The Time of the Angels (6 page)

“You do speak such beautiful English.”

“I learnt it at home as a small child. We all spoke English. I could speak it fluently before I left Russia.”

“Were you happy as a child?”

“Happy? In paradise.” It was true. He had been conceived and born in happiness, he had come to consciousness deep in a happy sea. He loved his parents. He loved his sister. He loved the servants. And everybody loved him and spoiled him. He was a little king. In the country he had his own pony and groom. In St Petersburg he had his own special sledge, with its horse Niko, and a servant, Fyodor, who always drove him when he went to see his friends. His boot crushes through the crisp sparkly surface of the snow and he climbs in. The brass fitments shine dazzling in the sun as if little lights had been placed here and there upon the sledge. The big fur rug is adjusted so that only his nose and eyes appear underneath his fur hat. The black leather belt which Fyodor is fixing is soft and smells of a special polish which is bought at the English shop on the Nevsky Prospect. The horse strains for a moment. Then there is effortless movement. The sledge skims, it flies. There is a faint singing. Faster, faster, dear Fyodor. The sun shines upon the snow of the road, creased and lined with the marks of other sledges. The sun shines upon the gilded dome of St Isaac’s and upon the slim finger of the Admiralty spire.

“How lucky you are to have happy memories. That at least they can never take from you.”

“They—yes.” They had taken almost everything else. But it was true that those six golden years remained an endless source of light. Their radiance did not pain him by any contrast. Rather he gratefully received a warmth from them even now. It was as if he had woven the duller, darker stuff of his life round and round that dear early time, like a sombre egg containing in its centre some glittering surprise, a jewel made by Fabergé.

“But what happened then, when you were six?”

“The Revolution happened. My parents fled to Riga with my sister and myself.”

“And you left everything behind?”

“Everything except some jewels. But they were worth a lot of money. We weren’t really poor in Riga, not at first anyway.” The memories are darkened now. Grown-ups whisper anxiously and fall silent when children approach. A round-eyed bewildered child gazes at a grey sea.

“You must feel very bitter against those people who drove you out.”

“I suppose we could have stayed. Well, it would have been difficult. No, I don’t feel bitter. Things were so dreadful before. Some people so rich and other people so poor. I expect it had to happen.” It was true that he did not feel bitter. There was a kind of cosmic justice in the ending of his happy world. Yet something was unjust, or perhaps simply unutterably sad. He loved his country so much.

“Where is Riga?”

“In Latvia. On the Baltic Sea.”

“Oh. And how long did you stay there?”

“Till I was twelve. My father was afraid that the Soviets would annex Latvia. They did in the end, but we were gone by that time. We went to Prague.”

“Prague. In Czechoslovakia. Were you poor then?”

“We were poor then. My father got a sort of clerical job with a firm of lawyers that knew our family. My mother gave Russian lessons. I gave Russian lessons too when I grew up. I went to the university in Prague.” Shut-in Prague. It had always seemed to him like a trap, a beautiful sinister cage. The big over-weighted buildings descended in cliffs of towers to the cooped-up river. They had had lodgings in a narrow street below the Strahov monastery. Being desperately, endlessly, cold in winter and listening to bells. Bells, bells in the cold.

“So you’re a university man?”

“Yes, I suppose I am a university man. But it was so long ago.”

“Could you make enough money?”

“Well, just. My father died when I was about twenty and things got more difficult. We all worked. My sister made clothes. Of course, there were a lot of Russians in Prague. We helped each other. We carried Russia with us. It lasted till then. But it was a sad time.” His father’s coffin tilts as it is carried up the steep street. The street is too narrow for the hearse. His mother and his sister stumble and weep but he is dry-eyed, hardening himself against pain. The hearse jolts on the cobbles. Bells.

“And what happened then?”

“Well, Hitler happened then. He cut short my studies.”

“Hitler. Oh yes. I’d forgotten. Did you escape again?”

“We tried to, but our papers weren’t in order. We were stopped at the frontier. My mother and my sister were sent back to Prague. I was directed to work in a factory. Later on I was sent to a labour camp.”

“Was it dreadful? How long were you there?”

“I was there till the war ended. It was fairly nasty, but others had a worse time. I worked in the fields. There was enough to eat.”

“Poor—poor you.”

“Look, I’ve been calling you ‘Pattie’ for days. Won’t you call me by my name, ‘Eugene’?” He gave it the English pronunciation of course. It had been a long grief to him that English people mispronounced both his first name and his surname. The beautiful Russian sounds had become a secret. Now he took almost a grim pleasure in the enforced incognito.

“Well, yes, I’ll try. I’ve never known anyone with that name.”

“Eugene.”

“Eugene. Thank you. What happened to your mother and sister?”

“My mother died of a stroke fairly soon. I never saw her after that time at the frontier, though I had some letters. My sister—I don’t know—she just—disappeared.”

“You mean you don’t know what happened to her?”

“Well, people did just disappear in the war. She disappeared. I kept hoping, for a while.”

“Oh, I am sorry. What was your sister’s name?”

There was a silence. Eugene had suddenly found himself unable to speak. A great lump of emotion rose inside him and seemed to surge out into the room. He gripped the edge of the table. It was years and years since he had spoken of these things to anybody. He said after a moment. “Her name was Elizabeth. Elizaveta in Russian.”

“I’m terribly sorry,” said Pattie. “I shouldn’t have asked you to talk. Please forgive me.”

