‘The old tales diagnose a kiss as the cure for sleeping beauties,’ said Vera, with some irony.
Olga’s maternal heart did not heed that irony. She pressed her lips to his forehead and his eyelids slowly fluttered, slowly opened and he lifted up his arms and slowly put them round her neck.
‘Mama,’ he said. That universal word.
Smiling, she shook her head. She saw that Walser no longer knew enough to ask: ‘Where am I?’ Like the landscape, he was a perfect blank.
They lifted him to his feet, to see if he could walk. After a few tries and demonstrations, he got the hang of it and laughed out loud with delight and pride as he toddled with increasing confidence back and forth from Olga’s arms to Vera’s less welcoming ones, until he could manage by himself. Shortly after that, he discovered in himself sensation. He rubbed his hand on his belly in a circular motion and searched the absence that had been his memory but he could find nothing there to tell him what to say. So he kept on rubbing.
Olga Alexandrovna found a can of milk in the kitchen, crumbled bread in it and got him to take some of that from her fingers because he no longer knew how to use a spoon. He was pleased with everything and cooed, gazing round him with eyes the size of saucers. When he finished his bread and milk, he rubbed his belly again, to see what might be forthcoming this time.
Olga Alexandrovna picked up the wire basket of eggs.
‘Does he want a nice eggy, then?’
The sight of the eggs set the jumble behind his eyes in motion. All manner of connections took place. Up he rose on tiptoe and flapped his arms.
‘Cock-a-doodle-dooski!’
‘Poor thing,’ said Olga Alexandrovna. ‘Lost his wits, may the Good Lord protect him.’
Then a shrill whistle pierced the night and, far off, they saw the sparks and glowing tender of a railway engine, arriving from the direction of the railhead at R., and they made out the shapes of men with torches, lanterns, ropes and axes, walking alongside the slowly moving engine. The white apron of a nurse flashed as she leant out of the cabin to catch a glimpse of the work that lay before her. So Olga Alexandrovna’s decision was made for her; and all now hastened to gather together bundles of useful tools and utensils, and to make off into the woods, towards the radiant uncertainties of love and freedom.
Olga, in a hurry, stuck a pin into an egg and gave it to Walser to suck, which he did eagerly.
‘Cock-a-doodle-do!’
‘I hate to leave the poor thing,’ she said to Vera.
‘He is a man, even if he has lost his wits,’ replied Vera. ‘We can do without him.’
Still Olga lingered, as if she thought there must be something useful this young man could do for them, if only she could think of it . . . but time was running out. When she kissed Walser goodbye, she kissed goodbye to her own son and all the past. The women vanished.
Walser crouched over the basket of eggs but found they were easily crushed. Disgruntled, he kicked the basket over and had some fun watching the eggs that remained whole roll around. The rescue party drew nearer, at a stately pace, for, however great the emergency, the antique stock would only chuff along at the most geriatric rate. Walser had some more fun jumping on the rolling eggs and smashing them, but not as much fun as all that. Bored, he flapped his arms, again.
‘Cock-a-doodle-do! Cock-a-doodle-dooski!’
When he realised the kind ladies were all gone, tears ran unhindered from his eyes. Crowing like a cock, flapping his arms up and down, he sprinted off among the trees in search of them but soon forgot his quest in his enchantment at the sight of dappled starlight on the snow.
FIVE
As soon as we turned our backs on the train, it ceased to exist; we were translated into another world, thrust into the hearts of limbo to which we had no map.
They took us further and yet further into the margins of the forest, which, no hasty gulper, swallowed us up at its primeval leisure. It took me a long while to somewhat recover my composure and by then we were inside it as securely as Jonah in the belly of the whale and in almost as profound a darkness, for the close boughs of the evergreens blotted out the sky except when a lump of the snow with which they were lined fell on our heads like the dropping of a big, cold-blooded bird, and then a few scraps of red light from the fire we left behind us showed through the gap, bloodying the night-time clouds.
Our hosts, of whose intentions I grew moment by moment more apprehensive, appeared, through long custom and the most intimate knowledge of the woods, to need no light to guide them along the path they had hewn among the close-grown trunks, and they did not speak to us or one another. Now and then I caught a whiff of the ones who dragged me along and they smelled like hell, I must say.
