The Birds Fall Down (62 page)

“Don’t cry. Oh, Vassili, you shouldn’t cry. It couldn’t be helped. We couldn’t just let him kill us.” But she knew that would not comfort him. The murder was necessary, but that did not prevent it from staining them both. If hooligans threw one into the mud, that was not one’s fault, but one’s clothes would be muddy. This was the blackest mud.

When he had stopped weeping, he asked, “And Berr. Have you seen Berr?”

“He is here now. He is here all the time; his wife is a candle-bearer.”

But Chubinov would not let her fetch Berr. He started one of those distressing disquisitions about the working and counterworking of the machine his friends controlled and the machine his enemies controlled, which had to be respected, since he was intelligent and had studied this subject and nothing else for years, but which were ugly. Man could not have been born for this. Russians, he said, lived in a labyrinth of suspicion, whether they were in Russia or abroad, and he did not want anyone drawn into its dark core because of him. There would be a brief period when the murder would be considered by the French police as an ordinary crime, with nothing to show that victim and assailant were not inhabitants of Paris. But as soon as he had gone away, and he assured her that his plans for getting away would surprise her, it would be intimated to the landlords of the Hotel de Guipuzcoa et de Racine and the Hôtel San Marino that a client of each, who would by then have been absent from his room for some days, was to be found in the police morgue; and in case either landlord felt reluctant to involve himself with the law, the police were to receive the same intimation. Then when it was realized that Gorin and Kamensky were one and the same man, and this a Russian, then the detectives in charge of the case would recall the unlucky policeman’s suspicion of Hippolyte Baraton, and for a day or two everybody known to have spoken to him would be examined and cross-examined, held at police headquarters, threatened, perhaps imprisoned. Even

Laura herself and her mother would be questioned, he thought. But that would be no ordeal. The Diakonov family was too important, and the British Embassy would protect them; and anyway her story was perfect, she had only to go on saying that her grandfather had introduced Baraton to her on the train.

This persecution would last only a day or two, even before they had time to recall him, in his role of Baraton, for examination. For the Russian Embassy would recognize at once that the dead man was not only Gorin and Kamensky but also Kaspar, their chief police agent, and by this time Chubinov and his helper would have seen to it that there had reached them material proving that most of the conspicuous terrorist accusations in recent years had been planned by Kaspar. It would be a Day of Judgment for the Russian Secret Police, particularly the staff of their Paris bureau. Also the French and Swiss Secret Services would be embarrassed, for they should have detected Gorin both as a terrorist agent and a Tsarist agent on their territories. The Quai d’Orsay would have to act in the interest of discretion. The press would be silenced and the police investigations would be abandoned. It annoyed Laura that he foretold this with pride. For if he and his friends had not been making this cat’s-cradle of mischief through the years the police investigations would never have begun in the first place.

But his gentle voice rang quite loud with pride, when he leaned forward and said, “But, Miss Laura, the matter will not end there. We of the revolutionary movement will make the truth known. In our own way. On our own terms. Russia will be aflame.”

That was too absurd. This shabby row had no spark within it to kindle any fire. A man with a talent for lying had used it to buy himself power and devotion, pleasant quarters by a lake, and fine clothes, while his doting and obedient disciples wandered homeless, shorn of their own kin and their identities, clad in garments such as the product of the female dentist’s skill, which Laura could see over Chubinov’s shoulder, hanging on the door in obvious deformity. It was so badly cut that it did not even fit the air.

“But for a day or two the authorities will carry on a merciless harassment of everyone who met me as Hippolyte Baraton. And even though the file is closed, a black mark might remain against the names of those questioned, if they were poor and helpless. I’d not choose to do that to anyone. But it gives me the pleasure of making a gift to a beloved friend, not to do it to Berr. So I’ll not see him. Anyway, it’s a great thing to sit here, under the same roof as Berr, as Nikolai, as your mother, as you.”

