The Russian Album (23 page)

Exile drew her closer to them. In the Caucasus they had seen her transformed into their ‘tigress'. Now, greying and in her fifties, she sewed their buttons and kept aside special treats for them when they came home from school, from university, from their first jobs. She cooked and washed for them and became, as she had never been before, the physical heart of their world. And before every journey she would ask them, ‘Have you seen to your digestions?'

She and Paul had drummed it into the boys that the past was past and that they must not end up like so many émigrés driving taxis and keeping their bags packed for the return journey to Petersburg. Alec, the family rebel and tease, most like his mother in looks, was the first to leave. In Kislovodsk he had become fascinated with geology and in England completed a degree at the Royal School of Mines. Soon he was off to Sierra Leone to work as an engineer in a gold mine. Nick, the family dreamer and philosopher, wanted to be a writer but his father insisted that he get a degree in something practical, so Nick soldiered his way through a degree in electrical engineering at the University of London. Blanching at the thought of settling in to suburban life, Nick answered an advertisement in a paper offering free passage, board and lodging to harvesters in Canada, and in 1924 set out for northern Alberta. Dima soon joined him, lured by Nick's promise of a job at a lumber camp making railway ties. Nick was a fantasist and Dima discovered when he arrived that there was no tie camp and no job. But they stuck it out harvesting and homesteading in the cold northern plains of Alberta.

Dima came back to England in the autumn of 1927, strong and sunburned, with stories of riding the boxcars and working in the endless fields of the prairies which reminded him of the vast plenty of old Russia. Paul was away all that winter of 1927–28 collecting money for the Red Cross and Dima ran the farm with Natasha while the younger boys, Lionel and George, completed their year at St Paul's. By the spring of 1928, Dima was determined to sell the farm. Milk prices were falling and the farm was too small to be profitable. Some of his former teachers from agricultural college came up to inspect the place and told him it was a lovely family home but hopeless as a commercial proposition. So the twenty-three-year-old Dima ordered the farm to be sold and wired his father when the deed was done. What is more, he told his father he was taking his mother and George and Lionel to Canada. If that was the case, his father replied, then he would stay on in Paris working for the Red Cross.

To this day, Dima's decision arouses passions. For Dima, the matter was straightforward: if the farm was losing money, it had to be sold. For George and Lionel, who could only dimly remember Russia as a place of terror and deprivation, Beauchamps was the only home they had ever known. Torn between a son who was certain the family would go under unless it made a break for Canada and a husband who was spending more and more time in the émigré world of Paris, Natasha decided in favour of her son. George and Lionel watched as the family wrenched itself apart.

In the early summer of 1928, after the house and farm had been sold, Dima called in the auctioneers to sell off the contents of Beauchamps. The valuers came through the house and put together a catalogue and then a crowd assembled on the lawn and the bidding began. As the hammer rapped down, George and Lionel and Natasha watched their furniture being carted off and the farm animals put into other men's halters and led away. Their own remaining possessions, a tiny heap of clothes and some Russian treasures, were piled once again into Natasha's trousseau trunk and shipped down to Southampton where in September 1928 it was loaded on board the steamship
Montrose,
bound for Montreal. When the ship sailed, George, then fifteen, crawled into bed and held his mother tight to stop her from crying.

They travelled on Nansen passports, issued to stateless refugees. Lionel's and George's were stamped with a Canadian visa admitting them as agricultural labourers. When they landed in Montreal, Dima took George's boater and chucked it into the St Lawrence. ‘You won't need that here!' he boomed.

Dima settled them into a cold-water flat in the Victoria Apartments in east-end Montreal. The winter of 1928–29 was a low ebb for Natasha. The money trickled away in that wretched bug-ridden apartment in the icy foreign city, and she was reduced to taking the streetcar down to Bonsecours market to bargain for cheap vegetables to feed her boys. But no matter how little money there was, she sent them to an exclusive private school, Lower Canada College. In order to pay for her sons' education, she gave up spending on herself and began gambling the money from the sale of the farm in penny mining stocks. She entered her sixtieth year, gaunt and bony with deep circles under her eyes, always dressed in the same severe ankle-length black dress fastened at the neck with one of her mother's brooches. Sometime that year Nick came back from Alberta with his fiancée, the daughter of Judge Woods from Edmonton. She remembered meeting Natasha in that dark, narrow apartment in the east end and thinking she was the most mournful and lonesome creature she had ever met in her life.

