The Wine of Solitude (13 page)

Tears were streaming down her face; she felt that because she had stopped fighting destiny she had abandoned Mademoiselle Rose to her fate. She was walking along the quayside now; she could feel the granite of the stone walls against her hands; it was wet and icy; she was shivering from the cold; the wind had picked up and filled the air with an angry sound.

The smell of the water, that rotting odour of the canals in St Petersburg, which to her was the very breath of the city, suddenly lifted; the fog wafted away, rolled slowly far from her. She stood and looked at the water in the canal for a long time. ‘I’d happily throw myself in,’ she thought, ‘I want to die.’

But she knew very well that she was lying. Everything she could see at that moment, everything she felt, her own unhappiness, her solitude and this dark water, the little flames from the gaslights flickering in the wind, everything, right down to her feeling of despair, drove her to choose life.

She stopped and slowly wiped her forehead. ‘No, I won’t let them do it to me,’ she said out loud. ‘I’m brave …’

She forced herself to look at the water, to overcome the troubling pull of its pulsating currents; she took deep breaths, tasting the wind.

‘At least I have that,’ she thought. ‘I’m horrid, hard-hearted, I don’t know how to forgive, but I’m courageous. My God! Help me!’

And slowly, clenching her teeth to stop herself from crying, she found her way home.

Mademoiselle Rose died that night in hospital; some soldiers had carried her there, for she had fainted on a street corner. A letter she had in her coat pocket, the last letter she’d received from France, was used to identify her from the name on the envelope.

The Karols were informed. She hadn’t suffered, they told Hélène. Her tired heart had stopped beating. She’d had a fit of delirium, presumably because she was homesick … She must have been ill for a long time.

‘You poor thing,’ said Hélène’s mother. ‘She was so attached to you. We would have given her a modest pension and she would have lived a quiet life. Although she might have felt very alone, because we’re leaving and we couldn’t have taken her with us. Perhaps it’s for the best.’

However, so many people were dying that no one, not then and not later, had time to waste on consoling Hélène. ‘Poor little thing,’ they said. ‘Just imagine how frightened she must have been. I hope she doesn’t get sick. That’s all we need …’

The day came to an end and Hélène found herself alone in her empty room, surrounded by the dead woman’s personal things: the old photograph of her with her sisters when she was twenty, so faded you could barely see it; her fine hair framed her face like a wisp of smoke; she wore a velvet ribbon round her neck and a belt with a buckle round her slim waist. Hélène studied the photo for a long time. She didn’t cry. She felt as if the weight of her tears filled her heart, making it as hard and heavy as stone.

They were due to depart in two days’ time. They were going to Finland. Karol would take them there and then come back to collect the gold ingots he’d left with a friend in Moscow. Max was leaving with them. His mother and sisters had fled to the Caucasus but he refused to join them. Karol looked the other way. Hélène heard her parents in the next room; they were sorting through Bella’s jewellery and sewing it into their clothing. She could hear their muffled whispering and the clinking of gold.

‘If only I’d known,’ thought Hélène. ‘If only I’d understood that the poor woman was going mad, I could have told the grown-ups. They would have taken care of her, made her well again, she’d still be alive …’

But then she immediately shook her head with a sad little snigger. Who, for God’s sake, would have had the time to take care of her? What was the health and life of a human being worth these days? What did it matter whether one person lived and the other died? All over the city people carried dead children to the cemetery tied up in sacks, for there were simply too many to afford a coffin. A few days before, during a break between lessons, she herself had watched a man being executed; and she was just a little girl
in a smock, with fat curls round her neck and fingers stained with ink; she stood glued to the window, staring out, without looking away, without crying out, with no outward sign of emotion except for a gradual draining of colour in her face until her lips turned white. Five soldiers were lined up opposite a wounded man who stood against a wall, his head bandaged and bloody, swaying as if he were drunk. He fell to the ground; they carried him away, just as on another day they had carried away some dead woman on a stretcher, wrapped in her black shawl, just as a starving dog had come to die beneath that very window, his emaciated body cut open and bleeding. And the child returned to her desk and mumbled her way through her lesson by the faint light of a candle: ‘Racine depicts men as they are, and Corneille as they should be …’

Or: ‘The father of our current beloved Emperor, Nicholas II, was called Alexander III and ascended to the throne in …’ for the history books hadn’t yet been updated.

