Boris Akunin - She Lover of Death

The train delivered the blue-eyed traveller, not to pompous St Petersburg, but to sad and mysterious Moscow – the City of Dreams, resembling a queen who has been shut away in a convent to while away the years of her life, a queen whose empty-headed and capricious lord has bartered her for a cold, snake-eyed rival. Let the new queen hold sway in her marble halls with mirrors that reflect the waters of the Baltic. The old queen wept clear, transparent tears, and when her tears dried up, she was reconciled to her simple life. She passes her days in spinning yarn and her nights in prayer. My place is with her, abandoned and unloved, and not with the one who turns her pampered face to the wan sun of the north.

I am Columbine, frivolous and unpredictable, subject only to the caprices of my own whimsical fantasy and the fey wafting of the wind. Pity the poor Pierrot who will have the misfortune to fall in love with my candy-box looks, for my destiny is to become a plaything in the hands of the scheming deceiver Harlequin and be left lying on the floor like a broken doll with a carefree smile on my little porcelain face . . .

She read it through again and was satisfied, but did not carry on writing for the time being, because she started thinking about Harlequin – Petya Lileiko (Li-lei-ko – what a light, jolly name, like the sound of a sleigh bell or drops of meltwater in spring!). And he really had appeared in the spring, come crashing into the dreary life of Irkutsk like a red fox into a sleepy henhouse. He had cast a spell on her with the halo of fiery-red curls scattering across his shoulders, his loose-fitting blouse and intoxicating poems. Before then, Masha had only sighed over the fact that life was an empty, stupid joke, but he had commented casually – as if it were perfectly obvious – that the only true beauty is in fading, wilting and dying. And the provincial dreamer had realised how true that was! Where else could Beauty be? Not in life! What was there in life that could be beautiful? Marry a tax assessor, have a crowd of children and sit by the samovar in your mob-cap for sixty years?

Beside the arbour on the high riverbank, the Moscow Harlequin had kissed the swooning young lady and whispered, ‘Out of pale and accidental life I have made a single endless thrill.’ And then poor Masha really was completely lost, because she realised that was the whole point. To become a weightless butterfly fluttering your rainbow wings and giving no thought to autumn.

After the kiss beside the arbour (there had been nothing else) she had stood in front of the mirror for a long time, looking at her reflection and hating it: a ruddy, round face with a stupid thick plait. And those terrible pink ears that flamed up like poppies when she was even slightly flustered!

And then, when Petya’s visit to his great-aunt, the deputy-governor’s widow, was over, he had ridden away again on the Transcontinental and Masha had started counting the days until she came of age – it turned out to be exactly one hundred, just like Napoleon after the Elbe. She remembered she had felt terribly sorry for the emperor in history lessons – it was hard, to return to fame and glory for only a hundred days, but now she realised just how long a hundred days really was.

However, everything comes to an end sooner or later. When her parents handed their daughter her birthday present – a set of silver teaspoons for her future family home – they did not even suspect that the hour of their Waterloo was upon them. Masha had already cut out the patterns for unbelievably bold outfits of her own design. Another month of secret nights spent hunched over the sewing-machine (the time passed quickly then) and the Siberian captive was absolutely ready for her transformation into Columbine.

Through all that long week on the railway she imagined how astounded Petya would be when he opened the door and saw her there on the threshold – not the timid goose from Irkutsk in a boring little dress of white muslin, but the bold Columbine in a scarlet cape that fluttered in the breeze and a pearl-embroidered cap with an ostrich feather. Then she would give him a devil-may-care smile and say, ‘A sudden blizzard from Siberia! Do with me what you will.’ Petya of course, would choke in surprise at such audacious directness and the sensation of his own boundless power over this creature who seemed to be woven out of the very ether. He would put his arms round her shoulders, plant a passionate kiss on her soft, submissive lips and lead his uninvited guest into a boudoir enveloped in mysterious twilight. Or perhaps he would take her with all the passion of a rampant young satyr, right there on the floor of the hallway.

Her lively imagination had immediately painted for her a scene of passion in the company of umbrellas stands and galoshes. The traveller had frowned and trained her unseeing gaze on the spurs of the Ural mountains. She realised that she would have to prepare the altar for the forthcoming sacrifice herself, she could not rely on the whim of chance. And that was when the miraculous word ‘Elysium’ had surfaced in her memory.

Well, she thought, the fifteen-rouble stage-setting was adequate for the sacred rites.

Masha – no, Masha no longer, Columbine – ran a caressing glance over the walls hung with lilac moiré satin, the deep-piled, bright-patterned carpet on the floor, the ethereally light furniture on curved legs, and frowned at the naked nymph in the sumptuous gold frame (that was going a bit too far).

Then she noticed an object of even greater luxury on the table beside the mirror – an absolutely genuine telephone! Her own personal apparatus, standing right there in her room! Just imagine!

And immediately an idea occurred to her that was even more dramatic than the first one of simply appearing in the doorway. Appearing was no problem, but what if he was not in when she did it? There was a whiff of provincial offhandedness about it too. And again, why make the journey if the fall (which was simultaneously a vertiginous flight) was to take place here, on this bed like a catafalque, with its carved columns and heavy canopy? But to telephone – that was modern, elegant, metropolitan .

Petya’s father was a doctor, he was absolutely certain to have a telephone at home.

Columbine picked the stylish brochure entitled Moscow Telephone Subscribers up off the table and – would you believe it – she opened it straight away at the letter ‘L’. There it was, now: ‘Terentii Savelievich Lileiko, Dr of Medicine – 3128’. Surely this was the finger of fate?

She stood for a moment, facing the gleaming lacquered box with its metal circles and caps and focusing her will. She twirled the handle with desperate speed and when a brassy voice squeaked ‘Central exchange’ into her earpiece, she recited the four figures rapidly.

While she was waiting, she suddenly realised that the phrase she had prepared would not do for a telephone conversation. ‘What sudden blizzard from Siberia?’ Petya would ask. ‘What sort of way is that to talk? And why should I do anything with you, madam?’

To bolster her courage, she opened the Japanese ivory cigarette case that she had bought at the station and lit the first papirosa of her life (the pakhitoska that Masha Mironova had once lit up in fifth class at school didn’t count – back then she hadn’t had the slightest idea that you were supposed to inhale the tobacco smoke). She propped her elbow on the little table, turned slightly sideways-on to the mirror and narrowed her eyes. Not bad, not bad at all, interesting and even rather enigmatic.

‘Doctor Lileiko’s apartment,’ a woman’s voice said in the earpiece. ‘With whom do you wish to speak?’

The smoker was rather disconcerted – for some reason she had been certain that Petya would answer. She rebuked herself sternly. How stupid! Of course, he didn’t live alone. His parents were there, and the servants, and possibly even some brothers and sisters. In fact, she didn’t really know very much about him: only that he was a student, he wrote poems and spoke wonderfully well about the beauty of tragic death. And also that he kissed a lot better than Kostya Levonidi, her former future-fiancé, who had been decisively dismissed for being so tediously positive, reliable and humdrum.