‘Cover your mouth with your muff. Stand up straight, Hélène …’
She didn’t take much notice; she stood up straight for a moment, then immediately dropped her head again. For the first time she thought seriously about her life and her family, but with a passionate attempt to find some sort of stability and happiness in her own existence; it was not in her nature to give in to pointless despair.
‘I’m happy too when I’m in my room with the lamp on. We’ll soon be home. I’ll sit down at my little yellow desk …’ She pictured with fondness the little desk of painted wood, which was just the right size for her, then the oil lamp with its green porcelain shade, shedding a milky light over her book. ‘No, I won’t read. All those books make me anxious and unhappy. I have to be happy; I have to be like other people. Tonight I’ll have my glass of milk, my bread and jam, the last piece of chocolate before brushing my teeth. When no one is watching I’ll hide the Mémorial under my pillow. No, no. Tonight, I’ll cut out pictures, I’ll draw … I’m happy; I want to be a happy little girl,’ she thought. And the thick ice and sinister shadows beneath a nearby porch, the dark windows with melting snow flowing down them like tears, became a blur before her eyes, merging to form a black, restless sea.
5
When Hélène first began to understand life, Sunday became a day she anticipated with a feeling of sad anguish: Mademoiselle Rose spent every Sunday with some French friends, leaving Hélène hostage to the crushing affection of her elderly grandmother. Once she’d learned her lessons, nothing lightened the empty hours, nothing allowed her to take refuge in an alternative universe, one that was sweet and tinged with brilliant silver from the last rays of light before sunset, one that chimed like the porcelain cup that sat on the sideboard. On Sundays, as soon as she opened a book, her grandmother would groan, ‘My darling, my sweet, sweet treasure, you’re going to wear out your beautiful eyes …’
And if Hélène were playing, she’d say, ‘Don’t bend down so much. You’ll hurt yourself. Don’t jump. You’ll fall. Don’t throw your ball against the wall. You’ll annoy Grandpa. Come and sit on my lap, my darling, let me hold you close to my heart …’
It was an old heart, one that to the youthful Hélène seemed so cold and so slow to come to life. Yet it beat anxiously, passionately; those old eyes looked down in timid hope, trying to find something familiar on the child’s face, an image, a distant memory …
‘Oh! Grandma, let me go,’ said Hélène.
If Hélène wasn’t there, her grandmother did nothing for days on end; she folded her thin hands and laid them on her lap; they were dark and furrowed by age and the household chores she suddenly decided to do every now and then, finding a kind of humble pleasure in washing and ironing, and allowing herself to be shooed away by the cook. Her entire life was scarred by the marks of misfortune and unhappiness; she had experienced poverty, illness, the death of people she loved; her husband had cheated on her, betrayed her; she felt that her daughter and her husband could barely stand her. She had been born old, anxious, weary, while everyone around her was overflowing with vitality and passionate desires. But her main affliction was a kind of prophetic sadness; she seemed more inclined to fear the future than weep for the past. Her lamentations weighed heavily on her granddaughter; her foolish words caused Hélène to feel a rush of terror, terror that she felt lived deep within her heart, and which seemed to form part of some obscure legacy. Fear of being alone, fear of dying, fear of the dark and the dread that, on a day just like today, she might watch Mademoiselle Rose go out, never to return.
She had often heard her friends’ mothers talking to Mademoiselle Rose with that hypocritically doting expression used when saying things children aren’t meant to understand: ‘If you were agreeable … We could go up to fifty roubles a month, or more. I’ve spoken to my husband about it. He’s very willing. You are sacrificing yourself, dear Mademoiselle Rose, and for what? Children are ungrateful creatures …’
Life was unsettled, insecure, unstable. Nothing lasted. A merciless flood swept away peaceful days, the people you loved, carrying them far, far away, keeping you and them apart, for ever. A rush of anguish suddenly ran through the child, making her shudder; she sat in a corner holding a book, quiet and alone; she felt as if she could sense the solitude of the grave; the room became hostile and frightening; beyond the narrow circle of the light from the lamp, darkness reigned; the shadows slithered towards Hélène, rising to engulf her; she strained to push them away, like a swimmer pushing back the water with his arms. The sudden appearance of a pale ray of light beneath the door made her blood run cold. It was almost nightfall and Mademoiselle Rose wasn’t there … would never be there again … ‘She’s not coming back. One day she’ll disappear and I’ll never see her again.’
