He ate again, so grossly that she had a sight of his many bad teeth. “In January, 1956, as an act of clemency you were granted a passport on condition the child Alexandra was left behind in Moscow. You exceeded the permitted time limit and remained in France, abandoning your child. Correct or false?”
The doors to the street were glass, the walls too. A big lorry parked outside them and the café darkened. The young waiter slammed down her tea without looking at her.
“Correct,” she said again, and managed this time to look at her interrogator, knowing what would follow, forcing herself to show him that on this score at least she had no doubts, and no regrets.
“Correct,” she repeated defiantly.
“As a condition of your application being favourably considered by the authorities, you signed an undertaking to the organs of State Security to perform certain tasks for them during your residence in Paris. One, to persuade your husband, the traitor Ostrakov, to return to the Soviet Union—”
“To
attempt
to persuade him,” she corrected him, with a faint smile. “He was not amenable to this suggestion.”
“Two, you undertook also to provide information concerning the activities and personalities of revanchist anti-Soviet émigré groups. You submitted two reports of no value and afterwards nothing. Why?”
“My husband despised such groups and had given up his contact with them.”
“You could have participated in the groups without him. You signed the document and neglected its undertaking. Yes or no?”
“Yes.”
“For this you abandon your child in Russia? To a Jew? In order to give your attention to an enemy of the people, a traitor of the State? For this you neglect your duty? Outstay the permitted period, remain in France?”
“My husband was dying. He needed me.”
“And the child Alexandra? She did not need you? A dying husband is more important than a living child? A traitor? A conspirator against the people?”
Releasing her wrist, Ostrakova deliberately took hold of her tea and watched the glass rise to her face, the lemon floating on the surface. Beyond it, she saw a grimy mosaic floor and beyond the floor the loved, ferocious, and kindly face of Glikman pressing down on her, exhorting her to sign, to go, to swear to anything they asked. The freedom of one is more than the slavery of three, he had whispered; a child of such parents as ourselves cannot prosper in Russia whether you stay or go; leave and we shall do our best to follow; sign anything, leave, and live for all of us; if you love me, go. . . .
“They were the hard days, still,” she said to the stranger finally, almost in a tone of reminiscence. “You are too young. They were the hard days, even after Stalin’s death: still hard.”
“Does the criminal Glikman continue to write to you?” the stranger asked in a superior, knowing way.
“He never wrote,” she lied. “How could he write, a dissident, living under restriction? The decision to stay in France was mine alone.”
Paint yourself black, she thought; do everything possible to spare those within their power.
“I have heard nothing from Glikman since I came to France more than twenty years ago,” she added, gathering courage. “Indirectly, I learned that he was angered by my anti-Soviet behaviour. He did not wish to know me any more. Inwardly he was already wishing to reform by the time I left him.”
“He did not write concerning your common child?”
“He did not write, he did not send messages. I told you this already.”
“Where is your daughter now?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have received communications from her?”
“Of course not. I heard only that she had entered a State orphanage and acquired another name. I assume she does not know I exist.”
The stranger ate again with one hand, while the other held the notebook. He filled his mouth, munched a little, then swilled his food down with the beer. But the superior smile remained.
“And now it is the criminal Glikman who is dead,” the stranger announced, revealing his little secret. He continued eating.
Suddenly Ostrakova wished the twenty years were two hundred. She wished that Glikman’s face had never, after all, looked down on her, that she had never loved him, never cared for him, never cooked for him, or got drunk with him day after day in his one-roomed exile where they lived on the charity of their friends, deprived of the right to work, to do anything but make music and love, get drunk, walk in the woods, and be cut dead by their neighbours.
“Next time I go to prison or you do, they will take her anyway. Alexandra is forfeit in any case,” Glikman had said. “But you can save yourself.”
“I will decide when I am there,” she had replied.
“Decide now.”
“When I am there.”
