The Russian Album (10 page)

Paul's closest friend from the law faculty in Petersburg, Vladimir Nabokov, also thought his friend's passion for farming was baffling. A man should be interested in tennis, in literature, in politics, not in manure and seeds. When Nabokov visited Kroupodernitsa in the summer holidays, he would sit under an umbrella in the cabriolet in a broad-brimmed hat and a cream linen suit and read while his earnest friend in the heavy corduroys discussed seed-drilling techniques with his peasant foremen in the dusty beet fields.

In the railway carriage carrying them back to their studies in Petersburg, the two friends argued about literature and politics. Paul particularly remembered a conversation which lasted through the night about Tolstoy's short story ‘The Kreutzer Sonata', a polemic against the sexual enslavement of marriage. Paul remembered insisting that he would model his life on Tolstoy's teaching, and when he got back to Petersburg, he did just that. He announced, somewhat sententiously, that he would remain a bachelor and when a coy female cousin asked him to write an inscription in her commonplace book he wrote a furious Tolstoyan epigram that was to guide him grimly through life:

Life is not a game, life is not a joke.

Renunciation! Renunciation!

It is only by putting on the chains of service that man can fulfil his destiny on earth.

This was the earnest, ascetic young man who reported for military service at the Gatchina headquarters of the Preobrajensky Guards in the summer of 1894. He loved his military service, the singsongs with his recruits, the hard physical drill, the rhythmic tramping of the boots on the parade ground, the sweat running down between his shoulderblades; and at the end of a long day, a cup of coffee in a tent he had hung with Ukrainian rugs. It was at the end of such a day, with the coffeepot brewing on the stove, that the tent flaps parted and the young lieutenant found himself staring at his commandant and the heir to the throne, the future Nicholas II. They asked if they could have a cup of coffee. While Paul was busying himself with the coffee, the commandant asked him to explain to the heir to the throne why the autocracy was so unpopular in Russia. Paul handed his guests their cups of coffee and said quietly, ‘If you mean the personal autocracy of the sovereign, you are probably wrong. The majority of Russians understand that the head of such a vast country with a mixed population must have the necessary power. What they do resent is the autocracy of the scribe, the policeman, the governor and even the minister.' The commandant laughed and the heir to the throne gave Paul one of his thin and impassive blue stares. Neither Paul nor, as it turned out, the heir to the throne forgot what had passed between them.

Paul's military service was soon over and he returned to Kroupodernitsa to the life of a bachelor farmer and a dutiful son. His brothers had married and had begun their careers in the army and the navy. Sister Katia was training to be a nurse, and Paul and sister Mika were left at Kroupodernitsa to attend their parents' slow decline and listen to their father's muddled recriminations. By this time, the old man's business affairs were in a mess. His steward, Grinevetsky, was swindling him openly and Paul had to mortgage estates to keep the creditors at bay. Old age and twenty years' exile from power had broken his father's morale.

There is a picture taken at the turn of the century of Paul's parents standing together in one of the chestnut alleys of the garden at Kroupodernitsa. The serene beauty whom the fine ladies of Hatfield House strove to emulate thirty years before is stout now, her hair grey and covered with a white shawl. Her husband leans heavily on her arm. He wears a plain white field cap, an unbraided army greatcoat and carpet slippers. His eyes are rheumy and resentful, glaring ahead at the dreary and foregone battle of aging. He who had once been so adventurous, so daring, wearing out post horses in every sordid inn from Irkutsk to Petersburg, is now at last unrelievedly old.

By then his kidneys and bladder were beginning to give out. In the winter of 1903 he went to Paris for an operation, and commanded Paul to join him on the Riviera to keep him company during his convalescence and to massage his gouty feet. When Paul was boarding the European express headed for Vienna and Cannes that January of 1903, one of the old Tartar waiters in the station restaurant, who had served the family since Paul was a boy, called out that Paul should get himself married. ‘Only fools marry!' Paul shouted back as the train pulled out.

