‘Arkadievitch, dear sir, Arkadievitch,’ he said affably, correcting the Minister’s son, ‘but never mind. You were saying?’
‘Your cannons, perhaps they might serve some other purpose? It seems to me they could be stripped down and used as scrap metal. I’m only a layman in such matters, of course, but I do believe we are short of scrap iron.’
Slivker, having achieved his aim, allowed himself to pause for breath; he took his time choosing some asparagus and waited quite a while before replying. ‘Would you care to speak to your father about it? My God, it wouldn’t commit you to anything … Of course he wouldn’t buy anything without thinking it over first …’
‘But he’s not the only one at the Ministry …’
‘Oh! You know, it’s only a matter of persuading the others.’
‘You mean bribing them,’ said Karol; he called a spade a spade.
‘Alas!’
‘The country’s in such a sad state,’ said Slivker who was only too happy to flatter Chestov now that he had got what he wanted.
‘When it’s an important matter of patriotism, as in this case, it’s not such a bad thing, but if you only knew … However, I can’t betray the secrets of the gods,’ said Chestov.
‘I know about a deal that’s better than your Spanish cannons. It’s a factory that was confiscated from an Austrian group at the beginning of the war and which is going to start operating again. I have it from a reliable source; they’re selling all the shares as one lot; they’ll cost 5 but will be worth 500 in two months,’ said Karol. ‘I don’t understand why people aren’t willing to get involved in sound business deals.’
‘Because’, Slivker said bitterly, ‘when you first get involved in a deal, you never know if it will turn out well.’
‘For example,’ said Karol, smiling sarcastically, ‘your bread deal with the army.’
‘What about it?’
‘You made us listen to you go on about it for six months. It ended up as a heap of rotten bread.’
‘The flour was of the finest quality,’ said Slivker, who seemed annoyed. ‘I used only the best millers. What went wrong was that they decided to save money on building the ovens, and since no one knew the exact dimensions to build them, the bread wasn’t cooked properly and went off.’
‘And soldiers died of dysentery,’ said Chestov.
‘Is that what you think? Well, the merchandise was rejected and that was the end of it; it was unfortunate, but the bread had to be thrown away. I insisted upon it myself to the authorities. I don’t have the death of a single man on my conscience,’ said Slivker.
Karol laughed like a child, his face contorting in a malicious grimace; he reached over the table and gave a little tug at Hélène’s hair; she grabbed the tanned, dry hand as he was pulling it away and kissed it. She loved the fire in his eyes, his white hair and his smile: it could be so sad and so mischievous.
‘Although, whenever he looks at that woman, he melts,’ Hélène thought resentfully. ‘Is it possible he doesn’t see through their charade? He’s actually happy, happy in this chaotic household, among the new furniture, the dining service engraved with initials that aren’t his, betrayed by an unfaithful wife … You can’t say he doesn’t see it … No, it’s not that; he just brushes it aside, ignores it … In the end, there’s only one thing in the world he’s passionate about and it’s slowly eating away at his soul: gambling, whether on the Stock Market or cards. And that’s all there is to it.’
They ate the apple charlotte, which was covered in hot chocolate sauce. Hélène loved chocolate and for a moment she stopped ‘listening to the conversation of adults’ as her mother put it when reproaching her.
‘Max also says that you’re too interested in hearing about business deals,’ her mother sometimes said. ‘Are they any of your concern? Think about your lessons instead.’
Hélène, out of pure perversity, put her heart and soul into listening and understanding what she heard.
But she was tired; all she could make out was some vague mumbling.
‘Ships …’
‘Petrol …’
‘Pipelines …’
‘Boots …’
‘Sleeping bags …’
‘Shares …’
‘… Millions … Millions … Millions …’
This last word constantly returned, punctuating their sentences like the chorus of a song. ‘An old song,’ Hélène thought wearily.
Dinner was over; Hélène left the table, gave a shy little curtsey that no one noticed and went to bed. The smell of cigars and brandy wafted through the house until morning, slipping beneath her door and insinuating itself into her dreams. A faraway rumbling shook the paving stones: artillery detachments were passing by in the street.
