‘Institute a search immediately!’ said the dwarf.
Asmatov was taken aback by the fellow’s impertinence, and he responded coolly that he could take no responsibility for livestock which had been brought into the theatre without his authority. He then went in search of Count Belphagore who, needless to say, was nowhere to be found.
Asmatov heard much that day about the pig Ilyich. It had been seen all over Petropol: trotting along the esplanade, in the famous Botanical Gardens where it had dug up and devoured an unusually rare orchid, even in the Turkish Baths where it had caused serious annoyance to several prominent members of the Petropol Chamber of Commerce. Three times it had been waylaid by the dogs of the town, but on each occasion it had rounded on its tormentors and routed them. A Borzoi belonging to the town’s homeopathic doctor had had its ear bitten off by the savage creature.
Eventually Ilyich was lured back into the theatre by several members of Belphagore’s company and a large dish of potato peelings. These had been rather reluctantly supplied by Madame Asmatova. Potato peelings, she was informed, were the only things that would tempt the Learned Pig into any kind of subservience.
Asmatov began to wonder whether Ilyich had been deliberately let loose in the town to drum up further publicity for Count Belphagore’s company. Certainly the incident had a marked effect on the ticket office. Bookings which had been rather sluggish increased rapidly. Matriona in her office was overwhelmed with requests for the ‘best seats available’ so that by the opening performance almost every seat had been taken for all three performances by the Count’s company.
On the opening night Asmatov took his usual stand, beneath the bust of Melpomene, to welcome his audience into the theatre. Despite the gratifying numbers who passed through the doors and up the grand staircase, Asmatov did not feel, as he usually did on these occasions, the satisfaction of a genial host welcoming his guests to a party. He was distinctly apprehensive. He noted with dismay rather than delight that the good people of Petropol had put on their finest clothes to witness the Count’s extravaganza: jewels sparkled, white shirt fronts gleamed. There was a susurrus of furs as they brushed the balustrade leading up to the Grand Tier. The air of expectation was palpable, but Asmatov knew neither what the customers were expecting, nor what they were about to receive. Acquaintances would nod and smile at him when they passed him by, as if to say: ‘My dear Asmatov, I know you will not let us down.’
As Asmatov took his own seat in the company box, he was pleased to find that a little troupe of musicians were in the pit busying their way competently through a selection from Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable. He had barely glanced at the programme for the opening performance of The Philosophy of the Damned before the lights had dimmed and the heavy red curtains embroidered with gold had lifted to reveal a brightly lit stage within the proscenium.
Asmatov had lived with the theatre a long time but he never failed to be excited by this moment. The raising of the curtain on the first act was to him like the coming of dawn to a traveller by night, an event of unblemished hope. The scene disclosed was both unexpected and reassuringly familiar. It was a conventional urban drawing room, Western European in appearance, and well decorated if not perhaps in the very latest style. Asmatov heard a murmur of satisfaction from the audience: he and they knew, or thought they knew, what they were about to enjoy: a drama or perhaps a comedy of bourgeois life, probably taken from the French. Asmatov read in his programme that we were in the apartment of Monsieur and Madame Fadinard. The play began with two bankers, Messieurs Fadinard and Fontrevault discussing arrangements for a night on the town in which they would escape their wives and resort to a house of assignation in which, they discovered to their mutual surprise, they both had a mistress. The play proceeded at first in a leisurely and genial fashion. There were little ripples of laughter which increased as the complications of the bankers’ intrigue began to escalate. Madame Fadinard appeared accompanied by her five year old daughter Francine, played, Asmatov thought, by a dwarf, but he could not be sure. There was a slightly curious incident in which Madame Fadinard’s father, a white whiskered old general in full military uniform, presented his little granddaughter with a miniature coffin in which to put her doll and she ran off in tears, but otherwise the play was proceeding very much on expected lines. A casual remark and a dropped letter arouses the suspicions of Madame Fadinard. She summons Madame Fontrevault to her aid, and by the end of the first act they are conspiring to pursue their husbands to the house of assignation. Finally Madame Fadinard says: ‘And if I find that Fadinard is up to something I’ll kill him!’ With that she pulls out a pistol from her pocket and fires it at a vase on the mantelpiece which shatters into a thousand pieces. There was a stunned silence from the audience and, with the sound of the pistol shot still ringing in their ears, the curtain fell. It was a good ten seconds before the applause began, but it was full and enthusiastic. The audience had been shocked by the gun, but they had evidently decided that they were in for an evening of uproarious comedy and had responded accordingly. Asmatov was not so sure.
