by Boris Akunin
The night had flown by so fast because they were talking about love.
Masa had told her about his ‘master’ (that was what he called his godfather). How noble, talented, fearless and intelligent he was. ‘He roves you,’ the Japanese had said, ‘and it tortures him. The onry thing in the worrd he is afraid of is rove. Because those he has roved have died. He brames himserf for their death.’
Eliza had shuddered at that. How very similar it was to her own situation.
She had started asking questions.
Masa had told her that he had not seen the first woman whom his ‘master’ had loved and lost. It had been a very long time ago. But he had known the second. It was a very, very sad story that he did not want to remember, because he would start to cry.
But then he had told her after all – something exotic and amazing, in the spirit of the play about two comets. He really had started crying, and Eliza had cried too. Poor Erast Petrovich! How cruelly fate had dealt with him!
‘Do not pray the usuar woman’s games with him,’ Masa had implored her. ‘He is not suited for them. I understand, you are an actress. You cannot behave otherwise. But if you are not sincere with him, you wirr rose him. For ever. That would be very sad for him and, I think, for you too. Because you wirr never meet another man rike my master, even if you rive to be a hundred years old and keep your beauty for the whore hundred years.’
At that she had fallen apart completely. She had burst into floods of tears, quite unconcerned about how she looked as she did it.
‘You do not rook rike an actress now,’ the Japanese had said, handing her a handkerchief. ‘Brow your nose, or erse it wirr be sworren.’
‘What will it be?’ Eliza had asked in a nasal voice, not understanding the word ‘sworren’.
‘Red. Like a prum. Brow your nose! That’s it, very good … Wirr you rove my master? Will you terr him tomorrow that your heart berongs onry to him?’
She had shaken her head and burst into tears again.
‘Not for anything in the world!’
‘Why?’
‘Because I love him. Because I don’t want …’
To destroy him, she had been going to say.
Masa had pondered for a long time before he eventually spoke.
‘I thought I understood a woman’s heart werr. But you have surprised me. “I rove” but “I don’t want”? You are very interesting, Eriza-san. Undoubtedry that is why my master ferr in love with you.’
And for a long time he had tried to persuade her not to be stubborn. However, the more vividly the Japanese described Erast Petrovich’s virtues, the more unwavering her determination to protect him from disaster had become. But she had enjoyed listening to it anyway.
In the morning, when she saw Fandorin at the rehearsal, looking so hurt and so proud, she had been frightened that she might not be able to control herself. She had even appealed in prayer to the Almighty, pleading for His help to resist temptation.
And God had heard her. After that day Erast disappeared. He had gone away.
In her own mind she had held an endless conversation with him, all the time preparing to meet him. And now they had met …
She was a fine one too, of course. All the phrases she had prepared had simply flown out of her head. ‘You know, I have received a proposal.’ She had just blurted it out in passing – and taken fright herself at how frivolous it sounded.
He hadn’t even raised an eyebrow. ‘Aha, well now.’
Apparently the Japanese actor could also be mistaken. Masa didn’t know his ‘master’ all that well after all. Or perhaps there had been love, but it had ended. That happened too. It happened all the time.
THE DAILY ROUND
It just happened that all the sincerity, all the passion of soul that, in her perplexity and torpor, had not been splashed out onto Fandorin fell to the lot of a man who was good, but unimportant – Vasya Gullibin. He was a faithful, reliable friend and sometimes Eliza had a secure, comforting cry on his shoulder, but she could just as well have buried her face in the fur of her dog, if she had had one.
Vasya glanced out of the auditorium a minute after Erast had turned round and walked away. Eliza’s face wore an unhappy expression and she had tears in her eyes. Gullibin, of course, dashed over to her to ask what was wrong. Well, she told him everything, she unburdened her heart.
That is, not absolutely everything, naturally. She didn’t tell him about Genghis Khan. But she did tell him the story of her drama of love.
She led Vasya into a box, so that no one would disturb them. Then she put her hands over her face and started talking incoherently through her tears – the dam burst. About how she loved one man and had to marry another; that she had no choice; or rather, she did, but it was an appalling one: either drag out a miserable life that was worse than death, or give herself to a man for whom she felt nothing.
On the stage Stern was rehearsing with Swardilin, going through his turn with the tightrope. Masa wasn’t graceful enough. A romantic hero should observe a certain austerity in his gesticulations, but the Japanese spread his knees too wide and stuck his elbows out. The other actors had taken advantage of this break to wander off in all directions.
Gullibin listened agitatedly and stroked her hair cautiously, but he simply couldn’t grasp the most important thing.
‘Who are you talking about, Lizonka?’ he asked eventually. (Gullibin was the only one who called her that, they had known each other from their theatre school days.)
The expression on his face was puzzled and kind.
‘Fandorin, who else?’
As if there was anyone else here she could love!
Vasya frowned.
‘Has he proposed to you? But why are you obliged to marry him? He’s old and completely grey!’
