The White Russian

by Vanora Bennett

  Pausing at the bottom of the rue Daru, clutching at a lamp-post and shifting around for a minute to ease the pain in her feet, she looked around in distaste at all the tatty Russian restaurants running up one side of the Alexander Nevsky cathedral, the heart of Little Russia. The waiters and waitresses moved from one restaurant to another, here or elsewhere in their adopted city. Sometimes they became proprietors themselves, drinking champagne on the opening night and putting out announcements in the Russian papers:

  Pyotr Vasilyevich Sidorov has the honour of informing his dear friends and clientele that he has opened his own restaurant, Tsarskaya Okhota, in such-and-such a street. Head chef: Valery Ivanovich Karpov. Large selection of hors d’oeuvres. Plat du jour – today rasstegai; tomorrow, suckling pig in sour cream.

  Substantial artistic programme. Daily performances by the public’s darling, Nadezhda Plevitskaya, the Tsar’s Nightingale.

  She could hardly bear to call to mind the magnificent chandeliered halls in which she’d once sung, back home, so unlike these nasty little dumps. She didn’t have to look, or go in, to know the meagre size of the restaurant interiors, the steel-and-glass flowers on the table, the little lamps with shades, and the squashed space they offered at the back for a single singer to cram herself onstage and do her best to entertain their drunken, unappreciative, cheapskate audiences. As for the fees – she grimaced. The only dates in her diary, these days, were in these unworthy venues. Without that recording, which might have done so much for her, it really was possible that she was all washed up.

  Shaking her head, as if to get rid of the bad thoughts, Plevitskaya straightened up, thrust her feet back into the agonizing shoes, and walked on.

  Of course, today, they weren’t going to meet their secret guests in this central zone of gossipy Little Russia where everyone knew everyone. No, her husband had chosen a more private meeting place on the other side of the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, in one of the cafés behind the art deco concert hall. It was only five minutes’ walk away, but it might as well have been a different country, for those cafés were inhabited by an entirely different tribe: impecunious music lovers, skinny young things spinning out single glasses of wine for hours with their noses stuck into scores and librettos. None of them would notice a few stray Russians sitting in a corner. No one would understand a word they said.

  So Plevitskaya walked away from the rue Daru, and the cathedral, and the rue de la Néva and the rue Pierre-le-Grand, turning her broad back decisively on the triangle of streets that constituted Russia abroad and on her career worries. Now wasn’t the moment to think about that, she admonished herself, feeling quite sober by now. She had to concentrate on the important business meeting with the crab salesman, and the benefits it might bring to her husband.

  Her husband needed a boost in life, she reflected. He’d lived with disappointment for so long. Before Kutyopov had been kidnapped, her husband had thought he’d be named the next head of ROVS. It was the job he’d always wanted. But then, as the result of the unhelpful rumour that had got about that he’d had a hand in the kidnapping himself, he’d been passed over, and General Miller appointed instead. She had to imagine how disappointed he must have been – perhaps almost as intensely disappointed as she now felt at the disappearance of her recording – because he’d never complained. He’d taken the number-two job instead, without a murmur. He’d never said a bad word against that fat old fool Miller, in all these seven years, even if he’d got more grumpy and disagreeable at home. It was time he got his chance to shine now. A bit of real success might make him less irritable, and less penny-pinching, too. It might turn him back into the pleasant consort he’d once been.

  Her husband and the two guests – one in a cheap Moscow suit and the other in a market-trader’s apron smelling of crab – were already at a table on the terrasse by the time she found the back-street café. Her husband was looking irritably at his watch. That made her nervous. And feeling nervous made her act flamboyant. Breaking into their quiet conversation about cargo – she heard a few words about when the freight carrier Maria Ulyanova should stop at Le Havre to pick the cargo up for dispatch to Leningrad – she kissed, and exclaimed, and smiled, all the while trying not to stare too openly at the crab salesman, who she knew was the boss, despite his workman’s clothes.

