‘Whatever you may have been told by Anna Stepanovna, Varvara is a good girl,’ Alyosha Sergei said. ‘Her fault is her humility. And a desire to sacrifice. It is in this spirit, I gather, that she has accepted Federmann. He is a merchant, she says. A Jew. From Königsberg. A reliable though undistinguished man.’
Sitting with the General in the garden of the Hôtel du Midi, it seemed to Theodora that they had watched the passage of the snail together, their common eye, measuring the inches over many years, more than a personal pilgrimage, farther than Kiev.
‘You are fidgety, Ludmilla,’ the General said. ‘You should sit and enjoy the pleasures of existence. But of course you are filled with the mad hopefulness of virtuous and domesticated women. You cannot sit. Here comes Katina Pavlou. She will sit and talk to me. She is still too young to delude herself into thinking she will find anything better.’
Theodora saw the girl who was apparently in the square woman’s charge walk out of the hotel. She was nursing a white kitten in her arms. It was also not a bad guess to say she had been crying.
‘Good evening, Katina,’ said the General.
‘Good evening, Alyosha Sergei,’ said the girl.
When she spoke, her words came dutifully, as she had been taught, but she was all cloudiness, choked. Theodora knew that she was still dazed by sitting alone in her room, trying to invoke life, and composing the poetry of other poets, which her emotions made her own. There was no doubt at all, she had been copying her warm, disturbing poems into a cahier she had bought for that purpose.
Katina Pavlou sat down dutifully and said, ‘Did you enjoy your siesta, Alyosha Sergei?’
‘You know I never sleep,’ said the General, blowing out his cheeks. ‘I have not slept passably since ’98. I can remember very vividly the last occasion. It was an afternoon. At Nijni Novgorod. There had been a thunderstorm. I woke, and the air smelled of earth, and outside the window some peasants were pulling at a cow by her halter. She refused to move. She had been frightened apparently by the thunder. She had a white star on her forehead. And the peasants were cursing and joking. They swore that in the thunder her milk had turned. I can remember thinking how pleasant it is to wake from sleep, and enjoy lying with one’s shirt open, and then to call for tea. I can remember thinking: And this is one of the simple things one can go on doing and doing, endlessly, joyfully. That, my bright Varvara, is the last time I can remember sleeping well.’
‘I am sorry,’ said Katina Pavlou.
She spoke from her cloud, out of the secret life in her own room.
‘Yes,’ she said hopelessly, with all the conviction of her age, ‘life is full of sadness.’
The white kitten jumped off her lap and advanced to try his nose on a cactus, that Katina Pavlou watched with the agony of what she knew must inevitably happen. But Alyosha Sergei, Theodora saw, had taken on a fresh lease of rubber, was swelling with young hopes, or old. She heard his decorations rustle again and he wiped his whiskers before the café glacé. Old men, she decided, should be quietly mopped up before they reach the age of dribble.
‘You must let me teach you,’ said the General, ignoring Theodora, ‘you must let me teach you that abstractions are a great mistake. If I do not always follow my own precept, it is because the concrete often offers itself in a somewhat unattractive form.’
‘Ah,’ cried Katina Pavlou, ‘it has happened.’
Her own white cry followed the kitten through the cactus trunks. She followed with little cries of love, unwinding like a ball of white thread, infinite, but failing.
‘Leave her alone, Alyosha Sergei,’ said Theodora when the child had gone.
‘You were always a conscience, Ludmilla,’ the General said. ‘A yellow, reasonable woman, whose stomach rumbled after camomile tea. You could never accept fatality. Not even when they showed you the gun.’
‘That may be. But leave her alone.’
‘Even when they show you the gun. Don’t you see, my good Ludmilla, that this is something which has got to happen? Even if she shoots me dead.’
Theodora listened to his voice leading her into a clearing, where they had fixed a little amateur stage, on which the curtain had not yet risen. Looking at the flat surface of the curtain, she was not sure whose corpse had been prepared, but she knew that the guignol must not begin.
She felt the General stir beneath her silence.
‘I do not intend to talk, Alyosha Sergei.’
‘I do,’ said the General. ‘It is the greatest relief on earth. Greater even than war. Or love. Look, Ludmilla, here she comes, my white kitten. Do you realize I am about to deny my own tragedy? That is why it is so important. Why did I never think of this before?’
Walking with her kitten, which she had retrieved from the dangers of the cactus forest, Katina Pavlou was very young, white, touching. As she walked, she inclined her head to avoid the attentions of the cactus pads, so that her neck was uncovered, and you were conscious of the same sober mystery that is sometimes suddenly revealed in a pan of milk or a nest of secret eggs.
‘Alyosha Sergei, you will put on your coat,’ Theodora said.
Because, she remembered, it is this way that you deal with a Sokolnikov, with a touch of brass.
‘But, Ludmilla,’ said the General, and his lips had begun to take a dubious shape, ‘do you intend to destroy me?’
His thighs cried, for the aching evenings in which horses pawed under the full plane trees, and the patent leather marked time.
‘You will put on your coat, Alyosha Sergei,’ said Theodora’s voice, yellowed by long proximity to conscience. ‘You will take me for a walk. You will point out objects of local interest.’
The General’s chair began to squeak.
‘But there is never anything to see,’ he said. ‘Anywhere. The meat is all inside the shell.’
She heard his voice farther, complaining but dutiful, fretting what had been the corner of the almost fluid hotel. Forms were flowing into other moulds. As the light withdrew, Theodora felt that she also had ebbed by several hours.
‘Well, Katina,’ she said in the accents of an aunt, ‘you have found your cat.’
‘My Aunt Smaragda, my aunt in Athens, once had a white kitten, a white kitten with a black tail. A very charming kitten,’ Katina said.
She used the word timidly, because it was one she had picked up from an older woman, and it was not yet her own. It belonged to the old women who practise social intercourse. As a word it was stale and dusty in her mouth.
‘Are you a spinster?’ Katina Pavlou asked.
‘That is how I am described,’ said Theodora Goodman.
‘So is my Aunt Smaragda who lives alone in Athens. She had an unfortunate love affair in Smyrna with somebody who went away.’
The shells on the shores of Asia Minor echoed faintly the misfortune of Aunt Smaragda. The air of the jardin exotique was full of sad sounds of no distinguishable origin.
‘But so far!’ said Theodora. ‘You make it sound so far.’
‘That is something we are not told,’ Katina Pavlou said.
And now her voice, white, furred, insinuated itself along the skin. It curled in the saucers of the body like a small white cat.
‘I would like to fall in love,’ said Katina Pavlou. ‘More fortunately, of course. I would like that best of all.’