Fig and the Flute Player

by Christine Harrison

  ‘You don’t want to miss the lecture,’ he said, ‘especially as Philomena has taken such a fancy to you. Come on, you’ve got half an hour. Just over.’

  Maisie put her arms round him sleepily.

  ‘No time for that,’ he said, pulling her up.

  She washed her face and put on a warm woollen dress with a patterned scarf round her neck. She coloured her lips with fresh bright lipstick.

  ‘Ready,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to hurry.’

  When they got there Philomena was shuffling her notes and fiddling with the slides. Someone was giving out transcripts of lecture notes.

  ‘Oh, good,’ said Michael, ‘a slide lecture. I can go to sleep in peace – it’s my turn.’

  They need not have hurried, no one else did. The afternoon banquet had slowed everyone up and Philomena began twenty minutes late.

  ‘There is something special about a Christmas Day lecture,’ she began. ‘I hope it will become a tradition, as I hope this Kiev conference will also be.’

  ‘I want to consider,’ she went on, ‘not the devotional repose of the older ikons, but the narrative and didactic elements to be found in the later religious works. And I want to start with the late-seventeenth-century so-called “Burning Thornbush Mother of God”. Would someone lower the lights, please?’

  Someone lowered the lights and for a moment nothing happened. A picture of Christ, protected inside a mandorla like a seed-pod, and descending into Hell, flashed up.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Philomena.

  Another picture came on to the screen, hovered about and settled down. It was the Mother of God inside a large eight-pointed star. The central four-pointed star enclosed the Virgin with the Christ Child on her arm, and a tiny Man-Christ, carrying a ladder, situated in the region of her heart.

  The other points of the star contained various angels. Scenes from the Old Testament stories formed a border round the panel.

  ‘Look first at the Old Testament stories which foreshadow the coming of a Redeemer,’ Philomena said. She dealt with each of these in scholarly detail.

  ‘And now I turn to something which may seem external and of small account, but does have an important bearing on our subject of study – I refer, of course, to the inscription.’

  Michael had gone to sleep, his head on Maisie’s shoulder. She settled down to enjoy the lecture.

  ‘As you know, the proportions of the figures are symbolic,’ Philomena was saying in her clearly enunciating Irish voice, with the faintest trace of accent. ‘The tiny adult Christ-figure stowed in the region of the Virgin’s heart points our minds forward to future events; he is holding a ladder in one hand – the ladder to Heaven, made from the Tree of Life. We are reminded of the tree on which he died.’

  Another ikon flashed up on the screen.

  ‘Again seventeenth-century, again Russian,’ said Philomena. ‘“The whole of Creation rejoices over thee.”’

  Maisie felt very happy.

  4

  ‘IT IS a highly stylised art,’ murmured Maisie, as they watched the young bearded monk at work.

  ‘It is full of rhythm,’ whispered Michael. ‘I am intrigued and amazed.’

  ‘It is a form of prayer,’ said the young monk, clearly, in English, looking up from his work.

  The three fell silent then. The ikon painter went on with his work as if alone in his workshop, the silence broken only by the brief sound of birds squabbling in the garden, by the occasional bubbling sound of glue being heated on the stove. The smell of resinous glue and chalky plaster and paint mixed with wood was not unpleasant.

  The monk, his dark hair almost shoulder-length, prematurely thinning on the crown of his head, and with a straggled beard, looked as if he was strong and peasant-built under the flowing black robe. His face was slightly pockmarked, his hands strong-looking. He held the brush with workmanlike dexterity; the palette in his other hand was a piece of broken pottery smeared with earth colours, ochre and burnt umber and black.

  All around the workshop were ikon panels in various stages of restoration. The merciful Christ with cruciform nimbus, open book in hand, the metal casing badly broken. Beside it an impassive Christ the Judge. The Mother of God of Pity, one of the Eleousa type of specifically Russian ikons with its peculiarly tender quality – almost black with the years of candle soot. But the monk was engaged now in painting a new ikon. It was one depicting St George and the dragon, a favourite Russian subject. As Maisie and Michael watched in silence, they saw how the painter was using strictly laid-down rules in his work. He was in fact using a pattern-book as he coloured the dark coils of the serpent.

