The White Russian (13 page)

I also thought she might ask, ‘Are
you
Russian?’ If she does, I was already thinking, realizing I was sitting up
straighter than usual, I’ll tell her. There’ll be no stories about Belleville butchers today.

But she didn’t laugh, or ask me any questions. She just looked at me without moving, so that, in the dusk, I couldn’t tell if she was even taking in what I was saying.

At last she nodded. But all she said, in a small, blank voice, was, ‘Well, I don’t have any old relatives. Just business.’

And then she turned her eyes down and started looking at her hands.

There was nothing rude about it. She just didn’t want to talk. If anything, she looked vulnerable. There was even, I thought, a faint possibility that there’d been tears springing up in her eyes.

Well, there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t force her to talk to me or, come to that, dry her tears. I was no one to her … just a taxi driver. Feeling, this time, sad more than angry, I turned back to face the road, and drove on.

But of course I listened to what her private business was. I stood out in the drive, by the car, breathing in evening air and smoke as I waited to bring her back into Paris, while she sat in the ground-floor office just a few feet away and with the window wide open and the curtains not drawn, talking with that old charlatan Madame Sabline.

I didn’t dare stare in. I thought she might feel my eyes on her. I kept my gaze fixed on the end of my cigarette glowing in the dark. But I eavesdropped shamelessly.

One of nature’s great money-sniffers, Madame Sabline trumped all the girl’s questions about the American woman
– who, it turned out, had been the girl’s grandmother, as well as Madame Sabline’s sister-in-law – with her own brutally self-interested questions about the will, the estate, who’d inherited what, what there’d been to leave. And then, when it turned out that the answer to these questions was ‘not much’, and there was no bequest to Madame Sabline or the home she ran, she broke the conversation off, quite abruptly, with the words, ‘Well, it’s nearly the dinner bell; time’s pressing; I’d better be getting on.’ I hadn’t heard her offer a word of condolence.

‘But … well, of course,’ I heard the girl reply, sounding crestfallen if polite. ‘Only there is one thing. Please can you look at this, and tell me what it says?’

There was a rustle of paper. ‘ “Zhenya”,’ Madame Sabline pronounced indifferently after a moment. I heard her chair scrape.

‘My grandmother wrote that when she got ill, you see. So I’m wondering, is there a Zhenya you know of who knew my grandmother?’ the girl persisted. ‘Someone she might have been thinking of at the last?’

Madame Sabline came over to the window. Without looking, I could see her silhouette. She could probably see mine too, standing by the taxi. I kept my eyes down. It was probably rude of me not to nod a greeting, but she was one of the Russians I didn’t like to associate with: the kind whose mind was full of the most banal lament imaginable for all the unimportant material things lost years ago when she left home behind: an inventory of missing silver spoons and chandeliers and bracelets. She started fiddling with the curtains. I’d been to enough evening classes in philosophy and writers’ get-togethers at that place myself, over the
years, to know that its administrator wouldn’t actually draw those curtains shut in the presence of a guest – they were in shreds. Looking out and twitching at the great ruined folds of dark-red damask so that the rings jingled against the rail was just her way of showing impatience.

‘It wouldn’t have been her husband – your brother?’ I heard from farther back in the room.

‘No. God rest his soul, he was Pavel Pavlovich.’

‘And he didn’t have any children from his first marriage?’

‘No.’

‘And my grandmother didn’t take an interest in any of your orphans called Yevgeny?’

Madame Sabline shook her head, leaning out of the window, taking in a deep breath of night air and my cigarette smoke. ‘Not particularly, no,’ she said. ‘Anyway, the orphanage closed down years ago. We’re none of us getting any younger.’

She perched herself on the window ledge, twisting back towards her guest. ‘Mademoiselle, it could be anyone, or everyone,’ she said with the brutality people sometimes call being cruel to be kind. ‘There’s no way you’ll ever know who was on her mind. It’s a common enough name. Every fifth Russian man is called Yevgeny. There are probably thousands of Yevgenys in Paris.’ Her harsh voice cracked into something approaching a laugh. ‘Why, even your taxi driver’s called Yevgeny.’

‘I didn’t realize you were Russian,’ the girl said to me.

