The Steppes of Paris (18 page)

“Twenty-three,” Great-Aunt Elena answered.

This was followed by a reflective pause, in the course of which a devastating thought came to Edward. Great-Aunt Elena had been three years younger than he was when she left Russia; to all intents and purposes, she had been his age. At that moment, her intended future had been sliced off. Her life had been in many respects halted. For here she was, eighty-something years old, still harking back to the time and the place before the amputation, and her whole being, everything about her, was still determined by that vanished world. He wondered whether anything comparable could conceivably happen to him, here and now, which would slice off his intended future the way hers had been sliced off, and result in his spending the rest of his life stopped short, in many respects, at the developmental stage he had reached now. It was such an appalling thought, he had to keep quiet to assimilate it.

Great-Aunt Elena had apparently taken off in another direction during the pause.

“I had a son,” she said.

Edward flinched. The use of the past tense in this sentence moved him more than anything else he had encountered in his embryonic journalist’s career. “I had a son.” He didn’t think he had ever heard the sentence spoken in the past tense before.

“I carried him out of Russia in my arms. He was only a baby, younger even than Irina’s mother. I hoped he was small enough to be spared; he wouldn’t remember anything, he would grow up in France or in Switzerland, wherever we ended up, and he would become a thorough citizen of that country, free of all our severances and dislocations. Maybe he would have; he was a stable boy. Although, look at Irina, one generation further on and still just as dislocated and confused. His name was Kiril. In France, it became Cyrille. And he was exceedingly French in a great many ways. We used to make fun of him. He was fussy about his clothes in a particularly French
way; everything had to be just so. And he was especially fussy about his food,
mon
Dieu,
a real
gourmet.
We used to joke whether he would open his own restaurant or go into
haute
couture.
As it turned out, he decided to study law. Well, he was a serious person at heart. I remember how he used to set off to the rue d’Assas each morning, with his armful of books and his fresh cravat, and Borya and I would watch him go and marvel at this impeccable Frenchman we had created. Then the second war came and Kiril was such an impeccable Frenchman, he escaped to London to join De Gaulle. He was more of a Frenchman than many of his compatriots, I can tell you that. He was killed outside Amiens.”

The lovingly preserved past of her living-room revealed itself as a memorial. Edward stared down at the carpet ahead of his feet, unable to come up with any worthwhile response. After a moment, he risked a sideways look at Great-Aunt Elena and saw her face had retreated behind a veil as it had on the night of the concert. For perhaps the first time, Edward had encountered an appropriate use for the adjective “tragic”.

In that most unfrivolous of moments, Irina and Varvara Stepanovna bounced back in, Irina parading the dress which Varvara was altering for her. She gave a model’s pirouette for their benefit, only pausing for fractionally longer in front of Edward than in front of her great-aunt.

“Aren’t I magnificent?” she pealed.

Varvara watched, her podgy hands clasped and her lunar face tipped to one side. The dress was a red and black sheath, which enclosed Irina like a capsule. Just a few pounds more, Edward thought, and Irina would not be able to squeeze into it. But, for now, it moulded her contours alluringly with its red and black pattern. There was unmissable longing in Varvara Stepanovna’s eyes, and Edward found himself thinking briefly, between admiring Irina, how insensitive of her it was to set the poor fat lady to work on sewing a dress like that for her. It was a dress to go out and shine in, to seduce people and to be lingeringly unzipped. None of these things would ever happen, had maybe ever happened, to Varvara Stepanovna, and lurid vicarious imaginings of them were painted all over her face.

There was a busy discussion of seams and hems and linings
among the women, during which Edward walked over to the nearest bookcase and browsed along its length. He found that the books themselves were, as in Irina’s own flat, largely out of bounds since they were almost all in Russian. But along the top of the bookcase, he found rich pickings: family photographs in old silver frames, including one, in pride of place, of a young man posing on some academic steps, whom he took to be Kiril, and slightly shockingly among the dead faces, one unmistakably of Irina as a little girl. She had been an unequivocally stocky child, seated slightly pompously on a donkey in the Jardin du Luxembourg.

