Chapter 20

 

 

 

I have thin eyelids, and the moment the room’s illumination reaches 0.05 lux, I wake up. However, after the night vigil with Vera-Virginia in the royal Square du Vert-Galant over the nocturnal Seine, fueled by a few glasses of Chardonnay, my awakening was different.

That morning, I opened my eyes when the sun, having risen high above the dense stone pines of our park, struck the glass balcony door with a beam. Piercing the light tulle curtain, it slashed across my eyelids. Startled, I leaped up, blinking as I took in my surroundings. Yes, it was already far from morning.

Vera-Virginia was sleeping peacefully, tilted back on her rubber-stamped spine. Her beautiful Black face resembled a refined, haute couture "Venetian mask" by designer Marine Serre, which I had seen yesterday at the Olympia; her arms, carelessly spread out on the snow-white sheet, looked like the wings of a black swan.

Looking at Vera-Virginia, I was reminded of Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and the ballerina Maria Mazepa, who had been performing the dual role of the white and black swans—Odette and Odile—for some forty years straight in this immortal production at the "On the Hills" Theater.

I could hear that life-affirming music; it didn't drift from an orchestra pit located somewhere far from this quiet corner of Paris; it resonated within me, and to some extent, it was me—an instrumental vibration of my soul. I saw the mirror surface of the forest lake as if it were just two steps away; I felt upon my skin the gentle ripples running across its surface as Maria pattered her feet on in pointe, creating the illusion of a swan gliding along the water's edge…

And suddenly, the persistent blare of a car horn shattered this pastoral scene. Grabbing the first thing that came to hand—a basket of hydrangeas we’d brought back after Vera’s triumph at the Olympia yesterday—I rushed out onto the balcony. I felt a spontaneous urge to hurl the basket straight at the head of the insolent Parisian who had breached etiquette.

Leaning over the railing, I saw a smiling young man in jeans with holes at the knees. As a child, I used to see that kind of holes in the trousers of road workers who paved highways with cobblestones. He stood there, head tilted back, holding a bunch of keys in his outstretched hand.

“What do you want?” I grumbled, setting the flower basket aside.

“Bonjour, Monsieur Mason!” he said upon seeing me. “I’ve brought your car. Please come down and take the keys... ”Only then did I notice a seafoam-green Peugeot 308 CC standing proudly behind his back.

I went back into the room, intending to wake Vera. But seeing the blissful smile on her face, I changed my mind. Slipping on my jeans, I headed downstairs.

The young man, who introduced himself as Pierre Desy, a Peugeot dealer, handed me a few sheets of paper and asked me to sign them. I scrawled my scribbles on each of them, just as he requested. After that, he handed over the insurance policy and the car keys, saying as a farewell: “From now on, she is in your care! Adieu...”

I walked around the nickel-gleaming Peugeot 308 CC, kicked all four of its tires, and, feeling satisfied, returned to the apartment. The soft click of the front door brought me back into the coolness of the rooms. I tossed the bunch of keys onto the coffee table; they jingled a bit too loudly for this sleepy Parisian afternoon.

Vera didn’t even stir; her breathing remained even, deep, and soothing. The black "wings" of her arms on the snow-white bed were just as inviting as before, promising a continuation of yesterday’s serenity. As I put on my shoes, I already knew where I would go while Vera rested after yesterday's triumph and our stroll through nocturnal Paris—complete with a stop at the Île de la Cité and a light, romantic transgression in the Square du Vert-Galant, our actions fully validating its amorous reputation.

I softly depressed the clutch pedal, and the Peugeot 308 rolled noiselessly down the park's gravel path, leaving the sleeping Vera, the Cadillac, and the villa behind.

“And where are we going?” My Brain’s voice immediately piped up as he woke.

“Shut up, Brain,” I cut him off mentally, steering onto a busy Parisian street. While Vera was resting, I decided to head over to one of Paris’s flea markets—Saint-Ouen—and buy a fishing spoon cast from antique knightly silver, if such a thing could be found... Truth be told, I don't care for fishing. A French fishing spoon is a metaphor for missed opportunities, one that would decently adorn my Odessa collection.