‘You fool!’ Eliza straightened up angrily. ‘You’re the one who’s old and withered. At the age of thirty, you already look forty, but he … he …’
And she started talking about Erast Petrovich – she just couldn’t stop. Vasya didn’t take offence at that word ‘withered’, he wasn’t the kind to take offence anyway, he forgave Eliza absolutely anything at all. He listened, sighed and suffered with her.
‘So you love the playwright,’ he said. ‘But who has proposed to you?’
When she replied, he whistled.
‘Oh boy! Has he now? That’s a real turn-up for the books!’
They both turned round at the sound of the the door opening slightly. There were always draughts wandering about in the theatre.
‘I haven’t accepted yet! I have another four days to think about it, until Saturday.’
‘Think it over, of course … It’s for you to decide. But you know yourself that lots of women, especially actresses, have a way of arranging things. A husband is one thing, love is another. It’s a perfectly normal business. So don’t you go upsetting yourself. Shustrov’s a millionaire, he’ll go a long way. You’d be the owner of our theatre. More important than Stern!’
Yes, Vasya was a real friend. He wished her well. In recent days (there was no point in denying it), Eliza had contemplated this possibility too: giving her hand to Andrei Gordeevich and leaving her heart for Erast Petrovich. But something told her that neither man would agree to a ménage of that kind. They were too serious, both of them.
‘Hey, who’s that eavesdropping out here?’ Vasya suddenly shouted out angrily. ‘That’s no draught, I saw someone’s shadow!’
The door swayed and they heard steps – someone walking away quickly on tiptoe.
While Gullibin was squeezing through the narrow gap between the chairs, the curious listener had time enough to disappear.
‘Who could it be?’ Eliza asked.
‘Anyone at all. This isn’t a theatre company – it’s a jar of spiders! The parish takes after the priest! Stern’s theory of rupture and scandal in action. Well, congratulations, now everyone will find out that you’re going to marry a man like that in four days’ time!
’
Wonderful Vasya was genuinely upset. But Eliza wasn’t. So they would find out, and that was just fine. It would be one thing if she had boasted about it herself, but now the news had leaked out without her being party to it. Let them all eat their hearts out with envy. And she would see whether she really would marry ‘a man like that’.
However, it had remained unclear whether the unknown spy had let the cat out of the bag or not. None of the others had started talking to Eliza about Shustrov directly. And as for their tangential, envious glances, she had always received plenty of those. The position of a leading lady was a bouquet of roses with extremely sharp thorns, and when it came to envy a theatre company could easily outdo the harem of a padishah.
But nonetheless, it was a bouquet of roses. Fragrant and beautiful. Every entrance, even during a rehearsal, brought that sweet oblivion in which she was cut off from the darkness and fear of real life. And a performance was sheer unadulterated happiness. The two shows that had been given since the premiere had turned out superbly. Everyone had acted with gusto – the play gave every actor an opportunity to hold the audience for a while, not sharing it with anyone else. And owing to the sudden disappearance of the ticket touts, the composition of the audience had changed noticeably. In the stalls there was less glittering of jewellery and gleaming of starched collars. Fresh, lively new faces had appeared, mostly young, and the emotional pitch had been heightened. The audience had started reacting more willingly and more gratefully, and that, in turn, had electrified the artistes. But most importantly of all, the faces had no longer radiated an avid anticipation of sensation and scandal, those constant companions of Stern’s theatre – those people who once paid speculators twenty-five roubles, and sometimes even fifty, for a place in the front rows had wanted to see more for their money than simply a theatrical performance.
The charm of the role that had come Eliza’s way lay in its difficulty of comprehension. The idea of a geisha – of a beauty that was incarnate and yet not of the flesh – thrilled her imagination. What an intoxicating craft – to serve as an object of desire while remaining inaccessible to embraces! How closely it resembled the existence of an actress, her own beautiful and sad destiny.
When Eliza, still simply Liza at the time, moved from the ballet department to the acting department of the college, a wise old teacher (a ‘noble father’ of the imperial theatres) had told her: ‘Little girl, the theatre will reward you generously – and fleece you of everything. Know that you will have neither a genuine family, nor genuine love.’ And she had replied blithely: ‘Then so be it!’ Afterwards there had been times when she regretted her choice, but for an actress there is no way back. And if there is, then she is not an actress – simply a woman.
Stern, for whom nothing existed in the world apart from the theatre, liked to repeat that every genuine actor was an emotional pauper and explained this, as he did many other things, with the help of a financial metaphor (Noah Noaevich’s innate commercialism was both his strength and his weakness at the same time). ‘Let us assume that an ordinary man has one rouble’s worth of feelings,’ he used to say, ‘and he spends fifty kopecks on his family, twenty-five kopecks on his work and the rest on his friends and his interests. All hundred kopecks of his emotions are expended on the daily round. Not so with an actor! In every role that he plays he invests five kopecks or perhaps ten – it is impossible to play convincingly without this vitally essential mite. In his career an outstanding talent may play ten, at most twenty, first-class roles. What is left over for the daily round of family, friends and lovers? Three and a quarter kopecks.’
