When he lived in Berlin, he heard about a poet who’d been in love with a girl who had finished with him. He did everything he could to win back her love, but nothing worked; in fact the more he tried to tempt her back with his poems and letters, his flowers and gifts, the more she seemed to despise him. The young man was in hell, and even considered suicide. One evening, he went to the café where she worked, ordered a glass of wine from her, tipped his head back to drink it in one, then crushed the glass in his fist until it shattered. What everybody saw next was a man rubbing the fine splinters of glass into the flesh of his cheeks in order to wash away his pain…

  He gazed at her, dazed with anguish.

  She sighed very softly.

  With a huge effort, he dragged himself to his feet to leave, but she grabbed his arm.

  ‘Don’t go… no, listen…Wait, listen… don’t be angry… I’ll be twenty-one in a month’s time… Alexei? Look at me… Old enough to know what I want… Not what my father wants, or my mother, or anybody else in my family… But what I want…’

  He still felt bitterly disappointed as he asked her what that was.

  ‘Do you need to ask? You know what…’

  ‘I’m not sure that I do …’

  ‘Kiss me, will you? Alexei?’

  He felt a flicker of emotion as he leaned towards her to comply.

  ‘That wasn’t much of a thing… I want a proper one…’

  Wisia swore to him that she had made up her mind to live her own life. Living away from her family in Paris had made her realise that there were other ways of living other than theirs. She didn’t have to follow the family traditions, or slavishly accept their old-fashioned morals, or place any importance on her ancestry – any more than she had to listen to her mother’s and grandmother’s priests, old men whose minds were still in thrall to the Middle Ages.

  Her mother had often told her that a woman’s duty was to stay at home, though in the same breath, she would say she believed in the equality of the sexes. But not a superficial equality like the right to vote, or go out to work – true equality meant man and woman had their own place in the pattern of creation: each as important as the other. But in the Sorbonne, Ludwika had absorbed other ideas, and she was determined to claim her happiness, and his too.

  These were the sweetest words Alyosha had ever heard.

  Wisia intended turning her back on her privileged background to live a different life. She wouldn’t deny her true feelings in order to comply with her family’s expectations. There was no virtue in a woman denying her own emotions by sacrificing herself to some perceived social and familial obligation. How would she hope to know her true self if she did that?

  Out on the streets, the festivities had come to an end, and the coloured bulbs had been extinguished. They walked arm-in-arm through the debris from the fair, pausing every now and then for a long kiss. Their dreams for the future had already bound them even closer together.

  36.

  When Wisia went off to her lectures, Alyosha always felt a sense of loss. The best years of his life, when he should be laying down a strong foundation for the future, were rotting between his fingers. He yearned to be studying for a degree at the Sorbonne himself. But what hope did he have of that, with barely a franc to his name? Over his dead body would he go and beg a single sou from his Uncle Artyom. Since he’d broken into his apartment and stolen from him, he had done his best not to think of him at all. His only choice was to keep on working at the Louvre, though, by now, he was thoroughly bored of repeating the same old guff day after day. He was stuck, going nowhere, while Wisia was honing her mind, discovering the power of ideas. At least she discussed her subject with him. He felt then that his own horizons were being widened.

  She was musical too, and was teaching herself to play the Hawaiian guitar in order to accompany herself as she sang. She was already a gifted pianist, and her deep contralto voice reminded Alyosha of his mother.

  ‘Chopin was a distant relative of mine’ she told him.

  ‘On your father’s side or your mother’s?’

  ‘Mother’s.’

  She told him that he had written his first piano concerto when he was just twenty, not long before political turmoil in Poland saw him leave his mother country for Paris. She described the three movements to him, the brisk first movement, followed by the romantic second and then the syncopated dance rhythms of the third. One day, they happened to stop at a bar which had an old piano, and she played him some of her favourite passages. Listening to the music, Alyosha reflected that his own life could be divided into three movements: Russia, Berlin, and Paris. But Paris was by far the most important movement, the one which should take him back to the beginning, back to his mother country a stronger man. Would Wisia be the one to somehow make that possible?

  She wrote to her mother asking for permission to stay on in Paris in July. She made up something about her tutor advising her to continue her education informally over the summer, in order to see and experience everything that Paris had to offer. For a week or two, her anxiety that her mother would insist on her returning to Poland made her uncharacteristically nervous and low-spirited, and it was as much as Alyosha could do to tease an occasional smile from her. But when the reply finally came, to her great surprise, her mother not only said she could stay, she even arranged for a generous increase in her allowance to be sent. Alyosha had never doubted it, for love was making an optimist of him. He felt fit and healthy, too, and full of hope for the future.

  Now that Wisia was in funds, they spent nearly all their evenings in bars. They liked the terrace of the Closerie des Lilas on the Place de l’Odéon, where they’d eke out their brandy and sodas for as long as possible to make them last, kissing and talking, watching the world go by, the café a hubbub of laughing couples, chinking crockery and clinking glasses.

  ‘What do you think truth is?’ Wisia asked him on one of these occasions, as she waved away the little cloud of insects that were flying around her. ‘I mean, is there even such a thing as one absolute truth? Or just different truths?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Can you give me an example?’

