The Russian Album (25 page)

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From a phone booth in the echoing concourse of Montreal's Grand Central Station, I call Dima and tell him my train will be arriving at Richmond in an hour and a half.

‘All present and correct to meet you, boy!' His voice booms: I hold the receiver away from my ear. The other brothers call him the Prefect.

The train journey from Montreal to Richmond winds southwest across the St Lawrence River through small brick sunlit towns called St Hyacinthe and Acton Vale, where now, on an August afternoon, men start sharing out the beer and lighting the barbecue and kids in Expo sweatshirts play scratch games on the lawns among the sprinklers. These towns are more French than they were in Natasha's time: all the signs which used to say Hardware now say Dépanneur, and the train man calls the names of the stops in French. In the car, the families down for a day's shopping in Montreal are munching potato chips and some of the children are asleep on their parents' laps. The fathers work in the Bombardier skidoo factory, in the asbestos mines at Thetford and on the dairy farms that dot the soft rolling countryside. The corn is ripening, the cows are wending their way to the barns.

When I smell the sulphur from the Windsor Mills pulp plant and catch my first glimpse of the St Francis River and the railway bridge I know we are nearly there. Dima brought Paul and Natasha here in 1936 to a little brick bungalow they built on the shores of the St Francis on land sold to them for a dollar by F. M. Robinson, the farmer for whom Dima had worked when he first came to Canada.

From the window of the train I see Dima striding up the platform searching the windows for my face and tapping the train windows with his stick. His hair is like steel wool and it rises straight up on the crest of his head; he is crooked like a great tree and he is wearing an extraordinary pair of bright green corduroy shorts. He is eighty-two years old. I tap on the window and he does a welcoming dumb-show, waving his stick and blowing me a kiss. When I step down on the platform he kisses me on the lips and bellows, ‘Say, it is good to see you, boy!'

They all know him here, the taxi drivers waiting for their old ladies back from a day's shopping, the retired schoolteacher waiting for his wife, the stationmaster with the packet of express mail for Sherbrooke down the line. He is a kind of local seigneur, living in the big house on the edge of town, taking the annual salute at the Canadian Legion parade on Remembrance Day. He waves his stick at them all and directs Florence to drive us home.

Florence wears her glasses on a chain and drives hunched forward grasping the wheel tightly and squinting at the road. She keeps him going, keeps his voice down to bearable levels, teases him off his certainties and reminds him that he's told the same story before.

The car pulls off the highway up the curving driveway to Beechmore, a three-storey, steeply-gabled Victorian house with high ceilings and numberless rooms, a big kitchen where the wood stove burns all day and night and deep-carpeted rooms where the clocks tick on white marble mantelpieces. The house was built in the 1860s: there is a mezzotint of Sir Wilfred Laurier in the hall and the furniture was made for the house out of Quebec maple 100 years ago. It is a house of the same size and vintage as ‘Beechums'. The bungalow where Paul and Natasha used to live was directly across the river: it has long since been sold. Beechmore is now the family's gathering place.

After downing his vodka and hot water and making himself comfortable in the huge armchair which has been built up to accommodate his gigantic size, Dima takes the notebook from my hand and draws the floor plan of the house at Kroupodernitsa, every room, every corridor, marking with an X the hole in the dining room wainscot where Alec and he would hide the Jerusalem artichokes they hated but their grandmother commanded them to eat. Dima's return to this house he has not seen since Easter 1915 is effortless. He remembers everything as if it were yesterday: Mitro the coachman and the morning rides with his grandmother through the lanes of the estate; the servant girls carrying the steaming cauldrons of jam to cool on the veranda steps; the way his grandmother used to crack walnuts between her teeth and hand her grandchildren the pieces. To Dima it seems the most natural thing in the world that through the transmission of his memory to me, I am joined in time with a woman who dined with Disraeli, wearing the Sultan's stars.

I ask him why he never went back to Petersburg. He will not have anything to do with Bolsheviks. ‘The bastards,' he says with relish. He has kept faith with his mother's convictions.

