Polychrome Venus

By Zabel Adarkhov

Simone Baraban wants answers for her eighteenth birthday. She must face danger,deception,deep desire and death before she can unravel the mystery of what befell her parents in the sublime wilds of southern France. Only then will she learn, with reluctance, what adulthood will have in store for her and her unborn child.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Martin
• Release date: Feb 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301789887

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Polychrome Venus

Zabel Adarkhov

Copyright © Zabel Adarkhov 2009

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover copyright © Robin Matto

www.robinmatto.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form binding or cover other than that which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on a subsequent purchaser.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter01

Chapter02

Chapter03

Chapter04

Chapter05 Written by Bella Baraban

Chapter06 written by George Temple

Chapter07

Chapter08

Chapter09

Chapter10

Chapter11

Chapter12 written by George Temple

Chapter13

Chapter14

Chapter15 written by Bella Baraban

Chapter16

Chapter17

Chapter18

Chapter19

PS for my children

Angelique by Dumitra Baraban

Chapter 1

It is done. I am clearly a throw back, in spite of my grandmother’s unceasing struggle to become middle class: I am just a peasant but my grandmother, Dumitra’s, efforts to bring me up gave me the choice. I am proud to be a peasant by choice, the most natural way to be: a pregnant teenage peasant.

When I told Dumitra I was pregnant she let out a howl like a stab in the entrails. Not again: the family dragged down again back to peasant-hood in spite of her years of struggle to gain status. Dumitra will never accept that what I have done is not a shameful social disaster but a deliberate, positive, step. As if her howl was not bad enough the fearsome look she gave me - staring into my eyes all the while, trying to peer into my brain - would have had me sobbing like a child if she had not wearily said to me soon after, almost in a whisper:

‘Oh Simone, only eighteen, just the age your mother was when she had you.’

She looked away and added, even more quietly to herself (a rare glimpse into a past life in some foreign village she chose to forget):

‘But then, I was just fifteen when I had your mother. Oh such love, I thought, such paradise ahead - instead: abandonment, drudgery, thankless toil - abuse. Men - boys - hah: love. Love? But I suppose you think love is what you have now: you think you too are destined for paradise. Well, who is he then, the loving father? Who is the boy who told you how much he loved you: how he’d love you and keep you forever?’

‘He’ll never know.’

‘Never know? We’ll see about that.’

How could I tell Dumitra the father was not a mere boy but a man she knew well; a man she once loved herself with a passion I suspect turned to the jealousy that drove him away. He never told me he loved me, let alone that he would love me forever, and I never said that I loved him. There was never any prospect of him providing for me, he won’t even provide for himself. I cannot recall that any words were spoken in the brief but eternal time it took to begin our baby. It had not been his fault that he fathered my child, it had not been mine: another woman was to blame: a woman whose mischievously destructive essence is, I suspect, as old as womankind. But how could I ever tell Dumitra any of that?

Dumitra was already thinking rapidly, weighing implications:

‘Your medicine, your pills: what effect will they have on the unborn? And you, how will you cope, the way you are?’

‘I haven’t taken the pills for months. I get better every day.’

I could tell from her look what credence Dumitra placed on that assessment of my condition.

‘No medication for months? No wonder then.’

I stopped my medication straight after Aram Sarcazian stole back to see me. As soon as Aram saw the pills on my kitchen table he hurled the box out of my back door into the bushes.

‘Pills again, Simone, have you forgotten everything I taught you? Do you want to lose your real self forever?’

In truth I had wanted to lose whatever horrible amalgam that self had become after my sixteenth birthday, when Aram went away forever, and my moods swung between such horrific extremes that I might as well have been an assortment of other people, all of them best avoided.

When Aram hurled the pills away I saw in an instant how I could find purpose and validity in my life and bind all my disparate elements together. After so many years of being the reclusive dependent invalid I needed someone who would need me more than anybody else, someone who would be incontrovertibly mine forever: my baby, my own, and for that I would need a very special father.

