by Boris Akunin
And he went on to babble something absolutely pitiful about a failed examination and the word of honour he had given to his father.
The reflection in the mirror batted its eyelids and the corners of its mouth turned slowly downwards. Who could have imagined that the guileful seducer Harlequin had to ask leave from his mummy before setting out on an amorous escapade? And she suddenly regretted terribly the fifteen roubles that she had spent.
‘Why are you here in Moscow?’ Petya whispered. ‘Surely not especially to see me?’
She laughed – it turned out very well, with a slightly husky note. She supposed that was because of the papirosa. So that he wouldn’t get above himself, she said enigmatically, ‘The meeting with you is no more than a prelude to another meeting. Do you understand?’
And she declaimed two lines from one of Petya’s own poems:
To live life like a line of ringing verse
And write its full stop with no hesitation.
That time back at the arbour, foolish little Masha had whispered with a happy smile (it was shameful to recall it now): ‘This must be true happiness.’ The visitor from Moscow had smiled condescendingly and said: ‘Happiness, Masha, is something quite different. Happiness is not a fleeting moment, but eternity. Not a comma, but a full stop.’ And then he had recited the poem about the line and the full stop. Masha had flushed, torn herself out of his arms and stood at the very top of the cliff, with the dark water sighing down below. ‘Do you want me to write that full stop right now?’ she had exclaimed. ‘Do you think I’ll be too frightened?’
‘You . . . Are you serious?’ the voice in the telephone asked very quietly. ‘Don’t think that I’ve forgotten . . .’
‘I’ll say I’m serious,’ she laughed, intrigued by the peculiar inflection that had crept into Petya’s voice.
‘A perfect fit . . .’ Petya whispered incomprehensibly. ‘Just when there’s a vacancy . . . Fate. Destiny . . . All right, here goes. I tell you what, let’s meet tomorrow evening at a quarter past eight . . . Yes, at a quarter past . . . Only where?’
Columbine’s heart began beating very, very fast as she tried to guess what spot he would choose for the tryst. A park? A bridge? A boulevard? And at the same time she tried to calculate whether she could afford to keep the room in the Elysium for one more night. That would make thirty roubles, an entire month of living! Sheer folly!
But Petya said: ‘Beside the Berry Market on the Marsh.’
‘What marsh?’ Columbine asked in astonishment.
‘Marsh Square, it’s near the Elysium. And from there I’ll take you to an absolutely special place, where you’ll meet some absolutely special people.’
The way he said it sounded so mysterious and solemn that Columbine didn’t feel even a shred of disappointment. On the contrary, she felt that same ‘endless thrill’ again very clearly and realised that the adventures were beginning. Perhaps not exactly as she had imagined, but even so, coming to the City of Dreams had not been a waste of time.
She sat in the armchair by the open window until late at night, snuggled up in a warm rug, and watched the dark barges with their swaying lanterns floating down the Moscow river.
She was terribly curious about what these ‘absolutely special’ people could be like.
Roll on tomorrow evening!
Cleopatra’s final moment
When Columbine woke up on the vast bed that had not, after all, become the altar of love, the evening still seemed a long way off. She lounged on the downy mattress for a while, phoned down to the ground floor to have coffee sent up, and in celebration of her new sophisticated life, drank it without cream or sugar. It was bitter and unpalatable, but it was bohemian.
In the foyer, after paying for the room and leaving her suitcase in the baggage closet, she leafed through the pages of announcements in the Moscow Provincial Gazette. She wrote out several addresses, selecting houses with at least three storeys, in which the flat on offer had to be at the very top.