No one would say anything to her. That’s how they had once hidden the fact that her dog had died. To avoid her annoying them with tears they’d said, ‘He’s sick, but he’ll be back …’ adding the torment of hope to her sadness. The day Mademoiselle Rose left they’d do exactly the same; they wouldn’t say a word to her; at suppertime she would be surrounded by lying faces: ‘Eat. Go to bed. She’s been held up. She’ll be back.’
She could almost hear their hypocritical, pitying voices. She looked around her with hatred. Emptiness, silence, dismal tranquillity and the fear that cunningly digs at the heart to torture it – these were her only companions. She was forced to live with the anguish that flowed through her veins, to suffer it as if it were some hereditary evil; she could feel the weight of anxious terror heavy on her delicate bones, the same terror that had bowed the shoulders and drained the faces of so many of her race.
But when she was ten years old she began to find a melancholy charm in the solitude of these Sundays. She liked the extraordinary silence of those long, self-contained days, which were like faint little suns in a different universe where time flowed at a calmer pace.
Daylight spread slowly up the silk-lined walls, once the colour of wine but now moth-eaten and pink, faded by many summers. When the sun’s rays reached the moulding, they became nothing more than a pale wash of light that slowly dissipated, leaving only the white, luminous ceiling to mirror the sky.
It was the very beginning of autumn; the air was clear and cold, and if you listened closely, you could hear the ice-cream seller’s bell ringing as he drove down the avenue. In the courtyard the trees were almost bare, most of their leaves blown away by the August wind, when autumn is already starting in such climates – pared-down trees, decorated only at the top by dry leaves, pink with the sun that shone through them.
One day Hélène went into her mother’s bedroom. She liked going in there. She had the vague feeling that, in this way, she could better take her mother by surprise, discover her secrets. She was beginning to become interested in her mother and in the mysterious life she now led entirely outside the house. She nurtured in her heart a strange hatred of her that seemed to increase as she grew older; like love, there were a thousand reasons for it and none; and, like love, there was the simple excuse: ‘It’s because of who she is, and because of who I am.’
She went into the room. She opened the drawers, played with her mother’s costume jewellery, things bought in Paris that had been thrown untidily into the bottom of the wardrobe. From the next room her grandmother called out, ‘What are you doing in there?’
‘I’m looking for some clothes to dress up in,’ said Hélène.
She was sitting on the rug, holding a nightdress she had found at the back of the chest of drawers.
The material was torn in several places; a heavy, strong hand had no doubt pulled at the lace shoulder strap so that it remained attached only by a few silk threads. It gave off a strange odour, a mixture of her mother’s perfume, which she hated, the scent of tobacco and a richer, warmer smell, one she didn’t recognise, but which she breathed in with amazement, with apprehension, with a kind of primitive sense of modesty. ‘I hate how this smells,’ sh
e thought.
She raised the torn silk to her face a few times, each time pushing it away again. An amber necklace had been thrown into the back of a drawer; she took hold of it, touched it for a moment, then picked up the nightdress again and closed her eyes, the way one does when trying to recall some distant memory, long forgotten. But no, she couldn’t remember anything; instead, her dormant, childlike sensuality rose up from deep within her for the very first time, making her feel anxious shame and ironic resentment. In the end she rolled the nightdress into a ball, threw it against the wall and trampled on it; then she walked out of the bedroom, but the scent lingered on her hands and pinafore. It stayed with her even as she slept, seeping into her childlike dreams, like a faraway call, like one note of music, like the husky, moaning cry of ringdoves in springtime.
