The Exiles Return (22 page)

The interval came and only Bimbo rose to leave the box, going out, he said, to smoke a cigarette in the foyer. As he went, Kanakis offered him his cigarette case, sleek and golden, smooth to the fingers and the eye. Bimbo took several cigarettes. ‘Thanks, Theophil. Are you coming?’

‘No, I’ll stay with the ladies.’

Resi turned to see Bimbo slip out of the box, but he was gone before she could decide to join him. Kanakis smiled at her intention but ignored it. ‘Are you enjoying the opera, Miss Larsen?’ he asked.

‘Immensely, it’s wonderful.’ Her eyes shone.

‘You have never been to a performance like this before? Am I right?’

‘No, never. I’ve been told about them, but it’s even lovelier than I imagined. What is going to happen next, do you know?’

‘Oh, yes. I’m afraid it’s very sad. Tatiana has fallen in love with Onegin and writes him a letter to tell him of her love, and he rejects her – tells her he is not a marrying man.’

‘She should not have written to him!’

‘Oh, I quite agree, it was foolish of her, but her feelings ran away with her. Then Onegin fights a duel with Lenski about another girl whom he also does not love – Olga, in fact – and kills him.’

‘How dreadful!’

‘Dreadful indeed, and so unnecessary – but that’s the story.’

‘What happens to Tatiana?’

‘She marries someone else – a very brilliant marriage – so all ends well for her, and then Onegin is sorry he missed his chance.’

‘I wonder whether she still loves him.’

‘Oh, I scarcely think so.’ Kanakis turned to Nina. ‘That’s the story in a nutshell, isn’t it, Princess?’

‘In a nutshell, as you say, Herr von Kanakis, very matter-of-fact the way you put it, an edition for schools.’

‘For the non-sentimental young, Princess; romance begins at thirty, don’t you agree? Besides, I didn’t have time for elaboration. The lights are going out, and here comes Bimbo. Tchaikovsky will supply what I left out.’

Once more the audience sat in silence and the occupants of No. 4 box were quiet. Invisible currents of emotion resumed their flow, and the curtain opened on the letter scene. Nina concentrated on listening, but could not entirely suppress an undercurrent of thought about the deliberately prosaic and unromantic way Kanakis had summarised the libretto for Resi’s benefit. Had he wanted to disenchant her in advance, with the infectious pathos of its romance? Put her on her guard against Bimbo? How awkward of him, if he was seriously attracted to the girl, to invite the two of them together to drink in Tchaikovsky’s impassioned harmonies. Romance begins at thirty, he had said. Begins? Nina doubted this was true – but it certainly depends. She turned her head in the darkness, as she felt rather than heard Kanakis breathing deeply in rapt concentration – watching Resi, she thought. But he was not looking at Resi. He was looking at Bimbo.

Nineteen

Another Thursday evening, and Theophil Kanakis was standing in the marble-paved hall of his little hidden pavilion. He had just welcomed two of the guests who came fairly regularly to his Thursday gatherings; they had gone through into the drawing room, leaving the door half-open for their host to follow. But Kanakis loitered, partly in anticipation of further arrivals, partly because he delighted in contemplating the hall itself when it was lit by candles in the old green and gold wall brackets. Then a figure appeared behind the plate-glass door and the bell rang. Kanakis opened the door himself to find Marie-Theres standing there, wrapped in a bulky raccoon coat, with a gauze scarf over her hair.

‘Marie-Theres, you have surely not walked here all alone!’

‘No, only this last bit through the courtyards. I had a taxi. Even so, it
was
very dark. But I did so want to come. Georg came for Hanni, and of course they wanted to be alone. Aunt Fini fussed about my coming here, but I said I had promised, and Mizzi went down and got a taxi.’ Marie-Theres chattered as Kanakis helped her out of her fur and she untied her scarf, while Hansi, a boy to whom Kanakis had given houseroom and a white jacket to act as manservant at his parties, went down on one knee to unfasten her snow boots.

‘How sweet of you to have insisted. Though I’m afraid you are going to be terribly bored tonight. We have practically no young people. They’ve all gone to various dances. Someone ought to have taken you. There’s only Bimbo here.’

Only Bimbo!

‘My dear child, if I had known you were alone I would have sent my car for you. You should have telephoned. A girl ought not to go out by herself at night, even in a taxi.’