It was, he thought, typical of Irina that she should succumb to jealousy of a bookcase. She dropped the discussion of her dress and bustled over to him.

“Are you getting bored?” she asked. “Are we neglecting you? I think you and I should leave soon.”

There were protests in the background from Elena and Varvara Stepanovna.

“You’ve been here for barely an hour and a half!”

“Why are you so keen to hurry away? Are we not entertaining enough?”

“We’re going to see a film,” Irina told them. “The
séance
starts at six fifteen.”

“Ah, what film?” asked Varvara, a glazed expression, which Edward only subsequently realised must be artistic appreciation, descending over her face.

Irina told her a name.

Like the little increasing speech bubbles in a strip cartoon, Edward saw himself thinking, ‘Well, huh, thank you for letting me know; that’s the first I’ve heard of it.’

When they were outside on the Boulevard de Courcelles again, Irina hugged him extravagantly.

“Thank you, Edouard. You were wonderful.”

“Meaning?” he asked, wrestling her jokingly away.

“You behaved so well towards my impossible family. I know it can’t be anybody’s idea of a good way to spend Saturday afternoon, sitting discussing English domestic traditions with an eighty-one-year-old fusspot, but you behaved so beautifully to her. I was watching; I was touched.”

Edward was about to tell her that he found her family
perfectly amazing; that he was more than happy to spend the odd Saturday afternoon soaking up their eccentricity. But he didn’t; he realised in time that Irina would take it wrong. She would object to her near and dear ones serving, as she put it, as curious postage stamps for his stamp album and, more to the point, she might query what it was that had attracted him to her in the first place.

The film she had mentioned was showing up and down the Champs-Elysées. It had Alain Delon and a strong love interest.

“We don’t
have
to go and see it,” Irina said as they approached the cinema. But, once they were there, of course, it seemed too much trouble to seek out an alternative.

Edward had his first opportunity to fondle Irina in the dark of a cinema, to hold hands and entangle across the upholstered arms of the seats. But, to his dismay, Irina strongly objected to this, and at his first encroaching hand in the dark – slipping matter-of-factly round her thigh – she gave a little shocked gasp of disapproval.

“
Mais
enfin,
Edouard, what are you doing?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” he whispered flippantly.

Irina snorted. “But not here,” she scolded him. “Not in the cinema.”

She sat very straight and stiff after that and stared fixedly at the cinema screen without acknowledging his presence for about twenty minutes. He sat beside her, feeling resentful, but at the same time, that being the unfair way with these things, a steadily increasing amount of desire.

They came out of the cinema into a Paris evening tuning up. The queues for the next programme of the film were already penned behind their metal barriers the length of the pavement: smoking, chattering, flirting, putting on a self-conscious parade of Parisian attitudes. Edward and Irina strolled down towards the Rond Point des Champs-Elysées, discussing the little there had been to discuss in their film. On a traffic island, Irina impulsively seized him and treated him to an extensive kiss.

“Why here?” Edward asked her afterwards, faintly irritated. “But not in the cinema?”

Irina twined her arm through his as they continued strolling.
“In the cinema, it’s dark and distasteful,” she explained. “And the contrast with the couple embracing on the screen is too dismal.”

They had agreed to eat in the Marais. They went down into the Metro at Franklin D. Roosevelt and rattled their eight stops in near silence.

Despite the proliferation of new restaurants in the Marais, the streets were quiet as they made their way to the one Irina had chosen. Edward had not made any serious suggestions when they were discussing it. He didn’t feel confident, even after four months’ residence, to submit his judgement to Irina’s Parisian scrutiny. So she had opted, after lengthy deliberations, for somewhere called the Soucoupe Musicale, just recently opened and apparently well recommended.

