The Model Read online

  If it had not been for the bonfire, Elena would have paled like a pearl.

  A subdued cry came from her: “She’s a bird of prey! I thought that at once.”

  “I shall rescue you. I am in disguise and can say no more.”

  “But, Anna Ismailova, you said that before. Please say something else.” Elena just stopped herself from extending a hand before the gaze of the simian footman, of whom there were at least four more in the hall, one in each corner, like the stoves. Who knew how many there were in all? How many wigs could be needed?

  “Silence, Elena Andreievna. There is danger in speech.”

  And, indeed, the woman in the brown dress was at that moment entering the hall, bringing many more footmen with her. Glancing at them, Elena remembered that monkeys do not look alike to other monkeys, but only to humans.

  “Begin to heat the bed,” the woman called out harshly.

  Footmen sped away in all directions, leaving perhaps only half a dozen in addition to the six fixed in their positions. Could there only be one bed? Elena wondered. She began to gasp and shiver at the same moment. Anna Ismailova remained impassive as a billiardiste.

  “Before sleep we must eat and drink, and hold a short conversation,” pronounced the woman in brown.

  Some of the footmen began to draw back part of the wall. Elena saw that up some steps was a table littered with flowers, some in season, some out, and, among the flowers, foodstuffs that Elena had never so much as imagined. The plates were fully enameled in gold, each with a cockatrice in the middle. Wine was in limpid flasks, tea in translucent samovars. The line of footmen on the other side of the table stretched from wall to wall.

  Elena wondered what had become of the bouquets which had been piled high around her and cast down upon her and thrown skillfully up at her during the tornado of applause. The book had said that the ballerina normally bestowed her flowers upon her maids and dressers. Elena visualized the women in grimy wrappers unpicking the bouquets: one orchid for you, one orchid for Vera Nikolaevna, one orchid for little me. And so on.

  As Elena began to ascend the steps, like Amédée in “La Belle Ensorceleuse,” the two footmen at the fire cast in their big logs with a crash and a fountain of sparks. They stooped, and immediately were bearing new logs, like coats of arms.

  Other footmen enclosed Elena in a cloak of unnumbered feathers, all bright, all different. Her cousin, Admiral Marek Vassilievitch Molotov, had brought back fragments of such cloaks from Mexico. In his unfinished book he had spoken of their significance. Elena, who, though required to read the book, had only glanced at it, as it was all in handwriting, could not remember what the significance was, even if she had ever reached that far. It seemed all too possible that the cloaks were worn by sacrificial victims, but then most things in old Mexico were. She glanced in panic at Anna Ismailova, but Anna, vrai homme du monde, had started to eat and drink, as if at home everywhere.

  Indeed, there proved to be nothing very remarkable about the meal that followed, apart from the gorgeousness of the surroundings, the rarity of the fare, and the elegance of the vintages. Elena, however, had still not attained to French champagne. There was not even Russian champagne: only exquisite, soporific, runic still wines in miraculous decanters. One was left with the aroma of old and magical raisins. Anna Ismailova was selecting and rejecting with wholly unobtrusive aplomb, and Elena noted that the woman in brown appeared to be picking and pecking much like other women Elena had known of the same apparent age, such as certain so-called aunts, who were really something else.

  That amount of wine acted upon Elena like a tonic, but she took particular care not to drink much too much.

  The meal ended in bananas. Trotting footmen brought in a whole tree, which had just been slashed down. Probably it had been growing in some outlying conservatory. It cannot be said that all the bananas were eaten by the little group.

  “And now for coffee and conversation in the Parrot Room,” announced the woman in brown. The mention of parrots made Elena realize that the brown dress was exactly like a bird’s working plumage.

