by A J Allen
Although it was not yet two o’clock in the afternoon, Ovseenko was already three quarters drunk and his wife had to hurriedly rouse him from his stupor, one moment scolding him in loud whispers for bringing disgrace to their household, the next plaintively offering their guest a glass of tea. Brushing her offer aside, the doctor waited with ill-concealed impatience while his host struggled to his feet and came forward to greet him. As soon as he was certain that the man could stand unaided, the doctor led him into his back yard where he hoped that the chill air might restore the craftsman to a state of partial, if resentful, sobriety.
Once outside, Dr. Tortsov wasted no time with the usual polite formalities.
“Ovseenko, has the Mayor placed an order for several sleighs with you?”
“Who wants to know?” slurred Ovseenko.
“Just answer me. Yes or no?”
“He may have,” replied the carpenter, swaying slightly. “What is it to you?”
“How many?”
Ovseenko opened his mouth to reply than shut it again. His thick lips twisted into a crafty smile.
“Are you trying to get me into trouble, Doctor? I’m not supposed to tell anybody about this.”
Gripping his arm, Dr. Tortsov began to shake it roughly.
“Just tell me how many. It’s very important.”
“Here, let go!” cried Ovseenko in alarm, trying to pull his arm away.
The two men struggled for an instant, then the carpenter stumbled and fell back against the wall of his house. Still holding him, the doctor came closer until his face was only a few inches from Ovseenko’s.
“How many, Ovseenko?” he repeated menacingly.
“Twelve!” shouted Ovseenko. “All right? Now get off of me!”
The two men separated, breathing heavily.
“Show me them,” demanded the doctor.
Grumbling, Ovseenko led the way round to his workshop. Unlocking two large doors, he pulled them wide open. Pushing past him, Dr. Tortsov saw that two completed sleighs had already been hoisted to the ceiling, to make extra room on the workshop floor. The running boards and seats of a third were lying untidily in a corner. He heard Ovseenko hurriedly closing the doors behind him.
“It’s supposed to be a secret,” he was complaining. “Nobody else is meant to know. The Mayor told me himself.”
“Yes,” said Dr. Tortsov flatly.
“How did you find out, then?” asked Ovseenko suspiciously. “Have you been spying on me?”
“Don’t be so absurd.”
“Only, the Mayor said that if anybody asked any questions about them,” Ovseenko went on, “I was to tell him and he would get old Izorov to sort them out.”
Turning round to face him, the doctor gave him a long, cool look.
“Colonel Izorov knows about this? Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure,” replied Ovseenko with more confidence. “It stands to reason, considering what they are for.”
Dr. Tortsov took a step towards the carpenter, who began backing away uncertainly.
“And what exactly are they for?”
“Now, now, Doctor! Don’t start all that again.”
Seeing the doctor take another step towards him, Ovseenko raised his fists in warning. Thrusting his own hands deep into the pockets of his overcoat, the doctor looked resignedly down at the floor.
“All right, Ovseenko,” he replied. “Have it your own way. I only hope you live long enough to spend the money. Assuming, that is, the Mayor will ever get round to paying you.”
With a sad shake of his head, he turned to go, but the carpenter quickly barred his way.
“What are you talking about?” he demanded. “Are you threatening me again?”
Dr. Tortsov regarded him sadly.
“No, Irkaly Gregorivich,” he replied. “You are threatening yourself, and perhaps every man, woman and child in this town. Just as surely as if you were holding a pistol to their heads.”
“What are you talking about? Tell me!” slurred Ovseenko.
“Do you remember the last serious outbreak of the typhus four years ago? When I had to declare the town in quarantine?”
“Yes. It was awful. So what?”
“Well, it’s beginning again.”
There was no urgency in the doctor’s voice, just a weary sense of defeat that immediately convinced the carpenter that he was telling him the truth. Dropping his fists, he swore softly to himself.
“For most of last week,” Dr. Tortsov informed him, “I have done little else but tour the villages, seeing what can be done to stop a new outbreak. But it’s got out of hand already. I’m afraid that I may have to seal the town off again.”
