‘No,’ he said, after another long pause, and his eyes were full of rage. ‘I’m not your son. The father I love is the man you just helped kidnap. The man you and your husband betrayed. The one whose blood will be on your hands if he’s gone for good.’
The energy went out of her. She stopped struggling. She drooped.
Over her head, Jean gave a wild, wolfish smile I’d never seen before. ‘Evie,’ he said, ‘call the police. Call them now.’
40
Jean
Evie ran for the police while the woman I hated went on wailing. I shut my eyes and ears and heart. Even holding her at arm’s length, I was still touching her, repelled by her damp skin and plump wrists under my hands. Her bones felt frail under my grip. I was aware of a murderous desire to squeeze tighter …
The police separated us in the end and took her away.
I wouldn’t look. I was determined not to give her a single memory to pick over in her cell.
But when the door had shut behind them, and Evie had come to me, I shifted myself so I could see out of the window on to the street before I opened my arms to accept the comfort she was offering.
I didn’t intend to, but when they led that woman out into the car outside, I couldn’t resist looking down over the top of Evie’s head at Plevitskaya’s, just for a moment.
She couldn’t be right, that woman. Even the thought of what she’d said made me feel unclean. It simply must be an insane fantasy that I could be her son, the flesh of her flesh. And yet, as I looked down, my gorge rose at the realization that her hair was as dark as mine.
She couldn’t be right. But, then again, perhaps she could – because perhaps the lost past she’d entered into was a place where any dream could come true, and any nightmare too.
If only I remembered something about the mother who’d lost me: eyes, a voice, a song – anything. But there was nothing I could cling on to as a defence against the horrible, invasive doubt that woman had left me with. All I could remember was the fantasy mothers I’d imagined for myself, years ago – young, pretty, attentive mothers out of books, girls out of Tolstoy, girls like Kitty Shcherbatskaya, with pink cheeks and shyly sparkling eyes and an infinite capacity for kindness and little hands in muffs (mothers whom I’d then stopped imagining, because they were part of the absurdity of fantasizing about the lost past, and I didn’t approve of that).
Shutting my eyes again, I tried to remember those other hands and arms, the ones I’d so recently had in mine and wanted to crush. Were they, could they be, like mine? Recognizably related? But all I could recall was the way my own flesh had crept at the feel of hers.
But Plevitskaya hadn’t always been old, I told myself. She hadn’t always looked the way she did now. And I knew she’d only met Skoblin later, during the retreat, when she’d been arrested by the Whites and ended up marrying her jailor, so there was no point in calling his hated face to mind; it would be an earlier husband who’d fathered me. The dark way I looked, so different from the fair man I called Father – colours, yet also the line of toenail and fingernail and shoulder, all those biological codes that meant nothing but everything – might as easily be an inheritance from that possible unknown father, as from her. If she was right. Which she couldn’t be.
Outside, the car door slammed. The engine started. Evie stirred and raised worried eyes to mine.
‘Was there really a Zyzyrovka …?’ Evie began. But when she saw my expression she quickly looked down. The car roared away. ‘Of course not,’ she went on in a whisper.
The horrifying thing was that I thought there might really have been a village with a name something like that, not all that far away from the nunnery. I vaguely remembered the signboard on the road, under the pines – a whitewashed board, rotting softly away, with the last letters missing in a fringe of splinters. I was almost sure there had been a ‘Z’ at the beginning of that board.
‘She’s wrong … or crazy,’ Evie whispered, her face hidden against my chest. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
But I didn’t know. In any case, I couldn’t do anything right then but sway on my feet, because, all at once, I’d been assailed by a mental picture of Father as he might be now. He was in torn and crumpled clothes, with grey stubble on his chin, backing away towards a damp wall from men I couldn’t see who meant him harm. He wasn’t the reassuring, all-knowing hero any more. He was a terrified wreck. And when I imagined him like that I, too, found myself melting into the kind of hot, childish panic that might once have turned into tears.
