She Lover of Death: The Further Adventures of Erast Fandorin (6 page)

The man in the morning coat immediately pressed his hand to his chest, bowed and introduced himself: ‘I am Kriton. You have a quite insane face, Mademoiselle Columbine. It possesses a ravishing amalgam of innocence and depravity.’

The tone of his voice indicated that this was a compliment, but Columbine felt offended by the ‘innocence’.

‘Kriton – that’s something chemical, isn’t it?’ It was an attempt to mock, to show this shabby, well-worn individual that he was not dealing with some kind
of ingénue
, but a mature, self-confident woman. Unfortunately, it didn’t work, it was even worse than that time in the literature exam when she called Goethe Johann-Sebastian instead of Johann-Wolfgang.

‘It is from “Egyptian Nights”, the man in shantung cotton replied with a condescending smile. ‘Do you remember this?’

Tra-ta-ta-ta, the sapient youth,
Who life’s sweet blandishments embraces,
Kriton, the bard of pleasure’s truth,
Singer of Cupid and the Graces
.

No, Columbine didn’t remember that at all. She couldn’t even remember who the Graces were.

‘Do you like to make wild, abandoned love in the night, on the roof, to the hurricane’s roar, with the teeming rain lashing your naked body?’ Kriton enquired without lowering his voice, ‘I truly love it.’

The poor Irkutsk girl was unable to find an answer to that. She looked round at Petya, but the rotten traitor moved away with a preoccupied air, striking up a conversation with a poorly dressed young man of very unattractive appearance: bright, bulging eyes, a wide, mobile mouth and blackheads scattered across his face.

‘You must have a fine taut body,’ Kriton surmised. ‘Whiplash-lean, like a young predator. I can just see you in the pose of a panther prepared to pounce.’

What should she do? How should she answer?

According to the Irkutsk code of conduct, she ought to slap the impudent fellow across the face, but here, in this club of the elect, that was unthinkable – they would think her a hypocrite or, even worse, a prim and proper provincial. And what was so insulting anyway, Columbine thought to herself. After all, this man said what he thought, and that was more honest than striking up a conversation about music or the various ills of society with a woman who had taken your fancy. Kriton looked absolutely nothing like a ‘young sage’, but even so the audacious things he said made Columbine quite feverish – no one had ever spoken to her like that before. However, on looking more closely at the outspoken gentleman, she decided that he probably did bear a certain resemblance to the god Pan.

‘I wish to teach you the terrible art of love, young Columbine,’ the goat-hoofed seducer cooed and squeezed her hand – the same one that Petya had recently squeezed. Columbine stood there woodenly and submissively allowed him to knead her fingers. A long stub of ash fell from her
papirosa
on to the carpet.

But just then a rapid whispering ran across the salon, and everybody turned towards a tall leather-upholstered double door.

It went absolutely quiet and she heard measured footsteps approaching. Then the door swung open without a sound and a figure – improbably broad, almost square – appeared on the threshold. But the next moment the man stepped into the room, and it was clear that his build was absolutely normal, he was simply wearing a wide gown like those worn by European university professors or doctors of philosophy.

No greetings were pronounced, but it seemed to Columbine that the moment those leather doors opened soundlessly, everything around her changed in some elusive manner: the shadows became blacker, the fire became brighter, sounds were suddenly more subdued.

At first she thought the man who had come in was really old: he had grey hair, cut in an old-fashioned style, the same length all round. Turgenev, Columbine thought. Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev. He looks just like him. Exactly like the portrait in the grammar-school library.

However, when the man in the gown halted beside the brazier and the crimson glow lit up his face from below, the eyes were not those of an old man at all – they were a refulgent black, and they glowed even brighter than the coals. Columbine made out a thoroughbred aquiline nose, thick white eyebrows and fleshy cheeks.
Venerable
– that’s what he is, she said to herself. Like in Lermontov: ‘The venerable grey-haired sage’, Or was it really Lermontov? Well, it didn’t matter.

