The Eleventh Year (5 page)

The following year a second son came. He did not look like her, as Alex did, nor did he look like anyone in Robert-Achille's family. He was plump and strong and bold-featured, and his hair was glossy and richly brown. She named him Paul, a name that suited him by its shining brevity. Adrien de Varenne watched this new grandson carefully. He seemed almost British in his appearance, a small Lord Fauntleroy.

Charlotte said nothing, but at Maxim's and in Montmartre, others talked. And everyone remembered that the Prince of Wales, Bertie, had made a sojourn to Paris and had resided on Avenue Foch, only a mile away from the Varenne mansion. Had he come alone, or with a friend? No one could quite recall. Charlotte, wise woman, let the rumor run its course. If she ever cared about Paul, her conscience could rest assured of her utmost selectivity in the matter of her lovers. Perhaps she should have felt more guilty toward Alex: For, after all, she had handed down through her own body the seed of the repulsive Robert-Achille.

It was obvious to everyone that Charlotte de Varenne cared only for herself. Her children were a nuisance, but it was unbecoming of a lady to admit this to her friends. And so, in front of society, she paraded the little boys, impeccably dressed and coiffed, and made motherly noises. They were beautiful children: Alex, tall and quiet, resembled her, and Paul was a plump, rosy, happy boy. The fact that she had produced such comely offspring was an asset to be displayed at the right moments, like precious but bothersome accouterments worn to enhance her beauty.

From the beginning the boys reacted differently to their mother. Her temper tantrums with the servants flared up almost daily. Alex would watch her from his crib, where he was tentatively attempting to stand up and appraise the world around him. Screams were physically painful to him. He was a sensitive child, aware of changes in smells from the kitchen, in voices when nurses quit and were replaced. Paul, on the other hand, made a great deal of noise himself, banging on doors and tables, trying to imitate, with ferocious glee, the shouts and screams that emanated from his mother. He did it to be like her, because she was beautiful; he also did it because from the first moment, he realized how much such behavior offended his brother. And although Charlotte bestowed her few kisses on him rather than Alex, Paul nevertheless wished that the latter would disappear and leave him alone with his mother. Their father was such a nonentity that even as babies they both ignored him.

Alexandre admired his grandfather, and was sad for the first time when Adrien died. But amid the mourning he was aware of a certain contentment. For, as in all French families of high lineage, with the old man's death his title would be passed on to his son. Count Robert-Achille became a Marquis. Alex himself went up a rung, from viscount to count, and his little brother, from baron to viscount. Charlotte was delighted to become a Marquise, but irritated that it was her elder son who was entitled to the more important level of nobility. But for little Alex, who was five, the ceremony was imprinted on his overdeveloped conscience. If he was now a count, he would one day rise to be a Marquis. And the family name would rest on his shoulders, as a mantel of responsibility. He was a child who was careful never to spill a drop, never to forget to put away his toys. This way his mother—so beautiful, and so impossible to please!—might perhaps remember him when it was time for the good-night kiss. But so often, no matter how hard he tried, she forgot nevertheless.

On the night after the burial of Adrien de Varenne, little Alex came up to his mother, alone in her boudoir, and said seriously: “Now that I am a count, Mama, I'll take good care of you.” She smiled, unexpectedly. He would remember that smile during all of his adolescence. She, that angel with the black hair and scintillating blue eyes, she whom all men bent over in their haste to kiss her jeweled hand, had smiled at him, Alex, the one she didn't love. Then, maybe, after all, there was a small reserve of affection somewhere in her heart. The key to producing it seemed to be to take care of her. He would make sure to do that. He would make sure to honor her, to guard her, as God had told him in his sacred commandment. For he believed that God was watching him at every point and was recording his doings in a neat ledger. He would do good things, so that God would reward him with one of Charlotte's kisses.

When he was six, a good thing happened, although for years to come he was not able to remember why. His father had been away on a hunting expedition and the governess had been ill with influenza, in a separate wing of the house. A sudden storm had broken out, and Alex was rudely awakened. Paul was still sleeping, impervious to the thunder and lightning, as he always was to any great noise. But Alex felt tremors passing through his small body, and even though big boys who had started school were not supposed to cry, the tears sprang to his eyes, and he jumped out of bed, his heart pounding.

