The Amber Rooms

by Ian Hocking

  Pasha placed the pocket watch in the pocket of his pyjama top. ‘I wish you still worked for us.’

  ‘So do I.’

  He cleared his throat. ‘Ms Tucholsky, there are some things that a man must do even though they are difficult. Sometimes they are futile. I am not a man yet.’

  ‘Pasha—’

  ‘Wait. Yesterday, I would have died a man. I knew that the horse guard wanted to kill you, and I placed myself between his sabre and your—’ He flicked away a run of sweat from his forehead. ‘Yourself.’ He sniffed in that noble manner again. ‘One may earn the right to be called a man if one acts as a man.’

  ‘We have a similar expression where I come from. “Stupid is as stupid does.”’

  ‘Alexander Pope?’

  ‘Forrest Gump.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Saskia leaned forward. She was still smiling. ‘Give me your hand.’

  ‘Ms Tucholsky …’

  She could feel the heat from his body. His hand was clammy. She guided it towards her body. ‘Here.’

  In a disappointed voice, Pasha said, ‘It’s a bottle.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He paused, then repeated, ‘It’s a bottle.’

  ‘Are you taking any medication prescribed by a doctor?’

  ‘Some teas. Nothing else.’

  ‘Then I want you to take one of these tablets each day. Never, ever take more than one. They’ll take about a week to become fully effective. Stop taking them if you feel overly dizzy, if your eyes feel as if they’re moving randomly, or if you get excessively clumsy.’

  ‘What happens if I take more than one?’

  ‘You’ll die. It’s a poison; but some poisons can help in non-fatal doses. Your seizures should stop. Hide the bottle where nobody can find it. There is a scientist at the Military Medical Academy with a great knowledge of physiology and medicine. He’s called Pavlov. If you need to see him, tell him that Penelope sent you.’

  Saskia lay across the bed, parallel to the foot rest, and put one arm beneath her head.

  ‘And now my last gift. What time is your viva voce at the Lyceum?’

  ‘Ten o’clock.’

  ‘You have six hours. Plenty of time.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Tell me how you will impress your interviewers.’

  ‘Well,’ Pasha said. ‘I will demonstrate my knowledge of mathematics. Euclid, and so on. That is the basis of my proposed study.’

  ‘Have you heard of the St Petersburg Paradox? It might serve as an interesting case of the failure of rationality in the light of mathematics.’

  ‘Ms Tucholsky, before we begin, I must finish my earlier thought. A man must speak his desires if he is to, so to speak, hold them.’

  ‘Put it away, junior.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘There are times when a man must accept the discrepancy between his wish and his reality. This is one of those times.’ She closed her eyes. ‘Now, imagine a roulette wheel. If you put your money on red and the wheel returns black, what would happen if you doubled your bet and placed it once more on red? Eventually, you are guaranteed to win at least the amount you put on red. Understand? This is the reason casinos have a maximum bet.’

  ‘I’m sleepy.’

  ‘We call the range of winnings the possible gain. Repeat that, please.’

  ‘I’m going to call for help.’

  Saskia gripped his foot through the blanket. ‘They would never reach you in time.’

  Pasha laughed. ‘The range of winnings is called the possible gain. But what does “paradox” mean?’

  ‘Парадокс. An entity whose components make sense individually but not as a whole.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Kamo had been installed in the public viewing room of the Police Department on the Fontanka. It was a plain wooden hall with leather-backed doors at both ends. Kamo was standing on a chair in the centre. His feet were chained and his hands cuffed behind his back. Around him, a line of building superintendents, and their assistants, and the otherwise curious, passed by in a spiralling queue. Their expressions were by turns curious or indifferent. He might have been the Tsar in state. As one of them lingered, Kamo stamped his foot, and hissed, ‘There you are! Did you get the consignment of illegal pamphlets I sent? Come, don’t be shy!’

  That gawker hurried on.

  Outside, the sound of church bells carried through the traffic.

  This abstract present carried wearisome generalities. Even the pain was boring. Kamo longed for the particular feel of forest earth beneath his felt boots.

