The Birds Fall Down (37 page)

“But what is that this Madame Verrier does, then?” asked Laura. “Could she hurt my grandfather?” Catherine clapped her hand over her mouth to hide her laughter, and Laura shook with sudden rage. “Please go and get me some Evian or Vichy water.”

“Yes, Mademoiselle,” said Catherine, trying to smoothe out the amusement on her face, and she turned at the door to say timidly, “I didn’t mean any harm, but it’s not suitable, not at all.”

The Professor hardly spoke when he left. He simply kissed Laura’s hand and said, “I’ll be back before long, and in the meantime you will find Madame Verrier—” he almost moaned it—“very competent.” She did not dare ask him what it was that Madame Verrier did which showed her to be a bad Catholic, and the mystery became greater when the nurse came back into the salon. It seemed impossible she should have been a bad anything, and she even might have been uncomfortably good. She had clear grey eyes which probed and might easily accuse. She had taken off her coat and had discovered some speck adhering to the cuff of her very clean, slightly starched white blouse, and she scratched at it constantly with her exquisitely kept hands, frowning deeply. She was thin, not merely slender, but thin, as if she ate too frugally. At first she spoke in an argumentative tone, but this was evidently habit, her voice softened as she told Laura that her grandfather was sleeping and that she would call her when he woke.

It was not long before she did. Through the shadows of the bedroom the old man was weakly complaining: “I long to receive Holy Unction, not only for the sake of the anointment, but for the sake of hearing the priests chant the hymns of the rite, which are of a special beauty. I hunger and thirst to hear them, and not a word will come back to me. Some of the prayers, yes, they are with me. ‘O Holy Father, Physician of Souls and Bodies, who didst send Thy only begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, which healeth every infirmity and delivereth from death.’ Yet is that right? It seems to me I’m making some mistake, but what? At any rate, the hymns are much dearer to me, they would give me back my lost power over myself, and of them I’ve forgotten every phrase.”

“Please, dear, dear Grandfather,” said Laura, “you’re forgetting the hymns simply because you’re tired. Rest, and in the morning you will remember them.”

“It isn’t entirely because I’m tired that I can’t remember the hymns,” said Nikolai. “It’s partly because my mind is in an impure state. I keep on thinking about Kamensky and wondering why he did not love me. Also the real reason I’m tired is because I can’t remember the hymns, not the other way round. Each of the services the Church appoints for an ordeal common to mankind is appropriate to that particular ordeal, to it and no other, and it alone can make that ordeal tolerable. Oh, God, give me back my memory of those dear hymns and take away my fatigue. Which is enormous. I feel as if I were about to fall through the mattress.”

“When I can’t remember poetry at school,” said Laura, “I shut my eyes and don’t think of anything at all, and sometimes it comes back to me.”

“I’ll try that,” said Nikolai, “but I am afraid I will think of Kamensky.”

“No, you don’t think of anything if you do something funny with the front part of your head.”

“Why, I knew that also when I was very young.” He grew still, so still that she sat back in her chair so that the bed curtain was between her and the sight of his stony whiteness, which could not have been more like stone or whiter, unless he died.

His cry was happy. “I’ve remembered one hymn! How the words comfort me as they flow on to my tongue. Where are you, Laura? Listen, listen! This is the hymn to the Mother of God. ‘Like drops of rain dried up by the summer sun, my days which are evil and few, gently vanish into nothingness. O Lady, save me …’ But, Laura, my memory hasn’t come back. Not altogether. For this is beautiful, but it is not quite right. Ah, but now I remember. ‘Through thy tenderness of heart and the many bounties of thy nature, O Lady, intervene for me in this dread hour, O Invincible Helper.’ Strange, it’s not right. ‘Great terror imprisoneth my soul, trembling unutterable and grievous, because it must go forth from the body.’ It must go forth from my body. It must go forth from my body. Ah, now I understand.”

He lifted up his voice in a shout which became a weak howl. The nurse opened the folding-doors and stood at the end of the bed, looking down at him with bent head and scrutinizing brows.

“My memory is perfect. Of course it is perfect. We Diakonovs never lose our memories. My memory has simply more common sense than my foolish heart, which makes me desire the consolation of Holy Unction, which is no longer for me. The prayer and the hymns which are coming into my mind are those appropriate to my state. They come from the Office for the Parting of the Soul from the Body.”