  Elena had naturally supposed the Parrot Room to be a matter of the wallpaper, perhaps painted in China by tender girls with tiny feet; but, in fact, the walls proved to be covered with a simple Pompeian damask (Mademoiselle Olivier-Page had spoken of Pompeii, and displayed a man’s silk handkerchief in that particular red), the parrots to be singing and shouting in cages and from perches. In fact, conversation might well prove unnecessary.

  “Mind your nose and both ears,” Anna Ismailova managed to enjoin, as she strolled languidly onward. Elena shrank into herself. But perhaps her feathery cloak would acclimatize her.

  The coffee table stood in the middle of the room, almost certainly out of pecking distance. Elena essayed a little rush to reach it. She had read in her book of a quick succession of pattering steps. It conveyed virginity and innocence and girlishness, and was said to be charming.

  Elena collapsed into a carved teak chair with a cushion like an orange, but very nearly jumped up again. She had realized that there were no footmen in the room. Only parrots, macaws, cockatoos.

  She remembered the words of Mikhail’s song, the very last song she had heard him sing. Homesickness overwhelmed her for a moment.

  Anna Ismailova was reclining on a heap of rugs, like a university student, needing only the little cap, the little beard, the little roulette pistol. With her own hand the woman in brown was pouring the blackest possible coffee into crystal glasses, like skulls.

  “Shall we talk about shooting?” asked the woman, as if it mattered little what the subject might be. Her seat was made of mammoth tusks. The honey skin of a wild horse was draped over it. It was like Tamerlane’s throne.

  “I don’t know about shooting,” replied Elena, with justified sulkiness.

  “Can you ride?”

  “Not very well.”

  “Travel, then. Where have you been?”

  “Nowhere,” said Elena truthfully.

  “I see that you will never be content unless we talk about your own career. I must tell you that you lack edge. You are only at the start. You lack sharpness. You need to be honed like a razor.”

  “Do you think so?” Elena had often watched Stefan Triforovitch honing for her Father. He did it in the little yard where the cows used to be, and Silke turned the wheel. She had always wondered how soon the slender steel would be completely honed away.

  “I can make you glint and flash. Only then will you dominate. I have finished off many of the greatest dancers in the world.”

  The woman put down her glass, rose to her feet, and began to demonstrate what she meant, as so many people do when the art of the dance is the subject. After forty or fifty seconds of inconclusive oscillation, she made a sudden battering plunge, as if to establish her point in one instant. To Elena it was as if a hawk had stooped upon a burrowing mole, though of course a brown hawk.

  “That is what it is like to be finished,” said the woman. Her voice grated ferally.

  The woman then walked slowly back to her throne of old ivory. Her eyes were half-closed and her expression replete. Elena noticed that Anna Ismailova was now sitting up, with her feet upon the onyx floor. She was wearing the most exquisite shoes.

  Seated once more, the woman was entirely as usual. “Being a ballerina is more than just a matter of what one looks like,” she said in her nonchalant way.

  “Yes, I know,” said Elena earnestly. The very same remark had been uttered by someone or other in her book. Elena was beginning to understand that the number of sentiments that can be put into words is definite and limited. If she had managed to read one book, she had probably read all of them.

  “Vassily,” said the woman. “Pour us all some more coffee.”

  It was as if she was tired of conversation. Indeed, she gave a curious matter-of-fact yawn, just as if she had been a man among men, or a raptor among raptors.

  All the while the plumed spirits of the jung
le were of course bawling their immodesties and screeching assorted staves from “Una voce poco fa.” Elena realized that one bird was simply repeating “Fly. Fly. Fly.” She could not help but turn to look. It was a plain and rather small African parrot in dark gray, with only a trace of pink tail feather. Her Father had once said it was the species that “talked best,” as he put it. He knew one that had prophesied every death and illness for more than a century.

  “They were all once human,” said the woman, as if it hardly mattered one way or the other.

  “They have the most beautiful colors,” said Elena politely, for some reason casting off her own feathered cloak at just that moment. After her long day, she too yawned, but in moderation, and at least with an attempt at pretending it was a show of interest.

