Light had dawned. Pensively Katya put a finger to her mouth, her blue eyes intent, though still wary. ‘Except – that we aren’t?’ she asked, softly.
His smile was beatific. ‘Exactly.’
She tapped her lip, still watching him. There was a very long silence.
‘There is, I assume, another –’ she hesitated ‘– lady involved?’
‘Yes.’
‘A married lady?’
He nodded.
‘And you want time – shall we say that doesn’t have to be accounted for? Furthermore,’ she laughed a little, genuinely amused, ‘you want your sister to stop nagging you?’
Jussi’s smile was bland. ‘Put simply: yes.’ Time, he told himself, that was all he was buying; a little time. Convictions and causes were one thing; tying oneself for life to a flibbertigibbet who no more wanted you than you did her was quite another. Anyway, as he had said to Elisabet, it simply wasn’t fair. The thought made him feel positively virtuous; an unaccustomed feeling that he took a self-indulgent moment to enjoy.
The wind caught a strand of her hair and whipped it free. She turned her head to look at the rippling water, remembering the ardent look in the eyes of her young Cossack captain last night, remembering too his last, whispered words –
‘What an extraordinarily good idea,’ she said.
Chapter Ten
Sasha Kolashki would have been the first to acknowledge that neither by nature nor by inclination should he have been in the army at all, let alone in the crack Preobrajensky Guards; and he was all too aware that he was not the only one to know it.
His reluctantly acknowledged call to arms had come about through the sudden, tragic and predictably spectacular death of his older brother, thrown by a recklessly-ridden, half-broken horse, compounded by Sasha’s own total inability to stand up against a world that was ready, neatly, to slot him into that same dead brother’s shoes. His second misfortune – the Guards’ Commission – came through the well-meaning interference of a family friend whose influence in high circles was matched by a complete misunderstanding of, or indifference to, Sasha’s own needs and character. To say that Sasha was no soldier would be to state but half the case; he was unsuited to such a life in almost every possible way. Artistic – he had, in his youth, been much given to the composition of poetry – imaginative, easygoing beyond the point of positive weakness, he had been perfectly happy as a second son of whom little was expected and to whom little of his fearsome father’s attention was paid. Until, that is, the day that a wild and unmanageable horse had thrown his equally wild and unmanageable brother into a ditch and rolled on him.
The family, old, respected, severely and constantly short of funds, lived in a quietly decaying house on an estate a few miles outside Moscow that had for the past hundred or so years steadily shrunk in size and profitability as each generation turned a few more hectares into cash in order to keep body, soul and ancient name together. His education had been haphazard, mostly at his gentle, long-suffering mother’s knee; for his father, possessing as he did in the bone-headed Grigor a son and heir in his own image, had been content on the whole to leave his second, prettier but less belligerent boy happily attached to the apron strings of the mother who adored him together with the sister whom he so resembled. Grigor’s untimely death had shaken the whole household to its not very firm foundations; but to no-one had it come as such a blow as to Sasha. Not that he had loved his brother – quite the contrary, having since childhood been subjected to the heavy-handed, sometimes downright vicious torments that Grigor considered it fitting to visit upon a younger brother – but with his death, suddenly, there was no-one standing between Sasha and his father. Between Sasha and the harsh real world. Worse; between Sasha and the Tsar’s army. In each generation for as long as their ancient and now crumbling house had stood at least one Kolashki son had served his ruler; sometimes, indeed, whole families had served and died together. Sasha’s great-grandfather had lost his life in the defiant stand against Napoleon, his grandfather, a little less valiantly in Sasha’s opinion, had been fatally wounded in the Polish patriot uprisings of the 1830s. There had been a Kolashki at Sebastopol, and his own father had, to his eternal shame, been part of the defeated Russian army routed by Japan in 1905. With Grigor gone there was no-one but Sasha to carry on the immutable tradition; and, ironically, he did not have the strength to stand against the pressures and expectations of this world into which he had been born. Because he did not have the courage to do anything else, he became a soldier.
