The Steppes of Paris (28 page)

“Irina has led perhaps an unusual life. I do not know if it was unusual from the beginning; if maybe the way we brought her up had some deficiencies we didn’t realise. Although I can’t see what they could have been; she always had a surfeit of everything. But, at any rate, since she has been grown-up and independent, managing her own life, I am afraid it has grown steadily more unusual. She has never found herself a serious and constant partner. Excuse me, this comment is not intended in any way as a reflection on you, Edward. What I mean is, Irina has somehow never settled on anybody who could last. She has had a series, oh dear, a long, long series, of highly unsatisfactory encounters. And, in this sorry series, Volodya’s apartment has played a most unfortunate part. We let her manage it because, after all, she is young and capable; a modern woman, a woman of the world. She could handle all the paperwork, the bureaucracy and the bank, much better than we could. We never dreamt of the way it would be exploited; how Irochka would use it, I am afraid quite scandalously, for her own purposes. Over the years, she has always chosen the tenants. We let her; we saw no harm in it. I think we were blinded to her intentions not only by our affection for her; I think she actively misled us. But eventually, of course, we realised what was going on. It was when the Italian moved in that we first had our suspicions, and then when he moved out rather suddenly and she replaced him with the Hungarian, the suspicions were reinforced. But, you see, we could scarcely believe it; our little Irochka up to such a thing! I am afraid it was the Brazilian banker who confirmed our darkest fears. Do I need to spell it out? Irina was using the apartment to house men whom she wanted to be close to. I’m sorry, but that is the case. We had a most unpleasant discussion. I said that from then on
I
would choose the tenants. I’m afraid the first person I chose was perhaps not entirely suitable, an American who turned out to be a follower of Hinduism. How was I to know? We never touched on religion in the interview. Anyway, we agreed
the next tenant would be a woman, and Varvara Stepanovna found us a very appropriate Norwegian woman through her self-help group. And then, just at the last minute, all we were waiting for was her bank reference, Irina suddenly came up with you. At first, we were adamant: no, not again. But Irina insisted; it was via the
lycée,
she couldn’t refuse a favour to her colleague, Madame Hirshfeld. And she told us how young you were. Excuse me, we thought nothing could possibly go amiss. But it seems we were mistaken, yet again.

“Edward, I must ask you, please, to stop seeing Irina. I know it will create difficulties for you. I know Irina can be a terribly tempestuous person. But, for her sake, please, be hard on her. She will ruin her life, I know, the way she is going. Please, tell her now, tell her no.”

Edward sat stunned, with over his head the inky black exclamation marks of a cartoon strip.

“Listen,” he said at last. “You don’t need to worry. I haven’t actually told Irina yet, but I’ve already heard about my next job. I’m leaving Paris in less than a month.”

“Oich!”

Some quite abstracted part of Edward’s brain reflected calmly how remarkable it was, the way these exclamations were inherited within the Iskarov family. How many times had he heard Irina make exactly that same winded little “Oich!” when he shocked her and by some uncouth act incurred her displeasure.

Elena leant forward, her face a frozen conglomeration of absolutely round, shocked cheeks, eyes and mouth.

“Less than a month?”

“Yes,” Edward said. “I’m sorry about the notice for the flat. But you can understand how, in the circumstances –”

Elena shook her head for a second or two helplessly. But then she seemed to brighten, realising that, however brutally, her aim had been achieved.

“Tell me,” she asked him eagerly. “Where is it to be? Which ‘land beyond the sea’ are they sending you to?”

“Brace yourself,” Edward told her. “Russia.”

Elena gaped at him with what looked very like awe. Yes, it was a little as if he had announced he had been picked for a
moon shot. Elena stared at him as if he had acquired a new and heroic stature.

“You’re going to
Russia
?”

“Yup.”

Once again, her head wobbled from side to side in astonished admiration. Then came a new exclamation:
“Molodyets!”

This one was not a burst paper bag; it sounded to Edward more like the cluck of extreme glee a hen might make upon laying an egg.

“Meaning?” he asked.

“Clever you!” Great-Aunt Elena exclaimed. “And can we claim a little of the credit for having switched your thoughts in that direction? Was it your Russian experiences here in Paris which made you choose Russia in preference to South America?”

