The People in the Photo (12 page)

Once the wheels were in motion, was there ever a chance to stop them turning? Which of us missed our chance to put a spoke in and prevent the inevitable tragedy? I can’t stop these thoughts from going round in my head at night. I remember mentioning offhand that I was due to meet Natasha in Dinard with the Vassilyevs, and Pierre begging me to bring back a
photograph of her. Would he have forgotten her had I not obeyed? Although she was pregnant at the time, I could tell from the way he ran his finger over the image that the sight of her had lifted some hidden barrier inside him, reactivating a virus that had lain dormant. Then the tragic train of events rolled onwards. Pierre turned up unannounced in Interlaken in 1970, finding us at the chalet to which Natasha had fled to have a break from her suffocating marriage. The look, my God, the look they gave one another, both stopping to touch their engagement rings at exactly the same time, as total silence descended on the room … A moment later, Pierre had wrapped his arms slowly, painfully around her. He embraced her so gently, the way you would hold a bundle of delicate twigs [small branches], and her entire body let itself be enveloped, dissolving into the calm passion that whispered from one atom of flesh to another: love me, love me, love me again.

I spent the night elsewhere. The next morning, I found them sitting side by side on the sofa, still entwined in their sleep, both fully dressed. Natasha’s head rested against Pierre’s neck. There was a look of peace on their faces, as if they had safely returned to port after a crossing fraught with dangers. I don’t think they had even made love. And even though I knew the affair would wreak havoc on the lives of all involved, I said to myself I would give anything to feel so totally attuned to another person.

20 December

Difficult to write in this diary. When I started it, Nataliya was still alive. Now both she and Oleg are dead, and her husband has vanished into thin air, taking Lena with him.

I’ve been seeing quite a bit of Pierre. He’s a shadow of his former self. He has never told me what he wrote to Natasha; whether he had a last-minute change of heart. The few times I have tried to mention her have met with stony silence. His marriage is a sham, but he’s staying for the sake of the children. To begin with, I thought he was going to kill himself. He wasn’t eating properly and was drinking heavily; he came close to losing the studio. And then, little by little, life, photos, albums took hold once more. But he barely speaks, and when he does it’s in monosyllables. His poor children can’t make sense of it, and Anna has become worryingly bigoted in her opinions. I visit once a fortnight and try to get the boys out of this poisonous [bad] atmosphere. This tragedy has already caused so much harm, and they are still so innocent.

25 December

Spent Christmas Day with the Crüstens. Mood was glum. Nevertheless, Anna and Pierre did their best to avoid spoiling the children’s day. I bought a new racquet for Philippe and an illustrated encyclopedia of plants
for Stéphane, who has become fascinated by trees. The boys came out to the car to say goodbye and, after I had hugged each of them, my godson whispered in my ear: ‘Jean, why doesn’t Papa love us any more?’

He’s only little, Stéphane, but he’s already very solemn and earnest, with his big blue eyes and blond curls tumbling onto his forehead. It’s clear he is taking things badly, because he doesn’t understand what’s going on.

I placed my hand on his neck, bent down to look him straight in the eyes and told him, ‘He does love you, I promise. He’s just very sad at the moment.’

Stéphane bit his lip and thought for a moment before asking, ‘When will he stop being sad?’

I gave him the only reply that seemed honest: as soon as he can.

And I told him to try not to think about it.

Ashford, 28 March 2008

Dearest Hélène,

I have just finished reading Jean’s diary. That certainly puts a new slant on things. It really is a never-ending web of lies.

I confess I’m feeling at a loss. When I awoke beside you in Saint-Malo, you were still asleep, and I watched you for a long time. At that point, I no longer believed that this search would really shed any light on the past, but I didn’t care. It had given me that moment of perfect happiness. That gift of fate was a miracle in itself.

After reading Sylvia’s letter (she apparently knew nothing of your mother’s final days), I was even more convinced that the past had finished unloading its toxic burden. As far as I was concerned, Nataliya had died in a car crash on her way to meet my father, when they were both probably on the point of divorcing. Nothing less, but nothing more.

Jean’s diary changes everything: an irresponsible coward, a reckless, suicidal woman, our dear parents seem a little less endearing this evening. Not to mention the others, only too eager to hush the whole thing up, I
suppose, so as not to have to face up to their own part in this disaster.

All of a sudden I feel as if I’ve inherited a heap of failures, defeats and disgraces of which I was oblivious. I wonder what you will think of me, the son of the man who drove your mother to despair, and in a way to her grave. How will I be able to forget that you are the daughter of the woman whose death spelled the destruction of our family? I wonder to what extent we aren’t the subjects of a cruel game, the panic-stricken negative of the couple that half gave birth to us both. And whether we will be able to avoid treading in their footsteps and repeating their mistakes.

