It was in this way, rather than through literature, that he came to know Russia, where he had been born forty years before.
His parents were living in Archangel at the time, right at the top of the map, on the White Sea, where five sisters and a brother had been born before him.
Of the entire family he was the only one not to know Russia, which he had left at the age of one. Maybe this was why at school he had begun to collect stamps. He must have been thirteen when one of his classmates had shown him his album.
'Look!' he had said to him. 'There's a picture of your country.'
It was, he could remember, all the better now that he possessed the stamp along with many other Russian ones, a 1905 blue and pink with a picture of the Kremlin.
'I've got some other ones, you know, but they're portraits.'
The stamps, issued in 1913 for the third centenary of the Romanovs, depicted Peter I, Alexander II, Alexis Michaelovitch, Paul I.
Later he was to make a complete collection of them, including the Winter Palace and the wooden palace of the Boyar Romanovs.
His elder sister Alyosha, who was sixteen when he was born, would now be fifty-six—if she were still alive. Nastasia would be fifty-four and Daniel, his only brother, who died in infancy, would have been just fifty.
The other three sisters, Stephanie, Sonia and Doussia, were forty- eight, forty-five and forty-two and, because he was the nearest to her in age, also because of her name, it was of Doussia that he thought most often.
He had never seen their faces. He didn't know anything about them, whether they were dead or alive, if they had rallied to the party or been massacred.
The manner of his departure from Russia had been typical of his mother, Natalie, typical of the Oudonovs, as his father would say, for the Oudonovs had always passed as eccentrics.
When he was born in their house at Archangel, where there had been eight servants, his father, who owned an important fishing fleet, had just left as an administrative officer for the army, and was somewhere behind the front line.
In order to be nearer him his mother—a regular carrier-pigeon, as his father kept saying—had left with all her family in the train for Moscow and they had descended on Aunt Zina.
Her real name was Zinaida Oudonova, but he had always heard her called Aunt Zina.
She lived, according to his parents, in a house so big that you could lose yourself in the corridors, and she was very rich. It was in her house that Jonas fell ill at the age of six months. He had contracted an infectious form of pneumonia which he did not seem to be able to throw off, and the doctors had recommended the gentler climate of the South.
They had some friends in the Crimea, at Yalta, the Shepilovs, and without a word of warning, his mother had decided one morning to go to them with the baby.
'I leave the girls in your care, Zina,' she had said to the aunt. 'We shall be back in a few weeks, as soon as we've got the colour back into this lad's cheeks.'
It was not easy, in the middle of a war, to travel across Russia, but nothing was impossible for an Oudonov. Fortunately her mother had found the Shepilovs at Yalta. She had lingered, as was to be expected with her, and it was there that the Revolution had taken her by surprise.
There was no further news of the father. The daughters were still with Zina in Moscow, and Natalie talked about leaving the baby at Yalta to go and fetch them.
The Shepilovs had dissuaded her. Shepilov was a pessimist. The exodus was starting. Lenin and Trotsky were taking over power. The Wrangel army was being formed.
Why not go to Constantinople to let the storm pass, and return in a few months?
The Shepilovs had taken his mother and they had become part of the Russian colony which invaded the hotels of Turkey, some of them with money, others in search of any sort of employment to keep themselves alive.
The Shepilovs had managed to bring out some gold and jewellery. Natalie had a few diamonds with her.
Why had they gone on to Paris from Constantinople? And how, from Paris, had they finished up in a little town in the Berry?
It was not altogether a mystery. Shepilov, before the war, used to entertain lavishly on his estates in the Ukraine and thus he had entertained a certain number of French people, in particular, for several weeks at a time, the Comte de Coubert whose chateau and farms were some eight miles from Louvant.
They had met after the exodus, which they still thought of as purely temporary, and Coubert had suggested to Shepilov that he should instal himself in his chateau. Natalie had followed, and with her Jonas, who had still no comprehensive grasp of the world across which he was being dragged in this way.
During this time Constantin Milk, who had been taken prisoner by the Germans, had been released at Aix-la-Chapelle following on the armistice. He was given neither provisions nor money, nor any means of transport, and there was no question of returning under these circumstances to the distant soil of Russia.
Stage by stage, begging his way with others like himself, Milk had reached Paris and one day the Comte de Coubert had seen his name in a list of Russian prisoners recently arrived.
Nothing was known of Aunt Zina, nor the girls, who probably had not had time to cross the frontier.
Constantin Milk wore thick spectacles, as his son was soon to do, and, being short in the leg, had the build of a Siberian bear. He had quickly tired of the life of inaction in the chateau and, one evening, had announced that he had bought a fishmongery in the town with Natalie's jewels.
'It may be a little hard for an Oudonov,' he had said with his enigmatic smile, 'but she'll jolly well have to get down to it.'
From his door Jonas could see the shop 'A La Marée', with its two white marble counters and its big copper scales. He had lived for years on the first floor, in the room with the sky-light now occupied by Chenu's daughter.
Until the time he went to school he had spoken hardly anything but Russian and then had almost completely forgotten it.