By the middle of the second act Asmatov was a baffled man, uncertain whether he was witnessing a farce or a tragedy, or something that was quite horribly neither. The scene was laid in the house of assignation where one of the male clients has just died. The police appear, and an undertaker with a coffin. A horribly real corpse appears on stage, white and bloated in a bloodstained night-shirt and proves to be too large for the coffin. A bigger coffin is ordered. One of the bankers hides in the coffin and is assumed to be dead by his wife who shoots the undertaker and kills him. The corpse is manhandled in and out of coffins and hidden under tables and in cupboards. The other wife attempts suicide. By the time the curtain fell, half the audience were weak with laughter, the other half in a state of shock.
The curtain for the third act went up on Monsieur Fadinard’s bourgeois home again, but it was a scene of desolation. Coffins and corpses were being delivered to it, for no apparent reason, and the place was beginning to look like a charnel house. By the end of the act most of the main characters were dead, either killed by some bizarre accident or by each other.
The plot had become impossibly confused, but the last moments of the play, though barely comprehensible, were extremely memorable. Asmatov regularly dreamed about them for the rest of his life.
The last coffin to be brought onto the stage was accompanied by a weeping Madame Fadinard dressed in black, escorted by two policemen who had, by this time, arrested her for murder. The coffin, somewhat less than half size, was set up on an almost vertical stand facing the audience. It was then opened to reveal what looked like the corpse of the child Francine, pale and still as the night, clothed in an elaborate white lace gown. Asmatov could not tell if it was a wax doll of some kind being used, or the dwarf actress. He heard and almost felt a shudder pass across the audience.
The little coffin was covered with a red cloth. There came a tremolo from the fiddles in the pit and the shape beneath the cloth began to grow. A monkey bounded onto the stage and tore away the cloth to reveal a full sized coffin in its place. Long strands of white hair were sprouting from under the lid of the box. For several bars of music—a military march of some kind—the hair appeared to grow and long white tresses crawled across the carpeted stage towards the orchestra pit. There was a flash, a drum roll from the pit, the monkey leapt onto the coffin, tore open the lid and revealed the corpse of the General, grandfather to the young Francine, in his military uniform with the long white hair and whiskers that had poured out of the coffin. As the curtain slowly fell the coffin was picked up by six dwarfs dressed as guardsman and carried off stage to the strains of a solemn funeral march. There was a mutter of applause and laughter, then silence. When the curtain rose again the scene was empty of all coffins and persons. There remained only the corpse of the little girl Francine lying on the floor, dead, her doll beside her in its coffin. When the curtain fell again Asmatov wondered if there was
going to be a riot. There was some applause, even the occasional ‘Bravo!’, but there were also shouts of protest, catcalls and boos. Asmatov himself felt exhausted; his expectations and feelings had been so remorselessly violated and confounded.
During the curtain calls that followed the hubbub died down, but there was not much clapping. The audience left the theatre in silence. Asmatov did not stay to see them out. He left by a side door and walked about the city.
He did not go into the theatre the following day. He stayed in his apartment and would not answer calls. He had felt strangely humiliated by the theatrical experience he had undergone because it had been so utterly beyond his comprehension. Besides, there was nothing he could do. The theatre was booked up for the next two nights; he must simply let events take their course.
He would rely upon Madame Asmatova, a plump amiable body whom everyone liked, to report back to him on the reaction of the town. She went out quite early that morning and returned at noon to inform him that the town was agog with last night’s events. Many people of course had not yet seen the show and some said that they would suspend judgement until they had witnessed it for themselves. Most people, however, regardless of whether they had seen The Philosophy of the Damned or not, had made up their mind about it.
