by Rose Tremain
I wanted to write this down, about the metronome, in case I ever forgot it. I thought, there must be hundreds of thousands of piano teachers all round the world, setting up their fucking metronomes, who don’t know what a heroic function it once performed. If people knew the history of the world better than they do, they might have different attitudes towards all kinds of things, including cannibalism. But I couldn’t write anything down because Alexis had stolen my Concorde notebook. I knew it was Alexis because he was the only one who understood a bit of English.
He first began to get agitated around this time. His agitation and the Siege of Leningrad were sort of linked in my mind, like Alexis was going mad and planning to kill us and cut us up to put in a stew.
Valentina told me he was getting restless because no response had come to his ransom demand. He’d demanded that Bianquis pay ten million francs, in cash, to be handed over at the refreshment kiosk in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont on a certain day. Now that certain day had passed and no one had come there. No money. Nothing. The request had just been totally ignored.
‘So,’ I said, ‘what’s Alexis going to do?’
‘Well,’ said Valentina calmly, ‘he’s threatening to kill me. But he knows he’s not capable of killing me. That’s why he shouts and screams. You see, he’s never really got beyond adolescence. He dreams stupid dreams and deludes himself about what he can or cannot do. He’s forgotten how well I know him.’
‘Will Bianquis pay the money in the end?’
‘Look, darling, ten million is a lot. Nobody parts with that kind of money if they don’t have to. They will stall. They will hope Alexis will crack and let us go.’
‘Why don’t you pay it?’ I said. ‘Why don’t you just tell Alexis how to get into your safe and let him take all your jewellery?’
‘You think I have ten million francs’ worth of jewellery, Lewis?’
‘I guess . . .’
‘Well, I don’t, darling. Nowhere near that. More like one million, if that.’
‘You could give him a bit of money as well, couldn’t you?’
Valentina sighed. ‘I could,’ she said, ‘but why should I? I’ve earned every penny of this money. I’ve worked for it for fifteen years. Why should I let Alexis just help himself?’
‘If you die, the money won’t be any good to you.’
‘I’m not going to die! If I thought there was a risk of it, I might tell Alexis to take the money and let me go. But I’ve told you: there’s not the least probability that that will happen.’
I said moodily: ‘I think Bianquis should just pay.’
‘It’s a lot of money. But I think something’s happening out there. It may be to do with you, I don’t know. They’ve asked Alexis for more time, for another week, while they try to put the money together. But he doesn’t like this delay. He’s got dreams of what he will do when he’s rich. The delay is making him frightened.’
I said that when I was frightened I quite often played chess, sometimes just in my mind or sometimes with a real opponent or with a computer. And Valentina seized on this and said: ‘Chess is a good idea, darling. It might calm Alexis down. Alexis was like you when I lived with him – only in that one respect, of course: he could reduce his anxiety by playing chess. And he often won. I don’t know why, when his mind is so wild, but he did.’
We drifted off the subject of Alexis and on to the subject of Stalin, whom Valentina called ‘another madman with a chess player’s cunning mind’. She told me that Anton and Olga (Mrs Gavrilovich) had met in the queue to pay their last respects to Stalin’s dead body. She said so many people were in that queue that seventeen of them were crushed to death during the days the coffin was open for public viewing.
I asked why, when Stalin had done such terrible things, Russians wanted to come and look at him. Valentina said: ‘You can understand why, can’t you? They needed to get proof. Proof that it was over. Proof that he was lying in the velvet coffin and that they were still alive.’
‘How did Stalin die?’ I asked.
‘Well, you know, he had a terrible death. Very, very slow, like death was torturing him. He had a cerebral haemorrhage, but it didn’t kill him straight away. It made him suffocate, agonisingly slowly, in his own blood. They say his features turned dark and his lips black. It took him four days to die. But of course when Maman and Papa saw him, the morticians had drained some of the blood and made him appear normal again, and, anyway, I think Maman and Papa hardly noticed how he looked. Papa used to say: “I made this pilgrimage from Leningrad to Moscow and I thought it was to say adieu to Stalin. But it wasn’t. It was a pilgrimage to find your mother.” Imagine. You’re in a queue of a million people and you look round and you see your future wife standing right behind you.’