Chapter 2

It is just over two months ago now since I woke up and looked out of my bedroom window to see those large footprints below on the dewy grass. Someone had just purposefully approached my home and stood awhile, those two final footprints had left a deeper impression in the grass. Presumably the person had stood staring up at my window. As I watched I saw a wriggling pink point appear in the grass. It elongated, rising through the wet green, until a huge fat worm had emerged and lay in the footprint’s contour. As I watched another, then another fat worm appeared: soon thick, glistening worms outlined the moist green impressions and writhed ecstatically together as if some vibrant energy left by the visitor had drawn them to the surface. In a flash a bird swooped down and seized the fattest worm, then another bird, and another until the worms were gone, and slowly the grass stems rose up straight again.

If I had looked out minutes later I would never have known there was a brief presence so near to my domain. I should have been afraid of what I saw but I felt excitement because I knew instinctively that Aram had returned.

I was four when I had my accident, ever since then I have lived with my grandmother. She was married, briefly, long ago to a much older man. Dumitra’s married name was Barabossa: after he died she changed her name to Baraban.

Viktor Barabossa was much older than his beautiful young bride. Victor had become a British Citizen and so his new wife became a British Citizen when he brought her from his native Hungary to live with him in England. Viktor died soon after, supposedly of a heart attack: Dumitra still says he was poisoned. He left her with a flat in London and a farmhouse with six acres and a barn near Totnes, in Devon. The properties were paid for but there was no cash beyond, or if there was, Dumitra never discovered where it was hidden. She suspected he had chosen to hide his cash by buying the remote farmhouse: there seemed no other reason for the purchase.

It emerged that Viktor owed rather a lot of money to the wrong people before he died - or rather - unpleasant people had claims on him. He had bought the properties and put them in Dumitra’s name to keep his money from the clutches of creditors, creditors she claimed had poisoned him to set an example when he insisted he owed them nothing.

When Viktor died Dumitra had no choice but to take up again what she knew best, the skill that ‘hooked’ her husband in the first place, a skill I charitably think of, not as ‘hooker’ but as ‘escort’. But Viktor must have seen more depths in Dumitra than mere beauty if he was prepared to marry her and take her illegitimate daughter, Bella - my mother - on a his own. Not only did he marry Dumitra but he also put his properties in her name.

Dumitra has always had ‘friends’ rather than ‘clients’. They have always been older than her and always generous during their lives, sometimes generous in death.

When Viktor died she sold the flat. For a while she thought she was being followed so she rented a small, shabby flat in Tooting, where she lived with my mother for a year, until she was sure she was no longer being watched. Then they slipped away to live in the country farmhouse, later converting the old barn for lucrative use as a holiday let, making sure never to be in debt to anybody. She declared no income and made sure she did not exist as far as the Inland Revenue were concerned.

The balance between struggle and comfort was tipped when my mother was about fourteen and sick, an extremely generous ‘friend’ gave Dumitra a hundred thousand pounds.

Though her quality of life has greatly improved Dumitra has always had her generous ‘friends’. She wants to be sure she will never return to the poverty of her past: I think she stills fears that one day there could be a hammering at the door and everything would be taken from her.

Dumitra’s friends have seen to it over the years that she has transport, usually a nice BMW or Mercedes, as well as nice clothes and travel abroad. When my mother was young she sometimes accompanied Dumitra and saw the world: perhaps she helped my grandmother and her current friend to pass themselves off as a respectable family.

Before Aram came to bless me I was hidden away all the time, twisted and sick. I have seen nothing of the world until recently, and now I have seen so much that I have come running back home to Dumitra for protection.