  ~

  In his memory, it is October, 1905. The weather is unseasonably cold. Tiflis could be warm in autumn, even sultry. The cold snap is a topic of conversation second only to the revolution.

  Kamo is walking past the railway station in Tiflis. A crowd of workers stand near a derailed locomotive. The huge, metal eyelid of its smokebox is open. The workers look sorry.

  Kamo, not stopping, glances into the smokebox. His thoughts have turned to his greater challenge. It has been decided by Lenin, Leonid Krassin, and Soso that Kamo should form a band of expropriators to secure funds for weaponry. Many agents in this fighting unit, or Outfit, will comprise individuals selected for their revolutionary attributes, which Kamo has interpreted as “attractiveness”. They will use their feminine characteristics to infiltrate those circles in which the transfer of State monies is discussed. They will romance State Bank and Treasury employees. Kamo will gather information about the movement of these funds and then take steps to expropriate them. Thus the money for the greater revolution will be deducted from the Tsar’s ration. Nobody in the Party believes the current troubles trigger the inevitable, beautiful revolution. That must wait. These ructions are the clearing of a throat. The money must see the Bolsheviks through coming days when the State will reassert itself.

  Kamo smiles. He takes a pistol from his belt and fires it into the smokebox. The sound is futuristic and dreadful. It might be the cry of a mechanical man. One of the workers makes the sign of the cross. Kamo laughs and hurries on to the north-east of the city, where he is due to interrogate the traitor Saakashvili.

  A boy runs up to Kamo. He is berry-brown, almost feral, and has a purposeful look in his eye. It is not unusual for Soso to use such boys as messengers. Kamo crouches. His skirted chokha fans out on the packed earth. In the distance, glass breaks.

  ‘What is your name, brother?’ he asks the boy.

  ‘You must help her.’

  Kamo cocks his head. The boy has not given him a code phrase. ‘Who?’

  ‘The lady from the forest. She gave me food.’

  Kamo stands and walks on.

  ‘Dmitri!’ calls the boy, jogging alongside him. ‘I am Dmitri!’

  ‘How old are you, Dmitri?’ asks Kamo. The question is automatic. Kamo has no interest.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Go home to your mother.’

  ‘The Tsar has her! Twenty men came out of the trees.’

  Kamo turns his head to the boy, but does not stop. They pass a burning police wagon.

  ‘Who? Your mother?’

  Dmitri, who is perhaps ten years old, but looks eight, reaches for the nearest of the two pistols that Kamo wears in his belt. Kamo claps his hand over the boy’s. They stop in the street.

  The two stare at one another. Kamo is impressed by the fierceness he sees.

  ‘And how do we know she is not yet dead?’

  ‘She killed four of them. I saw it. She learned boxing from a Chinaman. It’s all true.’

  The boy squints towards the smoke that covers the sun. It is cold. The great snows have not yet come, but they will come soon, and they will fill the cracks in the earth, bury the broken wood, and slow the quickening of the revolution.

  ~

  While he was being presented to the building superintendents, Kamo occupied himself with thoughts of Saskia. He wanted to kill her. It had been a mistake to attac
k the boy. Her maternal instincts had been piqued by the gesture, and doubled her strength.

  He smiled at an unpleasant-looking man, and screamed, ‘Watch the birdie!’

  An urchin followed the man. Kamo felt his fear as though it were an aroma. ‘Down with the Tsar!’ Kamo shouted. If his arms had not been tied, he would have twiddled his moustache. ‘Come on, boys, be wolves, not sheep. Let us murder these cowardly instruments of oppression and take flight. Let the revolution be bloody!’

  There was a Security Section case officer in the corner. He was overweight. Kamo had remarked upon this. The officer was sitting at a temporary desk that reminded Kamo of those used in school. The officer had been reading a novel. At Kamo’s outburst, he closed it.

  ‘Sergeant,’ he said, ‘let’s take a rest from the identification.’

  One gendarme ushered away the superintendents who had viewed Kamo. Another halted the line of newcomers at the door. Soon, Kamo was alone with the officer and four gendarmes. This was a different audience entirely. Kamo was still calculating how best to annoy them when two of the gendarmes helped him down from his chair and invited him to sit. As he did so, they pulled off his socks.