  ‘A painter’s manual,’ whispered Maisie. ‘Every line, every colour and gesture has a symbolic significance – it’s all in his manual.’

  ‘Individuality’, explained the monk, speaking Russian now, ‘does not come into it. The manuals specify even the stance of certain figures, how they are dressed and even what is in the background. An ikon must be able to convey its specific message even to an illiterate person.’

  Michael was as intensely interested as he had been bored by the lectures. Maisie explained what had been said. She felt pleased that his boredom had lifted. She could sense the instant sympathy and rapport he had with many men. He looked as if he would have taken up a brush in his hand and helped with the painting, given half a chance.

  But the monk’s next words explained the seriousness of the ikon painter’s occupation. He was doing something more than a painting, he said. He was translating matter – wood, water, resins, paint – into prayer, a means of salvation, a ‘window to heaven’. He prepared himself for his work by prayer and regarded the making of the ikon, the carving of the wood, the making of the plaster, the painting of the subject matter and even the sweeping-up of the wood chippings from the floor as part of the same prayerful activity.

  ‘Every man that comes into the world is stamped with the image of God,’ said the monk, ‘and every ikon should have God’s seal on it.’ He carefully washed his hands in the corner before beginning to apply gold leaf. All three again lapsed into silence.

  Michael really wanted to handle the tools, stir the glue; as it was, he brushed some wood shavings into a corner with his foot and picked up a piece of wood.

  ‘What kind of wood?’ he asked.

  ‘Birch,’ said the monk, ‘but we use other woods. Oak, alder.’ The two men had an easy naturalness between them, an instant bonding of some sort. What was it? Just that they were men, perhaps, thought Maisie, and felt jealous, and curious as to why she should. Her bond with Michael was not easy, it was full of awkwardness and tension. She envied the uncomplicated, unalloyed camaraderie of men. They could become brothers quickly, with no questions asked, in certain circumstances. Men. Doing any job, any work. St George’s vermilion cloak fluttered out behind him as his horse pranced over the dragon.

  After a while Maisie said, ‘I have come looking for someone.’ She showed the monk the piece of paper with the name on it that Werner had given her.

  The monk crossed himself. ‘He was my teacher,’ he said. ‘He died one week ago. He was a very old man. He died just sitting there in his chair, as if he had gone to sleep. I was his apprentice.’

  Maisie’s heart sank a little. How would she now ever find out about the ikon Denisov set such store by? She was standing in the very workshop where the Mother of God of the Black Steppes ikon had been restored. If she had been here only a few days before, she might have been able to speak with the old monk. Her disappointment was keen; but she wondered if his apprentice would be able to help her. She brought up the subject of the miracle-working ikons.

  ‘Then the Ikon of the Black Steppes,’ she said, ‘was restored in this workshop. Did you hear anything of its history, or what happened to it afterwards?’

  ‘I heard about it, of course. I heard about it many times. My teacher spoke of it, his methods of restoration and so on. Yes.’

  Somewhere the plangent sound of a bell beg
an, calling him to prayer.

  ‘That ikon,’ he said, ‘had been hidden for many years in the catacombs here. It was brought up during the time of the German advance into Russia. It had deteriorated in the catacombs and needed careful restoration.’

  ‘Afterwards,’ asked Maisie, ‘what happened to it?’

  ‘It disappeared,’ the monk said gravely. ‘Perhaps it had done its work. The Germans were beaten back, Kiev survived. No one knows what happened to the ikon in the chaos of war and later in the persecution of the monasteries. It was a terrible time.’

  ‘Was it ever replaced in the catacombs for safe keeping?’ asked Michael.

  ‘I do not think so,’ said the monk. ‘The catacombs are now much visited. We would have discovered it.’