FOUR

PAUL AND NATASHA

In January 1903, Natasha and her mother set out from her Moscow home to catch the train for the Riviera. After a chaotic procession of family and servants to the station in the snow, embraces and blessings on the platform, and after settling her mother in her compartment, Natasha sat back in peace, enfolded in the sealed world of the sleeping car, with its brown plush seats, washbasins and divans. For the empty hours until nightfall she watched the snow-bound Russian plain fly past her window. At dawn at the German border, she lay in her bed and felt the train being transferred from its broad Russian gauge to the narrower European one. It was like going to sleep in one century and waking up in another when the maternal rocking of the Russian gauges was replaced by the sharper gyration of the European lines. She changed trains in Paris and drifted asleep in the dark panelled compartments of the sleeping car while it awaited the departure whistle in the Gare de Lyon. At first light she lifted the blind at the end of the bed with her toe and as the train sped round the cliffs and through the tunnels, she saw the waves of the Mediterranean so close they seemed to be beating at her window.

Her Riviera smelled of the grey dust thrown up behind the carriages, the petals cascading upon her during the
bataille des fleurs
at Mardi Gras and incense at the Orthodox cathedral in Nice. In those days, Cannes and Nice were quiet, restful places, the long afternoons before tea punctuated by the sound of horses' hooves and the creaking of the fiacres carrying families from one big hotel to another. For Natasha and her mother the Riviera season began in January and ended in April: they came for the sea air and the weak winter sunlight on the promenades, for the gossip and companionship of the Russian restaurants, churches and bookshops, and above all, to escape the darkness and cold of Moscow and Petersburg. That winter of 1903, they came because Princess Mestchersky, Natasha's mother, knew that this visit would be her last. The respite from cancer which the operations had brought her was now coming to an end.

Natasha's mother had always admired the stout nationalist sentiments of General Nicholas Ignatieff. She had once presented him with a bouquet of flowers after an address he had given to the Slavonic Society in Moscow. So when General Ignatieff and his wife, who happened to be wintering at the Grand Hôtel de Californie in Cannes, sent a servant to the Mestchersky villa in Nice requesting that they visit them, Natasha's mother said she was too weak to go, but Natasha would be delighted to accept. Natasha was not so delighted, but there was no arguing with mother. She could not go alone and so her brother Peter chaperoned her on the hour-long carriage ride along the coast road from Nice to Cannes.

Natasha was exchanging tense pleasantries with General Ignatieff and his wife in the palm court of the Hôtel de Californie when a slim tall man in his early thirties, with a moustache and a sailor's tan on his high balding forehead, descended the main staircase and came towards her. When he smiled his teeth were very white, his eyes dark.

At that meeting, Paul and Natasha were shy and formal, sitting apart, exchanging glances while her brother Peter carried on with the exchange of ritual pleasantries with the Ignatieffs. When they rose to leave, Paul bowed, kissed her hand and said he hoped he would have the pleasure again. She blushed and bowed her head. All the way home, Peter teased his old spinster of a sister for that blush and she was furious with herself for having given herself away.

Next day, Paul appeared at the door of the Mestchersky villa in Nice and sent up his card. She received him in a little sitting room and shyly served him tea. He returned next day and the day after. In matters of courtship, they were a backward couple. He was earnest and serious, she was shy. Other Russians gamed at the tables in Monte Carlo, or dressed up in costumes and joined the carnival crowds. Paul and Natasha stayed away from the dances and the gaming tables. They walked together on the balcony of the casino at night overlooking the bay. They were moving closer but not yet touching, silently watching the lights of the yachts at anchor, listening to the whir of the gaming wheels.

When they first met, the Mestcherskys whispered that the Ignatieffs were ruined. With muddled indirection Natasha raised the question of Ignatieff family finance. Like a good Edwardian suitor, Paul assured her of his prospects. It is doubtful that he told her everything and it did not occur to him to ask himself whether this princess raised on a huge estate would be able to manage on a working farm in the depths of the Ukraine.

Paul and Natasha were soon aware that those two old nineteenth-century warships – the Ignatieff and Mestchersky families – were being surreptitiously manoeuvred alongside each other. Natasha began to feel the new undertow in her mother's talk: the hints, the looks, the sighs of a dying woman eager to see her youngest settled in time. Paul's father, for his part, was so worried that his son's Tolstoyan vows of celibacy might still carry the day that he wired Paul's old tutor Monsieur Castellot to come down from Paris and talk some sense into his son. Monsieur Castellot did not have to do much persuading.

