hedge, then removed them abruptly as the other woman’s vision hurt her eyes. She moved in the chair and encountered a small rectangular object tucked down the side of the cushion. As she slid her hand down to remove it Yevgenia said to her, “Let me trace the death of Alexander Alexandrovich Chornorouky.”

  Xenia leapt out of the chair with a terrible cry, whirling round to face the door. There was no one there. Fortunately for her, no one had seen that her face was bloodless. Her eyes, which normally appeared as pale as water, were dark and staring, the pupils enlarged almost to envelop the yellow-grey irises. She realized at once that no one had seen her involuntary self-betrayal. She put her hand to her chest. Her heart was lurching and pounding with overwhelming force that only gradually diminished sufficiently to allow her to hear the gentle hissing of revolving spools. She reached back into the chair and drew out the tiny palm-sized tape recorder. She touched the rewind button and waited until the light clunk indicated the beginning of the tape had been reached. She sat down again in Yevgenia’s place to press the play button.

  “Finding the Chornorouky money was as extraordinary and fortuitous as meeting Kenward and getting myself out of Germany. At the time that I came to England I had no idea that there was anything much here. Certainly it played no part in my wanting to come. I came in flight; I was running as far as I could from Kornu, from Xan, from Lai, from everything that had happened since the beginning of the war. Not even when I was once here, did I think of Prince Yegor. It was not until Kenward was divorced, not an easy or quick process in those days, and we were married, that somehow the memory came back to me. No one had told me anything directly. Aunt Zoya just before her death had told Xan that his grandfather had left an English will and there might be something for us in London. Xan had reported what she had said to me, without details, and almost in parenthesis. He had mentioned the English will, only to dismiss its importance. There might be money in England, but he did not intend to go there: Sweden and America were his goals and anything in London would have to wait for the unimaginable future after the war. If there was a written record in Latvia among Aunt Zoya’s or Xan’s papers, it was left behind when Alek and Lai and I began our trek to the West in 1944.

  “How do you find the legacy of a great-uncle who died more than twenty years ago in another country? At first I thought it was hopeless, that whatever was here was lost with everything else my family had once owned, one item in the trail of fortunes seized from them over the previous three decades, estates in Russia, the Ukraine, the Crimea, palaces in Moscow and St Petersburg, villas by the sea, country houses, all of them crammed with furniture, jewels, pictures, sculptures, none of which I had ever seen. I was entirely wrong. It was all so easy. Such an amazing contrast to come from Kornu, walking westward through devastated landscapes and a collapsed society, to arrive in England where administration had never broken down, where, even through a world war, all the aspects of civil life remained in place.

  “I went to Somerset House and obtained a copy of my great-uncle’s will, dated 1923. A solicitor in Queen Anne’s Gate, still there, still working in the same office, had drawn it up, was the executor. Everything was in order; the will proved; the money invested; the key to the safe deposit in Coutts waiting for me. The arrangements were all very simple: everything was to be divided between Xan and me, the last of the Chornoroukys. The money was not a great fortune, though it had been prudently invested for twenty-five years. The real legacy was an afterthought, discovered in the safe deposit. I can remember opening it one afternoon, with Kenward. It was with a complete lack of excitement, without any anticipation of treasure trove, that we unwrapped
a brown paper parcel containing an album, three rolled canvases and a casually scribbled note from Prince Yegor. It was addressed to Xan and stated that he had bought the album at auction in 1910 and for some reason it had been left in London throughout the war. One canvas, An Old Man, was being cleaned in 1914 and Prince Yegor had forgotten about it until a few months before his return to Kornu to die. The other two pictures had a special value for me. They had been ordered by my grandfather, Yuri Alexandrovich, for his daughter while they were in France in 1912. Prince Yegor had collected them for his brother from the artist in Cannes after the war and for some reason not transported them farther than London. His note to Xan finished, You and Genya must share these oddments one day as mementos of our past.”

  There was so long a pause on the tape that Xenia thought that Yevgenia must have broken off her account at that point. She was about to turn the machine off when Yevgenia said, “The flotsam of the Chornoroukys, cast up in London, by chance, in 1914 at the start of the war, consisted of about forty pages of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci. The Old Man was a Rembrandt. The two paintings which my grandfather had ordered for my mother on their travels together in Europe before her marriage, were by Matisse. They are called Sea and Sky and can, I believe, be seen nowadays at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. My mother had interested my grandfather in modern painters. From what Aunt Zoya used to tell me, I know that my mother particularly loved Paris and from the time of her earliest visits had bought paintings there. Her first purchase, as a teenager, had been a little oil of a pile of fruit by Cezanne, which had hung in the bedroom where she had been killed. I remember it was salvaged from my father’s house and brought to Kornu. I had it in my school room and used to sit at a battered pitch pine table, chewing the end of a pencil, looking at its acid greens and oranges. But that is by the way.”

