The Birds Fall Down (46 page)

“What organizations are they that he joined and is destroying?” She was tired of all this deception. She did not care what happened if she forced him to show his hand, his murderous hand.

Smoothly he answered, “Not very important ones. It is the principle which counts. Societies busying themselves with religious and educational activities in the oil provinces round Baku.”

She groaned because he was so clever. This time he had hardly paused at all before he found an answer, and her need for sleep was again a hunger, a thirst, an aching in the bones.

“Miss Laura, you must try to understand the greatness of my friend’s achievements and their idealistic foundations. For he has grown this garden from seed given him by your grandfather. As I told you, my friend was a liberal, and when he met your grandfather and saw that his ideas also had some value and that the situation was a theatre of the soul, a stage where history engendered its drama, he became a character in the drama and converted it into a masterpiece. Oh, won’t you soften your heart towards my friend, who has given Nikolai Nikolaievitch true philosphic immortality?”

“My grandfather, my grandfather,” she groaned. She leant across and fingered Madame Verrier’s skirt, to touch the hem of a garment worn by someone sane was as good as if it had been worn by somebody divine. She remembered that evening in Paris when her grandfather had slept in his chair for such a long time, so long that the white rose in the crystal vase on the table lost petal after petal, while the lights came on in the tall grey houses across the streets. He who had been so often afraid to sleep slept soundly then, because he had said to his friend, Kamensky, “I am in torment because I think I am the victim of a conspiracy, and that may mean I am mad,” and Kamensky had spoken a sentence, sweet as a mouthful of whipped cream, “You are not mad, for you are right in believing that you are the victim of a conspiracy.” The memory sent a shudder of hatred through her body; she said, “The man who tormented my grandfather. He should be tormented in Hell. For ever and ever.”

He did not seem to hear her. That was strange, he kept on not hearing what she said. There might have been a sheet of plate-glass between them. “Don’t you at all understand,” pleaded his innocent voice, “what my friend’s been trying to do?”

“How can I judge your friend’s doings when I haven’t heard how they worked out? When I don’t know what he’s doing now? When I can’t think how it’s all going to end?”

He hid in silence like a wild animal taking cover in a thicket, then murmured, as if the beast were venturing near the bushes on the fringe, “Well, it’s early yet to paint the whole picture. I told you, my friend’s just come to the end of the antithesis, in a few days the negation will be completed, the two organizations will begin to perish in their own self-doubt.” His voice died away. The gaslight flared up and showed joy on his face, and some surviving grains of gold on the wreaths stamped on the olive wall-paper. He continued, “And as to the synthesis, the third organization, which will be born of the other two, my friend won’t be there to see it. He’ll only have the satisfaction of knowing that he has controlled history.” He retreated again into the thicket of silence.

“Where is he now?”

He shifted in his chair, quite comfortably. It had not crossed his mind that she was mocking him. “He … it’s impossible to say what he’s doing at this actual moment. We must wait for news.” He laughed to himself. “There’s one thing interesting I can tell you about him. If we’re to believe his own account, he’s undergone a peculiar change. It’s as if the dialectic process doesn’t operate only in the world of ideas and of events, but on matter itself. For years my friend put his strength under a double strain by giving prodigally to two organizations, day in and day out, and he’d grown stale and slow, one might almost say old. But now that he’s come through the stages of thesis and antithesis he’s emerging into what I can only call his own personal synthesis. Oh, it’s extraordinary. Apparently—though, of course, I’ve nothing to go on but his letters—he’s become a young man again. He can’t believe it, he’s never tired, and when he looks in the glass he sees a man years younger than himself.”

She wondered if she had after all been mistaken. Perhaps he had not been talking of himself when he spoke of his friend, perhaps someone of the sort really existed. For he had not changed since she had first seen him, except to grow slightly older, and he did not look a bit like a young man.

