by Jasper Kent
He said nothing more and Tamara took it that the interview was at an end. She stood up to leave. ‘Thank you, Vasiliy Innokyentievich,’ she said. ‘I’ll be in touch.’
She was almost at the door when he spoke again. ‘Oh, and you’ll need this.’
She turned. His arm was held out across the desk, proffering a sheet of paper – a yellow sheet of paper. She took it from him, but did not need to look closely to see what it was: the yellow ticket that identified a woman formally as a prostitute. She guessed that one of the girls had not yet been issued with it; perhaps Raisa Styepanovna.
‘Who’s it for?’ she asked.
Yudin said nothing, but nodded his head towards the ticket. Tamara looked. The name on it was her own: Tamara Valentinovna Komarova. She had never needed such a thing before, despite meriting it, but this made things seem official. Yudin had been toying with her earlier. She looked questioningly at him.
‘Even senior officers have to pitch in with the troops sometimes,’ he said, ‘particularly in time of war.’
She cursed herself for thinking things might be any different, then turned and left.
CHAPTER II
DMITRY FELT ENTOMBED. The snow surrounded him, filling his nostrils, lashing against his eyes and inveigling its way between his lips. It was as if he had been buried in it, but he had not. It was merely a flurry within a storm that would soon die down again and then he would be able to see. Somewhere out there in front of him, across the river, stood the enemy. It might be the French, or the British, or the Turks. It could even be the damned Sardinians, now that they’d chosen to join in, sucking up to the French in the hope of support in their own war. Dmitry could not see to tell. He couldn’t even see the river, but he knew it was there.
‘Major Danilov!’
Dmitry turned. A young poruchik was standing beside him, a dispatch clutched in his gloved hand. Dmitry could only guess how the youth had managed to find him in the blizzard. He took the paper from him and tried to read it, holding it away from him so that he could focus. The driving snow flickered between his eyes and the scrawled writing, but it was not difficult to make out. There were only two words.
Save ammunition.
Dmitry screwed the paper into a ball and was about to throw it to the ground when he thought better of it. He slipped it into his pocket. What would the French make of it if they found orders like that?
‘Any reply, sir?’
Dmitry smiled to himself. Had he been both wittier and more reckless he might have sent a response that expressed his true feelings. ‘No reply,’ he said. The poruchik saluted and dashed away, disappearing in an instant behind sheets of falling snow.
It was the enemy’s first assault of the year, and a foolish one. The allied lines were to the south of Sevastopol, stretching inland from the coast. The city was their target, but it was well if hastily defended. Dividing it like a jagged wound was the harbour, wherein were anchored the remains of the Black Sea fleet – the whole reason that the British and French were here. The harbour was fed by the Chernaya river, continuing the natural line of defence out to the east. To cross it was the enemy’s best hope of encircling the city. But they had chosen the wrong day to attempt it.
Dmitry mounted his horse and trotted down the Russian lines. The wind had dropped, and although the snow was still falling, it was now possible to see a little further, almost to the far side of the river. The enemy weren’t making much progress. Their attack had begun with a bombardment. The intent had been to drive the Russians back from the north bank of the river, but while it had achieved that goal, it had also warned them of the impending advance. Some might question why Dmitry was even here. He was a staff officer, deemed too senior in more senses than one for service in the field; it was an assessment that sickened him, and when the attack had come he’d been among the first into action. He had the desire neither to die nor to kill – but either was better than remaining at headquarters, reading reports of both.
He didn’t bother to forward the orders he had been given. The men knew that ammunition was short as well as he did, and knew that it was down to the rotten supply lines from Moscow. Even the enemy, sailing through the Mediterranean, could get supplies quicker than the Russians. And now the English had built a railway up from the docks at Balaklava. There were no locomotives for it yet – the wagons were pulled by horses – but it meant that food, ammunition and even artillery could come all the way from the factories of England to the red-coated British infantrymen on the front line without ever travelling along anything so primitive as a road. If Tsar Nikolai had chosen to build a railway from Moscow to Sevastopol, or Simferopol or even Odessa, then the enemy wouldn’t have got a toehold on the peninsula. But the line from Moscow to Petersburg had more prestige – and that’s what mattered to a tsar.
