by Ian Hocking
Kamo blinked away the blood.
He turned to his left, where the body of the woman should have been.
There was nothing but a pit of snow.
~
Kamo was awoken by a long, icy train of water that choked him and dragged his eyelids open. Hands hooked his armpits and lifted him to his feet. Now, with his weight and the pressure of blood, his soles burned again. He grinned through his pain at the men who held his shoulders. From their countenance, he could tell that they were prepared for the bureaucracy of a prisoner who has died under interrogation.
After blindfolding him, they took him to a chamber whose earthen floor had been sprinkled with sawdust. He was dropped into a wooden chair and tied with leather straps. The seat had been polished by the cold arses of a thousand subversives, criminals, and innocents. It stank worse than the open drain in his cell.
Somebody removed the blindfold.
Dull daytime glowed on a high, dirty window. The case officer was leaning against the far wall. His head almost touched the window, and the effect was to silhouette his face. Kamo shivered on the chair. His feet were tilted to their outer edges.
The case officer pulled back his overcoat and checked his pocket watch. ‘You are being held by the Department for Protecting the Public Security and Order. You were found, disrobed and unconscious, in the Great Summer Palace of the Tsars having gained unlawful entry. You also impersonated a member of the Imperial horse guards. Would you like to tell me why?’
‘No.’
‘Mr Mirsky—’
Kamo strained at his leather straps. ‘Who told you my name?’
The case officer cocked his head, as though listening. ‘So. You wish me to think that we have guessed your name correctly. That only tells me that we haven’t. What is your name, my friend, if not Mirsky?’
‘I am the Tsar, you fool! But you may call me Nicholas—Nicholas the Last!’ Kamo laughed. ‘I demand to be returned to my estate in Poland.’ He assumed a serious expression. ‘There, I will apply myself carnally to the Tsarina.’
The case officer stared at him. He nodded to somebody behind Kamo, who walked around the chair: a short man in overalls. He did not look Kamo in the eye as he pushed Kamo’s legs apart, then tightened the straps so that they could not move.
‘The assistant will now remove your cock. It is a simple procedure, and you need not fear for your life. You just have to keep your legs crossed once the operation is complete. Is that not so, Jablonski?’
The man in overalls said nothing. But he took the bulb of Kamo’s penis between the index finger and thumb of his glove hand, nonchalant as a barber turning a chin for a close shave, and held a knife to its root.
The case officer held up his hand.
‘Only your cock will go, my friend. The rest of your equipment will function normally. Can you imagine a lifetime tormented by a growing desire but no outlet to satisfy it?’
‘No,’ said Kamo, ‘but if you are set on finding out, let us telephone your wife and ask her to describe the sensation.’
The case officer began to roll a cigarette. Midway through the procedure, he flicked his hand at the overalled man, who sheathed his knife and undid the straps around Kamo’s legs. Each leg was held until the straps were tightened once more, in case Kamo wished to kick the man in the face, which indeed he did.
‘So,’ said the case officer. ‘We have each spent many hours in such airless rooms. Let us dispense with the gambits and proceed directly to the endgame. You want, no doubt, to know whether I have the power to save you from Stolypin’s necktie. I do. I have assurance that your sentence will be considered for commutation if you supply suitable answers. You know what this means. We say to the magistrate, well, our friend is no criminal; he is a political. He wanted to avenge, say, the unlawful hanging of a dissident. Let him spend some years in Siberia, thinking hard.’
‘What kind of suitable information?’
‘I don’t care how you gained access to the Summer Palace. I don’t care where you obtained your handsome uniform. I want your identity. I want the identity of the woman who escaped, and the boy she was carrying. I want to know why you risked entry to the Summer Palace in the first place.’
Ah, Saskia, he thought. If only you had let slip the secret of that room. I would love to toss you as a scrap to these jaws.
‘You ask the earth, and I am a humble man with nothing but my beautiful smile.’
The case officer lit his cigarette, drew upon it, and expelled the smoke towards the sunlight. ‘There is such a small chance of your survival. Take it.’