“It’s also that he feels the blood racing through his veins, at a new speed, with a new drunkenness …” Hesitantly and softly, as softly as if he were talking of some delicate personal matter, he breathed some words, which she thought she had not heard correctly, and asked him to repeat. “I said, my friend’s account of his emotions reminds me of Hegel’s description of reality, when he likens it to a Bacchic dance in which there is not one of the elements which is not drunk.”

“I’d like the image better,” said Laura, “if I hadn’t so recently seen the landlord of this hotel.”

His voice went on, low and sibilant and dry, making the same sound as the autumn leaves one scuffs off garden paths in autumn. “What’s so remarkable is that all my friend’s life he’s dovetailed every moment of the day to make patterns that will fit into the complicated design of his great innovation. In a short time there’ll be hardly a fragment left of the solid structures he’s spent his life in building, structures which, there’s no denying it, gave him a certain position. They’ve collapsed, soon it’ll be as if they’d never been, but he doesn’t care, he’s full of joy.”

“Hush,” she said, “don’t speak so loud. You mustn’t wake poor Madame Verrier.” She did not want him to go home till he had told her more.

“Forgive me. The poor virtuous woman, toiling for the sick. Yes. Well, my friend’s joyously persuaded he need take no thought for the future. He’s got a trade and the world’s wide. There are whole continents in which a European can start afresh.” There was another of those silences like retreats into the undergrowth. He raised his trembling hand and loosened his collar. “I tell you, the dialectical process manifests itself not only in what is thought but in what is lived. In even the most personal experiences.” He passed his handkerchief across his forehead. His voice was not sweet any more, it was hoarse. “The negation of life, that’s death.”

She repeated the phrase in wonder. It was so commonplace that it was odd to hear it uttered except on some occasion when platitude was privileged, in a pulpit or at a prize-giving. Yet he had spoken it with agony. He was speaking of death as her grandfather had spoken of conspiracy and the fear of madness. Surely he had not really loved Nikolai, so that just knowing he was dead pierced him through and through. He took off his spectacles, and she put out her hand for them, saying, “Let me polish them,” so that she could stare into his naked eyes. But in the half-light they were merely circles of lustred darkness, and in any case they would never have told her anything. They had their own shutters.

Looking back into her eyes, he whispered, “What’s the negation of the negation here? What’s the negation of death? Ah, you can’t say. Only I know the answer. Perhaps nobody else has ever known it before. Our circumstances are terrible and unique. But perhaps I’m wrong there. History is terrible, possibly other people have been burned to the bone by such an obligation—such a—” Gently his fingers forced the spectacles out of her hand, he put them on again as if the nakedness of his eyes had suddenly become shameful to him. Unsteadily he told her, “It’s so awkward, not being able to explain to you. But you wouldn’t understand, at least not with your mind. Your whole being might grasp the meaning of what’s happened, of any action that was determined by necessity. The poise of your head, the elegance of your movements, they speak of consent to the force which makes the earth move round the sun, the same consent that’s given by all the great statues of the world. But in the meantime you must take my word for it. For what happened to my friend. There was life at its best. There was beauty, the still focus on earth of this force which keeps the stars shining in their place like icons, that sends forth the planets like processions on Holy Days. Then death came, or rather the threat of death. It seemed that life at its best had to go down to the grave. Beauty had to go into the darkness like a shooting star. Perfection had to rot. I accepted that. I even willed it. It had to be. But I felt such horror I thought I would fall dead myself, a crumpled heap of clothes, nothing inside them when they picked them up, myself ground to dust by my heartbeat. Then suddenly my horror turned to something else. Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. There came happiness. The synthesis. A glory for which there are no words. The spreading of pinions. The light up to the sun. The fearless flight. Knowing that the sun will not consume one. Knowing that one will consume the sun with one’s own fiercer, purer fire.” His voice broke, though his lips went on moving.

Watching him she was troubled by the suspicion that he was silently saying her name over and over again, as if he were practising some kind of magic against her. To get him back to talking she forced out the words, “What can death have to do with happiness?”

“Nothing at all, if you are thinking of happiness as it’s been known till now. But this is something new. I said, ‘flying up to the sun.’ Within sight of the Absolute. There are no words for it. There could not be. For it has not existed till now.”