Laura cried out, “No!” The idea that he was dying shocked her as if it had never occurred to her before, as if she had not thought him dead at the station, as if she had not discussed his death first with Chubinov and then with the doctors. Until this moment some part of her had not believed that anybody could really die. “You’re ill,” she argued, “very ill, but you’re not dying.”

“Allow your elders to know their own business best. I am on the point of death.” He began to pray again. “‘O our Lady, Holy Birth-giver, O Conqueror and Tormentor of the Fierce Prince of the Air, O Guardian of the Dread Path, help thou me to pass over unhindered, as I depart from earth. Lo, terror is come to meet me, O Lady, and I fear it.’”

She sat quite still, covering her eyes, while the wild prayers flew about the room like bats.

“‘Vouchsafe that I may escape the hordes of bodiless barbarians and rise through the abysses of the air, and enter into Heaven, and I will glorify thee forever, O Holy Birthgiver of God. O thou who didst bear the Lord God Almighty, banish thou far from me in my dying hours the Chieftain of Bitter Torments who ruleth the universe, and I will glorify thee forever.’” The nurse was standing at the end of the bed, crushing a tablet with a spoon in a glassful of water. “Who is she?” asked Nikolai. “But that I don’t really want to know. How vast is the number of people who exist, who even serve one, and whom one doesn’t want to know about. But I would like to know who that man was who told us that long story in the train. A senior police official, I suppose. Trust no one of his occupation. Do not trust me. Do not trust any of us, from the greatest man of state to the last lowest simpleton, who aid our Tsar in the sacred task of taking on the guilt of power in order that the common man may remain innocent. All, all of us are saved and tainted. But this man knew his business. You didn’t happen to hear his name?”

“He was Vassili Iulievitch Chubinov.”

“Really? I’m surprised at that. I knew him as a boy. He never showed any promise of being as good as that. All one could say in his favour was that he was a good revolver shot, and there are not many of them. Someone must have worked hard to raise him to that level. I wonder who it was.” He lay staring through the wall beyond the end of his bed. The nurse held the glass to his lips and he drank the water without looking at her. “If only I had a secretary who could take down my thoughts as I dictated them. If only Kamensky was here.”

“You shouldn’t think of doing anything tiring like that,” said Laura. “Try and go to sleep and tomorrow you can do everything you want.”

“You don’t understand the obligations inherent in this event—my death, I mean. It actually is written in the rite, ‘Arise, O my soul! O my soul, why sleepest thou? The end draweth near and thou must speak.’ Go into the other room, dear child, while I think what words they are that I ought to speak. It’s not easy. For one thing, I should speak of my own sins, and though I know I’m a very sinful man, I’ve never been able to see what my sins are. They don’t seem comparable to the sins which have been committed against me. But I understand that before I die I must really convince myself that I also have been in the wrong. I will have to work hard on this during my last hours, I will have to concentrate, for up till now I cannot see how I have ever been anything but in the right. Also, little one, if I rave of the deceptions and injustices which have been practised on me, you might feel that the world was too horrible for you to bear, not realizing that though these afflictions should by logic be unbearable, God gives you strength to bear them. I have really been enjoying myself all the time. But my agonies also have been stupendous, and my groans over them might mislead you, so go away, my dear little girl, my dear little Tania’s dear little daughter. It is not because I don’t love you that I wish you to leave me, it is because I do.”

She leaned over him to give him a kiss, and he said, “Tell the lacemakers not to sing so loud. I approve of them singing hymns while they work, but they are disturbing me.”

She went back to the salon and found that Catherine had brought in a bottle of Vichy water, which was standing in a bowl of ice. She filled a glass and went back to the window. The street was busier now. More customers than before were going in and out of the lit shops and stopping to gossip with the women and old men who were sitting on cane chairs beside the doorways, while the younger men leaned against the walls. Nearly all the women were sewing or knitting as they sat, and some of the old ones were bending their white linen caps over little pillows on which their lace was pinned, but their real occupation was the talk, which by jerked hands, shrugged shoulders, hands flung out palm upwards, wove the French fairy-tale about other people having shown an extraordinary lack of common sense. In the middle of the paved causeway children in blue overalls played gentle games. If a wrangle turned rough, parents started forward in their chairs and shot out jets of scolding, but the mellowness set in again at once. As the street darkened the sky grew brighter. The red roofs glowed terracotta, and in one of them, some distance off, a high sky-light blazed scarlet and diamond. There must be a magnificent sunset. Red sky at morning the shepherd’s warning, red sky at night the shepherd’s delight. The Channel would be smooth for her father.

