The Keeper of the Walls (19 page)

“Don't be so upset,” Claire said when they were riding across town in the silver Rolls. “Business is business. Your father didn't even come—it's a workday.”

“Papa didn't come because he's never socialized with the Robinsons. But Misha—I can't explain it. He left us there, alone—on purpose. Papa didn't come at all: you could use any excuse you wanted. But what can I say that Maryse and Wolf could possibly understand? That my husband didn't think they were important enough to miss a small meeting for their wedding reception? They
saw
him there: they
know
he wasn't ill. He did it to slight them.”

Claire was looking at her, puzzled. “And what makes you so belligerent?”

She shrugged, sighing. “It's just something that Wolf told me, not long ago. About people's reactions to Jews. Misha is, pure and simple, an anti-Semite. No different in any way from Papa.”

“No, no, there
is
a difference. Be fair to him, Lily.”

“It's not I who's unfair—it's him!” she cried. And then she closed her mouth and didn't speak until they arrived at the Avenue Henri-Martin.

On the drive back from Boulogne, where François, the chauffeur, had first dropped off Claire, Lily sat back, exhausted, and closed her eyes. For her, it had been a long, strenuous afternoon. The magnificent luncheon in the Robinson apartment, the good food, the shining cut crystal, Maryse's radiant face, Wolf's jokes—she saw all in chopped succession, like a series of quickly flashing snapshots.

She'd wanted so much to meet Leon Blum. But of course, he'd been surrounded by a group of gesticulating gentlemen, and she'd stayed on the outside, hearing bits and pieces. Aristide Briand was sure to win the Nobel prize for peace in the coming year, because of the Locarno agreements. Yes, she recalled hearing about that: the treaty among the French, the Belgians, the Germans, the British, and the Italians. Germany had promised to respect the Rhine frontier, set up in the Versailles agreements after the war. Everyone was happy about that. There wasn't going to be another war, even though Hindenburg, that war criminal, had recently been elected President of Germany. And anyway, just in case . . . there had been, last year, the mutual defense pact signed with Czechoslovakia. The gentlemen had all been in a good mood. In the end, she'd gone away, seeing that there was little chance for a word with the “real menace.”

And yet, at one point, Maryse had gone to him and put her arms around his neck, and said, gaily: “Well, Uncle Leon, are you really going to go into the kitchen and make our servants go on strike?” And he'd laughed, and swept her into the air, and answered half jokingly: “Is it necessary?”

At the door, on his way out, Wolf had detained him, and she'd gone over, once again. Wolf had made the introductions: “Monsieur Leon Blum, the Princess Brasilova.” He'd been quite charming. Inclining his head, bending over her hand, he'd said: “When a man meets such a lovely woman, does it really matter that he and her husband are on opposite sides?”

But she'd asked, seriously: “Is it true, really? That you and my husband are, as you say, ‘on opposite sides'?”

“As gentlemen, I'm sure we're not, Princess. But in the area of politics, certainly. Your husband is the last of the capitalists, and will fight to the end to maintain a capitalistic state. As for me, I've long since reached the conclusion that capitalism doesn't work. Too many people are hurt by it.”

“Then—why not participate in the formation of a cabinet?” Wolf had asked.

“Because we don't yet have a majority in the Assembly. And because power corrupts even the best of men. I'm trying to protect my people, Wolfgang.”

“But Misha isn't trying to hurt anyone,” Lily had interjected.

“Of course not, Princess. I'm sure the Prince is a very good man.”

“And a kind, generous one.”

“But what a man will do at home, and to what extremes his political feelings can drive him, are two entirely different things.”

She thought about that now, about the gentle, fatherly tone of the man who had told her this. And she wondered, suddenly, what Misha did or didn't do in the parts of his life from which she was excluded. And she was oddly troubled. What, really, were Misha's beliefs? After almost two years of marriage, she still wasn't exactly sure.

She felt the bumps on the road, opened her eyes, yawned behind a gloved hand. That other troubling moment: Claire's tears. And superimposed upon that, the vision she had caught of the Grand Rabbi of Paris, Julien Weill, better-looking than his brother-in-law, the Grand Rabbi of France. He'd been going to get a refill of poached salmon, when he'd suddenly noticed her mother, standing by the table, waiting for Maryse's brother to return with a glass of champagne for her. He'd seen her, because her person had crossed his field of vision: and he'd lifted his brows in surprise, the surprise of someone chancing upon an acquaintance one isn't expecting to encounter—an acquaintance who is liked. Lily had watched her mother, had seen the smile, the extended hand. She thought she'd heard him say: “Claire! And how are you?”

