by Boris Akunin
ZZ
Written on the night of 4 September 1900
1. Probability
2. A pity
CHAPTER 3
I. From the Newspapers
This is the Only Way?
In memory of Lorelei Rubinstein (1860–1900)
Hang your heads low, all you lovers of Russian literature. Your hearts will surely be filled not only with grief, but with the even more sombre feelings of bewilderment and despair. For a star that shone brightly in the firmament of Russian poetry in recent years has been tragically extinguished: it has fallen and, in falling, carved a bloody furrow across our hearts.
Suicide always has a terrible effect on those who are left behind. It is as though the person who leaves us spurns and rejects God’s world and all of us who dwell in it. We are no longer necessary or interesting to him. And it is a hundred times more unnatural when the person who acts in this way is a writer, whose bonds with the life of the spirit and society ought, one would think, to be especially strong.
Poor Russia! Her Shakespeares and Dantes seem to be marked down for some special deadly fate: those who are not slain by an enemy’s bullet, like Pushkin, Lermontov and Marlinsky, contrive to carry out the malevolent verdict of destiny themselves.
And now yet another resounding name has been added to the martyrology of Russian literary suicides. We have only just commemorated a bitter anniversary – a quarter of a century since the death of Count A.K. Tolstoy and the effervescent Vassily Kurochkin. They both poisoned themselves. The noble Garshin threw himself down a stairwell, while in his despair Nikolai Uspensky cut his own throat with a blunt knife. Each of these losses has left an open wound on the body of our literature.
And now a poetess, the woman they called the Russian Sappho.
I knew her. I was one of those who believed in her talent, which blossomed at a mature age but promised so very much.
The reason that prompted Lorelei Rubinstein to take up the pen at an age when the first blush of youth was already behind her is well known: it was the death from consumption of the husband she passionately adored, the late M.N. Rubinstein, whom many recall as the most noble and worthy of men. Deprived of the only being dear to her heart, the childless Lorelei turned to poetry for salvation. She opened that passionate, long-suffering heart to us, her readers – opened it unhesitatingly, even shamelessly, because sincere, genuine feeling knows no shame. It was the first time in Russian poetry that sensuality and passion had spoken so boldly through the lips of a woman – following the death of her beloved husband these natural impulses could find no other outlet except in her poems.
Young provincial ladies and schoolgirls secretly copied these spicy lines into their cherished albums. The poor souls were abused for it, sometimes even punished for this enthusiasm for ‘immoral’ poetry that could teach them nothing good. But that was only poetry! Now Lorelei has set these romantic maidens languishing in neurotic passion a far more terrible and tempting example. I fear that many will wish to copy not only her poems, but also her own terrible end . . .
I know quite certainly that she was a member of the ‘Lovers of Death’, where she was known as the ‘Lioness of Ecstasy’. In recent weeks I was fortunate enough to become more closely acquainted with this astounding woman and was an involuntary witness of the fiery fall of her brilliant star.
No, I was not with her at that crucial moment when she took the fatal dose of morphine, but I could see that she was sinking, irrevocably sinking. I could see it, but I was powerless. Not long ago she confided to me in secret that the ‘Tsarevich Death’ was sending her secret signs, and she would not have to suffer the torment of life for much longer. I do not think I was the only one she told about this, but everyone regarded this confession as the fruit of her irrepressible fantasy.
Alas, fantasies can give rise to phantoms: the hard-hearted Tsarevich has come for Lorelei and taken her away from us.
Before she made the transition from this life to the history of literature, the Lioness of Ecstasy left a farewell poem. How little remains in these incoherent, impatient, final lines of the heady brilliance that captivated her female admirers!
No more, it’s time, the call has come.
We shall meet later – do not keep me now:
Something, I know, I should recall before I go.
But what? But what?
I cannot think.
My thoughts are in confusion. No more, it’s time.
I must make haste to learn what there will be
Beyond the last horizon
Forward!