It was fully dark now. I was concentrating on a roundabout. I couldn’t look behind but, feeling warm, I moved my shoulder in a kind of nodding shrug to show I was listening.

‘Madame Sabline in there says your father runs the White Russian military in Europe?’

I nodded. I had such mixed feelings about Father’s work that I couldn’t feel proud, exactly. But I liked the respectful way she pronounced the words.

I turned off the roundabout, deep in the usual argument with myself that always began when I thought of Father. That dear old man, tap-tapping around with his cane and his belly, was almost cultured, and not without humour. But I’d never been able to grasp why a man with so little killer instinct would first have chosen to devote his youth to fighting, and then to have gone on and on with what he doggedly went on believing to be his calling despite the crushing defeat of the Civil War. They just weren’t cut out for the savagery of fighting in the twentieth century, he and all the other genteel ex-generals of ROVS. It was agonizing to watch someone so unsuited to strategic thinking still
vainly trying to plot the overthrow of Communism, like listening to a person with absolutely no ear for music trying to be a violinist. His past career contained nothing but monstrously irreparable mistakes, which were as obvious as they could possibly have been, yet it made no difference. He went on trying. He was so proud to be running ROVS in that apartment full of maps stuck through with coloured pins, even though there was nothing real about any of it. Even the journal he edited, which so many of his former associates from that long-dead army wrote for or subscribed to – for there were still tens of thousands of army men like my father, all over Europe; he claimed a membership of a hundred thousand – even the journal made me sad.

I was so absorbed in these painful thoughts that I was surprised when the girl spoke again.

‘And that your name is Yevgeny? Zhenya?’

I did turn round now. I could hear the irritation come unbidden into my voice as I snapped, ‘No! It’s Jean.’ But why bite her head off? None of the things that angered me were her fault. I added, eyes back on the road, hastily trying to sound less sour, ‘Though I
was
called Zhenya, Yevgeny, once, a long time ago, in Russia … But I live in France now. I go by a French name. I’ve been here for twelve years – pretty much half my life – so I reckon I’m pretty much a Frenchman, even if I do have Russian blood and a nonsense stateless passport. There are too many Russians who reject reality: people who’d rather just pretend they’ve never left Russia and are living in some sort of imaginary Saint-Pétersbourg-sur-Seine. That bores me. I keep out of the way of Russians. I don’t like all their spite and squabbles, plots, counter-plots, the endless talk about
lost splendours. All I want is to earn my crust; live my life in peace. What’s the point of living in the past?’

I’d still sounded more bitter than I’d meant to, I thought miserably. That wasn’t a well-put, worldly, amused explanation. It was a rant. I’d spoiled the moment. There’d be no more talk now.

But she did speak again, after a moment’s pause. She said, ‘And I’m Evie.’ Her voice was soft and, I thought, sympathetic. ‘
Enchantée, Jean.
’

I snatched a glance at her in the mirror. I could see she was smiling, because the moon was out.

For a while we drove in that moonlit quiet down the leafy suburban roads, heading for the porte d’Orléans.

I kept my eyes on the faintly shiny, gently moving clouds of foliage all around, but my mind was full of the girl behind me. I wanted to hear Evie’s voice again. I wanted, more than anything I’d wanted for a long while, to ask her questions. But I couldn’t find a way to frame the questions I wanted to ask. Why had she come all the way across the world to visit a family member, yet knew so little about the grandmother who’d died that she’d been reduced to driving around Paris at night, asking strangers questions about names scribbled on bits of paper? She’d told Madame Sabline that there was no money to leave, so she couldn’t have been asking for the obvious reason – because of something in the American woman’s will.

That old brute Madame Sabline had been rude, but she hadn’t been wrong. Unless this girl – Evie – already had some inkling who this Zhenya she was looking for was, she’d never find him now the old woman was dead.