‘Was Olga beautiful then?’
‘Yes. She had beautiful eyes, especially. And hair very thick and dark. She worked in Moscow at that time, in a shoe factory. She always says the first thing she noticed about Anton was what a poor condition his shoes were in. She wondered if he’d walked all the way from Leningrad!’
I remembered the shoe coming down on my book then, on the steps in the theatre foyer, and how the mark left on Paul Berger’s copy of Le Grand Meaulnes had bothered me. I said to Valentina: ‘How did Alexis know about the Meaulnes business?’
I could hear Valentina move on the other side of the wall. Lying there, with your face near the talking funnel, could make your body get stiff and quite often we broke off and went for walks. Mostly, we walked round Switzerland. We became sort of fond of these Swiss walks, with their cow bells and their wood-choppers and their sunsets over the mountains. But sometimes we went to other places and walked there. One of these places was London.
‘The difficulty I have with Alexis,’ said Valentina, after she’d settled herself down in a new position, ‘is remembering to treat him like a stranger. I was married to him for more than a year. I used to wash his hair. I’d listen to his poems in the middle of the night. And so I find, still, after all this time has gone by, that I tell him things without meaning to. I should have told him nothing about you, but it never, never, occurred to me that he would try to harm you. I just said that I had become . . . very fond of you, like you could be my own son, or something, the son Alexis wanted and I never had, and that I had given you a musical box and was helping you with your translation of Le Grand Meaulnes. I don’t know why I told him these things, but I just did, and now I’m so sorry, Lewis, I’m so sorry . . .’
‘Don’t cry, Valentina,’ I said. ‘Tell me about the café-charbon. Who came there? What was it like working in the café?’
I heard Valentina blow her nose. I asked her if she was blowing it on a torn-up bit of France Dimanche and she said she was. Then she said: ‘When I was a child, I used to love the café-charbon. We had an old cart then, with a pony. Imagine a pony on the streets of Paris! Nowadays, it would be killed by a BMW in about one week. But not then. And Anton would let me sit on the pony, sometimes, when he made his deliveries. And when you’re a child, the only life you know is the one you’ve got, and so that’s the life you love. It’s the same for us all. Children try their best to love what they’re given. But then later, when you can see beyond that life, you realise what poverty is, what drudgery is, what boredom is. I would look at my mother and father and think, how can they stand it? For all these years and years, this life of the café-charbon! How can they not see how pitiful it is? And I vowed, Lewis, I vowed to myself that I would find some other life. I didn’t know what, but I vowed nevertheless.’
‘And you did.’
‘Yes. Thank goodness, I did. But maybe, you see, if I hadn’t met Alexis—’
We had to stop this conversation there because we heard the monkeys coming back. I hoped they were bringing us a meal, even if it was a stew made from crows.
Food was on our minds quite a lot of the time. The only thing about the café-charbon Valentina seemed sad to have lost was the griddle pan on which
she and Olga used to make croquemonsieurs. And on one of our walks round London, when I asked Valentina where she’d been she said she’d had tea at Brown’s Hotel and dinner at the Caprice. When she told me where these places were, I pointed out to her that this wasn’t a proper walk, but all she said was: ‘I walked from Brown’s to the Caprice, darling. This meant going down Albemarle Street, crossing Piccadilly and into Arlington Street. It was raining, but I didn’t take a taxi.’
I didn’t know London as well as she did. I just knew the bits of it I’d been taken to see, like the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace, so mainly I just walked between these two places and back again, through St James’s Park.
