The Russian Album (4 page)

There must be something to the superstition that by returning to a place one can return in time to the self one once was in those places. My father was six when he left Russia in 1919, and his memories are few and indistinct. Yet he found a catharsis in returning, a rounding out of his life. For me, the trips to the Soviet Union redoubled my sense of the irrecoverable distance of my family past. But by a paradox that must be at the heart of writing itself, the more distant everything became, the more urgent it became to get the story down before the death of my father's generation broke the last living links.

My father and his brothers gave me every kind of help but they could not conceal their misgivings. I was like an auctioneer sent to value their treasures for sale. Our long sessions together over the tape recorder were harbingers of their mortality. I often thought that it would be better if I left the project aside until they were safely dead and buried. Then I would be free to say it all. But what kind of freedom is that, the freedom to say everything one never dared to say in person? Who is not haunted by the silences, the missed chances for truth that slip between father and son, mother and daughter, the chances that slip finally into the grave? I do not want to miss my chance.

I have done my best to disentangle history from myth, fact from fancy, but in the end I cannot be sure of the truth, either of what happened or what is remembered. I wasn't there. I can only register the impact of their struggle to remember: I can tell them the wave did reach the shore. Because Paul and Natasha managed to remember what they did and passed it on, I owe to them the conviction that my own life did not begin with my birth, but with hers and with his, a hundred years ago in a foreign land, and that now as the last of the generation who knew what life was like behind the red curtain of the revolution begins to depart, it is up to me to pass on their remembering to whoever comes after.

After all these years spent searching for their traces, I can hear their voices at last as if they were in the room. This is how Natasha began her memoirs, her first sentence:

‘I decide while I am still in my fresh mind to put down all dates and years of main episodes of our lives, my dear husband's and mine, so that when we pass into eternity our sons and their families may have a picture more or less of interesting episodes of our lives, colourful lives, thanks to so many striking events and in the middle age of our lives tremendous upheavals we had to pass through and which left a totally different side of our further existence.'

TWO

MOTHER AND DAUGHTER

Summer mornings at the Mestchersky country estate in the 1880s began with the same ritual. Natasha and her sister Vera, already washed, combed and dressed by their nurse, would file into their mother's bedroom and kiss her good morning. Their mother would then sit up in bed and swallow a raw egg. The maid brought it in a glass on a silver tray and her mother would down it with a brisk, convulsive snort. The maid would then pour warm water from a ewer into a silver basin and Natasha's mother would wash her hands. Natasha and her sister Vera sat on the end of the bed and watched.

The silver ewer and basin are just about the only things that have survived from those mornings at Doughino, the family estate in the western Russian province of Smolensk. They are plain, unadorned rectangular shapes, embossed with the family coat of arms. They used to stand on the dining-room table in our house in Ottawa and my mother used the jug for flowers. I have a memory from my early childhood of curling red petals, musty and fragrant, collecting in the silver of that basin.

After the egg and the washing of the hands, the maid brought Natasha, Vera and their mother cups of Ceylon tea, with scalded cream from the estate dairy. While their mother's jet-black hair was being braided, piled in two tight buns above her ears, she fired questions at Natasha and Vera: had they said their prayers? Were they washed? Were they ready for their lessons? The two little girls in their pinafores held hands and replied in unison. It was a family joke that when spoken to they always chimed in together with voices like mice. Their mother beckoned them closer, straightened their pinafores, took Natasha's hair between her fingers: why did it never curl? Natasha must have another session with Miss Saunders's curling iron.

When the butler appeared with the morning's post on a tray, the two girls were dismissed with a peck on the forehead. From her bed their mother dictated her correspondence to a secretary and the girls went off to the schoolroom for their lessons with Miss Saunders and later with Mr Sharples, the English tutor. They kept up English ways in the nursery – bread pudding with Lyle's Golden Syrup, Huntley & Palmer biscuits in square red tins from the English shops in Moscow.