“Holy Father!” breathed Ovseenko, crossing himself.
“Do you remember how bad it was for business, Irkaly? Quarantine was an unpopular but necessary precaution, but we were all in it together. Do you remember the Mayor saying that?”
“Yeah, I remember,” confirmed Ovseenko. “What is going on?”
“Well, perhaps this time they have decided to forestall my decision,” suggested the doctor. “I am only guessing, of course, but is seems to me that the Mayor is planning a fleet of sleighs to guarantee that at least some people can avoid the risk of danger.”
“Who?” asked the carpenter.
“Who do you think? It won’t be you or me. The town council with their families and friends, I expect.”
“But if what you say is true, Doctor,” objected Ovseenko, “they are going to need a damned sight more than twelve sleighs, aren’t they?”
“Oh yes,” Dr. Tortsov agreed grimly. “That is why they have ordered another ten sleighs off Gleb Pirogov and who knows how many from Averbuch.”
“You’re joking!”
“Go and see for yourself!” the doctor urged him. “I was at Pirogov’s shop not more than three hours ago and it was packed to the roof with timber, just like yours. And for exactly the same purpose.”
“And all bought from Kavelin, I’ll bet,” said Ovseenko sourly. “Why, the swines! The money they are paying us is going straight back into their own pockets.”
The doctor stared sourly up at the pair of sleighs that hung in the shadows above their heads.
“Isn’t that always the way?” he murmured.
Following his gaze, the carpenter swore again.
“Honestly, Doctor,” he insisted. “I didn’t know anything about this at all. His Excellency told me that they were to bring a party of politicians up here on a tour of the province. Really important people, he said. Maybe even the Governor General himself.”
“The Governor General? Here? In February?” retorted the doctor scornfully. “Did he really say that?”
“Well, I don’t know now…” Ovseenko admitted. “You’ve got me all confused. Maybe he didn’t actually mention the Governor by name, but he definitely said that they were very important people. Real barines, you know? That’s what all the secrecy is about.”
“And he said that Colonel Izorov knew all about this?”
“Definitely,” replied Ovseenko with an emphatic nod. “But what shall I do now? If I don’t finish the job, I’ll be ruined. They’ll never give me any more work.”
“Ovseenko, you must do what you think is right. But let me tell you this. From what I have seen of this epidemic, if ever it reaches Berezovo, the consequences will be too horrible to imagine. I’ve been in villages where more than three fifths of the population are either dead or dying. Think of it, no organisation and three fifths of the town dead.”
Walking to the door, he opened it, letting the cold air cool his heated brow.
“Now I am going to visit Isaac Averbuch,” he announced. “And, if my theory is correct, he too will be busy building sleighs. Only they won’t be sleighs, but death carts.”
With these terrible parting words, Dr. Tortsov left the carpenter staring wretchedly at the piles of sawn timber that surrounded him and struck off in the direction of the Jewish Quarte
r.
Tramping over the hard packed snow, he turned over in his mind what he had learnt from his visit. It seemed incredible to him that Kostya Izorov would condone a scheme that could only lead to panic and mayhem. Far more likely that Pobednyev had used the colonel’s name to frighten the man into silence. That was a dangerous game, but then the Mayor was playing for high stakes. The minute he posted the quarantine notice, the price of all goods in the shops would soar and there would be the constant threat of disorder and lawlessness. Ovseenko had been right about one thing: ten sleighs were not enough to carry away all the wealthier families and their possessions. Even twenty-two sleighs would hardly be sufficient to reach destinations such as Tiumen and Tobolsk that lay over a fortnight’s travel away.
Smiling grimly to himself, the doctor wondered whether the Mayor had considered where they were to sleep en route, if all the villages had become infected. It was possible that Pobednyev was counting on the isolation of the settlements to the east to provide them with safe shelter. Certainly ponies would be useless in such terrain, which was why the Mayor had commissioned the heavier type of sleighs pulled by reindeer.
