All The World's A Stage

by Boris Akunin

  If things went on like this, in order not to disappoint the public Noah Noaevich would have to come up with new tricks every time – in accordance with his own ‘theory of sensationalism’. Would he let crocodiles loose on the stage then? Or make the actresses perform naked? Vulpinova had already suggested that in The Three Sisters she should come out on stage in dishabille, supposedly to emphasise how slovenly and shameless Natalya became once she felt at home in the Prozorovs’ house. But who would want to feast his eyes on Xanthippe Petrovna’s bony ancient relics?

  Rehearsals for The Cherry Orchard were in full swing – every morning, starting at eleven. But somehow the production wasn’t coming together. How much sensationalism could there be in The Cherry Orchard, even in a new interpretation? Noah Noaevich himself seemed to realise that he had shot wide of the mark with this play, but he didn’t want to admit his mistake. That was a pity. Eliza wanted so much to play something piquant, refined and unusual. She did not like the role of Chekhov’s seventeen-year-old ingénue in the least. The character was boring and one-dimensional, there was almost nothing to play. But discipline is discipline.

  At a quarter to eleven she got into the automobile. The status of the leading man and the leading lady entitled them to an open car, while the others were given travel allowances for a cab, but today Eliza was travelling alone, thank goodness: Emeraldov had not spent the night at the hotel (that often happened with him).

  Holding on to her wide-brimmed hat with the ostrich feathers, Eliza set off along Tverskaya Street. She was recognised – people shouted greetings after her and the driver hooted his horn as a sign of appreciation. Eliza enjoyed these rides, they helped to charge her with creative energy before the rehearsal.

  All actors have a special ploy of their own, a cunning little trick that helps them get into the magical condition of Acting. Vulpinova, for instance, always had to quarrel with someone to raise her energy to the required level. Reginina deliberately dawdled and drew things out, so that she would arrive late and the director would shout at her. Plump Aphrodisina smacked herself on the cheeks (Eliza had seen this several times). Everyone knew that Lev Spiridonovich Sensiblin drained his little flask. And Eliza required a brief ride with the wind in her hair, accompanied by cries of greeting – or a walk along the street with a fleeting stride, so that people would recognise her and turn their heads.

  With flushed cheeks and all a-jangle inside, she ran up the staircase, threw off her wrap, took off her hat, looked at herself in the mirror (rather pale, but it suited her face) and walked into the hall, punctual to the minute, at precisely eleven. All the others, except for Reginina and Emeraldov, were sitting facing the stage, in the front row. Stern was standing up above them, holding his watch, already prepared to explode. Nonarikin was hovering behind him, empathising with his feelings.

  ‘I don’t understand how it is possible to treat one’s colleagues, and one’s art, come to that, so disrespectfully,’ Vulpinova began in a honeyed voice.

  Mephistov took up the refrain.

  ‘Would they have been late for the real Noah’s Ark too? The man who lays claim to the position of our company’s leading actor seems to regard all of us as menials. Including the director. Everyone has to wait, while he condescends to finish his breakfast! And these eternal late arrivals of Reginina’s! You work your way into the character, prepare yourself, put yourself in the mood to act, and then instead …’

  At this point red-faced Vasilisa Prokofievna came running into the hall with her usual cry of: ‘I’m not late, am I?’ Vulpinova said: ‘Ha-ha-ha’, Stern grabbed at his temples, Nonarikin shook his head reproachfully. They could have started now, but Emeraldov had still not appeared. It wasn’t like him. No matter where he spent the night and with whom, Hippolyte always showed up for rehearsals on time, even when his hangover was so bad that he could barely stagger along.

  ‘Someone go and take a look in the changing room. Our handsome hero’s face is probably so puffy he can’t powder over the bags under his eyes,’ Sensiblin suggested.

  ‘You go yourself. There aren’t any servants here,’ his former wife snapped contemptuously.

  Shiftsky made a joke.

  ‘How’s that, no servants? What about me?’

  But he didn’t get up off his seat. In the end, of course, the ever-dependable Vasya Gullibin went.

  What a bore, thought Eliza, suppressing a yawn. Mephistov’s right. This way the mood for acting will evaporate completely.

