‘Will he ever come out?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘What sent him over the edge?’

  ‘Russia.’

  Ludwika was in her second year at the Sorbonne studying philosophy and music. She knew about things that were quite new to him, and was always happy to share and discuss what she had learnt. Her lodgings were in the Latin Quarter, but her landlord had a gimlet eye, and knew exactly who came in and out of the building. He was a voyeur and a busybody, and would creep around the building, listening at doors and peering through keyholes, and she even suspected him of opening their letters when he could get away with it. She was convinced he would report back to her parents if he suspected Alyosha of sharing her bed, so it was safer for them to sleep at Passy.

  Alyosha was ashamed of his shabby room, and felt his Wisia deserved better. He resisted bringing her to his hovel to begin with, but she had insisted, teasing him that he must have another woman hidden away there. She seemed entirely unconcerned by the rough walls and the bare floorboards; to the contrary, they charmed her. Similarly, she found sharing his thin mattress while his roommate was out driving his taxi romantic rather than sordid. Wisia always wanted to hear every tiny detail of any story Alyosha told her about himself. Nothing was too trivial to be of interest and so he did his best to summon up his memories for her, some of pleasure and some of pain. He told her of one of his earliest, a train journey from Simferopol to Sebastopol when he was about six or seven. How he woke and gazed out of the window just before dawn, too excited to go back to sleep and not wanting to miss anything, as the sun started to warm his face and the unfamiliar smell of the singed and parched landscape filled his nose. Then, the train coming to a halt, the leaves on the trees shivering a little as if in greeting. The family had spent the day in the town, where the dry, hot winds had been mercilessly punishing the narrow streets for centuries. He remembered eating his lunch with his parents on the enclosed, glass terrace of their hotel, stuffy even with every window wide open and a canopy under the roof to provide shade. It overlooked a deep, sandstone valley, covered with thick blackthorn bushes. Further down that valley was a famous city of caves, where, long ago, when a different civilisation of people had lived on the edges of the Black Sea, they had carved hundreds of small, dark windows into the rock. Alyosha used to wonder about the mysterious lives of the children of the caves for many years. He often imagined himself playing amongst them, drew pictures, and begged his parents to take him there, but they never did. It would remain a city of the imagination for him forever.

  ‘Will you take me to Russia one day?’

  ‘I would if I could.’

  ‘Do you think you’ll ever go back?’

  ‘I don’t have much hope.’

  ‘I’m sure the opportunity will come for us to go back there someday,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t see how, unless the regime changes.’

  ‘That’s so sad.’

  For Wisia, the idea of never going back to the country of your birth was incomprehensible. He noticed an innocence in her eyes; that innocence, he thought, anchored her whole character. He put his hands on her shoulders and was surprised how warm they were.

  ‘Give me a kiss.’

  They kissed for a long time.

  She questioned him at length about the maid, Aisha. What had he seen in her? What was it about her that made him love her? Had he loved her?

  ‘She was the first…’

  Alyosha was forced to resurrect more and more of his boyhood in the face of her tireless questions. He surprised himself with how much he could remember – especially the summers; those holidays in southern Russia, where a narrow spit of land jutted out to sea, providing a shelter in its lee for the sailing boats to anchor. He remembered a three-masted yacht sailing in to harbour one evening, her sails filled with the colours of the setting sun. He remembered the Black Sea lapping against the boardwalk at Yalta, and the trams, with the open-roofed upper decks, and those warships at anchor out in the bay, like a school of fat whales.

  ‘I’d like to go with you to Yalta,’ she said.

  ‘I’d like that too, more than anything in the world.’

  He told her about the evenings; how all the doors and windows of the houses would be open to the street, so that you could hear snatches of conversation from inside as you walked by. Children’s laughter, women talking, the chink of crockery, a few notes from a piano, a dog barking. He remembered the smell of the almond trees – the purest smell in the entire world – mixed with the briny smell from the summer sea. At one time, his favourite spot had been down by the harbour. He used to sit on one of the wooden benches watching the golden haze of a sunset on the horizon sinking slowly into the sea, painting the water in a criss-cross of silver. Then, the last ray of sun would disappear, taking the transparent silver lattice with it, and an inky blue-black would saturate the sky, before thickening into the blackest black, so that on cloudy nights, only the quiet sound of the waves testified to the presence of the sea. That and the occasional silent light from a passing ship.

  Somehow these vivid pictures of himself had been preserved, but, in spite of that, he couldn’t really summon up that feeling of being a boy once more.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ she’d ask. ‘You’re hiding something; I can tell…’

  He wasn’t.

  ‘I know you’re keeping something back. What? What aren’t you telling me?’

  ‘I’ve told you everything.’

  ‘Every last thing?’

  ‘Bit by bit, yes.’

  ‘Are you sure? What really happened between you and Aisha then?’

  She went back over that episode compulsively. Was she really jealous of something that happened so long ago? He was getting tired of her questions.

  ‘So her lover punched you? That sailor, Oleg?’

  ‘Not exactly …’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘I’ve already told you…’

  ‘Tell me again.’