If escape was what the Mayor and his cronies on the town council were planning, then perhaps he should let him proceed and good riddance to bad rubbish. It would serve them all right if they froze to death on the snowfields or were murdered by the Yakuts. He slowed his place, in two minds as to whether his call on Averbuch was now necessary. It was unlikely that Pobednyev would give town council money to a Jew. But although he felt confident now that his deductions were correct, he decided to press on in the fervent hope that Pirogov had been misinformed and that Averbuch was not also building sleighs.
Averbuch had an order for eighteen deer sleighs. The Jew listened politely to the doctor’s impassioned arguments then shrugged his shoulders. Business was business. He had his whole family to think of first, before he considered what the good doctor called the ‘wider implications’. Besides, where was the proof that the doctor’s fears were justified? As far as he was concerned the touring sleighs were just what they appeared to be. Of course, the good doctor was right: to risk bringing disorder into the town was foolhardy. But what could he do? He had no control over the Mayor. If he did not supply what His Excellency wanted, someone else would. The doctor should go to his town council if he had a complaint. If he had grounds, Krasinsky would be happy to support him. He still had the piece of paper bearing the Mayor’s signature that gave the specifications for the job: an echt contract. He hoped the doctor understood that it was not that he did not trust the gentlemen on the town council; it was just that it was best to take certain precautions when dealing with them.
When the pointlessness of continuing their conversation had become clear to both of them, Dr. Tortsov allowed himself to be conducted to the door. As they stood on the threshold of the carpenter’s shop, he asked Averbuch whether he also was unable to supply the four trick chairs he needed for the performance of The Bear. Staring gloomily out at the passersby – the lanes of the Quarter were busy in odd contrast to the deserted Sabbath streets of the northern side of town – the doctor heard Averbuch chuckle.
“Now that is what I call unreasonable. You expect a good joiner to make furniture that collapses in front of the whole town! Do you want to ruin him?”
“No, you don’t understand. They are meant to collapse. It’s a coup de theatre.”
“How would I ever sell another chair when people think that every time they sat on it they are going to land on their tochis?” retorted Averbuch happily. “Good luck to you, Doctor.”
With a muttered farewell, Doctor Tortsov set off on the long journey home, inwardly cursing Averbuch.
It doesn’t do to lose your temper with these people, he reminded himself. Letting them see you were beaten only makes their victory sweeter.
He now regretted wasting so much time with the carpenter; he should have known that he would not get any satisfaction from the rascal. As he passed them by, he noticed people conversing in shop doorways stop talking and nudge each other. He quickened his pace. It was getting late and the narrow lanes and alley ways of the Quarter were no place for a professional man to be after nightfall. Looking up at the darkening skyline above the ill-kempt rooftops, he began to wish that he had brought a stout stick.
Chapter Fourteen
1902
London
For the first six weeks, Trotsky spent his time shuttling between the communal rooms he shared with Vera Zasulich and Jules Martov in Sidmouth Street and Nicolai Lenin and Nadezhda Krupskaya’s living quarters at Holford Square; two households both alike in dinginess, but differing greatly in temperament and purpose.
Vera and Jules preferred the bohemian life, full of midnight visitors and diversions. For weeks their rooms would remain unswept, littered with piles of dirty laundry and overflowing ashtrays. In the midst of this confusion, and miraculously to Trotsky’s mind, they were still able to produce articles for Iskra and other publications: Jules dashing off fluently brilliant critiques of the latest developments in Russia while Vera, as she admitted, agonised over every paragraph she wrote. Not for them the hours toiling over tables of statistics; they preferred the clash and clamour of ideas and were regular habitués of the scruffy public houses where gathered London’s small colony of Russian exiles of all political hues. In comparison, life at Holford Square was orderly and uneventful to the point of monotony. On most mornings, Nicolai would pick up his battered briefcase full of manuscript paper and walk to the Reading Room of the British Museum, where he would use the extensive reference library to research his latest work. Returning to their rooms, he would eat the frugal meal that Nadezhda had prepared for him; after which, leaving his wife to clear away the dishes, he would read the deciphered messages she had received that day in preparation for the next Iskra editorial conference.
