The Russian Album (6 page)

When Natasha was sixteen she spent her first winter in Nice with the family. She took her father's arm on the Promenade des Anglais during Carnival Week in February and they walked through the crowds, ducking the showers of confetti, watching the clowns, joining in the singing and then escaping the crowds to stand at the end of the promenade alone together to watch the black calm of the winter sea.

She was in Nice with her mother in the winter of 1894 when
Hofmeister
Bertram wired them to come home to Doughino immediately. The master was ill. She raced back through Paris and Dresden and Berlin to find her father twisting and turning on his bed in the last stages of a fatal urinary and kidney infection. Surgeons and nurses were brought from Moscow to the estate. They slept on divans outside his room and the daughters took shifts sitting with him. She had the night watch. Just before morning, after weeks of suffering, he seemed to awake and to look about. Before she had time to call her mother in the next room, he looked up at his daughter and closed his eyes for ever.

The body was dressed and placed in a coffin on the billiard table in the conservatory. The daughters took turns keeping the vigil and reading psalms in the days and nights before the funeral. Natasha sat by the coffin through one night watch reading psalms from the Bible on her knees:

I call to remembrance my song in the night.

I commune with mine own heart.

Will the Lord cast me off for ever?

Hath God forgotten to be gracious?

Through the long hours of that night, as she sat and watched the sere and sunken face of her father, a curtain billowed in the draught, the wax from the candles dripped on the floor and the leaves of the palms scraped and shuffled against each other. She was seventeen years old.

After they buried him in the family crypt among the birch trees at Doughino, it was to Natasha that her mother turned in her grief. She insisted on being taken up to the attic and Natasha would sit on the boxes and watch her bent, beloved back as she rummaged frantically, pointlessly through deeds and old papers, trying to give the air that she could cope now that she was alone. It was a shock to discover this commanding woman so vulnerable now that the man she had dominated was gone. And there was the shock too of seeing her mother, for the first time, as an old woman. Years later Natasha wrote, ‘It made my heart burst and I shed many tears alone. It seems being an old woman myself now, that since my childhood I have dreaded old age, and that old people have always made a heartrending impression upon me. It seems so tragic to notice the change in one's loved ones coming on. I am old myself now, but I feel I will never get over that feeling of awe and dread of old age.' Natasha was sixty-six when she wrote those lines, coming back full circle to the lonely daughter who watched her mother brought low by widowhood and sorrow.

All her sisters and brothers had begun their adult lives by then: Sasha had been sent to the lyceum and then to university, Peter to the regiment and the daughters to marriage: Natasha was at all family conferences when her sisters' suitors were mercilessly discussed and their antecedents checked, through the
Almanach de Gotha.
She was at the engagement parties, raised her champagne glass to their happiness, buttoned them into their wedding dresses, held their bouquets at the step of the landau and waved them down the long driveway to their honeymoons. And then she was left alone with her mother, the aging autocrat in the Bath chair. Natasha became the dutiful daughter, reading Carlyle's
History of Frederick the Great
to her in the long summer afternoons; the one who pushed her Bath chair along the Promenade des Anglais in the weak winter light and who, when they were back at Doughino, accompanied her on the daily tour of the estate gardens, watching the old hands palpating the peaches in the greenhouse and tapping her beloved evergreens with her stick. When her mother complained of the cold, Fidki, the lazy Cossack, would turn the Bath chair on the gravel and wheel her back home and Natasha would follow behind.

She slept in the next room to her mother, ready to rise, to comfort, to listen to the groans and lamentations. There was a pain in the old woman's breast which would not go away. The quacks descended: one whose name was Blitz prescribed massage, but the pain grew worse and the lump in her breast began to swell. Finally it became impossible to deny what was happening. From Doughino, a wire was sent to a surgeon in Moscow. He arrived by train seven hours later, took one look at his patient and ordered that a mass be sung in the chapel and that a room be scrubbed down for an operation.