‘No one lives in the past in America,’ I heard suddenly. She sounded tentative – almost, I thought, as if she’d also been trying to come up with the right way to carry on. I couldn’t help a quick private smile – she couldn’t see my face, after all, in the driver’s seat – as I realized that she wanted to talk to me. ‘Maybe you’ll think this is funny, but I actually came here because I
wanted
to find out more about the past …’

And then she was off, telling me about the Paris grandmother no one in her family talked about, who’d once been married to a diplomat who’d died in Russia, long ago, and then been cut out of the family and forced to leave her child behind because she had artistic yearnings (which, I thought cynically to myself, was probably just a respectable family’s code name for too many of the wrong kind of love affairs) and, finally, when the girl went to college, had started sending her gifts. About deciding she’d come over to Europe as soon as college was over, and get to know this grandmother for herself. About buying a ticket and just setting off, alone – ‘I wanted an adventure!’ she said, rather shakily – and making it all the way here, only for the old woman to die before they’d had a chance to talk. About how, before the old Countess Sabline had died, she’d written the name Zhenya down in a last note on a bit of blotting paper, and how Evie now wanted to find this Zhenya, because she thought he was someone her grandmother wanted to look after.

I nodded and nodded, finding solace in the possibility of relationship and the music of her voice.

I could hear many things in her story: not just the obvious fact that she had enough money to cross the world
on a whim, but also the cold wind that must blow through her family to have made her travel so far to seek love. I appreciated her good French and careful choice of words, too, which spoke of intelligence and a trained mind … And yet I also heard a contradictory note of naivety in what she was saying. She was talking about that piece of paper in her hand with what seemed to me too much of the wrong kind of hope, as though it were a clue in a detective story; as though it would actually take her to a living person, who’d give her vital information that would reveal the dead woman to her.

That was something I could sympathize with, and not just because I felt so drawn to her. I understood that yearning of hers to find something that was, in reality, irretrievably lost. The piece of paper was all she had left of the dead woman.

Gently, I said, ‘Shall I give you a piece of advice from Tolstoy?’ Then, before even bothering to look in the mirror at the puzzlement that would inevitably be on her foreign face, I added, ‘Who was a great Russian writer … He believed history was like a great clock moving unstoppably forward … and his advice to ordinary people, the helpless cogs in that clock’s machinery, was just to live in the present moment, as well as possible. He said: “If you want to be happy, be.” ’

‘Ah,’ I heard. She didn’t sound downcast. In fact, I heard a bright pleasure in her voice. ‘Yes, Tolstoy. But he also said, “Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait,” didn’t he; and, “The strongest of all warriors are these two, Time and Patience.” And I’ve got time, and patience … so I hope I’ll find out what I need to know.’

Thank God there was a red light, because I took my eyes right off the road to turn around and stare. ‘You know Tolstoy?’ I said. She was looking – just a bit – mischievous, pleased with herself at having risen to that challenge and capped my quote, I thought.

She smiled wider at my frank astonishment. ‘The quote’s from
War and Peace
, I think,’ she added with satisfaction. Then, ‘Do you know the light’s green …?’ I turned round, smiling myself, and put my foot down. We glided on.

‘It’s not every young American girl who knows Tolstoy,’ I said over my shoulder.

‘I love Tolstoy,’ she responded. ‘My grandmother sent me
Anna Karenina
when I started college. I’ve read lots more since.’ A pause. ‘It’s not every taxi driver who’s read Tolstoy, either …’

I almost laughed at that generalization, which, while it might be true of most Parisian drivers, certainly wasn’t of us Russians, many of whom had been professors once.

But I wanted to avoid sounding bitter, so I told her about some of the writers I was occasionally invited to spend evenings with, so I could listen to them talking about literature or reading bits of whatever they were working on. They’d started to let me come, as an acolyte, because they knew I wanted to write, too, one day. Someone had seen promise, somewhere, in some dark comment I’d made a year or two before and introduced me; these writers’ evenings were the chink of light in my life. The writers were all grindingly poor by any normal measure, but at least they were in a position to give some of their mind to the work of the mind that they’d been intended for. As I described them now, I dwelled in particular on my
Russian writer hero Sirin’s wry descriptions of the bizarre job his lover had taken to get them at least a taste of food – trimming poodles at a barber for rich pets – and of his own apartment, so tiny he had to write in the bathroom with an ironing board across the bidet for a desk. I even found myself trying to explain to the American girl his pun about our pennilessness in Paris: ‘
pas riche
’ in a city we knew, in Russian, by the same two syllables: ‘
Pa-rizh
’.

