by Lesley Lokko
‘Talbiya. Oh, the name’s changed. It’s Komemiyut now. Such a beautiful neighbourhood. I still remember the first time we went there—’
‘We?’
‘Lionel and I. And Georges, of course. Dear, dear Georges.’
Rebecca struggled to keep up. Aunt Bettina’s conversations could go anywhere, she’d noticed, a by-product of her advancing years. She jumped from topic to topic, wholly lucid, but often with enormous gaps in between and the assumption that Rebecca could simply keep up. ‘Who’s George?’
‘Georges Haddad. He was a friend of your Great Uncle Paul as well as Lionel’s. You won’t remember him, I shouldn’t think. He was already ninety when you were born. They lived long, those Harburg boys. Like me,’ Aunt Bettina gave one of her great, whooping cackles, followed by a coughing fit.
Rebecca struggled to place it all. ‘You said I knew Tariq?’
Aunt Bettina nodded. ‘Yes, yes. You used to play with him and his sister, Maryam. The three of you were very close, practically inseparable. It was dreadful when she died, just dreadful.’ Aunt Bettina’s voice grew soft and her hands began working against each other in distress.
Rebecca’s eyes grew wide. Why didn’t she remember any of it? ‘Wh-what happened to her?’
‘Leukaemia. Poor little thing, she was so sickly, so sickly. Lionel took her to New York, of course, but there was nothing they could do. She was buried here, right here in Jerusalem, in the garden at Talbiya. That’s why Tariq fought so hard to get the house back.’
‘Why don’t I remember any of this?’ Rebecca asked, suddenly feeling her throat tighten.
Aunt Bettina shrugged. ‘You were so little. And when Maryam died . . . well, well, who knows what goes on inside the heads of children? I certainly don’t,’ she sniffed. She stubbed out her cigarette and picked up the little silver bell to summon the woman who looked after her. A distracted frown suddenly appeared between her brows. Her face changed, becoming vague. ‘Where . . . where . . . ?’ Her hands moved about, as though she were trying to find something.
‘What is it, Aunt Bettina? What are you looking for?’ Rebecca asked her gently.
‘The photographs. My album. It was just here. I was looking at it before you came. Where did I put it? Nadine?’ She called for the middle-aged woman who’d been her companion for almost a decade.
‘What’s the matter, Safta?’ Nadine bustled into the room. ‘What’ve you lost this time?’
‘The photo album. The one I wanted to show her, remember? We had it out this morning. We were looking at it together, but I’ve gone and lost it.’ In her face there was a barely suppressed kind of anxiety that Rebecca understood had little to do with the missing photo album. It was to do with the recollection of a past that was fast slipping away from her. She felt her heart contract sympathetically. She knew just how she felt. Aunt Bettina had just opened a door onto a past she knew nothing about yet had clearly participated in. The yearning to know more was overwhelming.
‘Here it is. We put it away together, Safta, don’t you remember?’ Nadine bent down and pulled open one of the drawers of the elegant mahogany console that stood to one side of her aunt’s chair. Safta meant ‘grandmother’ in Hebrew, Rebecca knew. It was a touching mark of respect for someone who’d never even been a mother. ‘Here you are. Look. It’s not lost.’
Aunt Bettina’s face settled happily again. She took the album from Nadine with trembling hands. ‘Here you are, my lovely. Have a look through it. I’m going for my afternoon rest. Will you be here when I wake up?’
Rebecca shook her head. ‘I don’t think so, Aunt Bettina. Mama’s coming with the twins . . . they’ll be here any minute now. Are you sure you won’t wait to see them?’
Aunt Bettina waved a languid hand as Nadine helped her from her chair. ‘No, no, my dear. They’ll only wear me out. Put the album back in the drawer, there’s a dear. Don’t want it to get lost.’ She turned, holding onto Nadine with one hand and her silver-tipped cane with the other, a bent but elegant figure in her long, cream silk dress, low-heeled patent court shoes and, as ever, the triple string of pearls around her neck that she’d worn for as long as Rebecca could remember. She watched the pair make their way slowly out of the room, then she opened the album on her lap.