On the far riverbank Dmitry could just see French sappers trying to control the segmented pontoon bridges that they hoped would allow their fellow troops to march straight across. They made easy targets, but the weather was as effective a hindrance to them as any bullet. Even as he watched, one of the ropes that they were heaving on broke loose, whipping across the pontoon and knocking a man into the river. His comrades reached down for him, but then the blizzard blew up again and Dmitry could see no more. He remembered his father’s stories of the Battle of the Berezina, when Napoleon had desperately organized the bridging of the river so that he could lead his remaining troops out of Russia. His father had not attempted to hide his admiration for the sappers then, who stood chest deep in the freezing water, constantly shoring up the construction they had built from scavenged wood. But Dmitry could not feel a similar sympathy for his enemy. They at least came here by choice, whereas the Russian soldiers – the men, if not the officers – were serfs; owned either by the tsar or by other rich nobles and obliged to do their masters’ bidding, be it to die of exhaustion toiling in the cornfield or to die from a bullet in the field of battle.
‘Boat coming!’
Dmitry could not tell which eagle-eyed spotter had made the call, but as he looked out over the river, the prow of a landing craft began to emerge from the cascading snow. Dmitry was about to shout an instruction, but the captain of the company beat him to it.
‘Muskets only!’ he shouted. ‘Fire at will!’
‘Hold fire!’ Dmitry countermanded instantly, raising his hand in the air. ‘Let them get close.’
The captain corrected his instructions without the slightest complaint, just as Dmitry would have – each of them was merely a link in the chain of command. The corrected order was passed down the line. The men on the boat began to fire, and a number of the Russian infantrymen fell. Dmitry felt a bullet whistle past close to his ear and was surprised that he did not flinch. At least half the British and almost as many of the French had shtutsers, which reloaded faster and were more accurate than muskets. In the Russian army, they were almost non-existent. Dmitry remembered the discussions about introducing them, decades before, and recalled one senior officer’s opinion that faster-loading guns would only encourage the men to use up more ammunition instead of relying on their bayonets. That point of view had won out. It was the same attitude that encouraged men to deliberately loosen the ramrod and the keeper-rings on their muskets so that they rattled during drill. It was a fine thing for five hundred guns to sound together in perfect time on the parade ground, another to see that not one of them could hit a man in the field.
Still Dmitry held his hand in the air, like the conductor of some orchestra, holding off for as long as possible the delicious resolution of a suspended chord. When the boat was close enough – close enough for the men on board to dream that their assault might be successful – he dropped his hand, and accompanied the motion with a shout of ‘Fire!’ Again the order was echoed down the line, followed eagerly by the report of gunfire. At that range, not even a Russian musket could miss its mark – and there were far more muskets than there had been men on the boat.
With a slight thump, the
vessel hit the northern bank of the river, but no one was able to disembark. They were fools to have attempted a landing in this weather. For all his faults, Tsar Nikolai understood how Russia fought a war and had expressed it very clearly. ‘Russia has two generals in whom she can confide – Generals Janvier and Février.’ It was true, even as far south as this. It was the Russian winter that had defeated Napoleon, and the same winter that, so far, was holding off this new French assault. But January was over, and February was the shortest month, and then there would be ten more when the Russians would have to fight alone, without the assistance of Nikolai’s two favourite generals.
Another shout came from further down the line. Dmitry spurred his horse and rode on to see what was happening. This time it was a minor success by the pontoniers – they had managed to lash together two sections of a bridge, spanning perhaps a tenth of the total width of the river. Russian artillery fire quickly saw off the attack, destroying in seconds the work of many hours, along with most of the workers. Dmitry sat and watched impassively. The snow was stopping now, but it had done its work. It would soon be dark, and the enemy would not attack at night. Sevastopol was safe; until tomorrow.
The storm had settled down overnight and the following day was calm and clear, though it was still cold and the ground remained blanketed in snow. There had been no word of a further attempt to cross the river – the enemy had lost enough men and equipment to make them think twice about trying that route of attack again. Today Dmitry was off duty, back in the centre of the city. He sat in the mess at the Nikolai Barracks, trying to write a letter.
