The Birds Fall Down

by Rebecca West

  “Laura,” said Nikolai.

  “Grandfather?”

  “You’re biting your nails,” he said icily. “It’s an ill-bred trick. You have the good fortune to inherit the long, narrow hands of our family, do not spoil them.”

  “Yes, Grandfather,” she said, tears standing in her eyes. He should not have said that in front of a stranger.

  “As I’ve said,” continued Chubinov, “there was no further doubt in my mind. I was sure that at last we’d uncovered the trail of our Judas, and that we knew his name. I had to keep my thoughts to myself. There might be some traitors in that very room. I stood up and said that I could do nothing, I must return to Paris and confer with the head of the organization there, to the end of finding out what charges the police had brought against Primar and Korolenko and Damatov, and of warning our other centres that a traitor was at work. I also told them that I would try to get in touch with Gorin, and the mention of his name instantly tranquillized everybody. I bent over the actress and kissed her hand, and she looked up at me with her great eyes and told me that if Damatov were to die she would not wait a single day before following him into the Absolute. She said this with perfect sincerity, but also in perfect style, with that same utterly heart-breaking lack of resonance, and I knew that she would not fulfil this prediction, but would live to enjoy much happiness and success. There was nothing unpleasant about this realization, on the contrary, it was as agreeable as looking forward to spring in the middle of winter. I smiled down at her and kissed her hand again, and then asked the comrades who had met me in the station to take me somewhere where I could send a telegram, and said my good-byes.

  “We had to walk quite a long way, and then take a bus, and then go a journey by underground railway, to the General Post Office, which was the only place from which I could send a telegram at that hour. It was dark now, and the city was fascinating and terrifying in its exoticism. The streets round the General Post Office were empty, except for a large number of cats. It all might have been a fantasy drawn by Gustave Doré. I sent a telegram to the deputy head of our Battle Organization in Paris, whom I can now dare to name to you as a man called Stankovitch, who would, I was certain, know all that was to be known about the investigation of Berr, asking him to meet me at the station when I arrived in Paris the next afternoon. Then, finding that it was not so very late, I asked my companions to take me to look at St. Paul’s Cathedral, as I remembered from a passage in the correspondence of either Herzen or Marx that it was not far away. The two Englishmen seemed surprised by the request but agreed. I stood with them in the street looking up at the dark mass of the superb building against the starlit sky, but when I turned to them to compliment them on their national possession and ask them if they didn’t consider it wonderful that Wren had never seen a dome until he built one for himself, I found they were looking not at the cathedral but at me. One of them said, ‘You know a lot about all this, don’t you?’ I said that I knew no more than he and his friends. They said, ‘Well, when we asked you if you had known that Primar and Korolenko and Damatov were coming to London, you said you hadn’t, but it seemed to us you weren’t entirely surprised to hear that they’d meant to. And why were you smiling? You smiled twice when that woman was telling her story. What’s funny about all this?’ I could not tell them that I had smiled at the actress remembering a number because it was three more than the year she was born, or because I thought she would not take poison if Damatov were to die. They were good men, but they wouldn’t have understood. They took me back to my room in Pimlico, and arrived next morning to take me to Victoria as if they were police agents seeing a criminal out of town. I found myself resenting this for reasons which made me ashamed. It is hard to overcome the disadvantages of one’s birth. I was angry because one of the men who doubted me was an old soldier from the ranks, the other a tailor.

  “When I arrived at the Gare du Nord, Stankovitch was waiting for me. We went to a bar, and ordered a meal, and I left him in order to telephone to Gorin at the pension near Montreux. But he wasn’t there. The proprietress answered me and told me that he’d gone to Paris to see his doctor. This disquieted me and I asked anxiously about his health, but she answered with such indifference that, remembering she was a sympathizer, I concluded that she was probably repeating an untruth which Gorin had told her to give strangers. I rang off and tried to find him at the hotel he always stayed at in Paris, the Hôtel de Guipuzcoa et de Racine, it’s a little place between the Hôtel de Ville and the Tour Saint-Jacques. But he wasn’t there either. My heart sank. I then went back to Stankovitch and the meal we had ordered, and while we ate I spoke of the disappearance of the three young men and found that he knew all about that and the dispatch of Nadya Sarin to London, so I went on to question him about Berr. He answered reticently. Gorin, he said, had always impressed on him that Berr was to be handled with kid gloves, he might at any moment throw up his job as an informer. ‘Is he really so disagreeable?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know that first-hand, I’ve never spoken to him, but Gorin’s had him thoroughly investigated, and all the reports say so. Apparently he strides along with the most arrogant expression on his face, and he’s unkind to his wife, leaves her trotting after him, hardly able to catch up, and never seems to speak to her. But it’s not merely a question of his disposition. What’s to be feared is that he may get into difficulties with his niece’s husband, who’s a reactionary and who, if he found any of us hanging about, might denounce him and us.’ I found myself wondering if Gorin had not, since his illness, lost something of his genius. Surely this tale that no revolutionary must speak to an informer on account of his family was the very yarn which would be spun by a police spy who didn’t want his master to know that he was doing business with both sides.

