The Russian Album (26 page)

Dima and I set off after lunch up the hill to the cemetery. In the fields the light skims over the top of the waving grain; on the rutted path he reaches over for a stalk of barley, takes the head and works the kernels loose with his fingernails. He was a soils chemist by training, a scientific farmer as his father had been. For thirty years Dima was a soils expert with the Food and Agricultural Organization, trying to improve the yields of rice paddies and peasant plots throughout Asia and Africa, issuing voluble instructions about nitrogens and phosphates and the dangers of night soil in the food chain, leading singsongs of ‘Alouette' at all the parties,
Oncle Merde
to his French colleagues.

‘Would you rather have been a farmer?' I ask as he studies the barley. He shakes his head. ‘You have to be a mechanic, and you have to manage cheap labour. I would have been happy a hundred years ago.' I laugh: ‘With the serfs.'

He points his finger at me, and his eyebrows arch: ‘They weren't slaves, boy.'

‘Just people you could count on.'

‘Exactly.'

He resumes walking: his vigorous, bent gait, the huge feet and hands and the tapping stick rolling forward. ‘None of this damn modern stuff.'

‘Equality, you mean.'

‘That's it, none of this damn equality.'

He walks on in front of me, shouting over his shoulder as he goes, ‘I always knew I was a count. I always knew I had to take charge.' He always took charge, this old man who conserves intact the open cheerfulness of a twelve-year-old boy.

St Andrew's Presbyterian cemetery stands on a sloping hill high above the St Francis River. Dima is on the cemetery committee and he checks that they keep the grass trim and the cypresses against the skyline shaped and fertilized. A highway has been built to within 100 yards of the back fence and the occasional whine of a passing car makes him fret. For me it seems quiet and unchanged. All my memories flow together into one impression of the light upon the solid Presbyterian names cut into the marble, the cypresses at the top of the walk, the warm breeze off the fields and the glint of the river's course below.

Theirs are the only Russian names in the cemetery: ‘In loving memory, Count Paul Ignatieff, 1870–1945; Countess Natasha Ignatieff, 1877–1944.' They share the same stone, the same earth. There is a large plot of grass around them. Dima spreads his hands out and indicates where our plots are: there is room for everyone, even for me. And then for an instant he seems old and frail. He makes the sign of the cross, and he says, ‘And this, my dear boy, is where I join them.'

*   *   *

In August 1944, my father came back from London. He had been away nine years. He had left for England in 1936 to study at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He had been to Bulgaria to research a thesis about his grandfather and Tsarist policy in the Balkans; he filled folders with research notes; he saw his grandfather's statue in Varna's main square and spent long hours with his Uncle Kolya, finishing his days as a librarian in Sofia. He had been to Nuremberg, Munich and Vienna in the summer of 1938 and had seen fascism first hand. In 1940 and 1941 he fire-watched on the roof of Canada House in Trafalgar Square and organized the evacuation of London children on the transport ships. He had been to the hospitals in 1942 to visit the Canadian soldiers back from the massacre at Dieppe. He had met and fallen in love with my mother. He was a boy when he left for England; in 1944 he returned to his parents a man.

When he arrived in Montreal, his father said he should come down to see them in Upper Melbourne as quickly as he could. The old man's voice sounded rattled. When George came into Natasha's bedroom, the cedar-panelled refuge looking out over the row of pines and the bright August fields, she said immediately in her deep voice, ‘Here I am in my bed dying.'

Nick's wife Helen was with him and they sat Natasha up in bed and bathed her. The bones on her chest stood out unbearably, and there were deep cavities under her cheekbones. She was light as a child to lift, bright-eyed, feverish. In all those years of feeding others, she never seemed to feed herself. She would wander in and out of the kitchen, serving her men, nibbling on a biscuit or a prune, sipping from a glass of port, never joining in the eating. She was afraid of dying of cancer like her mother, and she believed cancer arrived in what she ate. So she ate as little as she could and now she was dying among other things of malnutrition, dying of her fear of cancer.