Tsarevich Death,
Come in your bloody-red apparel,
Give me your hand and lead me to the light,
Where I shall stand with arms outstretched
Like an angel, like fate, like the reflection
Of my own self. This is the only way.
What terrible words of farewell! ‘This is the only way.’ Are you not afraid, ladies and gentlemen? I am, very.
Lavr Zhemailo
Moscow Courier, 7 (20)
September 1900, p.1
II. From Columbine’s Diary
Puzzles
I really am terribly fortunate to depart this life in the year that marks the boundary between the old and new centuries. It is as if I have glanced through a door that has opened a crack and seen nothing deserving enough of my attention to open the door wider and walk in. I shall halt on the threshold, flutter my wings and fly away. You can have your cinematograph, self-propelled carriages and tunics à la grecque (terribly vulgar, in my opinion). Live in the twentieth century without me. To depart without looking back – that is beautiful.
And on the matter of beauty. Our members talk about it a great deal, they even elevate it to the level of a supreme standard. Essentially, I am of the same opinion, but a sudden thought: Who is more handsome, Prospero or Genji! Of course, they are very different, and each impressive in his own way. Probably nine women out of ten would say that Genji is more interesting, in addition to being a lot younger (although he is also very old, about forty). But without the slightest hesitation, I prefer Prospero, because he is more . . . significant. When I am with Genji, I feel calm and lucid, sometimes even lighthearted, but I am overwhelmed by an ‘infinite thrill’ only in the presence of the Doge. There is magic and mystery in him, and that weighs more heavily than superficial beauty.
But then, of course, there is quite a lot of mystery about Genji too. In the last few days he has played Death at roulette three times (if one counts those first two times, with the drum of the revolver) and remained alive! It is truly incredible that the ambulance carriage just happened to be driving along the boulevard at the very moment when Genji lost consciousness after drinking the poisoned wine!
Obviously all this is because there is too much vital energy in this man, and he expends it sparingly, holding it inside himself.
Yesterday he declared: ‘I cannot understand, Columbine, why you find the world so disagreeable. You’re young, healthy and rosy-cheeked, and p-perfectly cheerful by nature, even though you do try to assume an infernal air.’
I was terribly upset. ‘Healthy and rosy-cheeked’ – is that all? On the other hand, as they say, you can’t blame the mirror. He is right: I lack subtlety and fatality. But even so, it was very tactless of him to say it.
‘And what about you?’ I retorted. ‘As I recall, you were so outraged with the Doge that you even threatened to break up our club, but you keep coming and you even tried to poison yourself.’
He replied with a serious air: ‘I adore everything mysterious. There are far too many mysteries here, dear Columbine, and mysteries give me a kind of itch – I shall never calm down until I get to the bottom of everything.’ Then suddenly he made a suggestion. ‘Do you know what? Why d-don’t we solve this puzzle together? As far as I am aware, you have nothing else to do in any case. It will be good for you. You might even come to your senses!’
I did not like his didacti
c tone, but I thought about Ophelia’s inexplicable suicide and remembered Lorelei, without whom our meetings now seemed pale and colourless. And he was right – how long could I just sit at home, waiting for the evening to come?
‘Very well,’ I said. ‘A puzzle to be solved. When shall we begin?’
‘Tomorrow, with no d-delay. I shall call for you at eleven, if you would please be so kind as to be ready on time in full marching order.’
There is one thing I do not understand: whether he is in love with me or not. To judge from his manner of restrained mockery – not in the least. But perhaps he is simply trying to appear interesting? Acting in accordance with that idiotic homily: ‘The less we love a woman, the more she likes us.’ Of course, it is all the same to me, since I love Prospero. But I would still like to know.
Take tomorrow’s outing, for instance – what is his real interest in it? Now that is a genuine riddle.
All right. Let Mr Genji try to solve his puzzle, and I shall solve mine.