“So that’s how it is,” she said, and composed her hands on her lap. She had worked so hard to make Kamensky believe that she had not heard what Chubinov had told her grandfather, and had thought she had succeeded. But this raving could mean only that she had failed, that he intended to kill her, and that killing her would give him such pleasure that it was useless to hope he could be deflected from his purpose. He was sitting quite still, in a tense dream of action like a cat before it springs, and on his lap his bandaged hand pointed towards her, as if under its pretended helplessness there was a weapon ready to discharge. Somehow she was sharing his secrets. Quite well she knew that he was imagining with joy the act of shooting her, or piercing her body with a knife, or throwing a bomb that would scatter her to fragments. If she could keep going till the morning, her father would come and save her. But the tears formed in her eyes, for she doubted if she had so long. He was so clever, and he wanted so much to kill her.

Kamensky rose and stretched himself and smiled down at her, as if she were something he were going to eat. Slowly he strolled towards the window, brushing by the hunched body of Madame Verrier, without taking care not to awake her. He was a cruel man.

If it had been Chubinov who was here, as soon as his eyes had fallen on the nurse she would have become his sister, and her grandfather would have harshly classed her as an inferior, and then been tender with her. But to Kamensky she was no more than a chair or a table. Probably he could not relate her to anything he had ever read in a book.

With his back to Laura, he said, “I am here, nowhere else but here, how wonderful that is,” and drew back the curtains. The music from the ball stopped, and silence pressed into the room from outside. “What a pity. I thought it would be dawn. I expected the first sunlight and the first birds, but it’s still night. Only such an unstained night, I shouldn’t feel aggrieved. Look at the stars. They might be tapers lit for your grandfather’s death, the beeswax tapers you and I will be holding as we stand together at his funeral. Up there space should be smelling of beeswax, of honey.”

She wondered if that meant he planned to let her live until her grandfather was buried.

“And look at the white light over to the east, where the sun will rise. Such a pure light, against that blackness. Oh, Miss Laura, take me now to your grandfather. Let me kneel beside him and pray.”

She found herself on her feet. “You can’t do that.”

“But I must. I have so many things to tell him while he lingers on the threshold. I want to give thanks for all he did for me, and they’ll not be ordinary thanks. Generosity like his dispenses special powers along with its other gifts. Now in this hard hour I can render them back to him.”

She told herself that she must do anything Kamensky asked of her, until her father came. But she found herself standing in front of the folding-doors. “No. You can’t go in there.”

“But why not? You and I could kneel side by side and join our prayers together. I’m a man of the new age, I am a technologist, but I belong also to the world of old and magic things. All, all is within the Absolute.”

She repeated, “You can’t go in there,” and he repeated, “But why not?” There stirred within the gentleness of his voice a subdued suspicion, as if the conspiratorial elements in him had revived, though not at full strength. If he were still in any doubt as to whether she knew what Chubinov had told her grandfather, if he could yet be convinced that she did not know what he was, it might save her life if she let him pray by the dead as friends do. But she felt obliged to bar his way, and what was worse, to bar it in a way which showed she thought he was unfit. She had stiffened into the attitude of a priestess defending an altar from desecration, or rather, of a bad actress playing such a part. She had thrown her head back as far as it would go, her chin was sticking out, and her arms were stretched across the folding-doors behind her like pump handles. But she could not hold herself naturally, perhaps because she really wanted him to know what she was thinking. If she could save her life only by sucking up to Kamensky, it was not worth saving. Yet the whole thing was silly. It could make no difference to Nikolai if Kamensky chose to go on acting the hypocrite for a few minutes beside his discarded body. But that was nonsense, she could not face the shame of letting him into the room where that body lay, yellow, finished, empty, but still invested with a kind of honour which would be spat on as soon as that sweet voice began to call on God and the Birthgiver. “No,” she said, “you can’t,” and sighed deeply, for part of her wanted to live at any price.