“A letter … That’s interesting.…”
“Is anything coming back to you?” asked Nicolas eagerly.
Brisabois nodded, slowly. He took off his glasses and wiped them with a corner of his shirt. He slipped them back on.
“That last summer, 1993…” Brisabois hesitated.
“Yes?” said Nicolas. “That summer?”
“The last time I spoke to your father on the phone, the last time I ever heard his voice, he mentioned a letter.”
Nicolas looked at the thick fingers on the cup, then up to Brisabois’s face. “Can you remember what my father said, exactly?”
Brisabois exhaled sharply. “Nicolas, that was years ago.”
“Thirteen years ago. Just try, please.”
Brisabois ordered another coffee. He waited till it came. Nicolas waited, too, his legs quaking with impatience under the table.
Brisabois said in a low voice, “I remember. Théodore had just arrived in Biarritz. Must have been the beginning of August. Just before … He called me to discuss a professional matter. His voice sounded a little strange on the phone. Upset. Odd. I asked why. He just said this: ‘I read a letter. A hell of a letter.’ And that was it. That’s all he said. I asked him whether it was to do with our business deals. He replied no, no, nothing to do with business. And that was it. Your father had affairs. You probably knew that, didn’t you? I thought it was some woman, some woman in love writing a letter. There were always women in love, trailing after him. I dismissed it. I never thought about it again.”
“Someone called Alexeï wrote it. In July. From Russia. I think he sent it to Nina, my grandmother, my father’s mother.”
“How do you know all this?”
“My nutty grandfather, Lionel Duhamel, spilled the beans.”
“What do you think was in that letter, Nicolas?”
“Absolutely no idea. I don’t even know who Alexeï is. But I’m going to find out. At least I’m going to try.”
Brisabois’s eyes twinkled.
“Right now, I see him, peeping out at me, in your face. You look so much like him. When you walked into the café, I had a shock. It was like Théo striding toward me. You are darker, and your eyes are not blue, but … When you were a kid, there was a vague resemblance, but now … Oh! It’s both painful and wonderful to look at you.”
“Do you miss him, Albert?”
“I miss him more than you can possibly imagine. I miss his audacity, his bravery. Your father was like the hero of a novel. You don’t often meet people like that in a lifetime. I still hear his voice, and I dream of him every once in a while.”
“Do you think he’s still alive, somewhere, somehow?” asked Nicolas.
“When you never find a person’s body, you can imagine anything. Did your father long for a new start? Did he stage his own death? Is he living another life on the other side of the globe? Does he have a new family, a new wife, new kids, a new name?”
“Was it an accident?” continued Nicolas. “Was he unhappy? Did he want to end it all? Was he upset because of that letter? The letter Alexeï sent.”
They looked at each other in silence.
“The worst part about your father’s story is not knowing,” sighed Brisabois. “Being left in the dark.”
Nicolas thought of the past years. Growing up in the shadow of a father who had left no trace. He felt the old dull ache, the familiar pain.
“Being left in the dark,” he echoed. “The story of my life.”
“You still miss him, too, don’t you?”
Nicolas recalled those afternoons when he’d come home as a young boy, hoping against hope that his father had returned while he had been at school. “I have missed him every single day since August seventh, 1993.” Nicolas felt his eyes water up. He didn’t care if Brisabois saw the tears. There was no shame. “I miss him even more since I’ve learned his real name.”
Brisabois reached out and patted his shoulder comfortingly. Then he rubbed his hands. “So, what are you starting with, Nicolas? What’s first on your list? How can I help?”
Nicolas smiled for the first time. “I’m starting with Saint Petersburg.”
Once he obtained the visa, booked the airline tickets, the hotel, which all took a couple of weeks, he got an e-mail from Brisabois. The day of his arrival in Saint Petersburg, he was to take bus number thirteen from the airport. The bus went to Moskovskaïa metro station, on line two, which would bring him right up to the Nevski Prospekt station. Lisaveta Andréiévna Sapounova would be waiting there for him at four o’clock. She would then accompany him to his hotel.
