Mrs Midnight and Other Stories (23 page)

‘I promise you signs and wonders, Signor Asmatov,’ said the Count as they finally shook hands on the deal. ‘Signs and wonders!’

On the Monday of the following week Asmatov woke to find the little town of Petropol in something of an uproar. Deep in the previous night Petropol had been invaded and every conceivable empty space or wall, or hoarding—even the pillars of the town hall, even the trunks of the exotic palms that were such a picturesque feature of the town’s elegant sea front—had been smothered in posters advertising:
COUNT BELPHAGORE
,
and his Celebrated Company of Apocalyptic Comedians
and their astonishing new entertainment
The Philosophy of the Damned.
As he walked across the square to the theatre after breakfast Asmatov was assailed by several outraged citizens, but he noticed that they stopped short of asking him to do anything in particular to assuage their indignation. He suspected that secretly these people were quite relieved by the onslaught. The ominous quiet in which Petropol had been enveloped for some months was over. The doldrums were passed and wind was beginning to flutter in her sails.

When Asmatov entered the theatre he found it full of restless movement. Matriona stood by the bust of Melpomene. Her duster was in her hand, but she was doing nothing with it. She was watching a pair of dwarves who were engaged in a mock battle with wooden swords up and down the grand staircase. Asmatov enquired politely who they were and what they were doing. They stopped, bowed low to him and informed him that they were in Count Belphagore’s company, then they resumed their battle.

Asmatov negotiated his way past them and up the stairs. When he entered his office he found it already occupied. The room was heavy with cigar smoke and the Count was at his desk and using his telephone.

Asmatov was too astonished to be indignant. He waited some time before the Count noticed him. When he did, he merely said: ‘Do not be afraid. I am here to help you,’ and then continued with his telephone conversation. Asmatov left the office and went to the pass door which led directly back stage. He drew out the key on his key ring to unlock it, but then tried the handle. It was unlocked.

Back stage he found Sivorin beside the prompt corner scratching his head while all around him men and women from Count Belphagore’s troupe thronged, some putting up or hanging scenery, others rehearsing scenes or snatches of song, others trying on costumes or tuning musical instruments. Asmatov looked on as puzzled as Sivorin. He had seen many companies come and go in his theatre, but none so ceaselessly energetic as this, and with so little apparent purpose. He saw a drop cloth depicting a heavy cloud-strewn sky with a castle on a hill in the distance being pulled up and down, up and down several times for no ostensible reason.

A couple of young boys—or possibly young girls—in tights and spangled jackets began a tumbling act. Asmatov watched them as if hypnotised until he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Matriona.

‘Someone to see you. He waits outside the theatre.’

‘Then tell him to come in.’

‘He cannot. It is the Starets Afanasy.’

Asmatov understood. It would have not have been suitable for a Starets to set foot inside a theatre. Starets Afanasy had been for many years the Abbot of the nearby monastery of St Basil, a man renowned as a spiritual teacher and for the harshness of his ascetic practices. Recently he had resigned his position as Abbot to become a hermit and was living in a cave a mile distant from the monastery, seeing only the novice who brought him his meagre rations of bread and water. His appearance in Petropol was therefore an extraordinary event.

Asmatov left the theatre by the stage door and came round to the front where he found the Starets standing erect under a pillar of the great portico. He was attired simply in the black robes of a priest with only a crucifix for ornament. His hair and beard were grey and straggling. There was something wild about him in the eyes and—what was that scent he gave off? Asmatov noted that all men and women, whether they be drunken derelicts or holy ascetics like the Starets, who spend most of their time alone, exude this same odour, the odour not of sanctity but of isolation. When Afanasy looked at Asmatov it was with the intensely curious but alien stare of a wild animal encountered on a mountain path.

Asmatov did not quite know what to say. He thought that extreme formality was the best course:

‘To what do I owe this honour?’

The Starets was not looking at Asmatov, but he was perfectly aware of his presence. ‘I have watched over this town long enough to know when disaster is coming to it.’

‘You mean the theatre company? You wish to forbid their performance?’

The Starets smiled. ‘I can forbid nothing. I am too old.’

‘Then why have you come to me?’