I was gratified when I heard, behind me, her laughter in the dark.

‘So gallant, the Russians you talk about; how I admire that spirit …’ She sighed, then, ‘You’ll be a writer too,’ as if she were beginning to understand more. ‘Won’t you? One day? Maybe you write already?’

I wriggled in my seat, and knew there was bashfulness in my laugh. ‘Maybe a little …’

‘It must be strange driving a taxi,’ she said hesitantly, ‘if you weren’t born to it …? I mean, as an educated man …’

‘Why?’ I said, keeping my voice neutral. ‘It’s just realistic. There’s no point standing on one’s dignity when there’s no Russian dignity left. My father would do anything – has been fighting for years – to go home to where he was born. That’s his calling. And it doesn’t matter whether, left to my own devices, I’d just forget the past. I have to respect his dream. But someone has to pay the rent, too. Someone has to exist in the real world of Paris in 1937. So I go out and drive.’

‘Maybe it’s not so strange,’ she said, pushing back her golden hair. ‘I know so little, that’s all. But maybe you’re a bit like a man I met in the train, who was off to Spain to fight for the rights of the poor – perhaps, for you, it’s all a matter of principle.’

Principle?

I opened my mouth, trying to stop her say something so catastrophically naive that it would lose her my respect forever, but before I could say anything she’d gone artlessly on, ‘Because … after all, how good it must be to live and work among simple, honest people.’

I shook my head on a rising tide of silent fury directed both at the futility of my own existence and at her unforgiveable callowness. What made this rich young girl think being poor was good, or made you honest? Who did I know who was either simple or honest, however poor? The former foreign minister of a Balkan state, whom I met every now and then, still telling his worn diplomatic anecdotes from twenty years before? The other once influential people I sometimes had a cheap dinner with in a Russian restaurant, who were now labourers or drivers? Or might she mean the people I met in my other life: the Russian scroungers, the French vagrants, the prostitutes, the pimps?

‘Simple, honest people?’ I said, and my rage was all mixed up with unbearable disappointment that this girl and I would not, after all, have anything more to talk about. ‘I don’t know any of those. Though I do know plenty of stupid ones.’

There was silence for the rest of the drive back to the rue du Colisée.

She paid in silence. I gave her change in silence. She got out under the street lamp. Then she came back and leaned in through the cab, and again I smelled her faint fragrance and saw the smoothness of her skin. This time she looked straight into my eyes, and said, with disarming frankness,
‘I hope I didn’t say the wrong thing. I’m still just figuring things out.’

I nodded, with my lips still clamped tight. Even if the humbleness of that last comment had surprised me, I wasn’t going to let my guard down again.

She didn’t go away. She continued, ‘And I want to ask – could I employ you to help me for a few days?’ Her voice was all breathy with hope, but I wasn’t going to soften. I waited to hear her job offer. ‘So that I can track down the Zhenya my grandmother was thinking of?’ she stammered. I could tell in advance that she was about to say, tremulously, that, because she couldn’t speak Russian and didn’t understand enough about the Russian world in Paris to know where to look for this Zhenya, she’d like a fellow detective – or a Sherpa, paid, humiliatingly, by the day. I cut her off.

‘It’s a fool’s errand,’ I said. Why should I care if she knew I’d eavesdropped like a servant? Wasn’t it time at least one smug, frivolous, rich girl got a taste of reality? ‘Madame Sabline was right. There are thousands of Zhenyas in Paris. You’d be wasting your money.’

I put my foot on the pedal. The engine raced. ‘And I’m fully employed,’ I added.

‘It wouldn’t take long,’ she stammered, sounding stung. She didn’t let go of the window. After another moment’s thought, she added, ‘Well, can I at least show you her letters? Her apartment’s full of letters in Russian. I can’t read them.’

I shrugged. ‘There’s a bar I stop off at every night at about four in the morning, next to the station you’ll have arrived at,’ and I reeled off the address. It was a real place, and I really did park up nearby every night, and stop in it
for an hour or so before going to pick up clients arriving on the early morning train. But I knew in advance that she’d never go near a cheap bar like that. It wasn’t in a part of town that her rich sort ever went to. It would be invisible to her.