The Way I Found Her (43 page)

And it was weird, the minute I arrived there, how clearly I could see everything and smell the river and hear the engines of boats. All I was doing was going round and round my cell and sometimes tapping on Valentina's wall, but this imaginary London got such a grip on my mind, it was like I was a movie camera going along and getting everything into itself on film. The light seemed amazingly clear, so that there was a kind of shine on things, and as well as
seeing
these things I was also
composing
them into frames and going in and out of close-up shots and wide shots, and this felt like such a brilliant thing to be doing that my heart started to beat wildly.

So then I sat down for a moment, on the floor of my cell and on a conveniently placed municipal bench, looking out along the water. I tapped on the wall and said: ‘Valentina, do you think being a film director might be a good career?'

‘A film director, did you say?'

‘Yes.'

‘Is that what you want to be?'

‘I don't know. I just suddenly thought it up.'

Valentina didn't say anything for a moment. Then she said: ‘It's odd you should mention that. Do you know where I was on my London walk?'

‘Where?'

‘I was just going along Kensington High Street and I thought, I'll look in at the Odeon and see what movies they're showing this afternoon. Perhaps this is some kind of sign, darling, about your future life?'

The house was quiet, so we took the pipe out of the wall and lay down to rest, after pounding the hard pavements of London, and I asked Valentina how her ‘future life' as a writer of medieval romances had come into her mind. And she told me again that she never would have thought up the idea of becoming a writer if she hadn't met Alexis.

‘At the time of the café,' she told me, ‘when I was eighteen, nineteen, that kind of time, Papa and Maman used to take me to some Russian evenings they had up at Montmartre.

‘They were held in one of the old
guinguettes
. They used to clear away some tables and there would be dancing to the balalaika and that kind of thing. I think they were shabby places and the vodka they served was very poor quality, but I liked that Russian music very much and being with Russian people always made Anton and Olga happy. Strange, you see? They hated Russia in a way, but I think they were always homesick for the language.'

‘Were you homesick for the language?'

‘No. Remember I was three when they brought me here. I spoke Russian with them, but French at school and with everyone else. For me, Russian was the language of the family, that's all. But anyway, it was at one of those
guinguette
evenings that I met Alexis. All the others at those dances were shopkeepers or taxi drivers or café owners like us, or factory people, but suddenly there was this thin, serious young man and he told me he was a poet, and in a very short time I lost my heart to him. It wasn't that I loved him. What I loved was what he
did
. And all I wanted to say to him was: “Take me away.”

‘We got married. But he couldn't take me away from anything or to anywhere, because we had no money, nothing, and I had to stay on and work in the café just like before, while Alexis earned his few little beans from his poems, published here and there, in small-circulation journals.

‘And I soon realised that this life would just go on. On and on. Alexis had changed nothing. So I thought, if he can write, so can I. But I will write something that a
lot
of people want to read. Alexis's poems were so
Russian
, so much about suffering and prisons and grey skies. And I knew I didn't want to write about these things. You see how terrible our history is? I've given you a little flavour of it, haven't I? And I didn't want to write about my own life, either. Because what was in my own life except work in the café and seeing my father struggling backwards and forwards from the coal cellar with his sacks of coal? Who would have read a novel about these things? No one.'

I started to say that Dostoevsky had written about suffering and poverty in
Crime and Punishment
and so many hundreds of thousands of readers had read it that it now had the status of a ‘world classic', but Valentina wasn't listening. She began to describe to me how she'd started going to libraries and researching details about life in the Middle Ages, when chivalry was still a word that had meaning and handsome men used to ride around with hawks on their wrists. She said: ‘It was when I read about these hawks that I knew I had found my subject. My first hero was a falconer. That book sold ninety thousand copies.'

We lay in the dark for a while. I knew Valentina wanted me to say something about this falconer, but nothing came into my mind, so we just lay there, without talking. I'd moved my mattress up to the pipe hole, so that I could be comfortable during our conversations, and now I rolled over on to my back and stared up at the invisible roof. I'd forgotten if it was day or night or what the sky might be doing if I got up and moved the slate.

After about five minutes of silence, I heard Elroy come slithering through the hole towards me. He was Valentina's now, but she'd sent him on a mission into my cell.

Every day, when there was light and when the house was silent, I stood on the table and chair and worked on the slates until my arms ached too badly to continue.

Valentina had passed her rusty nail to me, stuck into Elroy's uniform, and I was trying to use this as a lever, to work the pins loose from the wood batons. As I worked, and I could feel the adjoining slates begin to move, a plan of escape came filtering very slowly into my mind, but the plan depended not only on the size of the hole I could make in the roof, but on other factors, whose outcome I couldn't know. Any one of these other factors, if it went against me, would render my plan unworkable.

Where the first slate had moved and rain had come in, one of the batons had gone brittle and pulpy along about five or six centimetres of its length. This gave me the idea of talking out a section of baton, so that, if I could remove the slates above, I'd eventually create a hole wide enough to climb through. But although it would be relatively easy to smash the pulpy section with the iron pipe, I hadn't solved the problem of how I was going to cut through the undamaged wood on either side.

Valentina knew I was working on an escape hole. She seemed to like the idea of the hole, but not the idea of climbing out of it. It was like she saw making the hole as just a way of passing the time. Whenever I mentioned getting out on to the roof, she said: ‘Lewis, the roof is dangerous. What you must not risk is your life.'

I knew we had to be on the third floor of a house. When the monkeys went quiet, I decided they were on the ground floor. At night, sometimes, I heard someone moving about right underneath me and so I assumed one of them probably slept there, and once or twice I woke up and knew, without being able to see anything, that Alexis was standing right outside my door; I could hear the little gasp in his breathing. And then I'd wait to see what he was going to do. But he never did anything. He just stood there, listening and gasping, and then he went away.

