The Birds Fall Down (64 page)

“Then we’ll talk no more of this till after the funeral,” said Tania, swinging herself off the bed on to her feet. She had crumpled her dress by lying on it, and she raised her hand as if to ring for Hélène, dropped it, and frowned down on the creases, as if longing to get to the end of a period in which she could not use the prop of elegance. She sat down in front of the dressing-table and smoothed her hair, and asked, “By the way, has the little Kamensky turned up?”

A shudder ran through Laura. “I’ve no idea.”

“That sounds rather cold. Laura, nothing—nothing happened at Grissaint?”

“Well, I should have said quite a lot. But what exactly do you mean, Mummie?”

“The fact is, I don’t want to seem absurd, but since we got here from London it had crossed my mind once or twice that the little Kamensky was taking too warm an interest in you.”

“You mean,” asked Laura, “that you thought he was in love with me?” She laughed aloud at her mother’s simplicity. “No, indeed. Sometimes he flattered me and told me I was a stunner like you, but one could see it was humbug a mile off.”

“It might not have been.”

But even if it had not been true that he feared and hated her to the ultimate point, the notion was ridiculous. She thought of reminding her mother that Kamensky was old enough to be her father, but that now proved nothing. She said, “Why, I don’t believe he’s as tall as I am. I should think he’d be a full inch shorter.”

“Oh, I’m probably wrong, I’m not very clever just now.” Tania put down her comb and rested her chin on her hands and looked at her reflections in the triple mirror. “I’m not so clever as I was. I’m not anything as much as I was. I’ve been destroyed.” But she pushed her chair away from the dressing-table so that she could no longer see herself in the glass, and spread her hands out as if she were wiping out of the air the words she had just spoken. “But I’m being absurd. Yes, I’ve been destroyed. Yes, I am maimed for life. But for other people, for the whole world, it isn’t so. For them life’s getting better and better all the time. Look at Russia. It’s coming out into the light, every year the sun shines on it more brightly. Oh, we still have pogroms, but we know whose fault that is. Everybody who isn’t old or mad is against the persecution of the Jews, the next Tsar will put an end to it. How I wish your grandfather had lived longer, he hadn’t realized yet that you’re of an age to enjoy serious talk. He would have told you such stories of what Russia used to be like when he was young. The serfs so ignorant that when there were cholera epidemics they thought the doctors who came to save them had given them the disease by poisoning the wells, and they killed the poor blessed saints. And the police went round the markets squeezing bribes out of the poor stallholders so that they’d only a few copecks to take home. And the army took their recruits by kidnapping them, and if there was a village where too many of the boys escaped into the forests, then every house was burned down. The prisons stank and the prisoners were sent there without proper trials, and day after day the chain-gangs dragged themselves along the Vladimirovsky Road to Siberia, and God knows how many fell dead on the way. But all those horrors are done with and over, and they all disappeared in one man’s lifetime, think of that, Laura, and we’re considered a backward country. And when all our peasants understand the new ways of farming, and all these new factories and railways are working, and all the men who are liberal like your uncles—you will like your uncles—have forced the Tsar to grant a constitution, nobody’ll be poor, nobody will be oppressed. And all over the world the old stupidities are going to die. I don’t believe there’ll be another war after this wretched South African business, we’ve all too much to lose. And people are getting so clever, there’s science, it’s going to do wonderful things, indeed, it’s doing them already.” She threw back her head and laughed as if she knew a wonderful secret. “Think of it, in ten and twenty years, with this radium treatment, nobody will ever die of cancer. Oh, my darling, unhappiness has touched us, but you are young, you are going to live in a happy, happy age.”

There was a knock on the door, and they delayed only long enough to smile at each other, and to exchange a kiss.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1966 by Rebecca West

cover design by Karen Horton

ISBN: 978-1-4532-0714-7

This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
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