“You won’t notice Lisa at first,” Brisabois had written.
“At first”—Nicolas wondered what he meant by that. Lisaveta was an “old friend,” Brisabois wrote, a woman he’d met in the eighties, when Saint Petersburg was still Leningrad. She was a translator, he explained, and a quarter French. She knew her city backward and forward, and spoke fluent French. However, she had a complex personality; she wasn’t the easy, outgoing type. “I call her my Russian princess,” he added. “Oh, nothing happened between us.… Just friends … Alas…” Nicolas had smiled at this.
“Saint Petersburg?” his mother had asked, surprised, when he informed her of his departure. “With Delphine?”
“No,” Nicolas had replied. “By myself. Just for a couple of days.”
When he told his girlfriend, she had not pried. Delphine sensed something was on his mind and was taking up a lot of his time. Whatever it was made him silent, pensive. One morning, she found him sitting at the kitchen table with his father’s old Montblanc in hand.
“What are you writing?” she asked.
“Nothing much. Just taking notes.”
She had seen the birth certificate; he had shown it to her when it had arrived.
“Look, my father’s name was Fiodor Koltchine.”
“How do you feel about all this?” she had asked gently when he had been to see his mother on that rainy day.
“I don’t know. Weird, I guess. Trying to understand. Trying to understand who he really was.”
“I’d do the same thing,” she said comfortingly, kissing his forehead.
Delphine lent him some money for the plane ticket. He had not wanted to ask his mother. He chose the cheapest hotel he could find, a central youth hostel. He took off in early November 2006, during the midterm school holidays. He would only miss a couple of tutorials.
How strange and lost he felt landing in a country where he could not read the signs. He had not thought of that when he had decided to come. As he took an endless escalator descending to the bowels of Moskovskaïa metro station, he prayed he was on the right train, heading to the right stop. He felt thankful that Brisabois had suggested a friend to help him out, as he did not even know how and where to begin. He hoped Lisaveta Sapounova might be helpful. He had no one else to turn to.
November was not a good month to visit Saint Petersburg, he had learned online. The crowds came for the famed white nights during the summer, when darkness fell for only two hours. He was to expect rain and cold. Well, he thought, Paris had not been very different in the past weeks, had it?
A fine drizzle greeted him as he emerged from the station. He stood on the Nevski Prospekt, his collar turned up, peering around for Lisaveta Sapounova. He supposed Brisabois had described him to her. Tall, young, dark, French-looking. He heard Russian being spoken around him, a rich, throaty language he understood nothing of, but that fascinated him, because it was part of him. He was, after all, half Russian. He found himself noticing his father’s slanted blue eyes, turned-up nose, wide mouth in every person walking by. This was, somehow, his country, yet he knew nothing of Russia, except what his history classes had taught him. He knew enough to know that the Saint Petersburg he was looking at now, filled with the animated throng of people coming and going, carrying shopping bags, chatting into mobile phones, and wearing designer clothes, had little to do with Leningrad of 1960, the year h
is father was born to a fifteen-year-old girl during the Cold War. He thought of the poet Anna Akhmatova, returning to Leningrad in May 1944, and writing, “a terrible ghost that pretended to be my city.” In his khâgne years, Nicolas had avidly read Blok, Bely, Gogol, Brodsky, all linked to Saint Petersburg, not yet knowing he himself had intimate ties to the city through his father.
“Nikolaï Duhamel?” came a feminine voice. She pronounced his name the Russian way. It enchanted him.
He looked down at a small, slender woman with a scarf tied around her head. Forty-five, or a little less. She held out a cold hand. Her face was stern.
“I am Lisaveta Andréiévna Sapounova.”
She held her chin up high, as if she was proud of her name, or herself. He noticed two beauty spots, one near her left eye, the other by the corner of her mouth. Brisabois’s Russian princess.
He followed her, head down. It was pouring now. She led him up the broad, brightly lit avenue, crossing a couple of streets, and finally stopping in front of an old building on the corner of another large, noisy avenue. They stepped into the lobby to take shelter.
