Missing Person (3 page)

The door they had entered by and which must have led into the chapel where the ceremony was taking place, this door which I was keeping under constant watch, suddenly opened, and the blonde woman in the Musketeer's hat stood framed in it. The brunette in the black shawl followed. Then the father and son, in their gray striped suits, supporting the plaster figure of the old man, who was talking to the fat bald-headed man with the Mongolian features. And the latter was stooping, his ear practically touching his companion's lips: the old gentleman's voice must certainly have been hardly more than a whisper. Others followed. I was watching for Styoppa, my heart pounding.

Finally, he emerged, among the last. His great height and navy blue overcoat allowed me to keep him in sight, as there was a large number of them, forty at least. They were mostly getting on in years, but I noticed a few young women and even children. They all lingered on the path, talking among themselves.

The scene resembled a country school playground. The old man with the plaster appearance was installed on a bench, and each of them in turn came up to greet him. Who was he? "Georges Sacher," mentioned in the newspaper notice? Or an ex-graduate of the School of Pages? Perhaps he and Marie de Rosen had lived out some brief idyll in Petersburg, or on the shores of the Black Sea, before everything fell to pieces? The fat bald-headed man with the Mongolian eyes was surrounded by people as well. The father and son, in their gray striped suits, circulated, like a pair of dancers at some society ball, moving from table to table. They seemed full of themselves, and the father kept breaking into laughter, throwing back his head, which I found incongruous.

Styoppa, for his part, was talking soberly with the woman in the gray Musketeer's hat. He laid his hand on her arm and on her shoulder in a courtly and affectionate manner. He must have been a very handsome man. I put him down as seventy. His face was a little bloated, his hair receding, but the prominent nose and the set of the head I found extremely noble. Or such was my impression from a distance.

Time passed. Almost half an hour had gone by and they were still talking. I was afraid that one of them would finally notice me, standing there on the pavement. And the taxi driver? I strode back to Rue Charles-Marie-Widor. The engine was still running and he was seated at the wheel, deep in his yellowy green paper.

"Well?" he asked me.

"I don't know," I said. "We might have to wait another hour."

"Hasn't your friend come out of the church yet?"

"Yes, but he's chatting with the others."

"You can't ask him to come?"

"No."

His large blue eyes stared at me in consternation.

"Don't worry," I said.

"It's for you ... I have to keep the meter running ..."

I returned to my post, opposite the Russian church.

Styoppa had advanced a few feet. As a matter of fact, he was no longer standing at the end of the path but on the pavement, in the center of a group consisting of the blonde woman in the Musketeer's hat, the brunette in the black shawl, the bald-headed man with the slanted Mongolian eyes, and two other men.

This time I crossed the street and stationed myself close to them, my back turned. The soft bursts of Russian filled the air and I wondered if a deeper, more resonant voice among them was Styoppa's. I turned around. He gave the blonde woman in the Musketeer's hat a long embrace. He was almost shaking her, and his features contracted in a painful grin. Then, in the same fashion, he embraced the fat bald-headed man with the slant eyes, and each of the others in turn. The time for farewells, I thought. I ran back to the taxi and jumped in.

"Quick . . . straight ahead ... in front of the Russian church..."

Styoppa was still talking to them.

"Do you see the tall guy in navy blue?"

"Yes."

"We'll have to follow him, if he's in a car."

The driver turned round, stared at me, and his blue eyes opened wide.

"I hope it's not dangerous, sir."

"Don't worry," I said.

Styoppa detached himself from the group, walked a few paces and, without turning, waved his arm. The others, standing still, watched him. The woman in the gray Musketeer's hat stood slightly to the front of the group, arched, like the figurehead of a ship, the large feather of her hat fluttering gently in the breeze.

He took some time opening the door of his car. I think he tried the wrong key. When he was seated at the wheel, I leaned forward to the taxi driver.

"Follow the car which the guy in navy-blue just got into."

And I hoped I wasn't on the wrong track, since there was nothing really to indicate that this man was Styoppa de Dzhagorev.

