The Dogs and the Wolves (12 page)

‘And were you?’

‘I am now,’ he said, smiling.

Heavy drops of rain began to fall as the storm broke. She followed him home.

A few weeks later, he managed to get some money together
and the documents necessary for their marriage. Everything happened as he had predicted: one day, they each left home to run their separate errands and met at the town hall. They returned to Aunt Raissa’s house a married couple. She threw them out. That very evening, they rented a hotel room and began their life as husband and wife.

On the Rue des Belles-Feuilles, at the Sinners’ home, the tea dance was to finish at eight o’clock.

Harry’s mother and aunts called these little parties ‘madcap afternoons’, the term used to describe them during their youth, in their native city. Whenever they asked: ‘Would you do us the honour of coming to our madcap afternoon with your daughter on the Seventeenth?’, people found a certain exotic, old-fashioned charm in such an invitation. (Years of living in France had not blotted out their foreign accent, but had refashioned it: they no longer rolled their ‘r’s the way Russians normally did, but pronounced them more gutturally, which gave a strange Parisian sound to their extremely refined, polite, delightful phrases.) Some even called it ‘Slavic charm’, in the most well-meaning way.

At eight o’clock, the hum of voices coming from the large green reception room where the buffet was set up grew much softer. Suddenly, fragments of conversation or a particular laugh were clearly audible where, a quarter of an hour earlier, there had merely been the noise of a hundred voices, footsteps and music. But it was only when the tired hostess was able to hear the song of a bird sitting in a tree in the garden (it had stayed on late, fooled by the light) that she allowed herself to hope that she could soon
rest. She was standing in the doorway of the scarlet entrance hall, shaking the hand of everyone who was leaving while mechanically reciting the various polite phrases that you shower on guests as you say goodbye, just as a gardener generously offers his flowers every last drop from the watering can.

‘But I’ve hardly had a chance to see you, dear Madame . . . We must arrange to get together . . . Do send your esteemed Mother my very warmest wishes, my dear child . . .’ What she was really thinking was: ‘It must be nearly nine o’clock.’ But she had to make allowances for the latecomers, the perpetually absent-minded, the possessive men who had waited, in vain, for a certain woman to arrive and who refused to give up hope, the couples in love still outside on the stone balcony. She was a good hostess, though, and like most Russians, only happy when the house was bursting with guests. But tonight, she was eager to be alone with Harry, finally to find out.

He had come into the dining room an hour earlier with Laurence Delarcher; the young woman walked a few steps ahead of him and he was looking at her with the passionate concentration that his mother knew so well . . . Ah, from that moment on she had been filled with fear. She could read Harry’s face like a book; at least, that was what she believed. Like all mothers, she was simultaneously close, yet far from the truth: things that were staring her in the face went unnoticed, but she had foreseen what even Harry did not yet understand. To her, her son’s soul was an ancient parchment on which sometimes only a single word was legible, but that was enough to cast a dazzling light on to the entire scroll. What mother worthy of the name, she thought, would not be the first to recognise that demanding yet humble expression on her son’s face that was unique to love as yet unacknowledged? Remembering it, she placed her handkerchief to her heart and, in the light of the setting sun, bluish sparks shot out from the diamonds on her fingers.

‘Too many rings . . . She always wears too many rings,’ her sisters-in-law would say. But jewellery shouldn’t be locked away in the darkness of a safe. Her sisters-in-law had such a boring, masculine way of dressing. Harry’s uncles encouraged her to buy jewels: she owed it to herself and to the family name she bore, and it flattered within them a secret, Oriental delight in owning valuable possessions that you could feel in your hands, press to your breast. She shared their way of thinking. Even tonight, it was a consolation to see the dazzling brilliance on her stubby, pale hands. And she needed to be consoled . . . How sad she was tonight. She could sense that Harry and the young woman had spoken to each other of serious matters, said things that would perhaps affect the future. Oh God, her son was still so young! She sighed to herself in Russian: ‘God, oh, God!’ At times of extreme emotion, she couldn’t find the words in French; she suddenly made mistakes when she spoke – she, who had learned French from a Parisian since she was three years old.

