by Jasper Kent
‘I just hope it happens quickly,’ I said. ‘The country can’t be without a leader, not now, with the Germans knocking at the door. And the city’s falling apart.’
‘Is no one taking charge?’
I shook my head. ‘The police are still loyal to Nikolai and so are some of the army. I’ve seen Cossacks switch to our side; I’m sure more will follow. But with the police trying to hold down the crowds, they’re not doing their real jobs. There’s looting and robbery all over the place – and worse. As I was coming home I saw a girl – God knows how young – selling herself in a doorway.’
‘Didn’t you stop her?’
‘I tried, but what good would it do? If she doesn’t get the money, she’ll starve.’ I didn’t want to tell the story of my humiliation, but there was something else about the incident that I needed to discuss with Nadya, though I knew I had to be cautious. ‘If the army can make up its mind, then the police can go back to doing what they’re supposed to.’
‘Will that happen?’
‘I don’t know.’ I pretended to change the subject. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard from Ilya.’
She shook her head sadly. ‘It’s been too long. I’ve given up writing.’
I knew well enough that I was the cause of the rift between Nadya and her brother. Though in truth it wasn’t a matter of ‘I’ but ‘we’. The relationship between Nadya and me – the fact that we weren’t married – meant that none of her family would speak to her. And yet she stayed with me.
‘He’s still at the Front, as far as I know,’ she added.
There was a knock at the door. It could only be Syeva.
‘Yes?’ I said.
He came in. ‘Supper’s ready, colonel, ma’am.’
‘Thank you, sergeant.’
We went through to the dining room, just next door. It was a pretence of orderliness, of propriety, to sit at a table and eat in a room set aside for the purpose, even though the meal today consisted only of black bread, cheese and pickled herring. We still had wine though. We sat opposite each other. I spoke the words of the grace quickly and softly. They seemed to mean more now than when food was plentiful.
‘O Christ God, bless the food and drink of Thy servants, for holy art Thou, always, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.’
I squeezed Nadya’s hand. ‘I’m sure he’s safe,’ I said.
She nodded and tried to smile, then began eating. The words did nothing to reassure her, but she didn’t know what I did – that they were more than just words. I’d seen her brother, Ilya Vadimovich, seen him that very day; recognized his face from the briefest glimpse. But I wasn’t going to tell Nadya that her brother was just streets away, hunched in a doorway, screwing a young girl for the price of a few kopeks.
CHAPTER II
I LAY AWAKE with Nadya in my arms. From time to time I heard noise outside. The raucous drunken laughter and cheering was an irritation, but it didn’t strike fear in me as much as the occasional isolated, determined shout and the patter of running feet, followed by silence. Beside the bed I had a shotgun and a sword, and under the pillow a revolver. Polkan was asleep next to Nadya’s side of the bed. The windows were shuttered and the door locked and bolted. Petrograd was no longer a safe place to live. There hadn’t been any burglaries in this part of town – not yet – but I wasn’t taking chances.
We’d lived here since 1910, though I’d known Nadya and her brother Ilya much longer than that; longer than she could remember. After 1881 – after I’d killed Iuda – I went away from the capital, still called Saint Petersburg back then, and spent some time in Saratov, the town where I’d grown up. The Lukins were the closest thing I had to a family and I stayed with them for a while, trying to find some purpose to my life now that my one goal – Iuda’s death – had been achieved. It didn’t take me long to realize that the only thing I understood was the army, so I rejoined my regiment. At the time they were stationed in Moscow and I decided to take the opportunity of looking up another family who had been just as kind to my mother as the Lukins, if not kinder.
Our connection with both families was through my grandfather, Aleksei Ivanovich. Back in 1812, two of his closest friends and comrades had been Vadim Fyodorovich Savin and Maksim Sergeivich Lukin. Neither survived the war. Maks had no children, but his family always remembered Aleksei and when his daughter Tamara came to them, pregnant with me, they took her in as one of their own.
