by Boris Akunin
So that’s who Ophelia is, Columbine realised. A genuine medium, and that’s why she seems so much like a sleepwalker.
The blonde nymph’s face was still and absolutely expressionless, her eyes were closed and only her lips were trembling slightly, as if she were soundlessly whispering some incantation.
Suddenly Columbine felt a tremor run across her fingers and a cold draught blow on her cheeks. Ophelia raised her long eyelashes and threw her head back, and her pupils were so wide that her eyes were completely black.
‘I see you are ready,’ the Doge declared in the same solemn tone. ‘Summon Moretta to us.’
Columbine remembered that was the name of the girl whose vacancy she had filled. The poor creature who had shot herself together with that other one, Lycanthrope.
Ophelia was absolutely still for a few seconds, and then she said: ‘Yes . . . Yes . . . I hear her . . . She is far away, but coming closer every moment . . . It is I, Moretta. I have come. What do you want to know?’ she suddenly said in a quite different voice – a low, breathy contralto.
‘That’s Moretta’s voice!’ Lorelei Rubinstein exclaimed. ‘Do you hear?’
The people at the table stirred and their chairs creaked, but Prospero shook his head impatiently and everyone was still again.
‘Moretta, my girl, have you found your happiness?’ he asked. ‘No . . . I don’t know . . . It all feels so strange . . . It’s dark here, I can’t see anything. But there is someone beside me, someone who touches me with his hands and breathes in my face . . .’
‘It is he! The Eternal Bridegroom!’ Lorelei whispered passionately.
‘Quiet!’ the bookkeeper Caliban bellowed at her.
The Doge’s voice was gentle, almost unctuous.
‘You are not yet accustomed to the World Beyond, it is hard for you to speak. But you know what you must tell us. Who will be next? Who should expect the Sign?’
The silence was so intense that they could hear the coals crackling in the brazier.
Ophelia didn’t say anything. Columbine noticed that Petya Lileiko’s little finger was trembling rapidly – he was sitting on her right – and she suddenly started trembling herself: what if the spirit of this Moretta were to name her, the new aspirant? But her sense of grievance was stronger than her fear. How unjust that would be! Before she had really even become a member of the club, before she had really understood anything properly. There, take that!
‘A . . . A-a-a . . . A-va . . . Avaddon . . .’ Ophelia said very quietly.
Everyone turned towards the unhandsome student, and the people beside him – the anatomist by the name of Horatio and one of the twins (Columbine couldn’t remember which one it was) involuntarily jerked their hands away. A bewildered smile appeared on Avaddon’s face, but he was looking at Prospero, not the medium.
‘Thank you, Moretta.’ the Doge said. ‘Return to your new dwelling place. We wish you eternal happiness. Send Lycanthrope to us.’
‘Teacher . . .’ Avaddon said with a gulp, but Prospero jerked his chin peremptorily.
‘Be quiet. This does not mean anything as yet. We shall ask Lycanthrope.’
‘I am already here,’ Ophelia responded in a hoarse young man’s voice. ‘Greetings to the honest company from the newly-wed.’
‘I see you are still a joker, even there,’ the Doge chuckled.
‘Well why not, this is a jolly place. Especially looking at you lot.’
‘Tell us who should be next,’ Prospero told the spirit sternly. ‘And no jokes.’
‘Ah, yes, that’s no joking matter . . .’
Columbine was gaping wide-eyed at Ophelia. It was incredible! How could this delicate girl’s lips speak in such a confident, natural baritone?
Lycanthrope’s spirit said quite clearly: ‘Avaddon. Who else?’ And then he concluded with a laugh: ‘The wedding bed is already made up and waiting . . .’
Avaddon cried out, and the strange guttural sound roused the medium from her trance. Ophelia shuddered, fluttered her eyelids and rubbed her eyes, and when she took her hands away, her face was as it had been before: absentminded and illuminated by a faint, timid smile. And her eyes were no longer black, but quite normal – bright and moist with tears.