She haggled for a while with the cabby: he wanted three roubles, she wanted to give him one, and they struck a deal for a rouble and forty kopecks. It was a good price, taking into account that for this sum the driver had agreed to drive the young lady round all four addresses, but the newcomer in town still paid too much anyway – she was so taken by the very first flat, right in the centre, in Kitaigorod, that there was no point in going any further. She tried to buy the driver off with a rouble (even that was a lot, for only fifteen minutes), but he was a good psychologist and he crushed the young provincial’s resistance with the words: ‘Here in Moscow a man might be a thief, but he still keeps his word.’ She blushed and paid, but insisted that he had to bring her baggage from the Elysium and she stuck firmly to that.
The flat was a real sight for sore eyes. And the monthly rent wasn’t high by Moscow standards – the same as one night at the Elysium. Of course, in Irkutsk you could rent an entire house with a garden and servant for that money, but then this wasn’t the back of beyond in Siberia, it was Russia’s Old Capital.
And then, who had ever seen buildings like this in Irkutsk? Six entire storeys high! The courtyard was all stone, not a blade of grass anywhere. It was obvious straight away that you were living in a real city and not a village. The side street that the windows of the room overlooked was as narrow as could be. If you stood on a stool in the kitchen and looked out through the small upper window frame, you could see the Kremlin towers and the spires of the Historical Museum.
The living space was not actually located in a garret or attic, as Columbine had been dreaming it would be, but it was on the top floor. Add to this that it was fully furnished, with gas lighting and an American stove. And the flat itself ! Columbine had never in her life seen anything so delightfully absurd.
When you entered from the stairs there was a short corridor. The door on the right led into the living room (the only one), from that room you turned left and found yourself in the little kitchen, and there was another passage on the left, where there was a water-closet with a washbasin and a bath, and then the corridor led back out into the hallway. It was a kind of ludicrous circle, and it was impossible to understand what purpose anyone could have designed it for.
The room had a balcony, and the brand-new Muscovite fell in love with it immediately. It was wide, with fancy cast-iron railings and what’s more – a point that was especially captivating because it was so fatuous – there was a gate in the railings. She couldn’t guess what on earth it was for. Perhaps the architect had been thinking of attaching a fire ladder to the outside of the balcony and then changed his mind?
Columbine drew back the stiff bolt, swung the heavy little gate open and glanced down. Far, far away, below the toes of her shoes, there were little carriages driving and little toy people creeping along. It was so wonderful that the new resident of the heavens actually burst into song.
On the opposite side of the street, but lower down, there was a gleaming metal figure: a well-fed angel with white wings, with a sign board swaying under his feet: ‘MÖBIUS AND SONS INSURANCE COMPANY. With us there is almost nothing to fear.’ How delightful!
There were also a few minuses, but they were insignificant.
It was all right that there was no elevator – it didn’t take long to run up to the sixth floor.
But there was something else that had alarmed her. The landlord had warned her quite frankly that the appearance of mice or, as he called them, ‘domestic rodents’ was not entirely out of the question. For a minute or two Columbine had been quite upset – she had been afraid of mice ever since she was a child. Sometimes, when she heard the patter of those tiny little feet on the floor, she used to screw her eyes up so tight that she saw fiery circles behind her eyelids. But that was all in her past, unreal life now, she told herself straight away. Columbine was far too frivolous and reckless a creature to be frightened by anything. If the worst came to the worst, she could always buy some of that Antirattin Salami that was
advertised in the Gazette.
That afternoon, when Columbine went to the market for provisions (oh, these Moscow prices!), she acquired another ally from the world of the night and the moon. She bought a young grass snake from some boys for eight kopecks. He was small and iridescent, and once in her basket he immediately curled up into a tight ring and lay there quiet.
Why did she buy him? Why, to drive Masha Mironova out of herself as quickly as possible. That big ninny was even more afraid of snakes than of mice. Whenever she saw one anywhere on a forest path, she used to started screaming and squealing like a fool.
At home Columbine resolutely bit her lip and took the reptile into her hand. The little snake turned out not to be wet and slippery as you might have thought from looking at him, but dry, rough and cool. His tiny little eyes gazed up at the giantess in horror.
