The Wine of Solitude (11 page)

‘What am I complaining about?’ she thought. ‘I’m no different from anyone else. Of course, everyone’s house has an adulterous wife, unhappy children and busy men who think only of money. With money, everyone flatters you, smiles at you, everything works out, that’s what they all say. I have money, I’m healthy, but I’m bored.’

One evening Chestov found her in this state of mind and walked over to her; he was drunk; he looked at her slim face raised towards him and smiled. ‘Such beautiful eyes,’ he said.

Hélène knew he was drunk and worse, that he was despicable, selling his country to the highest bidder. But he was the first man who had noticed her. She couldn’t explain how she felt. It was the first time she could feel the impact of a man’s eyes on her, the way he looked at her face, then down at her chest where his gaze lingered on her budding breasts, straining beneath her dress. For a long time Chestov’s gaze sought the tender spot between her chest and her shoulder, still small and angular like a young girl’s; he took her hand and kissed it, then left. That night, for the first time in her life, Hélène wasn’t able to sleep, feeling ashamed, unhappy, troubled to the point of suffering, and yet so proud, still feeling, there in the darkness, the heavy, insolent gaze of a man upon her. Yet from
that moment on, Chestov made her feel more and more afraid and she did everything she could to avoid him.

On another evening she saw groups of women marching through the city asking for bread. They walked behind a scrap of material that billowed in the wind and the sound that rose from the crowd was not a clamour but rather a muffled, timid pleading: ‘Bread, bread, we want bread …’

As they passed, all the doors closed one by one.

Hélène could hear them in the room next door saying, ‘… Buy … sell …’ ‘I’ve heard …’ ‘They say that …’ ‘Unrest, riots, a revolution …’

But deep inside they didn’t believe it; they were as irrational as men being swept along by a flood.

‘We’ll always have money …’

‘There’s only one thing to do … buy, buy …’

‘Buy anything … electric light bulbs, toothbrushes, jars of jam … I was recently told about a Rembrandt. They’d sell it for a piece of bread …’

Riots? They brushed the idea aside with a wave of the hand; they didn’t ignore it; they didn’t underestimate it, but that impatient wave of the hand meant ‘Yes, yes. But we know very well that it can’t last. Yes, yes. We can tell, just as you can, that it will all end, fade away. In any case we’re used to it. Stability is rather boring, frightens us. We understand, we understand perfectly well, but what prods us along, what we enjoy, is to gamble on the future, on the symbols of wealth, on the diamonds that will be confiscated, with stocks and shares that soon might only be worth the paper they’re printed on, on paintings that might be burned …’

‘I’ve heard that Rasputin has been murdered,’ someone said quietly. ‘They say he was assassinated by …’

Then there was a vague whispering: to them, a halo of respect and terror still surrounded the Emperor and the Imperial family.

‘Is it possible?’

A moment of shock, then they brushed it aside. ‘Yes, yes, we’ll have to see. For the moment, let us get on with gambling, getting intoxicated, piling up our gold, our jewellery, or at least let us talk about money, dream about money, amorously stroke our gold bars, our gemstones, our roubles … What will they be worth tomorrow? What will they be worth? Ah, tomorrow is tomorrow … What’s the point of thinking of tomorrow? We have to sell, sell, sell … We have to buy, buy, buy …’

‘Dear Lord, please protect Papa …’

Her mother was never included.

‘Dear Lord, please protect Mademoiselle Rose … Forgive me for my sins. Please let the French win the war …’

The February Revolution came and went, then the October Revolution. The city was distraught, buried in snow. It was a Sunday in autumn. Lunch was over. Max was there. Thick cigar smoke filled the room. You could hear the gentle crackling of the wads of American dollars and British pounds sewn into the armchairs. It was three o’clock; they were drinking very expensive cognac in brandy glasses. Everyone was silent, half listening to the dull, distant gunfire that echoed from the suburbs, day and night, though no one paid any attention to it any more.

