by Rose Tremain
I gave up nagging her at the point of her shrug and told her about Carmody’s search. I didn’t look at her while I described how thorough the police had been, even prodding about in the chimney and going through Valentina’s shoes. I expected her to seem frightened, knowing the next thing Carmody might do was start questioning everybody in the building, but she didn’t. And then, quite suddenly, she stood up and her face broke into a smile. She said: ‘Never mind those untidy police; I can tell you some other news, Louis.’
‘Can you? What other news?’
‘Today is a good day. My work permit came through!’
‘Hey!’ I said. ‘That’s brilliant. That’s fantastic!’
‘Oui, c’est fantastique!’
And Violette began a little dance round the kitchen table, with her hands in fists, gyrating and her bum sticking out and swaying. ‘C’est fantastique, c’est fantastique!’ she kept on saying and I joined in: ‘C’est fantastique, c’est fantastique!’ and tried to dance with her. Sergei stood at the kitchen door, barking at us, like we were two loons, and then Violette started singing what could have been a voodoo chant or a wedding song or a prayer or just a rhyme people sang in Benin when something good happened to them, like the return of a stolen truck:
‘Heh-heh, neh-neh, del, livrez-moi
Des beaux poissons et la main du Roi!’
I had to follow the Grisha trail. I knew more than Carmody because I’d seen the Post-It notes in Grisha’s book.
The next thing I had to do was to buy the French edition of the book and make notes about what was in it. After that, I had to get access to Alice’s English translation and compare the two. Then I’d know how much or how little Valentina had pinched from Grisha. What I still wouldn’t know was whether Grisha knew about it or not.
I was thinking, I hope Valentina is in Russia. I hope we’ll get a call from her today saying she’s coming back at the weekend. Then we can all go out to the airport to meet her – Alice and me and Mrs Gavrilovich and Sergei – and I’ll be able to stand where the passengers come out, knowing that within minutes I’m going to see her . . .
On my way out of the door with Sergei, en route for the bookshop, I heard the telephone ring. Alice wasn’t in the apartment, so I ran back and picked up the receiver. Every time the telephone rang, I expected Valentina’s kidnapper to be on the other end of the line. I imagined his voice, muffled by a balaclava. I imagined the phone booth he was in, outside some horrible factory, or in a village miles away in the mountains. I would say to him: ‘We’ll pay whatever you’re asking.’
It wasn’t him. It was a woman from Bianquis, Valentina’s publishers, and her name was Dominique. ‘C’est Dominique Monod,’ she said. ‘Est-ce que Valentina est là?’
She sounded completely calm and normal, so I knew she didn’t know a thing. I thought for a moment, then I told Dominique that Valentina was away in Russia and we weren’t certain when she’d be back. To get this lie out, I had to hold on to the arm of the hard chair by the telephone table. I had a feeling that this news would upset Dominique and it did. She began shouting at me. ‘In Russia? What on earth is she doing in Russia when she has a book to finish? Has she forgotten there’s a deadline?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said weakly.
‘Who am I talking to?’ asked Dominique crossly.
I said I was the son of Valentina’s English translator. This didn’t impress her. It was like translators were way down in her hierarchy of important people and the sons of translators were even further down, like the things Sergei found in the gutter.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘do you have a contact number for Valentina? I suppose she has a telephone in Russia?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Yes, she must have a number.’
‘No, there isn’t any number.’
She started talking in English then. She thought I hadn’t understood what she was saying, that I was an English moron who spent his life throwing beer cans at Eric Cantona.
‘We think she’s in Kiev,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you try all the hotels in Kiev?’
‘O, mon Dieu!’ she said and hung up. I imagined she had long hard nails, like the receptionist in the hotel. She would slit open her post with these nails and slit the throats of her authors who missed their deadlines.
