Jean
By the time I was able to think again, we were on a rumpled bed in a room full of rough canvases. For a moment, it was the pictures that caught my eye. There were plump naked women daubed across them in blue paint, running away from something. They looked like a call girl’s scared memories of a police raid on a maison de passe. I almost laughed.
And then I didn’t. Because here I was on a blue counterpane myself, with a naked woman’s cheek against mine, and her body stretched out under me.
Her eyes were shut, I saw in trepidation.
I thought she’d be horrified by what we’d just done. But when, eventually, she shifted her head, and then shifted sideways, so we were side by side, she didn’t leap out of the bed and run away, trailing draperies. She didn’t move more than a finger’s length. Her arms and legs stayed entwined with mine. She was breathless but smiling a heavy-lidded smile. ‘I never imagined it would be like that,’ she murmured. ‘Though I don’t know what I did think …’ She didn’t finish that thought, but I could feel her hands on my back.
‘Zhe …’ she whispered, a long while later, keeping her body’s length against mine, with her head turning slightly towards my ear, so I could feel warm breath on my neck. Then she kissed me below the ear and added, with a trembling hint of voice, ‘My Zhe …’
It took all that for me to really believe she wasn’t angry. Overcome with relief, and the beginning of confidence, I kissed her eyebrow, the nearest place, and held her tighter.
I didn’t want to think beyond this moment. It might not mean anything. It might be just a clinging in the darkness, after we’d failed to find the meaning we’d been looking for.
But, for now, she was here. And the miraculous unlikeliness of that made me feel suddenly reckless and dizzy with – at least temporary – happiness.
‘It’s “zhi”, not “zhe”,’ I whispered back, playfully.
She opened her eyes wider. ‘What?’
‘The name of the first letter of the French name “Jean” is “Zhi”, not “Zhe”,’ I said, stroking her hair.
She nodded, and burrowed closer, still clinging to me. I could feel that she didn’t want to end this embrace any more than I did; that she, like I, had no idea what might come next.
I lay still, savouring the feel of skin on skin, trying not to think. ‘ “If you want to be happy, be,” ’ I reminded myself. I shut my eyes. I opened them and looked unseeingly around the room and its strange pictures. But I couldn’t stop my mind racing.
If she went away now, what would I have left?
Wasn’t that what had happened to the ‘Zhe’ of the letters and the American woman?
I hadn’t ever thought about why Father would have stayed unmarried until, years later, he’d taken pity on Katerina Ivan’na. Might that be why?
And then my eye fixed on a picture on the mantel. I sat up.
Evie
‘What’s that?’ Jean shouted.
He looked as though he might be going to have a heart attack. My heart was pounding too. He’d dislodged me when he sat up so suddenly, so I got up and wrapped a blanket round myself and went and got the picture for him.
His eyes opened wider and wider when I handed it over. Then he smiled – a huge, relieved, still-astonished grin. I didn’t understand why. He hadn’t even read the Russian scribbles on the back.
‘Has this really been up here all the time?’ he asked, half laughing.
I nodded, bewildered. After all the intensity of everything that had happened between us in the past hour, that sudden laughter was incredibly endearing. Transforming, too. It turned him, instantly, from cinema detective to screen idol. But what was so funny about the picture?
Jean was pointing at the fair-haired young man in the boat. ‘It’s just – this is him,’ he said. ‘My father. Can’t you see? He keeps the same picture in his office downstairs. If only I’d looked …’
I sat down beside him again, trying to concentrate on the picture and not on the feel of his thigh against mine or the heat of his skin. I couldn’t quite believe it, even when I gave the young man in the boat my full attention. What, that thin lad – the portly general downstairs?
‘And that’, I said, pointing at the ringleted girl in the same boat, aware that I was suddenly smiling as radiantly back at him as he was at me, ‘is her.’
We stayed like that, poised on the brink of discovery, for a long, swaying moment before I even thought to ask, ‘And what does the writing on the back mean?’
Jean turned it over, and peered at it for what seemed forever.
When he did, eventually, speak, I saw, to my astonishment, that there were tears in his eyes.
‘ “He could not be mistaken,” ’ Jean translated, very quietly. I could hear at once, from the reverent way he formed those words, that it was the beginning of a quotation. ‘ “There were no other eyes like those in the world. There was only one creature in the world who could concentrate for him all the brightness and meaning of life …” ’
And suddenly I knew, and tears filled my eyes too, because – of course! – it was the great love passage from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, when the philosopher-hero, Levin, trying to devote himself to the simple life and be a good master to his peasants, unexpectedly catches sight of the woman whom he thought he’d lost, years before, and realizes that he has always loved her, that nothing else matters, and that he must go to her.
Taking Jean’s free hand in mine, I began speaking with him. ‘ “It was she,” ’ we both said, completing the quotation in unison. ‘ “It was Kitty.” ’
And then our own eyes met, and then our lips.
After a while, we parted, and Jean held the photo out again. ‘He put a date; April three years ago,’ he whispered. ‘I know his writing. It’s much worse these days than in those letters from before. I suppose he must have made her this copy of the two of them, from back there, when they met again, here. And, look, he’s written one more line from Anna Karenina: “Only with her could he find the solution of the riddle of his life, which had weighed so agonizingly upon him of late.” ’
‘So it is him,’ I started to say, interrupting Jean who was also murmuring, pensively, ‘So they did find each other again, in the end.’ (And so had I! I was telling myself privately. Marie-Thérèse’s hunch had been right all along! I’d actually found Grandmother’s Zhenya! He was real! And now I could go and talk to him and tell him her last wish.)
We stared at each other for a moment, letting the triumph sink in.
‘They’d become so different from each other, by the time they got here and met again,’ Jean said, and I saw his smile fade as he tussled with his thought. ‘She with her wild avant-garde artists, while he … with his cause—’ His voice broke off, and, although his slight frown told me that he was thinking something about his father that made him unhappy, he didn’t hint what.
‘It didn’t matter, maybe,’ I said, wanting to take the shadow off his face, ‘because finding each other again here, when they were older, let them go back to being who they’d been when they’d first met, and start again. And they weren’t so different, back then, at the start; just young, and maybe both lonely? Maybe, back then, getting to know each other helped each of them feel less trapped by their backgrounds? Maybe that’s what they loved? Because who can say where people will find love? Or feel free?’
Jean was looking so intently at me that I nearly lowered my own eyes. It took courage to keep my gaze meeting his.
‘How sad, though,’ I went on, trying to keep my voice steady, ‘that, even here, when they met again, they still weren’t really free. That this time he was married—’
‘What good luck,’ Jean said, abruptly, and his voice was strong, ‘that they somehow did manage to meet again, against the odds, and took what happiness they could.’ And then we were kissing again.