The Birds Fall Down (17 page)

Chubinov said, “No. At some point your men went wrong. Gorin wrote to me about my call for the assassination of the Tsar, yes. But none of the rest fits.” His manner was dispassionate, professional, brooding, and Nikolai answered in the same tone. “There could very well be a confusion. Gorin is a common name, and one lazy official, or one lazy morning indulged in by an active man could substitute your Gorin for my Gorin on the records for ever. Do what one can, such things will happen.”

“Mm,” agreed Chubinov, reflectively, and again they were policemen. (“Sergeant, there’s a pane here that’s been taken out and put back recently.” “Yes, but not last night. There’s three kids in the house, see if one of them hasn’t sent a ball through the window a week or so ago.”) Chubinov went on, “I’d better tell you about my Gorin, the one who quite certainly wrote to me about my article. He’s no older than I am. He was born in Lyskovo in the Gordnensko province. I’ve never known him to be ill till recently, and I doubt if even now he’s gone to a sanatorium. He’s a man of nondescript but pleasing appearance, so indeterminate that I don’t know why it pleases. He is,” he said hesitantly, “a wonderful man. Tell me, didn’t any of your men who spied on the students at Karlsruhe, didn’t any of them tell you that Gorin was a wonderful man?”

“They reported his height, the colour of his hair and beard and his eyes, and his treachery and blasphemies,” said Nikolai. “Nothing else would be in their line of business. We are not composing fairy-tales like your lot.”

“Well, Gorin, my Gorin, is a wonderful man. An old professor at Karlsruhe who was a German but was on our side said to me, ‘It’s a pity that future generations will know nothing of your friend. He can have no future for he’s spending himself on the present. Nobody can meet him without becoming a better man, without being purged of all trivial or base thought, all crude instincts. He can never achieve a great historical act or a scientific discovery or a work of art, because all his force is expended on his elevated personal life. Be happy,’ he told me, ‘for your friend is bestowing on you what would have enabled him to write another
Hamlet
or add a third part of
Faust.’”

“German professors gush like young ladies but are not so pretty,” said Nikolai.

“The years have not made this praise of my friend seem anything but literally true. Not that Gorin ever gives any proof of outstanding intellectual gift. Of course he knows where he is with the philosophic fathers of our Party, with Kant and Hegel. He’s against Marx and for Mikhailovsky, he’s always ready to demonstrate lucidly and without heat that the existence of our movement refutes Marxist dogma, for it’s born of the intelligentsia and the people, and couldn’t be termed a class movement. He’s warned us often that we must listen to Nietzsche’s call for a transvaluation of values but must close our eyes to his hatred of the state.”

“You speak of names that will be forgotten in twenty years’ time,” said Nikolai. “Except, of course, Kant and Hegel. But you have misread them. They prove our case, not yours.”

“Yes, they can be read both ways,” said Chubinov dryly, and again changed his pair of spectacles for the other. “But one way is wrong and one is right. Ours is the right way. But all that isn’t really Gorin’s field. He’s never been attached to the theoretical branch of the Party. He was an organizer of our practical activities.”

“You mean he’s a damned murderer,” said Nikolai.

“I was about to say that his field was friendship. One would be sitting in the dark in some wretched lodging in a strange town, afraid to light the lamp because some comrade had been arrested, some plan aborted, and there would be footsteps on the rickety stairs, one’s heart would sink, there would be the five reassuring taps on the door, the handle would turn, the unknown would enter and annul the blackness with the spark of a match, would bring out a little dark-lantern and through the half-light there would show the face of Gorin, smiling. And then, with so little demand for thanks, he would set down on the table a loaf and some sausage and a bottle of vodka and perhaps a precious revolutionary book, and it would be as if there were no such thing as despair.”

“The only one of you who had the sense to think that you might need a dark-lantern, the only one who knew where and how and when to buy bread and sausage and vodka,” said Nikolai. “There was no reason, was there, why you shouldn’t have had all these things by you? It is an extraordinary thing that suddenly village idiots have become enormously prolific, and their spawn has all joined the intelligentsia. Well, while the men and women who truly love the people were training as schoolteachers and building hospitals and going to schools of agriculture, you were sitting in garrets—either before you had done mischief or after you had done it—sustained by your infernal Gorin who might have added a third part to
Faust
, though even the second was too many, all feeling like little lambs.”

