The Aunt's Story (25 page)

Swimming too, somewhere off the shores of an island, Theodora hitched her trousers under the green water and prepared to touch land. Fire was coming towards her, and voices, and finally heads, along the banks of a little creek.

‘Who are you?' they asked, holding their fire close to the water.

‘My name is Epaphroditos,' said Theodora, rising shakily on sudden stones.

Wind twanged in her moustache, which was thick with salt.

‘That is strange,' they said. ‘You are unexpected, to say the least.'

‘Well, I cannot tell you any more,' said Theodora. ‘Because I am waiting to be told.'

Before her stone rolled. She retrieved her head from above her lap in the strict space of her
chambre modeste
.

‘You are sleeping, Ludmilla?' asked Alyosha Sergei.

‘I was,' said Theodora. ‘And you?'

‘Never.'

‘It must be sometimes a great bore.'

‘Everything is boring,' said Alyosha Sergei. ‘Boredom is a motive force which we are apt to overlook.'

Theodora began to have a suspicion that Sokolnikov was a great man. He was the greatest bore. She closed her Testament, which had been given to her by a clergyman in a train near Bournemouth, and prepared to listen to words.

‘All things spring from boredom,' said Sokolnikov.

He patted each statement like a balloon, not the gay globe of carnival, but a turgid gas balloon, determined to escape from its moorings in a slow wind. Theodora yawned.

‘Do we not work from boredom? Or would, if necessity did not exist. We sing from boredom. We fornicate from boredom. Out of the loneliness of boredom, we marry. Then, as a sop to our bored vanities, we proceed to reproduce. It is even probable that God created Adam on a rainy day.'

‘I cannot confirm that,' Theodora said.

‘But you can save me, Ludmilla, I beseech you, please. Let us make conversation and debauch ourselves interestingly for many hours. It is most stimulating.'

‘Go, Alyosha Sergei!' she cried. ‘You are a bore.'

But she came, as she had always come to Alyosha Sergei, her man's boots on a board floor. They were, in fact, that complementary curse and blessing, a relationship.

‘Yes,' she sighed, ‘I shall come. If it will settle anything.'

‘Nothing settles,' belched Sokolnikov. ‘It always rises, again and again.'

Theodora followed him down the passage, and the whole darkness lunged and plunged as if it might soon tear free. The passage was full of wind. But the room into which they walked, after a last lurch and a last righting, the room at least was moored.

‘I shall pour out a little one for the saints,' said Alyosha Sergei. ‘Do not accuse me, Ludmilla. It is far too late.'

It was too late for clocks. It was the hour for rubber words.
She watched the glass under his hand become solid as he poured, glitter, quiver solemnly for a moment, and dissolve into shapelessness.

‘There, Ludmilla,' the General said.

Together they watched the lovely lake, which was most necessary and natural. Theodora knew now that it could not have been otherwise, the endless, brimming, shivering glass, and the little, passive, touching lake. There were other things as well. There was the carcass of a duck. There were the smoked sprats that came from somewhere else in wooden boxes. The sprats were stiff and glazed in their wooden boxes on the table in the General's room.

‘I have been making a small meal,' said Alyosha Sergei, and, even now, he broke the heads off several sprats and stuffed them into his mouth.

‘You are an odious and repulsive glutton, Alyosha Sergei.'

But her words were worn by much use and had a certain shabby tenderness.

‘Now you speak like Anna Stepanovna,' said Aylosha Sergei.

His mouth quivered, rejecting the tails of several sprats, and an enormous bitterness that he had not bargained for.

‘They say they tore down the little pavilion beside the lake. They used it for firewood the following winter. Anna Stepanovna protested, but her argument was ineffectual.'

‘And the pavilion was rotten,' said Theodora remorselessly. ‘On one side the lattice had broken loose. When there was a wind it flapped.'

‘Yes,' said Alyosha Sergei. ‘The pavilion was rotten.'

So the pavilion was reduced to smoke. Theodora's eyes smarted. She remembered the silver bellies of the trees that the wind tumbled beside the lake in summer. It was not possible to reduce the melancholy ripple of the leaves.

