The Birds Fall Down (8 page)

“Well, did they find out anything?” asked Kamensky.

“It wasn’t like that at all. I noticed when I dictated the letter to my secretary that he was ill at ease. But I imagined that he might be worried about being away from St. Petersburg for so long, for he had a sick child. But when the Minister answered me I realized that I had been on quite the wrong tack. Count Brand is a very old friend of mine, and all our lives we have written to each other freely. But this time Brand sent me what was little more than a formal acknowledgment of my letter, and when my secretary gave it to me I knew from his manner that he had expected and feared this. He had not wished me to bring my fine discovery about the red writing paper before another Minister, because he had thought it ridiculous and he had quite rightly feared that Brand would find it ridiculous.”

“Ah, you are jumping at conclusions—Brand may have been preoccupied, unwell—”

“No. It was his considered opinion. The next time we met it was in the corridors of Tsarskoe Selo, and he looked at me with eyes full of pity and warned me against overwork. He presumed, he presumed! He told me that I must not let the terrorists break my nerve, since that is one of the chief aims of the terrorists. He dared say that.”

“Gently, gently,” said Kamensky. “Remember, you aren’t well, and all this happened long ago. It doesn’t do any good to live it all over again.”

“He dared to say it. He dared. I can’t tell you how unpleasant I found it to be pitied by a man who was certainly an old friend, but whom I had never considered as an equal. I was stronger than he’d ever been, and could work harder, and God gave me greater courage. That we had proved again and again when we were young and were in the same regiment. I rode many horses he did not trust himself to mount. Many risks that I was glad to take again and again were beyond him. I have known him ride away so that he should not see me take the big water jump on the officers’ course at Kharkov. I would be silent about such things as a rule, for they are a matter of God’s gift, which He has explained to us in a parable. He feels no need to make us equal. But I feel obliged to mention it now, just to make plain that if Brand’s nerve had not broken it was inconceivable that mine should break.”

She was glad her father was not there to hear this. But she did not mind. Quite often one wanted to brag.

“Don’t let’s talk of this any more,” said Kamensky. “Count Brand is well known to be of a peculiarly sceptical, rejecting kind of intelligence, who thought anything he had not found out for himself had never happened and could never happen. To him writing paper would not be dangerous unless it got out of its envelope and bit his hand. But none of this is of any significance today. Chess, chess, let us play chess.”

“Later. Later. Let me finish. My secretary was a good little man, full of common sense, but he was of the same mind as Brand. He thought my great discovery about the writing paper purely absurd, half-way to a delusion. Tell me, Alexander Gregorievitch, am I mad? I have been thrown down and disgraced because certain information known only to myself and three other officials passed out of our hands, and in consequence two sacred persons were murdered by the servants of evil. The three other officials were killed by the same bomb. We may presume them innocent. Therefore I have been presumed guilty. It seems to me that I was guiltless and that I am the victim of a conspiracy. But this may not be true. It might have been that though I kept my plans secret they were insufficiently ingenious, and that the terrorists were able to guess them, and guessed correctly all the three alternative routes from which we chose only one at the last moment, that thus they ambushed them all, and were able to strike when they saw the Grand Dukes. Look how the facts go round and round in my head. I speak in sentences like carousels, I want to tell you that all over again, but I must get on, sane men do not repeat themselves. I don’t think I did fail. I think my plans were sufficiently ingenious, and I think they were efficiently executed. I believe I was betrayed. I told you about those marks on the wood of the drawer in my desk, where I kept the orders for that day. They were faint marks, and other people might have missed them, but I still have eyes like a hawk. They were like pencil-strokes which someone had rubbed out, all but the last least trace. They could have been drawn round documents so that they could be taken away and replaced exactly where they had been before. Yet the police agents said that they might have been marks left by the carpenters. But what guidance could a carpenter need on the floor of a drawer? And if they were marks made by a spy, what can that mean except that someone copied my keys? And what keys they were! That was more a safe than a drawer. Only a familiar of mine, with liberty to come and go about my office, with the right to spend hours there unchallenged could have copied those keys. Oh, God, had those pencil-strokes any meaning which would have halted the attention of a sane man?”