4

I
T
WAS
NOT
very hard to follow him: he drove slowly. At the Porte Maillot, he ran a red light and the taxi driver did not dare follow suit, but we caught up with him again at Boulevard Maurice-Barrès. Our two cars pulled up side by side at a crosswalk. He glanced across at me absentmindedly, as motorists do when they find themselves side by side in a traffic jam.

He parked his car on Boulevard Richard-Wallace, in front of the apartment buildings at the end, near the Pont de Puteaux and the Seine. He started down Rue Julien-Potin and I paid off my taxi.

"Good luck, sir," said the driver. "Be careful..

And I felt his eyes following me as I too started down Rue Julien-Potin. Perhaps he thought I was in some danger.

Night was falling. A narrow road, lined by impersonal apartment buildings, built between the wars, which formed a single long façade, on each side and all the way along Rue Julien-Potin. Styoppa was ten yards ahead of me. He turned right into Rue Ernest-Deloison, and entered a grocery store.

The moment had come to approach him. But because of my shyness it was extremely hard for me, and I was afraid he would take me for a madman: I would stammer, my speech would become incoherent. Unless he recognized me at once, in which case I would let him do the talking.

He was coming out of the grocer's shop, holding a paper bag.

"Mr. Styoppa de Dzhagorev?"

He looked very surprised. Our heads were on the same level, which intimidated me even more.

"Yes. But who are you?"

No, he did not recognize me. He spoke French without an accent. I had to screw up my courage.

"I . . . I've been meaning to contact you for ... a long time..."

"What for?"

"I am writing... writing a book about the Emigration...
I..."

"Are you Russian?"

It was the second time I had been asked this question. The taxi driver too had asked me. And, actually, perhaps I had been Russian.

"No."

"And you're interested in the Emigration?"

"I . . . I . . . I'm writing a book about the Emigration. Some . . . someone suggested I come to see you . . . Paul Sonachidze..."

"Sonachidze?..."

He pronounced the name in the Russian way. It was very soft, like wind rustling in the trees.

"A Georgian name ... I don't know it..."

He frowned.

"Sonachidze ... no ..."

"I don't want to be a nuisance. If I could just ask you a few questions."

"I'd be happy to answer them ..

He smiled a sad smile.

"A tragic tale, the Emigration ... But how is it you call me Styoppa? ..."

"I... don't... I..."

"Most of those who called me Styoppa are dead. The others, you can count on the fingers of one hand."

"It was ... Sonachidze ..

"I don't know him."

"Can I... ask... you ... a few questions?"

"Yes. Would you like to come up to my place? We can talk."

In Rue Julien-Potin, after we had passed through a gateway, we crossed an open space surrounded by apartment buildings. We took a wooden elevator with a double latticework gate and, because of our height and the restricted space in the elevator, we had to bow our heads and keep them turned toward the wall, so we didn't knock brows.

He lived on the fifth floor in a two-room flat. He showed me into the bedroom and stretched out on the bed.

"Forgive me," he said, "but the ceiling is too low. It's suffocating to stand."

Indeed, there were only a few inches between the ceiling and the top of my head and I had to stoop. Furthermore, both he and I were a head too tall to clear the frame of the door leading into the other room and I imagined that he had often bumped his forehead there.

"You can stretch out too ... if you wish ..." He pointed to a small couch, upholstered in pale blue velvet, near the window.

"Make yourself at home ... you'll be much more comfortable lying down ... Even if you sit, you feel cooped up here ... Please, do lie down ..."

I did so.

He had switched on a lamp with a salmon-pink shade, which was standing on his bedside table, and it gave out a soft light and cast shadows on the ceiling.

"So, you're interested in the Emigration?"

"Very."

"And yet, you're still young ..."

Young? I had never thought of myself as young. A large mirror in a gold frame hung on the wall, close to me. I looked at my face. Young?

"Oh ... not so young as all that..."

There was a moment's silence. The two of us, stretched out on either side of the room, looked like opium smokers.