It was a beautiful day. Not as stiflingly hot as it had been, but just sunny and blue with all the traffic gleaming and the plane trees heavy and still. I walked down the Champs-Élysées, past guys trying to sell things to the tourists in the shadows of doorways. One of the things being hawked here were little rubber acrobats, smaller than a human hand. You threw them at the wall and they somersaulted backwards down the wall a few times and then fell off. You were meant to marvel at their agility and their ability to hold on to the wall before they fell, and the first time I saw them, I did marvel. Now, they looked a bit stupid, somehow, like I’d already outgrown them without ever buying one.
I found a pile of Grisha’s book, La Vie secrète de Catherine la Grande, in the librairie of Virgin Megastore. I thought, if Grisha were in Paris, he’d probably come in here every day, to see whether the pile had diminished. On the back of the book was a photograph of Grisha, looking wild, as if he’d just woken up from a hectic dream. The price of the book had been printed over his left hand.
I was in the queue, waiting to pay, when I heard a soft voice say: ‘Louis.’
Moinel was standing behind me. He was smartly dressed in a pale-blue suit, with his hair combed flat, and he held a pile of books. I felt quite glad that he’d spoken to me.
‘Moinel,’ I said. ‘Comment allez-vous?’
He smiled and answered me in his perfect English with the Radio 3 accent. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘But tell me what’s happening in your apartment. Has Valentina come home?’
‘No,’ I said, whispering, so that no one else could hear, ‘and there was a police search. They’ve taken masses of things away. It’s getting quite frightening.’
I hung around while Moinel paid for his books. He spent 1161 francs and wrote out a cheque in very small writing. Then he invited me to come and have a coffee with him and tell him what was going on.
We walked into the sunshine and I untied Sergei from his bollard and Moinel held my elbow as we crossed the Champs-Élysées to a café on the other side called the Deauville. The waiters there wore rugby shirts and held their trays athletically high. They knew Moinel and shook his hand and I heard him order coffee and pastries and we sat down at a table just behind the glass, where the noise from the boulevard receded. I felt glad he’d ordered the pastries.
He told me to tell him everything that had happened, so I ignored Carmody’s instructions not to say anything to anyone. It was a relief to be able to talk in English and be precise and be understood. I described Carmody’s Russia theory and my own forthcoming research into Valentina’s snitching of ideas.
‘Are we talking about plagiarism?’ asked Moinel.
‘Yes,’ I said, remembering this word from one of Hugh’s unasked-for lectures. ‘That’s it. Plagiarism.’
He said this was a serious matter, that Grigory was bound to feel really angry if he knew about it, and that Carmody’s belief that Valentina was in Russia could turn out to be right.
I said: ‘It could. But the thing I keep going back to is: what happened at the hospital? Was Valentina there or not? If she was never there, why did they tell Mrs Gavrilovich she was?’
‘I know that hospital very well,’ said Moinel. ‘I go there all the time.’
‘Do you? Why do you go there all the time?’
‘Oh, check-ups and tests. Just routine. But I can find out their exact procedure for checking in patients. As far as I can remember, they put a tick when you arrive for your appointment, then when you go through to see the doctor, they make another mark, but I don’t know what this is.’
The pastries were incredible, sugary and light, with a syrupy apricot, like the yolk of an egg, in the middle
. Moinel gestured for me to eat them all and I saw one of the sporty waiters smile. While I was munching, Moinel went on: ‘What we have to do is to go there and find out which receptionist was on the desk at around four o’clock that afternoon and talk to her. We take a picture of Valentina: that way she will be able to tell us if it was her she saw, or someone else. You can describe her dress. Then, to be absolutely certain, we have to try to get a look at the register.’
‘Yes. But suppose Carmody finds out what we’re doing?’
‘He won’t unless someone tells him. Who would tell him?’
‘No one. Shall we go now? Why don’t we just go now, straight away?’ I said.
‘No,’ said Moinel, ‘I have a business appointment now. What about tomorrow morning at ten-thirty?’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘I’ll meet you in this café at ten. I’ll order some more pastries for you.’
‘So we won’t tell anyone, not even Alice?’
‘Better not. It may lead nowhere.’
We sat on, drinking the good coffee. I asked Moinel where he’d learnt his brilliant English and he said he’d spent four years living in Pimlico. He said he had a share in an antique shop that sold nothing but garden statues. He said that in the 1980s, the minds of thousands of people in England had turned towards garden statues and then, slowly and sadly, turned away again when the recession came, and the shop had failed.
