The Wine of Solitude (2 page)

‘Ah, Paris!’ she thought, closing her eyes. ‘To eat at the bar of the Chauffeurs’ Café, to sleep in a train compartment, even if necessary on the hard benches in third class, but to be alone and free!’ Here, from every window, the women looked her up and down, glaring at her Parisian dresses, her make-up, the man she was with. Here, every married woman had a lover, whom the children called ‘Uncle’ and who played cards with their husbands. ‘Why bother having a lover at all, then?’ she thought, remembering the men who followed her around in Paris, men she didn’t know … That, at least, was exciting, dangerous, thrilling … To hold a man tightly in her arms when she didn’t even know his name or where he came from, a man she would never see again, that and that alone gave her the sharp thrill of pleasure she desired.

‘Ah,’ she thought, ‘I wasn’t destined to be a placid middle-class woman, satisfied with her husband and child.’

They had finished their meal; Karol pushed away his plate and set out the roulette wheel purchased the previous year in Nice. Everyone gathered round him: he threw the ivory ball almost angrily, but every now and again, when the sound of the accordion echoed more loudly from the courtyard, he
would raise his long finger in the air and, without interrupting his game of roulette, he would hum the tune they played with extreme accuracy, then softly whistle it through his half-open lips.

‘Do you remember Nice, Hélène?’ said Madame Karol.

Hélène did remember Nice.

‘And Paris? You haven’t forgotten Paris, have you?’

Hélène felt her heart melt with tenderness at the memory of Paris, the Tuileries Gardens … (Trees the colour of tarnished steel beneath the tender winter sky, the sweet smell of the rain, and in the heavy, misty dusk, the yellowish moon that rose slowly above the column in the Place Vendôme …)

Karol had forgotten everyone else around him. He drummed his fingers nervously on the table and watched the little ivory ball wildly spin and sway. ‘Black, red, the 2, the 8 … Ah! I would have won … Forty-four times what I’d bet. And with just one gold louis.’

But it was over almost too quickly. There wasn’t time to enjoy the uncertainty or the danger, the despair in defeat or the exhilaration of victory. Baccarat, now there was an idea … But he was still too poor for that, too unimportant. One day, perhaps …

‘Ah, dear God,’ the elderly Madame Safronov murmured. ‘Ah, dear God!’ It was an habitual refrain. She had a slight limp in one leg, but walked quickly: her features were faded, washed out by her tears, like a very old photograph; her yellowish wrinkled neck sat above the frilled little collar of her white blouse. She continually brought her hand to rest against her flat chest, as if every word she said would make her heart pound; she was always sad, complaining, anxious:
everything was an excuse for her to sigh, to lament. ‘Life is bad,’ she would say. ‘God is terrible. Men are harsh …’

She turned to her daughter. ‘You’re right, you know, Bella. Enjoy life while you’re still in good health. Eat something. Do you want some of this? A bit of that? Do you want my chair, my knife, my bread, my food? Take it … Take it, Boris, and you, Bella, and you, George, and you my darling Hélène …’ Take my time, my care, my blood, my flesh … she seemed to be saying as she stared at them with her soft, dead eyes.

But everyone pushed her away. Then she would shake her head affectionately and force herself to smile. ‘All right, all right, I’ll be quiet, I won’t say anything …’

Meanwhile, George Safronov had sat up straighter, lifting his tall, dry body and bald head, while carefully examining his fingernails. He polished them twice a day: all morning long, and once before the evening meal. He was not interested in the conversation of women. Boris Karol was a peasant. ‘He should consider himself very lucky to have married Safronov’s daughter …’ He opened out his newspaper.

Hélène read the word ‘War’. ‘Is there going to be a war, Grandfather?’ she asked.

‘What?’

Whenever she opened her mouth, everyone eyed her scornfully and waited a moment before speaking, firstly to find out her mother’s opinion on what she ’d said and then presumably because she was so unimportant, so young, that they felt they had to travel a great distance just to reach her.

‘War? And where have you heard talk of …? Oh! Maybe, no one knows …’

‘I really hope not,’ said Hélène, sensing it was what she was supposed to say.

They all looked at her and laughed nervously; her father smiled with a tender, melancholy, mocking expression.

‘What a clever thing to say,’ said Bella dismissively. ‘If there’s a war, fabric will be more expensive … You do know that Papa owns a textile factory, don’t you?’

