The Steppes of Paris (10 page)

When they parted, Edward climbing carefully out of Geoff’s
taxi on the corner of the rue Surcouf, Geoff, who was leaving Paris in the morning, gave him a large, vague wave. “See you in Phnom Penh, Teddy, my boy.”

Edward tried not to register the depressing domesticity of his front door, his back copies of
Le
Canard
Enchaîné
beside the lavatory, and his toothbrush in its glass. He remembered to down three coffee mugs of cold water and went straight to bed, to dream, hardly surprisingly but nevertheless unfairly, of aeroplanes and take-offs and bumpy landings on air strips cut out of impenetrable jungle.

By twenty past eight, he had even wondered whether the whole thing was an elaborate punishment set up by Irina and she was going to leave him standing out of pique. He had been waiting at the ticket windows of Metro Courcelles for nearly half an hour. He had got there early, not to make a good impression on Irina, he assured himself, but simply because he couldn’t yet judge his journey time with any degree of accuracy. It wasn’t a very busy station and the home-going solid citizens of the eighth
arrondissement
gave him sideways glances of beady suspicion. He had mentioned to Marie-Yvette, not in any spirit of boasting but just so that someone at the paper should know he had an active social life, that he was off to an engagement on the Boulevard de Courcelles and she had wrinkled her nose and said, “Ah la la! So you’re starting to move in all the
right
circles, I see.” He felt himself a conspicuous, visibly alien figure on the draughty station. From watching successive waves of passengers emerging, he lazily drew up a list of characteristics which marked the species Parisian male: bottle-green overcoats with a pleat in the back, hunched head and shoulders, worry lines. And the women, not so many at this hour, all came trotting smartly through the exit, tight-lipped, diamond-hard, bristling, and bringing gusts of perfume which seemed to Edward, rather than seductive,
more like the defensive odour sprayed out by a skunk. Irina, he realised, would stand out among them too. And when, finally, at almost half past eight, she did emerge, hurtling from the exit, her appearance had something arresting, quite dramatic about it, which temporarily prevented him from expressing his annoyance.

“Edouard!” she gasped. “I’m so sorry.”

“What happened?” he asked.

Irina put her hand on his arm. It wasn’t clear if she had done it as an endearment or simply to help her steady herself. “So
stupid
,” she panted. “I was all ready. I was waiting for a friend who was coming over to sit with Babushka and he didn’t come. I don’t know what to do. I rang the bookshop where he works and I rang his apartment, which I hate doing, but he wasn’t anywhere. I don’t know what’s happened; if he’s forgotten about it or if something’s gone wrong. I couldn’t reach you. I was going frantic.”

“Can’t you leave her by herself?” Edward asked, aghast at the thought of such a constraint on one’s liberty.

“Of course I can,” Irina answered scornfully. “How do you suppose I go out to work every day? I lead my life. It’s just sometimes she gets these – ideas and it’s best to have someone there to discourage her from trying to carry them out. Of course, she can hardly walk at all so it’s not really a risk but all the same I feel better if she’s not on her own. I just hope he shows up.”

“What sort of ideas?” asked Edward.

They had left the Metro station and were hurrying along a wide tree-lined boulevard. Beside him Irina, there was no other word for it, was scurrying. Every few yards, she glanced at her watch, tutted or clucked and scurried a little more. She answered his question with a dismissive “Tchuh!” and a flick of one hand. After a few moments, she added, “You couldn’t possibly understand. Specifically Russian delusions.”

Edward hesitated, his curiosity aroused. “Try me and see,” he suggested.

Irina gave a still louder “Tchuh!” “She tries to set out on a journey,” she said, almost resentfully. “Can you imagine? Eighty-seven years old, she can barely walk, and she takes it into her head she’s going to set out on a jaunt of a
few thousand miles. She couldn’t get to the Metro on her own!”

“Where does she want to go?” Edward asked.

Irina gave him a malevolent sideways look. “St Petersburg,” she snapped. “Leningrad to you.”

