— I can take you to Italy.—
She didn’t believe him, didn’t answer.
— No, it’s true. I know someone, I can get you papers. We’ll find work for you there. Not this, here. Better work. You can’t go on in this place.—
She shook her head, lower and lower. He was smiling, dismissing her powerlessness before his capability in the world of official fixes.
What could he know of the mother, the grandmother she went back to every night with leftover food one of the chefs smuggled from the hotel restaurant to give her.
— First days of next month, I go. I take you. Nothing for a girl like you, here. — Every lunchtime he confirmed, assumed the arrangement. And she found her voice — No, no I cannot. —
At last he lost interest — all right. There were plenty of girls who would jump at the chance to get out. And there are plenty of girls in Milan even if they haven’t the novelty of being a real Russian one.
But when she was walking home from the bus stop on her afternoon off duty she saw something so terrible that she was almost run over by a truck as she plunged across the traffic to reach it. Old people begging in the streets; they were everywhere, old men in the remnants of their respectable functionaries’ or clerks’ suits, old women with the bewildered faces of former housewives, shamed under shawls. But this one she was in panic to reach was her own grandmother. She took her home, unable to speak, eyes screwed with tears of anger, disgust, as if the old woman were a criminal caught in the act. At home, her mother first cried and then countered with an anger of her own. — She hasn’t had her pension paid for a year — one month more than a year. I stand with her for days outside the office, no-one is paid. What can they do but sit in the street and hope someone has something to give? Why shouldn’t she do what they do? How can we live on what you bring from that hotel? I’ll have to try and put her in an old people’s home, she’ll die there away from us! What else is there? — Next day the grandmother was back on her stool in the street. Her granddaughter saw her, and passed.
There was something else.
After the lunchtime love-making she brought up the subject he had set aside. — If you can do papers, I go to Italy.—
It was not just the sight of the revered old woman begging in the street; the sometime chambermaid had something of the rational intelligence, calculation, of the businessman. He would find decent work for her in that country outside, Italy, that wonderful city he spoke about, Milan, and she would send good currency back to her mother. If she stayed a chambermaid her grandmother would remain a beggar among all the other beggars.
She left them behind. Her mother had not known about the Italian businessman but when told of his offer she did not hesitate: Go, Elena. They did not speak about what would become of those left behind. Perhaps the mother could take over the daughter’s work as a chambermaid.
Her mother gave her in farewell a picture book of the city, its ancient palaces, churches, squares and museums they had visited together; she must have exchanged something for it in the market where people parted with their possessions, and the daughter herself asked for, and was granted, photographs taken in the city in times when her mother had a good position and they still owned a camera.
She had a room in a small hotel in his city, Milan, his country, Italy. The room was five floors up, a tiny cage of an elevator to take her there, bring him to her when he had time. The first day, he showed her a lacy stone spire just visible fretted out of the sky in the window. — You have a view of the Duomo! You must go to the piazza and see it, the most beautiful thing in the whole world.—
He paid for the hotel room and took her to a trattoria nearby where he had arranged with the patron for her to have her meals. It was a large and animated place where people working in the quarter came in a hurry to eat and drink plentifully. This was as he had told, a wonderful city; the narrow streets of shops displaying like art exhibitions beautiful clothes and shoes whose elegance you could not ever have imagined. He was looking out for something for her — work; but she had to have better clothes to wear if he should find that something! He took her to a department store that had good clothes on the racks, not as elegant as the small shops she gazed into, and bought for her trousers and jackets and shoes she had never had. Of course she always had been this tall, angular body with wide-apart breasts, this white skin and jutting cheekbones, shaggy dark hair, narrow black eyes and lips whose defining edges were attractively coarse in contrast with her skin; but now, in the shop mirror, she was seen by herself to be beautiful, in her way; as he, the Italian, must have seen her to be as a chambermaid. So she wandered the city dressed now like any of the smart working men and women from shops and offices, and hurried back to the hotel to see if there was any message from him; any day, every day, he might have found something, a job for her. She was listening avidly to the talk around her, reading the labels and signs on objects she could recognise, picking up a little of the language.
He did not come to claim love-making as often as he had back in that other hotel, her country. He had a great deal of work, a staff to direct, and she knew there was the apartment in some other part of the city where he lived with his wife; he had not talked about his family before he brought her to Italy, they couldn’t talk much then or now because of their lack of a fluent common language, their tongues in love-making were the only real form of communication they had in common. But now he would mention that he wouldn’t be coming to her from his offices next afternoon because his son had to be met at the airport or his wife was giving a cocktail party for her visiting relatives and he had to be home early. Although the city was a marvel surging around her she was more and more anxiously impatient to have work and belong to the city instead of being its spectator. Work and foreign currency to send back where she came from. And she also had the illusion — she knew it to be one — that she would pay him back, for the hotel, the trattoria, the clothes, in time; she would have liked the love-making not to be paid for in any way but the pleasure exchanged. But that, she knew, belonged to being in love. Men loved their wives. He loved his wife, she was sure of it, felt it; she had never had the chance to be in love.
He found something for her. And for himself as well.
It was not work, in Milan where he would be supposed to keep coming to her — perhaps there was some new woman for that diversion, or his wife was getting suspicious and difficult. But he treated his women kindly and it so happened that a solution came up to benefit everybody, satisfy what he felt was his wide family responsibility, uncles, aunts, cousins, as well. He told her, one weekend (she did not usually expect him in those periods it was taken for granted he would spend with his wife and children), he wanted to introduce her to someone in his family. Perhaps there was an opportunity because the wife was away, or the relative was one with whom he exchanged confidences over affairs with women, someone to be counted upon to be discreet. But she was surprised and shyly touched at this sign of letting her into his life. After an hour’s drive when the Alps were always present, approaching, withdrawing, as she followed this landscape that was Italy, the world, they came to a town, a large family apartment filled with imposing old dark furniture, generous food and wine laid out among the cries of people welcoming someone he told them he had saved from the chaos in Russia. They knew what a good man he was, generous. There was an aunt, another ample woman who might be her sister, a half-grown boy playing a computer game, the uncle, and a man who was the couple’s son. The Russian stranger had observed, in Milan, how difficult it was to gauge the age of certain foreigners; they might look slim and briskly young seen from the back and turn age-seamed faces in which the bones of the nose were almost emerging from the thin skin, or they might appear to be well-fleshed, stout-muscled young men, thighs and buttocks stretching tight pants, the fleshy jaws and earlobes not necessarily giving away middle age. The son was one of these, and his mature vigour was the epicentre of the gathering. He had his own apartment; the Russian girl and the cousin from Milan who had brought her were taken by the man — Lorenzo, the name was, among all the names presented to her — to see his apartment almost as if there were a reason for this, such as an estate agent showing a prospective dwelling to a client.