by Follett, Ken
Katerina inspected the place with a long look that took everything in, then she said: “You have all this to yourself?”
“No—I’m not rich! I share with my brother. He’ll be here later.”
She looked thoughtful. Perhaps she was afraid she might be expected to have sex with both of them. To reassure her, Grigori said: “Shall I introduce you to the women in the house?”
“Plenty of time for that.” She sat in one of the two chairs. “Let me rest a while.”
“Of course.” The fire was laid, ready to be lit: he always built it in the morning before going to work. He put a match to the kindling.
There was a thunderous noise, and Katerina looked frightened. “It’s just a train,” Grigori said. “We’re right next to the railway.”
He poured water from the jug into the bowl, then set the bowl on the hob to warm. He sat opposite Katerina and looked at her. She had straight fair hair and pale skin. At first he had judged her to be quite pretty, but now he saw that she was really beautiful, with an oriental cast to her bone structure that suggested Siberian ancestry. There was strength of character in her face, too: her wide mouth was sexy, but also determined, and there seemed to be iron purpose in her blue-green eyes.
Her lips were swelling up from Pinsky’s punch. “How do you feel?” Grigori asked.
She ran her hands over her shoulders, ribs, hips, and thighs. “Bruised all over,” she said. “But you pulled that animal off me before he could do any serious damage.”
She was not going to feel sorry for herself. He liked that. He said: “When the water’s warm, I’ll wash away the blood.”
He kept food in a tin box. He took out a knuckle of ham and dropped it in the saucepan, then added water from the jug. He rinsed a turnip and began to slice it into the pan. He caught Katerina’s eye and saw a look of surprise. She said: “Did your father cook?”
“No,” said Grigori, and in a blink he was transported back to the age of eleven. The nightmare memories of Princess Bea could no longer be resisted. He put the pan down heavily on the table, then sat on the edge of the bed and buried his head in his hands, overwhelmed by grief. “No,” he repeated, “my father didn’t cook.”
{ V }
They came to the village at dawn: the local land captain and six cavalrymen. As soon as Ma heard the trotting hoofbeats she picked up Lev. He was a heavy burden at age six, but Ma was broad-shouldered and strong-armed. She grabbed Grigori’s hand and ran out of the house. The horsemen were being led by the village elders, who must have met them at the outskirts. Because there was only one door, Grigori’s family had no chance of concealment, and as soon as they appeared the soldiers spurred their mounts.
Ma pounded around the side of the house, scattering chickens and scaring the goat so that it broke its tether and bolted too. She ran across the waste ground at the back toward the trees. They might have escaped, but Grigori suddenly realized that his grandmother was not with them. He stopped and pulled his hand free. “We forgot Gran!” he squealed.
“She can’t run!” Ma yelled back.
Grigori knew that. Gran could hardly walk. But all the same he felt they must not leave her behind.
“Grishka, come on!” Ma shouted, and she ran ahead, still carrying Lev, who was now shrieking with fear. Grigori followed, but the delay had been fatal. The horsemen came closer, one approaching on either side. The path to the woods was cut off. In desperation Ma ran into the pond, but her feet sank into the mud, she slowed down, and at last she fell into the water.
The soldiers hooted with laughter.
They tied Ma’s hands and marched her back. “Make sure the boys come too,” said the land captain. “Prince’s orders.”
Grigori’s father had been taken away a week ago, along with two other men. Yesterday, Prince Andrei’s household carpenters had built a scaffold in the north meadow. Now, as Grigori followed his mother into the meadow, he saw three men standing on the scaffold, bound hand and foot, with ropes around their necks. Beside the scaffold stood a priest.
Ma screamed: “No!” She began to struggle with the rope that bound her hands. A cavalryman drew a rifle from the holster fixed to his saddle and, reversing it, hit her in the face with its wooden stock. She stopped struggling and began to sob.
Grigori knew what this meant: his father was going to die here. He had seen horse thieves hanged by the village elders, though that had seemed different because the victims were men he did not know. He was seized by a terror that turned his entire body numb and feeble.
Perhaps something would happen to prevent the execution. The tsar might intervene, if he truly watched over his people. Or perhaps an angel. Grigori’s face felt wet and he realized he was crying.
He and his mother were forced to stand right in front of the scaffold. The other villagers gathered around. Like Ma, the wives of the other two men had to be dragged there, screaming and crying, their hands bound, their children holding on to their skirts and howling in terror.
On the dirt track beyond the field gate stood a closed carriage, its matching chestnut horses cropping the roadside grass. When everyone was present, a black-bearded figure emerged from the carriage in a long dark coat: Prince Andrei. He turned and gave his hand to his little sister, Princess Bea, with furs around her shoulders against the morning cold. The princess was beautiful, Grigori could not help noticing, with pale skin and fair hair, just as he imagined angels to look, even though she was obviously a devil.
The prince addressed the villagers. “This meadow belongs to Princess Bea,” he said. “No one may graze cattle here without her permission. To do so is to steal the princess’s grass.”
