Stained Glass (16 page)

Of course, being the daughter of Dimitri and Anna Chadinoff
was
a privilege, this she did not deny, though she wondered—she truly wondered—what her parents would have done about her if she had not been … clever. She had picked up that word in England and thereafter used it—there being no satisfactory American substitute, as she told Alice. Her friends supposed that her early memories of Germany were of intellectuals and artists coming to her parents' elegant apartment to eat stuffed goose and read aloud each others poems and short stories and argue long into the night the meaning of a fable by Pushkin. What Erika in fact remembered was the awful physical discomforts and the utter indifference of her father to them. She was very young when she learned that something called “money” was terribly important. When her mother looked into her handbag, either there was money in it or there was not money in it. In the former event Erika would eat dinner, in the latter event she would not. Beginning in midafternoon, Erika would find that her attention was substantially given over to the question, Would there be money that night when her mother opened her handbag? Her mother, though not as stoical as her father, was twice as vague. If, on opening her handbag, she had pulled out a diamond necklace, she'd have said, “Dimitri, dear, I apparently have a diamond necklace here I hadn't reckoned on.” Dimitri would have said, “That's fine, my dear,” which he would also have said if his wife had announced that she had found an armadillo in her handbag. Her mother did concern herself for Erika, and in the especially cold winter of 1936, washed dishes at the corner restaurant in return for bread and potatoes left over at the end of the evening's meal. Sometimes Erika had her dinner at one in the morning on her mother's return. Sometimes there was food left over from the night before. But sometimes there was no food at all. During these daily struggles her father was always reading or writing. He had access to the public library and spent much of his time there, often taking Erika because that way she could be warm. It was troublesome to do this at first because the guard at the door announced that the library was not a nursery in which to keep little girls. Dimitri Chadinoff asked just when could children be brought into the library, and the answer was: When they are old enough to read. Dimitri turned around, took Erika home, and was with her for three days, interrupted only when Erika could no longer stay awake. On the fourth day, triumphantly, he led her back and was stopped at the same entrance by the same guard. Calmly, Dimitri made his announcement. The guard leaned over from his high desk, put a newspaper into the girl's hands and, pointing to the headline, said: “Read this, little girl.” Her face solemn, Erika read, haltingly, but without error: “Roosevelt Sweeps Country/Dems Control Both Houses.” She was three years old. Her father showed no particular pride in his daughter, then or later when, at age seven, she earned a few pennies by drilling two dull teenage-boys, sons of a noble family, in English; or when Anna's friend Valerian Bibikoff, a fellow expatriate from Russia who taught piano and gave lessons to Erika, reported that the girl was singularly talented. Her father was as surprised as if he had been informed that his daughter was remarkable because she had ten fingers. He showed displeasure as rarely as he showed pleasure. When, freshly arrived in England, Erika returned to their flat to say she had made friends at school with the daughter of the Soviet military attaché, Dimitri looked down at her from his desk and told her that he would just as soon she did not associate with the children of barbarians. “Why are they barbarians?” Erika asked in French, that being the only language spoken at the Chadinoff household on Thursdays (Monday, German; Tuesday, English; Wednesday, Italian; Thursday, French; Friday, Saturday, and Sunday any language save the language spoken in the country being inhabited). “They are barbarians,” said Dimitri Chadinoff, “because they wish to obliterate everything important that human beings have learned about how to treat each other in three thousand years.” “Why do they want to obliterate it?”—Erika had no difficulty with unusual words. Her problem, at school, was in learning that some words
were
unusual: she had to study them attentively and learn to use them with great discretion, or preferably not at all, since at home they were used as nonchalantly as kitchen utensils. She got off to a bad start her first day at Blessed Sir Thomas More's School in Cadogan Square by asking a girl whether the policies of the school were “latitudinarian.” It was years before she could explain to anyone—the solemn Paul, at the Sorbonne—that she had been guilty of affectation throughout much of her youth only by searching out simple substitute words for those that occurred to her naturally.