A brief encounter, to say the least. Afterward, in the car, she'd hesitated to bring any of this up, and she'd decided that the tears were too private a matter, but the rabbi, not. So she'd said: “I didn't realize you knew Grand Rabbi Weill.”

Claire had nodded, pensive. “Yes. I've known Julien Weill for quite some time.”

“But—how?”

“Well, my dear, when one is forty-five years old, as I am today, one can count any number of interesting acquaintances.”

No, Lily thought: she is trying deliberately to evade me.

In front of her, François, his cap neatly on his head, was maneuvering the car in front of the house on the Rue Molitor. Lily wondered if, when he and Annette went to bed, they ever discussed the speeches of Leon Blum, and if they, too, were “on opposite sides” from the Brasilovs. For whatever Misha thought or did, she was his wife, and she owed him her allegiance.

Why is it, she asked herself, that no one sees fit to tell me their own truths?

I
n December
1925
, Kira was born, almost exactly a year after the birth of her brother, Nicolas. Like him, she was born at home, under the supervision of Lily's doctor from the American Hospital in Neuilly, and a nurse who remained for two weeks. After that, Zelle was able to take care of both children. Kira was different from Nicky: where he possessed his mother's equanimity and serene disposition—a French calm—she was high-strung and nervous from the start, a true little Russian princess. She had her father's interesting coloring: his green eyes and black hair, his healthy, ruddy complexion. And like him, she was given to moodiness, even as a very small infant. It was impossible to predict if she would accept the bottle or reject it; and sometimes she cried insistently for no apparent reason.

After Kira, Lily didn't regain her strength. Somehow, when she wanted to climb out of bed, her head would begin to spin and she had to lie down again. She spent hours of the day lying down, the door of her boudoir closed against the noise of the babies and the servants. A long corridor separated the nursery from the rest of the apartment, and she felt little inclination to walk the distance more than once or twice a day to see what was going on there. Nicky had accepted the intruder: in fact, he took his toys into Kira's room every time Zelle permitted it. The servants had welcomed the new arrival. And Misha, when he came home from work, always spent the first hour playing with his son and holding his small daughter. Lily felt guilty; but also, the enormous exhaustion that swept over her daily was a good enough excuse not to spend much time around her children. It wasn't that she didn't love them; and it wasn't that they bored her. She simply couldn't face the corridor, and the noise, and their young vivacity.

Counting the hours during the day, Lily felt a wrenching loneliness for Maryse. The Steiners wrote to her often: bright, interesting letters about what they were doing in Vienna. Maryse loved it there, and had already made a circle of friends. She went to the theater and the opera and the ballet with her husband, and during the day, she took walks in the Prater with her mother-in-law and visited art galleries. The Steiner family was phenomenally wealthy. Wolf was the only child left, for his only sister had died ten years before, in a riding accident. His father owned a large mansion at number 2, Schwindgasse, where Maryse and Wolf had their own, sumptuously furnished apartment, and Wolf, his office. For weekend retreats they owned a beautiful villa in Baden, near Vienna, and for longer vacations, a magnificent old castle in Tobitschau, in the province of Moravia. The Steiner fortune came from seemingly inexhaustible coal mines in the heart of Austria, and people called them, respectful of their pocket-book, the “Barons von Steiner.” The famous diva Lotte Lehmann was a frequent visitor, and three times a week Wolf, who was an aficionado of the cello, was joined by a violinist and a pianist from the Philharmonic Orchestra, and played for his pleasure and Maryse's. The household servants were wonderful: at the last minute, they could put together a dinner party for twenty, or a picnic lunch for Maryse and a dozen friends. By the time Lily and Misha had celebrated their second wedding anniversary, in March, Maryse was still sending photographs that showed her slim and girlish, unmarked by pregnancy and unstoppable in the flow of her activities. If anything, she was busier and happier than during her single years in Paris, when she had been courted by every eligible bachelor who'd known her.