The first few pages, separated by delicate, wafer-thin crinkled paper, were unremarkable; the yellowed, sepia-tinged photographs with their clipped white corners were replicas of hundreds of photographs that lay in drawers in the library at home. She turned the pages slowly. Lionel as a young man, muscular, finely turned legs in shorts, a woollen jumper and a scarf at his neck; Lionel in a suit, surrounded by other similarly dressed men – her uncles, she supposed. There were others she didn’t recognise but whose demeanour and clothing were of that age and time. There was a particularly fetching photograph of Embeth, shyly looking up at the camera from beneath the brim of a hat. She smiled to herself. There were photos of her as a baby, then as a little girl. She peered at them curiously. There were a few of her and cousin Adam, Rebecca looking determinedly at the camera, not smiling, not frowning. She recognised the face as the one she wore even now. She lifted the page, still smiling to herself and then she stopped, frowning. There it was, just as Aunt Bettina had said. A photograph of four children: herself, aged two or three at the most, a girl of perhaps four, then Adam, his arm round the shoulders of a younger boy with the beautiful, solemn face of the man she’d spoken to the night before. Right in front of her, looking at her from a distance of nearly forty years, was the face of Tariq Malouf.
92
TASH
Moscow
Tash stepped out of the cab and looked around her with a sinking heart. Behind her, Lyudmila was arguing with the taxi driver. Tash’s head hurt. Her eyes hurt. Her tongue hurt. It had been so long since she’d spoken Russian on an ongoing, continuous basis, that in the forty-eight hours they’d been in Russia, the muscles in her tongue and throat had started to ache. For the past hour or so, she’d fallen almost completely silent. Lyudmila, on the other hand, hadn’t stopped talking since they left London, two days earlier. Her happiness knew no bounds. It all started at Terminal Five. One of the ground staff recognised Tash as she and Lyudmila checked in for their flight to Sheremetyevo – first class, of course – and it had taken all of Lyudmila’s self-control not to swoon with delight.
‘Imagine! She know you . . . imagine that, Dushen’ka! We famous!’
We are famous, Tash corrected her silently, out of old habit. ‘So what’re you famous for?’ she asked Lyudmila mildly.
‘Me?’ Lyudmila’s blue eyes grew wide. ‘I your mother. Is stupid question.’
Tash declined to answer. She turned away, hiding her smile. If the truth were told, she loved every minute of it herself. Not the being recognised bit – she couldn’t have cared less about that. But she hugely enjoyed seeing Lyudmila clearly relishing every precious moment – from the chauffeur-driven BMW that picked her up to the specially reserved check-in counters for first-class passengers at Terminal Five, to the champagne-and-canapés and all the inflight magazines, free wash-bags and anything else that the BA staff could do to make their journey more pleasant, more comfortable, more relaxing. Lyudmila’s eyes practically misted over when the flight attendant brought her that morning’s copy of Pravda. ‘Spasibo,’ she murmured calmly, looking for all the world as if flying first class to Moscow were an everyday occurrence.
‘You’re welcome,’ the attendant smiled prettily at her. ‘Anything else I can get you, Mrs Bryce-Brudenell?’ It was only one of a handful of times that Lyudmila had been called ‘Mrs Bryce-Brudenell’ and it was enough to make her glow with radioactive warmth. Tash bit the inside of her lip to stop herself grinning.
But she wasn’t grinning now. She turned to look up at the block of flats Lyudmila was pointing to, squinting against the fierce, hot sun – no one had told her Moscow would be boiling in July – and hoped the dismay she felt didn’t show on her face. She’d never m
et her grandparents – on either side – and the thought of spending a week with two elderly strangers in a flat that looked like something out of Blade Runner (in a bad, run-down sort of way) was daunting, to say the least. At least their first two nights in Moscow had been spent in considerable style: a suite at the Ritz-Carlton, overlooking the Kremlin and right next to Red Square. Lyudmila had been unable to sleep, of course, and together they’d emptied the contents of the minibar – hence her splitting headache and hangover.
‘That one,’ Lyudmila pointed upwards. ‘Da, that one.’
Which one? They all looked the damned same. ‘How can you tell, Ma?’
Lyudmila shrugged. ‘Never forget.’
There wasn’t a whole lot you could say to that. If she’d grown up in a tower block like this one, she thought to herself grimly, she’d never forget it either. She watched her mother reluctantly peel off a pile of roubles to give to the scowling taxi driver. It was impossible for Lyudmila not to argue over price – it was in her blood, just as it was in Tash’s, though in her case, Tash preferred to think of it as business acumen rather than a tendency to haggle. ‘Ready?’ she asked her.