She drilled on the bell of her great-aunt’s apartment house and after the heavy, dark-green front door had clicked open in response, she hurried ahead of Edward down the deep entrance hall. The cavernous lift at the end of it was out of order, “
En
Dérangement
” in Edward’s favourite phrase. At the sight of the white card hanging askew from the lift door handle, Irina gave a little moan and plunged despairingly towards the staircase. By the time they reached the third floor, she was quite seriously out of breath. As they waited for the great-aunt to answer her bell, Edward felt suddenly acutely sorry for Irina, watching her struggle to control her panting and prepare her face into a serene expression of greeting. He had a half-formed intimation that getting older meant exactly this accumulation of worries, all the tedious constrictions and hindrances which had to be taken into account before you could do anything, and which culminated in his parents’ fretful immobility.

“You’ll be able to relax in church,” he comforted her.

A high-pitched torrent of greeting became audible behind the door and the great-aunt opened it in mid-sentence, stretching out both hands in delighted surprise as though their arrival were completely unexpected.

Edward was relieved to see she was a lot more vigorous than the grandmother. A certain spherical sturdiness was obviously a shared characteristic of all the women of the family. In Great-Aunt Elena, as Irina hastily introduced her, it took the form of a fair amount of corseted girth and a pair of pink-veined, only faintly wrinkled cheeks which Edward incongruously imagined being featured in a promotion by the Apple Marketing Authority. She gestured enthusiastically for them to come in. Irina interrupted her flow to point out that they were very short of time. Great-Aunt Elena paused and gave Irina a majestic look. “Indeed?” she declared. “And whose fault is that, may I ask?”

Indignantly, Irina started to explain. As soon as she mentioned the grandmother, Great-Aunt Elena erupted into
another stream of exclamations. “She was always impossible,” she pronounced. “Always. Long before – even when she was a girl, she was always on the point of running away somewhere, you know.” She turned to Edward. “Vera has suitcases on the brain.”

“Don’t drag him into it, please,” Irina said tensely. “Where are your coat and hat? We really should be on our way.”

Grumbling good-naturedly, Great-Aunt Elena went off into a side room. Edward tried to catch Irina’s eye so he could give her a cheery conspiratorial wink, but she studiously avoided looking his way, seemingly embarrassed by this collective display of family oddity.

Edward was actually rather enjoying it. The small hall where they were waiting looked to him like a fly-blown model interior in a museum. Every inch of space was crowded with visibly venerable belongings and no anachronistic ephemera from 1980s Paris had slipped in to mar the yellowed authenticity. He felt he was standing in a hall in another city entirely.

After a moment, Great-Aunt Elena returned, wearing a highly feathered black hat and holding out an aged black astrakhan coat for one of them to help her put it on. Her voice had been just audible out of the other room, keeping up her running commentary on the evening’s events. Now she paused in front of them, cocking her plumed head and looking winsomely from one to the other, waiting for them to compete for the favour of helping her on with her coat. Irina bustled forward and helped her a little roughly into it. Great-Aunt Elena pirouetted in front of a smoky mirror to judge the finished effect. She turned to Edward. “Irina lacks a gentleman’s gallant touch,” she said coyly.

As they went down the stairs, Irina and her great-aunt broke into Russian. Going down ahead of them, Edward tried to judge if the double chirruping conveyed discord or harmony but it was almost impossible to tell. Out in the street, they reverted smartly to French. He and Irina each giving Great-Aunt Elena one arm, which seemed unnecessary but which visibly gave her pleasure, they set off back up the boulevard. Edward glanced surreptitiously at his watch; it was just after nine.

He couldn’t say he was taken with the actual music but as
an all-round experience the concert was certainly gratifyingly weird. A good quarter of an hour late, they turned into the rue Daru, a plain, grey street of dormant Parisian apartment houses, and halfway along it they arrived at the black and gold gateway to a scene from a Russian village, astonishingly resurrected between the drab apartment houses. It was such an incongruous sight, the gold onion-domed church of folklore standing in a courtyard planted with silver birch trees, that Edward involuntarily stopped and goggled up at it. Above the church door, there was an arch filled with a gold mosaic depicting a blandly sweet-faced male saint holding an open book. Edward tried to make out what details he could of the rest of the church in the dark but he was chivvied forward by his two companions. They obviously weren’t the only latecomers, though, for there were other heavily coated figures ahead of them tramping up the flight of steps which led to the church door. In fact, the whole evening seemed to be running late because as they entered the church, a fat florid-faced man was only just announcing, in Russian and thickly accented French, the first item of the concert. The people who had come in ahead of them were engaged in a flurry of crossing themselves.

