The Birds Fall Down (38 page)

“Of course, Grandfather.”

“Don’t say ‘of course.’ It is your Christian duty, but nobody can say ‘of course’ with any appositeness about a Christian duty, which is always forced and extravagant and the last thing any sensible person would choose to undertake. I feel more certain that it is your duty to attempt to stop Chubinov killing Kamensky because it is so very unlikely that a young girl will be able to avert this crime. Oh, Laura, my little Laura, I grieve for you. Kamensky is very low. I had to raise him up to a great height before we could speak together and form a mutual affection, form what I believed to be a mutual affection. But through his lowness a great force travelled. Oh, my little one, dear child of my dear child, it may destroy you, it must certainly alter your world. The universe is full of great forces which manifest themselves in disgusting ways through our fallen humanity. O Lord, when I am dead, explain to me the folly of Thy creation, for the wisdom Thou Thyself hast given me faints with bewilderment.”

Professor Barrault and Madame Verrier had stolen in quietly through the folding-doors. “What are those two shuffling about for? Do they think I cannot see and hear? Till the last moment of my life my senses will be sharper than theirs have ever been. Ask the woman to leave. The man can stay, but not the woman. Yes, I know she is a nurse, but she affects me disagreeably, like the women students in our Russian universities. Thank you, my dear. Now give the man a chair. I am sure he knows his business so well that he will notice when I give signs of actually dying and will come forward and do what is necessary. Convey to him my respect for his skill and my gratitude that I should be the object of it. Now let me get on with what I must tell you, Laura. It’s fortunate for you that you have inherited the Diakonov intelligence and will understand at least part of my story. You see, I have discovered what my sins are, or rather what my great sin is. What is extraordinary is that, though nobody could call me a vain man, it proceeds from vanity. Some time ago you left the room—what did you do?”

“I sat at a window and looked down at the street.”

“What did you see?”

“Old people sitting at the doors, people going in and out of the shops, children playing, three children coming back from a party. It was quite pretty.”

“It may have been pretty but it can’t have been of the slightest importance. Whatever you did when you left the room can’t have meant anything at all. You see, when you went away I tried to imagine what it will be like when I am dead and come into the presence of God, and it wasn’t very hard, for I am no longer with you in my entirety. Half of me has already left my body and this world. So I could see how it will be when I meet God. And it will be a meeting between two beings who are different, more different than a man from a woman, more different than a white man from a Negro, totally different. It was like that”—he could still snap his fingers—“I saw the difference between God and Man running through the universe as a flash of lightning runs through the sky. I say that because that difference is a thing in itself. Other differences are comparisons. Not this, which is unique.”

He wept and impatiently dried his eyes with the sheet. Laura wiped away his tears with her own handkerchief and called him softly the tender names her nannie used to call her when she was ill, knowing that he would not understand them and could not blast them away with his scorn. He could not argue off-hand that he was not a cocker-nonny. Choking, he went on: “I’ve been wrong all the time. O my God, when I have done my best to serve Thee, why didst Thou not inform my ignorance and keep me from this sin? When we are face to face explain to me the mystery of Thy lack of candour. Almost before Thou dost anything else. Well, I have always known that God is good and the maker of all things good, the sower who broadcasts good seed and reaps the good harvest, and I have known too that Man is not good, he is a chaos in which evil mingles with good and is always preferred by its host, he is the bad land in which the good seed can grow but poorly, and then only by grace. But I thought Man was a lesser member of God’s family, even as I have relatives who are drunkards and adulterers and many things that I am not. I saw God as a man divinely free of Man’s evil, with no human qualities save when he clothed Himself with Jesus, and I saw Man as a God with the divinity extracted and the human qualities grossly proliferating into perpetual sin. On the contrary, God is God and Man is Man, and there is no bridge between them but grace, and that does not change Man into God, it simply saves him from damnation. In the same way, I could not make Kamensky my kinsman simply by making him my friend.”

“Well, then, that’s settled, you’re not God, you’re Man,” said Laura. “But we all loved you as a man. Of course God will forgive you. Now lie back and rest, dear, dear Grandfather.”