Someone lit the candles and soon the chandelier was lit too, making the drawing room very bright.
‘What’s his real name?’ Columbine asked, unable to take her eyes off the Chosen One (in fact, everyone else had eyes only for him).
‘Nikisha. Nikifor Sipyaga,’ Petya murmured in confusion.
Avaddon got up and looked at the others with a strange expression on his face, a mixture of fear and superiority.
‘Straight in off the red!’ he laughed, then sobbed and laughed again.
‘Congratulations!’ Caliban exclaimed with sincere feeling, shaking the condemned man firmly by the hand. ‘Phoo, your hand’s covered in cold sweat. Turned coward? Eh, the fools have all the luck!’
‘What . . . What now?’ Avaddon asked the Doge, ‘I can’t seem to gather my thoughts . . . my head’s spinning.’
‘Calm down,’ said Prospero, going over and putting a hand on his shoulder. ‘We know the spirits like to play tricks on the living. Without the Sign all this means absolutely nothing. Wait for the Sign, and make sure you don’t do anything stupid . . . That is all, the meeting is over. Leave now.’
He turned his back to the aspirants and one by one they made their way to the door.
Shaken by what she had seen and heard, Columbine watched Avaddon’s unnaturally straight back as he left the room first.
‘Let’s go.’ said Petya, taking her by the hand. ‘There won’t be anything else.’
Suddenly they heard a low, imperious voice.
‘Let the new girl stay!’
Columbine immediately forgot about Avaddon and Petya. She turned round, afraid of only one thing – that she might have misheard.
Without looking round, Prospero raised one hand and beckoned with his finger for her to approach.
Petya, the false Harlequin, looked plaintively into Columbine’s face and saw it was flushed with happiness. He shuffled his feet, sighed and meekly walked out.
A minute later, Columbine was left alone with the master of the house.
A discarded chrysalis
This is how it was. The wind was howling outside the windows, bending down the trees. The metal sheeting of the roof was clattering. Nature was rampaging in the grip of titanic passions.
The same passions were raging in Columbine’s soul. Her little heart alternately stood still and fluttered wildly, as rapidly as a moth beating its wings against the glass.
But he – he slowly approached and put his hands on her shoulders and throughout the entire mystical ritual he did not utter another word. There was no need to speak, this evening belonged to silence.
He grasped Columbine’s slim wrist and drew her after him into a dark series of rooms. The captive felt as if, passing through these rooms, she underwent a series of transformations, like a butterfly.
In the dining room she was still a larva – moist and timid, curled up, helpless; in the study she became rigid with fear, a blind, motionless chrysalis; but on the bearskin that was spread out in the bedroom, she was destined for transformation into a butterfly with bright-coloured wings.
No words can even come near to describing what happened. Her eyes were wide open as her innocence was sacrificed, but they saw nothing except shadows slipping across the ceiling. And as for sensations . . . No, I do not remember any. Alternating immersion first in cold, then in heat, then in cold – that is probably all.
There was none of the pleasure that is described in French novels. Nor any pain. There was the fear of saying or doing something wrong – what if he should pull away contemptuously and the ritual was interrupted, left incomplete? And so Columbine said nothing and did nothing, merely submitted to his gentle but astonishingly masterful hands.
One thing I know for certain: it did not
last long. When I walked back through the drawing room, alone, the candles were not even burned halfway down.
Oh no, he did not stand on ceremony with his obedient puppet. First he took her, never doubting his right for a moment, then he stood up and said: ‘Leave’. One word, only one.
Stunned and confused, Columbine heard the rustle of retreating footsteps and the quiet creak of a door: the rite of initiation was over.
The clothes lying on the floor even looked like a discarded chrysalis. Ah, a discarded chrysalis is nothing at all like an abandoned doll!
The new-born butterfly got up and fluttered her white arms like wings. She spun round on the spot. If she must leave, she must leave.
She walked along the deserted boulevard on her own. The wind threw leaves torn from the trees and fine rubbish into her face. Ah, how fiercely the night rejoiced in its new convert, exulted that the fall from light into darkness had finally been accomplished!
