‘If they had photographed a corpse to get that picture,’ thought Ostrakova aloud in her apartment, ‘I would not be surprised.’ And with this downright observation, she gave her first outward expression of the growing doubt inside her.
Toiling in her warehouse, sitting alone in her tiny apartment in the long evenings, Ostrakova racked her brains for someone she could trust; who would not condone and not condemn; who would see round the corners of the route she had embarked on; above all, who would not talk and thus wreck – she had been assured of it – wreck her chances of being reunited with Alexandra. Then one night, either God or her own striving memory supplied her with an answer : The General! she thought, sitting up in bed and putting on the light. Ostrakov himself had told her of him! Those émigré groups are a catastrophe, he used to say, and you must avoid them like the pest. The only one you can trust is Vladimir the General; he is an old devil, and a womanizer, but he is a man, he has connections and knows how to keep his mouth shut.
But Ostrakov had said this some twenty years ago, and not even old generals are immortal. And besides – Vladimir who? She did not even know his other name. Even the name Vladimir – Ostrakov had told her – was something he had put on for his military service; since his real name was Estonian, and not suitable for Red Army usage. Nevertheless, next day, she went down to the bookshop beside the Cathedral of St Alexander Nevsky, where information about the dwindling Russian population was often to be had, and made her first enquiries. She got a name and even a phone number, but no address. The phone was disconnected. She went to the Post Office, cajoled the assistants, and finally came up with a 1956 telephone directory listing the Movement for Baltic Freedom, followed by an address in Montparnasse. She was not stupid. She looked up the address and found no less than four other organizations listed there also; the Riga Group, the Association of Victims of Soviet Imperialism, the Forty-Eight Committee for a free Latvia, the Tallinn Committee of Freedom. She remembered vividly Ostrakov’s scathing opinions of such bodies, even though he had paid his dues to them. All the same, she went to the address and rang the bell, and the house was like one of her little churches : quaint, and very nearly closed for ever. Eventually an old White Russian opened the door wearing a cardigan crookedly buttoned, and leaning on a walking stick, and looking superior.
They’ve gone, he said, pointing his stick down the cobbled road. Moved out. Finished. Bigger outfits put them out of business, he added with a laugh. Too few of them, too many groups, and they squabbled like children. No wonder the Czar was defeated! The old White Russian had false teeth that didn’t fit, and thin hair plastered all over his scalp to hide his baldness.
But the General? she asked. Where was the General? Was he still alive, or had he-
The old Russian smirked and asked whether it was business.
It was not, said Ostrakova craftily, remembering the General’s reputation for philandering, and contrived a shy woman’s smile. The old Russian laughed, and his teeth rattled. He laughed again and said ‘Oh, the General! ‘ Then he came back with an address in London, stamped in mauve on a bit of card, and gave it to her. The General would never change, he said; when he got to Heaven, he’d be chasing after the angels and trying to up-end them, no question. And that night while the whole neighbourhood slept, Ostrakova sat at her dead husband’s desk and wrote to the General with a frankness which lonely people reserve for strangers, using French rather than Russian as an aid to greater detachment. She told him about her love for Glikman and took comfort from the knowledge that the General himself loved women just as Glikman had. She admitted immediately that she had come to France as a spy, and she explained how she had assembled the two trivial reports that were the squalid price of her freedom. It was à contre-coeur, she said; invention and evasion, she said; a nothing. But the reports existed, so did her signed undertaking, and they placed grave limits on her freedom. Then she told him of her soul, and of her prayers to God all round the Russian churches. Since the gingery stranger’s approach to her, she said, her days had become unreal; she had a feeling of being denied a natural explanation of her life, even if it had to be a painful one. She kept nothing back from him, for whatever guilty feelings she had, they did not relate to her efforts to bring Alexandra to the West, but rather to her decision to stay in Paris and take care of Ostrakov until he died – after which event, she said, the Soviets would not let her come back anyway; she had become a defector herself.