  She took a little mirror out of her reticule and started practising the facial expressions of her character: innocent joy, touching agitation, tender affection, slight fright. Everything girlish and gentle, in pastel tones.

  Stern was scolding Nonarikin for something. Kostya Shiftsky was making Serafima laugh, Vulpinova was bickering shrilly with Reginina.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen … Noah Noaevich!’

  Vasya was standing by the wing of the stage. His voice trembled and broke. Everyone turned round and the noise faded away.

  ‘Did you find Emeraldov?’ Stern asked angrily.

  ‘Yes …’ Gullibin’s lips started trembling.

  ‘Well, where is he, then?’

  ‘In his dressing room … I think he’s … dead.’

  ‘Don’t talk nonsense!’

  Noah Noaevich went dashing backstage, with the others following behind him. The little mirror jolted and bounced in Eliza’s hands. At that moment she wasn’t really thinking anything, she was simply stunned and followed the others.

  They were all frightened, disoriented, bewildered. Although it was clear at first glance that Hippolyte was dead (he was lying on the floor, on his back, with one twisted hand thrust up into the air), someone tried to lift him up and blow into his mouth and someone else shouted ‘Doctor! Doctor!’

  Eventually Noah Noaevich shouted:

  ‘What are you doing? Can’t you see that he’s already cold? Everybody get back! Nonarikin, telephone the police. They must have their own doctor … What’s that they’re called? A coroner.’

  Eliza cried, of course. She felt terribly sorry for Emeraldov, who had been so impossibly handsome in life, lying there now on the floor with his face contorted; one of his trouser legs was hitched up, but Hippolyte didn’t care.

  They stood there, huddling in the doorway, waiting for the police. Reginina recited a prayer with solemn feeling. Aphrodisina sobbed, Mephistov and Vulpinova discussed in whispers who the dead man could have spent the night with. Sensiblin sighed: ‘This is what all the womanising and drinking got him, the pitiful playboy. But I warned him.’ Unable to stand around doing nothing, Nonarikin tried to tidy things up; he righted a chair that had been knocked over and picked up a tin goblet (a stage prop from Hamlet). ‘Now where do I get a Lopakhin?’ Noah Noaevich asked, but it wasn’t clear whom he was asking.

  Eventually a police officer and a doctor arrived, asked everyone to go out and closed the door. The examination of the body took a long time. With the exception of Noah Noaevich, the men went to the buffet to drink to the memory of the newly departed. The first reporter showed up – God only knew where he had sniffed out the news of the tragedy. And then another one arrived, and another. Photographers appeared too.

  Eliza immediately went to her own room (her contract, like Emeraldov’s, entitled her to a private dressing room). She sat down in front of the mirror, wondering how to dress for the send-off. The funeral would be in St Petersburg, not here – Hippolyte had a wife, who hated the theatre and everything connected with it. Now her fickle husband would finally return to her and she would consign him to the ground as she saw fit.

  Eliza tried out various shades of grief on her face.

  Then someone started making a noise in the corridor; she heard footsteps and agitated voices and someone even shrieked. Eliza realised that the police had finished and it was time to go out to the press. She got up and threw on her feather boa from The Three Sisters – the line and colour were appropriately funereal. She s
et her eyebrows at a mournful angle and turned down the corners of her mouth. Her forehead and cheeks were pale, for quite natural reasons. And at the thought of poor Hippolyte her eyes immediately turned moist; in the photographs they would glisten. What terrible misfortune, how ghastly, Eliza told herself, working up her mood.

  But this wasn’t the really ghastly part yet. That began when Zoya Comedina’s little freckled face was thrust in at the door.

  ‘Can you imagine, Eliza? The doctor says that Emeraldov killed himself. And out of unrequited love too! Now who could have expected that, from Emeraldov of all people! The reporters have gone plain crazy!’

  And she went dashing on with the astounding news.

  But Eliza recalled the entrepreneur Furshtatsky. And something else as well – only now, at this very moment.