In the dining room, Florence serves us dinner from heavy silver dishes and she laughs when she recalls how Paul and Natasha would drive in together from Upper Melbourne to Richmond to do the shopping in the Buick they called Sweet Mary. Natasha would sit upright in the middle of the back seat in her hat and gloves and choker, and Paul would drive very slowly, tipping his fedora and bowing his head ever so slightly at the old ladies he passed in the street: ‘
Bonjour Madame,
' he would say out of the window.

Natasha used to bargain with the butcher in Richmond, the mild-mannered Mr Duluth. ‘Robber!
Cochon!
That's too much! I won't pay that!' None of his customers had ever tried to bargain with Mr Duluth before and he rather liked it. In some region of her mind, she was still at the Ohotniki Riad in the old Arbat in Moscow. He got to like the game, and once when Florence came in with Paul and paid his price without complaining, the butcher looked startled, then winked at Paul and said, ‘The young one's not like the old one, is she?'

Natasha loved to rummage in the Rexall drugstore, particularly in the one-cent sale tubs, and she stocked up on soap, toilet paper and laxatives as if preparing for a siege. There was never enough money: something from Dima and Florence every month, an old American insurance policy that had matured, and a tiny bit extra which she used to put on the mining stocks. Her boys teased her about her stock market gambling, but she took it very seriously and managed to recoup every cent lost in the crash of 1929.

She was famous for her conversations on the party line with the few local friends she made: Mrs Moray, the Swiss doctor's wife, or Mrs Trigg, the bank manager's wife. Whenever her neighbours on the party line heard the tell-tale click that announced she had come on the line, they would pick up their receivers and hear her say her cleaning lady was ‘fat as five cows', or hear her call herself ‘the old crow'.

I want to know whether my grandparents were happy in Canada. Florence says, ‘He was happy, I think.' Paul worked the garden every day of spring and summer, growing kohlrabi and beetroot, digging the earth with a pitchfork, in rubber boots and an old cardigan, an old Russian gentleman with a distinguished moustache and a battered fedora for garden use. In the winters, he sat with Mr Trigg, the retired bank manager, and worked on a translation of those even, sifted memoirs he had written sometime in the 1920s.

And Natasha? Florence knows what it is like here in the winter when the snow reaches the windowsill and every book has been read twice and for conversation you have to rely on Dima and your tender-hearted but slow-witted housekeeper. ‘You're fighting negative thoughts all the time. I mean, why not just give up?'

Then Dima says, ‘Just before I went overseas in 1940, I came back for the weekend to say goodbye and my mother took me aside and said, “We must get out of here.”' The winters were too hard and lonely: she was perishing for lack of stimulation. All her sons were far away and she wanted to go out to Vancouver, where the weather was better and where she could be near Lionel, who was teaching school. Dima was furious. ‘I had brought them here, helped them to build the house. I refused, I told her they must stay there.' He wants to explain, then he is silent for a time. ‘You see, that was the last time I ever saw her.'

They say good night and leave me rummaging among the family papers stored upstairs in the bare rooms under the eaves. It is all a jumble, too confused for any sorting: Natasha's and Paul's Nansen passports with terrible strained photographs of both of them; Paul's bills from the hotel in the Square des Batignolles; correspondence in Russian from the Azov bank relating to his vanished industrial estates; even the catalogue for the sale of the house contents at Beauchamps, with a price in some auctioneer's neat and pitiless hand beside every item. Sitting there at the top of a sleeping house, my hands black with dust from the documents, I wonder what possesses me to rummage through these traces of their mortality, why I must cover my hands with dust from the tomb of their dispossession.

When I come down to breakfast the next morning, Aunt Florence is in the kitchen making toast. She is talking about the times she used to visit Paul and Natasha during the war. ‘It was never Stalin or Hitler. Oh no. She always referred to them as Beast Stalin and Mad Dog Hitler. She would come down to breakfast and you would ask her what was on the news and she would say briskly, “They've shot down 189 of those beastly planes of Mad Dog Hitler, thank God.”'

