The White Russian

by Vanora Bennett

  ‘But I can hardly speak English,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll learn,’ she replied. ‘I’ll teach you more words on the boat.’

  ‘I’m not going to live on your money,’ I said.

  ‘You can’t,’ she agreed. ‘I’ve got some, but not enough to support us both in style forever. We’ll have to do something. We can open a bookshop.’

  ‘I’d be like your orphan, in New York, without friends; I don’t want to be anyone else’s orphan,’ I said.

  ‘Ach, you won’t,’ she said. ‘You’re a great adapter, and anyway you won’t depend on me for long. Your writer buddies will all be leaving here too as soon as they get papers, won’t they? They’ll want someone who’s already settled over there. You’ll have plenty of old friends round you soon enough. And there’ll be new ones too. I think you’ll like mine.’

  When I ran out of objections but still looked doubtful, she smiled. ‘There’s no past where I’m from, Jean,’ she said. ‘Just the future. Take a chance.’

  And I nodded, because – setting my pride aside – of course I didn’t want to be an émigré any more. I never had. I wanted to arrive somewhere for good and have a real life.

  But then I caught my breath, because she was looking up at me in that determined way I’d come to love so dearly. ‘But we’d have to marry for you to get a visa, and you haven’t asked,’ she said, and her smile was a challenge.

  ‘But I don’t want you to think I want to marry you just for papers,’ I said anxiously.

  She took no notice of that, except that her smile broadened.

  Then she stopped walking. I could tell she was waiting.

  We’d walked all the way to the rue du Colisée by then. We were outside number 29, that familiar building with the shuttered ground-floor windows where Father had once been. There was litter swirling in the wind, and a round white street lamp cast imitation moonlight on Evie’s upturned face. Her eyes shone brightly with its glow.

  ‘We choose our families, and I choose you,’ I said, finally knowing that what I was about to do was good, and right, and that Father would have approved. ‘Will you marry me?’

  EPILOGUE

  The American Boy

  Jean

  And so here I was in a new city, on a dark December afternoon, with eddies of snow swirling around me and a brutal wind that wouldn’t have been out of place in Siberia, looking at the black East River as we walked along a road with a number – E 58, E 59? – towards Evie’s family’s house.

  I was nervous about meeting them. I’d spent the time since I’d got here being gawped at like a zoo animal. There was a clumsy kindness in all her friends’ eyes. A whole crowd of bright-eyed innocents had been coming by at all hours to stare at me since we had arrived, two or three days before, in the big but crowded bare-boards apartment above a bakery, somewhere far away in a less intimidatingly rich part of town, where we were staying. (Two girls lived there, Eliza and Dorothy. There was no furniture to speak of, only boxes for tables and a few broken-down chairs and mattresses on the floors. The room they’d put us in was speckled with paint; Evie’s grandmother’s paintings, when they arrived, were going to fit right in.)

  For tonight, Evie had taken me shopping for a Brooks Brothers suit. The shirt had a stiff collar that rubbed. She’d insisted it was proper to wear the astonishingly colourful argyle socks I couldn’t feel sure about. If anything, the dressing up had made me feel even more like an exotic pet animal. I was aware that the family I was about to meet would find my broken English as comical as Evie’s friends clearly did, and might think me a fortune-hunter too. But I was keeping my reservations in check, because, after hearing so much about these people, I was curious.

  It was Evie who looked most nervous, swinging that big bag she insisted on carrying herself, biting her lip.

  Evie

  We were sitting in the familiar bower of orchids and gardenias, on the yellow silk cushions, watching Mother pour out pale tea into near-transparent cups. I’d almost forgotten how big this room was, and how immaculate Florence always kept everything. It didn’t feel half as fussy and suffocating as I’d remembered. It just felt a pleasure to be back, breathing in air scented by those colourless but exotic flowers.

  There was a more robust and cheerful smell in the air today, too, of roasting pumpkin and poultry, reminding me how, after whisking in here with the tray and the petits fours, a shiny-faced Florence had stared approvingly at Jean, grinned at me, and rushed back to the kitchen to go on masterminding the Thanksgiving cooking. Hughie would be along to join us in an hour; the cousins would start appearing later for dinner.