  She could feel her husband’s disapproving eyes on her. ‘We’ve ordered,’ he said. ‘You were late.’ Then he added, ‘I’ve ordered water for you. The wine’s for the men. You just need food.’

  She subsided into a seat, still flashing smiles around the table and wishing she could have a glass of wine to calm her nerves. Not looking at her husband, she told the hovering waiter she wanted the lobster. Well, she knew this was a meal that would go on somebody’s expenses, probably Moscow’s, and if everything went according to plan their money worries would soon be a thing of the past, anyway. She could afford to treat herself.

  If there’d been just the two of them there, she thought, her small extravagance would definitely have made her husband furious. But the crab salesman just nodded expressionlessly, and the waiter went away.

  The crab salesman, Plevitskaya thought, sneaking a proper look at him as she reached for the bread basket, must be in his late thirties. There was nothing remarkable about his appearance. Under his beret was dirty-blond hair and a flat, wide face, the ordinary Russian kind with a short nose and wide mouth. His hands were big and calloused. It was only his stillness, and those ice-blue eyes, that made him a little frightening.

  Suddenly he smiled directly at her. ‘A magnificent choice,’ he said in a nasal Moscow voice. The smile made him look quite handsome. But Plevitskaya started feeling clammy, all the same. (Perhaps it was the brandy.) ‘And a magnificent woman is just what we are going to need.’ Plevitskaya nodded, quiet as an obedient child.

  ‘Your job, on the day,’ he went on, ‘will be to provide Skoblin here with an alibi.’ He turned and smiled at Plevitskaya’s husband, who, like Plevitskaya, remained silent and round-eyed. ‘It will be a simple task for a magnificent woman like you. We’re going to send you out shopping at Monsieur Epstein’s boutique.’

  Monsieur Epstein’s boutique! Feeling suddenly happier, Plevitskaya sucked in her tummy, sat up straighter, and carried on nodding as she listened to the rest of the plan.

  It was only when the crab salesman had finished speaking, and everyone started saying how clever and foolproof the plan was, that Plevitskaya felt her husband stir. She glanced at him. She could see from the eager way he was smiling that, although he was scared of saying the wrong thing, he was also desperate enough to impress the Muscovites – especially the crab salesman – to venture a remark of his own.

  ‘The old man doesn’t suspect a thing, you know,’ her husband said. ‘He read the letter twenty times in front of me. He was practically jumping for joy. And he’s been shut up alone in his office with it ever since, thinking out his strategy for his secret meeting.’ Leaning forward, he put a tentative, tender hand on the crab salesman’s arm. ‘So your German must be up to snuff!’ he finished, then exploded into what Plevitskaya thought was probably unintentionally loud laughter.

  The crab salesman didn’t even crack a smile in return. Plevitskaya felt almost sorry for her husband as he put a napkin to his red face, turned his laugh into a cough, and, still gasping for breath, spluttered, ‘Crumb in my throat … sorry,’ into the silence.

  ‘Have some water,’ the crab salesman said. Quietly, she passed him her glass.

  15

  Jean

  The first thing I noticed, after getting the taxi out of the garage as evening drew on and driving to Father’s office to see if I could get him home tonight before I started work, was that a lot of drunk chancers were weaving out of his building on the rue du Colisée. Many of them, I could see at once, were some sort of Russian – some blue-eyed Slavs, others skinny lads with the dark look of Romanians or Jews – and they were all looking as pleased with themselves as dog
s who’ve stolen the chicken. I could guess what had brought them in such numbers, of course; they must have been filling their bellies at the funeral of the American woman who’d died upstairs, the one with the Russian name left her by a stray husband long ago – the woman who’d liked to patronize artists. Well, God be with her, I thought (not that I actually believe in any deity), and felt sorry that she had no one better to mourn her passing than these scroungers.

  The second thing I noticed – on my way out, once Father had told me, irritably, that he wasn’t ready to go home; hadn’t got his work for the day done yet; what was I bothering him for so early, and more in the same uncharacteristic, tetchy, red-eyed vein that made me think he must be sickening for something – was the girl.

