Fig and the Flute Player

by Christine Harrison

  ‘We have to take a train to the place, I can’t remember the name – Sergei knows it. I hope the weather stays fine.’

  ‘Go to sleep, then.’

  ‘I’m glad I came to Russia,’ said Rose. ‘Are you, Mummy?’

  Maisie pretended she was already asleep.

  3

  THEY woke to a sun like solid gold, burning against a periwinkle sky. It was going to be a very hot day.

  Elena and Vasily were enchanted with the idea of a picnic. Elena found a battered straw hat and tied a piece of net round it. Wearing this, she made some lemonade to take.

  ‘A picnic will do Vasily so much good – he is depressed today,’ she said.

  ‘Sergei said we are all to meet at the railway station,’ said Rose. ‘He will bring Michael and anyone else who wants to come.’

  Rose put her drawing materials in a large canvas shoulder-bag. ‘I’m going to sketch,’ she said. Maisie was surprised and pleased; Rose had done little of the kind since leaving university. There was a new tone in her daughter’s voice, eager and lively. Maisie put on a white linen suit and tied a white silk scarf round her head.

  When they got to the station, Sergei and Michael had just arrived with the drummer in the group (an older man, who seldom spoke) and a boy with an undernourished look and a merry smile, and Lila. They had brought a big cardboard box full of rye loaves, hard goat’s cheese and strawberries. Michael had brought his flute and flagons of wine, and looked to Maisie more attractive than she had ever seen him, he had taken to wearing his dark hair a little longer, and she liked it.

  ‘You look ravishing,’ he said to her, touching her face.

  ‘So do you,’ she said.

  ‘All of us are ravishing,’ said Sergei, not knowing what the word meant but liking the sound of it. He helped the old people on to the train, making a great fuss of them.

  The train was a stopping country train and had wooden carriages. It pulled out with a great jerk. Michael and Maisie stayed in the corridor together, Michael holding the back of her neck with one hand, and steadying them both with the other hand on the sash of the open window. As they left St Petersburg and its suburbs and made for open countryside, the smell of grass came through the window and, in the heat, the fields of rye seemed to shimmer and move like water. There was a burst of laughter from the carriage, where everyone seemed happy and convivial.

  Michael whispered in her ear. ‘I want to make love to you,’ and then, in the other ear, as if they were two separate secrets, ‘I love you.’

  But in spite of her happiness, Maisie tried to name her feelings and objectify her desire for this man, in a brave, high-spirited attempt to refuse herself permission to be overcome by love, as she had been and as she knew she could be once more. Michael, knowing intuitively what was going on, tried in subtle ways to break through her fragile defences, but she remained light and hung on to her precarious gaiety. It was a tightrope she was walking. If she fell, she might never again be restored to herself. The vertiginous feeling was like being drunk. She was in some sort of ecstasy, which had some connection with grief.

  The sights and sounds around her impinged on her with unusual intensity. Michael was an integral part of it all, but he was not the centre of it, not the focal point. There was no centre, no focal point, everything she saw and experienced was interrelated, everything part of everything else.

  ‘Are you happy?’ He probed her feelings.

  ‘Brilliantly happy,’ she said, smiling and kissing him. But he was perplexed by something. The first feeling he had ever had about her, that she could slip away from him, came back to him strongly. He stroked her hair, arranging the strands that escaped her scarf to his liking.

  They were speeding past great rolling expanses of rye grass and buttercups. Then they stopped at a tiny wooden station with a Pepsi Cola sign on the platform as if it was the name of the place, none other being visible: A man with a long-handled axe got on.

  Rose left the others and came out to join them while the train was stopped. She leaned out of the open window. ‘Isn’t it all beautiful?’ she said.

  There was the feeling of the train being a temporary home. Everyone seemed to settle down quite naturally and do the sort of things they would do at home. People were playing cards and having meals, not in the way English people do, with a packet of egg and cress sandwiches, surreptitiously, but laying everything out, producing a cloth, bringing out bottles of pickles, everything. Someone was even shaving into a bowl of water held by his little boy. The boy cursed as the train started again, spilling soapy water. Rose went back into the carriage with the others.

