Jean
Evie ran for the police while the woman I hated went on wailing. I shut my eyes and ears and heart. Even holding her at arm’s length, I was still touching her, repelled by her damp skin and plump wrists under my hands. Her bones felt frail under my grip. I was aware of a murderous desire to squeeze tighter …
The police separated us in the end and took her away.
I wouldn’t look. I was determined not to give her a single memory to pick over in her cell.
But when the door had shut behind them, and Evie had come to me, I shifted myself so I could see out of the window on to the street before I opened my arms to accept the comfort she was offering.
I didn’t intend to, but when they led that woman out into the car outside, I couldn’t resist looking down over the top of Evie’s head at Plevitskaya’s, just for a moment.
She couldn’t be right, that woman. Even the thought of what she’d said made me feel unclean. It simply must be an insane fantasy that I could be her son, the flesh of her flesh. And yet, as I looked down, my gorge rose at the realization that her hair was as dark as mine.
She couldn’t be right. But, then again, perhaps she could – because perhaps the lost past she’d entered into was a place where any dream could come true, and any nightmare too.
If only I remembered something about the mother who’d lost me: eyes, a voice, a song – anything. But there was nothing I could cling on to as a defence against the horrible, invasive doubt that woman had left me with. All I could remember was the fantasy mothers I’d imagined for myself, years ago – young, pretty, attentive mothers out of books, girls out of Tolstoy, girls like Kitty Shcherbatskaya, with pink cheeks and shyly sparkling eyes and an infinite capacity for kindness and little hands in muffs (mothers whom I’d then stopped imagining, because they were part of the absurdity of fantasizing about the lost past, and I didn’t approve of that).
Shutting my eyes again, I tried to remember those other hands and arms, the ones I’d so recently had in mine and wanted to crush. Were they, could they be, like mine? Recognizably related? But all I could recall was the way my own flesh had crept at the feel of hers.
But Plevitskaya hadn’t always been old, I told myself. She hadn’t always looked the way she did now. And I knew she’d only met Skoblin later, during the retreat, when she’d been arrested by the Whites and ended up marrying her jailor, so there was no point in calling his hated face to mind; it would be an earlier husband who’d fathered me. The dark way I looked, so different from the fair man I called Father – colours, yet also the line of toenail and fingernail and shoulder, all those biological codes that meant nothing but everything – might as easily be an inheritance from that possible unknown father, as from her. If she was right. Which she couldn’t be.
Outside, the car door slammed. The engine started. Evie stirred and raised worried eyes to mine.
‘Was there really a Zyzyrovka …?’ Evie began. But when she saw my expression she quickly looked down. The car roared away. ‘Of course not,’ she went on in a whisper.
The horrifying thing was that I thought there might really have been a village with a name something like that, not all that far away from the nunnery. I vaguely remembered the signboard on the road, under the pines – a whitewashed board, rotting softly away, with the last letters missing in a fringe of splinters. I was almost sure there had been a ‘Z’ at the beginning of that board.
‘She’s wrong … or crazy,’ Evie whispered, her face hidden against my chest. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
But I didn’t know. In any case, I couldn’t do anything right then but sway on my feet, because, all at once, I’d been assailed by a mental picture of Father as he might be now. He was in torn and crumpled clothes, with grey stubble on his chin, backing away towards a damp wall from men I couldn’t see who meant him harm. He wasn’t the reassuring, all-knowing hero any more. He was a terrified wreck. And when I imagined him like that I, too, found myself melting into the kind of hot, childish panic that might once have turned into tears.
I wasn’t going to weep. He’d brought me up to be strong. If there was one thing I could cling to in all this, it was the conviction that I had to be worthy. I was an officer’s son, or I’d been raised as one.
‘We’ll talk tomorrow,’ I said brusquely. I let go, ignoring the hurt look on Evie’s face. ‘I’m going down to the office now. I need to be alone. I need to think.’
I needed to be down in the messy darkness of the office because the poster of Plevitskaya was still in the lobby. She wasn’t young in it, or thin, but she was younger and thinner. I pulled it off the wall, and took it into Father’s office, which still smelled of him. ‘I’m sorry to bring her in here, Father,’ I muttered. ‘But I have to know.’
I stood by the cloudy mirror in the uncertain lamplight, looking at her face, then mine. Her hair was as dark as mine, but it was so greased down that you couldn’t tell whether it could ever be wild like mine. Her eyes were dark while mine were light, but was there something similar in the cast of them? She was much shorter than me. Hands, legs … I couldn’t know.
