Contango (Ill Wind) (29 page)

“But no, I can get you some.”

When she brought it to his room he was talking in German with a group of
other men; he just said “Thanks,” and she left it on the
wash-hand basin. Then she went back to her chair in the alcove. Most of the
arrivals had already gone down to dinner; it would be a slack time now until
about ten o’clock. She closed her eyes, and the feeling came to her
once more that life was just no good at all unless she were soon to hear from
Leon.

She had not seen him since 1927, when he had been over on a short holiday
from New York, but he had always (until of late) written to her regularly,
and had sometimes helped her by small remittances. She had cherished all
along the most confident belief in his genius, and had read and re-read the
art-critiques which he sent her from time to time. Her feeling for him was
somehow deeper than that of sister for brother, deeper even than that of one
survivor of a family for the only other. He represented, to her, the bare
chance of rising, phoenix-like, out of the ashes of disaster; he was the only
living link between the past and any sort of a future. The very fact that,
but for his one short visit, she had not seen him since the darkest days of
all, gave emphasis to this symbolism; for he alone, it seemed, had acquired a
second status after events had robbed him of his first. To become a famous
New York art-critic instead of a wealthy landowner near Rostov-on-Don was not
too bad an exchange; it was possible, anyhow, to think of it hopefully. And
she had been thinking of it hopefully for ten years. It stood for all that
was “not quite” in the totality of ruin.

The long evening began; the man who had asked for the soap passed with his
friends on the way to the lift, still talking animatedly. She did not often
notice faces, but she could not help looking at his—it was so cheerful
and pink, like a grown-up choir-boy’s, she thought…. Then, after the
clang of the lift-gate, she was alone in the muffled silence. It was at such
moments that, though she tried to forbid them, the memories came—of
Yalta, in the Crimea, where her parents had had a villa when she and Leon
were children; of Eastertide in St. Petersburg; of hotels like the
“Corona” at which she had stayed as a girl. For her father had
been extremely rich, and she and Leon had already seen a good deal of Europe
before 1914. She had many memories of Switzerland, the Rhine, Vienna, Berlin,
Dresden, and Rome; of her father, tall and fur-coated, losing his temper with
railway- porters, and of her mother dutifully pacifying him; and of Leon in
his cultured voice instructing them during their perambulations of Italian
picture- galleries. But her most poignant memory was of Leon in the
tight-fitting, gold- laced uniform of his crack regiment. Only the fact that
he didn’t sympathise with it had prevented him from fighting heroically
in the war against the Germans; she was sure of that, and sure also that his
attitude had been thoroughly right. For had not that war, after all, led
directly to the Revolution? Oh, if only… if only…

It always came to that, in the end. Pictures raced through her mind, like
a worn and flickering cinema-film, meaningless except for that single
torturing motif—if only…. So much of all that had happened could
have been avoided; so much of it very nearly hadn’t happened. If, for
instance, the English had burst through the Dardanelles and taken
Constantinople in 1915? Or if Denikin had had just a featherweight of better
luck in 1919? If only these, to take but two of the vividest near-happenings,
had eventuated, then she would not be listening for bells in a hotel corridor
in 1932, nor Leon have been sent to the edge of the world to report an
earthquake.

She fell into a doze and did not waken till one of the bells began to
tinkle. It was after ten; she would be busy from now on, carrying more hot
water. Just before midnight, when her duty ended, the man with the choir-boy
face passed her alone, going to his room. “Good night,” he called
out. “I hope you’re feeling better now.”

“Yes, thank you,” she answered. “Good night,
sir.”

He had a pleasant smile, she thought, as she undressed a few minutes later
in the drab attic which she shared with another hotel servant.

In the morning it was her turn to begin work at six. Two hours later she
tapped on the door of Number Two-five-seven and received a deep-voiced,
cheerful reply. She filled a can of hot water and placed it on the mat
outside the door. Next the boots brought along a pair of brown brogue shoes.
Then the waiter arrived with coffee and croissants. Finally came the porter
bringing a trunk and suit-cases—evidently the luggage that had gone
astray the previous evening. She felt what she so rarely felt—a tinge
of personal curiosity, in return, as it were, for the man’s previous
enquiry about her. She glanced casually, in passing, at the labels on the
luggage; they bore the name “Tribourov” and the emblematic seals
of the U.S.S.R.

