The People in the Photo (2 page)

Paris, 16 June (email)

Thank you for being so open with me, Stéphane. It means a lot. Let’s keep going then. Letter to follow very soon.

Warm wishes,

Hélène

Miami, 18 June 2007 (postcard)

Dear Hélène,

Greetings from Florida, where the beaches are as beautiful as in the photograph, even though the conference doesn’t leave me much time to enjoy them.

I’ll write soon.

Stéphane C.

Paris, 25 June 2007

Dear Stéphane,

I hope you got back from Florida safely and that you managed to catch at least a few rays of sunshine while you were there.

I’m sorry it has taken me so long to write to you as promised. Getting the catalogue on the Exposition Universelle done turned out to be no mean feat and I haven’t had much time to make any further enquiries.

I wanted to let you know how much it meant to me to get your long email: you cannot imagine how strongly your account of a broken family chimes with me, in spite of our very different circumstances. Yes, it is unbearable not knowing. Our families’ silence is a poison that infects everything it touches: our dreams, our fears, our entire adult lives. And it leaves us with nothing but questions to fall back on, thirty or forty years down the line (I don’t think I told you my age: I’m thirty-eight).

I didn’t get a chance to go to my parents’ flat until last weekend. This time, I decided to trawl through everything methodically, opening up each file and
folder one by one. Given the volume of papers and the very little spare time I have at present, I expect it will take me several weeks to get through it, but I’m fairly certain the answer is in there somewhere and I’m determined not to miss anything. I have to say, though, I felt very uneasy about rifling through my parents’ things; it’s as though I’m raiding their lives. Sad, too, because the study reminds me of my father and I miss him. As I write, I can still smell the scent of his tobacco and his favourite old leather armchair, where I sit and read sometimes when I’m over there.

By five o’clock, I was ready to call it a day, having drawn a blank. I was straightening up a row of hardbacks on one of the top bookshelves (a pet obsession of mine), when I met some resistance. I fetched the stepladder, took down the books and discovered a notebook that had dropped behind them. It turned out to be a
log-book
kept by my father, who was in the medical corps, in which he recorded details of some of his tours of duty off New Caledonia and the West Indies between 1968 and 1974. There was nothing much in it besides weather reports, daily menus and route maps, accompanied by sketches of plants and nautical charts. But tucked inside the cover, I came across a document I wasn’t expecting: my mother’s driving licence. From it, I learned that my mother’s maiden name was Nataliya Olegovna Zabvina and that she was born on 4 January 1941 in ‘Archangelsk’ (the official must have copied it down wrong). There was also an address in Rue de la Mouzaïa in Paris.

Needless to say, I was astonished. Evidently my mother was Russian and had lived in Paris in her youth. I knew none of this, of course, because it was my adoptive mother Sylvia’s name that was on my birth certificate. I don’t understand why my roots have been hidden from me, or why I’ve been told so many lies. This discovery has left me shaken, to say the least.

The irony is that fate chose to inform me of this through a driving licence, when I’ve never managed to pass my test even after four attempts, one of which has gone down in the annals of my driving school (I fainted at the wheel and almost got us killed).

You told me you found it difficult to come to terms with your background. As for me, I’ve been plagued by anxiety my whole life. My mind is filled with images I can’t explain, scenes of catastrophe and things falling apart. I have rarely been able to shake this sense of anguish, even at what should have been the happiest times of my life. This probably explains why I have found it so hard to build anything lasting; I never wanted children either, for the same reasons as you, I think.

None of this is really so terrible in itself. Yet the familiar, invisible burden becomes harder to bear with every year that passes. I’m a chronic asthma sufferer, which I now put down to the suffocating weight of silence. There’s something neat about this psychosomatic explanation, but above all it allows me to give form to the crushing emptiness of my memory.
In any case, every time I have an asthma attack, I’m relieved that no one will inherit this from me.

I intend to visit my mother’s old address, which is somewhere near the Buttes-Chaumont. But for the time being, I think I need to step back and mull it all over.

All the best,

Hélène

Ashford, 28 June (email)

Dear Hélène,

I can’t put myself in your shoes, but I imagine you must be reeling. When you said you knew little of your mother’s life, I didn’t realise you were ignorant even of her nationality and date of birth. I don’t know what could have made your parents conceal all that from you, but, looking back, such secrecy seems extremely cruel. This time, I’m the one who fears I’m prying, but what exactly were you told about your mother, and how did she die? Do you have any other documents besides that driving licence? I’d like to go to Geneva as soon as possible to look through the albums, but I’m stuck in my laboratory working on an experiment that’s going to require at least a month and a half of daily observations (no rest for scientists). Do you think you can wait until August? In the meantime, let me give you my phone number here in England. It’s at the bottom of this email in the signature. If you’d like to talk about all this over the phone, don’t hesitate to call me.

All the best,

Stéphane

Paris, 1 July (email)

Dear Stéphane,

Just a note to thank you for your offer and comforting words. For the time being, I think I need some space to reflect on what I’ve found out, but I’ll give you a call soon. It will be nice to hear your voice.

Best wishes,

Hélène

Ashford, 8 July (email)

Dear Hélène,

Thank you for your phone call the other evening. It was a pleasure to be able to talk to you in person at last. That said, I very much enjoy writing and receiving letters, and sometimes I watch out for the postman. So I hope that as well as talking to each other, we will continue to write.

All the best,

Stéphane

Paris, 11 July 2007

Dear Stéphane,

Now that my mini existential crisis has blown over, I’m ready to pick up my pen again. By the way, I forgot to ask the other day: what is this experiment that’s keeping you in England?

