The House of Special Purpose

by John Boyne

  Afterwards we lay on the two sofas in their living room, talking art and politics, while Zoya rested her body against my own and allowed me to place an arm around her shoulders, pulling her closer towards me, the warmth of her skin adding to my own, the scent of her hair, typically lavender, perfumed earlier with one of Sophie’s fragrances, quite intoxicating.

  ‘Now you two,’ said Leo, warming to his favourite topic, ‘you came from Russia. You must have been steeped in politics all your life.’

  ‘Not really,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘I grew up in a very small village that had no time for such things. We worked, we farmed, we tried to keep ourselves alive, that was all. We didn’t have time for debates. They would have been considered great luxuries.’

  ‘You should have made time,’ he insisted. ‘Especially in a country such as yours.’

  ‘Oh, Leo,’ said Sophie, pouring more wine, ‘not this again, please!’ She scolded him, but with good humour. Whenever we spent an evening together, the conversation always turned to politics eventually. Leo was an artist – a good one, too – but like most artists he believed that the world he re-created on his canvases was a corrupt one, which needed men of integrity, men like himself, to step to the fore and reclaim it for the people. He was a young man, of course, his naivety attested to that, but he hoped to put himself forward for election to the Chamber of Deputies one day. He was an idealist and a dreamer, but indolent too, and I doubted whether he would ever summon the necessary energy for a campaign.

  ‘But this is important,’ he insisted. ‘Each of us has a country that we call our own, am I right? And as long as we are alive it is our responsibility to try to make that country a better place for all.’

  ‘But better how?’ asked Sophie. ‘I like France the way it is, don’t you? I can’t imagine living anywhere else. I don’t want it to change.’

  ‘Better as in more fair to everyone,’ he replied. ‘Social equitability. Financial freedom. The liberalization of policy.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Zoya, her voice cutting through the atmosphere, for she had neither Sophie’s drunken enthusiasm nor Leo’s antagonistic self-righteousness. She had also been quiet for some time, her eyes closed, not sleeping but apparently relaxed in the warmth of the room and the luxury of the alcohol. All three of us looked at her immediately.

  ‘Well,’ replied Leo with a shrug, ‘only that it makes sense to me that every citizen has a responsibility to—’

  ‘No,’ she said, interrupting him, ‘not that. What you said before. About a country such as ours.’

  Leo thought about it for a moment and finally shrugged his shoulders, as if the whole thing was perfectly obvious. ‘Ah, that,’ he replied, propping himself up on one elbow as he warmed to his topic. ‘Look, Zoya, my country, France, she spent centuries under the oppressive weight of a disgusting aristocracy, generations of parasites who sucked the lifeblood out of every simple, hardworking man and woman in the land, stole our money, acquired our land, kept us in starvation and poverty while they indulged their own appetites and perversions to excess. And eventually we said “Too much!” We resisted, we revolted, we placed those fat little aristocrats in the tumbrils, we drove them to the Place de la Concorde, and swish!’ He passed the flat of his hand quickly down through the air, mimicking the blade descending. ‘We cut off their heads! And we took back the power. But my friends, that was nearly one hundred and fifty years ago. My great-great-great-grandfather fought with Robespierre, you know. He stormed the Bastille with—’

  ‘Oh, Leo,’ cried Sophie in frustration, ‘you don’t know that. You always say it, but what proof do you have?’

  ‘I have the proof that he told his son the stories of his heroism,’ he replied defensively. ‘And those stories have been passed down from father to son ever since.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Zoya – a certain chill entering her tone, I thought – ‘but what has that got to do with Russia? You are not comparing like with like.’

  ‘Well, pffft,” said Leo, exhaling a whistle through his lips. ’I only wonder why it took Mother Russia so much longer to do the same thing, that’s all. For how many centuries were peasants like you – forgive me, both of you, but let us call things what they are – forced into a pathetic existence just so the palaces could remain open, the balls could continue to be thrown? The season could take place?’ He shook his head as if even the concept of such things was too much for him. ‘Why did it take you so long to throw out your autocrats? To reclaim the power of your own land? To cut off their heads, as it were? Not that you did that, of course. You shot them, as I recall.’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Zoya. ‘We did.’