  She was waiting at the taxi rank as I got back into my parked cab – tall and very slender, and wearing a grey dress and pearls. She was standing in a beam of sunlight. But, under all those exuberant blond curls, her face was pensive.

  I remembered her arriving here the other evening, driven by the American woman’s chauffeur. The memory contained a touch of shame, because, just for a moment, seeing a new face among the familiars of our street, I’d wondered whether this wasn’t it – the attack on Father that we spent so much effort trying to prevent: the bomb, the stabbing, the injection of poison, whatever. Once I’d properly taken in which car she’d come in, and the quality of her foreign clothes, I’d recognized the stupidity of the thought. But it had taken a moment or two to relax out of my combat-readiness, and a part of me still felt apologetic that, for a moment, I’d been ready to attack this innocent passer-by.

  She’d had an uncertain, watchful look on her face then, too. But it had been transient, I’d thought; the effect of arriving in a new place, or of not understanding the fierce look I’d perhaps directed at her. I’d easily been able to imagine her with the shadow gone – turning back into just one more of the mass of identical sleek, contented, smugly established young people of her class, to whom everything came so easily. That hadn’t happened, though. There was no ease on her face. If anything, the shadow looked deeper now.

  Well, no wonder. She must have been staying with the old lady when she’d died. Perhaps she was family? Even if she wasn’t wearing proper mourning, she was probably dressed as sombrely as a holiday wardrobe allowed. And she must have spent this afternoon fending off the scroungers, too. Both things would be enough to make anyone sigh.

  I gave her a sympathetic look as I drove up to the rank.

  But there was no answering echo. She didn’t recognize me. In point of fact, she didn’t even look at me as she leaned in through the open window, smelling faintly of something elusive, not quite the innocent flower fragrances of young girls or the powerful musk-and-caustic of prostitutes (I’d left the windows open to get rid of that).

  I’d been a taxi driver long enough to know a lot about prostitutes and their clients. I came across them every night, and they always spoke to me as though I were one of them. ‘We do the same kind of work, you and us,’ they liked to say. When the sun was rising, on my way to the garage after finishing work, I often gave these women lifts – they’d be heading home after a night’s work too – and they’d always offer me payment in kind. I usually had them sit in the back of the car and not beside me, as they were all drenched in their strong cheap perfume, and their proximity gave me a nauseating taste in my mouth. They’d go, but the smell lingered on. I’d shut my nostrils.

  Unlike now. I took a cautious breath in, enjoying the mysterious otherness of this girl’s scent, and the pure white skin of her cheek.

  The moment’s pleasure didn’t last. She broke the spell by rattling off an all-too-familiar address, which I recognized at once as that of the Russian old people’s home run by Madame Sabline out in the suburbs. (Wasn’t that also the borrowed name of the American woman? I thought, unable to resist curiosity. Had the Russian she was said to have once married been some connection of Madame Sabline’s?) Then, with lowered eyes, the girl folded herself in back of the car and looked away, waiting for me to drive.

  Now, there’s nothing unusual about avoiding a taxi driver’s eyes. Parisians do it all the time. But, to a taxi driver, it’s a bad sign, a sign of a person who feels no restraining influences – someone who’s thinking: What does it matter what this driver thinks of me if I will never see him again and he has no way of telling my friends about it? Because, by absurd chance, I’d been obliged to adopt this job as my calling in life, I saw my chance clients as they were in reality and not as they wished to appear, and my contact with them had shown them in a very bad light on almost every occasion.

  Abruptly, I pulled away. I regretted my momentary sympathy for the girl now. Her indifference brought rushing into my head all the usual mixture of irritation and regret that such comfortless and pointless experiences should be my lot. Rage, too: when I looked down at my hands on the wheel, I saw that there were white points on my knuckles.

  I accelerated round a corner, sharply, not looking behind to see whether my passenger was shaken by the sudden speed, barely hearing the angry cacophony of car horns that resulted. I was remembering the man I’d given a lift to at dawn, who had five suitcases and whom I’d driven to the avenue Victor-Hugo. He’d got out of the car and said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, ‘Now take these suitcases up to the fifth floor.’ There wasn’t any doubt in his voice. He didn’t even bother to say ‘please’.

