But Lizzie and Fevvers owed their capacity for survival to a refusal to be impressed by their surroundings. Fevvers gently laid the young mother down on the table with a relieved grunt and stretched her weary arms. The young mother opened her eyes and took note of her surroundings. The god-hut of her native village! And why had the baby stopped crying? She found she felt a little less unwell and started to gather her strength in order to get up and investigate the preparations for her own funeral she was sure were under way.
‘Look out!’ hissed Lizzie.
There was a man in the corner.
No; not a man. The women breathed again. There in the corner, now lit, now dark again according to the swaying of the lamp, stood a wooden image, somewhat larger than the little life-size of the woodsmen, wrapped in furs, shawls and girdles, and there was one white shirt on him the front of which was stiff with dried egg-liquor. Fevvers’ heart went pit-a-pat when she saw that. The idol’s head bore several three-pointed caps made of black, blue and red cloth but it was hard to see much of its face because of the furs, shawls and bits of lace and tin and ribbon that covered it. Its maw appeared to be ravening, however, and its eyes, made of discs of beaten tin, flashed when visited by the wavering flame of the lamp.
The idol spoke.
‘Whence cometh thou? Whither goeth thou?’
The startled baby bawled to hear the idol speak in good American. The young mother leapt from the table – that yell was never posthumous! – and grappled with Lizzie for possession of the baby, adding her own shrieks to the din. Lizzie delivered up the baby so she could catch hold of a growling something as it came out from under the table where the Shaman had kicked it when the sacrifice was interrupted before it began. The bear, affronted, cuffed Lizzie about the head and they scuffled together, knocking over the table as they did so. The dish and knife fell clattering to the floor. They banged against the idol in their wrestling. The idol toppled against another one, similarly clad, with more of a stag-like look. Toppling in its turn, the staggy deity knocked the next in line of the row of idols from its perch and so on, in a domino effect of comprehensive desecration. A number of skulls rolled round the floor, released from their stash under the ursine idol. It was not at first apparent these were the skulls of bears. The disturbed lamp swished back and forth, faster and faster, splashing hot grease over everything. Fevvers kept her head sufficiently to dance backwards from the mêlée, singing out:
‘Come out, come out, wherever you are!’
The lamp dipped and swung with such energy the lit wick flew off, hit the wall and was extinguished, leaving the god-hut black as pitch, in which unseen presences made themselves felt with a vengeance, pinching, punching, sometimes made of fur, sometimes of leather, emitting weird screeches and jingle-jangling away their little bells; had the women been attacked by the ghosts of a team of morris dancers? Fevvers wrestled with an invisible until she smelt flesh and bit hard. She bit bone and tasted blood. It was alive. There was an ugly but unmistakably human squawk. She made a grab; another squawk, as she ascertained she wrestled with a male.
Once Lizzie got an arm-lock on the bear, she located the dropped stone knife with her foot and kept her foot firmly down on it, in spite of the blows with which some leathery, gibbering, tinkling thing belaboured her. Fevvers did not let go of the hand between her teeth as she tumbled the rest of the faceless anatomy to the ground, where she plumped herself down on his chest, breathing heavily. It shouted in a language that sounded not as if spoken but as if knitted on steel needles. It must have asked for some light on the business, for, a moment later, came an odd cadaverous glow from somewhere in a corner, accompanied by a peculiar smell.
The fuss died down, as if the light calmed them; a last whimper from the baby, a snuffle from the bear and, in the ensuing hush, Fevvers saw whom she straddled.
Walser wore his ceremonial dress and a triangular cap with a fur trim and a piece of tin cut in the shape of a dollar sign at the front. He was a little thinner in the face. To a European eye, the pale gold beard, which now reached halfway down his chest, ill-matched his leather petticoats and he could have done with soap and water; he stank. And that was not the half of it, for there was a vatic glare in his grey eyes, his eyes of a glossy brilliance, his eyes with the pin-point pupils. A vatic glare and no trace of scepticism at all. Furthermore, they seemed to have lost their power to reflect.
