The Keeper of the Walls Page 29

  A new doctor was on call, Marshak, a fellow Russian, and he told Misha that he was sorry, but that from now on, the patient would only be able to receive visitors between one and two in the afternoon. Also, one could go to the head nurse, and be taken to a door with two glass panes through which the patients could be observed.

  Misha walked out like an automaton. Claire was standing, alone, holding a cup of dark tea. She laid a gloved hand on his arm. “Come,” she said. “Drink this. You must! For him.”

  He turned his green eyes to her, and she saw the circles around them, the intensity of his look. “Do you know who lies on the other side of Papa?” he demanded. “Verlon! They’ve put the assassin next to him!”

  Claire didn’t reply. She simply held the cup up to his lips.

  After a while Claire seemed to have vanished, and he smelled an incongruously familiar perfume. He felt a hand on his shoulder. Almost angry at the intrusion, at the necessity of acknowledging yet another well-meaning friend, he turned to look up. Varvara, wrapped in gray astrakhan, with a fur bonnet on her red hair, was simply standing there. He breathed out with relief, and bowed his head. She sat down beside him, took his hand and played with it, soft caresses on his palm.

  “It’s in all the papers,” she said softly.

  He didn’t answer. Then she said: “It’s getting late. There’s a café across the street, where we could get a bite to eat. Then you can return to see him through the glass panel.”

  It would be his first meal in two days. Wearily, like a child being led by a wiser adult, he followed Varvara down the stairs and into the street. He could see some of the people he knew at the café, and felt, for a horrid moment, like running away in order not to face them. But Varvara’s fingers were closed tightly over his elbow. She marched him through the tables, answering with a distant smile the worried questions that many pairs of eyes were addressing her. Then she sat down with Misha and ordered hot soup, and coffee.

  “Speak to me,” he suddenly said, taking her hand and squeezing it in both of his. “Say something about—anything! The theater.”

  “There’s nothing to say about the theater. I’m an old hand at it now. Watch me: I’ll be like Sarah Bernhardt, or Réjane. I’ll grow old with my admirers. Although there’s nothing sadder than an old beauty queen.”

  Then Varvara sighed, and patted Misha’s hand. “Oh, dear God,” she whispered. “We all need a cause, don’t we? With you, it’s fighting the Communists; with me? I suppose it’s staving off poverty and obscurity. It’s not that I love the theater: it’s just that without it, who would I be? And there’s a need to be somebody, isn’t there?”

  “I don’t know anymore,” he replied, meeting her blue eyes with a strangely naked look.

  They ate their soup, drank their coffee, and then she led him back up to the ward, where he peered at his father through a glass partition. This was all the life he could feel now: to touch the glass with his forehead and chin, and to observe a semiconscious figure lying immobile behind a screen, which, for the purpose of his eyes, had been partially turned aside. He felt Varvara’s lips on the skin of his cheek, and then she was gone, only the warm scent of her perfume remaining. Varvara, Varvara. A woman like a river, ever changing yet forever constant.

  He was conscious with a jolt that she was forty-seven, and that she had succeeded in warding off the cruelty of time. His father had had no such pretensions: he’d only wished to live, to eat, to speak, to read in the quiet of his study. And to hold in his lap his grandchildren, his tie to the future and to his past, another link to his beloved wife, dead in another land.

  Misha thought, with so much pain that he had to turn away from the attendant: Where are these children now? And will I ever see them again? He’d lost, now, everything: his country, his mother, his wife, his children, his position and fortune . . . and, he felt with a peculiar intuitive certainty, his beloved father.

  The next day the streets were covered with sheets of impenetrable ice. He realized, with shock, that he had let the days go by without keeping track of them, and that it was already Saturday, December 2. He was greeted in the hospital corridor by the head nurse, who told him that the night had been a difficult one, and that the patient was worse: his stomach was swollen like a hard balloon. Dr. Marshak came at eleven, and looked pessimistic. Claire came, and sat with him outside the ward, then took him to the café across the street, where they shared a sandwich. Dr. Simkov came to them there, with a slightly more optimistic prognostication. Claire returned inside with Misha and took up vigil with him until Dr. Marshak returned at six thirty. The patient had a temperature of 38.8 Celsius, and his pulse beat one hundred sixty times per minute. His stomach was still swollen.