“Oh,” Edward blurted tactlessly, “I didn’t
choose
it. It’s just happened. Though,” he added quickly, “of course I’m terribly pleased.”

Elena sat back slightly, just a trifle disappointed.

“Well,” she declared, “I’ve sensed it all along, but now my feelings are confirmed: you are the future.”

Edward started to say, “Oh, come –”

Elena dismissed his objections. “You represent the new unfettered era,” she informed him. “There is no reason why you should not go anywhere. For you, all countries are as one. There are no taboos, no closed doors any more. The world is a self-service restaurant.”

There was more than one assumption in this speech which displeased Edward: the suggestion that he maybe didn’t distinguish deeply between one country and another, and the implicit comparison with the type of journalist he so despised, for whom a destination was only as appetising as its restaurants. But he thought he should be satisfied that Elena had taken this awkward news so positively, and not press the point.

“Of course,” he said, “I do intend to tell Irina. But I want to leave it as late as I can, you understand, so as not to upset her any sooner than necessary.”

Great-Aunt Elena seemed to look doubtful.

“Please,” Edward insisted. “You won’t tell her, will you?
I really think it’s important, in the circumstances, that the news comes from me.”

Elena still looked unhappy. “When will you tell her?”

“Oh, very soon,” Edward assured her. “As soon as I’ve got an actual date for going.”

“How will you go there?” Elena asked. “Will you go back to London first or will you travel directly?”

“I thought,” said Edward, “it might be rather fun to go by train, across Poland; a good introduction. But, of course, it depends how urgently I’m needed there.”

Great-Aunt Elena gazed at him. “You know why I’ve always liked the Boulevard de Courcelles? It reminds me of the palaces in St Petersburg on the banks of the Neva.”

“I’ll go and look at them,” Edward said earnestly. “And I’ll think of you. And you know what; I’ll send you a postcard of them.”

He returned to the rue Surcouf on an ebb tide of bilberry liqueur and fell almost immediately into a sound, satisfied sleep. The noise which woke him had the inexplicable and relentless quality of a nightmare and, for several seconds, he couldn’t work out if he were dreaming it or if it were really happening. Someone was battering on his front door. Thinking first of fire or some medical emergency, he scrambled out of bed and as he fumbled his way into the nearest pyjamas, he managed to focus on his bedside alarm clock and saw it was two o’clock in the morning. The pounding on the door didn’t let up during the few moments it took him to get to it.

He called,
“J’arrive,
j’arrive.
Qu’est-ce
qu’il
y
a?”

Irina’s voice howled back, “Let me in, Edouard.”

He did, for a moment, hesitate to open the door but he cringed, in what he acknowledged irritably was a very English way, at how his neighbours were liable to react if the noise continued.

Irina plunged in at him.

“Is it true?” she demanded.

“For Christ’s sake!” he protested. “What d’you think you’re doing? Is what true?”

“You’re leaving,” Irina panted. “They’re sending you to Moscow in a fortnight’s time.”

She looked so ghastly, Edward experienced an instant of
sheer revulsion: staring-eyed, livid-faced, and every incipient wrinkle of her thirty-six-year-old face starkly accentuated by her panic.

“Is this why you’ve come round now?” he asked her angrily. “Do you realise it’s bloody two o’clock in the morning? You must have woken up every single person in the building, banging on the door like that.”

Irina grabbed him by the arm and tugged at him fiercely.

“Tell me!” she shrieked.

He saw in her panic-stricken eyes black depths of desperation he had never seen before and he became gradually scared.

“Look, come in and sit down,” he said roughly. “We need to talk this over together quietly. There’s no point getting in such a state.”

As he tried to reach around Irina to close the front door discreetly behind her, she whirled round on him, pinning him against the door, which at least slipped securely shut beneath their combined weight.

Grimacing into his face from point-blank range, Irina breathed, “If you don’t tell me this instant –”

“OK,” Edward said furiously. “It’s true. I’m being sent to Moscow and I’ll be leaving in three or four weeks’ time. Now, if you don’t let go of me and calm down and stop behaving like a lunatic, I promise you, you’ll regret it.”

But he was already speaking to a deflated balloon; Irina released him in the process of clutching her own face and doubling up as if in unbearable pain. Gasping, she held her face and her stomach, as if with terrible difficulty holding herself together.

