Field of Mars (16 page)

‘I'm anointing you, I'm washing your sins away . . .' He tried to stand up, spin around and find Yuri again, but his feet slipped and he fell back down to the cobbles. His face was stinging and he shook his head so that he could see more clearly. There wasn't much to look at, the empty street and Vera as she tipped the bottle up, took the last drops on her tongue, and then flung the bottle high over her head into the night.

‘Now, you're all grown up,' she said and reached down and touched his bloody cheek with her light fingers. She was a silhouette against the lights, behind her the street stretched unbroken in the distance. There might be no one else on earth but the two of them. The reflections in the street cast an eerie watery light on her. She was smiling at him, beautiful. Somehow beautiful and terrible all at once. He was suddenly afraid of her, afraid and chilled to the bone. She looked like death come alive, like an avenging wraith, like a woman capable of anything he might imagine.

‘So, now you've seen what they do with little lost girls in Petersburg. Now you know the rules of the game, eh? Who comes out on top, who gets to sleep in the wet spot.' She laughed suddenly. ‘Think how much you've learned!'

Vera seemed genuinely happy at his progress, like she'd discovered a puppy that had finally figured out the purpose of a newspaper. She was looking around at the deserted street.

‘Yes, now you know, Mr Paintbrush . . . Now you know about everything.'

TWELVE

Mina Pohnlinskya rehearses in her dreams. Well, she has always made good use of her extra time. A fanatic, a perfectionist, her teachers said. It was the mask that hid the frustrated girl; frustrated at her inability to perform the combinations, all the many steps, leaps and poses that made up the complex choreography. Angry and ashamed at her own weakness, at her awkwardness, her lack of endurance. To advance, to get ahead, to get a solo, she had always been the one who worked harder. She had rehearsed even after her body had succumbed to fatigue. In her sleep, dreaming until things came out right.

Always it has been so.

She rehearses now for her reunion with Sergei, to make it perfect. No—to make it beyond perfect—
divine
. For three days now the telephones have been ringing; people begging for appointments. Invitations, telegrams, Sergei from Vienna, Sergei from Warsaw, Sergei from Riga. Boys delivering special sealed letters, pouches that are constantly arriving. Porters waiting on stand-by. The maids have dusted the library—she never uses it. There are fresh flowers. The cook has gone out early to order necessary provisions. A week he has promised her. An entire, glorious week.

She rehearses what she will say to him, what he will say to her. The first kiss after being apart for far too long. What they will eat, what they will do.

She has bathed again, gone to Basia's and been coiffed, plucked, waxed and scoured. All in the service of beauty. Beauty eternal, always fragile and ephemeral, always the loser in the battle against time and gravity.

Well, she hardly needs to worry, she is not yet thirty and still radiant as a virgin. Everywhere she goes she is Pohnlinskya, the Lilac Soap Goddess. Often simply
Lilac
. Men, soldiers, boys and grandfathers, women and even their infants recognize her.

She did it on the cusp of meeting Sergei. Took the soap money. A fortune, and alone it would have been enough for her to retire. Thus, when they met she was able to face him as something like an equal. Perhaps it was the challenge that attracted him, to take a famous woman, a woman of means, and bring her into his stable. Perhaps he saw her as a great trophy, merely one more superb jewel to add to his crown. In those years every girl wanted to land Sergei. Every girl wants him still.

Once, when she'd got tired of one more gawker tripping over themselves trying to back out of her way, interrupting their shopping in the Passage arcade, he whisked her out of the building and the next day bought the Lilac brand from Zhukov and took her face off the packages. That was when she knew he loved her.

But often times, if she were going to be truthful, she misses all that attention. Of course it was a famous image, Pohnlinskya and her little fairy fan in a clean sunlit glow, dressed in the whitest of white. An indelible portrait and yes, there are plenty who still remember, when she goes out to shop or to see the circus. Everywhere, really.

