Berezovo

by A J Allen

  The more the thought about it, the more he cursed himself for his stupidity. As a consequence of his own indiscretions Alexandra’s brothers, Illya and Grigory, had become a potential threat. He became convinced that his betrayal was inevitable, unless he acted swiftly. But what should he do? He could not risk promoting them within the Union in compensation for his treatment of their sister. Nothing was more easily recognised than the payments of personal debts with political plums, and they were already founder members of the Union and Grigori a cell leader. Neither could he drum them from the fledgling organisation without running the risk that they might rally the other founder members and succeed, in turn, driving him out into the political wilderness where he would be suspected by comrades and the police alike. There seemed to be no alternative but to foreswear his liaisons and hope that, in time, the brothers would forgive him. In the meantime, he would have to keep a watchful eye on both of them. He became silent in their company; so much so that they began to be concerned about his health. As fate would have it, their first betrayal had not come from Alexandra’s brothers, but indirectly from the rat Shrentzel.

  Shrentzel! The very memory of his name made him grimace. With hindsight he had realised that it had been foolish to suspect Grigory or Illya. They had spent so much time together that he could have accounted for their movements at most times of the day or night. Besides, in such young faces, the merest dissembling would have pronounced their guilt. But a little rat like Shrentzel, what was he? More importantly, who was he? Merely a courier, scuttling between one of their cells and their headquarters; and of course, the local Okhrana contact.

  How amateur it had all been! When he thought of the cells, each containing at least twenty people, he felt ashamed. They were far too large; too much like bunches of swollen ripe berries shouting out to the authorities, “Pick us! Pick us!” If he had to start all over again, he would make each cell a quarter of the size, with a maximum strength of six members. Yet, given the time, and the place, and as poor in resources as they were, the South Russia Workers Union had been the only centre of organised revolutionary activity for thousands of versts and had claimed several successes, filling factories with revolutionary propaganda and pillorying local capitalists in its broadsheets. Until then the O had stayed its hand, perhaps incredulous that this agitation had come from such a bunch of idealistic pups.

  Thinking now about the Shrentzel affair, Trotsky admitted that Nicolai had been correct: revolution followed laws of its own as much as did physics or chemistry. The organisation of illegal activities necessarily required clandestine conspiracy. Just as logically, it followed that once a conspiracy had been formed, the opposition would seek to infiltrate this conspiracy and so the problem of identification of traitors would inevitably arise.

  Once Shrentzel had been identified without doubt as being a police spy he was given only the most innocuous of material to deliver while the five leaders of the union debated what to do with him. After several unhappy and protracted discussions they had narrowed their choices down to four options. They could obtain a photograph of Shrentzel and publish it anonymously, branding him as a police spy, thus ensuring that he found no further work or support in the area. They could send him on the most important run of all, taking what he thought was secret material downriver on the night packet to Odessa, during which he would be beaten up and thrown overboard; ostensibly the hapless victim of a drunken brawl. They could use him to play a double game with the O and feed them back false information which would eventually alert the secret police that their informer had been blown. And, of course, they could put him on trial and execute him. What they could not do was to ignore the threat that he posed.

  It had become the greatest test of his leadership of the union and, like all leaders before him, he had discovered that he had to find the answer alone. For two days and nights he had turned the problem over in his mind, rejecting one solution as too ineffectual, another as too drastic. After all, they were communists, not gangsters. On the third day, he had sent messages to Ziv, Alexandra, Illya and Grigori telling them to meet at the rooms of Mukhin, an old comrade they could trust. Shrentzel would also be summoned there, under the pretext of receiving another parcel of pamphlets, and his problem resolved. More than that, he would not tell them; only to Mukhin did he reveal his true intentions.

  It had been Mukhin who had suggested that they should disguise the meeting as a party, so that if they received an unwelcome visit from the police, the tables should bear adequate witness of their peaceful intentions. Consequently wine had been purchased, cakes baked and fruit brought in from Shvigorsky’s orchard. By the time Shrentzel arrived, at about six in the evening, accompanied by the carpenter Nesterenko, there was a genuine party in progress. The alcohol had excited the anxieties of the founder members of the union, making them artificially jovial and loud. Even Alexandra was cheerful, though, like the others, she was ignorant of his plan. Although Shrentzel had undoubtedly already betrayed them, the danger posed by her brothers had still felt genuine. It was necessary that an example should be set on how he might deal with traitors in the future, and for that lesson to be learned, surprise was essential. Alexandra had to content herself with having wrung from him a promise that no blood would be spilt while they were in Mukhin’s apartment. Further than that he would not go.

  The capacity to use, and to react to, surprise is a hallmark of tactical ability. The arrival of Nesterenko accompanying Shrentzel had been a surprise, but it was easy to turn his presence to their advantage. The red-headed young carpenter had brought his balalaika and was easily persuaded to perform some of his own compositions with the unsuspecting Shrentzel joining in the chorus. Nesterenko had a good voice and for nearly an hour he had entertained them with his music. Just as he had finished his most popular song, a ballad dedicated to Marx himself (“Lo, a great Prophet comes”), Mukhin hammered for silence and demanded that Lev Davidovich now entertain them with a story. Ziv, Grigori, Illya and Alexandra had all jokingly applauded the suggestion, believing that their leader had perhaps changed his mind, unwilling to take action in such convivial company. But as soon as he had begun, it became evident that Trotsky had resolved to bring the matter to a head.

