The Russian Album (24 page)

‘Hi, Uncle,' the Chinaman says as Lino and I come in. ‘This your family from Russia?' ‘He's from London,' Lino says slowly. ‘You must be happy man, he come see you.' ‘I am happy,' Lino says. His legs are bent and he shuffles to a booth and lowers himself down slowly. He wears a pith helmet. He shows me the initials on the hatband and says he checks them to know which way to put it on. He takes the bus to this shopping mall once a month to get his hair cut. ‘There is not much to cut,' he says, rubbing his bald head. Afterwards he comes to this café and has tea and almond cookies. It is his major outing.

As a little boy, he grinned madly from the photographs in his father's arms in front of the wicker bathing hut at Misdroy. He is a Mestchersky like his mother but thinner, more finely featured than his brothers. The mad grin of childhood is replaced now by a whisper of a smile. He seems uninterested in the past.

I tell him I've been back to Beauchamps. ‘It must be overgrown by now.' He smiles, takes a nibble from the almond cookies. I ask him whether he remembers the view of the sea from his bedroom window. He looks puzzled. ‘The sea?'

He says, ‘I have something called Parkinson's disease. Do you know about it? It makes my hands shake.' He holds out his spidery hands. His mother's hands. They buzz with a barely perceptible tremor, like current humming through a line. ‘I also have had what they call depression. Here,' and he points to a place on the top of his head. ‘I received treatments, you know.'

My father had to sign the forms. They put the block between Lionel's teeth; they tied him down, they coursed the current through his limbs. They have stabilized his condition.

‘In the hospital I met some exceedingly interesting people, people I would never have met in the world outside. They were depressed too.' This bone-thin traveller, the mildest and gentlest of the brothers, has been in the locked wards. He was the one who paid the price.

‘I ask myself many times. What is this depression? I think I know.' He holds his coffee cup between thumb and forefinger and brings it delicately to his lips in a gesture from another time. There is Tina Turner on the radio. He is a long way from Petersburg. He says, ‘Depression is not having a purpose in life.'

His brothers say he is the one who was hurt most by exile, by the breaking up of the family in England, by the departure for Canada. He could have stayed in the Russian community in London; he could have continued to be an amateur actor in the dramatic society. Something went wrong. But if his illness is tenacious, so is he. After an early life of false starts – a marriage and a divorce – he got his doctorate and taught Russian literature at Western University in London, Ontario, until his retirement. I tell him I have been reading the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. He spreads his hands out on the table to watch the tremor. ‘In translation. What a pity.'

He looks at me. ‘Do you know
The Plain Truth?
' It is an American evangelical magazine. Lino watches evangelical television services from Pasadena, California, every Sunday. My father still takes him to the Orthodox services, but it is the electronic religion of California that has touched him deepest.

‘Why were we born?' he asks me. ‘Do you know why?'

He should have been a monk: he missed his vocation, he never found a place of retreat. ‘We were born of the flesh. We have eaten of the fruit of knowledge. We have been banished from the garden.' Neil Young is on the radio singing, ‘I've been searching for a heart of gold.' The Chinese proprietor is tapping his finger on the counter waiting for the fries to fry.

‘And why are we here?' Lino asks me. He looks out at a car wheeling around in the parking lot. ‘We are here to be sanctified. To be “spiritualized”.' He says the word as if he were holding it with tongs. ‘To become of the spirit.'

Exile took his purposes away, but now he has found them again. He looks at his watch. It is time to go back to the nursing home for lunch. The nursing home looks like other brown-glass corporate headquarters that squat along the ribbon of highway. In the lobby they are paging someone, and a bell sounds for lunch. Then Lino begins to sing.

‘In savage lands afar

Heathen darkness ruleth yet.

Arise O morning star

Arise and never set.

‘Savage lands
afar?
' he says and looks around the lobby. ‘Savage lands
here!
' He lets himself be kissed, shuffles determinedly to the elevator and is gone.