As far as I know Aram was the only friend Dumitra had who was near her age and never gave her anything but himself, and of his handsome, powerful, personable self I have no doubt he gave far more than most. In return he accepted her generosity, perhaps keeping his pride by viewing her help as artistic patronage. Dumitra has seven of his strange evocative sculptures in her garden: all carved from tree trunks. They are not unlike totem poles. I look at them each morning, cup my hands on their hard polished shafts and feel the energy course through them.

Aram never sold himself as an artist, always insisting his work sell itself, and indeed it might have done so literally if anyone had ever been given the chance to see its creation in the barns, sheds and old warehouses he was lent to work in over the years. Through even the coldest winters he would only allow himself to keep warm by burning the waste chips and shavings from his artworks, but he was never averse to basking in front of his benefactors’ fires whenever invited.

Aram’s sculptures were always carved from a fallen, never a felled tree: one that died a natural, albeit, sudden death, usually death by storm, preferably by lightning. A tree struck by lightning was very special, particularly if it was an oak, only the most special sculptures would be made from oak and would thus be imbued with oak’s magic. There were a few trunks killed by disease: great hollow rings of ancient trees. These always became the most terrible creations, agonised faces seemingly rising from the whorled and worn knots of old grain.

As soon as the work was finished Aram gave it to his patron or patroness.

Aram claimed he could understand trees and bring out of the trunk whatever the failing spirit of the tree desired to be remembered by. Strange, unsettling, creations always emerged: he said it was a dip into the water mind we all share, the water memory of the tree. Trees were our bridge with the spirit world, labyrinths of receptive water vapours. He believed the spirit could endure by retaining the impression of the water vapour that once defined its living body, just as homeopathic medicine retains the sub-atomic water memory of its trace ingredients after a million dilutions.

For Aram the world around us throbbed with spirits. His desire to placate, to propitiate, went far beyond, for instance, Dumitra’s own deeply ingrained superstitions. That is one feature of ingrained peasant-hood she has never abandoned: she still has a deep-seated fear of reprisals if ever she should ignore her superstitions.

Sometimes, when there were no bookings for holiday lets, Aram would stay in the converted barn and come and go as he pleased. Dumitra would never know how long he would stay, that way she could treasure each moment as if it might be the last. For years she never bored of him, never took him for granted, nor he her. But then, maybe he went off as soon as he felt the faintest threat of impending boredom.

I speak of Aram in the past tense now, for Aram is dead.

I never felt I could ask Dumitra about Aram and she never volunteered any personal details about him, neither did she try to pass him off as ‘Uncle Aram’, but I guessed, as his accent sounded similar to hers, that they had both escaped from some East European peasant poverty that I, naïvely, have always chosen to see as pure, romantic and magical. They certainly both had magic about them.

I am sure it was thanks to Aram’s magic that I learned to walk and talk again and found myself again able to function without prescribed, ‘unnatural’, medication for all the years when Aram was around. He gave me his own potions; he said they were natural. Whatever they were they redefined my life until two years ago, when went away, taking with him my last bottle of his potion.

My mental condition rapidly deteriorated. I was examined and pronounced to be suffering from bi-polar disorder: manic depression in old, prejudicial parlance, but what are words anyway? Either I am or am not sick in the head. Without Aram and his natural cures undoubtedly I was sick.

I do not know if Aram spent each night alone in the barn after I was safely in bed: maybe he rushed in to Dumitra as soon as my head hit the pillow, or maybe Dumitra rushed out to him and they made passionate love until sunrise, but he would always dramatically depart to his lair early in the evening and say good night to me before I went to bed and he always made his appearance, equally dramatically, from the barn every morning to join us for breakfast.

Then one day Aram went away. I thought it was no different from his usual departures, but when he was gone Dumitra said that since I was now sixteen I could move into the barn and have space of my own and independence.

‘Won’t we still be doing holiday lets?’

‘Not this year, Simone, too tiresome, and the whole place is overdue for redecoration and new carpets, new regulations: fire doors - all much too expensive.’

‘But when Aram comes back I will have to move out again.’

