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Faber & Faber
Freely inspired by
Alexander Pushkin’s verse novel
Eugene Onegin (1837)
and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s opera
Eugene Onegin (1879)
Don’t talk to me of love. Let’s talk of Paris,
The little bit of Paris in our view.
There’s that crack across the ceiling
And the hotel walls are peeling
And I’m in Paris with you.
James Fenton, ‘In Paris With You’
Contents
Disclaimer
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Acknowledgements
About the Author and Translator
Copyright
1
Because their story didn’t end at the right time, in the
right place,
because they let their feelings go to waste,
it was written, I think, that Eugene and Tatiana
would find each other
ten years later,
one morning in winter,
under terra firma,
on the Meteor, Line 14 (magenta) of the
Paris
Metro.
It was quarter to nine.
Imagine Eugene, dressed up fine: black corduroys,
pale blue check Oxford shirt, sensible collar, charcoal
tweed jacket, a grey scarf,
probably cashmere, frayed at the ends,
wrapped once,
twice
around his neck – and above this hung a face
that had softened
since the last time;
a face written more loosely,
a face less harsh, and more patient.
Suppler, gentler.
A face rinsed clean of its adolescence;
the face of a young man
who had learned to stifle his impatience,
a young man who had learned how to wait.
Tatiana, funnily enough,
had been thinking about him the previous evening.
Which might seem an amazing coincidence,
except that she often thought about him
– and I’m sure that
you, too, can brood and mope,
sometimes, about love affairs
that went wrong years ago.
The pain’s not worse after ten years.
It doesn’t necessarily increase with time.
It’s not
an investment,
you know,
regret.
Lost love doesn’t have to be a tragedy.
There’s not always enough material there for a story.
But for these two,
I’ll make an exception, if you don’t mind.
Look how shaken they are to find
each other again.
Look at their eyes …
‘Eugene, hi, haven’t seen you for ages!’
beamed Tatiana, a pretty good actress.
He sat down next to her; the seat was still warm.
On the black window reflecting his face,
a sleeper’s forehead had stamped
a little circle of grease
like the watermark on a banknote.
A record of time spent, now disappearing.
Tatiana could see herself in the window too,
at an angle, as the train sped up, roaring.
The sudden surges, sharp bends and screeching stops of
Line 14 are notoriously vicious. It’s hard to stand up or chat
or read. But it does have an upside: it takes you from your
first stop
to your last
fast.
As they rushed from one place to another,
Tatiana stared at the window that reflected him and her
together.
Eugene yelled:
‘So how are things? I had no idea
you were pregnant …’
She wasn’t.
And yet, it was difficult to contradict Eugene at that
moment, since on her duffle coat was a massive badge, and
on that badge a baby grinned, a big white speech bubble
proudly declaring in capital letters:
BABY ON BOARD!
And in smaller letters, just below:
THANK YOU FOR GIVING ME YOUR SEAT.
So it was only logical that Eugene
(who was feeling somewhat upset by this news,
and surprised to be upset, and a bit confused)
should come to this conclusion.
There was an explanation,
which could not be given then and there:
that because empty seats were so rare
on the Paris metro between eight
and nine a.m.,
Tatiana had, a few months before,
bought this VIP (very impregnated person) pass,
her guarantee of a place to rest her bum.
She loved seeing all those kind
ladies and gentlemen
spot her badge and leap to their feet
as if their seat
were on fire.
She would thank them, flashing
soft Virgin Mary smiles.
And since there was nothing secret about her condition,
it often set off shouted conversations
about baby names,
and baby clothes,
and giving birth, and epidurals,
and nurseries,
and breastfeeding,
and so on, and so on.
She’d had to do some research into the mysteries of
maternity.
She needed a coherent story,
for at that time of day, it was often the same
passengers standing/swaying/sitting
in the train carriage.