I never knew my grandfather, but my mother told me how, in the few hours they had together at the end of his life, he put his hand on her pregnant belly in the hope of feeling me kicking, though I was still too young for that. Most of what she knew of Aleksei she’d learned in that rushed conversation, every word of which she recited to me over and over as I grew up. It was from what Aleksei told her then that she learned of the Lukins.
But she already knew something of Aleksei’s other friend, his commanding officer Vadim Fyodorovich. Vadim had a daughter, Yelena, whose married name was Lavrova, and when Aleksei went into exile it was with Yelena and her husband Valentin that he left his infant daughter Tamara, to raise as their own. And so, when I was in Moscow in 1883 I decided to visit the Lavrovs, and discover if anyone remembered my mother or even my grandfather.
Yelena and Valentin were both long since dead but their son, Rodion, still lived at the family home in the Arbatskaya region of Moscow. He was in his seventies by then, having retired from the navy with the rank of captain second rank – kapdva as he liked to be addressed. He lived there with his son, Vadim Rodionovich, named after the earlier Vadim. Vadim Rodionovich had been eleven when he had last seen Tamara, but still remembered her fondly. Vadim now had a wife and family of his own. Ilya Vadimovich was six when I first met him, and Nadya was just one year old.
Military service took me away from Moscow, but I kept in touch with the Lavrovs, mostly with Ilya, giving him advice and help with his career in the army. And then in 1890 I met Irina Davidovna and the following year we were wed. It wasn’t a happy marriage. The fact that we failed to have children didn’t help, but what made it worse was that I could accept that state of affairs, while Irina was distraught. After I returned from the war against Japan, in 1906, we didn’t even bother to make the pretence of living together. I was becoming interested in politics and wanted to be in Petersburg where the Duma – Russia’s first attempt at a parliament – was being formed. Irina lived in Moscow.
And it was because of my interest in politics that I met Nadya Vadimovna Primakova, who was the wife of a member of the Duma. We fell in love and began an affaire. It was after the third time we made love, as we held each other and talked softly, that she told me about her life and told me that her maiden name was Lavrova, and I realized that we had met before, when she was scarcely more than a babe in arms. Eventually, when her marriage was broken beyond repair, we decided that we had to tell her family about us. I didn’t want to hide behind her, so I went to see Ilya, hoping he’d be able to see things from our point of view.
He punched me on the jaw. He didn’t even tell me to leave his sister alone. It was too late for that – the damage had been done. Then he went and told his father, Vadim. Vadim had never seen his daughter face to face since then, but he still wrote. Ilya didn’t even do that. Now I knew he was in Petrograd. I didn’t think he’d recognized me during our encounter, but then his mind had been on other things. I’d no idea what I would say to him. I couldn’t see much prospect of a reconciliation, but I knew how much Nadya would love to receive just the occasional letter from him. I’d seek him out.
Once I’d made that decision, I finally managed to get some sleep.
The following day was Sunday, so no one was up very early. I left the house soon after ten o’clock. Ilya was in the Izmailovsky Regiment and their barracks, when they were in Petrograd, was on the other side of the city, but as close to the Fontanka as we were. I took Polkan with me and he trotted happily at my heel, his white fur indistinguishable from the snow, a
t least where it was clean and fresh. The river ran south and then curved to the right. On every bridge there was a picket of either police or troops. I didn’t see any Cossacks. It might have been pure chance, or the authorities might have come to realize just who they could and couldn’t trust. Their job was to stop strikers and protestors – anyone really – from getting into the centre of town. In a city like Petrograd, cut through by so many waterways, it wasn’t an impossible task. If they could hold the line here at the Fontanka and to the north at the Neva then it might be achieved. There were only four bridges to guard on the Neva and about a dozen on the Fontanka, and several of them could be raised.
