The Dark Clouds Shining

by David Downing

  The fashions hadn’t changed. The women were still dressed in the full-length skirts fashionable at the time of the revolution; those men not in uniform were attired in either worn-looking suits or the traditional Russian summer wear of linen blouse, loose trousers, and high, soft boots.

  Halfway down the avenue, he noticed an open basement café. On the counter several loaves and a large slab of evil-looking lard provided the choice of fare; a price list was propped up beside the bubbling samovar. McColl helped himself to the bread, took a strong-looking brew from the woman serving, and handed her the requisite number of kopeks. She gathered them up in her apron and flicked a few beads across the abacus.

  He found a poorly lit corner seat, wolfed down the bread, and sipped at the scalding tea. The only other customer was an elderly man busy chewing sunflower seeds. After shelling each one in his mouth, he used his tongue to maneuver the husks onto his lower lip, where they sat in a quivering line.

  McColl tore his gaze from the spectacle and went through his options again. He had originally planned to spend at least one night in Petrograd, thinking it better to arrive in Moscow with some idea of Russian conditions. But that was too risky now—the Chekist he’d inadvertently thrown from the train was akin to a spluttering fuse. He had to keep moving.

  First he needed to change his clothes. A description of his current attire would no doubt soon be circulating, and in any case his travel permit was for a metallurgist.

  He gulped down the last of his tea, got up, and left the café. Farther down the avenue he came across a street leading off to the left, and then an alley that ran behind a row of disused stables. A door sagging off its hinges offered a way into one of them, which looked like it hadn’t been used for months. Sunbeams were lancing through gaps in the walls, and putting an eye to one crack McColl found himself watching a group of boys being drilled by a broad-chested sailor. Their formation was somewhat ragged, but everyone looked very earnest and determined to get it right.

  McColl took off the blouse and leather breeches, put on a threadbare suit, and rethreaded the belt that contained his emergency supply of silver coins. A few minutes later he was back on the avenue, breeches and blouse packed away in the suitcase, a metallurgist en route to a conference in the capital.

  Reaching Nevsky Prospect, he skirted Vosstaniya Square and entered the ornate grandeur of the old Nikolayev Station. In the concourse a horde of people were milling to and fro, many of them in uniform, and around the walls a regiment of peasants sat or lay with their belongings, watching the activity with the familiar air of blank detachment. The heat was oppressive, the smell of human sweat heavy on the air.

  McColl joined the scrum in the ticket hall and watched the line of harassed clerks as they examined credentials and issued tickets and permits. As far as he could see, the permits looked identical in style to his own. When his turn came, he stepped forward, resisting a ludicrous desire to turn and run, and passed across permit and papers. Without even a cursory look, the clerk used one finger to type out a ticket on an old American machine.

  “When’s the next train?” McColl asked.

  The clerk’s expression suggested he might as well have asked for a fortune-telling. “Perhaps today,” the clerk said shortly. “Next.”

  McColl took a long look at the concourse, and tried to decide what to do. There were plenty of Chekists in evidence, and joining the waiting throng seemed like asking for trouble, but he couldn’t just come back later if he had no idea when to come. He would have to trust his papers and try to be invisible. Over there, he thought, spying a corner that already seemed crowded, in the shadow of the eastern wall.

  It was a long day, and McColl moved with the shadow as it circled the concourse, until darkness finally fell. Two trains were announced one after the other soon after ten, but the first didn’t leave until just before midnight, a serpentine, twenty-one carriage monster hauled by three huge locomotives. Each coach was packed to the ceiling, making movement to a probably mythical restaurant car impossible, the transfer of bread from pocket to mouth merely difficult. Once on its way the train stopped with depressing frequency, though no one ever seemed to get off, and only the most determined had a ghost’s chance of getting on. There was much drunken singing and much vociferous debate, mostly about politics. Sleep, McColl decided, would not be possible.