  It was time for him to go. He held the door open for them, blessing them gravely. They watched him, like one of the black-hooded crows on the snow-covered grass grown large, flapping his black wings as he hurried down the hill to join his brothers.

  They began walking across the stiff white grass; it crackled under their feet. Pale winter light washed over everything – the sprawling monastery, bare trees, blue-black crows.

  ‘I was hoping to have more to tell Denisov,’ said Maisie. ‘There is a gap between when the ikon was last seen in Kiev and when Denisov acquired it. I suppose that’s the penalty for trying to investigate miracle-working ikons.’

  ‘Do you know how Denisov came by it?’

  ‘He bought it in a Paris sale room,’ said Maisie, ‘just after the war. It was before the fashionable revival of interest in ikons and he got it for next to nothing.’

  ‘Our monk would be horrified to think of an ikon bought and sold. Wasn’t he impressive? Single-minded. His life so orderly and deep.’

  ‘I wonder,’ said Maisie, as they walked around, hardly knowing where they were going, ‘whether, if you had to choose a companion – one companion, you are on a desert island, like Robinson Crusoe – you would choose a man or a woman?’

  ‘That’s a strange question, Maisie.’

  ‘No. It isn’t.’

  ‘All right, it’s a perfectly ordinary question. Coming from you I will take it seriously.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I’m thinking.’

  ‘You have to think?’

  ‘Well, of course, I would want you on a desert island.’

  ‘Yes. But that’s not quite my point. Imagine a whole life. Your whole life, into old age, death, everything. I don’t exist. Another man or a woman?’

  ‘It’s a very searching question.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Michael hesitated. ‘I think it would be a man,’ he said slowly.

  ‘I thought you would say so.’ Strange that her heart was beating so fast.

  ‘Because ultimately,’ said Michael, ‘I would find it more interesting.’ He looked at her, a little taken aback at his own words, and tried to explain. ‘Well. A man has a sort of thereness that a woman has not. She merges into things. A man doesn’t do that. He’s there.’

  ‘What about sex?’ she asked.

  ‘Mm,’ said Michael. ‘I wonder what Robinson Crusoe did. Why are we walking round in circles?’

  ‘This conversation is getting unsuitable for a monastery.’

  ‘Very suitable, I’d say.’

  ‘You’re very weird, Michael.’

  ‘Well, you asked me. What about you? I suppose you’ll say now you would take a woman.’

  ‘No, I would take a man.’

  ‘Why? Apart from the obvious.’

  ‘Because a man has a sort of thereness, of course.’

  Michael laughed and drew her very close, so now they were walking down the white slopes of the grassy banks, joined like one creature almost – a man-woman. Walking, then nearly running.

  ‘I want to see those catacombs,’ Michael insisted. Maisie had seen them before and had not enjoyed the gruesome experience. But with Michael’s warm loving flesh pressed against her, thigh on thigh, hip on hip, she felt brave. It had after all been the time of her break-up with Leo and perhaps she had been more sensitive than usual. She thought it would be a test of Michael’s love if he could protect her psyche, down there in the catacombs, from horror. And there she was again, always wanting to test things in such ways. Or was this now just the child in her, wanting to be protected from harm?

  As he led her into the catacombs she felt she should not have come. Stacked with mummified cadavers and skeletons of centuries, it was a grisly place, there was nothing there to relieve the atmosphere of horror. Only Michael’s presence in front of her now, and sometimes the touch of his hand as he helped her down steps slippery with dripping water. She did not examine what was around her, but sometimes a bony hand or broken skull leaped out at her from the half-dark as in a ghost train – except these ghosts were real.

  Some of the skeletons were dressed.

  Halfway through, claustrophobia seized her. She knew from last time that she was halfway through the dreadful, labyrinthine place. While in the grip of panic she fought against it silently, breathing slowly, though, with nostrils tight against the smell of the dead air.

  She kept her eyes down and said nothing. It would make things worse if she spoke, asked Michael to hurry, admitted her predicament. She must contain the panic herself, she knew. It is always like this, she thought. When it came down to it you are alone. Childbirth, extreme terror, going into battle, sickness, death. You are alone.

