The Wine of Solitude (9 page)

But Hélène whispered passionately in her ear, ‘I know, I know, I’m telling you I know.’

A door opened behind them. Mademoiselle Rose shuddered and fearfully squeezed her hand. ‘Be quiet,’ she said softly, ‘be quiet now. If they ever realised you suspected you’d be sent away to boarding school, my poor darling, and as for me …’

Hélène lowered her eyes, frozen with fear. ‘Don’t be silly …’

But she was thinking, ‘I’d be happier at boarding school. There’s nowhere I could be more miserable than in this house! But Mademoiselle Rose, my poor Mademoiselle Rose, what would she do without me? I’m not the one who needs her any more,’ she thought suddenly with cold, bleak lucidity. ‘I don’t need to be tucked into bed, looked after, hugged … I’ve grown up, got older … How old you can feel at twelve …’

She felt a sudden yearning for solitude, for silence, for an intense melancholy that would fill her soul until it overflowed with sadness and hatred.

‘If it weren’t for Mademoiselle Rose, no one could hurt me. She’s the only thing they can use against me. But I’m all she has. I think she would die without me.’

She clenched her fists; she felt small and weak, emotionally vulnerable, and this feeling of powerlessness filled her with rebellion and despair.

She went into the schoolroom next door; it contained cupboards, built for her mother’s clothes; a slight odour of camphor came from the wardrobe where she kept her furs. Everywhere Hélène went she found her mother.

She slammed the door shut, went back into her room, walked over to the window and looked out with a kind of gloomy horror at the torrents of rain pouring out of the dark sky; tears streamed down her cheeks.

‘You know that she … Mama has always said how happy she is to have you …’ she finally said, her voice shaking.

‘I know that,’ murmured Mademoiselle Rose, ‘but …’

She was standing in the middle of the room, small and frail in her black dress. She studied Hélène’s face with sad tenderness, but gradually her eyes became glassy and vacant. She seemed to be looking for something very far away, beyond
Hélène’s face, visions that only she could see. A past long gone … or the frightening future in this cold, inhospitable place: solitude, exile, old age. She sighed and whispered absent-mindedly, ‘Come along now, hang up your coat. Don’t throw your hat on the bed. Come here so I can tidy your hair …’

As always, she took solace in the most humble, everyday tasks, but she seemed to be doing them with a kind of anxiety and nervous determination that surprised Hélène. She unpacked the bags, folded the gloves and stockings and put them into a drawer, refusing to allow the servants to help her.

‘Tell them to leave me in peace, Hélène.’

‘She’s changed since the war started,’ thought Hélène.

1914 and 1915 came and went at a slow and deadly pace …

One evening Max came into the dining room where Hélène was sitting in a large armchair, half buried in newspapers. Wartime newspapers had entire columns left blank; no one else in the house looked at them, except for Karol who read the Stock Market listings on the last page. Max smiled. She was a funny little thing … She had a small, flat chest, slim, gangly arms poking through the short sleeves of her blue wool dress; a German-style white cambric smock with large deep pleats covered her body; her black hair was set in thick curls round her face, which was beginning to take on the cadaverous complexion of all St Petersburg children who were brought up without air, light or any form of exercise other than an hour’s ice skating on Sundays.

When she noticed him, she quickly took off a pair of glasses that made her look even older and uglier: her eyes were weak, worn out by the bright electric lights that were kept on from dawn.

He burst out laughing. ‘You wear glasses? How funny you look, my poor little thing. You look like a little old lady.’

‘I only wear them when I’m working or reading,’ she said, feeling a rush of blood to her cheeks.

He took cruel, mocking pleasure in her embarrassment: ‘You do care about the way you look! Poor little thing,’ he said again and the scornful sympathy in his voice sent a shudder of anger through Hélène’s soul.

‘Where’s your mother?’

She pointed sullenly to the next room, but at that very moment the door opened and Bella came in, wearing a lace dressing gown that barely concealed her breasts; she stretched out her hand for Max to kiss. As they stared at each other in silence, Max slowly half closed his eyes and parted his lips with a look of intense desire.

‘And they imagine I see nothing? Unbelievable,’ thought Hélène.

They went into the sitting room; Hélène sat down again in the red armchair and continued reading the papers. Was there anyone here, other than she and Mademoiselle Rose, who remembered there was a war on? Money kept pouring in; wine was overflowing. Who gave a thought to the wounded men, the women in mourning? Who heard the footsteps of troops in the street as dawn broke, the sad sound of soldiers marching towards death?