“This is the youth hostel,” she said. “I hope you will be comfortable.”
He nodded. She was intimidating. But not unpleasant to look at. She handed him a folded sheet of paper.
“This my address. I drew you a little map,” she explained. “Not far from here. So you can get there easily. I have time after tomorrow to show you. Sightseeing. The museums, the churches, the canals.”
He looked down at the paper: elegant feminine handwriting, a neat drawing of which streets to take to reach her place.
“Did Brisabois explain anything?” he asked.
She seemed puzzled. “Explain? He just asked me to show you around.”
Nicolas cleared his throat. “I am not here for sightseeing. Although it’s very kind of you.”
She frowned. “Well, what have you come for, then?”
He smiled. “To visit ghosts.”
He could tell she did not understand, so he hurriedly added, “I’ve come to find out more about my father and his family. He was born here. He died when I was a boy.”
A group of wet and merry young people stepping into the lobby jostled into them. They moved aside to let them past.
Lisaveta Sapounova took off her scarf. She had thick, lustrous dark hair, coal black eyes, smooth white skin.
“To find out what?” she asked.
“Who my father was. Where he came from.”
She looked up at him in silence for a few seconds, then smiled for the first time. It made her seem years younger.
“Da. I will help you,” she said, nodding. “Come day after tomorrow, for breakfast.”
“Horosho,” he said. It was one of the only Russian words he knew.
She smiled again, repeated the word, with the right accent, and asked, “Good. Do you prefer coffee or tea?”
“Tea, thank you.”
“Nine o’clock. Day after tomorrow. Do svidania. Till we meet again.”
She slipped away. Nicolas went up to the fourth floor. The place was clean, well kept. Some friendly Swedes shared his room. It was also their first night in the city. Their names were Anders and Erik. “What about a drink, a bite to eat?” they suggested. They’d met some girls earlier on, locals, who mentioned a fun bar not far off, with a band playing. Why didn’t he tag along? Nicolas did not want to spend the evening alone, so he accompanied the Swedes to the café, up another large street, through more persistent rain. The basement café was packed. The local girls were loquacious and entertaining. They spoke good English and ordered pickles, bouillon, blinis, vodka. One of the girls, Svetlana, got rapidly tipsy and excessively affectionate. Nicolas had a hard time keeping her off his lap. She kept climbing back on. Even after a couple of vodkas, she did not attract him; in fact, it was the opposite. As a loud band began to play and the small place became even more crowded and smoky, Nicolas lost them. He missed Delphine and wished she was here to share this with him. He felt tired and decided to leave.
On his way back, he got lost. In places, the wet streets smelled sour, as if the water was bringing up the odor from the sewers. A large golden church glowed through the darkness, a beautiful neoclassical structure, and he stared at it in awe before hurrying along. After more roaming, he found himself looking up from a canal at such spectacular onion-shaped domes, they made him forget the rain. A kind soul took pity on him and showed him the way back to the youth hostel. When Anders and Erik returned, more than drunk, he was asleep. They stumbled about the room, laughing inanely. Nicolas didn’t mind. He turned the light back on and watched them trip around the place, laughing along with them. The people in the next room came knocking, annoyed with the noise. It was late. The Swedes finally dozed off. One of them snored. Nicolas found that sleep eluded him. But it had nothing to do with the snoring. For the first time in his life, he was in the city where his father had been born forty-six years ago. That thought kept him awake for a long time.
Early in the morning, Nicolas used the communal bathroom as the others slept on. He planned to spend the day visiting the homes of his favorite Russian writers, those who had been born or who had died in his father’s city. The rain had stopped overnight. The morning light was pearly, the air crisp and cold. Pushkin’s house was by the Moïka canal. He found it easily. He had to bend over to get in through the low wooden door. A stern gray-haired lady barked at him in Russian, and when he blankly looked back at her, she gestured for him to slide protective plastic slippers over his shoes. He tiptoed through the silent blue-walled rooms and remained for a while in the poet’s study, which was lined with books. There was his walking stick, his pipe, his favorite armchair. Alexander Pushkin had died here on January 29, 1837, aged thirty-seven, mortally wounded after a duel with a Frenchman who was courting his pretty wife. Nicolas found the same reverential, hushed atmosphere in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s apartment at Kuznechny Pereulok. Like Pushkin, Dostoyevsky had also passed away in his office, suffering from a lung hemorrhage, on February 9, 1881. Another grim babushka waved Nicolas away from the great writer’s candlelit desk when he leaned in too far to admire its surface. This was where Dostoyevsky had written The Brothers Karamazov, where he’d prepared his famous speech for Pushkin’s memorial celebration, where he’d drafted the last issue of his Writer’s Diary, published posthumously.
