Berezovo

by A J Allen

  “May I see your bedroom? It looks lovely,” she asked, gesturing towards the half open door.

  “Certainly.”

  Irena escorted her into the next room. Walking over to the dressing table, Tatyana looked longingly at the collections of small pots and bottles on its lacquered surface. Picking up a bottle of perfume, she held it up to the light.

  “This looks lovely,” she said admiringly. “What’s it called?”

  “Apres l’Ondee. It’s made by Guerlain,” said Irena. “Illya brought it back from Paris last year. Would you like to try some?”

  “Oh, yes please!”

  Reaching down, Irena opened a small drawer in the dressing table and took out a small, neatly-pressed handkerchief trimmed with pink lace. Carefully sprinkling a few drops across the linen, she passed it to Tatyana.

  Gingerly Tatyana held it to her nose and took a deep sniff.

  “Mmm… it’s lovely,” she said doubtfully. “What’s in it?”

  “The scent of orange blossom and violets with a little something extra. It’s meant to smell of a garden in spring after a shower,” explained Irena.

  “It smells of no garden I have ever been in. I don’t think my Leonid would like it.”

  “Perhaps it’s a French garden,” said Irena thoughtfully. “They are probably nicer than Russian gardens.”

  “Has Illya taken you there yet?”

  “Where? To France?”

  Tatyana nodded.

  “No, not yet, but one day I will go,” said Irena emphatically. “I know I will.”

  Yes, thought Tatyana, Paris. That is where you belong.

  Chapter Twelve

  1902

  London

  Over the next ten months Trotsky had got to know Nadezhda Krupskaya well, and in all that time he never saw her say or do anything that contradicted the first impression he had gathered of her in the kitchen of the lodgings at Holford Square.

  If Nicolai Lenin was the strategist who was trying to stamp his image on the Party or, as his critics would have it, reanimate the Party’s corpus as his own creature like the fictional Victor Frankenstein, then his wife was the personal assistant he had chosen for his experiment. It was Nadezhda who encoded the messages from Iskra, oversaw the Party’s safe houses, arranged rendezvous and arranged for fall back procedures. It was Nadezhda who instructed the couriers, dictated their signs and countersigns and furnished them with false papers, detailed maps and amounts of currency in ten European currencies. She took charge of opening up access channels across distant frontiers, arranging the movement of persons, money and information in the most advanced amateur clandestine network the continent had ever seen. When one conduit was discovered by the authorities, she was prepared for the eventuality and had another open within seventy-two hours. It seemed that whenever a cell was penetrated and exposed by the Okhrana’s agent provocateurs she was able to bypass it, deftly operating the network like some gigantic switching machine. Another pogrom at Lodz… a successful strike in Toulon… the lines are down in Moscow… the text of Kautsky’s speech the previous day at Stuttgart. At any hour of the day or night she might receive reports from one of a hundred cities in Europe and would have them decoded, collated and memorised by the next morning’s eleven o’clock board meeting.

  Above all, she was scrupulous on matters of security. The air in the small bedsitting room she shared with Nicolai shared smelled perpetually of burning papers. And although he spent days being debriefed by Nicolai on the structure, membership, development and beliefs of the now defunct South Russia Workers Union, it was to Nadezhda that he had had to account for its betrayal and collapse.

  He had grown to admire and envy her. She had found peace through order and dedication. Although her clothes were sober to the point of drabness, she was always been neat. Perhaps it was something to do with her age, he wondered, or the years with Nicolai. At the same time there was nothing about her appearance that attracted him physically. She was plain, and if truth were told, quite shapeless; unless one could call ‘dumpy’ a shape. He would to try to imagine her and Nicolai in bed together, but no mental image resolved itself in his mind. One moment he could picture them both sitting up in bed – he, in a worn flannel nightshirt buttoned up to the neck, drafting an article for the paper; she next to him, shawled, her hair still tied in a bun, peering through her spectacles at the message she was encoding. They would work in silence, broken only by an occasional tut or sigh from Nicolai as he scratched out a word or phrase, until, at a pre-arranged point, the striking of a distant church clock perhaps, they would collect up their papers and put them in a neat stack: hers on one side of the bed, his on the other. The gas light would be extinguished, then… nothing. They would immediately fall asleep, lying at attention, sacrificing valuable hours so that their physical and mental strength could be replenished. The idea of perhaps a good night kiss or even an embrace was totally alien to them, he was sure. As for making love, what an atrocious squandering of energy that would be!