  She pointed at two young men in their shirtsleeves. ‘Say those two start punching the living daylights out of each other. As you pull them apart they give you two completely different accounts of the events leading up to the first punch. Each of them will have a valid reason for fighting, and they’ll both be right. They’ve both been in exactly the same tussle, but they’ve experienced it quite differently. You can’t call one or the other a liar because they’re both saying the truth.’ Wisia gazed at him earnestly. ‘So what, then, is the truth?’

  He didn’t have a clue.

  ‘In your experience? Is there such a thing as objective truth?’

  He thought about it at length. ‘To be honest, Wisia, I think everybody tends to see most things in life from their own standpoint.’

  Wisia considered this for a moment before asking: ‘So, is that a good thing? Or a bad thing?’

  ‘It’s not something we have any choice over.’

  ‘But then, how to know anything as it truly is? When I met Marshal Piłsudski for the first time, I found him charming, courteous and affable. He was reason itself in the discussion we had across my father’s dinner table, and more than happy to let everybody else have their say. But I’ve heard people speak about him very differently. They say he’s a terrible man.’

  ‘I’m sure you could have said exactly the same about Lenin when he was alive,’ said Alyosha thoughtfully. ‘If I’d met him personally, I expect I’d have found him pleasant enough. You have to be very astute to know the truth about someone.’

  37.

  Wisia suggested that they leave the city the minute her lectures were over, for a vacation. Alyosha was allowed a week’s leave, so they packed their bags, bought their tickets, boarded the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée Express at the Gare du Lyon, and headed south. As the train plunged deeper into the dusk, it passed between clay ravines, then on through shallow valleys, which turned from green to purple as they travelled further south. Every now and again, a ribbon of river would appear, and sometimes they’d catch the pale grey waters of a lake glinting in the evening sun.

  Their first stay was at Arles, where Alyosha bought himself a cheap straw hat, as the heat was so intense between the white walls it felt as though the sun was stabbing the streets. Then they spent a couple of days in Montpellier, and the following three nights in the small port of Sète, where tanned, athletic-looking young women biked along the quays, the loose cotton skirts of their dresses billowing out behind them, laughing as they went. On their first evening there, Alyosha and Wisia strolled down to the beach after dinner, and sat entwined, listening to the quiet sigh of the waves stroking the sand under the moonlight.

  The next afternoon, on the way to the beach for a swim, Alyosha thought he heard somebody call his name, and turning, saw a young man waving at him. He was accompanied by a woman whose face was obscured by a wide-brimmed straw hat with yellow flowers around the brim, and a younger woman in a short summer dress and sunglasses. As they waited for them to reach them, Wisia asked Alyosha who they were.

  ‘That’s Vladimir Glebovich Malikov. He was a pupil at the lycée next to the Hôtel de Nantes, where I used to live. We used to chat in Russian sometimes when he was on his way home.’

  Vladimir introduced them to his mother. Olga Sherbatovna Malikova was a woman in the prime of life, her whole being speaking of health and vitality. Her skin was tanned a dark brown, so that when she smiled, her even teeth seemed particularly white.

  ‘And you remember Erwana?’ Vladimir asked. Alyosha didn’t really know the Breton girl who now stood at his friend’s side, as Vladimir had only just started seeing her when Alyosha left the Hôtel de Nantes. But he remembered that she wanted to study to become a doctor, just like her father.

  ‘And this is Ludwika.’

  His old friend told him there were plenty of other Russian families on vacation in the town, and he invited them for dinner that evening to meet some of them. Alyosha accepted, and that evening he and Ludwika found themselves in a cheap bistro, surrounded by Russians. A man called Rostislav, who hacked and coughed incessantly, much to Ludwika’s disgust, introduced himself to Alyosha, and told him that he’d known his father, though, after further probing, it seemed he’s shaken hands with him once in Berlin. Later in the evening, Rostislav told him that he had lost a fortune of millions. His companion, Havronya, was a large, fleshy woman in her fifties, but her speaking voice was that of a little girl of six, which Alyosha found disconcerting. Havronya confided to Wisia that she hated her name, hated her life, hated being a widow, and most of all, hated playing the piano in a dirty old brasserie-concert in Lille. But she didn’t have a choice, as she and Rostislav both lived on the money she made there. They claimed to be brother and sister, but Alyosha knew well enough not to ask too many questions about the lives of other exiles.

  Alyosha noticed how quiet Wisia became when she was with people she didn’t know. She barely spoke for the entire meal. Sometimes she even looked a little vacant, which he thought might make people think she was rather rude. On such occasions, Alyosha was always plagued by doubts whether she truly loved him, or whether she wished she was with somebody else.

  After the meal they started to sing to each other, folk songs from Russia, Poland and Brittany. When it was Erwana’s turn she had a voice to tempt money from a miser’s wallet, and they insisted on an encore.

  She told them she’d sing a particular favourite of hers: a sad old folk song about sturdy farmers ploughing along with their horses until the sun had set, then scraping the earth from under their clogs on the thresholds of their cottages, exactly as their forefathers had done from beyond memory. But first, she would tell them a story.

