The Russian Album (28 page)

I had been lucky; many mansions were burned or sacked at the Revolution. This one had been converted into the village school, and the teachers were on the steps to greet me. A girl in a peasant costume and Ukrainian head-dress, made of purple and pink plastic flowers, curtseyed and presented me with the traditional greeting presents: a round loaf of bread, decorated with pastry leaves and a pastry sheaf of grain. Word of my arrival must have spread in the night: one of the teachers had baked it before coming to work. The little girl also carried a bowl of salt. I took a piece of the bread, dipped it in the salt and took a bite. This was how my grandmother was greeted when she arrived here as my grandfather's bride, in 1902. From cottage to cottage, the marriage procession went, and each family made them a ceremonial gift of bread and salt.

They led me into the house, a bare, rough-planked place built by peasant carpenters, now smelling of children and carbolic soap and fresh whitewash. My uncle Dima had described the interior to me many times: his grandfather's study with its crossed swords and its portrait of Gladstone; the heavy, cozy and overstuffed sitting-room where his grandmother received her grandchildren, no longer the fine young woman who charmed Disraeli at Hatfield House, but instead a stout
babushka
always clad in loose-flowing robes and a headscarf. She was the presiding matriarch of a large estate but in the photographs of that last family Easter in 1915, she seems more tender than imposing. In one picture, her five- and six-year-old grandchildren, my uncles Dima and Lionel, have clambered onto her lap, and she holds them by the waist. They entwine their fingers in hers. It seemed uncanny, and in some way very sad to be standing on the spot where that particular picture was taken, of an old lady bouncing her grandchildren on her knee, an old lady whose grandfather had led Russia's armies against Napoleon and whose grandchildren were to die in exile at the end of the 20th century five thousand miles away.

I was lost in thought when one of the teachers asked me whether it was true that Honoré de Balzac, the great French author, had stayed the night here. I said I doubted it. But then the director of the school told
me
something I did not know, though how the story had passed into the myths of the village I never learned. Apparently, my great-grandfather's daily companion and friend was the village priest. They walked in the gardens, lunched together, discussed the Scriptures. In his old age, glory gone, health declining, he became even more devout, kneeling down on the floor of the church, head bowed, considering his many sins. And in his loneliness and perhaps depression, he had only the company of his wife and the venerable old village priest. One day, in the year 1908, the servants came to him in great distress to announce that the old priest had died in his sleep. My great-grandfather heard the news in the downstairs hall and turned, so the schoolteacher told me, to make his way upstairs to his study, where he wished to be left alone. At the foot of the stairs, he fell and, while the servants made frantic attempts to revive him, he died. Here, right here, the schoolteacher said, as we mounted the plain-planked stairs.

In room after room, where my uncles must have slept as boys, children of six and seven were learning the Ukrainian language. One of these rooms, under the eaves, was Peggy Meadowcroft's: I have one of her snapshots of it, with heavy stuffed furniture, and wildflowers in three jars, and a white embroidered shawl draped over one chair, and the light streaming in through the windows and bleeding contrast out of the picture. Now it was filled with children bent over their school work, sneaking the occasional glance at me. Where they once learned about Yuri Gagarin and the heroic Soviet spacemen, they were now being taught about the Ukrainian bard Taras Shevchenko. In the next room, the children were learning patriotic songs, and for my benefit, one girl stood and sang an exceptionally bloody song (so Lena whispered to me) about the Ukrainian Cossacks overthrowing Moscow's yoke. She sang about the bloody revenge of the Cossack horsemen in a small, high-piping voice and smiled sweetly and curtseyed when she had finished.

Another upstairs room had been strewn with grasses, as peasant cottages of old were meant to be, and decorated as a museum of Ukrainian peasant culture. But the remains of that culture were beggarly: an old wooden spinning wheel, half-rotted away, a wooden rake, a blackened iron samovar.