Russia was for him a mysterious and bloody country where his five sisters, including Doussia, had very probably been massacred with Aunt Zina, like the Imperial family.
His father, like the Oudonovs whom he used to taunt, had also been a man of sudden decisions, or at any rate, if they matured slowly he never mentioned them to anyone.
In 1930, when Jonas was fourteen years old and going to the local lycée, Constantin Milk had announced that he was leaving for Moscow. As Natalie insisted that they should all go together, he had looked at his son and declared:
'Better make sure that at least one of us is left!'
Nobody knew what fate was in store for him out there. He had promised to send news somehow or other, but at the end of a year they had still heard nothing.
The Shepilovs had set up house in Paris where they had opened a bookshop in the Rue Jacob, and Natalie had written to ask them whether they would look after Jonas, whom she had sent to a lycée in Paris, while she in her turn would undertake the journey to Russia.
That was how he came to enter Condorcet.
In the meantime another war had broken out, in which his eyesight had prevented him from taking part, whole populations had been disturbed once more, there had been new exoduses, new waves of refugees.
Jonas had applied to all the authorities imaginable, Russian as well as French, without obtaining any news of his family.
Could he hope that his father, at eighty-two years old, and his mother at seventy-six, were still alive?
What had happened to Aunt Zina, in whose house people lost themselves, and his sisters, whose faces were unknown to him?
Did Doussia even know that she had a brother somewhere in the world?
All around him the walls were covered with old books. In his little room was a large stove which he kept roaring hot in winter as a luxury, and today he would have sworn that the smell of herrings still hung in the air in the kitchen.
The huge roof of the market was streaked with sunlight opposite his window an
d all around there were shops hardly larger than his own, except on the side of the Rue de Bourges where St. Cecilia's Church stood.
He could put a name to every face, recognize everyone's voice and, when people saw him in his doorway or when he went into Le Bouc's, they used to call out:
'Hullo, Monsieur Jonas!'
It was a world in which he had shut himself up, and Gina had walked in one fine day with a sway of her hips, bringing a warm smell of armpits with her into this world of his.
She had just walked out again, and he was overcome with a fit of giddiness.
IV
It was not that day that the complications were to begin, but he still had the feeling of a person who is incubating an illness.
In the afternoon, fortunately, the customers were fairly numerous in the shop and he received, among others, a visit from Monsieur Legendre, a retired railway guard, who used to read a book a day, sometimes two, changed them by the half-dozen and always sat down in a chair for a chat. He used to smoke a meerschaum pipe which made a spluttering noise each time he sucked at it, and as he had a habit of pressing down the burning tobacco, the entire top joint of his index finger was a golden brown colour.
He was not a widower nor a bachelor. His wife, small and thin, used to shop at the market, a black hat on her head, three times a week, and stop in front of all the stalls, disputing the price before buying a bunch of leeks.
Monsieur Legendre stayed for nearly an hour. The door was open. In the shadow of the covered market the cement, after being washed down, was drying slowly, leaving damp patches, and as it was Thursday, a crowd of children had taken possession of it and this time were playing at cowboys.
Two or three customers had interrupted the ex-railwayman's discourse and he waited, quite used to it, for the bookseller to finish serving them before carrying on the conversation at the exact point where he had left off.
'As I was saying . . .'
At seven o'clock, Jonas hesitated whether to lock up and go and have dinner at Pepito's as it seemed to him he ought to do, but finally he hadn't the heart. Instead he decided to walk across the Square and buy some eggs at Coutelle's, the dairy, where, as he expected, Madame Coutelle asked him:
'Isn't Gina there?'
It was without conviction, this time, that he replied:
'She's gone to Bourges.'
He made himself an omelette. It was good for him to keep himself occupied. His movements were meticulous. Just before pouring the whipped-up eggs into the pan he yielded once more to gluttony, as he had done at midday with the apple tart, and went into the yard to pick a few chives which were growing in a box.
Oughtn't he to have been indifferent to what he ate, seeing that Gina had gone? He arranged the butter, bread and coffee on the table, unfolded his napkin and ate his meal slowly, to all appearances thinking of nothing.
He had read in some book or other, probably war memoirs, that a certain time nearly always elapses before the most seriously wounded feel any pain, that sometimes they do not even realize at once that they have been hit.
In his case it was a little different. He felt no violent pain, nor despair. It was more that a void had been created inside him. He was no longer in a state of equilibrium. The kitchen, which had not changed, seemed to him not so much strange as lifeless, without any definite shape, as if he had been looking at it without his glasses.
He did not weep, did not sigh, that evening, any more than the day before. After eating a banana which had been bought by Gina, he did the washing up, swept out the kitchen, then went over to the doorway to watch the sun setting.
He did not stay where he was because the Chaignes, the grocers from next door, had brought their chairs out onto the pavement and were chatting in low voices with the butcher, who had come to keep them company.
If he no longer had his valuable stamps at least he still had his collection of Russian ones, for this, which was purely of sentimental value, he had stuck into an album rather in the way that in other houses family portraits are pasted in.
