3 Great Historical Novels

by Fay Weldon

  ‘Why are your eyes closed?’ Sonya’s voice pushed through the chinks of his counting.

  He opened one eye and looked sideways at her. ‘Just working out some bills in my head.’ It was almost the truth.

  ‘Papa!’ Her voice rose. ‘This is meant to be a treat!’ The car was at a temporary standstill at the top of the loop; wind whistled in Nikolai’s ears, voices floated up from the ground, and screams came from those swooping in front of them. Was this like the moment of complete clarity before facing an execution squad?

  Suddenly, they were flying, screaming, shrieking into nothingness. Sonya’s braid flew behind them, Nikolai’s eyes streamed with tears. As they churned over the bottom of the loop and back on an uphill gradient again, he felt relieved that at least he hadn’t been able to see clearly what was happening.

  Sonya’s hand crept into his. ‘That was fun, wasn’t it? Are you ready for another one?’

  ‘Of course!’ Nikolai wiped his palms on his trousers and gave a forced smile.

  After more ice cream, courtesy of Sonya’s birthday fund, and then some fried cutlets — ‘in the wrong order, but who cares,’ said Nikolai — they left the crowded Nevsky Prospect and wandered home along the narrow back streets. Windows stood open to the heat, and ragged tomcats lay at a distance from each other, too hot to bother with hissing or hostility.

  ‘Phew,’ said Sonya, when they reached their own front steps. ‘That was quite a day.’

  ‘Thank you for taking me out.’ Nikolai opened the front door and felt the cool breath of the hallway on his face.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ said Sonya formally.

  Aunt Tanya had already finished the day’s chores and gone home, but the cello was waiting for them, leaning against the sofa as if it, too, had succumbed to the heat.

  ‘I haven’t done my practice today.’ Sonya sounded guilty.

  ‘Consider it a rest day,’ said Nikolai. ‘Even professional musicians take days off.’

  ‘Did Mama?’ Sonya picked up the cello, and the C string gave a low gentle boing.

  ‘Even Mama! Although not many, I have to admit.’ He remembered there had been times when he’d forcibly unwrapped her hand from the bow, and days when she’d played so long it took hours for the dents in her fingers to disappear.

  ‘I’ll check that she approves.’ Sonya disappeared into her room with the cello.

  Nikolai lay on the sofa and stared at the broken edge in the moulded ceiling. He could hear Sonya murmuring away as she usually did in the evenings, telling her mother what they’d done that day. A tiny tear squeezed out the corner of his eye, running lightly down the side of his face and into the green cushion.

  The price of furniture

  Eliasberg had always listened at doors. He understood why the State functioned like this; it was the only way to find out the truth. The problem was, he didn’t rate the intelligence of Stalin’s information-gatherers at all highly. This was where the system fell down.

  Listening in to others had become a habit. He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t been standing in a hallway, leaning towards a wooden panel as if it were about to sing small confidences to him. By listening at doors or below windows (a necessary subterfuge, which he’d never considered as eavesdropping), he’d heard many useful things. Things that had lodged in his skin like burrs, inflaming him, driving him to succeed — and turning him into the professional man he now was.

  ‘Why must Karl Elias always creep around in stockinged feet?’ His father, seeing his eleven-year-old son soundlessly passing the kitchen door, had flung down his wrench. ‘If there’s one thing I’m good for, it should be putting shoes on the feet of my family.’

  ‘The cobbler’s children,’ ventured Elias, ‘always run barefoot.’ He’d heard a teacher say this about ginger-headed Boris, son of the famous botanist Boris Berlovich whose sharp eyes had discovered a rare form of ground moss on the day of Svetlana Stalin’s birthday (her name had been bestowed upon it). ‘Talk about the cobbler’s children!’ the teacher had exclaimed, watching Boris the Younger scrabbling blindly about in the undergrowth, searching for a bright white ball not two feet away from him, while the rest of the class watched in impatient silence. Naturally, Elias had remembered this, for out of the twenty contemptuous children he was the only one to whom this saying was applicable, and he was puzzled as to why the teacher had aimed it at short-sighted Boris.