George sat up all night with her. Poised there, at the lip of unconsciousness, holding his hand, with the comical, heart-aching directness that was always hers, she told him the most intimate secrets of her marriage: It was not his fault. I could not make him happy. Never blame your father. The blame is mine.

Mamenka, mamenka.

She confessed a sinful wish to die, to die before her husband. Her wish was granted.

They buried her in the cemetery on the hill overlooking the river on a bright August afternoon. Dima and Nick were still away at the war and Lino was in British Columbia, but George and Helen and Florence were there with all the people in Richmond and Upper Melbourne who had come to know them. Even Mr Duluth, her butcher, came and stood on the other side of the cemetery gate with his hat in his hands.

When Paul was left alone, his daughter-in-law Helen went to live with him in the cottage through the autumn and winter of 1944–45. She called him Jedda. He called Helen his black beauty and there can be little doubt he bloomed in the presence of his tall dark-haired daughter-in-law, who skied into town when the cottage was snowbound and who shared with him the bright cheerfulness of her baby son, Nicholas. Once Paul told her about the time he went with his father to the Cossack villages in the Caucasus mountains to buy wild horses from the tribesmen. But that was all, just that story. He was not one to reminisce. In the spring he put on his old fedora and his cardigan and planted out his kohlrabi. He kept Natasha's garden weeded and her phlox and delphinium came up in abundance in August.

The night before the war with Japan ended in August 1945, my father was sitting with his father listening to the radio. The bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been dropped. A man born in the Russian ambassador's house above the Bosphorus in 1870, a man who had been treated by Charcot and had served the last Tsar of all the Russias, had arrived in the estuary of the new age. My father looked out the window at the darkening light among the pines and heard his father say that the Japanese would never surrender unless guarantees were given about retaining the Emperor. It was with remarks such as these that they were closest, son and father, never talking about each other, but always about the news. My father turned to say that he thought he was right. His father's breathing had ceased.

*   *   *

Paul and Natasha died two years before I was born.

Someone once said devotion to the past is one of the disastrous forms of unrequited love. Like all loves mine feeds and grows on impossibilities. When I look at their final photographs in the family album, standing in front of the bungalow on a snowy afternoon, I want to be there to walk with them up the path to the house, to help them out of their coats, to make them a cup of tea and sit with them by the fire. I want to hear them speak, I want to feel the warmth of their hands.

Any love has its ambivalences, its feelings of suffocation. When I was younger, I wanted to be free of the unending stare of their portraits. But I also wanted them to mark out the path ahead, to help me make my choices, to guide me on the road. Now I have children and a family of my own and I have learned that you can inherit loyalties, indignation, a temperament, the line of your cheekbones, but you cannot inherit your self. You make your self with your own hands, here and now, alone or with others. There is no deliverance, no imperative in the blood. You cannot inherit your purposes. I know what I cannot have from Paul and Natasha and so we are reconciled.

I do not believe in roots. When Natasha was a little girl she believed she was a green shoot on a great tree descending into the dark earth. But I am the grandchild of her uprooting, the descendant of her dispossession. I am an expatriate Canadian writer who married an Englishwoman and makes his home overlooking some plane trees in a park in north London. That is my story and I make it up as I go along. Too much time and chance stand between their story and mine for me to believe that I am rooted in the Russian past. Nor do I wish to be. I want to be able to uproot myself when I get stuck, to start all over again when it seems that I must. I want to live on my wits rather than on my past. I live ironically, suspicious of what counts as self-knowledge, wary of any belonging I have not chosen.

I have not been on a voyage of self-discovery: I have just been keeping a promise to two people I never knew. These strangers are dear to me not because their lives contain the secret of my own, but because they saved their memory for my sake. They beamed out a signal to a generation they would never live to see. They kept faith with me and that is why I must keep faith with them and with those who are coming after me. There is no way of knowing what my children will make of ancestors from the age of dusty roads and long afternoons on the shaded veranda deep in the Russian countryside. But I want to leave the road marked and lighted, so that they can travel into the darkness ahead, as I do, sure of the road behind.