No, it wasn't exactly jealousy that Lily felt. But she was sad, when Misha left for work and she was alone. Except that she wasn't ever really alone: there were seven servants and two small children whose presence was felt even when her door remained closed. She was trapped. Maryse, in Vienna, was free. She came and went as she pleased, and her husband was delighted by all her friends and her stories about them. Wolf was a kind of confidant for his wife: they could talk for hours, analyzing people and events, or they laughed over any number of silly things that they had heard or seen. She, Lily, wouldn't have dared tell any such stories to Misha. He was, first of all, too judgmental; and, second, he would not have been amused by the foibles of people who didn't truly touch the sphere of his own life.

Lily stayed in her room, and steadfastly refused to enter the living room, where her piano, the Pleyel, elegant and noble, gleamed like a forgotten jewel at the bottom of a bank safe. And March rolled into April, and then into May. Raïssa Sudarskaya's telephone calls, never returned, became less frequent, and her notes, never answered, scarcer. And Misha, when he came home from work, went straight into the nursery to take note of the changes in his baby daughter, and to play some simple games with his little boy. He no longer asked how many times his wife had been there before him, and he didn't question Lily when he returned to her boudoir. Their conversation was quiet, polite, and impersonal. Neither knew how to bring it back to the present, to themselves, and to their family. He sat awkwardly at the dinner table, and tried to speak of events in the arts. And she sat across from him, always elegant in her understated fashion, pretending to care about what was going on outside their home. They sat, avoiding each other's eyes, and after dinner he sometimes asked her if she wanted to go somewhere, and when he did, she always demurred, because she was tired and felt weak. Then he would get dressed and go out, kissing the top of her head, and she never asked him where he was going, and he never told her.

But in the morning when Arkhippe's wife, Madeleine, came into the boudoir to wake her with the breakfast tray, Lily was always on one side of the bed, curled up like a small child; and when Arkhippe knocked on Misha's door, he always found his master sprawled out alone in the seven-foot bed, the pillow rumpled under his head, while on the other side, the other pillow sat starched and clean like a toy soldier at attention. The two servants never discussed this, but when they turned off their light in the privacy of their own room, they instinctively moved closer together, into the middle of their own double bed, to ward off the scent of bad luck.

M
isha parked his car
, locked it, and stepped outside, smelling the spring air of the city after nightfall. He loved the enveloping medieval quiet that always fell upon the Ile Saint-Louis, pulling him out of himself and into the scents and sounds around him. Sometimes he thought that he could almost feel the presence of Restif de La Bretonne, pungent chronicler of the last days of the French monarchy. Like Restif, he was always drawn to the unusual, to the strange, to people who, by occupation and status, ought never to have touched his existence. In Moscow, he had been irresistibly drawn to the pool halls of the underworld—and here? His acquaintanceships were certainly not limited to the elite of Paris whose palaces he frequented with his wife. He thought for a moment of Lily, imagining her reading quietly in her bed while he was out walking the streets of Paris.

He never liked to pursue thoughts that caused him guilty feelings; Lily was where she belonged, where he had placed her. She represented the most unsullied part of himself—the best, and the safest. Unlike him, she needed protection: she couldn't stand alone. He felt tremors that touched the deepest places of his heart, and stilled them.

He walked along the Quai de Bourbon, alongside the dark, silent waters of the Seine. Around him, the sculptured architecture of the seventeenth century spread itself out in elegant
hotels particuliers
that had witnessed the presence of Chopin and Baudelaire. In the distance, he could see the lighted ribbed arches of the cathedral of Notre-Dame. He crossed the street, and looked up. He was standing in front of an arched passage that led into a delightful enclosed garden. Le Vau had built the mansion to which it belonged, and, he thought with sudden anger, when Varvara had bought the place last year, relinquishing the more modest apartment on the Place Péreire, she'd paid a small fortune for the privilege of living here.

He crossed the garden, and rang the doorbell. Cécile Sorel,
grande dame
of the Parisian stage, had a palace on the Quai de Voltaire, not far away. Undoubtedly Varvara had wanted to reproduce Sorel's way of life, the way all parvenus sought to imitate the grandiose life-styles of those with old money. She'd done incredibly well for herself—especially when one remembered that she was forty years old, and fairly new to the stage. But she had ambition, and color. She'd been just exotic enough to conquer Paris. And now she was
somebody,
with her own place in the entertainment world of Paris. He'd done her a decided favor by divorcing her—even though she still, perversely, insisted on getting paid her five thousand a month no matter what: money that she no longer needed in any fashion.