After a miserable year at school, George set off for the west coast in the spring of 1929 to find a summer job on the railways. At Grand Central Station in Montreal, Natasha pressed twenty-five dollars into his hand and warned him in her inimitable way that if he got mixed up with ‘loose women' his nose would fall off. He was just sixteen and he worked all summer as an axeman on the shores of Kootenay Lake in British Columbia, cutting trees and making stakes for the right-of-way for a railbed linking the Crow's Nest pass with the Kettle Valley Railway line into Vancouver. The railbed skirted the canyon walls of the lake and an axeman had to master his trade one step from a fatal fall. George shed his St Paul's School diction for bunkhouse slang; he picked up an impressive scar on his knee during a duel of axe-throwing with an Irishman and he learned how to fight back when his mates dumped him, bedding and all, into the mountain stream at the back of the camp.

There is a picture in Natasha's album of George on the railbed at the edge of Kootenay Lake that summer of 1929. He has knotted a handkerchief and put it on his head against the heat and he is wearing a work-shirt, jeans and heavy boots. He is arm in arm with two of his workmates and he looks as tough and as happy as they do. They called him the Douk, because the only Russians they had ever met were Doukhobours, members of the reclusive religious sect who had emigrated from Russia and moved into the remote valleys of British Columbia. His boss spent his evenings going through volumes of the
Encyclopedia Britannica,
and one evening came across the article on George's grandfather, Nicholas Ignatieff. When he asked his young axeman whether they were related, George realized he was happier to be thought a decent axeman than to be a count. He came back to Montreal in the autumn, fired up as his brothers had been with the magic of the west and with the feeling that he had proved himself.

Fortunately the stock-market crash of October 1929 saved him from having to return to the pickled gentility of Lower Canada College. Natasha had been trying to stretch their money by buying stocks and when the market collapsed the capital from the sale of Beauchamps was halved. By this time Nick had a job as an electrical engineer with Ontario Hydro and at his instigation the family moved to a rented farmhouse in Thornhill on the northern outskirts of Toronto. The Depression brought the family back together. Dima, who had been homesteading in the Peace River country in northern Alberta, lost his farm to a hailstorm and returned to Toronto to work as a junior instructor in soils chemistry at the University of Toronto. It was his salary that kept the family going in 1930 and 1931.

Then in 1932, Paul arrived from Paris after four years away. The Depression had dried up charitable sources for the Russian Red Cross and so his work had slowed to a trickle. He was now sixty-two and after four years in the little room at the Hôtel Ramsès in the Square des Batignolles it was time to come home. What part he had played in the émigré politics of Paris, that tangled milieu of White plotters and Red
agents provocateurs,
he kept to himself. How Paul explained his absence, how Natasha took him back, neither ever said. They made some sort of peace between themselves and settled into a succession of houses the boys rented for them in Toronto. In the photographs, they always stand a distance apart: he in his rakish fedora, his face a mask of cool charm with the hint of a smile beneath his sweeping moustache; she stooped, squinting, smiling back at the camera, with the choker around her neck and the same spare black dress.

In 1936, Dima found them some land in Upper Melbourne, a small pulp town on the St Francis River in the Eastern Townships south of Montreal, and Paul supervised the building of a little brick two-bedroomed cottage with a screen porch and a high gabled roof to plane away the snow. It stood among the dark pines above the river and they settled in to raise vegetables, to grow a garden and to await the arrival of grandchildren. Natasha continued to play the stock market on the quiet, determined to recoup the losses of 1929. Soon the drawers of her desk were full of prospectuses from companies like White Lake Gold and Porcupine Silver.

George went on a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford in 1936. His parents did not want him to go, fearing he would be lost to them by settling in England. But his father presented him with General Ignatieff's gold watch and saw him off on the boat. Lionel went to law school at McGill.