When his mother had first seen him attired in the vivid and dashing dress uniform of an Ensign of the Preobrajenskys she had shed tears, both of sorrow and of pride; for in one circumstance alone did Sasha surpass his overpowering brother – he had his mother’s looks, and in uniform he was a sight to see. In truth Sasha had not been far from tears himself, but for very different reasons; for by then he had already discovered the horrors of barracks life. Only the natural skills acquired throughout a pseudo-military country childhood had saved him. He was lean and fit and fairly strong despite his light build; he knew an order when he heard one and rode as naturally as he walked. His excessive good looks, at least some were ready to concede, were hardly his fault. They even, to his horror, attracted a certain amount of interest in some quarters. His books of poetry had been burned by callous hands before his eyes within the first week. He had been – as was any newcomer as a matter of course – abused and brutalized; he had had many an occasion to remember his brother Grigor, and to wonder if here even he might have received a taste of his own peculiar medicine. Yet by the skin of his teeth, through a practised combination of stoicism and sycophancy that he himself despised, he had come through it all, though he knew too well that there were those he fooled – usually his fellow officers – and those he did not – all too often those he was supposed to command. And more often than not those he did not deceive were those he respected most. Nevertheless the young Lieutenant Sasha Kolashki who attended Katya Bourlova’s coming-of-age ball with a group of acquaintances he had met in a brothel the night before had achieved at least some degree of comfort and acceptance in a world that was not and never could be his own. His simple prayer, each day and more particularly in the dark hours of a lonely night, was that he should never be required to see action; he knew himself too well. Privately he thought of himself as a lead soldier, brightly painted, a toy. In fact he did himself injustice; he was a sensitive man, and a man of imagination; such a man sees too well what might be asked of him, what might be visited upon him, in times of violence.
Margarita Shalakova saw none of this, neither then nor it must be said at any later time. Margarita, as always, saw what she wanted to see. Heard, too, what she wanted to hear. She saw a handsome young man with instant interest and attraction in his eyes. She saw a brave uniform, a pair of wide shoulders, a neat turn of leg, narrow, well-made hands. She saw dark and ardent eyes and what to her inexperienced eyes looked like a small fortune in soft leather boots, gold-braided, bright-buttoned tunic, casually slung fur-edged jacket; she saw a foil for her own bright beauty. She heard laughter and a pretty turn of phrase, whispered compliments, a passing mention of an estate near Moscow; heard too a small, delightfully disturbing note of real desire in the well-modulated voice, saw it reflected in those warm dark eyes.
For his part Sasha was enchanted. Whilst by no means sexually inexperienced – aged fourteen he had happily surrendered his virginity to a mercilessly practised kitchen maid and even given a natural discrimination since then his good looks and his station had guaranteed a steady supply of compliant bedfellows – he had had surprisingly little social contact with respectable girls. No contact at all with respectable girls who looked as Margarita looked, who enticed as she enticed, who combined that devastating mixture of innocence and pure carnality of which she herself seemed unaware. The kiss – the two kisses – that she had readily surrendered upon the balcony of the Bourlov apartment that evening had int
riguingly demonstrated two things; first, her utter inexperience, tantalizing in itself, and second, an unstudied wantonness that had him leaving his fellows to carouse without him whilst he wandered alone along echoing, gaslit streets remembering the feel of her eager body against his and composing small, fragile verses to her beauty.
As the sun rose that morning he stood upon the Dvortzovi Bridge watching the light play upon the moving waters beneath him and against the grim walls of the great fortress of St Peter and St Paul, and determined – as she, unknown to him, already had – that he must see her again. She had steadfastly refused to give him her home address, but had hinted that Katya and her officer friends might be the contact between them. He pinched out his cigarette, tossed the end into the river, watched it pensively, a tiny scrap, born away on the current.