3
The revolution hadn’t yet begun, but everyone could sense it was imminent; even the air they breathed seemed heavy and full of a kind of menace, as dawn is on the day of a storm. No one was interested in news from the Front; the war seemed to have retreated into the distant past; the wounded were looked on with indifference, the soldiers with sullen hostility. Hélène came into contact with men who were passionate only about money. They were all getting rich. Money flowed like the Pactolus River, with such an impetuous, stormy, capricious force that it terrified everyone who lived along its banks who quenched their thirst with its waters. It flowed too quickly, too easily … The moment you bought some shares on the Stock Market they shot up like a fever. People no longer took pleasure in shouting out the figures in front of Hélène: they whispered them instead. She no longer heard ‘millions’, but ‘billions’, spoken in low voices that were hesitant, breathless; all around her she saw only expressions of greed and fear.
They bought everything at once. Anything, anywhere. Noon until night, men would arrive, pulling packages from their pockets; behind closed doors, Hélène could hear muffled voices involved in rushed, intense discussions about numbers. They bought fur pelts that hadn’t even been cleaned or sewn, just tied together with string and hung on a long rod, the way salesmen from Asia had sold them in some faraway bazaar; they bought ermine and sable pelts, chinchilla in lots that looked like rat skins, gemstones, necklaces, antique bracelets, all valued according to their weight, enormous emeralds, but cloudy, since their greed and haste were stronger than their judgement; they bought gold: in bars, in ingots, but most especially they bought shares, piles and piles of them, representing holdings in banks, tankers, pipelines and in diamonds that still lay buried beneath the ground. Pieces of paper poked out of the furniture. They made the walls and beds bulge; they were hidden in the servants’ rooms, in the study, at the backs of cupboards and, when spring came, in wood-burning stoves; wads of shares were sewn into the fabric of armchairs and the men who came to the Karols’ house took turns sitting on them, warming them with the heat of their bodies as if they were trying to hatch golden eggs. In the corner of the sitting room great bundles of paper were rolled up in the Savonnerie carpet decorated with garlands of roses; they rustled whenever there was a draft. Hélène sometimes amused herself by stepping on them to make them crunch, the way you crush dead leaves beneath your shoes in autumn. The white piano, its cover closed, shimmered faintly in the shadows; on the walls were motifs in gold: reed-pipes, bagpipes, hats in the style of Louis XV, shepherd’s crooks, ribbons, bouquets of flowers, all gathering dust. Hélène’s parents, the ‘businessmen’ and Max spent every evening in the stuffy little room that Karol used as an office. It contained nothing but a telephone and a typewriter. They piled in there, happy to breathe in the thick cigar smoke, happy to hear the bare floorboards creak beneath their feet, happy to look at the plain walls that were thick enough to muffle their discussions.
Sitting side by side in that narrow room, Max and Bella took advantage of the chaos and the dim light, which came from a single light bulb hanging down on a wire, to press their warm thighs, their warm bodies against each other. Karol noticed nothing, but every now and a
gain he would squeeze his wife’s bare arm affectionately in the dim light; she respected him now, and feared him, for he was the source of luxury and comfort. Yet she didn’t feel any more at ease in this house than Hélène; sometimes she was overcome with nostalgia for a hotel room, two packing cases piled in a corner and brief affairs embarked on by chance. Her Max was so impatient, so young; his beautiful body never grew tired; she encouraged his jealousy, his rage, his passion for her. Hélène found herself back among the arguments and quarrels that had been her lullabies as a very young child, but now they were between her mother and Max, and were imbued with a bitter intensity that annoyed her and which she couldn’t understand. Nevertheless, she forced herself to irritate them as much as possible; she had a derisive way of looking at Max that infuriated him; she never spoke to him; he started to hate her; he was only twenty-four and still childish enough to hate a little girl.
