Strange Are the Ways

by Strange Are the Ways (retail) (epub)

  But he did not ask. He delivered her back at the Summer Gardens punctiliously two short hours after they had left, lifted her hand briefly to his lips and left her, watching after him, confused, angry, near to tears. He had not suggested another meeting.

  That night, restless, she could not sleep, could not get the image of the man out of her head. Almost for the first time in her life she longed really to talk to someone, to confide in someone who might understand the strange and painful clash of emotions he roused in her.

  At midnight, with the house asleep around her, she lit her candle, settled by the stove in her room and wrote a long overdue letter to her cousin Anna.

  * * *

  Anna received the letter as the soft green bloom of spring was turning to the lusher verdancy of early summer in the Sussex countryside. She stood by the open French windows of the music room reading Katya’s impatient scrawl. A cuckoo called distantly from the woodland. The garden, which she had grown to love so dearly, lay tranquil and beautiful in fitful sunshine, a breeze rustled the bright new leaves.

  Guy sat behind her in a deep armchair, watching her, waiting for her to finish.

  She turned to him, smiling a little. ‘Poor Katya. She’s found her match at last from the sound of it. She’s fallen in love, she says, with a barbarian.’ For all the extravagant extremes of emotion in the letter – so like Katya – she could not help but laugh a little. ‘Poor Katya,’ she said again. ‘It had to happen, I suppose. She’s such a reckless soul.’ She dropped the letter onto a small table, went to stand behind her husband, her hand gentle upon his shoulder, stood looking out into the lovely garden. By the open windows a thrush sang.

  He covered the hand with his own, turned his head to look up at her. His bout of ill-health had taken its toll. He looked, she thought suddenly, frail and a little tired. ‘Would you like to go for a stroll in the garden?’ she asked.

  He shook his head. ‘Later, perhaps. I have some work to do. If you seduce me into your lovely leafy domain I’ll never shake myself free. I’ll come in an hour or so, and you can show me all your latest labours.’ He smiled, his still bright eyes warm. ‘A green-thumbed gardener indeed! Anna, my love, you’ve become more English than the English, do you know that?’

  She laughed, picked up a wide straw hat that lay upon a chair. ‘An hour. No more. You mustn’t wear yourself out. And I want you to see the bluebells in the woodland garden before they fade.’ As she moved to the window she picked up the letter before she stepped into the sunshine.

  She read it again sitting on a stone bench set against a huge clipped hedge of yew. The leaves scented the air in the sunshine, bees buzzed busily in a nearby flowerbed. She lifted her head. As a brief and haphazard postscript to her main letter Katya had appended news of the family; Lenka had had a little boy, but hardly anyone saw her any more since she seemed to have withdrawn entirely from the family. Margarita seemed blissfully happy with what Katya termed ‘her handsome toy soldier’, Dima and Natalia were living ‘like the most ancient of old married couples’, and Natalia was expecting a child. Anna sat quite still, her eyes distant. St Petersburg. The domes and the spires. The great river, locked in winter’s ice, turbulent with the spring thaws. The northern winters. The long, rose-gold days of summer. The white nights. Katya. Her family; suddenly she realized that almost without her noticing it a strange thing had happened. St Petersburg was no longer home. She looked around her. This was her home. When first she had come to England to read such a letter would have brought on a bout of homesickness that she would have had to fight for days; now she felt no such sadness. ‘More English than the English’ Guy had called her; and it was true. England suited her. This life, with its friendships, its music, the utter delight of this garden, suited her. She no longer wanted to go back, not to live. Recently she had been tinkering with the idea of going to visit, and that she thought she would enjoy, though even the vaguest of plans kept being postponed, casualties of a filled and busy life. The point was that she could contemplate it with no fear; the danger was over; she would not, she knew, find it hard to leave that other life to come home. As for Andrei: perhaps sadly, she hardly ever thought of him now. That wild young passion had died. When Varya mentioned him in her letters, which she did, infrequently, there was now no unsettling stirring of emotion. She was happy. She smiled suddenly. That was it; she was happy, here, with Guy, with her music, with her garden.