All through the war, Paul and Natasha felt a painful closeness to the course of the battle in the Soviet Union. A nephew, Nicholas Mestchersky, was one of those members of the White émigré community in Paris who believed after the fall of France that their best hope of a return to power in Russia lay in joining the German army and fighting on the Eastern Front. He died in the snow on the edges of Leningrad, wearing a German lieutenant's uniform. Paul's cousin Alexis Ignatieff had returned from Paris to Moscow and was lecturing at the Soviet army staff college and advising the military tailors who were reintroducing the epaulettes and shoulder flashes worn by the old Tsarist regiments into the Soviet army. In his apartment in Moscow his batman would answer the phone: ‘General Count Citizen Ignatieff at your service!' The family renegade, he had tired of the hatred of the émigré community for having backed Lenin in 1917 and sometime in the 1930s he returned to Stalin's Russia. The Kremlin made him a general and used him to bring back spit and polish and old-style drill. They even let him write his memoirs:
Fifty Years in the Service.
In the book, he dealt ironically with his poor cousin Paul, once a minister, once a millionaire, now ‘eking out his old age in poverty, supporting himself by the produce of his garden which he actually works himself, in far-off Canada'.

As Germans and Russians slaughtered each other at the gates of Kiev, Paul must have thought constantly about his sister Mika, last heard from in the summer of 1918 alone in the path of the German army, and now again – in her sixties if she was still alive – in the path of an invading army. Then against all odds, in the middle of the war, they received a picture of her, out in the snow carrying a load of wood with a peasant woman beside her: Mika has turned and is smiling at the camera. How Paul must have stared at the picture of his sister, lost behind the veil of war, her hair grey now like his, her skin worn like his, flesh of his flesh irremediably out of reach, yet transmitting like a distant star the message she knew would mean most to him and which she scribbled in pencil on the back of the postcard: ‘They have not forgotten the village choirmaster.'

There were grandchildren by then – Paul and Mika – brought down to visit by their mother Florence. Their grandfather towed them in sleighs and their grandmother made them Russian yoghurt sugared with maple syrup, and at night when they cried out in their sleep their grandfather would come to them and they would hear him say: ‘Is this a little bird I hear?' in his thick old Russian voice.

After breakfast, Dima leads the way up the stairs into the attic over the garage. The floorboards and the walls are made from massive rough-hewn planks – the unconsidered forest magnificence that grew on this site a century ago. We pick our way past boxes of children's clothes, old suitcases, toolboxes and sawhorses, spare lumber. At the end of the attic, lit by the cobwebbed light of the dormer window, stands a battered canvas trunk the shape of a loaf of Hovis bread, bound with leather straps. Her initials: NM for Natasha Mestchersky, the childhood self, then NI, the adult self, are visible on the top and when I shoo away the dust, all the stopping places of exile show up on baggage markings: a Canadian Pacific sticker for the ‘
SS
Montrose:
Countess Natasha Ignatieff, Montreal, Not Wanted on the Voyage'; then in pencil on a sticker, ‘10
A
Oxford Road, Putney'; then in faint but legible blue chalk – like words seen in a dream – ‘Kislovodsk via Mineralni Vodi'. We open up the top: the lining is white linen stretched on cane and on the inside lid there is the maker's stamp, E. Deraisme, 729 rue St Honoré, Paris, 1902. It is quite empty.

It is as if I have followed a river course along an arduous climb and found at last the bubbling cleft from which the water springs. This is the source of all we became in Canada: everything from that other life which has haunted me since childhood was in this trunk, the icons, the embossed volumes of Karamzin's history, the square silver basin and the ewer in which my great-grandmother used to wash her hands every morning at Doughino; the photograph albums, the Sultan's stars. All of this has flowed from the trunk down the branching capillaries of a family that now stretches out from here to Australia, to England, to New Mexico and that still has branches, unknown, on Russian soil. Dima remembers the trunk going on board
La Flandre
in Constantinople harbour in June 1919, how the Turkish stevedore's legs trembled, how he sweated as he wobbled up the gangplank – all the weight of that past teetering on the brink of its passage to the present. But it made it: all the voyages of eighty years now make a circle back to me: Nice to Kroupodernitsa, to Petersburg, to Kislovodsk, to Novorossisk, to Constantinople, to London, to Montreal, to the lumber room of an attic in Richmond, Quebec.