Kamo said, ‘I am resigned to death, my friend. I am absolutely calm in the face of it. Already, there should be grass growing six feet high on my grave. One can’t escape death forever. One must die. But I will try my luck once more and, perhaps, one day, I’ll laugh at my enemies again.’
‘Is that your final word?’
‘You have it,’ said Kamo.
‘Then I must send you to a brutal individual. His name is Draganov and he has never failed to break a man.’
Kamo laughed. ‘Draganov!’ He strained at his straps. ‘Draganov!’ The laughter grew. Spit erupted and his throat convulsed. His snorts came high and low. Kamo howled at the high window and they struck the vault of his skull and his lights were out before the sensation reached that part of him that laughed, that bubbled with delight.
~
The Cossacks stood in a semicircle with their backs to the forest. They wore skirted coats and fur hats. Each was armed with a rifle, sword, daggers, and pistols. Kamo had dragged himself upright against the hanging tree and was resting his head against his shoulder, as though his injuries were severe. He hoped that his bloody face would aid in the illusion. His right hand was thrust beneath his jacket.
‘Who are you?’ asked Kamo, though he knew well. They were Cossacks of the Kuban Host.
The men said nothing.
‘Come,’ said Kamo. ‘Are you soldiers?’
He could not judge their mood. Were they disappointed that their trap had sprung on only one poor Bolshevik?
A man from the centre of the group said, ‘Your papers.’
Kamo smiled. There was blood on his chin. He could feel it cooling. His papers, such as they were, had been loaned by a school friend. Perhaps his confidence betrayed him; the officer did not repeat his request. In the silence, a little snow fell from the tree.
‘Who will search me?’ asked Kamo. ‘Will it be you, officer?’ He moved his eyes around the group. ‘You? Or you?’ He waggled the hand behind his jacket. ‘Maybe I have something for you.’
The faces of the men remained blank.
‘If it is a bomb,’ said the officer, ‘show us.’
Kamo spat, ‘If I were a revolutionary, would I give you your evidence so easily? No, friend.’
‘Choose your words carefully,’ said the officer. ‘I have the moral advantage.’
‘What moral advantage can you have when your trap is honeyed by a boy?’
The man raised his rifle to hip height and shot at the snow between Kamo’s knees.
‘That’s for your insolence,’ said the officer. ‘Look behind you.’
Frowning, Kamo turned. Dmitri had made it one third of the way across the lake before the ice had broken. He was floating, quite dead, supported by the air trapped beneath his jacket.
‘That is truly sad,’ said Kamo. ‘We should be ashamed of our times, and what our State has brought us to.’
‘Thank you,’ said the officer. He seemed relieved that their conversation was over. ‘We will hang you for that. Now, give us a statement and my friend Oleg will write it down.’
‘All this for me?’ asked Kamo. ‘You must be disappointed.’
For the first time, the Cossacks looked unsure. There is something in this, thought Kamo. If I were Soso, I could smoke this out.
‘Listen, fine and brave Cossacks of the Kuban Host,’ said Kamo. An unease was growing among them. ‘“Thru
st out your chests to the moon / With outstretched arms, and revere / The spreader of light upon the earth!”’
‘That’s it,’ said the officer. ‘String him up for a fucking poet.’
A black shape fell upon the Cossack at the edge of the semicircle and the man collapsed in an explosion of snow. There was an instant of silence. Then, before could Kamo work out what had happened, the Cossacks were turning as one and the black shape, a hard contrast to the snow, seemed to spiral up from the ground like a dervish.
Kamo did not understand how a woman, or even a circus strongman, could survive such a fall without injury. Neither did he understand how she had returned to such conspicuous life after a hanging. But he did understand that death had moved one step away from him. Indeed, death had now taken the form of this creature. She knocked aside the rifle of the next Cossack in the line, struck his ribs with two hard elbow strikes, caught his rifle, and discharged it into his chest. The man was dead before he fell. Likewise the Cossack behind him, whose throat was burst by the same projectile.