*   *   *

Alec and Marjorie Ignatieff's house on Reid Avenue behind the Civic Hospital in Ottawa is a small bungalow ringed by a picket fence on a street of houses much the same as itself. The television is on in the sitting room: Alec sits on the chintz sofa looking at the
TV
with his good eye. He is terribly thin, grey-faced, his blind eye misted over. Yet for all that he is still the most beautiful of Natasha's children. Eighty years of life have laid the Mestchersky bone structure bare. In the silent and wasted immobility of age, he is still her sailor-suited son. He lets himself be kissed and he says in a whisper, ‘I'm going down very fast.' It has been a family joke that he has been going down very fast all his life. Marjorie says of him that he has a richly developed Nunc Dimittis mood. But when I look up, she does not wink as usual.

In a weak voice, he tells me about the Petersburg house, about the warren of corridors which led back to the kitchens and as he does so, he imitates the voices in his memory: ‘
Grafchiki
' – little count – ‘what are you doing in the kitchen? You are gentry, you shouldn't be here!' I see the sweating cook in Fourstatskaya shooing him down the passageway.

When I ask him about Kislovodsk, he tells me about the time he saw a ragged soldier beating a gypsy woman and cursing her over and over: ‘You slut, the times of bloody Tsar Nick are over!' He remembers going with his mother to a villagers' hovel outside Kislovodsk in the autumn of 1918 and hearing from inside a parched voice cry, ‘Boy, don't come closer. We've got the plague.' It was typhus.

In the fading light of an Ottawa winter afternoon he goes right back to the beginning, to the light of the salon in Kroupodernitsa. It is 1910. He has been reprimanded by Aunt Mika because he has mispronounced something. What is it? He searches, bends his head. Aunt Mika was giving him his Bible lesson, getting him to repeat the words of the Gospel when Christ appears before Pilate. Alec was four: he kept pronouncing Pontius like
ponchiki,
the word for brioche. Then he was turned by his shoulders and placed in the corner. His clear eye stares out across time: ‘I watch through the window as the light fades to the left. A darkening sky.' His words come out blurred, like a page of writing left out in the rain. Then there is silence, filled by the television news at six o'clock and the clicking of teacups. His memory reminds me of a film of an undersea wreck: here and there, amid the silt and gloom, there is a broken bottle, a shard, a doubloon.

He was the rebel son. ‘She wasn't kissable,' he says of Natasha. ‘Sometimes she would kiss us on the forehead. She would sit Lionel and George on her knees. I'm damn sure I was never on her knees.' He was the one who got out of 10
A
Oxford Road first, the one who slammed down his fists on the piano and refused to play another of Peggy Meadowcroft's infernal exercises. He went to the Royal School of Mines, to tin mines in Cornwall, gold mines in Sierra Leone. The mines were right for him: the solitary one of the family, down in the earth, bent double in those dark shafts. After the war he came to Canada and ran the Department of Mines in the Ministry of Energy.

Alec is silent so his wife says, ‘He was always the odd one out in the family.' ‘Why are you marrying this bad character?' were Paul's first words to Marjorie when Alec presented his bride to his father. ‘He was too hard on his sons,' she says with a look of pain in her face. Alec laughs, a dry harsh laugh. Silence. I get up to go. With great effort he levers himself up. He used to be several inches taller, a thin giant at six foot four. Now I am taller than he is. I kiss him on his forehead.

In the driveway, Marjorie squeezes my hand and says, ‘You came too late.'

*   *   *

I have a picture of Nick – the oldest brother – on horseback somewhere out west in the 1930s, tall and easy in the saddle, elegant in jodhpurs and a suede jacket, the sun lighting the high forehead, the deep eyes in shadow and an expression of irritation on his face as if he resents the camera's intrusion. He wanted to be a writer, but he made himself an electrical engineer to please his father. When he lost his job in the Depression, it came as a great release. He set off with a backpack through the bush country of northern Ontario, through little mining towns like Timmins and Cochrane, then across the prairies on the freights with the men who rode the rails in search of work. He wrote articles urging the opening up of the north for immigrant settlers, he wrote about the hobos he met on the rails and he thought of those months on the road as the happiest of his life. He slept under the stars by the northern lakes, in freight cars, on the front sofas of missionaries who combed the freight yards trying to convert the waifs and strays. He lived on a diet of raisins and bread, fruit and coffee. Tall, sunburned, athletic, slightly balding, with a natural authority that made him seem older than his years, he had a knack for making influential friends, for ending up in first class. His brothers in Toronto laughed when they got a telegram from their hobo brother telling them to put his dinner jacket on the first train north to Cochrane. He had met the president of the railroad at one of those northern sidings and the president had invited him to travel in his private car. All the way round Lake Superior, the big man smoked his cigars and listened while the young Russian poured out his schemes to open up the north to immigrant settlers. Nick was a man of schemes and dreams and speeches and projects and he always acted as if he was playing on a larger stage than the one he was actually on.

