The Steppes of Paris (20 page)

“Oh, I’m sick and tired of this litany,” Irina burst out. She dropped her knife and fork in disgust. “Tell me, how many times have I had to sit through the recital of the sufferings of the Iskarov family from A to Z? Since I was a child, year in, year out; never let little Irina forget how much we all suffered so that she could have her donkey rides in the Jardin du Luxembourg and get the bean on the Fête des Rois. Well, little Irina had enough! She didn’t see why she should carry the burden of all that inherited suffering into the next generation: inherited complexes, inherited disorientation, inherited weather! Little Irina decided a long time ago she was going to have a good time. So there’s no point going into it all over again, for Edouard’s benefit, thank you very much. Let’s just let the matter drop.”

There was a short, very sultry silence. Edward wished himself anywhere but in the midst of this family confrontation.

“I’m quite sure the distinction is clear to you, Edward,” Great-Aunt Elena continued provocatively. “For your generation, travel is just a ride on a fairground carousel or a Ferris wheel; you know, barring a disaster, you’ll come safely back to the place you set out from and you can sit back and enjoy the sensations of the voyage. You don’t need to worry that the station you started out from won’t be there any more when you get back.”

“You can tell her when you’ve had enough, you know,” Irina interrupted rudely.

“I think it’s extremely interesting,” Edward answered defiantly.

For a moment, he and Irina faced one another, all their extensive differences exposed.

“For us, of course, it was another matter entirely,” Great-Aunt Elena went on. “Only a very few people were fortunate enough in those days to sample exotic travel: the jungle or the Himalayas. For most people, travel was something that was forced on you quite against your will. It came, frankly, in the category of natural disasters; like an earthquake or a hurricane. It uprooted you, blew you in a turmoil halfway across the world and then dropped you down quite arbitrarily somewhere you hadn’t chosen at all, and you had to make a go of it as best you could. Travel meant essentially loss, not the acquisition of colourful experiences and mementoes. It meant the loss of people, of places, of ridiculous irreplaceable things like smells and sounds and colours. And the loss was absolute, irrevocable; those things weren’t just mislaid or temporarily out of reach, you understand. They were gone for good.” She hurried herself a little, as if she realised that Irina’s forbearance would only last so long. “Considering what a catastrophe it was, it is remarkable how quietly, how unnoticeably it began. The day of a disaster, and I suppose the day of your death, dawns just like any other, you know. Yes, the day on which your life is totally changed or utterly ruined begins with a perfectly unremarkable banality. Afterwards, looking back at that day, at the events which preceded the catastrophe, it is their very banality, their failure to foreshadow what followed, which astonishes you. You remember, not waking up and knowing that today the chain of events would start which will end in you and your family fleeing your native land, taking with you only what you can carry. No, you remember waking up and feeling pleased because you have a new blouse to wear. You remember very clearly the colour and the feel of that new blouse because it was the last new garment you had for a long, long time. You remember lying in bed in the early morning and listening to the familiar noise outside of the ice floes splitting and creaking as they float down the river. You have lain in bed in the morning and listened to that same strange noise every spring. It is just
one of the familiar seasonal phenomena of your youth. But you will remember this ordinary, annual phenomenon with such clarity, such intensity, because you will never hear it again.”

“Bravo!” Irina said tartly. “Now, if the show is over, perhaps we can go on to the cheese?”

“Why are you being so vile to her?” Edward whispered when Great-Aunt Elena had left the room, maintaining a dignified silence.

Irina heaved a giant sigh. “Please, Edouard, don’t take sides in a battle you don’t understand.”

“Oh, come off it,” said Edward. “I don’t need to
understand
anything to see you’re giving her a hard time. I think you’re being unbelievably mean.”

Unexpectedly, Irina capitulated. “You’re right,” she agreed. “I’m an utter cow.”

She stood up, her face distorted with remorse, and went out to the kitchen, presumably to make her peace with Great-Aunt Elena. They were gone for a fairly long time, during which Edward ambled around the cramped living-room, reviewing the photographs on the bookcase in the light of today’s stories. When they returned, bringing a platter of Double Gloucester and Stilton, both of them had pink eyes.