Hélène wandered sadly through all the rooms, waiting for dinner time. She had finished all her lessons; Mademoiselle Rose took the book from her hands. ‘You’ll ruin your eyes, Lili …’
It was true that, now and again, reading affected her too much, as if she were heavily intoxicated. But to sit in the schoolroom and do nothing, while Mademoiselle Rose sat in silence opposite her, gently nodding her head without saying a word, was beyond her. For a while she sat patiently, watching Mademoiselle’s skilful, ageing hands, which were always busy with some sewing; then, little by little, a desperate desire to do something, to have a change of scene, made her rush out of the room. Mademoiselle Rose had aged so much since the war. She hadn’t had any news of her family for three years and her brother, the one she called ‘little Marcel’, for he was her half-brother after her father’s second marriage, had disappeared in the Vosges region of France at the beginning of 1914. She had no friends in St Petersburg; she didn’t even understand the language of the country despite having lived there for nearly fifteen years. Everything upset her. Her entire life was dedicated to Hélène’s well-being, but Hélène was growing up. She needed to be cared for in other ways, but Mademoiselle Rose had known her since she was so very young, and was herself so innately reserved and with such a strong sense of propriety that she was unable to reach out to Hélène, to encourage confidences which, at that point in her life, Hélène wouldn’t have entrusted to her anyway.
Hélène protected her inner life; she hid it fiercely from sight – everyone’s sight, even from the person she loved most in the world. She and Mademoiselle Rose were bound together by a fear that neither of them dared to speak of: that Mademoiselle Rose might be sent away. Anything was possible. Their lives were ruled by Bella’s whims, by her excessively bad moods or a sarcastic remark from Max. During these deadly years Hélène did not once breathe freely; there wasn’t a single night when she went to bed feeling calm and confident. During the day, Mademoiselle Rose took Hélène to mass at the church of Notre-Dame-de-France. A French priest spoke to a small congregation of people born in this foreign land; he spoke of France, of the war, and prayed for ‘those who suffer, those who must travel, and the soldiers who have fallen on the battlefields’.
‘We’re fine,’ thought Hélène in between responses; she looked at the two low candles burning beneath the image of the Virgin Mary, and listened to the soft crackling of the wax tears that flowed and flowed, ever so slowly, until they fell on to the paving stones. She closed her eyes. At home, Bella would say, shrugging her shoulders, ‘Your Mademoiselle Rose is becoming holier-than-thou. That’s all we need …’
In church Hélène feared nothing, thought about nothing, allowed herself to be cradled by a soothing dream, but the moment she stepped outside and found herself in the dark street, walking along the gloomy, fetid canal, her heart ached with mortal anguish once more.
Sometimes Mademoiselle Rose looked around in surprise, as if she were waking from a dream. Sometimes she would murmur a few vague words, and when Hélène impatiently cried, ‘What do you mean?’ she would shudder and turn her large, deep-set eyes slowly away. ‘Nothing, Hélène, nothing,’ she would say softly.
Yet the pity that filled Hélène’s heart did not soften it; she bore the pity angrily, as if it were a burden. ‘I’m becoming horrible, now,’ she thought in despair, ‘just like everyone else.’
In the mirrors of the sitting room, lit up by the light that filtered in from beneath the office next door, Hélène studied her reflection for a long time: her face and the dark-coloured dress that looked like a black stain against the delicate light wood panelling, her thin, tanned neck that stuck out of the narrow collar of her checked dress, the gold chain and blue enamel locket that, to Hélène, were the only ‘outward signs’ of wealth. She was so bored. She believed she was unhappy because they dressed her like a little girl in short skirts, with her hair in great curls, although in Russia, a girl was already considered a woman at fourteen. As for the rest …
‘What am I complaining about?’ she thought. ‘I’m no different from anyone else. Of course, everyone’s house has an adulterous wife, unhappy children and busy men who think only of money. With money, everyone flatters you, smiles at you, everything works out, that’s what they all say. I have money, I’m healthy, but I’m bored.’
One evening Chestov found her in this state of mind and walked over to her; he was drunk; he looked at her slim face raised towards him and smiled. ‘Such beautiful eyes,’ he said.
