Fig and the Flute Player

by Christine Harrison

  In preparation for the trip Maisie had been clearing up a backlog of work. She was compiling a book (one for a series of art books) about the Russian ikon. It was to be a basic sort of book, but the illustrations had to be chosen carefully and the text had to be clear and interesting. The thing had been hanging about too long. Sometimes she sat halfway through the night working before she fell into bed.

  She had never put the lace curtains back round her bed. She had changed the whole room round, pushing the table where she worked up against the window, and she had bought a nineteenth-century American patchwork quilt for the bed. It altered the character of the room with its rich, darkish colours, lending it a sort of heavy stability. She had started to pack. Pictures of Michael at the farm flew in and out of her mind. She saw him running across the field with Kate, like two figures in a landscape, Kate’s bright hair loose and flowing out behind her. She saw Declan playing with the kittens and Kate stooping down to give him a kiss, and his quick, charming smile, Michael standing silently watching them. She saw the three of them off in one of the ramshackle cars, happy and carefree. She glimpsed them naked in the bed on the floor, where she had slept with Michael, under the indulgent eye of Michael’s father and the cool stare of his mother over the drooping lilies. Maisie despised these imaginings. She worked steadfastly, stoically, she ate and slept enough to keep herself going, and when she woke she felt the fell of dark, not day.

  PART FIVE

  St Petersburg

  1

  THE Abrahamovs met Maisie and Rose at the airport and took them straight out to a restaurant, insisting on buying them a good meal to welcome them to St Petersburg. ‘We live only on scraps these days,’ said Elena Abrahamova, ‘we are too old to bother much about food. But you young people must eat.’

  Maisie remembered them as being frugal and careful with money when it came to things like food and clothes – Elena was now wearing a rather strange hat which she might well have made herself out of an ancient piece of bric-a-brac found at the bottom of a drawer somewhere. However, they spent lavishly on things that interested them, their home stuffed with fabulous spoils from extensive travels. They had travelled in Arabia, China, India, Finland and Iceland as well as much of Russia, always living on a shoestring, parking themselves on people they hardly knew but who were overcome by their erudite charm, and felt honoured to have them as guests for as long as they wanted to stay. Which made it all the stranger that Maisie and Rose were being treated to this expensive meal.

  Maisie admired the wily old pair. Elena Abrahamova certainly looked as if she had lived her eighty years and more to the full, the intimation of experience showing in the lines and creases of a face that would be beautiful until her dying day.

  The thing you noticed about Vasily Abrahamov was the gaze from his large, dark brown eyes when speaking (most people had to look away). Maisie had seen no one else, ever, do this in the same way; the gaze was unfaltering, fixed, yet in some peculiar way unseeing – this was not connected to his blindness. It was something he had always done, and it was as if now his blindness had caught up with that disconcertingly frank, unseeing stare. There was an innocence in it, the look of a young child who first looks at new things in the world with unadulterated self-forgetful interest. As if the eye was a receiver only. It was impossible to believe that those brown eyes could not see, and Maisie wondered seriously whether his blindness was not something he had invented for some reason.

  Just as Maisie had predicted, Rose’s cynical facade did not stand a chance in the face of these formidable old people. She smiled openly and politely, even warmly, when they took her hands and said, ‘Is this really Rosa?’ She was just Rose, herself, with them, a young woman Maisie had not seen for a while. She did not flinch when they patted her hands, when Elena inspected her earrings with a magnifying glass she kept in her battered purse. (‘Sweet,’ she said of the starry clusters Rose had had for her birthday.) And Maisie’s dryness of spirit, her inner sadness, seemed nearer to self-pity in the face of their stoicism, which was both innate and habitual. In a way Maisie wanted to be left alone with her sadness. It was all that she had left of her love affair and she did not want to lose it. It kept her company, the sadness, like a friend stricken with a fatal illness, but whose last days you want to share.

