She Lover of Death: The Further Adventures of Erast Fandorin Read Free Page A

There is no road back.
    But her attempt to lift her spirits only made her feel even more timid.
    And her heart fell completely when she walked into the vestibule of the Elysium, with its bronze and crystal all aglow with electric light. Masha shamefully inscribed herself in the register as ‘Marya Mironova, company officer’s daughter’, although the plan had been to call herself by some special name: ‘Annabel Gray’ or simply ‘Columbine’.
    Never mind, she would become Columbine starting from tomorrow, when she would be transformed from a grey provincial moth to a bright-winged butterfly. At least she had taken an expensive room, with a view of the Kremlin and the river. What if a night in this gilded candy-box did cost a whole fifteen roubles! She would remember what was going to happen here for the rest of her life. And tomorrow she could find simpler lodgings. Definitely on the top floor, or even in an attic, so that no one would be shuffling their feet across the floor over her head; let there be nothing above her but the roof with cats gliding gracefully across it, and above that only the black sky and the indifferent stars.
    Having gazed her fill through the window at the Kremlin and unpacked her suitcase, Masha sat down at the table, and opened a small notebook bound in morocco leather. She thought for a while, chewing on the end of her pencil, and started writing.
Everybody keeps a diary now, everybody wants to appear more important than they really are and, even more than that, they want to overcome their own death and carry on living after it, if only in the form of a notebook bound in Moroccan leather. This alone should have deterred me from the idea of keeping a diary for, after all, I decided a long time ago, on the very first day of the new twentieth century, not to be like everyone else . And yet here I am sitting and writing. But this will not be a case of sentimental sighs with dried forget-me-nots between the pages, it will be a genuine work of art such as there has never been before in literature. I am writing a diary, not because I am afraid of death or, let us say, because I wish to be liked by strangers I do not know, who will some day read these lines. What do I want with people? I know them only too well and despise them thoroughly. And perhaps I am not even slightly afraid of death either. Why be afraid of it, when it is a natural law of existence? Everything that is born, that is, which has a beginning, will come to an end sooner or later. If I, Masha Mironova, appeared in the world twenty-one years and one month ago, then the day is bound to come when I shall leave this world, and there is nothing unusual about that. I only hope that it happens before my face is covered in wrinkles.
    She read it through, frowned and tore out the page.
    What kind of work of art was that? Too vapid, boring, run-of-the-mill. She had to learn to express her thoughts (for a start, at least on paper) elegantly, fragrantly, intoxicatingly. Her arrival in Moscow ought to be described in a quite different fashion.
    Masha thought again, this time chewing on the tail of her golden plait instead of the pencil. She leaned her head to one side like a grammar-school girl and started scribbling.
Columbine arrived in the City of Dreams on a lilac evening, on the final sigh of a long, lazy day that she had spent at the window of an express train as light as an arrow, which had rushed her past dark forests and bright lakes to her encounter with destiny. A following wind, favourable to those who slide across the silvery ice of life, had caught Columbine up and carried her on: long-awaited freedom beckoned to the frivolous seeker of adventures, rustling its lacy wings above her head.
The train delivered the blue-eyed traveller, not to pompous St Petersburg, but to sad and mysterious Moscow – the City of Dreams, resembling a queen who has been shut away in a convent to while away the years of her life, a queen whose