And then, oh! then, great, innocent, big-hearted stupid that he was, his eyes spilled over with fat tears and he cast aside the trestle, knocking over the remains of my scarcely finished breakfast in his enthusiasm, so he could fall on his knees before me and go into his big aria.
‘Remarkable lady from beyond the mountains and the distant sea! It is well known that the Tsar, the Little Father of All the Russians, would, if he but knew of it, never permit that honest peasants such as we should be driven from the plough to live like beasts far away from home outside the law because we did no more than he himself would do if dishonour threatened the Little Mother or his precious girls.
‘The last time we robbed the railhead at R., we took away the newspapers to see whether they carried any stories about us and there we read how you, the famous aerialiste, the winged wonder, the Britannic angel, the intimate of the English royal family –’
Curse the Colonel and his publicity stunts!
‘– would pass through Transbaikalia on your way to the Great Ocean, where you will cross to the Land of the Dragonfly to hobnob with another Emperor. We blew up the track, dear lady, solely in order to take you hostage so that we can beg with you, plead with you, plead on my knees beating my forehead on the ground before you –’ suiting his actions to his words ‘– to intercede with your mother-in-law-to-be, the Queen of England.’
Whatever has the Colonel been up to now? What fresh lies has he been spreading? I’ll pay him back for this!
‘To intercede with the great Queen Victoria, the well-beloved baboushka who sits on the throne of England and with her royal bellows keeps alight the charcoal under the bubbling samovar of the Empire on which the sun never sets. I beg you, gracious and amazing creature, to intercede with this Queen Empress to ask her granddaughter’s husband, the Tsar – see! it is a family matter! – to ask the Tsar to forgive us all, so that we might return free men to our native villages, take up the plough we left lying in the fields, milk the cows that have long been lowing untended with swollen udders since we were forced to leave, to harvest the corn we left uncut.
‘For the Tsar is the friend of simple truth and doesn’t know the half of what his officials get up to on the side.’
I could have laughed, if I wasn’t near tears, myself, by that time, at the pitiful simplicity of the man, at his truly appalling greatness of heart, that he believed, in his misfortune, there was some higher authority which was infallible and must always know and love the truth when it saw it, as in Fidelio, by Beethoven; nobility of spirit hand in hand with absence of analysis, that’s what’s always buggered up the working class. Though I tried to stop the brigand chief, he covered the hem of my tea-gown with wet kisses.
‘Wonderful lady, you shall – you must! write to her a letter, a letter to Queen Victoria, and we will take it to a train and the train will chug away with it far, very, very far, even so far as unto the city of London. And there, one foggy morning, a liveried butler will bear our letter, with its invisible cargo of hope and faith of honest men, even unto the Queen Empress as she sits tapping away with her golden egg-spoon at her breakfast egg in its golden egg-cup, propped up on the pillows in her bed in Buckingham Palace. When she sees your well-known and beloved writing on the envelope, how gladly she’ll cry out: “A letter! A letter from my dear almost daughter-inlaw!” And then –’
By now my knees were sopping wet with tears and kisses and I could bear it no longer.
‘Oh, my old duck, you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the papers! I’m never engaged to the Prince of Wales! Hasn’t he got a perfectly good wife of his own, already! I’m not even intimate with him, love, and such an intimacy he’d offer the likes of me wouldn’t go down well with the Widow of Windsor at all, at all! What idle folly is this, that you fancy these great ones care a single jot about the injustice you suffer? Don’t the great ones themselves weave the giant web of injustice that circumscribes the globe?’
First, he didn’t believe me; then, when my arguments convinced him, he broke out in a furious tempest of rage, grief and despair, well-nigh Wagnerian in its intensity, berating the world, the newspapers, the duplicity of princes and his own gullibility and I must say I heartily sympathised with him but then he took to breaking every single object in his tent, even kicked the trestle and the chairs apart, such was the fury of his disappointment. All the other bandits rushed in but could do nothing to curb his excesses, so I said: ‘Send for Samson,’ and good old Samson the Strong Man got him in a half-nelson and hit him over the head and in the ensuing hush we adjourned to our hut, which, such is the human heart’s capacity for fixing on whatever security offers itself even in the most extreme circumstances, already feels like ‘home’.