Once I’d come to myself, prone on that jolting litter, I pummelled their backsides until they let me off and there was our Liz, again, so I gave her a kiss on what bit of her anatomy I could get at, which turned out to be her nose.
‘Satisfied, now you’re on foot?’ she greeted me, the old witch. ‘Find this method of progress more appropriate to the scenery, do you?’
Now, when I call Liz a ‘witch’, you must take it with a pinch of salt because I am a rational being and, what’s more, took in my rationality with her milk, and you could say it’s too much rationality as procured her not altogether undeserved reputation, for when she puts two and two together sometimes she comes up with five, because she thinks quicker than most. How does she reconcile her politics with her hanky-panky? Don’t ask me! Ask that family of anarchist bomb-makers of hers! Who put the bomb in the bombe surprise at Jenny’s wedding? Work of a moment for our Gianni, for all his weak lungs; and who would ever think to look for dynamitards in an ice-cream parlour, amongst those bonny babies, to boot?
And, at this very moment, back home in Battersea, our babies may be asking: ‘Where’s our Auntie Liz, now? Where’s Fevvers?’ But, as for Fevvers and Liz, why, they can’t answer that question themselves! When I think of the babies, I feel on my front for the lucky violets my Violetta gave me last Christmas, and, of course, there they aren’t, they’ve dropped off somewhere in Siberia.
Hearing me give out a little sob, Liz says under her breath: ‘How’s the broken pinion?’
‘Bad enough.’
She gives my hand a squeeze.
‘And I’ve lost my lucky violets,’ I add. She drops my hand sharpish; she hates sentiment.
‘Bugger your lucky violets, wherever they are,’ she says. ‘Prepare yourself for the worst, gel; we’ve lost the bloody clock, haven’t we. Burnt to a crisp in the wreck, most likely. First your sword, now my clock. We’ll soon lose all track of time, and then what will become of us. Nelson’s clock. Gone. And that’s not all. My handbag. That’s gone too.’
This was a disaster so great I scarcely dare think of the distress it would cause us.
Forward, we went, deeper and deeper into an unknown terrain that was, at the same time, claustrophobic, due to the trees shutting us in, and agoraphobic, because of the enormous space which the trees filled. We dragged one increasingly weary foot before the other weary foot, all dreary and incomprehensible as a wet Sunday, until we got to a clearing full of dirty snow with, behind a spiked stockade, all manner of haphazard dwellings in it, some like wigwams made of skins, some like tents put up by soldiers, and a few sheds of raw, split logs with all the signs of the hastiest construction, cracks stuffed with earth. I could see everything by the light of sputtery torches of pinewood our captors now ignited and my suspicions there were no women amongst them were amply confirmed. I would not say this discovery gave me more confidence in my hosts.
They all crowded round especially me, stared at only me, and muttered and exclaimed to themselves, but for the Princess or Mignon they never spared a glance. It seemed I formed a special item on the menu, although I kept that blanket tight around me, I can tell you.
But they treated us quite kindly. They gave us hot tea and ardent spirits and offered us cold roast, I think
, moose, but I could eat nothing, I was overcome by silly weeping at the sight of food, which Liz said, then, was the effect of shock, but afterwards assured me that to see me off my feed was the first cause of real concern I’d given her since I was a baby.
They showed us even more consideration that night; they forbore to subject us to interrogation or stuff of that order, since we were so distraught and travel-weary, but put us all in a largish shed, where, to sleep on, was a wood platform with piles of furs, principally bearskins, not too well cured, by the smell. They left us huddled up all together, the poor remains of the Colonel’s circus, and he chattering with indignation as, apart from the indignities we’d suffered, he’d no great liking for the vodka they had hospitably provided for us, craving his lost bourbon like a baby snatched too early from the nipple and forlornly demanding an American consul be summoned ‘toot sweet’, he said. ‘Toot damn sweet.’