Dragi, his thin black head wrapped in a turquoise turban, opened the door. “Ah, Monsieur le Prince . . . Madame is in her room.”

Misha smiled. Tonight he knew that she'd had no performance. “Please tell her I'm here,” he said, and watched the black
maître d'hôtel
undulate away, like a Magi prince, from the entrance hall into the inner recesses of the mansion. Knowing his way around, Misha passed the enormous jade Buddha from whose lips emanated a blasphemous jet of water that fell into a shell-shaped marble basin filled with Oriental fish. He climbed down three steps into the living room, hardly glancing at the domed ceiling composed of myriad small mirrors. He went past the Coromandel screens to a set of lacquered armchairs, and sat down. Perhaps he liked the unbelievable exoticism of her taste because it represented everything that he, in his own home, would find unacceptable. She was a person who left her indelible signature on everything she touched: a phenomenon that set his nerves on edge while at the same time fascinating him.

Dragi had silently made his appearance, and executed three Indian bows. “Madame would like Monsieur le Prince to come to her bedroom,” he said. It was difficult to recall, from the mellifluous accents of his voice, that he was actually an American from Ohio.

Misha stood up, and followed. They passed silk paintings of dragons spitting flames, and brass ornaments whose function he could not have guessed at. A pervasive scent of cinnamon and ginger seemed to cling to the very walls. At the opened door to his mistress's bedroom, Dragi turned, bowed almost in half, and eclipsed himself. Misha wondered how much money she was paying him to play this absurd charade, even in front of him, a familiar visitor privy to the truth.

Varvara was sitting cross-legged on her bed, which was elevated on a pedestal of black marble. It was sculpted in brass, and its cover matched the Chinese red of the raw silk walls. The ceiling was of cut crystal, and small tables and chairs of Chinese design, all of lacquered wood, were strewn around. A magnificent Persian rug, black, jade green, and red, had been set underneath all of this.

“Hello, Misha,” she said. She was wearing loose pajamas of gold silk, and no makeup. Even so, she seemed smooth and young, and strangely vulnerable with her large baby blue eyes. She was smoking a cigarette, blowing out the smoke in little circles in front of her. “I was just playing solitaire.” She waved at the cards in neat rows over her bedspread. “Do you want a drink?”

He shook his head, and went to sit on one of the chairs. He watched her as she carelessly gathered up the cards and tossed them down on her bedside table. Five nights a week,
le tout-Paris
came to see her in her own revue, a great painted Russian bird, on display; but he'd known her for almost twelve years. He remembered meeting her, at a dinner, and being captivated by the way she'd held her head, by the way she'd moved, by the way she'd laughed when somebody had paid her a compliment—and noticing, all the time, her nervousness, her boredom, her restless unhappiness. He'd been oddly moved by that, more than by anything else: a still young society woman, exciting to look at, admired and probably even desired, who felt alone. Now, watching her moving around in the comfort of her room, he thought again of that sadness, and of the defiant way that she had sought to disprove its very existence.

“I'm always surprised,” he said softly, “when I come here and find you alone, doing the everyday things that other women do.”

She cocked her head at him, amused. “I think that's why you still like me. You think that I'm some sort of sphinx-woman, larger than life. But I'm very simple, and down-to-earth, compared to you.
You're
larger than life, Misha. To me...to me, you're like the vastness of Mother Russia, hungry and demanding, spoiled and grand. That's why I fell in love with you, eons and eons ago, when both of us were young, and living was an art, and a passion, instead of commonplace and brutal.”

“But you haven't become commonplace, have you, Vava? Perhaps just a little brutal, though.” He smiled at her, and added: “I'll have that drink. I'm tired. God, how weary I feel! France does this, somehow. In Russia, when we set out to purchase land, or to add a new company to our growing enterprise, I could feel the taste of the hunt, and electricity all through my body. But the French are a nation of civilized sheep. How could any hunter worth his mettle go after a foolish, bleating sheep? Too much civilization stunts a people, Vava.”