He cast a brief gaze at the mirror hanging on the wall and said aloud to his image: -Now that you’re in, you’d better go and make your peace with Virgil Jones. You’ve been forgetting your old friends.
Then, impossibly, behind his own image, a movement. In the mirror, as he finished speaking, he saw the door opening. But it’s locked, he thought frantically, and turned rapidly.
The door was still firmly shut and bolted. In confusion he looked back at the mirror. There, in the reflected image, the door was still, slowly, opening. Someone was coming in.
He heard a voice, bitter but recognizable:
– Hello, little brother.
The figure of Bird-Dog came into the mirrored room. Flapping Eagle felt the cold sweat breaking out all over him.
Bird-Dog’s spectre came a little way into the “room” and repeated:
– Hello, little brother.
Then it retreated back through the mirrored door and everything was sane once more. Flapping Eagle had to lean against a shelf to support himself.
Irina Cherkassova stood by a shed at the bottom of the garden. It had no windows and the doors were padlocked. Her grey eyes were impassive as the shaken Flapping Eagle made his way towards her.
– Mr Eagle, she said. I thought you had forgotten.
– I was delayed, he said. My apologies, Countess.
– Irina, she said quietly.
– Irina, he corrected himself.
– I wanted to explain, she said. My husband lives too much in the past; we all do, I suppose. You must not think him mad. He is quite sane. So is Elfrida, despite her obsession with purity and cleanliness and Gribb. And so, I suppose, is Gribb, despite… the rush of words dried up. Flapping Eagle felt too disturbed to press the point.
– I hear you came to K with Virgil Jones, she said quickly. Now there is a madman, if you like. And his ex-wife, too, madam Liv. We give her food out of sympathy for her illness. We are not mad, Mr Eagle I Her voice was fierce.
– I never believed you were, he said. It must be an awful thing to have to remake one’s life like this.
– I knew it, she said excitedly. I knew you were a man to confide in. I shall make you my friend, Mr Eagle.
– Flapping Eagle, he said.
– There, she said. Irina and Flapping Eagle. Now we are friends; and now I will show you how the past hangs around my neck, and what a weight it is.
She unlocked the shed and opened the door.
In the gloom Flapping Eagle could make out two men, both fully-grown, playing draughts with chessmen. One of them was Mr Page; he leapt to his feet in alarm and stood between them and the other man, until he recognized Irina.
– It’s all right, Mr Page, she said. This is Mr Page, Flapping Eagle. He helps us with our difficulty. I believe the correct medical term is allopathy: the treatment of a disease by inducing a different tendency. Mr Page, you see, loves games; he comes here to play with Alexei, in the hope of stirring something within him. A forlorn hope, I fear. My son lives here, in this shed; he prefers it to the house; so we keep him here, to avoid embarrassment. We think it best.
Alexei Cherkassov grinned foolishly up at them, a large, strapping sixteen-year-old in appearance. The looseness of his movements and facial muscles revealed that all was not well.
– A moron, said Irina venomously. His brain has the age of a child of four. Do you wonder I hold my husband’s stupidity against him? He has bred me an idiot for a son.
– Ma-ma, said Alexei Cherkassov, happily, and sucked his thumb.
Flapping Eagle followed Irina out of the shed. She locked the door, sealing her skeleton once more into its cupboard. -Mr Page has a key to the door on the far side, she said. He comes when he can. She leant against the shed, as though exhausted. Then she jerked herself erect, setting her jaw.
– Now I am going to tell you something else, Flapping Eagle, new friend, she said, grey eyes boring into him.
– Touch my stomach, she ordered; and when he hesitated she grasped his hand roughly and placed it there. -Do you feel anything? she asked.
– No, he said. It is a stomach.
– Well then, she said angrily, feel my breasts. He shook his head, uncomprehending. Was she drunk? Was this a seduction attempt?
– Feel my breasts, she repeated, dragging his hand upwards. -Well? she demanded. Again he shook his head.