Life, death, they were so insignificant …

Her heavy head fell down on to her chest, but what she feared most was sleep. She didn’t want to fall asleep, didn’t want to forget, didn’t want to wake up when her consciousness of unhappiness was still only vague and hazy, and look around for that familiar face in the other empty bed …

She clenched her teeth, looked out into the night, but the darkness was terrifying, full of sneering faces and swirls of black water, or so it seemed. The fog clung to the windows with its pale mist, lit up by the moon. The dank smell of water seemed to seep through the closed windows, rising up from the street, slithering towards her. And when it filled her with horror, she would turn away and see the empty bed once more.

‘Go on,’ a voice within her whispered, ‘call your parents, they’re here, they’ll understand that you’re afraid, they’ll let you sleep somewhere else, they’ll take away that other bed, so flat, so empty …’

But she wanted at least to hold on to her pride.

‘What am I, a child? Am I afraid of death, of unhappiness? Afraid of being alone? No, I won’t call for anyone and certainly not for them. I don’t need them. I’m stronger than all of them. They won’t see me cry. They aren’t worthy of helping me. I’ll never say her name again, never. They aren’t worthy of hearing it.’

The next day it was Hélène who sorted out the chest of drawers and put Mademoiselle Rose’s meagre belongings into a trunk; it was she who packed away the linen, then the books, then the blouses whose every pleat, every careful stitch were so familiar, then the coat that had been returned to them, still steeped in the smell of fog. She closed the lid, turned the key and never again spoke the name of Mademoiselle Rose in front of her family.

The sleigh rushed towards a faint light that seemed to disappear then return, happily twinkling through the falling snow. The night was crystal clear and bitterly cold. The snowfields of Finland were endless, without a single rock, a single hill, just an enormous expanse of ice as far as the eye could see; at the horizon the ice seemed to curve slightly, as if it were embracing the entire world.

Hélène had left St Petersburg that morning. It was only the beginning of November, but here it was already the dead of winter. There was no wind, but an icy mist blew joyously from the ground, rushing towards the dark sky, towards the stars, making them flicker like candles in a breeze. For a while the stars looked duller, glimmering like mirrors when you breathe on them; but when the freezing mist dissolved they shone even more brightly and the snow took on a kind of bluish glow that seemed very close by. All you had to do was reach out and touch it … the horses were catching it up and you could grab it in your hand. But no, the sleigh
continued on its way and the faint sparkle disappeared, then returned to shimmer, mockingly.

There was a turning in the road; the light on the horizon grew brighter; the horses shook the rows of little bells hanging from their necks so that each one rang out more joyously. Hélène felt the rushing wind whistle past her ears, then the horses slowed down again and the little bells became soft and languid once more.

Hélène was sitting between her parents and opposite Max, at the back of the sleigh. She leaned forward and opened the shawl that covered her face to breathe in the air slowly, as if it were ice-cold wine. For three years she had only smelled the faint odour of rotting water in St Petersburg; now she rediscovered the pleasure of feeling clean air flow freely into her nostrils, her open mouth, deep into her entire body, right down to her heart, she felt, her heart that beat with more strength and vigour.

Karol stretched out his hand and pointed to the light that was getting closer. ‘That must be the place, don’t you think?’

A lump of snow flew away from beneath the horses’ hooves and Hélène could smell the scent of pine trees, ice, earth and wind that seemed the very breath of the north, never to be forgotten. ‘This is nice,’ she thought.

They were getting closer; they could see it now. It was a simple two-storey house made of wood. A gate covered in snow creaked open.

‘Well, here we are!’ said Karol. ‘I’ll just have a glass of vodka and get going.’

‘What? Right now?’ cried Bella, her voice quivering with joy.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I have to. It would be dangerous to wait. The border could be closed at any moment.’

‘But what’s going to happen to us?’ Bella protested.