The third Cossack swung his rifle towards the woman. It struck her shoulder and she dropped onto her side. The Cossack aimed at her face and tensed to shoot, but now Kamo had picked up his own instrument and played it with the satisfaction of a maestro. The Cossacks had, to a man, turned towards this black apparition, and Kamo would not waste his gift. He shot the next in the head, thumbed the bolt, the next in the chest, thumbed the bolt, missed the third, heard a hasty shot pass over his head, thumbed the bolt, dropped the officer with a gutshot, tossed away his rifle, and emptied his pistols into the final two.
He kept his arms outstretched.
It was over.
The woman stood up. She had the posture of a noblewoman. It made Kamo want to laugh. What was noble in this warm work? But she was beautiful. Her hair had fallen from its pins. Her face had lost its death bloat. Yes, there was beauty. Clear eyes green as the grass. The noose still looked like a fur collar, the rope a bloody pigtail. Kamo thought of Dmitri and the coldness of his death. He wanted to laugh again.
‘Are you hurt?’ he asked, gesturing to her left hand, which was concealed under her right elbow.
The woman walked over to Kamo, crouched by him, and touched his face.
‘You are hurt,’ she said, in Georgian. Her voice had the ring of a poem by Soso. She might have been a native of Gori, the town where Kamo had grown up. ‘You should see a doctor.’
He laughed.
‘I should see a doctor, says the woman who was hanged!’
He took a knife to the rope cuffs that dangled from her right wrist, and then parted the knot that held her noose. The striations on her neck were bloody, but she could breathe well. This done, he stood. The pellets in his leg stung.
He said, ‘I am at your service.’
‘No. I am at yours.’
Her eyes were empty. Kamo told himself that, given her thin frame, the thickness of the rope, and the absence of a drop, it was not impossible that she could survive the hanging. Not impossible.
He thought about this as he hobbled around the Cossacks, finishing them with his dagger.
‘Are you hungry?’
The woman was standing on the edge of the lake with her back to him. She was looking at the boy. The way she concealed her left hand gave her a forlorn quality that Kamo judged would endear her handsomely to the employees of the State Bank.
‘Call me Kamo,’ he said, moving in front of her to occlude the boy’s death. ‘What shall I call you?’
The empty eyes looked at him. In a man, this would have angered Kamo. In her, it made him curious.
‘I don’t have a name.’
‘Where do you come from?’
When she spoke, she used the words that Kamo would hear again and again, as though her short history was a litany.
‘I became conscious for the first time when I walked west from Lake Baikal. Before that, there is nothing. Sometimes I dream about the time before. The dreams make no sense. If they are true, they are not my truth.’
‘You drop on your prey like a lynx,’ he said. ‘How is that for a name, Lynx?’
‘Lynx.’
‘Will you listen as I tell you how the people will rise up?’
‘You saved my life. I will listen.’
~
The prison wagon rattled through the streets. It was night. Now he was bound by chain instead of leather. Kamo could feel the spirit of a dead lawyer in the stinking suit they had given him. The lawyer: that beloved tool of the bourgeoisie. The suit reeked of mothballs and shit and the acid tang of fear, an aroma Kamo had smelled on men before, but never himself. He never would.
His eyes dawdled over the wet canvas roof, down to the gendarme opposite. Their heads rocked in synchrony. The gendarme faced the direction of travel while Kamo faced backward. The gendarme smiled as though he knew Kamo’s secret. Because he did not, Kamo smiled too. His eyes continued to drift. He looked at the iron rods that covered the small, high windows. Counted them. He noticed the tough, canvas layer that protected the floor. His bench was wooden. In it, two circular holes admitted his hands, and these found heavy manacles whose weight threatened to pop his shoulders and collapse his knuckles with every pothole and bump.
Kamo had long ceased his routine of playful comment. His mind had moved to the next challenge. How would he get word to Soso of this incarceration? Doubtless there would be comrades in the remand prison, but many would be stool pigeons. Time would pass before he met someone he recognised. Then, he would make his connection to the informal postal system that webbed the incarcerated political underground, on the condition that he was fortunate enough to be placed among the politicals.