But it only really made sense in the warm. Bridges in the frozen Petrograd winter were less of an irrelevance than they had once been, now that motor vehicles were getting ever heavier, but on foot the easiest way to traverse any waterway in the city was simply to walk across the ice. On the Fontanka it was harder to climb down to the water level, and with the bridges so closely spaced most of it was within range of the soldiers’ rifles. But on the Neva it was as simple as walking across an open field. They even laid tramlines on it in the winter months.
Fortunately I could make my whole journey without crossing the river, though if I’d needed to my papers probably still carried enough authority for me to be allowed through without too much trouble. As yet, there weren’t that many people trying to get across. Even during a revolution, Sunday remained a day of rest. Some observers might have taken solace in the fact that so many of the people chose to spend the morning in church, but it wasn’t true. The population of the city had doubled in the last two decades as the prospect of factory work brought ever more peasants in from the countryside. As badly as the city adapted to such an influx – failing to provide adequate transport or education – the church did worse. We’d discussed it in the Duma once. There were churches in some areas that would have needed to hold thirty thousand if everyone in the parish had bothered to attend. It was worse in Moscow. And so the church lost them, and they spent Saturday night drinking, and Sunday morning sleeping it off. Or some did. Others talked all through Saturday night and into Sunday morning, planning revolution.
Polkan stopped to mark one of the railing posts alongside the river and I peered down on to the ice below. I grimaced. There were bodies there, piled together. I was just down from the Anichkov Bridge, where Nevsky Prospekt crossed the waterway. I shouted to the guard there.
‘Hey!’
He turned towards me and leaned against the pedestal of one of the Tamers – a series of statues of a man taming a wild horse that stood at either end of the bridge.
‘What?’ he shouted back.
‘What happened here?’ I asked, gesturing towards the bodies.
‘Was yesterday. I wasn’t here. Some strikers tried to force their way through. Two or three of them got shot.’
‘Shot?’ I shouted back.
‘Shot, stabbed, trampled. Who gives a shit?’
He went back to his comrades. His indifference repelled me. There were four bodies, not the two or three he’d so vaguely acknowledged, and although I couldn’t see the wounds on all of them, the one on the top of the pile most certainly hadn’t been shot. There was a bloody wound straight across his throat, just what you might expect from a sabre in the hand of a horseman slashing at an enemy on foot. It was a method of killing that had long fallen out of favour in battle, thanks to the far greater efficacy of the bullet, but it still seemed popular when controlling a crowd. The corpse was deathly pale – in part from the cold, in part from loss of blood. It didn’t look much like a striker to me – that was to say, like a factory worker. He was too well dressed. But anyone who opposed the tsar, whatever their status, got tarred with the same brush.
I walked on, past more bridges patrolled by more pickets. This wasn’t a route with which I was particularly familiar. For me, like many, journeys in the city tended to follow a radial path, along the great prospekts such as Nevsky and Voznesensky, travelling either to or from the centre. To skirt the city as I did now was more unusual for a man of my position. It would be common for the workers who traipsed each day from the overcrowded slums where they lived to the overcrowded factories where they earned a living.
But I could recall one precise occasion when I’d walked along this stretch of the Fontanka before, within only a few weeks of my setting foot in the city for the first time. It was to visit the wife – the widow, strictly speaking – of my uncle Dmitry. The apartment where they’d both lived wasn’t far beyond the Izmailovsky barracks. It probably wasn’t a coincidence – that had been Dmitry’s regiment, though they wouldn’t remember him now. He’d fought in the Crimea, died soon after, and risen again as a vampire. As far as I knew he was still alive – still undead. We’d met, but somehow we’d never become enemies. Perhaps that was down to the blood we shared, or perhaps we each simply had our own more pressing concerns at the time. He’d told me he was going abroad, to the New World, but I never found out if he did, or if he’d even meant what he said.
At last I turned away from the river and soon I was at the barracks. It was a wide, low building – only two storeys high. The main gate was a little too grand for the scale of the rest of it. A triangular pediment stood on four pairs of white columns, which seemed purely for show since in the gaps between them stood perfectly solid walls. The entrance itself, between the inner two columns, had its own more diminutive columns, supporting their own rectangular pediment.