She laughed but without opening her mouth: her thin lips formed a harsh line that cut across her face and were always pinched, either to make her mouth seem smaller, or to hide the gold tooth at the back, or because she wanted to look refined. She raised her head and noticed the clock: ‘Time for bed. Off you go …’

Her grandmother put out her arm when Hélène walked past; her anxious eyes and weary face grew tense. ‘Give Grandma a hug and a kiss …’ And when the impatient, ungrateful, deeply irritated child allowed herself to be held for a moment by the thin old woman, she crushed Hélène to her breast with all her might.

The only kiss Hélène accepted and returned with joy was her father’s. She felt related and close to him alone, part of his flesh and blood, sharing his soul, his strength, his weaknesses. He leaned down towards her with his silvery white hair that looked almost green in the moonlight; his face was still young, but wrinkled, furrowed by cares; his eyes were sometimes intense and sad, sometimes lit up with the fire of mischievous cheerfulness; he tugged playfully at her hair. ‘Goodnight, Lenoussia, my little one …’

She left them, and at that very instant serenity and joy, along with pure and simple affection, returned to her heart; she held Mademoiselle Rose’s hand in hers. She went to bed and fell asleep. Mademoiselle Rose sat sewing in the golden beam of the lamp; its light shone across her thin, bare little
hand. A shaft of moonlight pushed through the white ruched blind. Mademoiselle Rose was lost in thought. ‘Hélène needs new dresses, pinafores, socks … Hélène is growing up too quickly …’

Occasionally a noise, a flash of lightning, the shadow of a bat, a cockroach on the white stove made her shudder. ‘I’ll never get used to this place,’ she sighed. ‘Never …’

Hélène was sitting on the floor in her bedroom, playing. It was a warm, clear spring evening; the pale sky was like a crystal ball with the glowing traces of a pink fire at its heart. Through the half-open door of the sitting room, the child could hear the sound of a French ballad. Bella was singing; when she wasn’t polishing her nails, when she wasn’t sighing from sadness and boredom, stretched out in the dining room on the old settee whose stuffing was sticking through the fabric in little tufts, she would sit at the piano and sing, accompanying herself with the odd lethargic chord. When she came to the words ‘love’ or ‘lover’, her voice sounded more passionate and clear; she was no longer afraid to open her mouth wide; she didn’t pinch her lips together; she sang out those words of love and her voice took on a sweet, husky tone that was unlike its normally bitter or weary sound. Hélène, who had quietly stepped into the room, watched her in surprised silence.

The sitting-room walls were covered in a cotton fabric that was meant to look like silk; it had once been flesh-coloured
but was now dusty and drab. This rough cotton material was manufactured at the factory where Karol was the manager; it smelled of glue and fruit, and the local women used it to make their Sunday dresses and headscarves. But the furniture came from Paris, from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine: ottomans covered in green and raspberry velvet, torchères in carved wood, Japanese lanterns fringed with coloured beads. A lamp lit up the nail buffer absent-mindedly left on top of the piano. Bella’s nails sparkled under the light; they were round and curved with sharp tips, like claws. In the rare moments when she displayed any maternal affection, pressing her daughter to her breast, her nails almost always scratched Hélène’s bare arm or face.

The child inched her way into the room. Sometimes Bella stopped playing and fell silent; with her hands resting on the keyboard, she seemed to be waiting, listening, her heart full of hope. But from outside came nothing but the indifferent silence of the spring evening and the sound of the impatient wind pushing along the endless yellow dust from Asia.

‘When – it’s – all – over,’ sighed Madame Karol. Hélène watched the way she clamped her teeth together; it was as if she were eating a piece of fruit; her wide, bright eyes that seemed so harsh, so empty, beneath the curve of her slim eyebrows, were full of tears: sparkling water that welled up but never spilled over.