  His father looked still more aggrieved. ‘Cobbler? Why does Karl Elias use such a word in this house? Has he not noticed the sign hanging outside his own home? Makers —’ He began hammering at the leaky pipe, punctuating his words with bangs. ‘— Of. Fine. FOOTWEAR!’ At the last blow, the pipe flew apart like a worm chopped in two by a shovel. Even this disaster didn’t throw Mr Eliasberg off course. Once started on the topic of his profession, he was unstoppable. ‘If Karl Elias is to take over the family business, he must learn that there’s a world of difference between a man who mends and a man who makes. Cobbler, my arse. I am an artisan!’

  ‘Please! Mind your language!’ Elias’s mother entered the room, and the fray. It was rare for her to criticise her husband, but she felt strongly about bad language.

  Elias shuffled his socked feet. Somewhere outside there was sun to be found, and the quietness of a Saturday afternoon, and an empty alley in which to kick a can. But his mother had caught sight of the ruined plumbing. ‘Heavenly stars!’ she exclaimed, turning to Elias. ‘Run upstairs and get Vladimir the Carpenter. He knows a thing or two about pipes.’

  ‘We don’t need no Vladimir,’ protested his father.

  ‘Any Vladimir,’ corrected his mother. ‘Karl Elias, go!’

  ‘Do as your mother says.’ His father looked both grumpy and relieved. ‘What do I know? I’m only a cobbler.’

  Mr Eliasberg’s self-pity had seeped into everyday life like strong bitter tea, and it was even stronger on the days when letters arrived from Uncle Georgii. George was the lucky one, the brave one, the one who’d sailed for the United States in time to escape violence, upheaval and poverty under the guise of opportunity for all. Occasionally Elias retrieved one of Uncle George’s letters from the bin, where it lay buried under potato peelings and tealeaves. ‘Exciting experiments … in the field of …’ He deciphered the blurred violet words with difficulty. ‘Working with an eminent scientist … by the name of —’ But the flimsy paper disintegrated in his hand.

  On these black-letter days, his father would disappear, like Mephistopheles, through a trapdoor in the kitchen floor and into the bowels of the building, where he laboured on fine boots for the city’s most beautiful ladies. Moody tappings shook the foundations of daily existence, making Elias’s desk shudder and his neat sums wobble. Concentrating, he held his tongue between his teeth so that when his father suddenly shouted he jumped and tasted his own blood.

  ‘Why will Karl Elias not come and help his poor father?’ Most of Mr Eliasberg’s questions started with ‘Why’ and revolved around his son. Why was Karl Elias so silent? Why did he spend so much time at the library?

  Elias had his own question that he phrased equally repetitively, but silently, for fear of receiving a lashing. ‘Why,’ he shouted inside his own defiant head, ‘do you always address me in the third person?’ At times his voice rang so loudly inside his skull that his ears could hear nothing except his own protest.

  It was strange but true. Every time his father used his name in this unthinking way, a small part of Elias was slivered away. By the time he was eleven, he felt almost invisible. When he was twelve, he learnt, by listening through his bedroom door, that he might indeed be a spectre sooner rather than later. For the doctor told his weeping mother that her son couldn’t be expected to live past fourteen years of age. Tuberculosis would carry him off.

  After the doctor left the house, Mrs Eliasberg sank to the floor outside the bedroom door. Elias knew this, for by now he was adept at interpreting what, in theatrical circles, were called ‘noises off’. First
the rustle of skirts. Then the creaking of floorboards on the landing. And, finally, a puff of air from crushed lungs. As he stood barely two feet away from his mother, separated from her grief by a panelled wooden door, he felt curiously optimistic — more alive, in fact, than he had for a long time. Was it true his demise might actually leave a small dent in someone else’s heart?

  But it was by checking in at the living-room door later that evening that he received the really useful piece of information, the one that kept him alive, sending defiant blood between his heart and his brain, shrinking the swelling on his neck. For his parents were discussing what they might sell to raise the money to send him to a sanatorium where his blood would be cleansed and his life saved.

