A few years ago a letter was sent to me at my shop. This event was in itself a rarity! Usually any correspondence comes to Portobello Road in buff-coloured envelopes and fails to spell my name correctly. But this was addressed in an educated Continental hand on a pale blue, square envelope of the best quality. Basildon Bond or something better.
The real surprise, however, lay within the envelope, for the majority of the letter was in Cyrillic, a fine, feminine Russian script so shockingly familiar that I raced through the closely written pages to the signature. The hand was that of Esmé Vallir, nee Loukianoff, my childhood sweetheart, my ideal. She spoke nostalgically of Kiev and South Russia, referring to events only she could know about. She had good news. My mother had also survived both Stalin and Hitler and was here in London staying in a hotel near the house of a family friend in Princelet Street, Spitalfields.
I am not sure if anyone could imagine the intensity of my response. Because of events in Kiev since I’d left, I had been forced to conclude that my mother was probably dead. Naturally I had made considerable efforts to contact her from time to time, especially through my cousin Shura. Eventually I despaired of restoring those links and privately mourned her. Indeed, I mourned her every day.
By 1969 when I received Esmé’s letter, I had become a successful businessman. No longer did I get oil under my fingernails. No longer was I reduced to repairing motorbikes and lawnmowers for Carpenters’, the big hardware store in Portobello Road. Some years earlier, with the help of Mrs Cornelius, I had opened my own premises just a few doors down from Carpenters’ themselves. In those days you had no trouble getting a lease. The rent was reasonable, and my goods were popular. Tourists came from all over the world. I was selling fine-quality furs and second-hand evening wear, also Guards’ and Marines’ dress uniforms which I bought very cheaply through the War Ministry. The collapse of the old empire, I must admit, put many fine costumes my way. Frank Cornelius’s idea was to call the place ‘The Spirit of St Petersburg’. That romantic and misleading epic Doctor Zhivago was soon to make Russian nostalgia very commercial.
From the beginning I specialised in furs. Foxes, stoles, bolero jackets, winter coats, hats. Thanks to television serials the girls were rediscovering the elegance of the previous century. I expanded as the fashion demanded. I sold not used clothes, but historic apparel. Heaven forbid I should end my days as an old-clothes man! This was a business requiring taste and a keen sense of the past. Film and TV companies came to rent from me. I did not buy every piece of tat which came my way. I attended auctions. I went to theatres which were closing down. To film studios. In my shop I was soon able to offer costumes from The Wicked Lady and Beau Brummell, from The Four Feathers, The Drum and Great Expectations. I continue to do good business with the music community.
Reading Esmé’s letter surrounded by so much history was a powerful sensation. At that time I even had some Cossack and Hussar uniforms, though they too were theatrical, part of a consignment from a touring production of The Merry Widow which ran out of money in Swindon. The manager had appealed for help to Mrs Cornelius, then playing one of the matrons, and I had stepped in with an unrefusable offer that paid for the cast’s bus back to London. The uniforms and gowns were of very good quality and needed only a little modification to give them a thoroughly authentic appearance. The majority of them sold within a week. They provided the holiday I took with Mrs Cornelius to Hastings that year.
We stayed in some style at the Grand Hotel. By sheer luck I was able to make yet another ‘killing’ with some costumes from an ambitious pantomime which had not done as well as expected the previous Christmas. The ‘big heads’ were genuine Victorian, great vividly painted grinning things. I sold many of the Pierrot, Colombine and Harlequin costumes on to the Rambert Company who were still active in Notting Hill Gate. Several found their way into the Victoria and Albert Museum. Those were very good years for business and the arts, if not for science. But all that changed with decimalisation of the currency, a confidence trick on us all.
Esmé spent several pages explaining what had happened to her since we had last met in Makhno’s camp during the Civil War. (I was fucked so much I had calluses on my cunt.) Reading her beautiful writing, I began to experience genuine shame for judging her so harshly. What a puritanical fellow I had been! I had been young, deeply in love with her and highly idealistic. But in my disgust, I had been insensitive. She had seemed so hard and cynical. Of course, she had been trying to disguise her shame and outrage. What I had mistaken for aggression was nothing but a protective shell. The letter made all that so clear. Esmé spent only a few sentences explaining how she had escaped the anarchists and returned eventually to Kiev where she had become a schoolteacher. She had seen several of our old friends regularly. Her father had died during the first siege of Kiev, and poor Herr and Frau Lustgarten had been shot as alleged German collaborators during Hrihorieff’s brief occupation of the city. My mother continued to work as a laundress and a seamstress, Esmé said. They met about once a week. I, of course, was always their preferred subject of conversation. They were convinced I had escaped to England or America and made a great success as a scientist. ‘Never once did your mama believe you to be anything but alive and flourishing.’
I had written to my mother a number of times since leaving Odessa, but the letters had never been answered. Eventually I came to accept that she was dead, no doubt a victim of Stalin’s planned famines. Esmé herself had lost touch with my mother when she became the representative for a Georgian wine company in Odessa during the period of the New Economic Policy. Soon after Lenin’s death she realised things were not going to improve in Russia and while in the Middle East met and married a Palestinian Christian, Edouard Vallir, himself a successful wine merchant. Esmé had never gone home. She and her husband established themselves in Haifa and were very successful. Only after the State of Israel was declared did they find it necessary to move, first to Tunisia and later to Marseilles. Monsieur Vallir died a year after they received their French citizenship.
In 1955 Esmé Vallir sold the business and retired, but she continued to travel. During a visit to Jaffa she spilled some coffee on her blouse and ran into my mother working at a nearby dry-cleaner’s! ‘I knew her at once. She has hardly changed. Her face is as sweet and noble as it always was and she is still strong as an ox. She, of course, didn’t like to tell me her age, but I knew you had been born when she was seventeen, when that wicked father of yours ran off.’ Understandably, this was more than my mother had ever told me! In those days one did not speak of such things in front of one’s own children. My mother always sought to protect me from the cruelties of the world. Though she had hinted at it, my father’s relationship to a famous noble family would still have constituted a death warrant in those days.
My mother worked at the cleaner’s part-time. ’You know how she always preferred to occupy herself . . . She had some terrible experiences, Maxim. She almost died in the famine. Then the Germans sent her to Babi Yar. She escaped with two other women. They caught her again in Poland. They sent her to Auschwitz in 1944, and she would have been killed except she spoke several languages and was useful as an interpreter in one of the offices. She had been selected to die just before the Allies came. Luckier than most, eh? After over two years in a DP camp, she immigrated to Jaffa in 1948. She was extraordinarily fit, all things considered; you would think her ten or twenty years younger. No doubt her good health also saved her from the “selections”.’