The rest of the meal passed relatively peacefully. Afterwards, they sat drinking numerous cups of coffee and talking innocuously about the relative merits of Costa Rican and Brazilian blends. Edward felt the first pins and needles of boredom. But Irina insisted on going to the kitchen to do all the washing-up in a lather of amends and, while she was gone, Great-Aunt Elena repeated to him what a dear girl she was. All she needed was someone who would show her the direction of proper happiness, instead of pursuing chimeras.

By the time they left, it was five o’clock. Outside, it was already dark; the brief winter’s day seemed to have lasted barely a couple of hours. Although Edward had expected it would be uncomfortable to be on his own again with Irina, after the interval of suppressed disagreement, in the event no argument surfaced. They walked in silence down the Boulevard de Courcelles, sculpted in a particularly severe Sunday stoniness. Since Irina didn’t round on him or begin
to scold him for taking her great-aunt’s side against her, he gave her hand a tentative squeeze.

“Why are you so fed up today?” he asked.

Her sigh was a classic of its kind. She gestured at the gold-tipped black railings of the Pare Monceau.

“Why? Because of this.”

Automatically, Edward cast a glance at the deserted gravel paths and the empty green wooden benches dripping with moisture.

“Anything in particular?” he teased her.

She looked around bleakly and settled on an elderly couple creeping down the opposite side of the boulevard towards them. She jutted her chin in their direction. “For example.”

As seriously as he could, for Irina’s moods always seemed to him faintly farcical, Edward considered the pair. They were moving at the slow precarious pace of brittle bones on slippery pavements, their arms crooked for mutual support at the elbow, their grey heads bowed in the struggle. They looked, as they shuffled forward, welded by long years of similar, painstaking companionship.

He considered Irina. With the collar of her fur coat turned up against the weather, and the dark rings of gloom around her eyes, she really did look exceptionally dramatic. She reminded him of the woman glimpsed through mist or cigarette smoke in a Forties film. He tried to decide whether he had ever fantasised about partnering such a woman. He couldn’t say he ever had. It really did just seem to be a stroke of ridiculous luck; Paris depositing this superlative booby prize in his lap. In that spirit, of grabbing your luck while it lasted, he reached for Irina’s hand again as they came to the Metro station and asked her, “Why don’t you come back with me to the rue Surcouf?”

She glanced at her watch and his spirits rose; the proposition was not rejected out of hand then.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s getting late.”

“Oh, go on,” Edward urged her. “You don’t need to stay for long.”

Irina giggled, apparently titillated by the implication. Still she hesitated. Then she sighed. “Sooner or later,” she said,
“I suppose it has to happen. But, in that case, we’re going by taxi and not on the Metro.”

The act was quite distinctively different in the bigger bed. As they came in through the inter-connecting rooms, Irina seemed to lose her usual cocky self-assurance. She tagged behind Edward in the direction of the bedroom, but stopping all the way to examine things wonderingly, as if the circumstances had given them a new dimension. In the bedroom doorway, she came to a complete standstill and Edward had gently but firmly to propel her the final stretch down onto the bed.

As he had expected, the constricting anxieties of the Cité Etienne Hubert were lifted here. There was nothing furtive in the way they engaged beneath the bedclothes. But, freed of the oppressive constraints and the fear of discovery, it seemed they might at the same time have lost an element of their usual excitement. Things were much slower getting off the ground. It was almost as if in the broad space of the double bed, everything had been somehow diluted.

Nevertheless, the upshot was well up to the mark. They lay afterwards, a little way apart, and Edward was glad to notice that he felt just slightly more detached from Irina than he might have expected at that juncture. She didn’t prattle anxiously either, holding onto him and repeating in the most sickly sentimental terms what a great performer he was. The bed seemed, if possible, to have put more than physical distance between them. It had taken them out of the grotesque nursery universe, in which one or other or both of them were always children, and returned them to a cool adult environment, where their encounter took place amid antecedents, consequences and inhibiting implications. To his considerable surprise, Edward realised that although comfort would certainly dictate more frequent use of his bed in future, he would not mind in fact if, from time to time, they still went back to the Cité Etienne Hubert.

Because Irina still didn’t say anything and because her eyes were closed, Edward assumed she was asleep. He had a sudden spitefully mischievous wish to whisper something to her in Russian, to confuse her. He hoped perversely that in this bed she might give the game away by muttering Volodya’s name in her sleep.