  He was woken by a hand shaking his shoulder and immediately feared the worst. Then he saw the other hand, holding in front of his eyes a card that identified the bearer as a member of the Young Communist League. Both the eyes and the card belonged to a boy of around eleven. It was Fedya, he thought for a second. Fedya returned in a dream.

  “For the famine victims, citizen,” the boy said, gesturing toward the collection box that his companion, a girl of about the same age, was holding out.

  McColl groped for some coins and dropped them into the box. The girl smiled at him, lighting large dark eyes in a pale, emaciated face. As the two children clambered their way out of the compartment, McColl noticed that both had bare feet.

  “Rossiya,” he murmured to himself. Russia. A time and place like no other, as someone had told him three years before. Through the window the trunks of the silver birches glowed in the morning twilight.

  Yuri Komarov always walked to the office, even though it was more than three miles from his room. Other men of similar rank—not that there were many—often used the official cars, but Komarov had never felt comfortable with privilege. He knew such self-denial made others feel guilty and himself unpopular, but people’s approval had never been high on his list of priorities.

  He walked down Bolshaya Lubyanka, past the criminal investigation office where he’d worked during the hectic weeks of the revolution, past the headquarters of the statewide Vecheka where its Chairman Felix Dzerzhinsky was probably still agonizing over some trivial problem that he should have left to a subordinate, and turned in through the doors of number 14. This impressive building, once home to Moscow’s governor and later used as offices by the Moscow Fire Insurance Company, now housed the headquarters of the M-Cheka. Dzerzhinsky was nominally in charge of this department as well, but left its running to Komarov.

  After passing through the large anteroom, he walked down a corridor, through another large office, and up a short flight of steps to his own smaller sanctum. A window looked out across the inner courtyard, where several prisoners were being given their morning exercise. The room itself conveyed an impression of bareness, despite containing four chairs, a desk, and two tall filing cabinets. The white-painted walls were yellow and peeling.

  Komarov hung his jacket on the back of his chair, sat down, and rolled up his shirt sleeves. His beautifully carved wooden in-tray—left behind by its previous owners, the czar’s secret police—was only half-full. He leafed through its contents: letters from relatives pleading for clemency, the latest reports on the currency-trading ring, amended schedules for supervising the movement of the International delegates.

  Things were getting better, he thought; six months ago the paper pile had reached toward the ceiling. He opened a drawer and checked his agenda. The meeting to discuss the abolition of the death penalty had been scheduled for the next Thursday. It was partly a sop to the foreign comrades now swarming around Moscow, but also more than that. Many in the Chekas—like himself, like Vecheka boss Felix Dzerzhinsky—had seen enough killing to last them several lifetimes.

  The weather helped, he thought, standing by the window and admiring the clarity of the blue sky. Hope was harder to come by in winter.

  A soft rap on the door, and his assistant came in with a glass of tea.

  “Thank you, Sasha,” Komarov said as the young Lett set the glass on his desk.

  The telephone rang. Picking up the earpiece, Komarov heard a crackling noise, as if someone were crumbling toast at the other end of the line.

  “Yuri Vladimirovich,” a famil
iar voice said, cutting through.

  It was Pyotr Baranov, his counterpart in Petrograd. Not one of life’s instinctive policemen, which, given his nautical background, wasn’t a great surprise. “Yes, Pyotr Vasilyevich,” Komarov said.

  “Yuri Vladimirovich, we have two imperialist agents on the loose.”

  Only two? Komarov thought but didn’t say. If Baranov had a sense of humor, he had always hidden it well.

  “Yesterday morning they attacked two of my men. On the train from up near the Finnish border. Killed one of them, threw the other off the train. He had to walk ten miles with a broken ankle!”

  Baranov sounded more offended than distressed, so Komarov refrained from offering sympathy. “So they could be in Moscow by now?”

  “This is why I called you. Two trains left here yesterday evening. I don’t know if they’ve reached you yet.”

  “Descriptions?”

  “Both dark, average height, bearded, rough clothes.”