  She wondered how Elena and Vasily Abrahamov would fare the one without the other, they were so intertwined, every gesture and thought. If their bond was severed by death, she thought, the stoicism would still be there, even in the face of that. Perhaps they would meet their end together – done to death by brigands in the Khyber Pass, or some such fitting thing.

  ‘We were sorry to hear about your mother,’ they said. ‘Such sad news.’ But that sort of grief, it was implied in the tone of voice, was to be taken as a matter of course, it was the way of things.

  Vasily had been a professor at the university, teaching literature – his special interest had been the Icelandic Sagas – but now he had a new, very different enthusiasm. It was Walt Whitman, whom he was translating into Russian. And he was researching a young unknown Russian poet who had died of starvation during the siege of Leningrad; ‘Such a loss to us.’ Elena had been a travel writer and still wrote the occasional piece, gave talks and slide lectures; she was in great demand.

  They could not have done half of what they did if they had not lived in this particular Russian city. ‘There has always been a certain freedom here,’ said Elena. ‘It is because of the quality of the light, you know. It affects everything.’

  Maisie thought it probably had more to do with the Abrahamovs’ patrician inability to be anything other than intellectually free. They seemed to have led charmed lives in some ways, moving about apparently freely and never seeming to watch what they said or wrote. But Maisie reckoned they always knew what they were up to, neither was a fool.

  They lived in a yellow-washed eighteenth-century house overlooking the sparkling water of the Neva. The drawing-room was dappled in moving reflected light from the water, which played over the mirrors and tapestries and rich carpets which hung on the walls. Everywhere in the big room were souvenirs of their travels, made of silver and jade, copper and mother-of-pearl, and many beautifully carved wooden pieces. Maisie especially admired a silver dish with enamelled tulips. The long sofa was piled deep with richly coloured and embroidered cushions. At one end of the room was an opened grand piano.

  ‘We have a little entertainment for you this evening,’ said Elena. There was no concession to the fact that her guests had had a long journey.

  ‘I think I’m too tired,’ Rose was murmuring. ‘I won’t keep awake much longer.’

  ‘You must not miss this,’ she was told, ‘the most wonderful lieder singer in Russia – perhaps the world. Oh, no – you must stay awake. Once he sings you will not feel tired.’

  Friends of the old couple turned up in ones and twos and sat about the room, chatting, waiting for the famous baritone to arrive.

  Suddenly he was there. A man in his late thirties, with magnificent, almost impossibly romantic good looks, in the splendour and prime of life. He was to sing Schubert – the Winterreise.

  In spite of his wonderful beauty and magnetic personality, Rose fell asleep, leaning against her mother. Maisie herself was drawn into the music, she was tired and the music flooded her.

  Kiev. The pathos of the snowy statues in the garden, shut out from the feast. The crunch of snow under Michael’s boots as he held her: ‘You are my prisoner.’ The way he looked sometimes, as if he wanted something out of reach. She had wanted it to be her, it had been her. She had lost it, thrown it away, denied it. The one thing.

  There was a tenacity in the music, in the voice of the Russian singing Schubert. Something brave and tenacious. After all – she closed her eyes, after all – the man’s voice, in its beauty, was drawing something out of her, drawing out poison, leaving her weak and well.

  Maisie went to bed that night with a new feeling, fresh, childlike. As
if cleansed, she slept through the light St Petersburg night as after a fever has left the body. She slept fitfully, waking to find it half-light, sleeping again, and waking to more light.

  Next morning she left Rose to sleep and, feeling hungry, went in search of some breakfast. It seemed there wasn’t any. Having given them such a welcome, their hosts went to the other extreme and told Maisie they must now fend for themselves as they, the Abrahamovs, led such abstemious lives, they were sure Maisie and Rose would not want to share their frugality. If they wanted to make themselves coffee that was quite all right, but coffee was such a price these days, they wouldn’t mind providing their own? Smiling charmingly, Elena produced an empty enamelled tin for the purpose.