Her mother's oldest friend, Countess Sheremetieff, who had been a nurse in the Russo-Turkish War, held her head while the chloroformed gauze was passed over her face. Under the chloroform, Natasha's mother shouted frantically that the surgeon should give up medicine and become a teacher, where he could at least do humanity some good, instead of inflicting such torture. Natasha waited in the chloroform-filled passageway, saying her prayers, listening to her mother's babbling in the next room.

The operation bought them all several years' respite. Life resumed at Doughino: the peasant children brought berries to the pantry door and the cook bought them to make jam. In the early autumn, there were mushroom hunts with the peasant children in the damp piney places under the trees and the cook would bake them into mushroom pies. In the spring, they would make a drink from the sap of birch trees and another with new buds of blackcurrant, flavoured with lemons and oranges, sugar and champagne. There were troika rides in summer, sleigh rides in the winter, muffled deep in furs. On the long summer afternoons, Natasha would take her nephews and nieces down to the meadow by the river while her sisters slept with their husbands upstairs in the bedrooms darkened against the heat.

The old woman's rule was drawing to a close but none of her daughters or sons-in-law dared disobey her. From June till September, she insisted the clan must be about her though she did not actually like to see them once they were there. On her morning walk, she forbade the sight of her grandchildren and if they heard the Bath chair crunching along the gravel they would scurry for cover behind the box hedges until the procession had gone by.

Doughino was a closed universe with the world held at a distance beyond the white gates. When the jangling bells of troikas were heard approaching in the park, Natasha and the servants would come running to see who the visitors might be. There was Chomiakoff, after 1905 one of the presidents of the Duma, a ‘queer man', Mongolian in appearance, always contradicting himself; and the elegant Ourousoffs, as delicate as moths, in their fawn riding clothes, recounting the latest gossip from the Riviera in a Russian flavoured with a slight French accent. She remembered best Professor Rachinsky, an excitable little man, with a face like a squeezed-out lemon, yellow but full of life. An indefatigable eccentric, he arrived with tremendous bustle from his estate in Tver province and seemed to inspect every leaf in the garden, and quizzed the village priest about the state of the peasants' moral education. At his own estate, he ran a school for peasant children.

Natasha wondered whether Professor Rachinsky's philanthropy ever came to anything – one of his peasant children became a priest, another became an artist – but the rest returned to the soil, untouched by the Professor's lessons. She was generous enough herself, as her father had been, but she was unburdened by that Tolstoyan sense of guilt and responsibility for the peasants that drove the old Professor on his grinding round of benevolence.

There was another visitor who talked like Rachinsky, a typical Russian madcap of a doctor, who had handsome red hair and who used to sit and spill out all his Tolstoyan theories to Natasha after dinner in the study. She was attracted to him, though marriage with a young country doctor was out of the question, and she liked the look of Russian absorption which came over him when he talked of putting the country to rights. He told her that he liked her austerity, the plain black dresses, the simple unadorned meals at table, the frugality observed in this most splendid of old houses. He said it would prepare her well for whatever life had to offer. She found the compliment amusing: it was said so sombrely, as if darkness lay ahead for both of them.

The subject of the peasantry always seemed to send the men at Doughino into that special mood of earnest self-importance which came over aristocratic Russians when they discussed a ‘social question'. She herself had very few thoughts about the peasants. They were in another world beyond the gates. Only one photograph in her family album shows peasants in the frame. The picture was taken sometime in the 1890s at the festival of St Peter and St Paul by the doorway of the family chapel at Doughino. Women in white kerchiefs crowd around the icons which are draped in white and carried by deacons with flowing black hair and vestments. The sea of faces is turned towards the icons, but one face – that of a woman in a white kerchief – is looking over her shoulder. Her back is broad and strong; there is an apron around her waist. She is staring at someone ‘from the big house', and her gaze is curious and unafraid.

In just twenty years these peasants were to burn Doughino to the ground and make the owner, mild stooping Sasha, sweep out the latrines in the prison yard at Sichevka. This irony – that I know what is coming and Natasha could not – is one of the barriers between us. I have to forget what comes next. To share her past, I have to forget her future.