“Oh, Gorin was certainly no lamb,” said Chubinov. “He was a wolf. He has in his time slain many. And always, from the beginning, with your help.”

Nikolai looked at him with hooded eyes.

“Did you never wonder how one of our members presented himself at the Ministry of the Interior in the guise of the aide-de-camp of the Grand Duke Serge, and was shown straight into the presence of General Sipyagin? It was because Sipyagin had received a letter that very morning, forged in your handwriting, on your private note-paper, sealed with your seal, and making an allusion to a funny story he had told you when he had dined with you at your house a week before. The letter told Sipyagin that the Grand Duke Serge was sending him a newly appointed aide-de-camp who would not know the routine and should be shown straight into the Ministerial office. Gorin arranged all that for us.”

“I’ve only your word for it,” said Nikolai.

“Better take it,” said Chubinov. “For that story, and for much else. A railway worker and a schoolteacher both went one day to see the Governor of Ufa. Neither had had any opportunity to learn his habits. But they climbed over a wall and went straight to a secluded corner in the cathedral garden where he went every day to sit and recite the day’s prayers. And he had told you this was his custom in a letter you had received a fortnight before. So Gorin had told us.”

Nikolai covered his mouth with a trembling hand.

“And that letter displeased you, for the Governor was a worldly man, and you suspected that when he did this at noon he was trying to curry favour with you and your devout kind. That was what you wrote in your diary. Gorin read it.”

“God forgive me for my lack of charity,” said Nikolai. “You do not hurt me as much as you hope by telling me that I am betrayed. I am a Christian and I know it must be so. Judas exists for all of us. That he touched Christ with his foul hand means that he touches every member of the human race with his eternally polluted finger, at all moments in time, in the past, in the present, in the future.”

“If I pester you for the name which Judas has assumed for you and for me at this particular moment of time,” said Chubinov, “it must by your showing be the will of God that I should pester you.”

“Leave me alone,” said Nikolai. “Give me a moment that I may pray for forgiveness for my lack of charity towards that poor man who was slaughtered by your assassins as he sat with God in a book upon his knee—”

“Grandfather, Grandfather,” said Laura, “what are you saying? Do you mean that these people killed the Governor?”

“Yes, indeed, and Sipyagin also was shot through the heart,” said Nikolai. “But my lack of charity, how unseeing, how insolent it was. If a man is brought to God by hopes of advancement, and the Governor of Ufa was a man with few social advantages and must have been much tempted that way, nevertheless he is brought to God and is sacred.”

Her spine stiffened, she sat up and stared at Chubinov with the total fury of a cat. She said to him, “You’re mixed up with all these murders?”

“They were not murders but surgical operations designed to cure the cancer which devours our Russia,” he answered. She hissed with hatred. She could not bear to think of a man with such meagre hair, such weak eyes, being responsible for the stopping of life. But he ignored her, asking Nikolai, “Don’t you really want to know the identity of the man who has made use of you to remove those objects of your loyalty, Dubassoff, Plehve, the Grand Duke Serge—”

“Oh, God,” exclaimed Nikolai, “were you, the son of my friend, a party to all those crimes?”

“Why, so were you,” said Chubinov.

The old man winced. She put her arms about him. “Why do we have to bother with this awful man?” she asked. He said, “Leave me alone, Sofia, Tania, Laura. I have to find out whether I have been negligent.” She had not the slightest idea what to do. This was possibly because she was only half-Russian. She had an idea that her grandmother or her mother would have found some means, which would perhaps have been a gesture rather than anything said, of persuading Nikolai to stop talking to this horrible man who owned he was as wicked as Jack the Ripper or Charles Peace. Perhaps they would have thrown themselves kneeling at his feet. But if she had done that she would simply have looked silly. It was open to her of course to go along the corridor and get the attendant to put Chubinov out of the carriage, but she did not dare to leave him alone with her grandfather, for he probably had a revolver on him. Perhaps she could get the Frenchwomen to watch for that while she went and got the attendant, they looked as if they might have a talent for screaming. She turned to them and was checked by the repugnance on their faces. She remembered that nannies and schoolmistresses were always saying that people who behaved oddly made themselves unpopular. The truth seemed to be sharper than that. Also, if she got the attendant, her grandfather would probably say he wanted to go on talking to Chubinov, that he was a friend. She kept her arms ineffectually on the great mass of his body while he and Chubinov talked about people with Russian names in the policemanly way.