No one was there. He began to panic and to sob. In his bare feet he padded out of the nursery. Mademoiselle—the current one—was ill, he remembered. He rushed out into the corridor and was even more scared by the lighted oil paintings of his forefathers. All at once he stopped, hearing laughter. The low, gentle laughter of a woman. His mother? But Mama never laughed, not with him and Paul, and around her friends her laugh was a brittle laugh, as she hid half her face behind an antique fan. This laughter was so attractive, so charming, that Alex wanted to be part of it, wanted to see who was laughing so generously, so merrily. He walked on tiptoe to a closed door and stopped. The laughter came from behind that door.

Dare he enter? Suppose his mother found out? Yet he was only six, and the mystery was too appealing to be left alone. He tried to turn the knob, but it resisted. Silence replaced the laughter, and now the old fear took possession of the small boy. A voice that was hard and shrill, his mother's voice, said: “Who's there? What is it?”

“It's me, Alexandre,” he replied, starting again to sob. He was bewildered. The laughter and his mother were together in that room. Yet the one could not possibly belong to the other. And now he would be caught, and punished. The door swung open, and the child fell back, stunned. An elegant gentleman was leaning out, peering at him. Alexandre didn't think he'd ever seen him before.

The man, unlike his father, was tall and smart, with shining brown hair and a fine face with twinkling eyes. “Well, young one,” he declared, “what seems to be the problem?”

The gentleman was wearing a silk kimono open around his chest. Behind him Alex could see his mother, in her nightgown, pink satin trimmed with lace. The gentleman was holding a brandy snifter in one hand and the door with the other. He was smiling. Yet Alex was terrified.

“I—I was scared,” he stammered. “The storm woke me up—”

“Send him back, for God's sake, Bertrand,” Charlotte was

saying with annoyance. “Can't you see the little fool's a coward?”

But the man's eyes were gentle on Alex, who was shrinking away from his mother's voice. He said, looking only at the child: “I myself used to be afraid of lightning when I was small. And nobody has ever dared to call
me
a coward. Come in, young man.”

“Are you out of your mind, Bertrand?” Charlotte screamed, rising in a fury.

The gentleman placed a protective hand over Alex's head and looked directly into Charlotte's angry blue eyes. He said: “I'm sorry, darling, but I don't like the thought of frightened children. He can come to bed with us for a while, until the worst of the storm is over.”

Alexandre was flabbergasted. This was such a nice, friendly man, and even his mother wasn't yelling anymore. She didn't want to argue with the nice man, was perhaps afraid her tantrums would send him away. And he
was
such a nice, handsome man that Alex could well understand her. He too wanted him to stay in the house.

And so, for two hours, little Alexandre was permitted to lie beneath the satin sheets and the great quilt, and the gentleman held him close. Alex's mother remained quiet. The child wished that she too would hold him, but this was the nicest thing that had ever happened to him in his entire life. He wanted to remain there all night, breathing his mother's perfume and the scent of the brandy and cigar on the gentleman's breath.

Later, when he was nine years old, he was leaving the Lycée Condorcet, when he saw that same gentleman again, riding across the avenue on a fine black stallion, a gold-studded riding crop in his hand. The current governess was not a mademoiselle, but a German fräulein, and Alex, tugging at her sleeve, said to her: “Who is he? I know him!”

“Yes, who is he, who is he?” Paul took up as a refrain. “He looks like the King of England!”

The governess laughed. “No, he's not British,” she answered. “He's a friend of your parents, I believe. All of Paris knows him. He collects beautiful paintings, and they say his apartments are a thing of wonder. His name is the Chevalier Bertrand de la Paume. I've never actually met him, but—”

“
I
have!” Alex suddenly cried, the blood rushing to his cheeks. “When I was little,” he broke out excitedly, his eyes shining like Charlotte's, “he took me into bed with him and my mama!”

All color drained from Fräulein's face, and at once Alex realized that he had committed a grave error. He didn't understand what he had said that was so wrong, but knew only that it was an irreparable gaffe. Fräulein was bending down, taking his shoulders in her firm hands and whispering, “Alexandre, you must never, never repeat this story. To anyone, do you hear? The honor of your family is at stake. Your mother's—your father's!”

“What has any of this to do with Father?” Alex asked.

“Everything!” Fräulein retorted, and now her cheeks were bright red. She hustled the children along and refused to exchange another word on the subject. Alex felt deeply ashamed. Somehow he had threatened the honor of his mother—and he had promised her, and God, that he would always take care of her. What had he done?

From that moment on Alexandre was careful never to talk before he'd thought everything through. He saw the gentleman again, but never dared to look him in the eye. He knew, somehow, that this man, whom he had thought so kind and friendly, was in reality a danger to his mother, to his whole family. Later Alex grew to hate the Chevalier de la Paume, who had brought such pleasant laughter to his mother. He grew to hate him and also to be a little afraid to talk openly to anyone about anything. If the family could be hurt through one innocent phrase….