At Basia's all the women know what's coming. You can only keep a secret so long. Maybe tonight it's a special occasion, a birthday, a party at Countess Sophie's. Tomorrow it's something even more splendid, a christening, a recital, a theatrical opening. She attends Basia's salon and the atmosphere is heavenly. Right away the girls there notice her exhilaration—she could not conceal it if she tried. An afternoon in the salon is an afternoon of cosseted luxury. A triumph of maternal understanding and unspoken conspiracy, a secret realm for women only and the occasional homosexual couturier—the only kind of man capable of understanding the minutiae of feminine allure. All of Basia's staff are endlessly supportive and, for something that, let's face it, can engender such anxiety—the adjustment of fashion and cosmetics—they are remarkably carefree. Everyone is smiling, with little thimbles of konyak delivered to your room on a pink tray.

He will be here on the Tuesday, he has telegraphed. In the morning arrives a fresh batch of cables. Some are for his eyes only and they are taken upstairs to a table in the library. The others—for her—are brought by Anna to wherever she might be in the great house. She rips them open and follows his progress across Europe. Sergei busy with this, busy with that. Sergei dashing quickly to Berlin; in Paris for an extra day.

Oh, Paris! How lucky he is, the bastard. She is jealous, she will make him pay. But he does, he pays for it all. Even though she has her money, which she has carefully hoarded for . . . for some undreamed disaster, he has paid for this fantastic residence,
Luxe
, on the Morskaya, and he has given it to her! It's a love-present for her, his big bouquet on the finest street in the city. Yes, he was a little disappointed that she hadn't taken number thirty-two right across the street, but she had wanted the sunny courtyard and the cold façade. Just like a ballerina, he'd laughed. Oh, his laugh!

Then on Tuesday he arrives. First, there is the commotion at the foyer, the doors are thrown open, his gay hello! She calls out and . . . flies, floats down the staircase into his arms. The kiss, not at all what she had rehearsed. A quick wet, hard, pressure on her mouth, modestly restrained because behind him comes a stream of porters, sent by the brokers at the station who manage his trunks. The remaining baggage will be coming in all week long, since some of it is on different trains following him around Europe, some of it still waiting in his private car.

While the minions go about their chores she joins him in the parlour. He notices a few things, the new fabric on the chairs, the flowers. And his smile!

His packets, his correspondence and telegrams are stacked exactly where he likes them. He leafs through the pile while she has some refreshments brought up to her bedroom.

The boudoir is gigantic, designed for lavish recreation followed by sound sleep. Large windows on the southern side that open on to the courtyard, heavy drapes to keep out the white nights, a fringe of trees that soften the high wall that separates the courtyard from the block of residences on the corner. An ornate back gate off the lane so that piles of firewood can be delivered. The firewood is only for the servants or a particularly chill autumn day like this one, because Mina always goes to France in the winter. A month from now she'll have closed up the house.

The servants potter continuously. She waits. They circle each other. How was Sofia? How was Wien? What about Oslo? And Paris . . . I'm so jealous. She pretends to slap him, it ends in a little kiss.

While they wait for their own special time, he goes about his business. There are telephone calls to make, but he has arrived in the afternoon, and therefore can return only two or three. Some urgent problem at his Saratov plant; a senior manager has died during his tour. The man was valuable to his entire operation. One of those rare finds; a self-taught engineer a veteran from his father's years at the helm. He tells her about him with genuine grief—oh, the old fellow was too kind to the workers by half, not really one for maximizing efficiency, but what she may not realize is that it was this old fellow's improvements to the basic design which enabled the Saratov valve model number four to take over the market for high-pressure fixed piping! Of course recruiting a replacement for this unique individual must become a priority. Sadly the funeral was nearly two weeks ago.

The food has come up, some cakes and a bottle of white stripe champagne. Mina has arrayed herself seductively on the chaise and awaits his presence. Thank God she is not a woman who hovers.

They talk about things, it comes out in disorganized snatches. Fragments gathered from their time apart—the relative conditions of his trip, unforeseen encounters, the status of old friends. Much of what he was doing he cannot talk about. She knows this, she has long ago accepted that she does not know everything.