On 19 February, two weeks after their meeting, Paul and Natasha went for a walk together in Chaplitz park above Nice, with her brother Peter and his brother Vladimir – on leave from the Russian fleet docked in the Riviera – bringing up the rear as chaperons. Paul sat her down on a bench beneath a lemon tree and began what she thought was to be a proposal of marriage. First he became entangled in a long and far-fetched story about motorcars and then he managed to leave Natasha thinking that she wasn't to be his life's companion after all. All that the chaperons could see was that Natasha had risen stiffly to her feet and that Paul sat stricken on the bench. Paul's brother Vladimir, sensing the turn events had taken, stepped up brightly and accompanied Natasha home, filling her silent distress with welcome chatter about his Pekinese dog. Recalling the scene at the end of her life, she added mournfully, ‘Maybe for Paul's future happiness it would be better if everything had been broken between us.' At her doorway, she whispered to Vladimir that she would be pleased to go for a walk again the following day.

Next morning at nine Vladimir and Paul appeared at the door, mackintoshes draped over their arms. It had rained, but the morning was bright and pungent. She was ready, so was her brother Peter, and they set off up the old road to Cimiez. This time they did not have to travel far. He put the question clearly. She answered clearly. Her brother, Peter, who had been bringing up the rear, sighed with relief when he saw them at last holding hands and smiling shyly. ‘At least my last pair of boots has been saved in time.' For his engagement present, he gave them a miniature replica in silver of the shoes he had worn out trudging behind them as chaperon.

For the next three weeks until their wedding, Paul would appear at nine at the Mestchersky villa in Nice with lilies he had chosen in the flower market of the old port. They would sit together in the front room, learning to relax in each other's company. They could now laugh at the gossip each family had heard about the other. He brought her a little brooch shaped like a cornflower because, he said, the cornflowers which grew among his wheat back home were his favourite flower. Natasha ordered her trousseau linen from Dresden, where the family crest was embroidered on the sheets and pillowcases, and her personal linen from Rouff in Nice. She ordered a travelling trunk from a shop in the rue St Honoré in Paris.

These weeks just before their marriage were to be the only extended time they had alone together for the next twenty years. ‘My husband never belonged to himself,' she said with some little irony, ‘always serving the state and his countrymen.' Duty, duty. He did not belong to himself. He did not belong to her.

In the gamble of marriage, theirs was a blind throw. Their courtship and engagement lasted barely a month. What could she have seen beneath his earnest smiling surface? He was as contained as his father was expansive. They were drawn to each other by what had been repressed in each, he to that mordant gaiety which lay concealed beneath her shy exterior, she to his practicality and charm which seemed to hint of physical gentleness to come.

They were married at a little Orthodox church on the rue Longchamps in Nice on 16 April 1903. She wore a white crepe-de-Chine dress with a long train. She carried a small wreath of orange blossoms and there were more orange blossoms in her hair. Her face was wreathed in a veil which Paul pulled back when he kissed her at the altar. She felt calm and disembodied, numb as a piece of wood. Her feelings, she said, always seemed to desert her at the most important moments of her life. Of the whole climactic day, she remembered only that she was very hungry and gobbled up pâté sandwiches at the reception afterwards. Later that afternoon, a landau laden with cornflowers took them along the coast road from Cannes to the Hôtel Cap d'Antibes for their honeymoon.

After a week walking together by the sea, they returned to the Ukraine. At the station, the old Tartar waiter who had seen Paul off to the Riviera two months before called from the restaurant window when Paul passed by with his bride: ‘Remember, only fools marry!' As she walked along the platform towards the Ignatieffs, their voices already booming out their greetings, she felt her face become a mask and her timid soul hide away. She had dreaded this plunge into a huge and alien family, thousands of miles from Doughino. Paul's brothers and sisters, his mother and father were there and their kisses, embraces and covert hard looks were, she said later, the ‘expiation of all her sins'.