“But, Count,” said Kamensky, “don’t you know quite well, as you know that you have a beard, that you are sane?”

“Well, I know that I can’t be very mad. I was always a capable administrator, even to the last, and my family was happy round me, though as you’re aware I have from time to time had disagreements with my sons. But you also know that that happened rarely, and it was always their fault and never mine, and they were always humbled and came back to me on their hands and knees, and I raised them up by my forgiveness, and it was as if it had never happened. But I may have become a little mad as the years went on. Seeing connections, you know, between things in fact unconnected. Like the old woman you find in every village, who comes on a branch on the road blown down from a tree by a gale and thinks it has been laid there by the butcher as a sign to the baker that the day has come for them to fulfil the plot they have long had in the hatching, and there will be arsenic in the next loaf she buys. I might be like that old woman, for God is no respecter of persons. He has turned my hair white as if I were anybody.”

“I worked under you for many years,” said Kamensky, “and I learned that you were a man of many facets, some of which would surprise you. But none of them ever made me think of a mad old woman in a village.”

“Don’t speak to me in that nurse’s voice,” said Nikolai, looking at him with something almost as cold as dislike. “Tell me the truth, I am dying for lack of it.”

“You need not die. You are right in believing yourself to be the victim of a conspiracy. Let me tell you how I know this. You’ve told me many things, quite trivial in themselves, which dovetail into a design we can’t imagine coming into being by accident. To speak of only one thing, I was particularly impressed by what you told me about the man who came in the beginning and the end of the winter to see to the lead roof on the Ministry cupola and how you met him in the corridor, at a strange hour for a maintenance worker to be on his job and—”

“Stop, stop,” groaned Nikolai, “we are back with the pencil-strokes in the drawer, with the bright red writing paper. Give me no more sympathy and sweetness, you who ought to have been a monk, be an engineer and give me real proof that I am not mad, for I am in torment.”

He was doing all the things that Laura did when she had to stop herself crying: blinking, pouting, raising his eyebrows, swallowing. She went to him and knelt at his feet and kissed his hands. It was a Russian thing to do, but she found it quite easy.

Kamensky stammered, “Count, I have a real proof. But it has nothing to do with fact. Not with facts that one can test and make a note of for the next edition of the encyclopedia. Count, consider I could not be here if there were not a conspiracy against you. You may remember that when the Grand Dukes were killed I was far away, in Norway, working at that experimental power station north of Bergen. It was long before the news of your troubles reached me, and I could not understand the situation. I did not believe that the catastrophe had been caused by negligence on your part, for you are a perfect administrator, you might be a German. There were only two alternatives. Either your mind had failed you, or you were the victim of betrayal from within the Ministry, of a terrorist conspiracy, such as both you and I know so well. It was intolerable for me not to be with you in your misfortune. It was for that reason that I threw up my Norwegian post and came here to work in France. But I knew quite well that, if the first alternative was the case, my journey was in vain. If your mind was disordered, then your disgrace was the will of God, and there would be nothing anyone could do for you, except leave you to the care of God. You would have been rapt from me. I could not have reached you in the place where you would then have been, to have the honour of serving you. But if you were the victim of a conspiracy, if you were a martyr, then God was working on you through the wills of men, and my will also was a weapon. I could come close to you and fight for you with my weapons. When I came to you, you were here, you had not been caught up by the sleeve of God, you were not rapt from me. You are here, I assure you, you are here with your wife, you are with your daughter, you are with Miss Laura, you are with me, you are with Holy Russia. Therefore I know God has not disordered your mind. If he had, I should be lost and alone. But I am not. This proof lives only in my inner life, but you will have to forget all that you know before you can doubt it for that reason.”