  When Hamlet-Emeraldov pinched Ophelia and some people in the theatre gasped and others guffawed, Eliza had noticed out of the corner of her eye that someone in a black frock coat jumped abruptly to his feet and walked towards the exit. At the time she was baffled and bewildered and she didn’t look more closely, but now that picture appeared in front of her eyes as clearly as if it were a photograph. Eliza’s glance possessed a quality that is important for an actress: it registered every detail in her memory.

  The man who walked out of the auditorium had square shoulders, a twitchy stride and a gleaming bald patch. It was Genghis Khan, quite definitely – she had no doubt about that now.

  Eliza suppressed her scream and grabbed hold of the table to prevent herself from falling. But she fell anyway. Her legs buckled as if they were made of limp rags.

  Hippolyte Emeraldov’s send-off was managed by Noah Noaevich in person, and he treated this sad event like a theatrical production.

  It made an impressive spectacle. The coffin was carried out through the entrance of the theatre with all due honours, to applause and keening from an entire choir of inconsolable female mourners – the leading man’s bereft admirers. The square was crowded with people. The procession, extending to well over half a mile in length, travelled halfway across the city to the Nikolaevsky railway station.

  Eliza walked immediately behind the hearse with her head lowered and not looking around. She wore a veil, which she occasionally raised to wipe away her tears.

  The state of terror and panic that had gripped her since the moment when she guessed the true cause of Hippolyte’s death had released her for the present. Eliza sensed people’s eyes on her and she was completely in character. The dead man, clad in the costume of Cyrano de Bergerac (that was his most famous role), except for the false nose, was transported in an open coffin, and it was not hard to imagine herself as Roxana seeing her prematurely deceased hero off on his final journey.

  Before the train departed, Stern delivered a magnificent speech that set the women in the crowd sobbing, some of them hysterically.

  ‘A great actor has left us, an enigma of a man who carries away with him the secret of his death. Goodbye, friend! Goodbye, most talented of my pupils! Oh, how luminously you lived! Oh, how darkly you have departed! From light through darkness to an even more radiant Light!’

  Eliza was also supposed to say some farewell words, as the deceased’s partner, but after Stern’s airs and graces, she didn’t want to appear like a fool, so she flung one hand up to her throat as if trying to force the lump of grief through it. Failing, she wilted and simply dropped a white lily into the coffin without speaking.

  That seemed to have gone quite well. What is so good about a veil? You can examine faces through it and no one will notice. So that was what Eliza did. Oh, how they were looking at her! With tears, with admiration, with adoration.

  Suddenly her attention was caught by a raised hand in a snow-white glove. It clenched into a fist and the thumb turned downwards in the gesture used to condemn a conquered gladiator to death. Eliza shuddered and shifted her gaze from the glove to the face – and everything was suddenly veiled in mist. It was him, Genghis Khan. Baring his teeth triumphantly in a smile of vengeance.

  Eliza fainted for the second time that day. Her nerves had worn very thin.

  On the way back from the station to the hotel Noah Noaevich admonished her, shouting above the roar of the engine.

  ‘The scene with the lily was marvellous, I won’t argue about that. But fainting was overdoing it. And then, why fall so crudely, so inelegantly? The sound as your head hit the asphalt could be heard ten paces away. When did you become a devotee of the naturalistic school?’

  She didn’t answer, she hadn’t fully recovered yet. Let Stern think whatever he wanted. Her life was over in any case …

  They didn’t go to the theatre to hold a wake. That would have been vulgar philistinism. The director said: ‘The best funeral feast with which to honour an actor is the continuation of work on his final show,’ and he announced an emergency meeting to redistribute the roles. The company supported the proposal ardently. They had been haggling since the day before over who would play Erast, Vershinin, Hamlet and Lopakhin.

  The speech that Noah Noaevich gave to the actors was quite different in kind from the one at the railway station.

  ‘He was a mediocre actor, but he died beautifully. You might say that he sacrificed himself on the altar of his theatre,’ he said with deep feeling, and after that he changed to a strictly businesslike tone and didn’t look particularly mournful any longer. ‘Thanks to Hippolyte everyone is writing about us and talking about us. In view of this, I suggest a bold move. We announce a month of mourning. We won’t replace Emeraldov in the existing repertoire. Let’s say that we accept the losses as a tribute to the memory of an outstanding artist. We close down the Sisters, Liza and Hamlet.’