There was a clang and a bang outside – the buggers have slid the bolt on us, amidst much disputation in the Russian language. For these men are not the natives of the place. The native woodsmen are low in stature, yellow of skin; sometimes we’ve seen ’em at the stations, loading skins from high-piled sleds into the baggage vans, and they wear curious hats, of a triangular shape, and chink with ornaments made of tin. But our men are big, sturdy fellows, although we’re far too far away from farmland for them to come of that peasant stock imported into Siberia centuries ago to till the soil. And I do think they’re strangers here as much as we.
There was a fire in the lodging and some of the smoke went up through a hole in the roof. A small boy was left with us, whose task was to sit by the fire all night and feed it with sticks, for they did not trust us with the means of combustion. The clown-dogs bounced around to see the little fellow, thinking they’d have a game with him, but when one black poodle bitch with its red satin bow still in its curls jumped up at him, beseeching friendship, this jolly little chap seized hold of her and broke her neck with one clean snap of his long-fingered hands, which put all the clowns in a terrible humour and didn’t reassure me as to the good hearts of our hosts in the least.
And the looks the fire-boy gave poor Sybil the pig were exactly those the ragged urchins that hopscotch on the Queenstown Road give Gianni when he calls out ‘Icey, icey, ice-cream!’ So I didn’t give Sybil much longer in this world, I can tell you, and she is clearly apprehensive herself and climbs right down inside the Colonel’s waistcoat and buries her snout in his breast, whimpering occasionally.
Nevertheless, I persuaded the fire-boy to split a log so Liz can make splints for my broken wing, binding the splints with strips she tore off our underlinen, and then I felt easier. But we couldn’t conceal what we were up to from the fire-boy and his eyes went big as cart-wheels when he saw what I’d got to show. God, he stared. And, would you believe, he crossed himself.
The Princess woke up at last and broke that life-long silence of hers with a vengeance but to no purpose, since she babbled away hysterically and her words made no sense. Even Mignon could not console her for it was plain to see the Princess knew Othello’s occupation was gone. She kept her hands stuck out straight in front of her as if they no longer belonged to her, as if, henceforward, she would have no use for them as hands. Her poor fingers were stiff as chapel hat-pegs already.
She made such a hullabaloo, lamenting, presumably, the passing of her keyboard and her tigers, that the clowns grew restive and were all for getting the fire-boy to open the door and shove her out in the snow but Lizzie found a pack of cards in her handbag and they settled down, resentfully but quietly, while the Princess’s passion wore itself out until she lay still in Mignon’s arms, racked only by exhausted sobs.
Liz hugged me and kissed me and, no matter what state she might have been in under her surface calm, she was fast asleep under the stinking bearskins in two shakes but my nerves were so ravaged by the shocking tragedy we had undergone I could not close my eyes although at last the clowns slept, cards and glasses in their hands, the Colonel slept, Mignon and the Princess both drifted into sleep.
The silence of the forest was interrupted only by the howling of the wolves, a sound that chills to the bone by virtue of its distance from humanity, and told me only how lonely I was and how the night around us contained nothing to assuage the infinite melancholy of these empty spaces.
There I lay, my face buried in my arms, and then I heard the softest step on the earthen floor, and then a touch, the smallest, tenderest touch you might imagine, on my back. Quickly as I sprang up, I didn’t catch him at it but now the fire-boy crouched cross-legged by the hearth, again, with, in his hand, a purple feather.
I had no heart to reprimand him.
My movement disturbed the Colonel; he rolled on his back and soon was snoring away in concert with his pig. Perhaps their duet lullabied me for slept I must have, although my young man was burned to a crisp, because the next thing I remember is the unbolting of the door.
Turns out the leader of the outlaws wants to see me all by myself and they’ve come to take me to his hut. They set me at a rough trestle in front of a goodish breakfast of sour milk, black bread and tea. Sleep had refreshed me, and I thought: while there’s life, there’s hope. So, in spite of my sorrow, I dipped my bread into the buttermilk and got a little something down. Meanwhile, he tugged his moustaches, which depended in two thin plaits from his upper lip to his Adam’s apple, and subjected me to a piercing scrutiny from his close-set but not inherently malevolent eyes.
