‘That’s the one.’
At this point Prince Genji proved that he was terribly old-fashioned and a total martyr to philistine prejudices. At the sight of the naked model he became embarrassed, turned his head away a full hundred and eighty degrees and started stammering twice as much as usuaclass="underline" in his place Prospero wouldn’t have batted an eyelid.
However, the Japanese Masa wasn’t even slightly embarrassed. He stared at the recumbent girl, clicked his tongue in approval and declared: ‘Beeootifur young rady. Round with fat regs.’
‘Masa!’ Genji protested, blushing. ‘How many times m-must I tell you? Stop staring! This isn’t Japan!’
But Dunya was obviously flattered by the comment from the Japanese.
‘What exactly are you interested in?’ asked the artist, squinting at each of his visitors in turn. ‘I really didn’t know him at all. I was never in his flat. He gave the impression of being a bit of a cold fish. No socialising, no binges, no women’s voices. A real hermit.’
‘The poor thing wasn’t much to look at either, his face was all covered in furuncles,’ Dunya put in, scratching her elbow and looking at Masa. ‘But he was interested in the female sex all right. When he ran into me in the entrance, he used to frisk me all over with those eyes of his. If he’d been a bit more perky, he could have been likeable enough. You get furuncles from loneliness. But he had good eyes, sort of sad, and the colour of cornflowers.’
‘Shut up, you fool,’ Stakhovich shouted at her. ‘To hear you talk, you’d think men have nothing on their minds but how to get their hands on your body. But she’s right: he was shy, you couldn’t get a word out of him. And he really was lonely, a lost soul. He was always muttering something in the evenings. Something rhythmical, like poetry. Sometimes he used to sing a bit out of tune – mostly Little Russian songs. The partition walls here are made of planks, you can hear every sound.’
All the walls of the room were hung with sketches and studies, most of them showing a female torso in various positions and from various angles, and it required no great gift of observation to realise that Dashka-Dunya’s body had served as the model for all of them.
‘Tell me,’ Columbine enquired. ‘Why do you always paint the same woman? Is it some kind of style you have? I’ve read that in Europe there are artists who only paint one thing – a cup, or flowers in a vase, or spots of light on glass – always trying to achieve perfection.’
‘What’s perfection got to do with it!’ Stakhovich exclaimed, turning round to take a look at this curious young lady. ‘Where would I get the money for any other models? Take you, for example. You wouldn’t pose for me out of the simple love of art, would you?’
Columbine felt as if the gaze of his narrowed eyes had pierced straight through her bolero, and she cringed slightly.
‘You have an interesting profile. The line of the hips is quite captivating. And the breasts must be pear-shaped, slightly asymmetrical, with large areolae. Am I right?’
Masha Mironova would probably have turned numb and blushed bright red at words like that. But Columbine didn’t turn a hair and even smiled.
‘C-come now sir, how d-dare you say such things?’ Genji exclaimed in horror, apparently prepared to intervene there and then for the honour of the lady and tear the insolent fellow into little pieces.
But Columbine saved the artist from the inevitable duel by saying in a perfectly calm voice: ‘I don’t know what areolae are, but I assure you that my breasts are perfectly symmetrical. However, you are quite right about them being pear-shaped.’
There was a brief pause. The artist examined the intrepid maiden’s waist. Genji mopped his forehead with a batiste handkerchief. Masa walked over to the model and offered her a boiled sweet in a green wrapper that he had taken out of his pocket.
‘From Landrine?’ Dashka-Dunya asked. ‘Merci.’
Columbine imagined Stakhovich, having become world-famous, bringing an exhibition of his work to Irkutsk. The most important canvas was a nude – Columbine Seduced. Now that would be a real scandal. It was probably worth thinking about.
But by now the artist was looking at the Japanese instead of her.
‘What an incredible face!’ Stakhovich exclaimed, rubbing his hands together in his excitement. ‘And you don’t notice it straight away. The way those eyes sparkle, and those folds! Chingiz Khan! Tamerlaine! Listen, good sir, I absolutely must paint your portrait!’
Columbine was stung. So she only had an interesting silhouette, but he thought this snuffling Oriental was Tamerlaine? Genji also stared at his valet with a certain degree of amazement, but Masa wasn’t even slightly surprised – he merely turned sideways so that the artist could appreciate his flattened profile as well.
Genji cautiously took the artist by the sleeve: ‘Mr Stakhovich, we have not come here to p-pose for you. The yard keeper told me that on the n-night of the suicide you supposedly heard some unusual sounds on the other side of the wall. Try to describe them in as much detail as possible.’
‘That’s the sort of thing you don’t forget in a hurry. It was a foul night, the wind was howling outside, the trees were cracking, but I could still hear it.’ The artist scratched the back of his head as he remembered. ‘Well, it was like this. He came home just before midnight – he slammed the front door very loudly, which was something he never used to do.’
‘That’s right!’ Dashka-Dunya put in. ‘And I said to you: “He’s drunk. Now he’ll start bringing whores back.” Remember?’
Genji cast an embarrassed sideways glance at Columbine, which she found very amusing. Was he concerned for her morals now? It was already quite clear that Dashka spent the nights here as well as the days.
‘Yes, that was exactly what you said,’ the artist confirmed. ‘We go to bed late. I work and Dunya looks at the pictures in the magazines until I finish. He was dashing around on the other side of the wall, stamping his feet and muttering something. He burst out laughing a couple of times, and then started sobbing – in general, he seemed a bit upset. And then, well after midnight, it suddenly started. This howling – very sinister it was, and it came and went. I’ve never heard anything like it in my life. At first I thought my neighbour had brought a stray dog home. But it didn’t sound like that. Then I imagined he’d gone barmy and started howling himself, but a man couldn’t have made sounds like that. It was a sort of deep, hollow sound, but at the same time it was articulate. As if it was chanting something, one word, over and over again. Two, three, four times in a row.’
‘O-o-o-oh!’ Dashka-Dunya howled in a deep bass voice. ‘Right, Sashura? Absolutely terrifying. O-o-o-oh!’
‘Yes, it was kind of like that,’ the artist said with a nod. ‘Only louder, and it was really weird. I’d say it wasn’t just “O-o-o-oh”, but more like “D-o-o-oh” or “K-o-o-oh”. It started with this vague, low sound, and then got louder and louder. Well, we make a bit of noise in here sometimes, so at first we put up with it. But when we went to bed – that was after three in the morning, we couldn’t take it any more. I banged on the wall and shouted: ‘Hey you, student, what kind of concert is that?’ But there was no answer. And it went on right until dawn.’
‘Just remembering it gives me goose pimples,’ the model complained to Masa, who was standing beside her, and he stroked her bare shoulder reassuringly, then left his hand where it was. Dashka-Dunya didn’t object.
‘Is that all?’ Genji asked pensively.
‘Yes,’ Stakhovich said with a shrug, observing Masa’s manoeuvres with amazement.