“They want to obliterate it,” said her father, “because they are bewitched by the secular superstition of Communism, which is a huge enterprise that will settle for nothing less than bringing misery to all the people of the world.”

“Why should they want to bring misery to all the people of the world?” Erika repeated her father's formulation piously.

“It isn't that they want to bring misery, though some do. They strut up and down in their baggy clothes swinging golden chains from their vests as if the keys to happiness were attached. All they have succeeded in doing is killing and torturing people and promising to do as much to people fortunate enough not to live in Russia during this period. To think that they have done it to Russia, the most beautiful land in the world,” said Dimitri Chadinoff, and Anna agreed, recalling how the weather would be now in their native hills outside St. Petersburg.

“Did they take away all your money?” Erika wanted to know.

“Yes, they took away all our money.”

Such an indifference as Dimitri Chadinoff's to money had not been seen since the natives begged St. Francis to accept a copper if only to have the pleasure of giving it away. But he did not deign to express where, in the hierarchy of Soviet offenses, the loss of the family money had come.
Infra dignitate
. Erika, a thoughtful girl, assumed that her father was correct but promised herself one day to think the matter over more exhaustively, and turned to her homework in mathematics, which she was always pleased to express her concern with because she knew it was the single subject in which neither her father nor her mother could help her.

“What exactly is an integer? I don't understand.”

“Ask your teacher. He's getting well paid,” said her father.

Well, not so well paid by modern standards, but the school was well staffed and now Dimitri was making five pounds per week translating for a London publisher on a piecemeal basis, and that same publisher had sent out Chadinoff's fresh translation of Pushkin to be assessed by scholars at Oxford and Cambridge. “I could advise you,” Chadinoff wrote to his editor, “which of the scholars at Cambridge and Oxford are competent to evaluate my work, but I suppose that if you agreed to accept my judgment in the matter the entire enterprise would be circular. Anyway, for the record the only man at either university who has the necessary background is Adam Sokolin at Cambridge. He studied under my old tutor, who beat some sense into him thirty years ago. Sokolin has done good work on Pushkin, from which we may safely conclude that he will not get very far in Cambridge.” The editor took the letter by the corner, his fingers raised as if carrying a dead rat by the tail, walked into the office of his superior, dropped it on his desk and asked: “Have I your permission to tell this egomaniac to go and peddle his Pushkin elsewhere?”

The next day, manuscript back in hand, Chadinoff sent it to the Harvard University Press. The following day, the London publisher dropped him as a part-time editor and then, after Erika had gone to sleep, Anna took Dimitri aside and, even though it was Tuesday, spoke to him in Russian and said that they had to do something to bring in some money, that all their friends and relatives were equally impoverished, that there was no money for the next week's rent, nor for the next month's school bills for Erika. Well, said Dimitri—ever so slightly disposed to point out, by twiddling his fingers on the open page of his book, that Anna had interrupted his reading—did she have any suggestions? Yes, she said, she had recently been talking to her friend Selnikov (former colonel in the Czar's prime equestrian unit). Poor Sergei Babevich had not only himself and his wife to look after but three daughters and a son. He had taken a position as a maître d'hôtel at a medium-priced restaurant where a knowledge of several languages was useful. “The trouble with you, dear Dimitri, is that your knowledge of food is really not very refined. You could write a scholarly book about the feasts of Lucullus, but you would not be able to distinguish the actual food from fish and chips at Lyons. So I have another idea.”

Dimitri had sat without any show of emotion thus far. “Well?”

Anna couldn't, at first, remember what her other idea was, and Dimitri waited. Finally the newspaper caught her eye.

“Ah yes. There is an advertisement in the paper for a concierge. He must be presentable—here.” She reached for the paper, shuffling through to the marked section. “Presentable, must be fluent in French and German. Some Italian and Spanish desirable. References.”