As he entered adulthood and the pieces of the puzzle became clear to him, he became afraid to look at his mother, for what she had done had been very wrong, a cardinal sin. But still, she was his mother, and try as he might, he could not abandon her.

A short time later, in 1902, it was eleven-year-old Paul who stumbled into Robert-Achille's study and found him dead, his head bleeding upon the desk, the blood seeping into the Aubusson carpet. It was Paul who stood clutching the wall, vomiting; it was Paul whom everyone pitied for years to come, who described the revolver on the desk, who saw the letter but could not read it for the blood. Charlotte read it. While the scandal erupted, she wore black and kept her eyes downcast. Robert-Achille's suicide was a mystery to no one, least of all to his elder son.

The family honor was at stake, centuries of Varenne blood, spilled now so wretchedly, yet once spilled in the great cause of the Christian Crusades. Adrien had died, and Robert-Achille was better off dead. Now the only Marquis de Varenne was a twelve-year-old boy called Alexandre.

As for Charlotte, she had new calling cards printed, which read: “Marquise de Varenne.” As a widow she no longer needed her husband's first names as marks of identification. She shed them gracefully, as easily as she shed her widow's weeds the following year. Of that fact, some men were sorry, for never before had a woman shown such elegance in mourning. But Charlotte was at last free, and rich in her own right.

S
he was tall
, statuesque like Minerva, with thick black hair that fell straight down her back, uncurled by the Marcel wave. Her high white brow, her full lips over strong white teeth, the prominent cheekbones tinged with red from the Siberian cold, all were characteristics of a Tatar maiden, willing to take all risks and laugh defeat in the face. Or so people said in the small Siberian village when first they laid eyes upon Princess Elena Sergeievna Egorova. She was nineteen years old, and it was 1909.

It had not always been this way. Tears of anger burned on the edge of her eyelids when she remembered the Nevsky Prospect, the balls, the Mariinsky and Alexandrinsky theaters: St. Petersburg. She, the only daughter of Prince Sergei Egorov, had been treated like a young queen then. He was the chief aide and confidant to Peter Stolypin. In 1904 Stolypin had been Minister of the Interior, but in ‘06 the tsar, Nicholas II, had appointed him premier. Prince Sergei had been his closest friend and associate. Elena could recall so well every article in the study where the two men would confer, and where she alone was allowed to enter, bearing the tea tray. She listened, and she never forgot. She had been, even then, a young woman of rare mettle.

Elena had gone to Paris with her family for a visit, to add to her wardrobe for the coming winter season. At eighteen, she had recently made her debut in the elegant society of the Russian capital and had been ready to conquer the Parisian capital too, much to the distress of her paid companion, Fräulein Borchner. Elena was so much taller, so much more striking than other girls her age, and when men turned around in the street to watch her, she would smile widely and tilt her head charmingly to one side. It was deliciously brazen. She was easily bored, courtly life became dull after a few dances. She wished, more than anything, that she'd been born a man. How she envied her father! He played with continents and moved soldiers around the map like pawns on a chessboard. But she'd been born a woman, and a beautiful one at that. And so she thought: Let them love me. Let them work for me without knowing they are.

Upon their return to St. Petersburg, the Egorovs were informed that revolutionary anarchists had set a bomb to Stolypin's villa on the suburban isle of Elaghin. All had perished, but their friend had not been in his home. Elena's mother, the fragile Princess Ekaterina, wanted to leave the country for good. The prince hesitated, profoundly shaken. Elena convinced them to stay. She cried out, her eyes wide with outraged pride: “We are Russians! We cannot also be cowards!”

But the bomb had been merely the beginning. It was followed by a series of unexpected government shakeups, and then, all at once—disaster. Her father was seized in the middle of the night and thrown into the Fortress of Peter and Paul, the strictest of all Russian prisons. Suddenly the telephone no longer rang. Elena was not invited to cotillions, she was snubbed in the street. “High treason!” people whispered. Elena heard everything, yet kept her elegant head high. She was angry and she was humiliated. Most of all she did not understand. Stolypin no longer came to the beautiful palace where Prince Egorov lived, not far from the tsar's own Winter Palace. Stolypin refused to save his dearest friend, and Elena realized they had been betrayed.