  They really were getting slightly cranky after all, Maisie thought, dryly remembering how she and Leo had entertained them for several weeks on full board, even paying for theatre tickets. Oh, well. There were shortages in the city. She smiled back. She went up to warn Rose that there was no breakfast to be had and that she must take enough roubles when she went out to feed herself for the day.

  ‘What do you want to do today, anyway?’ she asked Rose, who looked very tired still and said she was going to go back to sleep and then she’d go and wander about for a while.

  ‘Please don’t drag me off doing cultural things,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to look at museums or art galleries, I just want to drift about by myself.’

  ‘You don’t want to come to the auction with me?’

  ‘What bloody auction? I thought we were on holiday.’

  ‘We are on holiday. I thought you liked auctions. Anyway, I have to go. When Daddy knew I was coming to St Petersburg, he made a point of asking me to bid for something for a client of his. Actually this is quite something and should be interesting. Lately, you know, all the stuff has been shipped out for auction – the flood-gates are opening – but now the Russians are catching on and they’re hanging on to things to auction themselves. I expect there will be a lot of foreign buyers there.’

  ‘What have they asked you to bid for?’

  ‘A fifteenth-century Dormition of the Virgin. Exciting?’

  ‘Riveting, but you’re not going to persuade me to come.’

  ‘Well – enjoy your day, then. I’ll see you this evening.’

  ‘Yes … oh, I suppose I’d better get up.’

  Maisie smiled at her daughter. She checked on the address she had in her handbag of the venue for the auction. ‘Go and find some breakfast,’ she said to Rose.

  Maisie’s feeling of lightness and peace had stayed with her. It had been a long time since she had walked down a street with such a mood of calm and optimism. She noticed the other people in the world, fleshed out again in a real sense. She smiled at the citizens of St Petersburg. She shared the world with them: ‘We are all alive at the same time,’ she thought in wonder. The same century, the same day, a sunny day in St Petersburg. Love, no longer trapped, fixated, flooded out over the created world. She felt celibate and free.

  Her pleasant, quiet mood persisted even as she looked through the dusty stacked canvases in the auction room. There were so many and the place was in such a muddle. A lot of the stuff was worthless, abstract landscapes of a certain sort, State-orientated pictures of the Thirties and many nineteenth-century ikons. Seen like this, out of its religious context, Maisie reflected that the ikon was a strange, stiff, awkward sort of thing – it wasn’t like a painting in the usual sense. Thrown about the place like this, what did they mean? People were buying them as they might buy decorative wallpaper. Perhaps they would still work their purpose out in the households of the godless.

  Dealers were sitting about on the magnificent curving staircase. They shifted to let her go upstairs. Here, laid out in some sort of order was the cream of the collection. There were one or two Symbolist paintings – Russian Rossettis – several paintings from the Moscow avant-garde group that were expected to achieve high prices, and a huge, dynamic early-twentieth-century work by a painter who was beginning to interest the art world. There had obviously been an underground art market all through the post-Revolutionary years which had now thrown up paintings such as these.

  There were only two ikons, the Dormition that Maisie had come to see and an eighteenth-century Our Lady of Kazan, valuable mainly because of the silver and gold casing which was set with precious stones. Maisie examined the Dormition carefully. There was no doubt in her mind that it was genuine, unmistakably late-fifteenth-century and from a Novgorod painter.

  ‘Must we keep meeting like this, Mrs Shergold?’ The sweet, chirping voice was familiar, but she could not remember the name of the tall pale Englishman, from one of the London sale rooms. ‘I expect you’re after the Dormition,’ he went on, ‘it’s going to run up beyond its value.’

  ‘It wouldn’t surprise me,’ said Maisie, trying to recall the man’s name. The mild, dreamy look was deceptive – she guessed he was interested in the naïve painting of a family having a meal. He laughed and chirruped, ‘You’re quite right.’

  Nightingale, that was it – Simon Nightingale.