One morning, he heard us talking through the wall. Valentina was telling me how Anton and his regiment, fighting under Zhukov, were never allowed home on leave during the whole war. They just had to fight on and on and on. The only way a man could get home leave was if he was so badly wounded he couldn't hold a rifle. She said: ‘That's why the Russian army never gave up, you see. Even in temperatures so low, the wounded would die of frostbite in fifteen minutes if they were left out in the snow. There was no way out of the war for any of them – except to win it. And you know, Lewis, people talk about the German soldiers being brave, and I think they were: they had to endure that terrible cold as well and their uniforms were thin and inadequate. But Anton used to say to me, “Valya, I will tell you the truth of the war on the Eastern Front and that is that no one fought like we fought! No one anywhere else on earth!”'

I was about to say that, from the sound of all this, the war fought by the Brits in Western Europe was just a relatively puny thing compared with what the Russians endured, when I heard Alexis shout: ‘You hear, Lewis? You learn? You don't look down on us any more?'

What terrified me wasn't his sudden shouting, but the idea that he was going to come into my cell and see the pipe out of the wall and order the hole to be blocked up. I grabbed the pipe and, as quietly as I could, began inserting it back into the wall. While I was doing this, I said: ‘I've never looked down on anyone else's army since I saw this programme about Caen, when the British stopped for a tea break and let a German tank get into the city and start blasting it to smithereens.'

There was a silence. I knew Alexis wouldn't understand the expression ‘smithereens'. I didn't understand it either, not exactly. Then I said: ‘Will you play a chess game with me?'

I could hear him gasping. Valentina said nothing. Then Alexis said: ‘You play chess, Meaulnes?'

‘Yes.'

He laughed his high laugh and said: ‘English chess?'

I had the pipe back in place. I could feel Valentina take hold of her end of it and settle it back into position. I waited. Alexis was still laughing. I wondered whether poets had a universal tendency to laugh at their own jokes. I'd never met any poets before.

‘I usually play for money,' he said.

‘I haven't got any money,' I said. ‘You took it all.'

This made him laugh even harder. ‘I will consider your proposal,' he said. Then he went away.

To get Alexis to play chess with me was one essential part of my escape plan. Another essential part of the plan was to win at least one of the games, so I decided not to mention this to Valentina. I wouldn't know, until we'd played the first game, whether I was capable of winning against Alexis or not. What I did think was likely was that Alexis
would
agree to play with me. Being a kidnapper had to be almost as boring, on a day-to-day level, as being the kidnapped. The prime qualitative difference between the two forms of existence was a difference of light.

But Valentina and I fought boredom in loads of peculiar ways. When we next removed the pipe, I said to her: ‘Put your ear very close to the hole and close your eyes and listen.'

I got my sifflet du chasseur and began to be a bird. I still didn't know which bird I was, but I thought Valentina probably couldn't tell the difference between a chaffinch and a robin, so this didn't really matter.

After a long while of listening in silence to the whistling, she said: ‘Darling, how are you doing that? It brings tears to my eyes.'

‘Practice,' I said.

‘Who taught you?'

‘No one. I just picked it up.'

When I was tired of being this anonymous bird, I gave my mouth a rest for a while and then tried to be a lark, by letting more air come between my tongue and the sifflet, so that the sound was more shrill and on a two-note scale.

Valentina liked my lark. I don't know whether she'd ever heard one in her life, but she said, ‘That is just exactly and completely like a lark, darling!' Then she asked me to tell her about Devon and the dunes and our house near the sea, where she'd never been. She kept reassuring me that I'd be back there again very soon, but somehow no part of me wanted to believe this. What I wanted to believe, I found it impossible to express.

I described our house, which wasn't particularly beautiful, just old and ordinary and painted white, with wallflowers growing by the front door, and a tamarisk hedge at the bottom of the garden and a clothes line that ran from the kitchen wall to a wormy apple tree. I said that I'd always lived there and that the cellar was full of toys I'd had when I was small, which Hugh and Alice somehow couldn't bear to part with. I said: ‘I go and look at them about once a year. I don't know who they're being kept for.'

Then Valentina said an odd thing. She said: ‘Well, you know, Alice isn't so old, darling. Thirty-seven isn't old. She could have another baby if she wanted to. Perhaps they're keeping the toys for that day?'

‘No,' I said.

We were silent for a bit. And then, in the silence, I thought, yes, after all, that could turn out to be it, Valentina has put her finger on it: this unborn kid is the future. Except that nobody can say for sure who its father will be. It could be born with short sight. Or wings.

But Hugh will believe it's his. In time, my chess set will be given to it. Hugh will teach it how to interpret the standing stones of South Devon and how to recognise the cry of the lark. Reams of information that it never asked for will be poured into its ears. It will be taken on the Northern line to fly its kite on a windy hill. Hugh will tell it that happiness is no bigger than a shrimp in a rock pool, but it will try nevertheless – as I had tried – to love England and to love its life.

The next morning, the kidnappers let me take a shower. When they said the word ‘douche', I had difficulty believing I'd heard right. One of the things I'd begun to dream about was the bath in the attic at the rue Rembrandt. In these dreams, I heard that old whistler in the next room and I remembered the tune he'd been whistling had been slow and sad, like a sort of lament.

Vasily took me to the shower. He was the one who did most of the menial stuff and he was in a bad mood that day. He put on my blindfold, and then shoved me along the corridor and down some wooden stairs to the next floor. He told me, in French, that I smelled like a rat. I asked him how he knew what a rat smelled like, but he didn't answer. I slipped on the stairs and fell and he yanked me up, then pushed me into the shower room and locked me in.