‘Bastards,’ said Liz when I told her all and she did not mean the bandits. Even the Colonel looked abashed, as well he might, although he would take no responsibility for our plight, muttering it was a case of ‘caveat emptor’ and fools should take responsibility for themselves.
But – what will the brigand chief do with us, when he wakes up? Will he vent his rage upon ourselves? No use commandeering his weapons, since all the bandits are armed to the teeth and have their muzzles trained upon us. We’re in a pretty pickle, I must say.
The Princess is pacing up and down, bereft, her useless hands outstretched, looking ghastly as Lady Macbeth in the sleep-walking scene, Mignon one step behind to make sure she does no harm to herself, but the clowns have perked up sufficiently to entertain the fire-boy with a few simple card-tricks, episode of the poodle either forgotten or forgiven, but I foresee storms ahead when they run out of cigarettes. The Colonel, possibly from unacknowledged guilt, now overcomes his resistance to vodka to such an extent he is soon well away and sings songs of Old Kentucky over and over to himself in a high baritone. So all those still willing and able to form a council of war settle down together on that wooden platform and they are: yours truly; Lizzie; and – the Strong Man.
I am aware that strange changes are going on in Samson’s frontal lobes. His eyes that used to be so brightly vacant are darkening and growing more introspective hour by hour and though the time is not yet ripe for him to leap into discourse, I begin to have great hopes of him in that department, should we all live so long. If he does not partake in our discussion, he follows with a lively comprehension and, as we are, is torn between genuine compassion for the deceived outlaws and concern as to our own predicament.
‘The sun shines bright,’ warbles the Colonel, ‘on my Old Kentucky home.’
Sybil appeared to have given up on him now he was in his cups and was nesting down in the bearskins as far away from the fire-boy as she could burrow but we thought we might as well ‘consult the oracle’ and Lizzie extracted the letter cards from the Colonel’s pocket without him taking a blind bit of notice. But all the advice Sybil will give is: ‘w-a-i-t a-n-d s-e-e’, while, outside, the snow started to come down again, which spurred the fire-boy into action, I’m glad to say.
Then we heard the unmistakable sounds of the bandits drowning their sorrows and, comic operetta brigands as they were, they now indulged in a bass baritone chorus of laments, in parts, although, as time wears on, the part-singing becomes increasingly ragged. And it was sad music fit to make you cut your throat.
‘Here we are,’ opined Liz, ‘lodged up the arsehole of the universe with a bunch of scabby bandits so sunk in false consciousness they thought the Queen of England would shed a tear for them if only she knew their misery, and your wing is broken so we can’t fly away. And our clock is gone for good. And no means of knowing if that last lot of mail got home or not.’
Which seems the least of our problems, whether the comrades in London got hot news of the struggle. When I say that, we fell out, first time in our lives! Hard words pass between us. We withdraw to separate corners of the shed, to sulk, and, what with our bad feeling, and the Princess moping and mowing, and Mignon carrying on, and the Colonel running through the Stephen Foster songbook i
n ever a more discordant manner, as if vying with the lamentations of the outlaws outdoors as by the water of Babylon they sit down and weep, add to that the ululations of the wolves and the raucous laughter which accompanies the increasingly indecent games in which the clowns engage the fire-boy, I’m beginning to think I must have done something wicked in a former life to land in such a mess in this one.
And, silly superstitious little tremor as it is, childish and whimsical . . . all the same, the little sword that always armed me, and Father Time, who was once on our side – both these are gone, quite gone.
Besides, I suspect that not only my wing but also my heart has been a little broken.
No dinner brought us, because the bandits are too preoccupied with their dirges. But Lizzie, whose doings I keep watch on out of the corner of my eye, begs a knife off the fire-boy and starts in on cutting up the bearskins, so I see she’s a plan to make us all some good new clothes of a kind to withstand the weather outside and I can’t help but wonder if she’s cooking up some scheme of her own in her wily old head. But I don’t care to ask, since we’re not on speakers.