A select minority declared that they had enjoyed a profound theatrical experience. Others, more sceptical of its artistic merits, remarked in a superior kind of way that, whether one liked it or not, the work they had seen was undoubtedly a sign of the times. It was noticeable that these people were a little reluctant to specify what that sign signified, and perhaps they were wise not to do so. The majority of those who had seen The Philosophy of the Damned or who had merely heard about it from those who had, decided that the play was depraved from beginning to end, some kind of obscene joke, and an insult to the people of Petropol.
This feeling grew after the second night and on the third day, following the final performance, Asmatov himself ventured out to hear what the audience had felt. It was a bitter cold night as Asmatov walked from café to café, from street corner to street corner, his face muffled against recognition, listening to what was being said. The Philosophy of the Damned was on everyone’s lips and the news was not good. Asmatov suspected a riot, or at the very least a vehement protest against Count Belphagore and his Apocalyptic Comedians. It was time for him to go to the theatre and see what was to be done.
Asmatov entered by the stage door to find all apparently deserted. The dressing rooms were empty and looked as though they had never been used. The stage was likewise swept and bare. Everything—scenery, props, costumes—had been cleared away with remarkable thoroughness. It was odd therefore that the trap door in the centre of the stage had been left open. Asmatov approached the hole and peered in.
The light was very dim and at first he could see little beneath him, but he could hear a low murmuring and rustling sound coming from below, as of many voices and bodies in subdued but agitated restlessness. A rank smell, half-human, half-animal emanated from the trap. Quietly, Asmatov let himself down into the space beneath the stage.
It was an extensive area, deep enough for a man to walk in comfortably, but full of stage machinery and equipment and lit only by a few oil lamps suspended from the wooden uprights which supported the stage above it.
As his eyes became accustomed to the dark, Asmatov saw that the whole of this area was crowded with vast crates or containers, most of them covered by cloths and tarpaulins. From within these containers came the sounds that he had heard. The noises troubled him because he could not quite fix in his mind whether they were human or animal. They were both; they were neither. He caught the odd articulate word, but even these were strangely enunciated, as if by a parrot or some other beast who barely understood their meaning. And yet in the depths of his being he grasped the burden of all these sounds, a burden of ceaseless gnawing agitation, the movement of creatures caught in a trap, who know they are caught and yet cannot stop struggling because that is all the life they have to offer.
With infinite reluctance Asmatov drew aside one of the cloths that covered the crates. What he saw amazed him. The crate was more like a wooden cage with the bars very close together but through them he could see that these vessels were packed tight with living beings. There were men, women, children, dwarfs, animals of all kinds, even birds and snakes and they shifted endlessly within their confines, uttering strange semi-articulate cries and grunts. Asmatov uncovered one crate after another, all packed with the same varied contents. None of the inmates of these wooden prisons took the slightest notice of Asmatov: all were intent on their ceaseless, futile inward movements, like sick sleepers who toss and turn, but never settle comfortably.
As Asmatov gazed upon this panoply of damnation, the words of Starets Afanasy came to him unbidden: ‘Keep thy mind in Hell and despair not.’ Just then he heard a sharp noise, a footstep; then he saw a light. A man carrying a bright gas lantern had entered the understage. It was Count Belphagore.
Asmatov saw him climb onto the crates and, bent double because of the lowness of the ceiling, walk across them, peering into their snarling depths. As the Count looked down at his suffering creatures, Asmatov could see his face brightly illumined by the lamp, his red hair and whiskers looking more than ever like the flames of a wind-blown bonfire. Belphagore’s expression was inscrutable; it seemed to Asmatov to be deeply, almost restfully absorbed in the contemplation of his brood. Once he pushed something down through the bars of one of his prisons and was rewarded by an orgy of groans and howls. At that moment the Count’s face lit up with ecstatic delight. Asmatov recoiled in horror, making a slight noise as he did so. The noise immediately alerted the Count. He looked up, at once fiercely watchful, like a fox who has just scented a rabbit.