  Strange indeed are the ways of God, she found herself thinking, the words coming to her, unusually, in her own native tongue. She sat for a long quiet moment looking about her, trying to hold the moment, savouring the discovery of her contentment. Then she stood up and strolled back towards the house, to answer Katya’s letter.

  Not, she admitted to herself with a sudden, rueful smile, as she bent to tug at a stray weed in the flagstoned path, that she believed for a moment that anything she might say would deflect her cousin in the least from her own flamboyant and wayward path. God alone knew who or what would do that.

  Chapter Twelve

  There was little to distinguish the summer of 1912 from any other St Petersburg summer, except of course in a personal sense when events scarcely noted by the world at large changed the course of a private life. The weather was, as always, variable. The only significant political event was the election of the new Duma – a body regarded on the whole as a toothless watchdog of the peoples’ rights, leashed and held in check by the overwhelming power of the Tsar. Beneath the surface, the political cauldron seethed: revolutionary bodies, their leaders, exiled almost to a man to the various capitals of Western Europe, plotted, as always, against the State and against each other, and the workers and students of the city, stirred up by the agents of these same political agitators, relieved the tedium of life’s dreary, hand-to-mouth struggle by a series of strikes and demonstrations. In the middle of July the Okhrana – the Tsar’s hated secret police – found a new recruit in Pavel Petrovich Donovalov, Lenka’s husband, who embraced his new responsibilities with predictable enthusiasm. Lenka did not care how unsavoury was her husband’s new occupation, it mattered only that he had ceased to torment her. Meanwhile polite society, equally predictably, retired to the summer delight of Peterhof, there to ride, to dance and to pay court to its ruling family. And in a Europe regarded by most Russians, ignoring the lessons of history, as an alien world totally separate from their own, the great powers snarled and jostled for power in an undeclared contest of strength that grew more dangerous every day.

  Sasha Kolashki’s thoughts were far from such weighty matters as he made his way from the regiment’s headquarters near the Winter Palace towards the tiny apartment he shared when he could with Margarita in a narrow street behind the Liteini Prospekt; an apartment that, though cramped and far from comfortable, was nevertheless beyond their means. He had had to borrow yet again from his mother this month, a thing he hated to do. Sasha was thinking, as he so often did these days, of two things; money, or the lack of it, and his wife. He was thinking, too, of the very real possibility that far from being given the opportunity to leave the regiment of his own accord, if he displeased his senior officers further by his inability to sustain the social life expected of a Preobrajensky Guard he might well be required to make way for someone who could, connections notwithstanding. His immediate commanding officer had been more than unhappy at the marriage of his least well-off junior officer; it had been made clear at the time that the joys of marital bliss must not be at the expense of the regiment. This brought him to the matter of the Princess Vasselevski’s ball. Should he mention it to Margarita? If he did then certainly, between her and his displeased Major, he would not be able to escape attending. All officers of the Preobrajensky and of the Semeonovsky had been invited – the Princess’s father having served in the one regiment, her husband serving presently in the other. But to attend would mean a complete new outfit for Margarita and, even more expensive, a new dress uniform for himself, the old one – handed on from his fat
her – having finally faded beyond even reflected glory. Such things did not come cheap.

  He sighed, gloomily, shouldering his way through the crowds on the Nevsky, crossing the great Fontanka Canal with no glance at its swirling waters or the grand houses and palaces that lined it. Nothing came cheap. Especially when your pockets were for most of the time empty. Not even love.

  As he turned into the Liteini a tramcar clanged by, trailing blue sparks into the faint summer drizzle that drifted in air that was, despite the time of year, uncomfortably chill. A cool wind blew from the water.

