The Birds Fall Down (56 page)

She made no move to rise and leave now that the business of the clothes was finished. The two women started gossiping, out of charity, offering her their affairs as a distraction, muting their quality out of respect for the occasion, making life more childish and innocent than it is. Hélène and Juliette had been at school together, in the parish of Poissy, outside Paris, and now the girl was engaged to the son of one of their schoolfellows, Annette. They were going to be married in the old church, as old as old, at Poissy. It was a great joke, they laughed at it with reverently diminished laughter, because Annette was a twin and her other son had had twins. The young couple were looking for a house at Fontenay-les-Roses, where he worked, and it was being pointed out to them, that with this family tendency in view, they’d better choose a big one. Tania turned practical, asked whether they meant to rent or buy the house, and on hearing that it was to be bought with a legacy, told them they could use the services of the Diakonovs’ family lawyer, if they had none of their own. A phrase stirred in Laura’s memory.

“Mummie, who were the lacemakers? When Grandfather was near the end, he told me to ask the lacemakers not to sing so loud. He said he liked to hear them at their hymns, but they kept him awake.”

“Well, there were lacemakers on every big house in the country. The cleverest women did that. But enough of them to make a choir? Ah, I remember—but that was a long time ago. Something had driven him far, far back.”

‘What was a long time ago?”

“The trouble is I’ve forgotten. He told me about it several times but only when I was little. It was on the estate of someone who was quite elderly when he was a child, I think a grand-uncle of his. A river burst its banks, or was there a forest fire? Anyway a little village was destroyed and some dozens of serfs were homeless. The man who owned them couldn’t afford to rebuild the village, so whoever it was, your grandfather’s grand-uncle or whoever, bought the villagers, though he had too many serfs already, and put up some extra wooden houses and workshops for them. It turned out that in this particular village the people had been very clever. The men were good millers. Oh, it must have been a river that burst its banks, if the men were good at handling grain, they couldn’t have been forest people. And the women made beautiful lace and had divine voices. The estate-owner’s wife was musical, and she trained them. Yes, my father told me how he used to eavesdrop outside the workroom where they made lace, to listen to them as they sang hymns, and also they used to come into the drawing-room and stand round the door and sing to the guests. My father remembered the look of their bare feet on the parquet floor.”

“What happened to them all? Could one find their descendants, do you think?”

“Ah, no. They were dispersed even when my father was still young. The owner went bankrupt and the estate had to be sold.”

“Bankrupt, when he owned a lot of serfs?”

“Well, owning serfs didn’t stop people from going bankrupt. When the serfs were emancipated, it turned out that most of them were pledged to the banks. But where can that estate have been? And what was the disaster?” She stood up, picked up the black net and fitted it over her hair. “And now I remember something more. My father said the women were beautiful with slanting eyes and high cheekbones, higher than the Russians have, Asiatic high. He said there was Mongol blood there. But where isn’t it? It’s even here in this cheval glass so long as I stand in front of it. We both of us have a golden background to our skin, Laura. No, that doesn’t give us a clue to where the village was.”

She shuddered, said brief good-byes to the two women, bade them remember about the lawyer, and went out into the corridor and burst out: “Laura, we’re being swept away by a dark river. That village gone without a trace, we are like that. It’s our custom to have a Book of Remembrance, in which there’s written down the names of everyone united to a man by a bond of a certain strength, a certain good will. All his relatives, all his close friends, everybody whom he has helped, his blind, his lame, his idiots. When he dies it’s the custom to read this book in the church at the funeral. But it must not be read for my dear father, because he died in disgrace. A young officer might have to leave his regiment, a girl like you might be sent abruptly away from her place at court, if the name of a father or mother was read from that book at the service. We could read out the names of our beggars, but that would be to insult them, to state publicly that they cannot rouse respect enough to be taken seriously and persecuted. All I can do with that book is to hide it, and who knows, when it is safe for it to be found, nobody may recognize it for what it is, or care if they do.”

“Surely it doesn’t matter so long as we go on living after we’re dead,” said Laura.