  ‘Sublime, teacher!’ Nonarikin exclaimed. ‘A noble gesture!’

  ‘Nobility has nothing to do with it. The public has already seen our repertoire. Without Emeraldov and his hysterical admirers the shows will lose half their electricity. It would be a mistake to cancel the increased prices, but I can’t allow any empty seats in the hall. From here on, my friends, we shall concentrate on rehearsals for The Cherry Orchard. I ask everyone to be here on the spot at eleven. And don’t be late, Vasilisa Prokofievna, or I shall start fining you, in accordance with the terms of the contract.’

  ‘You always have to bring everything down to money! A trader in the temple, that’s who you are!’

  ‘People don’t buy tickets for the temple, Vasilisa Prokofievna,’ Stern retorted. ‘And church lectors don’t get paid three hundred roubles a month, regardless of the number of services, that is, performances.’

  Reginina turned away haughtily without condescending to reply.

  ‘In order to maintain the impetus and put some money in the till we shall hold several concerts in memory of Emeraldov. At the first one, the auditorium will be filled by his female admirers, who will come especially from St Petersburg. Suicide is fashionable at the moment. If we are lucky, some fool will follow her idol in laying hands on herself. And we shall also honour her memory in a special concert.’

  ‘But that’s terrible!’ Gullibin whispered. ‘How can you be so calculating about such things?’

  ‘Iniquitous cynicism!’ the grande dame who had been offended by the threat of a fine declared in a loud voice.

  But Eliza thought: Stern isn’t a cynic, for him life is unimaginable without theatricality, and theatricality is unimaginable without flamboyancy. Life is a stage set, death is a stage set. He is just like me: he would like to die on the stage to applause and sobbing from the audience.

  ‘This is all wonderful,’ Sensiblin boomed calmly, ‘but whom do you intend to introduce into the role of Lopakhin?’

  The director had his answer ready.

  ‘I shall try to find someone on the side. Perhaps I’ll be able to persuade Lyonya Leonidov to work with us temporarily – out of solidarity with our misfortune. He is familiar with the role and shifting the emphases is child’s play for an actor of his stature. And for th
e rehearsal period I’ll put in Nonarikin. You know the text, don’t you, Georges?’

  His assistant nodded eagerly.

  ‘Well, that’s excellent. I’ll play Simeon-Pishchik and the passer-by. And we can throw the stationmaster out altogether, Chekhov doesn’t give him a single word to say. We’ll start this very moment. All of you, please open your folders.’

  At that moment the door (they were sitting in the green room) creaked.

  ‘Now who is it?’ Noah Noaevich asked irritably; he couldn’t bear it when outsiders showed up during a rehearsal or a meeting.

  ‘Ah, it’s you, Mr Fandorin!’ The expression on the director’s thin face changed instantly and it was lit up by a charming smile. ‘I’d given up hope already …’

  Everyone looked round.

  Standing there in the doorway, holding a grey English top hat with a low crown, was the candidate for the post of repertoire manager.

  THE THEORY OF RUPTURE

  ‘Noah Noaevich, they informed me on the t-telephone that you were here,’ he said, stammering slightly. ‘I offer you my condolences and beg your pardon for disturbing you on this sad day, but …’

  ‘Do you have some news for me?’ the director asked with brisk interest. ‘Come in, do, come in!’

  ‘Yes … I mean no. Not in that sense, but in a d-different one, rather unexpected …’

  The new arrival was holding a leather folder under his arm. He bowed reticently to the assembled company.

  Eliza gave a cold nod and turned away. How clumsily he portrays embarrassment, she thought. He is probably not familiar with the feeling. He didn’t look embarrassed yesterday, in a far more awkward situation.

  Yesterday Eliza had been in a state of exalted emotion, sobbing and trembling in a nervous, jittery chill. And late in the evening, overcome by a sudden impulse, she had dashed to the theatre, holding in her hands a huge bouquet of black roses. She wanted to place the flowers on the spot where he had died, this man whom she so much disliked and had involuntarily doomed, as a gesture of repentance.