  “Is that all?” Komarov said, writing it down. These days half the men in Moscow looked like that.

  “My man was too busy fighting for his life to draw pictures! He didn’t get a good look at either of them.”

  “I understand . . .”

  “We are still searching for them here, but if they’re headed your way . . .”

  “Yes, thank you. If we find them, I’ll let you know.”

  “And I will do the same.”

  “Thank you, Pyotr Vasilyevich,” Komarov said, and hung up the phone. “Sasha!” he called out.

  The young man appeared in the doorway. “Yes, comrade.”

  Komarov passed him the description. “Phone this through to our office at the Petrograd station. One or both of these men may have left Petrograd yesterday evening, in which case they should be arriving today. Or have done so already.”

  Sasha disappeared.

  Komarov sat back in his chair and stared at the pattern of stains on the ceiling. Two foreign agents. Like a couple of fleas on a bear, he thought. Hardly worth the bother, even with decent descriptions. As it was . . .

  He pulled the appeals for clemency in front of him and studied the one on top of the pile. A woman in Tula explained how her son had fought in the Moscow uprising, how he . . . Komarov put the letter down. It was amazing how so many people thought their actions in 1917 granted them exemption for life. It was like claiming that being a good child gave you carte blanche as an adult.

  He saw his hand begin to flutter.

  Why did he read them?

  “Comrade,” Sasha said from the door. “Two trains arrived from Petrograd in the last hour, and the next one isn’t expected until this evening.”

  “Right. Thank you.” That was that. If the foreign agents had been aboard either train, they wouldn’t have hung around waiting for taxis. Whatever it was they’d come to do, they’d have to be caught in the act.

  Alexandra Kollontai had acquired a second room at the Hotel National since Caitlin’s last visit. Secretaries were working on either side of a round table in the old one, Kollontai dictating a letter in the new addition. The Zhenotdel director raised a hand in welcome, and then a single finger to say she’d be only a minute. Some hope, Caitlin thought, moving a pile of papers off the one available seat. She knew from long experience how elastic a Kollontai minute could be.

  This one wasn’t much more than five. “So I thought we could eat downstairs, then go for a walk,” Kollontai suggested once her typist had left. “It should be cooler by then.”

  “I’d like that,” Caitlin said. Over the last three years, she and Fanya had become quite close, but Kollontai was still the only woman in Russia with whom Caitlin felt able to share her emotional life.

  The canteen downstairs was smoky and loud, the food its usual pedestrian self. Several party leaders were tucking in to meals at the heavy oak tables—Bukharin and a group of his young disciples, Radek with one of the German comrades, Cheka boss Felix Dzerzhinsky sitting alone. Molotov even gave Caitlin a nod as she walked past his table. The presence of such men was reassuring. These days many like Sergei were eager to damn the Bolshevik elite, but living in luxury was one vice they hadn’t succumbed to. The men below them were another matter, but they could still be brought to heel provided the leaders stayed true.

  Caitlin found the looks that followed Kollontai a great deal more worrying. Three years ago these would have been mostly admiring, on occasion almost worshipful. Now they were wary, uncertain, on some faces downright hostile. These men didn’t see Kollontai’s support for the Workers’ Opposition as a valid difference of opinion; they saw it as betrayal.

  Kollontai seemed oblivious. “Let’s walk around the Kremlin,” she suggested once they had eaten.

  Outside it was still pretty hot. “How are you these days?” Kollontai asked as they walked up the slope toward Red Square. “How are you and Sergei?”

  Caitlin grimaced. “You remember your notion of ‘erotic friendship?’” she asked. “Well, we’re not having sex, and we’re not very friendly.”

  Kollontai laughed and apologized for doing so.