Resi turned round from fluffing out her hair in front of a tiny gold-framed looking glass. ‘How kind you are, Mr Kanakis!’

Only Bimbo!

‘Theophil,’ he said gently. ‘You promised the other evening to call me by my name. It means lover of God or beloved of God, whichever way you like to put it. A nice name, don’t you think? Please call me by it. Come in now. I’ll see what I can find for you. But there’s no dancing tonight. Everyone is just talking and eating.’

Two more guests were arriving, the actress with the sleek black hair and the large gold circular earrings who had been there the first time Marie-Theres had come, and her inseparable companion, and Kanakis left Marie-Theres to go to her and kiss both her hands, exclaiming at the honour and pleasure she was conferring on him. Marie-Theres went into the long, softly-lit drawing room. Compared with the crowded ‘first night’ when she had come here, it seemed almost empty. The small number of guests were clustered round the buffet table which Kanakis had had moved in from the dining room. They were moving round with plates and glasses in their hands, giving far more attention to the ham, the
chaud-froid
of chicken and Russian salad, to the cakes and meringues and the wines, than to talking to each other; there seemed to be no affinities at work inclining anyone to withdraw into a more intimate
tête-à-tête
; no one was sitting in the shadowy corners or on the low couches where, once settled, one was more or less committed for the evening; a catalyst was missing and Kanakis himself seemed unable to supply it, for he drifted about without much purpose between the unoccupied chairs, and went up to first one and then another of his guests with no suggestion other than to offer more food or a different wine.

Then two things happened. Marie-Theres saw Bimbo emerge from the closed door at the far end of the room, and he was alone. She looked at him intently and she thought he had seen her, but he did not come in her direction. Instead he turned aside to speak to Hansi, the white-coated boy who was collecting the used plates on the buffet table. Then he came towards her with that inimitable walk of his which seemed to glide an inch above the ground. He came closer, he was alone, he was going to speak to her. She felt a flutter in her throat, she felt sure she had lost her voice. Here he was, dark eyes smiling between long lashes and a gleam of white teeth as his lips parted. She mirrored his smile, she mirrored him entirely. In that instant she lost consciousness of herself as a separate entity and felt every movement of his hands, his shoulders, the flicker of his eyelids as her own. He was not very tall, his eyes were on the same level as hers, and she could not look away.

‘Let’s sit down,’ he said, and taking her elbow in his left hand he propelled her towards the sofa where she had sat on the first evening she came here. Just then two more people were greeted by Kanakis, and came with him towards the circle of chairs in front of the sofa. Bimbo had gone to the buffet table and was asking Hansi to serve a choice of dishes and wine to the newcomers, and this precipitated a general movement of the people standing around towards that circle of chairs. These were soon all occupied, so much so that some had to be drawn apart to allow spare ones to be inserted into the gaps. Marie-Theres saw her sofa being invaded and tried to spread her dress, putting her gloves and handbag on the seat next to her in the hope that Bimbo would return and sit down in the place he had left. The newcomers were Dr Helbling and his wife. Kanakis had met them a couple of weeks ago at a one-man show at one of the small private galleries that were opening up once more after the blight of the war years.

‘A few friends every Thursday evening, Dr Helbling – a glass of wine and conversation, almost a lost art I’m afraid nowadays, but I’m finding that among congenial minds it comes to life again. I’d be so delighted if you would both drop in, and with anyone else whom you would care to bring with you.’ Helbling had been polite but uninterested; however, it was not long before he heard from two or three others that these evenings were worth going to, and so they had come.

It happened that their coming on this particular evening – when the company was comparatively sparse and loosely-knit, but drawn together into an integrated circle round the table – provided the setting for a plan Bimbo had long been preparing in his mind. He came back and sat down next to Resi again, very close to her but not looking at her. His hands rested on his knees, he seemed deep in thought. ‘If only I had something to say to him, now that he’s here,’ she thought, but all she could do was look at his hands, smooth, brown hands with long fingers, on one of them a ring set with a large dark blue stone that was carved in a peculiar way. She had never seen a man wear a ring with a stone in it. Should she ask him what it was? It would be something to say, but it might be the wrong thing. It might break the spell of this feeling she had never experienced before, as if all the nerve endings in her skin were alert to something unknown.

