The Aunt's Story (26 page)

‘Ah, here it is. I was right,' said a voice. ‘It is a
barin
.'

Fire gave a face to the darkness, big and round, snub, with humorous nostrils.

‘You were right twice, Petya. There are two.'

‘Fetch them out, the bears. Into the light. Where we can see them. We'll make them dance at least.'

Theodora heard the many voices, that were also one, and the faces one, the big, dappled, half-genial, half-hostile face of firelight with the gaping nose.

‘Yes, fetch them out, Petya,' said a woman who smelled of excitement.

She wore a sailor's cap on her head, but only just. She was as firm and pretty as polished apples.

‘There is no system to all this,' said• a precise fellow with a small beard. ‘Revolution means system.'

‘Long live the Republic!'

‘Long live Kerensky!'

‘No! Down with Kerensky! Long live Lenin!'

‘Long live Lenin! Kerensky is a windbag.'

‘I would like to agree,' said Alyosha Sergei, who had begun to feel the weight of silence. ‘Kerensky is a brilliant fellow, all fire and feeling. A man of warmth and enlightened ideas.
Kerensky is a movement in himself. But, paradoxically enough, a movement requires more than movement. A movement requires a rock.'

Silence spat resin. The faces were quite flat in the wonderment of silence.

‘Friends, we have an orator in our midst,' said the precise beard at last.

A dark face, a kind of gipsy horse-dealer, who wore a brass ring with a stone too flash for a diamond, and who had been enjoying himself for days, began to laugh. He could not laugh too much. He passed it on. Other faces flashed. A sailor. And the polished apples of the fresh woman heaved.

‘Who are you?' asked the precise fellow.

‘My name is Lukich,' said Alyosha Sergei. ‘And this is my younger brother Pavel.'

‘Occupation?'

‘We have a business in the city. We are timber merchants in a small way,' said Alyosha Sergei.

‘I am tired of all this nonsense,' sighed an old man. ‘Let us sit down. My feet hurt.'

‘And no doubt Comrade Lukich was walking in this forest at midnight with a view to trees,' said the beard.

‘With his younger brother Pavel, don't forget,' said the horse-dealer.

‘On the contrary,' said Alyosha Sergei, ‘I suffer from insomnia, and find that the night air under trees has a certain soporific effect. We came here also when we were boys, to gather mushrooms after rain.'

Somebody cleared his throat heavily and spat. It was rather tame.

‘There is something here, comrades, that only men would swallow,' said the woman in the sailor's cap. ‘If my younger brother Pavel can explain his trousers, I am a fish.'

‘What has Anfisa found? What is the younger merchant hiding in his trousers?'

‘I say what is he not hiding,' Anfisa said.

‘It is quite true,' said Theodora. ‘Anfisa is, of course, right. My brother is among other things a buffoon. But let us at least follow the old man's example and sit down.'

She longed for the good warmth of fire, to sit on the rough, resin-smelling log with her knees somewhere near her chin. Whether the others followed suit was immaterial, because there are certain moments of consoled physical exhaustion where others stay or go.

‘No, you don't,' said the beard. ‘You are answerable to the people.'

‘Am I not a person?' asked Theodora.

‘That is not for you to decide.'

‘Who are you, anyway?' somebody else asked.

‘I am Ludmilla Sokolnikov, and I keep house for my brother in St Petersburg. We come of a reasonably good but impoverished military family. We have a house which is almost empty, because we have sold most of what was in it. Sometimes we go on short visits to richer relatives who have estates in the country. Only sometimes, though. For my brother is a bore, and as you see, I am yellow and thin, with a slight moustache. I am single, for the same reason, because I am ugly, and because I have never been in a position to buy a husband.'

‘Listen to this!' the horse-dealer said.

Then for a moment there was a thick wall of silence, over which even the beard failed to climb. Theodora, who had sat down in spite of opposition, looked at her knees. She was greatly consoled by the simplicity of things.

‘They're all right,' sighed the old man, who sat opposite, nursing a bottle near the blaze of fire. ‘A revolution's all very well. But you must breathe. Leave them alone. They're all right.'

Theodora did not care. She listened to Alyosha Sergei. The truth had made him gasp. He had a moist eye.

