The Silent Land

by Sally Spencer

  “Who in the Party ever thought they were not progressive?” I ask. “Who in the Party would ever concede that there was any other way to the Marxist utopia but their own?”

  He laughs – but uncomfortably. “If you prefer it,” he says, “we can substitute the word ‘liberal’ for ‘progressive’.”

  “And you want to use me, don’t you?” I demand. “I am a walking witness to a discredited revolution, and you want to use me as Gorbachev’s stick to beat the conservatives with.”

  “Yes, we want to use you,” he admits, “but the reactionaries will try to use you too, to support their own case. History is no longer as objective as we once believed it to be – that’s one of the things Stalin did manage to teach us.”

  Of course they’d all try to use me. The Party always did. What was I doing when I addressed the women textile workers in the Vyborg District? When I persuaded the soldiers to leave their barracks? Using them! And in this, at least, the Party does not stand alone in its guilt. Everyone, everywhere, uses everyone else. Very well, then, I’ll use Yuri for my own particular ends.

  But what are my ends? An hour ago, I had only one aim in mind – to keep out of the death camp. And now this journalist, The Man the Other Day, is offering me something I’d never imagined possible.

  Do I want it? Am I brave enough to leave the silent land of my exile and return to the greater silence of Russia? Could I …?

  Don’t lie to yourself, Annushka! Not now! Not now! It’s not silence you fear – there can be no silence for you in Russia.

  I could stand alone on vast steppes, without another living thing to be seen from one horizon to the other, and there would be no silence. The land would speak to me, as it has spoken to a hundred generations of Russians before me.

  “Beat us, steal from us, sleep with our wives and daughters,” the serfs used to say to the men from the big houses. “We are yours, do with us what you will – but the land is ours.”

  I’ve seen much, I’ve done much, since I left the mir, but I can’t escape from that line of ancestors, stretching into the mists of time, who planted and sowed, sweated and slaved. I am in the land – the land is in me.

  I, too, have planted and sowed, and though my crops, my few personal seeds, have long since been harvested – or died before they ever bloomed – I’m not sure I still have the courage to go and see where they once lay.

  “Your daughter would like to see you again,” Yuri says.

  I start to tremble. “T … Tania? Is she still alive?”

  Yuri laughs again, this time because he has scored a point. “Very much so, Princess. She’s as tough as her mother.”

  There has been a silence between us for nearly half a century, ever since the day she decided to return to Russia and work for – instead of against – the butcher who called himself our General Secretary. The silence is of her making, not mine – but who am I to complain? I taught my children to put their duty, as they saw it, above all else. Perhaps if Konstantin had lived longer, I would have felt it necessary to cut myself off from him, just as she has cut herself off from me.

  “The Mayakovsky Palace?” I ask. “Is it still there?”

  “It’s still there, Princess.”

  “What is it now?”

  He shrugs, as if it doesn’t matter. Well, it matters to me.

  “Don’t you know?” I ask.

  “I … er … believe it houses a number of enterprises – a co-operative press, a workshop, even a small museum.”

  And Konstantin. He’ll still be there, I’d be able to feel his presence in every room. I’m too old to be hurt again!

  Going home would bring back other memories, too, of friends and comrades lost, of lives wasted, of that terrible night in the Crimea which even now I find it hard to think about, which even now I … I …

  The Advance of the Red Army in the Southern Campaign of 1919. I was a political commissar by then, Trotsky’s watch-dog over the ‘military specialists’ who had once been Tsarist officers. No order could be issued without my counter-signature on it, no decision could be taken without my being consulted. I was not quite twenty-three, and I had more power than a General.

  The White armies had been routed and we were liberating as much territory each day as we could cover in that day’s march. The chaos was indescribable. Partisan bands who’d fought behind enemy lines now offered their services to the regular army or else set up small, temporary states of their own. Columns of refugees, either fleeing from the Whites or following them, begged and scavenged as best they could. Freed Bolsheviks pleaded for transport to their homes, often hundreds of miles away. Captured Whites milled around listlessly in hastily constructed prison camps and pondered on their fate.