  ‘It must be a substantial sum,’ stressed his tearful mother. Once again her skirts rustled, but this time, obviously, she was swivelling to assess the items of furniture in the room. ‘What about the bookshelf?

  ‘The only piece of good furniture my parents left me?’ queried Mr Eliasberg. ‘The only good piece they ever owned?’ The familiar contempt weighed down his voice. Having sprung from the loins of men who’d all worked in shoeing — first equine, then human — he’d never forgiven any of them. Grandfather, father, uncles, cousins, all were blamed for apprenticing him to a craft which they saw as honourable and he saw as a stigma. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The bookshelf stays.’ Elias heard him lean on it with a possessive elbow (squeak of cloth on polished oak) and then kick it (crack of leather on wood).

  ‘What about the table? And all four chairs?’ Already Mrs Eliasberg sounded defeated by the potential cost of saving her only son.

  ‘Where do you propose we eat? In the gutter?’

  A pause. On his side of the door, Elias wiped a film of sweat from his forehead and shifted from one weak leg to the other.

  ‘How about the best china?’ His father sounded a little brighter.

  Now it was Karl’s mother who demurred. The tea set was dear to her heart, the only possession in which she could take pride when entertaining. For some minutes Elias listened to his parents tipping the scales back and forth: the value of his health against various household items. His feet burned with cold, and his face burned with an emotion impossible to define. As he dragged his way back to bed, he felt a new strength in his limbs, and he clenched his hands under the chilly sheet.

  ‘I will live!’ he declared, spitting over the side of the bed into a basin, staring at the bubbling mix of blood and saliva. Then, propped up against his lumpy pillow, he wrote a list headed ‘Karl Illyich Eliasberg’s Ten Commandments’. They included:

  Surviving, to prove them all wrong

  Not becoming a Shoemaker or any other kind of tradesman

  Never valuing Material Possessions over Art or Life

  During the following months Elias recovered, thus achieving the first of his commandments. ‘Inexplicable,’ exclaimed the doctor. ‘A miracle.’ He sounded almost annoyed: predicting bad news and then being robbed of the outcome can leave one feeling faintly ridiculous.

  Though never strong, Elias proceeded to grow steadily upwards and increasingly inwards. He refused point blank to learn the shoe trade (thereby achieving his second commandment). To kneel in the dust of life, dealing with objects that came in contact with the base earth — this was not for him! He considered becoming a pilot — ‘A pilot?’ queried his mother in alarm — and a general, until he realised he disapproved of organised killing, whatever the cause.

  And then one Sunday, after performing a solo in a youth-choir concert, he was approached by a distinguished grey-haired man. Did Karl Eliasberg play an instrument, asked the man, as well as sing? Yes, Elias did; the neighbour across the landing owned a piano and she’d taught him for many years.

  ‘Would you mind playing something?’ asked the grey-haired man, with just the right mix of authority and diffidence.

  The dilapidated church echoed like a cave as Elias walked, with booming uncertain steps, to the piano. He started with a Bach prelude, which was all he could remember under duress. The notes fell starkly and too loudly into all that empty space. They seemed like stones hurled off a cliff, some flying in arcs, others aimed more deftly — but as they piled up together they achieved their own amassed validity. He started his favourite Beethoven sonata with more confidence. Boom, boom-be-boom! The low bass notes spread out impressively, while his right hand lifted the melody higher and higher towards the roof.

  When the final repeated chords had dissolved, the grey-haired man applauded. It was a reaction that seemed incongruous in a church, even a disused one, but Elias flushed with pleasure. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had listened to him so attentively, nor the last time he’d been praised. After the grey-haired man had asked several questions — where did Elias live, what was his age, how was his father’s financial situation? — he asked the most significant question of all. Was Karl interested in trying for a scholarship for the Conservatoire?

  Elias was taken aback, but as his father had developed pneumonia and was unable to work, and his mother had begun serving pancakes consisting mainly of coffee grounds — ‘Yes!’ he said. ‘I’d be most interested.’ At the very least, a scholarship would entitle him to extra grocery rations. At best, it would set him free.