Fevvers felt the hairs on her nape rise when she saw that he was looking at her as if, horror of horrors, she was perfectly natural – natural, but abominable. He fixed her with his phosphorescent eye and, after a moment, his voice rose in song:
‘Only a bird in a gilded cage –’
‘Oh, my Gawd!’ said Fevvers. For he had translated the familiar tune into some kind of chant, some kind of dirge, some kind of Siberian invocation of the spectral inhabitants of the other world which co-exists with this one, and Fevvers knew in her bones his song was meant to do her harm.
The Shaman identified her fur, her hair, her broken wing and was a little consoled to see how quickly she was fading. He eyed the young mother and her baby assessingly; did the bear-spirits intend them as a substitute for the cub? It would seem so. The smaller one still stood firmly on the sacrificial knife, however. Perhaps they intended to do the job themselves. The thing to do, obviously, was to assist the bear-spirits to fade away as quickly as possible, before they stretched mother and baby out on the altar, again. He snatched up his drum, which was propped against the wall, and banged away at an exorcism with the energy of the desperate. Walser’s voice swooped and quavered with a sound, to Fevvers, like the very essence of madness.
Fevvers felt that shivering sensation which always visited her when mages, wizards, impresarios came to take away her singularity as though it were their own invention, as though they believed she depended on their imaginations in order to be herself. She felt herself turning, willy-nilly, from a woman into an idea. The Shaman redoubled the vigour of his drumming and began to sing a song with strange yippings and yowlings in it. From an unseen censer, a purple, disorienting incense filled the god-hut, so the Shaman seemed to multiply himself until there were dozens of him, banging dozens of drums in the same appeal to this thing that was and was not Fevvers. In Walser’s eyes, she saw herself, at last, swimming into definition, like the image on photographic paper; but, instead of Fevvers, she saw two perfect miniatures of a dream.
She felt her outlines waver; she felt herself trapped forever in the reflection in Walser’s eyes. For one moment, just one moment, Fevvers suffered the worst crisis of her life: ‘Am I fact? Or am I fiction? Am I what I know I am? Or am I what he thinks I am?’
‘Show ’em your feathers, quick!’ urged Lizzie.
Fevvers, with a strange sense of desperation, a miserable awareness of her broken wing and her discoloured plumage, could think of nothing else to do but to obey. She shrugged off her furs and, though she could not spread two wings, she spread one – lopsided angel, partial and shabby splendour! No Venus, or Helen, or Angel of the Apocalypse, not Izrael or Isfahel . . . only a poor freak down on her luck, and an object of the most dubious kind of reality to her beholders, since both the men in the god-hut were accustomed to hallucinations and she who looks like a hallucination but is not had no place in their view of things.
The door creaked, and creaked again, and Fevvers knew, without turning round, that some of Walser’s new friends had arrived to see what the fuss was about. All manner of yellow faces now showed up at the door, looking like risen moons in the light of the lamps they carried. She felt their eyes on her back and tentatively fluttered the one whole wing at them. She was hesitant, uncertain, at first; but then her plumage – yes! it did! – her plumage rippled in the wind of wonder, their expelled breaths. Oooooooh!
As ever, that wind refreshed her spirits. It blew and blew through the god-hut, blowing away the drugged perfumes and smells of old blood. She cocked her head to relish the shine of the lamps, like footlights, lik
e stage-lights; it was as good as a stiff brandy, to see those footlights, and, beyond them, the eyes fixed upon her with astonishment, with awe, the eyes that told her who she was.
She would be the blonde of blondes, again, just as soon as she found peroxide; it was as easy as that, and, meanwhile, who cared! And of course her wing would mend – it would mend when the snow melted to reveal the whole taiga covered with violets; and that was when she would soar up on her mended wing above the village, above the forest, above the mountains and the frozen seas, her loved ones in her arms. Home! Yes! she would see Trafalgar Square, again; and Nelson on his plinth; and Chelsea Bridge as it dissolved into the Thames at twilight . . . and St Paul’s, the single Amazon breast of her beloved native city.