Noah Noaevich very much disliked it when people argued with him, and so Eliza listened to his ‘kopecks’ theory without saying anything. But if she had objected, she would have said: ‘It’s not true! Actors are special people, and they have a special emotional constitution. If you don’t possess this special charge of energy, you shouldn’t be on the stage. Let’s assume that initially I only had a rouble’s worth of feelings. But when I act, I don’t spend my rouble, I invest it, and every successful role brings me dividends. It is ordinary people who spend their hundred kopecks’ worth of emotions from birth to death, but I live on the interest and maintain my capital untouched! Other people’s lives, of which I become a part on the stage, are not deducted from my life, but added to it!’
If a show went well, Eliza could physically feel the energy of the feelings that filled her. There was so much of this energy that it saturated the entire audience, a thousand people! But in their turn the people in the audience charged Eliza with their fire. This is a magical effect known to every genuine actor. The late Emeraldov, a lover of vulgar metaphors, used to say that regardless of his or her gender, an actor was always a man, whose responsibility it was to bring the audience to a state of ecstasy, otherwise he would merely break into a sweat and waste his energy, and the lover would leave unsatisfied and seek other embraces.
That was why Eliza was bored by the idea of the cinematograph that Andrei Gordeevich dreamed about. What good was it to her if spectators in hundreds or even thousands of electric theatres sobbed or lusted when they saw her face on a piece of cheap cloth? She wouldn’t be able to touch this love and feel it, would she?
Let Shustrov think that she had accepted his proposal out of vanity, out of a yearning for worldwide fame. There was only one thing she wanted: for him to rid her of Genghis Khan. For that, she was prepared to be eternally in his debt. A marriage, even without love, could be harmonious. Did Shustrov value the actress in her more than the woman? Well then, she was an actress first and foremost.
But the other half of her nature, the womanly half, fluttered its wings like a bird caught in a trap. How much easier it would be to marry out of calculation, if only Fandorin didn’t exist! In four days’ time she would have to lock herself in a cage voluntarily. It was a cage of pure gold, offering reliable protection against any wild beasts on the prowl, but it meant abandoning for ever the flight of two comets in a starless sky!
If only she could know for certain, without any doubt, that Erast’s feelings for her had cooled. But how could she find out? She didn’t trust her stage partner Masa any longer. He was a very good person, but the soul of his ‘master’ remained as obscure to him as it was to her.
Provoke Fandorin into a frank conversation? But that was the same as flinging herself on his neck. Everybody knew how scenes of that kind ended. She wouldn’t be able to run away from him a second time. Genghis Khan would find out about her infatuation, and she didn’t need to guess what would happen after that … No, no, and a thousand times no!
After pondering over her doubts for a long time Eliza came up with the following solution. Of course, she must not permit any confessions of love. But in the course of some neutral conversation, she could attempt to sense – from his glance, from his voice, from some involuntary movement – whether he still loved her in the same way. After all, she was an actress, was she not, and her heart was particularly responsive to such things. If it didn’t sense any magnetic attraction, then what reason was there to suffer? And if it did … Eliza hadn’t decided what to do in that case.
The day after the encounter in the foyer, on Wednesday, when she arrived for the rehearsal, he was already there. Sitting at the director’s desk, reading the entries in the Tablets, with such an unnaturally intense air that Eliza guessed he was doing it deliberately, in order to avoid looking at her. She smiled inwardly. This was an encouraging symptom.
She had prepared a topic for conversation in advance.
‘Hello, Erast Petrovich.’ He got up and bowed. ‘I have a question for you as a dramatist. I’m reading a lot about Japan now, and about double suicides by lovers – in order to understand my character Izumi better …’
He listened intently, without speaking. The question of magnetism was not clear as yet.
‘And I read something very interesting. Apparently, before the Japanese depart from this life it is customa
ry for them to compose a poem. Only five lines long! I think that is so beautiful! What if my geisha were also to write a poem that would sum up her life in a few words?’
‘It is strange that I did not think of that myself,’ Erast said slowly. ‘Very probably a geisha would have done p-precisely that.’
‘Then write it! I shall read the poem before I press the electric switch.’
He thought about that for a moment.
‘But the play is already written in verse metre. The poem will sound like an ordinary m-monologue …’
‘I know what can be done here. You can retain the Japanese poetic metre: five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, five in the third and seven in each of the last two lines. To the Russian ear that will sound like prose and it will contrast with the iambic trimeter in which the monologues are written. For us, verse will fulfil the function of prose, and prose will fulfil the function of verse.’
‘An excellent idea.’
His eyes flashed admiringly, only it wasn’t clear if the admiration was meant for the idea or for Eliza herself. She had not determined whether Fandorin was radiating magnetism or not. Her own radiation must have interfered, it was too strong …
She had wanted to continue the investigation the next day, but Erast Petrovich had not shown up at the theatre either on Thursday or on Friday, and now the fateful day – Saturday – had arrived.