The White Russian (31 page)

Ruzsky walked on into the drawing room, which ran the length of the veranda. Oleg and Maria came in behind him, the light from the candle casting flickering shadows across his father’s prized collection of rare and ancient texts. Ruzsky ran his finger along them, disturbing a thick layer of dust.

He touched the leather chair by the door and turned the globe beside his father’s writing desk. Next to it was a bust of Ruzsky’s great-grandfather, who had become ADC to Alexander I and traveled to Paris with him, after Waterloo.

Ruzsky reached the window and pulled back the shutters, allowing the moonlight to stream across bare floorboards. He turned the key, shoved open the glass door ahead of him, and stepped out onto the snow-covered balcony.

Ruzsky slipped his hands into his pockets. He thought of those long summer evenings: Father at his desk, Mother at the piano, the three of them playing on the grass or lying on the veranda, legs swinging against the lilac bushes.

He found that he was staring at the tree on the hillock by the lake. It was impossible, in the darkness, to make out the tiny gravestone.

“We didn’t know you were coming, sir.”

Ruzsky turned around. He could see the compassion and concern in Maria’s eyes. “I didn’t know I was coming.”

“How is your father?” Oleg gave him a toothless smile.

“He’s fine.”

“And Dmitri?”

“Dmitri survived the front, that’s the main thing. He’s back in Petersburg now.” Ruzsky caught Maria’s eye. “He’s fine. Where is the good Mrs. Prenkova?”

Oleg looked down. He shook his head. “She passed away, Sandro. Some years ago now.”

Ruzsky felt his face flush. “I’m sorry. They didn’t tell me.”

Oleg looked up again. His eyes were hollow. “You must be ravenous! Come downstairs.”

As they walked through the hallway, Ruzsky guessed that the house’s decline had begun in earnest with the death of Oleg’s wife. She and Katya were sisters from Petrovo who had married local boys and seen them go on, under the Ruzsky family patronage, to become noncommissioned officers in the Preobrazhenskys before entering his father’s service. It was the way things had always worked.

As they descended the back stairs to the kitchen, the light from Oleg’s candle flickered across the lattice of cobwebs that hung from the ceiling. Since he was taller than Oleg, one caught in Ruzsky’s hair.

“You should have warned me,” Oleg said. “You should have warned me.”

There was no electric light in the kitchen-there never had been-but in the winter darkness, the cavernous room had always been brightly lit by huge torches. Oleg hurriedly lit two more candles as Ruzsky peered through the gloom. More cobwebs tethered the line of enormous copper pots and pans to the shelf beside the range.

He pulled back the wooden bench from the long table, for Maria to sit.

“You should have warned me,” Oleg said again as he disappeared into the larder. He returned with some bread-old and stale-and a hunk of ham and of cheese.

Oleg placed the food in front of them. In the awkward silence that followed, the truth of Oleg’s life here dawned on Ruzsky. The old man was alone, scraping a marginal existence amongst the cobweb-shrouded ghosts of their past. He had been forgotten by the family.

Ruzsky looked at the meager fare. He wondered how long this would keep Oleg.

“It must be lonely here on your own,” Maria said.

“A boy from the village comes to help with the garden.” He pushed the bread across to them. “The Colonel sometimes sends word.”

It was a lie and Ruzsky knew it, but said for Oleg’s benefit, he guessed, rather than his own. To accept poverty and neglect was one thing, to lose respect for the family you’d served for more than half a century, quite another. “Has he been down to visit?” Ruzsky asked.

“Not for a time.”

“Not since before the war?”

Oleg pretended to have to think hard. “It’s been a time. A few years, maybe. It is the war, of course.”

Ruzsky knew his father had been here since Ilusha’s death, but he thought that his visits had been nothing more than an attempt to prove something to himself, and so had eventually petered out. Dmitri had once told him that in the year before their mother’s death, both parents had eradicated the house and its memories from their minds, but the old man still refused him the chance to take it over and restore it. “It’s like a living tomb,” Dmitri had told him. “And I think that’s the way he wants it to remain.”