In the school auditorium, decorated with pictures of Soviet pioneers, heroes of the Patriotic War, and once my great-grandparents' drawing room, I was asked to address the pupils. The children, the boys' blond hair clipped short, the girls with little red bows in their braids, looked at me in baffled silence. With Lena translating, I told the children that I was the great-grandson of the man who built this house. I wanted to bridge the enormous distance of time which separated them from my past, but I found myself unable to find the words. I was as strange to them as if I had stepped out of one of Peggy Meadowcroft's photographs. So I merely said that I was grateful to the teachers for keeping the house intact and I then presented the school with copies of images from the Russian Album. Afterwards, they crowded around and pointed and stared at the photographs of women in long dresses and children, their age, in sailor-suits and short trousers.

After the revolution, Aunt Mika, a gentle and retiring spinster who ran a dispensary in the village and then a hospital for wounded soldiers from the Galician front stayed on at the estate. Perhaps in the 1920s, perhaps later in the 1930s, when collectivization began, she was spirited away to Kiev where she went into a nunnery for her protection. From there a postcard reached my grandfather in the middle of the war in his sister's handwriting, telling him that in the village they still remembered the choirmaster.

The peasants might have remembered, but it was also true that they had looted the house from the attic to the cellar. Not a stick of the furniture in the album photographs, not a picture on the walls, not a plate, not a piece of embroidered linen, not a samovar or a spoon remained. One old man did rush back to his house and pulled out a battered reproduction of a photograph of the Count, taken when he was already a bent old man. How such a photograph had survived, in a peasant's house, throughout the Stalin time, I never learned.

By the 1930s, so the headmaster told me, the house had been divided up into a dwelling house for many of the village families. Then, someone said, it had become an orphanage. During the Second World War, the area had been occupied by the Germans, but the village itself had not been touched and the house itself did not seem to have been requisitioned or used as a German barracks.

The south-central Ukraine was once home to Jewish small farmers, peddlers and dealers. One of the teachers took me aside to a window, out of earshot of the children, and told me – in broken German – that he had witnessed something terrible in Pogribisce in 1941. The
Einsatzgruppen
killing squads had followed the
Wehrmacht
's advance through the Ukraine and systematically destroyed the Jewish civilization which had shared these valleys with Orthodox people for centuries. The teacher had been a boy then, but in a clearing outside Pogribisce, he had seen shootings, open pits, bodies piled upon each other and work teams shovelling sand and lime over them. Why he had seen this, what he was doing there, whether he had seen it at all or had heard it from someone who had, he did not say. The sand, he said, kept moving after the bodies were covered over.

The church bells began tolling in the village. Lena and I said goodbye to the teachers and the children and we walked down to the church, where the choir and parishioners were assembling for a service. The sexton and his son were up in the tower making the bells ring out over the valley. The building, standing amidst a grassy churchyard full of graves, was built of striped layers of sand and red-coloured brick, topped by three lead-coloured domes. In the churchyard, I found a small chapel and ducking my head low went in. Still wet from a recent mop was a small granite slab inscribed with the words ‘Count Paul Ignatieff, 1909–1911'. This was the grave of the child who died of typhoid in Eupatoria, the one whose picture my grandmother kept by her bedside all her life: my uncle. And behind the church, surrounded by shade trees was a ten-foot wooden cross atop a granite plinth. By the heavy black anchors which ringed the plinth, I knew at once whose grave this must be: the sailor in the family, my grandfather's youngest brother, Vladimir, who died at the battle of Tsushima, in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905.

And now the sexton had come down from the tower and had opened the large plank doors to the church proper. Lights streamed through the windows onto the newly swept mosaic floor. On the pillars, on the vaulted ceiling high over my head the saints stared down, newly painted, in ochre and crimson, blue and gold. Old ladies walked from icon stand to icon stand lighting candles. The priest's wife lowered the huge candelabra down from the dome, lit all the candles one by one, and briskly hoisted it back into place. The choir – half a dozen men and women from nearby Vinnitsa, directed by the priest's son – took up its position in the choir stalls in the nave. A small collection of parishioners, mostly old bent ladies with sticks, took up their places, leaning against the pillars at the back, crossing themselves.