‘Da.’ Lyudmila belted the Dior dress Tash had bought her especially for the trip and pulled her Gucci sunglasses back down over her eyes. The gift wasn’t quite as altruistic as it sounded, she’d confided to Annick the night before they left. ‘It’s either that or some ghastly pink meringue. Trust me, I’m not about to show up in front of grandparents I’ve never seen with Ma in frilly pink; I’ll tell you that for free.’
‘Are you nervous?’ was Annick’s only – and strange – comment.
‘Nervous? Why on earth would I be nervous?’
‘Well, they’re your grandparents. They’re flesh and blood.’
‘So?’
‘So I’d be nervous.’
For once a ready quip failed to come to mind. ‘Well, I’m not,’ was just about all she could manage. The truth was, of course, that she was nervous. There’d never been anyone except her and Lyudmila. The whole concept of ‘family’ was a shaky one to her. She’d often wondered why Lyudmila had gone to the trouble of naming her ‘Bryce-Brudenell’ and not ‘Gordiskaya’. After all, it didn’t make sense to carry the name of a man who’d never seen her and clearly didn’t want to. Lyudmila was at first curiously vague on the subject. ‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘Is good name.’
‘But he doesn’t care about me. Does he even know I exist?’ She was thirteen at the time, a year or two before she’d made that fateful trip to Edinburgh, which Lyudmila still didn’t know about. Tash would never tell her, either.
‘Of course he knows. Why you think he give money?’
‘Not enough, clearly,’ Tash grumbled.
Lyudmila rounded on her. She held Tash by the shoulders, probably the last time she’d been able to, and forced her to look at her.
‘Listen to me, you, neblagodarnaya. Is better you have his name. Gordiskaya name is curse here. You want everyone think you some poor Russian girl with no money, no education, no brain? No! Better you have his name. You can be nice English girl; no one knows anything. Is all I ask from him. Give you little money, give you name. Now stop ask me questions about him, okay?’
Tash was too surprised to do anything other than nod.
And of course, Lyudmila was right. Bryce-Brudenell had proved to be an advantage. A double-barrelled name, an alumnus of St Benedict’s and a million-pound business under her belt? No one would ever accuse her of being a mail-order bride.
She looked up at the building Lyudmila had pointed out. In a few moments, she was about to meet the owners of the disembodied voices she’d occasionally heard down the telephone line when she could be persuaded to speak to them. When she was very young and Lyudmila had managed to place a call through the international operator to the Soviet Union, she’d have to be dragged to the phone. She hated the tears and the cries of ‘vnuchka, vnuchka!’, ‘granddaughter, granddaughter!’ and Lyudmila’s tears and dark moods that lasted for days afterwards. Later, the calls were made the other way round. There’d be a hesitant request for something – money, clothing, medicines – and then Lyudmila’s sulks, as she’d have to economise in order to send whatever it was they’d asked for. But somewhere in the past couple of years, things had changed. Now, Tash knew, Lyudmila often sent them whatever money Tash had just given her. It was one way for Lyudmila to show how proud she was – and of course, Lyudmila just loved to show off. Standing on the pavement next to them were four gigantic suitcases stuffed with clothes, gifts, food, jewellery, medicines, electrical goods. Everything Lyudmila could think of. She’d only recently learned how to shop online and could barely tear herself away from the laptop Tash had bought her. It sat on the table beside her bed, night after night, its little white apple glowing in the dark in the same way the television screen across the room flickered silently all night. In the days before their departure for Moscow, she could hardly contain her excitement. ‘Look, dushen’ka . . . is cute, no? For Mama.’ Tash would squint at the screen and nod.
‘But why don’t you get her something from us?’ she asked once. ‘Something that’ll last. I’m not sure about those jumpers, you know.’
Lyudmila scowled at her. ‘You crazy? Look. Shirt for four pounds. Nothing in your shop for four pounds.’
Tash sighed. There was little point explaining to Lyudmila that a) [email protected] wasn’t a shop and b) a jumper for four pounds would fall apart after the first wash. She bit her tongue.
And now here they were, on a Krylatskoe sidewalk in the middle of an absolutely baking July morning with four of the biggest Samsonite suitcases that Selfridges stocked, overflowing with jumpers for a tenner.