* * *
Katya’s small conspiracy with the young Finn Jussi Lavola worked even better than either of them had expected. That Margarita was more than ready to be drawn into their light-hearted deceptions made the sport all the easier. Jussi would call at the Bourlov apartment; Katya would be awaiting him, chaperoned by her young cousin. They would depart, demurely and with parental blessing, for carriage-ride, concert, afternoon walk or, as the first frosts came, perhaps a skating party on the river, or a sleigh ride in the countryside along the Gulf. At a given spot they would split up, to meet again at an agreed time and return innocently home. The scheme was neat and all but flawless. That it was also wildly irresponsible Katya knew but chose to ignore. Although far from stupid, she was all but incapable of thinking in such terms. She had been far too indulged to put Margarita’s well-being before her own; she saw what she wanted, and she took steps to ensure that it would be hers. Margarita, her unflagging acolyte in all things, learned this particular lesson very soon and very well.
Margarita had in fact little idea how fortunate she was in Sasha Kolashki; instinct had served her more than well. Despite his profession, despite the undoubted brutality of the world in which he lived, Sasha did not have it in him to harm anyone, let alone an innocent, and a beautiful one at that, whom he perceived as trusting him. Margarita was every heroine of every romance he had heard at his virtuous mother’s knee. To take advantage of that artless innocence would have been to run counter to everything in his nature. The added excitement of the deceits they practised in meeting, the flattering way her face lit when she saw him, the to all appearances ingenuous naivety that at one moment blushed like a poppy at a compliment and at the next warmed the brilliant blue eyes with the most ardent desire enslaved him. For the first time in his life Sasha lost his good sense entirely to infatuation, a not unpleasant experience for a young man with romantic inclinations.
Margarita, as ever determined upon perfection, liked to think she, too, was hopelessly in love. She certainly thought about Sasha most of the time, as she fetched and carried for her mother, sat beside her plying a dutiful needle and letting Varya’s often petulant voice flow over her like a bubbling stream, unheeded. Her sisters’ departure had left these two virtually alone together and unsurprisingly this had slightly soured the relationship, on Margarita’s side at least; no longer the pampered youngest, she found her mother’s demands as wearying as Anna had before her. They still, despite plans and promises, lived in the apartment on the Venskaya; after the splendours of the Bourlov apartment where she spent as much time as she possibly could, Margarita found it drab, dark and depressing. Sonya, after a positively operatic row with Varya, had departed the year before and Victor, given the reduction in the household numbers, had thriftily insisted that Seraphima and Varya manage the cooking between them; a decision, Margarita was convinced, much aided by the fact that, with the business flourishing, Victor himself ate out with clients most of the time. So, yes, Margarita spent a great deal of time thinking about Sasha Kolashki; and more particularly about how to entice him – or if necessary force him – to marry her. She was quite set upon it, the fact that despite his protestations of penury, which she did not believe anyway, his station was a great deal higher than hers notwithstanding. On the contrary, she had always known this to be her destiny. She had come this far; all that remained was to ensure that the besotted young man remained so entangled in her web that he had no chance of escape. At some point soon she planned to confide in her mother. But not yet. Not quite yet.
* * *
The weeks slipped by, and Christmas was approaching. Once again the city and the countryside wore their winter finery of silver and white. To worker and to peasant the bitter cold was a punishment to suffer, to be endured, on occasion to die under; but for those with the means, the time and the energy to enjoy the skating, the sledging, the sleigh and troika rides it was a time of magic.
The days were very short, dusk falling in mid-afternoon over the snow-cloaked city. Still Katya, Margarita and the feckless Jussi continued their clandestine expeditions. There was unrest in the city, mostly in the workers’ suburbs: the odd strike, the odd meeting broken up by soldiers and police – a few heads cracked, a few people ridden down by the Cossack ponies that were bred for such work, but nothing more disturbing than that. In Switzerland, in London, in Berlin and in Helsingfors, called Helsinki by the Finns, sedition was hatched by a few troublemakers best left to themselves. There were rumours that the unhealthy and venomous influence of the monk Rasputin upon the Empress, and through her upon the Tsar, was greater than ever; people shrugged and went about their business. Strange were the ways of God, and of the ruling classes: what did such goings-on have to do with ordinary folk? That a combination of circumstances was at work which was conspiring to create a gulf of epic, possibly unbridgeable, proportions between the rulers and the ruled occurred to very few; to those who did see it even fewer wanted to listen. Equally ignored on the whole were the rumblings in Europe, where the dogs of war, chained for a generation, were snarling greedily as nations jostled for position and power, jealously guarding their own interests. What had that to do with Mother Russia, secure as ever behind her snow-protected boundaries?