She looked at the time. Eight-thirty. Lessons and homework had filled the entire day since morning, without a moment’s rest. But she loved studying and books, the way other people love wine for its power to make you forget. What else did she have? She lived in a deserted, silent house. The sound of her own footsteps in the empty rooms, the
silence of the cold streets beyond the closed windows, the rain and the snow, the early darkness, the green lamp beside her that burned throughout the long evenings and which she watched for hours on end until its light began to waver before her weary eyes: this was the setting for her life. Her father was almost never there; her mother came home in the evening and locked herself away in the sitting room with Max; Bella had no women friends: in wartime, people had other things to worry about than the happiness of children …

A servant came in to close the curtains; in the next room she could hear Max’s muffled laughter.

‘What are the two of them doing in there?’ she thought. ‘But what does it matter, as long as they leave me the hell alone …’

She could smell cigarette smoke from under the door; her father wasn’t home yet; he’d get back between nine and ten o’clock and they’d eat meals that were either cold or burned; he would bring home men whom Hélène knew under the generic term of ‘business associates’, nervous, anxious men with impatient eyes and hands as taut and grasping as claws; she closed her eyes, imagining she could already hear the word they endlessly spoke, the only word Hélène understood, the word she heard again and again, buzzing around her, the word that invaded her waking moments and her dreams: ‘Millions … millions … millions …’

The servant stopped at the entrance to the room, looked at the clock and shook her head. ‘Does Mademoiselle know what time her father will be getting home?’

‘No, I don’t,’ said Hélène.

She pulled back the curtain and looked out into the street, trying to catch a glimpse of the carriage lights in the snow.
Little by little, everything around her faded away. She sank into a delicious trance, as she had done in the past when she’d played at being Napoleon. But now, other dreams filled her mind, dreams that returned again and again, imperious dreams of domination: to be a queen, to be a feared statesman, to be the most beautiful woman in the world … This last dream was new; she approached it with caution, as if it contained some mysterious fire.

‘Will I be beautiful? No, certainly not,’ she mused sadly. ‘I’m at that unattractive age now, when it’s impossible to be pretty. But I’ll never be beautiful; my mouth’s too big and I have an ugly complexion. Dear Lord, please make every man fall in love with me when I grow up …’

She shuddered: her father had just come in, followed by two men, Slivker, a Jew with jet-black eyes whose arm shook when he talked, as if he were still carrying the bundle of rugs he undoubtedly used to hawk on café terraces; the other man was Alexander Pavlovitch Chestov, the son of one of the short-lived Ministers of War of the period.

Hélène sat down at her place, next to Mademoiselle Rose. The dining table was weighed down by heavy silver place settings, bought at auction, for the old aristocracy had managed to lose all its money and was selling just about everything it owned to the newly wealthy businessmen.

‘Everything in this house is second-hand, like in a thieves’ den,’ mused Hélène; the heavy silver pieces came from various sales; they hadn’t bothered to remove the initials, coronets or family crests that decorated them; only their weight interested the Karols. Capo di Monte porcelain groups sat in a corner, still in their wrapping paper; the sideboard was piled with Sèvres statuettes and delicate pink plates
decorated with figures and flowers; Bella had bought them the week before at auction, but they just sat there sadly, unused, wrapped in straw and tissue paper. All the books in the library had been bought by the yard and no one except Hélène opened the leather-bound volumes emblazoned with gilt tooling.

‘Where could we buy some portraits of ancestors?’ joked Bella.

Only the furs brought back from Siberia were new. Each ermine pelt that now adorned her mother’s coat had once been a scrap of fur, the remains of a dead animal, which Hélène had seen emptied on to the table and rummaged through by greedy hands.

‘Alexander Pavlovitch …’

‘Salomon Arkadievitch …’

Chestov’s eyes were full of disdain when he spoke; he seemed afraid to raise his long head with its fine blond hair covered in pomade, as if the company of these Jews poisoned the air; Slivker returned his scornful look, though tempered by fear.

Adding to the clutter of the dining room were the bouquets and arrangements of flowers sent to Karol’s wife; because he had become so rich since the beginning of the war, everyone pandered to him.