"I've just returned from a funeral," he said. "It's a pity you didn't meet the old lady who died ... She could have told you many things ... She was one of the real personalities of the Emigration ..."

"Really?"

"A very brave woman. At the beginning, she opened a small tea-room, in Rue du Mont-Thabor, and she helped everybody... It was very hard ..."

He sat up on the edge of the bed, his back bowed, arms crossed.

"I was fifteen at the time ... When I think, there are not many left..."

"There's ... Georges Sacher ...," I said at random.

"Not for much longer. Do you know him?"

Was it the old gentleman of plaster? Or the fat bald-head with the Mongolian features?

"Look," he said, "I can't go over all these things again ... It makes me too sad ... But I can show you some photographs ... The names and dates are there on the back ... You'll manage on your own ..."

"It's very kind of you to take so much trouble."

He smiled at me.

"I've got lots of photos ... I wrote the names and dates on the back, because one forgets everything ..."

He stood up and, stooping, went into the next room.

I heard him open a drawer. He returned, a large red box in his hand, sat down on the floor and leaned his back against the edge of the bed.

"Come and sit down beside me. It will be easier to look at the photographs."

I did so. A confectioner's name was printed in gothic lettering on the lid of the box. He opened it. It was full of photos.

"In here you have the principal figures of the Emigration," he said.

He handed me the photographs one by one, telling me the names and dates he read on the back: it was a litany, to which the Russian names lent a particular resonance, now explosive like cymbals clashing, now plaintive or almost mute. Trubetskoy. Orbelyani. Sheremetev. Galitsyn. Eristov. Obolensky. Bagration. Chavchavadze ... Now and then, he took a photo back and consulted the name and date again. Some occasion. The Grand Duke Boris's table at a gala ball at the Château-Basque, long after the Revolution. And this garland of faces on a photograph taken at a "black and white" dinner party, in 1914 ... A class photograph of the Alexander Lycée in Petersburg.

"My older brother..."

He handed me the photos more and more quickly, no longer even looking at them. Evidently, he was anxious to have done with it. Suddenly I halted at one of them, printed on heavier paper than the others, and with no explanation on the back.

"What is it?" he asked me. "Something puzzling you?"

In the foreground, an old man, stiff and smiling, seated in an armchair. Behind him, a blonde young woman with very limpid eyes. All around, small groups of people, most of whom had their backs to the camera. And toward the left, his right arm cut off by the edge of the picture, his hand on the shoulder of the blonde young woman, an extremely tall man, in a broken check lounge suit, about thirty years old, with dark hair and a thin moustache. I was convinced it was me.

I drew closer to him. Our backs leaned against the edge of the bed, our legs were stretched out on the floor, our shoulders touched.

"Tell me, who are those people?" I asked him.

He took the photograph and looked at it wearily.

"That one was Giorgiadze ..."

He pointed to the old man, seated in the armchair.

"He was at the Georgian Consulate in Paris, up to the time..."

He did not finish his sentence, as though its conclusion must be obvious to me.

"That one was his grand-daughter ... Her name was Gay ... Gay Orlov. She emigrated to America with her parents..."

"Did you know her?"

"Not very well. No. She stayed on in America a long time."

"And what about him?" I asked in a toneless voice, pointing to myself in the photo.

"Him?"

He knitted his brows.

"I don't know who he is."

"Really?"

"No."

I sighed deeply.

"Don't you think he looks like me?"

He looked at me.

"Looks like you? No. Why?"

"Nothing."

He handed me another photograph.

It was a picture of a little girl in a white dress, with long fair hair, at a seaside resort, since one could see beach-huts and a section of beach and sea. "Mara Orlov - Yalta" was written in purple ink, on the back.

"There, you see ... the same girl... Gay Orlov ... Her name was Mara .. . She didn't yet have an American first name..."

And he pointed to the blonde young woman in the other photo which I was still holding.

"My mother kept all these things ..."

He rose abruptly.

"Do you mind if we stop now? My head is spinning..."

He passed a hand over his brow.