  Michael shifted Maisie in front of him and stood holding her from behind. She felt his warm breath on the back of her neck, she breathed in the sweet warm country air.

  Underneath her undoubted very real passion for him, there was this insistent voice which questioned everything, reminded her of what had happened in Ireland. Yet love was not a bargain – I’ll only love you if you’ll love me only. Only me, for ever and ever. Once she had been drawn to his look of freedom, his non-attachment, she had wanted it for herself.

  He wanted to reclaim her, she knew, by making love to her. From this she held back. She wanted the choice to be hers, not his. She would not be consumed by him. There was no doubt that she loved him, but she would not claim him. How often does he think of Kate? she wondered. Every day? She was surprised that the thought gave her no pain at all.

  Something was different now. She had retrieved her self. Because of this, her love spilled out towards the world in a way it had not done when it had been trapped, narrowed to those things that were to do with her lover … the station where she had met him, everything he came in contact with she had loved as if it was part of him, his environment and aura. Now her love and her interest spilled over to Sergei and Rose and their friends, to the Abrahamovs in the railway carriage, laughing and making a noise. To the old couple with their pickled herrings, and the man shaving and his serious little boy holding the bowl as steady as he could in the rocking train. It spread out to the fields of rye and the buttercups reflecting the bright gold of the sun, to the very breeze which Maisie drew in with her nostrils.

  Other people had been shadows to her, now they were infinitely human and real. Yet it was all precarious. Michael’s hold over her emotions was still alive, still potent. The look of loneliness in his eyes struck at her heart, but she hid that from him.

  The train stopped at a halt in open country, and Sergei started to bundle them out. ‘Follow me,’ he said, leading the way across the track.

  They walked single-file through the long grass threaded with poppies and many other wild flowers. It felt high above sea-level here, the air was thin and dry and hot.

  Sergei led his little tribe to the shade of a clump of heavily foliaged trees. In this oasis, they sat and rested in the lovely black shade, and spread out their picnic.

  ‘It’s good to be out of the city,’ said Vasily, ‘where such terrible things happen.’

  The drummer produced some small hard-boiled eggs like gull’s eggs from his pockets, and silently offered them round. He ate his, shell and all, to general fascination.

  Rose made sketches of the old people, Elena in her hat, Vasily with his strange gaze. And she made several sketches of Sergei. She told him she would like to paint his portrait. He was very pleased.

  Michael played for them on his flute for a while, obligingly playing what was asked for. Then he and Maisie wandered off. They found a small stream and sat down by it. It was very hot, and Maisie took off her scarf and soaked it in the water, and wiped her face, and Michael’s face.

  ‘It’s too hot to be out of the shade,’ she said.

  ‘I want to be alone with you,’ he answered. He kissed her, the sun scorching down on them.

  ‘We must go back,’ she said. ‘The sun is too hot to bear.’

  ‘Do you love me?’ he asked. ‘Do you still love me?’

  ‘Yes
,’ she said.

  They walked back to the shady trees and sat with the others, drinking Elena’s lemonade, watching a hawk hovering in the blue sky.

  ‘How cruel nature is,’ said Rose. She said it in a lively, curious way, as if it had just struck her.

  ‘It gives an edge to life,’ said Elena. ‘What a soft, cosy, boring world it would be without cruelty.’ She meant it.

  ‘Yet you are upset and depressed by things that happen in the world – by the murder in the Kirovsky Prospekt, for instance,’ said Maisie.

  ‘No, it is not me who is depressed by it,’ said Elena, ‘it is Vasily. He is an idealist and believes society is perfectible. Vasily believes everything should be achieved by education and dialogue. I do not share this belief.’

  Vasily’s eyes were closed, but he was not asleep. ‘In my last life,’ he said, ‘I was living in classical Greece. It was preferable. I preferred it.’

  Sergei was standing by one of the trees, eating strawberries, his face in profile for Rose to draw. He was pointing to the horizon. ‘Look,’ he said.

