They had left Moscow on February the 13th, 1913.
A woman Party member, a refugee from Latvia, had met them off the train and had taken them to a house in Montmartre. They had been given two attic rooms in an old house, thanks to Lensky’s influence. The woman apologised for the limited accommodation and Grigor Aarons had been quietly amused. They had had one room for the six of them in Moscow and the two large rooms they had been given were luxurious in comparison. And to add to his relief the woman’s daughter would look after the children while he was at work, and there was already a job for him in a small but stylish glove-maker’s workshop at the back of a fashion shop in Faubourg St. Honoré. He tried hard not to think of how happy Rosa would have been in such circumstances. His efforts must be for the children now. And for the Party. Their day would come. It might take years but it was inevitable.
The children sat around the battered, folding table of the kind that rich people used for playing cards. He had done them a chicken soup with pumpernickel bread and he sat on the chair by the window as they ate, chattering and laughing about their poor friends at school who couldn’t speak Russian. There were two apples between them and as Grigor cut them in half and gave them each a piece it was Anna who turned towards him and said, “Anne-Marie at school asked me why we are here, Papa. Why are we here?”
It was Andrei who answered. “Because we’re Jews.”
“We’re not Jews, we’re Russians.” Anna looked at her father. “Isn’t that so, Papa?”
“We’re both, little one. Now get on with your apple. And ’van, it’s your turn to wash up and fix the bed for tonight.”
With three young children to care for Grigor Aarons had not been called up to the French army when the war started and the shortage of able-bodied men had meant that he was put in charge of the workshop which was now making canvas belts and leggings for the navy and the army.
Eventually the war ended. Andrei and Anna were doing well at school and Grigor Aarons was now a junior partner in the glove business. The wonderful news of the October Revolution in October 1917 had been celebrated discreetly, but although the children had been told about the events in Moscow they were too young to understand what all the fuss was about, although they were used to hearing long arguments and discussions in the living room as they lay in bed. At home they spoke both Russian and French. Russian at meal-times and French when they told their father about school.
By the time Andrei was twelve years old his father talked to him every day about the struggle in Russia, telling him the names of all the important people involved. He learned about the struggle between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks and the opposition of men like Trotsky, Zinoviev and Bukharin. And he heard about the Comintern who would bring Communism to all the workers in the world and help them in their struggles against the capitalists. Although his father never said so Andrei knew that these were things that should never be discussed with outsiders.
They were good years. France was beginning to recover from the war, and his father was doing well at his work. There were titled ladies and wives of government ministers who would only have gloves made personally for them by Grigor Aarons.
By the time Andrei was sixteen years old he was working for his father who had been made an equal partner in the glove business. In the evenings he spent his time with the young communists who sat in cheap cafés putting the world to rights and speculating on the outcome of the revolution in Moscow. He spoke reasonable French now but most of his companions were refugees from the Baltic States—Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. With a few French students from the Sorbonne and Italians who worked in restaurants and hotels. But his closest friend was Igor Serov. Not that either of them was much given to outward expressions of friendship but Serov seemed impressed by Andrei’s ability to convince wavering Party members that all was well with both the theory and practice of Communism. He never knew how Serov earned his living but he guessed it was some sort of administrative job. One didn’t probe too deeply in a community where forged papers and new identities were the means of survival. But there was no doubt that Serov knew far more about what was going on in Moscow than could be learned from the newspapers.
In 1928 the Party in Paris was shaken by the news that thirty senior Party members, including Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamensky, had been banished from the Soviet Union and were living in exile. The official announcement had named no names, it was Serov who had told Andrei, whose father wouldn’t believe it, saying it was revisionist propaganda.
Grigor Aarons died in 1929, a week before Andrei’s twentieth birthday. An epidemic of ’flu had swept through Paris and taken a heavy toll. Andrei became the head of the family and he took to his new responsibilities conscientiously. The other two had jobs now. Ivan as a bellboy at one of the big hotels and Anna as an assistant in a large department store. They all got on well together despite their different temperaments and Andrei was loved and admired by the two of them. Even Ivan, who had grown up to be rather independent and cheeky, did what he was told. Andrei was nearly twenty-one when his life changed dramatically. It was Serov who changed it as if it had all been planned long before.
They were sitting at a table in a small café