The venerable sage ran his gaze slowly round the assembled company and it was clear immediately that not a single detail or, perhaps, secret thought could possibly escape those eyes. The calm gaze rested on Columbine for just a moment, no longer, and she suddenly swayed and trembled all over.

Without even realising it, she pulled her hand away from the ‘teacher of terrible love’ and pressed it to her breast.

Kriton whispered in her ear in a derisive tone: ‘And this is from Pushkin.

Not only in youth’s downy cheek
And curly locks of tender brown
Will passion its true object seek.
The furrowed brow and elder’s frown
May fire beauty’s imagination
With a consuming conflagration
.

‘Those “curly locks of tender brown” are yours, are they?’ the young lady snapped back, stung. ‘And anyway, who needs you and your Pushkin!’

She stomped off ostentatiously and stood beside Petya.

‘That’s Prospero,’ he told her in a low voice.

‘I guessed that without you.’

Their host cast a brief glance at the two whisperers, and immediately absolute silence fell. The Doge reached out one hand to the brazier, so that he looked like Mucius Scaevola in the fourth-class history book. He sighed and uttered a single word: ‘Dark.’

And then everybody gasped as he placed a red-hot coal on his palm. He really was Scaevola!

‘I think it will be better like this,’ Prospero said calmly, raising the lump of fire to the large crystal candelabra and lighting the twelve candles one after another.

The light revealed a round table, covered with a dark tablecloth. The darkness retreated to the corners of the room and now that she could finally examine the ‘lovers of death’ properly, Columbine began turning her head in all directions.

‘Who will read?’ their host enquired, seating himself on a chair with a high carved back.

All twelve of the other chairs set around the table were simpler and lower.

Several people immediately volunteered.

‘The Lioness of Ecstasy will begin,’ Prospero declared.

Columbine stared wide-eyed at the famous Lorelei Rubinstein, She didn’t look as she might have been imagined from her poems: not a slim, fragile lily with impulsive movements and huge black eyes, but a rather substantial lady in a shapeless robe that hung down to her heels. The Lioness looked about forty, but that was in the semi-darkness.

She cleared her throat and said in a rumbling voice: ‘ “The Black Rose”. Written last night.’

Her plump cheeks quivered with emotion, her eyes darted upwards, towards the rainbow sparkling of the chandelier, her eyebrows knitted together dolefully.

Columbine gave Lucifer a gentle slap to stop him distracting her by slithering round her neck, and she became all ears.

The celebrated poetess declaimed wonderfully, intoning with real passion.

When will Night come, rapturous and enticing,
When will he make his entrance through my door,
Entering swiftly, without knocking,
This darling Guest that I am waiting for?

How luminous, in jail or roaming free,
The flame with which my chosen lover glows
But in the sacred darkness here with me
His eye will not descry the lone black rose
.

And then the sonorous Word shall be proclaimed
Sundering the dense silence like a pall.
Let it be so: what is not fated
Will then be gone once and for all
.

Just think of it, she had heard a new poem by Lorelei Rubinstein, one she had only just written! She and these few chosen ones were the first!

Columbine began applauding loudly, but immediately broke off, realising that she had committed a
faux pas
. Applause was apparently not the done thing here. Everybody – including Prospero – looked at the enraptured young woman without saying a word. She froze with her hands parted and blushed. She had muffed it again!

The Doge cleared his throat and said to Lorelei in a quiet voice: ‘Your usual shortcoming: elegant, but unintelligible. But that black rose is interesting. What does the black rose mean to you? No, don’t tell me. I’ll guess for myself.’

He closed his eyes and lowered his head on to his chest. Everybody waited with bated breath, and the poetess’s cheeks flushed bright crimson.

‘Does the Doge write poems?’ Columbine asked Petya quietly.

He put a finger to his lips, but she knitted her brows angrily and he whispered back almost silently: ‘Yes, and they are works of genius, for certain. No one understands poetry better than he does.’

She found this reply strange.

‘ “For certain”?’

‘He doesn’t show his poems to anyone. He says that they’re not written for people to read and he will destroy everything he has written before his departure.’

