The Wine of Solitude (10 page)

‘What is in the interest of Russia,’ Chestov said harshly and looked around him, haughtily scrutinising everyone as if to remind them all that he was the representative of the government and had the right to look deep into their hearts and souls in the name of the Emperor.

‘Naturally,’ they all said at once. ‘Speaking of which, has anyone read the papers?’

‘Bring them here,’ Bella said to one of the servants.

They passed them round, each of them skimming the
headlines before carefully looking at the Stock Market page, then impatiently crumpled them up and threw them on the floor where the young servant collected them with a silver-gilt dustpan and brush that bore the coat of arms of Count Petschersky.

‘Nothing new,’ said Max. ‘It’s the next Hundred Years’ War.’ He looked at Bella with sensuous desire. ‘How wonderful these roses smell …’

‘They’re the ones you sent,’ Bella said. She smiled and pointed to the delicate silver filigree basket where the roses were opening their petals in the warmth around the table.

Meanwhile, Chestov was saying, ‘As far as the cannons are concerned, I do not share your enthusiasm, my dear … er …’ He hesitated, pretended to be trying to remember a name he’d forgotten. ‘… er … Salomon Salomonovitch …’

Slivker understood the insinuation but merely shrugged his shoulders as if he were thinking, ‘You can call me a pig if you like, just do as you’re told.’

‘Arkadievitch, dear sir, Arkadievitch,’ he said affably, correcting the Minister’s son, ‘but never mind. You were saying?’

‘Your cannons, perhaps they might serve some other purpose? It seems to me they could be stripped down and used as scrap metal. I’m only a layman in such matters, of course, but I do believe we are short of scrap iron.’

Slivker, having achieved his aim, allowed himself to pause for breath; he took his time choosing some asparagus and waited quite a while before replying. ‘Would you care to speak to your father about it? My God, it wouldn’t commit you to anything … Of course he wouldn’t buy anything without thinking it over first …’

‘But he’s not the only one at the Ministry …’

‘Oh! You know, it’s only a matter of persuading the others.’

‘You mean bribing them,’ said Karol; he called a spade a spade.

‘Alas!’

‘The country’s in such a sad state,’ said Slivker who was only too happy to flatter Chestov now that he had got what he wanted.

‘When it’s an important matter of patriotism, as in this case, it’s not such a bad thing, but if you only knew … However, I can’t betray the secrets of the gods,’ said Chestov.

‘I know about a deal that’s better than your Spanish cannons. It’s a factory that was confiscated from an Austrian group at the beginning of the war and which is going to start operating again. I have it from a reliable source; they’re selling all the shares as one lot; they’ll cost 5 but will be worth 500 in two months,’ said Karol. ‘I don’t understand why people aren’t willing to get involved in sound business deals.’

‘Because’, Slivker said bitterly, ‘when you first get involved in a deal, you never know if it will turn out well.’

‘For example,’ said Karol, smiling sarcastically, ‘your bread deal with the army.’

‘What about it?’

‘You made us listen to you go on about it for six months. It ended up as a heap of rotten bread.’

‘The flour was of the finest quality,’ said Slivker, who seemed annoyed. ‘I used only the best millers. What went wrong was that they decided to save money on building the ovens, and since no one knew the exact dimensions to build them, the bread wasn’t cooked properly and went off.’

‘And soldiers died of dysentery,’ said Chestov.

‘Is that what you think? Well, the merchandise was rejected and that was the end of it; it was unfortunate, but the bread had to be thrown away. I insisted upon it myself to the authorities. I don’t have the death of a single man on my conscience,’ said Slivker.

Karol laughed like a child, his face contorting in a malicious grimace; he reached over the table and gave a little tug at Hélène’s hair; she grabbed the tanned, dry hand as he was pulling it away and kissed it. She loved the fire in his eyes, his white hair and his smile: it could be so sad and so mischievous.

‘Although, whenever he looks at that woman, he melts,’ Hélène thought resentfully. ‘Is it possible he doesn’t see through their charade? He’s actually happy, happy in this chaotic household, among the new furniture, the dining service engraved with initials that aren’t his, betrayed by an unfaithful wife … You can’t say he doesn’t see it … No, it’s not that; he just brushes it aside, ignores it … In the end, there’s only one thing in the world he’s passionate about and it’s slowly eating away at his soul: gambling, whether on the Stock Market or cards. And that’s all there is to it.’