A French antiquarian with a thin, ferret-like mustache and a black satin mask embroidered with golden fleurs-de-lis—a clear echo of that very Covid carnival that was still rationing the air of Paris—was melancholically wiping a brass candlestick with a piece of velvet. Upon seeing me, he didn't even turn his head, merely raising a single eyebrow to size up my worn-out jeans and fresh tan.

I swept my gaze over the cluttered stalls. Amidst the dull silver, old letters, and dusty porcelain shepherdesses, there it lay on a piece of faded velvet. An antique French spoon lure. Heavy, forged silver, darkened by time, with a barely noticeable hallmark shaped like a mermaid right near the ring.

A thing with a history. A thing that had seen water far cleaner than that of the Seine today.

“Oh, here we go. The metaphysics of fishing in a Saint-Ouen setting,” Brain woke up in my head, stretching and flexing his synapses. “Lenya, snap out of it. You’ve just broken through police cordons in a Cadillac, jumped into the cabin of a seafoam-green Peugeot, you have a mystery woman sleeping back at the villa, and here you are standing before this collaborator, drooling over a piece of lead with a hook? Where is your sense of scale? Where is the existential angst?”

I looked around, hoping to find someone's support—however ephemeral—in a glance or a wink. Instead, I spotted Alexandre Vassiliev, the long-time host of the Moscow TV show Fashion Verdict, who had timely fled the Russian Themis to Latvia.

Right then, another Muscovite appeared: the famous writer Vasily Tyurya, author of the sensational novel Collapsed Russia. For that piece of work, he had earned a hefty prison sentence, which he served somewhere in Eastern Siberia or Magadan. He had miraculously managed to escape and, making his way through the Manchurian taiga, Japan, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates, had finally relocated to Paris.

However, the former "convict" suffered from a well-known Russian ailment—kleptomania. And while I was haggling with the mustachioed antiquarian—who under Vassiliev's piercing gaze had suddenly transformed from a ferret into a respectable yet tight-fisted Guy de Maupassant—trying to beat down the price, Tyurya executed his literary-criminal maneuver and pinched the intended lure spoon...

 “Genius!” Brain exploded in a firework of enthusiastic synapses. “There it is, the existential angst I was waiting for! While Maestro Vassiliev was lecturing on silhouettes, and ‘Maupassant’ was calculating euros, Tyurya executed a real-time collapse of the silver mermaid straight into the bottomless pocket of his worn-out Siberian quilted jacket, cleverly disguised as Parisian oversize! Lenya, this is a total triumph of metaphor!”

I notice the disappearance of the spoon lure at the exact second Tyurya, giving a barely perceptible wink with the wild eye of a man who had fled via Japan, begins to back away sideways, crab-like, toward the rows of old vinyl records.

Alexandre Vassiliev, engrossed in inspecting some lace jabot in the corner, noticed nothing. But the mustachioed Maupassant-antiquarian suddenly drops his gaze to the faded velvet. His eyebrows shoot up; his mask with the fleurs-de-lis stretches dangerously tight. The mermaid has swum away...

“Police! Police! I’ve just had an antique item stolen!” the Maupassant-antiquarian shrieks hoarsely.

“Who? These gentlemen?” asks an approaching agent, casting a suspicious glance at me and Vassiliev.

“No, Monsieur, it’s not them—at least, I don’t think so,” the antiquarian replies. “There was another one loitering about, looking terribly like a Russian Jew…”

“In Paris, all Russians have become Jewish,” the agent says. “Besides, they arouse suspicion as GRU agents and supporters of Marine Le Pen’s ultra-right party.”

I lightly take Vassiliev by the arm and lead him away toward the vinyl records. As if nothing had happened, I ask: “Alexandre Alexandrovich, how is your museum in Old Riga doing?”

“Wonderful!” the world-famous art historian replies. However, he is suddenly swept away by a group of young people who espouse alternative life values. The only thing that reaches my ears is a fragment of a conversation from a couple lagging behind the rest of the group: “I feel naughty right now hihihihi,” the girl said, “imagining us doing it against a window... hmmm would u risk being seen or keep it private?”

