He offered her vodka. She was glad of a drink but wary of the pile of glasses beside the bottle: did he intend to ask his friends in? But now, smiling, he arranged the glasses into a series of Roman letters. She watched what he was at with slitted, suspicious eyes until it dawned on her that he was writing the letters of her name with the vodka glasses. Her christened name, S-O-P-H-I-A. But – how does he know that?
Ooo-er, she thought. The familiar, goose-walking-over-agrave feeling that Tom-Tit-Tot suffers in the old story. She hated to be called, by strangers, Sophia.
‘An old Russian custom,’ he said, giving her a stiff little bow. ‘In your honour.’
Then he filled up all the glasses to the brim with vodka.
He’s never –
One by one, he knocked each back. She counted, mesmerised. Thirty-five.
And still on his feet!
At this point, she formed the opinion the Grand Duke was not as other men and could have wished, after all, that she had let Lizzie come along.
‘A little caviare?’ he offered.
She enjoyed caviare, which she preferred to eat with a soup spoon, and judged it best to fortify herself against whatever might happen next. While she tucked in, the Grand Duke said: ‘You shall have music with your supper. You must know I am a great collector of all kinds of objets d’art and marvels. Of all things, I love best toys – marvellous and unnatural artefacts.’
He winked at her in a manner she found lewd and offensive. It occurred to her: has he believed the Colonel’s story? does he think I’m really made of rubber? If so – where does he imagine the caviare is going to?
He pressed a button at the side of the stove and a section of the bookcase with which the walls were lined flew up. The gilded leather spines were only so much painted trompe l’oeil all the time! A musical trio, all together on a round, wheeled podium, rolled forward out of the dark cavity within the wall. The wall fell back into place with a soft thud.
These musicians were almost full-grown, about the size of Sicilian puppets, only a little less large than we are and constructed of precious metals, semi-precious stones and the plumage of birds, which last made Fevvers shudder as a cowboy does when he sees a blond scalp on an Indian’s belt.
And, indeed, one was in the very shape of a bird, of a thrush or a nightingale, but a very big bird, and the skilled artisan who made it had given it a Joseph’s coat of feathers of all kinds of soft, dark, winy, topazy colours and sharp little eyes of red gemstones. It stood on two sturdy legs scaled in overlapping shingles of beaten gold. Instead of a beak it bore a flute, an intricately carved flute, of ivory.
There was a stringed instrument, too; a harp or lyre in the form of a hollow woman, or, rather, a woman with no torso. For there was a head, and shoulders, and breasts, and there was a pelvis, but there was nothing in between the breasts and the pelvis except a set of strings attached to pegs on either side. She had arms, too, arms extended in a supplicatory gesture that had come about quite accidentally for they were stuck where they were when the mechanism that operated her last wound down. Her arms terminated in beautiful, cunningly articulated hands, with fingers and fingernails, all complete, and she was made of gold, with mother-of-pearl for the fingernails, and a mass of hair made of golden wires, and fine eyes of lapis lazuli on white enamel. At the impulse of a random current of air, she emitted a single, ghostly twang of her own accord.
The percussion section was the least unnerving. It was just a bronze gong, set in an ebony frame, but there was no sign of a gong-stick.
The Grand Duke surveyed his clockwork orchestra with a satisfied air. A bored Emperor commissioned them long ago, in China. A mandarin murdered the Emperor to obtain them. A bored ancestor of the Grand Duke’s murdered the mandarin to get them for himself. They had the authentically priceless glamour of objects intended only for pleasure, the impure allure of the absolutely functionless. The Grand Duke pressed another button.
The gong agitated itself and gave out a sweet thunder. The golden shoulder of the female harp moved, and, in moving, set in motion a complex, hidden mechanism of wheels and pulleys that drew up her elbows and brought the hands against the heart-strings. Her golden fingers, her pearly fingernails, flexed and stretched. She plucked a chord from herself, while the big bird whistled down its nose a strange, tritonic, almost-melody that meandered through its mathematical possibilities in a time that did not seem to be that of this planet but of some remote and freezing elsewhere.