Hubris, imagination, desire! The blood sang in her veins. Their eyes restored her soul. She rose up from her kneeling position on Walser’s chest. She put on a brilliant, artificial smile, extending her arms as if to enfold all present in a vast embrace. She sank down in a curtsey towards the door, offering herself to the company as if she were a gigantic sheaf of gladioli. Then she sank down in a curtsey towards Walser, now scrambling to his feet with an expression on his face as of the clearing of a haze. And then she saw he was not the man he had been or would ever be again; some other hen had hatched him out. For a moment, she was anxious as to whom this reconstructed Walser might turn out to be.
‘What is your name? Have you a soul? Can you love?’ he demanded of her in a great, rhapsodic rush as she rose up out of her curtsey. When she heard that, her heart lifted and sang. She batted her lashes at him, beaming, exuberant, newly armed. Now she looked big enough to crack the roof of the god-hut, all wild hair and feathers and triumphant breasts and blue eyes the size of dinner plates.
‘That’s the way to start the interview!’ she cried. ‘Get out your pencil and we’ll begin!’
ENVOI
‘For you must know that Liz just lost a child when she found me and so she took me to her breast and suckled me. And it was, of course, never religion that made her such an inconvenient harlot, but her habit of lecturing the clients on the white slave trade, the rights and wrongs of women, universal suffrage, as well as the Irish question, the Indian question, republicanism, anti-clericism, syndicalism and the abolition of the House of Lords. With all of which Nelson was in full sympathy but, as she said, the world won’t change overnight and we must eat.
‘Those letters we sent home by you in the diplomatic bag were news of the struggle in Russia to comrades in exile, written in invisible ink, so we made most grievous use of you, I’m sorry to say, for if the secret police had found out about it, you’d have been sent to Siberia somewhere we couldn’t find you. But Liz would do it, having made a promise to a spry little gent with a ’tache she met in the reading-room of the British Museum.
‘Furthermore, we played a trick on you with the aid of Nelson’s clock the first night we met, in the Alhambra, London; but the clock is gone and I’ll play tricks on you no more.
‘We told you no other lies nor in any way strayed from the honest truth. Believe it or not, all that I told you as real happenings were so, in fact; and as to questions of whether I am fact or fiction, you must answer that for yourself!’
Without her clothes on, she looked the size of a house. She was engaged in washing herself piece by piece in a pot of water drawn from the samovar while Walser, naked but for his beard, waited on the Shaman’s brass bed. He saw, without surprise, she indeed appeared to possess no navel but he was no longer in the mood to draw any definite conclusions from this fact. Her released feathers brushed against the walls; he recalled how nature had equipped her only for the ‘woman on top’ position and rustled on his straw mattress. He was as much himself again as he ever would be, and yet that ‘self’ would never be the same again for now he knew the meaning of fear as it defines itself in its most violent form, that is, fear of the death of the beloved, of the loss of the beloved, of the loss of love. It was the beginning of an anxiety that would never end, except with the deaths of either or both; and anxiety is the beginning of conscience, which is the parent of the soul but is not compatible with innocence.
Lizzie might sniff: ‘Look at him, Sophie, all for mumbo-jumbo and ladies’ dresses now!’ But, apart from this shaft, had looked on him almost kindly for, in the light of his grey eyes, her foster-daughter was transformed back into her old self again, without an application of peroxide, even. After a deal of nodding and winking from Fevvers, Lizzie had adjourned with the Shaman, his cousin, her eldest daughter and the new baby, to the cousin’s house, in which improvised maternity ward she embarked on the elaboration of an extensive ritual of mother-and-baby care, which, religiously implemented over the next decade, more than made up for the low birth rate by the reduction in perinatal mortality it procured.