  ‘Listen, mon vieux,’ I said, and he turned round at my familiar tone, looking as shocked as if I’d hit him. ‘Your arms aren’t paralysed, are they?’

  ‘No, why?’

  ‘I just don’t see why I should suddenly start carrying your suitcases up to the fifth floor, or any other floor. If I had to change a wheel, I wouldn’t turn to you and ask you to do it for me, would I?’

  He looked at me. Then he asked, ‘Are you a foreigner?’

  ‘No,’ I replied, provocatively. ‘My father is a butcher at 42 rue de Belleville.’

  He’d complained to the police, of course. But, as always happens when these misunderstandings arise, everything was sorted out as soon as I handed over my nonsense passport to the police, and they saw I was a Russian. After all, I hadn’t committed a crime. I’d just offended a wealthy man’s sense of the relationships that should prevail between different categories of citizen in France.

  I turned another corner, with a judder. I was secretly pleased to see, in the mirror, the girl’s hands closing quickly on the strap in the side of the door to hold herself steady.

  In this dark state of mind, which often came upon me, I felt that everything good in the world had been closed off from me. I was alone, locked out, and desperate not to be caught up forever in the endless human vileness with which my work brought me into nightly contact. By this I didn’t just mean the women on the streets, the men destroying their livers in the cafés, or the night people who inundated the city in a state of sexual frenzy – for, if you were a Paris taxi driver working at night, even the Russian Civil War could not compare with the absence of virtue of the streets I’d ended up in. No, what depressed me even more than all that was this strange separation of people into estates, and orders, as remote from each other as Eskimos and Australians, and the stultifying way no one ventured into acquaintanceships or even geographical areas not allocated to people of their sort, or even spoke much to anyone who wasn’t precisely the same as himself, or indeed herself. That Paris was made up of fixed zones for the different orders I learned, first, from the elderly worker next to me in a paper factory off the boulevard de la Gare. It was one of the first places I worked after getting here. He told me that during the entire forty years he had lived in Paris he had never been to the Champs-Élysées because, as he explained, he had never worked there. He couldn’t imagine any other reason for someone like him to see the centre of the city.

  I’d hardly been able to believe that. But experience confirmed it over and over again afterwards. Although wor
king people at least all talked to me as if I were one of them – there was no side to them – the poor were even more limited in their outlook than their rich oppressors. They had absolutely no idea that there might be ways out of their misery. For instance, I could never get it across to my fellow factory workers, back in those days, that I was going to night school. ‘What are you going to study?’ they’d ask, baffled. I’d tell them. ‘You do know it’s hard. You’ll need to know a lot of special words,’ they’d reply, shaking their heads doubtfully. A woman worker advised me to give up all of this useless stuff. It wasn’t for working people like us, she said, and tried to persuade me not to take the risk but to stay there, where, as she put it, in ten years’ time I might become a foreman or the head of a team of workers. ‘Ten years!’ I said. ‘I’d die ten times over in that time.’

  ‘You’ll come to a bad end,’ she said, finally.

  When I was on my way home, in the mornings, at five or six o’clock, driving through the unrecognizably empty and sleepy streets, I’d often pass through Les Halles. I’ll never forget how struck I was when I first saw workers in the vegetable market harnessed to those small carts on which they carry their cabbages and carrots. I still remember looking at their weather-beaten faces and strange eyes, which seemed to be covered with a transparent and impenetrable film, typical of people unused to thinking – most prostitutes have the same sort of eyes – and reflecting that Chinese coolies and Roman slaves probably had the same eternally veiled look and pretty similar conditions of existence, too. The entire history of human culture had never existed for people like these. All those names – Galileo, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Mozart, Tolstoy, Bach, Balzac – all the hundreds and thousands of years of human civilization meant nothing here. There was just dawn, and the harness, and the same old slave hauling his cart.