As they spotted the lifesize waiter’s silhouette holding the menu outside it, Edward suddenly worried that Henry and Mai might be eating there; a well-recommended new restaurant right in their neighbourhood. He wondered, in a panic, how ever he could explain away the fact that he was out having dinner with Mademoiselle Iskarov, his landlady, on a Saturday night. It seemed fairly clear that he couldn’t. While Irina read the menu in the silhouette’s graciously outheld hand, he considered the problem; even though Irina had sworn him to secrecy
vis-à-vis
her elderly relatives, he could hardly ask the same of her as regards his colleagues. The sensibilities of working journalists were not those of well-bred eighty-year-old refugees, and the implication that he was embarrassed about her was unavoidable.

“It looks fine,” Irina concluded. “They even have
blinis
.”

Henry and Mai weren’t in the restaurant and they enjoyed a thoroughly relaxed dinner. As they were drawing out the last remains of their desserts, Edward summoned his courage and asked Irina, “Would you mind coming back with me to the rue Surcouf tonight?”

Irina looked startled. “Why, Edouard?”

He hesitated, drawing out a trail of chocolate cream into a long question mark across his plate. “Well, we wouldn’t need to worry about your grandmother hearing us. And, remember, I’ve got a double bed.”

Irina looked distantly disgusted. “Babushka’s deaf,” she
replied. “And besides I
liked
the two of us so close together in my single bed. We were like Hansel and Gretel.”

One of Edward’s cartoon bubbles shot up, filled with expletives.

“But, Irina,” he said beseechingly, “can’t you see it’s more comfortable for both of us if we have a bit more room?”

Irina pouted. “It seems disappointingly soon for you to be concerned about things like that, Edouard. Anyway, I have to be there when Babushka gets up. I have to make her breakfast. D’you want me rushing back across Paris at crack of dawn?”

“Well, I had to,” Edward answered roughly.

Irina looked at him as if he were, he thought, a lesser form of insect life. “I know you are very young, Edouard,” she said with leaden dignity, “but please don’t be quite so uncouth. Just because I ask you to do something, it doesn’t mean you may automatically expect the same thing of me.”

To Edward, who had grown up in times of notional equality, this statement was at first staggering. He was on the verge of answering back when he realised abruptly there was no point. Irina operated by different rules. If the truth were told, he found her pompous little airs and graces to a certain extent appealing. After partners who drably put up with almost any indignity, there was something rather, if shamefully, entertaining about a woman who expected and performed a pantomime.

So they went back to the Cité Etienne Hubert. This time, they began to embrace in the lift and arrived at the fifth floor ready to proceed directly to Irina’s single bed. It was therefore especially frustrating that Irina should hiss, “Shush!” as she opened the front door, listen for a minute before whispering to Edward, “Babushka’s on the prowl” and tell him to wait outside on the landing until the coast was clear. He waited, fuming, for almost fifteen minutes. The peep hole in the door of the apartment opposite watched him with fishy humour. At last, Irina let him in, her finger to her lips, and led him in silence to her bedroom.

The delay had, as it turned out, only heightened their impatience. There was none of the previous Saturday’s slow motion undressing. They toppled, grappling with one another’s clothing, onto the pastel bedcover and what eventually
followed was one of the all time greats of Edward’s sexual career. Beneath him, he registered Irina coming twice in close succession and he himself forgot all thoughts of the prowling grandmother and bellowed his exultation like a ship’s funnel.

In the quiet which came afterwards, he still lay on top of Irina, relishing the feel of her small, warm mountain range, simmering like a recently erupted volcano. His pleasure was barely touched by the slippers which this time did pass down the corridor, and by the thought that he had never intended to like Irina this much.