  ‘Come for a drink,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t start for a couple of hours. You know old Pearson, don’t you?’ Another tall Englishman leered jokily at her. She had never seen him in her life. But they all ended up eating salad and pancakes stuffed with caviare and drinking a peppery vodka.

  Old Pearson squeezed lemon over his pancake. ‘They tell me the auctioneer is more used to dealing in horses – it should be an interesting afternoon. You’re after the Dormition, Nightingale tells me.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Maisie.

  ‘It’s an odd way of doing things, I must say. There’s so much stuff, half of it hasn’t been properly categorised – everything chucked in together. If you get your ikon, have you got a licence to get it out?’

  ‘That part is nothing to do with me,’ said Maisie, ‘thank goodness.’ She knew she should stay and talk shop, that way she might glean a few hints as to who she might be up against in the bidding. But she really did not feel like being with Nightingale and Pearson after their second vodkas. She was not doing her duty, but for once she didn’t care and made an excuse to leave.

  ‘See you there,’ she said.

  ‘Expect we’ll manage to stagger back, won’t we, Pearson?’ Nightingale cheeped happily.

  Maisie went out into the sunny street and walked about for a bit. Then, on the spur of the moment, she ran up the steps to the Russian Museum – she’d not been there for ages, and there it was lying in her path. Inside it was pleasantly cool and ordered. A few soft-footed people wandered about, almost on tiptoe, as people do in museums. The place was not at all crowded. She thought she would have a look round, then go and get a coffee, perhaps read a newspaper, until it was time to go back to the auction.

  She was in the Marine Gallery, she discovered, which housed the paintings of the great Russian painter Aivazovsky, Russia’s Turner. Leo had once, years ago, had one of his early landscapes through his hands. A huge painting dominated the room she was in. She was looking at … the sea. Sparkling, frothing, wet. You could have jumped into it. A great wave threw itself up, with a great shattering force, a violent crack. Deep underneath there, deep in the deepest depths, there was a force, a single power which held together the chaos, the seeming chaos, of the surface waves, which tossed about so furiously, so madly. And quite by the way, a ship was tossed, broken, sinking; small humans, unimportant, soon to be obliterated, were hanging on to the broken mast. It hardly seemed to matter whether they survived, one knew they would not survive this sea. Against its power their little lives were inconspicuous, of no consequence at all. The rending sound of the mast was swallowed up in the roaring mouth of the sea.

  The painting was about abandonment. The sea itself was abandoned to its own power, given up to it. And the little figures were abandoned in another sense – abandoned by everything, like a fistful of warm little toys thrown into the foam. There was no sign anywh
ere of Divine providence, only of an overwhelming creative power and energy. It was called The Wave; Maisie called it Abandonment.

  She turned away from the great picture. The place was emptying.

  She saw him first.

  He was putting on his glasses to look at his catalogue. At first she thought she had seen him, not in reality, but in some inward way. As it was so impossible that he should be here, some part of her brain denied it, told her it was not so.

  Only when he turned and recognised her, came over quickly to her, seized her by the hands, his face bright … only feeling him, the warmth and touch of his hands, hearing him say, ‘Maisie, Maisie’ … only then did she think it really might be him.

  ‘Hallo, Michael,’ she whispered. ‘Is it you?’

  He wiped his glasses, then, folding them with one hand, he put them in his pocket. His every small movement, the expressions which came and went around the mouth and eyes, seemed to her incredible and unique, and engaged her shaking heart. His eyes looked very green, greener than she remembered them, with a light like the light that flickers over the sea.

  He was holding her wrists then, delicately between finger and thumb. ‘Your little wrists,’ he said. The words were jagged, painful.

  Maisie was so overwhelmed by this meeting, it was as if they had never left and lost one another. Amazed that they had ever parted, she had forgotten how it had happened. They did not embrace each other then, or kiss. Only touched each other delicately, lightly, with feathery touches.