  There were streams of requests to be granted or refused, thousands of decisions to be taken and orders to be issued. It seemed never ending. I hadn’t seen my children for months. Tania would have grown out of recognition by the time I returned home, Nicky would have scores of new triumphs to relate to me.

  I worked eighteen or twenty hours at a stretch. Sometimes I got no sleep at all. I worked while I ate, as I travelled in the staff car, even when recurring attacks of diarrhoea forced me to spend hours on the toilet. My eyes prickled with tiredness and my body felt as if it would never stop aching again.

  Perhaps if I’d not been so exhausted, I’d have acted differently that night in the small Crimean town whose name I’ve forgotten. But I don’t think so. What else could I have done?

  We’d reached the Black Sea that day, and I’d set up my headquarters in the house of a local priest who’d fled with the White Army. I was in the dining room, in conference with some senior officers, when my aide entered.

  “There’s a local partisan leader outside, Comrade Commissar. He wants to see you.”

  I slammed down my pen in irritation. “Isn’t there anyone else who could deal with him?”

  “It has to be you. He says it’s important.”

  Not all the partisans were pro-Bolshevik. Some hated us as much as they hated the Whites. It wouldn’t be wise to offend a guerrilla leader at this point in the campaign. “Show him in,” I said wearily.

  He was a formidable man with a thick, black beard and flashing, angry eyes. On his head, he wore the close-fitting cap of a Crimean Tartar. He was not alone. A frightened-looking, dark-haired girl, perhaps fourteen or fifteen, was by his side. Despite her slightly Asiatic features, she reminded me very much of myself at her age.

  “How may we help you, Aga?” I asked.

  “I want justice for my daughter,” he said in strongly-accented Russian.

  “How was she wronged?”

  “Tell her,” the Tartar demanded.

  “I was walking back from my grandmother’s village,” the girl said, gazing down at the floor. “This … this officer came along on his horse. I was quite frightened at first, but when he spoke, he seemed so nice. He asked me if I wanted a ride. I was tired, and so I said yes. He … he took me into the woods. We stopped by a stream and he told me to undress. When I wouldn’t, he beat me, and then he ripped my clothes off and then he … and then he …”

  “Raped you?”

  The girl nodded mutely.

  “And when did this happen?”

  “Yesterday,” the Tartar said.

  “We only arrived today.”

  “It wasn’t one of your lot, it was one of the others,” the Tartar said dismissively, as if all Russians were the same.

  “Then I don’t see what I can do. The White Army is in retreat.”

  “Not this bastard. He was taken prisoner. They’re holding him in the cattle pens. They won’t let me get near him.”

  I turned to my aide. “Go with the girl,” I told him. “If she can identify the man who raped her, have him brought here.”

  “What will you do with him?” the Tartar snorted. “Slap his wrist?”

  And have him and his partisans go on the rampage? Risk the lives of my own men for the sake o
f one brutal enemy soldier? Oh no!

  “If I’m satisfied that he is the one who raped her, I’ll have him shot,” I said.

  The Tartar nodded his head. He would obviously have preferred a slow, painful death for the violator of his daughter’s innocence, but he was prepared to settle for a bullet.

  An escort returned with the accused man ten minutes later. They marched him to the centre of the room and called a halt. Standing there, with a soldier either side of him, he looked very vulnerable, and the crimson scratchmarks on his cheek served only to emphasize his paleness. The girl’s father, now being restrained by two of my bodyguards, shouted abuse at him, but he refused to look in the Tartar’s direction. He was guilty, there could be no possible doubt about that.

  “Take the Aga outside,” I said, aware of the tremble in my voice. “The escort can leave as well.” I turned to the officers sitting around the table. “You, too, comrades, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “But he’s a dangerous enemy, Comrade Commissar,” one of them objected.

