The People in the Photo by Hélène Gestern

we just about managed to understandone another. After going to great pains to make tea in a samovar at least as old as her, Vera motioned to me to sit down on a worn blue velvet sofa, staring fixedly at me again, her eyes hooded by her drooping lids.
    Without thinking, I said in Russian, ‘I am Nataliya Zabvina’s daughter.’
    It struck me how odd it was to be saying those words for the first time in my life, in that language, in that place, as though I was in the process of becoming another person.
    Vera replied, ‘I know.’ Then, after a long silence broken only by her wheezing, ‘You look like your mother.’
    I felt my throat tighten. Sylvia aside, this was the first time since we started digging into all this that I’d spoken to someone who had known my mother. All at once Nataliya ceased to be a nebulous, shadowy figure and was once more flesh and blood, a voice, a presence. I showed Vera the photo and she tapped one of the faces with her gnarled finger: one of the three adults, the woman standing next to the priest. Her story was long and laboured, and she stopped several times to take a sip of tea, think, immerse herself in memories. But I was glad of these lulls in her account, as they gave me time to take in the shock of confronting the past.
    From what I understood of Vera’s story, and her memory seems to be intact, my mother’s parents arrived in France soon after the end of the war. To begin with they lived in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois before theyfound a small, basic apartment on Rue de la Mouzaïa. According to Vera, my mother was very beautiful, loved music and sang in the parish choir. She had a friend who was older than her, ‘Jan’ (who must be Jean Pamiat), and they were always getting up to mischief together, smoking under the church steps or hiding a litter of newborn kittens behind the iconostasis. My grandfather’s name was Oleg and my grandmother’s Daria.
    When they first arrived, Oleg took on all kinds of jobs – worker in a corset factory, gardener and then taxi driver. A year later, Daria took over, working as a cleaner while Oleg, at over forty, re-sat his medical exams, having lost some of his certificates in the exodus. And all the while he was battling to have the whole family granted French citizenship. Eventually they saved enough to rent a tiny flat with three rooms, one of which served as the consulting room. Business grew quickly and within a few years they were in a position to expand the practice. That’s when the family left the 19th
arrondissement
. Vera couldn’t remember exactly when they had moved, but she knew they had gone to live in the east of Paris.
    Vera and my grandparents had continued to spend the summer holidays together until the distance came between them. Nataliya had returned to Saint-Serge several times to say hello to her old friends there. The last time she came, she was, Vera told me,
zamuzhem
– married – and carrying a babe in arms. ‘Eto byla ty,eto byla ty’ (it was you), the old woman said again and again, shaking her head and patting my arm. I looked into her eyes, faded and milky as they always are in the very elderly, the same eyes that thirty-nine years earlier had gazed on me in my mother’s arms and had kept a mental photograph of that moment somewhere in the recesses of her mind, a photograph I would never see.
    Vera knew that Nataliya had died: the priest at Saint-Serge had told her before the death notice went out. It was also the priest who told her a year or two afterwards that Dr Zabvine had passed away. ‘Ot chego ona umerla?’ (What did she die of?) – ‘Ya ne znayu’ (I don’t know).
    Just then, the old woman heaved herself out of her shabby armchair and, using a walking stick, made her way into another room. I could hear her opening doors and moving things around, muttering words in Russian I couldn’t understand. I sat for more than a quarter of an hour in the autumnal gloom of the living room, the window casting