Since the music, an unaccompanied doleful chanting, didn’t do much for Edward, he found his attention easily distracted during the first half of the concert by his surroundings and by the audience. On his left, Irina, for all her earlier scoffing at “depressing religious music”, sat apparently rapt. Beyond her, Great-Aunt Elena alternately fidgeted and drowsed. The rest of the church was filled to capacity with an audience which appeared to be entirely in their seventies and eighties. Looking idly around, Edward could see an unparalleled concentration of silver hair swept into pin-studded buns, pink bald pates and ludicrously old-fashioned hats. There was also an impressive concentration of serious furs, reducing the number of short, stout figures which could be fitted into each row of unevenly assembled benches and chairs, and adding to the predominant reek of incense a background blend of mothballs.

“Well?” Irina turned to him when, eventually, one of the heartbreaking chants ended in a disconcerting silence and,
without any applause, people laboured to their feet to go and greet acquaintances. “Are you enjoying it?”

Edward hesitated. “Well, the music’s not really my idea of fun,” he admitted. “But it is interesting. And actually I think this whole place is rather interesting; I am glad I came.”

Irina considered the audience with what looked like bleak affection. “You should study this society while you still can,” she said to him solemnly. “We’re coming up to the middle of the nineteen eighties. By the middle of the nineteen nineties, this will be gone forever.”

Undeterred by its imminent extinction, the aged community was battling towards a room off the vestibule where refreshments were being served.

Irina asked Edward, “Are you hungry? D’you want something?”

He shook his head. He had, slightly sordidly, eaten two Big Macs before taking the Metro to Courcelles. Eating Big Macs in Paris constituted a symbolic act of gastronomic rejection in which he still rather stubbornly took pleasure.

“Well, shall we go outside and breathe?” Irina suggested, “This incense gives me such a headache.”

Great-Aunt Elena had disappeared into a multitude of nodding black hats. Dismissing her disappearance with an airy wave, Irina led the way outside. She looked distracted, Edward thought, as they stood a little aimlessly in the dark courtyard. She played with the bracelet on her wrist and glanced at her watch.

“How long does the interval last?” Edward asked. “What time will the concert finish?”

Irina threw him a look of amused disdain. “It’s that bad, is it?”

“Why were
you
looking at your watch?” Edward retaliated.

“I was just hoping my friend had turned up,” Irina explained. “To keep an eye on Babushka.” She sighed heavily. “I don’t want to have to spend my afternoon off tomorrow unpacking her suitcases.”

Once again, Edward felt sorry for Irina, and slightly conscience-stricken. He was deeply glad that he had no one he needed to take into account. He asked, “Couldn’t you telephone?”

Irina shook her head, “They’re still pre-1917 here. I don’t think they have a public telephone. It doesn’t matter; I’ll try afterwards from Elena’s.”

On their way back in, Irina was stopped at least half a dozen times to say hello to people. From their gestures, stroking her on the cheek, patting her on the head, Edward concluded that most of these old characters must have known Irina since she was a child and still viewed her as one. When they reached their row, where Great-Aunt Elena was once more ensconced, talking animatedly to a new neighbour in ear muffs, Irina breathed a heavy sigh of relief. “Sometimes I think I should go and live in Australia,” she confided in a fierce whisper, “just to get away from them all.”

The second half of the concert frankly dragged. Although the stencilled programme notes explained that these chants were of a completely different origin, Edward couldn’t detect much difference. His attention freewheeled. He remembered Irina’s remark, “By the middle of the nineteen nineties, this will be gone forever,” and he wondered what it must feel like to be a historical curiosity. He wondered whether these sturdy old people in their furs even realised that they were a historical curiosity; meeting here only with their own kind, keeping up the language and customs of another country in another age, did the perceptions of the present day matter to them at all? He had entered a time warp. Subject only to the biological inevitability of ageing, the community was otherwise immune to change. He felt distinctly odd sitting in their midst, now he came to think about it; probably the only person who wasn’t in the least Russian in the whole church. What exactly was he doing there? Beside him, Irina was far away inside her enjoyment of the music; she belonged here. It wasn’t only her round face and the inherited ease with which she wore a fur coat. It was also a question of her nature. For all her flashy surface fashion, her coloured hair, the big brilliant green earrings she was sporting tonight, somewhere at her core it was still before the First World War. What worried Edward was that he hadn’t noticed where the time warp first began; it had begun at the front door of the Iskarovs’ flat.