Apparently there is pleasure even in this – wandering through the empty streets at random, without knowing the way. A strange, incomprehensible city. A strange, incomprehensible life.
But a genuine one. Absolutely genuine.
Columbine re-read the entry in her diary. She crossed out the paragraph about pleasure as too naive. She hesitated over the silence throughout the mystical ritual – that was not entirely true. When Prospero started unfastening the buttons of her lemon-yellow blouse as they walked along, silly little Lucifer had snapped at the aggressor’s finger with his infant fangs (he must have feeling jealous) and that had spoiled everything a little bit. The Doge had cried out in surprise and insisted that the reptile must be imprisoned in a jug during the ritual, and he had spent at least two minutes rubbing the bite – two tiny indentations in his skin – with alcohol. Meanwhile Columbine had stood there with her blouse unbuttoned, not knowing what to do – button the blouse up again or take it off herself.
No, she hadn’t written about that petty, annoying trifle – what would be the point?
Afterwards she sat down in front of a mirror and studied herself for a long time. Strange, but she couldn’t see any particular changes, any new maturity or sophistication, in her face. They would come, but obviously not straight away.
One thing was clear: she would not be able to sleep on this great night.
Columbine sat down in the armchair by the window and tried to spot a star, even the very tiniest, in the murky sky, but she couldn’t. She felt rather upset, but then she told herself that it was all right. The thicker the darkness, the better.
She did fall asleep after all. And she only realised she had been sleeping when she was woken by loud knocking.
Leave
When she opened her eyes, she saw the sun already high in the sky outside the window and heard the sounds of the street: hooves clopping over cobblestones, a knife-grinder crying his trade. And then she heard that insistent knocking again: rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat!
She realised it was late morning and someone was knocking on the door, perhaps they had already been knocking for a long time.
But before she went to open the door, she checked to make sure there were no creases or indentations on her face after her sleep (there weren’t), ran a comb through her hair, straightened her dressing gown (cut Japanese-style, with Mount Fujiyama on the back).
The knocking on the door continued. Then she heard a muffled call: ‘Open up! Open up! It’s me!’
Petya. Well, of course, who else? He had come to make a jealous scene. She shouldn’t have given him her address yesterday. Columbine sighed, pulled her hair across her left shoulder on to her breasts and tied it with a scarlet ribbon.
Lucifer was lying on the bed in a neat spiral. He was probably hungry, poor thing, so she poured some milk into a bowl for the little snake and only then let the jealous rival in.
Petya burst into the hallway, pale-faced, with his lips trembling. He cast a surreptitious glance at Columbine (at least, that was how it seemed to her) and immediately turned his eyes away. She shook her head in amazement at herself. How could she have taken him for Harlequin? He was Pierrot, an absolutely genuine Pierrot, and that was his real name, after all, Pyotr, Petya.
‘What are you doing here at the crack of dawn?’ she asked severely.
‘But it’s midday already,’ he babbled and sniffed. His nose was wet and red. Had he caught a cold? Or had he been crying?
It proved to be the latter. The disgraced Harlequin’s face contorted, his lower lip worked up and down, tears gushed from his eyes and he started blubbing in grand style. He spoke haltingly, incomprehensibly, and not about what Columbine had been expecting.
‘I went round this morning, to his flat . . . He rents one, on Basmannaya Street, in the Giant company building . . . Like yours, on the top . . . So we could go to lectures together. And I was worried after yesterday. I caught up with him and walked him home.’
‘Who?’ she asked. ‘Speak more clearly.’
‘Nikisha. You know, Nikifor, Avaddon.’ Petya sobbed. ‘He wasn’t himself at all, he kept repeating: “It’s been decided, it’s over, now I just have to wait for the Sign.” I said to him: “Maybe there won’t be any Sign, eh, Nikisha?” “No”, he said, “There will, I know there will. Goodbye, Petushok. We won’t see each other again. Never mind” he said, “it’s what I wanted” . . .’