I wasn’t going to weep. He’d brought me up to be strong. If there was one thing I could cling to in all this, it was the conviction that I had to be worthy. I was an officer’s son, or I’d been raised as one.
‘We’ll talk tomorrow,’ I said brusquely. I let go, ignoring the hurt look on Evie’s face. ‘I’m going down to the office now. I need to be alone. I need to think.’
I needed to be down in the messy darkness of the office because the poster of Plevitskaya was still in the lobby. She wasn’t young in it, or thin, but she was younger and thinner. I pulled it off the wall, and took it into Father’s office, which still smelled of him. ‘I’m sorry to bring her in here, Father,’ I muttered. ‘But I have to know.’
I stood by the cloudy mirror in the uncertain lamplight, looking at her face, then mine. Her hair was as dark as mine, but it was so greased down that you couldn’t tell whether it could ever be wild like mine. Her eyes were dark while mine were light, but was there something similar in the cast of them? She was much shorter than me. Hands, legs … I couldn’t know.
I looked all night, and I thought all night about Father, and his fearful eyes against that concrete wall. I thought of all I owed him. I thought about blood and family, duty and honour.
And as I thought I opened his bottle. I drank one draught. It went down like fire. Then I drank another, with nothing to eat between gulps that might have soaked up the alcohol. And then another.
I was still thinking about Father, and still looking at myself in the glass and then at the ripped-off poster of Plevitskaya when, at dawn, the police inspector came in. He was a thin man whom I’d heard talk to his subordinates in rough Parisian argot, with a fag hanging out of his mouth, but who spoke to me in elaborate sentences full of complicated tenses and arcane bureaucratese.
The inspector nodded when he saw the poster. He wanted to tell me about what that woman had said during her preliminary interrogation. She’d informed him that Father was bound for Leningrad on board a Soviet freight ship. Madame Plevitskaya was being further interrogated, he said, and might be lying to mask some other reality, and the ship was out of contact, and might be innocent; but, at least, it was a clue.
I heard Evie’s footsteps, padding down the stairs and into the secretaries’ room where she waited. I was glad she wasn’t in the room with us to see me struggle to maintain composure. The inspector, grinding out his cigarette end, was so excited with his clue that he couldn’t stop grinning as he left. Tact was not his forte. What struck me was that Father was as good as dead if he was a prisoner being taken to Soviet Russia – that he might as well be cowering against a crumbling wall as the brutes in my dream approached, because that was how he’d end up, sooner or later.
‘I’m going to Russia to find him,’ I told Evie when, in her nightdress, she brought me tea on the bone-hard sofa. ‘I have no choice. I have to try to get him out.’
I made my voice hard. I didn’t want to sound weak. I couldn’t sound weak if I was going to Russia.
By now, dawn was breaking and the sun was turning the Parisian sky rosy pink. Even as I spoke, and looked out of the window at the horrible loveliness of a new day, I knew it was impossible for me to go to Russia. What would I do, after all, without documents? Steal a passport? Stow away on another Soviet freighter? Drive my rented taxi to Poland and walk east? Go and ask the Soviet ambassador in Paris to give me a visa and help me find a hotel in Moscow?
That wasn’t t
he point. That wasn’t the point. There was only one point.
If Nadezhda Plevitskaya really was my mother – which meant my own flesh and blood being to blame for Father’s destruction – I had a debt of honour. Truculently, I told myself if Evie respected me she’d understand.
Evie took my hand in hers. She looked very sad. But she nodded. I should have been grateful, I knew, that she didn’t say a word.
‘I owe it to him,’ I said, knowing it was stupid to half wish she’d argue. ‘I must put things right.’
She tightened her grip. ‘Yes.’ She bowed her head. ‘I love you,’ she said simply. ‘I understand how terrible this is for you.’
For a moment, I felt sorry for both myself and this girl, as all the happiness I’d imagined coming to the two of us, in a shared future that would not now exist, flowed away. What had been between the two of us felt distant, now, as if I was only seeing our illusory might-have-been, this last time, from behind thick, thick glass. I was with Father already, in that cell; we were facing our tormentors together.