  “They are captive souls,” continued the woman.

  As Elena was by now out of her depth, it was as well that Anna Ismailova spoke for her. It was almost the first time Anna Ismailova had entered the general conversation.

  “They are ventriloquists’ dolls,” said Anna Ismailova.

  “They are wiser than the ventriloquists,” said the woman.

  After divers further causeries and rallies, touching upon every subject they could think of, the woman in the brown dress most kindly herself showed Elena to her room, and pointed out the right bed, one among many beds, when they had arrived there.

  “Be prepared,” Anna Ismailova had muttered, instead of the usual “good night.” She might have been a youthful Lieutenant General. She did not even kiss Elena, though Elena would have found a kiss reassuring.

  Elena wondered what had happened to all the footmen. Doubtless they were insensible up trees, or disposed by hundreds in the rafters, like magpies. Still, one might have expected a few night footmen also, such as those for whom Mozart wrote that delicate music. She was not sure whether to be glad or sorry there were none; and no music either.

  Elena was accustomed to sleeping in a large room, but this one would have slept all the officers in Suvorov’s Grand Patriotic Army. Elena’s inmost thoughts were more and more tinged by military analogies. The woman bent over her, grated out “Tomorrow,” and kissed her sharply in the middle of her brow. When she had gone, Elena rubbed the place gently with her pocket handkerchief. A nerve runs upward and downward at that point, and even a kiss can inflame.

  Elena saw that there was no icon in the room. She crossed herself.

  She began to take off her beautiful red dress. The next question would be how best to approach the heated bed. There was only one lamp, exactly as at home, but this lamp was carved in malachite to resemble a boyar, though Elena did not think the resemblance very close. She could see that portraits of many other boyars hung on the walls, all exactly alike, at least by the glimmer of a single lamp.

  At the very far other end of the room, a cupboard suddenly opened. Elena screamed. That anything more could happen was unbearable. It reminded Elena once more of her dreams. In dreams happenings never stop. One never rests or sleeps in a dream, or even embarks on quiet reflection, or upon an hour with the poets.

  A man was tiptoeing towards her, as, supposedly, in a nightmare: not a dragoon, as hitherto, but a hussar.

  “Stop!” cried the hussar. “No, go on.”

  Before Elena had time to scream again, the hussar said “Hush!” and Elena perceived that it was Anna Ismailova. She next perceived that the conflicting orders related to whether or not she should continue to undress.

  “Which?” Elena inquired in fatigued exasperation. Of course she had drunk goblets full of glutinous wine.

  “Come over here,” bid Anna Ismailova, pointing into the cupboard. “You must dress like me.”

  “I am too small!” cried Elena.

  “Boys are equal now with men,” explained Anna Ismailova. “The Tsar has decreed it.”

  “But why?” expostulated Elena, referring not to the distant Tsar but to the equally demanding Anna Ismailova.

  “We have to walk to Smorevsk, that far at least, and we do not wish to be molested by zanies.”

  “But it’s pitch dark!”

  “No. It’s dawn.” And so it was. The lamp looked as if deep in water.

  “I can’t walk to Smorevsk. I’ve been dancing.”

  “We shall stop at a hut.”

  “Must we go now? Is there no other way?”

  “It is the only way,” said Anna Ismailova.

  It was what Elena’s Mother had said only a few days ago.

  Elena shivered slightly in the late autumnal daybreak. Then she completed the removal of her dress and of whatever else had to be removed, and began slowly to array herself as ordered. These were not garments to which she was accustomed; not since the parties given by the wife and daughters of the Military Governor, to which every small, respectable child in the small town used to go, willingly or otherwise.

  “Hurry!” exclaimed Anna Ismailova. “When it is daylight we shall be visible.”

  The complete garb would no doubt have been exciting as well as precautionary, an unusual conjunction, but, alas, Elena was too weary for excitement.