He should be in Russia, working as a doctor or a teacher in some town where generation after generation would profit by his sweetness, and rejoice to pay him back in kind. Her eyes were wet, and she saw that his were too. He had better be left alone for a time. She put the coffee-pot and the dish of
lapsha
on the tray, since they were cold by now, and they seemed all he wanted. She carried the tray to the kitchen and asked that some fresh coffee and some hot
lapsha
should be ready in a quarter of an hour, and sat down in a corner, watching the first stage of the sombre domestic carnival which, her mother said, would reach its height the next day. The servants were all dressed in black cotton clothes, and they were still cooking, as they had been since dawn, the meal that would be served to the mourners after the funeral. The kitchen-table was covered with cold birds, and the cook was slowly moving round it decorating them with slices of lemon and sprays of herbs. There was a smaller table set up not far from it, spread with a fine cloth, on which a woman Laura had never seen before, who must have been brought in specially, was rolling out pastry into huge thin sheets, rolling them thinner and thinner till they were bluish, folding them up, and setting them aside, and beginning all over again. Nothing could stop the servants preparing this feast for mourners who were thousands of miles away, and who, even had they been present, would probably not have dared to attend. All of the servants moved slowly and hieratically, but the kitchen echoed with their quick cries, which, as always, performed a linguistic miracle: the Russians were talking Russian to the French, the French were talking French to the Russians, and although neither knew more than a few words of the other’s language, the conversation was coherent. But though it was coherent it was wild, for they talked as if there were taking place in their midst, in this apartment, even in the kitchen, an event which was a cross between a circus and a harshly conducted Day of Judgment.

Little Louison went by, staring down into the small wooden bowl he was carrying, pressing up and down a cutter shaped to its inner sides. He saw her, halted, and pulled up a stool beside her, as if they were two Westerners sticking together. She saw that the bowl and its cutter were a tool for chopping up herbs, and exquisitely made. She felt the smooth sides of the bowl, admired the way the cutter fitted into them. Human beings were never so exquisite as the things they made. She pulled out a fine frond of the parsley which had escaped the blade. Human beings were never so exquisite as the earth they lived on and the things that grew on it. Louison leaned towards her, and asked her to tell him who the people were in the pictures painted on the big iron panel round the kitchen clock. The French servants, he said, did not know, the Russian servants tried to tell him, but he could not understand what they said.

“Those are scenes from the life of Saint Serafim of Sarov.” They showed him standing before the altar and seeing the Son of Man coming down a path of gold between the kneeling worshippers; prostrating himself in the snow by his hermitage in the forest; walking among the pines with a maimed wild-cat in his arms and a wolf and bear beside him like happy children; being beaten by unbelieving robbers but saved by an angel from the final blow; receiving in his tiny cell the Queen of Heaven, attended by her twelve handmaidens, two angels, and Saint John the Baptist and Saint John the Divine.

“Ah, superstition,” nodded Louison, his blade going chop-chop in the bowl. So it was. But only such legends, which were not true, had prepared her for the strangeness of life. What the newspapers and books gave as fact pretended that events and people were the colour of photographs, and predictable. She did not know how she could explain this to Louison, but how useful it would be if she had the power. She stiffened with rage as she remembered the cruel trick that Kamensky had played by pretending that the boy had slammed the door on his hand. Perhaps poor Louison might still worry about this at nights, particularly if he heard that Kamensky had come to an ill end. She wished she could tell him that a devil from Hell had come to plague him for that minute.

When the quarter of an hour was up she took the tray along the corridor, she felt sick, for it was as if she would find in the sewing-room both Chubinov and the thing they had done together.

But he looked so gentle, so helpless, so spent, that she forgot everything in her concern for him, and listened sympathetically to his plans, for which he expected praise, though they sickened her. He was going to wander still farther away from his home, on an errand which would be empty of any purpose but deception; his very name would be a colourless blob, because it was assumed and there was no childhood or youth or manhood behind it. He was going to England, not to London, where Gorin’s people would still be hunting for him, but to England. For he had been much impressed by the advice she had given him at Grissaint when she had said that if he became a teacher in an English school he would be safe, for if members of the Battle Organization came to kill him the headmaster would simply send for the police and the matter would be at an end. He thought she was taking too simple a view of the situation. It could not be, he said, smiling, that England was so unaffected by the march of progress. She saw that he thought there was something slightly disgraceful in the idea of a society where, if someone with political ideas wanted to kill a teacher in a school, the staff might be able and willing to prevent it. He was so silly as to be mad, she reflected. But he had considered that in England the process of extraditing him might go so slowly that he would probably not get fetched back to France until the authorities had stopped looking for the murderer of Gorin. So he had gone to a scholastic agency which had once found him a post in a Belgian school when he was in need of cover, and found there was an emergency call from an English headmaster who had lost his French teacher in mid-term. So, tomorrow morning, after he had made his statement at the police-station, he would take the train to England and make his way to St. Aloysius’ College, Bournemouth.