It was Bimbo who broke the spell. His eyelids fluttered, he whistled softly under his breath. ‘Yes, yes, I think so,’ he whispered, ‘this is my opportunity, I can ask Helbling’s opinion.’ He jumped up and gave her a bland, angelic smile. ‘Would you like to see some pictures,’ he asked, ‘some drawings I got from a friend of mine? I’ll show them to you and to Dr Helbling since, by a stroke of luck, he is here this evening.’ Bimbo went out into the hall and came back with a large folder under his arm. It took a few moments before he could attract Dr Helbling’s attention. Eventually he asked:

‘Well, Prince Grein, what is it you have there?’

‘A few drawings, Herr Doktor, done by a friend of mine. He is anxious to get an expert opinion on them, on his draughtsmanship, I mean, and as I told him that I might sometime have the great good fortune to meet you here – without having to consult you, so to speak, officially at the gallery – I have brought them along. They are, as you will see, well, how shall I put it, a little bit out of the ordinary, rather special, shall I say.’ And he made some play with untying the tapes of the folder, thus succeeding by his words and fingers in arousing the expectation he desired.

Helbling was sitting opposite on another sofa, with the woman with the sleek head and large earrings beside him. Bimbo gave the second sheet to his neighbour and the third to Marie-Theres, who only glanced at it superficially, while Helbling, who had been called upon to judge, took out his spectacle-case, placed the spectacles on his nose, and looked. Then he raised his bushy, brindled eyebrows in silence and took up the next sheet as Bimbo handed each one on. The drawings, done in charcoal and red chalk, were of a nude woman, with the emphasis neither on shape nor texture, but, quite blatantly, on provocation. The unusual combination of the two media, the black and the red, were employed to focus the erotic intention on the position of the limbs and, on some of the sheets, on the distorting spasms of the face. The subject as depicted was not an individual person nor a stylised female shape, but a woman dehumanised by the stark grip of lust in its ambivalence of obsession and disgust.

No one holding a drawing said anything. There was complete silence round the table, as if nobody ventured to breathe lest by a sigh they should betray an emotion. And Kanakis’s voice as he chatted to his neighbour – they were the only ones who had not yet seen any of the drawings – suddenly sounded very loud in the general hush.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, looking round at the faces, which all seemed wooden with embarrassment. No one, however sophisticated, relished being caught in public in the role of ‘voyeur’, and no one ventured even by the flicker of an eyelid to condemn, or acknowledge, what they felt to be pornography, in case it might, after all, be ‘art’. It was for Dr Helbling to decide. Most of the sheets had now been passed to him, and he had them stacked on his knees while also holding one in each hand and looking at these thoughtfully between narrowed eyelids. At last he spoke, quietly, in a flat voice.

‘The draughtsmanship is not bad, if that is what you want my opinion about, Prince Grein,’ he said, ‘but it is not of such excellence as to make these sketches artistically valuable. There is an element of intended sensationalism in them which, in spite of a certain undoubted ability, stops them from being works of art and relegates them, to put it bluntly, to pornography – as undoubtedly you knew.’ He put the two sheets he was still holding down on the sheaf on his knees and the whole sheaf on the table. ‘Distasteful, to say the least, Prince Grein, distasteful,’ and he flicked the fingers of one hand with the fingers of the other, by which gestures he seemed to shake off some contaminating dust or dirt. Then, taking off his glasses, he polished them with his handkerchief, as if they, too, had been besmirched by what he had been looking at.

Bimbo smiled, unperturbed. ‘My friend will be disappointed by your verdict on his talent, but I find it strange that the subject should have shocked you.’

‘It is not the subject which is shocking, Prince Lorenzo, and, by the way, I didn’t say shocking, I said distasteful. If we have to speak of shock, which is a deep and powerful response to an artist’s creation, and a truly legitimate one, we have far more horrifying representations by Hieronymus Bosch, by Goya, or nearer the idiom of our own time, by Alfred Kubin. But they, however much they differ from one another, are terrifying and astringent. This man gloats and nauseates.’

‘But, Dr Helbling, aren’t you introducing moral criteria into what should be a purely aesthetic evaluation of a work of art?’ Bimbo asked with a smile of angelic innocence. ‘Surely such considerations are out of place,’ he added.