Hélène went and stood against the window, looking out into the street. Occasionally she would see an old carriage pulled by two slow-moving horses, driven by a coachman dressed in the Polish fashion: velvet waistcoat, puffy red sleeves and peacock feathers in his hat; it was Bella’s aunt, a Safronov from the older generation, a branch of the family
that had kept its wealth, that hadn’t squandered its fortune, that didn’t need to marry off its daughters to insignificant little Jews who managed factories in the poor part of town. Lydia Safronov was thin and stiff with dried-out yellowish skin and shining dark eyes; her chest was ravaged by cancer, which she suffered with a sort of aggressive resignation; always cold, she wrapped herself in an ample, regal fur coat. On seeing her niece, Lydia Safronov would barely deign to nod in icy acknowledgement, her mouth pinched close and her face wearing an expression that was impenetrable, distant and full of bitter, cruel scorn. Sometimes her son Max sat next to her; he was still a thin young boy dressed in the grey uniform worn in secondary school; his cap bore the symbol of the Imperial eagle; he held his little head very high atop his long, fragile neck, with the same harsh and haughty attitude as his mother; he had a delicate hooked nose and seemed aware of its fine quality, just as he was aware of the lush richness of the horses, the carriage, and the quality of the expensive English rug covering his knees; his eyes were cold with a faraway look in them. Whenever they ran into each other in the street, Mademoiselle Rose would give Hélène a little nudge, and she would curtsey, lowering her head in a sullen manner; her cousin would briefly acknowledge her before turning away, and her aunt looked at her with pity through a gold lorgnette that sparkled in the sunlight.

But on this day, only one carriage passed slowly beneath the window; a woman was inside; she was holding a child’s coffin tightly to her breast, as if it were a bundle of clothing; this was how the poor people avoided paying for funerals. The woman’s face looked peaceful; she was chewing some
sunflower seeds; she was smiling, doubtless happy to have one less mouth to feed, one less cry to break the silence of the night.

Suddenly the door opened and Hélène’s father came into the room.

Bella shuddered, quickly closing the piano, and looked anxiously at her husband. He never came home this early from the factory. For the first time in her life, Hélène saw her father’s face twitch slightly, a twitch that pulled his hollow cheeks to the side and which would come to represent for her the first sign of disaster, the mark of defeat on a man’s face, for Boris Karol never knew any other way to show he was upset, not then and not later, when he became old and ill.

He walked into the middle of the room, seemed to hesitate, then said with a little harsh, forced laugh, ‘Bella, I’ve lost my job.’

‘What?’ she cried.

He shrugged his shoulders and answered curtly, ‘You heard me.’

‘You’ve been let go?’

Karol pursed his lips. ‘That’s right,’ he said after a pause.

‘But why? Why? What did you do?’

‘Nothing,’ he said in a hoarse, weary voice, and Hélène felt a strange sense of pity as she heard the irritated little sigh that escaped through his clenched teeth. He lowered himself into a chair, the one nearest to him, and sat there motionless, his back hunched and arms dangling, looking down at the ground and whistling without realising it.

‘Nothing!’ Bella shouted, making him jump. ‘You must be mad! What did he say? What happened? But we’ll be penniless!’

She twisted her arms together with a sudden, supple movement that reminded Hélène of the serpents on the Medusa’s head she was drawing for her art teacher. From the delicate, convulsed mouth words, sighs and curses came flooding out: ‘What did you do, Boris? You have no right to hide anything from me! You have a family, a child! You weren’t let go for no reason! Did you play the stock market? I knew it! Admit it, go on, admit it! No? Well, then, did you lose money playing cards? At least say something, admit what happened, say something! Ah, you’re killing me!’

Hélène had slipped out through the open door. She went back to her room and sat down on the floor. She had heard them fighting so many times in her short life that she wasn’t overly concerned. They would shout, then they would stop. Nevertheless, her heart was heavy and tight in her chest.

‘The director called me in to see him,’ she heard him continue, ‘and since you want to know, Bella, he wanted to talk to me about you. Wait a moment. He told me you spent too much money. Just wait. You can have your say afterwards. He talked about your dresses, your trips abroad, which, according to him, I couldn’t possibly pay for on my salary. He told me that the money I had easy access to was a temptation he didn’t want to inflict on me. I asked him if a single penny had disappeared. “No,” he said, but it was inevitable that one day it would, if your lifestyle didn’t change. I warned you, Bella, remember? Every time you bought a new dress or fur coat, every time you left for Paris, I said it over and over again: “Be careful, we live in a small town. People talk. I’ll be accused of stealing.” The director of the factory lives in Moscow. It’s natural that he must be able to trust me, and he can’t trust me. I would have done the same if I were in
his shoes. I can’t refuse you anything. I can’t bear it when a woman nags and cries. I’d rather give in; I’d rather people take me for a coward, a thief, a hen-pecked husband, because, in the end, another man might suspect that … Be quiet,’ he shouted suddenly, and his rough, wild voice drowned out what Bella was saying. ‘Be quiet! I know exactly what you’re going to tell me. Yes, I trust you. Don’t say a word! I don’t want to know. You are my wife. My wife, my child, my house … When all is said and done, you’re all I have. Of course I have to take care of you,’ he said softly.