The stranger pushed aside his empty plate and once more took the sleek French notebook in both hands. He turned a page, as if approaching a new chapter.
“Concerning now your criminal daughter Alexandra,” he announced, through his food.
“
Criminal?
” she whispered.
To her astonishment the stranger was reciting a fresh catalogue of crimes. As he did so, Ostrakova lost her final hold upon the present. Her eyes were on the mosaic floor and she noticed the husks of langoustine and crumbs of bread. But her mind was in the Moscow law court again, where her own trial was being repeated. If not hers, then Glikman’s—yet not Glikman’s either. Then whose? She remembered trials that the two of them had attended as unwelcome spectators. Trials of friends, if only friends by accident: such as people who had questioned the absolute right of the authorities; or had worshipped some unacceptable god; or had painted criminally abstract pictures; or had published politically endangering love-poems. The chattering customers in the café became the jeering claque of the State police; the slamming of the bagatelle tables, the crash of iron doors. On this date, for escaping from the State orphanage on something street, so many months’ corrective detention. On that date, for insulting organs of State Security, so many more months, extended for bad behaviour, followed by so many years’ internal exile. Ostrakova felt her stomach turn and thought she might be sick. She put her hands to her glass of tea and saw the red pinch marks on her wrist. The stranger continued his recitation and she heard her daughter awarded another two years for refusing to accept employment at the something factory, God help her, and why shouldn’t she? Where had she learnt it? Ostrakova asked herself, incredulous. What had Glikman taught the child, in the short time before they took her away from him, that had stamped her in his mould and defeated all the system’s efforts? Fear, exultation, amazement jangled in Ostrakova’s mind, till something that the stranger was saying to her blocked them out.
“I did not hear,” she whispered after an age. “I am a little distressed. Kindly repeat what you just said.”
He said it again, and she looked up and stared at him, trying to think of all the tricks she had been warned against, but they were too many and she was no longer clever. She no longer had Glikman’s cleverness—if she had ever had it—about reading their lies and playing their games ahead of them. She knew only that to save herself and be reunited with her beloved Ostrakov, she had committed a great sin, the greatest a mother can commit. The stranger had begun threatening her, but for once the threat seemed meaningless. In the event of her non-collaboration—he was saying—a copy of her signed undertaking to the Soviet authorities would find its way to the French police. Copies of her useless two reports (done, as he well knew, solely in order to keep the brigands quiet) would be circulated among the surviving Paris émigrés—though, God knows, there were few enough of
them
about these days! Yet why should she have to submit to
pressure
in order to accept a gift of such immeasurable value—when, by some inexplicable act of clemency, this man, this system, was holding out to her the chance to redeem herself, and her child? She knew that her nightly and daily prayers for forgiveness had been answered, the thousands of candles, the thousands of tears. She made him say it a third time. She made him pull his notebook away from his gingery face, and she saw that his weak mouth had lifted into a half smile and that, idiotically, he seemed to require her absolution, even while he repeated his insane, God-given question.
“Assuming it has been decided to rid the Soviet Union of this disruptive and unsocial element, how would you like your daughter Alexandra to follow your footsteps here to France?”
For weeks after that encounter, and through all the hushed activities that accompanied it—furtive visits to the Soviet Embassy, form-filling, signed affidavits,
certificats d’hébergement,
the laborious trail through successive French ministries—Ostrakova followed her own actions as if they were someone else’s. She prayed often, but even with her prayers she adopted a conspiratorial attitude, dividing them among several Russian Orthodox churches so that in none would she be observed suffering an undue assault of piety. Some of the churches were no more than little private houses scattered round the 15th and 16th districts, with distinctive twice-struck crosses in plywood, and old, rain-sodden Russian notices on the doors, requesting cheap accommodation and offering instruction in the piano. She went to the Church of the Russian Abroad, and the Church of the Apparition of the Holy Virgin, and the Church of St. Seraphin of Sarov. She went everywhere. She rang the bells till someone came, a verger or a frail-faced woman in black; she gave them money, and they let her crouch in the damp cold before candle-lit icons, and breathe the thick incense till it made her half drunk. She made promises to the Almighty, she thanked Him, she asked Him for advice, she practically asked Him what
He
would have done if the stranger had approached Him in similar circumstances, she reminded Him that anyway she was under pressure, and they would destroy her if she did not obey. Yet at the same time, her indomitable common sense asserted itself, and she asked herself over and again
why
she of all people, wife of the traitor Ostrakov, lover of the dissident Glikman, mother—so she was given to believe—of a turbulent and anti-social daughter, should be singled out for such untypical indulgence?