Edward didn’t move an inch to help her, for his predominant emotion was outrage.

Irina reared up, proving that her seizure was either short-lived or, more likely, a sham.

“You
’ll
regret it!” she screamed. “Not me; you’ll regret it, Edouard Wenwright! You thought you could cheat me, didn’t you; deceive me and cheat me, and I wouldn’t find out? What was supposed to happen, tell me; was I supposed to wake up one fine morning and discover you were gone? Or would you have left me a little goodbye note maybe? ‘Cheerio, it’s been
nice knowing you.’ Was that what was supposed to happen? Well, I tear up your little goodbye note and I spit on it. I spit on
you,
Edouard. You’ve disappointed me more than I ever thought was possible. You know, I was stupid enough to think you were a decent man, my first-ever properly decent man. I thought you believed in all those fine English values: being a good sport and fair play. But you’re really a specimen of something else English, aren’t you? It’s true what they say about
perfide
Albion,
If it needed to be proved, you’ve just proved it.” Two or three times, in a quavering voice, she shrilled,
“Perfide
Albion!
Perfide
Albion!”

Edward was just considering some act of violent assertion to lower the noise level when Irina paused to summon breath for a final onslaught.

“You thought you’d steal away like a thief in the night, didn’t you?” she shrilled. “Take what you wanted and then sneak away,
filer
à
l’anglaise.
But you’re going to find out life’s not as easy as you thought. I’m going to teach you a lesson, Edouard Wenwright, which you’ll never forget.”

“I was going to tell you,” Edward said. “You weren’t meant to hear this way from Great-Aunt Elena. I asked her specially not to tell you.”

The tempest redoubled in volume.

“Of course!” Irina screeched. “And I know why! I may have been stupid, but not
that
stupid.”

“Actually,” Edward started vaguely. But he almost no longer cared. What appeal was there in retaining the goodwill of someone so hideously transformed?

“When I have done what I intend to do,” Irina announced, “I hope you can still have a nice life as you travel around the world. I wish you
bon
voyage
.”

She strutted towards him and although he could easily have restrained her at the front door, tried to talk some sense into her, he stood aside and held the door open with ironic courtesy. He was too outraged to make even the least conciliatory effort.

Irina stalked out. In the very last second before he closed the door completely after her, Edward saw her stop and begin to turn. He finished closing the door immediately, for the last thing he wanted was Irina coming back.

The rest of the night was of course a write-off. For hours, he turned furiously, fuming, thinking of cleverer, more conclusive responses than the ones he had given, and from time to time ruthlessly squashing a recurring uncoiling of anxiety over what dramatic act it was Irina was planning to perform. In the end he grew calm enough to sleep. He concluded, with a callousness which frankly surprised him, that Irina had at least solved the problem of how to say goodbye to her.

Reading up on his next country, plus the acquisition of the many indispensable objects which Arnold warned him over the telephone would be unobtainable in Moscow, enjoyably filled the rest of Edward’s time in Paris. He liked the sound of Arnold’s voice on the phone; albeit in the fruitiest of English public-school accents, it seemed to convey the same jovial, robustly cynical outlook as Henry’s.

Of course, he did worry about Irina, resentfully. But his worry tended to focus on the most likely form of her threatened revenge rather than on her plight. He realised he was, in fact, waiting for it, and every day of what should have been this splendidly happy countdown period was being subtly spoilt by the oppressive awareness that every day which elapsed free of drama only meant it was more likely the following day. He supposed there were two forms the reprisal could take; it would either be directed against him (sneaking into the flat while he was out and sabotaging his belongings, for example; lying in wait and somewhere publicly leaping at him; or possibly contacting the paper and causing him some monumental embarrassment) or else it would be directed against herself (suicide). Each drama-free day which passed in silence made this second dreadful option seem the most likely.

