Day of the Angel

By Irina Muravyova and John Dewey

‘Day of the Angel’ follows the fates and fortunes of three generations of the Ushakov family, members of the Russian émigré community living in Paris following the Revolution. Against the historical background of totalitarian terror, famine and war, depicted in harrowing detail as an epic struggle between the powers of good and evil, the family becomes swept up in a tide of events largely beyond their control.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781783080144

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Diary of Yelizaveta

Aleksandrovna Ushakova

Paris, 1955

It’s nearly a month now since we found out that le bébé est en route. This had the immediate effect of completely transforming my and Georgiy’s life. We have become calmer, more considerate towards each other. It’s even difficult to explain this change. Lyonya, as far as one can judge, is a bit embarrassed by the prospect of becoming a father, and he and Vera kept the news from us for as long as they could. There’s something of the child in my son, and Vera plays along with it, pretending to be more naïve and helpless than she really is. I went to see Mama and Papa in Toulouse. Thank goodness they’ve finally moved, as Mama was almost going out of her mind in our village. She’s developed a pronounced stoop, but still looks at you with those same eyes: bright blue, a touch dazzling even.

I said to her, Just imagine: you’re almost a great-grandmother!

She replied, Great-grandmother, so be it. But what about you, poor thing? How can you be a grandmother already?

My life has gone by so quickly! Vera’s stomach seems to grow bigger by the hour, and her whole face is covered with dark yellow blotches. Sometimes I have the feeling that she doesn’t like me. Could it be she’s aware of this? Once she asked me how it was that Georgiy is a whole generation older than me. I had to tell her that he also lived in Tarbes and to begin with helped my father break in horses. He came there in 1925 when I was twenty-three and he was forty-five. Vera couldn’t understand that. Weren’t there any younger men? I tried to explain to her that there were plenty of young men, but mostly French, and my parents wanted me to marry a Russian, one of our own kind, and I went along with that. She just didn’t believe me. I have no bad feelings towards Vera, God forbid! As long as my son is happy I’ve nothing against her. She’s very attractive. Her body could be that of a negress, with the slim waist and rounded derrière they so often have. Her eyes are almost violet in colour. My son probably feels a strong physical attraction towards her. I certainly sense that. Only I don’t know if she feels the same way about him, whether she’s happy with him.

Tomorrow I’m going away with N. for three days on the pretext of having to visit Didi. God! And here’s me about to be a grand-mami!

Anastasia Beckett – Yelizaveta

Aleksandrovna Ushakova

Moscow, 1933

Liza, here we are at last in Moscow, worn out from our exertions. We arrived towards evening on Saturday. They’d sent a Cadillac to pick us up at the station with a driver who surprised me by not uttering a single word during the whole journey. For the first two months we’re staying at the Hotel New Moscow, with a view of the Kremlin and the Moscow River. The hotel décor is sumptuous: mirrors everywhere, lots of red velvet, bright lights. However, we couldn’t fill the bathtub because there was no plug. Patrick got the man on duty to come and have a look. He was clearly alarmed at the thought of having upset the foreigners. He said they’d come and put it right tomorrow, and for the time being suggested either sitting on the hole or plugging it with one’s heel. When he’d gone Patrick and I burst out laughing and compared heels to see whose would do a better job of plugging the hole. That night I had a migraine and found we’d left all our medication in London. Patrick gave me some cognac to drink.

Next morning at nine we went for breakfast. There’s red carpet all along the corridor, lots of potted palms, and the chambermaids all have white aprons and little caps so stiffly starched they look like marble. To begin with we were the only ones in the large overheated dining room. We were served fried patties with a very tasty filling, black caviar, butter, jam and pineapple compôte. I was shocked by this display of luxury: after all, the country we’d come to is a proletarian state where it goes without saying that the common people are used to a quite different way of life, so what was the point of all this charade? Soon after us some other guests came in, possibly Germans or Swedes: very well dressed, sleek, spotlessly clean, with supercilious grins on their faces as if convinced that this magnificent display had been laid on especially for them, judging it for that reason no more than right and proper and allowing themselves to be fed black caviar and pineapple compôte. Patrick and I quickly finished our breakfast and returned to our room.