‘Aram will never come back.’

‘But surely - ?’

‘Never. We will never speak of Aram again.’

‘But - why?’

‘Not ever.’

From then on I felt myself disintegrate. I always did have my extremes, even when Aram was there, even with Aram’s natural potions, but now my extremes were too extreme. The pills from the doctor did not cure me they just held me in suspension while I awaited Aram’s return.

So it was that I looked out of the upstairs window of the converted barn and saw the large footprints in the wet grass, and the summoned worms, and heard excitement in the songs of birds, and smelt a pure smell in the air as if it had recently thundered, and knew the soporific nothingness of my sedated life was about to be banished.

Chapter 3

Dumitra might be my grandmother but she is only just over fifty, quite young for a granny, soon to be a great-granny, she could easily be my ‘geriatric mother’: a typical age nowadays for a career mother. I suppose she could still be thought of as beautiful: petite, brunette, vivaciously agile, dressing to make the most of her East European mystery, her incredible skin and fine bone structure. Together with her obvious intelligence, grasp of many languages, and dignified bearing she has always been able to find generous friends who feel honoured to be acquainted with her and suspect she might be some émigré countess with a secret past, graciously offering them the brief gift of her company, and maybe more if they are truly blessed.

All Dumitra’s friends are male of course, she has no female friends, not a one, just a few female associates and the women she would trust to baby-sit for me whenever she went off to please a friend. She used to take my mother away with her when she was young but she could not take me: it was not so much the obvious mental problems, it was more the physical ones, I was in a very bad state for a long time, even with Aram’s magic help.

I remember Aram telling me when I was just fourteen and starting to feel truly alive, that my own magic had cured me, not his: he was just the enabler; it was I who had the gift. He said he was only doing what I willed him to do; he was mine to do with as I pleased. He said this to me in a strange way; he could not look me in the eyes as he said this, as if he was truly in thrall to me. But for all that, he went away two years later, and despite my willing his return he did not come back for another two years: so much for any control I might have had over him.

Every night I said prayers - more like incantations - to bring him back. Every night for those two long years I would mutter madly into the darkness of long sleepless nights, medication or not.

After I saw the squirming footprints I washed and dressed to be prepared and was not surprised when, at eight thirty as I made my breakfast, I heard a light rap on my back door. Whoever it was knew the hours we kept, knew my back door could not be seen from the farmhouse, knew Dumitra rose early, bathed, but did exercises, and studied some language course until ten o’clock. She was always teaching herself something new.

I took a deep breath and opened my door to see Aram smiling at me, but I thought how lined his handsome dark face had become. He still shaved his head, or maybe he had no hair left at all, and his huge eyes still pierced into me. I suppose he was in his late fifties, tall, broad and straight-backed. He was beginning to show his age but still had the aura of someone who could make wonderful things happen at will.

‘I can’t stay long, Simone, and Dumitra must not know I’ve been here. I’ve brought you something for your eighteenth birthday, a week early, I know, but by the time you’re eighteen you’ll be an adult - free - you must be prepared.’

‘Why did you go?’

‘You must ask Dumitra.’

‘She said never to speak of you again.’

‘Bad as that?’

‘Why?’

‘You were just sixteen - so beautiful. I never realised what was in her mind until she voiced her suspicions and then I realised her feelings had grown too strong to be reasoned with. I did as she wished and I went away.’

‘Her suspicions: what could she have suspected?’

He shrugged and looked away. I feigned naïvety in the hope of teasing out a revelation.

‘I couldn’t have stayed, but if I’d taken you away and freed you back then Dumitra would have - no - I couldn’t. It wouldn’t have been right.’

‘Leaving the way you did was not right.’

He walked past me through to my warm little kitchen but on the way his foot caught somehow in the flex of a table lamp, the flex looped around his foot and pulled the onyx lamp off the table. It shattered on the tiled floor. I saw the look in his eyes, a new look, a look that said: ‘Have I lost it?’