  ‘It was more of a scuffle, but I somehow punched him and broke his nose. I was in such a jealous rage…’

  ‘Even though he was stronger than you?’

  ‘He was huge. A bull of a man. And a Bolshevik too. But I was too furious to be frightened.’

  A silence grew between them

  ‘Do you have a jealous nature Wisia?’ Alyosha asked her, running his hand lightly over her naked back.

  ‘Who doesn’t? Don’t you?’

  It was difficult trying to explain to her why he didn’t do anything with his mother. He told her about the day the previous summer when he’d been walking down Boulevard St. Michel and had stopped in his tracks, causing a woman to trip as she tried to sidestep him, barrelling into some man whose dog started to bark furiously (this made Wisia laugh). What had made him stop so suddenly was seeing his mother on a poster advertising the picture ‘Russia’s Altar’, dressed in a loose silk robe, bound by her wrists to an altar, her head hanging over the side, her breasts prominent. Standing above her was a brutish-looking individual – a combination of an Aztec priest and Trotsky – holding aloft a shining knife in both his fists, ready to plunge it into her white breast.

  Of course, he’d gone to see the picture, but didn’t last more than half an hour before he’d staggered out of the darkness into the stifling street, which smelled of the melting tar from the pavement, and the petrol fumes from the double-decker omnibus idling at the kerb while a crowd of tourists boarded. He’d been mortified at his mother’s performance. She had made a fool of herself yet again. How would she lift her head up after that? There was more acting ability in the flock of geese she and his stepfather had galloped through in the scene where they fled the Cheka.

  He’d headed for the Café du Musée-de-Cluny and nursed a drink, quietly brooding. It hadn’t been a cheap picture, but his mother’s performance had been appalling, full of clichéd gestures, the whole thing a ridiculous melodrama about two lovers crossing the border into Russia in order to fight the Soviet regime all on their own.

  ‘If only life were that simple,’ he told Wisia sadly.

  But, in spite of this new openness, there were things he chose not to tell Wisia. He didn’t tell her that he had never been able to forgive his mother and Uncle Artyom for getting rid of his lover, Grete, back in Berlin. Nor did he tell her how he had continued drinking in several other bars after seeing his mother’s picture, then spent some of the evening talking to a gang of well-to-do young Frenchmen, their light-hearted, easy banter such a contrast to his own mood. He had soon grown bored with their conversation, but all their boasting about women made him want sex, and he found himself making his way back to the brothel where his uncle had taken him when he first arrived in Paris from Berlin in the spring of 1924, a discreet little place in the Latin Quarter. The madam had welcomed him and rung a little hand bell to summon the girls. They were in just their underwear or a few scant garments, so there was a cornucopia of flesh on display. They formed a tableau vivant in front of him, clustered together, the three shorter girls kneeling and the taller girls standing behind them, a smile on all their faces. Alyosha, royally drunk by now, had found it difficult to focus on the girls, but he knew which one he wanted.

  ‘Is Grete here?’

  ‘We have several Gretes here,’ the madam said.

  ‘Where? Where is she?’

  ‘Here she is. This is Grete.’

  ‘It’s Grete I want.’

  ‘And it’s Grete you shall have. Look. Here she is.’

  Drunk as he was, he had burst out laughing.

  34.

  Alyosha may have been able to summon up scenes from his boyhood, but his grip on the recent past was far more faltering. Separating out the events of the past few years, trying to locate them in time and place, was difficult. All those evenings spent in various bars and cafés since he’d arrived in Paris from Berlin were just a fog of different impressions and colours. He struggled to isolate specific evenings, a night when he enjoyed himself – but all that remained was a song or two. Sometimes, he’d try to fish deeper in his memory. What year was it when he used to sit there and watch the sun set over the Black Sea? Could he really remember what anybody said that night with his family in the Hotel Billo in Yalta? The only thing he could remember clearly was a gypsy girl dancing. He remembered the heaviness of her breasts, how they felt when she pressed them against his shoulder, and the fine spray of her spittle on his cheek as she sang, and her voice, something alive and hot. He also remembered the figure of his mother dancing through the shadows…

  ‘You can’t fool me, Alexei.’

  Why was Wisia so reluctant to call him Alyosha?

  ‘Because you were christened Alexei.’

  ‘I don’t like “Alexei”.’

  They were walking through the pink-tinged dusk, the lights in the bars already burning brightly. In the distance, the words ‘Citroën, Citroën’ flashed red on the Eiffel Tower. They had been discussing his journey across Russia during the Civil War.

  ‘You’ll be Alexei to me forever.’

  ‘So I should call you Ludwika?’

  ‘I like you calling me Wisia.’

  A moment’s silence.

  ‘Something happened to you in Kiev.’

  She wasn’t asking – it was a statement.

  ‘Or to that other man then? Stanislav Markovich?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why do you go so quiet every time I ask you about it?’

  ‘Apart from being arrested, nothing happened to him. He escaped from Kiev, like thousands of us. Caught a ship from the Crimea. I saw him in Berlin.’

  ‘It’s hard to believe everything you went through.’

  Yes, it was hard to believe that the old walls of his life had been reduced to rubble by now.