The old man whispered, “Alexander Gregorievitch, Alexander Gregorievitch, I believe, Alexander Gregorievitch.” He sank low in his chair and turned his face away from them, and presently was still. The dusk silted up in the room, weakly diluted by the flame before the icon in the corner. Outside the window the lit rooms in the tall grey houses across the avenue were yellow oblongs. They could hear Nikolai’s breathing and the sound of the city. The clock struck a gentle quarter, and the sleeping man stirred but did not wake. The door handle turned and Kamensky hissed, “Hush, Aglaia,” and she whispered, “No light?” He whispered back, “No light.” When the door had closed again, he said softly, “Miss Laura, that didn’t wake him. You can go to your mother now.”

On the threshold she mouthed close to his ear, “You’re very good to my grandfather.”

“No, it is you who were good.”

“I did nothing.”

“You listened hard. He was aware of it. It is all that matters to him now.”

She went along the corridor, her eyes wet, and sat down on a carved Italian chest until she could be sure that they would stay dry. On the wall opposite hung a Persian rug, its lighter colours shining through the shadows. It was one of the Oriental carpets a Polish ancestress of hers had brought with her on her marriage into the family in the middle of the eighteenth century. “What a lot of things the Diakonovs possess,” she thought, “but they would be lost without Monsieur Kamensky, without this man who is poor and what they would still call unimportant, I suppose.” The tears ran down her cheeks in spite of her efforts. “How wicked the Tsar must be, and he will never be punished for the evil he does,” she told herself, and she walked up and down the corridor for some minutes, wishing it were possible for her to kill him. “Just imagine what it would be like if Queen Victoria or King Edward persecuted Papa like this,” she thought, and remembered with awe the innocence of England. She would not even have suffered like this over there. If she had been at home at Radnage Square and had not wanted to sit in any room because she had been crying, she would have gone up to the top landing, which was flooded with strong colourless light from the high north window, and Dolly the housemaid would keep on coming up, her glazed white dress giving back the brightness, to put the clean white sheets into the linen cupboard or take them out. Any conspiracy could have been blanched out of existence there or anywhere else in the house.

But here her hiding-place ran dark between treasures from twilit room to twilit room where people were dim as if they had lived long ago, in an age smoky with tragedy, and were now foundered in the text of dull history books. It would seem that only a king, when kings had absolute power, was high enough to have fallen so far as her grandfather; and there was royalty in reverse in her grandmother’s shrunken body, she might have been his queen, waiting outside the prison where they kept him. In this blackness Kamensky shone good, and exempt from greatness. She went towards her grandmother’s bedroom, unafraid because he was not afraid. As she drew near, Aglaia came out and held the door open for her.

Neither Sofia nor Tania heard her come in. Sofia was lying in bed, propped up on a high pile of pillows in the rosy shadow of taffeta curtains, crimson marabou feathers about her wasted wrists and corded neck, in her ears and on her fingers jewels big as the boiled sweets in a village shop, her face usurped by an old bird. Tania was standing at the end of the bed, looking like someone out of Romeo and Juliet, for her hair was loose on her shoulders and she was wearing a long clinging dress of pleated silk which her husband had bought for her at the Fortuny shop in Venice, but that was three years ago. The words which were rushing from her were English, and this showed they had been speaking about something Aglaia must not understand, for ordinarily they talked together in French or Russian. “I shouldn’t have written to you about my troubles, I see that now, Mamma,” she was saying, “but I didn’t know how ill you were, and I couldn’t bear all this alone.” She had her hairbrush in her hand, and she lifted it and swept it savagely down the full length of her hair, then spread wide her arms. “It is not bearable. If this is happening now, how do I know that it hasn’t happened often before and won’t happen often again?”

Sofia shut her eyes and opened them again and spoke past her daughter. “Laura, Laura. How good of you to come in and see me again.”

Tania turned round and sat down on the stool before the dressing-table and went on brushing her hair, holding herself badly, her back bent.

Laura curtsied and said, “I just thought I’d come and see how you were, though I knew you’d be in bed. I’ve been looking out of the window, and it’s getting dark and the lights are coming out in all the houses, and it’s very pretty, and I felt sad and very fond of everybody.”