The Aram I used know had all the world around him under his control, no flex would have dared try tripping him as events unfurled around him in a smooth flow. It was a form of luck, if something fell it would never hit him, anything he might have accidentally brushed off a tabletop he would deftly catch, as if he had only brushed it off to demonstrate the precision of his reflex response. But that morning in my kitchen I could see that life had changed for Aram: he was past his peak and no longer had control of his world.

He was full of apologies but as he searched for a dustpan he knocked a chair over. Then the toaster wire snagged improbably on his coat button: he caught the toaster but it flipped and scattered toasted breadcrumbs everywhere. I tried to put him at ease:

‘I’ll tidy up later Aram: please, please sit down and talk.’

He sat down warily at the carved oak table. His eyes darted round to make sure no other traps were lying in wait for him. I sat down too. He took a deep breath to clear his mind of what had just diverted us then looked into my eyes, the way he always used to do - he could always see right into my heart - and he said:

‘I’ve come here for a reason: the accident.’

‘I know: to break Dumitra’s ugly old table lamp.’

Aram did not ‘do’ levity. It was cruel of me to take advantage of the first dent I had ever seen made in his dignity. He did not even smile as he carried on:

‘The accident when you were four, the injuries, the terrible blow to your head - it was a good thing you forgot everything back then: those troubled times - Dumitra always said tell her nothing unless she asks, and if you did ask, just to say your parents both died in the car crash that injured you. But it wasn’t that way at all. Your parents didn’t die together.’

‘But she always - ’

‘Wait - hear me out. Dumitra brought you back here as soon as you were well enough to leave the hospital. She gave you back a life but not the truth, and I helped her conceal it, yet I knew more of the truth than she did. Well, I had to respect her wishes while you were a child, but soon you’ll be an adult, the deception has played on my mind. So here I am to make amends for the past, but don’t tell Dumitra you’ve seen me. I parked on the road and crossed the fields to the track to avoid her.’

‘More lies then?’

‘I promised her never to see you again.’

‘Broken promises too. If my parents didn’t die together in the car crash how did they die then, and where was I?’

He took a large brown envelope out of his inside coat pocket.

‘I know Dumitra thinks the past is best forgotten but your father was once a writer, he wrote about his life after separating from your mother; he wrote for her. When your mother read his words she wrote a little too, about their brief life together, but she wrote for you, then she died in a car accident in France: head on into a tree, no other car involved.’

‘But Dumitra said we were all together when the hit and run driver - is my father still alive then?’

‘I think he died first but not in a car accident.’

‘You think? Can’t you be sure?’

‘All I know is that your mother wrote here that she found him dead.’

‘Where? How had he died?’

‘Let me put it this way: if he did die, only your mother saw his body. Nobody else, but as far as I know, nobody has seen your father since then. Only your mother knew the truth, and perhaps she didn’t want to tell you the real truth either.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Maybe she had something to hide.’

‘What?’

‘Who can say - an argument between them, an accident?’

‘You mean she killed my father and then killed herself in an act of remorse? Have you come back to tell me that?’

‘No, no of course not. All I am saying is: we’ll never know now.’

‘Did Dumitra think my mother killed him? Is that why - ’

‘Simone: I have no more idea of what really happened than you will have after reading their words. But if you’d rather, I can take these papers away again until you feel more prepared.’

‘You said my mother wrote for me to read?’

‘She did.’

‘Then I should read what she wrote, and whatever my father wrote for her.’

‘I agree. Just don’t tell Dumitra about these papers.’

‘Has she never read them, her daughter’s words?’

‘She knows nothing about them: easier for all concerned if she remains in ignorance. She can get upset very easily.’

‘So can I, Aram, and when I do I tell Dumitra, and she helps me because she is the only person now who can.’

‘By sending you to her doctor?’

‘I don’t want to have secrets from her.’

‘And what name did her