But he didn’t know how to say anything. He reached for his watch and he noticed again that it was January 31st. February was invariably such a foul month, but he reflected contentedly that, contrary to all expectations, this year it looked as if he was going to get through it rather well.

Irina announced the idea to him like a premium bond she had won. They had met in the Taverne Tourville, for what Edward had pleasurably anticipated as another enjoyable evening of eating and drinking, winding up cosily on the fifth floor of Number Nine, Cité Etienne Hubert. They were on their first drink, Scotch and a
kir
respectively, and the only decision Edward had contemplated was how many drinks they might have here before moving on to a new restaurant and where that restaurant might be. They had already got into the habit of sitting at the same table, the one beside the glass dessert cabinet, and one of the waiters even knew what drinks they ordered.

Irina leant forward, propping her forearms across the peach cloth and trying to diffuse her excitement by playing elaborately with the silver-plated cruets. Lyova had asked her a favour. She darted Edward an apprehensive glance, in case Lyova’s name had had a detrimental effect. Lyova had to go away for a few days. A gallery owner in Nice had offered him his big break, an exhibition of his own, and Lyova obviously had to go down there to arrange it. The problem was, Lyova’s horrendous wife, Anna, had walked out on him yet again, this time it looked serious; she had taken up with some ghastly, vulgar advertising man, just
her type, and if Lyova went to Nice, there would be no one to look after the little girls. Irina broke into a broad grin. By a wonderful coincidence, though, it just happened to be when half-term fell at the
lycée.
When Lyova had put the problem to her, at his wits’ end, wanting to ask her to help out, of course, but knowing it would be impossible, she had at once been able to say yes, yes she would, yes with pleasure.

Edward tried to work out where in this story lay the key fact which was making Irina so delighted, and what, in any case, it had to do with him.

“So are you going to?” he asked cautiously.

Irina beamed. “Naturally. I shall stay in Lyova’s apartment for four days from Monday to Thursday. Elena will come over to be with Babushka and you and I will be free.”

“Oh yes?” Edward asked. “Where do I come into all this?”

Irina squeezed both his hands, unable to restrain her excitement any longer. “Don’t you see? Those two little girls are far too small to go spreading gossip and, anyway, if we take care, they won’t find out. Don’t you really see? You can come and stay there with me, of course. Lyova won’t mind. We can have four days and four nights to ourselves.” She raised her eyebrows and rolled her eyes at him with a luridly overdone suggestiveness. At the same time, she gripped his hands so tightly he had to extricate them.

“Hang on a minute,” he said. “I don’t want to come and stay at Lyova’s place and look after his children, thank you very much. You’re perfectly welcome to, if that’s your idea of a good time. But I’m afraid you can count me out.”

Irina’s face fell an incredibly long way. “I don’t understand you.”

“Nothing not to understand,” Edward said briskly. He was polishing off his Scotch at a fair lick. “It doesn’t appeal to me, that’s all. Sorry.”

Irina let go of his hands. “But Edouard,” she protested. “Maybe I haven’t explained myself; I’m inviting you to come and spend four days and four nights with
me
.”

Behind her head, a pot plant stood on the café’s white piano. Edward suddenly saw the two in juxtaposition: lady’s head and pot plant, a blandly decorative painting from his Paris period.
The vision enabled him to give Irina an absolutely calm look and to answer levelly, “Yes?”

Irina began to grow fretful. “This is a joke, isn’t it, Edouard? Although not a funny one.”

“Depends how you look at it,” Edward answered flippantly. “I think it’s rather a joke your suggesting that I come and help babysit for Lyova for four or five days.”

Irina glared at him. “You seem to be missing the point. I can’t tell if it’s because you’re really obtuse or if you’re just doing it to provoke me.”

“A combination of both?” Edward suggested.

He suddenly felt he didn’t want to lose the pleasant evening in prospect because of one of Irina’s whims. He squeezed both her hands hard and added, “Don’t get me wrong, Irina. I really enjoy spending time with you, you know that. Only not in Lyova’s flat, and not surrounded by kids.”

“Why not Lyova’s flat?” Irina asked petulantly. “What’s wrong with Lyova’s flat? You yourself complain that we have to go on tiptoes in my flat and you know it’s difficult for me to come to yours. So here’s someone offering us another flat, where we can be perfectly at peace, and, really, I don’t see where’s the problem. And, in any case, Lyova only has two children.”