  Dangerous? Not now. Not with me.

  “And I am armed,” I told them, holding up my pistol in a shaking hand. “If he makes a wrong move, I’ll shoot him.”

  “But Comrade Commissar—”

  “Go! For God’s sake, go!”

  I was silent while the others reluctantly left the room. The prisoner stepped forward and clutched at the top of a chair for support. Finally, the door closed behind the last officer, and we were alone.

  “Why, Misha?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose it was because they all reminded me of you.”

  “All?”

  “She wasn’t the first, not by a long way. I always started out just wanting to hold them, to be nice to them, but then, I don’t know, I’d feel this rage building up inside me, and I’d have to hurt them. It’s as if … it’s as if I wanted to punish them for not being you.”

  Or to punish me for being me.

  “If only you hadn’t been my sister!” he blurted out.

  Ah yes, if only I hadn’t been your sister. You were weak, Misha, you ran away when I really needed you. But you could also be brave, like the time you took the beating to save me. Perhaps with you I’d have found the tenderness I had with Sasha and felt the passion which Peter aroused in me. Perhaps, too, with me to guide you, you could have been a better man, more like my dear Konstantin.

  If only I hadn’t been your sister.

  “I’m going to have to order your execution,” I told him.

  He gasped. “You can’t … you just can’t!”

  “I don’t have any choice. It’s your life against dozens of others. And do you really think that even if I spared you, those Tartars out there would just let you walk away?”

  He nodded his head solemnly, as if he accepted the point. “But not by firing squad,” he pleaded. “I couldn’t take that. I’d break down, I know I would. Let me at least die with a little dignity.”

  I slid my pistol across the table. “Take it,” I said.

  He picked up the gun. His hand was trembling as much as mine. He cocked the hammer, placed the barrel against his forehead, and closed his eyes. I wanted to turn away, but I forced myself to watch – I owed him that at least. It was not warm in the room, but droplets of sweat were forming on his forehead.

  My eyes became transfixed by his trigger finger, which seemed to grow and grow until it filled my whole field of vision. The seconds ticked by. One … two … three … four … five … Misha lowered the gun.

  “I can’t,” he said miserably.

  “You have to!”

  He slid the weapon back to me. “Couldn’t you do it?”

  “Me! You want me to kill my own brother?”

  “It’s because I am your brother – and your lover – that I can ask you. You do still love me, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I admittedly heavily, “I still love you.” I picked up my gun and raised it until it was level with his chest.

  “No, not from the front,” he said. “I know I’ve got to die, but I don’t want to see it coming.”

  He walked to the centre of the room and turned his back on me. “Do it when you’re ready,” he said. “Only don’t speak. Don’t say a word. Shall I tell you what I’m thinking about? I’m thinking about that day in the woods, by the riverbank.”

  I cocked my pistol again and rose from my chair as quietly as I could.

  “I hadn’t planned it,” Misha continued. “If your horse hadn’t cast its shoe, it would never have happened.”

  I edged my way around the table, being careful not to bang against any of the chairs.

  “I’ve never stopped thinking about it. Never. Not just when I was with Mariamna or any of the other girls – I think about it all the time!”

  I stepped silently across the floor until I was standing right behind him.

  “It was a warm, sunny day. Do you remember? The sun has never felt half so kind since.”

  Shooting deserters and spies in the back of the head was a standard method of execution then. I’d seen it done many times. I lifted the pistol so slowly, so carefully, that not even a rustling of clothes gave my movements away.

  “I never imagined that anyone could be as beautiful as you were that day. Your face, your breasts …”

  Pistols have been known to jam. If this one jammed on me now, I told myself, I’d take it as a sign that God, or Fate – or something – didn’t want me to shoot Misha, and I’d do my best to help his escape, whatever it cost me – or anyone else.