In this new country, whose winters recalled their own, whose immensity brought back that lost immensity of their own, Paul and Natasha took out papers of citizenship and were at last able to consign their Nansen passports, emblems of homelessness, to the attic. They were too old by then to shed their accents or to take up new lives but they never tried to clamp their children within an émigré ghetto or to insist on Russian brides. All but one of the sons married outside the Russian circle. When Marjorie Adams, Florence Hargreaves, Helen Fraser and Alison Grant came into the family they stood uncomprehending through their own weddings at the Russian church. One by one the diamond stars on the necklace the Sultan of Turkey had given to the boys' grandmother were taken off and passed along the chain of a now Canadian family. Natasha and Paul bade them all welcome to the family, she with her Garbo voice, he with his courtly attention to the feminine. The Canadian daughters had to get accustomed to Russian directness about all the things which good Canadian Protestants never mentioned in company: digestion, money and grief. These Canadian brides learned how to cook Russian dishes and listened to stories of Kislovodsk and Kroupodernitsa for clues to their husbands' moods – melancholic, hysterical, passionate and withdrawn by turns. All of the sons sought strength and practicality in their wives; they searched for and found in them also their own mother's wry irony.

In September 1939, Nick and Dima enlisted and by 1940 were with the Canadian army in England. Alec was managing explosives factories there, and George was already a junior foreign service officer at Canada House in London. Only Lionel remained behind finishing law school at McGill, living with his parents in the little bungalow in Upper Melbourne, Quebec.

It was some time in the summer of 1940, with her boys overseas and her first grandchildren just arrived, that Natasha began typing out her memoirs in the little wood-panelled bedroom at the back of the bungalow. Paul had written his own memoirs years before in England. He wrote for a public audience; she wrote for her children and grandchildren. My boys, she said, tell me I have a ‘special vivid manner of expressing myself. Having no pretensions to authorship, I just do it to please my boys.' She enjoyed herself that summer. Memory, she said, ‘quite flew me back to my happy past'.

She used any old scrap of paper she could find – children's exercise books purchased at the Rexall drugstore in town, recipe cards, the back of grocery lists. She typed with two fingers, ignoring punctuation, writing as she spoke, in the English she had learned from governesses at Doughino, the English she knew her grandchildren would grow up speaking as their mother tongue. Back and forth across the years she scavenged, retrieving whatever she could from the darkness. The snow piled high outside in the long winters of the war. She and Paul sat by the fireplace in the sitting room listening to the radio for news of the battles. By 1943, Dima was a chemical warfare officer with the Canadian troops at the battle of Monte Cassino, and Paul and Natasha followed the news of the Italian campaign with painful attention. They listened for all bulletins about Russia, their hearts aching at the names of each town that fell.

I have a picture of them taken by Lionel in the winter of 1944. They are standing outside the cottage in Upper Melbourne, side by side in the snow on a cold winter's afternoon. They are bundled up in long winter coats that seem to pull them down into the earth. Natasha is smiling in that squinting quizzical way of hers. Her grey hair is pulled back in an untidy chignon and her long straight neck is enclosed in a black choker. Her knees are slightly bent and turned inwards, which gives her stance the awkwardness of a shy girl. Paul is standing a fraction apart, elegant as always with an astrakhan perched on his head, a carefully knotted tie and twirled moustaches. The sockets of his eyes are dark and the ridges of his cheekbones are sharp and exposed. He is not smiling. They are both wearing bedroom slippers and they stand on the flagstones, little dry islands in an expanse of white snow. Spring is months off; the darkness will soon close about the house. It is the last picture in the album.

NINE

THE LITTLE FOOLS

Natasha's
durachki,
her little fools, are now old men.

Last summer I went home to Canada to visit them all. Lionel lives in a nursing home north of Toronto. He is in his seventies now and looks like one of the studious saints on an Orthodox icon. I visit him in the Chinese café in a shopping mall many stop lights north of Highway 401, in the featureless sprawl of north Toronto. The café – and the whole mall – are owned by Hong Kong Chinese. Nothing but fields existed here five years ago.