The Model Page 3

  That same evening, as dusk was slowly falling yet again, Elena provided the bottom of the curtain with a wide silvery fringe, which originated in a headdress she had worn as a Girl from Tashkent at one of Tatiana’s Mother’s tea parties.

  She would have to devise a machine for raising and lowering the two parts of the curtain, and also to paint the entire structure, outside austerely, inside sparklingly. The interior of every box would be in a different color, as were the rooms in Tatiana’s house. Silke, though unable to ascend stairs (he lived where the bull used to live, before the bull, growing older, became a nuisance, and was quickly sold), Silke, though unable to raise his arms above his shoulders, had access to all the jars and pots of paint in the small town. He even knew how to prize paint (and other utilities) out of Stefan Triforovitch, should the need be great enough. Heaven had bestowed upon Silke certain compensations—capacities to influence and improvise.

  After only a few more days the opera house gleamed like granite; the auditorium dazzled like a flying palace that a child might enter and be never seen on earth again.

  “Why do you not wear your yellow boots, Elena Andreievna?” asked Bábaba each morning.

  “Because my legs are not yet cold, Bábaba,” Elena each morning replied.

  The rain had stopped, but the still, dark air was full of suspense as if more than mortal happenings impended.

  Elena’s own opinion was that she was in a trance, something that happened frequently to girls in Les coryphées de la petite cave, for one reason or another. At least one of the girls had drowned herself while in a trance. Another had married a Sergeant of the Guards while in the same condition. Everyone fell into a trance while watching the ballerina spin, leap, and agitate.

  Elena had not yet so much as mentioned her opera house to Tatiana, Ismene, Clémence, to Tatiana’s Mother, to Mademoiselle Olivier-Page, or to anyone at all except to Silke, who had only an inexact idea of what Elena was talking about, and helped solely from love of her. No one else in the house had a very clear idea of what Elena was doing at any time. Bábaba might know all that Elena needed to know, but what Elena actually did with herself was another matter.

  So far Elena had not told even Mikhail about her opera house, and she was perfectly well aware that this might be significant. She might continue to imply for some time yet, to herself and some others, that Mikhail was perfect, even to do so without a second thought, but she suspected that the brief visit of Herr and Frau Meyrendorff had left her a different person. She resented the prohibition upon her eating the fruit they had brought. The Meyrendorffs’ wide knowledge of things had led to their kindly bringing her the strange delicacy at this exact time, directing her to eat the whole of it. Deprived of it, she might well set off in a wrong direction, especially with Bábaba so busy, her Mother so exhausted, and her Father so absent, working to sustain them all. She and Tatiana knew perfectly well that there were precise stages or stopping places in the advance to life’s summit, none of them to be omitted without peril.

  What spectacle to mount first?

  The book offered several possibilities, but Elena decided upon “La Gitana,” a ballet interlude to Rossini’s best-known opera, because there was only one dancer in it that mattered, and because the dancer wore a red dress.

  How bright a red, there could be no precise knowing, but Elena knew just what to do.

  Downstairs was a small room which contained, with a few other things, the sad relics of Captain Leonid Gregorovitch Timorasiev, Elena’s great-uncle, who had known Lermontov, and had been shot for participating in political activity of some kind. Elena had never taken in all the details, partly because there were stories of that kind about so many men, partly because a much greater impression had been made upon her by the holes in the Captain’s azure jacket, each hole still surrounded with a faint brown flush. As well as the jacket, there were carmine breeches, very big boots, and a cap with a dwindled and drooping plume; swords and pistols and wands; a metal traveling box with great-uncle Leonid’s full name and rank painted upon the top in white, now grimy with campaigning; and a leather case of great-uncle Leonid’s Orders and Decorations. It was upon the last that Elena, on behalf of her opera house, had designs.

  She knew exactly what was in the case, because the gorgeous ribbons and swathes had always appealed to her more positively than most other things in the room. It was hard to believe that even so great a man as great-uncle Leonid had been given all this silk by the Tsar, and when, once, she had dared to raise the matter with her Father, her Father had merely smiled and said, “Perhaps not.” Visitors to the house, male and female, were always taken to the small room and stood there for moments in total and reverent silence, while Elena’s Father watched with concentration for the effect made upon them. One foreign visitor had said he perceived that great-uncle Leonid had been a Freemason.

  No one seemed to enter the room unless there were such visitors to the house and now the presentation was often left to Bábaba, who was, at these moments, even more silent than Elena’s Father, if that were possible, and who was said actually to have known great-uncle Leonid and to have been his handmaiden. Always someone, after standing his or her few moments, said “Death is beautiful,” and always Bábaba then wept, the only time she did.

  The room was kept locked, but, equally, the key was kept in the door. Times had been when members of the family wanted to enter the room, privately, and sometimes urgently, in order to brood and meditate there. The assumption was that such times might return. It was no one’s part to make that impracticable.

  Elena flitted down all the stairs, like a small and intricate flash of lightning, and, within a second, was within the room, with the key accompanying her, and at once used to lock the door on the inside.