* * *
Margarita and Sasha snuggled together beneath heavy furs as the troika flew over the packed snow, a barking dog scampering beside the singing runners. The tall, straight trunks of birch and fir flashed by, the slanting sun glimmering in the pale and shadowed depths of the woodland and falling in bright bars of light across the track they followed. Every so often the trees thinned to reveal the frozen Gulf, snow-covered and beautiful, stretching into the infinite, ice-hazed distance. They passed a small village of wooden buildings set haphazardly, like the playthings of a child, within a clearing in the forest. In the silence the bells on the harness rang like crystal, sounding clear above the muffled sound of the horses’ hooves and the high song of the runners.
Margarita disentangled a small hand from her muff and slipped it into Sasha’s. ‘How much further?’
He smiled down at her, dark eyes warm. She looked quite dazzlingly pretty, her fair hair curled about the white fur hat that had once been Katya’s, cheeks bright with colour in the cold air. ‘Not far.’ His heart, as he looked at her, beat uncomfortably fast. They would stay just an hour at the dacha. That was all. And nothing would happen. Nothing. He would show her the house. And then they would leave. She smiled again, trusting and happy; and again his heart lurched uncomfortably.
Margarita, well-satisfied, snuggled deeper into the fur, aware of and amused by the fact that Sasha had no inkling that it had been she who had contrived this trip, she who had chosen the time and the place, she who knew exactly what would happen, and how. When he had first mentioned that a cousin several times removed – a fellow officer in the Preobrajensky – owned a small dacha on the wooded shores of the Gulf, she had clapped her hands with pleasure, knowing how her child-like enthusiasm delighted him. ‘Oh, but how lovely! I’d so like to see it!’ She had allowed a small reproach to dim the brightness of her smile. ‘Sasha, darling Sasha, I haven’t seen anything that belongs to your family.’
‘But still –’ she had bestowed another warm, glowing smile ‘– wouldn’t it be fun to visit it?’
‘I – yes, I suppose so – one of these days.’
And here, sooner than he had ever anticipated, the day had come; and he found himself desperately doubting his own motives in having brought his pretty love here to the loneliest and most beautiful spot imaginable. He drew away from her a little, turning the collar of his heavy greatcoat up about his chin. Laughing she followed him, laying her head against his shoulder, the fur of her hat tickling his nose.
The dacha stood in a small clearing; it was not a big house, but long, low and verandahed, the gables decoratively carved, the windows shuttered. The troika driver pulled up in an unnecessary but spectacular spray of fine snow. ‘There, Excellency – this is the place?’ His small eyes were knowing, his smile faintly unpleasant. He was so wrapped about with rugs and blankets that he looked like a small, shapeless haystack topped with a tattered fin hat.
‘Er – y-yes. It is.’
Rita had sat up, leaning forward eagerly. ‘Oh, Sasha! It’s so pretty!’
‘There’s a village a little further on, my man.’ Awkwardly Sasha leaned forward and a coin changed hands. ‘There’s an inn there, I believe, where you’ll find a meal. Come back in –’ he glanced at Rita ‘– an hour.’
Margarita pouted a little. ‘Oh, two hours I’d say. We have our picnic, don’t we? And see – the shore is only a step away. After I’ve seen the house I’d like to go out onto the ice a little way. It’s so delightfully terrifying to feel that you’re walking over an ocean, don’t you think? Two hours, Sasha?’ she wheedled. ‘At least? We have time. We don’t have to meet the others until five.’
Strange Are the Ways Page 22