Edward laughed at her. “Two too many.”

Irina’s patience expired in an exasperated snort.

“What’s
wrong
with you?” she exploded. “Katya and Solange are the dearest, sweetest little things. They wouldn’t get in our way at all. And if they did, we could always take them to Anna’s sister for a bit during the day. It’s not a kindergarten I’m inviting you to; it’s a little holiday, just the two of us.”

“That’s not what it sounds like,” Edward countered.

“I never thought,” Irina said stuffily, “that I would have to criticise you for behaving too much like an old person. But, really, this hesitation, this caution; what are you worried about? Why can’t you just take a golden opportunity when it arises without fussing about how it might possibly go wrong?”

“Hang on a minute,” Edward objected. “Who’s saying this is such a tremendous opportunity? It sounds like purgatory to me. And anyway, I thought we’d worked out rather a good
compromise, haven’t we; your place at night and mine during the day?”

Irina’s face flushed furiously. “You’re so unromantic, Edouard,” she declared.

She downed the last of her
kir.
“I’m not going to beg you,” she announced loftily. “If you’re too much of a fuddy-duddy to recognise a stroke of good fortune when it comes your way, then I don’t see why I should make the effort to persuade you.”

They went to a modest Provençal restaurant. Throughout the meal, Edward had to try to scale the barricade of injured pride Irina had erected. It was tiring and irritating but he knew full well that unless he surmounted it, Irina took her dignity seriously enough to shut her front door in his face at the end of the evening, and that did seem an awful waste.

Towards the end of the meal, to secure his position, he raised the subject again conciliatingly. “Have you babysat for Lyova before?”

“Once or twice,” Irina said sulkily, and he saw he still had a man-sized grudge to work on.

He asked himself then if it were really worthwhile; all this uphill slogging when there must be no shortage of women in Paris who would give approximately as good a return for half the effort. An answer came to him which was almost mathematical in the simplicity of its logic; it had taken him over three months to land Irina. In three months more, with any luck, his time in Paris would be coming to an end.

“It’s very generous of you,” he said.

Irina looked at him suspiciously. “Lyova babysits for Babushka,” she said. “That’s much more of a favour.”

“When is it?” Edward asked. “When are you going to stay there?”

“You’re not interested,” Irina said resentfully. “Don’t pretend you are. What’s the point of my telling you when it is since we’re not going to see each other that week anyway?”

He only said it in a last-ditch attempt to save the evening: “Oh come off it, Irina,” he said. “There’s no reason why I shouldn’t come and
see
you at Lyova’s.”

What was all this about, he wondered increasingly uneasily over the intervening fortnight. He concluded it was about one
thing and one thing only: Irina’s body in a variety of positions and a variety of lights. He had had no intention of setting foot in Lyova’s flat. The whole plan sounded preposterous to him. But somehow, somewhere, between their
tarte
tatin
and the next morning’s croissant, he found he had agreed to do more than look in on Irina there. It was perfectly insane, but it seemed he had agreed to spend the night.

It was about the ghosts of breasts billowing in the dark; twin white ghosts which, when you touched them, turned out to be joyously warm and full and fleshy, equipped with little red lights at their tips which appeared to glow at you welcomingly. It was about sharing a too-small bed with a female mountain range, a chain of peaks and valleys which sprawled magnificently in relaxation and when aroused, spewed forth hot lava and elemental sighs. He derived nearly as much pleasure, although of a naturally more subdued kind, from covertly observing Irina naked as from getting down to business with her. He found the astonishing contrast between her calm, almost prim Old Master’s shape and what it so readily gave way to incredibly stimulating. Possessing Irina was like being admitted to a connoisseurs’ club, where everything, from the furniture to the refreshments, was embossed with a seal of venerable appreciation. He discovered too that sexual excitement could be triggered by inanimate objects which he would never have dreamt were capable of provoking such an effect. He felt a distinct anticipatory pleasure at the mere hissing of the lift ropes, and riding up in the cabin, even on his own, without Irina, he found the oblong box so charged with erotic associations that it reminded him of Woody Allen’s Orgasmatron in
Sleeper.
The Iskarovs’ flat was full of things which were in themselves utterly unexciting, even off-putting, but which, as accompaniments to what now took place there, had become positively indecent. Throughout the flat, there were a quantity of scattered leather pouffes, plump, over-filled, yet promptly yielding when someone sat on them. They let out little anguished sighs as they took your weight and they retained the imprint of your backside for hours and hours. Edward could not remember at what point he had had to stop sitting on the pouffes because of the embarrassing effect the yielding leather under his buttocks immediately
had on him. In Irina’s bedroom, there was a dressing-table with three long mirrors which, even though he found it a hideous piece of furniture, still had the most potent effect on him. It was painted a pale saccharine pink, as if it had been hewn from a block of strawberry icecream, and it was always packed with the countless bottles and jars of Irina’s beauty regimen. Even though Edward loathed the jostling bottles, the cotton wool and the Kleenex, they grotesquely triggered an unmistakable response in him. Coupled with their faint, rotting-flower smell, they were horrid objects. But, linked to the reflection of Irina triplicated in the mirrors, they still had an almighty effect on him, even when Irina wasn’t there.

