‘I am a man, and you are a man,’ said Theodora.
‘That is emotionalism.’
‘It is flesh and blood.’
But Wetherby was walking away.
It should be as simple as doves, felt Theodora, but it was not, but it was not. She looked into her handbag to find some reassuring object, something she had seen before, something all-dimensional. As a child she had resented the indestructibility of objects, before the great millennium of dissolution, the epoch of ideas. I shall know everything, said Theodora in the kitchen. Now at the approach of middle-age and knowledge, she regretted the closed stones, the fossil shells of Meroã.
In the jardin exotique, in spite of its impervious forms, of sword, and bulb, and the scarlet, sucking mouths, time continued to disintegrate into a painful, personal music, of which the themes were intertwined. So that it was not possible to withdraw into a comfortable isolation. Theodora sat. Confident her intuition would identify, she waited for Lieselotte to appear.
As she had suspected, Lieselotte was a snowdrop, quivering but green-veined. Depravity had tortured the original wax into lines of purest delicacy. Physical smallness intensified her passion.
‘He has been calling you,’ said Theodora.
‘Oh, he!’ said Lieselotte. ‘Yes. By nature he is the hero of an operetta. But he chose to be a disinfectant. To disinfect the world.’
‘How many of us,’ said Theodora, ‘lead more than one of our several lives?’
Lieselotte compressed her mauve lips, which were outlined very faintly in black, over her wax skin.
‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘I should have been born to a circus. To whip the lions through a paper hoop. But I can smell their coats singe, even though I wasn’t.’
‘Are you also the countess?’ Theodora asked.
‘My husband was a count. He fell in love a second time, with a myth, but a myth in jackboots. The country where we lived was a country of myths and tapestries and music. The grass beneath the Christmas trees was acid-green. In our forest there was a smell of rot, that was sometimes interesting and sometimes foul.’
In the fairy-tale that Lieselotte told, Theodora expected the candles to be dashed to the ground when doors opened. Wind rushed down the stone passages, swelled beneath the tapestries, till tree and stone and jousting manikins had turned to water, ebbing and flowing where the wall had been.
‘Even in summer,’ said Lieselotte, ‘the valleys were full of mist and orange fungus. Brown, wooden men acted a jolly pantomime of respect to please the Gesellschaft. They also came to the castle to hear the music that Rudi ordered as his duty towards Kunst. In the summer evenings, by torchlight, in the yard of the castle, we listened to more myths. We caught the sickness of the violins. We accepted the myth of love. Music dripped and coated the walls with a glistening moisture of sound.’
Lieselotte laughed.
‘When I painted this music they looked at my pictures and began to suspect my sanity and health.’
Theodora could feel the laughter of Lieselotte, pressed against her body in the cactus cage.
‘Finally Rudi sent me away,’ said Lieselotte. ‘Because I am decadent. Rudi is one of the men with golden skins and mackerel eyes, who see the world through water, or through music, and grow drunk on Ewigkeit. Tristan and Siegfried, I think, were this way.’
Winding like a horn through the forest, the leaves ebbed and flowed, cupped sometimes also in the memory, to meditate, stagnate, green-bubbled with scum. Theodora listened to Lieselotte’s voice.
‘Come with me, please, to my room,’ Lieselotte said. ‘You shall see my fever. I also want your protection against those who love me.’
She began to lead Theodora through the passages of the hotel, in which people were apparently reviving themselves, shaking off dreams, sprinkling their faces with water, breaking wind, and putting back their teeth.
‘Listen,’ said Lieselotte. ‘They are going to sleep.’
Theodora did not contradict. There were times when she preferred an easy life.
‘Here,’ said Lieselotte, ‘is where I live principally. Here you will find my raison d’être.’
Theodora saw that they were in a large room, somewhere high, the light purified by an immensity of surrounding space, the walls pierced by the open windows of pictures. And now she was drawn to the many windows, and the world these contained, the hanging gardens flowering with miraculous questions, the glass pagoda from which her own soul looked out, flaming like a bird of paradise.
‘I shall not ask you whether you like my pictures,’ Lieselotte said. ‘Because there is no more embarrassing question. This is what I think.’
And she took a knife, and she smashed the glass pagoda with its flaming bird.
‘No!’ cried Theodora, holding her hands to her head to protect it from the glass which did not fall.
‘Oh, but I am right,’ said Lieselotte. ‘We have destroyed so much, but we have not destroyed enough. We must destroy everything, everything, even ourselves. Then at last when there is nothing, perhaps we shall live.’
Her voice continued to hack at the screaming canvases, and Theodora, because she knew that this was not yet her crisis, went away. She went to the garden, because there was nowhere else, even though she would sit there uncomfortably upright on a bench, waiting without mirrors for fresh reflections.
‘Good evening, Ludmilla,’ said the General, who was sitting on a small and complicated iron chair, watching a slow snail.
‘I heard that bitch taking you up to her attic.’
‘Yes,’ said Theodora. ‘I saw her pictures.’
‘Her pictures, did you say?’ said Sokolnikov. ‘She is mad.’
But Theodora had now found the answer.
‘Only chairs and tables,’ she said, ‘are sane.’
‘She is no more an artist than I am a cook,’ the General said.
He spat on the leaf of an aloe, where the spittle lay and glittered, distracting him for a moment by its brightness.
‘I am an artist,’ said Alyosha Sergei, in a still, convinced voice. ‘Although I cannot produce any material evidence, and it is doubtful whether my sensibility will ever crystallize in just that way. I am the Artist. Very few people have the capacity for creating life, for being. But you cannot deny, Ludmilla, that one moment of my existence is intensely varied, intensely moving. Take that gob of spittle, for instance. A moonstone, a jewel. There is no denying that I am an artist.’
‘Or an old clown,’ said Theodora, who knew by revelation the way that Alyosha Sergei could somersault through a house, and how she was tired walking up and down, emptying his full ash trays, and mopping up the little damp patches where his thought dripped.
‘Dear Ludmilla,’ laughed Alyosha Sergei. ‘My sister Ludmilla. Varvara was my inspiration, my bright blue cloud, my singing bird. But Ludmilla, my sister, is my reason. She is a good soul, even though her face is yellow and her skirt trails in the mud when there is a thaw.’
But Theodora had no patience. For a long time the close, stovey breath of Alyosha Sergei had exasperated her beyond words. He could fume the ceilings of a whole house. So that when she spoke bitterness yellowed her voice, and her fingers struck at her belt, like keys.
‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Alyosha Sergei. And I believe you are drunk already.’
‘Not yet, Ludmilla,’ said Alyosha Sergei. ‘Not yet. Or only a little.’
He laughed through his fat red rubber lips, bubbling, and prodding at the snail with his stick.