– Why should you, after all, she sighed. I always think it must be glaringly obvious. This is what I mean, Flapping Eagle: soon after drinking the elixir of life I found I was three months pregnant. The elixir, as you know, arrests all growth and physical development. So that, all these centuries later, I am still with child. Still. Can you understand, Flapping Eagle, how that feels? What it is to have a second life stagnant within one’s womb, perhaps a genius, perhaps a second idiot, perhaps a monster, as frozen within me as the lovers on the grecian urn? What it does to a woman to be with child, heavy-breasted with the juices of maternity for so many eternities? Do you understand that?
– Yes, said Flapping Eagle. I can understand. But there are ways…
– You don’t understand at all, she cried. It is a life. A living thing. Innocent. Sacred. It was because I thought life was sacred that I drank the elixir. One cannot take life.
– Perhaps you are not the man you look, she added, catching her breath. He would have… She bit off her words once again, said: We must go in, and was gone. Flapping Eagle lingered a moment before returning to the window at the side of the house.
Irina’s unfinished sentences worried him. So, slightly, did the effortlessness with which he had been accepted. After the initial hostility of the Elbaroom, he had not expected it: Cherkassov and Ignatius seemed to be positively anxious to admit him to their company. He shrugged inwardly; perhaps it was enough that he was accepted. No doubt the rest would be made clear in time. Even Bird-Dog…
In the presence of the two pale ladies, his worries evaporated. He sat drinking the wine of K, desultory conversation idling between Cherkassov and Gribb, half-listening, half-dreaming, as the two of them circled the room in a hypnotic, aimless promenade. The white witches weaving their spell, binding him in silken cords. They made K real for him, despite Gribb’s theorizing, despite Moonshy, and, yes, despite Virgil. Acceptance may have come from Cherkassov, but the attraction, the first holds of K upon him sprang from these two women, circling, circling, moths to his candle. The green gaze and the grey, blurring together as they drifted. Pure Elfrida, tarnished Irina, tired Eagle. A spell was being woven which none of them understood, which they would all understand too late, as the pale sorceresses circled and smiled.
– I fear I feel a little faint, said Elfrida Gribb. I think we shall have to take our leave. She looked at Irina with a glance not quite affectionate; but Irina was all solicitude as she saw the trio to the door.
Elfrida found herself disapproving of the length of time the Countess allowed her hand to rest in Flapping Eagle’s, and of the expression (gratitude? remorse?) in her eyes-and then hastily corrected herself.
It was of no importance to her. She loved her husband. He loved her. The Cherkassov marriage was well known to be a hollow thing, maintained only by their joint abhorrence of scandal. What did it matter what Irina Cherkassova thought of Flapping Eagle, or he of her?
She was in an unusually bad temper as they walked home.
Flapping Eagle felt almost as debilitated by his second night in K as he had by the first.
Small insects, the creatures of the night, fluttered at their faces. The stage was set.
XXXIX Sodomy
THE GRIBBS’ DONKEY, perhaps the most obedient, least mulish donkey that ever was, jogged demurely along the Cobble-way with a divided Flapping Eagle upon its back. He had spent most of the day exploring his new home, and his mind was filled with a struggle between his desire to get to the bottom of the contradictions and anomalies he had already found, and his desire to stay, uncomplaining, in the bosom of his new circle of friends. The two were, it seemed, mutually exclusive. To accept his own recent experience and Virgil Jones’ explanation of it was to put himself outside the ethos of K, which denied Grimus and his effect; to accept the authorized Gospel according to Gribb was to deny the evidence of his own senses, or else to view Virgil Jones as both mad and evil; Flapping Eagle could not quite do that, nor understand how, if he did, he could explain his inner voyage. Perhaps a drug? But then, how to explain the vision of Bird-Dog? Had Cherkassov laced the wine with something more narcotic? The battle raged and fluctuated within him; he felt as ignorant, as stupid as his uncomplaining donkey, and wished his horizons were as narrow.