Читать книгу VanCleef & Arpels on the summer night - Nonna Ananieva - Страница 4

Using his status in Tunis Pekarsky got acquainted with the local bourgeoisie and political elite, two groups which are generally very closely connected in such countries. A family-member’s political success entailed immediate business success for all his relatives, however distant, and greatly contributed to the prosperity of his friends and acquaintances. It is quite easy to guess at the motives of Ilya’s actions, but whether or not his strategy was successful I cannot say for sure. Notwithstanding his relative youth, he had some authority among the Consulate representatives, and they allowed him to do a lot of things which were prohibited for others. They were surely taking into account his father’s contacts and long-term diplomatic activity in Western Europe, and in my opinion, also the connections of his maternal uncle, who was a professor of physics. And what wonderful son he was! Prince of the dreams of fellow Komsomol students and young teachers. At that time he was the embodiment of a member of a high-ranking family of Soviet princes and naturally, he knew it well enough.

I remember that he had become close friends with Suad, a business woman in her fifties and the wife of some minister of education or of agriculture – I am not sure which. She was very fond of her two sons, handsome, lazy guys who made active use of the family finances. Her husband was a politician busy with his career; they saw each other rarely, and had not held any special attraction for each other for many years. She was the owner of a villa in Sousse, which was occasionally occupied by her children: one of the sons sometimes stayed there with his Moroccan wife and his little son, the other, the most handsome man of the whole family, would entertain there his numerous French girlfriends. At that time a man could catch a lot of French girls, especially in spring. They came there to get jobs in the hotels or tourist agencies, or simply to look for opportunity; sometimes, actors and singers also came to live with him. Russian and Ukrainian women were not yet able to travel about with the ease of these French girls, and so a similar field of activity for our mademoiselles was practically uncultivated.

At the beginning of June, Suad decided to celebrate her birthday and invited Pekarsky to the private Swiss club on Karkana Island. Ilya said that he would come with friends, and invited me and Sergey to go with him. They were probably both leading me on – for all I know, Sergey might have been in cahoots with Pekarsky – but it certainly wasn’t chance that led them to ask me to join them. Refusal was out of the question; I was sick and tired of the limits imposed on our contact with others, and of being confined to certain rooms and places. It was even forbidden to go to the cinema or to the beach. Sometimes they organized trips to the seaside in the old UAZ cars, packed with people and without any air conditioning. Having made this trip once, squashed into the car along with wives of the officials of the second delegation, listening to their artless talk about sales and the latest knitting pattern (in Tunis they sold cheap mohair, and these women diligently knitted clothes for their children and husbands to wear during the long and frosty Russian winters), I had firmly resolved not to waste any more of my spare time like that. You couldn’t even spread out a towel more than two meters from the party, or to plunge into the water without having told your worried neighbors where you were going. On top of this you had to answer questions such as ‘Do you still miss your Motherland?’, and on the way back, sing ‘Katiusha’ in unison (I have never had anything against the military songs – at Dmitri Hvorostovsky’s concert devoted to V-day, at which he had performed only military songs, I had felt tears standing in my eyes along with many other people present). The whole consulate staff liked the song about ‘Gena the Crocodile’, and the Russian song ‘A beauty from Moldova’. And if you do not like it, ask yourself what’s the matter and try to make yourself believe that you still enjoy it. I had always thought cordially about my city – my mother, my father, the Institute, my childhood friends were all there, and in your twenties you still have a lot of illusions and a lot of angst, not fully expressed and experienced. Why should your irresistible wish to see the world be considered a crime and why should you surround yourself with people, who drink vodka in order to be patriotic – is that really a humane approach? In such an environment a trip to some private Swiss club on some island was as good as a winning lucky lottery ticket. And I didn’t care, whether that would tell on the rest of my life. One month was left until our return to Moscow.