In the Soviet Embassy, when she made her first formal application, she was treated with a regard she would never have dreamed possible, which was suited neither to a defector and renegade spy nor to the mother of an untamable hell-raiser. She was not ordered brusquely to a waiting-room, but escorted to an interviewing-room, where a young and personable official showed her a positively Western courtesy, even helping her, where her pen or courage faltered, to a proper formulation of her case.
And she told nobody, not even her nearest—though her nearest was not very near. The gingery man’s warning rang in her ears day and night: any indiscretion and your daughter will not be released.
And who was there, after all, apart from God, to turn to? To her half-sister Valentina, who lived in Lyons and was married to a car salesman? The very thought that Ostrakova had been consorting with a secret official from Moscow would send her rushing for her smelling-salts. In a
café,
Maria? In
broad daylight,
Maria? Yes, Valentina, and what he said is true. I had a bastard daughter by a Jew.
It was the nothingness that scared her most. The weeks passed; at the Embassy they told her that her application was receiving “favoured attention”; the French authorities had assured her that Alexandra would quickly qualify for French citizenship. The gingery stranger had persuaded her to backdate Alexandra’s birth so that she could be represented as an Ostrakova, not a Glikman; he said the French authorities would find this more acceptable; and it seemed that they had done so, even though she had never so much as mentioned the child’s existence at her naturalisation interviews. Now, suddenly, there were no more forms to fill in, no more hurdles to be cleared, and Ostrakova waited without knowing what she was waiting for. For the gingery stranger to reappear? He no longer existed. One ham omelette and
frites,
some Alsatian beer, two pieces of crusty bread had satisfied all his needs, apparently. What he was in relation to the Embassy she could not imagine: he had told her to present herself there, and that they would be expecting her; he was right. But when she referred to “your gentleman,” even “your blond, large gentleman who first approached me,” she met with smiling incomprehension.
Thus gradually whatever she was waiting for ceased to exist. First it was ahead of her, then it was behind her, and she had had no knowledge of its passing, no moment of fulfilment. Had Alexandra already arrived in France? Obtained her papers, moved on or gone to ground? Ostrakova began to think she might have done. Abandoned to a new and inconsolable sense of disappointment, she peered at the faces of young girls in the street, wondering what Alexandra looked like. Returning home, her eyes would fall automatically to the doormat in the hope of seeing a handwritten note or a
pneumatique:
“Mama, it is I. I am staying at the so-and-so hotel. . . .”A cable giving a flight number, arriving Orly tomorrow, tonight; or was it not Orly Airport but Charles de Gaulle? She had no familiarity with airlines, so she visited a travel agent, just to ask. It was both. She considered going to the expense of having a telephone installed so that Alexandra could ring her up. Yet what on earth was she expecting after all these years? Tearful reunions with a grown child to whom she had never been united? The wishful remaking, more than twenty years too late, of a relationship she had deliberately turned her back on? I have no right to her, Ostrakova told herself severely; I have only my debts and my obligations. She asked at the Embassy but they knew nothing more. The formalities were complete, they said. That was all they knew. And if Ostrakova wished to send her daughter money? she asked cunningly—for her fares, for instance, for her visa?—could they give her an address perhaps, an office that would find her?