  No, most certainly not love. Where Margarita got her spending habits from he really could not imagine. He hunched his shoulders beneath the shabby English jacket that he favoured when off duty. He had a two-day pass after having been in barracks for almost a week. At some time during those two days the unpleasant subject of their expenditure would have to be tackled. He flinched a little at the thought. Whilst it could not be denied that Margarita’s enchanting, child-like prettiness with every passing day matured towards true beauty, at the same time her tongue seemed to be sharpening with every passing hour. Graceful, the most beguiling of creatures when she cared to be – with Margarita on his arm he knew himself to be the envy of many of his young fellow-officers – yet crossed she could be a termagant, the storms of tears and torrents of passionate, accusing words exhausting in the extreme. But still, as he thought of her, he had to admit to the fact that with Margarita docile and lovely in his bed the doubts and fears that beset him when he was away from her dissipated like mist in the sun. He hoped she would be in a good mood. He thought of her, kneeling as she so often did before the tiny, intricate toy theatre that had been his first gift to her, absorbed as a child in the small conceits and fantasies she so loved. At those times, watching her, he believed he loved her more than life itself.

  Almost unconsciously he lengthened his stride. If only she would curb her extravagance a little. And if only she would respond with a little more decorum to the light-hearted but flagrant advances of his friends. Frowning suddenly, he paused to cross the busy street, tramcars and motor cars vying with horse-drawn traffic to make it as dangerous an operation as any skirmish on a battlefield. Finding a gap he dodged across. One couldn’t blame her, he supposed; she was such a pretty little thing, it was hardly her fault that she attracted such attention – ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ He had cannoned into a young man hurrying from the sidestreet into which he, Sasha, was turning. The boy was dressed in the virtually uniform student garb of blue flat cap, rough blue shirt and baggy workman’s trousers. The lad muttered something, brushing off Sasha’s steadying hand, and hurried on. Behind him another group of youngsters surged out of the sidestreet. Sasha stepped aside. He heard now what his preoccupation had prevented him from hearing before; the growing, ragged chant of many voices – ‘Bread! Justice! Freedom! Bread! Justice! Freedom! Workers of the world unite! Bread! Justice! Freedom!’

  Another of those absurd demonstrations. In the narrow street he pushed against the running tide of humanity until it became too difficult, then with an impatient grimace stepped into a doorway, allowing the growing flood to pass him. It was useless. He’d have to wait until the thing was past.

  It was not a very big demonstration, as these things went; mostly students, some working men and women, the inevitable banners and placards. The faces on the whole were grim, though here and there a young couple walked with swinging step, arm in arm and smiling as they chanted. Though most were dressed in the inevitable shabby dark blues and blacks of the working classes, some of the girls had thrown bright scarves about their heads to keep from the rain. He glimpsed one, bright scarlet and green, flower-like in the dimness of the narrow street, bobbing towards him. He glimpsed something else too, at the very moment when his practised ear picked out the sound of horses’ hooves on cobbles. At the far end of the street a small squadron of horsemen had appeared – Cossacks from their uniforms – and were riding steadily towards the demonstrators, herding them before them. People cast swift looks over their shoulders as the sound reached them, and the pace of the march quickened a little, the people behind pushing at those in front, treading on their heels. But still the chant, defiant and rhythmic, continued: ‘Bread, Justice, Freedom!’

  Sasha felt a sudden and extremely odd surge of something close to envy as he watched them; here were comrades indeed, united in their pathetic crusade, and, yes, in their coinage. Their lives might be hard, but he sensed about them a shared fervour, a fraternity that went beyond mere friendship. He drew back into his doorway as they streamed past, driven almost to running pace by the oncoming riders. He saw a man snatch a child as it fell and swing it onto his shoulders, saw a young man anxiously clasping the arm of a heavily pregnant girl as he helped her along.

  The Cossacks were riding easily, something unpleasantly like mischief in the dark, moustachioed faces; they were deliberately riding just that little bit too fast, nudging into the rear of the column, grinning at the signs of panic their presence was causing.

  Most of the marchers had reached the end of the narrow lane and were spilling into the Liteini. The Cossacks spurred on.

  Sasha saw the girl in the bright headscarf again – nearer now. She was towards the back of the column, walking with a thin young man and another girl. Her narrow face within the brilliant framework of the scarf was a blaze of defiance. Her mouth moved as she chanted. The three were arm in arm, marching steadily, refusing to be pushed. Behind them the muscled, curbed Cossack ponies pranced, bits jingling. Sasha frowned. The Cossacks had their whips out.