‘What a shame!’ she exclaimed rather more loudly than was necessary.

Prospero glanced at his new guest again, but once more he said nothing.

‘I have it,’ he said, giving Lorelei an affectionate, sad smile. ‘I understand.’

Lorelei beamed and the Doge turned to a spruce, quiet little man with a pince-nez and a Van Dyke beard.

‘Horatio, you promised to bring some poems today at last. You know there’s nothing to be done about it – the Bride accepts only poets.’

‘Horatio’s a doctor,’ Petya told Columbine. ‘That is, he’s a dissector – he cuts up bodies in the anatomy room. He took Lancelot’s place.’

‘And what happened to Lancelot?’

‘He departed. And he took some companions with him,’ Petya replied obscurely, but this was no time to ask questions – Horatio was ready to recite.

‘This is actually the first time I have tried my hand at poetry . . . I studied a manual on versification, made a great effort. And this, mmm, as it were, is the result.’

He cleared his throat in an embarrassed manner, straightened his tie and took a folded piece of paper out of his pocket. When he was just about to begin, he evidently decided that he had not explained enough: ‘The poem is about my professional, so to speak, line of work . . . there are even a few special terms in it. The rhyme has been simplified, just the second and fourth lines, it’s very hard when you’re not used to it . . . After our esteemed, mmm . . . Lioness of Ecstasy, of course, my efforts in verse will seem even less accomplished . . . But anyway, I offer them up for your strict judgement. The poem is called “Epicrisis”.

The girl swallowed a hundred needles
To still her heart’s torment and pain.
Slicing neatly into her abdomen
The scalpel brings them to the light again
.

‘You do not know if you should laugh or cry,
It’s like a hedgehog in the rain,
The way the human stomach shudders,
Flabbily trembling over and again
.

‘The young cadet condemned himself to death
After his visit to a whore.
You neatly open up his brain pan
To find what you are looking for
.

‘And you will find the piece of lead you seek
Among the grey necrotic mush,
Glinting dully like some precious pearl
Lodged in the epithalimus.

The reader broke off, crumpled up the sheet of paper and put it back in his pocket.

‘I wanted to describe the lungs of a woman who has drowned as well, but I couldn’t manage it. I only made up one line: “Among the dove-grey spongy mass”, but I just couldn’t carry on . . . Well gentlemen, was it very bad?’

Nobody spoke, waiting for the verdict of the chairman (he was the only one there still sitting in his original pose).

‘ “Epicrisis” – I believe that is the conclusion of a medical diagnosis,’ Prospero said, slowly and thoughtfully.

‘Yes indeed,’ Horatio agreed eagerly.

‘A-ha,’ Prospero drawled. ‘Well, this is my epicrisis for you: you cannot write poetry. But you are genuinely entranced by the multiplicity of the faces of death. Who is next?’

‘Teacher, let me!’ said a large strapping fellow with broad shoulders, raising his hand. He had childlike, naive blue eyes that looked strange in his coarse face. What does he want with the Eternal Bride? Columbine thought in surprise. He should be floating rafts of timber down the Angara river.

‘The Doge dubbed him Caliban,’ Petya whispered, and then felt it necessary to explain. ‘That’s from Shakespeare.’ Columbine nodded: so it was from Shakespeare. ‘Nowadays he works as an accountant in some loan company or other. He used to be a bookkeeper in a merchant-shipping line, sailing the oceans, but he was shipwrecked and only survived by a miracle, so he doesn’t go to sea any more.’

She smiled, pleased with her skill in reading faces – she hadn’t been so very far wrong with those rafts of timber.

‘As far as intellect goes, he’s a complete nonentity, an amoeba,’ Petya gossiped and then added enviously, ‘but Prospero gives him special treatment.’

Stamping loudly, Caliban walked out into the centre of the room, cocked his hip and started bawling out extremely strange verse in a stentorian voice:

The Island of Death

Where blue waves murmur to the sky
And seabirds ride the ocean swell
There is a solitary isle
Where only ghosts and phantoms dwell
.