“No, no. It is good for me to talk. I never tell these things. You do me good. Do go on asking me. I can answer any question you ask.”

“What happened then when the war ended?”

“I was in various refugee camps. Eventually I was in a camp in Austria.”

“And how long were you in the camps?”

“Nine years.”

“Nine years? Why so very long?”

“Well, it was difficult to get out. There was so much muddle and one was pushed from one place to another. Then later on I married my wife in the camp. Tanya was her name. Tatiana, that is. She was Russian. And she had T.B. And no one would take us with the T.B. It was a matter of finding some country that would take us, you see.” He had never intended to marry Tanya. It was Leo who had decided that matter.

“And what did you do all those years in the camp?”

“Nothing. Well, a little black market. Mainly nothing.” He recalled the long wooden hut among the pine trees. His bunk was in the corner. The thing was to get a corner. Later he and Tanya shared a small hut with another couple. They had arranged a few things round them, pinned pictures to the wall. He had not been too unhappy, especially when there was Leo. It was odd, after seven years of killing work, nine years of idleness.

“Did you ever think of going back to Russia?”

“Yes. I did think of it then. Tanya didn’t want to. I think I would have been afraid to anyway. And then there was religion.” He lifted his eyes to the icon. With gentle inclined faces the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost conferred around their table with the white cloth. Their golden wings overlapped, entwined. They were melancholy. They knew that all was not well with their creation. Perhaps they felt that they themselves were drifting quietly away from it.

“Oh, you’re a Christian, Russian Orthodox Church.”

“No, not now. I’m nothing now.” During the war his religion had consoled him, more perhaps as a memory of innocent and good people than as any personal faith in a saving deity. In the years of idleness it had slowly faded as indeed almost everything had faded in those years. He had given up his country for a God in whom he no longer believed. But no, he would never have had the guts to go back. Yet he had thought about Russia so much in that camp, lying on his bed through interminable summer afternoons, feeling hungry and smelling the pines and the creosote, and had imagined himself surrounded again by his own language and his own people.

“The picture, the icon. Did you have that with you all the time?”

“Not all the time, no. It was my mother’s. After she died some friends of ours in Prague took it, that lawyer’s family. Then after the war they traced me through the Red Cross and brought it to me in the camp. It’s the only thing that was there and is here.”

It was odd to think that it had hung in his mother’s bedroom in that house in St Petersburg. His mother’s bedroom was dark, full of wavery hanging curtains, laces and nets. It was stuffy and smelt of eau de Cologne. It was even stranger to think the icon had made that journey than to think that he himself had. Perhaps because he had grown old and the icon had not.

“It’s lovely. It must be worth an awful lot.”

“It is. I was always thinking someone would steal it in the camp. I think they might have done only they were a bit afraid of it, superstitious about it. I keep my room locked here—there are always sneak thieves about in this part of London. I meant to say to you to always lock up carefully. It might frighten a thief even here though. It’s supposed to be a miraculous icon. It belonged to a church before it came into our family, and they say it used to be carried on a procession once a year round the town, and while it was out it made all kinds of things happen, people suddenly confessed their crimes or became reconciled with their enemies.”

“Has it done any miracles for you?”

“No. But then I deserve no miracles. I have lost my faith.” He had lost his country and he had lost his faith. The great dark glittering enclosed interior of the Russian church had been a home, a house for him, for so many years of his childhood and his youth. A bearded Russian God had listened in that darkness to his supplications and his prayers, chided his failings, forgiven his trespasses, loved him. Very slowly it had come to him that after all the building was empty. The vast presence was simply some trick of the gloom. There was nothing but the darkness. And now he had a son who could not conceive of God.

“I love the icon,” he said. “I burn incense for it. It’s like feeding it. It’s more than a symbol.” Yet what could it be but a symbol? He was a sentimental superstitious man. He loved the icon because it had been his mother’s and had lived with them in Petersburg. Perhaps it somehow satisfied his defeated sense of property. He loved it too as a blank image of goodness from which all personality had been withdrawn.

“And you came to England?”

“In the end, yes.”

“And then—?”

“Nothing special then. I worked in various jobs. And here I am now talking to Pattie.” How had the years passed? Well, they had passed. Sometimes in memory the time seemed telescoped and it seemed that it was Hitler who had knocked on the gates of St Petersburg. His manhood had been somehow casually taken from him. Fifteen years in camps, the whole middle of his life. More than that, indeed, since he had never really stopped living in a camp. In England he had moved on from one shanty and nissen hut to another. He was living in a camp even now. He had made his corner. That was all.

“I wish I could work in one of those places,” said Pattie.

“You mean a refugee camp? Why?”

“It would be real—one would be near to real misery—helping people—”

“Nothing’s more unreal for the people who live there. Camp life is a dream, Pattie. It’s all right for the welfare workers. Oh, I’ve seen so many of them, so cheerful, so pleased with themselves! Nothing makes people feel happier and freer than seeing other people suffering and shut in! Well, they were good enough people those welfare workers, you mustn’t think me a cynic. But between their self-satisfaction and our dream somehow the reality was lost. Perhaps God saw it. Only a saint could be in the truth there.”

“Well, I should like to be a saint, then.”

Eugene laughed. “All the world’s a camp, Pattie, so you’ll have your chance. There are good corners and bad corners, but it’s just a transit camp in the end.”