He sobbed a little longer and said, as soon as he could, “I would be glad if you would see that Kamensky and Chubinov are each given some little possession of mine as a souvenir. An object of some value but with no family associations. Neither is related to me.”

“Yes, Grandfather,” said Laura. She turned aside and muttered into her wet handkerchief, “I’ll see them damned first.”

Professor Barrault said, “But this must stop. He is exhausting himself. Another tablet, I think, Mademoiselle—”

“He’s being quite happy in his way,” said Laura.

“You grasp the appalling consequences of my mistake. Since I didn’t understand that God and His Son are unique, I didn’t grasp that His suffering was unique and unlike that of any human being. Therefore I was led into the blasphemy of supposing that because His suffering has meaning, so has mine. Pretentious idiot that I was! I thought that in suffering I was buying something at a great price, carrying out a costly sacrifice which in time would be hailed in heaven and on earth as glorious. So I have lived in anguish. I’ve been tormented by the itch to inquire into the mechanism of my disgrace, for a martyr can’t help, I imagine, but have some curiosity about the details of his martyrdom. Sebastian must have wondered why all those pagan arrows did not harm him, though later the pagan rods beat him to death. Without dignity I panted like a thirsty dog, waiting for the day when my persecutors would be routed and my martyrdom acclaimed by men and angels. So I howled and caterwauled and made the lives of those around me a misery because I impudently expected my agony to be a sacrament to be the symbol in this material world of an event in the spiritual world. I’ve been no better than a peasant who goes mad and believes himself heir to an immense fortune, to an estate in the Crimea and mines in the Urals, so that he refuses to work and lets his wife and children and old parents starve. I have wasted my life because I have not seen that my pains are of no more significance than my pleasures, and they have none, and that my only worth lies in my love of God, and all that I did and was on earth is without meaning, because I am a man.”

He was in agony. She said, “This isn’t true. I love you, my mother loves you, my grandmother loves you, many people love you, for all sorts of reasons which matter. Oh, for one thing, you were so brave when you were hounded down.”

In a small voice he said, “Above the window.”

She turned about and looked.

“That blotch on the wall, running towards the corner of the room. The rain’s seeped in from a gutter on the outside. A workman’s scamped his work. My suffering means only that. I am evil because I am human, my evil heritage called to those cursed by the same heritage, and together we laid out our portion so that it increased. I am repenting. God will forgive me. But that doesn’t make my sufferings any more interesting. If you remember my misfortunes and your kind heart and your family loyalty make you pity me, remember that blotch on the wall. My whole life is as important as that blotch, no less and no more.”

Laura prayed aloud, “Oh, God, don’t let him think anything so awful. Do some sort of miracle.”

Nikolai said, “Ah, I’ve broken your heart. But I had to tell you, and it’s of no importance that anybody’s heart is broken. Conquer your pride and your respect for the emotions, which should be despised with all you can muster of contempt, which I hope is not much, since you are a woman, and remember what I say: ‘Man is not God, God is not Man,’ and repeat it often to yourself. You will have children, all women in our family marry, they never lack great attractions, and you must repeat it to those children of yours also. You may think it isn’t necessary, for the difference between the human and the divine is stated in every book of the Bible and in every office of our liturgy. But there’s a treacherous paradox here. There’s no better guide than custom, but on all that’s customary there settles the thick dust of material time, so that the mind turns away from it in distaste. For me that message of the Scriptures and the Church was dimmed with many readings and many hearings, so only in this last bitter hour did I learn what they had been trying to tell me. What a mistake, what frustration, but it does not matter, I know now I am a man.”

She prayed silently, “God, let him die now, God, let him die now.” Surely God could see the foam on his lips.

“I hope you go back to Russia, Laura. Oh, God, grant me this, since I am penitent, send my little Laura back to Russia. Our Russian society is the society which is precious to Thee, all the others are chance coagulations of pagan mobs. Russian society alone serves God, but not strenuously enough. It prays but it does not fast. At present it simply tells each of its members to spare himself the trouble of deciding what he shall be and do here on earth, since the Tsar makes all such decisions for him and takes on himself the guilt of earthly power. How beautiful, how very beautiful is our system. As time goes on it will be admired as the most merciful and fatherly form of government the world has ever known. Yet it has its faults. It is insufficiently rigid. There are occasions when it permits a man to use his own will. Even I, who have given my utter loyalty to the system, can look back to moments when I have made my own choice, God forgive me.”