  They all looked in surprise. A dark storm-cloud was rolling in. It was an incredible sight, it looked more like smoke from a great explosion or fire than anything else, but it was a dark rain-cloud unrolling like a black carpet across the sky, still in the distance.

  When they got back to the halt where they would pick up their train, it had become quite dark. But it still did not rain. On the way back Maisie sat in the carriage with Michael’s arm round her.

  At the next stop some gipsies got on. They sat apart, aware of their apartness but proud and swaggering, not in a boastful way – the swaggering was natural to them. One of the women had a baby dressed in rich, princely gear.

  Maisie closed her eyes. Sergei began singing, and they all sang Russian songs in the gloom. Like people being taken across the Styx.

  4

  ALTHOUGH the lovely weather had broken, and it was heavy and sultry, still it did not rain. Everyone was waiting for it, wishing it would. The metallic sky seemed to rest on the golden domes and rooftops.

  Sergei had invited Rose to go back with him to Kiev and meet Annya, and paint his portrait. So it was arranged that Rose should do this, and that she and her mother would meet up in Moscow for a look at the capital before they returned to London.

  Maisie would not go with them to Kiev. Nothing would have made her miss the Eucharist when the ikon was to find a Russian home. And she could not, in any case, have brought herself to leave Michael, who had one more engagement in St Petersburg: he was to give a whole day workshop of his own songs at the School of Music. The Russians loved him and took his work more seriously than anyone else had ever done.

  Maisie asked him if he would go with her to the Eucharist. ‘I am going everywhere with you,’ he said.

  When it came to it, they had some difficulty in finding the church. A taxi dropped them off at what turned out to be the wrong place, and they walked about for some time before they found it, the Church of the Apparition of the Virgin. It was already jammed with people. It was doubtful whether two more people could be squeezed in, but they found a space to breathe, stepping up on to a stone ridge at the back of the church. Here they leaned back, against scooped-out recesses, which made Maisie feel as if she and Michael were living frescoes. They had a perfect view over the heads of the mass of people, and they were not too near the heat from the thousands of candles.

  They had entered another world, although this church did not have the same ancient and mysterious feeling that had belonged to the one in Kiev they had visited. It was lighter, its atmosphere more joyful and optimistic. There were pillars covered in lapis lazuli, beautiful ironwork, banks of white geraniums whose scent freshened the heavy air and mixed with the smell of incense, angelic statues with gold-tipped wings leaning in towards the centre from the domed ceiling.

  The iconostasis was one of the most exquisitely harmonious that Maisie had ever seen, each ikon enriching and balancing every other. She longed to see it more closely. She was surprised that this church had been hitherto unregarded by her, and was not marked on the tourist map. It was obviously used and loved. ‘Look,’ she whispered to Michael. ‘The ikon.’

  People were waiting in line to kiss with reverent fervour the famous Ikon of the Steppes, which was placed apart in front of the iconostasis. All the while, through the long service, that peculiarly Russian sound of the choir, that low, warm, rich, reverberating sound, with a thrilling harsh edge, rose and fell, rose and fell. Maisie thought of Denisov, and wished he was here, thought perhaps he was. She thought too of the murdered Russian, no doubt now a martyr to the monarchist cause.

  A huge basket of crumbled bread was blessed. A priest removed the red napkin from a gold cup of wine. Then a line of people patiently formed a queue, like a bread queue; priests and acolytes moved amongst the press of people who kissed their robes.

  Maisie, absorbed in the scene, was becoming dimly aware of something unconnected to what she was watching – sudden bright stabs which spotlighted the gold-tipped angels, a different, whiter, more eerie light than the warm glow from the racks of candles. And again, underneath the sonorous music of the choir, a sound like gunfire or thunder. Then another sound, a sudden noise which she could not identify. She looked at Michael.

  ‘Rain,’ he whispered, ‘it’s a storm.’