They ate the apple charlotte, which was covered in hot chocolate sauce. Hélène loved chocolate and for a moment she stopped ‘listening to the conversation of adults’ as her mother put it when reproaching her.

‘Max also says that you’re too interested in hearing about business deals,’ her mother sometimes said. ‘Are they any of your concern? Think about your lessons instead.’

Hélène, out of pure perversity, put her heart and soul into listening and understanding what she heard.

But she was tired; all she could make out was some vague mumbling.

‘Ships …’

‘Petrol …’

‘Pipelines …’

‘Boots …’

‘Sleeping bags …’

‘Shares …’

‘… Millions … Millions … Millions …’

This last word constantly returned, punctuating their sentences like the chorus of a song. ‘An old song,’ Hélène thought wearily.

Dinner was over; Hélène left the table, gave a shy little curtsey that no one noticed and went to bed. The smell of cigars and brandy wafted through the house until morning, slipping beneath her door and insinuating itself into her dreams. A faraway rumbling shook the paving stones: artillery detachments were passing by in the street.

The revolution hadn’t yet begun, but everyone could sense it was imminent; even the air they breathed seemed heavy and full of a kind of menace, as dawn is on the day of a storm. No one was interested in news from the Front; the war seemed to have retreated into the distant past; the wounded were looked on with indifference, the soldiers with sullen hostility. Hélène came into contact with men who were passionate only about money. They were all getting rich. Money flowed like the Pactolus River, with such an impetuous, stormy, capricious force that it terrified everyone who lived along its banks who quenched their thirst with its waters. It flowed too quickly, too easily … The moment you bought some shares on the Stock Market they shot up like a fever. People no longer took pleasure in shouting out the figures in front of Hélène: they whispered them instead. She no longer heard ‘millions’, but ‘billions’, spoken in low voices that were hesitant, breathless; all around her she saw only expressions of greed and fear.

They bought everything at once. Anything, anywhere.
Noon until night, men would arrive, pulling packages from their pockets; behind closed doors, Hélène could hear muffled voices involved in rushed, intense discussions about numbers. They bought fur pelts that hadn’t even been cleaned or sewn, just tied together with string and hung on a long rod, the way salesmen from Asia had sold them in some faraway bazaar; they bought ermine and sable pelts, chinchilla in lots that looked like rat skins, gemstones, necklaces, antique bracelets, all valued according to their weight, enormous emeralds, but cloudy, since their greed and haste were stronger than their judgement; they bought gold: in bars, in ingots, but most especially they bought shares, piles and piles of them, representing holdings in banks, tankers, pipelines and in diamonds that still lay buried beneath the ground. Pieces of paper poked out of the furniture. They made the walls and beds bulge; they were hidden in the servants’ rooms, in the study, at the backs of cupboards and, when spring came, in wood-burning stoves; wads of shares were sewn into the fabric of armchairs and the men who came to the Karols’ house took turns sitting on them, warming them with the heat of their bodies as if they were trying to hatch golden eggs. In the corner of the sitting room great bundles of paper were rolled up in the Savonnerie carpet decorated with garlands of roses; they rustled whenever there was a draft. Hélène sometimes amused herself by stepping on them to make them crunch, the way you crush dead leaves beneath your shoes in autumn. The white piano, its cover closed, shimmered faintly in the shadows; on the walls were motifs in gold: reed-pipes, bagpipes, hats in the style of Louis XV, shepherd’s crooks, ribbons, bouquets of flowers, all gathering dust. Hélène’s parents, the ‘businessmen’ and Max spent every evening in the stuffy little room
that Karol used as an office. It contained nothing but a telephone and a typewriter. They piled in there, happy to breathe in the thick cigar smoke, happy to hear the bare floorboards creak beneath their feet, happy to look at the plain walls that were thick enough to muffle their discussions.