Then comes a knocking at the door and a strange, new voice in educated tones demands: ‘Anyone at home?’
‘Bolt’s on the other side!’ I sings out. ‘Open up and walk in!’
Which is how we made the acquaintance of the escaped convict.
SIX
Early morning. The dark blue sky stains the snow dark blue. The moon appears and disappears teasingly behind a scarf of blue gauze. Everything looks transparent. A volatile figure with its jaw now lightly clad in silvery beard flits through the thickets, evidently impervious to cold, for it exhibits no discomfort although it is half naked since it has lost its trousers, its comedy suspenders and its wig. There are feathers of the snowy owl, the goldeneye, the raven, stuck in its hair, along with burrs, thorns, twigs, mushrooms and mosses. This man looks as if both born in and born of the forest.
He mistakes the stars for birds and chirrups at them as if he knew no other language. Perhaps that angel who keeps the small birds under his wing has, in spite of his size, adopted him, for, apart from scratched shins, no harm has befallen him, and the odds and ends of cast-offs knocking about inside the box that used to hold his wits sometimes come together, kaleidoscope-wise, in the image of a feathered, tender thing that might, once upon a time, have sat upon his egg.
Although his cockscomb is long gone, he still cries: ‘Cock-a-doodle-do!’
The empty centre of an empty horizon, Walser flutters across the snowy wastes. He is a sentient being, still, but no longer a rational one; indeed, now he is all sensibility, without a grain of sense, and sense impressions alone have the power to shock and to ravish him. In his elevated state, he harkens to the rhythm of the drum.
Strange phenomenon of the landscape! as if it might have been sounds from the earth under the snow, or the heavens above it. A hollow, insistent drumming, soft at first, then increasing in intensity . . . a pitter-pat, a rat-tat-tap, and then a bim-bam-bom. Ruddeby-dubbedy-dub and rat-a-tat-a-tat, tattoos and riffs of more than Afro-Caribbean complexity.
Not that he can identify the drumming as drumming. It might, might it not, be nothing but the product of his disordered brains. He pauses on one leg, like a stork, sniffing the air as if to smell out from which direction, if any, this invocation comes but the cold snaps at his testicles when he stands still and, with a brief scream, he leaps off, again, coming to rest before the antlers of a reindeer bull sticking up out of the snow and looking for all the world like an abandoned hat-rack.
When Walser sniffed the air this time, his nostrils dilated at a whiff of something savoury, something aromatic on the cold-scoured air. The drumming grew louder and louder, more and more rhythmically innovative, as he pursued the delicious scent; until, among the trees, he found a brazier containing a small fire from which fragrant smoke issued. Beside the fire stood a being composed, or so it would seem, of fringed leather, gaudy rags and tinkling metal ornaments, applying the wooden stick he held in one hand to a skin drum the size of a dustbin lid, of the kind Irish musicians call a ‘bodrum’, brightly painted with all manner of strange devices, stretched on a wooden frame. This drum was talking to the wilderness in its own language.
The Shaman was not in the least surprised to see Walser, for he had drummed himself into that state of transcendental ecstasy demanded by his profession and his spirit was now disporting itself with a company of horned ancestors, of birds with fins and fish on stilts and many other physiologically anomalous apparitions, amongst which Walser cut rather an everyday figure. Walser squatted by the fire, enjoying the smoke and reacquainting himself with the sensuality of warmth until the Shaman’s eyes popped, his lips frothed and he fell down, dropping the drum, which rolled a little way on the snow and then toppled over.
Walser reached out for it but found he could coax only a few little muffled rumbles out of it. He did not know how to make the drum speak and, if he found out by accident, he could not have understood it.
Time passed. The Shaman sighed, got up, shook the snow off the skirts of his leather dress and saw that Walser was still there. The Shaman was prepared for anything when he took a spirit journey and greeted Walser affectionately, assuming he was an emanation of the wild which had elected to stick around a while after the drumming that summoned him stopped and would, in its own good time, softly and silently vanish away. But when Walser, recalling how nice things happened after he had done so once before, began to rub his belly with a circular motion, the Shaman had second thoughts.