Fevvers thought: there’s a musical box inside the bird. And, anyone who could make a grandfather clock could put that harpy together. And, the gong is sounded by electrical impulses. All the same, the hairs on her nape rose and the Grand Duke turned to her a satisfied smile, as if, all along, he intended her to be afraid of him.
For the first time in her life, she refused champagne.
Adding another percussive note to the uncanny harmonies, a drip fell from the nose of the ice Fevvers and struck the glass rim of the caviare dish with a plink. For an aghast moment, she thought a diamond had melted.
The Grand Duke gave her his arm: come to the gallery and inspect the rest of my collection! His breath, fiery with vodka, singed her cheek that, moment by moment, grew more chilly as the weird geometry of the haunting, circular, not-quite-random, fully inhuman music deformed the angles of the room.
The gallery was lined with glass cases lit up in such an ingeniously subdued way that each one glowed like a distinct little world.
‘My eggs,’ said the Grand Duke, ‘are full of surprises.’
I bet, thought Fevvers.
Yet each glass case contained an egg, truly an egg, a wonderful egg that never came from a chicken but out of a jeweller’s shop and he told her she could have whichever egg she chose just as soon as she took off her shawl and let him see her wings.
‘Egg first.’
‘After.’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘No.’
The Grand Duke shrugged and turned his back on her. All at once, every light in the place went out, leaving her in the dark with only the hooting, plucking and rattling of the artificial musicians down below for company and the faint plash as the ice dripped off her own effigy, down below. When she heard her nose melt, she felt faint.
‘Very well,’ she said sulkily. When the lights came on, her shawl was off and the Grand Duke went behind her to take a good look at the twin swellings in her bodice.
‘But you can’t touch!’ she said. Even in this extremity, some steely edge in her fishwife’s voice made him keep his hands to himself.
What inwards things his eggs were! And, indeed, full of surprises. For this one is made of pink enamel and opens up lengthwise to reveal an inner carapace of mother-of-pearl which, in turn, opens to reveal a spherical yolk of hollow gold. Inside the yolk, a golden hen. Inside the hen, a golden egg. Now we have diminished to the scale of Lilliput but we have not done yet; inside the egg there is the tiniest of picture-frames, set with minute brilliants. And what should the frame contain but a miniature of the aerialiste herself, in full spread as on the trapeze and yellow of hair, blue of eye as in life.
In spite of the increasing sense of diminishment she felt, and the odd shapes the music made of the corners of the room, Fevvers was flattered by this tiny tribute and her crude sense of justice told her it was only fair to give the Grand Duke permission to run his hands over her breasts and round beneath her armpits. After he ascertained she was not made of rubber, he sighed, perhaps with pleasure, and started to agitate the plumage rustling under the red satin.
Squeak, twang, bang and splash from below; squeak, twang, bang and splash.
A simple egg of jade sat in a gem-encrusted egg-cup in the next case, as if waiting for a spoon to tap it. Fevvers gazed expectantly at the Grand Duke, eager as a child, in spite of her apprehension. She guessed there was more to the egg than that. He left off his fumbling for a moment.
‘Let me turn the little key
. . .’
Noticing how his virile member now briskly outlined itself under the whipcord of his riding breeches, she bethought herself that, in some respect, he must be the same as other men and gave it a brisk, conciliatory pat, as if telling it to bide its time.
The egg-shell fell apart in two hollow halves, revealing a little tree in a tub of white agate overlaid with gold trelliswork. The tree was covered with leaves individually carved from dark green semi-precious stones. Its golden boughs were studded with flowers made out of pearls split four ways round a diamond centre and fruits made of citrine. The Duke reluctantly released his right hand from its business under her shoulder blades and touched one of these fruits. It, too, split open and out flew the smallest of all possible birds, made of red gold. It moved its head from side to side, flapped its wings and opened its beak and a shrill sweet warbling came out: ‘Only a bird in a gilded cage’. Fevvers gave a start. It finished the chorus, folded its wings and the hollow jade closed over again.