‘To awaken you if you wish to be woken.’

‘Woken? To what? What is your counsel to me?’

‘The same as I give to others: to keep your mind in Hell and despair not.’

With a little inclination of the head the Starets began to walk away from Asmatov across the square. Asmatov, knowing that the man had no more to say to him, remained for a while trying to make sense of the incident. When he had failed abjectly to do so he went back inside his theatre where in the foyer he met the Count furiously puffing on a cigar.

‘Where have you been, Signor Asmatov? Who have you been talking to?’

‘Why do you wish to know?’

‘I believe I am entitled to ask this of my theatre manager.’

‘
Yours
, Count?’

‘Mine.’

‘That is not how I see it.’

‘You very soon will.’

‘Perhaps so, Count, but until such time I would be obliged if you did not use my office and my telephone without permission.’

The Count appeared to ignore Asmatov’s last remark. He dropped his half smoked cigar on the marble floor of the foyer, but no move was made to crush its glowing end with his foot; he merely left it there to smoulder. Asmatov found himself staring at the Count’s face which was tilted upwards and wore an abstracted expression. He saw the Count’s nostrils dilate as if he were scenting the breeze.

Asmatov suddenly remembered how as a child he was taken by his parents for a picnic in the woods above Petropol one summer. In the somnolent aftermath of the feast he had wandered away to explore the forest for himself. He was eight at the time, just old enough to understand the meaning of danger and the consequences of solitary pleasure. Suddenly he broke into a clearing where stood a stag in a shaft of sunlight. For a moment the two stared at one another. Asmatov remembered the inscrutable look with which the stag had gazed at him, its casual, contemptuous curiosity, before it had raised its head to scent the air, as the Count had done, stamped its foot on the forest floor and ambled away into the shade of the trees. How was it that the Count was so like and so unlike the Starets he had just spoken to?

‘I have a right to know your intentions,’ said Asmatov.

‘My intention is to astonish.’

‘With what precisely? I demand to know.’

‘It is best you should not,’ said the Count suavely, ‘I do not deny your right, but you have to remember that the greatest weapon in our armoury is surprise. Let us do our best.’

From that moment Asmatov abrogated his responsibility towards the theatre, and it would seem that his services were barely needed. The company itself had seen to the publicity; they were even happy to relieve Matriona in the ticket office.

Several times during the three days that followed Asmatov was approached by some concerned citizen of Petropol and asked about Count Belphagore’s company. Was the theatrical fare that they were offering suitable for the delicate sensibilities of the young, the elderly, the ill-educated and unsophisticated? Asmatov noticed with some amusement that each of these persons was concerned not for his or her own morals or feelings but for those of some element in the community to which the enquirer did not belong. He concluded that the chief motivation behind their expressions of concern was curiosity. This he could understand because he was himself curious and, despite his best efforts, his curiosity remained unsatisfied until the performances began. Whenever he made an attempt to slip into the auditorium to witness rehearsals he found his efforts thwarted. Someone was always on hand to draw him away with a vital request for his services in another part of the building.

One curious incident occurred on the day before the first night. When he came into the theatre that morning Asmatov was informed by an agitated dwarf, one of the Count’s company, that a pig had escaped from the theatre.

‘A pig? What pig?’ said Asmatov indignantly. Had he known that the Count had brought pigs into the theatre he might have thought fit to object strenuously.

‘A small black pig which answers to the name of Ilyich,’ said the dwarf. ‘He must be found and returned at once.’

‘Why is that, pray?’ said Asmatov with a touch of irony in his voice.

‘He is a Learned Pig,’ said the dwarf, ‘a remarkable animal. He can identify and point out letters with his trotter, even the signs of the Zodiac!’

‘And what am I supposed to do about it, sir?’

‘Institute a search immediately!’ said the dwarf.

Asmatov was taken aback by the fellow’s impertinence, and he responded coolly that he could take no responsibility for livestock which had been brought into the theatre without his authority. He then went in search of Count Belphagore who, needless to say, was nowhere to be found.