But they did not set out at eleven the following day – and not at all because the young mistress of the flat had overslept or failed to make her preparations in time. On the contrary, Columbine was waiting for Prince Genji in perfect readiness and fully kitted out. Little Lucifer had been given food and drink and left to rustle about in a large plywood crate full of grass, and Columbine herself had put on an impressive outfit: a Bedouin burnous with little bells (she had spent half the night sewing them on).
His Japanese Majesty politely praised the costume but requested her to change into something a little less eye-catching, citing the particularly delicate nature of their mission. So it was his own fault that they were a little late.
With reluctant loathing, Columbine dressed up in a blue skirt and white blouse from Irkutsk, with a modest grey bolero, and put a beret on her head – the perfect image of a female student, only the spectacles were missing. But the earthbound Genji was pleased.
He did not come alone, but with his Japanese, to whom Columbine was formally introduced on this occasion, with endless bowing and scraping (on Mr Masa’s side, that is). In introducing his Man Friday, Genji called him ‘observant and sharp-witted’ and even ‘an invaluable assistant’ and the Oriental drew himself erect and puffed out his smooth cheeks so that he looked like a carefully polished samovar.
When the three of them got into the droshky, Columbine was helped in by both elbows, like a queen.
‘Where are we going, to Ophelia’s place?’ she asked.
‘No.’ Genji replied and gave the driver a familiar address, ‘Basmannaya Street, the Giant c-company’s apartment building. Let’s start with Avaddon. I can’t get that Beast out of my head – the one that howled on the night of the suicide.’
The sight of the large, grey five-storey block made the young woman feel rather unwell – she recalled the iron hook and the rope end hanging from it. Genji, however, did not walk into the left entrance, where the flat of the deceased Nikifor Sipyaga was located. He walked into the entrance on the right.
They walked all the way up to the top and rang the bell at a door with a plaque that said ‘A.F. Stakhovich, painter’. Columbine remembered that this man, Avaddon’s neighbour, had been mentioned by the yard keeper, who had taken Lucifer for an alcoholic hallucination.
The door was opened by a young man with a fiery ginger beard that covered his face almost right up to the eyes. There could be no doubt that this was the artist in person – he was wearing a dressing gown smeared with paint from top to bottom and clutching an extinct pipe in his teeth.
‘A thousand apologies, Alexei Fyodorovich,’ said Genji, politely doffing his top hat (so he had already found out the man’s first name and patronymic, how very meticulous). ‘We are friends of your neighbour, the late Mr Sipyaga, who met such an untimely d-death. We would like to reconstruct the woeful sequence of events.’
‘Yes, I felt sorry for the student,’ Stakhovich sighed, gesturing for them to go in. ‘Though of course, I hardly even knew him. A neighbour on the other side of the wall is not like one from the door opposite. Come in, only be careful, it’s chaos in here.’
His comment on the chaos was greatly understated. The small flat, an exact mirror image of Avaddon’s, was absolutely crammed with frames and canvases and there was all sorts of rubbish underfoot – empty bottles, rags, flattened paint tubes.
The room which Avaddon had made his bedroom served Stakhovich as a studio. Standing by the window was an unfinished painting of a female nude on a red divan (the nude’s body had been painted in detail, but the head was still missing), and placed against the opposite wall was the divan itself, covered in a red drape, and there really was a naked damsel reclining on it. She had a snub nose, freckles and loose straw-coloured hair, and she gazed at the visitors with idle curiosity, making no attempt to cover herself up.
‘This is Dashka,’ the painter said, nodding towards his model. ‘Stay there, Dunya, don’t move, it cost me a real effort to get you set out properly. They’ve come to make enquiries about that young fool from next door who hanged himself. They’ll be gone in a minute.’
‘A-a-ah,’ drawled Dashka, alias Dunya, and sniffed. ‘The one who hammered on the wall with his fist every time we started arguing a bit too loud?’
‘That’s the one.’