‘My sister Ludmilla has put things in a nutshell,' he said. ‘Our story has a touching simplicity of its own, which I had not realized before.'

‘It is a complete fabrication,' said the beard.

‘A what?' asked Petya.

‘A lie.'

‘Yes, yes,' said the woman. ‘All this Pavel nonsense first. I agree. How do we know they are not spies?'

‘You would talk your mouth off, Anfisa,' the horse-dealer said.

‘Is it not free speech, gipsy, that we're fighting for?'

‘Yes, yes,' said Alyosha Sergei. ‘If it is a lie, let us at least discuss the lie.'

‘That is fair enough,' said the old man. ‘But give me vodka any time. Vodka's the poor man's friend.'

The beard was almost ready to make a decision, which had been maturing some time now behind his face. He had been forming the words that he had read in pamphlets, and it was only a matter of choosing those that sounded best.

‘The revolution,' he said, ‘calls for action, and the liquidation of the bourgeoisie.'

‘It does, it does! Long live the Republic!'

‘Well?'

Then Theodora realized that this game had pistols.

‘It is absurd,' she said. ‘We are ridiculous, all of us, standing here among the trees, playing a ridiculous game, when we should be in our beds.'

But she was not sure that the ridiculousness of this game which is called life, whether it is played in a
salon
, or on a battlefield, or in a forest clearing, does not invariably prevail.

‘I protest,' she said, and this too sounded ridiculous.

The horse-dealer's face had seen something, something that was strange, but only for a moment, as if it were too great to accept, the face promptly closed. Now it was sullen, sweating flesh. Theodora remembered the face somewhere on the road to Kiev, and Anfisa, who smelled of her own excitement, and the carved Petya. Her life was moving round her. She heard a burst of pigeons released from the silver bellies of the trees beside the lake. She bit her mouth for the loveliness of many heavy, breaking summers. Then she began to ebb with the greatness and paleness, the thin, watery lightness, of the event in which she was taking part. It was a mystery which even the hand on the trigger now admitted.

‘Then I am dead,' said Theodora.

‘You are quite dead,' said Alyosha Sergei.

The breath came glugging up in him from somewhere deeper down, because almost always early in the morning he was overcome by emotion. His stomach was sad with sprats. He was a victim of something undefined.

‘And you?' Theodora asked, because she had lost him amongst the trees.

‘My end was far less apocalyptical,' he said. ‘After a short pause to consider the ethics of it, naturally and regrettably I ran. In the course of this operation I received a slight flesh wound in the left buttock. There was also something soft which hit my face in the dark. Possibly a frightened owl. But I continued to run. It was not so much a physical act as an emotional state. I ran till I reached the village where I met Tomokin, Michael Ivanich, and the unknown gentleman from Göttingen.'

‘The gentleman who hypothesized,' said Theodora.

She had not noticed before the grave and reasonable face of the wardrobe in Alyosha Sergei's room.

‘Exactly,' said Sokolnikov. ‘But the gentleman from Göttingen did not console. I was a wreck of my previous self, Ludmilla. It was as if experience had wrenched out my conscience by the roots, with a pair of tongs, and after a short bleeding space I sensed that it was dead.'

‘Death is far less emotional,' Theodora said.

The General vibrated steamily.

‘It is as simple as a bottle,' said Theodora. ‘And as clear.'

It had pared down to this.

‘And as empty,' she said.

‘Then let us remove the bottle,' said the General.

Which he took, and pitched, over his shoulder, at the wall.

‘Now there is nothing,' he said.

As if he were almost afraid to accept the responsibility, now that it was done.

‘But there must be something,' he said. ‘Or an illusion of something. Ludmilla, if you love me …'

‘Yes?'

Her head lolled.

‘If you love me, there is still one beautiful act to be done. In the room of this American adventuress, this mother-in-law of pomposities and insolence, there is a nautilus that she stole. I do not wish to repeat the act. But let us look, just once, together, at this lovely shell. Ludmilla, if you love me, you will fetch it. You are less resonant than I. You do not bounce at inconvenient moments. Bring, bring the nautilus.'

Theodora saw no reason why she should not. She was herself by now as vibrant and transparent as a shell. And at the same time she began to be obsessed by the same obsession as Sokolnikov, to hold the nautilus, to hold, if it is ever possible, to hold.

