‘Here, have mine,’ he said, thrusting the clean linen into her fingers, and positioning himself so as to shield her from the others while she dried her eyes. ‘What was it?’ he asked, when he judged she had recovered herself.
‘I thought of home – I was homesick,’ she said. She managed to smile, touched by his sympathy. ‘It’s all right – it’s passed now.’
‘Poor Anna,’ Sergei said tenderly. ‘I’m so used to your being here, that I forget Russia isn’t your home too.’
‘I forget it, most of the time,’ she said. ‘It’s just occasionally… Things are so very different here. And there’s so much of everything, that sometimes I feel overwhelmed.’
She saw that he didn’t understand her – and indeed, how could he? He had never been to England; and if he had, he would have felt, like the Count, confined by the smallness. Only someone born there could understand that a place might be larger on the inside than on the outside; that to be encircled by a closed horizon could give one more freedom than to stand in the middle of a vast and featureless plain.
It was a little, she thought, like the freedom of religion, the power and scope that was granted to one by virtue of belonging to God: the atheist might think he was free, but the very emptiness of his life was a prison. She thought of the Second Collect for Peace: ‘… whose service is perfect freedom’.
She could have explained those things to the Count, perhaps, but not, she felt, to Sergei. He was watching her now with his head a little cocked, alert but puzzled.
‘You were a long way away, then, thinking deep thoughts,’ he said. ‘What were they?’
‘Paradoxes,’ she said in English, not knowing the Russian word for it. He waited. ‘A thing which has two opposite qualities both at the same time.’
She hadn’t expected him to understand, but he said, ‘Yes, I know – like the White Nights, or like snow being so cold it bums, or being so comfortable in bed you ache with it!’
‘Yes!’ she laughed. ‘Just like that.’
Natasha came out from the house and headed straight for Sergei, pushing her small but solid body determinedly between him and Anne, looking up at him with gold eyes that seemed to shine in the twilight. Her soft, pale brown hair was drawn into one long plait behind, as Irina wore it. She looked very like her mother just then. Sergei caressed her head with an absent hand, and she sighed and nudged against his arm with pleasure.
He was still pursuing a thought. ‘Or like being in a church, and staring so hard at the candles on the high altar that after a while they seem to turn black. Have you ever done that? I sometimes think God must be like that,’ he added. ‘Darkness which is light.’
Anne was startled that his thoughts should have taken a similar turn to hers. ‘Henry Vaughan,’ she murmured. He made an interrogative sound. ‘An English poet,’ she explained. ‘He lived about a hundred years ago. He wrote: “There is in God – some say – a deep, but dazzling darkness.” I never fully understood it – our churches are not like yours. But now I can see how it would be…’ she mused. ‘Like staring at the sun.’
‘And then would you see God?’ Natasha asked, surprising them both, for they had almost forgotten she was there.
‘No Nashka, of course not. If you stared at the sun you would go blind. No one can see God,’ her brother explained kindly.
‘Some people do,’ she insisted; and sighed. ‘I suppose they must know where to look.’
‘We’ll all see God after we’re dead, Nashenka-maya,’ Sergei said cheerfully, ‘and that’s soon enough for me, I think. Look, here’s Zina coming out at last – that must mean the feast is ready. Let’s go and find out – I’m starved! Coming, Anna?’
‘Go on – I’ll follow,’ Anne said, amused at his abrupt descent from the supernatural to the physical plane, and watched him grab Nasha’s hand and dash off exuberantly.
Outside the ring of torchlight and firelight, it was quite dark now. A band of serfs was assembled at one end of the marked-out floor, with a fine collection of musical instruments – fiddles, balalaikas, bagpipes, fifes, a tambour, a set of bells and a kind of primitive hurdy-gurdy, which creaked and wheezed in the background, to the evident satisfaction of the sublimely deaf old greybeard who wound it.
Beef-scented smoke drifted over from time to time from the cookpit as the gentle night air changed direction. A second circle of torchlight illuminated the trestles on which the feast was assembled, where Bablash, growing ever more red-faced from a mixture of heat and alcohol, presided over the mountains of cold meats, pies, pasties, salads, cheeses, breads, cakes, creams, syllabubs, fruit and sweetmeats he had created for the delight of the Kiriakovs and their guests. Besides the whole roast ox, and one or two sucking-pigs charring in the embers, there was a huge cauldron of a local delicacy called pilaff, a mixture of rice, prawns and chicken, flavoured with a peppery sauce which could never be too spicy for the true aficionado. Urged on by Bablash, Anne tasted some cautiously, and tasted nothing else for over an hour.
To drink there was wine, of course, and home-brewed ale and cider, lemonade and raspberry juice to quench the thirst of the dancers, and a potable equivalent of the pilaff in the form of jonka, a rum punch in which it was the custom to float burning sugar lumps. Grishka could do a trick with it: tilting his cup gently and allowing the sugar to float into his mouth while still burning, he then exhaled gently, igniting the vapours and blowing out flames like a dragon in a fairy-story, to the hysterical delight of the children, who hung on his sleeve shrieking, ‘Do it again, Uncle Grishka! Again!’
Eating, drinking, dancing, conversing. The torches burned red and smoky, the cookpit spat golden sparks, the lamps on their poles were fat yellow buds on bare trees. The music sawed and thumped, the dancers whirled and sweated, and the watchers clapped their hands and cheered them on, and sang the words of favourite tunes. The children ran back and forth like maddened dogs, their shadows jumping up blackly as they crossed the light, their hands always full, their mouths stretched to accommodate cakes and laughter. And the gibbous moon rose at last, clear and lemon-pale, sailing free of the shadowy trees and casting a new and different light, silver-blue, on the dark places outside the lamp light.
Half-way through the evening, Sergei stood before Anne, looking eighteen again with his hair ruffled from his exertions.
‘We must have our dance!’ he shouted over the noise of the band. ‘I claim my dance, Anna Petrovna!’
She looked past him at the violent Cossack contortions being practised on the dancing-lawn. ‘What!’ she cried.
He laughed aloud. ‘No, no, not this! The next dance will be a country dance. When this one is ended, you will stand up with me?’
She shook her head deprecatingly. ‘You don’t want to dance with me.’
He looked surprised. ‘But it was a promise. Don’t you remember?’
‘Yes, I remember. But. I don’t hold you to it.’
‘But I want to dance with you!’ he cried, looking hurt. ‘You promised! You cannot go back on a debt of honour, you know.’
She looked past him again, and saw Zinaidia standing watching the dancers, her faint, sad smile still intact, though her lovely hair was tumbled. The neighbour’s son with whom she was in love was one of the dancers: aware of her eyes on him, he made spectacular leaps, slapping his feet behind him in midair. Her love for him just then needed no reciprocation; it was sufficient unto itself. She stood, patient under the burden of her beauty, absorbed in love, and the exquisiteness merely of breathing the same air as the beloved.