“I think it will be an agreeable hiding-place. They tell me Bournemouth is surrounded by pine-woods, and I imagine it resembles Finland, where I spent some happy summers when I was a child.”

“I shouldn’t count on that.”

But the future was to be wholly glorious. The next time her mother went back to Russia she would be received with the highest honours, solemnified by the remorse of the imperial family, for her father’s memory would have been rehabilitated, indeed enhanced, by the material he and his helpers would by that time have put before the authorities. “I have been able to clear your grandfather quite finally, thanks to the help of this comrade, who, as I mentioned to you, so greatly aided me to search Gorin’s two rooms. It’s ironical that we were brought together by Gorin’s own determination to destroy me.”

She had to listen. Of course she had been fully justified in conniving at the murder of Gorin. Yet she felt a strange hunger for still further justification.

“I can’t tell you this comrade’s name. But he’s wholly dedicated to the cause of revolution, that I must say for him, and highly intelligent, a former journalist on the staff of a Moscow newspaper. He came to me because when Gorin decided to kill me he had also to make my killing a respectable act by proving that I was a traitor to our organization. That’s where this man came in. Gorin was going to allege that I was secretly an adherent of a Marxist group which does not approve of terrorism and is not, like us, strictly democratic. Correspondence was to be produced between me and a man named Ulyanov or Lenin, who’s been for the last two or three years in Siberia, and has just returned to Russia and is on the point of being exiled and coming out into the West. This comrade who is helping me was commissioned by Gorin to forge the correspondence. But he came straight to me, and told me everything. For he himself is actually a secret member of Lenin’s group.”

“Let’s get this straight,” said Laura. “I haven’t understood. If this man was a member of the group, why did he tell you what he’d been asked to do, because if Gorin had to forge evidence proving you were a member of this group, you obviously weren’t?”

Chubinov looked uncomfortable. “Miss Laura, we aren’t in the nursery. We are making a revolution. Therefore we don’t, I freely admit it, act always with perfect candour. It’s possible, if it should happen that the revolutionary cause seemed to be in danger and the leaders were quite certain that this was due to one particular member, but they had no actual proof, they might feel under an obligation to provide forged evidence to convince the rank and file, who are bound to be their inferiors in intellect and intuition and experience.”

“But you wouldn’t have done that. Vassili, you couldn’t have done that.”

“No,” he said wretchedly, “it is not in my nature. But perhaps that is a weakness. And, as for Gorin, I thought that he was so clever, so harmonious, that such problems never existed for him, that he always found a way of avoiding them.”

The grief in his voice was so great that she stretched her hand across the table and stroked his cheek. “But this comrade. What happened when he came to you, thinking that you were one of the Marxist group and heard you weren’t?”

Again Chubinov looked uncomfortable. “I didn’t feel bound in view of the very pressing circumstances to tell him the exact truth. Then in the morning, when the import of Gorin’s papers was quite clear, I was frank with my comrade. And by that time it was obviously in the interests of both of us to work together for the purpose of exposing Gorin’s villainy. For when the truth is out we will be able to purify the revolutionary movement, which he has left honeycombed with treachery and mistrust, and to prove to the whole world the rottenness of the Tsarist government. This will certainly be to the benefit of our organization, and by a pardonable error, which I find quite pathetic, my poor comrade thinks that it will benefit his little Marxist group. Though heaven help us, if it were to be so, for Lenin and his followers represent the idea of revolution with all the poetry, all the spontaneity, all the natural grandeur, subtracted from it. Though, mind you, this Lenin is a clever man. He knows how to get people on to committees and off them against the will of the organization, indeed without anybody in the organization realizing what is happening till it is too late. But a courageous deed, the sublime defiance of authority, these things mean nothing to Lenin. Such a man can never change the course of history. That is for our organization to do, for to a man we are idealists.”