  I don’t recall how much I had drunk that night – a lot, I suspect – but I sobered up immediately and wished that I had recognized the direction in which the conversation was going. Had I enjoyed such foresight, I might have changed the topic more quickly, but it was too late now and Zoya was sitting erect, the blood draining from her face as she stared at him.

  ‘You stupid man,’ she said. ‘What do you know about Russia anyway, other than what you read in your newspapers? You cannot compare your country with ours. They are entirely different. The points you make are facile and ignorant.’

  ‘Zoya,’ he replied, surprised by her antagonism but unwilling to concede the point – I liked Leo very much, but he was the type who always believed that he was correct on such matters and looked with surprise and pity on those who did not share his views – ‘the facts are not in dispute. Why, one has only to read any of the published material to see how—’

  ‘You would consider yourself a Bolshevik then?’ she asked. ‘A revolutionary?’

  ‘I would side with Lenin, certainly,’ he said. ‘He is a great man. To come from where he has come and achieve all that he has achieved—’

  ‘He is a murderer,’ replied Zoya.

  ‘And the Tsar was not?’

  ‘Leo,’ I said quickly, placing my glass on the table before me, ‘it is impolite to speak this way. You must understand, we were brought up under the rule of the Tsar. There are many people who revered him, who continue to revere him. Two of them are in this room with you. Perhaps we know more about the Tsar and the Bolsheviks and even Lenin than you do, as we lived through those times and did not simply read about them. Perhaps we have suffered more than you can understand.’

  ‘And perhaps we shouldn’t talk about such things on Christmas Day,’ said Sophie, refilling everyone’s glasses. ‘We’re here to enjoy ourselves, aren’t we?’

  Leo shrugged and sat back, happy to let the subject drop, positive in his arrogance that he was right and that we were too foolish to see it. Zoya said very little more that evening and the celebration ended in tension, the handshakes a little more forced than usual, the kisses a little more perfunctory.

  ‘Is that what people think?’ Zoya asked me as we walked back towards our separate rooms. ‘Is that how they recall the Tsar? In the way that we think of Louis Seizième?’

  ‘I don’t know what people think,’ I said. ‘And I don’t care about it. What matters is what we think. What matters is what we know.’

  ‘But they have corrupted history, they know nothing of our struggles. They see Russia in such simplistic terms. The privileged as monsters, the poor as heroes, everyone is the same. They talk in such idealistic ways, these revolutionaries, but have such naive theories. It’s too funny.’

  ‘Leo is hardly a revolutionary,’ I said, trying to laugh it off. ‘He’s a painter, nothing more. He likes to think that he can change the world, but what does he do each day, after all, except paint portraits for fat tourists and drink the money away in pavement cafés, spouting his opinions to anyone who will listen? You shouldn’t concern yourself with him.’

  It was easy to see that Zoya remained unconvinced. She spoke little for the rest of our walk and allowed me no more than a chaste kiss on the cheek as we parted, as a sister might offer her brother. As I watched her step thro
ugh her front door, I guessed that she would have a difficult night ahead of her, her mind filled with all the things that she wanted to say, all the anger that she wanted to express. I wished that she would invite me in, just to share her troubles with her, nothing more. To be a partner in her anger. For I felt it too.

  We celebrated our second Christmas thirteen days later, on January the seventh, and returned the compliment by inviting Leo and Sophie to a café, where we offered to buy them dinner. There was no possibility of us preparing a meal in either of our homes – our landladies would never have permitted it – and anyway, I was embarrassed that Zoya and I did not live together and would not have enjoyed being a guest in her home or inviting her as a guest to mine. I wondered whether Leo and Sophie talked about our living arrangements and was sure that they did. Indeed, Leo had once referred to me in a moment of exuberant drunkenness as his ‘innocent young friend’ and I had been offended by the implication of purity that accompanied it, an allegation which did nothing to improve my self-esteem. On another occasion, he offered to bring me to a particular house he knew to rectify my problem, but I brushed the suggestion away and went home to satisfy my lust alone, before I could be tempted by his offer.