He dealt directly with Great-Aunt Elena over the business of relinquishing the flat and he realised he was ringing her more often than was strictly necessary to sort out the inventory, the documents and the bills because he assumed she would tell him if anything awful happened to Irina. He wondered whether Elena and Babushka were adequate guardians under whose protection to leave Irina and he couldn’t help feeling that, with their track record, they were not. For his own peace of mind, as much as anything else, he wished there were someone sensible he could tip off, who would keep an eye on Irina in the coming weeks and guarantee that his start in Moscow was not marred by the arrival of some ghastly black-edged envelope. It was at this point that he remembered Lyova and, much as he thought he disliked the man, a week before his departure decided to go and see him. It took him a while to identify the Russian bookshop in the telephone directory as
Les
Editeurs
Réunis
and he thought with reflex irritation how typical of Irina it was never to have called the shop by its proper name. The first time he rang, Lyova wasn’t there and a woman with a near-incomprehensible accent told Edward she didn’t know when he would be back. With some relief, Edward left it till the following day. He wondered whether it was really such a bright idea to contact Lyova after all. It was true Great-Aunt Elena had referred to him during that last dramatic truth session as one of Irina’s few trustworthy male friends, a “noble soul” she had described him. But Great-Aunt Elena’s judgement had hardly been brilliant, by her own admission. How was Edward to know that Great-Aunt Elena’s version of their friendship bore any relation at all to reality? She had portrayed Lyova as a much persecuted individual whose own suffering had enabled him to understand other people’s, and who magnanimously allowed poor, childless Irina to mind his little ones. This interpretation alone seemed to Edward to cast doubt over her whole reading. But there was no one else he could turn to and he knew that, even if something ghastly were to happen, he would sleep more peacefully if he had warned Lyova before he left.

The next day, it was Lyova who answered the telephone. He sounded only slightly surprised to hear from Edward, his predominant tone as usual being faintly aloof amusement. But
what caused Edward most indignation in the circumstances was that, to start off with, Lyova didn’t seem at all sure who he was. They arranged to meet at seven when the bookshop shut and Edward, just so as to keep his end up and not appear straight away as the helpless supplicant, suggested on the phone that they went for a drink at a different, he implied more congenial, café than the one the three of them had gone to before.

He and Lyova shook hands, probably with more sincerity than either of them felt, and set off in the direction of Edward’s preferred bar. It was only when Lyova, to break what was already a wary, awkward silence, asked, “How is Irina?” that it occurred to Edward that perhaps Lyova didn’t know what had happened. This was a possibility which had not crossed his mind. He had assumed Irina would have gone running straight to Lyova and sobbed what a pig, or possibly perfidious wretch Edward was and how, from now on, she would have nothing whatsoever to do with Englishmen, who, whatever people said about them, weren’t actually gentlemen at all. He had expected this conversation to be mainly self-justification, defending what Irina would already have portrayed as despicable behaviour. But if Lyova really knew nothing, he gained an immediate advantage.

He gave Lyova a careful sideways look. His face was, if anything, distracted, clouded in smoke from one of the pungent cigarettes he had offered Edward as soon as they began walking.

“When did you last see her?” Edward asked.

Lyova shrugged. “Not for a while. You’ve been keeping her too busy, I guess.”

“Listen,” Edward said precipitously. “I think there’s something you ought to know.”

He acknowledged he came out of his version of events, delivered somewhat hastily over red wine on the terrace of the bar, better than he would have out of Irina’s. But he felt he was fair.

“You see,” he concluded, “she seems to have got hold of the wrong end of the stick completely. There was never any question at all of this thing having a future.”

He was relieved that Lyova continued to smoke tranquilly.

Eventually Lyova shook his head with weary amusement.

“Don’t worry,” he said to Edward.

“I
do
worry,” Edward contradicted him, aware that he was exaggerating this worry in order to appear a more admirable person. He told Lyova, in a considerably censored version, about Irina’s threat of retaliation. “I’m afraid she may be thinking of doing something silly.”

To his astonishment, Lyova gave a rich roar of laughter.

“You mean suicide? Irina? Really, don’t worry!”

“But you didn’t see the state she was in,” Edward protested, now defending his own abilities as a judge of human nature as well. “She was – beside herself.”

Lyova crushed his cigarette butt in the metal ashtray. He took a large swig of his wine and sat back, crossing his arms.