The second time he spent the night with Irina, and the third, she did not throw him out in the early morning. Instead, she told him to stay secretly in bed while she made Babushka her breakfast and settled her for the day in her room. Then she would come back to him. He expected to sleep thankfully, lying across the warm space Irina had vacated. But it felt so extremely odd to be lying in bed in someone’s apartment, without their even knowing you were there, that for quite some time he didn’t go back to sleep. He listened for sounds of Irina and her grandmother moving about the apartment, but he couldn’t hear a thing. He wondered, slightly jealously, how Irina was able to sally out in her dressing-gown, as though nothing had happened, and sit quite calmly chatting to her grandmother, without giving away any sign of the action-packed night which had passed between them. Out there, it must be as though he didn’t exist. He lay feeling swallowed up by the large flat, a small object digested in one of the plural stomachs of a cow. Apart from Irina, no one in the world knew he was there. He drew the sheets over his head; he had disappeared. As he breathed in the remains of Irina’s perfume with short shallow breaths, it seemed to him the silence of the apartment had deepened. Had Irina taken her grandmother out for a Sunday morning stroll? She hadn’t
come back in here to get dressed. But maybe she kept clothes somewhere else in the flat too? He folded the sheets down and strained to listen. In his own personal cul-de-sac, within the greater cul-de-sac, the silence was absolute.

He had fallen sound asleep when Irina came back to bed. She pushed him gently over towards the wall and slid in again beside him. They lay for a while, drowsy, undecided between the relative merits of sleep and each other. But gradually Irina’s touch woke him and they rolled into an action replay, although this time it was unlike the volcanic activity of the night before. It was low key, slow and affectionate. Afterwards, they slept for the rest of the morning, curled in cramped but happily sweaty proximity.

At lunchtime, Irina said he should shower and dress while she diverted her grandmother’s attention, and then “arrive” for lunch by tiptoeing out through the front hall and ringing the door bell. It was an uncomfortable meal. The grandmother spoke hardly at all, only to Irina and only in Russian. But her eyes flickered back and forth between them, suspecting, Edward was certain, all there was to suspect. In spite of this, he and Irina kept up a pretence of formality, passing one another dishes and saying pointedly, “
S’il
vous
plaît”
and
“Merci.”
It didn’t do anything to improve Edward’s appetite for what was a disappointing meal of meat rissoles and red cabbage.

When they had eaten, Irina wanted to go out for a walk but it had started raining heavily. Despite her energetic efforts, Irina could not persuade her grandmother to go back to her room for her usual after-lunch nap. Instead the grandmother stayed sitting bolt upright in the living-room, not participating in Irina’s and Edward’s severely stilted conversation, but presumably monitoring it for indiscreet nuances.

Edward took the coward’s option. “I have to push off now,” he said to Irina. “Please do excuse my staying such a short time.”

Irina’s forlorn grin hid her obvious disappointment.

“When are we going to see each other again?” she whispered at the front door.

“Soon,” Edward promised her, but he escaped with one-hundred-per-cent relief into the dark-grey wintry afternoon.

He had been greatly looking forward to getting back to his sanctuary in the rue Surcouf, but when he let himself in, it struck him that the flat was perceptibly changing its character. The more involved he became with Irina, and the more she told him about her catastrophic family, the less this place was his and the more it belonged to her Uncle Volodya. The three inter-connecting rooms, which he had appropriated with such pleasure in October, were being taken over again by somebody else. Their previous owner, slowly through Irina acquiring a face and a history and habits, was reinstating his claim. It struck Edward especially forcefully that Sunday afternoon; he was coming back to someone else’s home.