What Andrianov talks about is his cover, his excuses. He says nothing of the artillery that he diverted to Serbia, nothing about his meeting with Fox in Vienna,
Apis
in Belgrade, nothing about the Plan. He watches her as she laughs at his witticisms. She can see he is tired and pouts sympathetically as he puts the telephone down with unconcealed relief. Tired, yes, but not too tired. He smiles at her direct gaze; soon now, a night with the delightful Mina.

He has given her everything but marriage. There is no wife, and she does not even have the semi-official status of mistress to a great man. She is something else; a kept woman, a girlfriend, an unmarried wife, a lover. Something modern and vague. It has been that way for five years now. An eternity. What hurts most is the time apart, the lure of motherhood, and having to manage the awkward architecture of her life as a single, yet very much attached woman, which for a girl as attractive as Mina is . . . difficult.

People expect things of her, people expect things of a genuine star as she was until Sergei plucked her off the stage and erased her from the soap cartons. It wasn't so bad—well, by then Nijinsky and that crowd were all the rage. You had to be able to jump over mountains and bend your body into the kind of poses you might find on an Egyptian wall, there was no classicism and very little beauty, and she'd had enough before it all started. Enough frustration and enough perfection.

She saw the same relentless drive in Sergei when they met. It was like two dynamos who are finally linked to the same wires. He never tried to pretend that he was not obsessively concerned with riches, with success, with . . . whatever he was obsessed about at the time. Yes, to his credit, at least he was honest about it, and she has always assumed that soon, one day next week, next month, or sometime maybe in spring, that he will mellow; lose at least some portion of his all-consuming drive to be . . . to be whatever he is trying to be . . . and then he will finally ask her.

Of course she will agree.

But, while she waits, he has been generous; the villa in Antibes on the Riviera is absolute paradise and the one place on earth that she feels truly alive. If all else falls away she is determined to hold on to the villa. The winters are glorious there, every now and then a draught, or one of those pelting rains that send floods coursing down the mountain rills, washing out the road to Cannes.

The servants are gone. The doors are closed and she slips on to the floor at his knees and allows herself to be kissed. These times she floats away, these times it is easy. For these times she is prepared; more awake than he is, more energetic, his dominatrix and now is her time. She has him in these hours and she will not let him go.

She has him again. And he sleeps and she watches him, watches and tries to imagine him as a boy . . . Naturally she has perused family photographs, but she never can quite see the transformation when the boy is lost to the man; something about the strength of the nose, the darkness around his eyes; the way he frowns as he sleeps. The way his mouth can fall open in sleep, as if he is trying to suck up all the air in the sky.

And she puts out the last candle, throws off her negligée and stands shivering in front of the great window. A nightscape of the trees, the leaves beginning to yellow, and the clouds coming in to erase the stars; infringing on the trees are the lead roofs and the tiled pediments of the Shugalov Palace. Over there all the lights are on, if she opened the window she might hear the strains of music—that's right, Betsy is giving a party tonight for her circle of all the liberals, journalists, and representatives of the Duma. Princes Trubetskoy and Cantacuzène of course, a mob of high-borns who think they understand the workers, tedious dreamers with foreign ideas that they keep pushing on everyone they meet. She was not invited. Of course. Betsy and that fool husband of hers.

She stands there naked, the sweat turning cold on her skin, her nipples hard, the gooseflesh spreading up her arms and across her strong thighs to her belly. Would they have a girl or a boy, she wonders. She will have it out with him, she will strike a bargain with him, have the child. Bastards, everyone has bastards, it's no shame any more, this is a modern age. She considers the matter as she stretches there in the night-light. She'll take the girl away and raise her in France, bring her back to Petersburg occasionally. What can he do about it? Nothing. She has her own money. Safe.

She returns to the huge bed, slips under the sheets, and he wakes a little, rolls over to meet her, pressing his face into the hollow of her neck, one arm thrown around her, latched together there in the great bed like two perfect beings finally made one. As close to heaven, or closer even, than most poor souls will ever get.