The Steppes of Paris (21 page)

Irina giggled. “Ach, Edouard, don’t be so silly. It belongs to a Russian who imports refrigerators from Eastern Europe, and he rents out the two upstairs floors to people in trouble. Lyova has this floor and downstairs there are some very charming Cuban refugees. Really, no one is supposed to be living here at all, because they aren’t residential premises, so the rent’s very low. D’you want to have a peep at the girls sleeping?”

Edward shook his head vigorously. “I waited on purpose until they were asleep. The last thing I want is to risk waking them up.”

Irina looked crestfallen. “But, Edouard, they’re so
sweet.
They’ve got stripey black and white pyjamas like zebras, and Katya goes to bed with a rabbit and Solange with a woollen snake.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Edward said rudely. “I want something to drink.”

He assumed Irina’s radiance was anticipation of the liberated fun and games ahead and he wanted to get into the right frame of mind to enjoy them. He could see no reason why she should want to dwell on the drawbacks. But, to his annoyance, she concluded, “Well, never mind, you’ll meet them in the morning anyway. I’ve told them not to come into the bedroom without knocking. But actually, you know Lyova’s set-up; the bedroom door has a very crucial lock and key.”

It was all really thoroughly off-putting, Edward found, and he couldn’t help wondering, as he followed Irina through into the small and quite phenomenally messy kitchen, what the upshot would be or whether, in these increasingly unpromising surroundings, there would actually be any upshot at all.

Irina had prepared a rather hasty meal. The girls, she explained (Edward felt not sufficiently apologetically, considering she had lured him here on the pretext of an idyll), the girls had kept her busy all day; she hadn’t had a moment to prepare for tonight. She had only finally got them into bed ten minutes or so before Edward arrived. When she had rung
to say they were in bed, in fact she had only extracted a promise from them that they would be in bed by the time Edward arrived. It had been touch and go; they were terribly curious to meet Irina’s “friend”.

At least there was no shortage of vodka. Edward used it to subdue his growing feelings of discomfort and dismay. He had expected to feel distinctly odd visiting Lyova’s flat. Of course, the oddity of the flat itself didn’t help; that sinister entrance and these little, close, low-ceilinged rooms, all absolutely packed with Lyova’s assortment of weird belongings. But what actually struck him as oddest in the set-up was the way Irina was behaving. Dressed, he could not help noticing, with far less than her usual smartness, her hair all dishevelled, she was still glowing with a completely uncharacteristic and apparently inexplicable elation. Moving about the little kitchen, setting out the bits and pieces of their slapdash dinner, she behaved as if she were taking part in some uniquely special celebration, and when they were ready to eat, she raised her glass over the assortment of greaseproof-paper-wrapped offerings and jubilantly toasted their “dolls’ house”.

Edward really could not see what in the circumstances should have put her in such an outrageously good mood. They were hardly going to be able to let fly with two sleeping infants in the room next door. There was precious little he could see in this sordid setting to make anyone feel romantic. It annoyed him that Irina should feel so evidently at home here when he felt totally excluded. Everything, from the Russian magazines left food-smeared around the kitchen to the subjects of the canvases Irina had shown him in Lyova’s small studio, was closed to him. Even some of the food on the supper table had to be explained. He hated being at such a disadvantage, in precisely the role Lyova had patronisingly cast him when they first met; the naïve young Englishman with whom Irina had amusingly taken up. Across the table, he resented Irina’s exuberance and when, for the second time, she got up to check that the sleeping girls were quite all right, he snapped at her, “Oh, for God’s sake, Irina, can’t we even eat in peace?”

After the meal, they moved to the equally jam-packed living-room, having added their plates and glasses to the stack of washing-up waiting in the sink. Irina put on one of
Lyova’s smuggled cassettes of Russian underground ballads, the singer Vladimir Vysotsky. Something in the way she sprawled contentedly on Lyova’s kilim-covered sofa to listen to the music, one hand extended, almost incidentally, to caress Edward’s knee, made his exclusion suddenly intolerable. Was he to sit here while she got into the bedroom mood, listening to songs he couldn’t even understand? He knew, of course, he had no place here and he had been pretty certain he couldn’t care less. But it was unmistakably in a bid to gain a toehold in the boisterous Slav universe Irina and Lyova and Volodya and all her relatives shared that he turned to her and asked, “Teach me how to say something in Russian.”