Dyadya Volodya was Irina’s mother’s elder brother. There had been another brother too, Igor, but his whereabouts were unclear. Edward seemed to remember Irina mentioning he had gone to live in Brazil, but frankly the number of family members the Iskarovs seemed to have misplaced was such, he really couldn’t be certain. In the absence of Irina’s own errant father, Volodya had taken over the paternal role in her upbringing. As long as his marriage to the awful Aunty Ada had lasted, it sounded as though the relationship had never gone much beyond big birthday presents and trips to the Jardin des Plantes, sitting on her favourite uncle’s lap and extorting franc pieces from his pockets. Volodya had been a big, genial, meatily male presence in small Irina’s otherwise lopsidedly female life. But with the disappearance of his hindrant wife, it seemed Volodya, who must have been particularly keen for female company himself at that time, had begun to play a far greater part in Irina’s life. This change had coincided with Irina’s teenage years and must, Edward thought, be responsible for her predilection for older men
à
la
Mr Blenkinsop. Until he himself had come on the scene, that was, and here he came up against the most awkward aspect of the whole situation. He was living in Volodya’s flat; but was he also stepping into Volodya’s shoes? He had wondered at the time whether Irina’s reluctance to come and spend the night with him in the rue Surcouf concealed anything more than material reasons. Did she feel uncomfortable about misbehaving with Edward in a flat which was so reminiscent of Volodya? Could she not face the thought of sleeping with
Edward in Volodya’s bed? At this point in his suppositions, Edward stopped every time. He had no reason at all to imagine that Volodya had been anything more than Irina’s favourite uncle. So why did his mind keep coming back to the idea in this sick, obsessive way? He might as well admit why: he was concerned that it wasn’t him at all that Irina was having an affair with, but the inhabitant of Volodya’s flat.

Edward made himself a cup of coffee and put on a cassette. Volodya’s presence was actually strongest, not as you might have expected in his bedroom, but in the living-room. Edward sat and listened to Bob Dylan and to the winter rain lashing down. He wondered whether the not unpleasant melancholy he felt might be characteristically Russian. As soon as it was permissibly late, he went to the kitchen to open a bottle of Nicolas plonk. There was a picture over the kitchen table which he had stared at vacantly often enough, but which he only now really took in. Who had chosen that picture? It was an oldish engraving, Edward didn’t know much about these things; maybe salvaged from Volodya’s antiques business which had never taken off. It was of a couple; a young woman in a long flouncy dress sitting in a swing. Her face, turned flirtatiously up towards a portly man standing watching over her, half-hidden by some shrubbery, bore an unmistakable resemblance to Irina. Edward wished he hadn’t noticed. She was doubtless going to swing over his breakfast every morning from now on. He took the bottle and his glass and went back into the living-room. He only hoped it wasn’t going to be the first of a string of similar discoveries; the walls and furniture of the flat shedding their surface appearance week after week to show him who was really who.

He imagined that it was Volodya Iskarov, instead of himself, sitting in the prime armchair, with his feet up on the battered footstool. It was of course Volodya Iskarov’s feet which had created the twin depressions in the cracked green leather where his own now rested. Edward looked warily around the rest of the room. As on the day, a fortnight ago, when he had found Irina’s food in the kitchen, he searched for clues which might reveal Volodya. He sensed somehow that many of the things in the flat were gifts from women. Although Volodya had ultimately been unlucky with women, he seemed
to have always had plenty of them on tap. The clock perhaps, with its over-loud, fussy tick, that seemed to be more of a woman’s choice than a man’s. Or the profusion of cushions, which Edward had always had difficulty with; surely they had been scattered by the hand of an Iskarov female. It was, of course, impossible to tell what had been in the flat beforehand, when Volodya had lived there, and what had been added since by Irina for her tenants. But the durable, old-fashioned ring holders on the bathroom wall for a shaving-brush and a mug, they undoubtedly dated from Volodya, and in the bedroom the incontrovertible evidence was the bed. For there was no way Irina would have gone to the expense of buying a new bed for her tenants. The broad, dark, wooden bed had also housed Volodya.

In the course of the evening, Edward had dinner, in the form of a number of successive forays to the fridge. He twiddled the television dial and drank considerably more than he had intended of his plonk.

Fairly late that night, the telephone rang. Irina’s voice said, “Edouard, darling, I am miserable without you.”

More churlishly than he meant to, Edward told her, “It’s the weather.”

“Don’t be like that,” Irina said. “This is genuine; I miss you.”

“I enjoyed being with you too,” Edward answered, he was aware, lamely.

“What are you doing now?” Irina asked.

He said, “Getting pissed.”

Irina tutted. “Drinking alone?” Then she added triumphantly, “You see, you do miss me too, Edouard.”