  “It was the happiest moment of my life,” Misha said. “It was my only really happy moment. Perhaps I should have died then and there.”

  I squeezed the trigger. The pistol did not jam.

  How can I go back to Russia? How can I visit the palace my husband died in? The town where I killed my brother? How can I face the daughter who, to preserve her ideological purity, banished me from her life for so long – the daughter who was hardly more than a girl the last time I saw her, and is now a pensioner?

  I can’t. I can’t. I’m old. I’m weak. There’s no fight left in me.

  “I’m sorry, Yuri,” I say to the journalist-politician. “I’ll help you in any way I can, but returning to Russia—”

  “What’s this! What the hell are you doing here?”

  Jennifer has, as usual, neglected to knock, and her angry words are directed not at me, but at my visitor. She’s not come alone. Sonia is standing beside her in the doorway, and in the corridor I can see Charles and Edward.

  “I said, what are you doing here?”

  “It is a free country,” Yuri replies, speaking for the first time in English, “or so you Britons always claim.”

  Jennifer advances into the room, crunching broken pottery under her heel. She stops for a moment to inspect it. “You see,” she says to her sister. “She’s not even swept up the vase she threw at us. She’s totally incapable of looking after herself.”

  “I know, I know,” Sonia chimes from the hallway.

  Jennifer is bending over me now. Her face is white with rage. “You had no right to talk to him!” she says through tight lips. “No right at all!” She turns on Yuri. “What has she been telling you?”

  “She talked about the Revolution. Lenin and the storming of the Winter Palace.”

  “You should never have bothered her,” my great-granddaughter says. “Can’t you see she’s easily confused?”

  “She seems lucid enough to me,” Yuri replies mildly.

  She seems lucid enough to me. Is that all the support I can hope for from my only ally? Well, what did I expect? That he would spring to my defence like a knight in shining armour? He’s a journalist – and a political fixer. He’s just doing his job. He doesn’t give a damn about me.

  You’re on your own, old woman. You have been since your husband died.

  “I can’t stop you saying what you like in Russia,” Jennifer says, pointing her finger at the journal
ist, “but if you print one word of your lies in a British paper, I’ll sue you for every penny you’ve got.”

  Ah, Jennifer, so like your father. So worried about what your fancy friends will say.

  Sonia has moved into the room now, and is opening the chest of drawers.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “Packing your things.” Brisk, efficient. “All the arrangements have been made.”

  I am sitting here and letting it happen. I am giving in to the inevitable. Perhaps I knew all along that I would in the end, and was only fooling myself. All I can hope for now is a quick death.

  “Arrangements?” Yuri asks. “What arrangements?”

  “Great-grandmother is going into a home,” Jennifer says. “Somewhere she’ll be protected from people like you.”

  I’ve been staring at the wall straight ahead of me – practising to be an imbecile – but something in Jennifer’s voice makes me turn towards her.

  The expression on her face shocks me. I thought I’d seen them all – her sulks, her looks of reproach and disdain, of contempt and exasperation. I’ve even seen her smile before – ingratiating smiles offered up to her husband’s superiors, regal smiles bestowed on the servants. But I’ve never seen her smile like this.

  It’s a look of triumph, of pure bourgeois complacency. It’s a look that could only play on the lips of a woman absolute convinced she’s one of the chosen few. She is so sure she’s right.

  Thank you, great-granddaughter. Thank you for giving me the strength to fight back. “I don’t want to go into a home,” I say. “I want to return to Russia.”

  “Return to Russia,” giggles Sonia, who’s still putting my clothes into my battered suitcase. “How could you afford that? You haven’t got two pennies to rub together.”

  “He’ll pay for me,” I say, pointing a bony finger at the journalist who is still sitting in my only chair.

  Jennifer swings round on him like a wildcat. “Is that true? Have you told her you’ll pay her fare back to Russia?”

  “Not me personally, but Soviet television is certainly willing to do so.”