The Birds Fall Down Page 21

  “I couldn’t think anything about my own death beyond the fact that it was probable. I was preoccupied by my anger at the abuse of Berr’s innocence, and by the anger that flamed up in me every time I remembered what the diplomat’s yellow-haired son had said in the actress’s bedroom in London: ‘The Tsar’s eagerly looking for some excuse to recall Nikolai Nikolaievitch to Russia and lay some trumped-up charge against him, and then discredit him thoroughly by never bringing him to trial and abandoning the proceedings on the pretence of showing him mercy.’ I couldn’t bear that to happen to you, and I couldn’t bear the Tsar to have the satisfaction of a victory which was so peculiarly to his disgusting taste. I couldn’t let this happen. If I couldn’t prevent it, then I’d been defeated by the universe as I wouldn’t be defeated by my own death. I walked out of the café, meaning to take a cab up to the Avenue Kléber, and then I realized that Gorin, who knew everything, would know that I would sooner or later want to go to you and offer you what I could give in the way of a son’s protection. Hadn’t he laid his arm across my shoulder, as we stood by the little harbour on Lake Geneva, and said, ‘I know well that much that is best in you comes from Nikolai Nikolaievitch’? He hadn’t cared where the best of me came from or the worst. He’d said it simply because he knew I loved you like a father. Therefore there’d already be someone stationed outside your door, another idealistic boy, waiting for me. But I didn’t see how he could stop me from telephoning your apartment, and I went back in the café and did that very thing.

  “I’d difficulty in finding your number, because I didn’t know how you transliterated your name. How utterly we Russians are not at home in the Western world! But at last I got it, I was put through, I repossessed my own life, I did something which Gorin couldn’t have foreseen. No, nobody in your home would have reported it to you. I didn’t dare to give my name to the lady who answered me, because of your spy, so I said I was the youngest of the Volkoff brothers, who was passing through Paris on his way to the family palace in Venice, and wanted to pay you his respects, if only by speaking a few words to you. She said, ‘I’m Tania,’ and I had realized that already, for we had, of course, known that she was staying with you. ‘How are you?’ she went on. ‘How pleasant that you’re ringing us up,’ but though she was scrupulously polite she sounded distraught in her indifference, it was as if nothing mattered to her any more. And when she told me that her mother was ill, her voice was flooded with grief strong as a child’s. That was so like you, Nikolai Nikolaievitch, your own indifference, which seems arctic yet melts in a moment. ‘I want,’ I told her, ‘to speak with your father,’ and I hinted that I’d something to say of special interest to you. Wearily she told me that you were asleep, and whatever it was I had to say had better be said to a nice little man, Monsieur Kamensky, who’d worked with you long ago as a civil servant and now acted as a confidential secretary whenever he was in Paris. ‘You could speak to him in half an hour,’ she promised me, ‘he’s dining with us.’

  “I couldn’t face that. Not yet. I said I must go to a dinner engagement, but would speak to him tomorrow, and she answered, that that would be impossible. ‘The good Kamensky is spending all his day helping us one way and another. At nine o’clock he’s taking my father to the station to see him off to Mûres-sur-Mer, where he’s going to stay with Aunt Florence, you’ll remember her. And later on he will be with me at the clinic where my mother’s going for her treatment.’ I held my breath. Now I had Gorin in the palm of my hand. I told your daughter that I had to leave Paris the next day, and sent you my salutations, and said that I wished I could bear her troubles. Out of the black earpiece your daughter’s sweet and fatigued voice said, ‘All you Volkoffs are so nice. You’re charming and gay, but you have hearts as well. There should be more Volkoffs in the world.’ I wished I hadn’t been forced to deceive her.

