The Aunt's Story (21 page)

‘Or an old clown,' said Theodora, who knew by revelation the way that Alyosha Sergei could somersault through a house, and how she was tired walking up and down, emptying his full ash trays, and mopping up the little damp patches where his thought dripped.

‘Dear Ludmilla,' laughed Alyosha Sergei. ‘My sister Ludmilla. Varvara was my inspiration, my bright blue cloud, my singing bird. But Ludmilla, my sister, is my reason. She is a good soul, even though her face is yellow and her skirt trails in the mud when there is a thaw.'

But Theodora had no patience. For a long time the close, stovey breath of Alyosha Sergei had exasperated her beyond
words. He could fume the ceilings of a whole house. So that when she spoke bitterness yellowed her voice, and her fingers struck at her belt, like keys.

‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Alyosha Sergei. And I believe you are drunk already.'

‘Not yet, Ludmilla,' said Alyosha Sergei. ‘Not yet. Or only a little.'

He laughed through his fat red rubber lips, bubbling, and prodding at the snail with his stick.

‘I am expecting Varvara,' he said.

‘Oh,' said Theodora. ‘Varvara.'

‘You speak of her with contempt,' said Alyosha Sergei. ‘Because I love Varvara. How can I help it? Varvara comes to me in the morning, when I am young. Varvara is a beginning. You don't take over till the small hours, Ludmilla, right at the end. All day you nurse your sense of duty and listen to the clocks.'

Theodora knew that this was true. Other voices had told her so. Varvara swam against the waltz, and they stood in the open doorways, applauding, as she dashed the water from her swan breast.

‘Let me tell you something,' said the General, shrinking to normal, as if he remembered for a moment the limitations of his iron chair. ‘I do not believe a thing against Varvara. Whatever Anna Stepanovna may say. Anna Stepanovna is a relation, and a vicious woman of a certain age.'

So Varvara was safe in her own morning glaze. She stood in the doorway, with her muff, on which the little crystals of snow had not yet melted. Her breath was still silver in the stovey room.

‘Aloysha Sergei,' said Varvara, ‘it is morning. Do you not realize? You sit here among the dregs. But we have begun again.'

She flirted the snow off her muff, and looked in the mirror at her brown mole, and laughed, and breathed, because she recognized herself and everything else as so obvious, and at the same time subtle, emotional. Through the window Petersburg was splintering into light.

‘Look, Ludmilla,' said Alyosha Sergei. ‘She is like a postcard, our Varvara.'

‘So prosaic, Alyosha Sergei? On the whole men
are
prosaic. They cannot rise above themselves. Sometimes perhaps in love, but sometimes only.'

‘But please tell me I am learning, Varvara. I am learning slowly.'

His face was quite ridiculous in its eagerness, Theodora saw. It had not yet suffered much, except in moments of self-revelation, in drink. But the first blow that would leave the imprint of real suffering was something Varvara still held, clenched tightly inside her muff.

‘You are so good, Alyosha Sergei,' Varvara said.

She touched her pale hair in the glass.

‘Then you will teach me?' asked Alyosha Sergei.

Outside bells were chiming. They rocked the cupolas. They shook the little particles of cold air. Theodora waited for the clear glaze of morning to split.

‘You know, Ludmilla,' said Varvara, raising her voice to rather an obvious pitch, ‘you know that I shall go to Staraya Russa, later in the spring, or early summer. Anna Stepanovna has sent for me. It is quite deadly, of course. We shall sit in the little summerhouse by the lake, and drink tea, and sew, and Anna Stepanovna will bring out the sketches and photographs of all the lovers she never had. But there is no choice. Anna Stepanovna is a woman of a certain age, and rich. In other words, a spider.'

Varvara examined in a close, interested way her own gloved hand, which was perfect.

‘I try also to think of the advantages,' she said. ‘There is a well at the bottom of her orchard of which the water is excellent for the skin. And at night I shall walk in the park, alone, with a shawl over my shoulders, and learn the stars. By heart.'

Theodora dusted with her handkerchief the back of a book, a tactical manual, that had been the property of an uncle.

‘Why do you say all this to Ludmilla?' cried Alyosha Sergei.

‘Because Ludmilla disapproves,' said Varvara. ‘And sometimes it is good to be disapproved of.'

But she smiled for some other reason that she still held inside her muff.