  “How do we get out?”

  “There is a ladder.”

  Elena peered through the window.

  “Bring your red dress,” said Anna Ismailova. “Stuff it in your sabretache.”

  “We ought to be taking food.”

  “God will provide.”

  The girls crossed themselves.

  There was no boundary wall, no moat or deep ditch, no attempt at a botanical garden, no gate.

  There were, however, marks in the sodden soil of animals and immense birds. There was also a very faint drizzle, but perhaps that was permanent. All the leaves were yellowy-brown, and all the trunks and branches fungoid. The silence was so intense as to suggest that nature had ceased to take part in things.

  The girls had difficulty in finding a track, even though they knew that while they looked they could still be seen from the manor. As to where the track led, the only pointer was a pocket compass of Anna Ismailova’s. Soon, in their gray garb, they had disappeared in the mist.

  “How do you know all the things you do know?” asked Elena, plodding as best she could.

  “I have been a year at the University,” replied Anna Ismailova. “For a year I have been a male.”

  Of course Elena knew that girls and women could not go to the University, or not as students, and she had also heard from Tatiana that some did as Anna Ismailova had done. Elena now understood how Tatiana had been so confident about that.

  “But you can’t have learned about every manor in Russia?”

  “Not through the curriculum. But some manors are more notorious than other manors. Not much happens in our country, you know, by comparison with its size.”

  “And about every Opera House in Russia?”

  “Tatiana wrote to me that you would soon be a ballerina in Smorevsk.”

  “And you traveled all this way?”

  “No, I was passing through, in any case.”

  Elena thought it best to accept that. She could not but think of a new question almost at every step, but most of them could wait. At the moment sleep was the need.

  A peasant and his wife took them in, as Anna Ismailova had promised. Elena had to admit that it could hardly have happened had she and Anna not been accepted as young officers on the usual secret duty. Anna Ismailova flourished their commission engraved on specially treated parchment, though the peasants could not read it.

  The girls were given wooden bowls of rye gruel and shredded marshweed before the peasant couple went out on to their plot, where the sturdy sons were working already. Elena supposed that the family could do very little in the way of marketing, either selling or buying. She herself could not finish more than half the meal, but Anna Ismailova did better. One could see the boxes in which the stalwart sons of the house slept, but the parents had offered the girls the use of their own bed in the back room. Here, as in the front room, the l
ight burned before the icon, and here the wooden walls were roughly painted with holy scenes. Elena, with almost no clothes on at all, was asleep within less than two and a half minutes beneath the heavy coverlet common to all. Anna Ismailova too had been through manifold and various exertions of her own. It had to be admitted that when the time came for the peasant couple to retire, the two young soldiers were not merely still abed but still slumbering. In accordance with the obligations of hospitality, the peasant couple bedded down on the main room floor, surrounded by their stertorous offspring, all male.

  It was dawn again when Elena again opened her eyes. Could she have slept continuously for more than twenty-one hours? Lying beside her, Anna Ismailova was smiling with sophistication as she read a novel in a pink and green cover from a private library at the University.

  Elena started to scratch, and then recollected that it was the very last thing one should do. For example, Anna Ismailova was hardly scratching at all.

  “A life for the Tsar!” cried the master of the hut, as the two officers resumed their march. The track might soon be almost a road.

  Both saluted, though not convincingly.

  Fortunately, it was too late for anyone to criticize.

  “How long were we in the carriage? Smorevsk cannot be all this way.”

  “I do not know and at the University we are told never to guess at anything.”

  However, Anna Ismailova glanced at her compass. Unfortunately, ever since last night, the compass seemed to have become subject to spells of idle spinning. Elena looked sulky, though she could quite see it was not reasonable so to do. She had brought it all on herself by reading books and making a model and lacking alternatives.

  They stumped forward in silence for a long time, with little company but partridges, centipedes, and marsh gas.

  At last, Elena spoke out.