The People in the Photo (8 page)

Paris, 10 March (email)

Dear Stéphane,

No news is good news, though given your current location, it wouldn’t surprise me to hear you had no reception.

It’s been quite a difficult day here. I went to see the solicitor straight after work: a very affable man, accompanied by a blushing intern looking awkward in his suit. My parents had clearly had their wills drawn up some time ago; everything has been left in good order, with no debts to pay. I’m to inherit the apartment on Rue de l’Observatoire, a number of bonds which will enable me to pay the inheritance tax, and a studio flat in Brittany. So here I am, a home-owner in Paris at going on for forty. As I listened to the will being read out, I pictured Sylvia with her slim glasses perched on the end of her nose, settling each item patiently and methodically, as was her way.

Her only stated wish was that if possible their shared library of books should not be dispersed. That was not my intention in any case. I am, however, going to try to find a way to have it moved from Rue de l’Observatoire.
I couldn’t face living there without them, surrounded by memories … Anyway, if you’re ever in need of a Parisian pied-à-terre, from now on you’ll be spoilt for choice.

Once he had finished reading, the solicitor told me he had something else he’d been keeping in trust for me: a small leather case Sylvia had given him three years earlier with instructions to pass it on to me after her death. The solicitor doesn’t know what it contains; he put a lock and chain around it and has given me the key. Since I had nothing to carry it in, the intern handed me a plastic FNAC bag. I took the métro home with the bag on my lap, thinking what bizarre ways our parents have contrived to remember themselves to us. As I write, I haven’t yet mustered the courage to open the case, which is still sitting on the kitchen counter. I’m beginning to be wary of the surprises our families have kept in store for us. Give me a ring when you can.

Thinking of you,

Hélène

Hawaii, 10 March (email)

Dearest,

Back safely from Big Island, it was magnificent. I’m exhausted. Will write again very soon.

Love and kisses,

Stéphane

Hawaii, 11 March (email)

Dearest Hélène,

I’ve only now managed to find the time to write to you, what with my teaching and recovering from the expedition to Big Island (extraordinary, breathtaking scenery). If you behave yourself, I’ll bring you here one day. Despite the view over the car park and the
plastic-wrapped
pasteurised fruit, I’m beginning to find this place increasingly interesting. Earlier, on the campus, I picked a hibiscus flower off the grass and in my mind I put it in your hair. For a second I sensed your presence beside me, so real that it left me feeling perturbed.

While I understand your reticence, I’m burning with impatience to find out what the leather case the solicitor gave you contains: if I were in your shoes, I don’t think I’d be able to stop myself from peeking inside, like a little boy dipping his finger in the jam jar. I’m willing to bet that it contains the explanation to everything you and I have been trying to understand over the last year. And that’s what we hoped for from the start, isn’t it?

Meanwhile, do you remember I told you that the photograph of your mother reminded me of a familiar
setting? Now I know where it was taken: not far from Besançon. As a child I used to go for walks near that little chapel, sitting on my father’s shoulders, or with my grandmother Séverine. There is now little doubt that our parents used to see each other, even though they were both married. But what I can’t understand is how Nataliya came to be there: I find it hard to imagine Pierre bringing his woman friend (his mistress?) into his mother’s house. Or maybe they were holed up in a nearby hotel, in secret? But why there rather than in Paris or Geneva? It’s a mystery.

My colleagues are waiting for me to go and have dinner. That’ll be all for today, my love.

Tender kisses,

Stéphane

Paris, 12 March (email)

Dear Stéphane,

You’re right. Of course. And deep down, I want to know what’s in it too. But I’m putting it off like a coward until Friday night, when the working week is over and I’ve had a chance to psych myself up for whatever I find.

You haven’t said any more about the photos you had developed in London. What was on the film in the end?

Kisses, distant wanderer,

Hélène

Honolulu, 12 March (email)

Dear Hélène,

Nothing of great interest, just snowscapes. I’ll show them to you when I’m back.

Love,

Stéphane

Paris, 14 March (email)

Dear Stéphane,

Delighted that all is going well. It was late in your part of the world, but I couldn’t resist hearing your voice. While I was looking through my window at the Paris sky, I could picture you over there in the warm rain you described.

I had a very different kind of phone call this evening, from Boris, the Russian lecturer, who told me he was about two-thirds of the way through the translation. From his tone of voice, I could tell something wasn’t right. He kept asking if I knew the people mentioned in the diary, if they were still alive today. Anyway, he wants to talk to me in person before handing over what he’s done; in fact he was very insistent about it. So he’s going to drop in next Wednesday.