The fixtures and fittings of his own flat seemed tame by contrast, and what took place there was, in fact, often less highly charged. But, even in the rue Surcouf, on the rare afternoons when they managed to get away from the demands of one or another of Irina’s relatives, there were accompaniments which endowed the proceedings with a richness quite new to Edward. It was daylight for a start, a winter daylight which gave no indication of what time of day it was and filled the bedroom with an opaque, ghostly light. In that light, Irina’s body would sometimes catch a more concentrated ray of light, emerging somewhere from between two clouds, and an unexpected part of her would be briefly highlighted in the gloom. The ease with which she moved, even quite naked, through the inter-connecting rooms convinced Edward more and more that she had known them in that state before, and this intuition, the mystery, and the apparent uncle who was there along with them, all gave their afternoons a grainy, marvellously sophisticated complexity.

None of it, Edward acknowledged, was probably reason enough to go and stay at Lyova’s.

“Teach me how to say something in Russian,” he asked Irina.

They were sitting in Lyova’s unbelievably squalid living-room after a late supper. Edward had refused to come over until the two little girls were safely tucked up in bed and it wasn’t until nearly ten o’clock that the telephone had rung in
the rue Surcouf and Irina, sounding flustered but exceptionally happy and triumphant, had informed him that the coast was clear.

Lyova lived in a distinctly seedy stretch of the twelfth
arrondissement
, quite close to the Gare de Lyon. As he walked down the long and increasingly unsavoury rue de Charenton, Edward reflected that Irina really was slumming it. The building in which Lyova lived could have been some sort of industrial premises, from its appearance. The low front door was set in a filthy small façade, hung with the nameplates of what seemed to be resident business operations. There was nothing to indicate that anyone actually lived there at all. Edward hesitated for a moment in front of the building, wondering if he had picked the wrong place. Then he noticed an unobtrusive, rather mucky-looking bell in a recess beside the front door and rang it on the off-chance. The door clicked open in response and he looked inside, into a long, barely lit yard, at the other end of which was, as Irina had told him, a small staircase going up into a three-storey, yellow-ochre building. He crossed the yard cautiously, still not absolutely convinced that this shabby forecourt, full of dismantled bits of unidentifiable machinery, really could be where Lyova, romantic Russian dissident and avant-garde artist, lived with his wife and children. He was prepared for a savage Alsatian, hopefully chained, to dash out at him at any moment or a burly figure, flashing a torch, to challenge his intrusion. Nothing of the sort happened, no one appeared, and when he got to the bottom of the staircase, he heard music coming from the lit windows on the second floor of the yellow-ochre building.

He was preparing to greet Irina, ‘What kind of a dump is this?’ But she looked so extraordinarily transformed by happiness when she opened the door to him that he momentarily lost track.

“So you found it OK?” she beamed. “No problems getting here?”

“No,” Edward answered. “No,” but then, recollecting himself, “What kind of a dump is this?”

“A cheap dump,” Irina said crisply, pulling him inside.

Her answer put him to shame, of course, reminding him with a pinprick that Lyova, engaged in his worthy struggle,
was desperately hard up. Edward reminded himself that it was perfectly possible to live somewhere poor but not ridiculous, and to show Irina that he was not humbled by her reproach, he persisted, “No, but what
is
it? A factory? An abattoir for
Deux-Chevaux
?”