Ruzsky thought of his mother. He remembered the cold accusation in her eyes on the morning after Ilusha’s death.

Ruzsky took a hunk of bread. Maria cut herself some ham. Oleg was trying to assess her with a subtlety he had never possessed.

“You’ve come far together?” he asked.

“We were on our way to Yalta,” Ruzsky said. “We found we were traveling companions.” Ruzsky wondered if Oleg would tell his father about his visitors, but he doubted it.

“All the boys in the village have gone,” Oleg said. “You remember Kirill?”

“Of course. He rode bareback, like a maniac,” Ruzsky told Maria. “He was the son of the foreman at the glassworks, and he loved to taunt us with his superior ability. Ah, Kirill…”

“Killed. And two of his sons. And many more. What’s the news from Petersburg. Will we win?”

“All the talk is of revolution again.”

Oleg looked at Maria. He did not seem to know whether to disapprove of her or not. His own personal code considered infidelity-even a hint of it-an abomination, and yet he could hardly fail to be affected by her beauty. Even in the dull light of this basement, she seemed to sparkle. Ruzsky watched as the old man sought a way of tactfully framing the questions to which he wished answers.

Oleg stood. He waved his hand. “It was bad enough last time. They know if they come to the house, I’ll shoot ’em. What have I got to live for?”

“Have you had trouble?”

“We’ve had trouble, once or twice. When did it start before? In 1905? I can’t remember. She was alive then. Tanya, I mean. There were some at the door. She stayed in her room. Shouted at me not to go down. I said I’d blow their heads off if they took another pace forward.”

“Who were they?”

“Thugs.”

“From the village?”

“No.” Oleg shook his head vigorously. “No, no. One of them was, a bad boy. He was dismissed from the factory for stealing. This house belonged to the people-that’s what he said! He must have led the others here. I heard some of them were from Tula, but I don’t know how they got this far.”

“What happened?”

“They left us alone, but I heard they burnt the Shuvalov house to the ground.”

Ruzsky shook his head. He was shocked. He’d heard of such things, of course, but did not expect them here.

“And assaulted the servants. Killed the butler!” Oleg was obviously proud of his success in defending their property. His face softened. “I’ll leave you, Master Sandro. I know you will want to look around. There are sheets on the bed in your parents’ room on the first floor.” His expression remained suitably opaque. “And in the guest room.”

Oleg lit a candle for them and then walked slowly to the door. “I’ve done my best, sir,” he said, turning to face them.

“Of course, Oleg.”

“I’m sorry for…” He thought better of it. “Good night, sir.”

“Good night.”

R uzsky walked slowly around the ground floor, the candle in his hand and Maria beside him. There were cobwebs in each nook and cranny and dust upon every surface. In the dining room, the silver candlesticks and salt and pepper cellars were still on the table, as if waiting for the family to sit down to dinner. Ruzsky opened the shutters, allowing the moonlight to spill into the room. “We used to eat as a family in the summer, all of us together, with these doors open and the sun streaming in.”

Ruzsky pushed open the double doors to the library. He pulled back the shutters here too. “The rest of my father’s collection of books. And his father’s. If you want a rare or unusual text, it’s probably here.” Ruzsky patted the dust off the top of a leather armchair.

A shaft of moonlight fell upon the giant portrait that hung above the fireplace and Ruzsky stood in front of it. “Your father?” Maria asked.

“My grandfather. They looked very alike.”

“All three of you do.”

Ruzsky looked at the face above him. “They were both tyrants, in their own way.”

“Did you know your grandfather?”

“He died when I was five. We had come down here to see him and he passed away in the room upstairs.” Ruzsky’s brow creased. “It was like a giant weight had been lifted from my father’s shoulders. That night, I heard him laugh for the first time.”

Ruzsky continued to stare at the dour, imperious face of his grandfather. “For a few years, he was a completely different man.”

“Is he buried here?”

“There is a graveyard beyond the walled garden. My father has never been there, but I have.”

He turned to face her.

“Is your mother buried here also?” she asked.

Ruzsky shook his head. “No. In Petersburg.”