  Xenia stopped the tape. She suddenly imagined the small Yevgenia of the 1920s, kicking her legs against her old chair, gazing at Cezanne’s fruit chosen by her mother. Was that painting one whose impersonal beauty Xenia had studied on the walls of the Pushkin Museum in Moscow? She thought of the postcards of admired images that she used to stick on the wall by her bed in the obshezhitiye. There was an immediate wash of envy and desire, as real as the fear that she had experienced a few minutes earlier. She would have the real one, not the imitation.

  “I sold them all, the album and the three paintings. No feeling for the past, for my mother’s love of art, held me back. Such possessions are appropriate for Russian princes, not for the English bourgeoisie. I could not sell them all at once, and that was another piece of luck for me, for the delay only increased the money I received. Half of everything belonged to Xan. The will was the kind of document made by people who see their families going on and on; there is no assumption that their world may come to an end and the dinosaurs and the dodos die out. So Prince Yegor had envisaged every case he could think of, my death or Xan’s, the birth of our children and our grandchildren. As I was the survivor, it all came to me; I only had to prove Xan’s death. I knew Xan was dead, clubbed and then shot on the platform of Riga Station as he was loaded onto the cattle trucks to Siberia, but they do not deliver death certificates in circumstances like that. I thought that this would mean that Xan’s half would stay in limbo and I was not unhappy that it should be so. It gave me some sense of his presence in the idea that his half of our inheritance remained separate, discrete. But this was something that was impossible to explain to Kenward who had not even known of Xan’s existence before this. He set in motion the legal machine which, although it moves very slowly, eventually produces what is required. Applications were made to the Soviet authorities to trace the death of Alexander Alexandrovich Chornorouky of Kornu in the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic. I too wrote, for the first time, to Inna at Jamala, asking her to try to get news of Xan from the authorities in Riga. Months passed and even years. I can’t remember which came through first, the formal legal notification of his death at Riga on 14th June 1941, or the letter from Inna, enclosing the statement she had received of Xan’s death at Krasnoyarsk in Siberia in 1944.

  “The inconsistency did not worry me. I knew Xan was dead. I had never believed in his being alive since the moment I had found the signs of the raid on the woodcutters’ hut. Now, looking back, I marvel at my faith in his death. You read of women who cling to their belief in the existence of their husbands, lovers, children, in the face of all the evidence and no evidence, and, years later, their loyalty is rewarded and the dead ones rise again, crawl out of the gulag to return home to them. I never believed. At the time, I knew that Lai had killed him; Lai had willed his death. Now, I think that I did it. If I had believed, if I had remained in Kornu with Alek throughout everything, would I have got Xan back? Would he have been released from the camps with the others in the 1950s and come home to Kornu, expecting to find me and Alek waiting for him? If I had believed enough, would he have survived?”

  Xenia turned off the tape recorder. The room was dark now and Yevgenia would soon be back, assisted by Zita; she would hear their voices speaking Russian with their odd accents, as they unlocked the door and entered the house. But still she did not move, but held the face of the machine against her cheek. An idea, germinating in her head since listening to Naomi before she left Hampstead, suddenly burst out fully grown, like a speeded up film of a developing plant seed. Those dead bones must be made to live.

  She went to her room and waited for the sounds of Yevgenia’s return; she counted her slow movement towards her bedroom, the sloth-like placing of stick, foot, stick, foot. She listened to the soft, night-time noises of running water and closing cupboards, checking the passage of time every fifteen minutes on her bedside clock until she dared to get out of bed and silently cross the hall to the drawing room again. She was sure there was more; she needed more. Without turning on any of the lights she knelt down by Yevgenia’s chair and placed her palms on the objects on the little table. Moving them around gently, she identified a box of tapes. She picked it up and crawled to the window, so that by the light of the moon she could examine them. They were only marked by numbers in Yevgenia’s clumsy arthritic hand. She took the first and slipped it into the machine. Holding it against her ear, still crouched on the floor, she turned it on.