Through our windows we could see the vast city spread out before us, with an iron bridge spanning the river, and the blue and green onion domes of St Basil’s Cathedral. Suddenly we heard the sound of a brass band just below our windows, and a lorry drove slowly past carrying an open coffin and relatives in black seated on wooden benches. Clearly visible from above were the immobile features of the deceased, who lay covered to the chin with a red drape strewn with small white asters. The bandsmen marched out in step behind the lorry, blowing their gleaming trumpets. I was unhappy that our first morning in Moscow should have begun with this funeral, which filled me with a sudden dark foreboding. But Patrick, who can always tell what’s on my mind, argued that we’d arrived in one of the world’s most exotic cities, where so much building was going on and so many changes were taking place before our very eyes, and that we’d find everything fascinating. No doubt he’s right.

The whole centre of Moscow has been dug up and hacked about like something disembowelled. At every turn one stumbles on yellow heaps of half-frozen earth, and half the streets are covered in a morass of dark-red clay. Whole areas are impassable on foot or by transport. Everywhere there’s the din and racket of excavators, the anxious faces of men in grimy caps and women in quilted jackets and red headscarves. Here women work on an equal footing with men, all building the metro which they say is due to open in time for the anniversary of the Revolution. Patrick and I went for a walk around the city, and I was struck by how people look when you see them up close. Their tired grey faces have nothing in common with those depicted on the cheerful posters which add dashes of colour to the city. Everyone’s clothes are shabby and inadequate, the streets are incredibly congested and the trams jam-packed. People all charge into each other, bite each other’s heads off, push the weak and less agile to the walls of buildings, leaving them standing there until they manage to find a way back into the merciless flow of human bodies. But do you know what struck me immediately? One is aware of a certain tense discipline in people, as if all the time they sense they’re being watched and could be punished. Patrick and I decided to take a tram back to the hotel. There were only five people waiting at the stop when we got there, but even so they’d lined up in orderly fashion, one behind the other. It’s the same at newspaper and tobacco kiosks. Nobody just stands there by him- or herself, everyone rushes to form a queue, as if without queues life would immediately descend into chaos. There are many beggars, so many! The homeless children make a particularly distressing sight. We were warned at the embassy of their great skill as petty thieves and told to keep a tight hold of our handbags, but now I’ve seen these children – emaciated, pale-faced, grubby, utterly neglected – I feel such shame as if I were personally to blame for them roaming the streets and begging for bread.

On Wednesday we were invited to dinner at the American embassy. I’d already heard in London that Bullitt and his wife host these incredible banquets and parties in Moscow. In the morning I sorted through and tried on everything I have, finally deciding on a long grey silk dress I’d had made in Riga. Soon after breakfast it started raining, giving rise to a pungent smell from the decaying leaves covering the streets. At six o’clock a car came to pick us up, and over the dress I put on a thick woollen coat trimmed with silver fox fur which I’d also had made in Riga. Our car stopped in front of a magnificent illuminated villa which looked a real palace.

What I saw vastly exceeded in opulence and splendour anything Patrick and I had imagined beforehand. The women were sumptuously attired. Many were showing a lot of bare flesh adorned with jewels and furs. What’s more, pearls and beads are not worn now as they used to be, but slung over the back to draw attention to the woman’s bare body. Silver fox and white fox were the most commonly worn furs, although I have to say there were a few bright-ginger, very fluffy ordinary fox furs there too. Make-up is different from what it used to be, too. Dark eye shadow and claret lipstick are out, and now it’s all thinly pencilled eyebrows and bright scarlet lips shot with gold or cherry. Nearly all the ladies were wearing very high heels. And you should have seen the food, Liza! The tables were literally groaning with it: mountains of black caviar, pineapples, grapes, bananas. In my grey dress and with nothing more than Mama’s little locket on display I felt like Cinderella. Near me all the time was a woman with a mousy face, flashing her diamonds so much it hurt your eyes. I learnt that she was the wife of some high-up military commander.

