As once before, my insomnia drove me out of my bed. I pulled on a sweatshirt and blue jeans and stepped out into the misty air and all at once it thickened and I was all alone in the swirl, as if the universe had vanished and there was only me. Then from far away I heard a sound, which was repeated, growing louder with each repetition. It was the sound of a man caught up in a wretched misery, sobbing uncontrollably. A cry to touch the heart.
I approached on tiptoe, my curiosity struggling against my more civilized instinct to give the weeping man his privacy. Not trusting the mist to conceal me, I did my best to lurk in the shrubbery, feeling a little ashamed (but only, I have to say, a little) of the victory of my voyeuristic desires. Finally I saw him, and was, I confess, astonished to recognize the night’s star player, around whom everything had revolved, the bridegroom himself, kneeling on the damp grass in expensive pajamas and beating his breast with his fists, ululating like a professional mourner at a funeral. What could have driven him out here in the small hours, abandoning his marital bed to howl at the vanishing moon? I crept as close as I dared and heard, or so I believe, these words: “Forgive me! I killed you both.”
Let me say now that I am not a believer in the claims of the mystically or supernaturally inclined. I have no time for heaven, hell, limbo, or any other posthumous vacation destinations. I do not believe that I will be reincarnated, neither as a dung beetle nor as George Clooney or his successor in cuteness. In spite of the enthusiasms of Joyce, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, I turn my back on metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls. The Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives was probably my favorite movie that year but I do not believe that Uncle Boonmee, or I, had any previous tours of duty here on Earth. I am uninterested in demon seeds; Damien, Carrie, Rosemary’s Baby, you can keep right on sitting there on the pulp fiction shelf. I have no time for angels or devils or creatures from blue lagoons. All of which is why I am at a loss to explain what I saw that night, and why I try to tell myself that it was a hallucination caused by taking too heavy a dose of Ambien (which had failed to knock me out) and then wandering woozily into the fog: some sort of waking nightmare. But the figure of the penitent Nero was real enough, and what I saw, what I know I saw, what I think I know I saw even though my rational mind rejects the idea, was the fog around him gathering, like some kind of ectoplasm, into two human shapes, the shapes of women, standing in front of the kneeling man to hear his bitter regret. The shapes did not speak, nor did they fully achieve solid form, remaining blurred and indistinct, but the thought came into my head, as clearly as if someone had said the words aloud, that these were the two mothers of his sons, the wife who died at the Taj and the poor abandoned woman who gave up her child and who, according to Mrs. Golden, had died a lonely anonymous death in one of the places where the destitute go to die.
Forgive me. I killed you both. How should such a plea, made on a man’s wedding night, be understood? As his expression of his guilt at finding new happiness while the unhappy dead lay at his feet? Or as his discovery that the haunting past had a far stronger hold on his emotions than the shallow, if young and beautiful, present? And where, right now, was the new Mrs. Golden, and what was her opinion of her husband blubbering to ghosts in the garden? An unpropitious beginning, it had to be said. I stepped away into the fog and made my way back to my bed, where, strange to say, I immediately fell asleep and slept the sleep of the just.
The next morning Vasilisa announced the next phase of her scheme to cleanse and renew the house from top to bottom, out with the old!, in with the new! New lamps for old! And he, the old man, acquiesced. But hers was no mere act of interior redecoration. “In Russia,” she said, “we are not so stupid as to think that demons do not exist.” This, while I was listening (I was by then a frequent and welcome visitor). “Excuse me, René, I understand that you are a skeptic, but reality is not a matter of choice. It does not care about your opinion on the matter. The world is as it has always been. Go to Orthodox church in Russia and you see the people brought by their families with the Devil sitting in their eyes, persons filled with hatred, also profane individuals, obscene individuals, individuals with much coldness of heart. Then, it starts. First the priest comes with the holy water and throws it and he is reciting also the passages from Holy Gospels in which Jesus, he drives the demons out, and my God, they come out, man’s voice comes out of woman, there is shaking of the body and hissing and shrieks of revenge against the priest, and the holy water burns them, you see, and many persons sound like animal, like cow, like bear, like pig. There is vomiting and falling down. It is terrible but good. In this house it is different. Maybe it is not persons who are possessed but the house itself. You have brought the evil with you from the old country and now it is in the walls, the rugs, in the dark corners and the toilets also. There are phantoms residing here, maybe these ones of yours, maybe also older things, who must be driven out. If you want to watch when priest comes, I will permit, I know you are a creative young man in search of materials, but stand there near Holy Mary and speak when it begins only the words of the Jesus prayer. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner. Doesn’t matter if you don’t believe but just say this and the words will keep you safe from harm.”
Newly installed in pride of place in the spacious first-floor “great room” of the Golden house, her face kissed by a strengthening wind blowing in through the French windows opening onto the Gardens, a wind moist with the promise of rain: an immaculate early copy of the Feodorovskaya icon of the Mother of God, the original of which hung at the Alexander Palace in the small chapel on the left side of the bedroom of the last Romanov Tsarina, Alexandra, who would pray to the Virgin for hours every day. This was surprising. The sons of Nero Golden made no secret of their lack of religious belief and although I had not heard him speak on the subject I had assumed that their father felt the same way, and was indeed the fountainhead, so to speak, of their shoulder-shrugging irreligion. Yet this sacred image was Nero’s wedding gift to his young wife, and now, without argument, he stood beside her before the Mother of God with clasped hands and bowed head and indicated that it was time for the exorcism to commence, and all three of the younger Goldens had been marshaled by him and were present and serious-faced, as instructed. And here right on cue was the Russian Orthodox priest, a beard in a tent, beginning to chant and to toss holy water over us all, and just at that moment Hurricane Irene showed up, the sky blackened, the heavens opened, and blazing lightning filled the room. The priest cried out in Russian and Vasilisa translated his words.