  An almost inescapable legacy

  During his first two terms at the Conservatoire, Elias noticed his father’s cheeks becoming hollow and heard the breath rattling in his lungs. Instead of pity, he felt hatred. His contempt for his dying father grew with every new technique he learned and with every conversation he had with fellow students.

  His father had taught him nothing, prepared him for nothing. He hadn’t shown Elias how to act around artists, nor coached him in the art of conversation. He’d sung neither hymns nor gypsy tunes, lullabies nor operas. He’d never even been to the opera. He hadn’t owned a decent suit, had never knotted a casual scarf around the throat like Professor Steinberg, nor worn an expensive jacket so carelessly that it ended up a nonchalant second skin.

  Even Eliasberg’s highly honed skills of observation were not enough to save him. When he wore a long fur coat to the end-of-term recital — as he’d heard the famous Professor Glazunov had, when performing for Artur Schnabel and other esteemed visitors from the West — laughter started up at the back of the auditorium. It didn’t stop until he’d finished all three of his chosen Etudes, an interminable journey, at the end of which no recognisable vestige of Chopin remained.

  Stumbling from the stage, he locked himself in one of the rehearsal rooms on the first floor. When the coast was clear, he crept back down to the empty auditorium and lay down in the wings behind the curtains, which smelt of mothballs, pressing his hot face against the cold floor.

  After some time he heard footsteps on the stage.

  ‘Extraordinary decision to wear that coat.’ It was Professor Steinberg. ‘Shoulders, arms, spine, all restricted. Whatever possessed him?’

  ‘Pretensions, I suppose.’ Professor Ferkelman pushed in the piano stool with a screech. ‘He’s completely out of his depth.’

  ‘Socially, you mean?’ Steinberg’s voice grew more distant. ‘His work’s certainly up to scratch.’

  ‘His own worst enemy.’ Ferkelman’s voice, too, was further away. ‘Tries too hard to fit in … stands apart.’

  When Elias finally reached home, he found his father sleeping. He stood over the bed, looking down at the diminished figure that had once — strange to remember! — represented authority. The body jutted through the threadbare sheet: haunches like a withered fox, a sharp march of ribs, one wasted arm lying across a rasping chest.

  ‘You’ve given me nothing but disadvantage,’ he said in a low voice. ‘You’ve taught me only what I don’t want to become. You have bestowed on me all the disadvantages of a narrow-minded, straight-laced upbringing. A life of endless scales and five-finger exercises, with no higher goal.’

  He put his face close to his father’s, staring at the sunken
cheeks and the stubble pushing through the yellow skin. The camphor fumes and the stuffy darkness made him as breathless as his dying father. ‘You pretended to be creative, but you were nothing but a craftsman,’ he said, backing away from the bed. ‘You were born and will die a bootmaker.’

  That night he lay awake for a long time, hearing tomcats shrieking in the alleys and the monotonous trolley cars rattling by. Where did he belong? Not here in this family with its wafer-thin layer of culture, nor in the corridors of the Conservatoire, among those who referred to Mussorgsky as casually as the latest football scores and somehow knew the right time to discuss each.

  Where do I fit in? He tossed and turned on the mattress. Being neither educated nor ignorant, he had ended up in no-man’s land, where rules couldn’t help him nor background support him. ‘I am an outsider,’ he whispered. ‘I am outside.’

  The sharp embarrassment of the afternoon, the guilt at not doing justice to Chopin, the needling pain of the professors’ comments: these seeped out of him like black ink and disappeared into the darkness. Nothing could comfort him, apart from the chilly austere knowledge that he was other, and therefore less likely to be tainted or influenced.

  Not until he saw the first dirty streaks of dawn over the railway station did he know what to do. ‘The dilettantes were right to fear,’ he said slowly. What he intended to achieve could not be bought by the wealthy or pulled down by philistines; it existed above social status and scorn. It was the only untouchable thing — and the only way to become untouchable.

  When he emerged, bleary-eyed, from his room, his mother was in the hallway, her eyes and nose streaming. His father had died. Karl Elias was the new head of the family.

  He stood there impassively, feeling her body shake against his. Should he announce his new-found resolve? It seemed neither the time nor place. But as he stared over his mother’s head, he saw a clear-cut future before him.