She couldn’t claim one day that she was
four months gone with twins,
and the next that it was a little girl with Down’s
that she and her husband had decided to keep,
and the day after that that it was
a miracle child, conceived after eight rounds of IVF,
and the day after that that she was
a surrogate mother for two gay men.
No one would believe her if her story kept changing.
This need for precision was the price she had to pay
for a free seat every day … until spring,
when she could ride a Vélib’ to the National Library
without shivering.
‘Who’s the father?’ asked Eugene.
‘The father? His name’s Murray.’
‘Murray? Do I know him?’
‘No, I don’t think so – he’s British,’
said Tatiana, who had just invented him.
For a moment they were silent.
Then Tatiana paid him a compliment:
‘You look very elegant!’
‘Ah, thank you,’ Eugene replied.
‘I’m going to my grandfather’s funeral.’
‘Oh! That’s great!’
said Tatiana,
who obviously hadn’t given herself
enough time to process this information.
Next station:
Gare de Lyon.
To the right, on the other side of
the tracks, a lush tropical forest suddenly appeared
behind glass.
(I remember how,
aged seven or eight,
I used to daydream
about seeing snakes
and monkeys in there.)
The doors slid open and a voice, automated,
intimated
in three languages, no less,
that passengers should exit from the left side of the train.
Bajada por el lado izquierdo.
(When I was young and everything
was new and a source of wonder,
I used to ponder
what kind of aliens this obscure message was addressing.
‘It’s in case there are any Spaniards on the train,’
my father explained.
‘So they know where to get off.’
I wasn’t sure what Spaniards were.
I imagined them tall and rubbery,
I don’t know why.
For months,
whenever we came into the Gare de Lyon, I would watch,
heart pounding, hands clasping my skirt, eager
who,
disobeying the train man’s very clear directive,
would open the door jungle side and vanish, undetected,
into the forest of palms.)
*
But let’s get back to our two passengers.
Their memories are more important than mine.
They have things to tell each other that they can’t articulate.
So they say other stuff, though of course it barely conceals
what’s really on their minds.
One of those cowardly conversations,
on this and that and the weather,
avoiding the heart of the matter.
That’s what happens when everything has gone to waste:
we can’t say it out loud;
we chicken out.
Thankfully someone inside us speaks in our place.
‘So what about you? Where are you going?’
Eugene asked politely.
‘To the National Library. Like I do
every morning,
at precisely
the same time … you know,
if by any chance you’re planning to make the same trip
tomorrow …’
He’s going to the cemetery, you idiot!
Tatiana yelled at herself inside her head.
Thankfully,
it was fine:
Eugene didn’t notice her blunder,
busy as he was trying to remember
what he was supposed to be doing
tomorrow at quarter to nine.
‘What are you up to in the library?’
‘I’m working on my thesis.
I’m in the last year of my PhD.’
‘Oh yeah? What’s your thesis about?’
‘History of art. It’s on Caillebotte.
Gustave Caillebotte.’
Then she shifted into autopilot:
Don’t worry, no one knows anything about Caillebotte …
‘Don’t worry, no one knows anything about Caillebotte. He
was a nineteenth-century artist – a painter and collector,
theoretically part of the Impressionist movement, but in
fact his paintings are much more precise, more classical in a
way – you might have seen one of his more famous pictures:
a view of Paris in the rain, Haussmann-style buildings like a
ship’s bow, with a man and a woman under an umbrella …’
‘I know,
I know,’
Eugene interrupted.
‘I know exactly who Caillebotte is,’ he muttered.
‘Ah! Perfect.
Well then, you know everything.’
To her chagrin, Tatiana felt that this declaration
somehow carried the implication
that her thesis didn’t really
amount to much.
Not wishing to leave Eugene with this impression,
she started to describe to him,
with a level of detail
that might seem excessive,
part of her third chapter,
still largely hypothetical at this stage,
about the representation of water
in Caillebotte’s art; in this chapter,
Tatiana demonstrated,
in a boldly rhetorical way,
that the liquid elements
in Caillebotte’s paintings
– rivers, bathwater, rain –
were a sort of discreet reply
to the stodgy, spongy daubings
of certain other artists
around at the same time.