Still haven’t worked up the courage to open the case. To take my mind off my cowardice, I decided to visit Rue de l’Observatoire to check everything was in order. The apartment has a sadness to it now, in a way it didn’t while Sylvia was in hospital, a different kind of emptiness. I can’t bear the thought of getting rid of
all their things – dividing up some, selling the rest, and moving boxes and boxes of books.

I spent the whole evening there in the end, sitting on the floor of the library. Every so often, I detected Sylvia’s perfume on the pages of a book she had held between her hands. She was the one who introduced me to Vicki Baum, believe it or not, and I found the series of 1960s paperback editions she used to pass on to me after she had finished them, with their slightly crisp pages and unmistakable smell. I had no idea she owned a first edition of Apollinaire’s
Alcools
– it must be worth a fortune now.

An even more surprising find was a dog-eared copy of Nabokov’s
Ada or Ardor
with notes scrawled in the margins and métro tickets and a restaurant bill shoved inside. I find it hard to believe Sylvia would treat a book so badly and even harder to imagine my father reading that kind of novel.

Michel’s Bible was squeezed between two encyclopedias. Judging by the thick coating of dust on it, he can’t have opened it very often these past few years. A black and white postcard used as a bookmark had been left inside. The picture showed a cluster of buildings, one of them with a little steeple, at the foot of a mountain (‘Interlaken und die Jungfrau. 4,367m’). It was sent from Interlaken on 17 June 1970:

‘My dear Michel. Getting lots of rest and enjoying the magnificent scenery. Maman told me Lena visited the zoo. With love, Nathalie.’

I sat there turning the little rectangle over in my hands – a piece of card my mother’s hand had touched – tracing the beautifully neat handwriting with my fingertips. So here we are again, back where we began. What was she doing there, with her husband’s full knowledge?

Tender kisses,

Hélène

Hawaii, 15 March (email)

Dearest Hélène,

I’m thinking of the way children play hunt-the-thimble: ‘you’re cold, warm, boiling’. For us adults it’s more like: ‘cold, warm, you’re getting burnt’. Fear is not necessarily cowardice, Hélène.

We have fantasised so much about our parents, young, beautiful, imagining a love affair that was very romantic when all is said and done … It is tempting to stop there and to hold on to the idyllic image of a couple under an arbour. Except that, if we run away from the past once again, I fear that sooner or later we’ll be presented with the bill of unanswered questions, plus interest.

If you prefer, we can wait until I’m back. But perhaps your curiosity will get the better of you, and that will enable me to satisfy my own. I’m burning too, but to know, I think.

All my love,

Stéphane

Paris, 16 March (email)

Dear Stéphane,

I did it, I opened the case. Inside, I found a letter, from Sylvia, folded around another sealed envelope, along with two albums bound in blue morocco.

There they were, the photos of my mother I had never been allowed to see, painstakingly ordered, arranged and captioned in what must have been Sylvia’s personal collection. She and Nataliya as little girls with plaits, and then as teenagers in the Saint-Serge days. A picture taken on a café terrace in which my mother is reading Nabokov (now everything’s coming together) with a cigarette in her hand. One of your father with his arm around her neck as they queue for the cinema. The two of them on the beach, my mother’s willowy frame vaguely resembling Catherine Pozzi, the poet (have you read her?). A photo from her wedding to Michel, too, taken at the top of the steps of Saint-Serge. He was a handsome man in his youth, my father, with his uniform and cap, and he was beaming with happiness that day; his young wife a little less so. And then a Polaroid picture of me, my mother and my grandparents. In a
split second I could see myself back there, with the fat cat almost as big as me, the smell of lavender and ether when my grandfather kissed me and my mother’s blue dress,
goluboye
: my memory of the word comes from there.

I didn’t feel like delving any further. I was starting to wheeze again, a sign I should stop. Boris is coming this week and I still need to read Sylvia’s long letter. I fell into bed without any dinner and slept for six hours straight, which hasn’t happened in weeks. I only got up to write to you.

Loving thoughts,

Hélène

Hawaii, 16 March (email)

Dearest Hélène,

Part of me is sorry not to be with you at this time which I imagine is very unsettling; another feels it is probably better that this reunion should take place in private and solitude. How hard it must be to have to relearn that whole lexicon of childhood which was stolen from you. Mine was incomplete, but at least I know the people and the stages, and besides, I’ve always had the photos too.

I can’t wait to be back. When I need some time to myself, I go to the park and memorise its fifty-five native species. I now know every heady or fetid fragrance by heart. No matter how far away we are, we still cling to our routines, the classes, seminars and lunches. And the nights go by, in the loneliness of my air-conditioned room, filled with nostalgia, emotion too, when I think what time it is in Paris.