In the large white marble colonnaded hall several very elegant couples were dancing. Liza, j’ai halluciné! Imagine a window in the shape of a gigantic fan, a high vaulted ceiling, and in the middle of it a huge crystal chandelier blazing with lights! Patrick said the orchestra had been brought over specially from Stockholm. With his tail coat down to the ground and red hair in a short prickly crew cut the conductor looked like some fantastic hedgehog.

Then we went into the dining room. This was very bright and colourful, decorated in the style russe. In the corners were cages with newborn lambs and kids and even a bear cub. There was a marvellous winter garden in an indoor conservatory, with gorgeous flowers and ripening oranges and lemons. It was just like a fairy tale! Each table had large blue and white flower arrangements on it: roses, lilies and narcissi. Poppies imported from Holland had been laid on the tables, one to each place setting. The knives, forks and spoons were of solid silver with gold monograms. My head was spinning from all this splendour, from all the sounds and scents. At three o’clock in the morning accordions struck up, and from finely worked gilt cages suspended from the ceiling cocks began to crow. All the guests laughed and clapped their hands, and Bullitt, red-faced and perspiring from drink, stood up and took a bow.

But now for the main event of the evening, Liza: I was introduced to the famous Duranty! We were seated at the same table as him and that idiotic woman Anna Strong, who’d slapped on her orange lipstick just anyhow like some circus clown. Duranty’s face has a really sardonic expression; his eyes are grey and transparent. His face often takes on a certain peculiar hardness, or rather immobility – paralysis almost – which I think he uses as a way of deflecting unwanted curiosity. He has a pronounced limp, but that’s no bad thing at all: on the contrary, it even adds a certain manly air. I already knew from Patrick that Duranty was recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his newspaper reports about the situation in the Ukraine. He’s been living in Moscow for years and has travelled all over the country, and as a result his opinions are taken very seriously in Europe and America. After supper Patrick went off somewhere, the carrot-lipped Strong also scurried away, and Duranty and I were left alone at our table. Feeling awkward, I rather clumsily congratulated him on his prestigious award. At this he suddenly leant forwards very close as if wanting to sniff my eyes and hair, and with a strange unemotional laugh said:

Never mind the reports! They’re all going to croak of starvation anyway. Ça me dit rien!

I recoiled from him so violently that my elbow caught the half-empty bottle of champagne and knocked it over, spilling the contents over my legs. When he saw this, a kind of mad gleam came into his eyes.

Would you like me to drink the rest of the champagne off your knee? he asked.

What! By now I was really scared. I had the sudden feeling he was about to throw himself at me.

I just want to play the gallant Frenchman, he went on, laughing with his lips alone while his eyes retained their mad gleam. Am I not right in thinking you claim France as your native land? But I too spent my best years in the Latin Quarter. That makes us almost fellow-nationals.

I was completely thrown, but nevertheless did my best to change the subject:

Are the Russian peasants really starving, then? That’s what we were told back in England. And in that case why don’t you describe things as they really are?

He frowned and took my hand in his, as if I were a child in need of reassurance.

First of all, I don’t write all that much. Learn to read between the lines… And secondly, what difference does it make? Europe has long been the realm of death. People have always cultivated a need for savagery and a passion for murder. Ça booste le moral! The Russians should be left to get on with it. Let them sort out their own mess. C’est le jour de la Sainte-Touche!

I just gulped, unable to speak, unable to think what to reply; and then again he laughed and again leant up close to me, so close that I could feel the heat and tension of his body.

Would you like me to take you for a spin about town? I have a car and chauffeur here and am at your service.

I felt that everyone was looking at us, that they could see him holding my hand and leaning so close, as if at any moment he would put his arms around me and start kissing me.

No, no, I don’t want to!

Are you really Russian? he whispered. Someone told me that Beckett had married a Russian. Which year did you emigrate?

1920.

And where are your parents now?