I said: ‘What happened to all the leftover statues?’ I imagined them in a yard somewhere, waiting for people’s minds to turn back towards them, lions and urns and nymphs without arms, but Moinel said they were all sold off at auction to pay the shop’s debts. He said: ‘That was a bad moment. Like losing a group of friends.’
The bill came and Moinel paid it. I looked at him in admiration. I thought, I’ve found my ally. I’d never imagined my ally having tangerine hair.
When I got back, I began Grisha’s book. The résumé on the back told me that Catherine’s last lover, Plato Zubov, was forty years younger than she was. I thought, I want to get to that bit. I want to see whether Valentina uses this idea of the boy-lover in her novel.
But it was impossible to match the page numbers of the French text with the Russian. I couldn’t identify where Valentina’s margin notes fitted it, so I just had to begin collecting the kinds of things I thought she might use and write my own margin notes against these. My main margin note was P? for Plagiarism.
The first thing I collected was that Catherine la Grande had beautiful handwriting, as a result of getting calligraphy lessons. The P I put in the margin had no question mark against it.
It became obvious after a few pages that Catherine la Grande had had the kind of unexpected life writers could be tempted to steal things from. She was born in Germany and named ‘Fike’, but then she was taken away from her family and everything she knew and loved and sent on a long journey to the freezing cold Russian court. She was supposed to become the bride of Archduke Peter, the grandson of Peter the Great and the chosen successor to the Tsar. Nobody seemed to care what Fike thought and felt about this. An old Russian proverb in those days went: ‘A chicken is not a bird, nor is a woman human.’ They put her into a cold room under a bell tower and gave her lessons day and night on how to behave. They wouldn’t let her write letters home to her mother.
Archduke Peter, her intended husband, was a puny wreck. He had what Grisha described as ‘a very poor mental endowment’. He couldn’t sit still, but fidgeted all the time. His teacher, Stehlin, had to walk up and down the room with him while he gave him lessons.
As a child, he’d had smallpox, so his skin was a mess. He refused to take baths or even wash his face. His favourite pastime was playing with his toy soldiers. He kept pet animals and birds and tortured them. On the night before her wedding to this disgusting Peter, Catherine looked at her wedding dress on its stand, made of spun silver and weighing as much as a suit of armour, and ‘felt a chill of winter, a chill of death’. Against this sentence I put a gigantic P, underlined three times.
I went to see Mrs Gavrilovich. She said she was glad I’d come; she’d just been sitting in her apartment, staring at the wall. She served me cold tea and some hard biscuits like macaroons.
I refrained from telling her she should have remembered to warn us about Carmody’s search. When we’d settled down with the tea and Sergei was crunching his share of the macaroons, I said: ‘Carmody is convinced Valentina is in Russia with Grigory. Do you think he’s right?’
She looked at me intently with her once-beautiful eyes. ‘Louis,’ she said, ‘you are a boy. It’s too soon for you to learn everything in the world.’
I said I didn’t want to learn everything in the world; I just wanted to know whether, in her opinion, Carmody’s theory had an ounce of sense in it.
She leant back in her armchair and gazed intently first at one bit of the room and then at another, as if she were trying to locate where God had got to in it. Then she sighed. ‘Grigory Panin is a very unhappy man,’ she said. ‘And now, I believe, he sees what his life would be if he had married Valentina – and this makes him very bitter.’
‘Did he ask Valentina to marry him once?’
‘She refused him. She didn’t want to be married. She wanted her freedom.’
‘Does she love him?’
‘Yes. A little.’
‘Enough to go back with him to Moscow?’
‘No. She has a good life now. She never knew Moscow. We were farmers, miles from the city, near Gorodnya, south of St Petersburg. Valentina was three when we left Russia. Why would she do that – exchange her good life for a bad one? If she is in Russia, then Grigory threatened her with something very serious. What that serious thing could be, I don’t know, Louis. I rack my brain. But I’m an old woman and my brain is slow . . .’