The sentry eyed Polkan suspiciously as he sniffed around, but beyond that seemed uninterested in my presence. There was no reason for him to know that I was a colonel, but not so many years before a soldier such as him would have stood to attention for someone like me, simply taking a judgement on the way I was dressed. The war had changed all that. I couldn’t fathom why. Every other war I’d known – or heard of – had drawn the people of Russia together. We called 1812 the Patriotic War. Mama had told me how in 1855, when the British and French were blockading the city from the Baltic, Petersburg had been united. But this war was different. From what I heard it was the same across Europe. Germany was as ripe for revolution as we were. Britain was becoming demoralized by the death toll. And still there was no end in sight.
‘I’m here to see Colonel Isayev,’ I said. I could have asked for Ilya directly, but I’d no reason to suppose he’d want to speak to me. It was better to approach him through a senior officer – and Isayev was an old friend.
The sentry turned his attention away from Polkan. ‘Who wants him?’
‘I’m Colonel Danilov.’
On hearing my rank he straightened up a little, but then deliberately overcame his instincts and slouched against the gatepost again. He turned his head to look into the barracks and raised his hand, sticking two fingers in his mouth to produce a loud whistle. He repeated the sound and then turned back to me.
‘He’ll be here in a minute.’
It was less than a minute, but it wasn’t Isayev, merely a corporal.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘I’m looking for Colonel Isayev.’
The corporal raised his hand to point down the street, uttering a single word. ‘Troitsky.’
For a moment I thought he’d said ‘Trotsky’, but it would have made little sense. Lyev Trotsky was a hero to men like these. But at the moment he was thousands of versts away, in exile like all the revolutionary leaders; in America according to the most recent news.
The corporal’s outstretched finger indicated what he’d really meant: the shining blue domes of the Troitsky Cathedral, just a little way down the road. The Cathedral of the Trinity was the regimental church of the Izmailovsky. It would be no surprise to find Isayev in there, especially at times like these.
I thanked them and called Polkan to heel. It was only a minute’s walk to the cathedral. I tied Polkan to the railing and went inside, taking off my hat as I entered. There was no service going on, but there were several dozen people ther
e – both soldiers and civilians – some praying, others sitting in quiet contemplation. Amongst the soldiers I didn’t see a single enlisted man; there was no one below the rank of lieutenant. These days it seemed only the officers were bothered to pray – only the officers needed to.
The space inside was enormous – almost as big as Saint Isaac’s. I skirted around the nave, looking at the faces of those who sat. I knew Isayev from Manchuria, when we’d been up against the Japanese. We fought together at the Battle of Sandepu, when we were both much more junior in rank than today. I soon recognized him. He was alone. I went and sat beside him, crossing myself as I looked at the iconostasis.
‘Roman Pyetrovich,’ I said quietly.
He turned and then smiled broadly. ‘Mihail Konstantinovich. It’s been a long time. You running the country yet?’
‘I think that rather depends on you, doesn’t it? What’s the mood in the regiment?’
He grimaced. ‘We’re scarcely in control any more. It was bad enough at the Front. Now they’re pulling battalions back into the city, and everyone knows why – to turn their guns on our own people.’
‘Will they do it, if they’re ordered to?’
He lowered his voice still further. ‘I won’t give the order, and I’m not the only one. But that’s not to say there aren’t plenty who will.’
‘So even the officers are divided?’ I asked.
‘We always have been – even in your day. There are those of us who had to work to get where we are, and those who were born into it. But now it’s got to the point that they’ll recruit anybody. We’re losing men by the barrel load, but we’re losing officers too. And all they can do to replace either is draw people in from the country. I’ve got a lieutenant who’s spent his entire life farming rye. He’s got a better idea of how to harness a plough to an ox than a gun to a carriage.’