  At first, he had been deliberately vague: “Once, not very far from Nikolayev, there had been a group of socialists…” and so on. But as the theme of treachery was introduced and coincidence began to pile upon coincidence, he had watched Shrentzel’s features at first flush red then blanch as he realised that the party he had been enjoying so much had taken a sinister turn. At one point, Shrentzel tried to rise from his chair, pleading that the wine and the closeness of the room had made him feel sick, but the heavy palms of Mukhin pressed him back into his seat. As he developed his story and watched the frightened man squirm and look about him in vain for help, Trotsky discovered with a thrill that not only was he terrifying the man, but also that he was getting satisfaction from doing so.

  Forcing himself to keep his voice level, he had continued the macabre show, telling how the leader of the socialists had confronted the traitor after inviting him to a bogus party, had taken a revolver from his pocket and shot him through the mouth in order that he could not betray more comrades. In front of the horrified gaze of Ziv, Alexandra, Illya, Grigori and Nesterenko, he had suited his action to his word, reaching inside the rough working man’s jacket that he had worn throughout the party (even though Shrentzel was right, it was unbearably hot in the room) and producing a revolver. Weighing it in the palm of his hand, he regarded it thoughtfully, affecting not to notice as Shrentzel began to blubber and plead for his life; preferring instead to wait until the spy was silent before he began the next phase of his destruction.

  Breaking the revolver, so that its empty magazine was visible to his cowering victim, he began to explain what fate lay in store for those who betrayed the union. It was, he explained, merely a matter of mathematical probability. If the spy had betrayed the whole organisation, how ma
ny of them would have escaped punishment? Possibly one, maybe two; probably none. That, he reminded him, was why they had all sworn – Shrentzel included – to die if necessary in order to protect their comrades. However, because Shrentzel had not been too great an inconvenience – he had in fact helped them mislead the O. several times without suspicion – he was to be allowed a safe passage out of the town on the condition that he told them everything that he had done. To ensure that he should not make the error of mistaking magnanimity for weakness, every time he hesitated in his confession, the magazine, loaded with one round, would be spun and the gun fired into the back of his head.

  At this point Trotsky had reached into the depths of his torn coat pocket and produced the bullet which he passed it to Mukhin, along with the revolver ordering the old man to load the gun and spin the magazine. As Mukhin was doing so, Trotsky had reasoned with Shrentzel that the odds that were being offered him to survive were far more favourable than would be offered to them, or to any union agitator, in the event of their capture. He then calmly and politely asked the traitor to commence his confession.

  By this time Shrentzel was in such a state, alternately weeping and wailing, that no sense could be made of what he said. So, with a theatrical sigh of regret, Trotsky had taken the revolver back from Mukhin and without any visible hesitation, raised it to the nape of Shrentzel’s neck and pulled the trigger.

  Alas, it had been Nesterenko, regular officer in the Okhrana, who had been sent underground by Peterhof to rid the region of its nest of revolutionary pests, and not Shrentzel. Years later, during his last summer of exile together, he had told Alexandra why he had done what he had done. She had despised him for his confession in the same way she had come to despise him for so many things. How could he have been so stupid as to ever suspect her brothers of betrayal when the real traitor had been in the room all along, entertaining them with his stupid songs? Confession, he recognised, was the coward’s way out; like telling Mukhin to switch the bullet for an empty cartridge. Yet, for all that, and in just the same way, it had proved effective. It had been the last confession he had ever made to her; the last, he promised himself, that he would make to any woman, and he had made it knowing that it would drive her even further away from him.

  So much the better, he told himself now. At that point he had already decided to leave, to go west and rejoin the living world, and that she would not be coming with him.

  Marriage to Alexandra had been an economic and practical convenience to both of them, he reasoned. The two and a half years they had spent together as man and wife had served their purpose. It had certainly saved Alexandra, for without him and their daughters to live for, he doubted that she would have survived exile. And he had not been a bad husband: he had never beaten her, nor had she ever been hungrier than he had been. In fact, with his work, first as a book keeper (it had not been his fault that he had been sacked for mistaking ‘poods’ for ‘pounds’) and then as a literary critic, they had lived better than most exiles. He had not taken to drink, as some of the others had done, nor let their desperate situation drive him to thoughts of death; neither had he given up the struggle. On the contrary, it was she who had sunk into torpor, seeing his relentless persistence as another example of what she called his “arrogance”. Increasingly she had blamed him for their sufferings and the fate of her family, for Grigori, Illya and Mariya had all been arrested in the round-up of the Nikolayev cells. She could never forgive him for their sentences, no matter how much he reasoned with her. As for their daughters, it was better that the two girls grew up safe in the steadfast love of one parent than in the sullen company of two.