You ask how much I know about my mother. The answer is simple: nothing. Let me tell you something. When I found that newspaper clipping, and particularly when I read the caption at the bottom, it literally took my breath away because it was the first time I had actually
seen
my mother’s face. And not only that, I had to
deduce
that it was her from the name below the photo – without it, I would never have recognised her. Of course I must have seen that face hundreds of times as a child, but my memory of it has vanished. Growing up, I was never shown any pictures of Nathalie (as my father called her, on the two or three occasions he referred to her), no matter how many times I asked. My father and Sylvia always told me that the album had been lost when they moved house(!). When I asked them what my mother looked like, he would reply that she was
beautiful and then he’d change the subject. Even as a teenager, I thought nothing of the fact that
no one
had kept a single portrait of her, not even a passport photo.

My whole childhood, I never knew how my mother had died. I remember a period of a few months, when I was eight or nine, when I constantly pestered the
grown-ups
about it. One day, when I had been asking the same thing over and over at the dinner table in that way children have of repeating things and no doubt driving their parents to distraction (‘But how did Nathalie die?’), my father, who’d stayed silent throughout, stood up and calmly slapped my face, twice: ‘That’s enough.’ Then he went back to his omelette. That was the only time in his life he ever raised a hand to me and it was such a shock that I didn’t even cry. Needless to say, I never broached the subject with him again.

Later on, as a teenager, I grilled Sylvia but she remained tight-lipped. She had this way of avoiding my gaze and dodging the question which made it obvious from the start that I wasn’t going to get anything out of her. When I pressed her on the whereabouts of my mother’s grave, she reluctantly told me that she had been cremated and her ashes scattered off the coast of Brittany.

It was one of my aunts who let the cat out of the bag at my eighteenth birthday dinner. After the meal (during which she’d had rather a lot to drink), she came into the kitchen for a cigarette while I was making coffee. She asked me what I would like as a gift to mark my
coming of age. I replied: tell me how my mother died. I remember that moment very clearly: the sudden silence amid all the noise, the loud gurgling of the coffee machine on one side, the regular whiffs of pungent smoke on the other. I didn’t dare turn round. I heard my aunt’s voice say in a strange tone: ‘Your mother died in a car accident. She veered off the road in bad weather and flipped over into a ravine.’ Just then, as if he had sensed danger, my father came into the kitchen and eyed us both with suspicion. My aunt said nothing more and went back out into the garden. When I brought it up again the next time I saw her, her expression hardened and she said she had been wrong to say anything, that I should forget all about it and concentrate on the future. Forget about what? How could I forget what I had never known?

I was nine when my father married Sylvia. By then, we had been seeing her almost every week for several years. My father never told me how he met her, but I can remember her coming on holiday with us before she moved into our apartment on Rue de l’Observatoire in Paris. She was always wonderful with me, very gentle; it wasn’t long before I asked if I could call her ‘Maman’, I was so fond of her. She was incredibly accomplished and well-read, and always looked stunning, even well into her old age. A woman of impeccable taste with a wonderful turn of phrase, but not the slightest bit aloof: she was warm and sociable and loved entertaining. She
was a librarian and then became head curator of the manuscripts department at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Although it was against the rules, I remember her taking me into the Labrouste reading room as a small child. I was so overwhelmed by the sight of so many books, I thought they must have been painted on the walls.

Life at home was much more fun with her around. Before then, my father had moved house frequently: I still have photographs of a town whose name I don’t remember, and pictures taken in Polynesia where we lived for several months. In one of them, I’m sitting on the lap of a large mixed-race woman with frizzy hair, probably my nanny. I’ve forgotten everything about the people I met and the houses I lived in, but never the hours I spent at school worrying whether my toys and stuffed cat would still be there when I got home. I’m told I used to have nightmares every night.

In Paris, Sylvia cared for me as her own child: she came to pick me up, gave me cuddles, made my tea and told me bedtime stories. I was overjoyed to have a mother at last. I had forgotten my own mother – I’m still unable to summon a single memory of her, no matter how hard I try – and above all, I was sick of the constant moves, the playground whispering and pitying glances. I think I even stopped speaking for a while; at least, I can picture my father growing angry in the attempt to get a sound out of me.

Sylvia and my father would have liked to have children
of their own. In a very right-on, typically eighties way, they sat me down in the kitchen one afternoon and asked if it would make me happy to have a little brother or sister. It’s funny to think of it now. Not least because I would have loved it. But I think there was a miscarriage and after that they stopped trying. In any case Sylvia, who had legally adopted me a year after their marriage, lavished all her love on me. I owe her such a lot, right down to the career she inspired me to follow. She made my father happy, as far as she could – he was never the easiest person to get along with. They grew old together, more or less gracefully, and it was after he passed away three years ago that her illness was diagnosed.

I have been going to see her three times a week since she went into a home, but she has forgotten who I am. Sometimes she gabbles non-stop like a radio, other times she says nothing for several days. She can no longer dress or feed herself or walk unaided. As she is also suffering from emphysema, the doctors say she doesn’t have long left. I hadn’t paid much attention to it before now, but I have been surprised a few times over the last couple of months to hear her come out with snatches of Russian. And yet I never heard her speak a word of Russian in all the years she lived with us. I shall try to listen more closely from now on to see if I can pick out any words or names.

Meanwhile, there’s a certain irony in the fact that our progress depends on the shaky recollections of a man
whose brain is half-dead and an old lady with a ravaged memory. A curious allegory for the present we’re piecing back together, one photo at a time.

Best wishes,

Hélène