The boys had said: ‘Put the snake in milk so it won’t go sour, and when it grows a bit, it’ll be good for catching mice.’ Columbine, however, had a different idea, far more interesting.
First of all she fed the grass snake with curdled milk (after eating he immediately settled down to sleep); then she gave him a name – Lucifer; and after that she painted over the yellow spots on the side of his head with Chinese ink, so that what she had was not a grass snake, but some weird and mysterious reptile that might very well be deadly poisonous.
She undressed to the waist in front of the mirror, set the snake, still drowsy after feeding, on her bare breasts and admired herself. It was ‘Cleopatra’s final moment’ to a tee.
A lucky ticket
She spent several hours preparing for her meeting with Harlequin and left the house in good time, in order to make her first gala promenade through the streets of Moscow without hurrying and give the city a chance to admire its new inhabitant.
The two of them – Moscow and Columbine – made a great impression on each other. On this overcast August evening the former was jaded, bored and blasé; the latter was wary and nervous, ready for any surprises.
For the Moscow premiere Columbine had chosen an outfit the like of which no one here could possibly have seen before. She didn’t put on a hat, because that was a bourgeois prejudice; she let down her thick hair and tied it with a broad black ribbon, gathering it together at the side, below her right ear, with a magnificent bow. She put on a crimson waistcoat with silver stars over her lemon-yellow silk blouse with Spanish sleeves and a frilly jabot; her immense skirt of opalescent blue with countless pleats swayed like the waves of the ocean. An important detail of this daring costume was an orange sash with a wooden buckle. All in all, there was plenty for the Muscovites to look at. And certain individuals who looked really closely were in for yet another shock: on closer inspection, the black glittering ribbon on the neck of this breathtakingly spectacular stroller proved to be a live snake, which would occasionally turn its narrow head this way and that.
Accompanied by gasps and squeals, Columbine strode haughtily across Red Square and across the Moskvoretsky Bridge, and turned on to the Sofiiskaya Embankment, where the respectable public was out strolling. And here, in addition to showing herself off, she gazed around wide-eyed, gathering new impressions.
For the most part the Moscow ladies were dressed rather boringly: a straight skirt and white blouse with a necktie, or silk dresses in dreary dark tones. She was impressed by the size of the hats, which this season seemed especially luxuriant. She encountered hardly any extravagant ladies of any age, except for one, with a gauze scarf fluttering over her shoulder. And there was a horsewoman with pearly ash-grey hair under a veil, who rode past, holding a long amber cigarette holder with a papirosa. Stylish, Columbine thought, as she watched the woman ride away.
There proved to be no small number of young men in Moscow with smocks and berets and long hair, and a large bow on their chests: she even called out to one after mistaking him for Petya.
She deliberately arrived at the rendezvous twenty minutes late, for which she had to walk back and forth along the entire length of the embankment twice. Harlequin was waiting beside a fountain where the cabdrivers watered their horses and he looked exactly the same as in Irkutsk, but here among the granite embankments and closely crowded houses, Columbine felt that this was not enough. Why had he not changed in all these months? Why had he not become something bigger, or something new, or something else?
And somehow the way Petya behaved wasn’t quite right either. He blushed and faltered. He was about to kiss her, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it – instead he held his hand out in an absolutely fatuous manner. Columbine stared at his hand in jaunty incomprehension, as if she had never seen anything funnier in her life. Then he became even more embarrassed and thrust a bunch of violets at her.
‘Why would I want these corpses of flowers?’ she asked with a capricious shrug of her shoulders. She walked over to a cabby’s horse and held the little bouquet out to her. The roan mare indifferently extended her large flabby lip over the violets and chewed them up in an instant.
‘Quick, we’re late,’ said Petya. ‘They don’t like that in our set. The horse-tram stops over there, just before the bridge. Let’s go!’
He glanced nervously at his companion and whispered.
‘Everybody’s looking at you. In Irkutsk you dressed differently.’