  “‘So you’re quite satisfied,’ I asked, ‘that Berr is loyal to us?’ ‘Yes, quite satisfied,’ he said. ‘He’s a very isolated man. He makes no contacts at all except with the Diakonov household, and nobody goes there now except the blind and the halt and the lame who are pensioners of the Countess’s charity. There’s nobody else at all,’ he said, ‘except a man named Kamensky, who worked for Diakonov when he was Minister of Justice and is of no importance at all. Gorin was interested in him at first, and three times set a comrade outside the Diakonov apartment to see if perhaps he was someone we’d known in Russia under a different name, and twice he didn’t turn up, but the third time he did. I forget who saw him, but anyway he was nobody; and Gorin put me to search Kamensky’s room at his hotel, the San Marino, near the Hôtel de Ville, and that told us everything we needed to learn. It’s a funny thing, he’s an engineer, and apparently quite a good one, and one would expect him to be enlightened, but he ought to have been a monk. There were several icons and shelves of religious books and a very full diary, full of pious vapourings. He’s evidently a thorough nincompoop and he spends much of his time toadying to the Countess Diakonova, who is a bigoted and reactionary woman.’ I must beg your pardon for that, Nikolai Nikolaievitch. ‘Anyway,’ Stankovitch went on, ‘Berr keeps us fully posted about all Kamensky’s doings, and they add up to exactly nothing. But don’t worry about Berr. He’s completely reliable. We’ve tested him again and again.’

  “It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him what I had heard from the diplomat’s son in London. But then it suddenly struck me that if Stankovitch spoke so well of Berr he was probably a traitor himself. It struck me that my world was terribly uncertain. I had been seen off from Victoria by men who thought I was a traitor, though I was loyal, and here I had landed at the Gare du Nord to be met by a man whom I had thought was loyal but who was probably a traitor. And I could not get in touch with Gorin. ‘Where does Berr live?’ I asked, quite without subtlety. I try to follow technique but I am apt to get flustered. That is one of the reasons why I admire Gorin, who is never at fault. ‘There’s no harm in my telling you that,’ said Stankovitch, ‘for strangely enough he’s in the telephone book. He lives in a block of flats in one o
f the newer working-class suburbs to the north-east of Paris, one of those places built on the English model, with gardens round them. He really must be a very disagreeable man. Apparently his wife runs about like mad all day, working for him, but Gorin says that in fine weather he’s apt to spend the whole day idling in a queer sort of hut, a summer-house affair, in a patch of his own he has in the vegetable patches which are part of the estate. I’ll tell you something. I think Gorin has kept a pretty close watch on this man Berr, in case we have to take disciplinary action against him some day.’

  “When Stankovitch said that, I saw my duty clear before me. I’d been wrong to doubt Gorin’s efficiency. He’d long suspected what I had just found out. Had he been available I’d have asked him what the next step should be, but he wasn’t and I didn’t think he would be for some time. He wasn’t in Lausanne and he wasn’t in Paris, and I suspected that either he had gone back to Russia on one of his periodic trips or had gone to London or Glasgow to look into the Rurik situation. So there was no help for it. I myself would have to kill Berr. This wasn’t easy for me. Not in any sense. I love humanity, therefore I can’t wish to shed human blood. I also have insufficient preparation for the performance of such a deed. It isn’t that I can’t shoot, you know I can. But as I’ve told you, though I’m associated with the terrorist group within our organization, it’s only as a theoretician and an archivist. I don’t know how to set about such things.

  “But I hadn’t the slightest doubt that that was my duty. Berr is a traitor to our movement, who had just betrayed Korolenko, Primar, and Damatov, and God knows how many of our comrades before that. As for the future, I didn’t believe that Berr could yet know of our plan to take over the Rurik and use it as a stage for the supremely desirable purge, the extirpation of the Tsar, but in view of his known resourcefulness I was afraid that once he had the three young men’s papers in his hands, he might report to his superiors some deductions which would lead them fairly near to the truth. I also wished, for once, to take some of the guilt from the shoulders of my beloved friend Gorin. Not that I thought the guilt of eliminating Berr was heavy, if, indeed, it existed at all. I would probably pay for Berr’s life with my own. I believe in Kant’s Law of Nature and it follows that I have a right to kill only if I am willing to give my own life in expiation. I am aware that there are philosophical difficulties in this position, but I think I could justify it, though perhaps this is not the most suitable time and place for such a discussion.