  ‘So much has happened to me. I still think about the people I was with in Russia then.’

  He had already told her about Mademoiselle Babin, his French governess who escaped on horseback with Prince Yakov. Wisia had met him when he’d waited on their table at the little restaurant in the Ile de la Cité on that first evening. Alyosha had also told her about Masha, Mishka and Boris, the children he’d crossed Russia with. Where were they by now, he wondered? Were they even alive?

  ‘I look back, sometimes, and feel I’ve been living some dream. That I’ll wake up one morning, and I won’t be in Paris, I’ll be back home in Petrograd, in my own bedroom, living again with Mother and Father and my little brother and my grandparents, and Uncle Kozma and Aunt Ella and Margarita and Larissa – the whole family all together like before.’

  Alyosha didn’t have a single photo to show her, and his father’s volume of Catullus was the only thing he possessed from that life. But the sun didn’t set on a single day when he hadn’t looked back at the landscape of his old life. He did his best to preserve what little remained to him, to keep it clear and clean. He tried to file it away in a tidy album in his memory. But what the essence of his memories was by now, he wasn’t altogether sure; he felt more and more that all his yesterdays had been warped out of shape by the exigencies of his present.

  How could he ever confess to Wisia that he had shot his father’s chauffeur, Ivan Kirilich, dead, at an open grave in Kiev? Yet, for all the things he couldn’t tell her, he had never been happier.

  35.

  It was the night of the Montparnasse fair, and people thronged the streets: beggars and pickpockets alongside prosperous families and courting couples, examining the wares at the various stalls, stopping to watch the clowns, acrobats, jugglers and fire-eaters, eating and drinking. It was so full that it was hard work to push a path through the crowds, and Alyosha thought that might be why Wisia was unusually quiet. Even when he won a coconut and a little orange bear with a button nose for her, it didn’t succeed in charming her or cheering her up.

  ‘Why are you acting like this?’

  ‘Like what?’ she asked curtly.

  He decided not to pursue it, and they pushed on through the crowds. A cluster of giggling girls under the blue and red lightbulbs, all dressed up in their finest, were making eyes at a gang of flat-capped lads who were trying their luck at the shooting range. One cock of the walk made a great show of taking his turn with the gun, and was greeted with howls of laughter from the girls when he missed the target every time. Those working-class girls of Montparnasse were a tough bunch, thought Alyosha, who had often seen a slanging match turn to hair-pulling, scratching, and worse.

  Eventually, Wisia pulled on his arm and said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  She took his hand and led him through the crowd. She was expecting! The thought flashed through his head suddenly. Wisia is going to tell me that she’s having a baby, he thought, and he felt a strange melting joy at the idea.

  There were no free tables at the Café de la Rotonde, so they had to wait at the door for a while until, eventually, the waiter showed them to a table at the back, under a yellow-and-black poster of the Moulin Rouge. They ordered two beers.

  ‘So, are you going to tell me now? Or do I have to guess?’

  ‘On my next birthday I’ll be twenty-one.’

  He already knew that. ‘What else?’

  Wisia went quiet once again.

  ‘What else do you want to tell me?’

  Normally so talkative, she seemed to be finding it strangely difficult to speak.

  ‘Wisia, what’s making you so sad?’

  She frowned and stared down at her fingers.

  ‘If you tell me what’s the matter I might be able to help.’

  She sighed.

  ‘Are you expecting?’

  At last, she looked him in the eye – and laughed. ‘What on earth made you think that?’

  He shrugged, embarrassed, ‘I don’t know…’

  She laughed lightly and then her expression grew sombre, ‘You’re such a fool sometimes.’

  He took her hand. ‘But something’s upsetting you…’

  ‘I’m not pregnant.’ Her tone was flat. ‘I made a promise to somebody last year.’

  She spoke so quietly, he didn’t catch what she said.

  ‘Say that again.’

  Wisia repeated her words.

  ‘What kind of promise?’

  She looked away.

  ‘Wisia, what promise?’

  ‘I’m engaged to be married.’

  Alyosha stared at her, feeling something pressing on his heart, as though a bucket of concrete had been poured onto his breastbone.

  ‘He asked on my twentieth birthday.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘His family are neighbours of my grandmother, their estate is nearby… Alexei, don’t, let go… your nails… you’re hurting my wrist…’

  He didn’t understand, but what was worse, he was scared of understanding. Wisia was telling him now that the engagement was something their two families had wanted for a long time. She told him that her fiancé, Mateusz Kolodziejski, was the commercial attaché at the Polish embassy in Bucharest, an ambitious young man from a good family who wanted to make his mark in the diplomatic service.

  ‘You don’t wear a ring.’

  ‘Why do you think?’

  He didn’t know what to think.

  ‘I thought it was only fair that you should know.’

  ‘When did you see him last?’

  ‘At Christmas… when I went home.

  ‘But you correspond?’

  Her silence confirmed that they did. He felt nausea rise from his stomach and he had to swallow hard or he would have been sick. Since he met her, Wisia had danced through his soul and had possessed it utterly, and now she had released this thunderbolt.