‘Do I alarm you?’ Columbine asked provocatively.
‘What do you . . .’ he exclaimed in fright. ‘I’m a poet and I despise the opinion of the crowd. It’s just really very unusual . . . Anyway, that’s not important.’
Could he really be embarrassed by me? she wondered in amazement. Did harlequins even know how to be embarrassed? She glanced round at her reflection in a brightly lit shop window and flinched inwardly – it was a very impressive outfit indeed – but the attack of shyness was dismissed as disgraceful. That pitiful feeling had been left behind for ever beyond the branching Ural mountains.
In the tram, Petya told her in a low voice about the place where they were going.
‘There isn’t another club like it in the whole of Russia, even in St Petersburg,’ he said, tickling her ear with his breath. ‘Such people, you’ve never seen anyone like them in Irkutsk! We use special names, everyone invents his own. And some are given their names by the Doge. For instance, he christened me Cherubino.’
‘Cherubino?’ Columbine echoed in a disappointed voice, thinking that Petya really was more like a curly-haired page-boy than a self-confident, imperious Harlequin.
Petya misinterpreted the intonation of her voice and drew himself upright haughtily.
‘That’s nothing. We have more bizarre aliases than that. Avaddon, Ophelia, Caliban, Horatio. And Lorelei Rubinstein . . .’
‘What, you mean Lorelei Rubinstein herself goes there?’ the young provincial gasped. ‘The poetess?’
There was good reason to gasp. Lorelei’s sultry, shamelessly sensual poems had only reached Irkutsk after a considerable delay. Progressive young ladies who understood modern poetry knew them off by heart.
‘Yes,’ said Cherubino-Petya, nodding portentously. ‘Her alias in our group is the Lioness of Ecstasy. Or simply Lioness. Although, of course, everyone knows who she really is.’
Ah, what a sweet tightness she felt in her chest! Liberal-handed Fortune had flung open before her the doors into the most select possible society, and she looked at Petya far more affectionately now.
He continued. ‘The leader of the club is Prospero. There aren’t many men like him – not one in a thousand, or even a million. He’s already getting on, his hair is completely grey. But you forget that straight away, he has such strength in him, such energy and magnetism. In biblical times the prophets were probably like him. And he is a kind of prophet, if you think about it. He’s one of the old prisoners from the Schliesselburg Fortress; he spent a long time in a cell for revolutionary activity, but he never talks about his former views, because he has abandoned politics completely. He says politics is for the masses, and nothing of a mass
nature can be beautiful, for beauty is always unique and inimitable. Prospero looks rather severe and he is often abrupt, but in actual fact he is kind and magnanimous, everybody knows that. He secretly helps those aspirants who need money. He used to be a chemical engineer before he was in the fortress, but now he has been left an inheritance and is rich, so he can afford it.’
‘Who are these “aspirants”?’ she asked.
‘That’s what the members of the club are called. We’re all poets. There are twelve of us, always twelve. And Prospero is our Doge. That’s the same thing as a chairman, only a chairman is elected, and in this case it’s the other way round: the Doge himself chooses who to accept as a member and who not.’
Columbine was alarmed.
‘But if there always have to be twelve of you, what about me? That makes me superfluous.’
Petya replied mysteriously: ‘When one of the aspirants marries, we can fill the place that is vacated with someone new. Naturally, the final decision is taken by Prospero. But before I take you into his home, you must swear that you will never tell anyone else what I have told you.’
Married? Vacated place? Columbine didn’t understand a thing but, of course, she immediately exclaimed: ‘I swear by sky, earth, water and fire that I shall say nothing!’
People on the seats nearby half-turned to look at her and Petya put one finger to his lips.
‘But what do you do there?’ asked Columbine, dying of curiosity.
The reply was triumphant.
‘We serve the Eternal Bride and dedicate poems to her. And some fortunate Chosen Ones offer up to her the supreme gift – their own life.’