  Misha hadn’t been allowed inside at all that day. In the evening the nurses purged Prince Ivan’s stomach, and the temperature went down to 38.2, with the pulse at one hundred thirty. They told Misha that his father’s tongue looked better than it had all day. He looked in through the glass panel, but nothing seemed changed.

  At ten thirty, Dr. Marshak told him that Henri Verlon had died, and that it seemed as if the story had come out, through some of his daughter’s testimony as well as that of a gunsmith in the Aisne Department. The day before the fatal incident, Verlon had talked happily of his little house, and of how pleased he had been with the arrangements. Then, the next day, he’d gone out and bought two guns. He’d come to Paris looking for Prince Mikhail, and, according to Rochefort, had appeared definitely deranged. And for no apparent reason, he’d shot Prince Ivan, whom he had never seen in his life, and then himself. The only conclusion that could be inferred was that he had become temporarily insane, and had lost all contact with reality.

  But Henri Verlon’s daughter had another idea. She knew that when the refinery project had been let go, her father had lost all hope of ever getting out from the problems of making ends meet. He’d examined his life, and realized that his one hope had lain in making a great deal of money with the Brasilovs, as manager of the refinery. Instead of a small house in the country, he might have had a lifetime of cruises left for his old age. So that, having brooded for months upon the breakdown of his hopes, he had lost his mind in a paroxysm of frustration, and decided to shoot Prince Mikhail, whom he considered to be responsible. And when the younger man had been absent from his office, he had shot the father.

  Misha nodded, but Marshak’s words told him absolutely nothing. He didn’t care. It really didn’t make any difference who had tried to kill his father, or why. He was drained of all emotion, and put his coat on and walked out of the hospital.

  Outside, he ran into Varvara and a young girl about eighteen years old, whom he didn’t remember. Varvara said: “Misha, this is Ida Chagall, the painter’s daughter. I saw her at a benefit sale, and she particularly wanted to give you her sympathy.”

  “Your father is a great man, Mikhail Ivanovitch,” the girl told him. He was staring at her blankly, not understanding. “All the Russians in Paris admire him.”

  Finally the words seemed to penetrate. He answered, softly, “Thank you, Ida Markovna. But all the admiration in the world won’t repair his intestine. Medicine hasn’t found a way yet to mend such delicate organs. Today they refused to let me in to visit him.”

  Ida Chagall turned her head aside, and Misha knew that she had meant well. He said, curtly: “I’m sorry, ladies, but I’m very tired. Good night.”

  His footsteps crunched on the pavement, and he could almost feel Varvara’s eyes boring holes into his back, trying to see inside his soul. She’d done the best she could; but still, she had her benefits to attend, her notoriety to uphold. Someone else’s father was dying.

  In the car, he thought: Even the Jews, then, admired Papa. And he felt strangely stirred, and touched.

  In the morning the frost was less pronounced. Misha had gone to bed and been awakened by the telephone at midnight. Dr. Marshak told him things looked worse. At 2:00 a.m. the telephone rang again, and again at f
our. Finally, at six, he washed and dressed and left the house. The night nurse and the head nurse both told him that the patient was extremely ill, and the screen had been put completely around the bed so that, when he tried to see his father, he saw only the wooden slats.

  He tried to find Dr. Basset, and when he did, was told that it might last till nighttime. Misha went across the street to the café, and smoked half a pack of cigarettes. If this was the end, why then, good God, did it have to drag out this way?

  At one, he was let into the ward, and led to the bed. Prince Ivan looked changed. His eyes were hollow, and his cheeks were like pale parchment dotted with unkempt points of gray where his beard had grown. What a proud man he’d always been! He would have felt ashamed to see his own appearance, now, on the edge of death. Misha held his hand, and thought that the lips began to move. He bent down, tried to hear the words, but no sound emerged. At two o’clock he was still sitting in the same position, holding his father’s hand, trying to read his lips, and the strong nurse had to lift him half up before he realized that it was time to go.