6
The Manassé family, whose son was a friend of Hélène’s, lived in a wooden house surrounded by a garden in an isolated part of the town. It was late autumn and the children were confined to the safety of their room, to protect them from the cold air that Russians feared as if it were a plague. That year, when Hélène came to play with the Manassé children on Sundays, their favourite game was to jump out of the schoolroom window, crawl along the sitting-room balcony and then jump down into the garden where the first snow had already fallen. Once there, they would throw snowballs at each other while playing at soldiers or highwaymen, dressed in old billowing capes, which they pretended were the romantic cloaks of warriors, and carrying branches – their wooden sabres and riding crops. The snow hadn’t yet had a chance to freeze and go hard; it was moist and heavy, with the lingering bitter smell of rotting earth, of rain, of autumn.
The two little Manassé boys were chubby, pale, blond, lethargic and docile. Hélène sent them off to build a shelter out of branches and dried leaves in a corner of the shed while she remained huddled in the darkness of the balcony, silently observing what the Manassés and their friends were doing and saying inside. They were calmly playing cards beneath the lamplight, but in her imagination they symbolised the Russian and Austrian High Command on the eve of the Battle of Austerlitz. The Manassé boys were Napoleon’s formidable army, barely visible in the distance; the hut they were building was a fortress: whoever took control of it would win the battle. Sitting in a circle round the green table, the Manassés were the perfect picture of the Austrian command bent over their maps and plans; she herself, outside in the darkness, in the snow and wind, was the brave young captain who had risked his life to cross the line of defence and penetrate the very heart of the enemy camp.
In this peaceful town, where books and newspapers were always abandoned half-finished, where no one ever dared bring politics into the conversation, while private matters were as tranquil and harmless as the calm waters of a river, flowing peacefully from honest mediocrity to honest simplicity, where people gave their blessing to adultery so that time transformed love affairs into a second, honourable marriage respected by everyone, including the husband – in this world, human passions were hidden behind playing cards and bitterly disputed small winnings. The days were short, the nights long; people spent their time playing cards, Whist or Whint, taking it in turns to go to each other’s houses.
Madame Manassé was sitting on a wing-backed armchair; she was fat, with a face the colour of flour and hair dyed gold piled high on her head; her ample bosom fell over her stomach, which in turn rested on her knees; her chubby cheeks shook like jelly. On one side of her was her husband, who wore glasses and had cold, pale hands; on the other her long-standing lover, who was even older, fatter and balder than her husband. A young woman with dark hair worn up in a long roll above her forehead sat opposite the window. She chain-smoked and talked incessantly so that a thin stream of sweet-smelling smoke flowed from her nostrils, like the Oracle of Delphi in a trance. It was she who raised her head and noticed Hélène’s pale face pressed against the window.
‘How many times have we told those children not to go out in such weather,’ said Madame Manassé, shaking her head reproachfully. She opened the window.
Hélène slipped through and jumped into the room. ‘Don’t scold your boys, Madame. They didn’t want to disobey you; they stayed in their room,’ she said, looking up at Madame Manassé with bright, innocent eyes. ‘And as for me, well, I’m wrapped up warm and not afraid of the cold.’
‘What am I going to do with these children!’
As soon as she had been reassured that her own children were safely inside, however, she just smiled and stretched out her hand – it smelled of almond soap – to feel Hélène’s curls. ‘What beautiful hair you have,’ she said.
But because it really was too much for her to compliment Bella Karol’s daughter she added, ‘You hair’s not naturally curly, is it?’ Her lips were so pursed that the words came out in a kind of soft whistle, like the sound of a flute.
‘Jealous bitch,’ thought Hélène.
‘Is your father going to be living in St Petersburg now?’
‘I don’t know, Madame.’
‘She speaks French so well!’ said Madame Manassé.