At this point Prince Genji proved that he was terribly old-fashioned and a total martyr to philistine prejudices. At the sight of the naked model he became embarrassed, turned his head away a full hundred and eighty degrees and started stammering twice as much as usual: in his place Prospero wouldn’t have batted an eyelid.
However, the Japanese Masa wasn’t even slightly embarrassed. He stared at the recumbent girl, clicked his tongue in approval and declared: ‘Beeootifur young rady. Round with fat regs.’
‘Masa!’ Genji protested, blushing. ‘How many times m-must I tell you? Stop staring! This isn’t Japan!’
But Dunya was obviously flattered by the comment from the Japanese.
‘What exactly are you interested in?’ asked the artist, squinting at each of his visitors in turn. ‘I really didn’t know him at all. I was never in his flat. He gave the impression of being a bit of a cold fish. No socialising, no binges, no women’s voices. A real hermit.’
‘The poor thing wasn’t much to look at either, his face was all covered in furuncles,’ Dunya put in, scratching her elbow and looking at Masa. ‘But he was interested in the female sex all right. When he ran into me in the entrance, he used to frisk me all over with those eyes of his. If he’d been a bit more perky, he could have been likeable enough. You get furuncles from loneliness. But he had good eyes, sort of sad, and the colour of cornflowers.’
‘Shut up, you fool,’ Stakhovich shouted at her. ‘To hear you talk, you’d think men have nothing on their minds but how to get their hands on your body. But she’s right: he was shy, you couldn’t get a word out of him. And he really was lonely, a lost soul. He was always muttering something in the evenings. Something rhythmical, like poetry. Sometimes he used to sing a bit out of tune – mostly Little Russian songs. The partition walls here are made of planks, you can hear every sound.’
All the walls of the room were hung with sketches and studies, most of them showing a female torso in various positions and from various angles, and it required no great gift of observation to realise that Dashka-Dunya’s body had served as the model for all of them.
‘Tell me,’ Columbine enquired. ‘Why do you always paint the same woman? Is it some kind of style you have? I’ve read that in Europe there are artists who only paint one thing – a cup, or flowers in a vase, or spots of light on glass – always trying to achieve perfection.’
‘What’s perfection got to do with it!’ Stakhovich exclaimed, turning round to take a look at this curious young lady. ‘Where would I get the money for any other models? Take you, for example. You wouldn’t pose for me out of the simple love of art, would you?’
Columbine felt as if the gaz
e of his narrowed eyes had pierced straight through her bolero, and she cringed slightly.
‘You have an interesting profile. The line of the hips is quite captivating. And the breasts must be pear-shaped, slightly asymmetrical, with large areolae. Am I right?’
Masha Mironova would probably have turned numb and blushed bright red at words like that. But Columbine didn’t turn a hair and even smiled.
‘C-come now sir, how d-dare you say such things?’ Genji exclaimed in horror, apparently prepared to intervene there and then for the honour of the lady and tear the insolent fellow into little pieces.
But Columbine saved the artist from the inevitable duel by saying in a perfectly calm voice: ‘I don’t know what areolae are, but I assure you that my breasts are perfectly symmetrical. However, you are quite right about them being pear-shaped.’
There was a brief pause. The artist examined the intrepid maiden’s waist. Genji mopped his forehead with a batiste handkerchief. Masa walked over to the model and offered her a boiled sweet in a green wrapper that he had taken out of his pocket.
‘From Landrine?’ Dashka-Dunya asked. ‘Merci.’
Columbine imagined Stakhovich, having become world-famous, bringing an exhibition of his work to Irkutsk. The most important canvas was a nude – Columbine Seduced. Now that would be a real scandal. It was probably worth thinking about.
But by now the artist was looking at the Japanese instead of her.
‘What an incredible face!’ Stakhovich exclaimed, rubbing his hands together in his excitement. ‘And you don’t notice it straight away. The way those eyes sparkle, and those folds! Chingiz Khan! Tamerlaine! Listen, good sir, I absolutely must paint your portrait!’