I took a sip of tea and said: ‘Could it have something to do with Valentina’s new book? Has Grigory seen a copy of the book?’
‘I don’t think so. Nobody has seen that book – only Alice.’
An image flashed into my mind then, like a photograph. It was the view I’d had that night from our restaurant table, with the Eiffel Tower gold and vast to the right of me. In the photograph Grigory had his back to me; he was walking away, in his fury, up the Avenue Montaigne and just coming into the frame, running to catch him up, was Alice.
I must have looked like a zombie suddenly, staring at this imaginary photograph, because Mrs Gavrilovich said: ‘What is it, Louis? What are you thinking now? Look at Sergei! I’ve given him four macaroons and he’s asking for more.’
‘No more!’ I said to Sergei. Then I asked: ‘What is Kiev like?’
‘Kiev? Once a beautiful city. The frescos at Kievo-Pecherskaya, I remember, and Kotsiubinsky Park. I suppose a lot of it was pulled down, but not all, and I was told some new cafés were opening now on the river. It may have lost all its heart since the accident at Chernobyl, I don’t know. The climate in summer is very good.’
‘Can you imagine Valentina living there?’
‘No. I can’t imagine Valentina living anywhere but Paris.’
Then Mrs Gavrilovich got up and shuffled into her bedroom where the shrine with the candles was. She seemed to have forgotten about the geranium-watering today. She came back with the photograph of the white-haired man that I’d seen and which I knew from the album was Anton Gavrilovich, and she gave it to me. ‘I’ve been talking to Anton,’ she said. ‘You see what a kind face he has? And he loved Valentina so much. I believe he is somehow protecting her. Between them, Anton and God are keeping her safe: this is what I must believe.’
It was stuffy in Mrs Gavrilovich’s apartment. When I came out, I decided to take Sergei for a walk along the river, where you could sometimes feel a breeze blowing in from the north.
We sat down on the Pont des Arts and listened to a saxophonist playing some old bluesy number from a distant era. In the streets of Paris, you can hear music from every century and every time. In London, al
l you get is rap and rock and the lousy buskers on the Tube. Hugh once said that England is a country slowly losing its hearing.
Sergei didn’t listen to the saxophone player. He watched the green water and barked at the gulls. But I closed my eyes and imagined myself in some dark-brown cellar that smelt of smoke and sweat, dancing with Valentina.
I stood very upright, holding her close to me, and after a while she laid her blonde head on my shoulder. We hardly moved our feet at all, just swayed around to the music, and I could feel all her body – her breasts and her stomach and her thighs – pressing against me. She sang a few phrases now and then, so softly you could hardly hear her voice. Her warm breath tickled my neck and the smell of her perfume mingled with the smell of smoke and aniseed. And the music just went on.
Then I did a peculiar thing: I tried to replace my image of Valentina with the image of the sixteen-year-old sister of my friend Carl at Beckett Bridges School. Her name was Ingrid. I’d had a wet dream about her the night after I’d found my football at the car-boot sale. She had long dark hair and she wore her school shirt buttoned up at the top and she called me ‘Lew’. Half the boys in the sixth form were in love with her.
So now I held Ingrid and wrapped her arms around me in the brown cellar and her hair made a kind of curtain round my face. She smelled of Timotei shampoo and her breasts were small.
For a while, I quite enjoyed dancing with Ingrid, but then she vanished of her own accord. She just slowly slipped away from me until I was alone, and so I waited, holding out my arms, for Valentina to come back. And when she was there again, I laid my head on her shoulder and thought, OK, she’s back now and she’s holding me and I can go to sleep . . .
Sergei woke me by licking my hand. The saxophonist had moved on and where he’d been a group of bongo drummers were setting up. They were women bongo drummers – white women with shaved hair and earrings, wearing tattered shorts and sandals. I stared at them and one of them stared brazenly back. They reminded me of the people I’d met on Violette’s stairs, who’d asked me Sergei’s name. So I got up and, keeping Sergei close to me, walked over the bridge and on.