In Moscow he began seeing Vassilissa again, quite openly, de Vèze never hid any aspect of his private life, it means he doesn’t have to answer questions put to him by underlings or short-arsed bantams, he notes everything in his desk diary, and makes no bones in doing so, entries that read ‘visit from Mademoiselle Soloviev’, or ‘out with Mademoiselle Soloviev’, often writing ‘ma demoiselle’ as two separate words, in the diary which after all is an official record, quite deliberately, hide nothing, you don’t get bothered that way, Vassilissa is tall, blonde, a mathematician whose field is non-commutative algebras, niece of a marshal, no less, who has a seat on the Central Committee, that’s the main reason why they are left alone, Vassilissa has brisk movements and a tight little bottom.
No one except Berthier has ever dared raise this subject with de Vèze. How would you do it? A man with a record like his is untouchable, the minute you ask him a question which he himself has not prompted, he looks straight at you, and you feel he is about to ask what the hell you did between 1940 and 1944, not in 1945 when there were already too many on the bandwagon, he has time only for survivors who were in it from the very start, like him, and when they send him a survivor who speaks to him candidly, the said survivor limits himself to making some trivial observation, because you don’t treat a man like de Vèze as some minion.
Yes, things are beginning to look up, but you can’t act yet, you’ll have to wait until he does something stupid, he doesn’t do that often, even this girl he has in Moscow, it’s not very prudent, she does maths, knows all about non-commutative algebras, you never know, anyhow that sort of thing’s just not done, and the Russians seem as wrongfooted as we are, but everything’s clear and above board, that’s their strength, they do something that’s quite outrageous and never try to cover it up.
If the girl had picked up a low-level cultural attache, she’d already be an inmate at Magadan, or at least at Yakutsk, alternatively Paris would have settled for recalling the cultural attaché, but as things stand she can look all and sundry right in the eye, it might be worth trying to make life hard for her because she’d slept with a hero of the Second World War, and the Russians know that if they ask for de Vèze to be recalled he won’t be replaced by a Gaullist, Gaullists are an endangered species, so they prefer to hang on to him, de Gaulle might have called him in and said:
‘Ha, de Vèze, go to it: to bed!’
But de Gaulle isn’t around any more, anyway, who knows, he might just have muttered ‘de Vèze? he’s just doing what men do’, and left it at that.
De Vèze and Vassilissa see each other Wednesdays and Saturdays, they prefer Saturdays.
Wednesdays are lively, they use de Vèze’s flat in the Embassy, Vassilissa knows she’s there for only a couple of hours, she wastes no time getting into bed, she has given de Vèze a present, a small painting in the naive style which she personally nailed to his bedroom wall, it shows a couple of closely paired dolphins leaping the waves, she expends her energies directly, once she told de Vèze:
‘If you want to know all about men, first you must wear them out.’
Saturdays are different, they can go off to the little house Vassilissa has in the country, it’s not the same Vassilissa as on Wednesdays, one thing de Vèze really likes about the house is the wall bed, mattress a bit soft, a king-size duvet made of real feathers, but Vassilissa says: no, walkies first.
The wood is full of birch and sweet chestnut and is very old and overrun by bushes, but it blends the light into varied hues of gold and ash.
They walk along the course of a winding stream as far as the small spring where it starts, they pass anglers who start scowling and muttering as they walk by, they startle pigeons which splash through the pools in the middle of the path, and cats out stalking field-mice, they reach the spring, a barely audible gurgle of tiny bubblings which break through the turf close by an outcrop of velvety black roots.
They look around them, their eyes are soon reeling with the water, the sands, the reflections of branches and the sun, they stay there for some time, it all seems so uncomplicated, the grey of the iron-ore which changes to red, the surface of the water which sometimes gleams with rainbow colours.
‘No, it’s not oil, Mister Know-all, it’s the composition of the ore, I’ll explain, I love being able to explain things to you from time to time.’
The water laps low, a rustle of birdwing. A silence deep in the foliage holds everything together. On their way back, they pick sour but edible blackberries.
They have their slow times, de Vèze likes watching Vassilissa wash, he fetches water from the pump, he heats it, pours it into the cistern, a more than rudimentary shower, not much more than a trickle of water, Vassilissa laughs a lot and uses de Vèze to hang her towel on. Sometimes it happens that they spend a Saturday night in the house, they have a little time, de Vèze kisses the back of Vassilissa’s heels then as he works upwards sometimes he hums two lines of a song they’d heard in some friends’ house when the children were being put to bed, he only remembers these two lines, they don’t rhyme, ‘there is a jolly butterfly, it’s like a flow’r that blows’, Vassilissa lowers her hand, strokes his hair, it makes her tingle and she smiles because de Vèze sings slightly off key.
On Sunday mornings, de Vèze is woken by the squeak of the handle of a coffee mill being turned, he gets up, Vassilissa holds the coffee mill steady between her legs, he tells her that in another life…
‘I know,’ she says, ‘you’d like to be a coffee mill in this house, but sometimes my aunt has first call on it.’
As soon as the weather turns warm, they hear the sound of birdsong through the blind. No one disturbs them, it’s their gingerbread house, they are left alone, the days of Stalin are over, de Vèze is a big boy now, relations between France and Russia have always been special, de Vèze is a Gaullist, the uncle of the said Vassilissa Soloviev is a marshal, a hero of the Soviet Union, Stalingrad, storm troops; that must be it, that accounts for the affection the Marshal has for de Vèze: how did you throw grenades at a panzer? Toss them into the tracks or push them through a slit in the turret? Which is worse, sand or snow?
But perhaps they go out of their way to avoid wartime reminiscences, each of them knows exactly what the other one did, so they speak of the books and paintings they like or go for walks; and what they did in those old wartime days simply adds a background resonance to what they say, they also talk about nature, the fields of rape, oh yes, come the spring, all of a sudden, a great slap of bright yellow administered to thousands of miles of terrain, from the Atlantic to the Urals.
Marshal Soloviev raises his glass to the fields of rape, that’s one plant at least, tovarich de Vèze, that continues to thrive, according to the directives issued by your Great Charles, from the Atlantic to the Urals, your Great Charles now sadly no longer with us, I drink to the rape plant, to the Atlantic, to the Urals, and especially to Great Charles! you shall take me to see the Atlantic, shall we say from Brest, comrade Ambassador? in exercises for the general staff in Moscow, I was given the role of officer commanding the military region of Brittany, not the French commander, the Soviet officer who leads the occupying force, I always managed to get all the way to Brest with my men, very serious Kriegspiel, it went fine, you can show me Brittany, fields of rape that sweep right down to the sea, and on my side I’ll take you to see the Urals after I retire.’
And the Marshall toasts friendship:
‘Za drouzhbou, tovarich!’