Boris Akunin - All the World's a Stage

Then the cornet nimbly darted inside, locking the door behind him. Eliza and he were left alone together. One couldn’t exactly say that she was frightened by this. In her time she had seen all sorts of hotheads. Some of them, especially officers and students, had committed worse antics than this. And in any case, Volodya behaved rather meekly. He went down on his knees, dropped his sword on the floor, grasped the hem of her negligee and pressed it reverently to his breast.

‘Let me be killed for your sake… Let them even throw me out of the regiment… My aged parents will never survive it, but even so, there is no life for me without you,’ he declaimed rather inarticulately but with true feeling. ‘If you spurn me, I shall slit my stomach open, as the Japanese did during the war!’

At the same time his fingers seemingly inadvertently crumpled up the fine silk fabric, so that it gathered into folds, rising higher and higher. The hussar broke off his tearful lament in order to lean down and kiss Eliza on her bare knee – and there he stayed, his kisses creeping higher and higher.

A chilly shudder suddenly ran through her. Not from the shamelessness of his touches, but from a terrible thought that had occurred to her.

What if fate has sent him to me? He is desperate, he is in love. If I tell him about my nightmare, he will simply challenge Genghis Khan to a duel and kill him. And I shall be free!

But immediately she felt ashamed. To risk the boy’s life for egotistical considerations of her own was a shameful idea.

‘Stop,’ she said in a weak voice, putting her hands on his shoulders (Limbach’s head was already completely hidden under the negligee). ‘Get up. I need to talk to you…’

She herself did not know how it would all have ended: whether she would have had the courage or, on the contrary, the cowardice to embroil the boy in a deadly intrigue.

Things never reached the stage of an explanation.

The door was torn off its hinges by a mighty blow. The hotel doorman, Gullibin and Nonarikin – with a crimson lump on his forehead and his eyes blazing – jostled in the doorway. They were moved aside by Noah Noaevich, who ran an outraged gaze over the indecent scene. Eliza smacked Limbach in the teeth with her knee.

‘Get out from under there!’

The cornet got up, tucked his cold weapon under his arm, ducked under the outstretched arms of the doorman and darted out into the corridor, howling: ‘I love you! I love you!’

‘Leave us,’ Stern ordered.

His eyes hurled lightning bolts.

‘Eliza, I was mistaken in you. I regarded you as a woman of the highest order, but you take the liberty…’ And so on and so forth.

She didn’t listen, but just looked down at the toes of her slippers.

Terrible? Yes. Shameful? Yes. But it is more forgivable to risk the life of a stupid little officer than the life of a great dramatist. Even if the duel were to end with Limbach being killed, Genghis Khan would still disappear from my life. He would go to prison, or flee to his khanate, or to Europe – it doesn’t matter where. I would be free. We would be free! This happiness can be paid for with a crime… Or can it?

Some wise man, Erast Petrovich thought it was La Rochefoucauld, had said that very few people know how to be old. Fandorin had assumed that he belonged to that happy minority – and he had turned out to be mistaken.

Where has the rational, dignified equilibrium disappeared to? Where are you, calm and liberty, detachment and harmony?

Fandorin’s own heart had played him a trick that he had never expected. Life had been turned upside down, and all the immutable values had been reduced to dust. He felt twice as young as before and three times as stupid. The latter assertion was perhaps not entirely true. His intellect seemed to have deviated from its established course and lost its singleness of purpose, but it had retained its perpetual acuity, relentlessly noting all the stages and twists and turns of his illness.

At the same time, Fandorin was not certain that what was happening to him should be considered an illness. Perhaps, on the contrary, he had recovered his health.

It was a philosophical question, and he was helped in finding the answer to it by the very best of philosophers – Kant. The philosopher had been sickly from the day he was born, he was constantly unwell and this distressed him very badly, until one fine day the sage was struck by the excellent idea of regarding his sickly condition as good health. Being unwell was normal, there was nothing here to be sad about, das ist Leben . And if it suddenly happened that nothing was hurting in the morning – that was a gift of fate. And life was immediately filled with the light of joy.

Fandorin acted in similar fashion. He stopped obstinately setting his reason and his heart at odds. If this was love, so be it, let it be considered a normal state of soul.

He immediately felt slightly better. At least an end had been put to his inner discord. Erast Petrovich had enough reasons for torment without self-flagellation.

Falling in love with an actress was a truly heavy cross to bear – a thought to which Fandorin’s mind returned a hundred times a day.

With her he could never be sure of anything. Apart from the fact that in the next moment she would be different from the way she was in the previous one. Now cold, now passionate, now false, now sincere, now sweetly clinging, now spurning! The first phase of their relationship, which had lasted only a few days, had made him think that Eliza, despite her actress’s affectation, was nonetheless a normal, real, live woman. But how could he explain what had happened at Cricket Lane? Had it really happened, that explosion of devastating passion, or had he imagined it? Did it really happen that a woman flung herself into a man’s arms and then ran away – and ran in terror, even revulsion? What had he done wrong? Oh, Erast Petrovich would have paid dearly to receive an answer to the question that was tormenting him. Pride did not permit him to ask. Present himself in the pitiful role of a petitioner, a quibbler over feelings? Never!

In fact, everything was clear enough anyway. The question was rhetorical.

Eliza was firstly an actress, and secondly a woman. A professional enchantress, who needed powerful effects, emotional rupture, morbid passions. The sudden shift in her behaviour was dual in nature; firstly, she had taken fright at a serious relationship and didn’t wish to lose her freedom, and secondly, of course, she wanted to get him more securely fastened on the hook. Such paradoxical motivation was typical for women of the theatrical caste.

He was a wise old bird and he had seen all sorts of things, including the eternal female game of cat-and-mouse. And he had seen it performed with greater skill. In the art of binding a man to herself, a European actress was no match for an experienced Japanese courtesan with a command of jyojutsu , the ‘skill of passion’.

But although he understood this uncomplicated game perfectly well, he succumbed to it nonetheless and suffered, and his suffering was genuine. Self-reproach and logic were no help.

And then Erast Petrovich started trying to convince himself that he was very lucky. There was a stupid saying: ‘If you want to fall in love, then love a queen’. But a queen was some kind of nonsense, she wasn’t even a woman at all, but a walking set of ceremonial conventions. If you wanted to fall in love, then love a great actress.

She embodied the eternally elusive beauty of yugen . She was not one woman, but ten, even twenty: Juliet and the Distant Princess, Ophelia and the Maid of Orleans and Marguerite Gauthier. To conquer the heart of a great actress was very difficult, almost impossible, but if you succeeded, it was like conquering the love of all the heroines at once. And if you failed to conquer, nonetheless you loved the very best women in the world all at once. You would have to devote your entire life to the struggle for requited feelings. For even if you did win the victory, it would never be final. There would be no relaxation and peace – but who had ever said that that was a bad thing? Genuine life was this eternal trepidation, and not at all the walls that he had built round himself when he decided to grow old correctly.