  “Then I rang up Gorin. I said to him, ‘Gorin, it’s I, Vassili Iulievitch. I’m not coming to see you tonight. I can’t.’ After a pause he gently inquired why I was not carrying out the orders he’d given me. ‘You don’t understand,’ I told him, ‘I’ve made a great discovery. Somebody else besides me knows all about Berr.’ There was silence at the other end of the line. I went on, ‘Yes, suddenly, about ten minutes ago, I remembered something, which I can’t tell you over the telephone, and I rang up a certain comrade and asked some discreet questions, and got some very indiscreet answers. I find he knows everything. Yes, what I know, and much more besides, and he says the full truth will astonish me when I hear it.’ ‘Who is this comrade?’ asked Gorin. ‘He’s thoroughly reliable,’ I said, ‘and that’s all that’s safe to say over the telephone.’ ‘Do I know him?’ asked Gorin. ‘We both know him well,’ I answered, ‘but don’t ask me any more questions. You’ll have an opportunity to talk to him yourself if you come to the Café Viborg tomorrow morning, for he’s going to meet me there. I didn’t tell him you were coming, in case it put him off. But I’m sure he’ll talk freely to you, he talked freely enough to me. Though I can’t quite see where all his information leads. But that, as I say, he’ll tell you and me tomorrow morning.’

  “‘When are you meeting him?’ asked Gorin. ‘At ten minutes to ten,’ I answered. I heard Gorin click his tongue against the roof of his mouth in annoyance, but he said, ‘I’ll be there.’ ‘And don’t be late,’ I said, ‘for he may be able to stay with us only a very short time. And by the way, there’s another thing. I’m being followed by a police spy. A tall, dark young man, with blue eyes and a deep cleft in his chin.’ ‘Oh, my dear friend, be careful, be very careful,’ said Gorin, with tears in his voice. ‘What worries me,’ I said, ‘is that if he continues to follow me, I’ll have to tell the comrade not to come to the Café Viborg tomorrow, and I won’t come myself. We can’t take unnecessary risks.’ ‘No, you can’t,’ he said. ‘That would,’ I pressed him, ‘be the right thing to do, wouldn’t it? If the police spy goes on following me, I should call the meeting off, shouldn’t I?’ ‘Yes,’ said Gorin, ‘yes, that would be the correct procedure.’ ‘Well, good-bye,’ I said, ‘till tomorrow, I hope.’ ‘If I may use the language of our childhood,’ Gorin said, ‘let me say, God be with you.’

  “I went back to my seat on the terrasse, just in front of the young man who was spying on me. I wasn’t going to leave until I’d seen him get his message to go home. Then I meant to slip into another café, which has two exits, and from there, when it was quite dark, scuttle off to one of those hotels near Les Halles where they take in farmers and carriers coming to the markets without luggage and are too busy to be curious, so that I could make my way to the Gare du Nord this morning and board this train; and that’s in fact what I did. I found it almost unendurable to wait the half-hour that passed before the young man was handed a note by a child. I was afraid that Gorin mightn’t have believed me and would have told the boy to put an end to me as I sat there. In order to preserve my calm, I set myself to watch the crowds that were passing as methodically as if I had been asked to report on them by our committee. They were gay crowds, as Paris crowds are on summer evenings, and there were many lovers among them. It’s often been remarked that every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art, or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris. A Polish professor has found an explanation in the presence in the subsoil of the city of certain earths heavily charged with electricity. It is wonderful how science is solving all mysteries. It seemed to me that the proportion of men and women quite evidently in love was higher than would have been the case in Berlin or Zürich or Petersburg, but also that they were exhibiting their state more candidly than they would have done in these other capitals. They walked arm-in-arm, their eyes shining, and they chattered and laughed.

  “As one is bound to do when one observes a large number of people sharing an experience, I recalled my own journey along that same road. I never felt such an exaggerated and carefree emotion as was inscribed on these people’s faces, and it’s many years since I’ve felt
a fervent attachment to anything but the cause. Nevertheless, I had much to remember. In my youth I was greatly attracted by the young daughter of some neighbours of ours, and I falsely imagined she was much attracted to me, until I realized that she was moved by nothing more than an ambition to marry the son of the wealthiest man in the district. But I had also the beautiful memory that later I was bound by the closest and most honourable ties to a fellow-member of our organization, a woman doctor of powerful intellect and the most exalted ideals and that, strangely enough, she never wearied of me and we were together when she died. I wondered how I had survived her loss, and the answer came to me at once. I had had a friend, a devoted and selfless comforter, I had had Gorin. Oh, believe me, my friendship for him was not an illusion like my passion for little Tamara Pallicer, it was on the same plane as my long union with my noble companion. I’d be a Judas myself if I forgot this.