In the south of France. My sister and her family live in Paris: she’s married with a little son.

Well, see how well everything turned out. Why have you come to this Slough of Despond?

Before I could reply Patrick returned and took me to meet a group of Moscow intellectuals keeping aloof from the general throng. I think they were quite disconcerted when they heard I was of Russian origin. I didn’t recognize any of their names apart from Meyerhold the theatre director and his wife the actress Zinaida Reich. As a couple they made a most unsympathetic impression on me. His hair stands up, and his face has an overwrought, pathetic and at the same time irate look to it, frequently assuming a haughty expression, and his eyes fall shut as if he’s about to faint. His speech is odd too: one moment he’ll be rattling along in a loud voice, then he starts mumbling to himself and a moment later stops altogether, deep in thought. His wife Zinaida Reich is a big overweight woman with expressive, somewhat hysterical eyes. You might call her beautiful were it not for her heavy lower jaw and lurid makeup through which you can’t even make out her face. Bukharin and his wife were there too. They both look old-fashioned, and she is plain and dresses like an old woman. I was in conversation with Meyerhold when I suddenly sensed with my whole back that someone was looking at me. I turned round: it was Duranty! Again that insolent gleam in his eyes, which gave me gooseflesh all over. Why was he looking at me like that? No doubt everyone had noticed it.

We returned to the hotel as it was getting light. Patrick told me that Duranty was without doubt an extremely talented journalist, but that dark things were rumoured of him. It’s known, for instance, that after the war he lived in Paris for a considerable length of time, indulging there in the most depraved debauchery, smoking opium and participating in some kind of unthinkable orgies at which sacrifices were made to the devil. He’s on his own here, without any family: they say his wife stayed behind in Paris.

When we’d gone to bed and outside Moscow was already bathed in pink light and filled with the clamour of horns, voices and other sounds, Patrick urged me several times and with great insistence to steer well clear of Duranty.

Vermont

Present Day

Vermont is paradise. Here in the mornings cocks give voice and horses, sad from infancy on, graze in the meadows on honey-scented grass. It has been remarked that all natives of Vermont look up particularly often at the sky with diffident joy. Beneath Vermont’s so placid sky it is especially difficult to kill or torment anything: not only a human being with a fiercely beating heart, but also the dumb animal, immobile amongst boughs of a slender tree shot through with blue-green leaves, standing in all humility to await the feel of death; or the fish whose wonderfully silky maw will be ripped apart in a second by the angler’s hook, the delicate creature’s blood dripping from the line, its eyes rolled up as if losing consciousness.

For years it never occurred to people in Russia to think of Vermont or imagine that it was paradise. If it did impinge on their consciousness, then only as some vague far-off place where the great writer Solzhenitsyn lived. For in general the minds of these people were haunted on a regular basis only by thoughts of what was forbidden, and it was that after which they constantly hankered. And so for years on end Russian life took its course in a never-ending world of hoarse voices, arguments, smokers’ coughs, odours of strong drink, fried potato, bottled kefir and that secretion of the human stomach commonly known as gastric acid. Some planned to hijack aircraft, others wrote letters to the government. All, of whichever persuasion, loved one another, tormented one another. By night they concocted denunciations in their kitchens. Treated burns with urine. Neglected to shave. Played ping-pong. Listened to lots of Bach. Squabbled, showed contempt. Wanted to live for ever. The men fearlessly learnt Hebrew, the women gave themselves greedily and with ease, begetting clever short-sighted children. As a rule they farmed the children out to their mothers (well-read, peevish smokers), while they themselves were quick to seek out the company of men again to fight and sleep with as before. Nobody got up too early in the mornings; they went to bed after midnight and didn’t turn off the light.

The day the great writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn suddenly felt that soft-hued green Vermont with its vaulting liquid sky was only distracting him from the real issues and, packing in haste, set off for Russia – that day when, already clad in quilted jacket and short scarf because of a recent cold, he gazed at his mournful face and drooping eyes in the mirror and said, The time has come! I must go! – on that very same day a calf was born.