Karol had pulled Hélène on to his knee. She had been there for a while, and he had forgotten she was there; he stroked her absent-mindedly, the way you play with a dog’s ears. And sometimes, while he was talking, he pulled her hair so hard that Hélène trembled in pain; he was rough in his affection, but Hélène bore it without complaining, happy to be able to irritate her mother. Nevertheless, she wanted to get down from his lap; he held her back.

‘Wait a while. You never sit with me.’

‘I have lessons to prepare, Papa,’ she said, kissing his tanned hand and its long, slender fingers; he wore an old-fashioned, wide, round wedding ring, the symbol of slavery.

‘Learn your lessons here then.’

‘All right, Papa.’

He slipped a small sugar cube dipped in cognac into her mouth. ‘This is for you, Hélène.’ Then immediately forgot about her again.

They talked about Shanghai, Tehran, Constantinople. They had to leave. But where should they go? Danger was everywhere, but since everyone was in the same boat it seemed less urgent; it would pass. Hélène wasn’t listening; she was completely indifferent to the name of some distant corner of the world where she would end up. She had got down from his lap and was sitting in the red armchair now, learning her lesson for the next day. It was from a book on ‘German Conversation’ and she had to memorise
‘die zwanzigste Lektion’
, the description of a close-knit family. Hélène repeated the words quietly: ‘
Eine glückliche Familie
(a happy family).
Der Vater
(the father)
ist ein frommer Mann
(is a pious man) …

‘Good Lord!’ she thought. ‘What imbeciles …’

She looked at the illustration that accompanied the text.

The ‘happy family’ all sat together in a blue sitting room; the father, who had a blond curly beard that came down to his chest, wore a frock coat and slippers, and was reading the newspapers beside the fireplace; the mother,
the Hausfrau
, was dusting the bookcase shelves, wearing a long apron tied at the waist; the young girl was playing the piano while the schoolboy learned his lessons by the light of a lamp; two young children, a yellow dog and a grey cat sat on the rug
in the middle of the room, all ‘playing’, according to the text, ‘the innocent games appropriate to their age’.

‘What a fantasy!’ thought Hélène.

She looked at the people around her. They didn’t even see she was there, but to her as well they were unreal, distant, half-hidden in a mist: vain, insubstantial ghosts lacking flesh and blood; she lived on the sidelines, far away from them, in an imaginary world where she was mistress and queen. She picked up the small pencil that she always kept in her pocket, hesitated, then gradually, very gradually, pulled the book close to her, as if it were a loaded weapon.

She started to write:

She stopped, twiddled the pencil round in her hand and a cruel, shy smile spread across her face. It made her feel better to write these things down. No one paid any attention to her or cared about her. She could amuse herself in any way she pleased; she continued writing, barely pressing down on the pencil, but with a strange rapidity and dexterity she had never experienced before, an agility of thought that made her aware of what she was writing and what was
taking shape in her mind simultaneously, so they suddenly coincided. She experimented with this new game, as if she were watching tears flow down her face on to her hands on a winter’s evening and seeing how the frost transformed them into icy flowers.

She hesitated, then wrote: ‘The lover …’

She rubbed out the last word, then wrote it in again, enthralled as it appeared before her eyes, then disguised it once more by adding little arrows and curlicues to each letter until the word disappeared and looked like a small insect with a mass of antennae, or a plant with many thorns. It had an evil air about it, strange, secretive and crude, that pleased her.

‘What are you writing, Hélène?’

She gave an involuntary start, and they all stared at her with surprise and suspicion as her face slowly turned white, looking old before its time and suddenly exhausted.

‘Now, then … What are you writing? Give it to me,’ Bella commanded.

Hélène clenched her hands together and silently began twisting and tearing up the paper.

Bella pounced. ‘I said give it to me!’

Desperately, Hélène tried to crumple the paper between her trembling fingers but it was too thick; the coloured illustration on the glossy paper creased but wouldn’t tear; terrified, she breathed in the smell of glue and heavy coloured ink that she would never forget …

‘You’re mad! You will give that to me at once! Be careful, Hélène!’ shouted Bella in a rage and, grabbing her daughter’s shoulder, she dug her nails into her with such fury that Hélène could feel their sharp tips pierce her flesh through her dress. But she clung on to the book, without shedding a tear, teeth clenched, until suddenly she dropped it and it fell to the floor.