  “But as I sat there on the terrasse, it became quite, quite clear to me who was my Judas. I’d received absolute proof when I told Gorin about the two actions which showed the same sort of perfidy: the gesture which exploited the actress’s knowledge of her beauty and her chastity, and the use of Berr’s blindness and innocent pride to foist on him the guilt of treachery. Gorin failed to recognize these actions as having any similarity, or as the results of a deliberate and nasty choice; they seemed to him automatic responses to the pressure of necessity, and therefore neutral in quality. Now, what class of actions always appear to us as automatic and neutral, inevitable and therefore exempt from censure? Our own. We always believe that what we did we had to do. Other men have free will, we ourselves live in a determinist universe. And though we may know everything about our actions, how they are carried out and what results followed, we cannot know them for what they are, as we know that a rose is red and is scented, a plate of soup brown and hot and made of beans. Each man is a mystery to himself; and the two men, the man who waved his hand to the actress from the doorway, and the other man who lied about Berr, they were both mysteries to Gorin. Therefore I think that they were one and the same man, and that man was Gorin.

  “I was a coward when I told you a little while ago that I couldn’t tell you the name of the spy in your household. I knew it well, as soon as Gorin clicked his tongue in annoyance because I told him he must come to the Café Viborg at ten to ten. I knew it past all doubt when you came to the Gare du Nord this morning, with your granddaughter and your footman, and nobody else. I was standing by the bookstall and you strode right past me. You can’t think how extraordinary you looked. You’re so abnormally tall, Nikolai Nikolaievitch, like certain types of primitive man who’ve become extinct in the course of evolution, and though it must have been right that they should disappear, for evolution can’t make a mistake, it’s impossible not to admire your strength, and your air of wealth seems something that you’ve fairly earned by being so strong, though of course that’s quite an immoral idea. And this granddaughter of yours with her golden hair, which is by nature the colour so many unfortunate victims of capitalism dye theirs, and her high cheekbones that are so Russian and her hard air that’s so English, and her general appearance of being a barbarian princess, she’s a form of inalienable wealth. If we took everything away from you, Nikolai Nikolaievitch, somehow you’d still have more than is ethically permissible. Yet you and I are beggars together. For Kamensky is Gorin. Gorin is Kamensky.”

  VIII

  If Kamensky was Gorin, Laura thought, it was terrible that he had used the same forks and spoons, eaten off the same plates, and drunk out of the same glasses as the Diakonov family, and sat at the table as it had been furnished by their dead. The silver equipage had been given to an ancestor by Catherine the Great: a string of silver elephants trod a narrow silver track on the shining white cloth round a larger elephant on a column, like the one in the square in Rome. The forks and spoons were different from the Georgian ones they used at home in Radnage Square, they were French. Another ancestor had taken his bride to Paris just before Louis XV had issued his decree requisitioning his subjects’ silver to pay for his wars, and they had taken back to Russia two great chests of it. The glasses had come from Prague, from another honeymoon, and they had survived a hundred years, only because they were always washed in a basin lined with several layers of flannel. People had forgotten what the plates were, and there were so many services nobody bothered whether they were Meissen or Sèvres. Some were Chelsea but were painted with Japanese landscapes. They had the childish look that belongs to a picture of a place by someone who has never been there. All were so beautiful she looked at them every time. Now, if Nikolai went into the dining-room and said, “Take all these things away for ever, they are spoiled,” he would be right. It would be no use just washing them.

  At home in Radnage Square they would pretend there was no problem, everyone would eat off the polluted ware, and it would be a sort of poisoning. There was some good in being Russian. But perhaps Kamensky was not Gorin.