*
When she finished this explanation,
the train howled to a stop
at the National Library metro station.
Eugene got off too.
‘Is your funeral near here?’ asked Tatiana,
not very tactfully.
‘It’s at the Kremlin-Bicêtre cemetery.
I’m going to walk. I have plenty of time.’
They stood in silence on the escalator,
Tatiana leaning clumsily to the right,
turned backwards
so she could face Eugene,
her right foot in front of her left
to hide the ladder
in her tights.
Eugene seemed pensive.
Tatiana noticed
some fine lines on his brow
that had not been there last time,
though she might have anticipated their arrival
because of all the frowning he used to do ten years ago
to express his disapproval.
As a teen he’d disapproved of everything –
the boy was always bored –
while she’d been too easily pleased
and lost in a daydream.
She wondered vaguely if she was still in love with him.
‘It’d be nice to see each other again,’ Eugene told her
halfway up the escalator.
As this sentence prompted a thousand questions,
Tatiana asked none of them
and concentrated instead
on the immediate perils of her ascension:
her left arm,
pulled by the handrail,
was escaping upwards,
faster
than the steps.
She checked that her scarf was not dragging on the floor,
to make sure it wouldn’t choke her at the end of the ride.
(She’d seen a video of a similar incident
on the Internet.
The guy died.)
Can I have your number?’ Eugene asked.
‘Of course,’ she said, reciting it digit by digit.
He texted her so she would have his too.
She already had it.
Apparently he hadn’t changed his number
in the past ten years.
Apparently he hadn’t kept hers.
‘How’s Olga?’ Eugene asked casually,
as they were elbowing their way towards the
turnstiles.
‘Oh … fine, you know. She’s got two daughters now.’
‘Ah, cool! They’ll be cousins to yours, I mean.’
Tatiana had momentarily forgotten the whole story with
the badge.
This was her chance to come clean:
‘Listen, I’m not really pregnant. I just bought this
thing
so I’d get a seat on the metro every morning.’
Eugene threw
his head back and laughed.
But the laughter surprised him
because it was more than laughter.
It gave Eugene the feeling
that he was
like a snowdrop or something,
one of those flowers that break
through the white winter crust
and suddenly breathe the icy air.
The laughter of someone who, until that laugh,
must not have been truly aware
that he was alive.
‘I did think you were a bit young for that kind of
responsibility.’
‘People always feel too young for responsibility,’
said Tatiana. ‘Any kind.
A kitten, a bonsai tree …
Keeping your ticket
till the end of your journey.’
She sighed as if to herself. ‘I have to use tickets now.
I didn’t renew my Navigo card – I’ve got no murray at the
moment.’
‘No murray?’
‘No money.
Damn it,
I don’t know why
I can’t speak properly today.’
‘But no Murray either?’ Eugene ventured.
‘No Murray either, no. Murray
was an underground invention.’
Eugene smiled and nodded, alarmed at the realisation
that the mere
idea
of brushing against Tatiana – the crowd was pressed
tight together as everyone pushed towards the exit –
made his head swim,
knees buckle
and pulse race
as though
he were standing on the top of a high-dive board
staring into the depths
below.
‘You go first, it’ll be easier that way.’
The turnstile must have had a sense of humour
(or maybe it was just that their wool coats rubbed against
each other)
because it gave them an electric shock.
Tatiana stuck her ticket in an ikebana of trash,
a foul efflorescence of ash,
in one of those bins where smokers stub their cigarettes.
Outside, it was the usual tornado
between the four towers of the National Library.
In all kinds of weather,
even in the middle of a hot August afternoon,
while the whole city languishes, breathlessly,
under a coal-black sun,
those library stairways are eternally swept by typhoons.