  That was hardly necessary. It is choice that distinguishes the artist from the common herd, but Elena had known well in advance, had known right from the moment when she had decided which spectacle she was first to present, that there was but one silk in the leather box that would meet her, and her audience’s demands, but especially hers. Only her silvery curvaceous scissors were worthy to cut deeply into such a fabric.

  Soon the red dress was completed, and Elena had decided that the color was perfect, whatever the Baron de la Touque might have thought; deep and glowing, so that Elena felt drawn right into it, but clear enough also to hold every eye, as Elena confirmed by draping the dress over her wooden pig, setting the pig on top of the stove in her room (not yet lighted, for all Bábaba’s talk), and first staring and then squinting at it from the far other side of the room, than which few opera houses could, needless to say, be bigger.

  There was pork too for the midday meal, with plenty of unchopped cabbage, and a little cream, though there was only Elena and kind Bábaba to devour it. Bábaba seemed to have stopped grumbling about the need for Elena to feel cold, or about anything else. She was portentously still. Bábaba, like the weather, had an aptitude for implying the future well before it struck.

  Elena was packing her book of French verses, her book of simple exercises on the pianoforte (never simple enough for Elena), her small sketching book, and her Young Girl’s Realm into the pockets of the plain gray cloak she wore for all ordinary occasions when there was the loudest possible hammer-hammer on the outer door, the imposing front door of the house, not the door through which tradesmen, children, and hens entered. Such a caller should have known the use of the doorbell, at the Timorasiev house singularly conspicuous.

  “It must be the Devil,” cried Bábaba, still clairvoyant.

  Elena crept after her, fascinated, but staying close to the walls.

  The caller did not seem like that at all, at least upon first acquaintance. He seemed a jolly fellow. He wore a speckled shirt, striped breeches, and very muddy boots. He had a nose like Punchinello’s, big and comic; a face as reddy-brown as that of any peasant in the fields; and remarkably big teeth. His ears projected widely. He laughed all the time he spoke, and as
he did so he shimmered and flickered.

  Bábaba dismantled the various chains and bars. All the household, and all ordinary people, used the other door. She implied as much with every movement.

  “What’s your name, young man?” asked Bábaba wryly.

  Elena was less sure that the visitor was so young. But she knew it to be a matter about which she was often mistaken. She had supposed Mikhail to be forty when he had only been about nineteen!

  “Irash,” said the man, laughing.

  “Is that all?” asked Bábaba suspiciously.

  “That is all, old dame, but I have business with Mademoiselle Elena Andreievna Timorasieva. If she is in the house, pray do me the honor of presenting me to her.”

  The visitor was speaking in Russian, but his accent in the one French word he had used seemed perfectly good, even though he had addressed kind Bábaba so disrespectfully.

  Elena slid away from the dark wall.

  “I am Elena Andreievna,” she said, enunciating most clearly, and almost as if she really were as grown-up as the man’s words had implied.

  “Mademoiselle!” the visitor exclaimed, as if overwhelmed, and throwing his fur hat to the ground, or rather onto the floor within the house. What was more, he began to speak in French. “Mademoiselle, please conduct me to some private place. I have a gift to bestow.”

  “Another gift!” cried Elena, not at all like a grownup.

  But, with Elena following, Bábaba led the visitor into the schoolroom: not Elena’s schoolroom, of course, but the schoolroom of the sisters of her father, who had once been numerous, and, before them, of their aunts, who had been too many to count, at least by this time. The room now contained nothing but potatoes, some of them gloomily sprouting. Bábaba lurked by the door, curator and chaperon.

  The man wasted no time. He fell upon his left knee, bowed before Elena as if she had been a gorgeous Grand Duchess, and was somehow holding out to her a package, with his arms extended above his head and behind his wide ears. It was even more remarkable than Frau von Meyrendorff’s presentations because the package was longer and larger. This time, however, it was not wrapped in anything. It was simply a serious wooden box, tied loosely round the middle with undressed hemp.

  “Thank you,” said Elena, first taking hold of the box in the middle where the ligature was, but then, realizing its weight, clutching at the two ends with widely parted arms.

  “That gift is much too heavy for a child,” cried Bábaba, darting forward to take the box from Elena.

  “Then I shall carry it upstairs moi-même,” said the visitor.

  Elena had indeed very nearly dropped the box on her toes, not even protected by boots, as Bábaba had all along recommended. In part, therefore, she was glad to hand it over, though in part apprehensive, having learned by experience what grown-ups so often do with presents returned to their hands.

  The visitor dodged past Bábaba as if playing a game, and even Elena managed to elude Bábaba’s snatch. Elena had never before felt so light and deft, or never that she could remember. She had not even torn her dress.

  The visitor began to leap up the many stairs as if he knew the house like the back of his hat, and as if the box were made of air, which Elena had learned for herself that it certainly was not. Until now, Elena, seldom rampant, except sometimes with Mikhail, would soon have been panting at the pace, but today she was capering upwards like a sprite.

  The visitor did not bother with Elena’s bedroom, where the book was, but sprang right up to the very top floor and plunged straight into Elena’s improvised workshop. He set down the heavy box on the dusty floor.