  “I was born in Petrograd in 1917 in the last days of the Russian empire…”

  Xenia listened to Yevgenia’s childhood for hours, then and on succeeding nights, sometimes sitting by the sliding doors, looking into the garden, sometimes in her own bed with the recorder tucked under her pillow below her ear. Her reactions to what she heard were complex. The ability to put herself in someone else’s place did not come naturally to her and she was usually too busy with her own emotions to make an effort to identify with another’s. No such effort was required of her in listening to the tapes. Yevgenia was Xenia; Xenia was Yevgenia. Somehow Yevgenia had managed to escape that doomed Latvian paradise and to reach England. Xenia listened to each tape in the hope of learning how it was done, but found nothing. Yevgenia had not told her story in chronological order. Although she had begun at the beginning, her mind had swung backwards and forwards across the years of her childhood and youth, picking out incidents and anecdotes, beginning each new recording session at a new point speaking Russian or English as her feelings or the subject dictated. Not that she thought that the same ploy that had worked for Yevgenia would work for her: Yevgenia herself had told her that at the opera. The interest lay in the parallel which she would make work for her, along with the name of her father. Was he the Alexander Alexandrovich Chornorouky, Yevgenia’s cousin and husband? Xenia was not sure. Her father had been born in 1915. He had been over seventy when he was consumed in the burning flat in Siberia. But how old would Xan have been? He was a few years older than Yevgenia, already in the care of Aunt Zoya when she was bom. His age was roughly right. But there was no other link that could connect her father with Xan Chornorouky. He had never spoken of an idyllic Latvian childho
od, of a girl cousin, of his great-aunt who brought him up, of his grandfather and great-uncle who had died when he was a child. He had never spoken about his childhood at all. Her knowledge of his life went back only to the camps. His past was all bitterness and wrong, but his fuddled conversations with himself had only rehearsed in detail the injustices he had suffered.

  Xenia wished now that she had paid more attention to those hours of drunken ramblings, instead of deliberately shutting her ears to them and filling her heart with hatred for him. His evenings had usually been spent in solitary drinking and sometimes the vodka did not speak. He would slip rapidly into unconsciousness before he had drunk so much that he was incapable of working the next day. Drunkenness was everywhere habitual in Novoleninsk and his pallid and tremulous appearance in the mornings was not remarkable. Only occasionally did the alcohol fail to deliver oblivion, and then he would remain awake, alive, and suddenly vocal. She always listened for the first sound of his voice. On those nights she did not come out of the minute kitchen where she sat over her homework to set up her camp bed in the hall at ten o’clock. Instead, she wedged the kitchen chair under the handle of the door and spent the night on the kitchen floor. She had suffered too much as a child, to risk facing him on those nights. Her suffering at first had been indirect, as a witness of her loved mother’s; only later when her mother had fled, had she herself become the target of his rage. So, even though she had been only eight when her mother disappeared one night, never to return, she could not blame her for her abandonment. It was, after all, so much less than what Xenia had finally done.

  The connexion between her father and Yevgenia’s cousin and husband was, in the end, immaterial, for she was going to recreate the past, so that the relationship was what she wanted it to be. As she had listened to Yevgenia’s tapes, hotch potch, she had only gradually come to an understanding of the links between the characters, of blood and emotion. Only when she came across the account of Yevgenia’s marriage to her cousin did she realize the significance of the first tape she had heard. Yevgenia had married Kenward Loftus as soon as his divorce was arranged. There was no mention of the dissolution of her own marriage. If you have had your husband snatched from his hiding place in the woods, if you have heard accounts of his being clubbed and shot on Riga Station, you are not likely to regard him an impediment to a second marriage, six years later. Yet, it seemed that it was not until she was trying to get hold of her share of her great-uncle’s property, long after she was married to her second husband, that she had bothered to obtain an official statement of her first husband’s death. Xenia began to suspect that Xan had been wiped out of Yevgenia’s life during that blank period at the end of the war that saw her transported from Latvia to England, transformed from an impoverished aristocrat in a remote corner of Europe to the wealthy wife of an English country doctor. Xenia felt a complete understanding. If the existence of a previous husband, now dead but unofficially so, could prevent your marriage and your new life, who would not forget him? Remembering him would not bring him back; burying him deep in the past and in your memory would enable you to live again. The knowledge of how easily you can erase someone came from her own experience. She did not resurrect the memory of the flames that had consumed their tiny apartment on the fifteenth floor; she simply recognized the process by which Xan had been made to disappear.