Yet he did not feel himself to be particularly Russian, witness the fact that he only felt at home in the Vieux-Marché.
The shopkeepers had been friendly when the Milks had set themselves up there, and although to start with Milk's father did not speak one word of French, he had soon made great headway. It sometimes provoked his great laugh, devoid of bitterness, to be selling fish by the pound when, a few years earlier, he owned the most important fishing fleet in Archangel, and his boats went as far as Spitzbergen and Novaya Zembla. A little while before the war he had even equipped his ships as whalers, and it was perhaps a sort of sense of humour all his own that prompted him to call his son Jonas.
Natalie was slower to adapt herself to their new life and her husband used to tease her in Russian in front of the customers, who did not understand a word.
'Come on, Ignatievna Oudonova, dip your pretty little hands into that tub and serve this fat lady with half a dozen whiting.'
Jonas knew practically nothing about the Oudonovs, his mother's family, except that they were merchants who provisioned boats. While Constantin Milk, whose grandfather was a shipowner before him, had kept some of his rough plebeian habits, the Oudonovs liked good manners and mixed in high society.
When he was in a good mood, Milk did not call his wife Natalie, but Ignatievna Oudonova, or simply Oudonova, and she would pout as if it were a reproach
Her chief despair was that there were no synagogues in the town, for the Milks, like the Oudonovs, were Jews. There were other Jews in the district, especially among the second-hand shops and small stores in the Rue Haute, but because the Milks were red-haired, with fair skin and blue eyes, the local people did not seem to be aware of their race.
To the world at large they were Russians, and in a sense it was true.
At school, at first, when he had hardly been able to speak French and often used comical expressions, Jonas had been the butt of many gibes, but it had not lasted long.
'They are very nice,' he would say to his parents when they asked him how his schoolmates treated him.
It was perfectly true. Everybody was nice to them. After his father's departure, nobody went into the shop without asking Natalie:
'Still no news?'
Jonas was rather proud at heart that his mother had abandoned him to go and join her husband. It had upset him more to leave the Old Market to go to Condorcet, and above all to meet the Shepilovs again.
Serge Sergeevitch Shepilov was an intellectual, and it could be seen in the attitudes he struck, in his way of speaking, of looking at the person he was talking to with a certain air of condescension. After eleven years of living in France he still regarded himself as an exile and went to all the White Russian meetings, worked for their newspaper and their reviews.
When Jonas used to go and see them on holidays, in the bookshop in the Rue Jacob, at the back of which they lived in a minute studio, Shepilov liked to address him in Russian then, stopping short, would remark bitterly:
'Ah, but then you've forgotten the language of your country!'
Shepilov was still alive. So, too, was his wife, Nina Ignatievna. Both old now, they had eventually installed themselves in Nice where the odd article which Shepilov sold to a newspaper from time to time enabled them to vegetate. Around the samovar they spent their declining years in the cult of the past and the denigration of the present.
'If your father hasn't been shot or sent to Siberia, then it's because he's rallied to the party cause, in which case I prefer never to see him again.'
Jonas hated nobody, not even the Bolsheviks, whose rise had scattered his family. If he ever thought of Doussia, it was less as a real person than as a sort of fairy. In his imagination Doussia resembled nobody he knew; she had become the symbol of fragile, tender femininity which brought tears to his eyes every time he thought of it.
So as not to be left with nothing to do for the whole evening, he turned over the pages of Russian
stamps, and in the little room where he had turned on the light, the history of his country unfolded itself before his eyes.
This collection, almost complete, had taken him a long time to build up, and it had required a great deal of patience, letters and exchanges with hundreds of philatelists, even though the entire album was worth less commercially than four or five of the stamps Gina had taken away.
The first stamp, which was also the first issued in Russia, dating from 1857, depicted an eagle in relief, and although Jonas possessed the ten and twenty kopeks, he had never managed to get hold of the thirty kopeks.
For years, the same symbol had been used with minor variations until the tercentenary in 1905, which the school friend from Condorcet had shown him.
Then with the 1914 war there came the charity stamps with the portrait of Murometz and the Cossack of the Don. He particularly liked, for its style and engraving, a St. George and the Dragon which, however, was only catalogued at forty francs.
He thought to himself as he fondled them:
'When this stamp was issued my father was twenty years old ... He was twenty-five. . . . He was meeting my mother. . . . That one dates from Alyosha's birth. . .
In 1917 it was the Phrygian cap of the Democratic Republic, with the two crossed sabres, then the stamps of Kerensky, on which a powerful hand was breaking a chain.
1921, 1922 saw the advent of illustrations with harder, coarser lines, and from 1923 onwards the commemorations started once again, no longer of the Romanovs, but of the fourth anniversary of the October Revolution, the fifth anniversary of the Soviet Republic.
Some more charity stamps at the time of the famine, then, with the U.S.S.R. pictures of workers, ploughmen, soldiers, the portrait of Lenin, in red and black for the first time in 1924.
He did not soften or feel touched with nostalgia. It was more curiosity which had impelled him to assemble this collection of a far-off world and place them side by side-…
The Little Man From Archangel Page 6