“Dmitri never talks of her.”

Ruzsky tried not to react to the mention of his brother’s name. “No, well…”

“He says your father believes she died of a broken heart.”

“It was a claim he once made.”

“Is it true?”

“No.”

“Why is it that you do not talk of her?”

Ruzsky stared at the portrait of his grandfather. “I don’t know.”

Maria waited for him to continue. After a long silence, he did so. “She was afflicted with a deep melancholia, even before Ilusha’s… Sometimes, she stayed in her room all day.” He put his hand to his forehead. “She suffered from terrible headaches.”

Ruzsky looked at Maria again. “Perhaps my memory plays tricks, but after we left here that last time, she never embraced me again.”

“Where should I sleep, Sandro?”

Ruzsky did not respond.

“I’m tired,” she said softly. “And this is your home.”

“Of course.” He cleared his throat. “Of course.”

Ruzsky led her through the hallway and up the stairs. He walked swiftly down the landing, past the orchestra gallery and his parents’ bedroom, to those reserved for guests. Oleg had lit a candle and placed a bowl of warm water in the first of the rooms. He’d also pulled back the covers. Ruzsky patted the bed with his fist and a cloud of dust rose into the air. “I’m sorry,” he said, glancing up at the ceiling, where the wallpaper had begun to peel, the spreading damp visible even in this light. “Will you be all right?”

Maria moved slowly toward him. She took his face gently in her hands, her eyes searching his. She kissed him once, with soft, warm lips, then wrapped her arms around him and pressed him to her. “Thank you for bringing me here, Sandro.”

She released him and stepped back.

Ruzsky hesitated.

Maria did not move. He saw compassion and regret in her eyes. Was that all?

He turned and walked to the door. He looked back.

“Good night, Sandro,” she said.

“Good night.”

Ruzsky stepped out, pulled the door shut, and took two or three paces down the corridor.

He stood in the darkness, his mind clouded and his heart pounding.

He waited.

He walked a few more paces and then stopped again. This corridor stripped away time. He felt a tightness in his chest. He was back at the night of Ilusha’s death, when Dmitri had clung to him by the door of his room, here, just before he had been summoned to his father’s study.

Ruzsky remembered every inch of that journey.

He remembered the warmth of the fire, the look on his father’s face, and his own terror as the reality of his emotional exile dawned upon him for the first time.

He could hear his mother’s cries, and Dmitri’s echoing silence as he had tried to recount his father’s words.

Ruzsky shivered. He found himself at Dmitri and Ilya’s door.

The room was empty. The two beds were still there and the old chest of drawers, but everything personal had been removed: Ilusha’s collection of bears that had occupied half the bed, Dmitri’s sword that had hung on the wall, the regimental flag above the door.

Ruzsky was as still as stone. He realized that he had wished to bathe in these memories, and even this had been denied him. He moved toward the shutters and pulled them slowly back.

The lake was white in the moonlight. Ruzsky felt his eyes drawn along the ice, toward the top of the slope on the far side, to the place where a small black stone stood in a clearing beneath the trees.

He turned and looked across the corridor toward his own bedroom. The door was shut.

He hesitated for only a moment before opening it. If his father-or perhaps even his mother when she had been alive-had stripped his brothers’ room, then he was certain they would have done the same to his own.

He was right, but the disappointment still tugged at something within him.

There was a blanket at the end of the bed where his toy bear had once slept, and Ruzsky lay down and covered himself with it, his boots hanging over the end of the mattress.

He closed his eyes.

All Ruzsky could see and all he could feel was the ice-cold water against his clammy skin, his arms and legs swirling helplessly.

He was drowning, eyes bulging and lungs empty. He was trying to breathe, but could not.

They were watching him. His father, mother, Dmitri… they were standing there impassively, watching him die.

Ruzsky felt the searing, wrenching pain in his chest.

This was his punishment, and would be for all eternity.

“Sandro!”

The slap awoke him, but it was a moment before his surroundings began to coalesce. She was above him; it was her. It was Maria, her face soft and beautiful and etched with concern; Oleg behind her, a candle above his head.