You are particularly in my thoughts this evening.

Love,

Stéphane

Paris, 17 March (email)

Dear Stéphane,

I had a nightmare earlier. I was driving a car, even though I knew I didn’t have a licence, and you were in the passenger seat. Before long, the road began to melt beneath us. You were making light of it, but I knew for certain we were going to die there, smothered in tar. I woke up covered in sweat.

So I got up, went into the kitchen, lit a cigarillo and opened Sylvia’s letter.

I cried so much, the tears are still flowing now. I don’t know how to say this … We were right, at least broadly so, but we had missed many of the links of cause and effect. Now at least we can say there was a logic to what happened between our parents, if nothing more.

The worst of this is seeing just how wrong Sylvia and Michel got it, in their desperation to protect me at all costs. In that regard, the letter is like a switch in a dark room: everything, absolutely everything makes sense in light of its contents. I ask myself how they could have been so stupid. And yet I can’t even bring myself to be angry with them.

I’ll scan these pages for you now rather than await your return, since the letter concerns you as much as me and I expect you’re eager to know what it says. I didn’t like to open the other letter though. I don’t know how it ended up there, but it’s not addressed to me and I won’t read it.

After I’d finished reading, I replayed every step of our journey in my mind, looking down from the window at the rear lights of the cars dancing silently in the Paris night. It’s dawning on me that having immersed ourselves in the past, chasing after the shadows and mysteries of other people’s lives, time is suddenly pushing us onwards, together, relentlessly. And it will snuff us out too, when our turn comes. Stéphane,
dorogoy
, who will remember us when we’re gone?

But for now, the question I ask above all others is what you’re going to think of them.

Hélène

Paris, 16 June 2004

My dear Hélène,

By the time you read these words I will have departed this world. First and foremost I want you to know how much your father and I loved you, and I hope you never doubt it. You have been our ray of sunshine, bringing us joy and, later, such pride. Life dealt me a cruel hand in not giving me children, but it made amends by allowing me to be a mother to you. When I look at you now and the person you have become – so generous and
sweet-natured
– I tell myself yes, we made a lot of mistakes, but at least we succeeded in surrounding you with the love you so deserved. You know I don’t believe in the hereafter, yet a little part of me hopes that wherever I end up, I will be with your father again and together we can continue to watch over you.

It has been two weeks since the doctor told me I am suffering from Alzheimer’s, but I had seen it coming a long way off; there were too many holes in my memory, too many muddles. I’ve read up on it and I know what’s going to happen: I will begin to forget, first the recent past, then more distant memories. There may come a day
when I am no longer able to recognise you. Naturally I hope my lungs will have carried me off before then, but I have to consider all the practical consequences now.

There is one thing I want to do before I go and while my memory is still intact – at least, those memories that concern you. Something I should have done long ago, but I lacked the courage. And I don’t know how to broach the subject with you now; I can’t bear the thought of throwing you off balance or making you unhappy. But neither can I stomach the prospect of taking this secret with me to the grave, leaving you to inherit nothing but unanswered questions.

My solicitor will hand this letter to you after my death. It’s a convenient solution – too convenient, perhaps, but at least it means you can choose when to read it and put it aside if you don’t feel ready yet. I want to tell you about your mother, Hélène – your mother, Nataliya Zabvina, who died soon after you turned four and about whom we have hidden the full truth from you. You will find two albums inside this box filled with photos of her and me, along with the last letter sent by someone very dear to her. She never got the chance to read it. It’s for you to decide what to do with it.

I’m ashamed to think of all the times you came to me with your sweet little face, asking questions which I systematically avoided answering. But you must understand, your father didn’t want us to talk about your mother and I was afraid of opening up old wounds which had taken years to heal. I say ‘you must
understand’, but in fact you’re perfectly entitled not to understand, to hate me even. What we did, holding back the truth for so long, was wrong, deeply wrong, and I’m all too aware of it.

Your mother, Nataliya (whom we called Natasha) and I were childhood friends. Her parents had come over from Russia at the end of the war; her father was enlisted in the Germans’ forced labour programme and feared reprisals should he return. Before the war in St Petersburg – or Leningrad as it was then called – he had been a brilliant and highly regarded young doctor and had even published a short paper on paediatric ophthalmology. Afterwards, he was merely a wretched exile like so many others in Europe who had lost everything. But he thanked God he had escaped with his life.