  The case officer looked at him. ‘Why the performance? It will come to nothing when you are recognised.’

  ‘My own mother wouldn’t recognise me. At least, not as well as yours would. What a night that was!’

  One gendarme offered his truncheon to Kamo’s mouth. Kamo grinned and bit. Then his legs were raised and a second truncheon was whipped across the soles of his feet. His neck twisted and his head snapped back and he gasped. The image of the unlit ceiling lamp fluttered with his eyelids. His tears mixed with his snot, and he wondered if there was some poetry in the strange contrast between this quiet office and the chatter, the telephone buzzers and the tapped typewriters that carried through the cracks in the old walls of this old police station. He fainted.

  ~

  The Turtle Lake wet a thin slice of the northern slope of Mtatsminda. It was shallow enough to have frozen already. The surrounding woods were colourless with snow. Kamo and the boy found the woman hanging in a tree close to the shore. The boy cried out at the sight. Kamo assessed her death: arms tied back; hatless; unusually good boots. He removed his rifle, which hung across his back, and cocked it. He looked into the trees for the telltale clouds of exhalation.

  The boy should not have cried out.

  But there was no sign of movement in the trees. They were alone.

  He looked at the snow beneath the hanged woman, and saw the traces of her executioners: cigarettes; matches; piss. The tracks led south.

  He watched the boy tug at the rope where it had been made fast to an exposed root. Kamo saw something to admire in the ferocity and the desperation. Though the woman was dead, Kamo took a dagger from his belt and passed it to the boy, blade first.

  The boy sawed at the rope. He used both hands and all his strength. The rope thrummed.

  Kamo turned in a slow circle. He held his rifle in a casual grip. He took a bullet from the lapel of his chokha and pushed it into the corner of his mouth like a cigar.

  He did not see the woman fall. The sound was muffled by the deeper snow close to the trunk of the tree. He turned to see her roll lifelessly through the powder until she was face down.

  ‘Does her heart beat?’ he asked. ‘Quickly, now.’

  The boy pushed onto her back. He put his cheek to her chest for a few seconds. When he looked at Kamo, there were no tears. He shook his head.

  Brave lad, Kamo thought. Maybe I can use him.

  ‘Say a prayer for her, if you wish. We will bury her. Then, Dmitri, I will take you to my sisters. They will help you.’

  ‘I want her to take care of me,’ said Dmitri. His tears were coming now. ‘Not your poxy sisters.’

  Kamo sighed. ‘A poet wrote, “Know for certain that once / struck down to the ground, an oppressed man strives again to reach the pure mountain when exalted by hope”. If you don’t understand now, you will soon enough.’

  The boy said nothing. They both looked at the woman. Her face was fat and red with death. The rope around her neck was thick, like a fur collar. Her death would have been prolonged. There had been no first drop to her execution. They had hauled her up like a black flag.

  ~

  The gendarmes inserted a needle beneath the nail of his big toe. That woke him. They were experts, after all. These gendarmes, careful as nurses, put his socks back on and helped him stand on the chair. The case officer asked for the door to be opened once more. The superintendents filed in. Kamo watched them sleepily.

  ‘Remember,’ called the officer, ‘if you recognise him, there is no need to tell us this instant. Have no fear. Begin.’

  Kamo barked. ‘I will dance for a penny, gentleman. Only a penny!’

  He danced, though the flesh of his feet was crushed and lumpy. The gendarmes steadied him and the case officer, shaking his head, returned to his book.

  ~

  Kamo turned towards the south, where the trees were thickest. He saw a sleek movement flicker between two trunks. It appeared again further up the slope. Kamo did not need another glance to tell him that this was a lynx. Unusual to see one so close to the city. Unusual to see one break cover.

  Slowly, Kamo worked the bullet from one side of his mouth to another.

  ‘Dmitri, do you remember the boat shed to the east of the lake?’

  ‘Why?’

  Kamo gave him a serious look. To his credit, the boy straightened his back. ‘I remember,’ he said. ‘The bicycle is there.’