I head to the parking lot, find our Peugeot, get behind the wheel, and start the engine. The moment I pull out onto the roadway, someone leaps over the right-side door and lands right in the passenger seat. I look over—it’s Tyurya, the novelist.

“Step on it!” he says without looking back. When we have driven about four blocks away from the Parisian flea market, Tyurya asks: “Don’t you recognize me?”

“Recognize who?” I ask.

“Me,” he replies. “I’m that very Moscow State University student who did an internship at your newspaper, Odesskie Izvestiya.”

“There were many of them,” I replied.

 “But I was the only one like that,” he said. “When the internship was wrapping up, I drank away all my money and couldn't afford a ticket back to Moscow.”

“Well, and?” I asked, glancing at Tyurya.

“Well, you lent me a thirty rubles and I safely made it to the capital of our motherland.”

“And you never paid me back!” I remembered.

“Here, I’m returning it,” he said, handing me the spoon lure he had just pinched from the flea-market Maupassant.

“I don’t use stolen goods,” I said.

Hearing this, my Brain squeezed its convolutions so hard that hammers started pounding in my temples.

“Stolen goods, you say?” Tyurya went on. “Did you know that this item is from the collection of Prince Felix Yusupov? It was stolen from him back when he was still alive…”

“What are you spinning, Tyurya?!”

“You don't know a thing, Lenya! This piece is crafted from cyzicenes—melted down ancient Greek coins—and not from the silver of the Knights Templar, as they say. This so-called spoon lure of yours is the work of the Odessa jeweler Israel Rouchomovsky…”

“The very same one who made the fake tiara of the Scythian king Saitaphernes?” I asked, nearly ramming the bumper of the sedan ahead of me out of sheer shock...

“Saitaphernes! Rouchomovsky! Lenya, hit the brakes, for heaven's sake, you’re going to smash our beautiful Peugeot into the rear of this mundane family hatchback!” Brain howled silently. “What irony! What pure Odessa drama! A collapsed Russia, ferrets embroidered with fleurs-de-lis, a overheard English-language sin by a window, and... a golden ghost from Uspenskaya Street right in your pocket!”

I straightened the wheel, glancing at Tyurya out of the corner of my eye. The Siberian fugitive sat in the passenger seat, breathing heavily, that same wild spark burning in his eyes—the kind found only in students who have drunk away their return ticket home, and in writers who have peered into the abyss.

“Exactly, Lenya!” Tyurya let out a crooked smile, tossing the darkened spoon lure in his palm. “Rouchomovsky! The greatest mystifier, who even fooled the experts at the Louvre with that damned tiara. And he made this little thing back in Odessa, for a very fickle client who loved fishing on the Dniester River and on the Red Spit of the Dniester Estuary.

 It’s real ancient gold from cyzicenes, coated with the thinnest layer of electroplated silver to hide its true value from prying eyes! Yusupov bought it later, already in exile, as a keepsake of the southern shores. So this isn't a theft, Lenya. This is the repatriation of cultural heritage back to Odessa! Historical justice for the thirty rubles you gave me for a ticket to Moscow!”

Our seafoam-green Peugeot smoothly drifts into a thick, sluggish Parisian traffic jam, right across from the gleaming display windows of the Tiffany’s boutique. Against the backdrop of this sterile, flawless American luxury, the darkened silver of Rouchomovsky’s mermaid feels like something alive, authentic, and infinitely far removed from the local glamour.

Тyurya looks at the reflection of diamonds in the display glass, then shifts his gaze to the spoon lure, and finally, to me. The frantic agility of a fugitive is gone from his eyes—leaving only the exhaustion of a man who has circled the globe from Siberia to the Seine. He gently lowers the heavy, forged mermaid onto the adjacent seat.

“Alright, Lenya, this is my stop,” Tyurya softly pats the Peugeot’s dashboard. “There won't be a chase; Maupassant is too proud to go running after us along the boulevards. As for this thing... you take this thing. And don’t even think about returning it to the French. This is your rightful thirty rubles from right before the collapse of the Union, the money that allowed me back then, in ninety-one, to survive and make it to Moscow, only to eventually write my Collapsed Russia and get a prison sentence for it. It belongs back home. Let it join your Odessa collection and stay there forever. As a keepsake that out of all the Moscow State University students who interned under you, I alone was worth the gold of cyzicenes.”