Her logic escaping him, he changed the subject. “What have you been doing with yourself today?”

He was rewarded by a full-scale sigh. “Trying to drum some sense into Babushka. Making afternoon tea and then supper for Babushka. Putting Babushka to bed. I tell you, Edouard, it’s just as well her state is not infectious. I’d be raving mad by now.” And then, with no apparent connection, she asked him, “Are you doing anything on Wednesday evening?”

Across his hesitation, she went on, “I’d like my friend Lyova to meet you. You remember, the one who came to
be with Babushka that time, who works in a bookshop? I’m going to visit him in the shop on Wednesday after school and I thought you could come with me.”

The ominous advances which this represented, seeing Irina at a time other than on Saturday night and presumably for a purpose other than on Saturday night, and being presented to one of her friends, were sufficient to make Edward hesitate even longer. The cons quite definitely outweighed the pros, so the only explanation he could think of for the fact that, after a moment or two, he accepted was Lyova’s Russian name. It was a day or two, in fact Wednesday, before the remainder of the explanation occurred to him; natural curiosity about this other man in Irina’s life, combined with the far-fetched idea that setting eyes on Lyova might somehow illuminate Volodya.

Irina had given him the address, Number Eleven, rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, and said they should meet directly at the bookshop, “rather than one or other of us having to wait at the Metro in this cold”. As things turned out, Edward was for once delayed in leaving the paper – an important telex was coming in from Yaoundé – and it was a good quarter of an hour after their arranged meeting time that he emerged from the nearest Metro station. It was one of his favourite names, Maubert-Mutualité, and he savoured it on the station signs before trying to identify the probable direction of the rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. It took him a while longer to find it – it wasn’t a neighbourhood he went to often – and so by the time he actually arrived at the bookshop and opened the door, setting off a quavering bell, Irina and her friend were long cosily installed drinking tea at a table at the back of the shop, looking a contentedly domesticated couple.

But Irina jumped up gratifyingly quickly when he came in and hurried forward to greet him. There were only two or three customers left in the shop, which was about to close, and none of them appeared to pay the slightest attention when in the middle of the shop Irina gave Edward a quick but audible kiss. They were all elderly characters, muffled so elaborately in woollen scarves and fur hats that perhaps they simply didn’t hear. They were reading with absorption, apparently from cover to cover.

Irina led Edward, holding his hand, to meet Lyova. He admitted that his first emotion was hostility, for Lyova, rising lazily to his feet to shake hands, looked down on him with scarcely concealed entertained surprise. He was a big man, who extended one spade-like hand and muttered a gruff,
“Enchanté
”
before disappearing into the back of the shop to bring Edward some tea.

Irina squeezed Edward’s knee under the table but he shook her off; he did not want consoling. He did feel slightly less aggressive when Lyova came back with his glass of tea and sat down opposite him for, seated, the disparity in their heights at least was gone. But Lyova still possessed a number of irritating advantages. In the first place, he looked like a hero; his was the face you saw in newspaper pictures of dissidents,
refuseniks,
unbreakable men coming out of years in camps. He had a jutting jaw and a long Pinnochio nose, stern brown eyes which conveyed the impression they had daily witnessed scenes not entered in your English schoolboy’s catalogue of horrors. He also had, which would have been an affectation on almost anybody else, collar-length hair and what Edward thought of as a Russian peasant smock, a dark woollen affair, buttoned down one side and held in by a mammoth belt. The last straw was he smoked; a potent, foul-smelling Cyrillic brand.

The only option open to Edward was to take the offensive. “What is this place?” he asked.

It sounded like a poor joke when they answered simultaneously, “The YMCA.” The shop was a dimly lit barn. Hanging neon strips overhead shed insufficient light across the lino floor and the crammed shelves of plainly bound books. The air smelt of cheap paper and cheaply bound books. Even when there was no one smoking in the shop, you knew there would be a nostalgic whiff of foreign cigarette smoke. It was a place for futile governments in exile and revolutionary plots doomed to extinction.