He was light-black, with a creamy-white patch on his forehead. With a sense of liberation and aching relief inside a body thrown into turmoil by its first calving, the cow uninterruptedly and with the desperation of intense love and alarm licked the calf with her hot tongue. He was her son, her flesh and blood.

Fifteen years after that day when Alexander Solzhenitsyn had hurried off on pressing business in the name of Russia and the Russian people, and on the farm neighbouring his Vermont house the calf had been born and its mother’s heart subjected to sustained pangs of anxiety, the shapely, almost noiseless aircraft carrying Dmitry Ushakov across the Atlantic was delayed in-flight because New York had been hit by hurricane Theodore, younger brother of the recently abated Joseph. New York had withheld clearance to land, and in a show of unconcern the passengers of the Air France plane chatted brightly among themselves; although the elderly nun sitting next to Ushakov whose remarkably plump and kindly mouth kept repeating one and the same movement as if chewing some tasty hidden morsel, suddenly closed her eyes and began rapidly fingering the dark-red beads of her rosary.

In its reticent and undemonstrative way the house in Vermont seemed welcoming enough on first impression. Its rooms, filled with antique furniture, breathed a golden stillness, every object in them living its own life in a calm and measured fashion, paying not the slightest attention to the house’s new owner. The steps leading to the garden were slightly mossy and the garden itself very dark, large and neglected, but when, having entered the house and set his luggage down in the drawing room, Ushakov had negotiated the slippery steps down into the garden’s mysteriously muffled darkness and filled his lungs with summer air, he experienced the same as often happens in the mountains when the hitherto unnoticed process of breathing becomes a source of intense pleasure. Startled at this new sensation, he stood for a long time looking down at the carefree stream, visited on the evidence of bare patches in the grass by the Vermont fauna to drink, its surface reflecting with watercolour lucidity the sky’s blue wash and not failing to register even the faintest of clouds. So he stood: breathing, desiring the artless tranquillity suffusing everything around him to grace his whole life from now on.

*

During his first year as a student of the Sorbonne’s Biomedical Faculty, nineteen-year-old Mitya Ushakov unexpectedly proposed to the daughter of the notorious Gabriel Dufy (in Russian: Grigory Dezhnyov). Mitya had first met Masha Dufy (known to her family as Manon) at the Three Saints’ church, preferred by his mother to the cathedral in the rue Daru, which was attended by many new and untested Russian people. Mitya had first set eyes on Masha at Easter when she was fourteen and he fifteen.

He and his mother had spent much time and effort preparing for the service. Mitya knew that in the evening, before they set off for church, his mother would carefully hide under his pillow the first Easter egg, painted red in remembrance of Christ’s blood, and that when they returned from church after midnight the first thing he had to do was take it out from under the pillow and eat it, because his mother believed the Easter egg had the miraculous ability to grant a child health and well-being for the coming year. She once told him that such an egg, thrown into a building where a fire had just broken out, had extinguished the flames. This year she had spent longer than usual on preparing the paskha Easter mould which she always took to church and was invariably judged the best at Father Vladimir’s festive spread. After setting out everything she needed on the table, she had joyfully offered up a prayer, as if intending not just to work curd cheese through a fine sieve and chop up candied peel, but with the aid of this snow-white curd cheese and candied peel become as one with what was about to take place, lightening the greyness and untidiness of life with its radiance and bringing salvation to all on earth, men and beasts alike. So it was that even such a simple act as decorating the Easter pyramid with whisked-up egg whites seemed to her a contribution to the miracle already under way. And watching from his room as his mother, her high cheek bones tinged with a purplish flush, carefully added freshly boiled cream to a ladle of sour cream, Mitya too felt that in the whole wide world there was not and could not be anything more beautiful than this night of joyous celebration. Then, when the curd cheese pyramid was finished and had been set on a flat white dish inscribed For Faith, Tsar and Fatherland in faded gold script around the rim, his mother as always reached up on tiptoe into the high kitchen cupboard, revealing as she did so slightly darkened patches of perspiration under her arms, to take out little dark-blue paper bags of vanilla, dried citrus fruit and mace…