These are not ghosts we have exhumed: they are very much alive; it is as if they will never stop spreading sorrow around them. I really do believe I hate them. And one of the reasons for this hatred is that their affair weighs heavily on ours, to the point of suffocation, and I’m terrified at the idea of losing you. So I picked up my pen, as in the early days of our correspondence, in the hope that the evil spell will have been warded off, I don’t know how, by the time these words reach you.

Show me the way.

Stéphane

Paris, 2 April 2008

Stéphane,

You feel totally adrift, I know, and with good reason. But don’t judge them, let’s not judge them.

While you’ve been wallowing in resentment, I’ve spent the last few evenings walking beside Canal Saint-Martin, thinking of them. I kept walking until I had run through every question in my mind and vented all the anger, outrage, sometimes fury I had for all of them – our parents, Sylvia and Michel. Finally I came round to hating myself, for having opened Pandora’s box.

And then I calmed down.

Because I realised there was really very little standing between them and us. We are looking upon them as two parents with a debt to pay, and we’re summoning them to be tried posthumously before us. We loathe them for not having been there for us, for keeping things from us, for their adultery and lies. But at the end of the day, they were just themselves: a man and a woman in love, torn between the feelings they had for one another and for their families.

All their efforts to deny that passion, all the pressure they put themselves under only made matters worse. A broken engagement, two marriages, children and distance could not put an end to it. The fact that they were reunited proves that the bond between them had withstood all the obstacles life – or they themselves – had thrown in their way.

We are looking down at their lives from the vantage point of the world today, with our freedoms already won. It’s easy. But my mother was a minor until the age of twenty-one and was married at twenty-seven: she spent almost her entire life in a state of subjection, first to her family and then to her husband. Yes, she fell pregnant by your father. Perhaps they could have avoided it, perhaps not: it wasn’t half as easy to get hold of the pill in the 1970s.

By going for an abortion, she was taking a huge risk; private clinic or no clinic, there’s no knowing what the consequences would have been. Yet she was willing to go down that road because she would have done anything, including losing the child of the man she loved, to see me again. I could never hold that against her. I could never blame her for having been scared. At the risk of shocking you, I’m even less minded to blame her given that I too was once on the brink of making that decision, and it cost me a ten-year relationship (the famous Hervé whom Sylvia referred to). That’s when I realised that some obstacles simply cannot be overcome
and we will do anything to get around them, even if it destroys us. And I’m convinced that if my mother chose this desperate option, it’s because she felt trapped and could see no other way out. Indeed, Jean’s entire diary tells us it was so.

No, your father’s behaviour doesn’t exactly cover him in glory, but to conclude that his silence was what pushed my mother into the ravine is absurd, just as absurd as the idea she threw herself over the edge on purpose. Pierre was scared. Most of all, I suspect, of losing his children. I know you’ve said he wasn’t around much; but you all knew who he was, what he was doing, where to find him. Philippe told me your father stood by your mother all the way through her illness: it’s not often you come across such loyalty through trials and discord, and that loyalty is doubtless the clearest sign he was not totally without integrity. With my mother, Pierre never had the chance to make up for his mistakes; the accident froze him in the role of bastard for posterity.

Every single day after Nataliya’s death must have been a living hell for all of them. How often must he and Michel Hivert have blamed themselves? Do you imagine they were able, just for one day, for one night, to forget that they had both rejected the woman they loved and had lost her for ever? When it seemed to us we were falling foul of their bad moods, what you and I were really seeing was the guilt gnawing away at them, their every memory a torment. Thirty years on, your
father was still visiting Natasha’s grave, and mine was still slamming doors every time he heard Sylvia call me Lena. Don’t be too hard on them, Stéphane. In life, it seems to me they were hard enough on themselves.

My feeling is that it’s time to forgive what they and those around them never forgave themselves for. Pierre and Nataliya loved one another, they loved us and, whether we like it or not, we are the heirs to that love. Those left behind kept their lips sealed, but they did so in order to protect themselves and to protect us. They don’t deserve our censure either.

There’s no denying we have suffered. And we have not yet fully unravelled the harsh truth which has already brought such pain, filling your father’s 220 albums with such indelible sadness. But the conclusion you came to in an earlier letter is the right one. We are now the sole beneficiaries of this past, so we alone are responsible for deciding what to do with it.

When I think of the two of them now, Stéphane, I marvel at the strength of their bond, the same bond that brought us together thirty-seven years later from the unlikely beginnings of a newspaper clipping. The way we felt sipping our first coffee together that sunny morning in Saint-Malo, the low February light rippling on the sea like glass and gold leaf – it’s them we have to thank for it. Yes, it was the people in the photo speaking to us, calling our names … I gaze into their faces until my head spins and I seem to hear them telling us it’s
time to live, to seize the opportunity they let slip away.

I want nothing more than for you to come back to me.

And for us to love one another.

Hélène

xxxx