I didn’t go down into the Tube and risk coming face to face with any untalented buskers. And, anyway, I couldn’t remember which Tube lines ran where, except that the Northern line went up to Hampstead and Hugh had once taken me there when I was about ten and we’d flown our bird kite on a wooded hill. I kept this place in reserve, for when I’d run out of other walks. I knew it might be difficult to imagine myself there alone, without Hugh and the kite.
I remembered that the Houses of Parliament were by the river, so when I’d gone round them and into Westminster Abbey and looked at a few tombs and out again, I started walking along the Embankment, going east, where there were loads of new buildings alongside the water and the dome of St Paul’s in the distance.
And it was weird, the minute I arrived there, how clearly I could see everything and smell the river and hear the engines of boats. All I was doing was going round and round my cell and sometimes tapping on Valentina’s wall, but this imaginary London got such a grip on my mind, it was like I was a movie camera going along and getting everything into itself on film. The light seemed amazingly clear, so that there was a kind of shine on things, and as well as seeing these things I was also composing them into frames and going in and out of close-up shots and wide shots, and this felt like such a brilliant thing to be doing that my heart started to beat wildly.
So then I sat down for a moment, on the floor of my cell and on a conveniently placed municipal bench, looking out along the water. I tapped on the wall and said: ‘Valentina, do you think being a film director might be a good career?’
‘A film director, did you say?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that what you want to be?’
‘I don’t know. I just suddenly thought it up.’
Valentina didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she said: ‘It’s odd you should mention that. Do you know where I was on my London walk?’
‘Where?’
‘I was just going along Kensington High Street and I thought, I’ll look in at the Odeon and see what movies they’re showing this afternoon. Perhaps this is some kind of sign, darling, about your future life?’
The house was quiet, so we took the pipe out of the wall and lay down to rest, after pounding the hard pavements of London, and I asked Valentina how her ‘future life’ as a writer of medieval romances had come into her mind. And she told me again that she never would have thought up the idea of becoming a writer if she hadn’t met Alexis.
‘At the time of the café,’ she told me, ‘when I was eighteen, nineteen, that kind of time, Papa and Maman used to take me to some Russian evenings they had up at Montmartre.
‘They were held in one of the old guinguettes. They used to clear away some tables and there would be dancing to the balalaika and that kind of thing. I think they were shabby places and the vodka they served was very poor quality, but I liked that Russian music very much and being with Russian people always made Anton and Olga happy. Strange, you see? They hated Russia in a way, but I think they were always homesick for the language.’
‘Were you homesick for the language?’
‘No. Remember I was three when they brought me here. I spoke Russian with them, but French at school and with everyone else. For me, Russian was the language of the family, that’s all. But anyway, it was at one of those guinguette evenings that I met Alexis. All the others at those dances were shopkeepers or taxi drivers or café owners like us, or factory people, but suddenly there was this thin, serious young man and he told me he was a poet, and in a very short time I lost my heart to him. It wasn’t that I loved him. What I loved was what he did. And all I wanted to say to him was: “Take me away.”
‘We got married. But he couldn’t take me away from anything or to anywhere, because we had no money, nothing, and I had to stay on and work in the café just like before, while Alexis earned his few little beans from his poems, published here and there, in small-circulation journals.
‘And I soon realised that this life would just go on. On and on. Alexis had changed nothing. So I thought, if he can write, so can I. But I will write something that a lot of people want to read. Alexis’s poems were so Russian, so much about suffering and prisons and grey skies. And I knew I didn’t want to write about these things. You see how terrible our history is? I’ve given you a little flavour of it, haven’t I? And I didn’t want to write about my own life, either. Because what was in my own life except work in the café and seeing my father struggling backwards and forwards from the coal cellar with his sacks of coal? Who would have read a novel about these things? No one.’
