A few days before the premiere Noah Noaevich called Fandorin in for an urgent consultation. He wanted to know whether the author would object to the main accent of the ending being shifted slightly – from the text to a visual effect. Since in the final scene the heroine was sitting in front of an open jewellery casket, ‘the prop had to be put to work’, for in the theatre there should not be any guns that did not fire. And so Nonarikin had come up with an interesting idea. He spent a long time fiddling about with wires and hanging suspended from the ceiling in a cradle, tinkering with the casket before eventually presenting the fruits of his engineering concept to the director. Stern was ecstatic – the invention was exactly to his taste.
After the phrase with which the author concluded his play, a miracle would occur: two comets consisting of little light bulbs would suddenly blaze up above the hall. Throwing her head back and raising her right hand, to which the attention of the audience would be riveted, with her left hand the heroine would imperceptibly press a little button – and everyone would gasp.
Georges demonstrated his invention. The work had been carried out impeccably, and in the front of the casket, where the audience could not see it, the master craftsman had mounted an electrical panel that showed the time: hours, minutes and even seconds.
‘I was taught that on an electrical combat-engineering course,’ he said proudly. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’
‘But what is the clock in the casket for?’ Eliza asked.
‘Not what is it for, but who is it for. It’s for you, my dear,’ Noah Noaevich told her. ‘So that you won’t drag out the pause. That’s a little fault that you do have. Watch the seconds, don’t get carried away. An excellent idea. Georges! It would be good to have a blinking clock, a big one, to hang above the stage on the inside. For the actors. We have too many ladies and gentlemen who like to hog the limelight.’
His assistant was nonplussed.
‘Oh no, that’s not what I did it for… I thought that afterwards, when the play’s taken out of the repertoire, Eliza could keep the casket – as a souvenir. A clock is a useful thing… There’s a little wheel here at the side, you can turn it if the clock’s running too slow or too fast. There are lots of wires inside it now, but later on I’ll disconnect them all, and the casket can be used for various cosmetics and such… And it runs off an ordinary electrical adaptor.’
Eliza smiled tenderly at Nonarikin, who was blushing.
‘Thank you, Georges. That’s very sweet of you.’ She looked at Fandorin. ‘You won’t object if the performance ends with a light show, will you? Mr Nonarikin has made such an effort.’
‘Whatever you wish. It’s all the s-same to me.’
Erast Petrovich turned his eyes away. Why was she looking at him imploringly? Surely not because of this little trinket? It must be the usual actress’s affectation – if you have to make a request, then do it with a tear in your eye. And all she wanted to do was encourage the zeal of yet another admirer. After all, she had to be loved by everyone around her – including even ‘all the horses, cats and dogs’.
As far as the finale was concerned, that really was all the same to him. He would have been glad not to come to the premiere – and not at all because of author’s nerves. Erast Petrovich was still hoping that the show would be a resounding flop. If the audience felt even a hundredth part of the revulsion that this sloppy romantic melodrama now inspired in the dramatist, then the result was not in any doubt.
Alas, alas.
The premiere of Two Comets, which took place exactly a month after the company was first acquainted with the play, was a resounding triumph.
The audience ecstatically drank in the exoticism of the karyukai or ‘world of flowers and willow trees’, the Japanese name for the chimerical kingdom of tea houses where unbelievably elegant geishas indulge their demanding clients with ephemeral, recherché, incorporeal pleasures. The stage sets were miraculously good, the actors performed splendidly, transforming themselves into puppets and then back into living people. The mysterious chiming of a gong and the honeyed recitation by the Storyteller alternately lulled and galvanised the audience. Eliza was dazzling – there was no other word for it. Under cover of darkness, from his position as one of a thousand spectators, Fandorin could watch her unhindered and he relished the forbidden fruit to the full. A strange feeling! She had nothing to do with him, but at the same time she spoke in his words and obeyed his will – after all, he was the author of this play!
Altairsky-Lointaine was given a magnificent reception and after every scene in which she appeared there were cries of ‘Bravo, Eliza!’ However, the completely unknown actor playing the part of the fateful killer enjoyed even greater success. In the programme it simply said ‘The Inaudible One: Mr Swardilin’ – that was how Masa had translated his Japanese name, Shibata, which consisted of the hieroglyphs for ‘meadow’ and ‘field’. His somersaulting and pirouetting (performed in a very mediocre fashion in Erast Petrovich’s biased view) sent a theatrical public not pampered by acrobatic tumbling into raptures. And when, as the plot required, the ninja pulled off his mask and turned out to be a genuine Japanese, the auditorium erupted into shouts of acclaim. No one had been expecting that. Caught in the beam of the spotlight, Masa glowed and shimmered like a golden Buddha.
The audience was also astounded by Nonarikin’s electrotechnical invention. When the lights went out and the two comets blazed into life high above their heads, a sigh ran through the auditorium. The stalls were a solid expanse of white faces raised to the ceiling, which was quite an effect in itself.
‘Brilliant! Stern has outdone himself!’ said the influential reviewers in the director’s box, where Fandorin was sitting. ‘Where did he get this miraculous Oriental? And who is this “E.F.” who wrote the play? He must be Japanese. Or American. Our playwrights don’t know how to do this sort of thing. Stern is deliberately concealing the name, so the other theatres won’t poach the author. And what about that love scene? Bordering on the scandalous, but so powerful!’
Erast Petrovich had not seen the love scene. He lowered his eyes and waited until the audience stopped gasping and gulping. The repulsive sounds could be heard quite clearly in the shocked silence that filled the hall.
The curtain calls went on for absolutely ages. Some people in the hall tried calling out ‘Author! Author!’ – but rather uncertainly: no one knew for certain whether the author was even in the theatre. It had been agreed with Stern that Erast Petrovich would not be invited up onto the stage. The audience clamoured briefly and stopped. They had quite enough people to celebrate and shower with flowers without the dramatist.
Erast Petrovich looked through his opera glasses at Eliza’s face, glowing with happiness. Ah, if only just once in his life she would look at him with that expression, nothing else would matter… Masa bowed ceremoniously from the waist and immediately started blowing kisses to the audience like a regular leading man.
But that was not the end of Fandorin’s trials. He still had to survive the backstage banquet – it was absolutely impossible not to go.
A RUINED BANQUET
Erast Petrovich spent a long time smoking in the foyer after the public had gone home and the bustle in the cloakroom had faded away. Eventually he heaved a sigh and went up to the actors’ floor.
First Erast Petrovich walked along the dark corridor onto which the doors of the actors’ dressing rooms opened. He suddenly felt an irresistible urge to glance into the room where Eliza prepared for her entrances, transforming herself from a real, live woman into a role: sitting in front of a mirror and exchanging one existence for another, like a kitsuné. Perhaps the appearance of the space that she used for these metamorphoses would somehow help him to understand her mystery?