The Summer Guest (11 page)

So, the magician. Maria Pavlovna told me the whole story, bemused, half laughing, half annoyed. I will try to reproduce her words, just as she told it.

For one of his tricks, she said, the magician asked for a volunteer from the audience. My brother Sasha went up: He began to joke with the magician in his jovial way, and everyone in the small audience was astonished—he made them look like utter fools, but the magician himself seemed to be delighted.

I think, confided Maria Pavlovna almost apologetically, that Sasha was quite drunk. It was embarrassing. He was shouting and waving his arms and saying Abracadabra and Boo! and making faces at the magician. Some people laughed, but Antosha decided it was time to go up and remove him from the stage, and Sasha swore and insulted him in front of everyone. By then I'd seen enough, as had Elena Mikhailovna, and we begged Antosha to leave with us, and the three of us went for a walk by the river.

Sasha did not return all night—we speculated that the magician had caused him to vanish. Until we learned from Georges that Sasha went straight from the theater to the station and took the first train back to Moscow. At two o'clock in the morning!

To begin with, your sisters were very worried when they learned that he had left. They were concerned that he was somehow displeased with the guesthouse—Sasha is the eldest, after all—but apparently, he said to Georges—who repeated it to Natasha, who repeated it to me—
Tell them that the only ones I'm happy with are you and Ivanenko, but as for the others . . .
It's dreadful! He didn't even finish his sentence. Goodness knows what he meant, perhaps the fact that we walked out during his
performance
? To make things worse, when I mentioned the incident to Antosha, he conjectured that our brother had spoken out of drunken spite.

She paused, perhaps for effect, then leaned closer to me. You see, he wrote a letter to your sister, Elena, asking for her hand in marriage (here Maria Pavlovna and I could not help but exclaim
and laugh nervously). However, Antosha discovered the letter and tore it up before Sasha had a chance to send it.

What? I exclaimed.

Sasha wasn't serious, concluded Maria Pavlovna softly, he can't have been; he's so confused, he's lonely and he drinks and he thinks of his two small sons whom he must look after, no one understands him at all; he thinks that proposing marriage to your sister is a noble, grand gesture when it is unfounded and hasty and . . .
ridiculous
and makes us all look bad. So I think that's why Antosha tore up the letter.

We sat for a moment in silence. Then she took my hand and gave a quiet, musing, wistful laugh. I sighed. On the surface, it seemed almost a pity; Elena had begun by feeling genuinely fond of Aleksandr Pavlovich, certainly concerned about him and not unaware of the possible consequences. But this behavior at the theater, even related at second hand . . . I felt that for now I could not help but commend Anton Pavlovich's intervention.

I turned to Masha and said, I don't want Elena to learn of this, she takes things far too much to heart. I believe she has been feeling genuinely sorry for Aleksandr Pavlovich. Her pity overwhelms her at times.

Maria Pavlovna mumbled something; I had to ask her to repeat it.

Is she hoping to marry?

I think she doesn't really know. She's torn. She would like a family, but she loves her work. She has been working so hard that she forgets other aspects of life. You've seen her; she treats the entire village like her children, losing sleep if this one sneezes, that one coughs—

Sasha is not a good man for her, said Masha emphatically. Your good peasants need her more than one man with two orphans and too great a fondness for his bottle.

ANA HAD BEEN SLEEPING
well, working with ease, losing herself in pages of Ukrainian summer.

When she finished her work, she turned to the BBC website and read about the Ukrainian winter. She watched short videos showing the demonstrations on the Maidan: They had turned violent. The sky was dark with the smoke of burning tires. Already eight protesters had been killed, many others injured.

Young people, despite their broken English, spoke eloquently and passionately to the reporters about their desire for change.
These people died for my future.
In the background, a brightness of flames from the braziers they lit to keep warm. Music, chanting, speeches. Ana had never been part of such a movement. At times she felt a surge of compassion that brought her close to tears, then relief: For all her isolation, she was still part of the human race; she could still feel.

She had never been political; she had left that to Léo. He was the one who went to all the demonstrations, who spent hours in cafés with his friends from university, planning, debating, arguing. Sometimes he would drag her along to the Latin Quarter for a
manif,
to swell the numbers, but she never felt at ease with the French
engouement
for protest. Even when she spoke the language fluently, even when she obtained her French passport—though Léo was long gone by then, anyway. And fluency made no difference to the chanting of simplistic slogans; she could have done as much in Quechua.