Into his mind’s eye came the cold, narrow stare of Soso, for whom the money was everything. It meant retaining his head. Expropriations had been voted down by the Party and it was a great difficulty for Lenin that Soso had continued his banditry. But there were other problems. Marked notes had been uncovered in Paris and Berlin, cities that suffered under active and enthusiastic foreign bureaus of the Protection. These sums were paltry, yes. They represented slivers of the cuts of middle men. But their leakage put Soso under pressure. Times were already difficult thanks to the stalled revolution three years earlier. For the gradualists, the new parliament was a path to power, and such criminal activities as those advocated by Soso had to be minimised. For the high-blooded revolutionaries, the failure to locate the bulk of the cash spoke to incompetence. The Party was suffocating without the sweet trade. It had to stage its grand meetings, like the one in London the previous year that so titillated the international Press, and maintain the irrigating work of propaganda. It had its underworld of couriers and agitators, none of whom could be expected to earn an honest living when Party business took them all over the Empire, made it impossible to acquire the legal paperwork for paid employment, and, most often, sent them on a slow train to Siberia and their ruin.
These thoughts settled on Kamo with a true weight.
The wagon turned a corner and halted. A rotten egg struck the window bars and a whoop of joy rose up from a gang of urchins. The sound made Kamo nostalgic for Tiflis. His mood was buoyed even more by the manner in which the gendarme picked eggshell from a magnificent side-whisker.
But before the wagon could set off, something heavy landed on the roof. Kamo watched it warp.
It was not likely to be a bomb. One threw a bomb beneath a carriage, not onto it, and such a bomb would come second to the first bomb, which should rip the life from the horses to prevent their flight. The weight of the object was spreading. Could it be person on all fours?
‘A wolf!’ said Kamo. ‘There’s nature for you, comrade. Red in tooth and claw.’
‘No, it’s the chicken who laid the eggs,’ said the gendarme nervously, referring to an old Caucasian nursery rhyme. But two more, softer sounds came from the roof. The gendarme moved from window to window. Red blotches stood out on his cheeks.
Kamo was ce
rtain that the two sounds were footfalls of a person moving forward
The gendarme fell into Kamo’s lap as the wagon juddered forward. Kamo watched him scramble back to a window once more. Above the street sounds, Kamo heard someone shout, ‘Yah! Yah!’ The carriage accelerated.
‘What do you suppose can be happening?’ he asked the gendarme. ‘A rescue? That must make me rather important. Do you regret being left with me in this carriage?’
The gendarme said, ‘Be quiet. Let’s see what happens.’
‘Do you wonder why a good fellow such as yourself should be killed so a person like me can go free? After all, you’re a good citizen. But there can be no good citizens in a corrupt society, comrade.’
‘I told you to shut up.’
‘I’ll ask my friends for leniency, assuming you’ll cooperate. What will you say if you are later presented with my face? Let’s practise.’
With a sudden jerk, the wagon’s speed increased. The gendarme collapsed into his seat and let his head fall into his grey-gloved hands. Whether this was a childish mime in answer to Kamo’s question, or simple despair, Kamo could not be sure.
Kamo strained to look through the window but the angle was too oblique. Street lamps passed in haste. He pictured the horses. He had a bad feeling. All of St Petersburg was being treated to a display of his botched escape. But, before that, the carriage would strike an errant bump, or attempt a corner, and a spill would be the result.
Then, in the next moment, the wagon flipped forward.
Kamo wondered if he were already dead. Perhaps the carriage had crashed minutes (centuries?) before and this experience was only an echo of his last moment, sounding again and again. But the gendarme was gripping his seat and asking for his mother to save him, and it became known to Kamo with a troubling certainty that the wagon had been ridden into the River Neva. Kamo had an image of the horses going over the bank; their drop would explain the sharp leverage needed to make the wagon flip.