  At the end of the service, the doors were opened to a sheet of water falling from the sky. As they prepared to go, hesitantly because of the inevitability of getting drenched, Michael spoke to her quietly. ‘Don’t go that way,’ he said softly, quickly. Maisie caught a glimpse of what he had seen. Waiting out in the pouring rain were half a dozen armed soldiers.

  Maisie felt faint. ‘We must warn them,’ she said.

  But Michael seized her hand and, holding it in a tight grip, pulled her sharply towards a small door on the opposite side. ‘Shut up,’ he said.

  When they were outside he said, ‘Don’t be a bloody fool, Maisie. Let’s just get out of here. I’m not going to end up in a police cell. Anyway,’ he said, ‘we’re all going to be drowned.’ The streets were deserted and running with water.

  A lone tram loomed into sight, lit up like a ship, and moving slowly. Michael hauled Maisie on board and they collapsed on to a seat, soaked to the skin.

  ‘Where is it going?’ Maisie wiped the water from her eyes.

  ‘Away from whatever is going on in there,’ said Michael. ‘I’m glad I was with you,’ he added.

  ‘You sensed all along there would be trouble,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I’ve been brought up with a nose for it, I suppose.’

  ‘I’m glad you got me out, Michael, but we deserted them.’

  ‘There’s nothing either of us could do. It’s all a foregone thing. We are onlookers, bystanders. Anyway, perhaps it’s not God’s plan – the monarchy, I mean – perhaps God has got something different and even more mysterious in mind.’

  Looking at Maisie’s distressed, anxious face he said, ‘I expect they will just pick up a few people for questioning and then release them. Some of them may be kicked out of the country. They haven’t actually done anything – they can’t be that much of a threat, there’s no army as far as we know.’

  ‘The interest of the people makes them a threat,’ said Maisie.

  ‘Yes, well, that’s not our problem. Our problem is where the hell are we?’

  The tram had stopped because of the depth of water they were in. They were near the river, and the whole wide street was completely flooded. Further down, the river was in full flood, a yellowish-brown, fast-flowing torrent of water. Someone was paddling a boat along the drowned street, shouting something. No one else was about.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Michael.

  The Abrahamovs’ house must be flooded.’ Maisie felt a stab of alarm.

  Holding on to each other for safety, they began to make their slow way through the water, which at times was up to Maisie’s knees. It took them ne
arly an hour to reach the Abrahamovs’ house, it was so difficult making a way through the flood-water. Sometimes someone in an upper window called to them to be careful.

  When they got to the house, they found the water up to the ground-floor window-sills. Michael climbed on to a sill and managed to open a window, and he pulled Maisie into the house after him. A weird and desolate sight met their eyes. The Abrahamovs’ treasures from all over the world were floating, bobbing about in the dirty water.

  Michael fished out a goblet and a bronze Chinese opium pipe. Maisie started to laugh. She had no idea why, the laughter just seized her. Michael gave her a sudden grin, and kissed her.

  They found Elena and Vasily Abrahamov sitting up in bed fully clothed. Elena was reading to her husband from Leaves of Grass. She motioned them to be quiet, ignoring their weary and dishevelled appearance. They sank quietly to the floor and listened as they were told ‘Of the terrible doubt of appearances … of the uncertainty after all, that we may be deluded.’ Vasily nodded his head as Elena read, translating the words in his mind into his native tongue.

  Elena silently pointed to the samovar, inviting Michael and Maisie to help themselves. Beside the samovar were glasses in beautiful silver holders. They helped themselves gratefully to tea. Vasily, hearing them, greeted them, telling them to listen. ‘Go on,’ he said impatiently to his wife.

  ‘Maybe the things I perceive, the animals, plants, men, hills, shining and flowing waters … the skies of day and night, colours, densities, forms, maybe these are (doubtless they are) only apparitions, and the real something to be known.’

  This time the lightning and the thunder came together, rattling the glasses on the table. Sitting there on the floor, wet through, listening to the words of the poem punctuated by thunderclaps, Maisie was overwhelmed with loneliness, and she reached out for Michael’s hand. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘we can’t sit about here drenched.’ But they finished their tea, telling the Abrahamovs what had happened.