When it was nearly night all the children ran to one end of the street and escorted back a boy and girl of eleven or nine or so, dressed in party clothes, carrying toys and leading between them a little girl, not more than five, golden-haired and dressed in a white frock with a blue sash low on her hips, who was clasping in her arms a doll dressed in white like herself. They all bore themselves like celebrities, and the occasion from which they had returned had evidently been recognized by everybody in the neighbourhood as quite out of the ordinary. As they went along the causeway, bright figures at the head of their blue-clad companions, the people sitting outside the houses eagerly called on them to stop, questioned them, examined their toys, admired their clothes, rubbing the hems of the little girls’ dresses between finger and thumb, kissed them all, and waved them on with congratulating gestures. After they had gone, the other children lost interest in their play and by twos and threes went indoors. Now the roofs were darkening to brown, and the sky-light might just have been a hole, the glass gave back no light. Above, across a crystal blue-green sky pricked with the first stars, there raced black clouds, sometimes mounting up into great cliffs fissured with gulfs and staying so, sometimes marching like armies, substanceless but full of purpose. Up towards this aerial confusion the smoke rose from the chimneypots in tight blue spirals, and swallows descended from the higher air to the eaves and up again, in flight as quick as cries. Her fear was like a dark arch over the lit stage where these things happened. She drank the cool water and put her forehead against the cool glass and prayed that her father would come soon.

Madame Verrier came out and said, “Your grandfather wants you. That sedative hardly worked at all. But the Professor will be coming back.”

Though the nurse had lit the gas and the bedroom was not dark, Nikolai asked Laura, “Who are you?” and then said to himself, “Yes, it’s her voice. And her slight accent. You would know she was not born in Russia.” Then he told her, without tenderness, as if giving instructions to a clerk, “Well, now I know what it was all about, and you must listen.”

“And what was it all about?”

“Why, nothing at all. When I say, nothing at all, I mean that that Kamensky business was of no importance.”

“What, you mean that what Chubinov said wasn’t true, was nonsense?”

“No, nothing he said was nonsense. He was one of us. He was one of the Russian nobility. Not a great family, but noble. If our sort talked nonsense, it was only because the occasion made it useless to talk sense. There have been many such occasions in Russian history. This was not one of them. The story Chubinov told us about Kamensky was perfectly true. But it meant nothing. Had no significance. Neither had the story of which it was a part, including my disgrace. That had no significance either. All that has happened is simply a consequence of the law that if opposites exist and meet they must destroy each other. To me the Tsar’s power is the point at which historical being meets the will of God. But it seems to Kamensky and his imbeciles that the Tsar debauched history and that there is no God. If we could have remained separate, Kamensky and I, we might have done each other no harm. But we were drawn together by the existence of the Tsar, by the existence of God. They forced us two to confront each other. So all that was he rushed out to destroy me, so all that was I rushed out to destroy him. It is an accident, that is all, like a collision between two railway trains.”

“But you aren’t destroyed.”

“In an earthly sense, I am. Utterly destroyed. First my honour, then my life. I would have lived years longer if I had not learned this morning that little Sasha was my Judas. I felt the sword coming out at the other side of my thick body. And Kamensky will die too. Chubinov will kill him.”

She breathed, “You’re sure of that?”

“Quite sure. To begin with, Chubinov is not such a fool as he looks. And consider his education. I took quite a lot of pains to make him a good revolver shot. My reason was that it was the sort of thing his father thought he would not be able to do, and he despised him for it. But whether I went to all this trouble out of Christian charity, because I was sorry for poor young Vassili, or because I wanted to keep his father in his place as inferior to me, I really cannot say. Well, there was I training him to kill Kamensky, without knowing it, and on the other side there was Kamensky training him to kill Kamensky, without knowing it either, by rubbing into him through the years the tactics and strategy of assassination. But, Laura, I hope you understand that you must do everything you can to prevent Chubinov killing Kamensky.”