Dear Papa,
That was as far as he got. He knew precisely what he wanted to express. The problem was he had written the same thing in a hundred different ways before, and always with the same response: no response at all. He rested his head back against the chair and tried not to think too hard. As ever, when he relaxed, music came to him. It had been so since he was a child, whole orchestras playing in his head, music that was familiar and yet strange. The harmony was harmony that he knew. The rhythms and counterpoints were all of a kind that would be accepted as correct by a professor of music, though perhaps frowned upon for being a little too avant-garde. But it was all original. Certainly Dmitry could summon up a well-known tune, but when he simply let the music flow through him, it was a creation of his own, something that neither he nor anyone else had ever heard before. In the whole of his forty-seven years, he didn’t believe it had ever repeated itself. But neither in that time had he ever managed to write a single note of it down on paper.
Perhaps one day it would happen, but he wouldn’t attempt to force it. Today it was with words that he was trying to express himself. The last time he had heard from his father had been in 1847. Neither of them had corresponded with enormous frequency, but it had been common for there to be one or two letters in each direction every year. Of course, 1848 had its significance. That was the year Dmitry’s mother had died. Many people in Petersburg had died, when both famine and cholera had struck the city. Marfa Mihailovna had been wealthy enough to have no concern over the famine, but disease was no respecter of status. Dmitry had not even been at home to comfort her, or to bury her.
But it was hard to see why that should have stopped Dmitry’s father from writing. Marfa had not been his wife in any real sense for years. It was his mistress, Domnikiia Semyonovna, who had followed him into exile after his participation in the Decembrist Uprising, thirty years before. Dmitry had loved his father for his stance against the tsar, but hated him for choosing his lover over his wife. But as the years had passed, the heroism of the former had eclipsed the human failing of the latter. And in truth it was Marfa who had made the choice, in not following her husband to Siberia. Long before her death she had forgiven her husband his infidelity, and urged Dmitry to do the same.
And so Aleksei’s distant silence made even less sense. There was the possibility that it was down to censorship. Dmitry was well aware that the Third Section read all letters to and from exiles; and a few more besides, he would guess. But he’d always been careful not to write anything that would cause them to be intercepted, and his father had been wise enough to do the same. Neither of them ever made mention of military matters, or politics, or mentioned Tsar Nikolai without expressing the deepest and sincerest affection for him – and without any hint of irony.
Dmitry looked down at the paper again, but still could not think of a way to express himself. It was simple enough; he just needed to say, ‘Please write, however little you put, however you wish to insult me, just to let me know you’re alive.’ But Dmitry already knew his father was alive. If he had died, Dmitry would have been informed. He knew other sons of Decembrist exiles who had been. By his reckoning, there could only be a score or so of them left alive – but his father was undoubtedly one of them.
He tried to stop thinking and listen again to the music in his head, in the hope that it would help him. Instead, all he heard was a vaguely familiar gypsy melody, played on the mess’s out-of-tune piano. He did not need to look round to know that Prince Galtsin had come into the room and gone straight to the instrument. The rivalry between them was unspoken. Dmitry was convinced he was the better pianist, but Galtsin had the more popular repertoire; around here at least. Dmitry had seen the appeal of peasant music in his youth, but as he had grown older it had struck him as increasingly trivial. But Dmitry’s tastes did not chime with those of the common – or even the noble – soldier. He found his playing more in favour among the ladies of Saint Petersburg.
Eventually Galtsin finished the piece and a round of applause broke out through the mess. ‘Bis! Bis!’ cried a voice that Dmitry did not recognize, but he did not look round for fear that he might seem to agree with the sentiment.
‘Perhaps Mitka would like to play for us,’ said Galtsin, raising his voice to be sure Dmitry would hear him.
‘The regiment seems spoilt for talent,’ said the unknown voice.
‘Come on, Mitka,’ said Galtsin. ‘You know you want to.’