When, anxious not to damage the newborn creature (firmer now in the cold spring air, the raisins on it gleaming with a blue tinge through muslin), they arrived at the church by taxi, it was already thronged with people standing inside and out, and the service was about to begin. Crossing himself before the Iveron Mother of God, Mitya felt no shame that his eyes had misted with tears; on the contrary, his only desire was to yield more completely, more unreservedly to the exultation which overcame him at such moments. He turned to reassure himself that his mother was next to him and experiencing the same as himself, when suddenly his gaze fell on a pair of strangely large eyes gleaming in the semi-darkness. The girl standing to the left of his mother was thin and delicate and looked almost a child. What struck Mitya about her face, lit by the rapid flickering of a candle flame, was its passionate, demanding expression. She prayed in a different way from others too: not meekly, hopefully, self-effacingly, but fervently, insistently; and those eyes of hers – so big the rest of her face was swallowed up, inundated by them – rested on Mitya for a second, then blinked several times in rapid succession as if he were some kind of irritant before gazing upwards again. When the procession of priests and congregation set off around the church, and cold spring with drips of recent rain from barely budded branches rose into the blue-black depths of the sky together with the exultant singing of Christ our Saviour, heavenly angels above sing of Thy resurrection; help us here on earth to praise Thee too with a pure heart, Mitya caught sight of her again in the slowly moving throng and was suddenly so happy he did not even notice when the flame of his candle was blown sideways by a sharp gust of wind and went out, or that a stately woman with a sleeping child on one arm had stopped briefly to relight it deftly with her own candle.

Four years later, already in his first year at the Sorbonne and hurrying to a lecture, Mitya jumped off a bus and almost collided with Manon. Surrounded by other girls, none of whom he recognized, she stood leaning against the latticework of some iron railings, taking rapid, greedily urgent drags on a cigarette. Hippy outfits were all the rage, and they were all dressed in deliberately casual style, with canvas bags slung over the shoulder and bead bracelets. This time too she made no less striking an impression on Mitya than back then in the church. She was still just as thin and petite, had grown indeed if possible even thinner and more transparent; but her face, its green eyes overshadowed by a vividly black fringe almost masking her upper eyelids, was the face of a mature woman acquainted with things of which Mitya had not the slightest concept. Giving her an embarrassed nod, again as in church he felt the flash of those bright pupils, and her velvety eyelashes blinked as if eager to break free from his face and turn back into the emptiness that alone could bring them peace.

From that day on his whole life became one very strange, delightful torment. In his sleep he saw her pale face which showed no trace of interest in him and was made to appear even paler and more remote by cigarette smoke; saw her screwed-up green eyes, her vivid black fringe, her bare knee, revealed as the wind played with the layers of her gypsy skirt; and he felt he could endure it no longer, that he must somehow get hold of her phone number, engineer a casual encounter as she was on her way back from lectures, take hold of her shoulder, her transparent hand…

A couple of weeks later the parishioners of their church were shaken by unwelcome news: Gabriel Dufy, alias Grigory Andreyevich Dezhnyov, editor-in-chief of the prestigious newspaper Le Monde, had published his intimate diary, as a result of which he had been obliged to leave his post as editor and begin divorce proceedings. Mitya’s mother returned from church quite beside herself.

Just imagine it! she exclaimed with feeling, pulling her beret from her curly hair and throwing her old patent-leather handbag on the hall table. And he claims to be a follower of the Orthodox faith! Publishing that awful diary, where he not only describes in graphic detail how much he loves to faire une partie des jambes en l’air, not only informs us what big violet breasts the negress who was his mistress had – ugh, Lord above! – but also writes how delightful skinny little girls are, and even worse, skinny little boys! And there’s him with a daughter of his own! He even has the audacity to write that the church is only there for sinners! And religious faith too! That the righteous can do well enough without Christ, as they’re righteous already!

"Well, he