For all the delight she felt to see this beautiful toy, Fevvers found this tree and its bird exceedingly troubling and turned away from it with a sense of imminent and deadly danger.
Oooo-er, she said to herself, again.
Squeak, twang, bang and splash; squeak, twang, bang and splash. And she felt more and more vague, less and less her own mistress. Walser would have recognised the sensation which gripped her; he had felt much the same in her dressing-room at the Alhambra, when midnight struck the third time.
I may be getting out of my depth, she thought. Oh, Lizzie, Lizzie, my darling! Where are you now that I need you!
All the same, since fair is fair and he deserved something for going to so much trouble, she reached round behind her and unfastened the hooks and eyes at the back of her dress. There was a swishing rush of released plumage and the Grand Duke exclaimed softly under his breath. Nuzzling away, he begged her to spread a little more and she did, whilst, although he did not ask her to, a deep instinct of self-preservation made her let his rooster out of the hen-coop for him and ruffle up its feathers, as he was ruffling hers.
Yet it was then, as her eyes went round the shadowy, two-tiered room, that she saw there were no windows anywhere and, when the Grand Duke’s arms tightened around her, she realised he was a man of quite exceptional physical strength, sufficient to pin even her to the ground.
Then the worst she could, at that moment, imagine happened. His investigation of her torso flushed out Nelson’s sword from its hiding place in her corset.
‘Give me that back –’
But he held the lethal toy out of her reach, examining it curiously, chuckling under his moustache before he bent his knee to snap the sword in two across it. He sent the pieces flying to either end of the gallery, where they disappeared in the darkness that was seeping in through the walls like water. Now she was defenceless. She could have wept.
Down below, the mechanical musicians continued to play and the ice continued to melt.
She gathered together her scattered wits as well as she could and moved resolutely on to the next case, continuing to manipulate him as she did so, as if her life depended on it. He dragged his feet, growing so blissful he scarcely noticed her open the case with her free hand.
And, here, inside a silver egg criss-crossed by a lattice of amethyst chips, she found, to her incredulous delight, nothing less than a model train – an engine, in black enamel, and one, two, three, four first-class carriages in tortoiseshell and ebony, all coiled round one another like a snake, with, engraved on the side of each in Cyrillic, the legend The Trans-Siberian Express.
‘I’ll have that one!’ she cried, reaching in greedily. Her exclamation and sudden movement roused the Grand Duke from the trance she had induced, although she never stopped caressing him; she’d not served her apprenticeship at Ma Nelson’s academy for nothing.
‘No, no, no,’ he forbade her, although his voice was glutinous with tumescence. He weakly slapped the hand that held the train but she did not let go. ‘Not that one. The next one’s for you. I ordered it especially. They delivered it this morning.’
It was white gold and topped with a lovely little swan, a tribute, perhaps, to her putative paternity. And, as she suspected, it contained a cage made out of gold wires with, inside, a little perch of rubies and of sapphires and of diamonds, the good old red, white and blue. The cage was empty. No bird stood on that perch, yet.
Fevvers did not shrink; but was at once aware of the hideous possibility she might do so. She said goodbye to the diamond necklace down below and contemplated life as a toy. With oriental inscrutability, the automatic orchestra laid down the geometries of the implausible and, by the thickening of his member, the movements that now came of their own accord, by his panting breath and glazed eye, Fevvers judged the Grand Duke’s time was nigh.
Then came a wet crash and clatter as the ice-carving of herself collapsed into the remains of the caviare in the room below, casting the necklace which had tempted her amongst the dirty supper things. The bitter knowledge she’d been fooled spurred Fevvers into action. She dropped the toy train on the Isfahan runner – mercifully, it landed on its wheels – as, with a grunt and whistle of expelled breath, the Grand Duke ejaculated.