  Nikolai and Chubinov were talking languidly, two tired men, about the origins of Kamensky and Gorin. Chubinov was saying that Gorin was forty-three years old and was born at Lyskovo in the Grodnensko province, and had studied at the University of St. Petersburg until the police began to harry them, then at Karlsruhe, and later at Darmstadt, where he had taken his diploma in engineering. Nikolai was saying that Kamensky was forty-one, was born at Kharkov, and had taken his degrees in engineering at Moscow and Berlin. That was certain. The Ministry had checked. “And Darmstadt too,” said Chubinov, “we checked that.” They were silent.

  “What does Gorin look like?” Laura asked.

  “He is dark. His eyes and hair are dark, and his face is unlined, considering his age.”

  “Kamensky is dark, dark and short, pleasing but not distinguished,” said Nikolai.

  “Gorin is not short,” said Chubinov, “he is not much shorter than I am.”

  “But you are short.”

  “For you who are abnormally tall, it’s difficult to get a conception of normal height.”

  “But what’s Gorin like?” asked Laura. “What would you tell somebody to look out for, if they had to meet him at a railway-station?”

  “Well, he’s a Russian. It isn’t only that his cheekbones are high, he’s got the Slav signature on his face. If you met him anywhere you’d say, Ah, here’s one of us.’ I really can’t think of anything else. I’ve often thought it strange that such a remarkable man should have such an ordinary appearance, for to tell the truth hundreds of thousands look exactly as he does.”

  “Millions of Russians look exactly like Kamensky, provided they’re not of noble birth,” said Nikolai. “But God forbid we should hang a man because he looks so like a great many other Russians that maybe he might be another man who also looks like a great many other Russians.” He spoke with a hint of cunning.

  “Gorin also looks as if he wasn’t noble,” meditated Chubinov. “I should think his father was probably a minor functionary in a not very large town, or perhaps a merchant, but in a small way of business. But he has, now I come to think of it, one physical trait as outstanding as his mental endowments. He has the eyes of an eagle. I’ve never known a man in middle life with such sight. Walking on the hills above Zürich, I’ve known him tell the time by the clock on a tower in the heart of the city, though not the youngest among us could see anything but the round dial.”

  “Then Gorin’s not Kamensky,” said Nikolai in calm and disagreeable triumph. “Kamensky’s almost blind. I’ve never seen him without his spectacles. He’s helpless without them.”

  “No, Grandfather,” Laura said, “he isn’t.”

  He looked at her out of the corner of his eye as if they were both Orientals and should not be speaking so directly.

  “Don’t you remember that the other day I tried on Monsieur Kamensky’s spectacles?”

  His glance did not soften.

  “I tried to tell you, but you were angry with me. What I wanted to say was that Mo
nsieur Kamensky’s spectacles are glass, plain glass. He can see as well as anybody.”

  Without a pause Nikolai answered, “Thousands of our minor functionaries do that. Wear spectacles which are plain glass. I’ve come across the practice again and again among those not wellborn. It’s a sign of distinction among the undistinguished. A claim that one’s not coarsely perfect, like one’s cousin the peasant. That my friend Kamensky, of whom I know nothing ill, wears such spectacles is no proof that he’s Chubinov’s friend Gorin, who seems to be all one might expect of his pack of enlightened scoundrels.”

  Chubinov said gently, “So you’re determined not to ask, just to die. I can’t do so. I feel it’s my duty to live until I’ve discovered the truth and proclaimed it.”

  “There’s no need for anyone but God to know the truth,” said Nikolai. “The part of man is to obey, and for obedience one does not have to know the truth. One has only to pay attention to the command.”

  “Please, Monsieur Chubinov,” said Laura, “does Gorin put anything on his hands? Monsieur Kamensky uses an ointment which his grandmother made for him when he got chilblains, with a herb in it which has a very strong smell.” She stopped, astonished, even after all that had happened, by the horror on his face.

  “In winter-time his room reeks with the stuff.”

  “People of that class always smell to high heaven from October to April, with the salves and messes made up for them by their old women,” said Nikolai. “It is no proof of anything.”

  “Gorin’s salve,” said Chubinov, “is made from a herb we call pizhina in Russian.”

  “We call it tansy. It’s very green and it doesn’t grow very high but it isn’t flat on the ground either. Would that be pizhina?”