Natasha was born Princess Mestchersky in August 1877, into a family of six girls and two boys: Katherine, Alexander (known as Sasha), Sonia, Maria, Sophia, Peter, Vera and Natasha. She was the last, the little gawky one, a child of middle age. Her mother, Maria Panin, was a descendant of Nikita Panin, Catherine the Great's chancellor whose brother, General Peter Panin, had led the troops in the suppression of the uprising of the peasant bandit Pugachev in the 1780s. Doughino, the family estate, was a gift to the Panins from the Empress. Natasha's father, Prince Nicholas Mestchersky, was rector of Moscow University.

Only one photograph remains of Natasha's mother and father. They are seated side by side on a couch at Doughino. He is thin, fine-boned and long in the face. His long white beard trails down the front of his frock coat. He is bending to graze his wife's hand with his lips. His eyes gaze at her devotedly. She does not spare him a glance. She stares out at the camera, massive, stout and ugly with highly polished black ankle boots poking out beneath her black taffeta dress. Her black hair is pulled back in a tight bun; her cheeks are heavy; her lidded eyes appraise the photographer with lofty amusement. The Panins had once been Panini and had come to Russia from Italy some time in the seventeenth century to make their fortune. From them, Natasha's mother had inherited dark olive skin and a passion for argument. Her daughters said she had a ‘man's brain'; she was impatient of the coy and innocent vagueness of the women of her time and class. Ugly and vivacious, imperious and argumentative, she ruled Doughino in the summers and the upper reaches of Moscow society in the winters. Together with Countess Sheremetieff and a Miss Tuitcheff, she made up a trio known as the ‘
conseil des infaillibles
' in the Moscow society of the 1880s. They were the court of final instance on manners, deportment and marriages. She was famous in her heyday for the sharpness of her tongue. Once when old Prince Volkonsky took her hand at a dinner party and began to tell her unsavoury Moscow gossip, she reached into her reticule, pulled out a small padlock and handed it to him, saying tartly in French that if he couldn't stop telling tales about his friends, he should keep his mouth shut. She dominated them all, husband, children, servants: every summer the married daughters were commanded to appear at Doughino with their husbands and children from the four corners of western Russia, with nurses and governesses, tutors and coachmen, to spend the summer together under her watchful and disapproving eye.

Natasha's father was a mild old gentleman of conventional opinions, ruled by his wife and his daughters. Natasha took after him in looks and temperament: high forehead, long straight nose, tall and thin-boned. His only apparent role in his children's upbringing was to line them up in his study every morning and administer a spoonful of cod-liver oil followed by a slice of black bread to take away the taste.

He was generous and absent-minded, always doling out money to the Moscow beggars when out on his morning walk to the university. Once when Natasha was with him, a beggar approached and when her father replied ruefully that he had forgotten to carry any change, the beggar replied that he had plenty; Natasha's father stood there smiling absently while the beggar took the ruble note and handed back enough kopecks to make the transaction satisfactory to both sides. In matters of charity, as in matters of the home, Natasha's father was a patriarch ruled by others.

Natasha's father had a brother as scabrous as he was respectable. An anti-Semitic homosexual, always in the company of young Guards officers, he was known in Petersburg circles as the Prince of Sodom. He was also the editor of
The Citizen
(
Grazhdanin
), required reading for the reactionaries of his epoch. Because of Uncle Vladimir, ‘a certain kind of citizen' became the Mestchersky code-phrase for homosexuals. ‘Petty informer, tattler, toady, a creature of perverted sexual taste, pulp novelist, embezzler' – the gossips did not spare him. It was said his wife had caught him
in flagrante
with a trumpet player of the Guards. It was whispered the Prince also dressed up in women's clothes. Yet his morals apparently did not bother those who read him for his opinions. After the assassination of the Liberator Tsar in 1881, Vladimir Mestchersky wrote an editorial in
The Citizen
which brayed out the master theme of a new epoch: ‘Everywhere one goes, only a single cry is heard from the people: Beat them! Beat them! In answer to this what do the authorities reply? Anything except the birch. What is the result of this contradiction? A terrible lack of discipline, the destruction of the father's authority within the family, drunkenness, crime and so on…'

When the new Tsar, Alexander III, took the throne in 1881, there were few makers of opinion more to his taste than Prince Mestchersky. Natasha's father and mother refused to receive the old debaucher in their home, yet they seem to have shared most of his views, though in milder form.