That gave her a shock. She had assumed, without ever wondering much, that
the man was German. And then the labels on the bags, names of Russian cities
printed in Russian characters… they brought her face to face with something
she was hardly prepared for. She had known, of course, as all the staff knew,
that the Russian delegation were coming to the hotel, and she had known, too,
if she had ever considered the matter, that they would all be Reds (what else
could they be, indeed?), yet somehow she had not expected their identities to
concern her any more than those of other hotel visitors.

This man Tribourov was, incidentally, the first Soviet personage of any
consequence whom she had ever seen. Before 1919, when she had escaped from
Russia, her contacts had all been with soldiers, minor officials, and
miscellaneous ruffiandom; such men as Lenin, Trotsky, Kameneff, Radek and the
rest, were mere names to her as to the rest of the world, though she felt for
them a fierce, blistering detestation that was shared by most of her
companions in exile. The so-called hatreds of the actually warring nations
were mild beside it, and proved their mildness by collapsing like pricked
balloons after the Armistice, leaving no greater soreness than between ally
and ally. But the loathing of White for Red, of the dispossessed for the
aggrandisers, was a darker, more searing thing, a poison in the blood, which
ten years of banishment had sharpened rather than assuaged. There were men in
Paris, in Berlin, and along the coastline of the Riviera, whom a chance-seen
photograph of Lenin could suddenly intoxicate with rage; they hated that
dome-like Mongol face with a hate that came less from their heads than from
their bowels. And in their waking dreams they saw themselves warriors
recrossing frontiers of time as well as space, wading back through rivers of
blood to the gilded salons of 1914. The least thing could quicken the ferment
of such anticipations—a glass of Clicquot stood them by a friend, a
glimpse of glittering epaulettes, the sound of a band playing
Tchaikovsky.

And if this were true of men, it was doubly so of the women, whose
dispossessions had often been more humiliating. There came a day in their
lives when they had sold the last jewel to the last Jew, when they found that
the tale of gentle birth merely bored where it did not antagonise; then,
taking the plunge, they became French, German, Swiss, burying the past in its
own black memories. Sometimes, like Paula Mirsky, they married foreigners and
acquired a new nationality in law. By their neighbours, employers, and
new-found companions the past was not only unknown, but unsuspected; and even
in their own souls it might seem to die. Then, abruptly, something would set
the old fires re-flickering.

This happened to Paula when she saw the labels on Tribourov’s
luggage. There were similar labels on other men’s luggage, but only
Tribourov’s affected her, because only Tribourov had made her aware of
him personally. The rest were mere embodiments of room-numbers; he alone was
a man, and as a man he invaded her life. He was, she had thought at first,
like a grown-up choir-boy, and the rather impressionist description still
stood when she noticed him further. And it was perhaps appropriate that his
first contact with her had been in connection with a demand for soap. For his
face looked always as if it had just been scrubbed; there was that ripe,
schoolboyish freshness about his skin. It was in his manner, too; he was
always cheerful, brisk, jauntily good-humoured. He had a deep laugh, and
seemed very popular, not only with his fellow-delegates, but with Germans and
visitors of other nationalities. Usually, as he came striding along the
corridor, he wore a black felt hat that was pushed a little too far back on
his head, and smoked a cheap Maryland cigarette which, as often as not, he
threw away half-finished into the plant-pot near the lift. There was nothing
really striking about him; he was average in height and figure for the
middle-aged man that he was, and it seemed somehow irrelevant as well as
impossible to decide whether his looks were good or otherwise. He was
certainly not handsome in any conventional sense.