  Meanwhile, here we were, the three of us. So far Mother was coping well with meeting my Russian husband. Perhaps it was just that she knew we’d had to marry for him to get into the country, but to my relief there’d been none of the pursed lips, averted eyes and chill I’d rather feared – not even when I said that his job, for now, would be translating for an émigré association, but that we were looking for a premises in the Village to set up a small bookshop with a Russian section.

  ‘Welcome, welcome,’ Mother kept saying, smiling and smiling and fussing over the cup with her sugar tongs and slivers of lemon before passing it to Jean. His English was still uncertain, so he wasn’t saying much in reply. But he looked back at her, suddenly, with a tenderness I hadn’t expected, and, to be honest, didn’t really like either.

  She glanced up at Jean from under her long eyelashes. She took the second cup of tea for herself. The third stood steaming but forgotten on the tray. It would have been absurd for me to spoil the moment by asking for it to be passed to me.

  Of course I should just have been pleased that Jean and she were getting on so well. But, for a moment, all I did feel was a familiar helpless disappointment. For a moment, I felt too tall, and awkward, and not half pretty enough, again – as much the overgrown child no one quite knew what to do with as I’d ever been.

  But only for a moment. Because once Jean had finished smiling back at her, he turned to me, and gave me a crinkly-eyed half-smile and a faint, but very encouraging, nod, and passed me his cup.

  He didn’t withdraw his hand, either, once I’d taken the tea. He put it lightly on my elbow. And he moved his chair, so he was just a bit closer, and facing just a little more towards me. Relief flooded through me. It felt as transforming as if he’d shouted, ‘I see!’ and ‘I’m here!’ and ‘Don’t forget you’ll always have me!’

  Mother looked briefly puzzled. Then she laughed gaily and said, to him, in her sweetest voice, ‘Oh my! Do please forgive my absentmindedness, I forgot all about the tea; I’m so hopeless these days …’ and passed Jean the neglected third cup.

  She still had eyes only for him. But, with his hand on my arm, it suddenly didn’t matter.

  I leaned forward and kissed her cheek. I suddenly wanted to show her that I’d stopped being the kind of thoughtless young girl who’d just take off overseas on a whim, leaving a provokingly uninformative note on my pillow (though Mother had been surprisingly forgiving about that when I’d first called, as soon as we’d docked, and rather nervously apologized. ‘We did worry, darling; but we hoped – well, we were sure – that you’d know you could tell us if you needed help,’ was all she’d said, in a careful voice, as if she’d taken the trouble beforehand to think out an answer that would absolve me of blame and then committed it to memory. I was grateful at this proof that she’d been trying to understand how we could get on now I was an adult; I wanted to try too). It felt a shock when, from close up, her eyes met mine. ‘It’s lovely to be back, Mother,’ I said. ‘I missed you.’ I thought I saw all kinds of emotions flit across her face – relief, surprise, maybe, and maybe a note of shyness, too. Or perhaps that was just what I was feeling.

  There was so much we’d never be able to say to each other, she and I. I could see that too. Even if she hadn’t found my bookishness and travel whims odd and threateningly unconventional, she was too much of a man’s
woman ever to feel entirely comfortable with another female in the room. But we’d get by.

  I got out the box from the bag I’d put at my feet. It was a capacious old one of Grandmother’s, and the sight of it reminded me of all the other things of Grandmother’s I’d left behind in Paris. I’d given her car and fur coat to Gaston and Marie-Thérèse, and – in private – also got Marie-Thérèse to choose one of the Fabergé trinkets as a keepsake. (I’d been rather relieved when, looking overwhelmed and close to tears, the one the housekeeper had picked out had been the reddish jewelled dog I liked least.)

  My heart started beating faster.