She considered his request. “What? What d’you want to say?”

He shook his head. “Anything. I don’t mind. You decide. Just teach me how to say something.”

Irina thought for a quite unnecessarily long time. “What sort of thing? Something affectionate? Something funny?”

“I told you, I don’t mind,” Edward repeated impatiently. “I’d just like to be able to say something, even ‘fuck off.”

“Oich!” Irina exclaimed. She recoiled a little along the settee. “I’m certainly not going to teach you anything like that, Edouard.”

He resisted replying, ‘Why not? It may come in useful one day.’

“OK,” he said. “Well, teach me something else then. Come on.”

Irina contemplated a rosy middle distance. At last, she pronounced slowly and clearly:

“For heaven’s sake,” Edward objected. “Does it have to be so long? Couldn’t you just teach me something short and simple like ‘hello’, ‘goodbye’, ‘thank you’? What does it mean?”

“First say it, then I’ll tell you,” Irina answered archly.

“Are you pulling my leg?” Edward asked. “Does it mean something really rude?”

“Certainly not,” Irina humphed. “It’s the beginning of a poem by Pushkin. Go on, say it.”

“You’ll have to say it again, more slowly,” Edward told her, “if you want me to start spouting poetry straight away.”

Laboriously, word by word, she taught Edward to repeat what she had said. He had always thought Russian sounded caressingly smooth spoken by Irina, but the words he pronounced with difficulty sounded throttled, quite unlovely.

Irina heaved with suppressed laughter at his efforts.
“Chudnoye,”
she ticked him off, “not
choodnoyeh,
really!”

It was his first acquaintance with Irina, the Russian teacher, and he couldn’t honestly say he took to her.

At last, on the fifth or sixth repetition, he managed to get his mouth round the lines.

“What does it mean?”

Irina looked unbearably smug. “It means: ‘I remember the wonderful moment when you (female) appeared before me’.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Edward protested. “Talk about fishing for compliments! Can’t you teach me to say something sensible?”

Again, Irina thought quite unnecessarily long and hard.

“OK, this is shorter,” she decided. She declaimed, “
A
schastye
bilo
tak
vozmojno,
tak
blizko
.”

“What’s this from?” Edward jeered.
“War
and
Peace?”

Irina threw him a crushing look.
“War
and
Peace
!
It’s another very famous quotation from Pushkin, from
Evgeny
Onegin.
It is a more appropriate comment.”

“A more appropriate comment on what?” Edward asked suspiciously. “And I’m not going to the trouble of saying it until you tell me what it means.”

Irina’s good mood seemed to be spoiling slightly too. She answered drily, “It means: ‘happiness was so possible, so close.’”

“Oh great,” Edward retorted. “Depressives of the world unite! Can’t you just tell me something short and snappy – and useful? Cut the heavy hints.”

Irina must have been spoiling for a fight. Or perhaps she had gone so far on her Pushkin kick that it was impossible to disengage. Without pausing, she began to recite line after
line of similar-sounding poetry, directing it almost vindictively at Edward. When she finished, she said, “An excerpt from Tatyana’s letter to Evgeny Onegin, for your benefit. I shall just translate the first line: ‘Why did you come to visit us?’”

Edward stood up. “OK, I’ve had enough of this game,” he said. “I’m going to bed.”

Where, in the end, it wasn’t up to much. In the morning, the bedroom door handle rattled urgently and a piping voice called in French, “Reena, Reena, let us in!”

Edward woke, confused, in time to see Irina bounding out of bed, again with that beatific smile on her face, and this time he knew for certain it could not have been caused by the delights of the night before.

Irina slipped out of the room without looking back at him and, for the next half-hour, the flat resounded with peals of girlish giggles, shrieks, and the urgent scampering of excited feet.