The Shaman’s cousin, the magic midwife, kept an amulet bag next to the samovar, just as he did. Lizzie cocked an interested eye; might she, perhaps, find herself a new handbag amongst these friendly and intelligent, if somewhat backward and superstitious, folk? The Shaman, entranced by her moustache, addressed her reverently as ‘little mother of all the bears’; the bear-cub tagged along behind her like the victim of a teenage crush. Lizzie sternly repressed the temptation to take – just this once, just for the night – a little holiday from rationality and play at being a minor deity.
‘Is there some place we can be alone?’ Fevvers had suggested, batting her eyelashes in an unequivocal fashion. Walser, whose head was clearing minute by minute, seized her hand and ran her to the Shaman’s house but lost the initiative immediately as she pinned him cheerfully to the bed and told him to wait while she freshened up. She seemed to be washing the colour back into her cheeks. She sang as she washed; what else but the ‘Habanera’ from Carmen. Am I biting off more than I can chew? pondered Walser.
He contemplated, as in a mirror, the self he was so busily reconstructing.
‘I am Jack Walser, an American citizen. I joined the circus of Colonel Kearney in order to delight my reading public with accounts of a few nights at the circus and, as a clown, performed before the Tsar of All the Russians, to great applause. (What a story!) I was derailed by brigands in Transbaikalia and lived as a wizard among the natives for a while. (God, what a story!) Let me introduce my wife, Mrs Sophie Walser, who formerly had a successful career on the music-hall stage under the name of –
‘Oh!’
Unbeknownst to the lovers, midnight, that movable feast, rolled over the taiga at that moment, disturbing nothing in its passage in spite of the era it was dragging in its wake. Precipitated in ignorance and bliss into the next century, there, after it was over, Walser took himself apart and put himself together again.
‘Jack, ever an adventurous boy, ran away with the circus for the sake of a bottle blonde in whose hands he was putty since the first moment he saw her. He got himself into scrape upon scrape, danced with a tigress, posed as a roast chicken, finally got himself an apprenticeship in the higher form of the confidence trick, initiated by a wily old pederast who bamboozled him completely. All that seemed to happen to me in the third person as though, most of my life, I watched it but did not live it. And now, hatched out of the shell of unknowing by a combination of a blow on the head and a sharp spasm of erotic ecstasy, I shall have to start all over again.’
Smothered in feathers and pleasure as he was, there was still one question teased him.
‘Fevvers . . .’ he said. Some sixth sense kept him from calling her Sophie. They were not yet sufficiently intimate.
‘Fevvers, only the one question . . . why did you go to such lengths, once upon a time, to convince me you were the “only fully-feathered intacta in the history of the world”?’
She began to laugh.
‘I fooled you, then!’ she said. ‘Gawd, I fooled you!’
She laughed so much the bed shook.
‘You mustn’t believe what you write in the papers!’ she assured him, stuttering and hicc
upping with mirth. ‘To think I fooled you!’
Her laughter spilled out of the window and made the tin ornaments on the tree outside the god-hut shake and tinkle. She laughed so loud that the baby in the Shaman’s cousin’s house heard her, waved its little fists in the air and laughed delightedly too. Although he did not understand the joke that convulsed the baby, the Shaman caught the infection and started to giggle. The bear panted sympathetically; he would have laughed if he could have. The Shaman’s cousin caught Lizzie’s eye and they both doubled up. Even the young mother in her peaceful bed of reindeer skins smiled in her sleep.
Fevvers’ laughter seeped through the gaps in the window-frames and cracks in the doorframes of all the houses in the village; the villagers stirred in their beds, chuckling at the enormous joke that invaded their dreams, of which they would remember nothing in the morning except the mirth it caused. She laughed, she laughed, she laughed.
It seemed this laughter of the happy young woman rose up from the wilderness in a spiral and began to twist and shudder across Siberia. It tickled the sleeping sides of the inhabitants of the railhead at R.; it penetrated the counterpoint of the music in the Maestro’s house; the members of the republic of free women experienced it as a refreshing breeze. The Colonel and the Escapee, snug in a smoking compartment on the way to Khabarovsk, caught the echoes and found abashed smiles creeping across their faces.