Sitting in the garden with the General, it seemed to Theodora that they had watched the passage of the snail together, their common eye, measuring the inches over many years. More than this. Without stethoscope she heard the heart muttering and ticking under scruffy serge. For the General was a good deal spotted by gravy and
béchamel
.

‘If one ever expected to regulate life,' said the General, then Varvara perhaps was in the wrong. But only women like Anna Stepanovna think they can regulate life, and one has to accept a certain amount of what such a woman says, because she is a rich landowner and a distant cousin.'

Anna Stepanovna sat in the little pavilion beside the lake, embroidering a present for someone who would be forced to accept it. Theodora knew that her own skirt was dusty, and she felt ashamed. If they had walked instead of hiring horses, it was because, said Alyosha Sergei, it was less expensive. It also gave to Anna Stepanovna, seeing the dust on Theodora's skirt, the satisfaction of knowing they were poor.

‘At K—the peasants have overrun all the big estates,' Anna Stepanovna said. ‘They have driven off the cows and horses. They have lost their heads. Ilya Ivanich tells me they broke into Princess Gorchakova's, and brought out the chairs under the trees, and sat on them, and got drunk. They even burned the piano. You could hear the strings ping as far away as the stables, Ilya Ivanich says.'

Alyosha Sergei sighed. ‘It is, for all that, a great historical movement,' sighed Alyosha Sergei.

‘If that is all the opposition it gets from you men!' said Anna Stepanovna. ‘Let them try to make history on
my
estate! But I am told there is a certain general, whose name I am not at liberty to repeat, who will organize resistance and save the situation. If they so much as took a chicken here, I'd string them to my own trees. It is all these so-called liberal ideas.'

Anna Stepanovna wore a black velvet ribbon round her throat, a kind of tourniquet, with a little medallion, the head of a man that she had never loved. Her hair was powdered, because she thought it suited her, and her movements suggested both hungriness and satisfaction.

‘Alyosha Sergei,' said Varvara, ‘lend me your hands to wind my silk. One there. No, no. So. And the other one here. How clumsy you are, Alyosha Sergei!'

‘Then you must teach me, Varvara,' he said.

Soon, Theodora saw, they would walk beside the lake, Varvara and Alyosha Sergei. In fact, they were already preparing, moving things from their laps. Then she could see their feet slowing with words or dead leaves. Wind had feathered the water with a little tender pattern, and faced the trees with silver. She could see Alyosha Sergei opening and closing his large hands beside the lake, his body assuming positions of quite absurd delicacy. And she wanted to look away, because of the emptiness, the hopelessness of his hands. The pavilion, she noticed, had rotted in places through neglect, so that in a high wind she imagined that the lattice must flap.

‘Look,' laughed Anna Stepanovna. ‘A proposal. Your branch of the family, Ludmilla, never knew what to do with its hands. Alyosha Sergei is too grotesque. And presumptuous. Varvara indeed, a pretty and talented girl, who accepted a young man called Ivanov at a ball last Thursday. He has estates in the Crimea, and is connected with a minister.'

Varvara walked slowly. She stroked her skirt, which was sprigged with little heliotropes, and her eyes were of that brightness which admits and loves its own folly. Varvara was also susceptible to landscape. She would have said: It is too beautiful, and I am not worthy of you, Alyosha Sergei, you must forgive me my weakness, or superior knowledge of myself.

Anna Stepanovna's teeth were quite yellow as she sucked up the dregs out of her glass.

‘What, going already, Alyosha Sergei?' she said.

‘It is some little walk to the village, as we have not hired horses,' said Alyosha Sergei.

Afterwards, as she felt her long black skirt trailing in the white dust, and the heavy weight of summer lying in the stubble, Theodora regretted that their branch of the family had always been awkward with its hands. She remembered also with longing the weariness of the pilgrimage to Kiev, the exhausted candles, the humble faces of the saints. But now she walked, stiff and upright, beside the steamy rubber body of Alyosha Sergei,
and knew that she could not bounce him out of his own path.

‘Whatever you may have been told by Anna Stepanovna, Varvara is a good girl,' Alyosha Sergei said. ‘Her fault is her humility. And a desire to sacrifice. It is in this spirit, I gather, that she has accepted Federmann. He is a merchant, she says. A Jew. From Königsberg. A reliable though undistinguished man.'

