The Coronation

20 May

He died in front of my very eyes, this strange and disagreeable gentleman.

It all happened so quickly, so very quickly.

The very instant the shots roared out, he was flung back against the cable.

He dropped his little revolver, clutched at the shaky handrail and froze on the spot, with his head thrown back. I caught a momentary glimpse of a white face, bisected by a black strip of moustache, before it disappeared behind the black mantle.

‘Erast Petrovich!’ I shouted, calling him by his given name and patronymic for the first time.

Or did I only mean to shout?

The precarious decking swayed beneath his feet. His head suddenly bobbed forward as if from a powerful jolt, his body began slumping, chest forward, over the cable, then swung round grotesquely – and the next instant it was already hurtling down, down, down.

The precious casket fell from my hands, struck a rock and split open. There was a flash of blinding sparks from the multicoloured facets of the diamonds, sapphires and emeralds, but I did not even glance at these incalculable riches as they scattered into the grass.

From the ravine there came the soft crunch of an impact, and I gasped. The black bundle went tumbling down the steep slope, gathering speed along the way and only ceasing its nauseous whirling motion at the very edge of the stream. It dropped one lifeless hand into the water and lay there, face down in the gravel.

I had not liked this man. Perhaps I had even hated him. In any case, I had wanted him to disappear from our lives once and for all. But I had not wished for his death.

His trade was risk, he toyed with danger constantly, but somehow I had never thought he could be killed. He had seemed immortal to me.

I do not know how long I stood there like that, gazing stiffly down. It cannot have been very long. But time seemed to rupture, to split apart, and I fell into the rent – back into the old, serene life that had ended abruptly exactly two weeks earlier.

Yes, that was a Monday too, the sixth of May.