Perhaps it was Léo who had inspired her mistrust of political
activism. He seemed to think it was part of his education as a Frenchman, a historical duty, a rite of passage, to be on the barricades. Or was it merely macho posturing, or an intellectual trend? Whatever his reasons, there was something not altogether sincere that she could only sense intuitively. He was always going on about unions and workers and the proletariat; he admired the Soviet Union. He envied her for speaking Russian, for having
been there
. Perhaps he was the dreamer and she was merely a realist. Politically, at any rate. But
being involved
was so much a part of who he was, the image he had of himself, the would-be revolutionary with his Guevara haircut (he stopped short at the beard).

When he wasn't plotting the next protest, he wrote novels. Earnest, wooden novels with archetypal peasants and workers and evil bosses. Ana found them difficult to judge: She thought he had a certain way with words, but she could not identify with his characters, their rigid motivation, their lack of emotion. Perhaps if her French had been better back then, she could have read the warning signs. Not one of those novels—she remembered three in the time they were together, written feverishly at night with shots of imported Moskovskaya—ever found a publisher; he used the ancient mimeograph machine at the Marxist student union to print up one of them and joked about capitalist
samizdat.
He would sneer at the paperbacks in English that Ana sometimes read—lusty historical romances that sold in the millions—and tell her she was polluting her brain. But every so often he would calmly, if condescendingly, enumerate the reasons behind those books' commercial success—their accessibility, easy escapism, simplistically sympathetic characters, primacy of page-turning plot—as though he, too, could write such a book if only he cared to.

What had become of him? She had looked for him online more than once, to no avail. She imagined him living in Bolivia or Venezuela or even Cuba, still fighting the fight, cynically, a balding, potbellied bureaucrat, smoking second-rate cigars in the
fly-infested offices of a struggling guerrilla movement. Or maybe he was the manager of a Super U or a furniture outlet in Lille or Calais or somewhere dreary like that, driving a Renault through the rain to pick up the kids for a microwaved dinner of Fleury Michon moussaka.

She wasn't sure which would be worse.

She would like to see him on her computer screen, chanting on the Maidan. Handsome, flamboyant Léo. But it wouldn't be him, it would be a young Ukrainian who actually felt what Léo—for all his scorn for emotions—had so desperately wanted to feel all those years ago.

KATYA HANDED PETER HIS
umbrella and waved as he went down the path and out the gate. Trees dripping with rain; a swoosh of traffic in the distance. She turned and went back to the kitchen, poured another cup of coffee, switched off the radio with its refrain of road accidents and suicide bombings and child sex abuse. Was it her own perception, or had the world really changed for the worse? Or was it the media, digging up stories that once remained under silence?

She'd grown up in such a vacuum of false good news. Celebratory five-year plans and visits from friendly heads of state or folk-dancing troupes. All the bad things always happened over there,
na zapadye,
in the West. Yet when she'd arrived in the West with Peter, she had seen none of those bad things—she had been dazzled by the novelty of it all, the shelves full of choice, the elegant window displays, the gardens. The gardens above all, justifying and defying the miserable weather, the pervasive damp; rain-soaked villages with their bursts of compensatory color; everywhere you looked, even on the smallest plots of land next to motorways or car parks. Katya was fascinated by plants and flowers, but she had never learned to garden. Peter used to in the early days; they had more time then. They had real weekends. They threw parties in their own little back garden when it was warm. It was a good life. Peter would mow their tiny lawn, then move about on his knees, up to his wrists in soil. Bushes, borders, bursts of color and texture. She never learned the names of the plants. Except the hydrangeas; everyone knew hydrangeas. He prepared
the garden for their parties the way she prepared the zakuski. Everyone loved Katya's zakuski. After a while, though, five or ten years, she began to doubt the enthusiasm of those polite English guests or their louder American friends and colleagues: They did not know how to classify her, she was too exotic, she was no hydrangea, so out of awkwardness, they enthused about her zakuski. She used to smile and shrug and say, They're just hors d'oeuvres. But because she was exotic, they tasted better.

Nowadays people just went out and bought expensive sushi.

