‘No,’ the Japanese replied with a joyful smile. He smiled joyfully almost all the time, even when there was no apparent reason for it.
‘And your… stepfather?’ she went on casually. As a matter of fact, she still hadn’t discovered in what circumstances Erast had acquired such an unusual stepson. Perhaps as a result of marriage with a Japanese woman? She decided to investigate that subject later.
Mikhail Erastovich thought for a bit, thought again and replied:
‘Not to my recorrection.’
‘Have you known him for a long time?’
‘More than cirty years,’ the Japanese said radiantly. Eliza had already grown accustomed to his imperfectly pronounced but entirely understandable and almost correct Russian.
She cheered up a bit at that: so Erast (he was about forty-five, wasn’t he?) had never been married. For some reason she felt glad about that.
‘Why hasn’t he ever married?’ she asked, pursuing the theme.
The round face of the Japanese took on a serious expression. He rubbed the stubble on the top of his head (Stern had ordered him not to shave his head for the show, it was unromantic).
‘He was unabur to find a woman worthy of him. That is what he tord me many times.’
‘Well, well, what high self-opinion!’ A caustic note crept into Eliza’s voice. ‘And did he try very hard?’
‘He tried very hard,’ Mikhail Erastovich confirmed. ‘Many women wished to marry him. He tried and he tried – he used to ask me: What do you cink, Masa? No, I said, she is not worthy. He agreed. He orways ristens to what I say.’
Eliza sighed and took note of that.
‘So he tried a lot of women?’
‘Very many! There were genuine princesses, there were revorutionaries. Some women were rike andjers, others were worse than the devir.’
‘Beautiful?’ she asked, forgetting about caution. The conversation had turned out too enthralling altogether.
Masa (that name suited him better, she thought, than ‘Mikhail Erastovich’) grimaced in a strange manner.
‘My master has sutrange taste,’ he said, and then, seeming suddenly to recall something, he corrected himself. ‘Very beautifur.’
And he even demonstrated exactly how beautiful they were: with a huge bust, full sides, immensely wide hips and tiny little eyes.
Fandorin really does have strange passions, Eliza concluded. He likes big women, I’m not to his taste at all.
At that point she started pondering and became sad, and the conversation ended. Eliza didn’t even ask why Masa called Fandorin ‘master’.
On closer acquaintance, however, it emerged that not all information acquired from the Japanese should be taken on trust. Her stage partner proved to be no novice when it came to telling a few fibs, or at least fantasising a little.
When, following some complicated manoeuvring, Eliza once again succeeded in directing the conversation to the subject of Erast and asked what he actually did, Masa replied briefly.
‘He rescues.’
‘Whom does he rescue?’ she asked, astounded.
‘Whoever he has to, he rescues them. Sometimes he rescues his homerand.’
‘Who?’
‘His homerand. Mother Russia. He has saved it about ten times arready. And he has saved the whore worrd three or four times,’ Masa declared, dumbfounding her and continuing to glow with his usual smile.
Well now, Eliza said to herself. It could well be that the information about the princesses and revolutionaries is from the same category.
September came to an end. The city turned yellow and was pervaded with a smell of tears, sadness and nature’s dying. How well this matched the condition of her own soul! At night Eliza hardly slept at all. She just lay there with her hands set behind her head. The pale orange rectangle on the ceiling, a projection of the window illuminated by a street lamp, looked like a cinema screen, and on it she saw Genghis Khan and Erast Petrovich, the geisha Izumi and the Japanese assassins, pale images of the past and the blackness of the future.
During the second night of the month of October the regular ‘screening’ concluded in a sudden shock.
As usual, she was running through the events of the day and the course of today’s rehearsal. She counted the number of days since she had seen Fandorin (an entire fifteen!) and sighed. Then she smiled, recalling the latest scandal in the theatre company. Someone had played the hooligan again and written an idiotic entry in the ‘Tablets’: ‘SEVEN 1S UNTIL THE BENEFIT PERFORMANCE’. No one knew when it had appeared – they hadn’t looked into the log for a long time, since there were no performances. But then some ‘phenomenal aphorism’ had occurred to Stern and he opened the book – and there were the scribbles in indelible pencil on the page for 2 October. The director threw a hysterical fit. His target was the venerable Vasilisa Prokofievna, who had only just recalled what magnificent benefit performances she used to have in the old days: with silver trays, and grandiloquent addresses, and box-office takings of thousands. Only Noah Noaevich could possibly have imagined Reginina secretly slavering over the indelible pencil and vandalising the sacred book with those crooked letters. How amusingly he had pounced on her! And how thunderously she had expressed her outrage! ‘Don’t you dare to insult me with your suspicions! I’ll never set foot in this den of iniquity again!’
Suddenly two immense black legs appeared, aimlessly swinging to and fro, on the ‘ceiling screen’ that Eliza was watching. She squealed and jerked upright on the bed. It was a moment before she thought of looking in the direction of the window. And when she did look, her fear turned to fury.
The legs were not chimerical, but perfectly genuine, in cavalry boots and jodhpurs. They were descending slowly, with a sword scabbard beating against them; then came a hitched-up hussar’s jacket and finally Cornet Limbach in toto, lowering himself down on a rope. He hadn’t shown up for two weeks after the previous incident – no doubt he had been sitting in the guardhouse. But now here he was back again, out of the blue.
This time the brat had prepared more thoroughly for his invasion. Standing on the windowsill, he took out a screwdriver or some other tool (Eliza couldn’t see it very well) and started fiddling with the window frame. The closed catch grated quietly and started turning.
This was just the last straw!
Jumping up off the bed, Eliza repeated the same trick as the last time: she pushed opened the window flaps. But this time the result was different. While he was twisting his screwdriver or whatever it was that he had, Limbach must have loosened his grip on the rope, or perhaps he had let go of it completely. In any case, he cried out pitifully at the sudden blow, turned a somersault in mid-air and went flying downwards.
Transfixed with horror, Eliza leaned out over the windowsill, expecting to see a motionless body on the pavement (after all, it was a high first floor, a good fifteen feet), but the cornet proved as agile as a cat and landed on all fours. Spotting the empress of his heart leaning out of the window, he pressed his hands imploringly to his breast.
‘To fall to my death at your feet is happiness!’ he shouted out in a ringing voice.
Eliza laughed despite herself and closed the window.
However, things could not go on like this. She would have to swap rooms with someone after all. But with whom?
It could be with Comedina. The ‘leading boy’ was always given the worst accommodation. And if Limbach climbed in the window again, Zoya, tiny little thing that she was, would still be able to see him off. If she wanted to, of course, Eliza thought slyly. And if she didn’t want to, then two birds would be killed with one stone: Zoya would have her amusement, and the little officer would leave Eliza alone.