  After the police had taken Plevitskaya away, I’d picked up the broken remains of Grandmother’s now-opened diary. By then, my quest to know her hadn’t seemed that important, compared with everything else happening around us. But I still wanted to know what was in it. Of course, there was nothing much except inconsequential nonsense – recent lists of scrappy pros and cons that we couldn’t understand, often headed, ‘Tell M?’ (‘She must have been very indecisive,’ Jean said drily later, when I showed him.) But there was one more old letter that we hadn’t read, one which must have been tucked inside. Grandmother had clearly never sent it. It was from her, soon after her husband had been killed, addressed to the lover she’d left. She must have written it while on her way home, halfway across the world, from Russia. I could see why she hadn’t sent it, of course. It was too full of pain – a tearful mess of bleak, hopeless phrases from ‘I can’t live without you’ to ‘I’m expecting a baby’.

  Now I caught Jean noticing the little furrowing of Mother’s brow above her wide-set pale eyes – an expression that, I could see, reminded him of his father – and nodding slightly.

  I’d never be able to tell Mother about Jean’s thoughtful voice, saying, ‘Of course, Zhenya is also a girl’s name … Yevgeniya. As you’d say in English, Eugenie.’ Or my small reply: ‘Or Jeannie, for short. My mother’s name.’

  For a moment, after that conversation on a gusty afternoon on deck, I’d forgotten Jean altogether. No wonder Grandmother had been unable to settle at home on her return from Russia, I thought, or love her newborn daughter. It must have felt too painful to bear, to look every day at a small face so like the adult one she couldn’t be with, and to know she’d never be able to tell her secret to the familiar people around her back home. No wonder she’d left the European clinic where they’d sent her to convalesce, and gone off to hide until it was too late, and she’d been locked out forever. But Aunt Mildred hadn’t been altogether wrong to keep her away, either, because her sister’s flightiness and pain must have been very visibly damaging the child she’d left behind. Look at how Mother had grown up, so anxious to lead the conventional life, still playing the cosseted, manipulative, little-girl darling of an older husband. Poor Mother, too – because who wouldn’t do anything to be loved, after being abandoned like that? And then I’d come back down to earth, and put all those thoughts aside, and smiled up at my new husband, who was smiling rather quizzically back at me.

  He was right. I’d never be quite sure enough that I’d understood the past right. There was no way of checking. I couldn’t know for sure which Zhenya Grandmother had had in mind when she scribbled the name on a piece of blotting paper. I could only be grateful that, in Paris, I’d found my future with Jean.

  At least I could, now, see more clearly why Grandmother had loved that poem about the unknown woman. I’d warmed to the yearning of those lines, because I’d thought she might have been thinking about me. But it was just as likely, wasn’t it, that, all along, she’d been thinking of the child she’d run away from and lost?

  So tonight I’d brought along the box of gifts sent to Grandmother, long ago, by her lover. I couldn’t say who Zhenya was. But I wanted Mother to hear that her mother had been thinking of her at the last. I wanted Mother to have her mother’s jewels.

  About the Author

  VANO RA BENNETT is the author of six novels, including Midnight in St. Petersburg and her much-heralded fiction debut, Portrait of an Unknown Woman. She has also written two works of nonfiction.A journalist for many years at Reuters, the Los Angeles Times and The Times (UK), she studied Russian at Oxford and in the USSR, served as the Moscow correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and received a US Overseas Press Club award for her writing on Russia. She lives in London, England.

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  Author’s Note

  Far-fetched though it might seem, the Russianized Paris of the twenties and thirties was very much as I have described it here – plots, kidnappings and all.

  Nearly two hundred thousand White Russians who escaped from Russia after the 1917 Revolution came to live in France. By the late twenties, Paris was the cultural and political centre of the diaspora.

  Paris had Russian-language newspapers, a literary scene, a theatre, schools, night classes, orphanages, an old people’s home or two, a cathedral and many restaurants. Many émigrés were gentlemen ex-officers who’d fought the Reds. Most were now broke. It became a cliché that Paris in the twenties and thirties was full of former grand dukes working as doormen or waiters or in car and yoghurt factories, princesses sewing or modelling for the rag trade and city taxis driven by former White officers. The Union of Russian Cab Drivers had three thousand members just before World War II.