In winter there came the official judgment. Prince Sergei Egorov was condemned to exile in Siberia for having revealed matters of state of the most secret kind. Elena stood in the courtroom and wanted to scream. She did not, but her eyes revealed her anger and her pain. She said nothing, but gripped her mother's cold fingers in her own and vowed that never again would anybody get the better of an Egorov. Never again.
She
would bleed
them,
all of them. Their friends had deserted them. The three young men who had proposed marriage to her had announced their engagements to three other young beauties of St. Petersburg. No one would ever slap the face of Elena Egorova again: She would see to that.

She was pleased then with her resiliency. Had her little brother survived the spinal meningitis that had felled him ten years before, she was certain that he would have been weaker, like her parents. Prince Sergei was broken. And the princess took to her little house and became a recluse, prostrate in her degradation. They'd been sent to Minusinsk, a miserable village near Krasnoyarsk, in eastern Siberia. The two princesses had never handled physical work before. Now they hired a young peasant girl to clean the rooms and cook. But the first time that Liza served them a chicken, she boiled it without removing either its organs or its feathers. Elena saw the horror on her mother's face and the disgust on her father's. She knew what they were thinking, but she refused to give into the temptation of “going back.” The only way they would survive would be to grasp strongly onto the present: They were still alive. The tsar might have condemned Prince Sergei to death. So Elena took an empty plate and used it for discarding the feathers. She carved the bird, dug out the gizzard and entrails, and deftly stuffed them behind the feathers so as not to turn her mother's stomach. Quickly she sailed into the kitchen and showed an astounded housemaid what one did with such unwanted materials, and then she returned, triumphant. “I'm starved,” she announced. And she began to cut into her meat. Her parents remained staring, openmouthed. But Elena knew that one ate to survive, especially in the depths of Siberia where water crystallized into shards of ice as a person washed his face.

The prince was soon playing cards with the mayor, the pharmacist, and the teacher. But Elena and her mother embroidered silently in their house. Sometimes the young woman went for a long walk. In wintertime the snow was so thick that it almost prevented one from going outside. The cold was intense, but the sky was blue, the sun shone, though without heat. Yet there was absolutely no wind and so one could brave the low temperatures more easily. Elena found the houses overheated. In the spring the village became a muddy cesspool with puddles. Summer, however, turned the country into a fairyland for four months. The peasants tilled and sowed, the wheat grew and matured, and there was time to reap and make hay twice before autumn came. The wind caressed the steppe, bearing its scents of sweetness. It was dotted with a multitude of diverse flowers, bursting with color, often overpowering in their perfume. Besides the daisies, goldenrod, and red, white, yellow, orange, pink, and blue flowers unknown to the rest of the European continent, there were wild lilies and gentians. Elena escaped from her mother's hermitage by exploring the surrounding nature. She was not searching for God but for a way out.

After a year the prince's situation improved. He was transferred to Krasnoyarsk. It was a true city. As with all the rivers of Russia, the eastern bank of the Yenisey was flat, while its west was a high cliff. Sharp rocks fell into the water, scarlet and green rocks, for these were mountains of porphyry and malachite.

But, as with most provincial Russian cities, the sidewalks were made of wood, the houses had only a single story, and there was neither electricity nor a sewage system. There were schools, however, and literary clubs, a theater, artistic circles, and a piano in almost every home. Mail arrived daily, the public library was well furnished, and several nations had sent their consuls to this Siberian city. For the prince, this meant a greater intellectual life; for the princess, an ability to socialize if not with her peers, then at least with women who knew some of the ways of the world. But for Elena, this represented only a continuation, an underscoring of the injustice that had been levied against her family. Krasnoyarsk might have been more bearable physically; but emotionally it was no different from the village of Minusinsk. She was twenty years old, and her old friends were all making brilliant marriages in the capital; she was vegetating in Siberia.

When Elena was twenty-four, the war broke out. In the remote parts of Siberia, it was hardly felt. She watched her father as he rather pompously “broke off” relations with the Prussian consul. Prince Sergei fundamentally still felt a part of his country's government. Elena's heart constricted for him—but she also had begun to despise him. She thought: I must get out of here.

She was surprised that she felt no pain from her decision. She sensed relief, even exhilaration at the notion of change—but not the hurt of previous times, when she had felt herself growing detached from her parents. She was a woman now, and on her own. There could be no last-minute hesitation—she'd have to leave Krasnoyarsk for good. The only unresolved issue was how to accomplish this? For she possessed no assets but her striking looks, and no talents but her will to survive.