All of his life was a long reckoning with the Soviet experiment and with the failure of the beliefs and hopes his father had lived by. In 1936 he wrote an article for
Saturday Night
magazine in Toronto in praise of Stalin's new Soviet constitution. He tried to defend terror, forced collectivization and the purges as the birth agony of a new society. In the coming war with Hitler, he said, Russia would be our ally again. It was always Russia he saw, eternal and unchanged beneath the carapace of the Soviet regime. His father thought him sentimental and naive and wrote a reply to the article saying so.

‘“Land to the peasants! Peace! Soldiers back to our homes!” Where are those promises now?' Paul wanted to know. ‘The land belongs to the state; the collective farms are run by outsiders belonging to the new bureaucracy; the peasant is enslaved more than ever; while more soldiers are under colours now than ever before and the entire nation is militarized.' Paul signed his reply, which
Saturday Night
published, ‘Your loving father and friend'. Nick replied, ‘There is nothing more futile than to belong to a class which learns nothing and forgets nothing.' And signed his reply, ‘Your otherwise respectful son Nicholas'.

When World War II came Nick served in the Russian section of British intelligence in London. Once he was sent to Buckingham Palace to brief the King, George VI, on the new Soviet ally. As the war progressed he became ever more disillusioned with the way the Allied intelligence community came to withhold military information from the Soviets, and he argued fiercely with his brother George over the need to trust and assist their Russian brothers-in-arms. George was always more circumspect than his brother about the Soviets.

After the war, Nick returned to a wife he hardly knew and a son he had never seen. A solitary moody man, hard to live with, hard to forget, he became warden of Hart House at the University of Toronto, helping ex-soldiers like himself to return to the university, lecturing and writing all the while on Soviet affairs, fighting as best he could the McCarthyite tide of anti-Soviet hysteria. In March 1952 he was lecturing the Defense Staff College in Kingston on Soviet strategic intentions, insisting – in the wake of the news that the Soviets had the H-bomb – that a nation bled white by war had no interest in military aggression against the West. Again and again, he came back to the theme of the essential continuity between the autocracy of old and new Russia; the anti-Western Slavophilism of his grandfather, he said, was echoed in the Communist ideology of capitalist encirclement. He was already at work on a book to be called
The Eternal Crisis – Russia and the West.

On 27 March 1952, he gave his annual speech to the students in the Great Hall of Hart House. By then, Russia past and present suffused his thoughts. He began his speech by recalling an autumn afternoon in 1918 when he had sat on a hillside in the Caucasus and had watched the Red and White armies in the valley below killing each other for possession of Kislovodsk:

I was then fourteen … I remember thinking acutely for the first time: what pitiful fools these grown men are to do this to each other on a day like this in a place like this. What blasphemy. All through those months and years of stress, excitement, misery, I was disturbed and refused to accept the authority of the explanations handed down to me by my elders and betters … When my father and all our friends and relations said that Communism could only be fought by force and even to hang Communists was a service to society, I could not see the point and was haunted by the spectacle of a young mother who happened to be an active Communist and wife of one of their captured leaders, hanging for three days from a gibbet erected on a hill in the middle of the town.

I often wonder why this memory of the gibbet on the hill came back to him that night, why it seemed to fuel his sense of suffocation at the McCarthyism around him, the parochialism of student politics, the numbing geniality of Toronto life. Next afternoon, he was changing a tyre in the parking lot at the base of Hart House tower. He had a heart attack and died instantly. He was forty-eight, an elusive romantic haunted by a country he never lived to see again.