In 1947 he managed to get his wife, Daria, and their daughter out of Austria (where they had fled at the end of the war) via Germany to join him in Paris. The first thing he did was get a job in a factory to feed himself and his family. Due to medical council red tape, he had to re-sit some of his exams at the university in Paris, and it wasn’t until late in 1953 that he was finally given approval to practise again. He opened a small surgery on Rue de la Mouzaïa where he was mainly a general practitioner, and transferred to the 12th
arrondissement
as soon as he was able. Before long he had built up a patient base there, this time practising his specialism. The move had symbolic significance for
him: a fresh start in a slightly smarter neighbourhood where he was no longer the humble factory worker returning to medicine, but the venerable Dr Zabvine, ophthalmologist. He mostly treated children; his young patients adored him for his humour and Russian accent, and their mothers were won over by his old-fashioned manners. It’s true he was a very funny man, always playing pranks on his wife such as swapping the flour for icing sugar or pretending to listen to the chicken’s heartbeat before carving it. Religion was almost the only thing he never joked about.

Natasha, then, arrived at the same time as her mother, not quite two years after the war had ended. She was six years old at the time, and didn’t speak a word of French. I met her a few years later, in the penultimate year of primary school, when we sat together in class. Since my parents, who had emigrated before the war, had taught me Russian at home, we soon began conversing in the language and quickly became inseparable. You wouldn’t believe how often we were scolded! Writing lines of ‘I must not chatter in Russian during mathematics lessons’ was our daily punishment. Not only that, but Natasha was even worse than Oleg; if ever there was a chance to be silly, she leapt at it. Once or twice we were called names like Russki, or told to go back where we came from, but overall my memories of that time are happy ones, the whole gang of us hurtling crazily down Rue de la Mouzaïa on our old bicycles.

Your mother loved music and had a very pretty
voice. Her father scrimped and saved to pay for lessons with a Russian émigré pianist even worse off than he was. Your grandmother who, like many refugees, had become very devout in exile, enrolled Natasha in the parish choir of Saint-Serge in the 19th
arrondissement
. It was there that your mother met the boy who went on to become her closest friend. His name is, or was – I don’t know if he’s still alive – Jean Pamiat. He came from a family of White Russians who had emigrated in 1917. Jean was an incredible character, always dressed like an aristocrat despite not having a
sou
to his name. He had just come back from military service – he was older than us – and was working around the Buttes-Chaumont as a photographer’s apprentice. He would have us all in stitches with his impressions of the rector of Saint-Serge; he only came to church for the music. It was a funny time, you know. Some of the kids really didn’t have much; they would wear their fathers’ old suit jackets and shoes with holes in them, and had no concept of what a holiday meant. But at the same time, when I think back to my childhood, my memory is of a lost paradise.

Natasha and I remained friends throughout secondary school and we sat the baccalauréat in the same year; she specialised in philosophy while I took maths. We were closer than ever. I was very fashion-conscious and always dressed up to the nines (you know me); she would walk about with one sleeve twisted, her collar sticking up and her hair all over the place, as though her
body wouldn’t let her clothes have the last word. Yet there was something irresistible about her. She had all the boys falling at her feet and she didn’t even notice, because all she cared about was music. I should have been jealous, but it was impossible to hold anything against her for more than three seconds because her wit (which could be ferocious) and generosity were so infectious. She was one of those people born with a kind of light inside them, drawing us to them in awe and wonder.

Both of us passed the
bac
with good grades, and I had my first hangover after the little party Oleg and my father threw in our honour, both of them bursting with pride. That same year the Zabvines moved house, but as we had both enrolled at the Sorbonne – Natasha to study English and I history – we still saw a lot of each other. Books were expensive in those days, so we both did a bit of teaching to make ends meet. The one luxury we allowed ourselves was a daily copy of
Le Monde
; we would separate the pages and take turns reading them. Occasionally we would stop off at a bar on our way home from Sainte-Geneviève library, sipping our café crèmes and sharing our dreams for the future. I wanted to teach history, whereas Natasha had plans to become a psychoanalyst or a novelist. That was what marked us out from most girls of our age, and the main reason we got on so well: we were nonconformists. We had no desire to get married and end up like our friends’ sisters, with three children by the age of thirty and a life
divided between shopping, washing-up and laundry. This didn’t always make us very popular with the boys.

Midway through our first or second term, I can’t remember precisely, Natasha began to change. She became moody, distant, suffering spells of gloom that were very unlike her. I kept asking what was wrong until she finally admitted that Jean Pamiat had introduced her to one of his army friends, a photographer, and she hadn’t stopped thinking about him since. She was losing sleep over it and could barely eat.