Vladimir Nabokov’s birthplace on Ulitsa Bolshaya Morskaya no longer looked like what it must have been when the writer was born there in 1899. It now housed the editorial offices of a daily newspaper. But on the ground floor, Nicolas happily wandered through high-ceilinged rooms, where he found the famous collection of butterflies caught by Nabokov himself, index cards with Nabokov’s handwriting, his pince-nez and travel Scrabble set, photographs of him as a boy, and an old-fashioned typewriter. A sullen young man ushered him into a cubicle, where he was shown a video from 1963—in black-and-white, of appalling quality—on a squeaky TV that could only have been a relic of perestroika, but nevertheless, he could make out Nabokov’s voice speaking English with a Russian accent, then his round face and his piercing dark eyes.
It was Anna Akhmatova’s communal apartment near the Fontanka canal, where she lived for thirty years, that moved Nicolas the most, in a way he could not entirely explain or describe. The humble kitchen with its dingy sink bore the vestiges of troubled times, hardship, and suffering. It was from this tranquil spot that Akhmatova watched with dread as her city endured revolution, civil war, political terror, world war. He spent a while in her room, observing her low bed, her high wooden desk. When he left the premises, it was dark already. A large marmalade-colored cat mewed at him as he walked away.
The next morning, after a more restful night, he left the hotel early again with Lisaveta Sapounova’s address in his pocket. He stepped out of the building, turned left, and took the second street on the left, following her map. He came to a large canal that he had already seen the day before, near Akhmat
ova’s house. “Fontanka,” Lisaveta Sapounova had written in her neat handwriting. He paused for a while, looking around him at the gray-blue expanse of water, the patrician buildings lining it, their subtle, mellow colors. He understood now that in the heart of this city, built on a marsh by a tsar who hated Moscow, everywhere he looked, his eyes would find something to feast on. But his father had hardly known his birthplace, he reminded himself. How old was he when he left? Six months? A year? Théodore Duhamel had remembered nothing. He’d never come back. Neither had his mother, Nina.
Lisaveta Sapounova lived in a weatherworn edifice that bore a dignified grandeur, its crumbling facade decorated with Greek-like pillars and high square windows. Nicolas went up a large antique staircase that seemed about to collapse; graffiti had been sprayed all over the peeling paint of the walls. “Door number three,” she had written. He knocked. Nothing happened. He noticed a small doorbell, and pressed it. Somewhere in the recesses of the ancient house, a faraway tinkle was heard. Then the quick tap of footsteps. The old locks whirred and groaned. The door opened with a whine. Lisaveta Sapounova led him into a single enormous room with the highest ceiling he had ever seen. The view over the Fontanka was extraordinary. He went straight to one of the bay windows and cried out in delight. She watched him, nodding and smiling. He finally tore his eyes from the canal and looked at her. She was wearing a dark brown dress that had a 1940s look. Her hair was tied back. He could not help noticing her slim waist. She held herself straight, hands on a chair, standing in front of a round table, on which he saw a glistening samovar and a porcelain tea set.
The room was entirely lined with books—Russian, French, German, and English. In one corner stood an old-fashioned four-poster bed with faded gold-and-blue curtains. In front of the windows was a long desk, on which he saw a computer, notebooks, pens and papers, icons, and a miniature malachite pyramid. A sagging crimson velvet sofa and some Moroccan poufs were arranged facing a vast stone fireplace in which a modern kitchen unit had been built.