  “Also I was drawn to this deed because it centred round you, Nikolai Nikolaievitch. For many years I’ve had dreams which I always felt were important, though I didn’t know what they meant, and they were inherently absurd. In these dreams I see something familiar, something rooted in my infancy and my childhood, mixed up with things quite unrelated to them. You remember that little lake in front of my father’s country house—it wasn’t a lake, really, just a large pond. In the middle of it was an island covered with birch trees, and coarse yellow grasses, an island which is round, quite round, as if it were drawn with compasses. Well, I dream that someone has set down on that little island a merry-go-round, the kind you see at fairs, with swing-boats like dragons painted scarlet and gold, or I dream of our conservatory, and it’s got a printing-press set down among all the delicate stove-plants my mother loved to cultivate, and that’s funny too, the press is rose-pink. Now I’m having a waking dream of that kind. There you are, whom I’ve known all my life, my father’s dearest friend, who far more than my father was the image of the man I hoped to be, for you were stronger than he was. You taught me to shoot, game-birds and red deer and the wild boar, because you were a better shot than my father, and though you are not a patient man you were more patient with my sickliness, too. I can still shoot, you know. Every now and then I take out my revolver again and go to a range and practise, because—that’s what I pretend to myself—it’s the most useful small arm for our movement. But it’s also because you always said that good revolver shots were very rare, and I was one of them. Now I’m going to use my revolver to protect you, the giant. I’m protecting you from your Judas. I know that it’s absurd to think of me protecting you, but that’s what I’m doing.”

  “For God’s sake,” said Nikolai, wiping the sweat from his brow, “did you kill this poor devil, Berr?” “Wait, wait,” said Chubinov.

  “Or did another of you hyenas get him? But probably not. Since so far as I can remember the man never existed.”

  “You’ll wish that it were so. I had to take the train to get to Berr’s home, and I found myself in one of those very ugly suburbs of Paris where the town suddenly stops, leaving a raw selvage which isn’t Paris and isn’t countryside. There’s a jumble of factories and small houses and tenements along the high road, and then a large new factory. Just beyond it a track leaves the high road and runs a couple of hundred yards up a hill to two blocks of tenements, which, I learned at the station, had been put up for the workers in the new factory. They’re the kind of hideous buildings which capitalists think fit for the dispossessed. I realized how unpleasant a character Berr must have, for he must be a materialist, or he would not be a Tsarist spy, yet he is indifferent to material beauty, or he would not live in such a drab place. I followed the track, which ends in a big square pavement, with some flower beds set into it, extending all round the two blocks. I identified the block in which Berr lived, according to the address in the telephone book. The track started again on the other side of the square and led up a slope covered with vegetable gardens divided into allotments. There were several benches on this paved square, and I sat down on one facing the door from which Berr must come out.

  “I opened a newspaper and pretended to read it, but I had no real need to keep up this pretence, for there was nobody about except some children playing together in a sandpit on the edge of the square, near an open washhouse where their mothers were working. So I was able to look about me, and I soon saw the hut in which I would have to confront the traitor Berr. There were many bits of home-made carpentering standing among the vegetable plots, but they were all simply tool-sheds. This one alone looked as if it had been made by a builder and planned as a summer-house, with a wide casement-window. I recognized the peculiar character of Berr in the perversity with which the window had been set on the side which had no view but looked back at the two hideous tenements. It was troublesome that it was not far away from them, but I counted on being able to induce him to take a walk with me, and I had a silencer on my revolver.

  “I wondered how long I’d have to wait. But the morning, which had been cloudy, suddenly cleared, and as soon as the sun was shining the Berrs came out of the block opposite me and made their way to the hut. They answered exactly to the descriptions I had been given. Berr had an arrogant appearance which was peculiarly objectionable because he was so mediocre that he should have felt obliged to be humble. His pride was generalized, it even made him walk stiffly and slowly, but it had not given him the geniality which sometimes accompanies self-satisfaction. His expression was like barbed wire. As for his wife, she was the very prototype of the bullied wife. She was a stout, short woman with a round face and flat nose, like millions of our Russian peasant women, and she had about her a goodness that can often be remarked in her kind. She had to hurry, hurry, hurry to keep up with her striding, scowling husband. When they came to the iron gate into the vegetable gardens she ran ahead and opened the heavy catch for him with a willingness which could only be described as pretty. But he stood back and let her do it, without a flicker of gratitude on his pompous face. She was talking all the time and he did not answer, and this was very touching, for it was clear that she was talking sensibly, she wasn’t babbling, and she was speaking playfully and kindly. I could imagine she was using all those endearing diminutives in which our language is so rich. I thought Berr must have a heart of stone to remain mute and unsmiling.

  “I watched them go up the slope, keeping to a strip of grass that ran beside the vegetabl
e plots. Her arm had been in his, but as might have been expected he soon disengaged it and fell a pace behind her. For that coldness, however, he showed some remorse, for he put out his hand and rested his finger-tips on her shoulder, in a way which would have seemed inexpressive enough in an ordinary person, but which no doubt counted almost as a caress from him. When they got to the hut he stood aside while she opened the door, flung wide the windows, and shook some cushions out into the sunlight. He did not offer to help her, but when she had finished he went in and sat down. She made as if she were at once going to return to the tenements, but before she’d gone a few steps she looked down on the ground, halted, dropped awkwardly on her knees, picked a sprig of some plant, held it to her nose, then struggled to her feet again, flapping her arms like a hen, and went back to the hut and handed the sprig to him. My heart began to beat very fast. I wished I was not under the necessity of bringing pain to this excellent creature.