“Listen,” he began patronisingly as though, Edward thought crossly, he were just sixteen rather than twenty-six. “I’ve known Irina for seven years. She was one of the first friends I made here when I came out. She wanted it to be otherwise; I mean, more than friends only. She was terribly keen on me. But I was still genuinely married then. The West hadn’t yet corrupted my marriage along with everything else. By the time the marriage started to come undone, by the time Anna decided that an advertising executive was a more appropriate partner than an artist in the West, I knew Irina too well to want to be anything more than the best of friends. Irina bore this disappointment very bravely. She was at that stage – otherwise engaged. I think she saw the benefit to both of us of having a good, close friendship that was free from complications. You see, Irina lives under the tyranny of her imagination. For her, the distinction between what she dreams and what she does is none too clear. She won’t commit suicide. She’s just in love with the idea of it.”

“Honestly,” Edward interrupted him, “she did seem dreadfully distraught.”

Lyova stroked wisely at his beard.

“I believe you,” he agreed. “From time to time this happens, inevitably. What Irina represents is the triumph of imagination over tedious reality. When reality insists on barging in, she is always deeply shocked and hurt. She really believes things
which aren’t true in the least, you know. I don’t know if she has ever talked to you about her beloved Dyadya Volodya. She has? Well, to listen to her, wouldn’t you agree, she and Volodya were the perfect couple, scandalously more than uncle and niece. Complete rubbish. I met this Volodya just before his death and, believe me, there was nothing to it. A spoilt little girl humoured by an incurably weak man. Irina had made the whole thing up. It would be a comedy if it weren’t also a tragedy.”

He took another cigarette from his battered Cyrillic brand packet.

“You can fly away to Moscow with your mind at rest,” he concluded ironically. “
Anna
Karenina
may be Irina’s favourite book but, I can assure you, she’s not about to compose a sequel.”

He breathed out smoke loftily.

“If you like, I can give you some names and addresses in Moscow. I know a woman there who’d love to make your acquaintance.”

In his last days, Edward reflected that what had happened to him in Paris was the opposite of a plot. All the lurid dimensions which he had imagined lay behind Irina’s half-coloured-in life turned out to be only that: imagined. None of them, it seemed, had ever existed at all. The relationship with Volodya, which he had invested with such sinister overtones, was, if Lyova was to be believed, nothing out of the ordinary. So what had given him the idea? Was it only Irina’s wishful thinking? Or did he have a conventional imagination which meant that when something was wrong, he expected it to be the obvious? Whereas, in the case of the Iskarov family, it was something more submerged and subtle, which had eluded him. And her friendship with Lyova himself, which, Edward had been convinced, was much more than Irina admitted, turned out to be the most innocent of friendships. Had he perhaps wanted all these sordid things to be true because they made dumpy, chaos-saddled Irina seem a more spicy and wicked partner? On the other hand, could everything really be as bland as Lyova suggested? He began to suspect Lyova’s motives in playing it all down, in attributing everything to Irina’s over-active imagination. What lay behind Lyova’s eagerness to promote
a cover-up? Although he did not intend or now expect to see Irina again, Edward could not suppress a slight, perhaps professionally inspired regret that he might not get to the bottom of this story.

They held a small leaving party for him at the paper. Everybody, Monsieur Marchais included, went out for a celebratory dinner on Edward’s final day, toasted his destination and offered him a variety of jokey parting ideas.

It was Aurore who, in innocent goodwill, delivered the most disturbing.

“I hope you find yourself a gorgeous Slav girlfriend,” she declared. “A ravishing beauty of the steppes, and one day you will bring her back to Paris and introduce her to all of us.”

Frankly drunk afterwards, Edward walked part of the way back to the rue Surcouf. He felt the decisive triumph of departure struggle with his usual feelings of helpless hostility between the dark apartment houses. How unyielding they looked, with their stone nipples, and their windows which he now, for the first time, saw looked vividly like architectural vaginas: long narrow slits with their narrow shutters forming prim labia on either side of them. He grinned drunkenly at the vision. The windows epitomised this prudishly exclusive female city. A vague depression settled over him as he walked, for he realised it could be said that he had failed here. The city had, not even on a grand scale, administered the first of the dents by which, he supposed, you eventually attained the battered cynicism of a Henry or an Arnold. If he could only view this Parisian dent as a battle scar, honourably acquired, then the time he had spent here would not have been only a setback.

He thought of Henry raising his glass at the party and repeating once again,
“Na
zdorovye”
and he concluded, with a rush of real affection for the man, that knowing Henry Hirshfeld had made his stay in Paris worthwhile.