I must have cut a farcical figure, guyed up in what remained of that lace tea-gown, which never suited me even when new, bought it from Swan and Edgar’s for the joke. Minus a petticoat. Plus a blanket around me, toga-fashion. His manners, however, had all the stately courtesy of the poor; he never asked me once to show my feathers, though you could tell he wanted, ever so, but knew it would be rude.
‘Now you are in Transbaikalia, where the rivers freeze solid to the bottom and trap the fish like flies in amber,’ he announced. You know I have knack with foreign languages, pick ’em up like fleas, and though his Russian was not that of Petersburg, I could follow it well enough and pitch in my own three ha’pence, too.
‘Charmed, I’m sure,’ I said.
‘Welcome to the brotherhood of free men.’
‘Brotherhood’, is it? I’m not a man, nor your brother, either! His fraternal greetings don’t go down half so well as his victuals and I give him a sneer, of which he takes no notice, but surges on:
‘We are neither prisoners, nor exiles, nor settlers, madame, though our ranks, on occasion, have been swelled by all three conditions of men; we exist outside a law that shows us no pity and we demonstrate by our lives and deeds, how the wild life in the woods can bring liberty, equality and fraternity to those who pay the price of homelessness, danger and death. Swords are our only sisters, now: our wives are those rifles with whom faithfully each night we share our mattresses and jealously never let out of our sight. We go towards our deaths as joyously as we would towards a marriage.’
Don’t think I’m unsympathetic to the spirit of his peroration, although the letter wants attending to here and there, to my mind. ‘Swords for sisters, rifles for wives’, indeed! What kind of intercourse is that? And anyone with any sense would go towards their marriage as if towards the noose, rather than the other way around. This fellow mixes his metaphors the way a toper does his drinks and, I dare say, gets just as tipsy on them. Furthermore, it seems to me his speech would sound well set to music, scored for brass and timpani, and a male voice chorus wouldn’t come amiss, at points. Nevertheless, although he’s kidnapped us, at this moment, I’m more for him than against him.
‘Only catastrophe,’ he goes on, ‘can lead a man to this remote territory.’
But ain’t I living proof that women don’t come here of their own accord, either? To cover up my irritation, I ask him for another glass of tea. With this request, he courteously complies, amidst a clank and bang of armaments, fo
r, besides the rifle propped against the trestle in easy reach of his hand, he’d a pair of pistols at his belt and his peasant caftan was criss-crossed by bandoliers. He’d a wide-bladed sword of a somewhat Turkish design to complete the ensemble. It was the outfit of a conspicuously untamed man, well set-off by the extraordinary ferocity of his moustaches. If this get-up smacked a bit of the comic-opera bandit, it must have been because they copied his get-up, not he theirs, and there was nothing of the wooden prop about his gun, although it looked old enough to have seen service in the Crimea.
‘Each man of us, even including the first fire-boy, is here in flight from a law which would extract punishment from us for the vengeance we took upon those minor officials, army officers, landlords and such like petty tyrants, who forcibly dishonoured the sisters, wives and sweethearts of flesh and blood we all once had, who are now left far behind us.’
So that’s where women come into the libretto! Absent friends!
‘What do you mean, “dishonour”?’ I says, hooking with distaste a dead fly out of my tea but, too cold for flies here, as it turns out, it’s nothing but a tea-leaf, to my relief. I probe him further on the ‘dishonour’ question.
‘Wherein does a woman’s honour reside, old chap? In her vagina or in her spirit?’
Which pithy quibble wouldn’t sound badly set to music, either. Nevertheless, it troubled him, although it might have been I spoke a dirty word that momentarily stemmed his flow. He sucked in his moustache braids and chewed them vehemently, unused to having his opinions questioned.
‘I do think, myself,’ I added, ‘that a girl should shoot her own rapists.’
And I gave his rifle such a proprietorial glance that, if he’d anything of that nature in the back of his mind, then he’d got another think coming.
‘It was my lads,’ he said, evidently not wanting to debate the point with me, ‘that blew up the railway track.’
‘Well done!’ I says ironically. ‘Smart move! Dynamite a circus train! What kind of strategy is that?’