‘It was, of course, right, Ludmilla. And they strung up Anna Stepanovna to her own trees for eating her own chickens. And they wiped the frozen snot off their faces with pieces of embroidery that she had spent years pricking and torturing out of canvas. And they burned the house, which certainly had patches of damp on the ceilings, and worm in much of the wood. But
none the less, one must admit, the rightness of certain acts is a melancholy fact.'

Emptying his mouth of all this, Alyosha Sergei began to feel the need for putting something inside. He fished in the carcass of the duck for its liver and placed it carefully on his tongue. Theodora bent forward, because it was time she also did something to dissolve her own hard shape. She bent and took the glass which had stood waiting amongst the skeleton fish, on the edges of the lake. She took the glass and it trembled clearly in her hand. The little glass had a clear and innocent beauty, before which she could not humble herself enough.

‘How right it is,' she said.

‘What is?'

‘Finally, almost everything,' Theodora said.

‘You are a fool or a saint, Ludmilla,' said Alyosha Sergei.

She was nothing that she knew. She drank the glass of vodka and the room sprang closer. These walls, too, had naked swords, but the blades jagged from attacking the heads of bottles, and the wires from which they hung had rusted in the sea air. He had arranged his boots against the skirting, where they glared, toeing the line. On the bed there was a cotton bedspread, of large, open, though intricate pattern, which Theodora felt she must eventually unravel.

‘A fool or a saint,' said Alyosha Sergei. ‘And I, I have so much food inside my belly it has begun to ache.'

He laid his head sideways on the table amongst the skeletons of fish. He began to snore, releasing a great deal of wind through endless ramifications of rubber.

Alyosha Sergei is a pig, a pig, breathed Theodora, who at times could not contain disgust, and particularly now, watching the motion of pig's bristles on the smooth pink rubber skin. Littered with squalor, she said, brushing from her skirt the wishbone of the duck.

It irritated her more to remember his pig's chest, that he had bared for greater comfort, and it was white and flabby as the scraped carcass of a pig, on which meandered two or three grey, ridiculous, forgotten hairs. Now that he lay with his head in the trough, his chest was covered, but it remained a grudge to be
jealously nursed. The bile came in her mouth. She could feel that her face was leathern and yellow, and she realized that she had not taken her camomile tea.

Wake up, you swine, she would have shouted, at any moment, she would have banged her flat hands on a gap in the table, or kicked him with her boot.

‘Ludmilla, you are going to accuse me,' said Alyosha Sergei.

He sat up, or half, and the backbone of a sprat trembled fatuously on a whisker.

‘I should say so,' she said. ‘You were snoring like a pig.'

She could not make it pointed enough, her hateful bodkin.

‘You, who never sleep,' she said.

‘I was thinking,' said Alyosha Sergei.

‘Then it is a great blessing,' she said, ‘that the majority of mankind does not.'

But it was unequal, her voice knew.

‘It is time we were going,' she said more gently.

It was unequal, because the room, with the ceiling which had been fumed over by Alyosha Sergei's voice, and the black portraits, and the golden saints, and the other rooms, which creaked with emptiness and mice, the whole empty, expectant house was full of that desperate affection which she had never quite been able to give. So that now, on the point of leaving, her mouth trembled, and expressed something shapeless that was neither hatred nor love.

‘Of course, we are going,' said Alyosha Sergei.

Now that the streets were quiet all emotion was unconvincing. It was several hours since the breath had come and gone in spasms, and that astonishing scene of men turning to wax in the gutters. But you could no longer hear the cries gush from paving stones. Now the silence lay in pools. It had quite congealed.

‘In three hours we shall reach P—, if we are fortunate,' said Alyosha Sergei. ‘There we should meet Tomokin and Michael Ivanich.'

‘You have said that seven times.'

‘Conversation, Ludmilla, is one indiction of reality.'

But she could not convince herself that she was not about to attempt to cross the mysteriously open space which separates beginning from end. And here was Alyosha Sergei, who looked
into the street, as if he expected a bear with a hand-organ, or dancing girls with streaming ribbons.

Here was Alyosha Sergei, who said, ‘I remember once meeting an old landowner from the Ukraine who had a cure for most things. He boiled nettles with a little
kvass
and took a soup night and morning. That amiable old imbecile, Ludmilla, was thrown from a piebald horse and dragged for several
versts
. When finally he was picked up by some peasant women who were gathering mushrooms in a wood, for all they knew he was offering his recipe of nettles to God.'