  ‘It’s yours.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘When I tell you, run as fast as you can across the lake. Keep to the edges. Don’t cross the middle. Run to the shed, get on the bicycle and ride back to the city. Go to the church of the Metekh near the old Royal Palace and ask for Papa Chiladze.’

  ‘But the bicycle is too big for me.’

  Kamo smiled. His heart slowed as it always did on the cusp of a fight. The worst angels of his nature quietened and the dragging, sapping burden of his anxiety lightened. He looked at the sunlight on the mountain behind them and understood the privilege of the moment.

  He tried to think through the nature of this trap. If a Tsarist group had hanged the woman and let the boy escape to return with help, how could they be sure that their net would snare revolutionaries? And why rig the trap so clumsily that their haul was so meagre? Kamo was, perhaps, a prize, but the Tsarists had no way of knowing that.

  How important was this woman, whom he had never seen before? Why did the Tsarists believe her peril would draw out revolutionaries, and in number?

  He put a second bullet in his mouth.

  ‘Dmitri, you run now.’

  They called from the trees, a dozen men or more, ‘In the name of the Tsar!’ and fell upon them both.

  ~

  Kamo counted six hours before they let him step down from the chair. By that time, his legs were bloated. He could not unlock his knees. His bladder was a tight, painful ball. The gendarmes helped him down through the building in a reinforced lift that—Kamo noted, one eye open—was unlocked by a key carried by each of them.

  His cell was a concrete cubicle no wider than a horse trough. Its floor sloped towards a drain with a fist-sized hole that had no echo and stank of the worst human smells. Eight feet above him, an electric light flickered. Its mesh was bunged with dead flies. Kamo smiled. He’d seen worse.

  They had taken his clothes. He moved to the rear of the cell and lay on his back. His feet, which he did not bother to inspect, throbbed somewhat less now, but the pain was growing. Even his cheeks ached where he had lost some of his beard to the thorough inspection of the sergeant, looking for razors or files or keys. He raised his legs so that they rested against the wall.

  Kamo, inverted, sang a Siberian fishing shanty in a strong Armenian accent. That would confuse them. And, at last, he held his penis and let the urine
out, steering it towards the drain. It was the colour of rosé. This did not worry him. The police in Georgia had played the same trick on his feet years before, and the blood was a temporary symptom. He sung the chorus of the shanty even more lustily.

  Having relieved himself, he paused his singing for the answer of fellow revolutionaries. None came. Perhaps he had the wing to himself.

  He acquiesced to sleep and the last of the shanty became a quiet slur. He did not relive the story of his defeat in his dreams, but parts of the episode flickered through him, as though on the pages of that book the case officer had been reading: Saskia, that spider, wearing that battle frown of hers; the boy with his fists raised like a proper gentleman; the smartly-dressed old man who had died with such surprise. Such surprise! Asleep, Kamo licked his lips. His hands twitched. Another image: the door to the Amber Room, opening.

  The Amber Room.

  An uncle in Alexandrapol had once shown him an amber pendant. When rubbed with a cloth, the amber could lift chicken feathers.

  His hands twitched again, as though scratching.

  ~

  Kamo had targeted one man and shot him. He picked his next man, who was loping through the high snow. Before Kamo could shoot, hot sparks struck his face. He growled and dropped to his knees. He loosed his next bullet blind. Seconds; seconds, he knew, until the group could close the distance and shoot him point-blank.

  He needed to find cover. Still blinded, he scrambled towards the hanging tree but pellets struck him in the thigh and buttock. He tumbled forward, rolled twice, and lay in the snow with a foamy blood on his lips.

  Distantly, a man shouted, ‘For the Tsar!’

  Kamo brought his hand to his face. It had been pierced by wood splinters from a ricochet. He scraped them out, rubbed the blood from his eyes, and blinked at the empty sky and the branches that veined through it. He focused first on the birds that had taken flight from the gunfire. Then he saw something he could not understand.

  It was a figure leaping with the ease of an acrobat through the trees. The figure crouched and launched upward again and again, using the bounce of the living wood, keeping to the hardier branches near the trunk, passing needle-like through the fir much as the lynx had passed through the forest less than five minutes before.