‘I am so sorry you have to leave at such
a early hour
,’ she would say, time and time again, or she would murmur emotionally: ‘Where is . . . well, where is
mine
son?’

Her sisters-in-law knew about this weakness and on several occasions had reminded her – acrimoniously – of the famous Jewish story of the wife of a rich banker who is giving birth and whispers in a faint voice: ‘My God, I’m in so much pain!’ But her husband will only come when she calls him in Yiddish, because when she does that, he knows that it’s important and that the child is about to be born. But her sisters-in-law had disagreeable and scathing minds. Besides, they knew no Yiddish, thank God. They hadn’t been brought up in the ghetto. Nevertheless, it was undeniable that when upset, it was hard to remember all the rules of French grammar and syntax; they were so difficult.

A few couples still lingered out on the balcony, relishing the coolness of evening. Where was Harry? Was it possible, my
God, that he might be considering marriage? He was only twenty-one.

‘Oh my son, my only child,’ she moaned to herself, ‘I love you so much. Yet marriage is a happy thing. But what do we know? How can we tell? What does God have in store? What will tomorrow bring?’ The unconscious, instinctive memory of all the tribulations of the Israelites shot through her mind. She remained standing, in exactly the same spot, automatically reciting her elaborate goodbyes; she looked like all the other women around her, but her magnificent, shiny dark eyes were wild and desperate and she turned her head nervously in all directions, as if she were trying to catch the scent of the wind, wondering from which side disaster would strike. Because if this marriage actually came about (‘God forbid!’ she thought to herself in Russian, at the same time secretly touching the expensive wood of a table to ward off ill fortune: two lucky charms were better than one, and she had a broad enough mind to borrow superstitions from a variety of cultures), if they really got married, who could predict with certainty that it would make Harry happy? And she wanted to take no chances where he was concerned. She had the extraordinary certainty that some mothers have that he was not destined to be happy. Quite the opposite: she always felt that people were going to harm Harry, hurt him, humiliate him . . . Any marriage carried risks. Any marriage was easy to make, but difficult to protect against danger, like those candles that are lit on the eve of certain holidays, in Russia, on the church porch: despite the snow, despite the wind, they always managed to get the flame to light, but then they had to keep it alight amid gusts of icy wind as they walked home through the dark streets. There were only a few who ever managed it. She herself had been happy in her marriage, even though she now recalled with regret all the moments of jealousy, all the vagaries of conjugal life . . . But most importantly, she and her husband spoke the same language, more or less understood one another,
while this young woman, though certainly pretty and from a good family, this young woman was a foreigner. And how was it possible to understand the soul of the French? This girl had such fair hair and rosy cheeks . . . For a moment, Madame Sinner imagined the children who might be born of this union between her son, who had such a dark complexion, and this pretty blonde, and this calmed her. But would the girl’s Catholic parents agree to it? She was already suffering in advance, her heart bleeding at the thought of Harry’s humiliation if they refused. (Ah, may God preserve and protect us!) ‘Why is it that the minute Jews fall in love, love becomes synonymous with fear?’ she wondered. She couldn’t stand still any longer. She wanted to see him. She made a show of taking one of the ladies by the arm and saying quite loudly, ‘No, no, you’ve only just arrived, I wouldn’t hear of you leaving . . . Come and have something to eat . . . some ice cream; it’s so hot! Yes, I insist, you can’t refuse, come along!’

They walked around the buffet. Harry wasn’t there. She dragged her guest towards the balcony. (‘It’s stifling hot inside, don’t you agree?’) And there, in the fading light, she saw Harry and Laurence Delarcher, all alone. Everything was silent for a moment.

In an attempt to appear pleasant, she contorted her face into a fixed, sickly smile that made her look like an old street hawker approaching a potential client. Her lined, shrivelled mouth tried in vain to form a Cupid’s bow, and her expressive, dark eyes scanned the face and body of the young woman with prodigious speed, ‘as though she were trying to judge what I was worth,’ thought Laurence.

She wasn’t wrong. But his mother wasn’t trying to estimate the pennies or francs, just the possibility of happiness, and her heart was breaking with jealousy, concern, aversion and tenderness.