Bella made a dive for the page Hélène had torn out, read the few sentences written in pencil, and looked in astonishment at the illustration. Blood rushed straight to her pale face, visible despite her thick make-up. ‘She’s gone mad,’ she exclaimed. ‘You miserable thing, you ungrateful little hussy. You’re a horrible liar! You’re nothing but a fool, do you hear me? Nothing but a wretched idiot. When someone thinks, dares to think such things, things that are so impertinent, so stupid, they at least shouldn’t write them down. They keep them to themselves. How dare you judge your parents. And we’re such good parents. We sacrifice everything for you, for your sake. We worry ourselves sick over your health, your happiness. How ungrateful of you! Do you even understand what it is like to be a parent? You should cherish us! You should think there is nothing dearer to you in the world!’

‘To top it all off,’ Hélène thought bitterly, ‘they want to be loved.’

Her mother’s face was convulsed with fury; she leaned in towards Hélène, her hated eyes burning, dilated with anger and fear. ‘Is there anything you don’t have, you ungrateful thing? Look at you! You have books, dresses, jewellery. What about this?’ she shouted, tearing the little blue enamel locket from its chain and sending it rolling on
to the floor; she crushed it with her heel, stamped on it in a rage.

‘Look at her, look at that face! Not a word of regret! Not a single tear! Just you wait. I know how to bring you to heel. All this is your governess’s fault. She’s turning you against your parents. She’s teaching you to hate us. Well, she can just pack her bags, do you hear me? You can say goodbye to your Mademoiselle Rose. You’ll never see her again! Ah, so that makes you cry, does it? Look at her, Boris! Look at your wonderful daughter. Not a tear for me, for her mother, or for you. But as soon as it concerns Mademoiselle Rose she’s all contrite. Ah, so you deign to speak now. And what have you got to say for yourself, let’s hear it!’

‘It wasn’t her, Mama! Mama, it’s all my fault!’

‘Shut up!’

‘Forgive me, Mama,’ cried Hélène; she sensed that only her humbleness was a precious enough offering to appease the wrath of the gods.

‘They can do whatever they want to me,’ she thought in despair. ‘She can beat me, she can kill me, but not that.’

‘Mama, please forgive me, it will never happen again,’ she cried, finding the words she found hardest to say because of her pride, the words of a chastised child. ‘I’m begging you to forgive me.’

But when she saw Hélène’s resistance collapse, Bella allowed herself to fly into a rage. Or perhaps she thought her tears and shouting would stun her husband, divert his attention from Max?

She ran to the door, opened it and shouted, ‘Mademoiselle! Come here at once!’

Mademoiselle Rose ran in; she was shaking. She hadn’t heard anything; she looked at Hélène in terror and asked what was wrong.

‘What’s wrong?’ cried Bella. ‘What’s wrong is that this child … this child is an ungrateful liar. And you’re the one who has brought the creature up. I congratulate you. But I’ve had enough, enough of this. I’ve put up with everything, but this is the final straw. You will leave, do you hear me! I’ll show you that I am the mistress in this house!’

Mademoiselle Rose listened to her without saying a word. She didn’t even turn white: it was impossible for her pallid face to get any paler. She still appeared to be listening even after Bella had stopped talking. The furious words seemed to awaken an echo that only she could hear. ‘Very well, Madam,’ she said quietly, sounding weary.

Max, who hadn’t said a word until then, shrugged his shoulders. ‘Oh, let them be, Bella. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.’

‘Get out!’ Bella shouted at her daughter, and she slapped her silent, motionless face, her nails leaving red marks. Hélène let out a yelp, but she refused to cry; she turned towards her father. He was still holding the book covered in writing. He said nothing. He was standing up, and what broke Hélène’s heart, filled it with remorse, was the movement backwards he made, crushing himself against the wall, as if he wanted to disappear, to fade away into the darkness.

Hélène walked over to him and quietly whispered, ‘Papa, do you want me to tell you what the word was, the word you couldn’t see?’