  Nadezhda had given him the address of a house a few streets away and he had moved in the following day. Grumbling, his new landlord, who lived on the ground floor with his wife and three children, had escorted him up to the first floor, where Jules Martov was waiting to greet him. Happy to get back to his supper and pausing only to take a fortnight’s rent off the newcomer, the landlord had left Martov to show him around. There were five rooms, the smallest of which was vacant and was now his. Next to his bedroom was Martov’s room. Its occupant shyly held the door open for his inspection but Trotsky had only a few seconds to take in the unmade bed littered with papers and books before he heard the sound of a woman’s voice, rising in complaint, call out from the upper landing.

  “Jules? You didn’t tell me that we had a new tenant?”

  Turning in the doorway, Trotsky looked up to see a middle aged woman descending the stairs. She was dressed in a grey skirt and blouse and wore her hair long and undressed. A brown woollen jacket, showing distinct signs of wear, was carelessly draped around her shoulders. Drooping from her lip, a hand rolled cigarette rained a fine shower of ash onto the worn landing carpet as she spoke again.

  “Come into our spacious drawing room and let me have a look at you,” she demanded, adding, “Our landlord keeps this landing in perpetual darkness as a memorial to his proletarian origins.”

  Turning, she led the way to a third door which opened into a much larger room. Sparsely furnished, it contained a rickety table, one leg of which was supported by two books. Four chairs were arranged around the table upon which lay scattered piles of newspapers, bottles of ink, some empty cups and a couple of ashtrays brimming with dead cigarette butts and spent matches. In a corner stood a small black stove and, jutting out of the wall next to it, a stone sink. A single dull brass tap dripped monotonously onto a stack of unwashed plates and cups, while on the stove’s single plate, two small, battered, cheap tin saucepans, also unwashed, vied for space. Crossing the room, the woman wrestled for a moment with the sash of the window above the sink, making its panes, opaque with the dirt of years, rattle in their loose frames so that minute flakes of paint dropped onto the cutlery and crockery piled in the sink below. With a last desperate effort, she flung the window up and taking the cigarette butt from her lip, tossed it into the unseen yard below. Smiling with satisfaction, she turned back to the two men, and patted her unkempt hair in a theatrical fashion.

  “This,” she declared gazing around her, “is what we choose to call the common room, for the simple reason that it is very, very common.”

  She paused, allowing the observation to sink in and then, with a vague fluttering motion of her hands, invited him to take a place at the table.

  “Please sit down, Mr…?”

  She hesitated, deliberately waiting for him to introduce himself properly.

  “Trotsky. Leon Trotsky. And you, Madame?”

  “Me?” said the woman, gathering up the papers from the table as she spoke, “I
am Vera Ivanova Zasulich and very hungry, in that order. Jules, why is this place in such a mess? When will you men learn to tidy up?”

  “Vera,” said Martov quietly, “this is ‘Pero’.”

  She stared at Trotsky blankly.

  “You? You are Pero?”

  She seemed to find the idea absurd, for she clapped her hands together and laughed.

  “But you are so young, even younger than little Martov here. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  Her brow darkened in mock anger.

  “How dare you be so young and yet write so well? Who taught you? I have read some of your reviews and articles. They flow like a river, while I have to sweat and struggle over every word, every sentence… How dare you be so talented and still so young!”

  Warming to her, Trotsky responded with a shrug and a shy smile.