In those few seconds of his lapse of consciousness, Fevvers ran helter-skelter down the platform, opened the door of the first-class compartment and clambered aboard.
‘Look what a mess he’s made of your dress, the pig,’ said Lizzie.
The weeping girl threw herself into the woman’s arms. It was the dark abyss of the night, into which moon plunges. In this abyss she had lost her magic sword. The station master blew his whistle and waved the flag. The train, slowly, slowly, began to pull its great length out of the station, dragging with it its freight of dreams.
‘I’ve learned my lesson,’ said Fevvers and, sitting up, ripped off her bracelet and earrings.
There was a sudden flurry and a burst of outraged boyish protest in the corridor. The door of their stateroom burst open and in came Walser, clutching in his arms a kicking, vehemently protesting little bundle dressed up in a clown’s clothing.
‘Sorry to disturb you, ma’am,’ he said to Fevvers. ‘But this young gazooney ain’t gonna run away with the circus, not for a few years yet!’
The train slid slowly past a platform thickly piled with freshly fallen snow. Lizzie let down the window, letting in a gust of cold air, and Walser dropped the howling child outside, inside a snowdrift.
‘Now pick yourself up and run straight home to granny!’
‘And give her these!’ cried Fevvers.
Little Ivan rolled in the snow, pelted with diamonds. Through our children we might be saved, perhaps.
The train picked up a little speed. Walser hung out of the stateroom window until he was quite sure that Little Ivan had not jumped back on board further down the train, then hauled the window up again on its thick leather strap. When all was secure, he turned back to the occupants of the carriage and was struck dumb to see Fevvers, raddled with tears, hair coming down, again, gypsy dress ripped and clotted with semen, trying as best she could to cover her bare breasts with a filthy but incontrovertible tangle of pin feathers.
3
SIBERIA
ONE
How do they live, here? How do they cope with it? Or aren’t I the right one to pop the question, I’m basically out of sympathy with landscape, I get the shivers on Hampstead bloody Heath. As soon as I’m out of sight of the abodes of humanity, my heart gives way beneath me like rotten floorboards, my courage fails. Now parks, I love, and gardens. And small fields with hedges and ditches round ’em and useful cows in ’em. But if you must have a wild hillside, let there be at least a sheep or two posed picturesquely on an outcrop of rock, ready to have its wool wound off, something like that . . . I hate to be where the hand of Man has badly wrought and, here, we are on that broad forehead of the world that had the mark of Cain branded on it when the world began, just as the old m
an at the station who came selling us the bears he’d carved had ‘convict’ branded on his cheek.
I bought all the bears he had, to send home to the children when we reach Vladivostok and a post-office. You couldn’t call it a ‘cheap’ gesture, he charged enough for the things, I’m sorry to say. And I got an earful along with it, for Lizzie swore I ‘did it for posterity’, meaning, for the young American to take note of.
‘Since he made himself known to us in Petersburg, you’ve been acting more and more like yourself,’ she says.
Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked splendour like a public execution across, it would seem, half a continent, where live only bears and shooting stars and the wolves who lap congealing ice from water that holds within it the entire sky. All white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be used or touched. Horrors! And, as on a cyclorama, this unnatural spectacle rolls past at twenty-odd miles an hour in a tidy frame of lace curtains only a little the worse for soot and drapes of a heavy velvet of dark, dusty blue.
The rasp of charcoal in the corridor means they’re stoking up the samovar for tea. How cosy we are.
Brass monkey weather, outside, but, in our carriage, snug and warm – there’s a little stove. And a round table with a velvet cover, blue to match the curtains, and an easy chair upholstered likewise in which our Lizzie sits, dealing out a game of patience for herself.
Patience. Give me patience.
‘What I mean is, you grow more and more like your own publicity,’ says Lizzie. ‘Ever the golden-hearted Cockney who don’t stand on ceremony. Huh.’