Dmitry stood and turned, his eyes immediately fixing on the figure standing beside Galtsin at the piano. It was a naval lieutenant of perhaps thirty-five years. What many would immediately note in him was his height, but as Dmitry approached, he realized that their eyes were on the same level. Dmitry was a tall man, and this newcomer matched him exactly. What struck Dmitry was his leanness. He was thin, but not skinny, as though every limb was composed solely of muscle, from what Dmitry could judge through the uniform. Certainly on his neck and jaw the flesh was sculpted as though part of some ancient statue.
‘Anatoliy Vladimirovich Tyeplov,’ said Galtsin, introducing them. ‘Dmitry Alekseevich Danilov.’
They shook hands. Tyeplov’s grip was as firm as Dmitry had expected.
‘Danilov?’ said Tyeplov. ‘Son of Aleksei …’
‘Son of Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov,’ Dmitry completed. ‘The Decembrist.’ Nobody had ever held Dmitry’s father’s actions against him. For all his faults, the tsar had been scrupulous in announcing that no stain should attach itself to the innocent relatives of any of the conspirators, however close the relationship might be.
‘Of course,’ said Tyeplov happily. ‘I knew I’d heard the name somewhere.’ As he spoke, he fiddled with the fingers of his left hand, as if toying with a ring that he evidently did not possess. ‘Play for us,’ he added, indicating the piano as Galtsin vacated the seat.
Dmitry sat down and considered. He was not going to pander to the crowd, as Galtsin had. There was one composer whom Dmitry loved above all others, and over whose early death he still sometimes felt the desire to weep. The officers in the mess would be bored with his work, if they knew enough to recognize Dmitry’s obsession. Even so, Chopin it would be. But what piece? He let his hands fall to the keyboard, his left little finger and right thumb falling on two low Cs, an octave apart. Then his hands wandered upwards over the keys, always with the same interval between them, before the piece
settled into the slow, sublime six-four of Chopin’s first ballade.
He lost himself in the music, enjoying the fast, complex arpeggios and the huge, understated main theme, letting it flow into him as well as out of him. The music seemed to tell him a story of mystery and joy, of adversity and victory, that he could never quite remember once it had ended, like the details of a dream. It was a story of which he was the narrator, but as with his own music, he could not both create it and consume it at the same time. He felt as though he had scarcely begun when he heard that the music had come to an end. His hands were still, sustaining the final low Gs. He breathed deeply. He had lost any sense of time, but he knew that the piece usually took him about ten minutes. He resisted the urge to move on to the second ballade, hearing the pa-pom, pa-pom of its opening notes only in his head. Galtsin was standing over on the far side of the room with a glass of vodka in his hand, chatting in a low voice. Others were displaying the minimum of polite interest that they could get away with.
Only Tyeplov remained, leaning on the piano and staring at Dmitry with a look of surprised rapture that would only be expected from a man who was listening to Chopin for the first time in his entire life.
Dmitry paced angrily through the slush-filled streets of Sevastopol. Winter was departing, sooner than he had expected, but then he was used to the weather in Petersburg, far to the north. When the siege had first begun, the previous autumn, he had wondered whether in winter the harbour itself might freeze over, making the journey between the north and south of the city easier. But it was a foolish idea, now he knew the climate. He’d even imagined the possibility that if the harbour did freeze then the enemy might be able to march across its icy surface and into the city. He’d soon dismissed the fear. A few well-aimed cannonballs would break up the ice and send the troops fleeing back to land.
His mind went back, as so often, to 14 December 1825. He’d not seen it but he had heard how many of the fleeing rebels ran out on to the frozen Neva to escape, only for Nikolai to order just the same tactics. The ice over the river was broken into pieces, and many brave men froze or drowned. For months Dmitry had believed that his closest friend had thus perished. Vasiliy Denisovich Makarov had been like a second father to Dmitry, often understanding him better than his own father did. After the uprising Vasiliy had gone into hiding and written to both Dmitry and his mother from Prussia. And when he finally returned to his homeland, it had been under a different name: Vasiliy Innokyentievich Yudin. Tsar Nikolai had a long memory, and was not likely to forgive anyone who could be identified as having stood in Senate Square that day. Dmitry was lucky not to have been so identified – he had both his father and Yudin to thank for it, but in saving him, they had made him a coward.