  “Jules! Run and fetch some meat from the butcher on the corner,” she commanded Martov. “Then call in at the public house for a pail of beer on the way back. You’ll find some money on my bedside table. Tonight, we shall celebrate the arrival of our comrade, the Young Eagle!”

  Snatching up the remaining papers that lay strewn over the table, she dumped them unceremoniously on one of the seats. Then, pausing only to untie a small bag of tobacco which she wore fixed to a belt around her waist, she sat down heavily and beamed across at him.

  “So, Pero,” she exclaimed, nodding him to take the other chair, “you have come at last.”

  Leaning forward, she offered him her tobacco. Taking the pouch, he began to roll a cigarette.

  “Now, tell me about Russia,” she said.

  Tired as he was, he had talked far into the early hours of the following morning, answering her questions between mouthfuls of a mutton casserole that Martov had prepared. He could tell at once that much of what he had to tell disappointed her, for she craved news of a different Russia to his; a Russia of bustling streets and rapturous theatre audiences, of music and literature and tumultuous mass meetings, and above all, of St. Petersburg. The nearest he had to offer her was his account of the Butyrka transfer prison in Moscow. But as soon as he had begun to describe the long journey that had led him from exile to London, she had visibly brightened. The name of Kler, the Iskra courier in Samara who had helped him get out of the country, meant nothing to her but the merest mention of Adler, the leader of the Austrian Social Democrats, sent her into paroxysms of delight.

  “Dear Victor! How is he? Still working too hard, I suppose? And how is Max and his beautiful wife, Katya? Oh, she is such a darling! Almost a daughter to Victor instead of a daughter-in-law. Did you meet her? Yes? She’s Russian, of course. A curious marriage when you come to think of it, Russian and Austrian. Our peoples are so different. But that means nothing to good socialists, eh, Jules? And what about Adler’s old assistant, Austerlitz? Did you meet him? My God, never have I heard a man shout so much! He has a voice that was made for a parade ground! But I am being unkind. I heard him try to whisper once. It was like a foghorn across the Neva! Old Fritz would die for Victor Adler; there is no doubt of it. But what a voice! And after Vienna? Where did you go then? Zurich? Then you must have seen Axelrod! Tell me, that butter business he runs, is it true that he is nearly bankrupt?”

  They talked until the early hours and the voice of Vera Zasulich remained with him until his head finally touched his pillow. Awaking the next morning, he considered his situation afresh. Of one thing he was certain: any residual guilt he felt about abandoning Alexandra and the children had dwindled to nothing over the miles and the weeks he had travelled. Personal ties and old private loyalties had to be put aside in favour of the greater purpose of the movement. Everyone he had met in the underground had long ago made their own sacrifice to the cause; he could no longer regard his loss as being of any more account than theirs. Besides, how else would he have got as far? Not by waiting patiently for his sentence to end in the mire of Verkholensk, that was certain.

  Look where I am now, he reasoned. Living in the very same house as two of the joint editors of Iskra, not to mention the production manager, and hailed as the Young Eagle by no less a person than Vera Zasulich.

  Sitting up in bed, he had hugged himself with pleasure. The Young Eagle! What a title! Perhaps he could suggest it as new nom-de-plume. Not that Pero (The Pen) was that bad. Certainly he had earned it. But the Young Eagle…

  A discreet tap on the door cut short his self-congratulation. The bearded and bespectacled face of Jules Martov appeared. Would he care to take lunch with Lenin, Zasulich and himself at Holford Square?

  Enthusiastically Trotsky accepted the invitation. Rising from his bed, he began to dress hurriedly. Outside, chill October winds blew down drab streets, but deep in his heart there was an inextinguishable glow that told him that it was great to be alive. He felt tremendously fortunate, almost as if he had been chosen by the Fates.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Sunday 4th February 1907

  Berezovo, Northern Siberia

  Until his visit to Pirogov’s workshop that morning, Doctor Tortsov had had every reason to believe that the day promised to be pleasant, even satisfactory. A late breakfast; church; lunch with Yeliena and young Chevanin; a rest in the afternoon (he was still feeling the fatigue from his tour of the outer villages) and then, in the evening, a gentle stroll round to the Hotel New Century for the casting session for the plays. Of these events, he was looking forward to the last with most pleasure.