Sitting side by side in that narrow room, Max and Bella took advantage of the chaos and the dim light, which came from a single light bulb hanging down on a wire, to press their warm thighs, their warm bodies against each other. Karol noticed nothing, but every now and again he would squeeze his wife’s bare arm affectionately in the dim light; she respected him now, and feared him, for he was the source of luxury and comfort. Yet she didn’t feel any more at ease in this house than Hélène; sometimes she was overcome with nostalgia for a hotel room, two packing cases piled in a corner and brief affairs embarked on by chance. Her Max was so impatient, so young; his beautiful body never grew tired; she encouraged his jealousy, his rage, his passion for her. Hélène found herself back among the arguments and quarrels that had been her lullabies as a very young child, but now they were between her mother and Max, and were imbued with a bitter intensity that annoyed her and which she couldn’t understand. Nevertheless, she forced herself to irritate them as much as possible; she had a derisive way of looking at Max that infuriated him; she never spoke to him; he started to hate her; he was only twenty-four and still childish enough to hate a little girl.

Hélène wandered sadly through all the rooms, waiting for dinner time. She had finished all her lessons; Mademoiselle Rose took the book from her hands. ‘You’ll ruin your eyes, Lili …’

It was true that, now and again, reading affected her too much, as if she were heavily intoxicated. But to sit in the schoolroom and do nothing, while Mademoiselle Rose sat in silence opposite her, gently nodding her head without saying a word, was beyond her. For a while she sat patiently, watching Mademoiselle’s skilful, ageing hands, which were always busy with some sewing; then, little by little, a desperate desire to do something, to have a change of scene, made her rush out of the room. Mademoiselle Rose had aged so much since the war. She hadn’t had any news of her family for three years and her brother, the one she called ‘little Marcel’, for he was her half-brother after her father’s second marriage, had disappeared in the Vosges region of France at the beginning of 1914. She had no friends in St Petersburg; she didn’t even understand the language of the country despite having lived there for nearly fifteen years. Everything upset her. Her entire life was dedicated to Hélène’s well-being, but Hélène was growing up. She needed to be cared for in other ways, but Mademoiselle Rose had known her since she was so very young, and was herself so innately reserved and with such a strong sense of propriety that she was unable to reach out to Hélène, to encourage confidences which, at that point in her life, Hélène wouldn’t have entrusted to her anyway.

Hélène protected her inner life; she hid it fiercely from sight – everyone’s sight, even from the person she loved most in the world. She and Mademoiselle Rose were bound together by a fear that neither of them dared to speak of: that Mademoiselle Rose might be sent away. Anything was possible. Their lives were ruled by Bella’s whims, by her excessively bad moods or a sarcastic remark from Max.
During these deadly years Hélène did not once breathe freely; there wasn’t a single night when she went to bed feeling calm and confident. During the day, Mademoiselle Rose took Hélène to mass at the church of Notre-Dame-de-France. A French priest spoke to a small congregation of people born in this foreign land; he spoke of France, of the war, and prayed for ‘those who suffer, those who must travel, and the soldiers who have fallen on the battlefields’.

‘We’re fine,’ thought Hélène in between responses; she looked at the two low candles burning beneath the image of the Virgin Mary, and listened to the soft crackling of the wax tears that flowed and flowed, ever so slowly, until they fell on to the paving stones. She closed her eyes. At home, Bella would say, shrugging her shoulders, ‘Your Mademoiselle Rose is becoming holier-than-thou. That’s all we need …’

In church Hélène feared nothing, thought about nothing, allowed herself to be cradled by a soothing dream, but the moment she stepped outside and found herself in the dark street, walking along the gloomy, fetid canal, her heart ached with mortal anguish once more.

Sometimes Mademoiselle Rose looked around in surprise, as if she were waking from a dream. Sometimes she would murmur a few vague words, and when Hélène impatiently cried, ‘What do you mean?’ she would shudder and turn her large, deep-set eyes slowly away. ‘Nothing, Hélène, nothing,’ she would say softly.

Yet the pity that filled Hélène’s heart did not soften it; she bore the pity angrily, as if it were a burden. ‘I’m becoming horrible, now,’ she thought in despair, ‘just like everyone else.’

In the mirrors of the sitting room, lit up by the light that filtered in from beneath the office next door, Hélène studied
her reflection for a long time: her face and the dark-coloured dress that looked like a black stain against the delicate light wood panelling, her thin, tanned neck that stuck out of the narrow collar of her checked dress, the gold chain and blue enamel locket that, to Hélène, were the only ‘outward signs’ of wealth. She was so bored. She believed she was unhappy because they dressed her like a little girl in short skirts, with her hair in great curls, although in Russia, a girl was already considered a woman at fourteen. As for the rest …