But so did she. How, for example, was she to preserve the original colour of her memories of the Coronation ceremonies of 1896 from the wash of retrospective foreboding that swept over all recollections of Nicholas and Alexandra after 1917? She was watching from the stands outside the cathedral in Moscow as the imperial couple arrived and she believed afterwards that she had felt a chill of anxiety when she saw the Tsarina descend from the coach, with her stiff, strained expression, holding on tight to the arm of her tragic-eyed consort. As the Tsarina passed their stand, bowing to right and left at the old families, Natasha and her mother noticed that the young queen's arms and face were discoloured by red flushes, a nervous symptom, the insignia of dread.

This was one of exile's subtler wounds – the way time future recoloured time past, so that sitting by the window in the Quebec countryside she could not help feeling that her entire past was leading to her dispossession. Each memory, even the blushes on the Tsarina's arms, was dispossessed of its innocent opacity, its plurality of possible meanings and made to follow time's fatal vector. Recollection for her was not only an escape from the diminishing circle of old age, but also a struggle to escape the future's grip on the past. When she stared out of the window at the snow of a foreign land and fought to remember the name of the gardeners at Doughino or the word for a type of Turkish delight made from berries, she was fighting to save her past from the pall of inevitability that the future cast back upon it like a malign shadow.

THREE

FATHER AND SON

One of my grandfather Paul's earliest memories was of Sundays at his grandfather Ignatieff's house on Gagarinsky Prospekt in St Petersburg in 1879. Paul was nine years old and he came with his father and mother, his four brothers and two sisters to attend the Sunday service at the family chapel. The chapel was full of uncles, aunts, cousins and relatives: the Zouroffs, Engalicheffs and Maltsevs. At the back stood the housemaids, porters, coachmen and butlers led by the chief servant, Vassily, serf since boyhood to the master.

At the front stood the patriarch of the family, Paul's namesake, Count Paul Ignatieff, State Councillor, Chairman of His Majesty's Council of Ministers, Protector of the Russian Throne during His Majesty's absences on the field of battle against the Turks. Count Paul Ignatieff was by then nearly eighty, loaded with infirmities and honours, leaning on the arm of his wife, Countess Maria. His sons and their families stood behind him. Of these sons, the oldest was Count Nicholas, my grandfather Paul's father. Paul stood next to his father, and they sang together, bass and soprano entwining. They knelt together, Paul in his sailor suit, his father in a general's uniform and high leather boots. They said their prayers and at the end of the service everyone approached the altar in strict order of family precedence to kiss the cross. Then Count Paul and Countess Maria stiffly turned and led the family procession in to Sunday lunch.

In the dining room, the table was set for thirty. Each went to his appointed place, the children shooed to their chairs by their mothers. They all stood waiting until grandfather and grandmother were helped into their places at opposite ends of the table. Count Paul said a blessing and then the family babble started. Paul told his Zouroff cousins about Countess Tiesenhausen's monkey, how that summer in the Crimea it leaped from its perch in the tree onto his shoulders, with the chain on its ankle jangling and spinning, how it tickled his hair with its fingers.

No wine was served at lunch – Paul's grandfather did not allow cards or spirits in the house – and the food was plain soldiers' food, easy on an old man's digestion, soup and
kotleti,
breaded cutlets of chicken. Paul waited for the
kissail,
the dessert of whipped cranberries with the sweet metallic taste.

Grandfather Paul who now broke his bread with shaking hands once held his regimental colours aloft on the Champs Elysées when, having driven Napoleon from Russia, the Preobrajensky Guards rode into Paris in 1815. He had been seventeen then, an ensign in the Household Company and only son of a forgotten fort commander on the Polish frontier. He belonged to that generation of young officers who returned from the campaign against Napoleon to Russian barrack towns dreaming of Paris, talking of Liberty, that generation who were to lead the December uprising against Tsar Nicholas I in 1825. Many of his fellow officers in the cafés and billiard halls, the regimental dances and parade grounds, became Decembrists, but he promised his mother he would be sensible. On that December morning in 1825, the young Tsar looked anxiously from his balcony window overlooking Winter Palace Square for detachments to come to his support to quell the revolt stirring through the regimental barracks. The first platoons to stream beneath the arches and take up position were commanded by Captain Paul Ignatieff.