  What triggered the charge was very hard to tell; he saw a horseman jostle a marcher, a huge young man carrying a banner upon which the single word ‘ISKRA’ had been painted – the word, meaning spark, was he knew the battlecry of one of the many workers’ parties. The young man turned, angrily. The banner flapped in the pony’s face. It reared. Its rider, knowing well what he did, wheeled the animal, dancing it flamboyantly on its hind legs, to bring its flailing hooves crashing down upon the marcher. Blood spurted. A girl screamed, shrill, fearful and distraught. The riders, as one man, whips raised, clapped their heels to the impatient ponies’ sides.

  What remained of the march broke in panic. People ran, shrieking, from the oncoming riders. Whips rose and fell. There was another high, pain-filled scream. A girl reeled from a galloping horseman, her hands hiding her face. Sasha saw the girl in the red and green scarf, running like a hare, her skirts lifted to her knees, long legs flashing. Behind her a stocky pony bore down on her, its rider obviously having picked his target. Run! Sasha found himself thinking, and then out loud he shouted. ‘Run!’

  She ran. And on the rain-slick cobbles opposite Sasha’s doorway she slipped, reeling, arms flailing, unable to keep her balance. Instinctively he was moving before he knew it, leaping out in front of the Cossack rider, arms waving into the pony’s face, screaming his throat raw, ‘Away! Get away!’

  It was over in a moment. The horse, startled, shied. The rider, furious, fought it down. Sasha, dodging the hooves, had grabbed the girl’s hand and was hauling her back into the doorway. He saw the raised whip, could do nothing to avoid it. He jerked his head sideways and the lash intended to catch him full in the face sliced instead across his jaw. The blow sent him sprawling in a helpless heap on top of the stumbling girl. By the time he had scrambled to his feet the rider had gone, spurring after his fellows, and the street was empty but for the still form of the trampled marcher that lay, ungainly in death, on rain- and blood-slick cobbles, a weeping girl crouched beside it, and a few others, shocked, battered but alive, who stood or leaned in small groups along the length of the narrow lane. It was very quiet. Even the roar of the traffic from the main street seemed muted. Nearby a woman sobbed, quietly, and a man swore, viciously and ferociously.

  ‘Thank you.’ The girl’s voice was light and commendably calm, though a slight tremor shook it and she had to clear her throat before she spoke. ‘You saved my
life, I think.’

  He shook his head, embarrassed. The side of his face throbbed terribly. Something dripped from his chin onto his jacket; he put up his hand. It came away crimson with blood.

  ‘The Pharoes!’ someone called, urgently, from the Liteini end of the street. ‘The Pharoes are coming!’

  The girl caught his hand. ‘Come! Quickly!’ She pushed him out of the doorway into the street. ‘This way!’ She turned.

  ‘Wait!’ He pulled away from her, though her hand gripped his firmly. ‘I’m all right. You go.’

  She looked at him in impatient astonishment. ‘Don’t be stupid. You heard what he said – the Pharoes are coming –’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about –’

  The look deepened to exasperation. ‘The police, stupid! They’re coming to arrest us!’

  ‘But I wasn’t part of the demonstration –’ He stopped.

  She had raised her eyebrows. He put his hand to his face again. The cut inflicted by the Cossack whip was bleeding copiously. ‘Try telling them that,’ she said, brusquely. ‘You’ll have worse than that to show for it before you’ve convinced them, believe me! They’ll beat you half to death before they ever get around to asking your name. Now stop buggering about and come on, for heaven’s sake. That cut needs seeing to, and I know someone who’ll do it, no questions asked.’ She grinned, quickly, the smile lighting her dirty face, a sudden, lively flicker of interest in her dark eyes. ‘He won’t spoil that handsome face, I promise. Now, do come on – run!’

  He ran with her, down the street, round a corner, away from the direction he should have taken for the apartment and Margarita. He allowed himself one small prayer of thanks that neither his wife nor his commanding officer could see Alexandr Feodovorich Kolashki, last son of that name as, face streaming blood and clothes wet and muddy, he allowed his brusque and shabby guide to tow him into the back streets of St Petersburg. Once in relative quiet she stopped, turned to him, pulling her own long woollen scarf from about her neck. ‘Come here.’