I started to say that Dostoevsky had written about suffering and poverty in Crime and Punishment and so many hundreds of thousands of readers had read it that it now had the status of a ‘world classic’, but Valentina wasn’t listening. She began to describe to me how she’d started going to libraries and researching details about life in the Middle Ages, when chivalry was still a word that had meaning and handsome men used to ride around with hawks on their wrists. She said: ‘It was when I read about these hawks that I knew I had found my subject. My first hero was a falconer. That book sold ninety thousand copies.’
We lay in the dark for a while. I knew Valentina wanted me to say something about this falconer, but nothing came into my mind, so we just lay there, without talking. I’d moved my mattress up to the pipe hole, so that I could be comfortable during our conversations, and now I rolled over on to my back and stared up at the invisible roof. I’d forgotten if it was day or night or what the sky might be doing if I got up and moved the slate.
After about five minutes of silence, I heard Elroy come slithering through the hole towards me. He was Valentina’s now, but she’d sent him on a mission into my cell.
Every day, when there was light and when the house was silent, I stood on the table and chair and worked on the slates until my arms ached too badly to continue.
Valentina had passed her rusty nail to me, stuck into Elroy’s uniform, and I was trying to use this as a lever, to work the pins loose from the wood batons. As I worked, and I could feel the adjoining slates begin to move, a plan of escape came filtering very slowly into my mind, but the plan depended not only on the size of the hole I could make in the roof, but on other factors, whose outcome I couldn’t know. Any one of these other factors, if it went against me, would render my plan unworkable.
Where the first slate had moved and rain had come in, one of the batons had gone brittle and pulpy along about five or six centimetres of its length. This gave me the idea of talking out a section of baton, so that, if I could remove the slates above, I’d eventually create a hole wide enough to climb through. But although it would be relatively easy to smash the pulpy section with the iron pipe, I hadn’t solved the problem of how I was going to cut through the undamaged wood on either side.
Valentina knew I was working on an escape hole. She seemed to like the idea of the hole, but not the idea of climbing out of it. It was like she saw making the hole as just a way of passing the time. Whenever I mentioned getting out on to the roof, she said: ‘Lewis, the roof is dangerous. What you must not risk is your life.’
I knew we had to be on the third floor of a house. When the monkeys went quiet, I decided they were on the ground floor. At night, sometimes, I heard someone moving about righ
t underneath me and so I assumed one of them probably slept there, and once or twice I woke up and knew, without being able to see anything, that Alexis was standing right outside my door; I could hear the little gasp in his breathing. And then I’d wait to see what he was going to do. But he never did anything. He just stood there, listening and gasping, and then he went away.
One morning, he heard us talking through the wall. Valentina was telling me how Anton and his regiment, fighting under Zhukov, were never allowed home on leave during the whole war. They just had to fight on and on and on. The only way a man could get home leave was if he was so badly wounded he couldn’t hold a rifle. She said: ‘That’s why the Russian army never gave up, you see. Even in temperatures so low, the wounded would die of frostbite in fifteen minutes if they were left out in the snow. There was no way out of the war for any of them – except to win it. And you know, Lewis, people talk about the German soldiers being brave, and I think they were: they had to endure that terrible cold as well and their uniforms were thin and inadequate. But Anton used to say to me, “Valya, I will tell you the truth of the war on the Eastern Front and that is that no one fought like we fought! No one anywhere else on earth!”’
I was about to say that, from the sound of all this, the war fought by the Brits in Western Europe was just a relatively puny thing compared with what the Russians endured, when I heard Alexis shout: ‘You hear, Lewis? You learn? You don’t look down on us any more?’
What terrified me wasn’t his sudden shouting, but the idea that he was going to come into my cell and see the pipe out of the wall and order the hole to be blocked up. I grabbed the pipe and, as quietly as I could, began inserting it back into the wall. While I was doing this, I said: ‘I’ve never looked down on anyone else’s army since I saw this programme about Caen, when the British stopped for a tea break and let a German tank get into the city and start blasting it to smithereens.’