Dimitri took the job. His hours were from one until midnight. He would sleep until six and then resume his own work. Erika was not permitted to see her father at the hotel during working hours. Once she decided mischievously to do so. She was small for twelve years, so that her head only just reached the counter. She had on a friend's hat, and her light-brown hair was knotted under it. She put on spectacles and, carrying a handbag, she said in a little girl's voice, imitating her father's own imperious accent and speaking in German: “Concierge, please get me a sleeper to the Finland Station!” Dimitri permitted himself a smile, and then in Russian said to her: “Get yourself out of here, Rikushka, before I invite the manager to paddle your behind.” She went out roaring, and told her mother, who laughed, and then said not, ever, to do such a thing again. The following morning, when she went off to school, she found tucked into her notebook, in her father's unmistakable hand, a fable dedicated to her. It was called, “The Little Girl Who Took the Train to the Finland Station, and Woke Up Lenin.” That day, she thought, she was closer to her father than she had ever been before.

When the letter came from the Harvard University Press, Chadinoff was pleased, but not particularly surprised. He knew his Pushkin was superior. But he was surprised a month later to be invited by the Department of Slavic and Romance Languages to go to Harvard to lecture during the spring term. Chadinoff replied that, thanks very much, he would be happy to do so, and able to do so inasmuch as his job as concierge at the Basil Street Hotel required him to give only three weeks' notice, and February was still three months away.

They made reservations for the tenth of December on the S.S.
Mount Vernon
, and it was well that they did, because after the seventh of December, which was the day of Pearl Harbor, no reservations were accepted save for returning residents of the United States. Chadinoff and his family carried Nansen passports, and his excited wife and daughter were apprehensive, up until the moment the gangplank was lifted, about having to yield their room to returning U.S. residents.

During the commotion Erika, snugly dressed in a white skirt, peasant blouse, and tweed jacket, excitedly accosted a tall, handsome blond boy—at least two years older, she judged—wearing an English public-school blazer, chewing an apple, and affecting the ways of the cosmopolitan traveler.

“Do you think we will pull out on time?” she began the conversation.

“Oh, sure,” he said. She was surprised his accent was American. “They always pull out on time. Especially when there are submarines.”

“Why should a ship be punctual for the sake of the submarines?”

Blackford Oakes looked at her pert face, and frank, inquisitive eyes accented by her austerely coiled braids. “Because”—he spoke just a little less casually than before—“there are escort vessels, and it is quite a muddle if every boat decides for itself when to start out.”

She did not answer, but looked at her lumpy watch. She would wait—for what, later at Smith College, the philosophy professor would tell her is called “empirical verification.” And, in fact, at exactly one forty-five in the afternoon the gangplank was pulled, the whistles and horns blew, the crowd at the pier interrupted its waving and yelling, and her parents rejoined her. Before skipping off she turned to the boy, munching a fresh apple and looking very self-satisfied.

“You were right.”

He smiled—it was a splendid smile, warm, animated. He reached into the brown paper bag and said, “Here, have an apple.” She looked up at her mother, who nodded her head, so she took it and said, “Thank you,” and then with her free hand grabbed her straw hat, which almost blew away as the great steamship slid out of the lee of the quay.

By the time Erika was sixteen her father was well known in the academic world and now held down a chair at Brown University, delivering learned, acidulous, witty lectures that would become famous. There was now money enough to pay the tuitions at the Ethel Walker School and, later, Smith College, and in her senior year her father gave her a secondhand car which Erika rejoiced in, traveling about New England tirelessly, to celebrate the end of gas rationing. She took on every challenge, competing for the classics prize, the philosophy prize, winning one, placing second in the other. In her junior year the dean had called her in to ask whether she would consider
not
competing for the Russian, German, French, and Italian prizes. She had won them all in her freshman and sophomore years, and now the teachers were finding it hard to persuade anyone to compete against so certain a winner. Erika said she would have to consult with her father, whose instructions to her had been to enter every competition. He wrote back and told his daughter that, noblesse oblige, she should allow other girls a chance at the prizes, but if she wanted to compete for the big Prix Giscard she might focus her energies on winning it. This prize went annually to four girls selected from applicants throughout the country to study in Paris, all expenses paid, and its renewal, now that the war was over, had recently been advertised.