The Wanting (17 page)

Collette pointed to a group of women in cheap coats and homemade hats.

“Disgusting, aren’t they?” she said.

We found the entrance to Collette’s building, one of the maze of apartment blocks in forlorn shades of pink and yellow. They reminded me of the girls at a party who never get asked to dance.

We pressed for the elevator. It groaned open, and a fetor stretched out toward us, followed by a large woman in a fur coat pulling a frightened little dog.

“Collette Petrovna!” she bellowed. “Hello! And who’s this nice young fellow?” She bent down and petted her dog. “Say hello, Vova!”

Collette did not reply. Instead, she edged me quickly into the elevator and pressed her floor.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“Plotkina,” she replied. “She’s just a pest. Don’t worry about her.”

Collette’s apartment was at the end of a long, narrow hall, its floors sodden by an endless parade of wet boots. She set the key in the lock and turned the bolt. We stepped inside, she flipped on the light, and I gasped.

The door had opened onto a room suffused in color and light. In the center was a kind of velvet throne with baroque finials and arms in the shape of lion’s paws; beside it, a floor lamp carved to resemble one of the undulating pillars of Saint Peter’s in Rome, topped with a shade of colored glass; the drapes were burnished taffeta, made dazzling with tassels of gold; and her rug—a riot of color, stitched, woven, glued, I could not say how, into a magic carpet. Her walls were hand-painted with tea roses, and in her tiny bedroom, a lace canopy was strung with silk flowers.

“This must be what France looks like,” I marveled.

“How would I know?” she answered sadly. “It’s all just junk I found.”

I followed her into the tiny kitchen, watched as she put on the kettle. Her hands were not delicate like Irina’s but rounded, like the rest of her body, fleshy and full, though the long red nails made them elegant and European. She brought one of these hands up
to her face and languidly brushed a few untamed strands of hair from her eyes. By this time, her lipstick was mostly worn off, but her lips picked up moisture from the steaming kettle and seemed, if anything, more luminous than ever.

“Can I help with the tea?” I said.

“Wait a minute,” she replied.

Collette lifted the telephone, rotated the dial a few notches, and shoved a pencil between the finger hole and the stop bar, transfixing it in the no-man’s-land between on and off.

“That’s the way they listen,” she said. “When you break the connection, they go deaf.”

“Okay,” I said.

“You didn’t know that? Everyone knows that.”

“Of course I knew that.”

She frowned. “I don’t want them to listen to me. I’m sick of them listening to me.” Just as suddenly she broke into a smile. “But I want you to listen to me.”

“I love to listen to you, Collette.”

She poured the tea. Her china was English or maybe Japanese, and I was afraid the teacup would shatter between my fingers.

“You have your own problems,” she said. “Why do you want to hear mine?”

“I don’t really have any problems,” I told her.

“Then you live in a different world than I do.” Suddenly she looked up at me. “Roman, do you know what love is?”

“Of course I do,” I said.

“No. You cannot. How could you? You’re the lucky one.”

She put down her cup. “I met him because there is a God in heaven after all.”

“Whom?”

“Do you want to hear or not?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do.”

“He appeared in the early afternoon,” she began. “I remember
this specifically, because I had been looking out the window, and only the youngest children were playing—school was not yet out. It was spring, I had thrown the windows open and the air was full of life—you know, children laughing in the courtyard, birds singing, bees buzzing—spring! When out of the blue, there was a knock on my door. I was afraid, of course. No one ever comes unannounced unless it’s trouble. And then through the door I hear
Je cherche Collette, Collette Pierrovna Chernova
. Can you imagine? French coming through my door? I had not heard French since my grandfather …” She sighed as if Grandfather had only yesterday passed away. “And so beautiful. I peeked through the glazok. The face on the other side … the eyes so blue, so pure
 … Mademoiselle Chernoff? J’espère que je ne suis pas venu à un temps incommode
. But Roman, you don’t understand French, do you?”

“Well, yes. Some,” I told her.

“Don’t worry, I’ll tell it in Russian.” She glanced at her hands, then out the window. “He was so tall! He wore a tweed jacket. Do you even know what tweed is? And his name was Pascal. Pascal!” She was smiling happily now. “The first thing he said to me was ‘I have a letter for you.’ He was so nervous! He kept looking around for the police to come jumping through the windows!

“He seemed like a boy to me, the way he smiled, the way it was impossible to take offense at anything he said. I made him tea.”

“Like for me.”

“Yes, like for you. Only he didn’t drink it like we Russians do, slurping and dripping and loading our cups with spoonfuls of sugar, but elegantly, unaffected. He seemed to enjoy it so much.”

“Collette,” I said, “what is the point of all this?”

“The point? There is no point. Just my life. If you’re not interested, you’re not interested.”

“No, no,” I said.

She sipped her tea very slowly, pouting. But at last she began again. “Finally, he reached into his pocket and handed me a big white envelope. Inside this envelope was … but let me get it for you.”

“That’s not necessary,” I said to her.