One day she was passing the time in a small teahouse on the edge of town, when the thick outer door swung open and gay voices filtered through the tearoom. Elena looked up, gasped, and looked again. Two pretty women in their thirties, wrapped in furs, were shaking the snow from their coats, fluffing their hair under their elegant toque hats and sitting down at a small table toward the front. Elena was mesmerized. These women, with their bright faces, the diamond pendants on their ears, didn't belong in Krasnoyarsk, let alone in this godforsaken teahouse. They were from St. Petersburg, or Moscow, or, at the very least, Kiev. Elena wanted to be with them, to breathe their French perfume, to hear what it was like in the city that they had obviously so recently left. Unable to resist, she stood and moved across the room toward the women.

And then Elena was near them, speaking to them, her voice trembling slightly. “I am Princess Elena Sergeievna Egorova,” she said to them, conscious of the tilt of her head as she pronounced the noble name and of how she herself, with her marvelous black hair loose over her shoulders, contrasted with the outdated seal pelisse that she was still wearing—a remnant of better days. She could taste the salt of her own bitterness but also the excitement of having found these women, who belonged to that past, perhaps.

The younger one had lovely brown eyes, soft brown hair and fair skin. The two resembled one another, but the other woman, whose nose was a tiny bit larger, had skin that was darker, more sultry. It was she who looked up first, who smiled, whose face mirrored the apparent pleasure of this aristocratic introduction. She replied in a gentle voice: “We are the Adlers—Evgenia Borisovna, my sister; and I am Fania. We're from Moscow—you may have recognized it by our accent.”

The other said: “Please, sit down and join us for a glass of tea. Do you live here?”

The intense humiliation with which Elena had learned to exist, returned in a flood. She cleared her throat, swallowed back tears of remembrances. “Yes,” she answered.

“You're very beautiful,” Fania commented frankly. “Like a rare painting. Our father had a most wondrous collection at home. There was a French painter whom he had discovered in Paris, drinking himself to death—Modigliani, was it, Genia?”

“I believe so. Modi-something. But you are embarrassing the princess, Fanny.”

“No, please. It was a great compliment. I haven't been to France in several years. I miss it very much. I used to go each year, of course….”

“Of course. But Genia and I are tired of the usual travel routes. We're on our way to China this time. The war—Europe seems blighted now, all the men dying on the fronts….”

“Yes.” Elena fidgeted with her fingers and a piece of lace on the tablecloth. How did one avoid telling them about her father, when any stranger might inform them the next day? She knew she couldn't lie. But she also couldn't admit the truth. She felt hot waves of shame and realized that she was growing to hate the man she had so loved, this father whose exile had so shamed her and her mother. She wasn't sure he'd done what he'd been accused of. It didn't matter. What mattered was that he had been caught and sent away. Therein, more than in the dubious question of guilt, lay the shame.

Adler, Fania Borisovna had said. Adler—a German name. Or a Jewish one? From beneath lowered lashes she examined her companions. Yes, they might very well be Jewish, with their noses curving delicately down. Rich Jewish women from the golden ghetto. Slowly, realizing that if indeed these were Jews, they would have a common ground—that of being forever on the outside looking into society—she murmured: “We suffered a terrible tragedy in our family. My little brother died. My parents never were able to recuperate from their loss. And so, although my father had a most important job in one of the ministries in St. Petersburg, he couldn't face the capital any longer. He's happy enough here—but I am very much alone. There is no future in Krasnoyarsk.”

“Oh, my dear, how simply awful,” Fania replied. The waitress brought Elena a glass of tea, removed the Adlers' empty ones. Everyone was silent. Elena thought: I have said too much. They will suspect me. One doesn't spill this intimate a story to two strangers on first sight.

“It's really amazing,” Genia was commenting, “how when we suffer, we hold it in so well in our natural surroundings. Then, suddenly when we're out of our element, the truth comes flowing out of us. It's so much easier to tell one's problems to a total stranger—someone who has no place whatsoever in our lives. I can empathize so acutely with the princess's story. Do you feel it too, Fanny?”

I've won! Elena thought, turning red from the unexpected joy at Genia's thoughts. Fania was saying: “Yes, absolutely. The princess lives her tragedy—her dreadful isolation—daily, with the same anonymous crowds around her. The way we did during Papa's lifetime. And look at us now….”

Elena didn't understand, and so she was quiet, sipping her tea. The Adlers didn't continue, didn't bother to elucidate. Theirs was the real truth, and therefore they were more reserved, more guarded. She looked directly at Fania, asked: “Will you be here long?” She could feel the tightness returning to her throat and wished she could cry out: No, you must stay! You are my past, my future—My
future?
But how?