At this point the story was interrupted by another fit of sobbing, but Columbine had already guessed what was wrong.
‘What, there was a Sign?’ she gasped. ‘A Sign of Death? The choice was confirmed? And now Avaddon will die?’
‘He already has!’ Petya sobbed. ‘When I got there, the door was wide open. The yard keeper, the owner of the house, the police. He hanged himself!’
Columbine bit her lip and pressed one hand to her breast, her heart was pounding so hard. She listened to the rest without interrupting.
‘And Prospero was there too. He said he hadn’t been able to get to sleep during the night, and just before dawn he quite clearly heard Avaddon calling him, so he got up, got dressed and went. He saw that the door was half-open. He went in, and there was Nikifor, that is, Avaddon, in the noose. He was already cold . . . Of course, the police don’t know anything about the club. They decided that Prospero and I were simply acquaintances of the deceased.’ Petya squeezed his eyes shut, obviously recalling the terrible scene. ‘Nikisha was lying on the floor, with a blue furrow round his neck and his eyes bulging out, and his tongue was huge and swollen, too big to fit in his mouth. And there was an appalling smell!’
Petya started shaking and his teeth chattered
‘So there must have been a Sign . . .’ Columbine whispered and raised her hand to cross herself (not out of piety, of course, but from childish habit), and only caught herself just in time. She had to pretend to tuck away a lock of hair.
‘Who can tell now?’ Petya asked with a fearful shudder. ‘The poem doesn’t say anything about a Sign.’
‘What poem?’
‘The death poem. It’s a custom of ours. Before you marry Death, you have to write a poem, it’s essential. Prospero calls it the “epithalamium” and also the “moment of truth”. He gave the constable fifty kopecks, and he allowed him to make a copy. I copied it out for myself too . . .’
‘Give it to me!’ Columbine demanded.
She grabbed the crumpled, tear-stained piece of paper out of Petya’s hands. At the top, in big letters, she read ‘A Riddle’. That was obviously the title.
But she simply couldn’t read the epithalamium with Petya there. He burst into sobs again and started telling the whole story for a second time.
So Columbine took hold of him by the shoulders, pushed him towards the door and said just one word: ‘Leave’.
She said it in exactly the same way as Prospero had to her the night before, after everything was over. Only she pointed with her finger for greater emphasis.
Petya looked at her imploringly, wavered on the spot for a while, sighed sev
eral times and walked out, like a beaten puppy dog. Columbine frowned. Surely she hadn’t looked as pitiful as that the night before?
Petya’s expulsion gave her a distinctly wicked pleasure. I definitely have what it takes to be a femme fatale, Columbine told herself, and sat down by the window to read the poem by the ugly individual who in life had borne the ugly name of Nikifor Sipyaga.
A Riddle
A nervous night, a hostile night,
The bed clatters its teeth,
Arching its back in wolfish spite.
I dare not sleep.
I fear sleep. In my waking trance
The wall-eyed windows show
Blue ash-tree skeletons that dance.
They creak, they groan.
I am still in this world, still here,
Warm, quivering, afraid.
The wind, knowing the Beast is near,
Taps on the pane.
The sated Beast will still be here,
The wind will sob and sigh
But I shall not be in this world.
Oh where am I?
Columbine suddenly felt quite unbearably afraid – afraid enough to make her want to go running after Petya and ask him to come back.
‘Oh, dear mother,’ whispered the femme fatale. ‘What Beast is this?’
III. From the ‘Agents’ Reports’ File
To His Honour Lieutenant-Colonel Besikov
(Private and confidential)
Dear Lieutenant-Colonel,
Ever since our latest exchange of opinions I have been reproaching myself for failing to display the firmness of character required to answer you in the appropriate manner. I am a weak man, and you possess the strange ability to stifle my will. The most disgusting thing of all is that I experience a strange pleasure in submitting to you, for which I hate myself afterwards. I swear that I shall drive this base, voluptuous servility out of myself !