“Of course it doesn’t. I am lying. I am a hypocrite. I’m talking nonsense about my father, whom nothing can hurt, when I am really thinking how I’m hurt, how the best of my life has been swept away by a dark river. Because of what has happened I can’t bear to remember how I have spent my life between my eighteenth and my thirty-eighth year. Laura, you are my pride, my treasure, I love you more than anything else in the world, but I can’t face thinking of how you came to be. It isn’t only living people who die, it is great stretches of living, which can die even when the people who lived there still exist. Life drains away from itself and goes into nothingness. Now I understand why in our services for the dead we sing over and over again just the two words, ‘Everlasting Memory, Everlasting Memory.’ But come, let’s see how the preparations are going on in the big drawing-room. They should be finished now.”

The room was as different from itself as the last few days of Laura’s life differed from that that had come before. Folding-doors she had never noticed had been closed, and nothing was left of the ordinary furniture in the remaining half except another veiled mirror over the chimneypiece. In the middle of the room, low on four rounded supports, was the empty coffin. It was not like an English coffin, it was broad at the head and tapered straight to the feet, and very shallow, and it was covered with cloth of gold. It lay askew, the head turned towards the icon in the corner of the room, and at each end of it were two candlesticks, not yet lit, rising high above it, with lengths of white muslin like petticoats tied to them with black ribbon. Facing the icon across the coffin was a lectern, only a little more solid than a music-stand in an orchestra, covered with a piece of fine linen, with a large leather-bound volume resting on it. Close under the icon there was set a dark crucifix, nearly the height of a man, with a scarf of muslin twisted round it as if for decency’s sake. It could have been a critical onlooker, deeply involved but not taking control, not offering active help. The rites to be performed here should be useful enough to make any special intervention unnecessary.

Words that she had heard her grandfather speak and had instantly forgotten sounded in her ear again. He had told her it was her Christian duty to dissuade Chubinov from murdering Kamensky. It did not deeply distress her that she had disobeyed, for after all God killed everyone by decreeing the existence of death, and it would be unfair if He did not occasionally permit a human being to kill in self-defence. Certainly she ought to defend herself. Apart from her own desire not to die, which might be sheer prejudice, she could not go away, so irretrievably away, from her mother at this time. But Nikolai had told her a Christian duty was invariably disagreeable, and the aspect of this room, the pattern described by the tall crucifix and the low coffin set aslant, confirmed that she expected to do something which would cause her pain. She had already some vague notion of what it was, and had even known she was holding her thoughts back from their proper end. Now she admitted to herself that if Chubinov killed Kamensky and was caught she could not let him take the whole blame. She would have to confess to the police that she had asked him and aided him to commit the crime. The drunkenness of self-sacrifice ran through her veins, but the room kept her sober. She looked again at the flickering light of the icon, the veiled mirror, the tall cross, the coffin set askew, the lectern with its Psalter, the four petticoated candlesticks. They were not demanding self-sacrifice of her, but the same grim ingenuity which, placing these things thus and so, made possible the performance of the useful rite. Perhaps Berr would show her what to do.

XV

“If my father had been in his own home in Russia,” Tania said bitterly to Laura, “we would not have been with him, but he would have had three sons and two daughters and fourteen grandchildren to kneel by his side. Now, because he was exiled by our most pious, autocrat, and puissant Tsar of All the Russias, as the Prayer Book calls him, he is alone with you and me. So one or other of us will have to spend nearly all the day with him and we will keep vigil with him tonight. It’s a lot to ask of a girl of your age, but think of yourself as going out to meet the Tsar on the field of battle and humiliating him with your prayers. Oh, don’t look at me in that English way. You English sing, ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers,’ there can’t be so much to feel strange about in this.”

“You don’t understand. I was wondering about something else. Quite different. Feeling like that about the Tsar, could you join the revolutionaries?”

