‘Yes,’ replied Zoya. ‘We did.’
I don’t recall how much I had drunk that night – a lot, I suspect – but I sobered up immediately and wished that I had recognized the direction in which the conversation was going. Had I enjoyed such foresight, I might have changed the topic more quickly, but it was too late now and Zoya was sitting erect, the blood draining from her face as she stared at him.
‘You stupid man,’ she said. ‘What do you know about Russia anyway, other than what you read in your newspapers? You cannot compare your country with ours. They are entirely different. The points you make are facile and ignorant.’
‘Zoya,’ he replied, surprised by her antagonism but unwilling to concede the point – I liked Leo very much, but he was the type who always believed that he was correct on such matters and looked with surprise and pity on those who did not share his views – ‘the facts are not in dispute. Why, one has only to read any of the published material to see how—’
‘You would consider yourself a Bolshevik then?’ she asked. ‘A revolutionary?’
‘I would side with Lenin, certainly,’ he said. ‘He is a great man. To come from where he has come and achieve all that he has achieved—’
‘He is a murderer,’ replied Zoya.
‘And the Tsar was not?’
‘Leo,’ I said quickly, placing my glass on the table before me, ‘it is impolite to speak this way. You must understand, we were brought up under the rule of the Tsar. There are many people who revered him, who continue to revere him. Two of them are in this room with you. Perhaps we know more about the Tsar and the Bolsheviks and even Lenin than you do, as we lived through those times and did not simply read about them. Perhaps we have suffered more than you can understand.’
‘And perhaps we shouldn’t talk about such things on Christmas Day,’ said Sophie, refilling everyone’s glasses. ‘We’re here to enjoy ourselves, aren’t we?’
Leo shrugged and sat back, happy to let the subject drop, positive in his arrogance that he was right and that we were too foolish to see it. Zoya said very little more that evening and the celebration ended in tension, the handshakes a little more forced than usual, the kisses a little more perfunctory.
‘Is that what people think?’ Zoya asked me as we walked back towards our separate rooms. ‘Is that how they recall the Tsar? In the way that we think of Louis Seizième?’
‘I don’t know what people think,’ I said. ‘And I don’t care about it. What matters is what we think. What matters is what we know.’
‘But they have corrupted history, they know nothing of our struggles. They see Russia in such simplistic terms. The privileged as monsters, the poor as heroes, everyone is the same. They talk in such idealistic ways, these revolutionaries, but have such naive theories. It’s too funny.’
‘Leo is hardly a revolutionary,’ I said, trying to laugh it off. ‘He’s a painter, nothing more. He likes to think that he can change the world, but what does he do each day, after all, except paint portraits for fat tourists and drink the money away in pavement cafés, spouting his opinions to anyone who will listen? You shouldn’t concern yourself with him.’
It was easy to see that Zoya remained unconvinced. She spoke little for the rest of our walk and allowed me no more than a chaste kiss on the cheek as we parted, as a sister might offer her brother. As I watched her step through her front door, I guessed that she would have a difficult night ahead of her, her mind filled with all the things that she wanted to say, all the anger that she wanted to express. I wished that she would invite me in, just to share her troubles with her, nothing more. To be a partner in her anger. For I felt it too.
We celebrated our second Christmas thirteen days later, on January the seventh, and returned the compliment by inviting Leo and Sophie to a café, where we offered to buy them dinner. There was no possibility of us preparing a meal in either of our homes – our landladies would never have permitted it – and anyway, I was embarrassed that Zoya and I did not live together and would not have enjoyed being a guest in her home or inviting her as a guest to mine. I wondered whether Leo and Sophie talked about our living arrangements and was sure that they did. Indeed, Leo had once referred to me in a moment of exuberant drunkenness as his ‘innocent young friend’ and I had been offended by the implication of purity that accompanied it, an allegation which did nothing to improve my self-esteem. On another occasion, he offered to bring me to a particular house he knew to rectify my problem, but I brushed the suggestion away and went home to satisfy my lust alone, before I could be tempted by his offer.
‘But I don’t understand,’ said Sophie, taking her hat off and shaking out her long dark hair as we sat down. ‘A second Christmas?’
‘It is the traditional Russian Orthodox Christmas,’ I explained. ‘It’s got something to do with the Julian and Gregorian calendars. It’s all very complicated. The Bolsheviks would have the people conform to the rest of the world, and there’s a certain irony in there somewhere, but those of us who are traditionalists think differently. Hence, a separate Christmas Day.’
‘Of course,’ said Leo with a charming smile. ‘Heaven forbid that you should accede to the Bolsheviks!’
Zoya and Leo had not spoken since the earlier incident and the memory of their argument hung over the table like a cloud, but the fact that we had extended the invitation at all implied that we did not wish to lose their friendship and so, to his credit, Leo was the first to sue for peace.
‘I think I owe you an apology, Zoya,’ he said after two glasses of wine and a noticeable elbow in the ribs from Sophie to spur him into action. ‘Perhaps I was a little rude to you on Christmas Day. Our Christmas Day, that is. I was probably a little drunk. Said some things I should never have said. I had no right to speak about your native country in the way that I did.’
‘No, you shouldn’t have,’ she replied, but without any aggression in her tone. ‘But at the same time, I should not have reacted quite as I did in your home either, that is not how I was brought up, and I think I owe you an apology too.’
I noticed that neither of them was conceding that their points of view were incorrect, nor were they actually apologizing, simply lingering under the impression that they owed each other an apology, but I did not want to restart the argument by pointing either of these things out.
‘Well, you’re a guest in our country,’ he said, smiling widely at her, ‘and as such it was wrong of me to speak as I did. If you’ll permit me?’ He raised his glass in the air and we lifted ours to join him. ‘To Russia,’ he said.
‘To Russia,’ we replied, clinking glasses together and taking mouthfuls of wine.
‘Vive la révolution,’ he added beneath his breath, but I think only I heard that comment and of course I let it go.
‘I do wonder all the same why you never speak of it,’ he said a moment later. ‘If it was such a wonderful place, I mean. Oh now, don’t look at me like that, Sophie, it’s a perfectly reasonable question that I ask.’
‘Zoya doesn’t like to talk about it,’ Sophie replied, for she had tried on more than one occasion to solicit confidences from her new friend about her past, but had finally given up.