There was a murmur of resentment from the crowd. They did not believe in this kind of ownership, despite what they were told every Sunday in church. They adhered to an older, peasant morality, according to which the land was for those who worked it.
The prince pointed to the three men on the scaffold. “These fools broke the law—not once, but repeatedly.” His voice was shrill with outrage, like a child whose toy has been snatched. “Worse, they told others that the princess had no right to stop them, and that fields the landowner is not using should be available to poor peasants.” Grigori had heard his father say such things often. “As a result, men from other villages have started grazing cattle on land that belongs to the nobility. Instead of repenting their sins, these three have turned their neighbors into sinners too! That is why they have been sentenced to death.” He nodded to the priest.
The priest climbed the makeshift steps and spoke quietly to each man in turn. The first nodded expressionlessly. The second wept and began to pray aloud. The third, Grigori’s father, spat in the priest’s face. No one was shocked: the villagers had a low opinion of the clergy, and Grigori had heard his father say that they told the police everything they heard in the confessional.
The priest descended the steps, and Prince Andrei nodded to one of his servants, who was standing by with a sledgehammer. Grigori noticed for the first time that the three condemned men were standing on a crudely hinged wooden platform supported only by a single prop, and he realized with terror that the sledgehammer was to knock away the prop.
Now, he thought, this is when an angel should appear.
The villagers moaned. The wives began to scream, and this time the soldiers did not stop them. Little Lev was hysterical. He probably did not understand what was about to happen, Grigori thought, but he was scared by their mother’s shrieks.
Pa showed no emotion. His face was stony. He looked into the distance and awaited his fate. Grigori wanted to be that strong. He struggled to maintain his self-control, even though he needed to howl like Lev. He could not hold back the tears, but he bit his lip and remained as silent as his father.
The servant hefted his sledgehammer, touched it to the prop to get his range, swung backward, and struck. The prop flew through the air. The hinged platform came down with a bang. The three men dropped, then jerked, their fall
arrested by the ropes around their necks.
Grigori was unable to look away. He stared at his father. Pa did not die instantly. He opened his mouth, trying to breathe, or to shout, but could not do either. His face turned red and he struggled with the ropes that bound him. It seemed to go on for a long time. His face became redder.
Then his skin turned a bluish color and his movements became weaker. At last he was still.
Ma stopped screaming and began to sob.
The priest prayed aloud, but the villagers ignored him and, one by one, they turned away from the sight of the three dead men.
The prince and the princess got back into their carriage, and after a moment, the coachman cracked his whip and drove away.
{ VI }
Grigori was calm again by the time he finished telling the story. He dragged his sleeve across his face to dry his tears, then turned his attention back to Katerina. She had listened to him in compassionate silence, but she was not shocked. She must have seen similar sights herself: hanging, flogging, and mutilation were normal punishments in the villages.
Grigori put the bowl of warm water on the table and found a clean towel. Katerina tilted her head back, and Grigori hung the kerosene lamp from a hook on the wall so that he could see better.
There was a cut on her forehead and a bruise on her cheek, and her lips were puffy. Even so, staring at her close up took Grigori’s breath away. She looked back at him with a candid, fearless gaze that he found enchanting.
He dipped a corner of the towel in warm water.
“Be gentle,” she said.
“Of course.” He began by wiping her forehead. Her injury there was only a graze, he saw when he had dabbed away the blood.
“That feels better,” she said.
She watched his face while he worked. He washed her cheeks and her throat, then said: “I’ve left the painful part until last.”
“It will be all right,” she said. “You have such a light touch.” All the same, she winced when his towel touched her swollen lips.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Keep going.”
The abrasions were already healing, he saw as he cleaned them. She had the even white teeth of a young girl. He wiped the corners of her wide mouth. As he bent closer, he could feel her warm breath on his face.
When he had finished he felt a sense of disappointment, as if he had been waiting for something that had not happened.
He sat back and rinsed the towel in the water, which was now dark with her blood.
“Thank you,” she said. “You have very good hands.”
His heart was racing. He had bathed people’s wounds before, but he had never experienced this dizzy sensation. He felt he might be about to do something foolish.
He opened the window and emptied the bowl, making a pink splash on the snow in the yard.
The mad thought crossed his mind that Katerina might be a dream. He turned, half expecting her chair to be empty. But there she was, looking back at him with those blue-green eyes, and he realized he wanted her never to go away.
It occurred to him that he might be in love.
He had never thought that before. He was usually too busy looking after Lev to chase women. He was not a virgin: he had had sex with three different women. It had always been a joyless experience, perhaps because he had not much cared for any of them.
But now, he thought shakily, he wanted, more than anything else in the world, to lie down with Katerina on the narrow bed against the wall and kiss her hurt face and tell her—
And tell her that he loved her.
Don’t be stupid, he said to himself. You met her an hour ago. What she wants from you is not love, but a loan and a job and a place to sleep.
He closed the window with a slam.
She said: “So you cook for your brother, and you have gentle hands, and yet you can knock a policeman to the ground with one punch.”
He did not know what to say.
“You told me how your father died,” she went on. “But your mother died, too, when you were young—didn’t she?”