She continued to gently stroke Hélène’s curls; her hands were pale and fat, and the curls straightened as they ran through her fingers. Every now and again she would raise her hands, gently shaking them to force the blood back down her long veins so her skin could retain its paleness. She pushed back Hélène’s hair to reveal her ears, noted with a sigh of regret that they were small and well formed, then carefully arranged the curls over her forehead.
‘Don’t you find her French wonderful? She has no accent at all. Mademoiselle Rose is from Paris and it shows. She has good taste and nimble fingers. Your mama is lucky to have her. So you didn’t know that your father was going to live in St Petersburg? And you as well, of course. Hasn’t your mother told you anything?’
‘No, Madame. Not yet …’
‘She’ll be happy to see your father after so many years. Ah, how she must be looking forward to that. If I had to be apart from my darling husband … well, I can’t even imagine it,’ said Madame Manassé with feeling. ‘But not everyone has the same nature, thank goodness. It’s been two years, hasn’t it? Two years since your father left?’
‘Yes, Madame.’
‘Two years … You still remember him, I hope?’
‘Oh, yes, Madame.’
Did she remember her father? ‘Of course,’ thought Hélène; her heart ached when she thought of him, recalling exactly how he looked when he used to come into her room each evening … ‘Yet this is the first time I’ve thought about him since he left,’ mused Hélène, her heart full of affection and remorse.
‘Mama isn’t too bored, is she?’ asked Madame Manassé.
Hélène coldly studied the faces all around her, each one tense with eager curiosity. The young woman’s nostrils trembled, releasing blue rings into the air. The men looked at each other and sniggered, saying ‘hm’ while tapping their dry, gnarled fingers on the table; they sighed, shrugged their shoulders and glanced at Hélène with irony and pity in their eyes.
‘No, she’s not bored …’
‘Ah hah!’ said one of the men, laughing. ‘Out of the mouths of babes, as they say. I knew your mother when she was barely older than you, Mademoiselle.’
‘Did you also know Safronov senior when he was at the height of his success?’ asked Madame Manassé. ‘When I came to live here he was already old.’
‘Yes, I did know him. He squandered three fortunes: his mother’s, his wife’s and his daughter’s, who had some money left to her by his wife’s father. Three fortunes …’
‘Quite apart from his own, I imagine.’
‘He never had a penny, which didn’t stop him from living the high life, I can assure you. As for Bella, she was just a schoolgirl when I first met her …’
Hélène thought of the photograph of her mother when she was a child: she ’d been a chubby girl with a round face and hair worn up, with a comb to hold
it in place. But she dismissed this image at once: to think that the mother she so feared and hated had once been a little girl like any other, that even she had the right to reproach her parents, would allow too many subtleties to seep into the cruel picture of her mother that Hélène had long ago secretly etched into her heart.
‘Hélène has beautiful eyes,’ murmured Madame Manassé.
‘She looks like her father; there’s no doubt about it!’ someone said disappointedly.
‘Oh, my dear …’
‘What! These things happen. But I know a particular person who has always been lucky …’
‘Ivan Ivanitch, you terrible gossip, stop it right now!’ said Madame Manassé. She laughed and glanced sideways towards Hélène as if to say, ‘The child will understand … It’s not her fault …’
‘How old are you, Hélène?’
‘Ten, Madame.’
‘She’s a big girl now. Her mother will soon start thinking about finding a husband.’
‘She won’t have any trouble doing that. Did you know that the way things are going, Karol will soon be a millionaire?’
‘Now, let’s not exaggerate!’ said Madame Manassé; she suddenly found it difficult to speak, as if the words burned her mouth as she spoke them. ‘He has earned a lot of money, or so they say. Some people think he’s discovered a new mine, which, by the way, strikes me as the most likely, but others say he’s improved the output of the old one. It’s possible. I have no idea. There are so many ways to make a fortune for a man who’s … clever … But whatever the case may be, money earned quickly gets spent quickly, my dears. Rushing all over the world is not always the best way to get rich. Although Lord knows I wish him all the prosperity in the world, the poor man …’