I looked all night, and I thought all night about Father, and his fearful eyes against that concrete wall. I thought of all I owed him. I thought about blood and family, duty and honour.
And as I thought I opened his bottle. I drank one draught. It went down like fire. Then I drank another, with nothing to eat between gulps that might have soaked up the alcohol. And then another.
I was still thinking about Father, and still looking at myself in the glass and then at the ripped-off poster of Plevitskaya when, at dawn, the police inspector came in. He was a thin man whom I’d heard talk to his subordinates in rough Parisian argot, with a fag hanging out of his mouth, but who spoke to me in elaborate sentences full of complicated tenses and arcane bureaucratese.
The inspector nodded when he saw the poster. He wanted to tell me about what that woman had said during her preliminary interrogation. She’d informed him that Father was bound for Leningrad on board a Soviet freight ship. Madame Plevitskaya was being further interrogated, he said, and might be lying to mask some other reality, and the ship was out of contact, and might be innocent; but, at least, it was a clue.
I heard Evie’s footsteps, padding down the stairs and into the secretaries’ room where she waited. I was glad she wasn’t in the room with us to see me struggle to maintain composure. The inspector, grinding out his cigarette end, was so excited with his clue that he couldn’t stop grinning as he left. Tact was not his forte. What struck me was that Father was as good as dead if he was a prisoner being taken to Soviet Russia – that he might as well be cowering against a crumbling wall as the brutes in my dream approached, because that was how he’d end up, sooner or later.
‘I’m going to Russia to find him,’ I told Evie when, in her nightdress, she brought me tea on the bone-hard sofa. ‘I have no choice. I have to try to get him out.’
I made my voice hard. I didn’t want to sound weak. I couldn’t sound weak if I was going to Russia.
By now, dawn was breaking and the sun was turning the Parisian sky rosy pink. Even as I spoke, and looked out of the window at the horrible loveliness of a new day, I knew it was impossible for me to go to Russia. What would I do, after all, without documents? Steal a passport? Stow away on another Soviet freighter? Drive my rented taxi to Poland and walk east? Go and ask the Soviet ambassador in Paris to give me a visa and help me find a hotel in Moscow?
That wasn’t the point. That wasn’t the point. There was only one point.
If Nadezhda Plevitskaya really was my mother – which meant my own flesh and blood being to blame for Father’s destruction – I had a debt of honour. Truculently, I told myself if Evie respected me she’d understand.
Evie took my hand in hers. She looked very sad. But she nodded. I should have been grateful, I knew, that she didn’t say a word.
‘I owe it to him,’ I said, knowing it was stupid to half wish she’d argue. ‘I must put things right.’
She tightened her grip. ‘Yes.’ She bowed her head. ‘I love you,’ she said simply. ‘I understand how terrible this is for you.’
For a moment, I felt sorry for both myself and this girl, as all the happiness I’d imagined coming to the two of us, in a shared future that would not now exist, flowed away. What had been between the two of us felt distant, now, as if I was only seeing our illusory might-have-been, this last time, from behind thick, thick glass. I was with Father already, in that cell; we were facing our tormentors together.
Perhaps Evie didn’t understand how little chance there was I’d come back? Didn’t she see that I was going, willingly, to an almost certain death? The thought of my heroism brought to my eyes tears that – even in that moment – I knew to be cheap and sentimental. Vodka tears.
My death would be the only way to avenge his, I told myself. My sacrifice for him would be the only way to show the Nightingale how completely I denied whatever blood tie linked me to her, and how fully I chose instead the man who’d raised me, as the parent I would shed my own blood for. I had to die to expiate that woman’s sin.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said stiffly, wondering why my tongue felt so thick in my mouth. I was tired, mortally tired. I could barely get words out. My voice was slurring. My limbs were heavy. The room was going round. ‘Sorry … about us. But you must see … this comes first.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I do see.’ She looked at me – a serious, calm, careful look that showed me, even in my lurching drunkenness, that she really could see my worries. For a moment, as the stuffy room lurched like a ship’s cabin, I felt – just a little – comforted.
‘But first you must sleep,’ she said.
I shook my head. ‘Got to go now.’
‘Just lie on the sofa. We’ll talk again when it’s a bit lighter. I’ll get dressed. I’ll help you make a plan. I promise I will.’
I was swaying on my feet. She found the blanket in the cupboard.
I let her tuck it round me on the divan. She took away the bottle and the glass and closed the shutters.
I’d never sleep, I knew that. Never. But I shut my eyes.