“How did you know?”
Katerina shrugged. “Because you had to become a mother.”
{ VII }
She died on January 9, 1905, by the old Russian calendar. It was a Sunday, and in the days and years that followed it came to be known as Bloody Sunday.
Grigori was sixteen and Lev eleven. Like Ma, both boys worked at the Putilov factory. Grigori was an apprentice foundryman, Lev a sweep. That January all three of them were on strike, along with more than a hundred thousand other St. Petersburg factory workers, for an eight-hour day and the right to form trade unions. On the morning of the ninth they put on their best clothes and went out, holding hands and tramping through a fresh fall of snow, to a church near the Putilov factory. After the service they joined the thousands of workers marching from all points of the city toward the Winter Palace.
“Why do we have to march?” young Lev whined. He would have preferred to play soccer in an alleyway.
“Because of your father,” said Ma. “Because princes and princesses are murdering brutes. Because we have to overthrow the tsar and all his kind. Because I will not rest until Russia is a republic.”
It was a perfect St. Petersburg day, cold but dry, and Grigori’s face was warmed by the sun just as his heart was warmed by the feeling of comradeship in a just cause.
Their leader, Father Gapon, was like an Old Testament prophet, with his long beard, his biblical language, and the light of glory in his eye. He was no revolutionary: his self-help clubs, approved by the government, started all meetings with the Lord’s Prayer and ended with the national anthem. “I can see now what the tsar intended Gapon to be,” Grigori said to Katerina nine years later, in his room overlooking the railway line. “A safety valve, designed to take the pressure for reform and release it harmlessly in tea drinking and country dancing. But it didn’t work.”
Wearing a long white robe and carrying a crucifix, Gapon led the procession along the Narva highway. Grigori, Lev, and Ma were right beside him: he encouraged families to march at the front, saying that the soldiers would never fire on infants. Behind them two neighbors carried a large portrait of the tsar. Gapon told them that the tsar was the father of his people. He would listen to their cries, overrule his hard-hearted ministers, and grant the workers’ reasonable demands. “The Lord Jesus said: ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me,’ and the tsar says the same,” Gapon cried, and Grigori believed him.
They had approached the Narva Gate, a massive triumphal arch, and Grigori remembered looking up at the statue of a chariot with six gigantic horses; then a squadron of cavalry charged the marchers, almost as if the copper horses atop the monument had come thunderously alive.
Some demonstrators fled, some fell to the hammer blows of the hooves. Grigori froze in place, terrified, as did Ma and Lev.
The soldiers did not draw weapons, and seemed intent simply on scaring people away; but there were too many workers, and a few minutes later the cavalry wheeled their horses and rode off.
The march resumed in a different spirit. Grigori sensed that the day might not end peacefully. He thought about the forces ranged against them: the nobility, the ministers, and the army. How far would they go to keep the people from speaking to their tsar?
His answer came almost immediately. Looking over the heads in front of him he saw a line of infantry and realized, with a shudder of dread, that they were in firing position.
The march slowed as people comprehended what they faced. Father Gapon, who was within touching distance of Grigori, turned and shouted to his followers: “The tsar will never allow his armies to shoot at his beloved people!”
There was a deafening rattle, like a hailstorm on a tin roof: the soldiers had fired a salvo. The acrid smell of gunpowder stung Grigori’s nostrils, and fear clutched at his heart.
The priest shouted: “Don’t worry—they’re firing into the air!”
> Another volley rang out, but no bullets seemed to land. All the same, Grigori’s bowels clenched in terror.
Then there was a third salvo, and this time the bullets did not fly harmlessly up. Grigori heard screams and saw people fall. He stared around in confusion for a moment, then Ma shoved him violently, shouting: “Lie down!” He fell flat. At the same time Ma threw Lev to the ground and dropped on top of him.
We’re going to die, Grigori thought, and his heart thudded louder than the guns.
The shooting continued relentlessly, a nightmare noise that could not be shut out. As people fled in panic, Grigori was trodden on by heavy boots, but Ma protected his head and Lev’s. They lay there trembling while the shooting and screaming went on above them.
Then the firing stopped. Ma moved, and Grigori raised his head to look around. People were hurrying away in all directions, shouting to one another, but the screaming died down. “Get up, come on,” said Ma, and they scrambled to their feet and hurried away from the road, jumping over still bodies and running around the bleeding wounded. They reached a side street and slowed down. Lev whispered to Grigori: “I’ve wet myself! Don’t tell Ma!”
Ma’s blood was up. “We WILL speak to the tsar!” she cried, and people stopped to look at her broad peasant face and intense gaze. She was deep-chested, and her voice boomed out across the street. “They cannot prevent us—we must go to the Winter Palace!” Some people cheered, and others nodded agreement. Lev started to cry.
Listening to the story, nine years later, Katerina said: “Why did she do that? She should have taken her children home to safety!”
“She used to say she did not want her sons to live as she had,” Grigori replied. “I think she felt it would be better for us all to die than to give up the hope of a better life.”
Katerina looked thoughtful. “I suppose that’s brave.”