  In the middle of Brittany one time, in the insignificant town of Loudéac, a dreamy-looking girl stood behind the counter of the buffet at the station, her fist against her cheek, staring at a skinny youth with a long neck in a blue collarless shirt, eating bread and drinking cider at one of the tables. He’d placed his scythe against the window frame, and the smell of a harvest sun was strong on his skin. When he had filled his stomach, he rose and admitted that he didn’t have a single franc to his name, as the farmer hadn’t paid him for his reaping, but after a hard day’s work in the meadows he’d been ravenous. He feared the worst, and thought the girl would call the boss for sure, and that he in turn would fetch the police. But instead she said, ‘Sing to me. I don’t care what, as long as you sing. If you do, I’ll let you off.’

  He didn’t have the best voice in the world, but by the time the song came to an end the girl’s face was wreathed in smiles. Nobody had ever sung to her before, to her and only to her, though the entire buffet was listening to the song of the big strong men ploughing with their horses.

  To this day, on her birthday, he still sings her the song, as he has done every year since their wedding day.

  The couple were Erwana’s grandparents.

  At the end of the evening, Olga Sherbatovna insisted on settling the bill, though she didn’t seem much more affluent than the rest of them. Alyosha and Wisia were returning to Paris the next day, but Vladimir made them promise to look them up in the autumn.

  38.

  Autumn duly arrived and Wisia returned to her studies, but within a fortnight, a letter arrived from home which brought nothing but unhappiness.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  It was from her mother, instructing her to come home at once, as her father was very ill. Alyosha hated to think of her leaving but he realised she had no choice but to pack her bags and leave immediately; it sounded as if there wasn’t a second to lose.

  They didn’t sleep at all that night, just talked through the hours until dawn. The thought of leaving her to go to work that day was so unbearable that Alyosha decided that, even if they gave him the sack, he couldn’t care less, he would accompany Wisia to Montparnasse Station, so that he could say his last goodbyes to her there.

  ‘The second I’m home, I’ll write to you,’ she said.

  He asked her to promise.

  Of course she would.

  But their mutual assurances of daily letters did nothing to stop the cold feeling which seeped through his bones.

  ‘Do you have to go?’ he implored.

  She hugged him tightly but said, ‘Don’t make things harder than they are.’

  But he found he couldn’t leave her at the Gare de Montparnasse, and decided to travel with her as far as Le Havre.

  39.

  Black clouds hung low in the sky above Haute-Normandie, and by the time they reached the port, it was raining. The town was depressing: grey people in greyer streets and a dull fog hanging over everything. By the end of the afternoon, it had started to pour down, sending them scurrying for shelter into a bar called Lamartine. Wisia was sniffing with cold, the tip of her nose damp and her cheeks drained of colour. Her hair hung in damp hanks over her shoulders and back, making her look prettier than ever, Alyosha thought. He squeezed her hand and pulled her to him, kissing her on her cold lips.

  At eight o’clock that night, the Adam Mickiewicz had been due to raise anchor, but, for some reason – a fault in the engine or something – this was put back to ten o’clock the following morning. They had no choice but to find a bed for the night, and found a room in a small pension owned by a Madame Bilbaut, a young widow with five children, who had lost her husband in the 1914–1918 war. Her mother lived with her, too – a toothless, tiny old lady who sat in a rocking chair, swathed in her black shawl, muttering continually to herself.

  The bed was hard and lumpy, but after not sleeping at all the previous night, they fell asleep almost instantly, Alyosha’s nose nestled against the nape of Wisia’s neck.

  The next day, they made their farewells at the quayside. When Wisia, wearing a hat which made her look older than her age, finally made her way up the gangway, Alyosha felt as though his world was over. He lifted his fingertips to his lips in a ghost of a kiss. At the top of the gangway she turned to stop and throw another kiss towards him, at the same second that he threw her a kiss. They both burst out laughing as they hurled more kisses at each other.

  ‘What?’ shouted Alyosha cupping his ear. ‘Shout louder,’ he yelled as her words vanished under the screeching of the seagulls. She mimed at him to be sure not to miss his train, though he had a good hour before the next departure. Finally, she raised her hand and threw him one last kiss before stepping away from the rail and disappearing from sight.

  Alyosha had nearly reached the station when in one mad impulsive moment he turned on his heel and ran like the wind, ran as fast as his legs would carry him back to the port. Panting for breath, he hurtled into the ticket office – now completely deserted – and bought a third class ticket. A short, wattled clerk with an officious air served him ponderously, his manner as measured as a clock, as Alyosha fidgeted in an agony of anticipation. Hearing the ship’s foghorn announce it was about to set sail, he begged the clerk to hurry, but the man proceeded with the paperwork with an almost-unbearable, steady deliberateness.

  Finally, clutching the piece of paper in his fist, Alyosha hurled himself along the quayside until he reached the gangway, gasping for breath and in a lather of sweat.

  He stayed on deck until he saw the grey harbour walls of Le Havre disappearing in the distance, and he experienced a moment of delightful calm when he realised that the mainland had completely disappeared, and that only sea could be seen all around.

  He was going to ask Wisia to marry him.