Laura’s eyes and mouth opened wide. Was he really unaware that from his birth he had done exactly as he pleased?

“At many moments our Russian State turns to water. It often does not stand four-square. These weaker moments are speciously attractive. My own doctor is the son of one of my father’s serfs, and in my folly I have rejoiced in this as admirable. But now I see I was wrong, for such liberty leads straight to the sin I have committed. If a man can change his place in the world and the condition of the world, he must construct for himself some philosophical belief which will teach him what changes to make, and since he is vain he will attach great importance to this belief, since it is the work of his own mind. Then he is bound to sin with me and forget that God is God and Man is Man. He will become a rival to God and pretend that he understands life as well as God does and can control the direction of history. Then he must become a miserable and grieving rebel against God, and will insist that his suffering has a meaning, though the whole of existence will prove to him that it has not, and he will waste his life in useless lamentations as I have wasted mine, or in murderous conspiracies like my poor little Sasha and that idiot Vassili Iulievitch. A small man has come into the room, my eyes are failing, I can only see that he is small. How curious it must be to be small. I am glad I was spared that humiliation. Who is he?”

“He’s the doctor who was so kind to us at the station.”

“Tell him he may stay if he does not interrupt. Oh, Laura, we Russians have been too lax. Let Russians build up a citadel of goodness, where nobody places a vain value on his individuality, where everybody realizes that his highest destiny, his only respectable destiny is to obey. Let each Russian offer up the dear wayward son of his soul, his will, as God the Father offered up His dear obedient son, Christ. For the sake of the world we must surrender our souls to God and our bodies to His servant the ruler of Russia. This is not even very much to ask of ourselves, for it is not a sacrifice which need be made for ever. When Holy Russia has been anointed for centuries by the blessed oil of its children’s abnegated will, all Russians will be born committed to innocence. The State is only an instrument of man’s moral struggle, so then, all men being moral, there will be no need for the State. It will wither away. Grace will replace the law. The kingdom of Heaven will be established on earth. Laura, go back to Russia and await that day.”

He threw himself back in his bed and closed his eyes violently, as if to kill his sight. Professor Barrault came forward and put his fingers on his wrist and said to the nurse, “Quick, the syringe.” But Nikolai flung off his hand and said, “Remember, Laura, to give my love to my dear wife and all my family, the women as well. I realize how much I must have tried their patience by my preoccupation with my griefs. But I suppose I made it up to them in quite a number of ways.”

“Nurse,” said Professor Barrault, “let’s try again. He really ought to have the injection.”

“I shouldn’t bother,” said Professor Saint-Gratien.

Nikolai heaved himself up in bed again. Shuddering, he said, “In the desert place I may see a giant hand or foot. I must try to keep my self-command though I will be dead and remember that it’s an illusion of the Devil. Why has nobody lit the gas? I saw a gas-jet when I came into the room.”

“The gas is on,” said Professor Barrault.

“Then get candles,” said Nikolai, turning his face about so that everybody present got the full force of his displeasure. “Must we talk in the dark like gipsies?”

It was as if he himself were a candle: a lit candle which was then blown out.

When the doctors sent Laura out of the bedroom, she went back to the window and looked out through the lenses of her tears. The shops were still bright and had some customers, but there were no children in the causeway, except a few who were leaning against the walls and eating sandwiches or supping out of bowls, with an air of discontent and abandonment. All the chairs had been taken in from the doorways. Most of the upper rooms were lit and it was there life was being carried on now: dark figures moved backwards and forwards against the wavering blow of lamplight. The hours were passing, it could not be so long before her father would be with her. She did not know how she could bear this sharp pain without him. For as she had found earlier that fear is an affliction of the body, gliding about in the bowels, so she was now finding out that grief was a wound in the chest. Presently the doctors came in and drew up two chairs beside her. Now that she had seen a dead person, the living seemed more strange. How did one move and feel? While she listened to the doctor she surreptitiously looked down at her hand, spread out the fingers, brought them together again, and wondered at the miracle.