It took a good half an hour for the fuss generated by their visit to die down. As soon as one set of neighbours departed, the women in tears of joy, the men scratching their heads in baffled pride, a fresh group rolled in.
Tash sat in the middle, at once the centre of attention and yet peripheral to the celebrations. Lyudmila, resplendent in Dior, her freshly coloured blonde hair cascading down her leather-clad back, beautiful just-manicured red nails clutching her third glass of vodka, reigned supreme. It was a performance worthy of an Oscar, three Golden Globes, a Grammy or an Emmy and a handful of whatever else might be going. Tears, laughter, screams, songs, more tears, more songs, the works. Everyone in Krylatskoe who knew her (or who’d once said ‘hello’ to her nearly forty years ago) showed up to pay homage, sneak a kiss or even just a peek. She was in her element. Tash, whom everyone gazed at the way they might have gazed at a giraffe, sat calmly in the middle of it all, sipping her own vodka (her fourth), bemused and amused by the fuss, secretly praying their attention wouldn’t turn to her. Her grandfather, Vladimir, almost totally deaf, sat in the corner of the room by the window, his face opening and closing in confusion and sporadic recollection. Alzheimer’s, Lyudmila whispered. Elsa, her grandmother, shouted out to him at intervals when it became clear he’d lost the plot, ‘That’s Tash, our granddaughter. Míla’s child. You remember Míla?’
He looked from Elsa to Tash. ‘Who is that?’ he asked, pointing at Lyudmila. Elsa began to explain but he dismissed her, and with a look of crafty collusion, leaned towards Tash. ‘Who is she? What’s she doing here?’
Elsa bustled over, adjusting the blankets over his knees, fussing with his cardigan. ‘It’s Míla, Vladimir. Míla. And that’s her daughter. Your granddaughter, glupets.’ Silly man. It was said affectionately.
The old man must have recognised something in her tone for he smiled, a wide, toothless grin. His hand went up to his mouth and he pressed it, saying angrily to his wife, ‘Why haven’t I got my teeth in? Where are my teeth?’
Elsa sighed. ‘Your gums were sore this morning, Vladimir, don’t you remember? No, wait . . . I’ll go and get them. But I want to put some of that gel on first . . . no? All right, I’m coming, I’m coming.’ Her grandmother got up heavily and went to fetch his false teeth. He grabbe
d them from her and then concentrated carefully on the plates, deciding which was which. He inserted them slowly, his mouth masticating as though chewing on some long-forgotten piece of food. Finally it was done. His voice, when it came, was different; higher-pitched and more controlled. It seemed to Tash to be the voice of a puppet, speaking in a language and at a pitch no one fully understood. No one paid him much attention anyhow; their squeals and exclamations of delight were directed at the three open suitcases on the crowded sitting-room floor. Like a demented creature in a cartoon strip, Lyudmila dived in, pulling out gifts, one after the other. Friends and neighbours stood around, arms folded across their chests as though holding in their hearts and comments, watching enviously as Elsa disappeared under the mountain of clothing, shoes, perfumes and toiletries, the likes of which she’d clearly never seen before and certainly never in such industrial quantities.
Tash got up from her seat in the middle of the room and walked to the window. She looked down at the playground, six storeys below. The ten-storey apartments stretched on for a kilometre or more, indistinguishable from each other. It was hard to think of Lyudmila growing up here, one blonde schoolgirl amongst so many others, but in some ways, it made many of her idiosyncrasies – so utterly inexplicable to an English teenager – understandable, in an odd way. One of the neighbours had let it drop that the apartments in Krylatskoe were still heated for free, thank God. No wonder Lyudmila always left the lights on or the heating turned up. Someone else commented on the government’s plans to start charging for prescriptions. Again, little wonder Lyudmila was a hypochondriac. She was used to free medical treatment, free dental treatment, free heating and light. The Soviet Union wasn’t quite the bleak wasteland of underachievement, shortages and ruin she’d made it out to be. Tash saw now that for all their material deprivation, there was a closeness and warmth that existed between these people who’d lived cheek-by-jowl through some of the biggest upheavals of the twenty-first century. They’d emerged from it all with their humour and generosity intact, their humanity untouched and unharmed. She swallowed hard. It was light years away from London and the life she knew to be hers.