On her way to her place at the table, Bella picked up a red rose and placed it in Max’s buttonhole. Her lace dress gaped open slightly, revealing her bosom; she slowly pulled it closed: her breasts were beautiful.

The butler came in, followed by an underling who carried the soup in a silver tureen that bore the Besborodko family coat of arms; the glasses were Baccarat, but all of them
were chipped; no one took any notice; everyone seemed to sense that such wealth was fleeting: since it had come out of nowhere, it could just as easily disappear in a cloud of smoke.

Mademoiselle Rose leaned in towards Hélène. ‘Have you read the papers?’ she whispered anxiously.

‘Yes. It’s always the same thing,’ Hélène said sadly. ‘They’re “treading water” …’

‘You don’t understand,’ Slivker was saying. ‘For us, the war is a bit of good luck. Those bits of paper you play around with will be worth less than that tomorrow,’ he said, pointing to the vase of fragrant, dark-red roses that decorated the table. ‘What the war needs, what’s important to war, are arms, munitions, weapons, cannons. And besides, it’s our patriotic duty!’

‘And what if the war ends in a month?’ Chestov bellowed shrilly. ‘We’d be left with all that stock on our hands …’

‘If we always worried about tomorrow …’ said Slivker, laughing, pushing away his empty plate.

The Minister’s son took his monocle out of his pocket; he turned it over in his hands, slowly, affectionately, as if it were a flower, before placing it over his eye and fixing it there with a sudden contraction of his facial muscles. Throwing Slivker a look of aristocratic scorn, he leaned towards Bella. ‘Our conversation isn’t very interesting for Madame,’ he said amiably, in French.

‘She’s used to it,’ said Slivker.

‘It isn’t wise to have dealings in the things you were talking about,’ Karol interjected. ‘That’s up to the department of National Defence. No, what’s important are uniforms for the soldiers, boots, food …’

The butler brought in the sturgeon in aspic, arranged on a bed of herbs and garnished with golden egg yolks, accompanied by a silver sauceboat decorated in bas-relief with little shepherds and bagpipes.

They ate for a while in silence. Hélène looked up and heard Slivker say, ‘… Some business about cannons … In Spain, they have some cannons that date back to 1860, but they’re still in excellent condition, it must be said. Apparently, they can aim better than the ones we have now.’ He’d wolfed down the fish in two bites, then grabbed one of the two glasses of wine set before him without caring which one it was. It was a sweet Barsac that the Karols always served with fish; he gulped it down, then grimaced in disgust; he was teetotal, didn’t smoke and would never had gone near a woman, or played cards, or eaten pork if circumstances hadn’t forced him to seek out the company of members of the government. Government officials, it seemed, could only understand business matters when surrounded by food or women.

‘Live with the dogs, not like them,’ he sometimes told Karol, since Karol loved gambling, wine and women. ‘They’ll be the death of you.’

‘Brilliant deal, big money … Could tell you about it, if you’re interested …’ he continued. ‘Wonderful cannons,’ he said, finally allowing himself to get carried away, as was his nature, and singing the praises of the strange cannons as if he were selling stockings outside the entrance to some building.

‘But, for goodness sake, they were made in 1860!’

‘Why do you think they would be worse than the ones we have now? Don’t you think that our fathers were as sly
as you and me? Why wouldn’t they have been? Where’s your evidence?’

‘If I might say something,’ said Chestov, carefully choosing a glass of wine and drinking it slowly, a smile on his pursed lips and a look of scorn in his eyes. ‘You …’

‘No,
you
allow
me
to say something. We must keep everybody’s role straight. After all, it’s not up to me to say whether these cannons are good or bad.
I’m
not an engineer.
I’m
not an artilleryman. I’m a “speculator”, a businessman. That’s my part in all this,’ he said, turning his back on Chestov to help himself to the partridge in cream sauce that was being offered to him; he smelled the salad and sent it away with a gesture of disgust, for he didn’t like the look of it.

‘I go to the War Ministry,’ he continued. ‘I say, “Here’s the situation. I’ve been offered this or that. Are you interested? Look into it and see if it’s suitable.” I wouldn’t take on such responsibility myself, what an idea. You want it? This is how much it costs. You don’t want it? Good evening, then. Naturally, it is essential that they understand … that
everyone
,’ he said, emphasising the word while staring fixedly and ironically at Chestov, ‘that
everyone
understands what is in his own best interest.’