Boris Akunin - She Lover of Death

The reader broke off, crumpled up the sheet of paper and put it back in his pocket.

‘I wanted to describe the lungs of a woman who has drowned as well, but I couldn’t manage it. I only made up one line: “Among the dove-grey spongy mass”, but I just couldn’t carry on . . . Well gentlemen, was it very bad?’

Nobody spoke, waiting for the verdict of the chairman (he was the only one there still sitting in his original pose).

‘ “Epicrisis” – I believe that is the conclusion of a medical diagnosis,’ Prospero said, slowly and thoughtfully.

‘Yes indeed,’ Horatio agreed eagerly.

‘A-ha,’ Prospero drawled. ‘Well, this is my epicrisis for you: you cannot write poetry. But you are genuinely entranced by the multiplicity of the faces of death. Who is next?’

‘Teacher, let me!’ said a large strapping fellow with broad shoulders, raising his hand. He had childlike, naive blue eyes that looked strange in his coarse face. What does he want with the Eternal Bride? Columbine thought in surprise. He should be floating rafts of timber down the Angara river.

‘The Doge dubbed him Caliban,’ Petya whispered, and then felt it necessary to explain. ‘That’s from Shakespeare.’ Columbine nodded: so it was from Shakespeare. ‘Nowadays he works as an accountant in some loan company or other. He used to be a bookkeeper in a merchant-shipping line, sailing the oceans, but he was shipwrecked and only survived by a miracle, so he doesn’t go to sea any more.’

She smiled, pleased with her skill in reading faces – she hadn’t been so very far wrong with those rafts of timber.

‘As far as intellect goes, he’s a complete nonentity, an amoeba,’ Petya gossiped and then added enviously, ‘but Prospero gives him special treatment.’

Stamping loudly, Caliban walked out into the centre of the room, cocked his hip and started bawling out extremely strange verse in a stentorian voice:

The Island of Death

At the beginning Columbine almost snorted out loud, but Caliban declaimed his ungainly doggerel with such feeling that she soon stopped wanting to laugh, and the final verse sent cold shivers down her spine.

She glanced at Prospero without the slightest doubt that the severe judge who had dared to criticise Lorelei Rubinstein herself would demolish these shoddy efforts utterly.

But he didn’t!

‘Very good,’ the Doge declared. ‘Such expression! You can hear the sound of the ocean waves and see their foaming crests. Powerful. Impressive.’

Caliban’s face lit up in a smile of happiness that completely transformed his square-cut features.

‘I told you, he’s the favourite,’ Petya muttered in her ear. ‘What on earth does he see in this primitive amoeba? Aha, this is Avaddon, he’s at university with me. He’s the one who brought me here.’

Now it was the turn of the ill-favoured youth with blackheads who had been talking to Petya earlier.

The Doge nodded patronisingly.

‘Very well, Avaddon, we are listening.’

‘He’s going to read “Angel of the Abyss”,’ Petya told her. ‘I’ve already heard it. It’s his best poem. I wonder what Prospero will say.’

This was the poem:

Angel of the Abyss

Columbine liked the poem very much, but she was no longer sure what she ought to think about it. What if Prospero thought it was mediocre?

Their host paused for a moment and then said: ‘Not bad, not bad at all. The last stanza is good. But “flourish their sharp barbs” is no good at all. And the rhyme “death” and “breath” is very hackneyed.’

‘Nonsense,’ a clear, angry voice exclaimed. ‘There are almost no rhymes for the word “death”, and they can no more be hackneyed than can Death itself ! It is the rhymes for the word “love” that have been mauled by sticky hands until they are banal, but no dross can stick to Death!’

The person who had called the opinion of the master ‘nonsense’ was a pretty-looking youth who seemed hardly more than a boy – tall and slim, with a capriciously curved mouth and a feverish bloom on his smooth cheeks.

‘It is not a matter of the freshness of the rhyme, but of its precision,’ he continued somewhat incoherently. ‘Rhyme is the most mysterious thing in the world. Rhymes are like the reverse side of a coin! They can make the exalted seem ludicrous and the ludicrous seem exalted! Hiding behind the swaggering word “king” we have the banal “thing” and behind the gentle “flower” we have “power”! There is a special connection between phenomena and the sounds that denote them. The person who can penetrate to the heart of these meanings will be the very greatest of discoverers.’

‘Gdlevsky,’ Petya sighed with a shrug. ‘He’s eighteen, hasn’t even finished grammar school yet. Prospero says he’s as talented as Rimbaud.’

‘Really?’ Columbine took a closer look at the irascible boy, but failed to see anything special about him. Except that he was good-looking. ‘And what’s his alias?’

‘He doesn’t have one. Just “Gdlevsky”. He doesn’t want to be called anything else.’

The Doge was not at all angry with the troublemaker – on the contrary, he smiled paternally as he looked at him.

‘All right, all right. You’re not really very strong on theorising. Since you got so steamed up over the rhyme, I expect you have “breath” and “death” too?’