So, feeling very pleased with myself, I did what good friends do: I went to persuade Jean to set up a date between this young man, whose name was Pierre, and your mother. They fell, as the saying goes, head over heels in love, and were engaged within two months. I have rarely seen two people so strikingly well matched. They were like two faces of the same being – just seeing them walk down the road together brought a lump to your throat, and they turned heads wherever they went. The Zabvines, on the other hand, were rather less enchanted. Firstly, because Pierre was eight years older than your mother; and secondly, because he did not have what we would nowadays call a ‘stable income’, and was living off photographic commissions and odd jobs. It had been such a struggle for Oleg to lift his family out of relative poverty that he could not bear to hand his daughter over to an impoverished ‘artist’. But what Daria could not forgive Pierre was his agnosticism and irreverence towards all forms of religion, which he saw
as an insult to human intelligence. She had caught him quoting one or two of Voltaire’s anti-religious jibes, which did not go down well at all.

And so, after almost a year, your grandparents made Natasha break off the engagement. Such a statement must sound ridiculous to a woman of your generation, but it wasn’t for ours, I can assure you. We were still minors until the age of twenty-one and getting married without permission was out of the question. On top of that, Natasha had no money, had not finished her studies, and the Zabvines had threatened to cut her off; Pierre, meanwhile, was already on the breadline. In my opinion, if the Zabvines had felt they had no choice in the matter, they might have backed down, but there you are. The real problem was that Natasha adored her parents and they her, and she chose to suffer rather than cause them pain. And so it was with the heaviest of hearts that she agreed to leave her fiancé. Poor thing, she cried so many tears that year; poor things, I should say, because it was a terrible time for Pierre too. I know he begged her to change her mind, and went to see Oleg too, but nothing could persuade your grandparents to go back on their decision.

Afterwards, Natasha never quite regained the joie de vivre I knew and loved; it was as if part of her had been shut off and she had suddenly aged by several years. She fooled around less, instead making cruel sarcastic remarks which were completely out of character. For several years, she refused to set foot in a concert hall; she
couldn’t bear to hear a single note without Pierre, with whom she had so enjoyed listening to music. In spite of everything, he had asked her to keep the engagement ring and she continued to wear it on a chain around her neck. Soon after she broke off their engagement, Pierre left Paris for Switzerland. When she found out, Tasha was despondent, because of course she still loved him. She just about managed to finish her degree, after I had badgered her to turn up for her exams. She scraped a pass, with much lower marks than she deserved, and then looked for work. It was around that time we began to drift apart.

She found a job through one of Oleg’s patients, a lawyer who needed an English-speaking secretary. She was still living with her parents, not far from Cours de Vincennes. We sometimes went to the pictures together on the few evenings I took off from revising for my teaching exams. Once or twice she brought someone with her, a nice boy called Vladimir or Vasily or something, but he wasn’t on the scene for very long. I don’t think she had got over her broken heart. We no longer saw Jean Pamiat, who had also left for Switzerland, but he wrote to us. I heard – from him, I suppose – that Pierre had got married two years after the engagement was broken off and had a little boy. I never told Natasha.

She had become quite secretive herself. Her lawyer boss had ended up asking her to marry him, but she turned him down, much to her parents’ displeasure. I
had failed my teaching exams and while weighing up whether or not to enrol for a PhD in history, I took a job at the Bibliothèque Nationale to tide me over. I ended up staying there for the rest of my career, and I think I was happier than I would have been teaching a class of teenagers. At that point, I was only seeing Natasha every three or four months; I had started going out with one of the librarians at work, and we ended up getting married in 1963. Your mother and Jean were my witnesses.

Sadly, my husband, who was also called Jean, died two years later from a poorly treated collapsed lung. I was devastated, as you can imagine – it was all so sudden. Had it not been for Natasha, I think I might have done something stupid. She supported me, kept me company, even came to live in our apartment for a few months so she could make sure I was eating and help me through my grief. Things slowly got back to some kind of normality. The years went by and I carried on living the life of a young widow. Natasha in her
mid-twenties
was still ‘on the shelf’, as they say; being unmarried at that age was cause for concern in those days. After refusing the lawyer’s proposal, she changed jobs and was now employed by a publisher, compiling English grammar textbooks. She enjoyed her work. She had moved out of her parents’ home and was living in a little studio near the Jussieu campus. We used to rent a house in Brittany together for a week every year. One summer, she confided she was afraid of what the future
held, and that her parents were driving her up the wall saying she was going to end up an old maid.