She turned her back, inside the big serge cloak which she had fished out of an attic for the journey, and which smelled of time, of childhood, nettles, rain, and the slow smell of dung, so that the act of turning was as much avoidance as exasperation.

She turned her back and said, ‘Have you got the money?'

‘Money? You should know, Ludmilla, that it is not possible to buy off God.'

‘Then, let us go,' said Theodora. ‘There is nothing to wait for.'

She put up her hand to arrange her hair, which she found, of course, that she had cut off. She was a thin man in a cloak, with the trousers stuffed inside her boots, like a Cossack or a peasant.

Alyosha Sergei began to laugh.

‘You are the Pale Horse,' he laughed. ‘The Pale Horse with his ears back.'

She would have laughed too, but sometimes she could not. And the whole house was aching with the laughter of Alyosha Sergei. So that Alyosha Sergei's laughter was enough.

‘You are drunk,' said General Sokolnikov, looking for the bottle in the debris of sprats, in the glare of light in which they sat, under a severe arrangement of suspended swords, in a mediocre bedroom. ‘You are drunk, but not yet drunk enough.'

‘No, but I am warm,' said Theodora.

She was. She was enough. She had not yet unravelled the large, open pattern of the cotton quilt on the General's bed.

‘You are intoxicated by your own melancholy,' said Sokolnikov. ‘You expect too much of life.'

‘I have seen extraordinary things,' Theodora said.

‘Everything is extraordinary,' said Alyosha Sergei.

She looked at the cotton quilt on the bed. She arched her eye
brows, because at this moment the vodka leapt inside her. She looked at the cotton quilt, which was after all only a honeycomb.

It was both simple and extraordinary. It was a honeycomb, but without bees. There was no brown buzz. There was only the imprint which Alyosha Sergei's body had left on it that afternoon.

‘Everything is so extraordinary,' he said, ‘that there is some question of whether we can withstand the impact, whether we can survive.'

Theodora took the glass, which had begun to quiver and glow again amongst the stiff, salt spars of the little glittering sprats. She drank, and her head was electric, it was full of silver wires.

‘I have survived,' she said.

She put down the glass on its small but heavy base.

‘You? You are an illusion.'

‘I beg to contradict. I can show you my passport,' Theodora said.

But he had got up. He had gone to listen, scattering the fragments of food that hung, fastening his ear on the door as if he expected to suck up sounds. Then he came back and put his finger on her arm. He touched the strange and thoughtful substance of Theodora Goodman, which was not apparently flesh.

‘You, Ludmilla,' he said, ‘are dead.'

So that she ebbed with the greatness of it.

‘It is difficult to believe,' said Alyosha Sergei. ‘None of us could. Neither Tomokin, nor Michael Ivanich, and there was also a gentleman who had not yet made your acquaintance, and who had studied the toll system of Germany at Göttingen. This gentleman, whose name I have forgotten suggested that at the moment of death the soul chooses freely, which naturally removes much of the melancholy from the occasion. Michael Ivanich and I were considerably interested in this hypothesis, and were anxious to hold a little discussion. It was also unpleasant walking in the dark. But Tomokin, who was greatly moved, he kept mopping his face with a red cotton handkerchief which had been given him for the journey by his old nurse, Tomokin said it was our sacred duty to make for the frontier and join Yudenich. So it was decided we should walk, and the
difficulty of this operation, and the pain from the wound in my left buttock, prevented me from explaining adequately to the gentleman from Göttingen that you had protested, Ludmilla, when they showed you the gun.'

It was moving towards her darkly across the clearing. Her feet were rooted now in mute needles. She stood close against the tree, which smelled strongly of resin, the tree which was rough and so close that it had ceased to be a comfort or protection, as she could feel its heart beating painfully, erratically in its side. Released by the lusty, palpitating gold and red of firelight, trees leapt skyward in sudden puffs of branch and crest. Across the clearing trees had begun to move. It was these that frightened. She smelled the fire. She smelled the voices, their smell of sweat, and dark hair, approaching out of the darkness, this was thick with hair. In the general disintegration of firelight, and darkness, and burning resin, and sailing trees, the belt round her waist was no great guarantee of personality.