  “Open it now, if you wish,” said the visitor politely.

  Elena began to pull at the hemp.

  “Both hands, mademoiselle,” said the visitor, laughing as always.

  When the box was opened, Elena saw that it contained jointed wooden figures, neither clothed nor painted. She was used to dolls of that kind, but liked them to look a little brighter. On the other hand, she had never seen so many of them at one time; not even in Ossip Novakov’s workshop. With the eye of an artist Elena could see that the dolls in the box varied in stature and shape, though only a little.

  “Thank you very much,” said Elena. “They will make a platoon of soldiers.” She knew that this was always the procedure when many people were available, all looking more or less alike. The Tsar himself required it.

  “Mais non, mademoiselle,” said the visitor, laughing more noticeably than ever. “Think again, if you please. Look again. Consider further.”

  “Oh!” cried Elena. “Oh!”

  “They are not soldiers,” said the visitor, “but coryphées. Perhaps you do not know that word?”

  At this moment Bábaba struggled in, wheezing like a bellows, and deep red all over, if one might judge by her visible face and two hands. She had quite possibly never mounted before as high in the house. Bábaba had other things to do than climb stairs without end in search of children without respect.

  “Oh, go away, Bábaba,” cried Elena, in great excitement, before Bábaba had been able to say one word.

  Bábaba all but burst with exertion and indignity.

  “Go away, Bábaba,” repeated Elena, so eager to continue with her real life.

  It could have been predicted that Bábaba would cease trying for words. She seized the stout stick that stood in the corner of the makeshift workroom. Elena’s brothers used it for killing ducks.

  But the visitor stepped towards her.

  “Pray descend, madame,” he said in a soft but firm voice, smiling enigmatically.

  Elena had already noticed for herself that the visitor’s good manners were not exactly those of a professional messenger. Moreover, there was normally one person only in the house to be addressed as madame.

  Make what one might of such factors, true it was that Bábaba first put the stout stick back in its place, then cast her eyes floorwards, then quietly shuffled from the soi-disant workplace. She had not uttered one single word. It was something else that Elena had never before seen.

  The visitor struck an attitude.

  “Coryphées,” said the visitor, his yellow eyes glinting, his hairy finger pointing, his toes angled.

  “Yes,” said Elena. “I should have known.”

  The visitor merely waited for Elena to speak again. He had never been so completely still since he had entered the house, never before for two seconds.

  “They will all need dresses,” said Elena anxiously. But it was important not to be overwhelmed.

  “No doubt,” said the visitor. It was just when one might have expected his laughter to become positively boisterous, but Elena distinctly noticed that he was not even smiling.

  “I have woven a dress for the ballerina,” said Elena.

  “Woven?”

  Elena blushed. “Sewed,” she said.

  “It is the right red, of course?”

  Elena nodded. She had no means of knowing. She looked hard at the contents of the box.

  “Which is the ballerina?” she asked.

  “You are the ballerina,” said the visitor.

  As he spoke, the rain began to fall again, and there was a ripple of thunder. Elena knew it was essential to behave quite naturally. Maturity was astalk.

  “I’m too big,” said Elena, smiling in turn.

  “This is a small town,” said the visitor.

  Elena nodded again. Everyone remarked upon how small a town it was.

  “What can I do?” Elena asked.

  “You must come to Smorevsk. More room. More people. I shall await you. Remember that my name is Irash.”

  “I shall die before forgetting that,” said Elena, very seriously.

  After, through another of the dirty windows, she had watched the visitor springing down the empty street in his fur hat, dodging all the many puddles, almost dodging the separate columns of rain; after she had seen him lose shape, diminish, and vanish: after these experiences, Elena deci
ded in an instant that a model was one thing, her own life another.

  If she were to be a ballerina in Smorevsk, and surely as soon as possible, it was hardly worthwhile spending difficult hours in making her spangled blue curtain rise and fall, or far more difficult days and weeks making dresses for her entire troupe: dressmaking being one further art in which Elena fully realized that, alas, she would never graduate—or even truly participate. Elena glanced dubiously at the timbery horde. For a task of that magnitude she would have had to enroll Tatiana and the rest, which would have meant revealing almost everything, which would almost certainly have been a mistake, though Elena had little idea why it should be. It was simply a lesson she had learned.

  Ismene’s Grandmother’s companion, an elderly lady from Azerbaijan, understood to have been once a slave, frequently referred to life’s lessons, and to their importance, especially to females, who had so few other opportunities to learn anything.

  Elena put the lid on the box and slowly descended the stairs. It was impossible to decide what to do for the best, to decide before it was time for the next meal (whether or not the next meal appeared on time). Elena supposed that the model she had built, with only Silke’s aid, must offer guidance of some kind, if only the guidance could be interpreted. Something was bound to happen because she was still young.

  In the meantime Elena withdrew quietly to her bedroom and seated herself on the floor, turning over the pages of her new book, as if she had been a monk with his Virgil. The rug beneath her had been looted years before from a British Asiatic station by men under the command of one of Elena’s many relatives who had died or disappeared heroically. When much younger, Elena had often used the rug to disguise herself as an Indian elephant.