And those parties: She always went to bed—the dishwasher half loaded, piles of plates and parades of glasses all over the kitchen—with a sense of something lost or never attained. Where were the conversations, the truly enthusiastic and deep philosophic engagement she remembered from parties back in Russia? These people gossiped about authors and actors, or house prices, or where they would send their children to school, or a skiing trip to some French resort whose name she could hardly pronounce (nor could they); they were not stupid, far from it, she just wondered if they did not accept their comfortable lives as glibly as her erstwhile Soviet compatriots had accepted the drivel churned out by
Pravda
and
Izvestia
. She wanted to shake them.

But once, she had sat until sunrise in the garden with a guest. And that time she had felt as if she were back in Russia, philosophizing, questioning life. Do you love your husband? Is it enough to have a job, to travel? What about religion? Death? How do you define freedom? What gives meaning? Where are the limits of the individual?

Andrey Stepanovich. They had paid for his ticket from the newly rebaptized Saint Petersburg. He was a rising young author, and Polyana had published his prizewinning novel. They had spent more on the marketing budget than for any other book in their short history. They had arranged readings and signings and radio appearances for Andrey, which he performed with charm
and earnestness. They expected him to become the new Nabokov, the next Kundera.

He seemed to have brought the white nights with him in his pale, vibrant eyes. He made her want to stay awake, not to miss anything, as if he were an ambassador bearing a gift that would dissolve in the morning sunlight. He was not dazzled by the West, because in those early days of transition he believed he could contribute to a new, democratic Russia. The other guests had left, Peter had gone to bed, and Katya sat on with Andrey, wrapped in her shawl, shivering from the chill air, and something else.

Why do you stay here now? he asked her. You could go back to Russia, start a business, teach English, translate literature. Now is the time.

Katya did not remember what she had told him. A flat excuse,
My life is here now,
that sort of thing.

His voice went on into the night, weaving circles around her, entrapping her with a long list of all the reasons why she should go back to Russia. She laughed at some of them—he was such an idealist! But she recalled that by the end of his list, she had an image as vivid and real as if she had turned the clock back to before Peter, before England. Finally, she stopped him and said, This is just nostalgia. I won't find that Russia, because I've changed, too. And what you describe is what you dream of—it's your utopia, it's not real. It's like your book, beautiful but unreal. You have kept all the best things from our childhood, all the eternal Russian values, and added some fantasy of a sort of modernized, enlightened democracy. No such place exists even outside Russia.

He hung his head as if disappointed in her bleak realism or his failure to convince her. Then he turned and looked at her. It is because, he said in English as if for emphasis, it is because when you love, you see everything more beautiful.

She burst out laughing. She thought he was referring to Russia, and she was beginning to find his love of motherland a
bit overblown. There was a moment of silence, and then with his voice quiet and even but almost pained, he said in Russian, When I leave tomorrow—I mean tonight—Ekaterina Sergeyevna, will you come with me?

Katya's shivering seemed to grow worse. He stood up and came over to her, put his hands on her elbows, and coaxed her up from her chair. There was a kiss, a very long one. She realized his eyes were the same color as hers. And that he was probably younger than she was. She thought that if she were able to believe a fraction of what he had said, the long poem that had filled her with a homesickness no less potent than this simple desire to kiss and be kissed, she would go with him to Saint Petersburg. But she didn't, couldn't, believe. Her sense of timing had changed. Deep down, she disapproved of his spontaneous declaration.

Andrey had gone back to Saint Petersburg, and Katya and Peter heard nothing more from him. The book did only moderately well. As Katya had found with her poetry, the West was no longer interested in the literature of the former Eastern bloc. There was enough new, democratic material written directly in English. India was hot; Ireland was hot.

Sometimes, in idle moments like this one, she wondered what would have happened if she had gone back to Russia. Left Peter and gone back. There had been those shaky years in their marriage, not unlike now. She would not have gone to Andrey; she would have gone to the evanescent dawn place of her nostalgia, the country they had imagined between them. That something she thought she had lost, or somehow never attained, in her life in England—would she have found it?

No. Because she would have had to define it first; she did not know what she was looking for. It was not geographical, it was personal. Perhaps it was something all exiles looked for: a key, a missing self, a cultural identity.

She thought it was a sad irony that these last months had served to sharpen her understanding more effectively than an entire comfortable adult life in Britain. And then with a rush of something almost like joy, she realized that she had found that key to completion after all—at last, yes, she realized what it was, not that it had been there all along: It had crept into her life unobtrusively, discreetly. Together with Zinaida Mikhailovna.