  He went into the hallway, and leaned wearily against the wall. It was always drafty there, and he could feel himself trembling with a sort of fever. He half opened his eyes. Coming toward him, at the far end of the hall, was a woman in a dark coat, walking quickly. He watched her grow larger and larger, made out the long, well-shaped legs and the dark head of hair. And then his body was seized in a sort of paroxysm, and the dam ruptured. He felt the start of his own tears at the same moment that he felt her arms go about him.

  At 4:00 a.m., when Dr. Basset found him to tell him that this was the end, he found them sitting together, wordlessly, holding hands. They went in together, and sat on either side of Prince Ivan as he breathed his last agonizing moments. Then she bent down to close his eyes, and brushed his forehead with her lips. “Good night, Papa,” she whispered, and the room was still.

  Outside the gray of early morning greeted them, aureoled with pink. They walked aimlessly, holding each other tight, mute against the sharp sounds of the waking birds. Finally they sat down on a bench, and she held his head against the warmth of her neck. He was afraid to ask her if she planned to go away, now that it was over. And she didn’t want to say, because her own grief had been so small compared to his. The enormity of life and death swayed over them both.

  She held him until they entered the car, and when he inserted his key into the lock of the apartment, he went quickly into one of the bathrooms so as not to be in her way. But when he emerged, afraid, she wasn’t in the living room. He called out her name, “Lily!” and went, hesitantly, to his bedroom. She was already inside the bed, her dark hair loose about her shoulders.

  And so he undressed, aware of the ticking sounds of time passing, and went to her. Under the cold sheets, he could feel the heat of her body near him. He was afraid to touch her, but the pain of death had been too strong, too wrenching, and so he moved toward her, conscious that, in the same moment, she had moved toward him.

  They welcomed the strength and power of their bodies merging, warding away the terror of death and reaffirming their own pulsing life, and as he fell asleep he remembered that he still hadn’t asked her what her plans were. But her head lay in the crook of his neck, and her hair caressed his chest with the softness of pussywillows, and so he let his mind drift off in peace, for the first time in many months.

  God had taken someone dear from him, but had given him back a treasure he had thought lost forever.

  Chapter 14

  It was better for everybody to start a fresh life, and when Philippe de Chaynisart proposed to Misha that he move his family into a small suite at the Hotel Rovaro, this seemed to solve many problems at once. It would have been impossible to remain at the Avenue Paul-Doumer apartment, and to live surrounded by the mementos of Prince Ivan, knowing that he would never be with them again. Misha wasn’t the kind of man to hang on to mementos: he preferred to turn the page, and thereby to accept his father’s death. It seemed far better to let all his private memories live on in his spirit—and to keep only those few things that had a particular sentimental value to him. He kept the ruby cuff links, and a few other items. The rest was put up for public auction.

  And, of course, the best part about the hotel was that there was no rent to pay. There were drawbacks, however. The suite was very small. In the bedroom was the big bed, and a small cot for Nicky. Kira slept on the divan in the living room. Misha marveled within himself at his wife’s easy adaptability. She appeared not to miss the large apartment and the many servants. And because of her attitude, the children didn’t question the arrangement, either.

  Kira and Nicky had immediately gone exploring, discovering the kitchens and the multitude of servants always full of stories. They’d sat down Maurice, the old bellhop, and made him tell them all his anecdotes about the people who had lived at the hotel. There was the Pink Lady, dressed in shocking pink with boa feathers, who’d run out of her suite in the middle of the night, in a pink nightgown, screaming “Fire! Fire!” only to have the Baron Charles discover that the “flames” she’d seen had been her husband’s red bathrobe left hanging in the bathroom, aureoled by a yellow light bulb he’d forgotten to turn off. And the American heiress from Iowa who’d asked Maurice why she couldn’t seem to find the man she’d fallen in love with: they’d met on a ship, his name was Andre, and she’d walked up and down “Main Street” looking for him. The children loved these tales of human foibles, and the old man in his red uniform with the elegant gold braiding on the shoulders and cuffs.

