Читать книгу Kaleidoscope. English edition - Irina Bjørnø - Страница 4

The Сountess was old and sick. She was overweight, her feet were swollen from gout, and the blood was circulating in her massive body with various drugs, which she was taken from morning till night, and a ‘angina pectoris’ was the precise title of her heart failure, because when she breathed, she did it heavily and noisily as a fat pimply toad seemed to live in it.

She was dying. She was in her late eighties, and she had lived a long life, where she played the role of the Countess every day, and she played this role great. She had fused with this role so much that she started to believe in all the true and invented stories from the life of the countess, which she often was happy to tell to others. In those moments when the audience became still and opened their mouth in surprise, she really enjoyed her life of a real Russian countess.

And now the Countess was sitting on her old, leaky and faded chair with a portrait of her great-grandfather behind her as she assured them all – the Count and the hero of Russian-Turkish war, with fluffy sideburns and horse-faced. She did not want to die.

There was her mother’s gold necklace with five small Faberge eggs on her neck studded with varicoloured stones, which she did not leave day or night.

She wore the ring called “gold baptistery” on the little finger of her left hand, but a huge, Siberian blue diamond with a unique Russian diamond cut – was not there any more: it might have fallen in the hospital, where she spent more and more time, or it was stolen as she was lying unconscious after her next blood transfusion.

But these things, as well as a small brooch with a double-headed royal eagle with big diamonds, which travelled from one blouse to the other, were part of her role of the Countess, and she would never sell them, under no circumstances. She wouldn’t feel herself the Countess without them.

She lived in a small apartment with three small rooms and paid for it from her

little pension. The apartment was in an old house with no lift on the third

floor, and now for half a year the Countess did not go out, because she could not climb the steep steps up: swollen legs did not keep her heavy body properly any more.

But the prospect of moving to a nursing home for the old was impossible for her. Only in this apartment, stuffed with old Russian paintings, water-colours belonged to sister’s of murdered last Russian Tzar, a portrait of her mother in a ball gown from 1904 and furniture from the study cabinet of Alexander the Third, she felt herself the Countess.

She hadn’t got any children. She met her second husband, a former White officer in Paris, where he had whiled away the life as a taxi driver, so she hadn’t got money for servants, and other Countess’s fun at home.

She loved her phone, especially when it called, and at that moments she seems to came to real life of Countess, when each time she screamed into the phone, not allowing the caller to say a word, “Kisya are you coming to me?”. She named “Kissya’ (or “Pussy cat” in Russian) referring to anybody. She had no more memory for names, except those that she needed for her stories, and the others, she needed in her troubled life of old lady, recorded them carefully in her notebook, which was always next to her chair.

So, she invited persistently all the listeners of her stories and those who might render small, but necessary for her life daily services as cleaning, washing up or buying something eatable. If a man called, then, irrespective of age, she called him “such a little nasty chap” and used to say always the same:" I know you and your dirty thoughts! You want to go to bed with me – but I do not love you.” She didn’t probably love anyone but herself and her role as a real Russian Countess, who lived in exile.

She was born in a foreign country – not in Russia, and the first time came to Russia in the eighties – at the end of Brezhnev’s Empire of the developed socialism. She hated the communists, because she believed that they were guilty for everything that had happened in distant October of the seventeenth 1917.

The Countess’s mother, lady-in-waiting of the old Russian Empress, blowing from Russia and her place in the aristocratic society by revolution strong wind, left Russia together with the mother of murdered last Russian Tzar, with one of her Cossack and her dear spouse. She was pregnant with our Countess at that distant and shaking time. They had taken out of Russia some of the royal furniture, pictures and, of course, compact and smart diamonds which they had sewn in all bras of their dresses.

The Countess’s mother delivered her daughter in a foreign land, and the desperate mother of the last Russian Tzar became her godmother and in heritage her a large Faberge egg with the gold wagon inside and studded with a lot of Siberian blue diamonds.

This egg was now standing on the table of our Countess, and it had been there for more than eighty years of her long life, but the countess did not dare to take it to the antique specialists, because she was afraid that a somebody could replace the diamonds with glass beads, and she couldn’t distinguish real diamonds from fake ones.

Her mother did not learn the language of the country that had given shelter to her and her husband, so they spoke Russian at home. It was a beautiful old language of Pushkin’s time with rich French expressions inside. So the Russian language of the First World War had stuck in that aristocratic family, which was fighting for their survival in new to them, wet and not too friendly Scandinavian country.

The Countess’s mother was busy with Russian church, which became the center of the Russian emigration at that time, and her father earned his living as a sale consultant in a large international company. He learned a new language quickly and even enjoyed this working life, which was new for him.

The little countess finished best private school and got married a German baron, who didn’t have any money, but title. Then the Second World War broke out, and her Baron as good German went to Hitler’s troops, and she lost her job as laboratory assistant at local hospital because of her German name and her husband’s nazi sympathy.

After her mother and father passed away, she continued doing her mother’s job in the Russian church, where they opened a hospital for Russian soldiers. Her faith in God was undoubted, and she was involved in organisation of everything connected with the church, including the financial part. It gave her some money for existence and possibilities to play the role of the real Russian Countess. She had often appeared on local radio and sent the articles about the history of Russian church – of source old Russian church – and her personal stories of Russian Countess living in exile to woman’s magazines. These old magazines with her interviews and yellowed faded pages from past time, were gathering now dust on her coffee table, waiting for the new visitors, who came round to see her less and less.

She kept her personal stories for them, which she polished to perfection over many years of practice, repeating them again and again. She liked the story of the ladder, which is hold by the angels, and the souls of the dead climbing up on it to the sky, most of all. She used to tell this story a lot, as an example of Russian faith in God. Now, when she became old and was sick, she would not want to accept that it was her time to climb the ladder, wreathed with flowers and supported by angels, preferring to take medicine and suffer, but to be there on the Earth and play the role of the real Russian Countess.

Who knows what will happen to her, in the heavens and what role she would have to play in the company of God? The role of the Earth’s Russian Countess had made her happy, and she did not want to part with it.

The Countess closed her eyes, with clumsy made every morning makeup done with her shaking hand, and her sick body fell asleep. But even in her sleep she dreamed of admiration, diamonds, and herself, young and beautiful, who was endlessly dancing at the court ball. That was just a dream.

The Countess deceived herself all her life, couldn’t see what was going on, either in this small Scandinavian country or in remote and incomprehensible to her Russia, lulling herself and the others with fairytales about tzars, princes and countesses. That was her role in the life. And she was playing this role, which she had got by chance, until her last breath.

That day, she fell asleep in her old faded royal chair forever, having played the role until the very end of play, the role of last real Russian Countess.

Dedicated to my close friend Countess Tatiana Sergeyevna Ladyzhenskaya.