Sitting with the General in the garden of the Hôtel du Midi, it seemed to Theodora that they had watched the passage of the snail together, their common eye, measuring the inches over many years, more than a personal pilgrimage, farther than Kiev.

‘You are fidgety, Ludmilla,' the General said. ‘You should sit and enjoy the pleasures of existence. But of course you are filled with the mad hopefulness of virtuous and domesticated women. You cannot sit. Here comes Katina Pavlou. She will sit and talk to me. She is still too young to delude herself into thinking she will find anything better.'

Theodora saw the girl who was apparently in the square woman's charge walk out of the hotel. She was nursing a white kitten in her arms. It was also not a bad guess to say she had been crying.

‘Good evening, Katina,' said the General.

‘Good evening, Alyosha Sergei,' said the girl.

When she spoke, her words came dutifully, as she had been taught, but she was all cloudiness, choked. Theodora knew that she was still dazed by sitting alone in her room, trying to invoke life, and composing the poetry of other poets, which her emotions made her own. There was no doubt at all, she had been copying her warm, disturbing poems into a
cahier
she had bought for that purpose.

Katina Pavlou sat down dutifully and said, ‘Did you enjoy your siesta, Alyosha Sergei?'

‘You know I never sleep,' said the General, blowing out his cheeks. ‘I have not slept passably since '98. I can remember very vividly the last occasion. It was an afternoon. At Nijni Novgorod. There had been a thunderstorm. I woke, and the air smelled of earth, and outside the window some peasants were pulling at a cow by her halter. She refused to move. She had been frightened
apparently by the thunder. She had a white star on her forehead. And the peasants were cursing and joking. They swore that in the thunder her milk had turned. I can remember thinking how pleasant it is to wake from sleep, and enjoy lying with one's shirt open, and then to call for tea. I can remember thinking: And this is one of the simple things one can go on doing and doing, endlessly, joyfully. That, my bright Varvara, is the last time I can remember sleeping well.'

‘I am sorry,' said Katina Pavlou.

She spoke from her cloud, out of the secret life in her own room.

‘Yes,' she said hopelessly, with all the conviction of her age, ‘life is full of sadness.'

The white kitten jumped off her lap and advanced to try his nose on a cactus, that Katina Pavlou watched with the agony of what she knew must inevitably happen. But Alyosha Sergei, Theodora saw, had taken on a fresh lease of rubber, was swelling with young hopes, or old. She heard his decorations rustle again and he wiped his whiskers before the
café glacé
. Old men, she decided, should be quietly mopped up before they reach the age of dribble.

‘You must let me teach you,' said the General, ignoring Theodora, ‘you must let me teach you that abstractions are a great mistake. If I do not always follow my own precept, it is because the concrete often offers itself in a somewhat unattractive form.'

‘Ah,' cried Katina Pavlou, ‘it has happened.'

Her own white cry followed the kitten through the cactus trunks. She followed with little cries of love, unwinding like a ball of white thread, infinite, but failing.

‘Leave her alone, Alyosha Sergei,' said Theodora when the child had gone.

‘You were always a conscience, Ludmilla,' the General said. ‘A yellow, reasonable woman, whose stomach rumbled after camomile tea. You could never accept fatality. Not even when they showed you the gun.'

‘That may be. But leave her alone.'

‘Even when they show you the gun. Don't you see, my good Ludmilla, that this is something which has got to happen? Even if she shoots me dead.'

Theodora listened to his voice leading her into a clearing, where they had fixed a little amateur stage, on which the curtain had not yet risen. Looking at the flat surface of the curtain, she was not sure whose corpse had been prepared, but she knew that the
guignol
must not begin.

She felt the General stir beneath her silence.

‘I do not intend to talk, Alyosha Sergei.'

‘I do,' said the General. ‘It is the greatest relief on earth. Greater even than war. Or love. Look, Ludmilla, here she comes, my white kitten. Do you realize I am about to deny my own tragedy? That is why it is so important. Why did I never think of this before?'

Walking with her kitten, which she had retrieved from the dangers of the cactus forest, Katina Pavlou was very young, white, touching. As she walked, she inclined her head to avoid the attentions of the cactus pads, so that her neck was uncovered, and you were conscious of the same sober mystery that is sometimes suddenly revealed in a pan of milk or a nest of secret eggs.