The church was a cave full of jewels, a treasure-trove, filled with winking diamond points of light, and the glimmer of gold, and the jewel-bright colours of the icons and the priest’s robes. It was filled with singing, too, and the sweet harmony of the massed voices was too beautiful to be melancholy: it bore the coffin forward as though to some joyful celebration. The altar was so weighted with candles it looked like a fire-ship; before it stood the priest in white and purple, and the attendants swinging the censers, filling the air with lilac clouds of incense which drifted across the golden candlelight, and wreathed the sad, dark brow of the Byzantine Christ painted on the tall panel behind.
More and more people came in, packing the crowd ever tighter. Anne thought briefly of the churches of England: the cool, elegant spaces, the careful distance maintained between the clergy and the people, and between the people themselves; the restraint, the civilised lack of emotion. Crushed between so many bodies, Anne thought of England longingly, deplored this barbarous proximity, the heat, the smells, the lights, the childish colours.
But it was a brief rebellion. The singing worked its way past her defences, unlocked her heart, set free the tears she longed to cry. The long, dark faces of the saints, transfixed in mortal agony, looked back at her from their golden frames, telling her that they understood, that they had surmounted human sorrow, that ease was possible, that wounds could be healed. The colours were not crude, but pure and beautiful and comforting; the cloudy incense blurred the edges of pain; the bright dancing flames spoke of life and hope.
The service was long, the rites complicated, the responses unknown; but as weariness increasingly blunted her sense of reality, Anne found herself yielding more and more to the dark earth-magic of the old religion. The sounds and the rhythms sank deep into her soul like water penetrating the earth, bringing things to life that had laid dormant year after dry year, making them spring up green and living. She began to murmur responses, learning them as she went, finding they fell into place as though she had known them already, long ago. Her hand of its own accord made the sign of the cross, and she felt a joy of release. She looked up at the narrow, Byzantine face of Christ, and He, too, seemed familiar. He seemed to say I know you: welcome home.
Idolatry, said a warning voice in her mind; but it was a small voice, and very far away. All that was here was love: there was nothing bad or wrong. The candle flames wavered and blurred into each other until they became one single light, a burning golden light, at the heart of which was the dark face, itself more full of light than a hundred thousand candles, than the sun itself: a darkness that was light. There is in God a deep but dazzling darkness. I understand, she thought humbly. It was a thing to be understood not with the mind, but with what was older by millennia than the mind: the first part God made – primitive, blind, dumb, but turning always, instinctively, towards the light; knowing nothing, and so knowing better.
The service was over, the rites completed. The lid was screwed down on the coffin, and the congregation streamed out into the darkness. The torches massed to make a new path, round the side of the church to the little burying plot behind, fenced for decency, shaded by tall trees invisible in the darkness. The coffin was born aloft again, floated down a stream of fire on its last journey. Now they were by the graveside, an oblong hole in the solid earth, the cast-out soil heaped beside it, horribly real. Anne saw the colours of the strata, heaped in the reverse order from Nature’s: the black topsoil, the greyish clay, and on top the yellow sandy subsoil. She saw in the fluctuating light the crumbled sides of the hole, with severed rootlets protruding. The incense clouds were dispersing from her mind. Oh don’t let the magic stop now, she prayed. I don’t want to see this.
But the grass was dew-cold under her feet, the night air drifted the smell of bodies and tar and smoke and the soured, turned earth across her senses. Sergei beside her was grey with fatigue, taking no nourishment from the rites of passage; beyond him was Irina, and as their eyes met, Anne saw her despair and pain as the numbness of shock wore off, and the reality of the graveside brought her, too, wide awake.
The clamour of the bells filled the air, almost drowning the priest’s words. The four serfs at the ropes’ ends swung the coffin over the open grave and began to lower it. It swung a little, dislodging a shower of stones and earth as it struck the side. It was all too reaclass="underline" a child’s body in the coffin, being buried deep in the cold earth. Natasha was dead. To outlive a child seemed monstrous, an affront to nature.
The ropes went slack. The coffin was at the bottom of the hole. The priest stooped and took a handful of soil, and pressed it into Irina’s hand. She looked at him, bewildered, and then at her hand, and then threw the soil into the grave with a jerky movement. It struck the coffin lid with a a sound so like a hand knocking at a closed door that Anne’s heart jumped; and at the same instant Irina cried out, and flung herself down as though she would jump into the grave. Dmitri and Sergei, to either side of her, grabbed her arms, pulled her back, and to her feet. ‘Give me my child!’ she cried out. ‘Give me back my child!’ Dmitri said something; Zena and Katya came close, murmuring; but she went on crying out her useless appeal, over and over with the monotony of madness, until the last words had been said, the gravediggers reached for their shovels, and her sisters drew her away.
The serfs worked quickly, as though in a race against time, and within minutes the coffin had disappeared, and the grave was only a hole in the ground. After the first few spadefuls, most people moved quietly away; but Anne stayed to the very end, not so much from a need to pay her respects, but from not really knowing what to do next.
The following day was worse, by far the worst day since Natasha had disappeared, for now all doubts were resolved, and there was nothing left to do. The Kiriakov men went, a little apologetically, back to their work. Irina did not emerge from her room, and Nyanka had taken charge of Sashka with such an evident need to fill her empty arms that it would have been cruel to deprive her of him, which left Anne with nothing to do but think.
It was a dry, hot day, unfeelingly bright, too hot to ride, even had she been able to bring herself to make the effort. She wandered out on to the verandah and sat in Irina’s rocking chair, and rocked herself, and thought.
All her memories of Natasha were there to hand: she remembered the moment she had first seen her, when she had run in to Anne’s room in her white nightshirt, her toffee-coloured curls disordered from sleep, her eyes bright with unspoken thoughts. Little Nemetzka, the strange one, seeing so much and saying so little! She remembered her at her lessons, so quick in some ways, so blankly withdrawn in others. She remembered the day at the fair when she had first spoken – a precious memory, mixed up with her feelings for the Count. Oh, God, what would he suffer when he heard the news? To have missed so much of his child’s life, and to have lost her at such a distance!
But why had she been lost? That had not been at all clear from Sergei’s confused narrative of the night before. He had been too exhausted, and everyone else too shocked, for a detailed exposition; and after the funeral, he had sat apart in grey silence, locked into a world of his own bitter thoughts. Anne had watched him from the corner of her eye, longing to be able to comfort him, but knowing that she could not have reached him then. He would come to her in his own time, she thought, and she would give him what comfort she could – though, God knew, that would be little enough.