AFTERWORD

The paved road had given out many miles back and the Moskvitch sedan was now picking its way among the ruts and up-ended cobbles of a farm road in the dark. It was a clear cold night in October and we were in south-central Ukraine, but only the driver, who said nothing, seemed to have any idea where we were. For an hour, the road had been winding through featureless fields bereft of hedges or trees. On the outskirts of an industrial town called Pogribisce, we had passed a factory, working at night, sending up plumes of steam into the air. I had fallen asleep and had just woken again as the car pitched down a steep hill and bumped over some railway tracks, gleaming in the dark between a pair of low white-washed barns. The Moscow-Odessa line, the driver said. After crossing the railway tracks, the farm road led down between steeply sloping stony fields towards a clump of trees. The car's headlights sprayed beams down into the valley below and picked up a silvered dome amidst the trees. At the bottom of the hill, the road petered out into a cleared space in front of a churchyard gate. We stopped and Lena, my translator, and I got out. The driver lit a cigarette and waited. Not a dog's bark. Just the deep silence of the countryside at night and the stars through the trees above my head. I knew where I was.

My father and I had talked about coming here together. In the summer of 1983, we had arrived in Kiev and he had mentioned the village's name to the tour guide and asked how far it was. It was far, we were told, and roads were bumpy and you couldn't make it back to Kiev by nightfall and there was nowhere to stay when you got there. As far as my father was concerned, that was that. The place didn't mean anything much to him – he had never actually been there, only his brothers had – and I didn't press the point, though I knew he was being disingenuous. By the time we reached Kiev, we had already been to Petersburg and he was tired. He had only been six years old when he left Russia: it was all behind the veil. There was almost nothing for him to hold on to. The effort to remember anything at all had left him feeling exhausted and somehow bereft. On the day we had left Petersburg, he sat by the train window with my mother. Later she told me that he looked out at the city of his birth sliding by, then blurring, then disappearing and he suddenly began to cry.

In August 1989, six years after the trip to Petersburg, he went back to Richmond, Quebec, to visit his brother Dima and his wife, Florence. These visits had their rituals: every time he went, he drove past the pine-shadowed bungalow where his mother and father had lived the last years of their lives; he drove up to the cemetery on the ridge and stood there, just by the low iron gate and looked at his parents' graves; he spent a few days reminiscing with Dima and Florence, sitting together on lawn chairs in front of the big Victorian house called Beechmore. My brother was there and he says my father was in good spirits. One day, the town doctor stopped by to pay Dima a call, and while he was there, my father asked the doctor to listen to his heart. He said he'd felt short of breath carrying in the groceries that morning. Doctor Cormier put his stethoscope to my father's heart and went to the phone and dialled a number. An ambulance came and took him to the Sherbrooke General Hospital, and my father died there – alone, in an intensive care unit – of a multiple heart attack in the early hours of 10 August 1989. He died in the same hospital as his mother, and my brother and I buried him next to his parents on the ridge overlooking the St Francis River.

Now, four years later, I was standing in the dark by the churchyard in the middle of the Ukraine, and it seemed that I was resuming the journey my father and I had started, but never completed.

Even in the dark, I had an intense sense of knowing where I was. The Russian Album had guided me home. It was as if the photographs had lodged their faint and fading outlines in my mind as a memory of my own. I was certain, for example, that the barns on either side of the railroad tracks had been built by my great-grandfather. There would have been a small station at the top of the road, where the Moscow-Odessa express would stop, and my great-grandfather's newspapers and mail would have been handed to the station porter, who in turn would have handed them to my grandfather, then in his teens, who would have tossed them onto the seat beside him and driven back, in the two-wheeler, down the very hill I had just travelled to deliver them to his father, taking his morning's tea on the veranda of the great house. Now I stood by the green gates of the village church he had built in the 1880s, a small-scale brick imitation of Santa Sophia in Sofia, its brick outlines and lead domes just visible behind a line of pine trees ringing the graveyard.