“Yes,” said Nikolai, thoughtfully. “I did know someone called Pravdine. And, yes, I have a vague impression that he had some connection with the Ministry of Justice. I can even remember what he looked like. He was a small man, a very small man. And now I speak of him, I can see him quite distinctly, holding his little daughter by the hand, a little girl who looked like a doll, who had golden curls and blue eyes and cheeks like painted wax. There was a toy trumpet swinging from her little hand. But I had hardly anything to do with him. He can’t have told your Gorin anything about me of importance.”

“I’m of that opinion also,” said Chubinov. “I think Gorin lied when he said his informant was Pravdine. There. I have said it. I think Gorin lied.”

“Yes,” Nikolai went on, “now I see Pravdine very clearly. He’s standing in the entrance of his apartment with this little girl by his side, this child who looked like a French doll. She was wearing a fine muslin dress which spread out like the lampshades ladies have in their boudoirs, and she carried this toy trumpet. Behind him was an open door, opening on a gaslit room, and I can just see the tips of the branches of a Christmas tree, and I hear the sounds of children’s voices. I can’t imagine why I should have been present on such an occasion at this man’s home, for he was a person of no importance. Ah, yes, now it comes back to me, Pravdine was the man we used to call the fifth cow in the Ministry of Justice. But you wouldn’t understand that.”

“Indeed I do,” said Chubinov. “I’ve known the story ever since I was a child. When your father inherited your grandfather’s St. Petersburg palace he invited my grandfather to go over it with him, and they found five cows kept in stalls on the roof, with a serf from the estate living with his wife and children in a hut beside them. That was usual enough, of course. But only four of the cows belonged to the family, the fifth was an intruder whose milk was sold in the street by a Kalmuck who was living in another hut on the roof and could give no account of how he came to be there. The serf had found him there when he was sent up from the estate. And always at my home, as I think at yours, we spoke of the unidentifiable person, the guest at the party whom nobody knows, the speaker at the conference whose name is not on the agenda, as ‘the fifth cow.’”

“Oh, Vassili Iulievitch,” breathed Nikolai, “how pleasant it is to talk of what there was between your father and me, your family and mine. You smiled like an innocent man when you told me that story. For a minute it seemed as if nothing had gone wrong, with any of us, with Russia. Ah, well, the fifth cow. The fifth cow. But of course I know why we called Pravdine that. He had a room in the short corridor leading from the main one to my office—”

“Then Gorin’s story might be true?” Chubinov asked eagerly.

“Not possibly. The room was very small. At one time the cleaners had kept their pails and brooms there, and it was no place for any official, but we had to find somewhere to put poor Pravdine, who kept office hours but had almost nothing to do. You see, this was a case of impulsive royal generosity. The Empress Mother had visited some town in the provinces and had been touched by the plight of the widow of an official who had been struck by lightning in a storm which struck the city at the moment of her arrival. The official was of quite a humble rank and his family were left with no means, and therefore the Empress arranged for the woman’s son, who was Pravdine, to be appointed to a post in the Ministry of Justice which she herself had just insisted on being created because she had formed an erroneous impression that there was no school for the staff’s children in a prison she had inspected on the Polish border, and had concluded, as erroneously, there were no schools for the children of prison staffs anywhere in Russia. The whole story was consonant with the Empress Mother’s unique personality.”

“You know what the Tsar and Tsarina call her in private?” asked Chubinov, smiling.
“‘L’Irascible.’”

“You know that too,” said Nikolai and fell silent for a moment. “Well, there Pravdine lived in his little cupboard, sometimes ordering a blackboard or some exercise-books. But I never spoke to him except once, when I went to his Christmas party at his apartment, because his wife’s sister had married a priest of whom my wife thought well. I don’t see how the poor man could possibly have told you anything about me, even if he had wanted to, and I don’t believe he would want to.”