Boris Akunin - She Lover of Death

Something similar happened in Sarajevo in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but there the outcome was more sombre. The suicide club in question called itself ‘The Club of the Aware’ and its membership numbered at least fifty. They gathered in the evenings to draw lots, each of them selecting a card from the pack until someone drew the death’s head. The person who received the fateful card had to die within twenty-four hours. One young Hungarian told his comrades that he was leaving the club, because he had fallen in love and wanted to get married. They agreed to let him out on condition that he take part in the drawing of lots for one last time. In the first round the young man drew the ace of hearts – the symbol of love – and in the second round the death’s head. As a man of his word, he shot himself. The inconsolable fiancée denounced ‘The Aware’ to the police, and as a result the whole business became public knowledge.

To judge from what has been happening in Moscow in recent weeks, our death-worshippers have no fear of public opinion and are not too concerned about publicity – at least, they do not take any measures to conceal the fruits of their activities.

I promise the Courier’s readers that the investigation will be continued. If a secret league of madmen who toy with death really has appeared in Russia’s old capital, society must know of it.

Lavr Zhemailo

Moscow Courier , 22 August

(4 September) 1900, p.1,

continued on p.4

She arrived in the City of Dreams on a quiet lilac evening

Everything had been thought through in advance, down to the smallest detail.

After alighting from the Irkutsk train at the platform of Moscow’s Ryazan station, Masha stood there for half a minute with her eyes squeezed shut, breathing in the smell of the city – the mingled scent of flowers, fuel oil and bagels. Then she opened her eyes and in a voice loud enough for the whole platform to hear, proclaimed the quatrain that she had composed two days earlier, on crossing the border between Asia and Europe.

People glanced round over their shoulders at the young lady with the clear voice and thick plait – some in curiosity, some in disapproval, and one tradeswoman even twirled a finger beside her temple. Generally speaking, the first public act of Masha’s life could be considered a success – and just you wait!

It was a symbolic step, marking the beginning of a new era, adventurous and uninhibited.

She had left quietly, without any public display. Left a long, long letter for papa and mama on the table in the drawing room. Tried to explain about the new age, and how unbearable the tedium of Irkutsk was, and about poetry. She had dropped tears all over every page, but how could they really understand? If it had happened a month earlier, before her birthday, they would have gone running to the police – to bring back their runaway daughter by force. But now, I beg your pardon, Marya Mironova has reached the age of majority and may arrange her life as she herself thinks fit. And she was also free to use the inheritance from her aunt as she thought best. The capital sum was not very large, but it would suffice for half a year, even with Moscow’s famously high prices, and trying to see further than that was common and prosaic.

She told the cabby to drive to the Hotel Elysium. She had heard about it even in Irkutsk, and been captivated by the name that flowed like silvery mercury.

As she rode along in the carriage, she constantly looked round at the large stone buildings and signboards and felt desperately afraid. A huge city, with an entire million people, and not one of them, not one, had anything to do with Marya Mironova.

Just you wait, she threatened the city, you’re going to hear about me. I’ll make you gasp in delight and indignation, but I don’t need your love. And even if you crush me in your stone jaws, it doesn’t matter. There is no road back.

But her attempt to lift her spirits only made her feel even more timid.

And her heart fell completely when she walked into the vestibule of the Elysium, with its bronze and crystal all aglow with electric light. Masha shamefully inscribed herself in the register as ‘Marya Mironova, company officer’s daughter’, although the plan had been to call herself by some special name: ‘Annabel Gray’ or simply ‘Columbine’.

Never mind, she would become Columbine starting from tomorrow, when she would be transformed from a grey provincial moth to a bright-winged butterfly. At least she had taken an expensive room, with a view of the Kremlin and the river. What if a night in this gilded candy-box did cost a whole fifteen roubles! She would remember what was going to happen here for the rest of her life. And tomorrow she could find simpler lodgings. Definitely on the top floor, or even in an attic, so that no one would be shuffling their feet across the floor over her head; let there be nothing above her but the roof with cats gliding gracefully across it, and above that only the black sky and the indifferent stars.

Having gazed her fill through the window at the Kremlin and unpacked her suitcase, Masha sat down at the table, and opened a small notebook bound in morocco leather. She thought for a while, chewing on the end of her pencil, and started writing.

Everybody keeps a diary now, everybody wants to appear more important than they really are and, even more than that, they want to overcome their own death and carry on living after it, if only in the form of a notebook bound in Moroccan leather. This alone should have deterred me from the idea of keeping a diary for, after all, I decided a long time ago, on the very first day of the new twentieth century, not to be like everyone else . And yet here I am sitting and writing. But this will not be a case of sentimental sighs with dried forget-me-nots between the pages, it will be a genuine work of art such as there has never been before in literature. I am writing a diary, not because I am afraid of death or, let us say, because I wish to be liked by strangers I do not know, who will some day read these lines. What do I want with people? I know them only too well and despise them thoroughly. And perhaps I am not even slightly afraid of death either. Why be afraid of it, when it is a natural law of existence? Everything that is born, that is, which has a beginning, will come to an end sooner or later. If I, Masha Mironova, appeared in the world twenty-one years and one month ago, then the day is bound to come when I shall leave this world, and there is nothing unusual about that. I only hope that it happens before my face is covered in wrinkles.

She read it through, frowned and tore out the page.

What kind of work of art was that? Too vapid, boring, run-of-the-mill. She had to learn to express her thoughts (for a start, at least on paper) elegantly, fragrantly, intoxicatingly. Her arrival in Moscow ought to be described in a quite different fashion.

Masha thought again, this time chewing on the tail of her golden plait instead of the pencil. She leaned her head to one side like a grammar-school girl and started scribbling.

Columbine arrived in the City of Dreams on a lilac evening, on the final sigh of a long, lazy day that she had spent at the window of an express train as light as an arrow, which had rushed her past dark forests and bright lakes to her encounter with destiny. A following wind, favourable to those who slide across the silvery ice of life, had caught Columbine up and carried her on: long-awaited freedom beckoned to the frivolous seeker of adventures, rustling its lacy wings above her head.