  When Dresnyakov, in his capacity as chairman of the drama committee, had first tentatively raised the possibility of his directing the committee’s next production, he had hesitated. He had, as Yeliena had said, so much else to occupy his time. But lying awake that night he had turned the matter over in his mind like a dog worrying a bone; first toying with the idea, then allowing himself the luxury of devouring it. Why shouldn’t he accept the invitation? The committee would be unlikely to ask him again if he turned them down. Chevanin had shown that he had the makings of a general physician – for which he held himself principally responsible – and the young man was now competent enough to handle the ordinary cases. In addition, Dresnyakov had assured him that the committee members would give him every practical assistance, without getting in his way. In fact, it would be entirely ‘his show’.

  The following morning, he had sent Dresnyakov a note informing him that he would be prepared to accept the role of director on two conditions. Firstly, that the entertainments should be two small one-act plays, separated by a musical interlude, so that as many people as possible would be able to participate. Secondly, that they would both be comic pieces. There was to be no mention of sickness, disease or social distress. The plays were to celebrate life and dispense that most indispensable of tonics: laughter. These conditions had been accepted by the committee and, so far, all was proceeding smoothly. The scripts had arrived, the scenery had been commissioned and the barracks hall had been booked. Of the dramatis personae, one of the principal roles had already been cast and he had every reason to expect the remainder would be determined that evening.

  Such is the unstable nature of life that it abhors efforts to celebrate its virtues and finds devious ways to frustrate those who attempt to do so. First there had been the reports of the epidemic. Then there had been that sudden and unexplained setback with the date of the performance. Here no serious damage had been done. In fact, the doctor felt that this was all to his advantage, since it gave him an extra week to rehearse his actors. Now there was this matter of the Mayor’s sleighs.

  The more he thought of those sinister stacks of wood in Pirogov’s workshop, the more troubled he became. A chilling explanation for the Mayor’s commission was growing in his mind which, if his suspicions were correct, placed not just his production but the population of Berezovo at risk. On leaving Pirogov’s workshop he had been determined to call upon the Mayor at once and demand an interview, but the journey back across town had cooled him down and returned some of his rea
son to him. He needed to collect more evidence, he told himself, before he could confront the Mayor. Instead of resting, he must go out a second time to speak to the other two carpenters whose names Pirogov had given him. The necessity of this extra visit filled him with such unreasoning anger that he shook his fist at the windows of the Mayor’s large house as he drove slowly past on his way to his own, more modest dwelling in Ostermann Street.

  It is a truth universally acknowledged, and the world holds as self-evident, that medicine is an inward-looking profession obsessed with its own tribalism and convinced of its own sagacity. This latter deficiency is understandable. If patients consistently come expecting answers and invest their trust in one’s judgement, after a time even the most level-headed physician will be drawn to believe two things: that their patients know nothing and that their own judgement is infallible. Regrettably, this worldview can extend to include those closest to them.

  As he was later to admit ruefully to himself, Dr. Tortsov might have saved himself a great deal of trouble and embarrassment if he had shared his anxiety over the Mayor’s mysterious order with his wife and his assistant and sought their counsel. Instead, at that day’s luncheon he shared nothing but his ill temper, rebuking them both in turn, and Katya for good measure. Flinging his napkin down he stalked out of the dining room as soon as the meal had finished, paying little attention to his wife, who fled upstairs, and leaving Anton Ivanovich Chevanin still seated at the table staring pale-faced at his plate. It should be recorded in the doctor’s defence that almost immediately he had felt ashamed of his loss of control. As a consequence, and because he believed that little, if anything, had ever been achieved by anger alone, Dr. Tortsov chose to walk the not inconsiderable distance back to the neighbourhood that he had visited that morning and where, two streets south of Pirogov’s workshop, Ovseenko’s premises were to be found.

  * * *