  ‘But I don’t understand,’ said Sophie, taking her hat off and shaking out her long dark hair as we sat down. ‘A second Christmas?’

  ‘It is the traditional Russian Orthodox Christmas,’ I explained. ‘It’s got something to do with the Julian and Gregorian calendars. It’s all very complicated. The Bolsheviks would have the people conform to the rest of the world, and there’s a certain irony in there somewhere, but those of us who are traditionalists think differently. Hence, a separate Christmas Day.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Leo with a charming smile. ‘Heaven forbid that you should accede to the Bolsheviks!’

  Zoya and Leo had not spoken since the earlier incident and the memory of their argument hung over the table like a cloud, but the fact that we had extended the invitation at all implied that we did not wish to lose their friendship and so, to his credit, Leo was the first to sue for peace.

  ‘I think I owe you an apology, Zoya,’ he said after two glasses of wine and a noticeable elbow in the ribs from Sophie to spur him into action. ‘Perhaps I was a little rude to you on Christmas Day. Our Christmas Day, that is. I was probably a little drunk. Said some things I should never have said. I had no right to speak about your native country in the way that I did.’

  ‘No, you shouldn’t have,’ she replied, but without any aggression in her tone. ‘But at the same time, I should not have reacted quite as I did in your home either, that is not how I was brought up, and I think I owe you an apology too.’

  I noticed that neither of them was conceding that their points of view were incorrect, nor were they actually apologizing, simply lingering under the impression that they owed each other an apology, but I did not want to restart the argument by pointing either of these things out.

  ‘Well, you’re a guest in our country,’ he said, smiling widely at her, ‘and as such it was wrong of me to speak as I did. If you’ll permit me?’ He raised his glass in the air and we lifted ours to join him. ‘To Russia,’ he said.

  ‘To Russia,’ we replied, clinking glasses together and taking mouthfuls of wine.

  ‘Vive la révolution,’ he added beneath his breath, but I think only I heard that comment and of course I let it go.

  ‘I do wonder all the same why you never speak of it,’ he said a moment later. ‘If it was such a wonderful place, I mean. Oh now, don’t look at me like that, Sophie, it’s a perfectly reasonable question that I ask.’

  ‘Zoya doesn’t like to talk about it,’ Sophie replied, for she had tried on more than one occasion to solicit confidences from her new friend about her past, but had finally given up.

  ‘Well, what about you then, Georgy?’ asked Leo. ‘Can’t you tell us a little bit about your life before you came to Paris?’

  ‘There’s so little to tell,’ I replied with a shrug. ‘Nineteen years of living on a farm, that’s all. It’s not the stuff of anecdotes.’

  ‘Well, where did you two meet then? You said you were from St Petersburg, Zoya, didn’t you?’

  ‘In a train compartment,’ I said. ‘The day we both left Russia for the last time. We were sitting opposite each other, there was no one else there, and we started talking. We’ve been together ever since.’

  ‘How romantic,’ said Sophie. ‘But tell me this. If you have two Christmas Days, then surely you must be given two sets of presents. Am I right? And I know you bought her perfume for the first Christmas Day, Georgy. So what about it, Zoya? Did Georgy give you something else today?’

  Zoya looked across at me and smiled and I nodded, happy for her to tell them. She laughed then and looked at them, a wide grin spreading across her face. ‘Yes, of course he did,’ she said. ‘But didn’t you notice?’

  And with that she extended her left hand to show them my gift. I wasn’t surprised that they had failed to notice it before. It must have been the smallest engagement ring in history. But it was all that I could afford. And what mattered was that she was wearing it.