I stood alone under the dome, with Lena behind me, and the choir began to sing the
pannihida,
the memorial service for the dead. The priest had asked Lena for the names of all my family, and now in his prayers, he mentioned them one by one, my mother, my two children, my father, my uncles, my grandparents and great-grandparents, Russian names, English names mixed in with the benedictions and formulas of Church Slavonic, the names lifted by the choir's voices and carried aloft into the uppermost reaches of the church.

When the singing was done, the priest came over and asked me to turn around and say something to the choir and to the parishioners. I thanked them for remembering my family in prayer, for singing their names and for keeping their graves. Three old women edged closer. One took my hand and began to kiss it. Another tugged my sleeve and said through broken teeth, and in a hoarse whisper, that she was one of the village children, one of those who had been a godchild of Aunt Mika. She brought mushrooms to the kitchen door. She remembered the smell of jam cooking. She wanted me to know how bad it had been afterwards, and then she began to cry, helplessly, touching her old face with both hands, her mouth a black circle of lamentation, at once the kerchiefed young girl she had once been and also, and irremediably, the broken survivor of all the horror that had followed.

The priest led me away, out of the church, through the graveyard. The doors to the crypt had been opened, and the light streamed into the low, vaulted space, strewn with grasses, with fresh field flowers in pickle jars in front of the icons, and all the candles lit. There, directly in front of me, exactly as the photographs led me to expect, was the grave of my great-grandfather, a white marble slab on a black basalt base, engraved with his name, his military rank of General Adjutant, his court title of Count, the dates 1832–1908, and beneath that the names of the two treaties he had signed in the Czar's name: Peking 1860, and San Stefano 1878. In several places the lettering was bisected by vigorous slashes cut deep into the stone by some exceedingly sharp blade. I ran my finger tip along the cold incisions in the basalt over the Ignatieff name. They used your great-grandfather's tomb as a butcher's block, the priest said, From the 1930s until the early 1950s, when the priest arrived, animal carcasses – hogs and cattle mostly – were unloaded in the churchyard outside and dragged into the crypt to be cut into sections. It wasn't hard to imagine the cleaver striking sparks on the gore-smeared stone and the blood of animals running on the pavings at my feet. The priest made a rueful click of his tongue, as if to commiserate. But I wasn't sure that it was a profanation exactly, or if it was, I didn't feel it as such. I felt better knowing what had happened. Instead of there being only silence and darkness and the slow gathering of dust since 1917, and nothing known for certain about any of the time intervening, there had been, at least for some years, a butcher with knives and cleavers cutting up the hogs and cattle of Kroupodernitsa on the old Count's grave. I had come in search, not of what the village had once been – since I knew that already from the Russian Album – but of what had happened after, after the time frozen in those snapshots, when the pose was broken, when the smiles faded on every face. Now I knew something certain about what had happened
after.
The grave had been a butcher's block. The cuts across its surface seemed to stand for everything that had happened here since the moments frozen in the album at Easter 1915. And despite everything, the cuts did not run all that deep. The letters of our name were still visible. The blood had washed away. The butcher and his meat had gone. The grave was still there.

On each side of his tomb, there were jagged breaks in the tile flooring, and where the titles should be, beaten earth strewn with wildflowers. As I edged back the flowers with my shoe, the earthen space where the tiles had been ripped up assumed the outline shape of a shrouded body. I realized I was staring down at graves, roughly and hastily dug through the earthenware tiles into the damp earth. But whose graves? The priest knew. One was my grandfather's sister, Aunt Katia. My grandfather had brought her home himself from the Eastern Front, where she had died nursing soldiers in a hospital train in 1915. For some reason, it being in the middle of the war, he had not been able to raise a burial stone over her body. And now she lay there, beneath the crypt, beside her father – and still uncovered. On the other side of his tomb lay a second, more or less identical body-shaped tear in the earthenware tiles. This must be where my great-grandmother had been laid, when she died in January 1917. Again, my grandfather must have meant to raise a stone over her head. I wanted to think it had been ordered, even paid for. But the revolution had intervened. The family went into exile. Who, but Aunt Mika, alone and penniless, was left to supervise the laying of the stones?