Hélène knew he was drunk and worse, that he was despicable, selling his country to the highest bidder. But he was the first man who had noticed her. She couldn’t explain how she felt. It was the first time she could feel the impact of a man’s eyes on her, the way he looked at her face, then down at her chest where his gaze lingered on her budding breasts, straining beneath her dress. For a long time Chestov’s gaze sought the tender spot between her chest and her shoulder, still small and angular like a young girl’s; he took her hand and kissed it, then left. That night, for the first time in her life, Hélène wasn’t able to sleep, feeling ashamed, unhappy, troubled to the point of suffering, and yet so proud, still feeling, there in the darkness, the heavy, insolent gaze of a man upon her. Yet from that moment on, Chestov made her feel more and more afraid and she did everything she could to avoid him.
On another evening she saw groups of women marching through the city asking for bread. They walked behind a scrap of material that billowed in the wind and the sound that rose from the crowd was not a clamour but rather a muffled, timid pleading: ‘Bread, bread, we want bread …’
As they passed, all the doors closed one by one.
Hélène could hear them in the room next door saying, ‘… Buy … sell …’ ‘I’ve heard …’ ‘They say that …’ ‘Unrest, riots, a revolution …’
But deep inside they didn’t believe it; they were as irrational as men being swept along by a flood.
‘We’ll always have money …’
‘There’s only one thing to do … buy, buy …’
‘Buy anything … electric light bulbs, toothbrushes, jars of jam … I was recently told about a Rembrandt. They’d sell it for a piece of bread …’
Riots? They brushed the idea aside with a wave of the hand; they didn’t ignore it; they didn’t underestimate it, but that impatient wave of the hand meant ‘Yes, yes. But we know very well that it can’t last. Yes, yes. We can tell, just as you can, that it will all end, fade away. In any case we’re used to it. Stability is rather boring, frightens us. We understand, we understand perfectly well, but what prods us along, what we enjoy, is to gamble on the future, on the symbols of wealth, on the diamonds that will be confiscated, with stocks and shares that soon might only be worth the paper they’re printed on, on paintings that might be burned …’
‘I’ve heard that Rasputin has been murdered,’ someone said quietly. ‘They say he was assassinated by …’
Then there was a vague whispering: to them, a halo of respect and terror still surrounded the Emperor and the Imperial family.
r /> ‘Is it possible?’
A moment of shock, then they brushed it aside. ‘Yes, yes, we’ll have to see. For the moment, let us get on with gambling, getting intoxicated, piling up our gold, our jewellery, or at least let us talk about money, dream about money, amorously stroke our gold bars, our gemstones, our roubles … What will they be worth tomorrow? What will they be worth? Ah, tomorrow is tomorrow … What’s the point of thinking of tomorrow? We have to sell, sell, sell … We have to buy, buy, buy …’
‘Dear Lord, please protect Papa …’
Her mother was never included.
‘Dear Lord, please protect Mademoiselle Rose … Forgive me for my sins. Please let the French win the war …’
4
The February Revolution came and went, then the October Revolution. The city was distraught, buried in snow. It was a Sunday in autumn. Lunch was over. Max was there. Thick cigar smoke filled the room. You could hear the gentle crackling of the wads of American dollars and British pounds sewn into the armchairs. It was three o’clock; they were drinking very expensive cognac in brandy glasses. Everyone was silent, half listening to the dull, distant gunfire that echoed from the suburbs, day and night, though no one paid any attention to it any more.
Karol had pulled Hélène on to his knee. She had been there for a while, and he had forgotten she was there; he stroked her absent-mindedly, the way you play with a dog’s ears. And sometimes, while he was talking, he pulled her hair so hard that Hélène trembled in pain; he was rough in his affection, but Hélène bore it without complaining, happy to be able to irritate her mother. Nevertheless, she wanted to get down from his lap; he held her back.
‘Wait a while. You never sit with me.’
‘I have lessons to prepare, Papa,’ she said, kissing his tanned hand and its long, slender fingers; he wore an old-fashioned, wide, round wedding ring, the symbol of slavery.