She felt, in observing him, a sensation that was partly one of horror, and
she had the same feeling when she was attending to his room. Cheerfully he
strode, as it seemed to her, over the ruined lives of such as herself; and
with that same jaunty briskness he held control of the blood-guilty machine.
She avoided his eyes when they met, and never answered his occasional remarks
with more than the minimum of words. Even contact with his possessions
stirred her inwardly; there was a photograph of a woman which he had put on
his dressing- table, and she felt a contempt for both the pictured face and
for the sentimentality of the man who carried such a reminder about with him.
His wife, she presumed, if men such as he had any use for the term; and she
imagined them living in absurd magnificence in some mansion that had belonged
to a pre- Revolution aristocrat. Probably the silver frame of the photograph
had a similar history.

Once, when she brought him hot water before dinner, he said suddenly:
“I heard you talking in German this morning to the man across the
corridor. You speak it very well.”

She smiled slightly without replying.

“Better talk in German to me in future,” he added. “My
French isn’t very good.”

“If you prefer, certainly, sir.”

He then continued, in fluent and well-accented German: “They work
you long hours in this place.”

“I’ve nothing to complain about.”

“No? Do you get decently fed?”

“Quite.”

He threw his half smoked cigarette into the empty fire-grate—
where, she reflected, she would later on have to clear it up. “Look
here, I’m not talking to you as a superior to an inferior. If you find
my questions impertinent, you can say so—and, on the other hand, if
you don’t find them so, you can answer them with more than ‘Yes,
sir,’ and ‘No, sir.’ I’m interested in the wages and
conditions of hotel-workers, because a little while ago I carried out a
reorganisation of the hotel industry in Moscow and other big cities in the
Union.”

Still she made no reply, and after a pause he went on, abruptly:
“Well, thank you for bringing me the water.”

She had snubbed him, she told herself as she left his room; and her heart
glowed with a nearer approach to ecstasy than she had felt for a long
time.

Meanwhile the Conference was in full swing, providing daily columns for
hundreds of newspapers throughout the world. Paula, however, did not often
read newspapers. That core of inward bitterness left her little feeling of
concern with the strange hazards and groupings of the post-War nations, and
it was quite by chance that she saw Tribourov’s name and photograph in
a local journal, together with a report of a speech he had made. She read it
scornfully, finding in it all kinds of unlikeable qualities, from hypocrisy
to errors of style. Yet the odd thing was that while she was reading she
could both see and hear the man—could hear his deep voice uttering
certain words as she knew he would utter them, and could see his round,
glistening cheeks bulging with excitement as she knew they would.

One afternoon he met her in the post office, where she had just received
the usual reply that no letters had arrived for her. He raised his hat and
passed some comment on the weather, after which she saw him walk over to the
telephones. Two heavily-built men accompanied him across the crowded floor
and stood outside the door of the box.

That evening, when she made her usual visit to his room, he said
cheerfully: “Oh, did you notice my bodyguard this afternoon? The
Government insists on it—for my safety.”

“Indeed?” She had betrayed interest before she could check
herself.

“Yes, I understand they’ve discovered a plot to kill me. But
I’m not worrying, though it’s a nuisance to have those two hefty
fellows at my heels wherever I go. They’re downstairs now, smoking long
cigars and trying not to look like the most obvious plain-clothes detectives
you ever set eyes on. It makes a man feel such a child.”

She thought that he LOOKED like a child, too—at that moment a child
just slightly cross over a trifle.

“Well,” he added, “as I said, I’m not worrying. If
they want to get me and try hard enough, I suppose they will. But they
won’t achieve anything much by it. There are plenty of others to carry
on my work.”

“But it would be a gesture,” she said quietly.

He showed surprise at her remark—the first one of any individuality
that she had yet made. “Oh, yes, I suppose you could call it
that,” he admitted. “But the world is tired of gestures. It cries
out for acts that have a meaning in themselves. This
Conference—” He stopped, laughed suddenly, and added:
“I’m afraid I should soon bore you if I were to begin talking
about it. As you say, my assassination would be a gesture. And perhaps it
couldn’t happen more appropriately than here—in this city of
gestures.”