The Doge cleared his throat and said to Lorelei in a quiet voice: ‘Your usual shortcoming: elegant, but unintelligible. But that black rose is interesting. What does the black rose mean to you? No, don’t tell me. I’ll guess for myself.’
He closed his eyes and lowered his head on to his chest. Everybody waited with bated breath, and the poetess’s cheeks flushed bright crimson.
‘Does the Doge write poems?’ Columbine asked Petya quietly.
He put a finger to his lips, but she knitted her brows angrily and he whispered back almost silently: ‘Yes, and they are works of genius, for certain. No one understands poetry better than he does.’
She found this reply strange.
‘ “For certain”?’
‘He doesn’t show his poems to anyone. He says that they’re not written for people to read and he will destroy everything he has written before his departure.’
‘What a shame!’ she exclaimed rather more loudly than was necessary.
Prospero glanced at his new guest again, but once more he said nothing.
‘I have it,’ he said, giving Lorelei an affectionate, sad smile. ‘I understand.’
Lorelei beamed and the Doge turned to a spruce, quiet little man with a pince-nez and a Van Dyke beard.
‘Horatio, you promised to bring some poems today at last. You know there’s nothing to be done about it – the Bride accepts only poets.’
‘Horatio’s a doctor,’ Petya told Columbine. ‘That is, he’s a dissector – he cuts up bodies in the anatomy room. He took Lancelot’s place.’
‘And what happened to Lancelot?’
‘He departed. And he took some companions with him,’ Petya replied obscurely, but this was no time to ask questions – Horatio was ready to recite.
‘This is actually the first time I have tried my hand at poetry . . . I studied a manual on versification, made a great effort. And this, mmm, as it were, is the result.’
He cleared his throat in an embarrassed manner, straightened his tie and took a folded piece of paper out of his pocket. When he was just about to begin, he evidently decided that he had not explained enough: ‘The poem is about my professional, so to speak, line of work . . . there are even a few special terms in it. The rhyme has been simplified, just the second and fourth lines, it’s very hard when you’re not used to it . . . After our esteemed, mmm . . . Lioness of Ecstasy, of course, my efforts in verse will seem even less accomplished . . . But anyway, I offer them up for your strict judgement. The poem is called “Epicrisis”.
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.