Perhaps Evie didn’t understand how little chance there was I’d come back? Didn’t she see that I was going, willingly, to an almost certain death? The thought of my heroism brought to my eyes tears that – even in that moment – I knew to be cheap and sentimental. Vodka tears.
My death would be the only way to avenge his, I told myself. My sacrifice for him would be the only way to show the Nightingale how completely I denied whatever blood tie linked me to her, and how fully I chose instead the man who’d raised me, as the parent I would shed my own blood for. I had to die to expiate that woman’s sin.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said stiffly, wondering why my tongue felt so thick in my mouth. I was tired, mortally tired. I could barely get words out. My voice was slurring. My limbs were heavy. The room was going round. ‘Sorry … about us. But you must see … this comes first.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I do see.’ She looked at me – a serious, calm, careful look that showed me, even in my lurching drunkenness, that she really could see my worries. For a moment, as the stuffy room lurched like a ship’s cabin, I felt – just a little – comforted.
‘But first you must sleep,’ she said.
I shook my head. ‘Got to go now.’
‘Just lie on the sofa. We’ll talk again when it’s a bit lighter. I’ll get dressed. I’ll help you make a plan. I promise I will.’
I was swaying on my feet. She found the blanket in the cupboard.
I let her tuck it round me on the divan. She took away the bottle and the glass and closed the shutters.
I’d never sleep, I knew that. Never. But I shut my eyes.
41
Jean
It was evening when I woke up, the quiet golden hour when the air is honey. She was sitting at the desk reading, and had a plateful of rye-bread buterbrody with pickled herring waiting at her elbow.
My head was pounding, my tongue cleaving to the dry roof of my mouth.
This was why I never drank, and why I despised drinkers: this – the sick shame that came after that vain hunt for courage at the bottom of a bottle. I shook my head at the hangover cures on that plate that some knowing Russian must have assembled.
She smiled, and passed me a glass of milk. How beautiful she was. How calm she looked – happy almost – as though nothing could dent her tranquillity.
I couldn’t quite yet remember anything beyond how bad I felt, except how good it was that she was here. In a moment, I knew, some awful reality would explode over me. But I wanted to stay here for a little longer, in the fragile peace of her presence, before I let myself call it to mind. I wanted to be in her world, in that still calm.
‘We’ve all been talking about it out there,’ she said. ‘About Plevitskaya believing that she was your mother.’ She paused. ‘The secretaries,’ she went on, very softly, as if worried that her voice might crack open my head. ‘The colonels.’
The knowledge of what had happened to my father was beginning to return now, and the fear of who my mother might have been. I groaned, and put my hands to my clanging head. The memory of what I now had to do was coming back as well, and so was the darkness that went with it.
‘And the colours are wrong,’ she added. ‘Have you noticed?’
I could feel helpless tears start up. They were real tears, these, and it was the kindness in her voice that had made them prickle into life. I closed my eyes. In a minute I’d have to go, set off on my impossible journey, or I’d be completely unmanned.
But for now I just lay there and listened to the echo of her words in my head.
‘Your eyes are blue, and hers are dark. You don’t get blue-eyed children from dark-eyed parents. And the toy on your wrist, the little ball, was white, not red.’
The sickness was still swimming around my body. I didn’t remember telling her the toy on my wrist had been white, just light-coloured (though I probably hadn’t told her, either, that by the time the nuns saw it they said it stank too badly of shit to be saved; there was so much that would always be beyond words). And now everything was too confusing, and I didn’t remember. But something was lightening inside me.
‘But … I said, or maybe I didn’t say anything, because perhaps it had been white.
‘None of them believes a word of it,’ she said. ‘Every colonel and general in the office says they remember a village called “Zi” something or “Zna” something near every town in the war from Poland to Siberia. The village name means nothing. She just so wanted to find the son she loved, and the past she’d lost, that she let herself believe it was you.’
Evie looked towards the window. There was sadness in her eyes.