A few moments later, someone came to collect Laurence. Almost everyone had gone by now. You could see the succession of great,
airy reception rooms and a fading greenish light that seeped through their open windows; the very last guests wandered past the furniture covered in pale, silver-white satin, looking for their hostess, to say goodbye.

Harry smiled and took his mother’s arm: ‘Go on, Mama.’

‘Harry,’ she resisted. ‘Harry,’ she repeated very quietly, looking at him with the same hopeless, passionate expression she always had when he was ill and she was nursing him, and which was the same whether he had a migraine or pneumonia. ‘Harry, my dear, a quick word!’

‘Later, Mama, in a minute; we’re not alone.’

‘Did you ask?’ she said, in French, forgetting, as always when she was upset, that in Paris everyone understood the language and that it would have been better to speak a different one if she didn’t want people to know what she was saying.

‘Yes,’ he said.

She crumpled her fine pink handkerchief and pressed it nervously to her lips and nose. She had been extremely well brought up and knew that one mustn’t express sadness and disappointment by shouting or swearing, but she was, in spite of everything, from a lower social class than her sisters-in-law, wealthy for only two generations while the Sinners had been wealthy for three. She still had not learned how to display her pain as they could, with trembling lips and a disdainful toss of the head. Her eldest sister-in-law had earned great respect in the family by taking the shock of hearing that her beloved brother had died with a single gesture: she had bowed her head as if in prayer, then raised her eyes to heaven, thus expressing, without uttering a single word, her acceptance of the will of Divine Providence, her sincere distress and her perfect upbringing. Madame Sinner had not attained such heights of refinement: she still found it necessary to wring her bejewelled hands, blink her eyes, groan, sigh, in a word, display in the most spectacular manner the feelings that were oppressing
her, feelings that were deep and uncomplicated. She cherished her son. She was afraid for her son.

Harry, meanwhile, looked at her with pity and tender impatience.

‘I knew that something bad would happen . . .’ she murmured. ‘I dreamed of turbid rivers all night long.’

‘So you think that my marrying Laurence Delarcher will be a bad thing, Mama?’

Harry knew how to remain impassive, his mouth tightly closed and eyes lowered, but she could see, she could sense, how his sensitive, nervous, delicate body was trembling. Whenever he was scolded as a child (and with such kindness!), she had never heard him complain, but he would tremble afterwards for a long while.

‘You’re so young, my darling,’ she said.

‘Well, then, Mama, you’ll undoubtedly be pleased to learn that Laurence has turned me down.’

‘She turned you down – you? But why?’

He didn’t reply. He started to walk away, but she stood in front of him, blocked his path.

‘Why did she say no?’

‘Her parents would not approve of the marriage,’ he explained curtly.

She raised her arms to heaven. Yes, she saw in horror how she must have looked, wringing her hands and raising her arms to heaven. She was beside herself. Her son, her Harry, humiliated, rejected! Her son, unhappy! Each of the sorrows that she felt on his behalf, the pain of seeing him suffer, the fear of losing him – none of these struck a healthy body for the first time; each was a blow to an old wound that had been opened a thousand times, one that endlessly wept and bled.

‘We’re richer than they are!’ she cried with pride.

‘Mama,’ begged Harry.

‘Do you love her, my darling?’ she asked, composing herself. ‘Do you love her?’

At that moment, she would have gone to the ends of the earth, beseeched the most powerful people in the world (but whom could she implore? And wasn’t she, she herself, amongst the most powerful? That idea caused her to feel strangely anxious); she would have allowed herself to be dragged on her knees over sharp stones to secure the very thing she had so dreaded just a few moments before: that young woman marrying her son.

‘She’ll say yes,’ said Harry softly, more to himself than to his worried, trembling mother. ‘I’ll ask her over and over again,’ he thought, ‘and I’ll wear her down. I’ll make myself humble, insistent, imploring.’

Invincible hope had risen from within him, hope born of defeat, aroused and nourished by that very defeat.

His mother was still talking; he didn’t reply, but gently left her side and went to join one of the guests who was saying goodbye to his aunts. A little while later, the last car left. Harry went up to his room. The first drops of rain from the storm suddenly began falling over Paris.