At first Trotsky thought that the difference between the two households lay only in their daily routines, which he characterised as order versus chaos. He knew which was the more conducive to his ambition of becoming a regular contributor to the paper. After a month of late nights, hurried deadlines and the continuing squalor of their rooms, he envied the order and discipline of Holford Square and had often to lock his door to stem the stream of interruptions from Jules, Vera and their visitors before he could settle down to write. Yet he saw little point in living like a monk and willingly joined in the pair’s nocturnal forays, hurrying after them as they walked briskly from one meeting place to another through the unfamiliar maze of narrow streets and alleys.
As the weeks passed and his surroundings became less alien, he began to detect that deeper fissures separated the two camps. Of these, the most obvious was that Vera came from an older and more distant generation than Nicolai and Jules. More significantly, Nicolai and Jules acted. They initiated policy discussions and strived to chart the party’s course. Vera and the older editors, on the other hand, seemed only capable of reacting to events as they arose. And there was something else, something in Vera that separated her from the other editors. A homesickness; a nostalgia for the sights, smells and sounds of the land she had been forced to flee more than twenty years before.
As a Russian socialist heroine, her credentials were faultless. Trotsky had read and re-read the correspondence she had conducted with Karl Marx. Not only had she written regularly to the Great Prophet, she had even argued with him! He was mistaken, she had written, to assume that the Russian situation was a ‘special case’; that it could not develop into a socialist state as would the other, more industrialised nations of Europe. Neither of them had given way. Refusing to hand them over to Edouard Bernstein, who had been named as Marx’s literary executor, and whom she did not trust, Vera had kept the letters partly because of their historical importance and partly, she had told him with a sad smile and a shrug, for sentimental reasons.
And there it was, as the English say, ‘in a nutshell’. Vera Zasulich was a sentimental social
ist, and Nicolai Lenin and Jules Martov were revolutionary socialists. If Nadezhda Krupskaya was the Keeper of the Codes then, in his mind’s eye, Vera Zasulich had become the Keeper of the Scrapbook, hoarding anecdotes, memoirs and ephemera relating to the Movement’s history over the past three decades. She was the archivist par excellence and like all archivists she was rooted in the past. The Party’s future lay in the hands of the younger men like Jules and Nicolai.
Between Jules and Nicolai, Trotsky sensed there lay another, more significant chasm. In hindsight he realised that this was the difference that would later come to tear the Party asunder but at this point, as a new spectator witnessing the evolving conflict of personality traits and policy differences between the two men, he could not yet define its nature. The one thing he knew instinctively was that Jules Martov was invariably kind to people, and Nicolai Lenin was only kind when he felt it would benefit his position. As Trotsky was later to admit to himself, lying in the hospital bed in Berezovo, it was possible to like Jules but not to admire him, and to admire Nicolai but not to like him.
Of the two, Trotsky recognised, Nicolai had proved the more influential; especially on his own writing style. Under Nicolai’s mentorship he had turned out article after article for Iskra without rejection. This was not to say his first drafts were accepted uncritically. Nicolai did not hesitate to point out those passages where his analysis was woolly or his style too florid, and to let him know that Georgi Plekhanov, the editor in chief, shared his opinion. By adopting a more disciplined prose style (although still too flamboyant for Nicolai’s taste), he had become a better writer and had seen his contributions gradually gain a prominence on Iskra’s pages second only to Nicolai’s dry theoretical expositions and Martov’s biting political commentaries.
Yet, despite the help that Nicolai had generously provided, the charge of unkindness stuck. Trotsky had witnessed Nicolai’s caustic wit on more than one occasion, and knew well he used rudeness and sarcasm to demean those comrades who disagreed with him. In the same situation Jules would smile and shake his head, acknowledging that it was inevitable in a democratic party that friends would hold different opinions. But not Nicolai Lenin.