‘Poor Plevitskaya,’ she murmured, almost to herself. ‘She thought she was giving herself up for love. She thought she’d found her long-lost child, and she wanted to prove to you that, whatever she’d done, she wasn’t as bad as she knew you’d think her. And now they’ll execute her, or give her twenty years’ hard labour – but she gave herself up for nothing. You’re not her son. It was all a delusion; maybe looking for the past always is.’
‘I still have to …’ I started weakly, but the combination of my uncertain insides and the tears pouring down my cheeks stopped me. Anyway, I didn’t need to finish the sentence. She knew what I’d been going to say. She had the answer.
‘You won’t find your father if you try to go back to Russia.’ She still sounded faraway and a little sad. But she turned her gentle gaze back on me. ‘You’ll just meet the awful end he spent half his life trying to save you from, twenty years late,’ she said. ‘It would be the worst thing he could imagine, that you’d do that – give yourself up. It would make you like her. And it would make his life meaningless.’
I couldn’t sit up. But I did, gratefully, stretch out my hand to touch hers.
And, there in that room, at that time of complete failure, something changed. When the woman who meant everything to me looked into my eyes with that quiet depth of understanding, and saw me truly, she absolved me from my past and set me free.
I didn’t understand that at the time. All I knew was that she squeezed my hand back, and said, ‘He wanted you to live. So live. Stay with me.’
My father was never found. People said, afterwards, that they thought the Reds might have got him all the way to Moscow, like Kutyopov before him, to have secrets tortured out of him (if he knew any secrets). We never found out how he died.
Skoblin disappeared forever too. Rumour had it that he was smuggled out of France by the Soviets via the Spanish war, and was killed there.
The past was shutting down on all sides. ROVS was closed. The office apartment was sold. The proceeds went to fund Madame Sabline’s old people’s home.
It was late autumn before Plevitskaya’s trial opened.
In the dock she was full of artifice. Every inch the show-woman, she wore black. She pleaded tearfully that she knew nothing, and was just a simple woman duped by her disappearing husband. We were
in the gallery. We could see people – other women mostly – nod and sigh sympathetically. And then the code books that had been found in the cat baskets at her home were brought into the courtroom, and the experts who knew what the strings of numbers meant, and it turned out she’d been in it up to the hilt. But she didn’t turn a hair. She was no coward. You could see she was going to go down fighting. ‘Yes, my husband liked to write numbers in those books,’ she said, and her voice trembled helplessly. ‘But I – I am a woman. I have never understood numbers. I have no idea what he was writing.’ And the women leaning over the gallery sighed and tutted again.
I still hated Plevitskaya. Of course I did. There was no doubt she’d helped destroy my father. She wasn’t even repentant. But it wasn’t the same, now I knew she wasn’t my blood. I looked at her from the back row of the gallery (I didn’t want to be near, or have her see me), and felt distant from her, and all the strange, sad workings of the past that had drawn her and her fellow conspirators into their wickedness.
The start of the trial didn’t bring the emotional release I’d hoped for either. At the end of the first day I got up feeling oddly empty and unsatisfied. When Plevitskaya was led back to her cell, Evie turned to me and said, ‘It will go on for weeks more, you know.’
She looked as uncertain as I felt.
‘She’s nothing to us any more, is she?’ Evie said as we walked out into the evening, all wind and bluster and the last of the falling leaves, smelling of decay. ‘Let’s not torment ourselves going over the whole thing again. It won’t change anything. Let’s go away.’
I knew she missed home. She’d been writing long letters to her mother and stepfather and an aunt and to friends in New York while we waited for the trial.
‘We can’t,’ I said.
‘Why not?’ She linked her arm in mine and looked up at me.
We walked on.
It was true, in a sense, I realized. There was nothing holding me back any more. It had never occurred to me that freedom might come so easily – might sneak in through the back door without my even noticing. Even when she said, ‘Because I want to take you home with me to New York,’ I just went on shaking my head, half in negation, half simply in surprise.
The White Russian Page 27