He addressed Walser in his native tongue, an obscure Finno-Ugrian dialect just about to perplex three generations of philologists.
‘Whence cometh thou? Whither goeth thou?’
Walser giggled, went nowhere, went on rubbing his belly. From the satchel in which he transported his fetishes, the Shaman unpacked the tumbler in which he’d proposed to serve himself tea (prepared on the brazier with the aid of a tea-brick) to restore himself after his exertions. He modestly turned his back, raised his skirt and pissed into this tumbler. Then, with smiling formality, he offered the steaming glass of amber fluid to his unexpected guest.
‘No sugar,’ complained Walser. ‘No lemons.’
But he was thirsty and he drank.
Then his eyes began to spin round and round in his head and to send off sparks, like Catherine wheels. Even the Shaman, well used to the effects of fly agaric distilled through the kidneys, was startled. Walser entered an immediate fugue of hallucinations, in which birds, witches, mothers and elephants mixed up with sights and smells of Fisherman’s Wharf, the Alhambra Theatre, London, the Imperial Circus, Petersburg, and many other places.
All his past life coursed through his head in concrete but discrete fragments and he could not make head nor tail of any of it. He began to babble helplessly in a language unknown to the Shaman, which excited the Shaman’s curiosity all the more.
The Shaman packed up his belongings and slung his drum over his shoulder. He emptied the fire out of the brazier and stamped on it to put it out. He packed up the brazier. Himself, he was pretty sure, by now, that Walser, whatever he was, was not one of his own hallucinations, and might, he conjectured, be an apprentice shaman from another tribe, of, he noted, a markedly different physical type, who had wandered off-course during the ill-planned trip. He picked Walser up in a fireman’s lift – he was a small man, but tough – and started off back to his own village with him.
Upside down Walser continued to upbraid the embroidered back of the Shaman’s ceremonial frock. The hallucinogenic urine put the sluggish motor in his skull into overdrive.
‘Oh!’ he declaimed to the oncoming Siberian dawn. ‘What a piece of work is man!’
SEVEN
The Escapee opened up, came inside, had a good toast at the fire and was tickled pink to discover such a motley crew held hostage in the outlaws’ camp. He was a well-educated man – boy, I should say, for he wasn’t above tw
enty and didn’t look his age, a fresh-faced, bright-eyed, eager little cherub who spoke very fair French and enough English to get by. And he was a breath of fresh air in this miserable place, I can tell you, for he never mentioned ‘yesterday’. All he could talk of was ‘tomorrow’, a shining morrow of peace and love and justice in which the human soul, ever through history striving for harmony and perfection, would at last achieve it. And to the coming century he looked for the delivery of the concentrated essence of all the good things of that ideal ‘tomorrow’.
He’d been sent off to exile for trying to bring Utopia one step nearer by blowing up a copper-shop, which made our Liz look kindly on him at first. But when he embarrassedly confessed there’d been no bang nor damage because the dynamite was damp, Liz ‘tut-tutted’ his inefficiency, her brow darkened with displeasure at him and with his ‘soul’, with his ‘tomorrow’, she ferociously took issue.
‘First place, what is this soul of which you speak? Show me its location in the human anatomy and then I might believe in it. But, I tell you straight, dissect away how much you like, you won’t find it. And you can’t make perfect a thing that don’t exist. So, scrub the “soul” from out of your discourse. Second place, as we say in our country: “tomorrow never comes”, which is why you’re promised jam tomorrow. We live, always, in the here and now, the present. To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with. Third place, how will you recognise “perfection” when you see it? You can only define the future perfect by the present imperfect, and the present, in which, inevitably, we all live, always seems imperfect to somebody. This present time seems quite sufficiently perfect to such as that Grand Duke that wanted my foster-daughter, here, to add to his collection of toys. For the wretched peasants whose rents pay for his extravagances, the present is merry hell.