  We were married in the autumn of 1919, almost fifteen months after we had fled Russia, in a ceremony so lacking in grandeur that it would have seemed almost pathetic had we not compensated for its paucity with the intensity of our love.

  Brought up to revere a strict, unswerving doctrine, we wanted nothing more than the blessing of the Church to sanctify our union. However, there were no Russian Orthodox churches to be found in Paris and so I suggested marrying in a French Catholic church instead, but Zoya would not hear of it and seemed almost angry when I made the suggestion. I myself had never been particularly spiritual, although I did not question the faith in which I had been reared, but Zoya felt differently and saw rejection of our creed as a final step away from our homeland and one that she was not prepared to make.

  ‘But where then?’ I asked her. ‘You surely don’t believe that we should return to Russia for the ceremony? The danger alone would—’

  ‘Of course not,’ she said, although I knew very well that there was a part of her that longed to return to the country of our births. She felt a connection to the land and to the people that I myself had quickly shrugged off; it was an indelible part of her character. ‘But Georgy, I would not feel truly married if the proper ceremonies did not take place. Think of my father and mother, how they would feel if I rejected our traditions.’

  There was no argument that could be made against this and so I began the process of trying to locate a Russian Orthodox priest in the city. The Russian community itself was small and scattered and we had never made any attempts to assimilate ourselves into it. Indeed, on one occasion when a young Russian couple entered the small bookstore where I worked as an assistant, I heard their voices immediately – the music of their language as they spoke to each other in our native tongue summoned pictures and memories that made me dizzy with longing and regret – and I was forced to excuse myself and retreat to the alley behind the shop on the pretence that I felt suddenly ill, leaving my employer, Monsieur Ferré, irritated at having to serve the couple himself. I knew that most of my fellow émigrés lived and worked in the Neuilly district in the dix-septième and we avoided it deliberately, not wishing to become part of a society which could lead to potential danger for us.

  I was subtle in my detective work, however, and was finally introduced to an elderly man by the name of Rakhletsky, living in a small tenement house in Les Halles, who agreed to perform the ceremony. He told me that he had been ordained a priest in Moscow during the 1870s and was a true believer, but he had fallen out with his diocese after the 1905 Revolution and relocated to France. A loyal subject of the Tsar, he had strongly opposed the revolutionary priest, Father Gapon, and had tried to dissuade him from marching on the Winter Palace that year.

  ‘Gapon was belligerent,’ he told me. ‘An anarchist portraying himself as the workers
’ champion. He broke the conventions of the Church, marrying twice, challenging the Tsar, and still they made a hero of him.’

  ‘Before they turned on him and hanged him,’ I replied, a naive boy patronizing an elderly man.

  ‘Yes, before that,’ he admitted. ‘But how many innocent people died because of him on Bloody Sunday? A thousand? Twice that amount? Four times?’ He shook his head, appearing half regretful and half furious. ‘I could not stay after that. He would have ordered me to be killed for my disobedience. It has always astonished me, Georgy Daniilovich, that those who are most repulsed by autocratic or dictatorial rule are among the first to eliminate their enemies once they take on the mantle of power themselves.’

  ‘Father Gapon never achieved any power,’ I pointed out.

  ‘But Lenin did,’ he replied, smiling at me. ‘Just another Tsar, don’t you think?’

  I did not take his political views to Zoya, although she would have agreed with them, because I thought it wrong to bring such memories to our wedding day. I wanted simply to present Father Rakhletsky as just another exile, forced out of his home by the advance of the Kaiser’s forces. It had taken me this long to find the man, I did not want any problems that might postpone our marriage any longer than necessary.

  The ceremony took place in Sophie and Leo’s flat on a warm Saturday evening in October. Our friends had generously offered the use of their home for the service and acted as witnesses on the day. Father Rakhletsky spent an hour alone in the small apartment earlier in the afternoon, consecrating their living room as a holy place, a procedure he said was ‘highly unorthodox but extremely pleasurable’, a turn of phrase which amused me.