  Lily usually took the children by bus to their lycées, at eight in the morning, and then walked home. At eleven she would walk again to pick them up for lunch, strolling back so that they would get their exercise. They lunched at the hotel, and often Misha joined them. Lunch was from twelve thirty to one o’clock. There were days when the rotund Philippe de Chaynisart stopped at their table to drink a cup of coffee. Lily liked him; but he was not, she thought, as affable and congenial as he wanted others to believe he was. One had to stay on one’s toes, but this was not a problem for the Brasilovs. He’d taken Misha under his wing, and had approved all the changes the latter had been making.

  Lily had gone through her old belongings, and put everything up for auction with Prince Ivan’s things. It hadn’t been easy; but there was no choice anymore, and the suite was small. Claire had taken the Pleyel piano. Misha borrowed one of the smaller upright pianos from one of the lounges, where it was never used, and had it brought up to the living room. And so, twice a week, Raïssa Markovna Sudarskaya would come to give the two children their lessons, as before.

  Life was cramped, and there were almost no luxuries left. Sometimes, Lily thought back on the life she had left behind in Vienna. The Steiners had wrapped themselves around her like a warm matrix, yet she had been, for the first time in her life, on her own. She felt a twinge of regret, for those moments alone, for those moments with them ...for the fact that there, she hadn’t been somebody’s wife, but just herself, Lily. Yet it felt good to be “home,” to sleep every night with Misha, to forget the hurts and the anguish that had separated them. She needed to be here, not just for herself and him as a couple, but to give the children a stability that they’d missed. They were completed by their father: without him, and his strong love, they’d been just a little disconnected, in spite of all the love that had come from other corners.

  And Mark? Lily didn’t have much free time for reflection, except when she was walking back and forth to the lycées. But then, watching the frostbitten trees, she would sometimes think back on that lovely spring, on the moments she had been with him, simply talking, or silent with memories. But Mark, like her own self-sufficiency, was part of the past—a stolen moment of friendship, of awakened hope, of . . . ? She couldn’t tag a name to the sentiment.

  The morning of February 6, 1934 began with a sharp, gray wind. After she had taken the children to school, Lily went to the Stock boo
kstore. When she came home, Claire telephoned and asked her to join them for dinner at the Hotel Crillon. A veterans’ parade had been planned for the evening, but rumor had it that this would be the excuse to launch a massive riot to oust Premier Édouard Daladier and the other lame politicians whom the French Right was blaming for the Stavisky scandals. “I don’t know if I should leave the Rovaro,” Lily said hesitantly.

  “Aunt Marthe is here, darling. You can’t not come. She’s very old now and only comes to Paris once or twice a year. Last year, and the year before, you were in Vienna.”

  Aunt Marthe Bertholet was Paul’s father’s sister, and was at least seventy-three. She had married a man who had become an electrician, in Nantes, near the Loire. He had worked hard, and developed an invention dealing with storage batteries. Eventually he had patented this and opened a large factory, becoming quite wealthy. Then he had died, leaving his widow a considerable fortune. When one traveled through the fields of France, posters still greeted one’s eye, saying bertholet batteries, at least as many as those that advertised the newspaper Le Matin and that other staple of the French marketplace, Amer Picon.

  She was tall, thick, with a bull’s neck, a head that was round like a marble, with half-closed eyes and a potato nose that emerged from fat cheeks, and her mouth was crooked. For some reason, she had always believed that she was an irresistible beauty. Her husband, Uncle Alfred, had died twenty years before, and she had often wondered, out loud, why no rich and fascinating young man had presented himself in the interim. Lily found Aunt Marthe the most disagreeable woman she knew; but, once a year, she came to Paris and insisted on seeing her “beloved family.” If she could avoid it, Lily skipped this rendezvous, and very rarely took the children. But Claire, out of a sense of duty because the old woman was alone in the world, always made it a point to meet with her and act as her companion during her week’s visit. She always stayed at the Hotel Crillon, at the Place de la Concorde, midway between the Champs-Élysées and the Ile de la Cité across the Seine River. It was a stately mansion built in the late eighteenth century by the architect Gabriel, and Aunt Marthe felt that it was the only hotel in Paris good enough for her patronage. “A lady can entertain so well there,” she would announce for all to hear, in her nasal voice.