  The truth was, by that time he had become sick of his wife, and sick of himself for remaining with her. Sick of Alexandra’s moody silences that had once been mistaken for mysterious aloofness. Sick of her slack stretched breasts that had lost their shape after the feeding of the two children. She had let herself go; she had let the sentence of four years’ temporary exile break her spirit; that was what had been so unexpected. Certainly, they had shared some hard times at Verkholensk, but he had been able to read; brushing the cockroaches from the pages of Kapital and discovering the French authors, like Maupassant and Flaubert. Moreover, he had established himself as a published writer, and had once more attracted the attention of the party abroad. He had gone on, gone forward, had taken up the challenge; while she had just given up. He could have forgiven her sudden ageing, could even have helped her if she had let him. But to give up, just like that? He had despised her for it, all the more so because it had been she who had once appeared so strong, so certain.

  It had been from her lips, he had challenged her, that he had learned to respect the names of Plekhanov, Axelrod and Zasulich. Especially Vera Zasulich, for she was fighting two struggles: as a revolutionary and as a woman. What was the function of such heroes if not to be emulated and even to be surpassed in courageous actions? Perhaps there was even now some senior pupil at the Nikolayev Realschule who was sitting in the classroom, ostensibly paying attention to her lessons while all the time her breast burned with the fire kindled by the union’s struggle? Alexandra who had so often accused him of arrogance, was, he argued, more arrogant than he was, for her attitude was despondence in the face of defeat. Just because they had been arrested and exiled did not mean that the cause was lost, nor that the struggle was over. They had created something in the Union that should never be forgotten.

  But Alexandra would not be persuaded of that view and in the end, he had left her, hiding beneath the straw with a fellow escapee, a lady translator of Marx, for several hours as the peasant’s cart took them further and further away from their place of exile. It had been a fairly safe risk, a probability he had calculated of eight to one in favour of success.

  After Alexandra there had been no one else until he had reached Paris and, that first time, on entering the small bar off the Rue Cavertin he had only caught a few glimpses of the beautiful stranger, laughing amongst a group of students. A small band of her friends had clubbed together and made up a party to celebrate her birthday. He had arrived just as they were seeing her off and she had passed by quite near him, surrounded by the chattering crowd. One or two of the older men sitting at the small tables that lined the wall of the bar raised their glasses to her, toasting her youth and beauty, and she was gaily returning their salutes; emptying her glass of wine and handing it to one of her waiters.

  Just as she reached the door, a large bear of a man had appeared beside her and was greeted with good natured cheers by the students. Blinking, the newcomer smiled sheepishly, his bearded face blushing at the applause of the crowd. From behind his back he clumsily produced an elegantly wrapped bunch of flowers which he offered her. Delighted, she accepted them and rewarded him with a kiss, standing on tiptoe so that she might reach his cheek. This brought more cheers and laughter as the group swung out into the street, surrounding the slight figure of the girl in whose wake ambled the smitten giant.

  The passage of the young woman, from the rear part of the bar where a table stood littered with bottles to the bar’s entrance, took less than two minutes. As she was swept past, she seemed not to have noticed him, standing tired and bedraggled at the bar. And why should she have done? Wearing the same clothes in which he had travelled all the way from Zurich, clutching the battered travelling case in the bottom of which, on onion-skin paper, was typed the latest intelligence from the Swiss comrades, he looked nondescript. But his eyes had followed her, taking in the neat black dress beneath her black coat with its lapis lazuli brooch; her young aristocratic features, and her bright eyes flashing out beneath the short veil that draped from the hat adorning her simply coiffured hair. Just as she disappeared through the door, she had glanced backwards in the manner of a woman checking to see that she had left nothing behind, and catching Trotsky’s admiring gaze had smiled straight at him. He had half raised his hand in salute, but by then she had gone, leaving him foolishly waving to no one.<
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  To cover his embarrassment, he had haltingly ordered a biere and, following his memorised instructions and in an accent that made the barman wince, had asked for the whereabouts of a man called Jaques. The barman gave a brief shrug and shake of his head and had moved off to tend to other customers. As the people at the tables around him returned to their conversations he was left to sip his drink and ponder his next move.

  He was alone in a capital city, one of the imperial cornerstones of Europe with no more than a few sous in his pocket. His accent, if not his clothes, proclaimed him to be a foreigner. The evening was drawing on and it was more than possible that he had come to the wrong bar. He had no knowledge of the city, no comrades to call upon for assistance and a cache of confidential papers in his luggage.

  He was beginning to feel uneasy when a second glass appeared alongside his on the bar counter. Looking up, he saw a pale faced young man had joined him at the bar. Introducing himself as Paul – although Trotsky though that he might have misheard as the man spoke Russian tinged with a thick Polish accent – he motioned to Trotsky to drink up his biere and said quietly that he would take him to the mysterious Jaques.

  “Who was that young woman?” asked Trotsky, nodding towards the door. “The one who just left.”

  “Oh, her?” replied the Pole with a chuckle. “That was Natalya Sedova.”

  Chapter Nine

  Saturday 3rd February 1907