  “I don’t know what happened,” Caitlin said. “It seemed to work, and then it didn’t. I know he saw and did things in the Antonov rebellion that he hasn’t come to terms with—he still wakes up screaming or crying or both. I tried talking to him when he came back the first time, but it didn’t help. And then there was Kronstadt and the NEP, and that sense of betrayal that a lot of the comrades felt. And the pain and the grief all turned to anger. Like a knot in his stomach he can’t untie. He just seethes. Sometimes it makes a bizarre sort of sense, but at others it feels like he’s gone a little crazy. Not all the time—he can be his old sweet self for a while, but then he slips back. I don’t know what to do with him.”

  “Let him go?” Kollontai suggested as the two of them swerved to avoid a group of foreign comrades, most of them posing for pictures in front of St. Basil’s.

  “I sometimes think I should,” Caitlin said. “But then I feel I’d be letting him down. He’s like an angry child, and who would let one of those loose on his own?” As she’d done with her brother Colm.

  Kollontai shook her head. “You’re not his mother. And he would hate you thinking him that helpless.”

  “I know. But enough of my troubles. How are you?”

  “Physically? Better than I was a few months ago. My heart’s too weak for the life I live—that’s all there is to it—but a few weeks in bed always seems to put me right.”

  “And emotionally?”

  “Not so good. Dybenko and I—well, we’re finished and both of us know it, even though we sometimes pretend that we aren’t. We had wonderful times, and I have no regrets whatsoever. The man I truly miss is my son. Misha is still buried in his studies in Petrograd. I doubt if he even knows there is a Workers’ Opposition.”

  “So how’s your political health?” Caitlin asked pointedly.

  “I like it!” Kollontai said, clapping her hands. “The three types of health—physical, emotional, and political. You should write a pamphlet!”

  “You haven’t answered the question,” Caitlin reminded her. The river was in front of them—away to the left was the towpath where she’d told Jack about the czar’s execution. Three long years ago.

  “Probably because I don’t much like the answer,” Kollontai said, glancing up at the Kremlin wall to her right. “They see us as a direct threat,” she said. “And they should because we speak for those who they always claimed were the ones who mattered. Ours was a workers’ revolution. It only makes sense as a workers’ revolution. It can only blossom as a workers’ revolution.”

  Caitlin considered her response. “When it comes to things like this,” she said, “I trust your judgment more than I trust my own. But in this case that doesn’t mean much because I can’t seem to work out what I think.
So what I and most of the women at the office do is just get on with our work. But of course we all know that this other stuff matters because your standing in the party will influence the way the party sees the Zhenotdel.”

  “I know that,” Kollontai said. “Of course I do. And yes, my support for the Workers’ Opposition will hurt the Zhenotdel, at least in the short run. But would the Zhenotdel be better off if I resigned? If Klavia took over as director, for example? It might—I don’t think Vladimir Ilych would be so petty as to punish an organization because I once led it. Not once he’d calmed down. But—and I may be fooling myself—I don’t think my remaining leader is the biggest threat to the Zhenotdel.”

  “So what is?” Caitlin prompted when Kollontai fell silent.

  Her friend let a few more moments pass before responding. “Ever since the civil war ended, we’ve been in retreat. Oh, I know we’ve had victories—the abortion law, the apprenticeships, the unveilings the other week—but they’re all things that don’t cost money and don’t inconvenience men. In the factories and on the farms—in the real economy—the old patterns are reasserting themselves. Returning soldiers are pushing women out of jobs and wanting them back in the kitchen and bedroom. The Orgbureau is less willing to accommodate us now than it was a year ago, and it was damn near impossible to get them to do it then. Things I thought we’d settled for good, we’re having to fight for all over again. We’re regressing, in more ways than one.”

  Caitlin was slightly shocked. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you sound so . . . pessimistic.”

  “I don’t mean to. What I’m saying is—if the system isn’t working for us, then that’s what we have to change. If the party doesn’t respond to the current disillusion, if it doesn’t turn to the sort of ideas and policies that the Workers’ Opposition is espousing, then the Zhenotdel will inevitably be among the casualties. A government that needs closed doors to survive will never look kindly on an organization that delights in flinging them open.”