Asmatov heard much that day about the pig Ilyich. It had been seen all over Petropol: trotting along the esplanade, in the famous Botanical Gardens where it had dug up and devoured an unusually rare orchid, even in the Turkish Baths where it had caused serious annoyance to several prominent members of the Petropol Chamber of Commerce. Three times it had been waylaid by the dogs of the town, but on each occasion it had rounded on its tormentors and routed them. A Borzoi belonging to the town’s homeopathic doctor had had its ear bitten off by the savage creature.

Eventually Ilyich was lured back into the theatre by several members of Belphagore’s company and a large dish of potato peelings. These had been rather reluctantly supplied by Madame Asmatova. Potato peelings, she was informed, were the only things that would tempt the Learned Pig into any kind of subservience.

Asmatov began to wonder whether Ilyich had been deliberately let loose in the town to drum up further publicity for Count Belphagore’s company. Certainly the incident had a marked effect on the ticket office. Bookings which had been rather sluggish increased rapidly. Matriona in her office was overwhelmed with requests for the ‘best seats available’ so that by the opening performance almost every seat had been taken for all three performances by the Count’s company.

On the opening night Asmatov took his usual stand, beneath the bust of Melpomene, to welcome his audience into the theatre. Despite the gratifying numbers who passed through the doors and up the grand staircase, Asmatov did not feel, as he usually did on these occasions, the satisfaction of a genial host welcoming his guests to a party. He was distinctly apprehensive. He noted with dismay rather than delight that the good people of Petropol had put on their finest clothes to witness the Count’s extravaganza: jewels sparkled, white shirt fronts gleamed. There was a susurrus of furs as they brushed the balustrade leading up to the Grand Tier. The air of expectation was palpable, but Asmatov knew neither what the customers were expecting, nor what they were about to receive. Acquaintances would nod and smile at him when they passed him by, as if to say: ‘My dear Asmatov, I know you will not let us down.’

As Asmatov took his own seat in the company box, he was pleased to find that a little troupe of musicians were in the pit busying their way competently through a selection from Meyerbeer’s
Robert le Diable
. He had barely glanced at the programme for the opening performance of
The Philosophy of the Damned
before the lights had dimmed and the heavy red curtains embroidered with gold had lifted to reveal a brightly lit stage within the proscenium.

Asmatov had lived with the theatre a long time but he never failed to be excited by this moment. The raising of the curtain on the first act was to him like the coming of dawn to a traveller by night, an event of unblemished hope. The scene disclosed was both unexpected and reassuringly familiar. It was a conventional urban drawing room, Western European in appearance, and well decorated if not perhaps in the very latest style. Asmatov heard a murmur of satisfaction from the audience: he and they knew, or thought they knew, what they were about to enjoy: a drama or perhaps a comedy of bourgeois life, probably taken from the French. Asmatov read in his programme that we were in the apartment of Monsieur and Madame Fadinard. The play began with two bankers, Messieurs Fadinard and Fontrevault discussing arrangements for a night on the town in which they would escape their wives and resort to a house of assignation in which, they discovered to their mutual surprise, they both had a mistress. The play proceeded at first in a leisurely and genial fashion. There were little ripples of laughter which increased as the complications of the bankers’ intrigue began to escalate. Madame Fadinard appeared accompanied by her five year old daughter Francine, played, Asmatov thought, by a dwarf, but he could not be sure. There was a slightly curious incident in which Madame Fadinard’s father, a white whiskered old general in full military uniform, presented his little granddaughter with a miniature coffin in which to put her doll and she ran off in tears, but otherwise the play was proceeding very much on expected lines. A casual remark and a dropped letter arouses the suspicions of Madame Fadinard. She summons Madame Fontrevault to her aid, and by the end of the first act they are conspiring to pursue their husbands to the house of assignation. Finally Madame Fadinard says: ‘And if I find that Fadinard is up to something I’ll kill him!’ With that she pulls out a pistol from her pocket and fires it at a vase on the mantelpiece which shatters into a thousand pieces. There was a stunned silence from the audience and, with the sound of the pistol shot still ringing in their ears, the curtain fell. It was a good ten seconds before the applause began, but it was full and enthusiastic. The audience had been shocked by the gun, but they had evidently decided that they were in for an evening of uproarious comedy and had responded accordingly. Asmatov was not so sure.