‘I shall most certainly try,' she said as she got up, propping herself with two wooden fingers on the surface of the table that was thick with carcasses. ‘I shall most certainly try.'

‘My excellent Ludmilla,' cried the General. ‘I have every reason to believe that you will execute this mission.'

But she did not bother to consider whether the room contained certainty of action, or just a steamy Slav. On the whole, she thought, certainty did not inhabit the rooms of small hotels. But she began to cross the floor. She observed a row of empty boots. She observed a door, waiting miraculously to receive her exit.

Then the passage was darkness. Darkness flowed, whether up or down she did not know, but soft as dandelions to blow. If I have not blown out the darkness before noon I shall have reached Mrs Rapallo, said Theodora Goodman. She watched the darkness for a monkey combing hair. Mignon, she mumbled, recoiling from the paper hands of darkness, but at least it did not examine its dandruff in public, or had not done so yet.

A light stood in a saucer in Mrs Rapallo's room.

Elsie Rapallo is afraid of the dark, said Theodora Goodman.

Though why, she did not know, for the light fingered unmercifully. It exposed the considerable mineral deposits in Elsie Rapallo's abandoned skull.

Theodora stood in the doorway and considered which path to pick. They all wound. Sometimes it was the perplexed objects of darkness which obstructed, sometimes a dream stirred and threatened to form. Walking at random, she heard her feet bruising the faces of old letters. Tactical foresight made her avoid Queen Marie of Rumania, whose autograph had hands.

It is an exceedingly long way, Theodora sighed.

‘It is an aquamarine,' said Mrs Rapallo, in quite a distinct voice.

Her cheek rubbed against some greater depth of sleep. And there was
le petit paquet sur la commode en marbre
. Of course.
As Henriette had said. Mrs Rapallo had finally dissolved the marble groups that waited beneath the Veronese, spoons poised above the ices, for cardinals to pass.

Theodora advanced. She was somewhere near the little table in marquetry which threatened to erupt music if she touched. She held her skirt. She dreaded the stiff music that Mrs Rapallo's boxes must contain.

I have come here, she said, for the nautilus.

Though now she had begun to doubt whether she could reach. Whether the pampas of the darkness would allow, and its great clouds of grass, heavy as breath, that she parted with her ineffectual hands. She also doubted whether the nautilus was substance enough, or whether it would blow.

Just then Theodora slipped on satin.

‘
Nous avons pris le thé chez Dodo
,' Mrs Rapallo said.

Many agonies righted themselves on many tables. There was a gingerbread heart on which Theodora read
Ich liebe dich
, in dust or sugar.

But she was there also, she saw. Her hands could just touch an article of furniture, ugly and involved with carved game, on which the nautilus stood.

Above the bed, on its brass branch, Mrs Rapallo's hair had begun to chatter.

This is a possibility that I had forgotten, Theodora said.

She had forgotten also the feel of monkey, the kind of orphan intimacy of monkeys' hands. Launching out of the darkness with one purpose, the monkey sat against her neck. The monkey touched a pulse, and touched, and touched. A terrible nostalgia for skin to inspire its monkey finger.

‘Mignon, I am touched,' Theodora said. ‘But now I am in no mood, in no mood at all, for monkeys.'

As if Mignon were prepared to hear. Mignon was all sadness. Mignon held her ear close to Theodora's skin, counting the murmurs, as if for monkeys the promised land is flesh.

Mrs Rapallo stirred, and scratched her scalp.

‘Mignon. Pretty Mignon.
Va-t'en
!' Theodora said.

But she could not shake the monkey's heavy sadness. Mignon clung.

Something desperate must happen, Theodora felt.

In the semi-darkness of Mrs Rapallo's room, furred and clammy as monkey skin, with the same distinctive smell, she looked for some event. But in Mrs Rapallo's room events were past. They hung from hooks, or littered the chairs with discarded whalebone. Nothing would ever disturb the dust, except a finger aimlessly writing a name.
Gloria Leontini
, the finger had written, on the small undecorated space of oak on which the nautilus stood.
Principessa dell' Isola Grande
, garlanding the foot of the
compotier
.