The Mestcherskys were a family of highly strung hypochondriacs. Like most Russian families of the time, they called doctors at the slightest cough or fever. In their case, however, family anxieties about health had some foundation. Natasha's oldest sister, Katherine, had gone to a hotel in Ostend to take the sea air and had died of ‘galloping consumption' (tuberculosis) at the age of twenty; in their grief, Natasha's mother and father watched over their remaining children with obsessive attention. The next daughter, Maria, had been invalided by a riding accident and was taken on a round-the-world tour by her mother to recover. The older son, Sasha, a stooping giant six foot six inches tall, was a mild and gentle character whose passion was his mother's greenhouses: he grew carnations from cuttings and became a fanatic for the colour green, wearing a suite of green baize with a green deerstalker hat and experimenting with all the variations of green orchids. His favourite dish was pea soup.

An English tutor was hired to turn this shy and peculiar boy into a gentleman fit for a career. No one ever knew quite what happened – Natasha's mother could not bear to discuss it – but the tutor took to beating Sasha for every mistake in lessons and for every bout of masturbation in bed. The boy would have silently endured this routine had he not succumbed to meningitis. When he recovered the truth came out, the tutor was dismissed, and the parents reconciled themselves to the fact that poor Sasha was happier after all devoting himself to his Malmaison carnations and the manageable world of the greenhouse.

Natasha thought Sasha was lovable but insipid and Peter, her younger brother, charming but weak; her sisters were ‘all good women, but none of them brilliant'. The tall and elegant Sonia, with her chestnut hair, was a bit of a flirt before marriage and then too austere and serious-minded afterwards; Sophia likewise was too earnest; Maria a bit of an invalid; poor Vera ‘very high strung' and the man she married, the worthy Baron Offenberg, a most dreadful bore. Natasha was as blunt as her mother in her estimation of the faults of her kin.

The winters of Natasha's childhood were spent in the Mestchersky house opposite the yellow and white buildings of Moscow University, just behind the Kremlin on the Nikitskaya. The summers, from late May until the end of September, were spent at Doughino.

I take out Baedeker's guide to the Russian Empire, 1914 edition, and follow the railway lines 200 miles west from Moscow to the province of Smolensk and find the river Vasousa. The river flowed through the bottom of the estate. In spring it would burst its banks and the surrounding countryside would be flooded, with clumps of trees marooned in the sodden fields. When the Mestcherskys arrived from Moscow in these wet springs to begin their summer at the estate, they would have to be poled through the fields by their servants in flat-bottomed boats from the station. Carriages would be waiting on the high ground to take them up through the white-columned gates past the twin spires of the family chapel to the house on the hill.

It was a peach-coloured two-storey eighteenth-century mansion, garlanded with vines, with six huge marble columns supporting a classical Corinthian portico. Hothouse plants decorated the balconies over the entrance and there were two life-size marble lions on either side of the doorway. In the photographs I count thirty-four windows looking out onto the English garden. There were a hundred rooms, stables, greenhouses and acres of park laid out in boxwood, pines and floral beds; the sloping meadows down to the river at the foot of the garden used to burst with flowers in the spring. Wherever she was afterwards, Natasha could always guide her mind's eye through the vanished rooms, along the big entrance hall lined with oak benches, up the two flights of stairs, past the illustrations from La Fontaine's fables in the gilt frames, through her father's study, to the dancing hall, the dining room furnished in maplewood, past the china cabinets, to her mother's boudoir. There her memory moved to a portrait of her grandmother in a dark-brown velvet dress with frills, her sparkling eyes as brown as the wood of the frame.

Somewhere behind, there was a door to the library. All along the rows of maplewood shelves were lined the books of her ancestor Nicholas Karamzin, flagged with his slips, scribbled over with his annotations. It was from this store of books that he had written his history of Russia. Through all the waystations of revolution and exile, Natasha was to insist on carrying the full three volumes of Karamzin's history of Alexander I's reign, in their red leather bindings decorated with the family crest. Like her mother's basin and ewer, these volumes were her talismans: she held on to them to keep faith with all the other things she had left behind.