He leaned forward and kissed her. But Hélène had seen none of this. She had leapt down and was joyously stamping her feet on ground; it was as hard and shiny as a diamond. She breathed in the icy, clean air of the winter’s night; a bright reddish fire glistened through a window; the sound of a waltz echoed through the empty landscape.

Hélène felt a kind of serenity and profound peace that she had never before experienced in her short life. And immediately afterwards a childlike exhilaration, a sort of joyous passion that filled her soul, the way drinking a tonic is followed by a sense of well-being. She ran into the house. Her parents stood with their friends on the doorstep. Through the open door she could vaguely make out what they were saying:

‘The Revolution … The Reds … It will last all winter, at the very least …’

‘There are no troubles here …’

‘Lambs, sheep, that’s what the Communists are around here,’ a man proclaimed loudly. ‘May God protect them. And we have butter, flour, eggs …’

‘There’s no flour,’ a woman said, ‘you mustn’t exaggerate. As far as I’m concerned, if they told me there was any flour left in heaven, I wouldn’t believe it.’

Hélène heard them laugh; she went into the hall where, later on, she would so often stop to take off her ice skates; she could see the dining room through the open door. It was a kind of canteen with a large table set for twenty people. The floors, walls and furniture were all made of the same
light, shiny wood, which gave off the delicious smell of freshly cut pine trees whose sap flows through a groove deep in the heart of their trunks. But what struck Hélène most was the joyful sound that filled the entire house; she heard children shouting, young voices, sounds she had forgotten existed. Children came in from outside, groups of them, gangs of them, carrying their sledges on their shoulders, their ice skates hanging from their necks by the laces, their cheeks bright red from the cold night air, their hair powdered with snow. Hélène glanced scornfully at them. She was much older than they were. She was fifteen. She shook her head and sighed like an old woman. It had come upon her so quickly, at such a sad time, this age she had dreamed of being, in Nice, when she was little, when Mademoiselle Rose was still alive … A wave of pain rose in her heart. She took a few steps, opened a door, saw a shabby little sitting room where some young women were dancing. They looked at Hélène coldly. She went back into the hall where two little boys with blond hair and fat rosy cheeks were playing.

A young man, his shoulders covered with snow, appeared on the doorstep. The children shouted ‘Papa!’ and ran towards him; he took them in his arms. A very beautiful woman opened a door and smiled; she had a calm face and black hair held neatly in place by a headband.

‘Good Lord, Fred, just look at you!’ she said with mocking affection. ‘Let go of the children, you’ll get snow all over them.’

The young man shook himself free and laughed; he removed his fur hat, noticed Hélène and smiled at her. Then he walked over to his wife, who took his arm. A servant came to fetch the children; they hung off their mother’s skirt,
a full, wide, black taffeta skirt that rustled softly. She leaned down to kiss them. Hélène noticed her long gold earrings with pearls at the ends that sparkled against her dark hair. She had beautiful hands with no jewellery and wore a pleated linen collar. She sensed Hélène was staring at her and gave her a smile. Then her husband opened the door and they disappeared. Hélène could hear the heavy silk dress swishing and the sound of the piano as it echoed through the house; the woman began singing a French love song in a warm, soft voice. Hélène stood very still, listening, lost in happy thoughts. She barely heard her father calling her: he was leaving. She ran towards him; he kissed her with the restrained, defiant affection that was the only emotion he allowed himself to show her; the sleigh that had brought them was waiting in front of the house; he sat down in the back and was gone.

Hélène rushed into the garden. She ran around it, panting and breathing in the snow. The frozen white path beneath her feet glistened faintly, lit up by a lamp near the steps. What a joy it was to run like this. Her legs were already womanly but had lost none of their agility. The dinner bell rang. The simple fact of this delightful, calming routine filled Hélène with extraordinary pleasure. The shabby little piano sent the notes of the ballad ringing into the still night while the tender voice rose effortlessly, like the song of a bird, like an arrow, up towards the icy sky.

A big yellow dog came out of the darkness and put his wet nose in Hélène’s hand. She hugged him and gave him a kiss. She could smell hot soup and cakes made of the potato flour they had to use instead of ordinary flour.