Asmatov ducked down behind the crates, as above him he heard the Count leaping from one to the other, searching for him. Belphagore was muttering words in a strange tongue, not Italian, a guttural language that rumbled in the throat. Such a language, thought Asmatov, might be spoken by wild beasts one to another, could they speak. He knew now that the Count was intent on hunting him down.
Asmatov was stout, ungainly, fearful and already out of breath, but he had one slender advantage over the Count: he knew the theatre as well as he knew his own home. While Asmatov wove his way carefully around the crates he could hear, and even feel the Count leaping about above him, growling and occasionally sniffing the air. There was a little side door which opened into the orchestra pit from the understage, and it was towards this that Asmatov was tentatively crawling, trying hard to suppress his gasps for breath in the fetid air. Then he knew that the Count had sensed his direction. This was no time for caution. Asmatov made a leap for the little door and got through it with the Count hard on his heels.
Asmatov was surprised to find the orchestra pit cluttered with abandoned musical instruments. It took him only a moment to realise that he could put this to his own advantage. As the Count burst through the door to the pit, Asmatov seized a cello by the neck and advanced on him, driving the spike at its base directly against Count Belphagore’s chest. The Count gave a hoarse roar as he felt himself penetrated by the spike. Meanwhile Asmatov had leapt onto the conductor’s podium, seized the brass rail that separated him from the auditorium and, at the second attempt, had vaulted over it. As he ran up the central aisle of the auditorium he had just enough sense to realise that it might be wise to get out of the theatre by a side exit. Somewhere behind him the Count was roaring and thundering after him, but further and further away now.
Asmatov slipped out of the theatre by a pass door at the side and into an alley. Snow was falling, a rare event for Petropol, even in November, softening the streets, robing the town in purity. Asmatov put his coat collar up and hurried along in the direction of St Basil’s Square. As he approached it he began to hear the sound of a crowd murmuring. Then he was out of the narrow alley and into St Basil’s.
A large number o
f Petropolitans, some carrying torches, others with pickaxes and other crude offensive weapons were gathered on the steps of the Opera House. Around them snow was falling gently from a black sky. Asmatov kept his distance from them as he skirted the square, but he could see that one man was addressing them from the glass panelled portals of the theatre itself.
Behind the glass all had been blackness; then there was a flash of light, and Asmatov saw that Count Belphagore had entered the foyer. He was holding his gas lamp aloft, but unsteadily, and, as the light swung, the man’s red hair flamed in the blackness. He staggered like a drunkard, his eyes were wild; he looked like a madman. When they saw this the crowd became frantic. They rushed for the doors of the theatre and started to smash their way in.
Asmatov saw no more. He was making for his apartment on the other side of St Basil’s Square. He had a wife and child to think of.
***
Very early the following morning Asmatov with his wife and daughter made their way unobtrusively to the harbour and boarded the little steamer for Constantinople. A few days later the Red Army swept into Petropol. It would be idle, as well as a cliché, to say that the rest was history, because it always is, but the history of Petropol was one that Mr Asmatov, a man who knew his capacities and limitations, chose never to read. He was attending to his own history.
By the year 1923 Asmatov with his wife and daughter had found their way to England, and he had become the Front of House Manager of the Bijou Theatre in Godalming. It was a modest modern building which boasted, for the greater part of the year, a permanent repertory company offering the good citizens of Godalming a pleasant diet of comedies, farces and thrillers. Every week there was a new play which was, at the same time, always exactly the same. Asmatov’s daughter, Elena, had embarked on a moderately successful career as an actress and his plump wife had reconciled herself quite comfortably to the tea and small talk of an English Provincial Town. As for Asmatov, he looked back to the days of the Imperial Opera House, Petropol as another age. If he thought of Count Belphagore and his Apocalyptic Comedians, he could believe in them only as a kind of dream he had once had. But, as Mr Asmatov, who was a wise as well as a modest man, occasionally reflected, it is often in dreams that reality begins.
Mrs Midnight and Other Stories Page 21