  Momentarily taken out of herself, Maisie noticed and pitied an old man, thin, fur hat pulled down to the eyes, worn old black coat too short in the sleeves, purplish cheeks and watery eyes. She wished he had not come down there. Among the skeletons. And mummified bodies. Some dressed.

  And as they emerged and the panic seeped back into the catacombs from whence it came, Maisie’s first thought as she surveyed the world again was that Michael had not been able to help her.

  ‘You didn’t like that, Maisie,’ said Michael. ‘How I love you. Sometimes, how I love you. You look so white. It is an awful place.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, Maisie. We’ll go back to the hotel and go to bed.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Yes. I want us to make love.’

  It was enough that he had understood how she felt. If he had not been able to protect her down there in Hades, at least he understood where she had been. It did not matter now if they did not make love. But they made their way back anyway, stopping for a bowl of steaming bortsch at a rough little bistro.

  Back in their hotel room, they undressed quickly and made love for a long time with a sort of determination, as if it would conquer death.

  ‘Sergei told me that the peasants used to cover their household ikon with a cloth when they had sexual intercourse,’ Michael said.

  ‘How sweet,’ said Maisie. ‘Who is Sergei?’

  ‘This bloke I met, he’s a musician. I asked him where I could buy a present for you and he took me to one or two shops but it was hopeless.’ He was laughing quietly to himself. ‘And you are an expert – a consultant, forsooth – and you didn’t know enough to advise your clients to cover their ikons before sex.’ It amused him that he was able to tell her something she did not know about her subject.

  But she was not listening, still seized by a ravenous physical hunger and wishing he would stop laughing and pay attention to it.

  Instead he said, ‘I am going now to resurrect myself. Have a shower. And we are going to hit the town.’

  But he knew there was still something to expunge and he tried words, as he smoothed her body with his hand. ‘Think of it like this – it’s all the same creation. This – your lovely body. Wind, flowers, snow, all the same, blood, entrails, bones.’

  Maisie remembered the litter at Paddington Station with its aura of glory. But the cadavers in their dreadful grave clothes had not been glorified for her. Death and decay. What was it?

  ‘You get dressed up in your jewels and everything, and I’ll g
o down to the Intourist place and see if they can fix up tickets for something or other.’

  ‘The ballet,’ said Maisie.

  ‘Oh, God, all right,’ said Michael.

  He left her trying on different earrings and came back to find her naked except for pearls in her ears, but he took no notice.

  ‘No seats for the ballet,’ he said, looking pleased, ‘but there’s – would you believe it? – a version of Hamlet in Russian, and with music! The poster looks as if it’s more like a circus than a Shakespeare play. What about that? Might be fun. Or a boring concert.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ said Maisie, beginning to dress. ‘You choose.’

  ‘Hamlet it is,’ said Michael.

  There had never been a Hamlet like it, nor ever would be again.

  The actors were athletes and probably circus performers. They leaped and twirled and danced about the stage with that special laconic verve and energy Russians have, making incredible feats look easy and natural.

  The story had been pared down to the source story on which Shakespeare had based Hamlet: the murder of a king by a usurper to the throne, aided by his paramour, the queen. All of Hamlet’s soliloquies were cut out, along with much else of the dialogue, but if the play was short on dialogue, it was long on sword fights of incredible acrobatic dexterity. The travelling band that came to entertain the royal impostors included fire-eaters and trapeze artists. The whole play was accompanied by wild percussive music. It was fast, noisy and exciting, and very colourful. The curtain came down on a stage littered with corpses.

  The audience had loved it and applauded enthusiastically as the corpses got up and re-enacted sword fights and fire eating by way of an encore.

  ‘But is it Shakespeare?’ laughed Michael, clapping wildly.

  ‘I think Shakespeare would have loved it,’ said Maisie above the din. ‘It was very exciting theatre!’

  ‘Well, I must say I preferred it to any Shakespeare I’ve ever seen,’ said Michael as they made their way out of the theatre.