With a sharp, Siberian motion, he flings open the right-side door of the cabriolet, steps out onto the asphalt bathed in soft Parisian light, and dissolves into the crowd near Tiffany’s just as swiftly as he had appeared. Beneath the lining of his oversized padded jacket rustles the manuscript of a new novel, while I am left holding Odessa, Yusupov, Rouchomovsky, and thirty rubles of an unreturnable debt…

When I returned to our apartment with Vera, she pounced on me with reproaches: “Where have you been for so long? While you were gone, I already managed to drop our Cadillac off at the repair shop, came back home, made a light Togolese breakfast, took a shower, and watched the report about our evening at the Olympia yesterday.”

“And what were your impressions of the report?”

“Bastards!” Vera said with indignation.

 “What happened, honey?” I asked.

“Your journalists distorted everything, turning it completely upside down! They turned my critique of ‘Colonialism 2.0’ into praise for transnational corporations that are supposedly sponsoring the development of the mining industry in African countries,” the thoroughly outraged woman said. “On top of that, they showed a clip from Brussels where I’m stopping an enraged, frenzied mob that was trying to tear down the monument to Leopold II. They show me with my hand raised high and my breast half-bare, saying that we do not fight against monuments.

 And behind the scenes, the voice of Yefim Kopelyan declares: ‘Thus, a brave African woman stood alone against a frenzied crowd of thousands and saved the monument to the King-Builder!’”

“This is completely unacceptable,” I said. “We are going to take this to court.”

“Suing the press is more trouble than it’s worth,” Vera replied, already packing her bags. She kept repeating, “We are leaving this Paris, and as fast as possible...”

“But you said you’d sent the Cadillac to the repair shop,” I reminded her.

“We’ll take the Peugeot. I believe you’ve already given it a spin...”

“Yeah, it’s a great French car. The engine runs like clockwork, you can’t even hear it,” I said, helping Vera pack.

When we cruised onto the Champs-Élysées, massive crowds lined the sidewalks along the entire avenue.

I wonder who tipped them off about our departure?’ I thought to myself. But what struck me the most was that among the crowd of well-wishers, I couldn't spot a single white or even olive-skinned face. And this testifies overwhelming majority of refugees and migrants still head for Paris. Residents of this city told Gazeta. Ru that migrants changed the face of the capital a long time ago. “Today in Paris, it’s impossible to live without involuntarily walking into immigrant neighborhoods every day. There is a Chinatown where everything is in Chinese, with nothing but Chinese cafes and shops; there are Arab neighborhoods. The atmosphere is different everywhere. In France, people have always lived side-by-side with migrants from the colonies; it’s already part of the country’s culture. Overall, the migrant issue is, in my opinion, seriously exaggerated by the media,” claims Olga Bougnier, head of a French modeling agency.

After visiting this ‘dream city of fools,’ the only thing I was left with was a toxic-green stain. As we tore through the Bois de Boulogne at breakneck speed, leaving gendarmes and taxi drivers utterly stupefied, a clueless wild pigeon—clearly out of sheer terror—evacuated its bowels right onto the lapel of my sharp white suit jacket. But judging by the size of the splatter, it wasn't a pigeon; it was a condor!

When we finally broke free from the clutches of the overcrowded city and merged into the flow of traffic on the Paris–Marseille highway, Vera asked: “Leo, where did you learn to drive so well?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted honestly. “I don’t even have a driver’s license.”

“It happens,” Vera said.

“Listen, Vera,” I said, keeping my eyes glued to the road. “I have one request.”

“Yes?”

“Please don’t call me Leo.”

“Then what should I call you?”

“Just call me Leonard.”

“Well, the time for Leonard hasn't come yet,” she said, a cryptic smile playing on the edge of her blue lips.I took offense and didn't utter another word.

Somewhere halfway to Marseille, Vera rolled a cigarette for me. I took a drag and drifted right back into a trance. It seems that besides the weed, her African witchcraft—Voodoo, or whatever it is—is working on me too. There’s a reason she hasn't let go of my earlobe the entire way...