  Paris Russians lived mostly around rue Vaugirard (in the 15th arrondissement), around place des Ternes, rue Daru, rue Pierre-le-Grand, and rue de la Néva (in the 8th and the 17th), and in outlying areas like Issy-les-Moulineaux, Vincennes and Boulogne-Billancourt.

  The exiles had expected (and been expected) to return to Russia when the Bolshevik revolt faded. But, when it didn’t, visible European and American support for the Whites’ plans to overthrow the Reds became covert and then vanished.

  Because the Bolshevik government had stripped the exiles of their citizenship shortly after taking power, the White Russians became stateless persons as soon as France recognized the USSR in 1924. An international commission was formed to give them travel documents called Nansen passports – usually known as ‘nonsense passports’.

  At first the Russians at least got French sympathy. But by the time the Thirties and the Depression came, and there weren’t enough jobs to go around, they’d outstayed their welcome. The sense of loss every Russian lived with festered, in a few, as a hatred of communism so virulent that the opposite extreme of fascism – then taking shape in Germany and Italy and Spain – exerted a pull. For a few, this rage translated into violence. In 1932, a Russian immigrant called Pavel Gorgulev assassinated the French President, Paul Doumer, who, he said, hadn’t done enough for the White Russians.

  In their turn, the Bolsheviks infiltrated White Russian organizations and compromised every political opposition movement. The Russian expatriate community was riven by suspicion and double-dealing. It was impossible to tell who was with you and who was in the pay of the Soviet secret agents from the Cheka, later known as the NKVD (and later still as the KGB). Many figures were lured back into Russia where they were arrested and executed.

  In 1930 a kidnap team from Soviet Moscow snatched and ‘disappeared’ the head of what was left of the White Army, General Kutyopov. He was never seen again.

  His replacement at the White Army successor body, known as ROVS or the Russian General Military Union, was General Yevgeny Karlovich Miller, a White Russian officer of German ancestry.

  On 22 September 1937, ROVS’s intelligence chief Nikolai Skoblin led General Miller to a Paris safe house, where he was to meet with two German Abwehr agents. The agents were not who they appeared to be. They were in fact officers of the Soviet NKVD disguised as Germans. They drugged Miller, placed him in a steamer trunk and smuggled him aboard a Soviet ship in Le Havre.

  However, Miller left behind a note to be opened if he failed to return from the meeting. In it he detailed his suspicions about Sk
oblin.

  French police launched a massive manhunt, but Skoblin could not be found. However, Skoblin’s wife, the gypsy singer Nadezhda Plevitskaya, was arrested, convicted and sentenced by a French court to twenty years in prison. She died behind bars just a couple of years later.

  We now know that Skoblin fled to the Soviet embassy in Paris and was eventually smuggled to Barcelona, where the Second Spanish Republic refused to extradite him to France. After that the trail goes dead.

  We have also learned since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 that the NKVD successfully smuggled General Miller back to Moscow, where he was tortured and summarily shot nineteen months after the kidnapping, on 11 May 1939. According to General Pavel Sudoplatov, who proudly described the whole kidnap plot on Russian TV decades later, ‘His kidnapping was a cause célèbre. Eliminating him disrupted his organization of Tsarist officers and effectively prevented them from collaborating with the Germans against us.’ Copies of letters written by Miller while he was imprisoned in Moscow are in the Dimitri Volkogonov papers at America’s Library of Congress.

  I’ve always been fascinated by this wistful, desperate, shifting, duplicitous world-within-a-world (which more or less vanished soon after the time of my book, as the Second World War prompted many Paris Russians to carry on west to the USA).

  Of course, as a student of Russian, I read about these waifs and strays in the literature they wrote. Famously, Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita features a Colonel Taxovich, a stocky, platitudinous White Russian who’s been reduced – of course – to driving a taxi and has become infatuated with the narrator Humbert Humbert’s first wife.

  Nabokov himself lived in Paris from 1931, after Berlin, where he had initially taken refuge in the wake of the Revolution, became too dangerous for him and his Jewish wife. He is a rich source of amusing stories about émigré life (I reference his pen name, Sirin, in my story, as a bit of an hommage. The first short story Nabokov ever wrote in the English language was a mocking feuilleton about the General Miller of this book).