“Of course not. Let’s leave out the question of whether a revolution would do any good or not, whether it isn’t so alien from the Russian people that a revolution would mean that they ceased to exist as what they now are, it’s not possible for people like you and me to become revolutionaries. Tyrants have to be deposed by subjects who have broken, whose nerves snap under tyranny, who are seized by frenzy. But people like us don’t break. It’s not specially to our credit. Indeed, it’s a form of misfortune. Now I must go and receive General Dukingen. I am dreading it, he’s very deaf.”

Laura went slowly down the corridor to the room where the coffin lay, noting that her mother was out of date. She was thinking of the French Revolution. Now revolutionaries sat quiet in their enemies’ armchairs, and handed the ladies of the household their coffee and their cognac, and sat well-brushed and dapper while their thoughts went out and did their work for them. In the room, she found Berr’s wife still standing at the lectern and reading the Psalms, though she had begun in the early morning, and it was now afternoon. The other candlebearer was quite ready to take her place. Laura had just seen him in the kitchen, eating pickled mushrooms and reading back-numbers of Russian newspapers, and he had spoken of Berr’s wife with humorous sympathy, as a professional might speak of an amateur intractable in her enthusiasm. But Berr’s wife meant to use her stocky strength till it ran out, Berr was kneeling in prayer beside her, because they could make no other sign of gratitude to the old man in the coffin. She was chanting the Holy Writ in the quick monotone the priests had taught her, so that the words ran together into an incantation such as tongue and lips might have woven before words were invented. But her round peasant face confirmed the sense. When her face crumpled as if a milk-ing-pail had fallen on her toe, the King David was crying that God had cast him off and had given up his armies as sheep to the slaughterers, and sold them for nought and made them a scorn and derision for their neighbours. When happiness lifted her cheeks high like little shrunken russet apples, then David was naming the Lord his light and his salvation, the strength of his life, in whom he delighted, and who gave him the desires of his heart.

The incantation, the upward reflection of the Psalter on her face, did not cease when visitors came into the room, to pray by the coffin and sometimes to lift the pall and look on Nikolai’s face. There were more of them than Tania had expected. She had known the Countess von Krehmunden would come. It was in the chapel of her house in the Champs Elysées that Sofia had been worshipping of late. The old woman had drawn the exiled family as close to her as she could, saying that she was too old to fear anything the Tsar could do, but moved, Tania said, by a far more interesting consideration. “She’s Russian only by marriage, being a German by birth, but she’s the more Russian for that. She’s a member of the house of Anhalt-Zerbst which never forgets it sent Catherine the Great to Moscow. So she thinks of the present Tsar as having let a flourishing family business go to pot. And when Germany had the luck to send another Tsarina to Russia in our time, she can’t bear to think it was the present poor little thing.” It was indeed deep shame which possessed the Countess as she advanced into the room, small and stout, dwarfed by a hat covered with black birds on the top of a crimped mahogany wig, her short neck built up solid as a fortress with a dog-collar of black and white pearls, her black dress armoured with jet, her hand just able to beat the air in an attempt at a reverent gesture, since arthritis had made her rigid. The skill of her maid had covered her old face with some powder or lotion which did in fact soften her wrinkles with something like the bloom of youth, and this incongruity was not incongruous. She was an octogenarian grieving stoically for a lifelong friend and for a dynasty, but she was also pitifully embarrassed, as a young person might be when confronted with the fatal results of an act committed by a discreditable relative. The wrong that Nikolai had suffered was so great that, not only for the Countess but for all the other visitors, it competed with death in its power to awe. The Countess must have been the only one of them who had not had to overcome at least a moment of cowardice before determining to disregard Tania’s advice and pay the customary visit of condolence; for all the rest murmured, “We felt we had to come,” and moved with the dandyish air given by consciousness of bravery, the men holding their tall hats high against their pearl-grey waistcoats, the women curtsying slowly right down to the floor. When they lifted the pall from Nikolai’s face they did not sigh at its sudden revelation of the peace of eternity, they breathed quickly, angered by what had been done to him in his time, of what might, perhaps, be done to them also, in a small measure, simply because they had made this act of presence.