“No, I’ll get it. I want you to see it. To see I’m not making this up.”

She disappeared into her bedroom and then reappeared with a white envelope, just as she said, only now it was somewhat darkened, dog-eared at the corners. She withdrew from it a smaller envelope and held it up to me. It was addressed simply to “Collette,” and from that she withdrew a few sheets of onionskin. She held these to my face also, and I could make out, in a fine but shaking hand, tightly spaced lines in muted green ink.

“I’ll translate as I read,” she went on, “so you will forgive me if sometimes I make a mistake.”

“Collette,” I said again, “it’s not necessary.”

“You don’t want to hear?”

“You don’t have to translate. I know French.”

But she translated anyway.

“I couldn’t believe what I was reading,” Collette went on. “Curator? Journalist? ‘They’re both retired now,’ Pascal told me. ‘But I
don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Oh, they’re very old now,’ he explained. And I said, ‘Curator of
what?
’ ‘At the Louvre, of course. Didn’t you know?’ Didn’t I know? Didn’t I know?

“How could I know? Did I even have the slightest idea my grandfather had a brother? There were the thousand and one tales of riches long gone, of the house in Saint Petersburg, the estate in Tver’—my grandfather’s voice came back to me,
Ah, if you could only have seen Basyinka! There was no place on earth like Basyinka!
On and on, day in, day out. But did he ever mention a brother? And then he would begin about the years in Paris, the house on the rue de la Varenne, believe me, I could describe every room to you in the smallest possible detail—but did he mention that a brother had come with him to Paris? Lived in the same house? Was clever enough to remain in Paris when my idiot grandfather was all too happy to fall into Stalin’s net, that this brother married, studied, became an important curator of textiles at the Louvre while his wife, Lorrette, wrote articles for
Le Monde?
Of course not. Not a hint, not a slip of the tongue, nothing. And then one day, years after Grandfather died, voilà! An uncle! An aunt!

“I said to Pascal, ‘How is this possible?’ And he said, ‘Everything is possible.’ He took my two hands in his and said, ‘Everything is possible.’ ”

Tears welled up in her eyes. “It’s crazy,” she said. “I thought I had to tell him my whole life right then and there, from the beginning up to that very moment. When I finished he was weeping. ‘It’s just my life,’ I said to him. ‘Things like that should never happen,’ he said. ‘I won’t let this happen to you anymore!’ Not like a big declaration, but in a very small voice, almost a whisper, like a breeze. And throughout all of it he never let go of my hands.”

Collette went to the sink, rinsed out the cups, and laid them in the drainer.

“So just like that you were in love?” I blurted. “In one day.”

“You think such a thing is impossible?”

I didn’t answer her.

“You needn’t worry,” Collette said. “It’s over.”

“Why? Why is it over?”

“It’s over. Leave it at that. Anyway, it’s not what you think. He could stay in Moscow only a few days at a time, and they only gave him a visa once every few months. They watched us constantly. We never had a single night. How can you be lovers if they refuse to let you love? He wanted to marry me. But of course it was impossible.”

“Why was it so impossible?”

“What difference does it make? I told you, it’s over.”

She had the habit—I might have mentioned it already—of pushing back the lock of hair that always fell over her eye. But this time she tugged all of her hair back with both hands, as if she were gathering it into a ponytail. She held it there for what seemed like several minutes, deciding, and then suddenly released it. The hair exploded from her hands like a flock of birds alighting upon the ripe branches of her shoulders.

“Don’t misunderstand!” she cried. “He never hid it from me. I don’t want you to think that he did. He hid nothing! But his wife would never divorce him. It was as simple as that. She vowed to him, never. He told me this in tears. On top of everything she was a true Catholic. He tried everything to convince her. He begged her. Offered her whatever she wanted. Money, the house. Whatever she wanted. But time and again she said no. I suppose she loved him. Naturally, he would never take her to court. How could he? Was he supposed to accuse her of something horrible? They had two boys! Pascal could not bear even to see them scrape their knees, so how could he do such a terrible thing to them? Legally, he could live separately from her for six years, then take her to court. But how could I ask him to do that? How could I separate him from his children, when who knows if they would ever let me leave? He said he would come and live here. ‘Now I know you love me,’ I told him, ‘now I understand love.’ But I loved him, too. So I told him no. I made him go home. I made him promise never to return, never to write to me, never even to think about me. So that is how I love, Roman. That is how it is.”

“But you said it was they who wouldn’t let him back in.”

“Yes,” she said absently.

•    •    •

We sat there for a while not speaking. Then she said, “I have some beautiful things he brought me from Paris. Would you like to see them?”

She led me into the living room and opened the doors of a small china closet she’d cobbled together with old windows she had scavenged and painted with glitter. But before she could lay hold of the cloisonné bowl or the alabaster elephant with the sapphire eyes, I took her arm, spun her around, pulled her to me, and kissed her with the full force of my mouth. She pulled away, regarded me coolly, and began to unbutton her blouse.