Edward had half-hoped to get back to sleep for a bit; it was only seven. But that was out of the question. Failing that, he wondered if Irina might come back to bed again. By eight o’clock, it was clear she wouldn’t, and he had to admit he was hardly surprised. At the same time, he couldn’t help feeling a little resentful because it was she who had got them, quite against his wishes, into these uncongenial circumstances. He put on the pyjamas, which Irina had insisted he bring with him for the sake of the little girls, and ventured out apprehensively in the direction of the bathroom. Almost at once, there was a scuttling noise behind him and two tiny, shrill, sharp-faced girls leapt at him, shouting competitively,
“Bonjour!
B
onjour!”
It was the worst way of starting the day he could possibly imagine.

The little girls scampered around him, keeping up a squeaky running commentary on his name, his age, his unshaven face and, most amusement-inducing of all, his flapping pyjamas. He waved his hands rather helplessly around them.
“Allez
,
allez,
I need to get washed and dressed.” But they barred his way to the bathroom, giggling, and insisting he answer their questions.

Irina appeared in the kitchen doorway and he turned to her, hoping she would call them off. But, instead, she merely
beamed at them, and then at him, and said, “Aren’t they adorable?”

“Not,” Edward answered in English, “at bloody eight o’clock in the morning. I’ve got to go to work, you know. Can’t you keep them out of my way, at least until I’m washed and dressed?”

Irina flinched at his bad temper. Still in her shapeless and horribly mumsy dressing-gown, which he had never seen before, she bustled forward and scooping up a little girl by each hand, she hurried them away in the direction of the kitchen as if out of reach of some savage wild beast.

“Come along,” she clucked. “Edouard will come and have breakfast with us when he is ready.”

That was the culmination of his ghastly visit. Breakfast was never his forte. All he needed was to restore his caffeine level and, here in Paris, he had rather taken to the affectation of a croissant. But a meal at that hour was more than he could cope with.

Katya and Solange ate, in varying degrees of sloppiness, cereal, yellow
biscottes
and eggs. The decibel level in the kitchen was perilously high for someone who had consumed the amount of vodka he had the previous evening and, feeling distinctly delicate, he had to watch the horrible hit-and-miss encounters between Katya and Solange’s mouths and clumsy spoonfuls of cereal and egg yolk.

The fact they continued to squeak at him non-stop made matters considerably worse, of course. He supposed he could see that they were very energetic, vivacious children, but what seemed to him their shrill, spiteful dedication in interrogating him, plus the fact of course that they were Lyova’s children, made them appear precociously shrewish. Katya, the elder one, looked out at him quizzically from under miniature replicas of Lyova’s eyebrows and asked him needling questions about his friendship with “Reena”. Solange, who was too young to look quizzical, just stared intently from the safety of Irina’s lap, as though he really were some savage wild beast. He answered in monosyllables and, once, when Katya thrust her dribbling egg
shell at him, demanding to know whether he thought there were any chickens inside, he turned on Irina and protested, “Why don’t you get them to pipe down?”

Irina sat, still radiant, amid the chaos. Inevitably, Edward’s bad temper focused on her. She seemed to be in her element in this revolting domestic quicksand. For the first time, he thought that she looked utterly unappetising. Her dreadful dressing-gown was now splashed with traces of infants’ breakfasts. In the Cité Etienne Hubert, she wore a green and black kimono. Her hair needed washing and, unmade-up, he thought cruelly, her face showed her age. But it wasn’t the deterioration in her looks which made him stand up, as soon as he had drunk his first cup of black coffee, and announce, “I’m off”: it was her obvious, transparent pleasure in her come-down which he could not forgive her. Sleek, vampish, seductive in the late afternoons of the rue Surcouf, or breathing elemental sighs at night in the Cité Etienne Hubert, Irina had never looked as unequivocally happy as she did now. It confirmed all Edward’s prejudices against children that two such small ones could wreak that much havoc on Irina in twenty-four hours.

She did not get up to accompany him to the front door. Solange was still sitting on her lap. It irritated Edward unreasonably that, when she was looking the worst he had ever seen her, she should seem to care least about his leaving. Normally, her anxiety would surface at every one of his departures. Today she merely, nauseatingly, made Solange wave goodbye. So it was much easier than it might have been for him to say casually, “I shan’t be coming over tonight.”

She did look disturbed at that, despite her beatitude. “Why not?”